Ричард Деминг: Whistle Past the Graveyard [= Give the Girl a Gun]

As a matter of course Fausta and I were invited, and as a matter of course I politely declined. Not that we had any other unbreakable plans, as we had already had dinner in Fausta’s apartment and merely contemplated visiting a night spot or two, then taking a drive along the river road; but I felt we were being invited only as a matter of course and I didn’t want to intrude on a private party. But Barney Amhurst insisted to the point where he was almost demanding to know what we intended doing instead of attending his party, and Bubbles, who suddenly seemed to take an unexpected fancy to me, added her insistence.

When the waiter had brought chairs for Fausta and me, he had placed Fausta’s on Amhurst’s right between Amhurst and the debonair Walter Ford. Bubbles Duval immediately moved her chair away from Ford’s in order to make space for the second chair, with the result that I ended up between her and her escort.

I sat next to Bubbles for several minutes before discovering, to my considerable surprise, that she was a rubber. Another man would have discovered it immediately, for I believe her left calf pressed against my right almost the moment I sat down. But my right calf consists of aluminum and cork instead of flesh and bone, as that leg ends in a stump just below the knee. I am so used to wearing an artificial leg that it no longer impairs my activities in the slightest degree, but I have never been able to induce in it a sense of feeling. Consequently it was only when she became emboldened by my apparent agreeability to having my leg rubbed by hers, and increased the pressure to the point where I was in danger of being pushed off my chair, that I realized what she was doing.

My first impulse was to shift my position, but then what Fausta refers to as my “perverted sense of humor” got the best of me. Somehow the thought of what the blonde’s reaction would be if she discovered she was wasting her caresses on an inanimate mechanical contrivance instead of a male leg struck me as funny, so I merely braced myself against the pressure and left it there for her to rub.

Momentarily letting up on the pressure, Bubbles leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Please come to the party, Manny. We’ve got to have one live man there.” Then she glanced past me at Walter Ford, made a small face and giggled.

Catching this byplay, Fausta studied Bubbles momentarily with narrowed eyes, decided she wasn’t important competition and dismissed her. This was not because Bubbles was unattractive in Fausta’s estimation, I knew, but only because she was aware I am constituted so that the only emotion girls ten years younger than I can arouse in me is paternal instinct. I prefer my women more mature.

Fausta studied Evelyn Karnes a little more thoughtfully, but since the lacquered brunette had not once glanced at me since we were introduced, or at anyone else other than Walter Ford for that matter, apparently Fausta decided she would not be active competition either. Evelyn could not seem to keep her eyes off Walter’s sardonically handsome face, and her unconcealed interest in the man did not go unnoticed by her escort, Ed Friday. Though he made no attempt to draw his date’s attention back to himself, the way in which his teeth clamped down on the fat cigar he was smoking, when he looked from Evelyn to Walter Ford and back again, indicated his thoughts were not pleasant.

In a less open way Ford was returning the brunette’s attention, which I suspect was the reason Bubbles so eagerly accepted my addition to the party.

The third woman in the group, the red-haired Madeline Strong, Fausta did not even consider, as she seemed to have a friendly interest in the girl and Fausta never mistrusts her friends.

Lest I create the impression that I am a roué and Fausta is a shrew, let me explain that Fausta’s jealousy is a matter of habit rather than emotion. Years back, when she was a penniless refugee, we had a violent romance which nearly ended in marriage. But unfortunately I tend to be pigheaded, and from the moment Fausta started to gain success in the night-club business, I started to back out of the picture. On the old-fashioned theory that the man is supposed to be the breadwinner, the richer she became, the farther I backed. Now that she was one of the richest women in town, I had backed so far that we saw each other not more than once in two weeks.

Having completed her estimation of the situation, Fausta seemed to decide she was capable of protecting me from any of the women present and gave me a questioning look. I passed the decision back again by shrugging.

“We will come for a little while,” Fausta told Barney, leaving herself an out in case we decided we didn’t like the party. “Manny and I have some plans for later on.”

As I already had my hat in my hand and Fausta was carrying her evening cloak over her arm, we stopped at the front door to have a word with Mouldy Greene while the others reclaimed various articles from the cloakroom. Mouldy, whose actual name is Marmaduke Greene and who derives his nickname from a mild case of acne, holds a position at El Patio rather hard to define.

During my stint in the army, Mouldy had been a basic in the company in which I was first sergeant. According to army regulations, a basic is a private without a specialty, but it was a mis-designation in Mouldy’s case, for he definitely had a specialty. His specialty was fouling up details.

I doubt that any army ever contained a less efficient soldier than Marmaduke Greene, and the few gray hairs I developed in service are directly attributable to his talent for doing the wrong thing at the worst possible moment. When the army finally released him with a sigh of relief, Mouldy got a job as bodyguard for the underworld character who at that time owned El Patio and ran it as a gambling casino. How he talked himself into the job is a question which has always intrigued me; for while he has a body encased in muscle, five minutes of conversation with Mouldy should have warned his prospective employer his head is encased in the same substance.

The result of this arrangement was a foregone conclusion. Louis Bagnell, Mouldy’s gambler boss, failed to live out the year.

When Fausta took over El Patio and converted it into a supper club, it was already staffed with bartenders, waiters and a collection of bouncers, dice men and card dealers. She kept the bartenders and waiters, but cleaned out the rest with one swipe. When she came to Mouldy, however, softheartedness got the best of her judgment and she found herself incapable of casting him out into a competitive world.

She tried him at practically every job in the place, including headwaiter for one disastrous evening, before she discovered the job which was Mouldy’s natural niche in life. Now he was El Patio’s official customer-greeter, which involved his standing just inside the front door with a hideous smile on his face, greeting customers with friendly insults.

The more dignified the customer, the less formal Mouldy became. A typical greeting to a United States Senator might be, for example, “Hi, Bub. How goes digging in the public trough?” Dowagers he invariably addressed as “Babe,” usually accompanying the greeting with a resounding slap on the back.

Once new customers recovered from the initial shock, they loved Mouldy, for he had much the same charm as a friendly mongrel dog, if you can visualize a mongrel dog weighing two hundred and forty pounds.

Mouldy as usual greeted me as “Sarge,” a hangover from army days, eyed Fausta’s gown critically and commented that it wasn’t a bad looking rag.

“You going out with that old crook and his crowd?” he asked.

“Crook?” Fausta said.

“Ed Friday.”

“Well, yes, but what makes you think Mr. Friday is a crook?”