The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (17 page)

M
izner was even more of a man about town than Britt had been. He introduced Ketchel to the plushest brothel in the city, a place that bore no sign on its handsome brick exterior but was known as the Pleasure Dome. Every one of its girls so lovely that Ketchel could hardly decide which to pick, and finally chose both a Latin girl with skin the color of caramel and a redhead pale as cream.

They afterward had a drink and told each other of the fine time they’d had. “The Dome’s got the prettiest girls in New York, no question,” Mizner said, “and every one of them with a heart that’ll cut glass. Then again, nobody goes to a whorehouse to find a girl like Mom, does he? Not unless he had the sort of mom I’d like to know.”

Ketchel admitted he’d had his share of good times with whores, but he preferred to get his loving from women who weren’t professionals.

“I’m with you, champ. It’s always best when it’s from a woman who likes something about you besides your billfold, even if she’s no Pleasure Dome girl in looks.”

“Like the Widow Yerkes?” Ketchel grinned at him in the backbar mirror.

“Christ, kid, you got a mean streak, you know that?”

Actually, Mizner was on intimate terms with a number of attractive women in the arts and literary worlds, almost all of them given to bohemian attitudes. He knew actresses, singers and dancers, models, copy editors and book illustrators, and over the next few weeks he introduced Ketchel to a number of them. In the company of such women they passed most of their evenings in cafés and night clubs, dancehalls that never closed. The girls were invariably impressed not only by Ketchel’s championship but as well by his dancing and singing.

So, too, was Mizner. The first time he heard Ketchel croon was on an evening in a club where they’d gone with a fetching pair of art school models. While the band was taking a break, Ketchel impulsively went up to the bandstand and without preamble or musical accompaniment began crooning “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” When he finished, there was vigorous applause and calls for more. He beamed and said, “You folks like moon songs, do you?” Then sang “On Moonlight Bay” and received an even bigger hand than before. He bowed formally, then shook his hands together above his head.

Back at the table, Mizner clapped him on the shoulder. “I gotta say, champ, you got a real talent. You belong on the stage.”

“That’s right,” said one of the girls. She made a show of checking the wall clock. “I think there’s one leaving in about five minutes.” She and the other girl giggled drunkenly at this ancient and lamest of jokes.

Mizner stared at them without expression, then said to Ketchel, “The thing about models is, most of them are pretty as a picture but about as intelligent as a turnip.”

“Oh
yeah?”
said the other girl. “Well, you’re about as intelligent as a…as a
rutabaga.”
The girls shrilled with laughter.

“As an
eggplant,”
the first girl said, and they doubled over the table and hit it with their fists.

“You didn’t let me finish,” Mizner said. “I was about to say it’s a good thing I love the taste of turnips.”

“Oh sure,” the first girl said.

“I’m not kidding,” he said, and leaned over and ran his tongue into her ear.

She hunched her shoulders and giggled. “
Ooooh….
”

Mizner paused and affected to look thoughtful. Then picked up a salt cellar and sprinkled a few grains on the girl’s dampened ear, licked it again, and said, “Aaah…just right.”

D
RINKING WITH
M
IZNER
in a Fifth Avenue saloon one evening, Ketchel spied a Gibson Girl poster on the far wall. The one of Evelyn Nesbit as
The Eternal Question.
By way of the newspapers, he had kept abreast of her husband’s two trials for the murder of Stanford White and of her testimony on his behalf. The first trial ended with a hung jury, the second in Thaw’s incarceration for an indefinite period in the Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Mizner followed Ketchel’s gaze to see what held his attention.
“Ah yes, Evelyn,” he said, as much in sigh as declaration. “One of God’s most sublime creations. Have I told you I know her?” He grinned at the expression on Ketchel’s face, then leaned toward him and said in near-whisper, “And I mean
very
damn well.”

“Oh brother, tell me another one.”

Mizner swore it was true. He’d met her more than a year ago, shortly after her husband got sent to the asylum. They were introduced by a mutual friend, a stage director who also gave acting lessons. Evelyn was one of his students. According to rumor, she was receiving far less financial support from her imprisoned husband than was publicly supposed. Whether that was true or not, she was seeking to make a career as an actress.

“Far be it from me to smooch and tell,” Mizner said, “but just between us, I’ve had some memorable moments with that exquisite lady. I’m not the only one who can make that boast, I admit, but so what? The way I see it, a share of Evelyn is better than none of Evelyn.”

Sad to say, he added, she had just a few weeks before fallen in love with a painter in the Village. Her
true
love, as she had described him to Mizner. What Mizner found sad about it was that Evelyn believed in being true to her true love, a concept he found baffling in a woman of her experience, and she had therefore ceased sharing her favors with anyone but the painter. There was, however, reason to hope for a return to sweeter times. Evelyn had twice before in the previous year believed she had fallen in true love, and in both instances she had fallen back out of it within a month.

“Come to think of it,” Mizner said, “she’s past due to no longer be in true love with that painter. Say now, champ, this may be an opportune time to give her a call.”

“I gotta hand it to you, pal,” Ketchel said. “You really know how to lay it on. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost believe you.”

Mizner affected to take umbrage, then went to use the telephone mounted on the rear wall. When he returned to the bar he said, “The lady informs me that the painter became part of her sad past as of last week.
And
she’d love nothing better than to meet the middleweight champion of the world.”

“Oh yeah? When?”

“Now.”

“If you’re pulling my leg, Bill….”

“The only leg I want to get my hand on is Evelyn’s. Let’s go.”

T
HEY MADE A
brief stop at a saloon where Mizner knew the owner and bought a bottle of absinthe from his back room. Although popular with the bohemian set and with artists who praised its inspirational effects, the liqueur was commonly believed to be highly addictive and to cause hallucinations, madness, in some cases death. Its banning in America would precede Prohibition by some eight years and long outlast it.

“Her favorite treat,” Mizner said, waggling the bottle. Ketchel admitted that he had never tasted it. “You haven’t missed much,” Mizner said. “I can hardly stand the stuff, and nothing in the world will give you a worse hangover. But the doll loves it, and I love what it does to her disposition. It bodes immensely well for our visit, mon ami, that she asked if we’d be so kind as to bring a bottle of it.”

Evelyn Nesbit’s apartment was in an elegant building of brick and dark wood, fronted by a wide sidewalk and trees in new leaf. They were admitted by a doorman who had their names on a list, then took the elevator up to the top floor. Mizner rapped lightly on her door and a moment later it opened and there she was.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “I’m so pleased you’re here.”

Her voice was soft and had a slight rasp. Her eyes shadowed in blue. Her smile small and despite its crimson lipstick somehow shy as a child’s. She wore a white shirtwaist and black skirt, her dusky blonde hair loosely bunched at the back of her neck and tied with a black ribbon. Ketchel thought she was even more beautiful than in the first photos he’d seen of her more than three years before.

She ushered them into the foyer and took their hats and gave Mizner a hug. He introduced Ketchel. She offered her hand and said she was thrilled to make his acquaintance. The touch of her fingers deepened his breath.

The parlor was lighted by the low flames of a fireplace and variously colored tapers in tall glass holders. The furnishings were Middle Eastern, the walls hung with darkly colored Persian rugs and but a single painting, a desertscape with a small oasis under a thin crescent moon. There was a faint fragrance of incense. A phonograph, its cabinet doors partially closed to mute the volume, issued music of a sort Ketchel had not heard before, at once lively and mournful. She sensed his curiosity and said, “It’s an old gypsy tune called ‘The Black Raven.’ You like it?”

“Sure do. But why the
black
raven? Ain’t…aren’t all ravens black?”

“Well now, I hadn’t thought about that. Maybe the gypsies know something we don’t.”

“Maybe gypsies don’t care a fig about grammatical redundancy,” Mizner said. He produced the absinthe and Evelyn brightened. “Why, Wilson, you darling man.”

At a small bar against the wall Mizner poured three slim glasses a quarter full each. Ketchel detected a scent reminiscent of licorice.
Evelyn picked up a glass and held it before a candle flame. The liqueur glowed like molten emerald. “La Fée Verte,” she said.

Ketchel’s stiff face bespoke his ignorance of the phrase.

“The Green Fairy,” Evelyn said. “Isn’t that a lovely name for it? Oscar Wilde said a glass of absinthe is as poetical as a sunset.”

Ketchel figured Oscar Wilde must’ve been drunk as a coot to imagine a green sunset, but he kept the thought to himself.

Mizner said he himself preferred the “blue ruin,” as gin was sometimes called in newspaper editorials and not always in jest. “But in deference to our lovely hostess, I’m willing to risk my so-called sanity on this occasion.”

“I have always admired daring,” Evelyn said.

She set the glass down. Ketchel watched with keen interest as Mizner placed a sugar cube in a perforated spoon, held the spoon over the glass, and gently decanted ice water a few drops at a time over the sugar.

Evelyn put her lips almost to Ketchel’s ear as if she were imparting some deep secret and whispered, “To ease the bitterness.” Her breath was warm on his ear and he felt the small hairs stir on his nape. Her eyes gleamed with candlelight. She stood so close he was not sure if he felt the touch of her breast on the back of his arm or only imagined it.

Mizner poured each glass about three-quarters full, the contents now clouded to a milky green. Evelyn raised her glass and regarded the opaque liqueur. “The French say it is now louche,” she said. “Such a lovely word for ‘indecent.’ It actually means cross-eyed, you know.”

Ketchel said he hadn’t known that. “But I know when it comes to getting cross-eyed most any kind of booze’ll do the trick.”

Evelyn touched his arm. “You are droll, Mr. Ketchel.”

He said to please call him Steve. She said only if he would call her Evelyn. He said they had a deal. Mizner asked if anybody had read any good books lately, but neither of them seemed to have heard him. He cursed himself for a dope for having brought Ketchel.

They sat in the parlor and sipped at their absinthe and talked for a while about her acting classes. She loved the actor’s art, she said, the assumption of a character different from oneself. The habitation of an invention, as she had once heard acting described. She now and again rose from her chair to change the record on the phonograph.

Mizner asked Ketchel how he liked the absinthe.

“Tastes like medicine.”

“That’s what everybody says who’s never had it before. Don’t worry, pretty soon most of your taste buds will be dead and it won’t be so bad.”

“It will still taste like medicine,” Evelyn said. She sipped from her glass and smiled at Ketchel. “It
is
medicine.”

When she played a recording of “Maple Leaf Rag” they paused in the conversation to listen. She was pleased to learn they also liked Scott Joplin’s music, and she played several more of his rags, opening the cabinet doors to raise the volume. She finished her drink and asked Mizner for another. Ketchel was only half done with his. The heat it kindled in his belly was different from that of whiskey. He could feel it seep into his bones. The music seemed keener now, the colors of the wall rugs more vibrant, the candle flames brighter. So, too, Evelyn’s eyes.

She wanted to know more about him. She’d been familiar with his name for some time and knew of his boxing championship, and she had read about his rugged hobo boyhood and his arduous years
in Montana, a place that to her was as distant and foreboding as the moon, yet somehow as romantic too. Ketchel said he wouldn’t call Montana romantic as the moon, but it was for sure as cold. She said she had only recently read of his splendid singing voice and wonderful dancing talent. Ketchel said the newspapers tended to exaggerate things. She asked if he might honor her with a song. He was reluctant, thinking how poorly he would compare to the truly great singers she had heard. But she said “Please,” and so he said of course. She requested “When You Were Sweet Sixteen.” He stood up and sang it to her in a perfect tone of bittersweet melancholy. She applauded heartily and said he was wonderful.

Slumped low in his chair, Mizner flapped his palms together and muttered, “Yeah, real nice, kid.”

She asked Mizner for another absinthe. While he prepared it she went to the gramophone and changed the record, re-cranked the handle and set the needle to the spinning groove. The room filled with the strains of an instrumental version of “After the Ball.”

“I pray I am not being overly bold,” she said to Ketchel, “but may I have the pleasure of this dance?”

He said he admired boldness and the pleasure would be all his. She held her arms out to him and he stepped into her embrace and they danced around the room. Even through the incense he could smell her perfume. The scent of her hair.

Mizner set her fresh drink on the small table beside her chair and watched them for a moment, then said he heard his mother calling and please don’t anyone trouble himself to see him to the door. Not until the record played out did they become aware he had gone.