Page 34 of Shadow Ticket
“Maybe you also recognized her from the society section, thought you’d promote a quick fetch-and-return fee.”
Out the back way, full speed. “Abyssinia, Sheldon.”
“OK and whose tab? Yours or Miss Airmont’s?”
“Miss who?”
“Madcap Subdeb Cheese Heiress all over the papers for years now? how jay it’s getting around this joint anymore.”
At the moment Daphne happens to be on the run from Winnetka Shores Psychopathic, a ritzy banana plantation in the neighborhood, overseen by a Dr. Swampscott Vobe, M.D. Known for a susceptibility to anything newfangled, Dr. Vobe has somehow gotten it into his head that the patients at WSP are all available to him as lab material to try out his therapy ideas on, free of charge. Drugs, electricity, rays. Dr. Vobe is specially interested in rays.
“Come on in and have a look, just looking can’t hurt, can it?” There’s a chemical hospital smell, lights blinking across the panels of mysterious electrical equipment, an oppressive throb of insincerity. “You’ll like it here, nothing unpleasant, brief sessions under the rays, a few injections…Oh and we’ll need a quick signature and a set of fingerprints—”
“You bet, only be a minute,” Daphne amiably, head-feinting one way then taking off in another, pursued, after a moment to confer, by the two heavies in loony-bin garb who by luck both turn out to be slower than Daphne by the step-and-a-half she needs, so that by the time they’re up to speed, she’s already on the running board of Lois’s snappy yellow Kissel Speedster and accelerating away.
“Sure, it could’ve been more romantic,” Hicks admits later to April, “but there was this crosswind situation, a sky nobody could see let alone read, kind of night when gales come down out of nowhere.”
They proceed at a brisk pace past the shadowed Spanish melancholy of the abandoned Plaza del Lago, maintaining in the dark its vigil for the return of Prosperity. Down to lakeside. Hicks hands Daphne aboard the speedboat he came in on, and off they go.
Later, out on the Lake, rooster tail luminous behind them, “I like this mahogany detailing. Honduran, isn’t it, not the cheap African stuff you find in Chris-Crafts.”
“Don’t tell Al Capone, he has a whole fleet.”
“Not that I’d dream of calling the Big Fellow a cheapskate, understand.”
Breezy chitchat. Hicks wonders how she knows so much about rumrunner design.
“You know, Miss Airmont, you could’ve said something. Snazzy redhead, how’s anybody supposed to react?”
“Thanks. Maybe just once I’d like to be rescued for myself, not for my hair.”
“This is what we’re doing? I’m rescuing you?”
“The Indians have a belief…”
“Sure, just gimme a second here,” Hicks sashaying them around a buoy rearing up out of the fog.
“You can’t go rescuing somebody and then just forget it—Ojibwe belief is, interfere with somebody’s life and you’re responsible for them forever—”
Opportunities for light conversation after that deteriorated along with the weather.
“See if I have all this straight,” April with an unnatural calm he recognizes, “you’re barrel-assing up the Lake with this very underage baby vamp,invisible state lines everyplace, cross any of which and it’s a federal rap, white slave laws and worse, when did you get so adventurous?”
“Last thing on my mind.”
“That I can believe.”
“All over with long before I met you, Angel.”
“How long?”
“Oh, long…long.”
“Happy we cleared that one up, Lunchmeat, and I’ll sure do the same for you sometime.”
“You have this confused with one of those type of movies you dames go to.”
“Lowlife and high-society party girl, is it so improbable?”
