Lawrence Block - Chip Harrison Scores Again

“What a horrible thing!”

“I don’t know. If you gotta go—”

“Oh, Mother of Pearl,” she said. She was trembling. “Imagine me doing that to a dead man. Oh, I’m just shaking fit to die myself!”

I picked up his wrist and looked around for his pulse. It took me a little while, but ultimately I found what I was looking for and told Claureen she wasn’t a murderess.

“I thought I Frenched him to death,” she said. “Oh, mercy.”

“You may have Frenched him into a coma,” I told her. “His pulse is there but it’s very slow. It’s as if he was in some kind of hypnotic trance.”

“I hypnotized him? I didn’t say anything like, ‘Look into my eyes,’ or any of that. All I did was—”

“I know what you did,” I said, quickly. “Maybe I’d better tell Geraldine to call the doctor.”

“At this hour?”

“I don’t know what’ll happen if we wait until morning. Suppose he comes to in the middle of the night? With nobody around?” I put my ear to his face. “Or suppose he does die, for that matter. He’s breathing, but it’s so faint you wouldn’t believe it.”

“What’ll we do?”

“Maybe an orgasm would wake him.”

“That’s what I tried , Chip. That’s what took so long. I did everything I could think of. Even the vibrator.”

“And nothing worked?”

“Nothing. If it worked, he wouldn’t be here.”

“That’s a point.”

“What’ll we do?”

“I’m going to tell Geraldine.”

“She’ll kill me,” Claureen said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not your fault.”

I went downstairs and told Geraldine what the problem was. Rita was sitting with her at the time. There were just the two girls there during the week, Rita and Claureen. They both had rooms upstairs that they slept in after working hours. On weekends or particularly busy nights another girl would work the busy hours, usually Jo Lee or Marguerite.

Rita just stared while I was talking. “I never heard the like,” she said.

“I have,” Geraldine said. “Never saw it, but heard of it. Heard of men overdosing with sleeping pills and then going with a girl, and they never wake up afterward, but that’s something else because they don’t stay hard like that. But I’ve heard of this, too. What you have to do is get their rocks off and then they wake up.”

“Claureen hasn’t been able to,” I said. “And she tried everything.”

“Don’t even ask me,” Rita said.

“Oh, I won’t.” Geraldine thought for a moment.

“Claureen’s young,” she said, and went silent again. Then she said, “God damn it to hell, you just never get to retire in this business. You think you’re retired and you find out you’re not. God damn it to hell.”

She got up and went to the stairs. Rita and I sat and looked at each other.

I said, “I never heard her swear before.”

“Neither did I. And I’ve been here for almost three years. Geraldine wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful. I can’t believe it, Chip.”

“What happens now?”

“I don’t know.”

What happened was that Claureen came downstairs. She was wearing a dress and shoes instead of the wrapper and slippers. We stared at her. She came over and sat down at our table.

“She cursed,” she said, hollowly. “Geraldine cursed.”

“Did she curse you , honey?”

She shook her head. “She just cursed generally, like. She said, ‘God damn it to hell.’“

“She said it down here. Twice.”

“And then she told me to put a dress on and come downstairs. I didn’t want to just go and leave her there with that, uh, with him, and I said I don’t know what-all, and she just turned and looked at me. And I just put on the dress and the shoes and I came down here.”

“You look so pale, girl.”

“Look at how I’m shaking—”

Rita said, “Was she doin’ anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“With that farmer.”

“Oh. She made me leave the room. She wouldn’t even look at him until I left the room, and then—”

“What?”

“She locked the door. You know what she always said, that you never lock the door unless you-all are alone in the room. Geraldine locked the door.”

I started to say something, then stopped. The girls saw the expression on my face and followed my eyes to the staircase. The tobacco farmer was coming down it, neatly dressed, an absolutely blank look in his eyes. He came down and he walked out and the door closed behind him.

Maybe two minutes later Geraldine came down. She passed our table without a glance and drew a couple of beers for the drinkers at the bar. One of them said something and she joked back with them the way she always did. Then she came back to our table.

For the longest time in the world nobody said anything. It was really weird. We were all waiting for Geraldine to talk up, and she was off in some other world.

Finally she said, “You never really retire. You just can’t, want to or not.”

Claureen or Rita said, “What happened?”

“He came and went. Or he’d be there still, saluting the ceiling.”

Claureen or Rita said, “But what did you—”

There was a pause on the order of the Grand Canyon during which a whole load of expressions flashed over Geraldine’s face. You couldn’t really read any of them because none of them were there long enough.

Then all at once her whole face smiled. I can’t remember ever seeing a smile like that one before or since, and certainly not from Geraldine. A sour grin was more her usual speed. But this smile was the real thing, with lights going on and everything.

And she said, “I’m not going to tell you.”

And she never did.

That was a whole lot more excitement than we usually had. Most of the time nothing much happened. You know, if someone had told me I was going to be a Deputy Sheriff in a South Carolina whorehouse I would have thought he was crazy, but if he’d gone on to tell me I’d be generally bored with the job I would have known he was crazy. I mean, what could be boring about it?

The thing is, there wasn’t much to do. Five days a week there wasn’t much for any of us to do, and it was a big night if Claureen and Rita turned half a dozen tricks between them. Fridays and Saturdays were busier, particularly Saturdays, when the workers drew their pay and the farmers came into town to do their trading. I never tried to keep count, but on a decent Saturday the girls would be pretty busy all through the night, with hardly any time at all to sit around and talk. There was also pretty good bar business on Saturday — less on Friday — and there was an average of two fights every Saturday night. One a little before midnight, usually, and the other between one-thirty and two. Geraldine told me at the beginning that that would be the pattern and it usually came out just about that way.

The fights were a pain in the neck but I got so I looked forward to them. I knew they were going to happen sooner or later and I wanted to get them over with. They were the same damned sort of fights the apple pickers used to have in upstate New York. Two guys who were lifelong buddies would try to beat the hell out of each other after a few drinks, and the next week they’d be buddies again.

I had a club to settle fights with but I hardly ever had to use it. See, with most of the guys, they would get drunk enough to start a fight, but not so drunk that they didn’t know what they were doing. And one thing they were careful not to forget was that all they had to do was pull a knife or break something and Geraldine would bar them from the Lighthouse forever. Which meant they would be limited in terms of sex to their hands and their sheep and their sisters. They might chance getting killed in a fight, but they sure as hell didn’t want to be barred.