Page 22 of Shadow Ticket
“Don’t know what I can afford to pay you. Skeet seemed to feel we could work the fee out somehow. This is where you people work? It looks like the ladies’ lounge at Hudson’s. The Budget Store, not the big one.”
“Stuffy could be in on some federal beef,” Hicks points out. “The B of I’s been after him for a while, so if all you want to know is his whereabouts—”
“Besides what else?”
“If it’s not a skip, if he didn’t take something you want back.”
She gazes at him steadily for a long time. April looks like this when she’s getting ready to sing. “Something, yeah,” Fancy Vivid in a whisper. “My heart.”
Oh. “Not to get too personal, but…you and Stuffy…you’re sayin this is the goods—”
“Sure,” an eyebrow maneuver for and so what. “Can’t always see theappeal there myself…He does have a mean streak, not with me so much but now and then there’ll be some middle-of-the-night phone call, you know, some forlorn li’l face in a powder-room mirror, that kinda thing.”
“You’re sure this is Stuffy we’re talking about.”
“I know—two-bit con artist, thinks he’s figured out an angle or two, never knows the going price on anything. Takes more trouble than it’s worth over some li’l handful of change, which he never believes it’ll work anyway, and when it does, it’s like a miracle, the look on his face…so innocent. That’s what gets me, you know, that innocence, and you’d have to be a colder customer than me not to just want to…oh…”
“Here, use this.”
“You’re sure? the day just started, some other Miss Waterworks might come along.”
“It’s OK, we have to keep a pocketful of spares, it all gets charged to overhead.”
A silent beat and a half.
“He ever say anything to you about a submarine?” Hicks wonders about the same time Fancy asks, “He ever say anything to you about a submarine?”
“Kept wanting to know if I’d ever been on one, if I’d like to go for a ride on one. At first I thought it was some kind of sex talk.”
“And…”
“Swore he wasn’t making it up. Said it could be our cruise to salvation.”
Later, looking through an unhelpful file, Hicks nods into a half-minute dream about Stuffy. They’re in Chicago, or something calling itself that, up North Clark, across the suicides’ bridge, deep in that part of the North Side known as The Shadows.
An intense black-and-white glare, a pattern of arc light through girderwork announcing that they are entering a region not for everyone. What seems to be the old county jailhouse over on Dearborn, haunted to saturation by the unquiet spirits of hanged men and women, white, Negro, and American Indian—Stuffy’s been sleeping in the execution room, passing his daylight hours out on West Madison trying to blend in.
Unwelcome visitors, faces indistinct.
“Hicks, what’s going on, hey?”
Hicks as surprised as anybody.
“For Chrissake they’re gonna—”
“They took my heater, Stuffy, what’m I supposed to do?”
“Enough, enough. Say good night to your pal, unless you want in on this too.”
“Stuffy, I’ll see what I can do, I’ll call the office—” But Stuffy’s attention has moved elsewhere, as if he’s caught a glimpse of the next world and can’t look away.
A power failure, all the lights go out, all comfortable illusion of busy Loop activity fades to darkness, silence. How many more times is Hicks going to let somebody down like this, somebody who trusted him? He blinks awake.
Only a dream, he has to keep reminding himself all day till he’s out of range of coffee urns and news of the day. Only a dream.
10
Next time Hicks is over to the Flaschners for what turns out to be another novelty casserole, he finds Uncle Lefty in a reminiscent yet strangely gemütlich state of mind.
