Page 14 of Shadow Ticket
“Nah. Don’t feel like that at all. Whatever it means.”
“Hicks, it’s as plain as the nose on your face. If you’d only stop to think.”
Stop doing what, was the problem, but she wouldn’t get specific. It kept going back to the last strike he worked, and the four-eyed Bolshevik he meant to kill but didn’t. He kept trying to find somebody to talk to about it, even Boynt, though the boss wasn’t too sympathetic. “Look at your rap sheet. Never tried, never even booked, street legal forever including the streets of heaven, count your blessings, get over it.”
“Maybe I killed somebody, Boynt, maybe more than once, and never knew it.”
“You always know when you’ve done it. If you’re not sure, assume you didn’t. Guilt’s all it is. Have you been to the company brain-croakers about this yet?”
“Back office says no dice, insurance only covers the one annual checkup, psycho ain’t included.”
“So…untreated guilt complex, mm-hmm. Some lucky voodoo artist out there’s looking at hours of gainful employment. Save the bellyaching, Hicks, I’ve heard it all.”
“And what would you do in my place?”
“Why not have a word with Thessalie. Even the back office listens to her.”
Good idea. Thessalie happens to have worked as a stage mentalist, till talking pictures put the whammy on vaudeville, “And now I’m reduced to this. You think it isn’t humiliating? All this carnal-relations stuff? Typing ‘penis’ every day? Not like I have a choice. A shot at anything, any toilet anywhere, any death trail from here on south of the border—say, wouldn’t I jump at it. But you see what’s happening to vaudeville, they’re even tearingdown the Majestic now, for Pete’s sake, it’s the double whammy, the talkies arrive exactly the same time as the Depression. Some coincidence, huh. Almost like somebody’s trying to get rid of us old troupers.”
Whenever it becomes necessary to trace the history of physical cash, it’s Thessalie who’s likely to get the midnight phone call…paid off on the Q.T. one job at a time in—what else?—overhandled currency, typically $2 bills loaded with enough resentment, remorse, lust, anxiety sometimes to send an unwary psychometrist swooning nearly to collapse.
“Strange thing,” Uncle Lefty reluctantly admits, “but she seems to be the genuine goods.” Though the MPD have never been that crazy about psychics, whom they like to blame for fondling evidence, smudging prints, compromising bloodstains, Thessalie has been enough help with a number of cases that she’s widely sought-after now by city police here and down the Lake, whenever what they think they see with their own eyes isn’t enough…nothing in writing of course.
5
Hicks and Thessalie meet one day at Velocity Lunch, a quiet joint with an upstairs you can loiter in and not be bothered, meet briefly for a handoff, or for hours of matrimonial business, even to eat at. Lunch dramas passing like storm fronts, pies in glass cases slowly losing their a.m. allure, grill artists taking care of various counterside chores while whatever they’re flipping is in midair rotating end over end. Fluorescent light through Today’s Special, a vivid green salad centerpiece the size and shape of a human brain, molded in lime Jell-O, versions of which have actually been observed to glow. “We used to dim down the lights before bringing it in to the table, but eating it in the dark made too many people uncomfortable.”
Thessalie is a nice enough trick if brainy and resourceful is your type. Although knowing what men are thinking about doesn’t take supernatural powers, still it has often put a certain kibosh on her social life, which she doesn’t mind complaining about. The mind-reader angle doesn’t strike Hicks as much of a selling point either. So maybe he’s a little nervous.
After a brief guess at Hicks’s arm length, she sets her purse out of reach and switches on a smile. “Boynt mentioned you have something on your mind you want to talk about.”
Him and his big mouth. “Thessalie, if you ain’t just the spit of that Joan Blondell.”
“Widely remarked on, and don’t change the subject.”
“Just that I wouldn’t know how to—”
“It’s OK, no taboos, you can ask me anything, long as it isn’t state capitals.”
“Well…say you’re just about to…you know, give somebody the business, OK, only it doesn’t happen, not because your aim is off, see, but because your weapon all of a sudden somehow isn’t…uh…”
“Isn’t there any more? Sure, happens a lot, an often heard excuse. ‘It withdrew into its own space, it asported to safety.’ ”
“It, um…?”
“Asported. When something disappears suddenly off to someplace else, in the business that’s called an asport. Coming in at you the other way, appearing out of nowhere, that’s an ‘apport.’ Happens in séances a lot, kind of side effect. Ass and app, as we say.”
“This was outdoors, during a strike. Solid one minute, there in my hand, then…” Small shrug, palms up and empty, “I had a pretty good look around, figuring I dropped it someplace, but—”
“A firearm of some kind.”
“A beavertail. Kind of a loaded sap.”
“Been out socially with a number of them. How long ago’s this been now?”
“Dunno, a while.”
“And it’s still on your mind.”
