Catch the Brass Ring

CHAPTER SEVEN

“TAKE YOU BACK TO Coney, Gid?”

It was Karen. I shook my head and it surprised her. I wanted to see the Tollivers. Allison appeared in the hallway a moment later, face flushed an angry red. “Damn that dog, Gregory,” she said. “He tried to bite me. One of these days I’m going to kill that animal. Those places over in New Jersey with nice, tame German Shepherds weren’t good enough for you, oh, no. You needed a goddamned rabid boxer!”

“My dear, please. You and not Shamus are frothing at the mouth at the moment. You know Shamus is not rabid.”

“I swear, he’ll kill me some day when you’re not around. Or I’ll kill him.”

“There had better be signs that he attacked you first in that case. But, my dear, we are arguing like children.”

“I’m sorry, Greg… oh, there’s Gideon. Hi, Gid.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Have you decided to visit us, Mr. Frey?”

“Well, I don’t know. I’m pretty busy at my new job.”

“Then a quiet day in the country will certainly do you some good. We have our own dock and a forty-foot cabin cruiser and anything else you’d want.”

“Anything at all,” Allison said. “Incidentally, we had Bert Archer out once or twice, you know. You’d be surprised how you can relax and let yourself go once you get away from the city.”

I hadn’t expected that. I smiled at them. “You’re twisting my arm. In another minute you’ll have me saying yes.”

Allison did twist my arm. At least she took my hand in both of hers and squeezed it. “How about Sunday, Gid? You could come out early in the morning and make a day of it.”

“Well… all right.”

“Splendid,” Tolliver said. “We’ll look forward to it.”

Shamus chose that moment to growl and show Allison his teeth. Anger crossed her face so quickly you would have missed it entirely unless you were staring. I was staring. Then Allison whimpered. She wasn’t the whimpering type and Tolliver must have known it, but of course he couldn’t see what happened after that. I not only saw it, I felt it.

Allison flung herself against me sideways, retreating in mock-horror from the dog. It was about as convincing as one of those old silent movies where the heroine throws her hands up over her head and wails noiselessly while Simon Legree proceeds to foreclose the mortgage on the old homestead. Her hip jarred against my thighs and tried to grind a hole through me. Her face rolled against my chest and the copper hair tickled my chin. “I’m just a big baby,” she said while Tolliver fingered Shamus’ throat until the boxer stopped growling.

“We should apologize to Mr. Frey for this scene, Allison.”

“I’m… I’m sorry, Gideon,” Allison said contritely, but she winked at me.

When I returned to Funland and told Karen I wanted Sunday off she said it was one of our busy days and anyway, I’d only started working this week.

I shrugged. “So fire me.”

“But I thought you…”

“I want to find out what happened to Bert. Having Sunday off is part of finding out.”

“What are you going to do?”

“When Sunday comes I’ll find out. You want a written report?”

“All right, Gideon. You can have your day, but I won’t pay you for it.”

“At the inquest you said you wouldn’t have married Bert. That’s not the way he saw it.”

Karen’s eyes widened and I thought she was going to holler and maybe start swinging again. “It’s none of your business, you realize. Whatever happened between Bert and me had nothing to do with the killing.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Look, Gid. People change their minds. I met Bert before he got drafted and spent a lot of time with him after he went to OCS and became a second lieutenant. It gave Bert a great deal of free time, more than I had expected. We had some wonderful days together. Bert started getting ideas.

“Before he received his orders for Korea, he’d already proposed to me three or four times. I didn’t say yes. But I didn’t say no, either. I wasn’t sure. We only knew each other on our best behavior, I said. Always going out, always having a great time.”

“So while Bert was in Korea you changed your mind.”

“Will you listen to me? I’m telling you the whole story, once and for all… well, most of the story. Then do whatever you want about Bert, but leave me out of it.”

“What do you intend to do?”

“That’s my business. Anyway, I told Bert I didn’t know him well enough and suggested that we spend a weekend together. Maybe you think this is just too new-fangled to be decent, but I wouldn’t marry anyone until I saw what he was like when he woke up in the morning, among other things.

“It shocked Bert. You know what he was like, kind of a kid and very proper.”

“If you mean he was stuffy, he wasn’t.”

“Stop putting words in my mouth. I didn’t say stuffy. He had to grow up and get rid of some Victorian notions, that’s all.”

“I’m listening.”

“All right. Well, Bert asked me if… if I were a virgin. I’m twenty-seven, Gideon. I told Bert no, I wasn’t. I don’t think he commented on that. He just said we’d better not spend that weekend together. We’d both have time to think when he went to Korea. He’d already asked me to run the arcade while he was gone, though. We drew up partnership papers, fifty-fifty.” Karen lit a cigarette and abruptly asked a question. “Gid, do you know if Bert ever had a woman?”

“What kind of a crazy question is that? Are you trying to tell me he wasn’t normal?”

“You keep putting words in my mouth.”

“I don’t know. He never said. In a lot of ways Bert was a kid and I was his big brother in Korea. But he was an officer and I was a noncom. Everyone used to talk about conquests, but come to think of it, Bert didn’t.”

“I didn’t mean Bert wasn’t normal. I mean he’d led a sheltered life.” Karen blushed faintly. I hadn’t thought she was capable of it. “I’m going to hate myself tonight. The inquest must have wound me up, that’s all.”

“You wound yourself up, now you’re going to unwind while I listen.”

“I want to. I’m tired of us fighting with each other all the time. I can’t.”

“Baloney. If people want change they’ll just have to wait.” I locked the cash box, took Karen’s hand and half-dragged her into the back room.

“Sit down,” I said. “Maybe I never made my position clear to you. I have no patience for the police if Billy-boy Drake is one of them. You’re on my list right now, Karen. You’re near the top. I don’t want to make any mistakes. When I find the killer maybe I’ll turn him in and maybe I won’t, but he’ll be punished. Get that through your head. Here’s something else for you to think about. Someone tried to kill me today.”

“I—”

“Shut up. It’s open war now. Me and them, whoever they are. There’s something dirty going on here at Tolliver’s, I don’t know what. Bert was killed for it.” I tried to read Karen’s face. I’d hate to play poker with her. “Maybe they’ll kill me too and maybe they won’t. I’m not going anyplace. I set myself up as a clay pigeon once and I’ll do it again. Do you have anything to drink back here?”

Karen stared at me like she’d seen me for the first time. Her mouth hung open slightly. She said, “You mean that, all of it.”

“Dammit, get the truth serum.”

It struck her funny. I expected a nervous laugh but was treated to that mink coat smile for the second time. Karen opened a desk drawer and took out a fifth of Old Taylor and two shot glasses. “You rat,” she said, still smiling. “Two shots of sodium pentathol coming up.” She poured, all the while staring at me. I was some kind of strange animal.

We toasted wordlessly and drank. “More,” I said. We toasted and drank again. We did this five times and while I have an extensive capacity for whiskey I began to wonder. If Karen had a wooden leg it was more shapely than any I’d ever seen.

“This is silly, Gid. You can’t get me to talk like this. If I drink wanting to get drunk I never do.”

After that, I did the pouring. We kept right on drinking.

“See? It isn’t working.” But a thickness had crept into Karen’s speech. “It’s just no good, Gid. If you think I’m going to get so stinking you can ask anything you want, you’re mishtaken… mistaken. I’m free and… light this cigarette for me.”

I did. I felt unsteady, too, but not that unsteady. “Get it off your chest,” I said. “It’s a kind of psychotherapy.”

“Would Freud have approved of all this whishkey?” Karen tittered.

“Freud would have approved of anything.”

“That’s what you say. Don’t go thinking the wrong things because of what I said about not being a virgin. Are you trying to make me?”

The spring wasn’t just unwinding now, it was unwinding in all directions. “No,” I said. “When I try to make you, you’ll know it.”

“I’ve heard that song before, Gideon Frey. I’ve beaten off bigger wolves than you. It isn’t ladylike but I’m five foot nine in nylons and I have muscles. See?” Brother, we were moving about in a fog of alcohol. Karen wore a short-sleeved blouse and flexed her biceps. I laughed because it looked trim and feminine, the kind of arm which, if all the other items of equipment matched it, could win beauty contests hut not hurt anyone.

“You think I’m kidding. Lishen… listen. I had a twin brother I grew up with. Nature made me big and gave him a nasty temper. We fought all the time and I could take care of myself. Gee, how could I have married Bert? It wouldn’t have worked. I liked the guy, I felt sorry for him more than anything, I guess. Say, are you listening? Give me another drink.” Karen drank and sniffed and wiped tears from her eyes. “We used to go down to the beach and wrestle around in the water like anyone else. I could duck him or pin him on the sand and he used to call me his Amazon. His beautiful Amazon. You’re not listening. Am I beautiful?”

I nodded.

“Well, I’m not an Amazon. I weigh a hundred and forty-five pounds but I’m skinny. I can’t help it if I’m six feet tall in spike-heels.”

“You are not skinny. A little angular perhaps, but not skinny. Keep talking.”

“I don’t want to be anybody’s darn Amazon. When I fall for a man he’ll have to be able to throw me around with one hand. Shay, could you do that, Gid? Could you do that?”

I squinted and wasn’t sure which image of her to pick up, but I managed to find the right one and lifted her and put her on the desk. I placed my hands at the base of her ribcage and lifted her overhead while she giggled. I was Atlas holding up the world.

“Hercules my shipmate,” she squeaked. “Let’s go swimming.”

Someplace in the back of my mind the reason why all this had taken place still lurked. I rationalized and told myself maybe a good swim would make her feel like talking even more. We staggered out of the penny arcade and didn’t bother to lock up. We went upstairs and across the hall to the bathhouse. We had to walk past the pool to reach the locker rooms and people stared at us. So we were holding hands. So what? So we were smiling at each other but no one here knew we hated each other a little while ago. So what? So we were stumbling and making a great effort to walk a straight line and failing, that’s what. Brother, we were pie-eyed.

I managed to climb into a pair of trunks in the men’s locker room and found Karen wailing for me outside. “You didn’t rent that contraption here!” I yowled. “It’s gorgeous.”

She wore a two-piece suit of some iridescent yellow material. Enough on top to support her breasts, not rounded like Sheila’s, but firm and high-arched and struggling with the top of the halter. It looked like a game halter but I’d have put my money on what was inside if she indulged over-zealously in beach athletics. Enough downstairs to cover the delightful unmentionables, commencing just below the navel and ending right where the long, golden-smooth thighs began.

“Oh, it’s my suit,” Karen said. She pirouetted and showed the backs of curved calves and thighs and a hip flare which had to be padded to look like that only under the trunks of that Bikini you couldn’t have fit a Kleenex tissue. Picture Karen with a little patch of yellow iridescence on the mainsail and one on the poop deck and picture us both higher than box-kites on a windy day and running out to the beach after getting stamped at the Tolliver gate while all the women in line made nasty, jealous faces. Picture us running straight out into the water, kicking sand into a lot of faces and not caring and then plunging on into the slight gray swells which passed for waves here and surface diving and swimming out rapidly beyond all the bobbing bathing caps, then treading water and looking at each other, breathless and still high.

“I’ll bet we’re halfway out to Sandy Hook,” Karen said. “Where’d you learn to swim like that?”

“I used to be a life guard.” I waxed philosophical. “It’s strange,” I said while my chin dipped in and out of the water. “I was a life guard down at Riis Park before I managed a gas station in Staten Island, but that’s another story. Anyway, if someone drowned, we’d call the Royal Mounted Police if we had to in order to save him. We’d go out in a pontoon boat and we’d swim, and we’d drag him back to the beach and pump his lungs. They’d have an oxygen inhalator if it was needed and an emergency ambulance standing by ready to rush him to the nearest hospital and everyone at the beach would probably talk for the next two weeks how the guy almost drowned and what a terrible thing it was. Then maybe a year or two later the guy would go to Korea and get his head shot off by some kill-crazy gook so full of opium you could smoke him and put on a jag and the guy who almost drowned at the beach would become a statistic in the latest casualty report and no one but the immediate family would give a good God damn.”

“You’re a funny guy, Gid… Excuse me!” Treading water, she bicycled up and down. I had a glimpse of bronzed skin and yellow suit and something flashing white. What was inside the halter had won the battle on our long swim. Karen rose up and I saw what there was to see and then she plunged under the surface headfirst and became a faint shadow and was gone. So I caught my breath and followed her down.

Out this far the water was briny and buoyant and clear. Karen tried to refasten the halter and tried to stay down at the same time. I stared and stared and wished the water would go away until she shook her fist at me, then started to surface. In her excitement she lost the halter completely. I swam after it and saw Karen’s legs kicking up frantically because she needed air. I retrieved the strip of yellow iridescence and wondered how it could cover anything. Then I surfaced and gulped in oxygen and there was Karen still shaking her fist.

Up over my head I held the halter, grinning and taking a mouthful of water. The nearest swimmer was a good fifty yards closer to the beach and there’s something as private as a hermit’s cave about a lot of cool, deep ocean water. “Come and get it,” I said.

A sober Karen might have stood her ground or yelled for help or cussed me out until I relented. A high Karen disappeared under the water’s surface with an I’ll-fix-you look on her face. Well, she tried.

She grabbed my ankles and tugged. She gave a man-sized yank and I floated down below her, then her long legs had scissored my neck from behind and she was sitting there, underwater on my shoulders and trying to reach my outstretched hand and grab the halter. She knew her way around in the water, all right, but she was monkeying with an ex-lifeguard. When we surfaced I had Karen in tow, dragging her out deeper until we couldn’t even see any other swimmers. Then I put the halter back on her while she yelped and raved and splashed and half-drowned herself.

We swam back toward the distant beach without a word. We went back to Tolliver’s still without speaking and changed back to street clothing and met on the far side of the pool.

“Darn you, Gideon Frey,” Karen said. “I’m beginning to get sober. What did you want to ask me?”

“Ask you? I can’t remember.” Like hell I couldn’t. I remembered and so did Karen but if I broke this spell now it would never come back quite this way again. Karen and I were good for each other, like a kind of tonic the doctors haven’t invented yet, like spinach for Popeye. There was an urgency about it all, as if we’d have to hurry and keep moving and keep doing things if we didn’t want to lose this thing we’d so suddenly found. The questions could wait. I said. “I’m hungry. I’d like some chow.”

“Restaurant variety?”

“Hell, no. How commercial can you get, woman? Where do you live?”

“Out in Queens,” she said, leading me toward Surf Avenue. The kid in the lot was still reading his comic book. Karen gave me the keys to her ’47 Mercury. I kissed the tip of her nose and took them. I hugged her until it hurt me and I can imagine what it was doing to her. She said, “Hurry, Gideon.” Out along the Belt Parkway and the Van Wyck Expressway we did sixty in a thirty-five mile an hour zone. We passed everything on the highway except our own racing hearts. I looked at Karen so much she had to remind me to glue my eyes to the road. It’s a miracle we reached the garden apartments where she lived.

The baby carriage brigade stared at Karen and me with quiet distaste. The lips said nothing. The eyes said she was single and bringing a man to her apartment in the afternoon. In the night was bad enough, but in the afternoon all decent people should be working.

Karen must have seen it all but she didn’t care. She said hello Mrs. Ardello and hello Mrs. Greengrass and how’s Marvin and my doesn’t little Stevie look cute with that new hat and it certainly is a lovely day and no, I’m sorry I couldn’t baby-sit tonight Mrs. McGarity in a way that made Mrs. McGarity’s eyes follow us up to the apartment door on long, invisible stalks.

We closed the door behind us. We slanted the blind slats up and drew the draw-string drapes and Karen lit a small lamp on a corner table between two sections of a low, modern sofa. “They’re as bad as that Army of yours, Gid. Hup, two, three, faw. Hup, two, three, faw — you know.”

“Cut the chit-chat and give me a drink,” I said. Karen went into the kitchen and I heard ice-cubes clinking in glasses. She came out in a while with two highballs and the fixings for more on a wooden tray. She spun us some music on one of those open Webster jobs. Beethoven’s Eroica.

We refilled then re-refilled our highball glasses. We talked about everything and nothing. I flipped the LP record over and said, “I’m still hungry. How about those culinary tricks, now, Karen? Want to show them off?”

“I’m no Escoffier, but you’d better like it. Mrs. McGarity was looking that way because you’re the first man I’ve had out here for dinner or anything.”

“Truth?”

“Truth. Why don’t you make yourself presentable while I whip up some supper? There’s a little razor in the medicine cabinet I use for…”

“I know where you use it.” I fingered the stubble on my chin. “Come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea.”

“That settles it. You are trying to impress me. Yonder lies the bathroom.” Karen pointed and I weaved my way through the living room and a hallway. “Make some cocktails before dinner,” I called back over my shoulder.

I heard Karen’s “yes, master,” and closed the bathroom door behind me. I peeled off my shirt and used a cake of bath soap and plenty of hot water to work up a sparse lather on my face. Finding a gold-plated razor in the medicine cabinet, I began singing up a storm and scraping the whiskers from my left cheek when the bathroom door opened.

“Cocktails are served,” said Karen. She held a cocktail glass in each hand and had broken all speed records changing into a wheat-colored hostess gown which stayed in place by virtue of a sash belted at her waist. “You know, I always wanted to shave a man,” she told me cheerfully, giggling. All those drinks had finally had their effect, but I was so busy trying to figure out what, if anything, lay between the wheat-colored robe and Karen’s skin that I let her pluck the tiny razor from my hand.

Probably, she’d seen it done in the movies. She yanked up my skin with her left hand and brought the razor down across it with her right. It was a quick slash, but not deft. My face began to sting and Karen mumbled, “uh-oh,” then wadded some toilet paper and patted my nicked cheek with it.

Karen hid the razor behind her back and leered at me. She’d had more than just the kiss of the hops, as the ads say. She had the heart of the grain, thrice distilled.

She had deposited the cocktail glasses on the edge of the bathtub for safe-keeping. Her gown swirled out from her legs as she whirled away from me with the razor, brushing the cocktails into the bathtub with a tinkling of glass.

“Talk about your bathtub brew,” she said. But her eyes were big and somehow solemn when she backed away as far as she could go and I still kept coming. We bumped hard and laughed and I didn’t retreat. The hostess gown did the job all alone.

I told her I wasn’t thirsty anyway while she leaned away from me. The backs of her knees caught on the edge of the tub and she began to go over with a little yelp, the hostess gown riding high on graceful thighs and parting when the sash began to come loose. I caught her before she could fall and lifted her of! the floor and padded out of the bathroom with her kicking and thrashing but laughing too. The soap had dried and stiffened on my face and was smarting where she’d cut me with the gold-plated razor.

“Gideon, wait. If this is just a joke to you, like what happened at the beach….”

“Shut up, baby.” It was no joke. It was suddenly, devastatingly, wonderfully the sum-total of all that mattered in the world. Karen, with the white-gold hair framing her face and the wheat-colored gown almost matching her skin as it parted further and slipped from her shoulders and left me holding bare skin, smooth as satin but animal warm with a woman scent of perfume and musk….

“Say something nice. Say something nice or I’ll scream.”

She meant it. “It’s crazy, “I told her, “but it’s like things ought to be.”

I dumped her on the bed, a big, oversized job done in what they call Chinese modern. She crouched there on hands and knees, staring at me, ready to leap at me or dart away, I didn’t know which. She crouched there, bronze with two white slashes across her body. “Say something. I’ll make you say something.”

She hurled herself at me, a gouging, kicking, slapping wildcat. She was dead serious. I found myself wrestled over on my back. A knee plowed into my stomach and drove the wind from my lungs. “If this was just a game with you….”

I fought for breath and knew she could handle a lot of men with that feline strength of hers. But when my breath returned I laughed and got my hands under her armpits and threw her off. She tumbled to the floor and was silent. I didn’t even hear her breathing.

I looked at the ceiling and called myself every name in the book. What a way to conduct an investigation, but there it was. “Goddammit, Karen,” I said. “I think I’m falling in love with you.” And I meant it.

A halo of white-blonde hair appeared over the edge of the bed. And then her face and the rest of her in solemn repose now, all the fight gone from her and all the pentup agony which makes the most interesting people live the shortest lives.

It was dark outside by the time we ate dinner.