Sheldon Lord, Alan Marshall
A Girl Called Honey
this is for
DON WESTLAKE AND LARRY BLOCK
who introduced us
One
Her name was Honour Mercy Bane and she was thoroughly confused.
She was a very beautiful girl. If she had been in New York, sitting at a table at Twenty-One with a whiskey sour at one elbow and a wealthy escort at the other, she would have been a good deal more beautiful, or at the very least a good deal more spectacular. Beauty, despite the histrionics of a handful of hysterical poets, is more than face and figure, more than eyes and lips and even teeth, more than breasts and thighs and buttocks. Beauty consists also in the trappings of the face and figure.
A well-lipsticked mouth is more attractive than an unlipsticked mouth or, god forbid, a sloppily lipsticked mouth. A well-dressed body is more lovely than a poorly dressed body; unfortunately, the bulk of womanhood being shaped the way it is, a well-dressed body is more lovely than a stark naked body. Just as clothes make the man, the proper clothes make the man want to make the woman.
These fundamental tenets seriously militated against the appearance of Honour Mercy Bane.
For one thing, she was not sitting in Twenty-One. She was standing in the Greyhound Bus Terminal in the town of Newport in the state of Kentucky, and that is a far cry indeed from Twenty-One. Instead of a whiskey sour at her elbow she had a ratty cardboard suitcase in her hand.
Instead of a glamorous Schiaparelli original, she wore a man’s plaid shirt open at the throat and a pair of faded blue denim trousers patched at the knees and worn at the cuffs. Her mouth had no lipstick to brighten it and her hair, instead of being done up in some exotic style or other, was completely uncoiffed. It just hung there.
But she was still a very beautiful girl, and this is striking testimony to the quality of eyes and lips and teeth, of breasts and thighs and buttocks.
Her hair was chestnut. The adjective is currently used to describe any shade that combines elements of red and brown, but in the case of Honour Mercy Bane it was the proper adjective. It was the color of ripe horse-chestnuts with the husk just removed and the nut still moist on the surface, a glowing red-brown that was alive and vibrant in the long hair that flowed freely over sloping shoulders.
Her face was virtually perfect. White and even teeth. A small nose that had the slightest tendency to turn up at the tip. Full lips that were quite red without lipstick. A complexion that was creamily flawless.
Superlatives could also be applied to the body which the man’s plaid shirt failed to conceal and which the tight blue jeans made very obvious. Breasts that were large and firm and that got along without benefit of brassiere — which was fortunate because she was not wearing one. Legs that tapered from swollen thighs to properly anemic ankles. A behind that silently screamed for a pinch.
These, then, were the separate components which, taken together, made up the entity known to herself and the world as Honour Mercy Bane. The total effect was enough to bring words of praise to the lips of a Trappist monk. Not even the stain of a tear on one cheek could spoil the effect.
Seeing her there in the Newport terminal of the Greyhound Bus Lines, a passerby might have wondered who she was, what she was doing, where she was headed. Observing her, with the suitcase dangling from her hand like an umbilical cord after a birth, with a lost look on her face and an incongruous set to her jaw, one well might have asked these questions. The answers are simple.
Who was she? Her name was Honour Mercy Bane. She was eighteen years old, the only child of Prudence and Abraham Bane of Coldwater, Kentucky.
What was she doing? Standing, waiting, planning, thinking. Getting her bearings, really.
Where was she headed? She was headed for a small diner at the corner of Third Street and Schwerner Boulevard, a diner called the Third Street Grill.
She was going to get a job in a whorehouse.
Cincinnati is a clean town.
This is an expression and little more. It does not mean that Cincinnati does not have garbage blowing around its precious streets, nor does it mean that Cincinnati juveniles do not write dirty words in lavatories. It means, in the coy jargon of twentieth-century America, that Cincinnati lacks prostitutes, gambling dens, dope parlors, and similar appurtenances of modern living.
The citizens of Cincinnati are no more virtuous than their brothers in Galveston or New York or Cicero or Weehawken or Klamath Falls. They are, on the contrary, as sinful and lowdown and sneaky and sex-crazed and vile as any other collection of people. But, fortunately for them, they have no need for prostitutes or gambling dens or dope parlors. Not in their home town.
They have Newport.
Newport is located directly across the Ohio River from Cincy. A streamlined bridge connects the two cities and makes it possible for Cincinnatians to get from Cincinnati to Newport in very little time. They don’t even have to pay a toll.
And Newport, fair city that it is, has everything that Cincinnati lacks. Cathouses by the dozen. Gambling dens by the score, a pusher on every corner, and bootleg whiskey sold over the counter in every drugstore.
Residential Newport is as pleasant a little town as anyone could want to live in. The schools are relatively good. The streets are wide and lined with trees. The cost of living is low; the gambling and whoring and drinking keep down taxes.
Commercial Newport is the living end. No loose women walk the streets — this is strictly forbidden to eliminate amateur competition which would harass houses that charge five to twenty dollars for a quick roll. Dice games can never be found in darkened alleyways; a Cleveland syndicate runs gambling in Newport and runs it with an iron hand. If a person were stupid enough, he could walk the streets from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn without seeing anything out of the ordinary. But if he so much as mumbled his wishes to a cabby, he could enjoy any form of gambling, according to Hoyle, or any form of sexual activity, according to Krafft-Ebing.
Newport is a going town.
Madge liked it that way.
She sat at the counter, her big body perched precariously on a stool, her fingers curled around a cup of very light coffee. There was an ashtray next to the cup of coffee and a filter-tip cigarette was burning in the ashtray. A thin column of smoke rose from the cigarette to the ceiling in one long and unbroken line. Madge glanced at the cigarette from time to time but let it burn without touching it. She smoked between two and three packs of cigarettes a day but rarely took more than two puffs from each one.
Madge finished her coffee in a single swallow, then waggled a plump finger at the woman behind the counter. The woman was a beanpole in her forties with stringy washed-out black hair and protruding teeth. Her name was Clara and she had come to Newport years ago to be a whore, failed at it and became a waitress instead. Now she filled the cup half-full of coffee and half-full of milk and gave it back to Madge.
Madge sipped the coffee. She looked as unlike Clara as was humanly possible. Her hair was bleached a raucous blonde, her body as plump as Clara’s was thin. She carried a tremendous amount of weight without being genuinely fat, and even though she was pushing fifty she remained sexually desirable, with a pretty kewpie-doll face and breasts that were still mildly appealing although they had lost their pep. Beautiful she wasn’t, but she thought contentedly that she could still have a man when the urge hit her without paying some young jerko to satisfy her. If only she could lose about thirty-five pounds...
But that, she realized, was out of the question. When you were a junkie who was no longer using junk, you ate. You had to eat or you would get nervous, and it wasn’t good to be nervous. Especially when you were a madam. A nervous madam made things hectic for the girls and set the customers on edge, and as a result the customers were occasionally impotent or at the very least enjoyed their turn in the saddle less than they would have otherwise. So you ate — it was better for your health and better for business, and at forty-eight you didn’t have to be a beauty queen anyway, so the hell with it.