Ричард Деминг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1953

I shook my head wonderingly.

“Don’t fret about it, darling,” she said. “The point is, I’ve got it. And I’ve got it where it’s all nice and soft and warm.”

Our drinks came. Gloria raised her glass and clicked it against mine. “To us, Marty,” she said. “To our finding each other again.”

I took a drag on my drink and put it down.

“I’ve got hot news for you,” I said. “We didn’t find each other again. It took me a while to get over you, maybe two or three days, but I did it. I want to keep it that way. Sorry, Gloria, but no Mexico City. No more dates. No nothing.”

She looked at me, half smiling, ready to turn on the full voltage if she saw I was kidding.

But I wasn’t kidding.

Color spread up into her face and the dark eyes looked as if they were going to shoot sparks.

“Why, you big, egotistical six-foot-two of... of nothing!”

“Please,” I said. “This is a hallowed place.” I was a little sorry for her. This was probably the first time in her fife that anything like this had ever happened to her. But this was the way it had to be.

She rose half way from her chair, then sank back down again.

“But why not?” she asked. “Just give me one good reason!”

“You, for one,” I told her. “And Al Prince for another. You gave me the brush for him — which was all right, this being a free country and all. But once was enough. More than enough.”

Her lips drew away from her teeth, and now she wasn’t quite so beautiful. “Damn you, Marty!” she said, her voice suddenly loud and shrill. “Who do you think you are?”

People were giving us the hard eye now. Especially Julie Cole. I saw the boss duck his head out of his cubbyhole. He glared at me, shuttled his eyes meaningfully between me and the piano, and pulled his head back in again.

“Got to go to work, Gloria,” I said. “First night in a new place. You know how it is.”

She shook her head. “We’re going to talk this out!”

“No,” I said.

She surprised me. She slapped me. And she slapped me hard. It made quite a noise.

I got up and turned toward the piano. But she was up beside me in an instant, her hands clutching my arm. “Damn you, Marty! I said we were going to talk this out!”

I thought of my date with Julie at four. I got off at three-thirty. I pushed Gloria’s hands off my arm and fished the keys to my Caddy out of my pocket and gave them to her.

“You know what my car looks like,” I said. “It’s parked in the mouth of that alley on Christopher Street, where I used to park it when I worked at the Gopher Hole. You remember?”

She nodded, her eyes blazing.

“Wait for me there,” I said.

“How long?”

“I’m off in fifteen minutes.”

She said something beneath her breath, gave me a go-to-hell look and started for the door. Every eye in the place followed that lithe, swivel-hipped walk of hers, even my own.

I went back to the spinet and started playing again. I glanced around at the cash customers, to see how they’d taken the free floor show — and that’s when I saw Al Prince. He was standing by the steps that led up to the street, and he was staring at me with the most open look of hatred I’d ever seen on a man’s face. He was blonde and handsome and big, almost as big as me, and I could almost swear he was so mad that he was trembling.

I hadn’t seen him come in, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been there all the time that Gloria was. It didn’t mean anything.

The boss came by and stopped and gave me a hard eye.

“Watch yourself, Bishop,” he said.

“Shove it, Dad,” I said. “Keep moving.”

He got a little red, but he kept moving.

A bunch of young kids, mostly girls, came down the steps into the club. Artists, if the fact that they were all barefooted meant anything. A new fad, brought back from the Left Bank in Paris. When the kids had cleared out of the way, Al Prince was gone. Maybe back outside. I couldn’t tell. I wondered if he’d be punk enough to lay for me out there. Could be.

Al was a flashy light-heavyweight who had been knocking on the throne room a lot of years now without ever getting a crack at the title. Money he had, and a lot of rugged good looks. But no savvy about women. He liked to get physical about things. Yeah... he’d probably be waiting.

I played straight through until three-thirty, modulating from one number to another without a break in rhythm and without fluffing a single figure. When I got up, the crowd gave me a hand, which surprised me. Up till now, they’d been pretty cold-fish.

At the check room I waited a moment for Julie Cole to finish talking to somebody on the wall telephone at one side of her tiny alcove.

She hung the phone back on its hook and came over to me and leaned on the counter and winked one big blue eye. She had shoulder length auburn hair and dimples, and there were those who thought she might be stretching it a little when she claimed she was nineteen. Just looking at her gave me a real charge, and there was a rich, ripe female smell to her that took over where the looks left off.

“You can sure pick them,” she said, laughing. “I’m fuming.”

“I’ve got to go out for a couple minutes, Julie,” I told her. “I’ll be back at four, right on the button. Okay?”

She tilted her head; the blue eyes measured me. “Maybe there won’t be much left of you by then.”

“Forget it,” I said. “This is strictly business.”

“Of course,” she said. “Business. Well, have fun — just the same.”

I shrugged and went up the steps to the street and walked along toward the alley where I’d parked the Caddy. There weren’t many people cruising the Village tonight, and what few there were seemed pretty well lushed. Tourists, mostly. But one of the drunks who passed me was no tourist. He shambled by without looking at me, and I almost didn’t recognize him. His name was Ed Farr. He’d been a top-drawer song-writer once, a handsome guy with a lot of friends. But not now. Now the hooch had got him.

The hooch and Gloria Gayle.

She’d been singing with Tony Schuyler’s band when Ed met her. Just another beautiful body with a so-so voice. But she had a phenomenal memory for words and music, and when Ed had played and sung a new song for her, she’d lost no time in swiping it for her own. Those things happen, and they happen easy. She simply peddled it to a notorious Tin Pan Alley pirate who beat Ed Farr to the copyright. Just like that. Ed had been on the thin edge of alcoholism anyhow, and when the stolen song made the Hit Parade, he’d slipped all the way under.

I tried not to think of Ed. Liquor was my trouble too; it’s a sort of occupational disease in the music business.

I kept an eye out for Al Prince, a little surprised that he hadn’t been waiting for me outside the club. Surprised, and glad. I’m big, and reasonably healthy, but I’m no pro fighter.

Gloria Gayle wasn’t sitting in the Caddy, and she was nowhere near it. I stood there in the mouth of the alley and leaned up against the car and lit a cigarette. I felt relieved. The cool morning air was good to breath after the smoke and perfume and liquor fumes in the club.

I wondered if Al Prince had caught up with Gloria outside and talked her into going off with him. Or maybe she had talked him into going off with her, to keep him from bouncing me up and down on the sidewalk.

Either way, it was fine with me. And then I remembered that she had the keys to the Caddy.

I reached down to try the door handle, figuring that she might have passed the car and had had enough consideration to leave them in the dash.

My hand stayed on the door handle a long time. I couldn’t have moved it if I’d wanted to.