Page 21 of Shadow Ticket
“You know how crazy that sounds.”
“What’s the un-crazy story then?”
Shrug. “Maybe we just don’t want to hear about it.”
“We’ve all been looking at the same blotters, if he’s silent key and it’s a ghost we saw then there’d be a coroner’s verdict someplace, likely Chicago, hit-and-run victim not used to big-city traffic, Milwaukee being notorious for its inattentive pedestrians, ‘Jaywalkee,’ as it’s known to the wisemouths of the County of Cook…”
“Times Stuffy thought he wasn’t here anymore—that they really did get him when they blew up the truck. Kept saying things like ‘Maybe I’m a ghost now and I’m haunting you.’ ”
“Thanks, Skeet. If it’s creepy stories tonight, I hope somebody remembered to bring the marshmallows.”
9
Skeet shows up at the office next day with an out-of-town tomato who causes a certain commotion. Thessalie asks her where she buys her shoes. Zbig Dubinski has his hat off and his hair combed and has changed into his Lucky Necktie. Boynt has a grimly professional smile on. “It figures,” he mutters. “Child enticement now.”
“Beg your pardon,” she points out, “I’m over eighteen even if I don’t look it.”
Boynt was talking about Skeet, but understands when to keep shtum.
Small hat at a provocative angle, blindingly platinum cocktail bob, belted city dress with sleeve dimensions seen typically only in movies dames go to. Calls herself Fancy Vivid. Apparently she and Stuffy met on one of his trips to Detroit, where she was working as a chorine in the house revue at the Club Palermo, a Hamtramck joint just off of what the papers liked to call the Joseph Campau midway of sin, with its own secret escape tunnel that let you out into some church basement blocks away. One of those recreational centers where you’re apt to find Grosse Pointe aristocracy mixing with line workers between shifts from the Dodge Main plant, college kids from Ann Arbor, tourists from farther afield.
We’re…
step-pin out-of-our step-ins, so long
silk, ’n’ ray-yon, ’n’
lace— ’Cause
all-a-girl needs to look
hep in’s, just
that smile she’s got on, her, fa-a-a-ce!
So don’t
bo-ther frisk-in-for weap-ons,
You won’t even find lonja-ra-y-y…
Cause we’re steppin’ out of our
step-ins, and skip-
steppin the night a-way!
“Don’t suppose you’d go for a friendly snort, Miss Vivid—”
“Oh call me Fancy. Actually not teetotal but after years, well, months, of pretending to sip champagne, I do seem to’ve picked up something of an honest-to-goodnessgingeralehabit…”
“I’ll have a look in the icebox,” Zbig already on the way.
“Oh thanks so much, Vernor’s if you’ve got any, Canadian style tends to be a little too much on the brut side for me. But what I really—”
“She’s trying to find Stuffy Keegan,” Skeet explains.
“There seems to be an uncommon amount of interest in the whereabouts of Mr. Keegan,” sez Boynt. “I expect his likeness to appear at any moment on post office walls across the land.”
