The Cocktail Waitress (13 page)

With Mr. White, however, things were different, and little by little, and then much by much, the situation changed. He was in the next afternoon, after the one I’ve just told about, still grim, but with no repetition of his hysterical outbreak. He ordered, then sat looking straight ahead, saying nothing at all. However, I wasn’t too bashful to speak. “In the first place,” I told him, beginning right in the middle without any small talk at all, “you can get rid of that snoop, that spy.”

“I don’t have any snoop.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. White, you have one.”

“You doubt my word?”

“You want a straight answer to that?”

“I demand a straight answer to it.”

“I not only doubt your word, I call you a goddam liar. You do have a snoop, and if you want to know how I know I go by that look in your eye. So spit it out, Mr. White. You do have a snoop, don’t you?”

“I have a man, O.K. But not to
spy
on you, for heaven’s sake.”

“A snoop is a snoop is a snoop.”

“This was a man that works for me, a man from down in the office, that I asked to keep an eye on you—not to spy, that’s the truth, simply to see that nothing happened to you after leaving here at night. That was all, I swear it was.”

I let him stew a bit before I relented: “Then O.K. I believe you.”

Because I knew he was telling the truth, or at least thought he was. I went on: “But in return for taking your word, taking your
word on him, I must have your word it’s the end, that he won’t stake me out anymore, that you take him off my neck. What do you say to that?”

“… Joan, if you insist, I say O.K., of course. But—”

“I don’t need protection. Thanks to your great generosity, I have my own car now. I don’t ride with Liz anymore, I go straight home, let myself in with my key, and if I need the police can call them. Do I have your word you’re taking that tail off my back?”

“Joan, I’ve already said it.”

“Then O.K., let’s get on to the next matter.”

He looked up in surprise, and I went right on, boring in: “About you and I, getting married. On that, you said you asked nothing better, and would go through with it gladly, except that your doctor forbade it, as a sure sentence of death. O.K., Mr. White, but whose life is it? Your doctor’s?”

“… What do you mean, Joan? That it’s up to me to die to prove how I feel about you?”

“No, Mr. White, it’s not.
But,
there is a way out.”

“What do you mean, a way out?”

“Way in, perhaps I should say. Mr. White, sex isn’t everything. There’s no reason at all that you couldn’t marry me, stay in your bedroom, and let me stay in mine. That way, you’d have me with you always, if I mean what you say I do to you, and I’d have you with me always, and I do confess that would mean quite a lot. In addition to which, I could quit this job serving drinks, which has been a godsend to me, but which I confess I could do without. And most important of all to me, I could have my son back, and give him the growing up a boy dreams of, in that beautiful house, playing on that beautiful grass, and rolling his tricycle on that beautiful drive. What use is all that house and those grounds with just you living there by yourself? You’ve told me how lonely you are, how much more you
like it here where we can talk and be together. For god’s sake, Earl, why should a man like you have to come to a bar for companionship? Or in other words, once again to make plain what I mean: Who’s running your life?”

“I’d love to have you helping me run it.”

“O.K., then. What do you say to what I just now said?”

“I say I’ll think it over.”

“It’s what I want you to do.”

It was two or three weeks after that, I would say in mid-September, so it was coming on for fall, before he came up with his answer—if you could call it that. He came in, ordered, and then, in the most casual way, said: “I think I’m going to say yes—but I must go to New York first.”

“New York? You mean, now?”

“I thought to leave tomorrow.”

“For how long?”

“Oh—better part of a month. Maybe more.”

There was something peculiar about it, and I asked: “What’s in New York? Why must you go up there?”

“Lawyer. He’s spending some time up there, working on a business deal for me, an important one.”

“And what does he have to do with you and me?”

“About such a marriage as ours, such a marriage as ours would be, there are quite a few legal angles. I’m not sure I know what they are, except in a general way. I think I should talk to him. And I need to be there to see to the deal as well.”

“I see. I see.”

“You could talk to a lawyer too.”

“That might be a good idea.”

I left him, did one or two things at the bar, and thought over what
he had said. Then I went back and told him: “It’s really the best way, I agree. You go now, have your month in New York, and if you forget me, O.K. I have other chances, don’t worry.”

“…
Stop talking like that!
”

“I told you go—then we’ll know where we stand.”

So he went, and for a time, things were very humdrum, we could even say a bit flat. I missed him coming to the bar each night; at least I missed his nineteen-dollar tips. Things went on I suppose for two or three weeks, into the early fall. It was the tail end of September by then, and I’d switched back from my summer hot pants to the velveteen trunks and pantyhose, which I’d just gotten on one afternoon when the bell rang, and when I opened the door it was Tom. I hadn’t seen him since that night, and no doubt acted cool. “… Oh?” I said. “Tom? What can I do for you?”

“Joan,” he half stammered, “I have to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“I think you know, and I won’t enjoy it, I promise you. Just the same, I won’t talk on your doorstep.”

“Then—come in, please.”

I brought him into the living room, and asked him: “How would I know what you’ve come about?”

“You haven’t seen this?”

I noticed for the first time he had a paper under his arm, which he unrolled and waved around. “I don’t take the afternoon paper,” I told him. “What’s in it to concern me? What is this anyway?”

He handed it over, and on page one, not the main story but big enough to make it onto the front page, was one about Mr. Lacey, the man whose bail bond I’d signed. It said:

LACEY CASE CALLED:

NO LACEY

—or something like that. The story simply said that when the case
of James Lacey, indicted municipal engineer, was called for trial that morning, “Mr. Lacey didn’t make the required appearance.” It then went on to say that “Melvin T. Lackman, Mr. Lacey’s attorney, told the court Mr. Lacey hadn’t arrived at his office as scheduled to accompany him to the trial, and that he had no information on where Mr. Lacey was. The court, in the person of Judge T. D. Enos, ordered a bench warrant issued for Mr. Lacey’s arrest.” That was all, except for a picture of Mr. Lacey, looking as I remembered him, only younger and not so fat. My stomach began telling me this was bad news, but I still wasn’t quite caught up. I asked: “Well? Where do I come in?”

“Joan, you signed his bail bond, that’s where.”

“You mean, I lose my house? It gets taken and sold to pay the bond?”

“On that, I don’t know yet—I’m as caught by surprise as you are, and know as little about it. Where I do know what I mean, is to stand by you one hundred percent—you did this thing for me, and I’m not letting you take the fall for it alone.”

“That’s a lovely sentiment, Tom, but I don’t see what you can do, unless some of those projects of yours have ripened and you now have not one but twelve thousand dollars to spare.”

“I think I don’t need it, and neither do you. If we can find that son of a bitch and bring him back for trial, we can let a court take it from there. But that’s what I
think,
and what I know is nothing. As of now, the first thing is to get a lawyer.”

“… I don’t know any lawyer.”

“So happens, I do.”

He mentioned one I’d heard of, at the time of my real estate deal, with offices over in Marlboro, Dwight Eckert was his name, and Tom offered to drive me to see him. I thought to put in a call first, to find out if he’d be in, and it turned out he would be, after four o’clock. It was then going on for three, which just gave me time to change from my waitress clothes, and put on a suit I’d bought, which would do nicely, as the air by now had a nip in it. I excused myself, went back
to the bedroom and started to change, when there he was, in the door. I asked: “Who invited you back here?”

He leaned against the doorpost and crossed his arms. “Figured we could continue talking. Not like it’s the first time I’ve seen you undressed, brief though the last time was.”

I was wearing no more than I’d been the last time, just my panties. I turned to him and held out my hand, palm up. “That’ll be twenty-five dollars, please.”

“… What did you say?”

“I said, pay. From being taken to visit a whorehouse, I learned some tricks of the trade. Now, you want to watch me undress, you pay to watch me undress. Twenty-five dollars, I said—payable now.”

He stood there, stared, and then took out his wallet. He counted out two tens and a five, and tossed them on the bed. I snatched them up and threw them at him. “Tom,” I said, in a way that really meant business, “you get out. You get the hell out, do you hear?” He picked up the money, took out his wallet once more, and put it back in. At the bedroom door he turned back.

“I don’t understand you. Starting with the night at the Wigwam. If you’d pushed me away as soon as we walked through the door, all right. But you didn’t. You can’t tell me you didn’t want me. Or you can tell me, but I know better—you were hot wet, and let
me
tell
you,
a wet—”

“Tom!”

“All right, let’s say a woman’s body, then—a woman’s body doesn’t lie.”

“At that moment, Tom, I wanted you with every fiber of my being. So much so that I didn’t even mind you taking me to that rotten place so long as it made possible what we both wanted. But Tom, there’s something I wanted more, and I can’t have both.”

“And that’s what?”

“Another man, one who will marry me—”

“Who said I wouldn’t marry you?”

“—and provide for me, and what’s more important, for my son, in a way you never could. I’m sorry, Tom, but it’s so. You never could, not if all your projects succeeded, every one of them.”

He nodded, said no more, and walked out the bedroom door, shutting it quietly behind him. I finished changing my clothes, then went back to the living room. He was sitting there waiting, and got up, very formal, when he saw me. I said: “Are we ready?” Then I remembered and called Bianca, to tell her I wouldn’t be in. I could have just come late, the meeting with the lawyer wouldn’t run more than an hour I was sure, but with what I had on my mind, an evening of serving drinks was more than I could face. She was upset, but had to say O.K.

Not much was said on the drive over to Marlboro, except for his answers to some of my questions as to who Mr. Eckert was and what I needed to ask him—all I could think of was, would I lose my house, but Tom reminded me that other things had to be asked, like how much time did we have, and actually what would be done, on a “play-by-play basis,” as he put it. “I would think the sheriff figures in it,” he told me, in a hesitant, guarded way, “and we ought to find out first how he goes about it, whatever it is that he does. Could be we have to cooperate—or something.”

I had a sudden vision of walking into a police station and finding Private Church there, suspicious as always and ready to jump on me at the least little sign of anything askew. I took some comfort from the distance between Hyattsville and Marlboro, but not as much as I would have if there had been a county line separating them. I almost said we should turn around and I’d take my chances, losing the house if need be, but by the time I’d reached that point we’d arrived.

Mr. Eckert turned out to be a youngish guy in lounge coat and gray slack pants, who shook hands, looked at me quite sharp, and
came around the desk to seat me in a chair beside him. When he’d motioned Tom to a chair facing him, he sat down, and read what it said in the paper, which Tom still had in his hand. “Yes,” he told us, nodding. “I heard about it and heard about the young girl who had no more sense than to go Jim Lacey’s bail—which nobody else would do, considering the guy he was. Jim’s wild, that’s all that can be said— and the kindest thing, I guess, is to leave it at that and get on. Now hold everything while I check on how things stand.”

He picked up his phone and called, then asked: “Sheriff’s office? Dwight Eckert calling—about the Lacey case. Will you put somebody on that’s familiar with it?” Apparently someone came on, a deputy from what Mr. Eckert said, and for a time it was nothing but all sorts of questions, the date of the warrant, what was being done to serve it, the officer in charge of the case, and: “So, what do we think, where is he?”

Then: “Oh, you have no idea at all? But don’t you fellows know Lacey well enough …?”

Pretty soon he hung up, and reported: “They’re on the case, they’ve been given the bench warrant to serve, the one the judge signed this morning, for Lacey’s arrest, and they’ll bring him in when they know where he is. But that’s the catch: They
don’t
know where he is, and being ‘short-handed,’ as that deputy said, they have no one detailed to find him. Now I’ll leave you to decide if that’s really the reason or if the fact that Lacey was the engineer who worked on building their new station house has anything to do with it. He hung around the station plenty, glad-handing and ingratiating himself as best he could. They all knew him.”

“You don’t mean they’d let him get away?”

Eckert shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe not; maybe they didn’t even like him. Most people who got to know him didn’t. But if they did, and if they’re short-handed anyway, it could be they just wouldn’t choose to put the few men they do have on his case. No one could
fault them—you have to remember, it’s not a regular criminal case. Still…” He looked me over in a way that made me feel like I was wearing my work uniform rather than my gray wool suit… “… it wouldn’t surprise me, if a good-looking lady were to go over and talk to whoever’s in charge over there and explain what she had at stake, that might light a fire under them. They’re human too, after all.”