“I want to find out what happened to Bert.”
“I don’t care what you want to find out. You can start to work tomorrow. The salary is sixty dollars and that’s all I can afford. Come in around noon with your social security card, but don’t try to find things out on my time. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Yes, sir.”
I smiled and found it was a mistake.
“If you think anything around here is funny, I don’t want to know it. Don’t call me Karen until I act like I want you to call me that. My name is Miss Tanner.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good afternoon, Gideon.”
“Good afternoon, Miss Tanner.”
I watched her light another cigarette from the stub of her old one. A big blonde girl, and built. You could get yourself all hot and bothered just thinking about the way she looked, the long, clean lines of her legs, the sudden hip flare, trim flat waist and high sharp breasts with the fan blowing the cotton of her dress tight against them. But I had a hunch she was as cold as the winds that would come howling down Surf Avenue next December.
I got out of there and didn’t know what to do next. I thought about all the private detective novels I’d read while convalescing in Japan. Those guys always knew where to head and what to do when they arrived. Even if they walked into a latrine, chances were they’d find someone sitting on a stool who could supply them with a vital piece of the puzzle. Me, I wasn’t sure I had any puzzle at all. I certainly had no pieces to fit it, not even vague ideas, except for Karen’s relationship with Bert, which I didn’t like at all, and the Lutz’s business at Tolliver’s, which I didn’t understand. Oh, yes. I had one other thing — a pretty strong notion it was murder and the kind of half-assed proof which means something to a friend but would hardly stand up in a court of law. “Taking in the sights, Mr. Frey?”
I whirled at the sound of the voice, a musical voice, lilting but not affected, with the suggestion of Ireland in every syllable, although you couldn’t really call it a brogue. She was small and trim and wore her black hair cropped short over a pert, pug-nosed face with wide, yellow-flecked brown eyes. Freckles clustered at the bridge of her nose and made her look younger than she probably was. She was smiling and her lower lip was a little too full over her small pointed chin. She wasn’t stacked like Karen Tanner, but she was a nice bundle all the way down to the ballerina slippers she wore. The last time I saw her she’d sat in front of Tolliver’s on the sidewalk, crying.
“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m starting to work here tomorrow.”
“I thought you would. Miss Tanner told me all about you after we had a typical female crying jag together.”
“Karen was crying?”
“My gosh, yes. She was crying her eyes out, only she’s smarter than me and wanted to cry in private. It was funny. She brought me inside to help me. She got out a handful of tissues and told me to blow my nose and then started bawling herself. She’s nicer than you think, Mr. Frey.”
“What makes you think I have to be told that?”
“You looked surprised when you found out she cried. Gosh, she and Bert loved each other.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Bert wouldn’t give me a tumble. Mr. Frey, do you think it’s possible for a girl to love two men at the same time? I mean, really love them both in every way so she’d want to marry them both if the law let her?”
“How old is the girl?”
“She’s eighteen. But she looks older.”
“It’s quite possible,” I said, grinning. She grinned back at me.
“Would you like me to show you around Tolliver’s? It’s like a little Coney Island inside the bigger one.”
“You’re telling me,” I shouted over the noise. Small caliber rifles cracked flatly at the shooting gallery. Gongs clanged, feet shuffled on the dirty boardwalk floor, voices shouted, pitchmen pleaded. And there was this smell, a mixture of every kind of fun house smell, all wafted to your nostrils on a cloying base.
Sheila grabbed my elbow and began to steer me around. “That’s Vito Lucca in the Pizzeria,” she said. “He works the day shift and his mother does some of the swinging. Vito’s a nice boy.” She got stars in her eyes when she said that. I’d already met Vito but I got introduced formally and heard Sheila tell him I was Bert’s friend and was going to work for Karen. Vito obliged with a wedge of pizza on the house.
We met a whole crew of fun-makers whose names slipped through my mind like confetti through a sidewalk grate because I was still thinking of Bert. I kept thinking about Bert and Karen while Sheila kept introducing me to people but talking about Vito Lucca every chance she got. “Vito’s a nice boy,” she repeated a dozen times. “Vito’s got to learn we can’t all climb to the top of the world, that’s all.” Sheila pouted. “Well, shouldn’t he?”
So Sheila had a crush on Bert and one on Vito. “I guess so,” I said. “What’s upstairs?”
“Oh. We’re coming to that now. You go up, then along a hallway and down another flight of stairs. It’s Tolliver’s bathhouse, second largest in Coney Island. You can also enter it off the boardwalk.”
“The place with the steam rooms?” I demanded. Sheila got solemn. “Yes. I thought I’d just show you the stairs, but if you really want to go up…”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I can hop up there myself. What do you do around here, Sheila?”
“We have a little show at night in the restaurant. I dance a solo mambo.”
“I’ll bet you’re good.”
“Vito thinks so. He says Tolliver’s is too small-time for me. But that’s like Vito. Gosh, he’s always running around.”
“Thanks for the tour, kid. I’ll catch your number later, maybe. Right now I want to go upstairs and have a look around.”
“Honest, I’ll take you if you want.”
“Uh-uh. You go let Vito make eyes at you. I’ll see you later.”
A flight of wide wooden steps with the white paint flaked and scabby led upstairs to what could have been anything from a restaurant to a convention hall at one time. Now the place was deserted. Downstairs, Tolliver’s was cooler than the street because this place offered a cushion of air as insulation. Up here it was like walking through a furnace and by the time I found the hallway on the other side I was wringing wet.
The hallway opened on another flight of steps on an outside wall of the place. Spread out below me in a huge courtyard was Tolliver’s bathhouse. A high school girl in a two-piece bathing suit watched me remove my damp shirt and asked me why I didn’t come in through the boardwalk entrance instead of getting all sweaty like that, so I told her I had to see her and she wasn’t on the boardwalk gate, was she? She smiled coyly, dropped my four bits in a metal cash-box and gave me a numbered key, a pair of blue bathing trunks and a towel and then went back to her issue of Love Comics.
Five women paraded around the place for every man. Women queued up to use the low diving board, women filled the great rectangular pool with acres of scantily clad flesh, women lined the counter of the refreshment stand, women formed patterns of tanned arms and legs on the sand around the pool, women chattered and yammered and roved the bathhouse in small wolf-gangs looking for prey.
I made for the life guard’s stand and called up to him: “Hey, Weissmueller! Talk to you for a minute?”
He breathed deep and expanded his chest and the women around me ooh’ed and ah’ed. “Shoot,” he said.
“I’m looking for the manager.” If I ever wanted to operate around here I’d have to soak up some ultraviolet because alongside the life guard I looked like the White Cliffs of Dover.