Girls in Pink

  Girls in Pink

  by

  Bob Bickford

  Girls in Pink by Bob Bickford

  Copyright 2016

  ISBN 978-1-943789-42-8

  Published by Taylor and Seale Publishing, LLC

  3408 South Atlantic Avenue

  Unit 139

  Daytona Beach Shores, FL 32118

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author or publisher. This book was printed in the United States of America.

  Cover layout by WhiteRabbitgraphix.com

  Cover photo by: Donnez Cardoza, used with permission.

  This book is a work of fiction. Except for specific historical references, names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead or to locales is entirely coincidental.

  Eight of hearts,

  I want to play.

  Girls in Pink

  Bob Bickford

  Part One

  Saxophones, Razzmatazz, and a Birthday Cake

  Friday, June 27, 1947

  Santa Teresa, California

  11:45 am

  The Browning automatic on my desk made me a little bit nervous. Not because it pointed at me—it belonged to me, but because I had forgotten to put it away before my client came in, and now it lay on the blotter between us, looking unfriendly. With no graceful way to get it into the drawer without drawing attention to it, I left it where it lay.

  “Are you married, Mister Crowe?”

  Her legs were crossed, and the black-piped hem of a pink dress rode up over one knee. She looked delectable, and in no apparent hurry. She had nice enough legs, and I wasn't in a hurry, either. I shook my head, no, and waited for her to finish getting out her checkbook.

  “I like your suit,” she said. “I like a man that knows how to dress.”

  She picked up the straw fedora from the corner of my desk and ran her finger along the band.

  “Do you ever go dancing?” she asked. “What do you do for fun?”

  She had very blonde hair drawn back from her face in what must have been expensive waves, carefully arranged around a jaunty pink hat that matched her dress. Her eyes were wide and blue, and she used them in a way she probably considered disingenuous. I knew she wasn’t any such thing. She also had a small gap between her front teeth. It was probably the most honest thing about her, and I liked it, but when she sensed me looking there she closed her rosebud mouth quickly.

  “I do this, Mrs. Cleveland,” I said. “I don’t know much about fun, I guess.”

  The clock on the far wall said just before noon. It was made to look like Krazy Kat. A client had given me two of them, and while I didn't see the point of it, I needed a clock and it kept time just fine. I had the other one hung in my kitchen at home.

  “Charlene,” she smiled. “I’m not anyone’s missus anymore, thanks to you. We should celebrate.”

  I leaned forward, and slid a single sheet of paper, my bill, an inch closer to her. She looked at it and didn't pick it up.

  “You could at least buy me a drink,” she said. “You’re getting paid enough money for this. It didn’t take you very long.”

  “It took more out of me than you may realize, Mrs. Cleveland.”

  A fresh bottle of Four Roses snoozed in the top left drawer of my desk, and I took it out and broke the seal. I got up and blew the dust out of a couple of glasses, and then poured each of us an inch of bourbon. I set hers on the desk in front of her, and tossed mine back before I sat down again. The liquor burned nicely, but I knew right away it had been a mistake. Drinking in the middle of the day made me tired.

  “How did you get my husband to agree to a divorce so fast?” she asked. “I still can't believe it's really true.”

  “People tend to act in their best interests,” I said. “Even tough people. I scrounged up some . . . well, you could call it evidence I suppose. It was good enough to make him think letting you go represented a fair deal. We made a simple trade.”

  “What could possibly be bad enough for that?” she asked. “Can you tell me?”

  I shook my head, no.

  “I could talk you into it,” she smiled. “We both know that I could.”

  “When you’re done with your drink, I’d like to settle your bill,” I said. “Not even lunch time, and it’s been a hell of a day already.”

  “No dinner?” she pouted. “No dancing?”

  She uncrossed her legs. After a suggestive pause, she crossed them the other way, taking just enough time to let me see that she'd selected her undergarments to match the dress she wore. I was too worn out, and maybe too old, to snap at the bait.

  “There's nothing at all I can interest you in?” she persisted.

  “We've danced enough, Mrs. Cleveland. What interests me now is getting to the bank with your check before it closes. No offense, but you're leaving town. At least, I hope you are.”

  She sat up and stared at me. Underneath the seductive makeup, her face changed.

  “You son of a bitch,” she said.

  She picked up her purse and pulled out her checkbook and a fountain pen.

  When she had almost finished writing it out, a teardrop splashed onto the check and ruined it. I hadn’t realized she was crying. She tore it off the book, crumpled it into her purse, and started on a fresh one. I felt sorry for her, but it was too late for that.

  “I hate you,” she said, not looking up. “I thought I was in love with you, but you're a bastard like all of them.”

  After she finished, she shook the check a couple of times to dry the ink and then tossed it onto the desk in front of me.

  “Maybe you won't turn down the next poor girl who needs you, who wants to share her life with you,” she said. “You don't know the first thing about love.”

  “I don't know anything about love, Mrs. Cleveland.” I felt suddenly even more tired than just the liquor could account for. “You're right about that. From my experience, I'm not sure what anyone sees in it.”

  She stood up and arranged herself without drying her eyes, and then went out without speaking to me again. The door stayed open behind her.

  “What the hell?” I asked, of no one in particular, and no one answered.

  I looked at her untouched drink and decided it would be a lot of trouble to pour it back into the bottle. I stared out the window and drank it slower than the first one.

  Looking out my third floor window, I couldn't see the ocean unless I leaned out far enough to risk falling, but it wasn't very far away. Sometimes, late at night, it got quiet enough that I could hear it. The building stood on lower State Street, in downtown Santa Teresa. It wasn't much, just a waiting room with a small desk for the secretary I didn't have, and my office behind a frosted glass door. A lot of traffic rolled under my window during the day and a lot of drunks rolled out from the bar downstairs at night. It suited me and made me feel like I was in the middle of things.

  When I finished the drink, I went up the hall to rinse the glasses in the men’s room. I capped the bourbon and put it away. The folded check went into my breast pocket. I got my hat and locked the office door behind me.

  “Share her life with me,” I muttered, shaking my head. “The next poor girl who needs me.”

  At the bank, I asked the young woman in the teller's cage for fifty dollars in cash and to deposit the rest into my account. She threw a sweet smile my way as she counted out the bills. I figured that I'd better leave in a hurry before I made her cry, too. I
folded the three tens and four fives into my wallet, and went home to take a nap.

  -Two-

  Saturday, June 28, 1947

  Santa Teresa County, California

  3:00 a.m.

  Charlene Cleveland felt happy for the first time in a very long time.

  Two suitcases lay on the seat behind her, and another in the trunk. They weren’t much, but they would do. The eyes that looked back at her from the rear-view mirror were still young enough and pretty enough, and she had the face and legs to match them. She had five hundred dollars in her purse, a friend waiting for her in Vegas, and a belief that things worked out fine if you gave them the chance.

  A radio station came into range, and she turned it up just as a saxophone blew and held a long string of notes. They streamed out the window and unfurled in the red slipstream of her taillights. Tattered by the dark wind, they swirled and floated and finally settled onto the road. The music lingered on the faintly warm asphalt long after the car was gone.

  The two lanes wound their way through the canyon, up and down a forty-mile stretch of hairpin curves and sheer drops. The macadam twisted and turned and dipped. It didn't lend itself to being driven easily during the day, and it got worse at night. The price for a mistake could be a drop of three hundred feet or more into a brushy gully. Some car wrecks weren't found for months after they happened. Some were never found.

  There were easier ways to get from the coastal city of Santa Teresa to the highway that raced across the desert to the state line, but all the easy ways needed a detour south nearly to Los Angeles. This road, straight over the old mountains, saved at least a hundred miles of travel.

  The night air smelled of cooling rock and chaparral, and carried occasional perfumes of the almond and orange groves she passed, tucked into the invisible hillsides. Their sweetness exhilarated her, and she drove a little bit faster than she should have, chasing the beams of her lights around the bends, following the white line in the middle of the road.

  It all smelled like freedom. Eighteen months of bad marriage now a dream, and she wondered how long it would take her to forget her married name. She would never see the wretched city behind her again. She planned to take the tan Ford convertible she drove to a dealer's lot as soon as she got where she was heading. She loved it, but it had been a wedding present, and she planned to leave behind every single thing that reminded her of the slaps, insults, threats and infidelity.

  She was leaving behind the constant sickness of fear, and that was best of all.

  Two years ago, she had looked out the window of the office where she worked and saw the people running out of buildings and pouring from doorways to mill around in the street. She stared at the other girls who were typing at desks across from her, and then they all jumped up together and dashed out.

  Someone in the crowd shouted “VE day!” when she asked what was going on. She had no idea what that meant but she joined the spontaneous kissing and shouting, anyway. After a little while she heard Adolph Hitler was dead and the war in Europe over. The soldiers would be coming home soon, and things would go back to the way they had always been.

  She had laughed and danced with the rest of them, but deep inside she didn’t know if she wanted things to go back to the way they had been before the war. She had a job, some money, and a lot of freedoms she didn't used to have. That night she got drunk in a series of bars where there were more fistfights, more screams, and a lot more blackness than usual. She wondered if maybe other people felt the way she did about things going back to how they had always been.

  A strange man took her to a hotel. In the morning, she looked at his sleeping face and didn't remember him. When he woke up he asked her to marry him. Somehow she wasn't surprised, and she said 'yes' out loud, even though she said 'no' inside. His name was Sal Cleveland. He was older than her, and he had a beautiful face. He dressed wonderfully and knew exactly what to do to her once he'd undressed her.

  He was a gangster. She found out later that he was a monster, too, but by then it was too late.

  Her wedding had been a white vision, not at all the way she imagined a hoodlum ceremony would be. Blossoms filled the church, and the priest beamed at her. The satin and silk, the candles and the bright solemn words were a world away from anything Charlene had known, far removed from any expectations she'd held for herself. Afterward, the great hall burst into a riot of bubbles and clinking silverware and softly colored lights that matched the floating music. She took a slightly tipsy turn around the floor with her groom, and the guests lined the edges of the dance floor, clapped enthusiastically and nodded their approval.

  They watched her dance, and she forgot all about the gap between her front teeth and didn't so much mind her fanny, which spread just a little wider than those that trailed the women in elegant fashion magazines. She had a pallid, pretty face, good legs, and fine blonde hair as yet untouched by chemicals. They all watched her and she felt every bit of the power of her youth and beauty. She drank wine and laughed and enjoyed the eyes as they followed her.

  Fear intermingled with the admiration she felt from the crowd, and some of that was fear of her. She was now and forever tied in matrimony to the man who had walked the city of Santa Teresa on a leash for the last decade. She sensed that behind the respectful deference lay the urgent need to please, to curry favor, or to escape attention. She was settled in now, under the leathery wing of the most feared gangster between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

  She wasn’t Charlene Arnott anymore. She was Mrs. Sal Cleveland, and her bridegroom was splendid. Afterward, she always remembered the lily he had worn in his lapel, and how it had smelled like a funeral. She danced and danced, and as she went around and around she tried not to look too deeply into his lovely eyes. Some instinct told her not to gain the attention of whatever swam in them and peered up from beneath their surface.

  She decided it was all wonderful, and that she finally had what rightfully belonged to her. If her new husband made her a little nervous, it seemed a small price to pay.

  The radio station faded, and she spun the dial back and forth, past a blur of static and meaningless voices until she found the music again. Her pale profile glimmered, nearly ghostly in the tiny glow from the dashboard gauges. She bit her lower lip. Despite the constant working of the road beneath her, she remained lost in her thoughts.

  The convertible passed the entrance to one of the isolated groves tucked away in the hills. Her headlights briefly illuminated the shiny black flank of a large sedan parked nose-out, facing the road. Charlene's eyes didn't register it, and she sped by. It was a Buick, one of the new ones with mean-looking swept back rear decks that had come out after the war. A few seconds after the Ford had gone, the saloon's big engine rumbled to life and the headlights came on. It paused for a moment at the edge of the highway, and then the exhaust roared and it sprayed gravel from the rear tires as it took off, following her.

  Charlene remembered the long days in the big house that overlooked Santa Teresa’s harbor. Marital relations began to include slaps, insults and small and occasional bedroom humiliations that grew bolder as time went by. Prostitutes from the nightclub Sal owned, the Star-lite Lounge, became occasional visitors to their home and later to their bed.

  In time, it all began to seem normal, and she believed the unhappiness she felt was her own fault. Isolated and numb, any attention at all made her grateful. Her days were spent alone, by the swimming pool. She would have liked to go into the water, but she had never learned to swim and there was no one here to show her how. She sat on a chair and looked at the ocean instead.

  The road began to rise more steeply as it bent and switched its way up the mountain. She outran the beams of her headlights as she entered and exited the curves, and Charlene shifted the transmission into second gear and tried to focus on her driving. She knew her drifting thoughts were dangerous, but after a few moments she got lost in her reverie again, unable to control her hateful memories.

>   All of it had stopped seeming normal almost two months ago. One night Charlene awakened abruptly from a numb sleep. Sal had come home drunk, furious, and nearly incoherent. He wanted to talk, and she was at first grateful to be an ear for what bothered him. He sat on a chesterfield next to her, his head on her shoulder. She had listened, at first sympathetic and then with increasing horror. She knew what happened to people who crossed Sal Cleveland.

  Behind her, as yet escaping her notice, the Buick saloon swayed on its springs as it rocketed through the curves, closing the distance between the two cars. Driven expertly, its large exhaust bellowed down straight-aways. Its brake lights flashed only occasionally as it twisted down through arroyos and up the mountain.

  Sal had told her that a woman had come to Santa Teresa, a woman who had betrayed him years before, and later escaped the city. He didn't have to tell Charlene that the woman had been his lover. Now she was back, and living openly in the city. Sal didn't explain why this enraged him as much as it did. He vowed to kill her. He said he would burn her to death. He said Charlene would be there when he did it, so she understood how he dealt with betrayal.

  It was too much, burning someone to death. It was much worse than beating them or shooting them with a gun. The idea had frightened her badly, so badly that she knew she had to get out. She knew she needed a divorce, and she knew that Sal wouldn't give it to her. Most of all, she knew that she needed help, and a lot of it.

  A mile behind her, the Buick's driver began to catch occasional glimpses of the tan convertible's taillights, appearing and disappearing in the curves ahead. Behind the wheel, he tossed his cigarette out of the open window and smiled.

  Charlene remembered how she had finally found help in the form of a private detective with a nondescript office on State Street. One lucky day she had passed his building, and seen his small sign. Surprised by her own audacity, she had impulsively abandoned her shopping and gone up the stairs and into his waiting room. He was indeed a detective, she discovered. His name was Nathaniel Crowe.