For the past three months now Kenny’s Lounge (if you were wealthy and inclined to cheat, then you knew all about Kenny’s Lounge) had been enjoying standing-room-only business and it was exactly because of all the new songs that Richard Hanratty had been introducing here.
There was only one trouble with all the adulation being bestowed on Hanratty. He didn’t deserve it. Literally. Because he wasn’t writing the songs.
Once a week he’d come into work — he was never sure which day it would be — and there on the Steinway up on the circular little stage with the baby blue spotlight that made him look a little less fleshy and a little more handsome than he was... waiting for him there on the Steinway would be a brand new song all laid out in perfect form on sheet music in a very precise and knowing hand.
Hanratty had no idea who was leaving these songs for him.
Hanratty said, “You think over my offer?”
Kenny Bentley said, “You want a lot, Richard. Too much.”
“You think they’re coming here to see you — or hear me?”
Kenny Bentley sighed. He was forty-one, slender, and had apparently taken as his hero one of those gangster B-movie actors from the Forties who never seem to be out of tuxedo or into daylight. He wore his dyed black hair slicked back. He wore contacts so dark his eyes sparkled like black ice. He carried a gun in a shoulder rig in an obvious way. It added to the sense of danger he liked to create right down to the small jagged scar under his left eye which Hanratty felt sure Bentley had put there himself for effect. Bentley — even that was phony, Hanratty learning from the bartender that Bentley’s real last name was Conroy.
They were in Hanratty’s dressing room. It smelled now of mildew and martini, the one drink Hanratty allowed himself before going on. The walls were covered with big black and white blowups of movie goddesses from the Thirties and Forties. Hanratty’s favorite was of Rita Hayworth in a silky, sensual slip. He didn’t think he’d ever seen a more erotic woman. The rest of the room was taken up by a couch, a full-length dressing table with bubble lights encircling the mirror and various kinds of makeup strewn across the chipped and faded mahogany surface. He was secure in his masculinity. Wearing makeup had never bothered him.
He said, taking a slightly defensive tone that sickened him to hear, “I’m just asking for my fair share, Kenny. Business has nearly tripled, but you’re paying me the same.”
“That another new song I heard out there?”
“Is that an answer to my question?”
Bentley smiled with startling white teeth a vampire would envy. “I still can’t figure out where you got so much talent all of a sudden.”
“Maybe my muse decided to pay me a visit.”
“Your muse.” Bentley bit the words off bitterly. “You’re a lounge piano player for twenty-some years who’s had three bad marriages, ten cars that the finance company has repossessed, and you’ve got a drinking problem. The few times you ever played your own compositions before, the whole crowd went to sleep and I had to force you to go back to playing standards. But then all of a sudden—” He took out an unfiltered cigarette from a silver case that cost as much as Hanratty’s monthly rent. The smoke he exhaled was silver as the case itself. His hair shone dark as his eyes. He gazed suspiciously at Hanratty. “Then all of a sudden, you start writing these beautiful, beautiful songs. I don’t understand and something’s damn funny about it. Damn funny.”
“Maybe it just took time for my talent to bloom,” Hanratty said. There was a note of irony in his voice. He was uncomfortable talking about the songs. They weren’t, after all, his.
A knock sounded on the door just as Bentley was about to say something else.
Bentley went to the door, opened it.
She stood there, Sally Carson, looking as overwhelmingly voluptuous as ever — almost unreal in certain ways — spilling out of the tiny pirate’s costume all the waitresses wore at Kenny’s Lounge. She was six feet or better, with a breathtaking bust, and perfectly formed hips and legs. She also owned one of those tiny overbites that add just the right sexy bit of imperfection to a beautiful woman’s face. Only one thing was wrong with Sally and that was all the makeup she wore around her right eye. It looked as if she’d put it on with a spade and Hanratty knew why.
She was Kenny Bentley’s current girlfriend and Kenny Bentley, a man who brought new meaning to the term insanely jealous, had obviously worked her over again last night. If you looked carefully at Sally — as Hanratty did dreamily many times — you also noticed that her nose had been fractured right up on the bridge. Another memento from Kenny.
“What the hell is it?” Bentley demanded. “We’re talking business.”
Sally suddenly lost all her poise and confidence. She shied back and said, “You said to tell you when the Swansons arrived.”
“Oh. Right. Thanks.”
And with that, Bentley slammed the door in her face.
Hanratty said, “You shouldn’t treat her like that, Kenny. She’s a hell of a nice woman. Smart.” He wanted to say too smart for you but he knew better.
Bentley stubbed out his cigarette. “I’ll go half your demand, Hanratty. Half but no more.”
Hanratty shrugged. “I’ll have to think it over, Kenny.”
“You do that.” The suspicion was back in his eyes. “In the meantime, I’m going to find out what the hell’s going on here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that no broken-down lounge singer suddenly comes into talent. There’s just no way, Hanratty, just no way.” He started toward the door and paused. “In college did you read a book called WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN?”
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
“Well, you know how Sammy Glick steals that poor jerk’s movie scripts and sells them as his own?”
Hanratty felt his face redden and his hands fold up naturally into fists.
“Well, something like that’s going on here, Hanratty. Something very much like that.”
With that, he was gone, the sound of the slamming door reverberating like a gunshot.
Hanratty smoked a cigarette, just one of the innumerable vices he’d never been able to give up, and tried to calm down. He thought of how ironic it was that he’d just become so self-righteous when Bentley had accused him of using somebody else’s material. Wasn’t that exactly what he was doing?
He thought again of the tentative call he’d made this morning to a New York song publisher. Inquiring about how you went about selling songs... but then he’d backed off and told the woman he’d call her back soon. Without knowing where the songs came from, it would be a dangerous thing to start peddling them... at the least it could lead to embarrassment, at the worst to prison.
He jabbed out his cigarette and went over to the walk-in closet to select one of four lamé dinner jackets. There was a green one, a red one, a blue one, a black one, festive and tacky at the same time, and just what you’d expect from somebody who had spent his life — despite big gaudy dreams of being a star in his own right — singing other people’s material, tapping parasite-like into creativity not his own.
As usual, the smell of moth balls startled his senses as he pushed the sliding closet door back. It always reminded him of his parents’ attic back in South Dakota. He reached in for the blue jacket and felt another familiar sensation — a slight draft, one whose source he’d never been sure of. He’d never checked it out but tonight, with twenty minutes to go and no desire to sit at his dressing table and brood, he decided to get on his hands and knees and find out just where the draft came from somewhere in the darkness at the east end of the long closet.