It Takes Two (25 page)

I swabbed my face with a towel. I swigged half my coffee before I answered. “Admiral,” I said finally, “You trained me and made a man of me, and I appreciate that. I was drowning and you pulled me onto dry land. But you didn’t just throw me in bed with some horny palooka the first night, and show me dirty movies, and shout that you knew all my secrets.”

Reaching into the breadbasket again, Asdeck held up a banana Danish for inspection. “You were drowning. But you already knew how to swim. All I did was give you a hand so you could get moving again and feel better about wherever you got to, whether you used a backstroke or the crawl.”

I nodded. He was right.

“Your buddy,” he went on. “We don’t know whether he can swim or not. He’s hardly gotten his feet wet. He’ll drown unless you quit being his water wings.”

“I need to train him,” I replied. “According to my plan, sir. Not yours.”

Asdeck remarked that we were already in deep water and explained that the unlucky Ford dealer had hoped to open a rival card room in Myers. The local official he’d turned to for protection, however, refused to cooperate.

“In other words,” I answered, “Sheriff Hollipaugh decided to honor the bargain he’d already made?”

“I’m not at all sure how your buddy would react to hearing
that
,” Asdeck answered. In any case, he added, we’d have to put off making a decision. He had a finance meeting to attend in New York and an overnight train to catch.

I told him I’d stay in close touch. I didn’t say I’d decided to invite Bud to supper for a powwow.

Needing more, and better looking, waitresses, I’d run a want-ad in that week’s
News-Press
:

top pay for ladies

Dining Room. Uniforms supplied. All shifts. Interviews on Tuesdays and Thursdays before lunch. Only experienced servers need apply to Manager, Caloosa Hotel, Fort Myers.

Four candidates showed up that morning, their appointments set up by Carmen Veranda during the previous few days. The first combined grandmotherly appearance with prewar experience at all-night diners in Norfolk. The second, thirty years younger, wore a cross on a chain around her neck, and spoke extensively of arranging church suppers and after-service coffee socials at the United Tabernacle Church of the Blessed Redeemer. Both were white. Neither was what I was looking for. I told each woman I’d keep her paperwork on file.

The third applicant was a thin brown woman about my age. I’d seen her only two days before in a very different setting. Carmen hadn’t recognized her name when she telephoned, nor did he have any particular reason to.

Did Mary know how much I knew about her? I wasn’t sure. She appeared in my office wearing a green maid’s uniform, white oxfords, a plain gold wedding ring and a nurse’s cap neatly pinned to her pomaded hair. Yes, she said, she’d been a house-maid at one time. But she needed work now and the prospect of better pay in a hotel led her to apply. She’d worked as a waitress in a colored hotel in Tampa, waited tables at a roadhouse in Pinellas County and then at a lunch counter in Ybor City. Although she’d never worked in a white hotel, she knew food and how to write up an order.

References? No, they’d been lost when her house was broken into.

Given her barely disguised charges about the Caloosa two days earlier, it crossed my mind that she might be here to do her own investigation. On the other hand, I felt sorry for the woman, figuring her to be a friendless double widow, down on her luck and, as she said, out of a job.

So, instead of showing her the door, I played her story back to her as gently as I could.

A defeated woman might have raged or collapsed in tears. A stupid woman might have tried a transparent lie. Mary Davis was neither. She listened coolly, covered her face, took a breath, and stood up once I’d finished. “Guess you don’t want to talk to me no more,” she said, gathering up her purse and smoothing her skirt. “Thank you kindly all the same.”

“But I do want to talk to you,” I exclaimed, also rising. “About a lot of things, including a job.”

So she sat back down. I was feeling generous. I figured she had about as much to lose as I had in late 1945, the day Asdeck plucked my personnel file out of a Pacific Command fuck-ups pile and pulled me off that troop ship in Japan.

“What things would that be?” she said. “Aside from a job?”

“You’ve worked all your life, all the time you were married?”

“Yes, sir. We always needed the money.”

“Even when your husband was in the Army?”

She sat up a little straighter. “Mrs. Roosevelt, she couldn’t do much about raising benefits for the wives of colored enlisteds.”

“Your husband came home safe, though?”

“Yes, sir, came home from Italy as a sergeant and wearing all kind of decorations. Proudly served in the all-Negro 92nd Division for over three years.”

“But had trouble keeping a job back home?”

“Had trouble finding a good job, sir. Finding anything to fit his experience.”

“So you had to keep working as a maid?”

“Yes, sir, that’s how it was. Like they say, my Wash, he didn’t adjust too well to peacetime.”

“Or to the politics down here?”

“You mean, in the…South? The war didn’t change much. Southern people been like this a long time.”

“So why did you choose to apply to this hotel?” I asked. “Given what you said over Hillard Norris’s grave?”

Covering her face again, she shook her head, then said, “You was there, then? Huh! Well, you know, not too many other places in this town would be likely to hire me.”

When I asked if she couldn’t get another house-maid’s job, she answered dully, “Not after what I been through.”

When I said I knew something of her history with the Norris family, and that I’d heard how her husband had refused Hillard’s job offer, she scowled, then spat back an answer: “That was Wash’s low point, Mr. Ewing. And mine, up to
that
point. Only I didn’t know it.”

I started to say something else but she cut me off.

“He tried to do what they taught him in the Army: to lead men. He tried to do some organizing here. You know what I mean? Getting colored folks to vote. Going door to door. He even tried to start an NAACP chapter. Wrote off for a charter application, started calling meetings. Only nobody came. And the preachers pushed him aside, said it wasn’t the right time, said he wasn’t the right man for the job, that he was goin’ too fast.”

“Excuse my asking,” I said. “But did Hillard know all that?”

“Mr. Hillard, he knew some of it. So did Miss Willene.”

“Some guy told me her old daddy was a big-time Klan leader.”

Mary shook her head. “The colonel didn’t believe all that. Was just politics is all. Course I never knew him. And Mr. Hillard, he wasn’t like that at all.”

Just politics
. Bud had used the same phrase in characterizing Sheriff Hollipaugh’s links to the Klan. On the one hand, I was shocked at what sounded like willful innocence on both their parts. On the other hand, thinking back, I’d grown up in the same racially segregated society they had. Our assumptions were much the same: There was never a right time for reform. Politicians didn’t really believe the poison they fed to the public. Only other people, never one’s family or close associates, knowingly did evil or joined evil groups.

How much different from her innocence was mine concerning the prospects for men who loved men?
Maybe
, I thought,
Bud is the only level-headed one here
.

Like I say, though, I was cocky and full of fight. Having read Kinsey, I knew Bud and I weren’t alone in the world. Being young, I nonetheless hoped that social reform, like the latest movie, was coming soon.

And job or no job, it was not my business to ask how or why she became Hillard Norris’s mistress. But, having come this far in the conversation, I wanted to know a little more of what she knew about him.

“The Klan marched at his funeral,” I said.

“That was for the old woman,” Mary said. “The colonel’s wife, the old—” Catching herself, she finished, “Old Nana Turnipblossom.”

“How long did you work for them?”

“Too long. Close to five years. Wash was thinking of reenlisting. And if he’d gone in, I’d ’a gone with him.”

“Might have been better.”

She laughed silently, without smiling. “Wash was a good man, and I was a whore for Mr. Hillard. But that was over and done with. I’d told them both so. I was breaking it off for good that night, last Saturday, when Wash come in and…and everything changed.”

Breaking it off for good
… And yet, Hillard had been sexually aroused before he was killed. Plus the whole condom thing.

I wanted to keep Mary around. But I’d have been stupid to let her handle drinks or enter the club room. “I’m sorry, Mary, all our waitressing jobs are filled, but we might find a place for you as a chamber maid.”

Startled, she shook her head slowly, then evidently changed her mind and said that would suit her. I sent her to the housekeeper for a second interview.

Candidate four had more, and more recent, waitressing experience. When Slim Nichols entered my office, she took one look at me and her sharp jaw dropped. Then she laughed.

“Seen you with Bud,” she said, smoothing her hairdo. “Over at the Arcade.”

“And I thought you had the best job in town,” I answered, feeling awkward and unready to put her at ease. “I know you’re darned good at it.”

“Oh, yeah, thanks. It’s all mink and pearls, hon. Only a girlfriend of mine pointed out your advert. And I called your Miss Emma Mae, you know? That works for you on the dock? And I asked what is up. And she said you had in mind hiring some younger women. And that there was benefits and paid vacation.”

Mentally noting that I needed to have a word with Emma Mae, I smiled welcomingly and answered that everything was negotiable.

“So what are you paying, if you don’t mind if I ask, sweetie? And how do the tips get divvied up?”

I countered with a question about references and experience. Slim joked that she could provide as much of those as I could handle.

Ha ha
, I thought.

More to the point, I wondered:
How would I like having Bud and his paramour both working for me, even if Slim does become, as I’m planning, his ex?

The whole thing didn’t feel right. On the other hand, she was a pro—not to mention somebody I’d keep running into week after week as long as I stayed in Myers.

“We just hired a lady not fifteen minutes ago,” I said. “But I definitely want to keep you in mind. So will you let me keep your job application on top of the pile? And we won’t say anything about it, natch, while you’re still working the mink-and-pearl circuit. Right? Call me Dan, by the way.”

“Miss Emma Mae told me you was still a bachelor man, Dan,” she answered. “How come a frisky young fella like you don’t have a girl yet?”

This question I could handle. “Oh, my fiancée died,” I said, dropping my eyes to the desktop and assuming a somber expression. “Drowned. A good while ago.”

Slim touched her lips with her fingertips. “Jesus, honey,” she whispered. “That’s tough.”

“Oh,” I answered. “I’m trying to get over it.”

“Buenos noches, ladies and gentlemens,” Carmen Veranda chirped, seizing a stack of menus and waving them under Bud’s nose. “I reserve for you the most—how you say?—the most secluded-est table on the pool terrace. Very nice and
silencio
, for a little more privacy, yes? And now if you will follow me?
Por favor?
”

Bud looked blank, then closed his mouth. “Oh,” he said, glancing my way. “Sure.”

I wanted to tell Carmen to knock off the flamenco act. But what the hell? Unless Bud’s 20/20 eyesight had suddenly failed, he’d already spotted the rouged cheeks, mascara-lined eyes, Duchess of Alba fingernails and theatrically cocked hip.

Carmen’s emphasis on privacy and seclusion seemed almost certainly a reference to our mezzanine make-out session the night before. His post at the projector had given him a ringside view.

Leading the way through the half-filled dining room, across the terrace, past the pool and out to a trio of empty tables lined up beside the diving board, he stopped at a table for two and pulled back the chairs. Once we were seated, he handed us menus and lit the candle in the hurricane-glass shade.

The deuce had been specially set. White linen cloths, yellow napkins, stemware and embossed Syracuse service plates were standard. But the tabletop also contained a RESERVED sign and a pair of red and yellow ginger blossoms in an oriental jar.

The spiky symbolism was unmistakable.

I thought:
Somebody won’t quit
. I said: “Pretty. But you went to a lot of trouble.”