What`s Better Than Money

CHAPTER ONE

I

I had been playing the piano in Rusty’s bar for four months or so when I met Rima Marshall.

She came into the bar one wild night with the rain pounding down on the tin roof and thunder rumbling in the distance.

There were only two customers at the bar, both drunks. There was Rusty behind the bar, aimlessly polishing glasses. Across the way in a booth, Sam the negro waiter, was reading a racing sheet. There was me at the piano.

I was playing a nocturne by Chopin. My back was turned to the entrance. I didn’t see or hear her come in.

Later, Rusty told me she had come in out of the drowning rain around twenty minutes to nine. She was soaking wet, and she sat down in one of the booths to my right and behind me.

Rusty didn’t like having lone women in his bar. Usually he chased them out, but as the bar was practically empty and it was raining fit to drown a duck, he let her be.

She ordered a coke, and then lighting a cigarette, she rested her elbows on the table and stared broodingly at the two drunks at the bar.

After she had been sitting there for maybe ten minutes, things began to happen.

All of a sudden the bar door crashed open and a man came in. He took four plunging steps into the bar, the way a man walks on a rolling ship, and then came to an abrupt standstill.

It was then Rima began to scream, and it was then I became aware of her and the man who had entered.

Her scream made me jerk around to stare at her.

I’ll always remember my first sight of her. She was around eighteen years of age. Her hair was the colour of polished silver and her wide, large eyes were cobalt blue. She had on a scarlet light-weight sweater that set off her breasts and a pair of black, tight-fitting slacks. There was a grubby unkempt look about her as if she had been living rough. On a chair by her side lay a plastic mac that had a rip in the sleeve and looked on its last legs.

In repose she would have been pretty the way so many girls her age are pretty who clutter up the sidewalks of Hollywood, hunting for film work, but she wasn’t in repose right at that moment.

The terror on her face was ugly to see. Her wide open mouth as it formed her continuous scream was an ugly hole in her face. She was pressing her body against the wall like an animal trying to get back into its burrow, and from her finger nails came a nerve jarring sound of scratching as she clawed at the panelling in a futile, panic-stricken quest for escape.

The man who had come in looked like something straight out of a nightmare. He was around twenty-four, small, fine-boned with a thin, pointed face that was as white as cold mutton fat. His black hair was long and plastered to his head by the rain. It hung down either side of his face in limp strands. It was his eyes that gave him his nightmare appearance. The pupils were enormous, nearly filling the entire iris, and for a moment I got the impression that he was blind. But he wasn’t blind. He was looking at the screaming girl, and there was an expression on his face that had me scared.

He had on a shabby blue suit, a dirty shirt and a black tie that looked like a shoe string. His clothes were soaking wet, and from the cuffs of his trousers water dripped, forming two little puddles on the floor.

For about three or four seconds, he stood motionless, looking at Rima, then out of his thin, vicious mouth came a steady hissing sound.

Rusty, the two drunks and I stared at him. His right hand groped into his hip pocket. He pulled a wicked looking flick-knife. It had a long pointed blade that glittered in the light. Holding the knife, its blade pointing at the screaming girl, he began to move forward, the way a spider moves, quickly, slightly crabwise and the hissing grew in sound.

‘Hey, you!’ Rusty bawled. ‘Drop it!’

But he was careful to stay right where he was behind the bar. The two drunks didn’t move. They sat on the bar stools and watched, their mouths hanging open.

Sam, his face suddenly grey with fear, slid under the table and out of sight.

That left me.

A hay head with a knife is about the most dangerous thing anyone can tackle, but I couldn’t sit there and watch him stab the girl, and I knew that was what he was going to do.

I kicked my chair away and started for him.

Rima had stopped screaming. She pushed the table sideways so it blocked the entrance to the booth.

She held onto the table, staring with blind terror at the man as he came at her.

All this took less than five seconds.

I reached him as he reached the booth.

He seemed completely unaware of me. His concentration on the girl was terrifying.

The knife flashed as I hit him.

It was a wild panicky punch, but there was plenty of weight behind it. It landed on the side of his head and sent him reeling, but it was a fraction late.

The knife slashed her arm. I saw the sleeve of her sweater turn dark, and she slumped back against the wall, then slid down out of sight behind the table.

This I saw out of the corner of my eye. I was watching him all the time. He staggered back until he had got his balance then he came forward again, not looking at me, his owl-like eyes on the booth.

As he reached the table, I set myself and really belted him. My fist connected with the side of his jaw.

The impact lifted him clean off his feet and sent him sprawling on the floor.

He lay on his back, stunned, but he still held onto the blood-stained knife. I jumped forward and stamped on his wrist. I had to stamp twice before he released his grip. I grabbed the knife and threw it across the room.

Hissing like a snake, he bounced to his feet and came at me in a horrible, purposeful rush. He was all over me before I could punch him away. His finger nails raked my face and his teeth snapped at my throat.

Somehow I flung him off, then as he came at me again, I hung one on the point of his chin that sent a jarring pain up my arm and practically tore his head off his shoulders.

He went skittling across the bar, his arms flung wide, to land up against the wall, upsetting a table and smashing a number of glasses.

He lay there, his chin pointing towards the ceiling, his breathing rasping and quick.

As I pulled the table out of the booth, I heard Rusty yelling into the telephone for the police.

Rima was bleeding. She sat huddled up on the floor, blood making a pool by her side, her face chalk-white, her big eyes staring at me.

I must have looked a pretty sight. The hay head’s finger nails had ripped four furrows down the side of my face and I was bleeding nearly as badly as she was.

‘Are you badly hurt?’ I asked, squatting at her side.

She shook her head.

‘I’m all right.’

Her voice was surprisingly steady, and there was no longer that ugly look of terror on her face. She was looking past me at the hay head as he lay unconscious against the wall. She looked at him the way you would look at a hairy-legged spider that suddenly appears at the foot of your bed.

‘Don’t worry about him,’ I said. ‘He’ll be quiet for hours. Can you stand?’

‘You are bleeding…’

‘And don’t worry about me…’

I offered her my hand. Hers was cold as she put it into mine. I got her to her feet and she leaned against me.

Then the bar door kicked open and a couple of patrolmen stormed in.

They looked at me, bleeding onto the floor and Rima leaning against me, her sweater sleeve blood soaked, and one of them pulled his club and started across towards me.

‘Hey! He’s the guy you want.’ I said.

The cop looked as if he were going to take a swing at my head. He paused, then looked over his shoulder at the hay head on the floor, then back at me.

‘Okay, okay,’ the other patrolman said. ‘Don’t rush it, Tom. Let’s get it all straightened out, shall we?’

Rima gave a sudden sighing moan and fainted. I just had time to take her weight before she slid to the floor.

I knelt by her, supporting her head. I felt pretty bad myself.

‘Can’t you do something?’ I bawled at the patrolman. ‘She’s bleeding!’

The calm cop came over. He took out a pocket knife and cut away her sleeve. He inspected the long, deep cut on her arm. He produced a first-aid pack and in less than a minute, he had strapped her arm, stopping the bleeding.

By then Rusty had explained to the other cop what it was all about, and the cop went over to the hay head and stirred him with his foot.

‘Watch it!’ I said, still supporting Rima. ‘He’s a muggle smoker and he’s hopped to the eyeballs.’

The cop sneered at me.

‘Yeah? Think I don’t know how to handle a junky?’

The hay head came alive. He shot to his feet, snatched up a carafe of water from the bar and before the cop could dodge, he slammed it down on his head. The carafe burst like a bomb and the impact drove the cop onto his knees.

The hay head turned. His owl-like eyes found Rima who was just coming out of her faint. Holding the broken neck of the carafe like a spear, he charged at her and he really had me scared.

I was holding her and kneeling, and in that position I was helpless. If it hadn’t been for the calm cop, both she and I would have been butchered.

He let the hay head go past him, then he slammed his club down on the back of his head.

The hay head shot forward on his face, rolled away from us and the jagged neck of the bottle fell out of his hand.

The cop bent over him and snapped on the handcuffs. The other cop, cursing, leaned weakly against the bar, holding his head between his hands.

The calm cop told Rusty to call the Station House for an ambulance.

I helped Rima to her feet and sat her on a chair well away from where the hay head lay. She was shivering, and I could see the shock was hitting her. I stood by her, holding her against me while with my free hand I kept a handkerchief to my face.

In about five minutes the ambulance and a police car arrived. A couple of guys in white coats bustled in. They strapped the hay head to a stretcher and took him out, then one of them came back and fixed my face.

While this was going on, a big, red-faced plain-clothes man who had come with the ambulance and who had introduced himself as Sergeant Hammond talked to Rusty. Then he came over to Rima.

She sat limply, nursing her arm and staring at the floor.

‘Let’s have it, sister,’ Hammond said. ‘What’s your name?’

I listened because I was curious about her.

She said her name was Rima Marshall.

‘Address?’

‘Simmonds Hotel,’ naming a fifth rate joint along the waterfront.

‘Occupation?’

She glanced up at him, then away. There was a sullen expression on her face as she said, ‘I’m an extra at the Pacific Studios.’

‘Who is the junky?’

‘He calls himself Wilbur. I don’t know his other name.’

‘Why did he try to cut you?’

She hesitated for a split second.

‘We lived together once. I walked out on him.’

‘Why?’

She stared at him.

‘You saw him, didn’t you? Wouldn’t you walk out on him?’

‘Maybe.’ Hammond scowled, pushing his hat to the back of his head. ‘Well, okay. You’ll be wanted in court tomorrow.’

She got unsteadily to her feet.

‘Is that all?’

‘Yeah.’ Hammond turned to one of the cops standing by the door. ‘Drive her to her hotel, Jack.’

Rima said, ‘You’d better check with the New York police. They want him.’

Hammond’s eyes narrowed as he stared at her.

‘What for?’

‘I don’t know but they want him.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He told me.’

Hammond hesitated, then shrugged. He waved to the cop.

‘Take her to her hotel.’

Rima walked out into the rain, the cop following her. I watched her go. I was a little surprised she didn’t even look at me. I had saved her life, hadn’t I?

Hammond waved me to a chair.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Jeff Gordon.’

It wasn’t my real name, but a name I had been using while out in Hollywood.

‘Address?’

I told him. I had a room in a rooming-house at the back of Rusty’s bar.

‘Let’s have your version of the shindig.’

I gave it to him.

‘Do you think he meant business?’

‘If you mean was he going to kill her, I think he was.’

He blew out his cheeks.

‘Well, okay. We’ll want you in court tomorrow at eleven sharp.’ He stared at me. ‘You’d better take care of that face of yours. Have you ever seen her in here before?’

‘No.’

‘It beats me how a good looking girl like her could think of living with a rat like him.’ He grimaced.

‘Girls… thank God, I’ve got a boy.’

He jerked his head at the remaining cop, and together they went out into the rain.

II

All this I’m telling you about took place a year after Hitler’s war. Pearl Harbour seems a long way in the past now, but at that time I was twenty-one and at college, working hard to qualify as a Consulting Engineer. I was in grabbing distance of my degree when the pace of war hotted up and I couldn’t resist the call to arms. My father nearly hit the ceiling when I told him I was going to volunteer. He tried to persuade me to get my degree before joining up but the thought of another six months in college while there was fighting to be done was something I couldn’t face up to.

Four months later at the age of twenty-two I was one of the first to land on the beaches of Okinawa. I got an inch of red hot shrapnel in my face as I started towards the swaying palm trees that hid the Japanese guns, and that was the end of the war so far as I was concerned.

For the next six months I lay in a hospital bed while the plastic experts remodelled my face.

They made a reasonably good job of it except they left me with a slight droop in my right eyelid and a scar like a silver thread along the right side of my jaw. They told me they could fix that if I cared to stay with them for another three months, but I had had enough. The horrors I had seen in that hospital ward remain with me even now. I couldn’t get out fast enough.

I went home.

My father was a manager of a bank. He hadn’t much money, but he was more than ready to finance me until I had completed my studies as a consulting engineer.

To please him I went back to college, but those months in the battle unit and the months in hospital had done something to me. I found I hadn’t any more interest in Engineering. I just couldn’t concentrate.

After a week’s work, I quit. I told my father how it was. He listened, and he was sympathetic.

‘So what will you do?’

I said I didn’t know, but I did know I couldn’t settle to book work anyway for some time.

His eyes moved from my drooping right eyelid to the scar on my jaw and then he smiled at me.

‘All right, Jeff. You’re still young. Why don’t you go off somewhere and take a look around? I can spare you two hundred dollars. Take a vacation, then come back and settle to work.’

I took the money. I wasn’t proud of taking it because I knew he couldn’t spare it, but right then I was in such a rotten mental state I felt I had to get away or I would crack up.

I arrived in Los Angeles with the vague idea that I might get a job on the movies. That came unstuck pretty fast.

I didn’t care. I didn’t want to work anyway. I hung around the waterfront for a month doing nothing and drinking too much. At that time there were a lot of guys in reserved occupations with uneasy consciences because they hadn’t done any fighting, who were ready to buy drinks for guys in return for battle stories, but this didn’t last long. Pretty soon my money began to run out and I began to wonder what I was going to do for the next meal.

I had got into the habit of going every night to Rusty Mac-Gowan’s bar. It was a bar with a certain amount of character and it faced the bay where the gambling ships are moored. Rusty had got the place up to look like a ship’s cabin with port holes for windows and a lot of brasswork that drove Sam, the negro waiter, crazy to keep polished.

Rusty had been a top sergeant and he had fought the Japs. He knew what I had been up against, and he took an interest in me. He was a very good guy. He was tough and as hard as teak, but there was nothing he wouldn’t have done for me. When he heard I was out of a job, he said he was planning to buy a piano if he could find someone to play it, then he grinned at me.

He had come to the right man. The only thing I could do reasonably well was to play the piano. I told him to go ahead and buy the piano and he bought it.

I played the piano in his bar from eight o’clock in the evening to midnight for thirty bucks a week. It suited me all right. The money paid for my room, my cigarettes and my food. Rusty kept me in liquor.

Every so often he would ask me how much longer I was going to stay with him. He said with my education I should be doing something a lot better than thumping a piano night after night. I told him if it suited me, it was none of his business what I did. Every so often he would ask me again, and I would give him the same answer.

Well, that was the setup when Rima walked in out of the storm. That’s the background. I was twenty-three and no good to anyone. When she walked in, trouble for me walked in with her. I didn’t know it then, but I found out fast enough.

A little after ten o’clock the following morning, Mrs. Millard who ran the rooming-house where I lived, yelled up the stairs that I was wanted on the telephone.

I was trying to shave around the claw marks on my face which had puffed up in the night and now looked terrible. I cursed under my breath as I wiped off the soap.

I went down the three flights of stairs to the booth in the hall and picked up the receiver.

It was Sergeant Hammond.

‘We won’t be wanting you in court, Gordon,’ he said. ‘We’re not going ahead with the assault rap against Wilbur.’

I was surprised.

‘You’re not?’

‘No. That silver wig is certainly the kiss of death. She’s fingered him into a twenty year rap.’

‘What was that?’

‘A fact. We contacted the New York police. They welcomed the news that we had him like a mother finding her long lost child. They have enough on him to put him away for twenty years.’

I whistled.

‘That’s quite a stretch.’

‘Isn’t it?’ He paused. I could hear his heavy slow breathing over the line. ‘She wanted your address.’

‘She did? Well, it’s no secret. Did you give it to her?’

‘No, in spite of the fact she said she just wanted to thank you for saving her life. Take my tip, Gordon, keep out of her way. I have an idea she would be poison to any man.’

That annoyed me. I didn’t take any advice easily.

‘I’ll judge that,’ I said.

‘I expect you will. So long,’ and he hung up.

That evening, around nine o’clock, Rima came into the bar. She was wearing a black sweater and a grey skirt. The black sweater set off her silver hair pretty well.

The bar was crowded. Rusty was so busy he didn’t notice her come in.

She sat at a table right by my side. I was playing an étude by Chopin. No one was listening. I was playing to please myself.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘How’s the arm?’

‘It’s all right.’ She opened her shabby little bag and took out a pack of cigarettes. ‘Thanks for the rescue act last night.’

‘Think nothing of it. I’ve always been a hero.’ I slid my hands off the keys and turned so I faced her.

‘I know I look terrible, but it won’t last long.’

She cocked her head on one side as she stared at me.

‘From the look of you, you seem to make a habit of getting your face into trouble.’

‘That’s a fact.’ I turned and began to pick out the melody of It Had To Be You. Remarks about my face embarrassed me. ‘I hear Wilbur is going away for twenty years.’

‘Good riddance!’ She wrinkled her nose, grimacing. ‘I hope I’ve lost him for good now. He stabbed two policemen in New York. He was lucky they didn’t die. He’s a great little stabber.’

‘He certainly must be.’

Sam, the waiter, came up and looked enquiringly at her.

‘You’d better order something,’ I said to her, ‘or you’ll get thrown out.’

‘Is that an invitation?’ she asked, lifting her eyebrows at me.

‘No. If you can’t buy your own drinks you shouldn’t come in here.’

She told Sam to bring her a coke.

‘While we are on the subject,’ I said to her, ‘I don’t reckon to have attachments. I can’t afford them.’

She stared at me blankly.

‘Well, you’re frank even if you are stingy.’

‘That’s the idea. Frank Stingy, that’s the name, baby.’

I began to play Body and Soul.

Since I had got that lump of shrapnel in my face, I had lost interest in women the way I had lost interest in work. There had been a time when I went for the girls the way most college boys go for them, but I couldn’t be bothered now. Those six months in the plastic surgery ward had drained everything out of me: I was a sexless zombie, and I liked it.

Suddenly I became aware that Rima was singing softly to my playing, and after five or six bars, I felt a creepy sensation crawl up my spine.

This was no ordinary voice. It was dead on pitch, slightly off-beat on the rhythm as it should be, and as clear as a silver bell. It was the clearness that got me after listening for so long to the husky torch singers who moan at you from the discs.

I played on and listened to her. She stopped abruptly when Sam came with the coke. When he had gone I swung around and stared at her.

‘Who taught you to sing like that?’

‘Sing? Why, nobody. Do you call that singing?’

‘Yes, I call it singing. What are you like with the throttle wide open?’

‘You mean loud?’

‘That’s what I mean.’

She hunched her shoulders.

‘I can be loud.’

‘Then go ahead and be loud. Body and Soul. As loud as you damn well like.’

She looked startled.

‘I’ll be thrown out.’

‘You go ahead and be loud. I’ll take care of it if it’s any good. If it isn’t, I don’t care if you are thrown out.’

I began to play.

I had told her to be loud, but what came out of her throat shook me. I expected it to be something, but not this volume of silver sound, with a knife edge that cut through the uproar around the bar like a razor slicing through silk.

The first three bars killed the uproar. Even the drunks stopped yammering. They turned to stare.

Rusty, his eyes popping, leaned across the bar, his ham-like hands knotted into fists.

She didn’t even have to stand up. Leaning back, and slightly swelling her deep chest, she let it come out of her as effortlessly as water out of a tap. The sound moved into the room and filled it. It hit everyone between the eyes: it snagged them the way a hook snags a fish. It was on pitch; it was swing; it was blues; it was magnificent!

We did a verse and a chorus, then I signalled to her to cut it. The last note came out of her and rolled up my spine and up the spines of the drunks right into their hair. It hung for a moment filling the room before she cut it off and let the glasses on the bar shelf settle down and stop rattling.

I sat motionless, my hands resting on the keys and waited.

It was as I imagined it would be. It was too much for them. No one clapped or cheered. No one looked her way. Rusty picked up a glass and began to polish it, his face embarrassed. Three or four of the regulars drifted to the door and went out. The conversation started to buzz again, although on an uneasy note. It had been too good for them; they just couldn’t take it.

I looked at Rima and she wrinkled her nose at me. I got to know that expression of hers: it meant: ‘So what? Do you think I care?’

‘Pearls before swine,’ I said. ‘With a voice like that you can’t fail to go places. You could sing yourself into a fortune. You could be a major sensation!’

‘Do you think so?’ She lifted her shoulders. ‘Tell me something: where can I find a cheap room to live in? I’m nearly out of money.’

I laughed at her.

‘You should worry about money. Don’t you realise your voice is pure gold?’

‘One thing at the time,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to economise.’

‘Come to my place,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing cheaper, and nothing more horrible. 25 Lexon Avenue: first turning on the right as you leave here.’

She stubbed out her cigarette and stood up.

‘Thanks. I’ll go and fix it.’

She walked out of the bar, her hips swaying slightly, her silver head held high.

All the lushes up the bar stared after her. One of them was stupid enough to whistle after her.

It wasn’t until Sam nudged me that I realised she had gone without paying for the coke.

I paid for it.

I felt it was the least I could do after listening to that wonderful voice.