If she wasn’t arrested, then so much the better. I’d still be free of her, since I could in theory turn her in at any time. Either way, I’d be free of Miranda.
We paused on the landing outside Miranda’s door. Annabelle handed me a large envelope containing my money. I checked it quickly, and nodded my acceptance. She inserted the key in the lock, more noisily than I had hoped. Before turning it, she said: “Here goes. Give us a smile for luck, Jez.”
Miranda Denny stood before us, in the center of her hallway, completely naked.
“Grab her!” said Annabelle, closing the door behind us.
I did so, overcoming my natural revulsion. She didn’t struggle. I heard Annabelle breathing heavily as she came up the hallway towards us. “Get ready,” I said, and I threw Miranda away from me with all my force, so that she bounced off a closed door and slumped onto the carpet.
I saw a flash of light in front of me, and then a nauseous pain colonised the back of my head and everything I had ever held to be true gushed out of my nose and down my shirt and onto the floor.
“YOU GAINED ACCESS to the flat by means of a door key which you had stolen from Ms. Inwood’s handbag when you visited her office earlier in the day,” said the detective chief inspector sitting opposite me in the little interview room. “Surprising the two occupants of the flat in bed, you became irate and irrational, ranting and saying that you were in love with Ms. Denny.” He put a finger on his notebook to mark his place, and glanced up at me. “Do you deny any of this, Mr. Becker?”
I said nothing. I had said nothing since waking up in the hospital, two days previously.
“They tried to reason with you, and were able to persuade you to retreat as far as the hall. But then you pulled out a handgun and said that if you couldn’t have Miranda, then no one could. You raised the gun and made as if to fire it at Ms. Denny. At this point, however, the lady’s partner, Ms. Inwood, hit you over the head with a Chinese dog.”
“With a what?”
He checked his notes. “Sorry, a china dog. An ornament, which had stood on a side table. So, you have got a tongue after all?”
I regretted my involuntary outburst, and said nothing more. There was very little I could say. Perhaps forensic evidence would have assisted me, but the police would only look for it if they had reason to-and I could not afford to give them that reason. The truth was useless to me, not only because it wouldn’t have been believed, but because, if it was believed, it would only place me in a deeper hole than the one I was already in. I did not wish to face charges of robbery and conspiracy, in addition to those already proffered against me.
“The gun went off as you fell,” said the policeman, “causing a single round of ammunition to enter the wall of the hallway at about head height. No one was hurt as a result of the shooting.”
I didn’t listen to the rest of what he had to say. I used the time instead to ponder upon the disgraceful nature of the events which had overtaken me. It was a mortal outrage that I should face time in prison for attempted murder, when I had never in my life attempted to murder anyone, and for firearms offenses, when I had never in my life handled a firearm of any sort (except very briefly, and then only as an intermediary). It was a mortal outrage that an ugly woman and a plain one should conspire to take such disproportionate revenge on a man whose own crimes were minor-and who had, in any case, renounced his former trade, and reformed of his own free will.
My life ruined in exchange for a purse full of cash: Yes, I would call that disproportionate. I would call that a mortal outrage. I would call that a slap in the face of justice.
Break a Leg by STUART M. KAMINSKY
KENNY KILLED THE wrong poodle, but it really didn’t matter.
You see Kenny wanted to kill Pinky of Ben Burke and His Amazing Poodles. Pinky was the star. Pinky was also getting old which was one reason Kenny didn’t feel so bad about poisoning Pinky’s food bowl. Actually, there were signs of arthritis or something in Pinky. Kenny was doing the dog, and himself, a favor. At least he would have been had Pinky eaten the food instead of Puddles. A mistake. But it was enough to cancel Ben Burke and His Amazing Poodles from the show which moved Kenny up a notch on the bill.
He still had a long way to go. Ben Burke would be replaced. That couldn’t be helped, but given Goobernick’s budget and the dwindling number of vaudeville houses and smaller audiences, the replacement would be someone cheap, a whistler, an alcoholic comic with a big tie, a juggler.
It was 1924. Movies were taking over the vaudeville houses. First the movies were an act like the seals and the dancing Bronte Sisters, but now the movies were taking over and the old acts were becoming filler for Valentino, Keaton, and Garbo.
Kenny was an optimist. Vaudeville wouldn’t die completely. People would get tired of mimes in black and white on a flat screen. There’d always be room for a few good acts like Kenny Poole the Dancing Fool. Actually, Kenny’s real name was Pemerhoven. But except for Sid Scrimberger and his Musical Seals no one Kenny knew in the business had kept their real names. Of course the Scrimberger name had been associated with seal acts for who knows how the hell many years but that didn’t really matter to anyone anymore. Besides, if things went right, the Scrimberger seals wouldn’t be belching or playing their horns or balancing their balls or clapping their fins much longer. The two of them would be dead. There had once, not long ago, been three Scrimberger seals. Old Betsy, who was temperamental and fat but the smartest of the trio, had swallowed a light bulb and died.
The problem was simple. Goobernick had told the eight acts on the traveling bill that three of them were going to have to be cut and soon. It didn’t take The Amazing Weller, the World’s Greatest Mind Reader, to figure out that it was the last three acts on the bill that would go. Even having moved up one with the death of the poodle, Kenny was still only one act up from the bottom. For him to survive, three of the top five had to meet with accidents.
They were in Chicago, the Rialto on State Street. Winter. Blizzard. Small houses. Almost not worth selling the tickets, but the show goes on, the girls stripped. Strippers didn’t belong. Burlesque was taking over. Burlesque and moving pictures. Vaudeville was talent, real talent like Kenny’s or even the dogs and seals and those cousin contortionists and people like Callahan the World’s Greatest Irish Tenor who, when sober, could hit a note Caruso would envy.
Kenny sat in the diner across from the Rialto. Cars went by. The snow was blowing at an angle. Getting heavier. Cold out there. Mug of coffee and the sinker felt good.
Kenny had bills to pay. No relatives he could turn to. If he didn’t take care of himself, who would? Nobody, that’s who. Like Bert Williams sang, “Nobody.” Kenny liked to dance to that song, self-taught, making it all up. Now Bert Williams’s songs were too slow for the audiences. Kenny was so far down the bill that by the time they got to him, the people on the other side of the lights were looking at their watches. Kenny had to dance fast, smile, do tricks like the once over with a double click. He had to use taps. Make noise. Eccentric dancing wasn’t enough anymore. Kenny could only do the one-legged rollover to his right, but nobody knew or noticed.