I was relaxing in Dick Fleming’s apartment, wearing my tart’s duds, hooker’s heels parked up on his cobbler’s bench.
For some reason 1 really didn’t understand, Dick was turned on by my floozy costume. He liked the spiked heels, the net stockings, the padded bra. I wondered if I had suggested fun-and-games while wearing that getup, if he would, finally, be able to cut the mustard. I decided I didn’t want to find out.
‘Problem,’ I said, my nose in my glass of white wine.
‘What’s that?’
‘When I come out at night in this Sadie Thompson disguise, I try to sail past the doorman as fast as 1 can. No problem there — so far. I think he thinks I’m a call girl balling one of those rich bachelors on the sixth floor. But tonight, as I was coming out of my apartment, my next-door neighbour was leaving at the same moment. I ducked back inside just in time. But if I keep coming out dressed like this, someone on my floor is going to see me sooner or later, and I’ll have a lot of questions to answer.’
‘But after you get your new place, won’t you be living there?’
‘Sure, but not
We were silent a few moments, pondering. Dick topped off our glasses.
‘I don’t really think it’s a problem,’ he said finally. ‘You’ll drive back to your permanent apartment, and in the car, you take off the wig and false eyelashes and wipe off some of the guck. Then you button the trenchcoat up to your chin. You could even keep a pair of loafers in the car so you don’t have to parade through the lobby on your stilts.’
‘Sounds good,’ I said, nodding. ‘You’re so smart. And when I go from my apartment to the new place, I’ll just reverse the process, park somewhere and put on my wig and makeup in the car. That solves one problem and brings up another. My car. That XKE is just too conspicuous. Also, the license number could be traced. Also, a crook hoping to pull off a successful heist wouldn’t be driving a car like that.’
‘Borrow my VW,’ Dick suggested.
I shook my head. ‘Same objections. License could be traced, and a VW is just out of character. I think I’d better rent a car. Something that isn’t worth a second look. A nondescript Ford or Chevy or Plymouth. Something ordinary.’
That same night, we decided on a name — Bea — to go with my new appearance, then on an identity for her. We agreed I’d try to avoid volunteering any information about Bea’s background, but if pressed I would grudgingly reveal the following:
Beatrice Flanders was born in a small farming-community near Terre Haute, Indiana. Both her parents were dead, but she had an older, married sister in Indianapolis, and a brother in the Navy. She was a high school graduate who had also attended business college for six months before she decided there was more money to be made as a cocktail waitress. She had been married to a nogoodnick who had introduced her to the shoddier, least profitable forms of larceny, including gas station holdups and the badger game. Hubby had deserted for parts unknown, never to reappear, and Beatrice had returned to hustling drinks in bars, taverns, roadhouses. She had also, for a few years, followed the convention circuit as a party girl. At various times she had teamed up with strong-arm thugs, safe-crackers, cat burglars, hotel thieves, etc., learning as she went along. Finally, for the last two years, she had been associated with Danny ‘Woppo’ Epstein, who specialized in jewelry store holdups, working alone or recruiting local talent as needed. Danny had taught Beatrice all the tricks of his trade, although he never allowed her to go along on his jobs. Bea and Woppo had cut a wide and successful swath through the Midwest until a gutsy Chicago jeweler, reaching into an open safe at Danny’s command, came out with a Smith and Wesson.38 and blew Woppo away. Now Beatrice Flanders was in Manhattan alone, her funds running low, looking around.
We parked the rented Fairlane on West 87th Street, making certain the suitcases were in the locked trunk, out of sight. Then we began tramping up one cross street and down the next, from Riverside Drive to Columbus Avenue. In that area, Beatrice Flanders looked like one of the World’s Ten Best Dressed Women, but no one gave us a second glance. There were harlequins on the streets you wouldn’t believe, drunks in the gutters, spaced-out addicts nodding in doorways.
We wandered from fleabag to fleabag, and after a while stopped asking each other how people could live like that. The answer was obvious: They had no choice. We saw crumbling walls, decayed ceilings, cracked plumbing fixtures, exposed electrical wiring. We saw one room that appeared to have decorative wallpaper until we realized it was an enormous roach colony. We saw a once-elegant hotel that had become a whores’ dormitory. And always the diseased dogs, scabrous cats, cripples on crutches, wounded drunks with filthy bandages, and what seemed to be hundreds of mental cases talking to themselves, urinating on the sidewalk, howling at the sky, or sitting catatonically on the curb, fingering gutter filth.
Finally, late in the afternoon, we found what we were looking for on West 94th Street between Broadway and West End. The Hotel Harding. Someone had defaced the outside sign to make it read ‘Hotel Hard-On.’ It had once been a structure of some dignity, with a facade of gray stone and pillars of reddish marble framing the entrance. The lobby smelled of urine, vomit, old cigar smoke, hashish, and a disinfectant so acrid it made my eyes water. There were no chairs in the lobby — to discourage loiterers off the street, I guessed. In fact, there was nothing in the lobby but the scarred desk and the birdcage of an ancient elevator shaft. The elevator itself, however, was a self-service and relatively new, but already layered with the ubiquitous graffiti. The brass indicator showed twelve floors.
The man behind the desk, reading a tout sheet through a hand-held magnifying glass, must have weighed at least 300 pounds of not-so-pure blubber. He was wearing a blue, sweated undershirt. His transistor radio was roaring racing results, and he was annoyed at being interrupted.
‘Five a day, thirty a week, a hundred a month,’ the fat man said, singsong, in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. The thirty came out ‘thoity,’ hundred was ‘undert,’ and month was ‘munt.’
‘With private bathroom?’ I said in my husky whisper.
He looked at me disgustedly.
‘Ja say so?’ he demanded. ‘Seven a day, forty a week, one-thirty a month. You want it?’
‘We’d like to take a look at the room,’ Dick said firmly.
The clerk took a key attached to a brass tab from a board of hooks and tossed it contemptuously onto the counter. It would have skittered to the floor if Dick hadn’t caught it.
‘Room 703,’ the man-mountain snarled. ‘Cross ventilation. Sheets and towels every week.’
We waited for the elevator to descend, then took a leisurely ride to the seventh floor. As we inched past the third floor we heard loud screams of extreme anguish: either a murder in progress or a woman in labor. On the fifth floor, someone was playing acid rock on a radio or hi-fi, loud enough to make the elevator vibrate in its shaft.
Room 703 was on the east side of the hotel. I don’t know how the desk clerk figured it provided cross ventilation, unless you left the corridor door open and there was a breeze coming down the air shaft on the other side. The room was about fifteen feet square, with one window (on the shaft) and a small open closet. The walls were cracked, the paint rippled with age and peeling in patches. The floor was covered with slimed linoleum, so worn that in several places the brown backing showed through.
There was a single bed, a dresser, a tarnished mirror, an upholstered armchair, a small, rickety desk with a chair to match. Everything in that cheesy orangewood. There were no linens on the bed, and the mattress was stained in ways I didn’t care to imagine.
The bathroom door had been painted so many times it couldn’t be closed. There was a sink, a toilet, an open shower stall. The fixtures were yellowed and crackled, the sink rusted, the toilet seat cracked and peeling. Dick flushed the toilet. It sounded like the Charge of the Light Brigade.
We went back into the living room-bedroom-study-dining room-parlor,
‘Let’s forget it,’ Dick said.
‘Look for another place?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘let’s forget the whole thing. You can’t live here or anywhere like it. Give it up, Jannie.’
‘Bea,’ I said. ‘Watch yourself. And I’m not giving it up. This is great local color. I can get a page or two of description out of this place. Very realistic. I’m taking it.’
