“I’ll find her,” answered Joey. “You pay her.”
“Half and half,” Jack offered.
“And I get the half that eats?” Joey asked. “You play, you pay.”
“I never touched her.”
“Jack, Jack, Jack. You’re like, what, a Baptist?”
“Yeah.” What was this greaseball talking about?
“You should be a Catholic, Jack,” Joe Foglio continued, “then you wouldn’t be consumed by all this guilt. Look at me. Do I look like I’m consumed with guilt?”
Jack Landis had heard that the very definition of a sociopath was a person who didn’t feel guilt, but he decided not to share that thought at the moment, so he said, “No.”
“Because I’m a Catholic,” Joe said proudly. “See, you Baptists are supposed to-what is it?-Accept Christ as your personal savior, right?”
“I guess that’s the basic idea,” Jack answered to get it out of the way. “Now, what are we-”
Joey continued. “See, that’s a mistake, that ‘personal’ part. What you need is a middleman, a fixer, a priest. I go to confession every day, Jack, every day. I go to confession, I rat myself out to the priest, the priest squares it with God, then I got the whole rest of the day to chase more pussy, skim more money-whatever-and the odds are still on my side I go to heaven. I couldn’t believe it when the nuns first told me about this, I thought it was so great.
“Believe me, Jack, this world was made for Catholic men. You want me to set you up with a priest? I think you gotta take a few classes, let him pour some holy water on you… no big deal.”
Jack wondered how on earth he got to be partners with a man who was obviously insane. He had to get Joey focused on the problem of Polly Paget.
“The gravy train’s derailing, Joe, you’re the guy who can get it back on the track.”
Talking to me like he’s on TV, Joey thought. Like I’m going to buy a time-share in Candyland. Like I’m a jerk.
I’ll show you a freaking train, Jackie.
“I already got a plan,” Joey said.
“You do?” Jack asked. “What is it? No, I don’t want to know.”
“No, you don’t want to know, Jack.” Joey looked at Harold and they both laughed.
Jack straightened his string tie, smiled into the mirror, and steeled himself to go back out into public.
“You’re the man, Joe,” he said.
Harold opened the door and Jack Landis stepped out.
“And you’re the jerk,” Joey said softly.
The bodyguard started to laugh.
“He still doesn’t get it, does he?”
Foglio shook his head. “Proves you don’t need brains to make money in this country.”
Landis had any brains, Foglio thought, he’d know that I knew all about him and Polly Paget almost from the first cigarette-an insurance policy against Jack Landis canceling our deal.
A sweet deal it is, too. So much easier than honest crime.
And the stupid Paget skank blows it. Because maybe this cracker bastard doesn’t buy her dinner and a movie one night. Rape, my aching ass. Broad can’t sell it, then complains it’s been stolen. And then goes to the newspapers.
“You want me to make the call, Joe?” Harold asked.
“Yeah,” Joe said. He didn’t make phone calls himself, lest he someday appear on the Justice Department’s Greatest Hits tapes, volume five. “Yeah, reach out.”
Reach out, reach out and touch someone.
Joey Foglio left the men’s room humming to himself.
5
It’s nice, Walter Withers thought, that there’s a place you can still go to hear someone do a Hart tune and not butcher it. Or do a Hart tune at all, for that matter.
Ah, New York, New York. Sitting in a dark room, listening to a smoky piano behind a chanteuse, sipping on quality scotch with a beautiful woman at the table beside you.
All right, maybe Gloria is not exactly beautiful in the modern anemic fashion, and perhaps she is a bit… bed-worn… a woman of experience, one might say. Perhaps the blond hair comes from a bottle. So many good things do. Perhaps her makeup is a tad thick. A woman of a certain age is entitled. Perhaps she smokes incessantly. She came to maturity in the age of black-and-white films, and besides, it allows me to light her cigarettes for her. Perhaps she is a drunk. I have been buying her drinks.
To loosen her tongue, among other things.
He leaned over his glass and peered through the smoke into her eyes.
“You look lovely tonight, darling,” he said.
Gloria took a demure sip of her fourth martini and said, “Let’s go back to my place.”
“Check, please,” Withers said.
She saw his eyes light up and said, “Walter, if you think I’m giving you so much as a hand job, you’re fooling yourself. It’s late and I’m expecting an important phone call, if you know what I mean.”
Walter knew what she meant. He paid the tab and gave the doorman a five to hail a taxi.
Gloria lived in a huge drab building on West Fifty-seventh Street. A blue plaque outside the main door claimed that Bela Bartok had once resided there.
Withers didn’t particularly care for Bartok.
Her apartment was big, a testament to rent control. Withers plopped himself down in one of her old overstuffed chairs in the living room.
“You want a drink, Walter? What a dumb question,” she said. She went into the kitchen, found a bottle of scotch, and poured a straight shot.
“Why are you doing this?” Withers asked as she handed him the glass.
“Does it make a difference? Look, I’m like an older sister to the kid. I love her. But she’s never going to beat Jack Landis in court and she’s never going to make it on her brains, so she might as well get something out of this mess.”
“Posing nude for a magazine?” Withers asked.
“Marilyn Monroe… Jayne Mansfield… Mamie Van Doren…” she said, counting them off on her fingers. “Look what it did for them.”
“These will be pretty graphic shots, I think, Gloria.”
She looked at him as if he was a dope, shrugged, and said, “You sell what you have to sell.”
“Apparently,” he answered.
Neal snuggled up against Karen. “What do you think?” he asked.
She rearranged the blanket so that it covered both their shoulders and said, “I think she’s telling the truth.”
“You do?”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s your problem, Neal,” she said. “You don’t trust people.”
“Occupational hazard,” he answered.
“That’s part of it,” Karen said. “You really don’t trust women.”
Skip the rest of it, Neal thought. I’ve already heard it. How my father never showed up and my mother was a junkie hooker and so I never really had a chance to be a kid and learn to trust and yadda-yadda-yadda. It might be true, but I still have to get up mornings.
“I trust you,” he said, “and you’re a woman. Singular. You get trust combined with collective nouns and you’re right. I don’t trust women, and I don’t trust men, for that matter.”
“You trust Graham.”
True, he thought.
“What about Landis?” he asked her. “He says he never touched her. Do you trust him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s lying,” Karen said.
“And you know this because she’s telling the truth.”
“Right.”
“Try this out,” he said. “Suppose they had an affair, which I agree they probably did. One night he says he wants sex; she says she doesn’t. He thinks she’s playing and forces the issue. To him, it was a game; to her, it was rape. Which is it?”
“Rape.”
“It’s not that simple,” he said.
“It’s just that simple,” she insisted. “The difficult question is, why does Polly have to become Audrey Hepburn before she can be believed?”
“Let me remind you that just this morning all Polly Paget was to you was a Jacuzzi on the deck,” Neal said. “It doesn’t make us all that different from the newspapers, the magazines, or the TV shows. We all have an economic interest in that commodity known as Polly Paget, who is now asleep on the bed in our study.”