Queenpin Read online

  It had all happened so quickly. An hour before, I’d picked up the money from the accountant over on the east side. I didn’t see anyone watching me as I left, but I wasn’t taking chances.

  It had to look real enough. The usual routine was to go straight to the track, so that’s what I did.

  We’d talked about how Casa Mar would be crowded, jammed with spectators. Most places, we’d have to do too much playacting and there was the risk of someone playing hero, seeing it and saving the day. Then we hit it. More than once, I’d walked behind the paddocks, having a cigarette, listening for any useful back-fence chin-wagging. So we made it so I’d stroll just far enough from the mix, behind the jockeys’ quarters.

  Standing there, I lit a cigarette, and two puffs in, it was clear the time was now. He came at me. He came at me hard. No one was watching. We’d both made sure. But from far enough away, it would look real. It would look like an ugly holdup.

  When he came at me, there was this: he was the wolf again. The yellow flare in his eyes. His hands on me. And he was all-in. I remember thinking, He’s hitting me like he’d hit a man, and I wanted to take it that way, oh, did I. I also remember thinking how it was like being back at Saint Lucy’s, where your whole body is prone, your whole body is ready to take it. Because that’s why you’re there.

  He wasn’t supposed to knock me out, Vic. It would make it harder for me to avoid the cops, a ruckus. I didn’t want a ruckus. Even if I had been mugged, she wouldn’t like that, wouldn’t like all the questions.

  A wandering horse trainer found me as I was coming to, helped me to my car. He wanted to take me to the track docs, the track badges, but I told him if my husband found out where I was, he’d do me worse than the mugger ever did. So he let me go.

  The whole drive, scared I would pass out again and crash, I gritted my teeth so deep into my lip it bled. But it kept me awake. I went straight to her doctor, just like I would have done if I’d really been clipped. He said I should have gone to the emergency room. He talked about contusions, a crushed cheekbone, and how he hated to see girls in this line of work. He put three stitches above my eyebrow—Vic hadn’t bothered to take his ring off either—and gave me a shoebox full of dope.

  When I got home, I didn’t look in the mirror. I knew it would pass with her, it had to. Who would do this to herself on purpose?

  The only nagging fear was that she might think whatever fellow had put the bruises on my thigh had now knocked the face out of my face and taken my money. Which was true, after all.

  When she called that night, I told her. I told her I’d been jumped at the track by some gee who must’ve been following me, waiting for his shot.

  “You went to see Haskins?”

  “Yeah, he wrapped me up.”

  “Gave you some Mr. Blue?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cut the booze then,” she said. I could hear her exhaling. “I told you about tails,” she went on. “About where you walk and when.” Then, after a pause, she said, “Funny.”

  “What?”

  “That today of all days it happens. It’s like they knew you were carrying twice the action.”

  “Some people might’ve known.”

  “My accountant’s clean,” she said, rough. “I’ve known him thirty years.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” I said. “My head’s fuzzy.” I let my voice go soft, weak. It wasn’t hard. I was feeling the gluey rush of the morphine I had taken an hour before, in preparation.

  “Get some shut-eye,” she said. “I’ll get a cab from the train station and be over first thing in the morning.”

  When she saw me, her eyes widened. It was the first time I’d ever seen the whites of her eyes. Her jaw was trembling so slightly, like a violin string. So slight only I would notice. Because I’d never seen it any way but granite still.

  I was lying on the sofa, curled up in my bathrobe. I was Camille.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  She walked over. For a second, it looked like she was going to place one gloved hand on mine. It hovered there. She was letting me see something, but just barely.

  “He came out of nowhere,” I murmured. “I should have made him. It was like he came out of nowhere.”

  She sat down on the coffee table facing me. Taking off her sunglasses, she peered at my face. I felt like something behind glass, something smeared on a slide under a microscope.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated. “You have to know. It won’t ever happen again.”

  “No,” she said. “It won’t.”

  I didn’t like the look in her eye. “Please, Gloria. I’ll make it up.”

  “I know,” she said. “I should have taught you this. I should have taught you how to handle yourself for this.”

  Through the throb over my eye I looked at her. She was nervous. For her, this was nervous. A little twitch on the side of her mouth, her arms straight at her sides, fingers closed around the edge of the table. For her, this was as bare as it got. It seemed like a good sign. Like she was figuring things, how to work it so we didn’t take the hit for this.

  “You can still teach me that,” I said, trying to sit up, my face pulsing like a separate, living thing. “Teach me how to handle myself.”

  She nodded at me. “All right,” she said, “but for now, stay put.” And she reached down for the afghan hanging off the edge of the sofa. She lifted it with her gloved fingers, pulled it up my chest.

  I could hear her breathing, hear her thinking. How am I going to play this with the big boys? That’s what she was thinking. How’m I going to save my girl?

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said as she left.

  No word from Vic, but that was probably smart. We knew we had to be careful. Had to bide our time. The next day I went to the drugstore for the football results. The man who sold me the paper tried not to look at my face when he gave me change.

  “Who was favored?” I asked, pointing to the score.

  “State. They were favored by thirteen. Won by six.”

  “Okay,” I said. I would have smiled, but it hurt too much.

  She came over later in the day with some more dope and some groceries.

  She didn’t look so nervous anymore. And she didn’t like my face. She kept staring at it and shaking her head.

  “You can’t make any runs until your face heals. You look like a two-dollar whore.”

  She wasn’t going to be tucking me under any afghans today, that was clear. I wondered what she’d found out.

  “I know I can’t,” I said. “In a few days…”

  “Go back to Haskins tomorrow. Have him try to do something. Christ.”

  We had some coffee. She told me she would have jobs for me in a week or two. Until then, I’d have to lay low. I asked her about any fallout from the bets I hadn’t been able to place. I was sure her bosses weren’t happy paying off a higher return rate to bookies whose bets they’d covered as place and show.

  “Nobody’s happy,” she said. “But I told you: I’m taking care of things.”

  As she was leaving, she turned to me, slipping on her leather driving gloves.

  “You know,” she said, “the action at the track that day—somebody won big on the fourth race. The way some might see it, the tough who robbed you ended up playing that dough. All on one horse. I have a lot of eyes at the track and they’re looking into it for us.”

  “Good,” I said, because there was nothing else I could say.

  I think I probably already knew Vic had played at least some of that money at the track, even with his sweet football tip. He couldn’t help himself. He had to take every shot he had. He couldn’t turn away from a sure thing. All his life was about sure things. Oh, Vic.

  He finally called the next day.

  “I saw your game played out real nice,” I said.

  “Yeah, baby.” I could hear his smile. “And there’s plenty more gold to mine there.”

  “So you put the w
hole haul on the game?”

  “Sure did. Just like we said, buttercup.”

  “And so now you’re true blue with Mackey?”

  “True blue, baby. So can I see you? I been thinking about you. About the catch in your throat you get… About your—”

  “I’m not exactly pretty as a picture,” I said. “Besides, it’s too risky.

  “Okay, baby. You’ll let me know when it’s time. I’ll be waiting.”

  “Yeah, Vic. I will.”

  When I hung up, I knew three things. First, he’d either bet some or all of the dough at the track, or he’d gotten some kind of payoff from passing on what he knew about the odds at the track that day. Second, he hadn’t settled up with Amos Mackey. At most, he’d paid an ounce of vig to hold off the baseball bat. Third, he was now in the hole deeper than ever. If I were putting money on it, I’d have bet he’d lost every last thin dime at one of the grind joints the night after he’d collected big.

  All for nothing, I thought, pouring myself a vodka chaser to go with the morphine haze. If I skate out of this, if I make it, that’s it. Here on out, I only bend for her. I only got ears for Mama.

  You get one, I kept saying to myself. That was your one.

  The next evening she was taking me out to dinner. She said I’d been through a lot and I deserved it.

  The night before, I’d dreamt of things happening to me, to her. Every story I’d heard about her, every story she’d told me about them, the bosses, came back in shards, piercing sounds. Faceless men in black cars running me down, long blades and hinges of skin, shotguns in my face, and the smell of my own flesh against the radiator.

  I knew I had to shake the fear. It was all over me. I had to shake it. I had to play it regular.

  She’d made special reservations, she said, at the swank new Venetian Gardens. “It’s one of Amos Mackey’s new joints,” she’d said on the phone. “He’s on the move, that one.”

  “Is that so,” I’d said as flat as she ever taught me.

  I wanted her to see I was on the mend, would be ready to dance for her again soon. I troweled a thick layer of Pan-Cake over my mottled face. Looking in the mirror, I watched as the creamy Amber Rose erased all the Technicolor, leaving everything smooth, molded, like the pinch-face Nancy Ann Story-book doll I had when I was a kid.

  Before, even with all the bruises, the sunken cheekbone, I had seen myself in the glass. I could look in the mirror and see me. Now, with the makeup leaving only slits for eyes, it was like that face was gone and in its place was something else. Someone else. I knew who else.

  She came over at nine p.m., dressed head to toe in sharky silver.

  “You look good.” She nodded at me. “But this is an occasion. And occasions call for little extras.” She lifted the garment bag in her hand. “You can wear it tonight.”

  I smiled, feeling the Pan-Cake crack slightly. “But I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve anything.”

  She looked at me and shook her head. “Don’t sweat it, kid. It’s just one twist in a long seam. Don’t worry your black-and-blue head over it.”

  She must have seen the relief in my eyes, my slitted eyes, because she added, “You don’t give me enough credit, baby. I don’t leave you hung out to dry. It’s not good business. And besides, you’re my girl.”

  Her garnet lips curled, slanted into something, something like a smile. The closest to a smile she came. I smiled back. I felt like I must have been crazy to do what I’d done to her. After everything. She was the one in my corner. The only one.

  “Now let’s go celebrate,” she said. “Toast your recovery. Let’s paint the town.”

  She lifted the garment bag high, like a fisherman showing off his biggest catch. “We’re going to dress you to kill,” she said. “You gotta show ’em you’re not down for the count.”

  I said okay. I said I’d love to. I was hers.

  In one long stroke, she unzipped the garment bag and the shimmering red dress gushed out.

  “With your fox,” she said. “It’s meant to go with the platina fox.” The one she’d bought me for my first night of casino rounds. My favorite piece, silvertips hand-dyed by Regina, when Regina was still around.

  I slid out of my sheath dress and felt her hand touch my still-raw back as I stepped into the gown. The neckline hung low, weighted down with heavy beading like scales against my chest. We walked over to the long mirror in the corner of the room. She stood behind me, six inches taller, that crown of titian hair and those eyes thin as dark threads punched in her face.

  We stood there a long time. I could feel something was happening. It was razoring in the back of my head without coming to the fore. The way she was looking at me.

  She laced her silver gloves across my collarbones, eyes trained on our reflection in the mirror. It was as if she was saying to herself, This was me once. I guess I’m a thousand years old to you, I’ve seen it all. But look. We’re the same, we’re the same. I made you. Sometimes it’s as if I made you up inside my head.

  I watched the red panels splash against the silver of her suit. My teeth were clattering. I looked in her eyes, the lashy slots. Were those my eyes? Would they be? Those eyes, they knew everything. Everything.

  I felt like we would be locked like this forever, pressed against each other, front to back, she with one sharp stiletto jutting between my stocking feet. The red dress tight across my breasts, my hips, her hands splayed across my throat. That’s when I got it. This was it. It wasn’t me and her. We weren’t the same. It was me and Candy Annie at the ladies’ room in the Breakwater Hotel. The one who got it with a straight-edge razor, gutted like a flopping fish.

  But I couldn’t move.

  Maybe I didn’t want to.

  “I hope he was worth it,” she said, even as her mouth was still. “Was he worth it.”

  Her arm came forward and I saw that bronze letter opener in her gloved hands. She held it to one side of my throat.

  I’d like to say I said a Hail Mary or something like it. But I didn’t. The pointy tip grazing a throbbing vein in my throat, I just shut my eyes and waited for it. Waited for the warm jet, the feeling of my body sinking. I was ready.

  But it didn’t come.

  “You’re lucky I’m soft,” her voice rang out, loud and rickety. Not her voice at all. I opened my eyes as she dropped her raised arm to her side. With a shove, she knocked me down and my knees hit the floor with a familiar crack.

  “Gloria, I—”

  “Hell, I put in good time with you. I gave you a year. I’m not throwing it away just because you can’t keep your legs together when it comes to two-bit pikers like your boy Vic Riordan.”

  I let myself slide completely to the floor, curling a hand around my neck. She was still holding the letter opener and it was at my eye level. It kept catching the light.

  “How did you find out?” I managed.

  She let her head fall to one side mockingly. “Oh, kid, you know better than that. How couldn’t I have found out? Imagine my disappointment with how easy you got caught.”

  “You tailed me?”

  “Amos Mackey got me wise weeks ago,” she said, grabbing her handbag and dropping the letter opener in it. I was glad to see it go. “I’d already figured you were giving it up to some sharpie. It was written all over your face. Your body was twisting with it. But I didn’t know who it was until Mackey told me.”

  “How did he know?” I asked, sliding back against the front of the sofa.

  “He had a tail on your lover boy. He wanted his money. He saw you going into Riordan’s apartment every night, coming out an hour later with your stockings in your hands. I never pegged you for such a round heels, Tinker Bell. I thought I’d snagged a good girl from a long line of fish eaters.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She looked down at me. Looking at me seemed to rock her all over again.

  “Get off your honeyed ass, little girl,” she spat. “Put on your coat.”

 
“Where are we—”

  “You know where.”

  We were in her car. She made me drive. It was a fifteen-minute ride to Vic’s, which didn’t seem nearly long enough to talk her out of anything.

  “What are you going to do, Gloria?” I asked, keeping my voice steady. She was moving in this queer, jerking way, not her usual measured gestures, her slow turns, the methodical way she’d open and close her purse, light a cigarette, get into a car. As I drove, she kept coiling around in her seat, her mouth hooked across her face, a strand of hair, no two, slipping from her chignon, catching in her mouth.

  I didn’t recognize her. She wasn’t the Gloria I knew, but maybe she was the Gloria I’d heard about. The one from those stories they told at the Tee Hee. I felt a phantom pulse in my neck where the letter opener had pressed, its two-headed handle nestled in my jaw.

  “Mackey’s boys will take care of him, Gloria. He’s in so deep, he—”

  “Like hell I’ll leave it to them,” she tore out at me, voice deep and guttural. “He tangled with me. He’s going to answer to me.”

  “But why put the heat on you,” I said, counting on her endless practicality, her all-business style. “Why draw the spotlight—”

  “This is the gink who beat you raw like street trade,” she snarled. “He’s going to see what it’s like to be ridden.”

  Hearing that gave me a window in. Seemed like maybe she didn’t know how Judas I was. Didn’t know I was a game partner in the setup. Well, let her go on thinking that way. Looking at her blood-rimmed eyes, who was I to correct her? If she was almost willing to slice me just for being a doormat girlfriend, who knew what she’d do if—Well, that meant bad things for Vic.

  “But I never want to see him again,” I tried. We were a half mile away and time was running out. As much as it was looking like Vic had played me, I didn’t want to unleash her on him. Besides, who knew what he might say to her about me? Back against the wall, he could start spilling like a stuck pig.