The Cocktail Waitress (29 page)

The newspapers got hold of it, as I later learned, and ran story after story, with photographs of Earl from their files and of me from the day of my arrest, Sergeant Young’s body only partly blocking me from view. They’d even got one somehow of me in my uniform from the Garden, how I don’t know, and they ran it over and over, with black bars to cover up what they deemed indecent. Of course this made it appear more indecent than it actually was.

Inevitably, the headline writers, knowing of my job and faced with three deaths in which I was alleged to have served the men in my life a lethal concoction, or anyway one that facilitated their deaths, took to calling me “the Cocktail Waitress”—just like that, with capital letters,
one for each capital charge against me. It was a sobriquet that caught on, and one that has dogged me ever since. It is why I finally began taping this, so that my name might be cleared, and my children not be saddled with a shame and notoriety that I never deserved and they certainly do not.

Children—yes. But I’ve leapt ahead of myself.

Mr. Hoopes made his last impassioned statement to the judge late in the afternoon two weeks to the day from the date of my arrest, and I had the night that followed to stew and to wonder what the outcome would be. Would my case proceed to trial, and from there, if I were to lose, on to sentencing? I could practically feel the restraints closing on my wrists and ankles, the metal cap lowering over my brow, and if I slept a wink all night I didn’t know it. But in the morning, word came down of the judge’s decision: two words,
Insufficient Evidence.
And I was free.

I had everything on earth that I needed to make me happy then: besides my freedom, I had, it was true, enough money left, as well as a mansion to live in if I wished, and friends. Except that I did not have the one thing that I wanted, which was my little boy.

On my exit from the prison, before Mr. Hoopes could depart, I asked if he would come along with me for one more task. He eyed his wristwatch, but still flush with his victory on my behalf and no doubt computing the extra fee he could charge, he agreed. We drove straight to Ethel’s house and pulled up in front of their drive just as they were packing bags into the trunk of their sedan. The judge’s decision had leaked somehow and been picked up by the morning papers, and Ethel had lost no time in preparing her husband and Tad for a trip, perhaps a long one, perhaps one-way. If I’d delayed even by half an hour, if I’d even gone home to change my clothes first or shower, I’d have arrived at an empty house, my son vanished.

But as it happened, I spotted him seated in the back seat of the sedan and ran over to the door and flung it open. I heard Ethel shout my name, but didn’t care, for Tad was in my arms and I was swinging him up in the air, showering him with all the kisses I’d been forced to store up since I’d held him last. I had tears streaming down my face, and frightened by it, he began to bawl, but I cooed at him and wiped my eyes and told him not to be afraid, that Mommy was back to stay.

While I was doing all this, Jack Lucas stood looking on, a trunk in each hand and a guilty expression on his face, aware of what it looked
like that we’d caught them on their way out. But there was no guilt showing on Ethel’s face, only rage.

“Put that child down, Joan. You’re not taking him away.”

“… I am. I have. He’s taken.”

“What court will let you keep him, Joan? A notorious murderess?”

“I’m free, Joan. The judge found me innocent.”

“Like hell. I read the article. He only said there wasn’t enough evidence to prove you guilty. That doesn’t mean you’re not. There’s not a person in this state who doesn’t know you did it.”

“I’ll thank you, Ethel, not to speak ill of me in front of my boy,” I said, cupping one hand over Tad’s ear. “And if you’re serious about wanting to fight for custody, I’d like to introduce you to my attorney, Mr. R. Harry Hoopes.”

Hoopes came forward, enough steel in his stare to arm a battalion. “Why don’t we talk, Mrs. Lucas, Mr. Lucas—why don’t we just go inside and talk?”

The next several days were consumed with meetings. I was seeing lawyers, realtors, and bankers. The lawyers were probating Earl’s will, and had things I had to sign. The realtors hoped, despite all the attention, to sell the mansion, but on that I hadn’t made up my mind, and anyhow, it had to wait on the lawyers, until their work with the will was done. The bankers were Earl’s partners—they owned only a minority of his firm, but knew how his business was done, and I would have been a fool not to bulge up their share, so they would carry on. I did, the thing was put on paper, in a new agreement that I signed, and then lo and behold, I was a 40% partner in a prosperous banking concern—EKW Associates, as they decided to call themselves.

I had requests, too, from the papers and the newsweeklies, and from radio and television—more than I could count. But I ignored them all, and had Araminta go out front twice to beg all those who
had gathered there to leave, out of respect for the young child in the house if not for me. They didn’t leave. Which meant no playing on the lawn for Tad, and no trips outside for me—except for one.

I learned, to my horror, that Tom’s body had remained all this time in the morgue, unclaimed. Of course, I knew his parents were deceased, and that he had no wife or siblings. But it had never occurred to me that he had no one at all. In time, I guess, he would have been given a public burial of some sort, perhaps in some municipal graveyard, and I couldn’t bear that. For all that he’d done wrong, he still deserved better than a pauper’s grave.

So, I claimed the body, and called the undertaker, and made arrangements, and rode once more to a funeral with Tom by my side, only this time I was sitting with him in the back of the hearse, not a limousine, and he wouldn’t be returning with me after.

I’d worn a black dress, conservative and sober, with elbow-length gloves and a hat, both also black, as befit the occasion. I wore, too, the dark glasses from our trip to the airport together, not to prevent the reporters and photographers from recognizing me, as that was hopeless, but to prevent them from seeing me cry, and capturing it with their cameras.

As it was, photos of me from the service did run in all the major papers—the first photos of “the Cocktail Waitress” since her controversial release from prison. I only regret one thing, which was my decision at the last moment before I left the house to rouge my lips, for it got commented on in every piece of coverage without exception. But I felt I needed a little color, so as not to look like a corpse myself.

We didn’t hold a separate service, just went direct to the cemetery and met up there with the one clergyman I’d found who had been willing to do the honors. He kindly glossed over Tom’s suicide in his remarks, and also kept them brief, and for his pains took home a fee healthy enough to refurnish his church, or his home if he preferred.

Liz was there, and Bianca, both of them weeping copiously at the loss. “I can’t believe he did it,” Liz said. “It’s my fault, Joanie, all my fault.” I tried my best to reassure her that it wasn’t, but I was afraid my words rang hollow to her. So I just held her tight and let her cry and patted her shoulder. When she finally let go, I saw a woman standing behind her that I didn’t recognize at first, but knew that I knew. Then I realized it was Pearl Lacey. I hadn’t thought she’d known Tom so well, but then remembered she’d been fond of him. I went over to shake her hand. “Shocking, shocking,” she said. It was the only word she spoke to me the whole time.

I want to say you know the whole story now—what happened, and how it happened, and why. But there’s one more piece I haven’t told, and that’s what happened when I got home from Tom’s funeral. I realized something, walking through the door, and began to cry, not weeping softly as I had at the cemetery while looking down into the freshly dug grave, but sobbing so hard I could barely catch my breath. Araminta rushed me a glass of water from the kitchen and I almost choked getting it down.

Then I asked her, gasping, for a calendar. She brought one, a tiny thing she kept pinned to the front of the Frigidaire with a magnet. I turned back a page and counted, though I hardly had to. I’d missed my period this time for sure.

Since that day, nine months have passed, nearly; my due date is tomorrow. The doctor who will deliver my baby is the same one who came when, in the first heat of panic, I called and begged him to bring over to the mansion whatever apparatus he needed to perform a test on the spot. He came, he performed the test, and sure enough, this time it wasn’t a delay caused by stress, though god knows I’d had stress enough to dry me up for a lifetime. No, it was a baby, and I’ve carried her ever since.

Of course I don’t know it’s a girl—not so I can be sure. But I have a feeling about it. I’ve had dreams in which she’s spoken to me, and in all of them it’s been a little girl’s voice. Who knows if that’s reliable, the doctors say no, but some women I’ve talked to take a different view.

It’s been a difficult pregnancy, with lots of morning sickness and bed-rest needed. Little Tad has been an angel about it, but it hasn’t been easy on him, for sure. Of course we now have the money to hire ten caretakers if need be—but that isn’t the same as having Mommy there to pick you up and whirl you around the room.

Fortunately, I had some of Hilda’s pills left—a few—and they helped me through the worst of it. I couldn’t ask a doctor for more, of course. Any pills but those, perhaps; but if it got out that the Cocktail Waitress had asked for more Thalidomide—god help me, the newspapers would have a field day with it. As it is, the coverage has picked up, people interested in the story again now that the baby’s almost due.
A KILLER’S CHILD
, read one headline I passed on the street. I didn’t know if they meant me or Tom. But that night I began recording this. To make sure the truth gets told.

I can’t wait to see my little girl, to hold her in my arms. Tom’s baby. With a father like him … she’s bound to be a beauty, a perfect little beauty, and I want her to have the life I never did, and that even Tad lost out on, the first four years of his life. He’s a good boy, but every now and again a frightened one, you can see he’s one who’s known pain. But his little sister—I pray she’ll be spared all the cruelties we’ve endured.

I seemed to be all taped up—that must be all.

For now.

by Charles Ardai

When people talk about James M. Cain these days, it tends to be in reverential tones—he’s earned a spot as one of the ‘big three,’ the giants of hardboiled crime fiction whose works are considered classics (the other two being Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler). Cain’s books have been taught in universities, even Harvard. People write dissertations about them.

But back when Cain started publishing his lean, tough novels in the 1930s and 40s—and even on into the 50s and 60s—he was seen very differently: as a dabbler in sin and scandal, a purveyor of the lurid and the low. The
Saturday Review of Literature
famously said, “No one has ever stopped reading in the middle of one of Jim Cain’s books,” a line that has been quoted on several generations of Cain paperbacks, but it was a backhanded compliment, acknowledging his books’ explosive popularity with readers more than their quality.
Time
magazine, meanwhile, sneeringly called his books “carnal and criminal” and their author a “hoary old sensation-monger,” opining in 1965 (with more than a whiff of envy) that

For 30 years, novelist James M. Cain has worked a literary lode bordering a trash heap. Even his best works
—The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity—
reeked of their neighborhood, and no doubt as a consequence were made into movies.

They were indeed made into movies. One, Billy Wilder’s
Double Indemnity,
scored a Best Picture nomination upon release and has since been named one of the 100 best American films of all time by the American Film Institute. Cain’s books also sold millions of copies and were translated into eighteen or nineteen languages. All of which just goes to show how little critics’ opinions count for if you’ve got readers in the palm of your hand (which, god knows, Cain did), and if your books are actually good (which, god knows, Cain’s are).

But it would be a mistake to completely ignore the reception Cain
got in his heyday, because it tells you something about what it was Cain was doing. The fact is that Cain
was
a scandalous, shocking writer—even a dangerous one, insofar as any novelist can be called dangerous. He shook up the social order of his day, delighting in pricking over-inflated balloons and watching them go pop. He brought matters into popular fiction that weren’t the subject of polite conversation back then (some still aren’t even now)—adultery, incest, depravity of all stripes, sexuality of all flavors. He had an underage temptress stealing her mother’s lover a decade before
Lolita.
He had murders so brutal, so visceral, that even reading them today your gut twists. His books were banned. Is there any wonder that he attracted readers by the carload, or that they read his books breathlessly to the last page?