County Kill (20 page)

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Don't Cry for Me

I
T WAS A WARM DAY
, I remember, and John sat in that big leather chair of his, looking out the glass doors of his study. There wasn't anything to see out there excepting the deserted patio. But John very rarely looks at me when he's giving me hell.

In his quiet and restrained way he was giving me hell again this warm afternoon. A very solid citizen, John, a great defender of the
status quo. Incorruptible,
I thought, looking at him.
Stuffy, but incorruptible. Handsome, too, in his dignified way, and I'll bet he wouldn't think of looking at another woman. He might as well be homely.

John's my brother.

“I wonder,” he was saying, “if Dad hadn't passed on, just what he'd think of you, Pete.”

In John's world people don't die. They “pass on.” “I don't know,” I said. “He never thought much of me, except at S.C. when I threw the pass that beat the Irish. Dad wasn't my kind of people.”

Now John looked at me. You'd think I'd voted the straight Democratic ticket the way he looked at me. “What a nice thing to say. About your
own
father.”

“I was always a poor liar,” I said evenly. “What did you want me to say?” I took a breath. “He wasn't my kind of people, and neither are you, John. Mother, I don't remember, but from what I've heard, I guess she was more in my line.”

John ridged his jaw muscles, like Spencer Tracy. “Mother was a lady, from what I remember.”

I chuckled. “You wouldn't want me to be a lady, would you, John? What are we quibbling about? I came here to tell you I can't get by on the hundred a week. And you've told me I'm not going to get any more.” I stood up. “There's no reason we have to camp in each other's hair. Take care of yourself, kid.”

He frowned. “Pete — I — Oh, bell, kid, we're — ” He shook his head in irritation.

“Brothers?” I finished for him. “Sure. Always. You give me active nausea, at times, laddie, but I have nothing but the highest regard for you. I almost wish I could be like you. Things would be so much simpler if I were.”

He sighed and looked at the rug. “Simpler? Hardly.”

“Simpler,” I repeated. “The good and the bad, the black and the white, the fair and the foul. It's all straight in your mind, and you can walk the narrow road and feel properly noble. Nothing's straight in my mind. Nothing's that clear.”

He stood up now. “When it is, when you know what you intend to do, what you hope to make of yourself, we'll see eye to eye, Pete. Everything will work out.”

I shrugged. He came along with me to the front door. There he put a hand on my shoulder. “Don't be a stranger, Pete. You never come here unless it's to ask for something. And you know both Martha and I enjoy you thoroughly.”

“I'll be seeing you,” I said. “Give my love to Martha. Sorry I missed her.”

“She'll be sorry she missed you, too. Pete — be careful, won't you? Keep — our name out of the papers, Pete. It's a good name in this town.”

“I'll do my best,” I said. “Stay sober, sport.”

I went down to the Merc and climbed in. The top was down and the seat was hot. Pete Worden, perpetual soph, convertible type kid. The Merc had Creager heads and pots, and she was a girl who could walk. I was only three payments behind.

John still stood in the doorway of his big, proud home. I waved at him and he waved back, and there wasn't any reason in the world why I should suddenly feel sorry for him. Because he had everything. A nice home, a grand wife, charge of the estate, the respect of everyone who knew him. And all the answers. Why should I feel sorry for John?

I swung the Merc in a U-turn because it was illegal to make a U-turn here, and it would heckle him. I waved again and headed back Sunset, back toward Hollywood.

John lived in Beverly Hills. Of course.

John belonged to the right clubs and knew the right people. He paid his debts and loved his wife and sent his kids to the right school. And never even noticed his world was dying.

L.A. is not Miami, despite what the chamber of commerce says. But sometimes in the winter, we get a golden day like this, a smog-free, fog-free, visibility-unlimited day, and you're glad you're alive.

I had seven dollars in my wallet and some change in my pocket and the immediate necessity of seeing That Man about the delinquent payments on the Merc. But I was humming, and the Merc was humming, and to hell with all of them today.

I took the wind of Sunset all the way to Hollywood and cut off that on Doheny, heading down the hill. I stopped in front of the paint store and put the top up before cutting the motor.

That's where Ellen lives, above a paint store. Three rooms and bath, and a stone's throw, as she was wont to say, from the Strip, and the rent's cheap enough to make her forget the smell of paint.

She was waiting for me when I got to the top of the stairs. She's got fine, straight legs and a flat tummy and a sort of urchin insolence. She's a little top-heavy, but a girl without sag or simper. We get along very well.

She had her black hair high on her head this hot afternoon, and her dark-blue eyes probed mine. “So — “

“So — no. Emphatically and with gestures. A young man who can't get along on a hundred a week is decadent and degraded and demented. A young man of twenty-nine who won't work and has never worked should consider himself very lucky to — ” I shook my head. “He said no.”

“Now we'll never get married,” she said. I said nothing, but put one hand on the doorjamb for support.

Her chuckle had an overtone of brimstone. “I was only kidding. I just like to see you flinch.”

“My heart — ” I said. “You must be careful. Baby, do you think I'm a bum?”

“At times. Why?”

She went over to sit on the big davenport near the fireplace, and I stretched out, my head in her lap. It was cool here and quiet, and there was no smell of paint.

“Why?” she repeated. “Has that brother of yours finally got through to you?”

I thought about it. “Maybe.”

“How old is he?”

“John? Let's see. John's — thirty-four.”

“And what does
he
do for a living?”

“Why he — well, I mean, he — John sort of — I don't know what to say.”

“Sure. He watches the money. The money your dad
earned.
That's easy, to watch it. That's even less work than spending it.”

“Less fun, too,” I said. “But I mean he's got a couple fine kids, and this solid wife, who works for all these charities, and John's always in the papers, heading this committee and that for this good cause and that. That's what he does, he heads committees.”

She put one finger to the tip of my nose, and pushed it about a quarter of an inch to the right. “Who bent your nose?”

“A guy from UCLA, a tackle. And John's got to watch the investments, too. That's work, these days, watching — “

“You'd be almost good-looking if your nose was straight,” she said. “I wouldn't have to be apologizing to all my friends about you. I wouldn't have to eat in booths when we went out. Couldn't you get it straightened?”

“Sure could. And you would then be out of my life. You don't think I'd hang around with an old hag like you if I had a straight nose, do you?”

“Huh,” she said. “I've seen you with worse.”

“And better.”

She frowned. “One, maybe. At the most, two. Not counting that forty-seven-year-old starlet from MGM. What was her name?”

“Look,” I said patiently, “I asked you if you thought I was a bum. I want to be serious.”

“I guess you're a bum,” she said. “I guess I am, too. I guess we're a couple of round-heels, and who cares?”

“I do, and you should. Didn't you ever — wasn't there a time when you — oh, dreamed the big dream?”

“No time I remember.”

“Level, baby,” I said quietly.

No lightness to my lady now, no casualness to her tone. “Oh, Pete, for heaven's sake — what brought this on? I'll make us a drink.”

I lifted my head, and she slid out and stood up. For just a second she stood there, looking down at me. Her face was blank.

Then she went over to the liquor cabinet, built into the wall next to the fireplace.

I said, “If I were a gentleman,
I'd
make the drink. It's a great comfort, being a mug.”

She said nothing. I heard the ice cubes clink in a glass.

Cool, here, and the thought of John fading, and even the remembrance of the three overdue payments growing dim. Above a paint store in the magic village, and my love mixing a drink.

At ease, and I waited lazily for the sound of the ice on glass again, but none came, nor any other sound. And I got a feeling for some reason, and raised up to look at Ellen.

She was crying. Standing in front of her built-in liquor cabinet with the etched plywood front, quietly crying. No sob or tremor, no hiccup or histrionics, no pretense.

Just the tears rolling down her clear cheeks, the dark-blue eyes swimming, her hands steady on the Formica drain of the cabinet.

I got up quietly and went over to put my arms around her, and a title of Saroyan's came to me, some words of my old idol. I said, “Hello, baby, this is the world,” which was probably corny, but my arms were tight around her, and it was a time she needed that.

Around seven she said, “I've got almost fourteen dollars. We could go some place and get drunk, some cheap place.”

“No,” I said. The only light in the room came from a street lamp, and the glow of our cigarettes. “Not right away,” I went on. “Tell me about the tears now. Tell me about Ellen Gallegher, late of Eau Claire, the girl who cries standing up.”

“Forget it, Pete,” she said.

“Never,” I said, “if I live to be eight hundred and seven years old. Come on. Catharsis, you know.”

“A mood,” she said. “For heaven's sakes, a mood. Don't you ever have them? A combination of sound and place and memory trick, or something.”

“And some nasty words of Pete Worden?”

“Don't be ridiculous. What did you say?”

“I don't remember.”

“A girl can't be chirping all the time, like a damned sparrow, you know.”

“I know. Did you — were you ever very religious, Ellen?”

Her voice was light. “Now, didn't you put that tactfully? My folks are, my good folks back in Eau Claire. And maybe I was, too, before I read
Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.
Does that answer your tactful question tactfully, Mr. Worden?”

“You probably still are,” I said. “You'll probably always be an Eau Claire Gallegher, at heart.”

“Yup,” she said, and I could see her, in the dimness, leaning forward to put her cigarette out. She stood up then, and went to the front windows. “You know what it was, really? Do you want to know what hit me?”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“I kept remembering those other girls you had, and the way you glance around when we're out. And I keep wondering who's next; who takes your place, Ellen Gallegher?”

I couldn't see her face. I couldn't tell if she was kidding or not. I took the chance she was and said, “Let us not look ahead. Nor back. We have now and it's wonderful at times, but it might get dull over the long haul. I'm hungry; aren't you?”

“Famished. Will we need my fourteen dollars?”

“I have over seven,” I told her firmly, “and we will stay well within the limits of that. We will eat spaghetti.”

At
Tony's
we ate spaghetti.
Tony's
can be duplicated anywhere west of New York and north of Key West. The Tonys of this world seem to think if you have checked tablecloths and rough, round tables and waiters with cheap and shiny black semi-tuxedos, you got atmosphere peculiar to
this Tony's.

They also have wives who can cook, which was all they needed in the first place.

Spaghetti Neapolitan, we had. With sausage, that means, and ham and mushrooms and onions. And, of course, garlic.

Wine we had, red and cheap.

After the third glass of that, she said, “You could work, you know. You're not so dumb you couldn't find a job.”

“What kind?” I asked her. “I can throw a football, though not up to Waterfield or Van Brocklin, not well enough to get paid for it. And I carried a rifle for four years, but who's paying for that now?”

“The same employer,” she said. “Though he's moved his plant. You'll be carrying a rifle yet, if you don't get a job, I'll bet.”

“What are you saying?” I asked her. “Get in defense work now, get essential?”

“You certainly must loathe the army, the way I've heard you talk about it.”

“I also loathe the time clock, and am not a guy to play it cute. Let us not talk of defense work.”

“You could run an elevator or drive a truck, I'll bet.

Or sell sportswear in some ritzy shop. Even with that nose you have a certain flair.”

“Relax, Irish,” I said. “Have some more wine. Don't fret about me.”

“Somebody has to,” she said.

“Nobody has to,” I told her. “Nobody ever has.”

“I'll bet your mother did,” she said. “You must have been her favorite.”

“Put away your needle. What the hell are you up to?” I realized I'd raised my voice, and people were looking our way. I lowered my voice. “Is this another of your moods?”

She didn't have time to answer. Somebody clapped me on the back and said, “Pete Worden, my bread and butter, my ace in the hole.”

It was Jake Schuster, a bookie I knew, a lanky and congenial gent addicted to plaster-faced blondes. He had one with him, and I rose.

“This is Vicki Lincoln,” Jake said. “Vicki, this is Ellen Gallegher and Pete Worden.”