The Walking Wounded Read online

  game little ferry ploughing toward the largest woman in the world. There were a lot of

  people on that tug, hordes of school kids but I couldn't see or hear anybody. I was

  locked into the Past.

  With Dolores again.

  And Alma Wheeler.

  And the bright, flip young man who was going to save the world with a shining

  .45 and a P.I. card. With blue serge to match. How many light years and memories ago was that?

  Centuries, eons and a thousand heartbreaks ago. All the victories and all the

  defeats I had in me were sealed in those twenty years. The Lives and Deaths of a Private

  Eye. High and Low Noon.

  They call me Shamus now but they don't know what they are talking about. They

  never did. They don't even understand true camp.

  I was hemmed in, penned off, and roped around with Death and Tragedy.

  Corpses followed wherever I went. A Pied Piper in black.

  Marcel Alevoinne, who had claimed critics were for killing, was dead. A man

  who wouldn't hurt a typewriter key.

  Jo Malmedy was still alive. He was a critic, too. Of the Past.

  But he was the walking wounded. He had been disabled and lame from the very

  beginning. All the way back to that other door. The iron one that his mother had

  slammed into his crying face. Forever.

  I stared out at the water, lapping and racing with the ferry. White, dark-flecked

  gulls soared in flight, keeping pace. There was a hum of silence in the air. A drone of

  timelessness. Like Egyptian sand.

  The Statue of Liberty drew closer. A lovelier Kong, in close-up.

  The stone lady of the sea. A Beauty no Beast can ever kill.

  The Tall Dolores of legend. My legend.

  I tried to read her face as the distance narrowed.

  I couldn't.

  Stone faces can't tell you anything. They neither smile or cry. Or even murmur.

  There was nothing left for me. Nothing in twenty years of remembering, two

  decades of trying to forget. Jo Malmedy had drawn the same blank. He hadn't changed

  anything; only his own lonely existence.

  But because of him, Dolores Ainsley Brand had not died.

  She had lived on, lousing up the present with the mistakes of the past. And Jo

  Malmedy would go to his grave, marked forever.

  A horn blasted in the harbor. The gulls cawed and spread out, wheeling off like

  buzzards in the leaden, grey sky. The ferry banked sharply, swinging around to the slip

  that lay at the feet of the Statue. All around me, voices rose in expectation and

  excitement. Going to the Lady was a party for some people. It still was, no matter what.

  The Battery would be lost without Lady Liberty.

  I looked up and found the stone face of The Tall Dolores and saluted her softly.

  She stared down at me, graven features bleak and impassive. She wouldn't have said a

  word even if she could have.

  It was just as well, anyway.

  She really didn't look anything like Dolores Ainsley.

  She never did.

  She never would.

  She had too much class for that.

  There was more of Alma Wheeler in her, than anyone.

  There always would be--now. So we beat on, boats against the current,

  Borne back ceaselessly into the past.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  STILL WALKING

  Jo Malmedy didn't make it into the next Broadway season. The son of Dolores

  Ainsley couldn't wait, I guess. Or rather he didn't want to. When you take away the

  freedom of a man like that, not even his life's blood, the writing, can sustain him. The

  war widows had walked away in his prize-winning play, the greatest creation of his

  career. Like them, he could walk away too. And he did. All the way to oblivion.

  On a wintry day, months later, after the very famous trial which was Page Oned

  all over town. I never did have to show up in court. Like Lieutenant Di Gregorio had

  suggested, a smart defense lawyer would have dragged me into the act by the heels, to

  plant sympathy all over his defendant, as the murderer of a child's mother. But I knew

  Jo Malmedy too well. He didn't want any more part of The Tall Dolores. Of being a

  forlorn, woebegone bastard son. It was his final gesture of repudiation. His own iron door, of sorts. I think I knew exactly how he felt. We've all been the ugly duckling at

  some time in our lives. Malmedy had had it.

  The oblivion he chose was suicide.

  There was a big stink about how a man sitting in a state penitentiary, with

  maximum security, could get his hands on a lethal dose of cyanide. But it happened all

  the same, sometime in the middle of a cold night with the searchlights playing over the

  bleak walls and the railroad trains hooting by. In the morning, they found him dead in

  his cell, the broad-planed face a twisted caricature of what it usually had been. I wasn't

  there but I would have bet a tenner that Jo Malmedy was smiling, in spite of everything.

  The last dramatic gesture, the final curtain, had been applied by a master of the play

  form.

  Lieutenant Di Gregorio never did track down the Broadway shop, mentioned so

  much in the notes which Valerie Wales had turned over to him with breathless, gushing

  excitement. Malmedy had been right about Money, too. It can accomplish pretty nearly

  anything in this crooked cosmos. The ensuing shake-up at the penitentiary didn't bring

  forth any official rats, either. Hush is another of the things that money can buy.

  So Jo Malmedy died.

  And everybody else went back to living.

  I took the play he had sent me down to the mouse auditorium about two days after

  the story broke in the papers. There was nothing to do, much less to say, to anyone

  about Jo Malmedy. He belonged to me in a private way I could never explain to anyone.

  Not as a son, simply as a personal part. Like an arm or a leg or one of my eyes.

  The ghouls had already gathered, months ago. Each and everyone of Charles Oldenfield Wilson's Wolfe-like novels had been

  reprinted and were flooding the bookshelves of all the stores in America. Marcel

  Alevoinne, the great writer and entertainer of millions, was never more so well-read or

  so bought as when he was a man murdered by a fellow writer, intentionally or otherwise.

  Sensation had added another dimension to the power of his by-line.

  Just as the public will embrace the silly, valueless, hacked-out nonsense of

  hooker memoirs, White House backstairs-maid memories and so-called illicit romances

  of famous presidents, so did the works of Mad Marcel soar to the top of the charts and

  stay there.

  And the critics, those legless runners he despised so much, had the usual field

  day re-examining his work and setting down their fresh appraisals in nice black print, all

  the while lamenting the Herd for behaving like a nation of sheep, again. Running to the

  next Sensation and keeping up with the Jones in true mindless purchasing.

  I put the manuscript of The Tall Dolores in the office wall safe and left it there for

  posterity. Or at least a later day when I could think straight again. There was still a

  bygone aura of Yesterday all over me. Over my clothes, my mind, my heart and my

  soul. I hadn't really run away from anything, either. Not even Jo Malmedy dying had

  released me from the prison of the past. My mind's eye was still in Cinerama.

  Melissa Mercer was not at t
he office that day. I didn't know where she was but I

  wasn't thinking of her. I wasn't thinking much of anything. Nostalgia was a heavy fog in

  the atmosphere of my West 46th Street business address. I had never felt the weight of

  my .45 so much. It had begun to resemble a cross. A cross I'd been carrying uphill most of my days. Toward whatever Mount Calvary there is for private detectives who refuse to

  work for a living. To go Establishment.

  And then Valerie Wales walked into my life.

  Jo Malmedy's Valerie Wales. The nymphomaniac Miss Wales.

  Of Boston. Of honey-blonde hair, long legs, Balenciaga outfits, of lips thicker

  than Julie Christie's. Broadway Jo had described her with tell-tale accuracy. You almost

  saw her accent before you heard it. She was still wearing those platform shoes he had

  found so ridiculous. The outfit was a blue, clinging, filmy-sleeved creation. Something

  between a caftan and a cheongsam. I don't really know. Or care.

  She had slunk in when no one had answered her knock and I realized I had left the

  outer and inner office doors open. I was sleep-walking that day. It didn't matter,

  anyway. There were priorities on my attention lately. Very few things had mattered.

  Hardly anything at all.

  "Hi, Mr. Noon. You do remember me, I suppose?"

  "Hi, yourself. You're easy to remember, Miss Wales."

  "I wanted to see you. I suppose I should have phoned. Made an appointment.

  But---it was a case of nerves. I wasn't sure. So I started in this direction and then when I

  was downstairs, I decided to take the bull by the horns---you don't mind?"

  "No, I don't mind. Sit down."

  "I'd rather not. Then I'd feel all guilty and on inspection. I can talk better on my

  feet---"

  She proved that by swirling about the room, pacing like an over-trained animal

  act, to the wall with the four-drawer files and then back to my desk. I watched her and saw everything in her that Jo Malmedy had seen. No more than a bright young thing with

  an over-developed sex organ.

  I should have seen the other thing. But I didn't. My mind was wrapped in cotton,

  as I said. My eyes were on a distant horizon.

  "---I wanted to come to you sooner. I just don't know really what to do. That's

  the hell of it. I'm against killing anything. And then there's the possibility of an

  inheritance. And, oh---lawyers didn't seem the right answer. So I came to you. You

  were somebody special to Jo. I know that, now. And what with everything I've found

  out about you since the trial---gollee, Mr. Noon, I just don't see how I could have been

  so damn careless---me! Of all people."

  I took my feet down off the desk and sat up straight. Cured.

  I stared up at her, trying to think. To listen. To understand.

  "Valerie, stop talking around everything. What are you trying to say? Against

  killing what?"

  She braked to a halt before the desk, the Balenciaga swirling, and sighed

  heavily, moistening the lips that were a shade too thick. Her blue eyes were a little

  pathetic just then. Like a lost little girl.

  "I'm pregnant, for Christ's sakes," she said. "And it's got to be Jo's. A little more

  than four months, I make it. And I don't know what the hell to do before it really starts

  to show."

  The office felt like a time bomb was about to go off any minute. Any second.

  The Past was rushing to meet the Present, anxious to hurtle on by, into the Future. The collision course was in motion, again. The same old terrible one that winds all the way

  back to the dawn of Time.

  "Did you tell him?" I asked. "I have to know that first."

  "Of course, I told him! He had a right to know. I thought it would make him feel

  better cooper up in that awful prison. I loved him, Mr. Noon. Honest to Christ, I really

  did, you know."

  She was looking down at me, incredulously, mingled anger and confusion,

  mixed in equal parts on the sensuous rich-girl's face.

  "Sure you did, Valerie," I said.

  I didn't have to worry or wonder about the cyanide anymore.

  Jo Malmedy had answered that one for me.

  The wounded were still walking.

  As they always would.

  Into the Future.

  But always having to look back, over their shoulders.

  At the sins of the fathers. And the mothers.

  "Well---?" Valerie Wales rasped, her voice harsh and almost whining, "aren't

  you going to tell me what you think? What I ought to do? I just won't have an abortion,

  you know. I'm against that---"

  The bitch was asking my advice about her soon-to-be bastard.

  "Shut up," I rasped back, "and don't snap at me. Rome wasn't built in a day, you

  know. And I'm no marriage counselor. Or am I a shrink. This is going to take a little

  thought----" I could have wept.

  For Jo Malmedy, for Alma, for Dolores Ainsley. For everybody on this

  cockeyed earth. Even for Valerie Wales' unborn child.

  And for myself.

  Most of all.

  PLAY IT AGAIN, ED

  I stopped in Benny's soft drink emporium before going up to the office. I had to.

  It was too soon after everything. I needed a pick-me-up bad. How was I going to tell

  Alma?

  "Hi, Ed," Benny came over, rubbing down the bar on the way. Benny was

  proud of his bar. He kept it clean.

  "'Lo, Benny."

  Normally, Benny and I chewed the rag to shreds. But, somehow I didn't feel like

  talking. That was another nice thing about Benny. He could tell when you didn't feel

  like talking.

  "What'll it be, Ed? The usual?" I looked at him. Stared past his friendly mug into the wide mirror over the

  bottles. I saw myself. My expression was peculiar.

  "Pour me one, Benny. I'll have a Tall Dolores."

  Benny has mixed everything from Singapore Slings to Pink Ladies. But all he

  said was "Come again?"

  "Sorry, Benny. Martini. Dryer than you've ever made it before."

  I thought of things while I was waiting for my drink. Things that will pop into

  your noodle on a hot sticky afternoon. I thought of Daniel Brand and his warped

  intellect, of Kinney and his special brand of the Pursuit of Happiness, of Monks and his

  dog-like fulfillment of the law that had been turned over to him by the city. And Sam

  Foley who never harmed a fly but was being buried this very afternoon.

  But I guess I was thinking most of all of Dolores. With her pituitary gland that

  was out of order. With her mad worship of the Almighty Dollar. With her ability to tell

  baloney yarns. With her body with the back of her head blown off. Dolores who was

  Alma's sister.

  I got the martini down very slowly. I let it burn me out inside. Till I was feeling

  hollow. I waited for it to settle in my stomach which had gone without food since early

  morning. Waited for it to paralyze me.

  When I was pretty certain I had all my soft nature drowned thoroughly, I paid

  Benny and left.

  Then I went upstairs to tell Alma.

  The Tall Dolores ©1953, Henry Holt And Co.

 

 

 
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