All These Condemned (18 page)

I went up to my room. As I went by Wilma’s half-open door she said, “Judy, dear?”

I shrugged and went in. “Hi, Wilma.”

“Are you having a good time?” She was sitting at a dressing table doing something with her nails.

“A dandy time,” I said.

“Please sit down, dear. It’s time we had a little talk.”

“Isn’t it, though!”

She gave me a glance like a scalpel and looked back at her nails. “I’ve been thinking about you, Judy. Trying to find some answers. You see, just out of loyalty, I’d like to be able to use you again this coming fall. I hate to let people go.”

I wanted to tell her that at no time had I been aware of exactly working for her. But I remembered Willy’s warning and so I just sat.

“I’ve wondered what made you so popular for a time. I think I know now. You’re a rather pretty woman, Judy. There’s a certain amount of sensitivity in your face. And you have a pleasant little voice.”

“Thanks,” I said a bit darkly.

She rode right over me. She frowned. “Humor, I suppose, is really the unexpected, isn’t it? So really there is something grotesque and, I suppose, amusing, about an attractive girl throwing herself around and trying to look her worst instead of her best. Goo running down your face and all that. And it will charm the public for a while. But it isn’t anything you can continue indefinitely, now, is it?”

I had news for her. She had a few things to know about timing, emphasis. How you can smell the audience and underplay when you should and underline when you have to. How you work on the show, adding stuff, throwing stuff out, picking what’s best for you.

She put her tools down and faced me squarely. “You have to face the fact, dear, that as far as the public is concerned, you’ve ceased to be funny. All you had was a certain shock value. I’ve told Wallace to try to find a replacement for you. But, you see, I take a personal interest in your future. Have you ever thought about taking acting lessons?”

I lit a cigarette and huffed the smoke in her general direction. “Back up a minute, sis. I’m through. Is that what you’re saying?”

She smiled. “Quite.”

“You, milady, are a rough apple. You’re rough as a cob. But leave us restate the case. I sold you my services through my agent and through your advertising agency. Your opinion of my future, or lack of same, interests me about as much as does spherical geometry. So let’s knock off the personal approach, shall we?”

“I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, dear.”

“You haven’t,” I said, trying to match smiles, but my hand trembled and I knew, damnit, that she saw it.

“I don’t care if you despise me, Judy. I’m just saying this for your own good. You’re young. You’re at a dead end. You
must
start thinking of what you’re going to do with your life.”

“I’ll do fine with my life.”

“You’ve had the sort of publicity that can go to a person’s head. You people fall into the trap of believing what other people are paid to say about you. You know that, don’t you?”

“It happens to some.”

“I didn’t want to do this through middlemen, Judy. I thought we could talk nicely to each other.”

“We’re talking.”

“Smart promotion made you queen for a day. That day is definitely over. You must face that, you know.”

I got up. They don’t call it a retreat any more. They call it shortening your lines of communication. A big one-legged Marine told me that. “I appreciate all your advice, Mrs. Ferris. Miss Ferris. Whatever it is legally. I can scoot off right now, or stay through to the bitter end, whichever you please.”

“I wouldn’t
think
of your leaving now.”

I looked into those eyes. I wondered how her nail scissors would look sticking out of her throat. “Like I said, thanks.”

“You’re more than welcome, Judy.”

I didn’t start really shaking until I got to my room. Even if the Judy fad had faded, I’d still had one thing: pride in being a workman. A trooper. A pro. And, damn her eyes, she’s picked that one thing to work on. Fourteen years of show business didn’t mean a thing. I was a girl they threw goo at, for shock value. Maybe everybody thought that.
Damn her! So poisonously sweet, and taking an aimed kick at your best prop. Well, she’d wobbled me badly. Put a few fracture lines in my supports. But I’d last. I always had.

But I was going to spend a lot of time thinking of ways to kill her. Acting lessons! For God’s sake. Be a willow tree. Be smoke rising from a fire. Be a sad grasshopper. I’d see Willy and I’d put a show back together, and find a sponsor and shove the show right down her throat.

But …

I sat there on the bed and looked at my hands. I sat and felt as if she’d poisoned me. Rejection. Something you put in the blood stream. It dulls the reflexes, waters down hope, hamstrings pride.

I had been going to change. Instead, I put on a robe and headed back out. I wanted a highball that would look like iced coffee. I wanted a fist fight. I wanted a chance to make a big gesture. Any kind.

When it was night we were splashing around. Then they had to take off their suits and turn off the lights and be real bold. Steve called me chicken. I told him I’d got over being childish when I’d got over being a child. I told them about Hash. About how all of us came in on the train into Penn Station and Hash made his bet and I held the stakes. One hundred and twenty bucks he bet. He had to get from the train to the taxi stark naked. He made quite a stir as he went through the station, running like the wind, suitcase in one hand, tram case in the other. Would have made it, too, but his bare feet slipped and he hit his head when he went down. He was fined a hundred bucks. I told them anybody could
swim thusly if it was his inclination. But it took a different kind of mind to Minsky your way through Penn Station.

Randy, Wallace, and I were the conformists. I swam around at a safe distance. Randy stayed on the dock, I think. Much giggling and splashing and games. How gay in the wilderness! I wondered what the loons thought. And the perch. I thought, so help me, of how enjoyable it would be if friend Wilma floated down the creek at the end of the lake and on down the river and out to sea.

So when the shouting began to make sense and I suddenly became aware of trouble and made the dock and scrambled up and found out Wilma was gone, it gave me a feeling of nightmare. As if my wish had been too strong. A feeling of guilt. I got my robe on. Come on, Judy. You’re a comic. Say something funny now.

THERE IS AN OLD
, not so funny Hollywood story about two studio heads walking down the street trying to think up a good sequence for a picture in process. Every time one of them gets an idea, he acts it out, with gestures. And the other shakes his head sadly. A safe is being lowered out of an office window. The rope breaks. The safe lands with damp finality on one of the two executives. The other one looks at the scene in eye-bulging horror and then yells, “Too gruesome, Sammy! We can’t use it!”

There I was. Idea boy. Standing on the dock and thinking I should call Wilma and get her back in. Too gruesome, kid. We can’t use it. It isn’t a good PR pitch. The public won’t go for it.

And then the night got bigger and blacker. The hills got older. The sky got farther away. The lake got deeper and
darker. I shivered. You live in a place full of light bulbs and chrome and rare fillets and box-top contests. But when you die, you die in a place of mountains and sky, earth and fire, stars and the sea. I felt tiny as hell. I didn’t like the feeling. I felt like a pasteboard man on a dock somebody built with a toy kit, looking at the real world for the first time.

Up until that moment I had a fighting chance. I might have been able to wiggle things around so as to save my own bacon by retaining at least one of the three sagging accounts. And that one was going to be Wilma. At least, working through Randy, with Noel working on him, I seemed to have the best chance there. I stood there and I saw an imaginary office in an almost first-rate hotel, and me in the office on a stinking salary beating my brains out trying to fatten the guest list with almost first-rate people, with the fractured nobility and with Texans who didn’t know any better, and trying to angle the name of the house into the columns of those big warmhearted columnists who would crucify their dear old mothers if by so doing they could add one more paper to the string.

And then that lovely vision faded as I suddenly saw what was being handed me on a platter. It kindled a little fire of excitement in the pit of my stomach and then roared up through the flue. I felt twice life size. This was going to be it. When they recovered the body, I wanted to kiss the stone-cold forehead.

It meant I had to do some very fancy operating. I had to be light on my feet. While I was still thinking, Paul enlisted me to go out there and do some futile diving for the body. I hoped we wouldn’t find her right away. Because it might be
possible to revive her. This was going to be Steve’s big chance. I dived on order, but I did damn little hunting. I was too busy thinking.

The tabloid boys were going to try to turn this into a sensation. There was all the raw material there. When the body was recovered, it was going to be awfully bare. And the house full of lintheads who would talk too much. We had to have a plot, a better one than the one we were stuck with. And the brass that would swoop down on us had to be handled. I would have to coach the people in the new plot and make it consistent. And keep the working press off their backs until they had it clearly in mind. The thing that seemed to make the most sense was to say that we’d all come up here to work out an idea for a new fall show, headlining Judy Jonah. Hayes could be worked into the idea somehow. Maybe sets, costumes. O.K., so we had the sales manager, the account executive, a public-relations consultant, her business manager. If it was handled right, it might generate a lot of public interest in the fall show, and might even make it worth while using Jonah again. The deal on the swimming was what would make it tough. It was too sweet a tabloid angle. What I should do was get to her room and get hold of a suit and smuggle it out and rip it a little and get it into the water. They would probably drag for the body. If I could get the suit on one of the grapples, the whole thing would look better.

If I could cool it all off, if I could give them nothing to chew on, then Steve Winsan would be known around town as the bright eyes who saved the ball game. And that would mean new people on the list.

I was getting pretty pooped with all the diving. Paul had
us knock off as the officials arrived. I hung around to see what would go on. Cold as I was. Then the one named Fish caught me flat-footed by finding Wilma’s suit in the pocket of her robe. I went up to my room and dried off and changed and went back down, thinking hard all the time. I wanted to get them apart and tell them what I had cooked up. But Fish intercepted me on the dock.

“What’s your name again?”

“Winsan. Steve Winsan.”

“O.K., Mr. Winsan. Get in that boat there. That’s Will Agar. Got to have two men in a boat, one on the oars and one on the grapple.”

“But …”

“Suppose you co-operate, Mr. Winsan.”

“I’ve got some phone calls to make.”

“I already told the operator not to take any calls from this number unless I make them, so you don’t have to worry about it. Just get in the boat there and Will will tell you what he wants done.”

What could I do? I got in the boat. Will was all teeth, Adam’s apple, and adenoids. Somebody yelled from the dock. “You, Will, go make your sweep to the north of Bobby.”

The grapple was a crude thing, a piece of pipe on a heavy line with gang hooks fastened in a row.

Will said, “Now if she comes fast, pull slow and easy. If it’s the body, it’ll come up slow. But if it goes tight, we got bottom. Then we got to work it loose.”

I looked toward the shore in complete despair. They’d turned out some of the floods, the ones that were in our eyes. I could count fifteen boats. Holding the line, I could
feel the pipe bumping along the bottom, dragging the hooks after it. Every once in a while we would catch. Each time it happened, it would give me a feeling of shock. Will would clamber back and test the tension of the line. “Hung up again,” he’d say. He’d circle back and work it loose. I was trapped out there in full view of the house, with no way of knowing what the damn fools there were saying to the officials. The house lights were on. I could see people moving around once in a while. And sometimes they’d wander out on the dock, alone or in pairs, and look out at us. Will wasn’t scintillating company. The long slow hours passed. My hands were getting raw from tugging the rough line loose. I had no cigarettes left. We would finish a sweep and then somebody would tell us where to go next. I could see a night city editor someplace. “You know, that Ferris woman. Lake Vale. I don’t give a damn if you don’t know where it is. Somebody knows where it is. Get one of those guys who fly fishermen around in float planes. I’m lining up somebody for pics. Phone your stuff in to Saul. He’s got all the stuff out of the morgue on her.”

And I was afraid that while I was still out in this stinking rowboat I’d start seeing flash bulbs popping. With me out here fishing. Everything was a dull milky gray when Will said quietly, “O.K., pull it up, Mr. Winsan.”

I asked him why. He didn’t answer. I turned and looked at him. He was looking at a boat about forty feet away. That boat had a kerosene lantern on one of the seats. There were two old guys in it. They were gingerly pulling in a line, hand over hand, both staring at the surface of the black water. For a few moments there it looked like one of those old paintings. The two old guys with the light orange on
their faces, and the light making a flickering path on the water. Other boats had stopped moving. The world seemed very still. I saw the heavy whiteness break the surface, and then one man yelped and the other made a lunge, nearly upsetting their boat. The lantern rocked dangerously.

“Here she is, boys,” a cracked old voice sang out.

They got together and worked her up over the side. She came over the side, white and heavy, the lanterns making wet highlights on her, her head loose, black hair pasted flat. I heard the thumping as she tumbled onto the bottom of the boat. They covered her up and we headed in and the other boats came along.