Whistle Past the Graveyard [= Give the Girl a Gun]

Chapter One

By now I should be used to the attention Fausta Moreni draws in public, for I have squired her across enough night-club floors amid the drooling of every male customer and the homicidal glares of every female. Yet as always when her passage turned every head, none of which so much as flicked a glance at me, I had to suppress an impulse to cross my eyes, put both thumbs in my ears and wiggle the fingers just to test my theory that she made me invisible.

Fausta’s own club, El Patio, was the scene of this gauntlet running, and we were on our way out. On the infrequent occasions we spent an evening together, they always start like that, for the stairs from Fausta’s apartment on the second floor of El Patio lead to a hall at the rear of the club, and in order to get out of the place you have to traverse the whole length of the dining room and one end of the cocktail lounge.

Fausta, also as always, dragged out our exit an unreasonable length of time by playing the hostess clear across the dining room. At every table we passed, she smiled at the customers and. dropped a gracious “Good evening.” When she knew a customer by name, which involved about every third table, she stopped for a moment’s chat. To my past bitter objection that when she took a night off, she ought to take it off completely, she always explained that devoting a few seconds of personal attention to her customers bred good will. But why a supper club which nightly turned away people without reservations required further good will, she has never explained to my satisfaction.

We were almost to the door when a young fellow at a table for six hailed her. He was a handsome lad in an underdeveloped sort of way, thin and curly-haired, white-toothed and actually possessing dimples. There were three couples at the table and apparently his date was the slim, fresh-looking redhead on his left.

“Fausta!” he called. “Come drink a toast to our future.”

Fausta flashed him a friendly smile and said, “Thank you, Barney, but we are just leaving.”

“Not without wishing us luck,” Barney insisted.

He stood up and gestured with a half-full champagne bottle.

“Oh!” Fausta said in a delighted voice. “You and Madeline are getting married?”

For an instant the young man looked blank. Then he flushed slightly. Across the table a heavy-set middle-aged man who looked vaguely familiar, but whom I could not quite place, erupted into a roar of laughter. The redhead on Barney’s left blushed furiously.

“Now you’ll have to ask her, Barney,” the heavy-set man said in a rubbery voice. “You compromised her publicly.”

Fausta gave the redhead a contrite look. “I have made a faux pas, Madeline? I am sorry.”

The redhead continued to blush and Barney laughed a trifle uncertainly. “That would call for an even bigger celebration,” he said. “But unfortunately Madeline’s planning to marry another guy one of these days and only regards me as a business associate. Tonight we’re just celebrating the incorporation of the Huntsafe Company.”

When Fausta merely looked politely puzzled, the red-haired Madeline said, “Barney got word today the patent application on the Gimmick was approved.” She had a clear, pleasant voice which somehow fitted her fresh appearance.

“Oh? You mean that thing with which you shoot deer?”

Barney grinned at her. “You weren’t listening when I explained it, Fausta. It’s not to shoot deer, it’s to avoid shooting deer hunters. But sit down at least long enough to have a drink.”

Fausta glanced inquiringly over her shoulder at me. I shrugged, having learned not to waste effort trying to influence her minor decisions, as she invariably does as she pleases anyway. This time she apparently decided she should make amends for her faux pas by accepting the invitation.

Signaling a nearby waiter for a couple of extra chairs, she took my hand, drew me up beside her and said, “I would like you people to meet Manville Moon.”

The curly-haired young man she introduced as Bernard Amhurst, and the redhead as Madeline Strong. When she designated the heavy-set man who had guffawed as being Edgar Friday, I understood why he had seemed familiar.

Ed Friday was supposed to be an ex-racketeer, though certain people with a thorough knowledge of what went on in town seemed a trifle dubious about the “ex.” Open local gossip said he had accumulated his pile in the extortion racket years back, but just prior to World War II had dissolved his underworld connections and invested his ill-gotten gains in legitimate business, primarily in a couple of wartime manufacturing plants and in a chain of grocery stores. Less overt gossip whispered the switch from extortion to respectable money-making operations did not represent complete reform, and in addition to legitimate enterprise he had dabbled in wartime black market, shady steel speculation, and had cut a big slice of profit from the war-surplus-material racket.

Whatever the truth, he was clean insofar as his official record was concerned. During his extortion days he had been lucky enough never to have gotten tagged, and now that he was supposed to have graduated to the more refined but more lucrative rackets, where purchased influence and sharp dealing were the weapons instead of guns and clubs, he was beyond the range of a municipal rackets squad. If the whispers were true, it would take either a Congressional investigation or the Federal tax boys to upset his applecart.

The woman with Friday, a sleek brunette of about thirty who gave the impression she had been bathed, dressed, made up and then lacquered so that her total effect was permanently fixed and would remain flawless even in a wind storm, was named Evelyn Karnes and was in “show business.” Whether as a Metropolitan Opera star or as a strip-teaser, no one made clear. On her wrist I noted a bracelet of clear, square-cut stones that glinted like blue diamonds. If they were real, I judged that a similar bracelet for Fausta would cost me about ten years of my income.

The third couple consisted of a lean, debonair man of about thirty and a giggling blonde about eight years younger. The man was named Walter Ford and the girl Beatrice Duval. Immediately after introductions the latter informed me I could call her Bubbles.

“Thank you, Bubbles,” I said. “Call me Manny in return.”

Bubbles giggled.

It developed the sextet’s celebration was in honor of a corporation formed only that day, and all four stockholders were in the party. Barney Amhurst was the newly named president, and Ed Friday. Walter Ford and the red-haired Madeline Strong comprised his board of directors. The lacquered brunette and the giggling blonde were not stockholders, it seemed, but were along only to round things out.

Barney Amhurst and Madeline Strong between them explained that the Huntsafe Company, Incorporated, had been formed to manufacture and distribute an invention of Amhurst’s which both fondly referred to as the “Gimmick.” Apparently everyone else in the party, including Fausta, knew what the Gimmick was, but no one undertook to explain it to me. From the conversation all I could gather was that it in some way had to do with deer hunting, it worked, and it was going to make a pile of money.

By the time we had toasted our way through two quarts of champagne, I also gathered there was a change of plans under way among the celebrants. Apparently the original plan for the evening had been dinner and champagne in El Patio’s dining room, then transfer to the ballroom, which is across the cocktail lounge on the other side of the building, where they could intersperse more serious drinking with an occasional dance. But someone, Barney Amhurst, I believe, suggested a private party might result in more uninhibited celebration, and the next thing I knew everyone was enthusiastic about repairing in a body to Amhurst’s apartment.

As a matter of course Fausta and I were invited, and as a matter of course I politely declined. Not that we had any other unbreakable plans, as we had already had dinner in Fausta’s apartment and merely contemplated visiting a night spot or two, then taking a drive along the river road; but I felt we were being invited only as a matter of course and I didn’t want to intrude on a private party. But Barney Amhurst insisted to the point where he was almost demanding to know what we intended doing instead of attending his party, and Bubbles, who suddenly seemed to take an unexpected fancy to me, added her insistence.

When the waiter had brought chairs for Fausta and me, he had placed Fausta’s on Amhurst’s right between Amhurst and the debonair Walter Ford. Bubbles Duval immediately moved her chair away from Ford’s in order to make space for the second chair, with the result that I ended up between her and her escort.

I sat next to Bubbles for several minutes before discovering, to my considerable surprise, that she was a rubber. Another man would have discovered it immediately, for I believe her left calf pressed against my right almost the moment I sat down. But my right calf consists of aluminum and cork instead of flesh and bone, as that leg ends in a stump just below the knee. I am so used to wearing an artificial leg that it no longer impairs my activities in the slightest degree, but I have never been able to induce in it a sense of feeling. Consequently it was only when she became emboldened by my apparent agreeability to having my leg rubbed by hers, and increased the pressure to the point where I was in danger of being pushed off my chair, that I realized what she was doing.

My first impulse was to shift my position, but then what Fausta refers to as my “perverted sense of humor” got the best of me. Somehow the thought of what the blonde’s reaction would be if she discovered she was wasting her caresses on an inanimate mechanical contrivance instead of a male leg struck me as funny, so I merely braced myself against the pressure and left it there for her to rub.

Momentarily letting up on the pressure, Bubbles leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Please come to the party, Manny. We’ve got to have one live man there.” Then she glanced past me at Walter Ford, made a small face and giggled.