Laurel and Hardy Murders (7 page)

“What? Letting it ride?”

“That’s it.” She turned to Butler. “How about it? Y’wanna let it ride?”

“I don’t get you.” He stubbed out his cigar. “You saying we should play gin honest-like?” The idea seemed to appall him.

“Not gin,” she replied. “Bridge.”

“
Bridge
?” He stared at her as if she were screwy.

“Hilary,” I politely reminded her, “it takes four to play bridge.”

“No-no,” she argued, speech slurring. “One player always sits out.” Her eyes looked crossed.

Her idea was nutty. In bridge, the first thing that happens in every hand is that the two competing teams bid for the privilege of naming trumps. The winners have to take in a number of tricks determined by the size of the bid with which they won the auction. During the bidding, neither partner may look at the other’s hand, though afterwards, one member of the team sits out and lays his cards face-up on the table for his partner to play (and his opponents to see). This face-up hand is called the dummy. Hilary wanted to automatically accept the obligation of winning a certain number of tricks, playing both her hand and the dummy—even though there are many times in bridge when such poor cards are received that it’s wise to avoid winning the contract and setting trumps. If Butler took her bet, she would be totally at the mercy of the deal.

I said all this to her, then added that there was something else wrong with the idea. “If you automatically accept the contract, Hilary, would you tell me how in hell you are going to know how many tricks to set and what suit to call as trumps if you’re not permitted to examine your ‘partner’s hand’ at that point?”

“Easy,” she shrugged. “I’ll announce my contract on the sole basis of the cards I have in my own hand.”

Which was sheer, stupid madness!

The avarice was growing in the Old Man’s eyes. He didn’t have to be asked twice whether he wanted to play. It was unfair to take advantage of her in the condition she was in, and I was extremely reluctant to be a party to the proceedings, but she insisted that I take the east hand.

“What’re the stakes?” Butler asked. I swear his voice trembled.

“You name them,” said Hilary, punctuating her remark with a hiccup.

It must have been hard for Butler to reconcile his warring senses of avarice and compassion. But he may have remembered that Hilary queered his gin game inasmuch as he finally suggested a bet that was little short of indecent.

And Hilary, the damn fool, took it.

She began to shuffle the cards, but her reflexes were an uncoordinated mess and she made a lousy job of it. Cards went all over the tabletop. She gathered them, mixed them as best she could, then embarked upon the strangest travesty of a bridge deal that I’ve ever witnessed. Her trouble was that her brain was too muddled for her to count correctly. First she dealt three cards to Butler, then one to the dummy, four to me and five to herself. Shaking her head, she deposited two from her hand onto the dummy, then took one away from me and gave it to the Old Man. But still that wasn’t right, so she had to distribute more cards to even it out, only she miscounted again. I tried to give her a little help, but she slapped my hand away.

“I can do it,” she protested, “I’ll show you!” Hilary waved me off with a gesture so flamboyant she nearly fell off her chair.

Well, somehow or other she actually managed to distribute the cards. It took much arbitrary fishing of haphazard pasteboards from one place to another, but at last there were thirteen cards in every hand.

“That’s the sloppiest deal I ever saw,” Butler complained.

I sighed and picked up my hand to sort it into suits. Right away, I noticed I had a void in spades.

“My contract,” said Hilary Quayle, “is seven spades.”

Had I been eating, I would’ve gagged. She’d named one of the highest bids and hardest contracts to fill in all bridge. To make it, she’d have to win all thirteen tricks, a near impossibility.

Butler guffawed loud and long. “Talk about dumb broads! Seven spades! Chrissake, you’d better have practically every—”

He shut up and stared. So did I.

Hilary was no longer slouching in her seat. A moment earlier, her eyes had been valiantly trying to focus, but now they shone with a cold, mocking light. One by one, she turned over her cards so we could see them.

She had a trump grand slam—every single spade from the ace through the king.

“I think,” she understated, “this is what is known as an unbeatable combination,
n’est-ce pas
?”

I didn’t know the exact odds, but I was pretty sure it would be easier to get a royal flush in poker on the initial deal, without drawing.

“So,” I said, “you aren’t drunk after all.”

“If you’d thought I was sober, would either of you have tolerated that outrageous deal?”

“What the hell’s going on?” Butler demanded.

“Remember when I went out to get my magnifying glass?” she asked. “In case you don’t recall, I took the cards with me. When I was alone, I removed the spades and put them on top of the pack.”

“Yeah, but I saw you shuffle ’em later.”

“Not till I’d examined them, one at a time. During the process, it was simple for me to bend the corners of each spade a little, just enough so they would be easy to recognize when I dealt like a drunk.”

“Goddamn!” Butler swore. “Conned twice. I feel like the guy in Aesop whose donkey keeps kicking him and he says, ‘Once more unto the breach!’”

She pointed a finger at him. “In case you wonder what you did to deserve two knuckle-raps, you can write off the gin rummy business as a favor to Gene. But conning you at bridge is my way of paying you back for getting fresh.”

“I thought we were square on that!”

“Only when I thought you were drunk.”

He glowered at her, probably wondering whether to admire her chutzpah or kick her in the pants—a reaction to Hilary with which I was extremely familiar.

The Old Man left ten minutes later. He would have stomped out immediately, but I slipped past and blocked the door until he decided to pay up.

C
UT TO:

MEDIUM SHOT.
The Lambs. Early June.

Since it was the Friday of the New York banquet, I received special dispensation from Hilary to take the day off and help the special events committee decorate and set up.

I should have known better than to come on time, but it was a bright, sunny morning, so I didn’t mind the prospect of waiting ten or fifteen minutes outside the entrance of the club for the rest of the volunteers to arrive.

Optimist that I was, I showed up at five after nine. No one else appeared till way past ten. By then, I’d grown tired of waiting underneath the blue awning, so I grabbed a seat in the lounge and started reading Jack McCabe’s
The Comedy World of Stan Laurel,
which I’d brought along to occupy myself during the bus ride over.

The earliest of the latecomers was our treasurer, Natie Barrows, he of the eternally nervous smile and Mary Tyler Moore T-shirt.

We said hello. He was agitated. I asked him what was wrong.

“Did you hear what O. J. pulled? I just found out!”

“What?”

“Wayne Poe’s on the show tonight!”

“Doesn’t surprise me.”

A new voice sounded. “
He’s got who on the show
?”

We turned. The speaker was Barry Richmond. He looked shocked.

Natie repeated his news. Barry shook his head.

“You’d think,” he said, “O. J. would learn from experience. He asked Poe to do ten minutes last year, and he bored the hell out of everybody for half an hour.”

“Not only that,” Natie said, his voice trembling with indignation, “but Poe did the same material then that we heard two years before.”

The door opened and O. J. walked in. He was instantly pounced on.

“I don’t understand what you’re objecting to,” he said evenly, his innocent blue eyes widening. “Last year, when Jody Lange got sick at the last minute, Wayne did me a big favor and filled in. He’s been a real friend to the Sons, and Frank Butler says Wayne got a great big hand in Philly. I’m asking him to do just ten minutes right after the skit. Frank suggested that, too.”

“Since when,” Natie demanded, “does a Two Tars officer decide parent tent business?”

“Don’t be so huffy,” O. J. admonished him. “All Frank did was make a suggestion. I was on the telephone with him yesterday because I needed the dates of the Philly-New York confab to announce at dinner tonight...otherwise, no one’s going to be there. So while we were talking, Frank asked if Poe was going to be on the banquet show and I said yes, then mentioned I was wondering who to put on after the skit. Sandy’s too green to follow a show-stopper. So that’s when Butler said I ought to use a professional in that spot, and he urged me to pick Poe.”

Butler said he wanted to murder Poe, and he meant it. The skit featured Jack Black in his first live appearance in a decade and a half. The nostalgia quotient alone would bring down the house, and I pitied any poor slob who had to try to top it. The sensible decision would have been to schedule a musical number afterwards, but O. J.’s forte is selling hats, not routining entertainment.

It was no use bickering with O. J. He couldn’t be riled, he just smiled and talked around any and every complaint and ended up doing what he wanted, anyway. Natie gave up and let Barry have the floor. His Excellency ran through a fair-sized itinerary of last-minute things that needed to be done.

For the next three hours, I helped hang streamers, rooted in dusty storage closets on the third floor of The Lambs for electrical cable and connectors, and mounted dozens of stills from Laurel and Hardy films. I made a trip to get the programs, an extra projection lamp, and miscellaneous push-pins, luminous tape, Coca-Colas, and beer.

By one o’clock, it was time to accompany O. J. on the upstate drive to the AGVA home.

It took about an hour to get there. Jack Black, waiting for us at the front desk, was nattily dressed and carried a small valise. He suggested we stop in for a moment to say hello to his ailing friend and ex-partner.

Billy White was sitting up in bed when we entered. His body had not suffered the whittling influence of time nearly so much as Black’s. There was still a lot of flesh on his frame, though much of it hung in loose folds. He was nearly bald, and his jowls, stubbled with whiskers, were unhealthy in color.

“Good to see you, O. J.,” he wheezed in a frail, breathy tenor that sounded like a man who’d been walking too long and hard. His mouth was curiously slack and it was not easy to understand what he was saying. Black explained in a low voice that White’s stroke had nearly paralyzed the entire right side of his face, though it had evidently not impaired his thinking.

I can’t reproduce the exact sound, but it took all his will to shape the words which we had to strain for.

“Sorry I can’t come with Jackie,” he laboriously told O. J. “Gotta stay in bed. Give my love to Hal.” He coughed. Even that was an effort. Feebly, he pressed O. J.’s hands in his gnarled fingers.

On our way out, O. J. told me that White is Hal Fawkes’s uncle. “That’s how we got them to agree to be our banquet guests.” He turned to Jack Black and asked what caused White’s stroke.

“He got some bad news,” Black replied. “Couldn’t take it.”

The nonagenarian walked briskly, setting a difficult pace. Age had not hampered him much; he was still tough. Slight and wiry, Black had a head shaped like an egg, the point being his chin. His big eyes were comically grotesque behind thick bifocals he wore attached to a cord. He was a fine choice for Fin, even to the high forehead, though Black lacked a mustache. All in all, he resembled a cross between an elegant undertaker and Charlie McCarthy.

I offered to take his bag to the car, but he shook me off.

“I was on the road seventy years,” he said in his crisp, incisive voice. “No porter ever touched
my
bags.” I could sympathize with his pride: at his age every victory against the rigors of encroaching Time must be reassuring. Nevertheless, after pitching the valise into the trunk of O. J.’s red Maverick, he settled into the rear seat with a very audible sigh.

It was a little before four
P.M.
when we pulled up in front of The Lambs. I got out first and helped Black clamber onto the sidewalk. O. J. took the old man’s bag from the trunk, gave it to him, then drove away to park in a garage up the street.

We were barely on time. The skit was supposed to rehearse at four, and since it would be the only time the rest of the cast could do it with Black, I expected that (contrary to usual Sons custom), the rehearsal would get underway on the dot.

I was right. Everyone was waiting for us in the third-floor Lambs theater. Tye Morrow, our tent’s ex-president, was directing; he sat in the front row going over last-minute notes with Natie, who’d exchanged his MTM T-shirt for a costume and makeup that made him look like Oliver Hardy.

Onstage, the diffident delegate, Toby Sanders, waited in Stan Laurel garb and gear. He was talking to O. J.’s wife, Della, who was made up like Mae Busch. Della was full-bosomed and tall, with honey-blonde hair that demanded only minimal aid from Clairol. She was always either laughing or smiling, much of the time at the supposed witticisms of the omnipresent gents then dancing attendance on her. Most of the men in the tent dearly lusted after her.

She was always worth a second look, but this time I had to give her a third. The premise of the skit was “Laurel and Hardy in the Garden of Eden,” but Toby and Natie’s garb was standard: suits and ties and bowlers; the only concession to Biblical tradition was a feeble attempt to twine ivy about their skypieces. Della, on the other hand, had not been permitted nearly so liberal an interpretation of costuming in her role of Lilith. She was showing more skin than I’d ever been privileged to scan, and I couldn’t deny being appreciative of the chance.

Black took a few minutes to get into makeup and costume as “the landlord” of the Garden of Eden. He pulled on a baldhead rubber skullpiece, affixed bushy eyebrows and mustache, and transformed himself into a tolerable look-alike of Jimmy Finlayson. Tye leaned over and flicked on a tape recorder in the empty orchestra pit, and the run-through began.