‘Of course we’re shooting a movie.’
‘You are paying a girl fifty dollars a week so that the three of you can indulge whatever bizarre sexual fantasies you have, sometimes seven and eight hours a night, every day of the week including Saturdays and Sundays.’
‘We are doing nothing of the sort.’
‘That’s just what you’re doing,’ Harry said. ‘You are treating that girl like a common streetwalker, except that you’d have to pay a streetwalker more than you’re paying her. It’s obscene,’ Harry said.
‘Harry,’ I said, ‘don’t be a dope.’
‘I am not a dope,’ he said, ‘I happen to be a very highly regarded insurance adjuster. And anyway, I wanted to see you today only to tell you it’s finished.’
‘What’s finished?’
‘The picture’s finished, the whole set-up is finished. I’ve already discussed it with her, and she’s quitting. In fact, she’s already quit.’
‘You’ve discussed it with the girl?’
‘I’ve been seeing her regularly. I’ve been seeing her every day. She told me what was going on, and that was when I got suspicious and decided to check up.’
‘Harry,’ I said, ‘don’t be a dope. If that’s what you suspect... if what you suspect is that the three of us figured out a scheme to get a little sexual pleasure at a minimal weekly cost... if that’s what you suspect, which is a lie, we’ll be happy to cut you in on the deal, we’ll put you back in the picture starting tonight. I’ll ask Solly to rewrite the script so that there’s a great deal of action between The Girl and The Leading Man, we’ll do that right away, if that’s what you suspect, though of course it’s a lie.’
‘I love her,’ Harry said.
‘You what?’
‘I love her. I’ve asked her to marry me.’
‘Harry,’ I said, ‘that’s in the movie
‘It’s in real life, too,’ he said. ‘She’s going to marry me, we’re leaving this city as soon as you and I are finished with our talk here. You just try to go anywhere near her, or telephone her, or anything, and I’ll call the police. I’m sure what you did here was illegal. You signed a contract with her, and also with me, and we’re supposed to get a percentage of the profits on this movie you were making without any goddamn film in the camera!’
‘Harry,’ I said, ‘you can’t fault us for a small oversight like forgetting to put film in the camera.’
He hit me in the nose then, and broke it.
I will never forgive Harry. Never. I don’t mean about the nose because to tell the truth my nose was never such a prize to begin with, and besides, they tapped it up nice, and the bones knitted, though a little crooked. I am talking about the way he ruined our dream. Solly tells me the best laid plans, and all that, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. And Ben has been going around town telling anybody who’ll listen that the idea was his to begin with, which it wasn’t, and anyway that’s not the point. The point is he’s killing any chance we might possibly have of finding ourselves another girl, and making her a star, too, when if only he’d shut up...
Ah, what the hell.
That’s show biz.
The Prisoner
They were telling the same tired jokes in the squadroom when Randolph came in with his prisoner.
Outside the grilled windows, October lay like a copper coin, and the sun struck only glancing blows at the pavement. The season had changed, but the jokes had not, and the climate inside the squadroom was one of stale cigarette smoke and male perspiration. For a tired moment, Randolph had the feeling that the room was suspended in time, unchanging, unmoving and that he would see the same faces and hear the same jokes until he was an old, old man.
He had led the girl up the precinct steps, past the hanging green globes, past the desk in the entrance corridor, nodding perfunctorily at the desk sergeant. He had walked beneath the white sign with its black-lettered DETECTIVE DIVISION and its pointing hand, and then had climbed the steps to the second floor of the building, never once looking back at the girl, knowing that in her terror and uncertainty she was following him. When he reached the slatted rail divider, which separated the corridor from the detective squadroom, he heard Burroughs telling his old joke, and perhaps it was the joke which caused him to turn harshly to the girl.
‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘On that bench!’
The girl winced at the sound of his voice. She was a thin girl wearing a straight skirt and a faded green cardigan. Her hair was a bleached blonde, the roots growing in brown. She had wide blue eyes, and they served as the focal point of an otherwise uninteresting face. She had slashed lipstick across her mouth in a wide, garish red smear. She flinched when Randolph spoke, and then she backed away from him and went to sit on the wooden bench in the corridor, opposite the men’s room.
Randolph glanced at her briefly, the way he would look at a bulletin board notice about the Policeman’s Ball. Then he pushed through the rail divider and walked directly to Burroughs’ desk.
‘Any calls?’ he asked.
‘Oh, hi, Frank,’ Burroughs said. ‘No calls. You’re interrupting a joke.’
‘I’m sure it’s hilarious.’
‘Well, I think it’s pretty funny,’ Burroughs said defensively.
‘I thought it was pretty funny, too,’ Randolph said, ‘For the first hundred times.’
He stood over Burroughs’ desk, a tall man with close-cropped brown hair and lustreless brown eyes. His nose had been broken once in a street fight, and together with the hard, unyielding line of his mouth, it gave his face an over-all look of meanness. He knew he was intimidating Burroughs, but he didn’t much give a damn. He almost wished that Burroughs would really take offence and come out of the chair fighting. There was nothing he’d have liked better than to knock Burroughs on his ass.
‘You don’t like the jokes, you don’t have to listen,’ Burroughs said, but his voice lacked conviction.
‘Thank you. I won’t.’
From a typewriter at the next desk Dave Fields looked up. Fields was a big cop with shrewd blue eyes and a friendly smile. The smile belied the fact that he could be the toughest cop in the precinct when he wanted to.
‘What’s eating you, Frank?’ he asked, smiling.
‘Nothing. What’s eating you?’
Fields continued smiling. ‘You looking for a fight?’ he asked.
Randolph studied him. He had seen Fields in action, and he was not particularly anxious to provoke him. He wanted to smile back and say something like, ‘Ah, the hell with it. I’m just down in the dumps’—anything to let Fields know he had no real quarrel with him. But something else inside him took over, something that had not been a part of him long ago.
He held Fields’ eyes with his own. ‘Any time you’re ready for one,’ he said, and there was no smile on his mouth.
‘He’s got the crud,’ Fields said. ‘Every month or so, the bulls in this precinct get the crud. It’s from dealing with criminal types.’
He recognized Fields’ manoeuvre and was grateful for it. Fields was smoothing it over. Fields didn’t want trouble, and so he was joking his way out of it now, handling it as it should have been handled. But whereas he realized Fields was being the bigger of the two men, he was still immensely satisfied that he had not backed down. Yet his satisfaction rankled.
‘I’ll give you some advice,’ Fields said. ‘You want some advice, Frank? Free?’
‘Go ahead,’ Randolph said.