Queen of the Underworld (8 page)

“I’ll pass on the pie, but I’d love another Coke.”

“Coming up. But what made Lucifer a star was his ‘Queen of the Underworld’ series—the bust-up of this elite house of prostitution run by a mobster over on Palm Island. You ever hear of it? No? The series was picked up all over the country, even abroad. No, that’s right, six years ago you would have been just a teenager. The ‘queen’ herself was still a teenager when she was launched, and twenty-one when she blew the whistle and brought it all down. Look it up in the morgue: Queen of the Underworld trial, also under Ginevra Snow, and the Valentis—they were the Mafia uncle and the nephew. Ginevra was this Georgia fruit-stand beauty who caught the eye of the nephew. He got her to run away with him, promised marriage as soon as he finished law school at the University of Miami. Meanwhile he had his uncle enroll her at Biscayne Academy, that was a posh Miami finishing school for debutantes. Well, she finishes before he does and comes out bearing herself like a queen while the nephew’s still goofing off and flunking courses and procrastinating about the wedding. Ginevra moves into the uncle’s villa on Palm Island, and one thing leads to another—though at the trial she testified the uncle never laid a hand on her and none of the clients did, either, it was strictly a business arrangement between her and the uncle while her fiancé finished his degree. She kept the books and polished the girls’ manners like she’d been taught at the Biscayne Academy, she took them shopping and chose their clothes, and the uncle provided the funds and invited the guests. Well, two more years pass, the nephew’s still in law school, she sees him only on the weekends, and sometimes not even then because of studying and tests or he’s feeling indisposed. And then one Sunday morning it all blows sky-high when Ginevra wakes up in her Palm Island bedroom and opens the
Star
’s society section to find that her fiancé is engaged to someone else! She picks up the phone and calls the
Star
and asks to speak to a reporter, and guess who just happens to be working overtime on the Sunday morning desk?

“All Lou had to do was make a couple of phone calls and then sit back and wait for Hell-hath-no-fury to drive herself across the MacArthur Causeway to the paper. While she was spilling her story, her unsuspecting pimp was arrested coming out of St. Ignatius Catholic Church with his new fiancée. A raid squad was dispatched to Palm Island to pick up Ginevra’s personal belongings, which included an appointment book filled with the names of prominent figures, including a federal judge. Lou took her over to the photo lab and got them to shoot a demure head and shoulders portrait of her just like the
Star
’s standard engagement photos, and then the DA himself arrived and spirited her away to an undisclosed location. The story broke on Monday, circulation started going up and up, prominent heads rolled when the contents of the young lady’s appointment book were made known, and during the trial Lou Norbright became as much of a household word as his famous queen.”

“Why was she a queen?”

“Lou made her into one. He made her into a modern-day Persephone—you know, the young goddess abducted by Hades, the King of the Underworld. Whereas Ginevra was only abducted from her grandmother’s fruit stand by a Mafia brat and transformed by the sophisticated mobster uncle into a highly successful madam while the nephew kept promising to marry her as soon as he finished law school.

“It was what Lou did with Ginevra’s testimony and background that hooked readers. He drove up to Waycross and talked to the old crosspatch redneck grandmother, a far cry from Persephone’s mother, but it only made readers all the more sorry for Ginevra—the granny had raised her after the child’s mother drank herself to death, but demanded her own pound of flesh as soon as the little girl could stand on a box behind the fruit stand and count out change.

“Then he interviewed her high school boyfriend, who confirmed Ginevra had always conducted herself like a queen. She’d never gone all the way with him because they were saving it for their marriage. Oh boy. Circulation kept going up and up, the story had everything, how could Lou top himself after that?

“Next thing, Feeney sends him up to the
Star
’s Washington bureau—ah, my key lime pie. Sure you won’t change your mind?”

“No, thanks. But what happened to her—Ginevra—and the uncle and the nephew?”

“The nephew got five years for transporting a minor across the state line, but he jumped bail and vanished, probably abroad, where the uncle had gone to avoid a subpoena for pandering. Ginevra became a local celebrity for a few months, there was talk of her working with disadvantaged girls or collaborating with Hollywood for a movie, but then she married her shrink, a guy named Brown, and dropped out of sight, more or less, on Key Biscayne. She’s made a couple of suicide attempts since—I covered them, such as they were—but six years is like a generation in the newspaper business. Now you have to remind readers who the Queen of the Underworld was.

“You know, after Feeney sent Lou up to the Washington bureau, I really missed the guy. Once I conceded his superiority, I got a surge of adrenaline just from watching him operate. When he suddenly returned, none of us could figure it out. His Washington stories had been top-of-the-line; but here he was back
assisting
on city desk, then moving humbly around to sports, business, state, being everybody’s friend. He and I had a couple more lunches here at Walgreens and I brought him up to date on everything.

“Well, three months later, Feeney fires the city editor and replaces him with you-know-who. The whole thing had been Lou’s idea. Feeney had wanted to bring him back from Washington and install him straight off as city editor, but Lou said no, let him mingle with the staff as their peer first, listen to their gripes, find out who’s working and who isn’t, get a better fix on the whole operation from inside. In other words be a sneaky, ruthless son of a bitch, which is what people called him afterward, not that he minded, he was the first to admit it himself. He once told me that most people look on a promotion as having arrived but he saw it simply as his next point of departure.”

“When I was down here for my Christmas interview,” I said, “Feeney was all by himself in there. Yet he seems happy sharing his office with Norbright.”

“Feeney’s the convivial type; he likes being visible in the community, giving out the awards and scholarships, being keynote speaker at benefits. He never liked the pressure side of the job. Deadlines, crises, resentments and rivalries, all the things Lou thrives on. So now Feeney can be the benevolent overseer while his dark assistant goes to and fro in the newsroom and does the dirty work.”

“I wonder what Lou Norbright really wants. I mean,
ultimately.
” I loved conversations in which you tried to figure out the motives of sinister or very successful people, who were often a combination of both.

“Lucifer? Power and control, just like his counterpart. Aren’t you going to eat your pickle?”

W
HEN
B
ISBEE
and I returned to the office, I found a half sheet of copy paper stuck under the bar of my Remington.

emma: go see harmon for tests at 3:30

rr

“What’s this about?” I showed Bisbee the note.

“Harry Harmon’s the personnel director. The
Star
gives personality tests now. Good thing I escaped them, I’d never have got in the door.”

“But I thought I was already
in
the door.”

“It’s a new management thing, probably Lucifer’s idea. Don’t sweat it. Just don’t be too interesting when you go up there is my advice. Harmon’s a stuffed shirt.”

Having forty-five minutes to kill and no new assignments from “rr,” who was nowhere in sight, I picked up my spiral-bound pad and a copy pencil and headed for the morgue. Moira Parks was now cutting up Sunday’s inside pages.

“Hi,” I said. “Just thought I’d look up a few things, kind of get myself oriented.”

“Let me know if I can be of help,” she responded without looking up from her scissoring.
ALL MY OPPONENTS TRAITORS—CASTRO
I read upside down as she severed the two-column story from the adjoining department store ad.

First I looked up Tess, under her husband’s name. It was a slimmer envelope than I’d expected.
FORMER MISS MIAMI BEACH WEDS PIONEER FAMILY SCION
. There was the same three-column wedding picture of the bride that was yellowing in one of Loney’s bureau drawers: Tess swathed in acres of tulle and satin, trapped in a circle of train.

I had been old enough then to remember Mother and Loney debating whether Mother should go down for the wedding.

“I’m sure it would mean a lot to Tess,” said Loney, “and you certainly have the right clothes.”

“Yes, but here I am widowed and working, with a five-year-old child. I’ll be damned if I’ll set myself up to be pitied by a bunch of Junior Leaguers.”

“Well, if you’re not going to enjoy it, you oughtn’t to go,” replied the reasonable Loney, and that was that.

Within a year, infant pictures of the junior scion joined Loney’s keepsakes, and the following year came the anguished long-distance call from Miami and Tess’s monthlong visit, during which I slept on the sofa while she recuperated in my room from ruining her life.

We knew about the annulment in progress: it was much discussed by my mother and grandmother. “I still don’t understand,” Loney would say. “How can you annul a marriage when there’s already a child?” “Money,” my mother would answer, “and you have to be a Roman Catholic.”

We also knew that Tess had gone off to live in an apartment, leaving the baby with her estranged husband and his mother. And after Tess came to stay with us, she confided at the table one evening that she had brought down the house by falling in love with her husband’s younger brother, a naval officer who had been flown home a wounded hero from the Solomon Islands campaign.

But here in a single-column inside-page story with “May 1, 1944” pencilled above the headline (could that be the younger Moira Parks’s fastidious cursive?) was the rest of what had gone unimagined even by us.

PROMINENT WAR HERO
TAKES OWN LIFE

He and Tess had been living together, and it was Tess who found him asphyxiated in the apartment house garage. That she was the former Miss Miami Beach and was estranged from her “scion” husband, brother of the deceased, was in the story, but there was no mention of any child. The family must have used all its clout with some
Star
scion to keep the story so bare and small.

No need to take notes on this one. Hardly longer than the standard obits I had been writing all day, it could be reported from memory to Mother and Loney when I next wrote to them. The deceased hero had been twenty-two and Tess at the time must have been thirty, though her age was not given.

Poor Tess, whom I would be seeing tonight: what a thing to have lived through—and to have it in her newspaper file, where she must expect I would be looking it up. Though maybe her thoughts were elsewhere. She had a boss, who perhaps doubled as a lover, whose praises she sang daily, and she had become fluent in a new language that made her sound like a different version of herself. I replaced the slender file.

More furtively, I moved on to the
N
’s, which were another shelf’s distance away from Moira Parks, who was humming a tune under her breath. The
N
’s were at shoulder level, so I wouldn’t have to crouch. Even better, they were completely out of sight from the newsroom, in case anybody with an
N
name happened to be passing.

My jealousy animal reared up dangerously on its hind legs when I laid my hands on Norbright’s corpus: six stuffed envelopes in as many years. If I was still here in six years, how many would I have? I would be twenty-eight. Would I have a novel published by then? Would I have won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting? Oh God, so much to get done.

I checked my watch, a frivolous gold-mesh appurtenance, a graduation gift from Mother’s rich cousin who had wanted to annex us. It was all wrong for a newspaper reporter: you had to pry open a diamond-studded cover to see the time. There was a little less than half an hour to go before my date with the stuffed shirt.

I quickly skimmed the first envelope of Lucifer’s clippings. The religious-relic swindler did indeed look like an upright beetle in a Hawaiian shirt. Bisbee certainly had an eye.

Norbright wrote a caustic, cocky prose.

Want to make a easy buck? All you need is a bank of phones, a few Miami Beach retirees on limited incomes, and a couple of thousand devout souls in need of a mail-order miracle.

No time today to linger on the early successes. Get to the big one. His “Queen of the Underworld” series filled an entire envelope. I cursed my awkward stand-up-and-peek method.

I devoured the series in random gulps, having to unfold and refold each clipping, casting nervous glances over my shoulder in case someone came in. Moira’s incessant humming spooked me and I was coming to loathe the foolish wristwatch coyly concealing its one purpose in life beneath the diamond-studded orb.

As I pounced on blocks of type and absorbed image after image of Palm Island’s Ginevra Snow, formerly of Waycross, Georgia—did she never strike an unbewitching angle?—I felt an increasing attraction to her. She had the kind of looks I most admired in other women, that lethal frontage of fine features riding a solid understructure of sex appeal. Her cloud of dark hair, pulled back with a schoolgirlish headband for the court appearances, still floated like a summer thunderstorm about to wreak havoc, which she certainly had. Her wide-spaced, slanty eyes were both hopeful and calculating, and the mouth in the various photos ranged in expression from affronted innocence to cunning hauteur. I wanted to know her from the inside; I wanted to experience her whole adventure—the motherless childhood with the exploitative grandmother, the abduction by the Mafia nephew, the finishing school for debutantes, the sophisticated mobster uncle, and what it was like to be a madam of nineteen presiding over an elite island whorehouse. In some strange way I felt she offered an alternative version of myself. To follow her story would be to glimpse what I might have done had I been trapped in Waycross in her circumstances.