Catch the Brass Ring

CHAPTER TWO

DOWN AT the precinct on West 8th, the desk sergeant listened to Billy’s report. The desk sergeant was bald and sweating profusely, even on the top of his head. His uniform was darkened under the armpits and across his chest and his hands left big wet stains when he lifted them from the surface of the desk. “How about it, Mr. Frey?” he asked me.

“Sort of guilty,” I admitted. I’d calmed down plenty. I wanted to get back to Tolliver’s on the double, although I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I got there. “That is, I did open the basket and look inside. I’m sorry about that, sergeant. I shouldn’t have, but we were buddies in Korea and I—”

“Marines?” the sergeant wanted to know.

“Army. Third Division.”

“If it was the Marines I would have thrown the book at you, Frey. I saw some action on Guadalcanal the last time. We did the fighting, the Marines got the press. I’ll bet it was tough in Korea. I’ll bet it was the same way, though.”

I grinned at him. “I’m just glad to be back, that’s all.”

“You shouldn’t go poking your nose into police business. Leave an address where we can call you.”

Billy was finger-combing his wavy blond hair again. “You mean he can go?”

“I mean he can do anything he wants, Drake.”

Billy’s lips started to curl but he forced them into a smile. “I’m sorry you don’t see things my way, sarge.”

“I’m sorry we wear the same uniform, kid. Get back to your beat now.”

“You see that they keep those wrappers off the clean sand,” I told him again and winked at the sergeant. We got along fine.

“Good luck, Frey,” he said. “If you’re going to be around Tolliver’s awhile keep your nose clean. We don’t want any trouble.”

“Neither do I, sergeant,” I said, and went out to look for some.

On my way back to Tolliver’s I passed Ben Lutz’s bar and decided to follow a teen-aged couple inside. The boy had his arm around the girl’s waist, his fingers dropping down over her wagging backside. When they reached the bar they had to settle for sarsaparilla after they couldn’t convince Ben they were eighteen. The girl pouted but the boy seemed relieved.

“Hello, Ben,” I said.

He looked at me and his eyes said he wasn’t happy with what he saw. He waved the head off a glass of tap beer with a plastic wand and busied himself over some clean glasses. I tossed a fifty-cent piece on the bar and left the change there for some refills.

“You wanted me to warn Bert about something, Ben. Care to tell me what?”

“No.” Ben drew a beer for himself.

“You left in a hurry when you found out he was dead.”

“Umm.”

“But you said you had some business over at Tolliver’s. Your missus wanted you to tell them something which got the both of you all hot and bothered for different reasons. Any connection, Ben?”

“Are you a cop?”

“No, but I can talk to the cops. Tell me or tell them, either way it will come out in the wash.”

“Why don’t you leave me alone? I’ve got my own problems.”

One of them waddled out from the rear of the place. It was Becky, his wife. “You didn’t tell me,” she said. “Did you talk to them like I wanted or didn’t you?”

“I — I didn’t have a chance,” Ben said.

“That’s right, Becky. He got scared off by a corpse.”

“What are you talking about, mister?”

“Bert Archer,” I said. “He’s dead.”

Becky stood there staring at me, her puffy face draining white then flooding red as the blood rushed back. Her eyes narrowed to slits and she jabbed a pudgy finger against Ben’s chest and said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t, that’s all. Are you satisfied now? Do you still want I should go back up to Tolliver’s and ask them?”

“Let me think,” Becky said, wringing out a gray washrag and patting her face with it. “Mister, are you a cop?”

“Ben just asked me that. No.”

“Then you’re working for them.”

“I don’t even know who them is.”

She didn’t believe me. I could almost see the wheels spinning inside her head. It wasn’t hard to see who wore the pants around here.

“My friend is dead,” I told Becky. “Someday the cops will find out how he died, but I can’t wait till someday. I’ve got to find out for myself or I won’t be able to go about the business of becoming a civilian again. You got it so far? O.K., this is where you come in. You wanted Ben to ask them something at Tolliver’s. He wasn’t sure if he’d ask them or not. When he heard about Bert he didn’t walk, he ran. So, there’s a connection. What did you want him to do, Mrs. Lutz?”

She had small, shrewd eyes under scraggly, masculine brows. She stared me down blandly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you be a nice boy and go away? We’ve got customers.” The teenagers were sipping their sarsaparilla and listening avidly.

I gave Ben a look which said I’d see him later or tomorrow or sometime and he’d best have some answers. On my way out, I heard Becky’s voice call after me:

“See, mister? We mind our own business. You tell them that. We don’t talk unless we’re supposed to. Don’t forget to tell them, mister.”

So she still thought I was grinding someone else’s ax. Well, it might come in handy at that. As I left I heard her giving Ben hell, teenagers or no.

A few tired-looking gals paraded around on the outside runway of the sideshow next door to the Lutz’s place, wiggling and stamping to the sounds of an electric guitar. The pitchman hinted they had a sense of propriety outside and would really cut loose once the show started.

I cut out for Tolliver’s with long strides. The more I thought about Karen Tanner the angrier I got. Men talked about a lot of things in Korean bunkers, with Red artillery fire muted and distant or so close it shook the walls. They talked of good food and better liquor or girls, and the Pittsburgh Pirates who Branch Rickey was supposed to do wonders for but hadn’t yet. Bert Archer had only two things on his mind, though — Karen Tanner and a marriage license. Karen hadn’t even bothered to look sad. The crowd outside Tolliver’s had returned to normal, entering, leaving or just wandering by but no longer milling about to see corpses toted out in baskets. An old couple strolled by munching great yellow ears of corn and gawking at the sights. A fat slob of a kid trailed them, dripping tomato and cheese from a broad slab of pizza pie. Behind him came a buck-toothed girl of sixteen with a pin between her haltered breasts which said LOOK BUT DON’T TOUCH.

Inside Tolliver’s the air was damp and cooler, and smelled strongly of chlorine from the swimming pool, grease and dough from a huge machine which turned out doughnuts on an assembly line, pungent spices from Mama Lucca’s Pizzeria, and people. Another smell seemed to form a kind of sweet-sour base for all of these but I couldn’t place it and figured it might have been the sum-total playing hob with my nostrils.

I nodded at the dark-eyed Italian boy serving up the thin heavy slabs behind the counter of Mama Lucca’s Pizzeria and said, “You’re not Mama.”

“Pizza?” he asked me, ignoring the crack.

“Not now. I’m looking for Karen Tanner.”

“She runs the penny arcade back of the merry-go-round. The place is closed though.”

“Yeah? Why?” I damn well knew why, but I wanted to hear it from one of the Tolliver people.

“An accident. Her partner got killed earlier today.”

“You don’t tell me.”

“That’s right, mister.”

“Fall out of a roller-coaster?” I asked.

“No. Suffocated in a steam room at the bathhouse.”

“You don’t tell me.”

“That’s right. Excuse me.”

The fat slob was back for more pizza, buying a wedge for each hand this time.

A frenzied organ cleared La Paloma from its brassy throat while the merry-go-round spun row-on-row of four-abreast horses in medieval trappings around and around. The carousel was far from full, so most of the riders sat outside mounts and had a chance at plucking the brass ring off its pole. A brass ring won a free ride, a sign said, but you leaned out of your saddle for them at your own risk.

Behind the merry-go-round a door led to the Penny Palace. No one had bothered to close the door, but a placard had been strung across the entrance with the words Closed For Alterations painted on it in blocky black letters. I swung my long legs over the rope which bore the placard and called, “Anybody home?”

“In the back.” It was Karen Tanner’s throaty voice. I wended my way among boxing machines, baseball games, strength-testing devices, machine gun emplacements, kinescope peep shows, foot-easers, horoscope venders and the like. I found an archway and went through it to an office. Window-less and small, it had a desk, two chairs, a small filing cabinet. A stationary fan groaned its need for oil and whipped Karen Tanner’s white-blonde hair back. “Hello, Gideon,” she said. She’d been chain smoking. The butts were strewn in a large bronze pipe ashtray although the fan had blown the ashes out. Bert Archer smoked a pipe and the ashtray was old and chipped in spots and if I were Karen I’d never have been able to use it, not today.

“Hi. Your friend Billy couldn’t make the charge stick. He’s mad.”

“Billy’s all right. He just acts like a kid sometimes, but if you bother him he’ll make trouble for you.”

“I’m shaking like a leaf.”

A single green-shaded light hung suspended from a ceiling chain and swung in the fan’s breeze, throwing grotesque shadows about the small office. In its light I couldn’t tell if Karen had been crying.

“I’m going to need help here now,” she said. “Bert would have wanted it to be you. If you’d still like the job, it’s yours.”

Her composure rattled me. I wanted to hit her and make her scream. I said, “How did Bert die, Karen?”

“I’d rather not talk about it today.”

“Was he murdered?”

“I’m not the coroner.”

“Do you think he was murdered?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“Were you going to marry him?”

“I… don’t know. We’d planned on it, but…”

“But what?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sorry Bert’s dead?”

“You… louse!” Her voice caught. She choked on the first word and gagged on the second and I started feeling better. I let her hit me twice, hard, stinging blows with her open palm, then I caught her wrist and felt still better. It affected her after all.

“Get out of here!” she cried. “I asked you to leave me alone before but you wouldn’t listen. What I said still goes, you can work here if you want because Bert would have liked that. It’s strictly business, so don’t expect me to answer any of your questions.”

“I want to find out what happened to Bert.”

“I don’t care what you want to find out. You can start to work tomorrow. The salary is sixty dollars and that’s all I can afford. Come in around noon with your social security card, but don’t try to find things out on my time. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Yes, sir.”

I smiled and found it was a mistake.

“If you think anything around here is funny, I don’t want to know it. Don’t call me Karen until I act like I want you to call me that. My name is Miss Tanner.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good afternoon, Gideon.”

“Good afternoon, Miss Tanner.”

I watched her light another cigarette from the stub of her old one. A big blonde girl, and built. You could get yourself all hot and bothered just thinking about the way she looked, the long, clean lines of her legs, the sudden hip flare, trim flat waist and high sharp breasts with the fan blowing the cotton of her dress tight against them. But I had a hunch she was as cold as the winds that would come howling down Surf Avenue next December.

I got out of there and didn’t know what to do next. I thought about all the private detective novels I’d read while convalescing in Japan. Those guys always knew where to head and what to do when they arrived. Even if they walked into a latrine, chances were they’d find someone sitting on a stool who could supply them with a vital piece of the puzzle. Me, I wasn’t sure I had any puzzle at all. I certainly had no pieces to fit it, not even vague ideas, except for Karen’s relationship with Bert, which I didn’t like at all, and the Lutz’s business at Tolliver’s, which I didn’t understand. Oh, yes. I had one other thing — a pretty strong notion it was murder and the kind of half-assed proof which means something to a friend but would hardly stand up in a court of law. “Taking in the sights, Mr. Frey?”

I whirled at the sound of the voice, a musical voice, lilting but not affected, with the suggestion of Ireland in every syllable, although you couldn’t really call it a brogue. She was small and trim and wore her black hair cropped short over a pert, pug-nosed face with wide, yellow-flecked brown eyes. Freckles clustered at the bridge of her nose and made her look younger than she probably was. She was smiling and her lower lip was a little too full over her small pointed chin. She wasn’t stacked like Karen Tanner, but she was a nice bundle all the way down to the ballerina slippers she wore. The last time I saw her she’d sat in front of Tolliver’s on the sidewalk, crying.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m starting to work here tomorrow.”

“I thought you would. Miss Tanner told me all about you after we had a typical female crying jag together.”

“Karen was crying?”

“My gosh, yes. She was crying her eyes out, only she’s smarter than me and wanted to cry in private. It was funny. She brought me inside to help me. She got out a handful of tissues and told me to blow my nose and then started bawling herself. She’s nicer than you think, Mr. Frey.”

“What makes you think I have to be told that?”

“You looked surprised when you found out she cried. Gosh, she and Bert loved each other.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Bert wouldn’t give me a tumble. Mr. Frey, do you think it’s possible for a girl to love two men at the same time? I mean, really love them both in every way so she’d want to marry them both if the law let her?”

“How old is the girl?”

“She’s eighteen. But she looks older.”

“It’s quite possible,” I said, grinning. She grinned back at me.

“Would you like me to show you around Tolliver’s? It’s like a little Coney Island inside the bigger one.”

“You’re telling me,” I shouted over the noise. Small caliber rifles cracked flatly at the shooting gallery. Gongs clanged, feet shuffled on the dirty boardwalk floor, voices shouted, pitchmen pleaded. And there was this smell, a mixture of every kind of fun house smell, all wafted to your nostrils on a cloying base.

Sheila grabbed my elbow and began to steer me around. “That’s Vito Lucca in the Pizzeria,” she said. “He works the day shift and his mother does some of the swinging. Vito’s a nice boy.” She got stars in her eyes when she said that. I’d already met Vito but I got introduced formally and heard Sheila tell him I was Bert’s friend and was going to work for Karen. Vito obliged with a wedge of pizza on the house.

We met a whole crew of fun-makers whose names slipped through my mind like confetti through a sidewalk grate because I was still thinking of Bert. I kept thinking about Bert and Karen while Sheila kept introducing me to people but talking about Vito Lucca every chance she got. “Vito’s a nice boy,” she repeated a dozen times. “Vito’s got to learn we can’t all climb to the top of the world, that’s all.” Sheila pouted. “Well, shouldn’t he?”

So Sheila had a crush on Bert and one on Vito. “I guess so,” I said. “What’s upstairs?”

“Oh. We’re coming to that now. You go up, then along a hallway and down another flight of stairs. It’s Tolliver’s bathhouse, second largest in Coney Island. You can also enter it off the boardwalk.”

“The place with the steam rooms?” I demanded. Sheila got solemn. “Yes. I thought I’d just show you the stairs, but if you really want to go up…”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I can hop up there myself. What do you do around here, Sheila?”

“We have a little show at night in the restaurant. I dance a solo mambo.”

“I’ll bet you’re good.”

“Vito thinks so. He says Tolliver’s is too small-time for me. But that’s like Vito. Gosh, he’s always running around.”

“Thanks for the tour, kid. I’ll catch your number later, maybe. Right now I want to go upstairs and have a look around.”

“Honest, I’ll take you if you want.”

“Uh-uh. You go let Vito make eyes at you. I’ll see you later.”

A flight of wide wooden steps with the white paint flaked and scabby led upstairs to what could have been anything from a restaurant to a convention hall at one time. Now the place was deserted. Downstairs, Tolliver’s was cooler than the street because this place offered a cushion of air as insulation. Up here it was like walking through a furnace and by the time I found the hallway on the other side I was wringing wet.

The hallway opened on another flight of steps on an outside wall of the place. Spread out below me in a huge courtyard was Tolliver’s bathhouse. A high school girl in a two-piece bathing suit watched me remove my damp shirt and asked me why I didn’t come in through the boardwalk entrance instead of getting all sweaty like that, so I told her I had to see her and she wasn’t on the boardwalk gate, was she? She smiled coyly, dropped my four bits in a metal cash-box and gave me a numbered key, a pair of blue bathing trunks and a towel and then went back to her issue of Love Comics.

Five women paraded around the place for every man. Women queued up to use the low diving board, women filled the great rectangular pool with acres of scantily clad flesh, women lined the counter of the refreshment stand, women formed patterns of tanned arms and legs on the sand around the pool, women chattered and yammered and roved the bathhouse in small wolf-gangs looking for prey.

I made for the life guard’s stand and called up to him: “Hey, Weissmueller! Talk to you for a minute?”

He breathed deep and expanded his chest and the women around me ooh’ed and ah’ed. “Shoot,” he said.

“I’m looking for the manager.” If I ever wanted to operate around here I’d have to soak up some ultraviolet because alongside the life guard I looked like the White Cliffs of Dover.

The life guard jerked a brown hand behind him. “Down that ramp,” he said. “Then turn left. You’ll have to take your shoes off first.”

I unlaced my shoes, then tied them together. I carried them by the strings in one hand, with my shirt under my arm. In the other hand I carried the bathing trunks and the towel and I decided it was high time to find the locker my key fit. So instead of turning left at the bottom of the ramp I went straight ahead, wading through a trough of muddy chlorinated water which was supposed to keep sand out of the locker rooms. I followed the “men” arrow and went left.

The place was deserted except for an occasional old duffer who’d spread a blanket between the aisles of lockers and had sprawled on it with a portable radio, a bag of fruit and a lot of smelly suntan oil.

I’m not very good at these things. I asked someone where locker 1418 was, but he didn’t know, so I kept wandering around with my arms growing heavy, threading my way in and out among the lockers.

I was about to pile my gear in a corner somewhere and change to the bathing trunks without benefit of a locker when I heard something besides the portable radio commercials. The slapping sound of flesh against wet flesh was punctuated by uneven grunting off to the right of the last aisle of lockers, where a sign said I neared the solarium and steam rooms. I entered a roofed-over passageway and the sounds grew louder. My heart thumped as if I’d just run a four-minute mile when I realized Bert had probably died in here someplace. I heard the distant hissing of steam.

The passage opened on a bare-walled room with an archway leading out the other end. A stocky, hair-matted man with a pale white belly lay on one of the three sheet-topped tables grunting and groaning and dripping sweat. A towel like the one I carried was draped across his loins.

Paul Bunyan himself was working the man over, kneading the flesh of his putty-soft belly, gouging strong fingers into the flab of his thighs. Paul Bunyan stood almost six and a half feet tall in shower clogs and a black bathing suit. He made the lifeguard outside look like the before half of a Charles Atlas ad. He was brown as a bar of milk chocolate except for his right forearm, which was yellow-white and scrawny. I’d have bet my separation pay against a free ride on the rollercoaster that he’d worn a plaster cast on that arm until recently.

He looked up but didn’t pause in his kneading. He said, “Have a table, friend. With you in a while.” He really liked his work, did Paul Bunyan. He attacked the soft belly with gusto. I thought his patient would leave the table black and blue.

Paul Bunyan was working up a man-sized appetite, grimacing between cleaver-like strokes of his great hands but grinning when they landed and blinking sweat from his eyes and grunting more than his victim. I did some blinking too. Old Paul Bunyan was having quite a time. The Marquis of Sade had nothing on him, nothing at all, but that was only the half of it. He should have worn gossamer wings on his back and I don’t mean angel’s wings.