I feel I owe you an explanation. You’re probably wondering why the hell that episode was dragged in out of the blue and thrust in front of your eyes. Of course it took place during the time we were working on this case, but lots of things take place that I don’t plague you with. I don’t mention every time I go to the toilet for instance. Which is not to say that seeing Ruthellen is like going to the toilet. Except, come to think of it, it is, sort of.
Okay.
When I wrote this book, the Ruthellen bit wasn’t in it. And then I got a call from Joe Elder, who is my editor at Gold Medal.
“Like the book,” he said. “But there’s a problem.”
“Oh.”
“Not enough sex.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sure you can think of something.”
I argued a lot, but I didn’t get anyplace. “We’re not in business to sell books,” he said. “We’re selling hard- ons. Hard-ons sell books. You need a sex scene fairly early on in the book to hook the reader’s attention and rivet his eye to the page.”
Well, that’s why the Ruthellen bit is in. I mean, it did happen, so I suppose it’s legitimate. But I’m not really happy with it, and I’d be much happier if Mr. Elder would change his mind and cut it out after all, and—
Oh, the hell with it. Let’s get back to the story.
Eight
SIMON BARCKOVER’S OFFICE was in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway. I went into the lobby and found his name on the board while half the musicians and performers in America walked past me. I rode up to the seventh floor in an elevator I shared with two men carrying saxophones and one swarthy woman toting a caged parrot. I got off and found a door with a frosted glass window labeled
A girl with red hair and freckles smiled at me from behind a green metal desk that almost matched her eyes. She asked if she could help me. “My name is Harrison,” I said, “and I work for Leo Haig. I believe Mr. Barckover is expecting me.”
“Oh, yes. You called earlier.”
“That’s right.”
She glanced at the phone on her desk. One of its four buttons was glowing. “He’s on a call right now. Won’t you have a seat?”
“Thanks but I’ll stand.”
She took a cigarette from a pack on her desk. “I guess you want to see him about Cherry,” she said. “That was a shock. It was really terrible.”
“Did you know her? I guess you must have, working in this office.”
“I’ve only been here a couple months.”
I looked at her for a moment. “I’ve seen you before,” I said. “You were there last night.”
“I was working there. Sometimes if I have a free night I do substitute waitress work in some of the clubs that book a lot of acts through Mr. Barckover. Mostly as a favor, but the extra money helps. Some places you get really decent tips.”
“Do they tip well at Treasure Chest?”
“They didn’t last night. I’ve only worked there a couple times and actually they never tip well there. They figure they’re being taken, you know, paying such high prices for such rotten drinks, and then there’s a cover charge at the tables, so they take it out on the poor waitress by leaving her next to nothing. Last night most of the people didn’t even pay their checks in the confusion and everything. But I don’t like clubs like Treasure Chest. I just did it last night as a favor to Mr. Barckover.”
“Is he a good man to work for?”
Her hesitation answered the question for me. “Well, the pay isn’t great,” she said. “He’s a nice man. He loses his temper a lot but that’s because he’s in such a high-pressure business. And he’s very tolerant. He doesn’t get uptight if I smoke dope or like that, and we have an agreement that I can take off whenever there’s an audition I want to check out.”
“You’re in show business?”
“Let’s say I’m going to be in show business. I’m a singer. So far nobody’s in a rush to pay me money to sing, but I’ll make it. Someday you can hear me at the Persian Room of the Plaza.”
“I’ll take a ringside table.”
“You’d better make your reservations now. My opening’s going to be sold out months in advance.” The green eyes twinkled. “That’s why I’m working for Mr. Barckover. He may not be the best agent in the business, but you get a real inside view of things working in an office like this. It’s not just making contacts, although that doesn’t hurt. It’s learning how the business works and how to make your own openings.”
I considered telling her that if her voice was as pretty as the rest of her she had nothing to worry about. But in a job like that she’d probably heard every line in the world, and mine was neither all that original nor all that terrific. While I hunted for a way to revise it, the little light on the phone went off.
“I’ll tell him you’re here,” she said, and did. “He’ll see you now,” she said. “Right through that door.”
I went right through that door. Barckover took a bite out of a sandwich and motioned me toward a seat, chewing furiously. He washed it down with a swig of coffee from a styrofoam container, bit a chunk out of a jelly doughnut, swallowed some more coffee, then lit a half-smoked cigar and leaned back in his chair. It was one hell of a change from Haskell Henderson and the alfalfa sprouts.
So was the conversation. Barckover didn’t have to try hiding his presence at Treasure Chest from me because the police already knew about it, and he had a bonafide business reason for being there. The police had already pumped him dry. He’d agreed to see me because he couldn’t very well refuse to, since Tulip was his client, but this didn’t make him enthusiastic about it. He figured it was a waste of time. Actually more of my time than his got wasted, because he went ahead taking calls during the course of our interview, telling clients that he didn’t have anything for them, telling club owners how sensational his clients were. The interruptions were a nuisance but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
“I been over this with the police five or six times already,” he said. “I was off in the back with this spastic prick from New Jersey. Like I only looked at the stage every ten minutes or so to make sure somebody was on it. You don’t know what this business is like, man. After a few years you get so sick of tits and asses that the only way you can get a hard-on is if your woman wears clothes to bed. I never even saw Cherry take her fall. I heard the commotion and I looked up and I couldn’t see anything by then because she was lying down and out of sight. I didn’t see anybody do anything suspicious. I didn’t even think to look for anything suspicious. I figure she fainted from popping too many pills or else she had a bad heart or something. What was it, something pygmies put on darts?”
“Something like that,” I said. “Did Cherry take a lot of drugs?”
“For all I know she never even dropped an aspirin. Just going on generalities. Most of the go-go dancers and the topless-bottomless chicks do uppers. All that moving around and all those geeks gaping at them and it gets to them, and a little dexie straightens everything out and they can prevail, they can maintain, if you dig it. Like Lennie Bruce, baby, you got to be on top of it in order to get it out.”
I had already been thinking of Lennie Bruce. One line of his in particular. He said there’s nothing sadder than an old hipster.
I asked what Cherry was like.
“A comer,” he said. “That kid started with nothing. She showed me some pictures of herself taken four, five years ago. Nothing. Big nose, flat in the chest. Not a pig but you’d never look at her twice.”
“Cherry?”
He flicked the ash from his cigar. “Plastic surgery” he said. “Her old lady died and left her a couple of K’s, no fortune, just of couple of K’s, and she went and spent the whole bundle putting herself together. New nose, a trim
