Big Money (42 page)

“Howdy, Charley,” said O'Higgins. “I'm sorry to do this but it's all in the line of duty. You don't deny that you are Charles Anderson, do you? Well, I thought you'd rather hear it from me than just read the legal terms. Mrs. Anderson is suing you for divorce in Michigan. . . . That's all right, boys.”

The shabby men bowed meekly and backed out the door.

“Of all the lousy stinkin' tricks . . .”

“Mrs. Anderson's had the detectives on your trail ever since you fired her chauffeur in Jacksonville.”

Charley had such a splitting headache and felt so weak from a hangover that he couldn't lift his head. He wanted to get up and sock that sonofabitch O'Higgins but all he could do was lie there and take it. “But she never said anything about it in her letters. She's been writin' me right along. There's never been any trouble between us.”

O'Higgins shook his curly red head. “Too bad,” he said. “Maybe if you can see her you can arrange it between you. You know my advice about these things is always keep 'em out of court. Well, I'm heartily sorry, old boy, to have caused you and your charming friend any embarrassment . . . no hard feelings I hope, Charley old man. . . . I thought it would be pleasanter more open and aboveboard if I came along if you saw a friendly face, as you might say. I'm sure this can all
be amicably settled.” He stood there a while rubbing his hands and nodding and then tiptoed to the door. Standing there with one hand on the doorknob he waved the other big flipper towards the bed. “Well, solong, Sally. . . . Guess I'll be seein' you down at the office.” Then he closed the door softly after him. Sally had jumped out of bed and was running towards the door with a terrified look on her face. Charley began to laugh in spite of his splitting headache. “Aw, never mind, girlie,” he said. “Serves me right for bein' a sucker. . . . I know we all got our livin's to make. . . . Come on back to bed.”

Was Céline to blame? To young Scotty marriage seemed just a lark, a wild time in good standing. But when she began to demand money and the extravagant things he couldn't afford did Céline meet him halfway? Or did she blind herself to the very meaning of the sacred word: wife?

 

CROOK FROZEN OUT OF SHARE IN BONDS
TELLS MURDER PLOT

 

TO REPEAL DECISION ON CAST IRON PIPE

 

In a little Spanish town

    
'Twas on a night like this

 

speculative sentiment was encouraged at the opening of the week by the clearer outlook. Favorable weather was doing much to eliminate the signs of hesitation lately evinced by several trades

 

I'm in love again

    
And the Spring

         
Is comin'

I'm in love again

    
Hear my heart strings

         
Strummin'

 

ITCHING GONE IN ONE NIGHT

 

thousands of prosperous happy women began to earn double and treble their former wages and sometimes even more immediately

 

Yes sir that's my baby

    
That's my baby na-ow!

 

APE TRIAL GOAT TO CONFER WITH ATTORNEYS

 

Mysterious Mr. Y to Testify

 

an exquisite replica in miniature of a sunlit French country home on the banks of the Rhone boldly built on the crest of Sunset Ridge overlooking the most beautiful lakeland in New Jersey where every window frames a picture of surprising beauty

 

And the tune I'm hummin'

    
I'll not go roamin' like a kid again

         
I'll stay home and be a kid again

 

NEIGHBORS ENJOIN NOCTURNAL SHOUTS
IN TURKISH BATH

 

ALL CITY POLICE TURN OUT IN
BANDIT HUNT

 

CONGOLEUM BREAK FEATURES OPENING

 

for the sixth week freight car loadings have passed the million mark in this country, indicating that prosperity is general and that records are being established and broken everywhere

 

Good-bye east and good-bye west

    
Good-bye north and all the rest

         
Hello Swan-ee Hello

When Margo got back to the city after her spring in Miami everybody cried out how handsome she looked with her tan and her blue eyes and her hair bleached out light by the Florida sun. But she sure found her work cut out for her. The Mandevilles were in a bad way. Frank had spent three months in the hospital and had had one kidney removed in an operation. When he got home he was still so sick that Agnes gave up her position to stay home and nurse him; she and Frank had taken up Science and wouldn't have the doctor any more. They talked all the time about having proper thoughts and about how Frank's life had been saved by Miss Jenkins, a practitioner Agnes had met at her tearoom. They owed five hundred dollars in doctor's
bills and hospital expenses, and talked about God all the time. It was lucky that Mr. Anderson the new boyfriend was a very rich man.

Mr. A, as she called him, kept offering to set Margo up in an apartment on Park Avenue, but she always said nothing doing, what did he think she was, a kept woman? She did let him play the stockmarket a little for her, and buy her clothes and jewelry and take her to Atlantic City and Long Beach weekends. He'd been an airplane pilot and decorated in the war and had big investments in airplane companies. He drank more than was good for him; he was a beefy florid guy who looked older than he was, a big talker, and hard to handle when he'd been drinking, but he was openhanded and liked laughing and jokes when he was feeling good. Margo thought he was a pretty good egg. “Anyway, what can you do when a guy picks up a telephone and turns over a thousand dollars for you?” was what she'd tell Agnes when she wanted to tease her. “Margie dear, you mustn't talk like that,” Agnes would say. “It sounds so mercenary.” Agnes talked an awful lot about Love and right thoughts and being true and good these days. Margo liked better to hear Mr. Anderson blowing about his killings on the stockmarket and the planes he'd designed, and how he was going to organize a net of airways that would make the Pennsylvania Railroad look like a suburban busline.

Evening after evening she'd have to sit with him in speakeasies in the Fifties drinking whiskey and listening to him talk about this business and that and big deals in stocks down on the Street, and about how he was out to get that Detroit crowd that was trying to ease him out of Standard Airparts and about his divorce and how much it was costing him. One night at the Stork Club, when he was showing her pictures of his kids, he broke down and started to blubber. The court had just awarded the custody of the children to his wife.

Mr. A had his troubles all right. One of the worst was a redheaded girl he'd been caught with in a hotel by his wife's detectives who was all the time blackmailing him, and threatening to sue for breach of promise and give the whole story to the Hearst papers. “Oh, how awful,” Agnes would keep saying, when Margo would tell her about it over a cup of coffee at noon. “If he only had the right thoughts. . . . You must talk to him and make him try and see. . . . If he only understood I know everything would be different. . . . A successful man like that should be full of right thoughts.”

“Full of Canadian Club, that's what's the matter with him. . . . You ought to see the trouble I have getting him home nights.” “You're the only friend he has,” Agnes would say, rolling up her eyes. “I think it's noble of you to stick by him.”

Margo was paying all the back bills up at the apartment and had started a small account at the Bowery Savings Bank just to be on the safe side. She felt she was getting the hang of the stockmarket a little. Still it made her feel trashy not working and it gave her the creeps sitting around in the apartment summer afternoons while Agnes read Frank
Science and Health
in a singsong voice, so she started going around the dress shops to see if she could get herself a job as a model. “I want to learn some more about clothes . . . mine always look like they were made of old floursacks,” she explained to Agnes. “Are you sure Mr. Anderson won't mind?” “If he don't like it he can lump it,” said Margo, tossing her head.

In the fall they finally took her on at Piquot's new French gown-shop on Fiftyseventh Street. It was tiresome work but it left her evenings free. She confided to Agnes that if she ever let Mr. A out of her sight in the evening some little floosey or other would get hold of him sure as fate. Agnes was delighted that Margo was out of the show business. “I never felt it was right for you to do that sort of thing and now I feel you can be a real power for good with poor Mr. Anderson,” Agnes said. Whenever Margo told them about a new plunger he had taken on the market, Agnes and Frank would hold the thought for Mr. Anderson.

Jules Piquot was a middleaged roundfaced Frenchman with a funny waddle like a duck who thought all the girls were crazy about him. He took a great fancy to Margo, or maybe it was that he'd found out somewhere that her protector, as he called it, was a millionaire. He said she must always keep that beautiful golden tan and made her wear her hair smooth on her head instead of in the curls she'd worn it in since she had been a Follies girl. “Vat is te use to make beautiful clothes for American women if tey look so healty like from milkin' a cow?” he said. “Vat you need to make interestin' a dress is 'ere,” and he struck himself with a pudgy ringed fist on the bosom of his silk pleated shirt. “It is drama. . . . In America all you care about is te perfect tirtysix.”

“Oh, I guess you think we're very unrefined,” said Margo. “If I only 'ad some capital,” groaned Piquot, shaking his head as he went back to his office on the mezzanine that was all glass and eggshellwhite with aluminum fittings. “I could make New York te most stylish city in te vorld.”

Margo liked it parading around in the Paris models and in Piquot's own slinky contraptions over the deep puttycolored rugs. It was better than shaking her fanny in the chorus all right. She didn't have to get down to the showrooms till late. The showrooms were warm and spotless, with a faint bitter smell on the air of new materials and dyes and mothballs, shot through with a whiff of scented Egyptian cigarettes. The models had a little room in the back where they could sit and read magazines and talk about beauty treatments and the theaters and the football season, when there were no customers. There were only two other girls who came regularly and there weren't too many customers either. The girls said that Piquot was going broke.

When he had his sale after Christmas Margo got Agnes to go down one Monday morning and buy her three stunning gowns for thirty dollars each; she tipped Agnes off on just what to buy and made out not to know her when she pranced out to show the new spring models off.

There wasn't any doubt any more that Piquot was going broke. Billcollectors stormed in the little office on the mezzanine and everybody's pay was three weeks in arrears, and Piquot's moonshaped face drooped in tiny sagging wrinkles. Margo decided she'd better start looking around for another job, especially as Mr. A's drinking was getting harder and harder to handle. Every morning she studied the stockmarket reports. She didn't have the faith she had at first in Mr. A's tips after she'd bought Sinclair one day and had had to cover her margin and had come out three hundred dollars in the hole.

One Saturday there was a great stir around Piquot's. Piquot himself kept charging out of his office waving his short arms, sometimes peevish and sometimes cackling and giggling, driving the salesladies and models before him like a new rooster in a henyard. Somebody was coming to take photographs for
Vogue.
The photographer when he finally came was a thin-faced young Jewish boy with a pasty skin and dark circles under his eyes. He had a regular big photographer's camera and a great many flashlight bulbs all silvercrinkly inside that Piquot kept picking up and handling in a gingerly kind of
way and exclaiming over. “A vonderful invention. . . . I vould never 'ave photographs taken before because I detest explosions and ten te danger of fire.”

It was a warm day in February and the steamheated showrooms were stifling hot. The young man who came to take the pictures was drenched in sweat when he came out from under the black cloth. Piquot wouldn't leave him alone for a second. He had to take Piquot in his office, Piquot at the draftingboard, Piquot among the models. The girls thought their turn would never come. The photographer kept saying, “You let me alone, Mr. Piquot. . . . I want to plan something artistic.” The girls all got to giggling. At last Piquot went off and locked himself in his office in a pet. They could see him in there through the glass partition, sitting at his desk with his head in his hands. After that things quieted down. Margo and the photographer got along very well. He kept whispering to her to see what she could do to keep the old gent out of the pictures. When he left to go up to the loft upstairs where the dresses were made, the photographer handed her his card and asked her if she wouldn't let him take her picture at his studio some Sunday. It would mean a great deal to him and it wouldn't cost her anything. He was sure he could get something distinctively artistic. She took his card and said she'd be around the next afternoon. On the card it said Margolies, Art Photographer.