Hard Case Crime: Fifty to One (3 page)

It didn’t
look
like any hotel she’d ever seen in the movies or on television, never mind the two they had back in Aberdeen. The lobby was dark and narrow; there was no place to sit; there were no bellboys pushing luggage carts, no potted plants for atmosphere, no concierge’s desk, no registration window. Instead, there was only a standing ashtray between a pair of elevator doors at the room’s far end and a large board on the wall, under glass. Rows of metal letters behind the glass spelled out what appeared to be the names of firms:

...and so on, through
WHITEMAN AND SON, DDS
in 404 and something merely called
ZIEGLER
in 1111.

Beside the board, screwed tightly to the wall, was an angled metal dispenser containing a stack of business cards for anyone to take. Tricia took one and compared it to the one Carter Blandon had handed her. It was identical.

A residential hotel for unaccompanied young women? This was an office building! And the worst sort, by all appearances, the sort that rented tiny airless suites to desperate businessmen and get-rich-quick schemers—she knew the sort, she’d seen them often enough in the movies, read about them in the two-bit crime novels they sold in every drugstore.

The louse! The dirty...dirty...
rat!
To take a woman’s money like that, to pretend fellow-feeling and kindness and generosity only as a pretense for stealing from her! Tricia found the man’s audacity breathtaking, literally—she found she had to sit down on one of her suitcases and make an effort to breathe. And now the feeling of panic she’d quelled earlier returned, and the sob with it. She was alone in New York City and very nearly penniless, with three heavy bags and no place to stay and a sister who had fallen into god only knew what sort of depravity—but not far enough into it that she was willing to share it with Tricia. Because the sad truth was, if she’d offered it to Tricia now, Tricia would have said yes. However bad things were in Coral’s life, they could hardly be worse than Tricia’s situation was right now.

She couldn’t even return home as Coral had urged her to do—she didn’t have the train fare.

She wiped her eyes on a handkerchief she retrieved from her purse, then got up and hefted her bags once more.

It was three in the afternoon and slowly but surely night was coming. She had to take care of herself—no one else was going to. With her free elbow she jabbed the elevator call button, and while she waited for the car to arrive she scanned through the building’s list of tenants once more. A place to stay and a way to pay for it—that’s what she needed. And the latter, at least, meant getting a job. Not a month from now—now.

She was no dentist, no lawyer, didn’t know what a ‘notion’ or ‘sundry’ might be. Her knowledge of fashion was, as mama never hesitated to tell her, a disaster, and the only importing she’d ever done involved bringing herself from South Dakota to Manhattan.

But she could move.

When the elevator door slid open and the wizened operator on a stool inside drew back the metal accordion-fold gate, she lugged her bags inside, deposited them on the floor, and met his flinty stare with one of her own.

“Third floor,” she said. “And step on it.”

The hallway was, if possible, even shabbier than the lobby had been, the paint on the walls a tired olive green, the pebbled glass in most of the doorways dark. She passed doors labeled with faded gilt lettering and ones that weren’t labeled at all, just hastily numbered with black paint. Green glass shades hung from the ceiling at intervals along the hall, but fewer than half the bulbs seemed to be working. A few of the doorways were illuminated, and one was propped open at the bottom with a brick. From inside she heard a radio quietly playing what sounded like Perry Como.

She looked back, but the elevator door had closed behind her.

After a stretch, the hallway branched, and a sign directed her to the left for 310-317, right for 318-325. She turned left.

310. 311. 312. Maintenance closet. 313.

Of course it had to be at the very end. Tricia’s arms were getting sore, and she had to put her luggage down twice to rest them before she finally reached the door labeled 317. On the glass it said

MADAME HELGA DANCERS,

MODELS, CHANTEUSES, ETC.

“WE’VE GOT HER NUMBER!”

The glass was, against all odds, brightly lit. Tricia could even see shadows inside that looked like human silhouettes. She fixed her hair briefly and, glancing into her compact, traced a pinky along her lower lip to straighten the rouge she’d applied on the train. She looked a wreck, she thought. Her cheeks were flushed from exertion, her dress disarrayed, and the day’s strain was telling around her eyes. But it wasn’t as though the passage of still more time, never mind a night spent on the streets of New York, would make her look any better.

She put on the brightest smile she had and knocked briskly.

“G’way,” a woman’s voice called from inside, “audition’s over!”

“I don’t know what audition you mean,” Tricia called back to her through the door. “I just got into the city and I’m looking for some work.”

“What sort of work?” came the voice.

“What sort have you got?”

There was silence, and it stretched on a good long time.

Finally, the voice said, “Well, what do you do? Sing? Dance?”

“I can dance,” Tricia said.

“What?”

She said it again, louder. “I can dance!”

“Well how do you expect me to see that through a closed door?”

Tricia tried the knob, cautiously pushed the door open. Inside was a big open room with a desk in the middle. A window on one wall had words lettered on it in reverse, so they could be read from the street outside. There was a wooden bench under the window and two young women were sitting there, folios of sheet music clutched in their hands. Behind the desk was a third young woman, only a year or two older than Tricia herself, wearing a black sheath dress with a bright red leather belt. Her hair neatly matched the belt.

“And you are?” the redhead asked.

“My name’s...Trixie,” Tricia said.

“Sure it is. Mine’s Scarlett O’Hara. At least you’re not another goddamn singer. No offense, girls.” The girls on the bench didn’t look offended. They looked terrified.

“So?” the redhead said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Tricia pulled her bags inside, shut the door, stepped up to the desk, then realized she had no idea what to do. “I’m not sure,” she said, “exactly how this works.”

“How it works? You show me your dancing, I tell you it’s not good enough, and you take your pretty little keister back to Podunk, Wyoming or wherever the hell it is you came from. That’s how it works.”

“South Dakota,” Tricia said icily. “Aberdeen, South Dakota. And if you’ve got your mind made up already, I don’t see why I—”

At that moment, a buzzer sounded and a light lit up on the Bakelite intercom box beside the redhead’s telephone. She thumbed a button.

A man’s voice boomed from the loudspeaker. “It’s gonna be Kitty. You can send the other one home.”

“You heard him, girls,” the redhead said. Both of the young women stood up, one looking elated, the other crushed. “Noon, tomorrow, Kitty, at Mizel’s, they’ll fit you for your gown. Sorry, Jean, better luck next time.”

“You think so?” Jean said. “I’ve been waiting a long time for better luck.”

The redhead shrugged. It was no problem of hers.

The two women filed out and the redhead turned her attention back to Tricia. “So, you gonna show me your dancing or what?”

But the buzzer interrupted again. “What?” the redhead asked the little box.

“We’re gonna be here a couple hours more,” the man said. “Order us some food, will you? Maybe some of that brisket from Lester’s, and...what do you want, Robbie?”

Another man’s voice, heavily accented, said “Brisket. What is that, beef?”

“Yeah,” the first man said. “Make it two, Erin, and a couple of beers. Hey, listen, Erin, you know what else, Robbie’s gonna need some girls to round out the number, can you ring up a few?”

“What kind of girls?” the redhead asked. “You want clotheshorses?”

“Jesus, no, they just stand there like coat racks. Get me some who know how to shake their little asses.”

“When do you need ’em?”

“Yesterday.”

The redhead looked up, released the button. “Can you shake your little ass, Wyoming?”

Tricia thought about walking out. She thought about it for all of two seconds. Then she nodded vigorously.

The redhead pushed the button again. “I’ve got someone here right now, says she can dance.”

“Well, fine,” the man said. “Send her in.”

Tricia left her bags outside, walked through the door Erin held open for her. She put a little swing into her step, the sort she knew would win her a whistle on any street in downtown Aberdeen. The two men inside watched her approach. The younger one had a cigarette between his lips, a grey felt hat pushed back on his head, and his pulled-open necktie dangling halfway down his shirt. The other was nicely put together in a snappy suit and bowtie, his black hair slicked back, a pencil mustache punctuating his upper lip. This second man was swarthy, olive-skinned. He twirled a finger in the air in a gesture Tricia interpreted to mean “turn around.”

Neither man whistled.

Tricia turned in place. She could be graceful, she could be delicate—but she could also be earthy and sensual. She tried for a combination of the two. She saw their eyes following her, but couldn’t read their reaction. She put together a couple of dance steps, something slow and languorous, something that looked like dancing even without any music to accompany it. She was tired and knew it probably showed, so she aimed for a sleepy-eyed strut that conveyed hints of opium dens and Oriental pleasure palaces. She raised one arm and ran the fingers of her other hand along it, down it, stroking slowly. She curled her fingers and twisted her neck, swept this way and that before them. Out of the corner of one eye she caught sight of the swarthy man nodding.

“What do you think?” the younger man said.

“She’s good,” he said. “She’s good. How you say, very...romancing? Romantic. Very romantic. She make you want to kiss.”

“Don’t let your wife hear you talking like that.”

“Or her uncle, eh?” The swarthy man stood, came up to Tricia, walked in a tight circle around her. “Not much up top,” he said. “But put her in a nice dress, something satin, something bright...it could be okay, could be. Now, the hair...” He touched her hair, ran his thick fingers through it to her scalp. “This is not for Roberto Monge, this, this...plain, brown hair.”

“No,” the other man said. “Honey, you’re gonna have to go blonde, or you know, red, like Erin—”

“Not red,” Roberto said. “Blonde.”

“Alright, blonde,” he said. “You ever been blonde?”

Tricia, who’d spent the last minute mightily resisting the urge to slap Roberto’s hand away, shook her head.

“You know how?”

“I’m sure there are instructions on the bottle,” she said.

The man thumbed the intercom button on his desk. “Erin, I need you to get this girl’s hair bleached.”

Erin’s voice came back in a crackle of static. “What, she can’t do it herself?”

“We need her on stage tomorrow night. We can’t take any chances something goes wrong.”

Erin sighed. “You got it, Billy.”

“Good.” He turned back to Tricia. “Five nights a week, two shows a night, you’ll be backing up Robbie’s orchestra at the Sun. You know the Sun?”

She shook her head.

“See, Robbie? Not everyone knows who you are. Kid: It’s a big nightclub on 49th Street near the river. Lots of swells go there. Broadway stars, Hollywood stars, big shots who want a nice time. They want to see something classy, not your low-down burlesque, you understand?”

She nodded.

“There’ll be at least one or two other girls. You can work out a routine together, whatever Robbie wants. But nothing
too
sexy. We wouldn’t want the place raided.”

Roberto laughed.

“How much does it pay?” Tricia somehow worked up the nerve to ask.

“Pay?” the man said. “You want to get paid?” Then he chuckled at his little joke and Tricia’s heart started beating again. “Five a night, sister. And you should be glad to get it. It’s only that high because Robbie here’s a generous man.”

“I
am
glad to get it,” Tricia said. “Believe me. You won’t be sorry, Mister...?”

“Hoffman,” the man said. “Billy Hoffman.”

“Mr. Hoffman. Just one question, if I can, and I’m sorry if it’s a little forward, but—is there any way I can get an advance on the first week’s—”

“An advance?” Hoffman roared. “What do I look like, the Chase Manhattan bank?”

“It’s just that I’m new in the city and don’t have a place to stay...”

Hoffman rolled his eyes. He depressed the intercom button again. “Erin, is there any room at the chateau? For our newest dancer?”

“Am I going to have to cut up her food for her, too?” Erin said.