The Lime Pit (9 page)

I shadowed Hugo as he picked up his ticket and,
together, we walked down to the basement lockers. Hugo got the
shoebox out of his valise; and, after taking three of the photographs
out and slipping them into my pocket, I shoved the box into a
fifty-cent cubicle and locked it shut.

"O.K., Hugo," I said. "Let's go."

The old man pivoted lightly on one foot and said,
"You don't have to stick around, Harry. I can find my way to the
bus."

I smiled and shook my head ruefully. I'd known it was
coming; I just hadn't known what form it was going to take. Actually
I was a little disappointed that Hugo had thought he could get rid of
me so easily.

"Now Just a second," he said, as I tugged
him by the coat sleeve. "Just a minute, here."

"It isn't going to work, Hugo," I said.

"I ain't no damn kid," he said testily,
"that has to be watched over every second."

I grabbed his arm firmly and picked up the straw
suitcase. "Let's go."

"Now, Harry."

I walked him to the loading area and he cursed and
muttered and fumed every step of the way. "You can't do this to
me. This is a free country.... I got my rights.... Damn it, Harry,
let go of my arm ... the way they treat old folks in this city is a
crime. . . ."

When he saw that it wasn't going to work, Hugo grew
sly arid pensive looking. "I didn't call my damn son," he
said suddenly. "There ain't going to be nobody there to meet
me."

"That's tough, Hugo. You'll just have to walk a
few blocks."

"I'm recovering from a stroke," he whined.
"You ain't going to put me out in the hot sun and make me walk
till I keel over, are you?"

"Yeah." I nodded. "That's what I'm
going to do."

"You ain't got a drop of pity in you, Harry,"
Hugo said bitterly. "If I drop dead on the streets of Dayton, my
blood'll be on your head. Are you willing to live with that guilt?"

"You'll be all right, Hugo," I said with a
sigh. "I called your son myself this morning. And he'll be there
to meet you."

"You called Ralph?" Hugo said in a little
voice.

I nodded. "This morning, Hugo."

He shrivelled like a spent balloon. "Damn,"
he said, shaking his wispy white head.

Hugo didn't say another word until the bus arrived.
As the passengers queued up beside the door, he got slowly to his
feet. "You'll be careful, now, won't you, Harry?" he said
in a forlorn voice. "You won't let nothing bad happen, now, will
you?"

"No," I said, smiling at him. "Nothing
bad will happen."

"And you'll call me once and awhile, won't you?
To let me know how things are?"

"Sure I will."

"About the money," he said, rubbing his
grizzled chin.

"We'll talk about that when I've got Cindy Ann
back for you."

Hugo patted his coat pockets and his pants pockets
and sighed. "Well," lie said, holding out his hand. "Looks
like I got everything."

I shook his hand and said, "The key."

"Huh?" Hugo looked at me uncertainly.

"The key to your apartment, Hugo. I want it."

Hugo blew a little air out of his mouth and cursed
violently.

"You don't miss much either," he said,
clawing at his pants pocket. "Do you, Mister Harry Stoner?"

"I try not to."

"Well, just you keep it up," he said as he
walked up to the bus door. "You hear?" Hugo stepped up onto
the bus. "And try to make this quick, will you?" he called
out as the bus door sighed shut. "A few weeks with Ralph and
I'll be ready for the V.A. hospital."
 
 

9

ONCE I'D seen Hugo safely off, I walked up Fifth
Street to a pancake house at the corner of Elm and contemplated the
world over a plate of doughy waffles. From where I was sitting Elm
seemed to be full of girls in bright summer dresses, and each one of
them looked as if she had just stepped off the bus from Greenburg or
Sunman or Milan. Perhaps from as far away as Sioux Falls, wherever
the hell that was. Each of them had the same look on her face--that
dreamy, vacant look that comes when the eye is turned inward and
fully in love with what it sees. It was like an erotic daydream out
there on the blazing street, a predator's dream of ripe and easy
pickings, a world of Cindy Anns. I took a sip of bitter coffee and,
when I looked up again, the girls seemed to have grown a lot wiser.
It's not you, ladies, I said to myself. It's just me. Just me and a
handful of photographs that I can't get out of my mind. I pressed my
coat pocket and felt the little square that the snapshots made under
the fabric. When this was just a market town, maybe Cindy Ann could
have afforded to come here wide-eyed and unwary. But cities grow up
like psychopathic children. They grow up and become delinquents. Even
cities as strict and unglamorous as this one. Years pass and what is
just a smirk or a piece of conventional wisdom out in the farmlands
becomes an industry in the flats.

I paid my check at the register and walked down Fifth
to the bus terminal. The meter was just running out as I got to the
car. But that was all right. I had a trip to make anyway. : had a
captain of industry to see.

From the Ohio side, Newport, Kentucky, seems a small,
colorful hamlet nestled in green hills. On the river bank the posh
marinas reach baby-white fingers out into the clear run of the Ohio.
Speedboats chase up and down the shore, towing an occasional skier in
their wakes. Above the water's edge Newport rises in a talus of shale
and seems to keep rising gently in a sweep of white and red roofs
that have the sleepy look of adobe and sunbaked tile. And everywhere
that isn't white or red is green with the maple trees that cascade
down from the surrounding hillsides and flood through the hamlet in a
wave that stops just short of the river bank. From the Ohio shore,
Newport has the look of one of those vacation communities that people
like Cox and Meyer plant on the edges of newly dredged lakes and call
Sunwood or Lake of the Four Pines. From the Kentucky side, it's a
different view entirely.

For one thing, you're suddenly aware that there is a
big city behind you--a clean expanse of bright glass and structured
steel and china-red brick. The little one and two-story businesses
that dot the main drags of Newport seem very small indeed, by
comparison. And the age that shows on them is anything but
picturesque. Once you've settled down in the garden streets that
criss-cross the town proper, the summery look of vacation quickly
fades. The houses are frame and the paint is peeling everywhere and
the streets are littered with broken glass and in need of patching.
And the men and women who live on the streets have the unmistakable
look of the urban poor--so pinched and chalk-white in the face and on
the arms and legs that you would think, in Newport, that a suntan was
something you had to be able to afford.

The "poor cousin" look of Newport is
deceptive. There is money in the city, but it's concentrated and
virtually hidden away in the auto dealerships that proliferate like
cement ponds along the riverfront and in the night clubs that seem to
occupy whole blocks of the business district. It doesn't take a
trained eye to discover where most of the dollars have gone. Not when
the City Hall is an old brick firehouse and the Pink Kittycat Club
looks like a small Vegas hotel. The men who work that stretch of town
never lack a tan, even in the dead of winter. And the clothes they
wear have creases in them that could cut bread.

Every city has a reason for being where it is. And
Newport's reason is to service Cincinnati, to provide the gambling,
the prostitution, and the sin that the good elders of our town have
turned out of the city limits. Newport is an open secret, a dirty
little joke that nobody laughs at because there's too much muscle and
money in Newport to make it a fun or a funny place. It's a tough,
leering border town, with a wide-open police department and a
come-hither night life. And every one of those good Cincinnati
burghers is very glad it's around. There has to be some place for the
convention trade to go. There has to be some place for the
businessmen from Elkhart and Louisville and Dayton to blow off a
little steam. And Newport is the place. Let the conventioneer dine in
Cincinnati, put up in a good Cincinnati hotel. Let him cheer the Reds
in the early evening and grab a drink or two downtown. And, then, let
him cross the river, with the city's blessing, and find some harder
action. Most of the money ends up in Cincinnati's pocket, anyway.
Most of it is Cincinnati money to begin with.

There are two or three people in Newport who are
above what little law there is. And one of them is "Porky"
Simlab, the man I was going to see. There is a story about Porky that
bears repeating. It took place thirty years ago, when Newport was
even more of a wide open town than it is today. At the time, Porky
and his wife Blanche owned the Golden Deer on Main--a bar and strip
joint that had a raucous and highly profitable second floor. It's
said that two out-of-towners, independents with loose gangland
credentials, moved in on Porky's gold mine, first by trying to buy
him out and then by trying to drive him out. There were words and,
one afternoon, Blanche Simlab got into her pink Cadillac and came
back out through the windshield, in a fiery blast that tore the car
and Blanche in two. The next day, Porky sold the Golden Deer to the
two men from out of town and went into a different line of work. He
bought a motion picture theater on the north side of the city, became
a model citizen, and, two or three years later, ran for mayor on a
reform ticket. He was elected by a landslide. Everyone loved good ol'
Porky, who was and is a tubby country boy with a fat placid face and
an odd habit of winking with his mouth instead of with his little
brown eyes. Once Porky got into office, in that shed they call "City
Hall," he made a counter-proposal to the two businessmen from
out of town who had purchased the Golden Deer. It wasn't a question
of the price being wrong-no money was offered. It was more of a
case of escheat, of property returning to its rightful owner, with a
provision that the new owners leave town. Of course, the two owners
didn't think much of the deal. So, one cold February night in 1952,
Porky authorized a raid on the Golden Deer and insisted that his
police hot-load their revolvers and shotguns, in case of trouble.
There wasn't much trouble. The cops came through the door about one
hour after closing and killed every man and woman on the first floor
of the night club. And a week later Porky Simlab repossessed the
Golden Deer.

He never did let go of the motion picture theater
and, about ten years after the night of the Golden Deer raid, he
bought another one--a first-run house in Erlanger that specializes in
Disney films, wholesome family entertainment. By then, Porky was
legend in Boone County. A local character who drove around in a pink
El Dorado with bull's horns for a hood ornament and who held daily
court on the slat porch of his modest home on Charles Street, with
his feet up on the railing, his rear parked in a bentwood rocker, and
his mouth winking away in that fat baby face with its unsmiling eyes.
He was a soft-spoken, cracker-jack country hood, who dressed in
tieless white linen shirts with flat splayed collars and two-piece
leisure suits of a loamy brown. I'd first met him in 1968 when I was
working for Pinkerton and he'd taken a "shine" to me. He'd
invited me "all" out to the house for a nice pork roast and
an evening of bourbon and talk, during the course of which he'd let
it be known that I'd be better off not messin' in the little, old
robbery I'd been assigned to investigate. And, when, in due course,
the case petered out and nothing was recovered, Porky let it be known
that his house was my house, whenever I saw fit to pay him a visit.
He was mighty 'preciative. Mighty.

I hadn't made a habit of going over to Charles
Street. But, the few times I had visited, Porky had come up with the
name or the address of the man I was looking for. He was a rotund,
seedy old man, with a shock of greasy straw-colored hair and the
ragged look of a Kentucky colonel fallen on hard times. But he was a
mine of information, and he was always mighty 'preciative to me. It
was three-thirty when I pulled up across from Porky's house on
Charles Street. Mint julep time on the old veranda. I could see ten
or twelve of his cronies on the porch and a half-dozen more chatting
in groups on the stoop and the lawn. Red Bannion was among them. A
compact, strong-armed man with a small town cop's creased and weary
face, black horn-rim glasses, and the kind of burr hair cut that
makes for a streak of bald flesh down the center of the skull, Red
was Porky's right-hand man, his valet, his drinking companion, his
chief-of-police during the Golden Deer days, and his bodyguard. He
waved to me from the stoop as I walked up the lawn.

"Long time no see, lad," he said, shaking
my hand vigorously. "Old Porky is going to be mighty glad you
come."

Red guided me by the arm up to the veranda and
hollered: "Hey, Porky! Y'all look who's come to see ya!"

"Harry!" Porky called from his rocker.
"Harry Stoner!"

He made a half-hearted effort to work his enormous
body out of the chair and I waved him back.

"Sit," he said to me, pointing to a chair
beside him. I sat.