She moved forward and suddenly Margot was at her side.
“What is it, Mama? What happened?”
Caroline shook her head and they moved more quickly, came upon the circle of spectators, saw Vivian Maynard’s mother, sobbing, being led away.
“Call the ambulance.” Al Peters’ face was grim.
The circle parted then and Vivian lay on the floor, in an awkward position, still and white. One braid lay stretched out from her head. Like a big, broken doll, dropped and discarded.
Caroline tugged at Peters sleeve.
“What... what happened?”
He turned dull eyes on her.
“She fell. God know how. She fell from up there.”
Caroline looked up to the winding metal staircase, to the narrow balcony that edged the dressing rooms. “Is she hurt bad?”
Peters shrugged. “I’d say it didn’t do her any good.”
Caroline was surprised to hear Margot’s voice, firm and clear. “She looks dead.”
Peters turned slowly, looked down at her. His face was inscrutable. “Get ready,” he said. “We’ll call a special rehearsal this afternoon. You’ll have to go on.”
Margot smiled up at him, her most winsome smile. “I’m ready,” she said.
Peters’ eyes narrowed for a moment. “Incidentally,” he said and his voice was low, “Where were you when it happened?”
Caroline felt her heart stop.
“Why—,” the blue eyes were wide, “I was in the ladies’ room. With Mama. Wasn’t I, Mama?”
Caroline felt her head move up and down. Inside a blackness was spreading and the lights grew dim. Then, after a long time, her heart beat again, but not the way a heart should beat at all. Oh, so slowly. Oh, so hard. Somehow it felt as though it were incased in ice.
The Chips Are Down
by Wilfred Alexander
His dame bad called him a punk, but she wouldn’t be calling him that any more. Not after he’d clipped a hard guy for eight grand...
“Punk!” That’s what she called me. “Punk! You’re nothing but a two-for-a-nickel punk! That’s all you’ll ever be. Punk! Two-bit punk! Pushing dames around, because that’s all you’ll ever have: two bits! Punk! P-u-n-k!”
I let her have it, my hard fist, right in the kisser, and she went down; she came up with a busted lip and bloody nose.
I hated it when she came up bleeding and cut like that, because in that condition she refused to go to work, and when my broad didn’t work, I often didn’t eat.
Now I wondered what she would say when she saw me with eight thousand smackeroos in my pockets. Ha! Ha! I rushed along over the broken, slippery wet cement pavement. Tall, dirty, gray stone tenement buildings towered over me. I met sleepy-eyed men and women who had left their homes at five o’clock in the morning to go to work. The crisp and wrinkled bills of money, genuine U.S. currency, of various denominations to total more than eight thousand bucks bulged three of my pockets: legal tender, none of it counterfeit or hot.
I plunged down the street at a pace faster than walking, but I did not run. Every half dozen steps or more, I turned my face over my left shoulder to see if Raven’s men were following me. Soon as he caught on to the cross, he’d be hot on my tail with his goons. No one tailed me. Several times I stumbled on the broken sidewalk and my legs kicked wildly about under me. Passers-by turned to stare at me; no doubt, they believed I had been out all night no a spree and was now too drunk to go to work.
But I didn’t care what they thought. A man with eight thousand dollars in his pocket was above the suspicions of these stupid slum faces, these dumb punk faces. I turned off the street and burst through an apartment house vestibule door. In the vestibule I hesitated. I had to be sure. I stuck my head out the door and looked up and down the street. I detected no one following me and murmured, “Good,” to myself.
Turning, I ran up the stairs and beat on the door marked B2 at the top of the stairs. I hammered on the door with my fist and kicked it with my feet. Where was that dumb broad? I hadn’t all day. She usually woke up easier than this.
“Anna!”
An impatient voice sang out to me in a grumbling tone.
“Wait a Goddamn minute, will you?”
When she opened the door, she was wearing a pink pajama top. She never wore the bottoms. Her long bare legs always seemed much longer than they actually were when she wore just the pajama top, with her breasts holding the material out in front. She had gone to bed without putting her hair up and it was falling over her face. Her red toe nails turned up, as if to point at me, and for a minute, as if I really were a punk, I forgot that I was on the run. I imagined what those wide hips of hers would look like draped in the silk I was going to buy her, a dress cut so low at the neck that it showed off her magnificent breasts. A pretty pair of shoes for her tiny. feet would make all the guys stare.
“Don’t just stand there panting, out of breath, like the cops are after you,” she said. “Come in.”
I stepped in, kicked the door close, and grabbed her shoulders, squeezing them tightly. I quickly forgot her body, concerned with myself.
“We’ve got to hurry,” I said. “We’ve got to go away.”
She knocked my hands off her shoulders, pushed me back, and picked up a pack of Camels from the dresser.
“I ain’t got to go nowhere with you, punk!”
The words cut me deep, and I bled inside. I grabbed her wrist, the wrist of the hand in which she held the cigarette, as she tried to climb back in bed, and fire from the cigarette fell on the sheets, burning a hole in them.
“You’re going with me!”
She stood on her knees in the bed. “Going where?”
“Chicago first.”
“I’m not going to any Chicago. I’m staying right here in New York. Now either come to bed or get out. I’m tired after slinging drinks in a tavern all night.”
I had no time to argue. But she was my girl, and a guy’s girl is supposed to do what he says. I slapped her face. That’s the only kind of arguments some broads understand. Anna’s one of them. Her cigarette went flying across the room. I grabbed her pajama top and ripped it off her back. She didn’t try to cover up, but she got mad. Before she could open her mouth, I had jerked her off the bed and sent her sprawling over towards her closet.
“Get some clothes on and let’s get out of here!” Her flesh was trembling. “Look!”
I pulled the crumpled bills of money from my pocket, first from this pocket, then from that pocket, now from another pocket, and threw them in a pile on the bed. She approached the bed slowly, and picked up one of the bills gingerly, as if it contained a deadly contagious poison. “Dick!” she whispered. So much money frightened her. I searched my pockets for more money.
“You still think I’m just a punk, huh?”
I sat on the bed beside her. She put one hand on my shoulder and spoke with her face so close to mine that her breath tickled my face.
“You won all that in one night?”
I began to smooth out the crumpled bills, putting them in a pile on top of the straight ones.
“I’m taking you with me,” I said. “I’m not asking you if you want to go. You’re my woman, so I’m taking you. Now if you got nothing you want to take, put some rags on your bare tail and come on. Any other skirt’d be glad I even considered taking them, but no, not you. Not Miss Anna!”
She stared at me suspiciously, then at the money. Her voice quivered.