The Kind One (3 page)

My head hurt. I always kept a little tin of Bayer aspirin in my pocket. I got up and went in the kitchen. No glasses. I’d have to buy some. I’d have to buy a lot of things. I didn’t really own anything, except a toothbrush, a shaving kit, a couple suitcases of clothes. And the car. It used to be Bud’s car. He gave it to me. After I got hit in the head.

I put two aspirin in my mouth, turned on the tap, put my cupped hand under the water, and washed the aspirin down. Then I went in the bedroom.

A bare mattress lay on a rickety frame. I needed sheets, and pillows. On the mattress was a tea-colored stain almost exactly the shape of the state of Texas.

I lay down on the bed, avoiding Texas. The box springs creaked. I put my hands behind my head. I planned to stay here till my headache went away.

I heard something, and looked toward the window. Sunlight was pouring in. A fly was buzzing and butting its head against the glass. The fly was green, bright as a jewel.

   I PULLED INTO the parking lot of the Peacock Club. It was on the north side of the Sunset Strip, just down the street from the Clover Club.

It was early afternoon, and the club wasn’t open yet. Inside Bud Seitz sat in his usual U-shaped booth, just to the right of the stage.

Every table had its own little wooden peacock, and the walls and ceiling were covered with painted peacocks, and there were a thousand or a million or who knows how many eyes of the tails of the peacocks looking at you. The club was called Cicero’s before Bud bought it. He changed the name and the look because when he was a kid growing up in New York he went to the Central Park Zoo and fell in love with the peacocks. On opening night he had three dozen live peacocks brought in. They were supposed to just walk around looking proud and pretty but almost immediately it got out of hand. People got drunk and started chasing the peacocks around trying to pull out their tail feathers and the peacocks were screaming and crapping all over everything and then one of them flew up on a table where there were candles burning and its tail caught on fire. The burning peacock flapped around the room and everybody just went nuts, guys in tuxes and girls covered in jewels were yelling
fire, fire
and running toward the exits, movie stars were cursing and swinging their elbows and knocking people down and the funny thing was, the newspapers the next day didn’t print a thing about it. Sure, they had stories about the gala opening of the Peacock Club and pictures too, but everything went swimmingly and everybody had a grand time according to the reporters who were all on Bud’s payroll.

One of those reporters, John Hobbs of the
Los Angeles Times,
was sitting with Bud in his booth. Nucky Williams, Nello Marlini, and Arnold Dublinski were there too. There was so much smoke rising out of the booth it was like it was on fire with Nucky and Nello and Blinky smoking cigarettes, Hobbs a pipe, and Seitz a cigar. I didn’t smoke. It gave me a headache.

I sat down with them. Eddie, the waiter, brought me a cup of coffee. Everybody was drinking coffee. Bud had a firm rule that nobody could have a drink before sunset. Sitting over at the bar, Tommy and Dick Prettie were also drinking coffee. Tommy in particular was a real booze hound, and I could see him in the mirror staring at all those shiny bottles of liquor behind the bar like sundown couldn’t come fast enough.

Bud was forty-two but looked older. He had a narrow face with deep grooves in it, slightly buck teeth, bushy eyebrows, and small brown eyes that could scare you to death when they looked at you in a certain way. He was starting to lose his hair. He was maybe five-ten and a hundred sixty pounds.

He was always dressed to the nines. Today he was wearing a gray suit, a gray shirt, and a white tie, with a white carnation in his buttonhole.

There was no way you could describe Bud as handsome, but girls were always all over him. Maybe it was just a matter of him having a lot of dough and being a big important guy. Or maybe some girls actually liked him.

It wasn’t like Bud was getting laid by a different girl every day though. He was very careful about girls, because he was scared of catching something from them. Before he slept with somebody she had to go to his doctor to get a clean bill of health. He had a thing about germs, about cleanliness. He showered three times a day. He didn’t like to shake hands with people. He always had to have a box of Kleenex tissues near him and every five or ten minutes he’d wipe his hands.

He also had a thing about order. Let’s say that on his desk were a fountain pen, a cigar box, and a letter opener, then they had to be lined up a certain way, and if anybody moved them even half an inch when he wasn’t around he’d blow his top. And he couldn’t stand to have anything pointing at him. Once this little bookie named Louie Vachaboski put his cigarette down in an ashtray with the lit tip pointed right at Bud. Bud picked up the cigarette and dived over the table and grabbed Louie by the throat with one hand and with the other hand mashed out the cigarette in Louie’s left eyeball. Louie cut loose with these high-pitched, girlish screams, which got him nicknamed “Fay Wray” after the screaming blonde in
King Kong
. When Bud was done with Louie, he had to wash his hands about fifty times to get rid of his germs.

“She’s a milestone around my neck,” Bud was saying. He was talking about his wife, Bernice. They’d been married ten or twelve years but the last two years they’d been living in separate houses, Bud in Hollywood and Bernice in Beverly Hills.

“She spends my dough like there ain’t no tomorrow. And she’s always calling me up and pestering me about dumb shit. Like she calls me last week, she likes sunbathing naked by her swimming pool and she says these two kids that live next door are always climbing up in a tree to get a gander at her. She says she opens her eyes up and sees them two kids staring down at her and jacking off and she wants me to take care of ’em. What am I supposed to do, send some of you guys over to bump ’em off? Shit, the truth is I feel sorry for them kids if they’re so desperate they gotta jack off by looking at Bernice’s fat ass.”

Everybody laughed. John Hobbs puffed on his pipe and said: “She still won’t give you a divorce?”

“Nah, she’s a Catholic. She thinks the Pope’ll send us both to hell if we get a divorce. And she says she still loves me too much to let me go to hell. I tell her the Pope’s gonna try and send me to hell anyway ’cause I’m a Jew. But she won’t listen to me.”

“We need to get something on her,” Blinky said. “So she’ll cooperate.”

“Yeah,” said Bud. “Like she’s fucking a nigger. Something like that.”

Hobbs wrote something down in a notebook. He was wearing a tweed coat and a red bowtie, and he had a lazy eye that gave him a slightly loony look. He said: “Maybe I can look into it.”

“It oughta be a famous nigger,” said Nucky. “Not just some regular nigger.”

“There’s no such thing as a famous nigger,” said Nello.

“What the fuck’s Jack Johnson then?” said Nucky. “Danny? You ever hear of Jack Johnson?”

“Sure. He’s a boxer.”

“See? Even Danny knows who Jack Johnson is.”

“But he’s all washed up now,” said Nello. “He ain’t had a fight in years.”

“That don’t matter. He’s still famous.”

“He
used
to be famous. He ain’t now.”

“Why don’t both you guys shut up?” said Bud. “You’re giving me a fucking headache.”

Stan Tinney brought a girl over to the booth. Stan used to run some big club in New York till Bud had brought him in to manage the Peacock. He was an older guy, with white hair and heavy, black-framed glasses. Stan could hire anybody he wanted as long as it wasn’t a girl. Bud had to approve any girls.

Stan introduced Armilda Lee Keddy to him. Said she was up for the job as the new cigarette girl.

“What happened to Betty?” said Bud.

“She quit, Bud. She took a job over at the Pom Pom Club.”

“You telling me she’s going to work for those cocksuckers?” Bud looked incredulous. Stan shrugged.

“I even offered her a raise.”

“Even offered her a raise,” repeated Bud, shaking his head; then he turned his attention to Armilda Lee. “Where you from?”

“Ada, Oklahoma.”

She had brown hair, dimples, and a hayseed accent; her jaws were working hard on a piece of gum.

“Another dumb hick from Oklahoma,” said Bud pleasantly. “Just what this town needs.”

Armilda Lee giggled, her dimples deepening.

“Spit it out.”

“Huh?”

“The gum. Get rid of it.”

Armilda Lee quickly spit the gum out in her hand, then put both hands behind her back.

“People chewing gum. It makes me sick.”

She looked scared and said: “I’m sorry, Mr. Seitz.”

“Lemme see your legs.”

She hiked up her skirt a foot or two. We all inspected her legs. Armilda Lee Keddy had killer legs.

“Armilda Lee, if I hire you, do you promise never to go to work at the Pom Pom Club?”

Armilda Lee’s face lit up. “Oh yes sir, I swear to God, I’d never do nothing like that. And my daddy’s a preacher, so I don’t take swearing to the good Lord lightly.”

Bud bared his buck teeth in a smile. “Well hallelujah, sister. Welcome to the Peacock.”

Stan led the ecstatic Armilda Lee away. “I need to talk to Danny,” said Bud. “So everybody kindly clear out.”

Everybody did. Bud plucked out a tissue from the box and wiped off his hands, then added it to a white puffy pile of used tissues. He chewed on his cigar, looked at me through the smoke.

“How you been doing, Danny?”

“Fine.”

Eddie came over, warmed up our coffee, took away the Kleenex.

“You ain’t seemed yourself lately. I’m thinking maybe you’re sore at me.”

“Why would I be sore?”

“Maybe you’re wondering why I made you take care of Doc, since you liked him so much.”

“Yeah, I guess I was wondering that.”

“You’ve forgot a lot, and so now I’m trying to teach some of it back to you. Sometimes it becomes necessary in life to do stuff we don’t wanna do. It ain’t easy, I know. I’ve done a lot of stuff I didn’t wanna do. But, like I said—sometimes it’s necessary.”

Since I couldn’t think of anything to say, I was glad Darla picked this moment to walk in.

I watched her slide into the booth, kiss Bud on the cheek, smile across the table at me. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I? Eddie?” she called out to the waiter. “How’s about some orange juice?” She took Bud’s cigar right out of his mouth and lit a cigarette with it. If anybody else had touched Bud or something belonging to him without his okay he’d have probably broken their arm, but he was just watching her with this goofy grin on his face, like he was some yokel in a carnival tent in Tennessee and she was a shimmying hoochie koochie dancer.

“Whatta you been doing?” he said.

“Nothing. I do nothing all the time now. It’s what I do for a living.”

“It’s good you come by. There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. You and Danny.”

She looked at me curiously. I shrugged.

“It’s like this,” said Bud. “It’s getting around town that you’re my girl.”

She blew a stream of smoke in his general direction. “Is that what I am? Your girl?”

“Sure. Sure you are.”

“I thought I was your mistress.”

“I don’t like the sound of that, mistress. Girl’s nicer.”

“Okay. So?”

“So I got a lot of enemies. I ain’t the easiest guy to get to, but they might try to hurt me by hurting you.”

Eddie came back with the orange juice. Darla took a long drink like she was really thirsty. Then she looked back at Bud.

“Hurt me how?”

“Use your imagination. So I don’t want you going nowhere alone no more. Danny’ll go with you.”

Darla looked at me. “He’ll be my bodyguard, you mean?”

Bud nodded. My heart started beating a little faster.

“I don’t need a bodyguard.”

“I guess you got wax in your ears, baby. I just said you do.”

Darla drank the rest of her juice, then set the glass down so hard on the table she was lucky it didn’t break. “I
don’t
need a fucking
body
guard!” She slid out of the booth and began to flounce her way toward the exit.

“DARLA!”

She stopped in her tracks and looked back at Bud. Everybody else in the place was looking too, Eddie and Dick and Tommy and Nello and Nucky and Blinky and John Hobbs and Stan Tinney and Armilda Lee and the peacocks and this little Chinese guy that was sweeping up with a broom. When Bud spoke again, it was so quietly you could hardly hear him.

“Where you going?”

“To the beauty parlor.” It was like her voice had shrunk several sizes.

“Danny’ll drive you. Wait outside for him. He’ll be there in a minute.”

She just stood there, with everybody looking at her like she’d been hit in the face with a rotten tomato. Then she turned and walked out.

Bud’s cigar had gone out. He put a match to it and puffed a few times, then gave me a crooked grin.

“Broads, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m giving you a lot of responsibility, Danny. But I think you’re ready for it.”

I nodded.

“Lookit, you and me both know you can’t never trust a broad. They’re just born troublemakers. But don’t ever let her make any trouble between you and me. You know what I’m saying?”

“I think so.”

“Don’t ever let her tempt you. Just imagine she’s got a big sign hanging in front of her snatch. Private Club. Members Only. No Trespassing.”

“Okay.”

“That’s it then.”

I got up, walked away a couple of steps—then turned back toward the booth.

“Bud?”

“Yeah?”

“I won’t ever let anybody hurt Darla. I promise.”

Bud looked at me. Nodded a little.

I walked out to where she was waiting.

   DARLA WAS ALWAYS reading magazines about houses, like
House Beautiful
and
American Home
. Today, as we drove away from the club, she was looking through
House and Home
, and acting like I was invisible.