He brought me my drink. “That’s why I came up, Joe.”
“I’m damn glad they nailed the guy who did it.”
“What!”
“Hell, didn’t you know that?”
“I just got into town.”
“Then you wouldn’t. They grabbed him around noon in a rooming house in the north end. It’s in the evening papers. Record as long as your arm. He’s all sewed up.”
“I’m glad they got him,” I said.
“It sort of surprised me, Gev,” he said, looking down into his glass.
“That they got him? Have the cops gotten that bad?”
“I didn’t mean that. It’s not my place to say anything. Look, forget I opened my mouth.”
“What do you mean, it’s not your place? Whose place would it be, Joe? We’ve been friends a long time. Don’t start something like that and then try to back away from it.”
He sat down behind his desk. He looked embarrassed. “A man sees a lot in this business. Maybe he adds two and two too often. And makes a fool habit of getting six.”
“What about Ken?”
He looked at me. “I had it all tabbed as suicide. Now wait a minute. I thought he’d worked it out in some tricky way, maybe for the insurance angle or something. And I was going to keep my mouth shut. Now don’t look so sore. I know he wasn’t the suicide type. He definitely wasn’t until this past year.”
“And this past year?”
Joe shrugged. “It’s a pattern. Came in every day at four-thirty. Eight, nine, or ten stingers. Got very sedately loaded and sat around with ghosts in his eyes. Everybody knew he was on his way out at the plant. He was coming apart. After a while he’d get up and go home. Walking a chalk line, walking like somebody with a big bundle of trouble balanced on his head.”
“The plant never meant that much to him. He didn’t have enough yen to be top dog, Joe.”
“Not when you knew him. Hell, that didn’t sound very good. Your own brother.”
“It’s accurate, Joe,” I said briskly. “I used to know him. Now I keep thinking of the four years. I was a damn fool.”
“A woman like that can make anybody act like a damn fool.”
“Is that an excuse?”
“Knock it off, Gevvy,” he said gently. “It’s spilled milk. Stirring it with a stick turns it into the self-pity pitch. Everybody is in some sense a damn fool. Anyway, you don’t have to believe me. Be in the Copper Lounge tonight about eleven. I’ll introduce you to a little girl who knows more than I do. She’s a cutie and she sings for me and her name is Hildy Devereaux.”
“Was he playing around?”
“That word covers too much ground, Gevvy. They were friendly. If they were ever in the hay, it wasn’t here. I would have had a report.” He looked suddenly older. “Need a bed?”
“I left the bag with the bell captain. Haven’t tried for a room yet.”
He picked up the phone and asked for the desk. “Ralph? What are we holding?” He listened for a moment. “Okay. A Mr. Gevan Dean goes in the suite on eight. Send a boy to my office with the key and the card.”
Joe built us another drink. The boy came. I signed the card and described my bag and told him where I left it and asked him to bring the key back to me. We had some aimless talk about old times and old places. The boy came back and I tipped him. Joe went with me to his office door. “It’s a hell of a world, Gev. I’ll miss Kenny. He was one of the nice people.”
It was nearly eleven when I went into the Copper Lounge. Business was very very good. Low lights gleamed on the bar, on the bare shoulders of women, on the forward-leaning, soft-talking, intense faces of their men. A girl in silver lamé sat at a little pastel piano in the light of a subdued spot, doodling old tunes, chatting and smiling up at a heavy man who leaned on the piano, a drink in his hand.
I found a stool at the bar and ordered a drink. The bits and pieces of conversation around me were in the tradition of boom town. It was the same record that had been played in the early forties.
“So we finally got it in carload lots out of Gulfport after Texas City turned us down...”
“...told them if they wanted to hit their delivery dates on the nose, they could put on another shift like we had to...”
“... the last time I was home it was the middle of February and how the hell do I know what she’s doing while I’m being bounced all over the damn country...”
“...look, why doesn’t George bring the plane to Cleveland and that’ll give us an extra day in Chicago...”
“...so they furnish hotel suites complete with girls and then have a hell of a flap if you won’t set delivery ahead to...”
This was the same record they’d played many years ago. I looked around at the male faces at the bar. Tension in the mouth, eyes moving quickly, pencil whipped out for a fast sketch on the back of a bar tab. “...Like this, see? Then you use extruded plastic for the sleeve, see? Then you don’t have to sweat out deliveries on the metal stampings.”
Operators. Angle boys. The expense-account boys. A lot of them were chasing the fast buck and the special privilege. But there were just as many who were in it because they loved the tension, the pressure, the excitement of it. In the old wars of long ago the sutlers were scorned. But not in these wars. A hundred-ton press is worth two battalions. One physicist can be worth two allies. The equations are new.
The girl at the piano bowed off into the gloom to a polite spattering of applause. A sallow man took her place and the spot slid away from him, moved ten feet to focus on a girl who stood at a microphone. She was small and she had long brown hair and gold tones in her skin and big, brown eyes. She bit her lip and smiled in an appealingly nervous fashion. She stood there until the conversations quieted down.
There was something helpless about her that made you want to give her your attention. She nodded in the direction of the piano, took a short, unobtrusive introduction, and then sang.
A ballad about loneliness and longing. The lyrics were tired and flat, but her voice, low and tender, and her manner, intimate and warm, gave the words a personal meaning to every man in the Copper Lounge. She was a pro and she was good and she didn’t corn up the gestures or wag her body around the way amateurs do. Yet you were aware of her body, aware of the good lines of it. The dress was clever. Like a kid’s first formal when you half looked at it, but then you saw how, in the fit and cut, it was very daring.
While I was adding my share to the loud applause, Joe Gardland edged in beside me and asked, “Like our Hildy?”
“Very choice, Joe. Very special.”
He flagged a waiter and said, “Give Mr. Dean that deuce by the wall, Albert.” He turned back to me and said, “Take the table, and I’ll bring Hildy over after her turn.”
After her songs were over, I saw her coming through the tables toward me, smiling. I stood up. She said, “I’m Hildy. Joe couldn’t bring me. He had to send me.” A waiter held her chair. “Ken spoke of you often, Gev.”
At close range her features had that flavor of boldness typical of entertainers. She was no longer a shy child singing tender for the people. Entertainers are a separate breed. They have their own language and customs and tribal mannerisms. Any other person is enough to form an audience. I often wonder what they do when they are completely alone — or if they ever are.
“It was nice of you to come over.”
“I sing the words other people write, Gev. It doesn’t leave me any of my own to tell you how terribly sorry I am about Ken.”
“Thank you, Hildy,” I said, and my tone may have been a bit stuffy. “You sing other people’s words very nicely indeed.”
She tilted her head a bit on the side. “Thank you. I guess you’re a lot like him, aren’t you? You’re kind of standoffish right now. Looking at me as if I were ‘the other woman.’ ”