“Wayne, this here’s my wife, Betty.”
“Hello, Betty,” I said. Red was well over sixty, and despite her haggard appearance this girl wasn’t much more than twenty-five.
“You mind what I said now. You can get into trouble peddling scripts. Take it from one who knows.”
I sat down at a table by myself where some industrious cracker named FERLIN had applied his energies and skills to carving his name into the wood. No fewer than four Kilroys peered idiotically at me from that same tabletop, and someone named GaLEN had immortalized his love for a DoRothEa. The childishness of the inlay brought my anonymous correspondent to mind, and I felt an unexpected and unaccustomed sense of anxiety at the thought, accentuated by what Red had just said about my activities as a procurer of narcotics.
I set the legal pad down and by the time I got up to go home my list was filigreed with doodled pistols, daggers, skulls, and nooses, and I was no closer to neutralizing my enemies than I’d been before I walked in.
I’D TAKEN TO eating dinner at home on a regular basis, and Sally was making a serious effort to improve her cooking. The three miserable years she spent living in my mother’s house while I was in Europe hadn’t improved her skills in the kitchen; the old lady was an awful cook who had never cared for food much, possibly due to a head injury sustained when she was a young woman that diminished her sense of smell. Sally’s slovenly mother hadn’t been much of a cook either; when she was in a depressive trance, which was most of the time, she could hardly summon the wherewithal to throw together a roast chicken. During her occasional two–or three-day spells of frenetic activity, she’d concoct improvised artistic creations that wouldn’t have passed muster in the galley of an insane asylum, then cackle with glee at her family’s brave attempts to choke them down.
But Sally had noticed that I didn’t much like what she cooked, and she bought recipe books, and she was making improvements. She even made me calves’ liver and onions once a week, even though that meant she had to make herself a different main course. “It’s good for you,” I’d tell her, knowing full well the taste and texture nauseated her. “Full of iron. Good for baby,” a phrase that got thrown around a lot during those months.
THE CHANGE IN diet made more appealing the prospect of staying at home in the evenings, but one night after a strikingly unsuccessful attempt at a meat loaf—the spices the recipe called for struck her, in her delicate digestive condition, as unappealing, and at the moment it called for an egg to be folded in she realized we had none—I was feeling some hunger pangs and told her I was going out. Though she glared at me over my half-eaten lump of bland ground beef, overcooked to a blackish-grey stiffness, she didn’t object.
AND SO THAT evening I followed Park and Collins on their nightly prowl. I wasn’t necessarily looking for a woman, but when Collins decided he wanted to get some gals sent up to a room at the Eaton I didn’t object. Just like in the old days, I took care of renting the room, calling the fellow who ran the whores, and paying off the front desk.
I also made sure that the hotel detective got a separate payment, and when I poked my head in his office he greeted me like an old army buddy.
“Ogden, where the hell you been keeping yourself?” His pink, hairless head shone under the naked bulb in the overhead socket. The Eaton was still a swell place, but the hotel detective’s office belonged in a flophouse, right down to the worn-down trail in the carpet from door to desk and the peeling 1915 wall paper.
“Here and there, Jerry,” I said. “Out of trouble, mostly.” I handed him an envelope with a sawbuck in it.
“That doesn’t sound like the old Wayne. You out on the town with the boss?”
“Yeah, for old times’ sake. Got old Herman Nester sending some girls
“Hello, Betty,” I said. Red was well over sixty, and despite her haggard appearance this girl wasn’t much more than twenty-five.
“You mind what I said now. You can get into trouble peddling scripts. Take it from one who knows.”
I sat down at a table by myself where some industrious cracker named FERLIN had applied his energies and skills to carving his name into the wood. No fewer than four Kilroys peered idiotically at me from that same tabletop, and someone named GaLEN had immortalized his love for a DoRothEa. The childishness of the inlay brought my anonymous correspondent to mind, and I felt an unexpected and unaccustomed sense of anxiety at the thought, accentuated by what Red had just said about my activities as a procurer of narcotics.
I set the legal pad down and by the time I got up to go home my list was filigreed with doodled pistols, daggers, skulls, and nooses, and I was no closer to neutralizing my enemies than I’d been before I walked in.
I’D TAKEN TO eating dinner at home on a regular basis, and Sally was making a serious effort to improve her cooking. The three miserable years she spent living in my mother’s house while I was in Europe hadn’t improved her skills in the kitchen; the old lady was an awful cook who had never cared for food much, possibly due to a head injury sustained when she was a young woman that diminished her sense of smell. Sally’s slovenly mother hadn’t been much of a cook either; when she was in a depressive trance, which was most of the time, she could hardly summon the wherewithal to throw together a roast chicken. During her occasional two–or three-day spells of frenetic activity, she’d concoct improvised artistic creations that wouldn’t have passed muster in the galley of an insane asylum, then cackle with glee at her family’s brave attempts to choke them down.
But Sally had noticed that I didn’t much like what she cooked, and she bought recipe books, and she was making improvements. She even made me calves’ liver and onions once a week, even though that meant she had to make herself a different main course. “It’s good for you,” I’d tell her, knowing full well the taste and texture nauseated her. “Full of iron. Good for baby,” a phrase that got thrown around a lot during those months.
THE CHANGE IN diet made more appealing the prospect of staying at home in the evenings, but one night after a strikingly unsuccessful attempt at a meat loaf—the spices the recipe called for struck her, in her delicate digestive condition, as unappealing, and at the moment it called for an egg to be folded in she realized we had none—I was feeling some hunger pangs and told her I was going out. Though she glared at me over my half-eaten lump of bland ground beef, overcooked to a blackish-grey stiffness, she didn’t object.
AND SO THAT evening I followed Park and Collins on their nightly prowl. I wasn’t necessarily looking for a woman, but when Collins decided he wanted to get some gals sent up to a room at the Eaton I didn’t object. Just like in the old days, I took care of renting the room, calling the fellow who ran the whores, and paying off the front desk.
I also made sure that the hotel detective got a separate payment, and when I poked my head in his office he greeted me like an old army buddy.
“Ogden, where the hell you been keeping yourself?” His pink, hairless head shone under the naked bulb in the overhead socket. The Eaton was still a swell place, but the hotel detective’s office belonged in a flophouse, right down to the worn-down trail in the carpet from door to desk and the peeling 1915 wall paper.
“Here and there, Jerry,” I said. “Out of trouble, mostly.” I handed him an envelope with a sawbuck in it.
“That doesn’t sound like the old Wayne. You out on the town with the boss?”
“Yeah, for old times’ sake. Got old Herman Nester sending some girls
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