The Lime Pit (10 page)

He didn't look as if he'd changed a bit since I'd
last talked to him, and I told him so. Still the same broad-faced,
mopheaded old boy from Berea.

"No, Harry," he whined in a husky,
whiskey-scented voice. "I'm changing, son. Getting up in years."
Porky had a way of lingering over words, a finicky oratorical style
of speaking that he'd probably picked up while politicking and kept
up after he'd retired from public life because it mated so well with
that country-squire life style. "To what do I owe the pleasure
of this heah visit?"

"Business, Porky," I said to him.

"I figured," he said with a sigh. "When
y'all goin' ta come over heah for somethin' other than business?"

I shrugged. "It can't be helped."

"Aw, shoot," he said. "That ain't so.
Someday, boy, you're goin' ta wake up and discover that we ain't so
different as you think. You know, we're all nigguhs under the skin,
Harry. Some of us are a little fatter than most-" He broke up in
hoarse laughter and waved it away with his chubby hands. "Okay,"
he said, clapping his knees. "What kin I do for ya?"

"I need some facts."

Porky's flat brown eyes flitted toward the men
standing along the railing of the veranda and then back to me. "Red!"
he shouted. "Y'all take these fine genl'men 'round back, will
ya? Show 'em the barbecue and where we hide the liquor."

The men along the railing chuckled feebly and began
to file off the porch. Porky held up a fat hand of farewell and
winked with his mouth. "I'll be 'round directly."

When the last of them had disappeared around the
corner of the house, Porky's hand dropped to his lap and his mouth
winked shut. "All right, Harry. What is it?"

I reached inside my coat and pulled out the three
photographs of Cindy Ann. Porky looked at them for a minute,
expressionlessly, and then winked with his mouth. "Hot, ain't
it?" he said, fanning himself with the sheaf of snapshots.
"Suppose to hit near a hunnert today." He handed the
pictures back to me and folded his hands on his belly. "That
ain't exactly in my line," he said.

"I know that," I said to him. "That's
some old man's daughter, Porky. And all he wants is to get her back."

"An old man, you say?" Porky puckered his
lips and plucked one of the photographs from my hand. "What
exactly you need to know?"

"She's disappeared. I'd like to find out where.
If she's been working this side of the river, I'd like to know that,
too."

"What makes you think she's working over here?"

"A bird by the name of Abel Jones told me."

Porky winked twice.

"You know him?"

"I heard his name."

"Well, he and a pair of high-steppers named
Jellicoe are somehow tied into this. They've got that girl. And
you've seen the pictures."

He looked at the photo again. "Shit. She's just
a kid." He shook his head and tut-tutted with his lips. "Times
do change. Don't nobody I know right off-hand go in for this sorta
thing." He tucked the snapshot in his shirt and gaped at the
lawn. "Red!" he bellowed.

Bannion came trundling around the side of the house,
one hand pressed against his glasses and the other hovering nervously
above the flap of his coat.

"Is old Willie Keeluh still runnin' the theat-uh
over on Main Street?"

Red passed a hand over his brow and squinted up at
the porch. "I think so," he said. "Yessuh, I think he
is."

Porky got to his feet with a quickness that just
didn't seem possible in a man of his size and years. "Y'all take
Harry heah over ta see him. I'll go on back and keep them boys
entertained."

Porky danced down the
steps and out into the yard. "You keep in touch, heah?" he
said to me. "I'll work on this for ya and let you know what I
find."

***

Red Bannion drove me over to the theater in Porky's
pink Cadillac. Around Porky, Red always seemed a genial man, quick to
share in his employer's moods. In the car, he was silent and
unfriendly and his weatherbeaten face quickly assumed a look of
undisguised boredom. I figured he didn't like to be sent on Porky's
errands and, since I was the cause, I figured he didn't particularly
like me. Red must have been sixty years old that summer, but, like
Porky, there was a good deal of mean energy left in him. And I, for
one, didn't want to get on the wrong side of it.

Willie Keeler's theater was located on North Main in
a block that was taken up by small retail stores-shoe stores,
furniture stores, laundromats. The marquee said that a flick called
Young and Restless was playing, and it also said that "proof of
age is strictly enforced." A couple of sad cases were loitering
in front of the ticket window. Red shooed them away with a "Git!"
and marched through the big glass doors. He was mad, all right. And I
decided the quicker I could make this business the better for
everyone. I didn't think Keeler would know much about the pictures,
anyway. There's a limited market for the sort of thing those photos
advertised. What I had to do was find one satisfied customer and then
I might be able to work my way back through him to Cindy Ann.

There was a popcorn machine and a glass candy case in
the lobby of the theater, and, to their right, was a wooden door
marked "Office." Red didn't bother to knock. He just barged
through the door, and I followed him in.

Keeler was a gaunt, silver-haired man in his early
fifties with a slick sallow complexion that reminded me of a piece of
wax fruit. He was sitting behind a small desk when we came through
the door. He'd apparently been listening to a baseball game on a
little table radio beside the desk. But he flipped it off as soon as
we entered the room and stood up with a start, as if we'd caught him
in
flagrante delicto
.

"Don't you know how to knock?" he snapped
at Red. His voice was thin and nasal. Not the kind of voice that was
comfortable snapping at a man like Red Bannion. I had the impression
from the way Keeler was acting that, once, maybe not so long before,
Red had gotten tough with him and had gotten away with it.

Bannion looked at him once, a cop's look, the kind of
glance that's really a form of computation rather than an open-eyed
stare. Then, his eyes shut down to slits and he said, "Porky
sent us," in a matter-of-fact voice.

"Yeah?" Keeler looked at me uncertainly.
"You're not the law, are you? Because if you are, I've paid my
monthly dues. You can call Phil Tracewell over at C.I.D., if you
don't believe me."

"I'm not the law. I'm a P.I., and I'm looking
for a missing girl." I handed him one of the photos from my
pocket. "This girl."

Keeler picked up a pair of bifocals that were laying
on his desk and peered down at the picture as if he were reading the
ingredients on a soup can label. "No," he said, shaking his
head. He flipped off the glasses and handed the photo back to me.
"I've never seen her."

"Do you run loops in the lobby?" I asked
him. "Yeah. We have two quarter machines."

"How often do you change the loops?"

"Every two weeks."

"Well, I'd appreciate it if you'd keep an eye
out for that face. If you spot her, give me a call."

I gave him one of my cards and, after thinking it
over for a second, told him to keep the snapshot.

"We don't get much of the kiddie stuff," he
said. "The cops don't like it." He glared at Red Bannion
and said, "Do they, Red?"

"I wouldn't know what cops like or don't like,"
he said flatly.

"The hell,"
Keeler said. "I'll keep an eye open, Stoner. Sometimes we get
local stuff for the machines. If this one pops up, I'll let you
know."

***

Red Bannion's spirits improved considerably on the
trip back to Charles Street.

"I don't like that man," he said
cheerfully. "Don't care for that line of work at all."

We drove down Main to Seventh Street and past the
Golden Deer. Red looked affectionately out the window as we passed
by. "Hope you don't mind me comin' this way," he said.

"Sometimes I just gotta remind myself who I am."

"No, Red. I don't mind," I said.

"Lad," he said wistfully. "You'd be
plumb amazed at how things have changed in this town. When Porky and
I started out after the war, there was only one club on Seventh
Street. Now, look at it."

He waved his arm at the row of rococo night clubs-the
Kittycat, the Silver Mule, the Hideaway, the Three-Ring Circus, the
Dew Drop Inn.

"Looks like skid row, now, don't it? It's all
gone bad and sneaky. It's all-commercial," he said with
distaste. "No character anymore. Hell, you could line the men
that run those joints up against a wall and you'd be hard put to tell
one from the next. They're all of them wops in business suits and
sunglasses. Not like the old days when it was Porky and Texas Jim
McElroy and Hymie Gould. No," he said mournfully. "It's all
changed."

There's nothing like a sentimental gangster to put
the world in perspective. Red Bannion was working up to something.
And, since he was not the kind of man to whom confession came easily,
he'd prefaced it--whatever it was--with a short ride and a bit of old
times, as if he were working off his inhibitions by reminding himself
of who he had been and of who he was now. I thought maybe what he
wanted to say had to do with Willie Keeler. The hatred that both men
felt for each other had been obvious. I'd even thought of asking him
about it when we'd stepped back out onto the sidewalk; but, thank
God, some little warning bell went off in my head just as I was about
to open my mouth. I suppose one of the hardest things I've had to
learn in life is not to ask a detective's questions of my friends,
which is damn tough to remember when you're usually getting paid to
be nosy. As it turned out, it was a good thing I'd been able to keep
my mouth shut, because what Red wanted to say had nothing to do with
Keeler.

He pulled the Cadillac up across from the house on
Charles Street and sat back in the seat with a sigh. He swiped off
his glasses and tenderly massaged the indentations they'd made on the
bridge of his nose. "Those pictures, Harry," he said in an
achy voice. "Who wants to know about 'em?"

"An old man in Clifton," I said. "He's
the girl's father."

Bannion nodded and continued to rub his nose. His
eyes were shut and, for just a second, I had the eerie feeling he was
praying. His teeth raked once across his lower lip, and he opened his
eyes and pushed the glasses firmly back on his nose. In that split
second, he'd come to some sort of decision about what he wanted to
say and concluded that he could live with it, or, maybe, that I
could. "I may be able to help you with this," he said,
smiling at me. "Seems to me I done seen that girl's face some
place before, though I'll be damned if I kin recollec' where. You
wanna give me a look at one of those photos?"

I took the third print out of my coat and passed it
over to Red. He flipped down the sun visor and held the snapshot in
front of him. "Sure 'nough I seen this girl," he said. "In
Newport, not too long ago. 'Course, she was made up different."
He touched the air as if he were touching Cindy Ann's face. "Her
hair was-" he swept the air into long tresses. "And her
eyes was made up different, too. Shoot, in this picture, she don't
look more'n sixteen."

"That's how old she is."

"Naw," Red said and flicked the snapshot
with his thumbnail. "She gotta be older than that."
I looked at him a second and asked: "Why?"

Red flushed slightly and said, "No reason. No
reason a'tall. Might not have been this girl, neither. We can check
it out, though. Over at the Deer."

"Was she hooking, Red?" I said. "Is
that what you're saying?"

He looked down at the dash. "I don't rightly
know, Harry. We can check it out, though. Y'all wanna come back over
heah tonight?"

"I can't tonight," I said.

"Well, maybe I kin give you a call tomorrow
morning. And let you know if it was her I saw. Kin I keep this?"
he said, holding up the photo.

"Yeah."

"You still in Clifton?"

"Still and always."

"All rightie," he said and opened the car
door. We got out, and Red straightened himself and brushed at his
coat. "I don't like that kind of thing," he said and smiled
without pleasure. "Me and ol' Willie had us some words about it
no more'n a year or so ago. I'd like to lend a hand, if I could. If
you don't mind?"

He looked up at me and smiled like a choir boy. A
brawny, yellow-toothed, bullet-headed, sixty-year-old choir boy.

"I don't mind," I told him.
 
 

10

THE SUN was setting behind me as I crossed the
Suspension Bridge, but the day's heat was still cooking the air. The
nightfall was sticky hot and the evening would remain hot long past
midnight. It was those damn hills that did it; they contained the
heat like the walls of an oven and, with it, the fumes of the
downtown industries and the exhaust of the cars and buses. I hadn't
heard the news but I guessed that pollution was near the alert level.
A sickly bile-colored haze was floating above the river and laying in
fog-like patches along the basin. I felt tired and sweaty-dirty, as
if I'd spent the afternoon baling hay instead of talking with three
local mobsters.