Any Woman He Wanted Read online

  “I know most of the lyrics.”

  Her eyes brimmed again. She kept her face tilted. “What am I going to do, Mr. Ballard?”

  I spread my hands. “It’s like Lieutenant Gault told you, Lupe. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “It’s not for me, Mr. Ballard. I got in it. I can take it. I’m not asking anything for myself.”

  “No? Who are you asking for?”

  She looked straight into my eyes, olive cheeks starkly pale. “For my folks. My mother and father. They’re good people. Even if they are—Spanish.”

  “You don’t have to apologize to me. You don’t have to apologize to anyone for being Spanish. So they don’t speak perfect English—so what?”

  Her mouth quivered. “It’s more than that, and you know it.”

  “Twenty-third Street,” I said, thinking how it sliced the town in two; the right side, the wrong side. “It’s a pretty wide street, eh?”

  “I—can’t get across it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean. But you said it—I didn’t.”

  I sat there and ran my tongue around the inside of my dry mouth. I glanced at the clock. It was five minutes past five, and now, suddenly, the minute hand was racing. Damn Ernie Gault.

  “I’m going to have a baby, Mr. Ballard,”

  I shrugged. “So what else is new?”

  She bit her lip. Her black eyes flashed. “You already knew that, didn’t you?”

  I shrugged.

  “You knew. Because you know girls like me. Don’t you, Mr. Ballard? You were born up there. You knew a lot of us, didn’t you? Cheap, Mr. Ballard? Easy?”

  I moved in my chair. I could never remember having been so tired in my life.

  “You’re a beautiful girl,” I said, “I never said you were cheap. I said there was nothing I could do to help you.”

  But I was hooked. She had raged at Ernie Gault because he had not really understood the depth and scope of her problem, though he had sympathized with her. Now, though her voice still shook and the tears still clogged her throat, she was calmer. As far as she was concerned, she was home. By now she knew Ernie had not lied—I was a boy right off her block. I had her pegged—and she had me. She was still worried, but she was not afraid any more.

  “I’m in trouble, Mr. Ballard. Bad trouble. The kind that could kill my folks.”

  “Why don’t you see some good, reliable, crooked doctor? You’re a nurse, ask around. It’s done every day.”

  She shuddered. “That isn’t the kind of help I want. I want my baby.”

  “Good. Then what’s the beef?”

  She sat as rigid as if she’d turned to stone. She was seeing something I could not see, but something I didn’t care about seeing anyhow “I need help,” she said at last. “It’s not as simple as you think. Won’t you please listen to me?”

  It never was as simple as we thought. I looked at her, at the empty desks, at the few men remaining in the long room, the dust-thickened sunlight at the windows.

  I spread my hands hopelessly. “Sure. You want to come along and tell me your story over bourbon and water? I’ll listen.”

  She hesitated, bit her lip. Her hands were white on her purse. “I’ll go with you,” she said.

  She walked ahead of me into the Greek’s on Lafayette Street; the boys all eyed her, turning from the bar and at the tables, taking their time. Then they looked at me and grinned.

  I chased a drunk out of the rear booth and by the time Lupe and I sat down, the bartender was there with my bourbon and water.

  “Anything for the lady, Mike?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t bother looking at her. “A glass of milk.”

  When I did look at her, she was chewing at that full under lip. When my eyes met hers, she smiled.

  She said, “Can I tell you about it now? I don’t want to waste your time.”

  You’re already wasting my time, baby, I thought. I took a long pull at the whiskey and water. The bartender brought me a second drink, set it down along with Lupe’s glass of milk.

  When I looked up, Doc Yerrgsted was listing toward us. He carried his glass. He did not see Lupe until he was sliding into the booth beside her, across the table from me.

  He stopped, bushy brows and moustache working. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said.

  He looked Lupe over. Observant man, Doc Yerrgsted; he saw everything in a fleeting second that I had seen since I met her, and how much more I would never know.

  “Doc usually drinks his supper here with me,” I told Lupe.

  “Oh,” she said. She did not offer to move over and make room for Doc. This girl had her woes, and there was room for nothing else in her mind. She had me and she wanted no complications.

  “It’s all right,” Yerrgsted said. “I can find another booth. I can always find another booth.”

  I grinned up at him. “Sure, you can.”

  Those wrinkles deepened around his eyes, and he got a roguish tilt to his moustache. “Just one little question, my boy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you entertaining jailbait these days?”

  I laughed. “A man gets harder and harder to please as he get older, Doc. You know that.”

  Doc Yerrgsted smiled, apparently satisfied. He bowed to Lupe. “My child,” he said, “you’re young enough to be this man’s daughter. But this I can tell you. If you had a father like him, you couldn’t do better.”

  “You’re spilling your drink,” I told him.

  “Plenty more where that would have gone,” he said, listing back toward the bar.

  I sat, watching him crouch on a stool at the mahogany counter.

  “He’s right about you,” Valdez said. “You are a good man.”

  “His mind is a sponge.”

  “It would kill you if anybody knew how good you are, wouldn’t it?”

  I finished off my second drink. I motioned the bartender. He nodded. When I looked down, Lupe was frowning again.

  I said, “All right, baby, get it off your chest”

  She sighed. “I may as well tell you about it” And she began her story, talking slowly, her voice flat and dead. I stared at Doc’s rounded back at the bar. A lost lonely old man. A girl, possibly lost looking for home in a stranger.

  “...I fell so crazy in love with him I didn’t even care what happened. What he wanted—that was what I wanted.”

  “Sure, baby. Happens all the time.”

  “But this was different. There was something different about the way I felt about Morgan. When I was a little girl I used to get the same funny feeling when I saw the sun look through the stained-glass windows at the church. Nothing could be bad about what Morgan and I did.”

  “That’s what keeps it spinning, all right”

  “I couldn’t believe it—when he told me he was marrying this girl from Hyde Park.”

  “Takes a lot to cure you, huh?”

  “I was his, for good and all, Mr. Ballard. I thought he felt the same way about me. We loved each other. We were faithful—”

  “You were faithful.”

  She smiled again, a wry attempt at perspective. Her eyes brimmed.

  “Mr. Ballard, there was nothing in the world I wouldn’t have done for Morgan. I—I even promised to stay away from him. Because that’s what he said he wanted. He told me to stay away from him, not to try to see him again. He said he was marrying this—this s-society girl. His family wanted him to marry her.”

  “I like that line. He dug deep for that. I wonder how he thought of it.”

  She bit her lip. “It sounds pretty second-hand to you, doesn’t it? But I loved him so much I promised to stay away.”

  “But that was before you knew about the baby.”

  Her head jerked up. Her black eyes widened and she stared at me. After a moment, she nodded. “Yes. That’s right. It was before I knew I was pregnant. Now things have changed. Everything is all different. You can see that, can’t you, Mr. Ballard?”

  “
I can see it,” I told her. “But I’m just an innocent bystander. The important thing is to get the message to your lover. What did he say? Did you tell him you were enciente?”

  Her mouth quivered. She sat up straight, swallowed. “I can’t tell you what he said. I—just can’t.”

  “Hell, you don’t have to.”

  She reached across the table, caught my hand, gripped it hard. “He said that the baby wasn’t his. That I was loose, cheap—and easy, He said—”

  “Never mind, kid. I know what he said. He hasn’t come up with anything new yet.”

  She sank back against the booth, sighing, exhausted, still hard to convince that her boyfriend hadn’t written the most original script in the world—simply because all this banality had happened to her.

  At last, though, she came to the nub of the matter. “What am I going to do? Morgan ought to give me money for his baby—so I could go away to some hospital where nobody knows me. So the baby would have good care. After all, Morgan’s father is rich. Why should the poor little baby have to suffer?”

  Money. Almost everything came back to that sooner or later. Gimme.

  I moved the whiskey glass around on the table. “Beats me.”

  “I tried to tell Morgan. I don’t want anything for myself. But he’s rich. I want a trust fund for his baby, that’s all.”

  I was frowning. Now that I had begun to listen to her, to give all my attention to what she was saying, the name began to strike a chord. I felt the sweat breaking out across my neck.

  “You told who?”

  “Morgan,” she said.

  “Yeah. Now Morgan. As in J. P.—with money. This is just a name you selected. No real names. Huh?”

  “His name is Morgan Carmichael.”

  I drew in a deep breath. His name was Morgan Carmichael. Sure it was. What else? It was a small world. Until yesterday I’d never seen Fred Carmichael’s son. Yesterday I met him and now was meeting his friends. The redhaired doll, looking along her nose, and then this chick crying in her milk.

  “A lawyer might help you,” I said.

  She leaned forward, shaking her head. “I went to a lawyer. It’s too much like blackmail, with a man as rich as Morgan. I’ve got to have somebody strong, somebody who can talk to Morgan and make him listen. Somebody like a good cop who understands what happened. I’m not asking anything for myself, but—”

  “For the baby,” I finished.

  “Yes. That’s all I want.”

  I pushed my drink away. I didn’t want it. I knew it would be tasteless.

  Now I reached across the table and covered her hands with one of mine.

  “Honey,” I said. “Baby. Sweetheart. Will you do me a favor? Will you listen carefully to me? At first you were a nuisance, and all I wanted was to get rid of you.”

  She smiled, turning her palm upward under mine, clinging to my hand with her fingers. “I know,” she said.

  “All right. But now, I’m from up there on Twenty-third. I’m telling you straight. The father of that boy is the most powerful man in this town— maybe in this state.”

  “I know that. But it’s for the baby, not me.”

  “It’s no good, sweetie.”

  Her fingers tightened. “Please, Mr. Ballard. Mike. Don’t turn me down. Everybody’s afraid, but you’re not.”

  “Honey. I’m trying to tell you. Being afraid has nothing to do with it. What’s the point of fighting if you can’t win?”

  She scrubbed the tears from her eyes. Her voice went flat. “You won’t help me?”

  “I can’t”

  She looked at me again, as if she still could not believe it, as if she still would not give up.

  She stood up suddenly, knocking over her glass of milk. She ran swiftly out of the booth and toward the front door. She did not look back. I watched her until the door hissed closed behind her. Then I stared down at the spreading white puddle of milk on the table. The bartender came running to wipe it up with a bar rag.

  5

  At four-thirty the next afternoon I was leaning back in my chair. Another long day. I had had no trouble sleeping last night, though. Doc Yerrgsted, the Greek and I had sat in the booth for three hours after the bar had closed, drinking and talking. Doc had relived the days of his greatest glory. The Greek had remembered the evil time he once had getting started in the restaurant business because his English was poor. I remember Doc laughing until he cried because we could hardly understand the Greek now, twenty-four years later, when he tried to tell us about it.

  The phone rang, ripping at exposed nerve ends left dangling from this morning’s hangover.

  I grabbed up that receiver quickly—and was instantly afraid the caller might be Lupe. Girls can be hard to discourage.

  “Homicide. Ballard.”

  There was a slight pause, curiously dead at the other end of the line, as if whoever had called had simply ceased to exist. I heard nothing, not even breathing.

  Then, a woman’s voice asked, “Mike? Mike Ballard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mike—this is Carolyn.”

  Like that. After seven years, the phone rings on the tail end of a misspent life and a voice says, Mike—this is Carolyn....

  I pulled in a deep breath. “This is a surprise.”

  “Is it, Mike?”

  “What do you think? Why would you be calling Homicide?”

  She laughed. “I used to think about calling you, Mike. A long time ago. Once in a while I’d get as far as the telephone. You know?”

  “Yes. I’ve been that far myself.”

  “It’s sweet of you to say so, Mike. We were very young—and very foolish, weren’t we?”

  “Psycho.”

  “How are you, Mike? I wanted you to stay for dinner the other day. I truly did. I was so afraid it would be awkward—and yet all the time I was looking forward to it.”

  I made my voice laugh. “You always were a troublemaker.”

  “Yes.... Jerry says to say hi. He’s sorry he tried to show off.”

  “Jerry hasn’t changed much. Maybe he ought to stop feeling sorry.”

  She laughed. “I guess he always wanted to beat you—beat the champ. Is there anything wrong with that?”

  “That depends. Is he sore?”

  “You mean angry with you? No. He’s always admired you, Mike. Even when he tried the hardest to put you down. But he was physically sore the other night—he ate dinner standing up. He says you haven’t changed, Mike. I’m glad about that”

  I glanced about the office. There was the usual festering bustle—the average plainclothes bureau is a scab over a running sore of society. It didn’t seem real, talking to her from a place like this.

  “Mike?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t want to waste your time—”

  “My God. After seven years? I’m glad you called.”

  “It is important, Mike. It’s—about Tom.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry, Mike. Must you sound so—flat? Don’t hate Tom. He’s unbending, straitlaced. But he is a good man, Mike. He has a goodness of the kind that never gets in the newspapers.”

  I put my foot against the desk, avoided kicking it. The breath was tight in my chest “Make no mistake, Carolyn. I never hated Tom Flynn.”

  “But you won’t work for him.”

  I let my foot slip off the desk, sat up straight. “Did he ask you to call me, Carolyn?”

  “Of course not. He’d be furious if he knew I had called. But he’s desperate, Mike. Can I make you understand that? He’s a good man, up against something he can’t fight. He thinks you could. I don’t even understand all of it. I only know he needs you, Mike. Terribly.”

  My hand tightened on the receiver. I could see Lupe Valdez’s tear-streaked face. I thought of Fred Carmichael, whose son had got her into trouble. What would Tom Flynn say if I brought some of the city’s filth right into his swimming pool? I’d had my share of trouble.

  My hand
sweated on that phone. I ached, wanting to replace the receiver, and break this connection, quick, clean and final. Mike Ballard had fought his battles, and had his scars to prove it. I had loved Carolyn seven years ago. But four years ago I had also loved a girl named Peggy. I was a wise, tired old bastard of thirty-three who wanted just one thing, to be allowed to drink with the Doc and the Greek, and never again have to look at tears.

  “I’m sorry, Carolyn.”

  “Tom’s been almost ill for weeks, Mike. He won’t talk to me about it. Isn’t there anything I can say to change your mind?”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Mike, I’ve always loved you. But I’d owe you everything if you would help him.”

  I felt the sweat across my forehead. “Don’t do this, Carolyn. I don’t want you to beg. If I could help, I’d do it—for you. You wouldn’t even have to ask. But there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Mike—I don’t know where to turn. I don’t know what to do. Can I come to see you, Mike? At your apartment?”

  I replaced the receiver gently. I didn’t want to hear more.

  Ernie Gault came over and sat on the corner of my desk. I looked up. He was grinning. His lean, dour face was exercising muscles long atrophied.

  “You look like you just lost your last blonde,” Ernie said.

  Coming from him, the words were crazy. I stared. Hell. Gault would pick this moment for levity.

  “What’s eating you?” I asked.

  He smiled again. If you’ve ever seen a bloodhound chewing briars, I don’t have to tell you what his smile looked like.

  “Mike, you remember four years ago? Christmas?”

  “No.”

  “Sure you do. Grace was in the hospital. Female operation. Remember?” He glanced around to see if he were overheard, lowered his voice, flushing faintly. “Hysterectomy.”

  “No.”

  ‘Aw, come on, Mike. I was up a stump. Borrowed from every bank, loan shark and credit union. You let me have a hundred bucks. If you hadn’t, those three kids of mine wouldn’t of had any Christmas at all that year. You told me I could pay it back any way I wanted to.”

  “I also told you to forget it.”