A Signet Society by Grant Tracey

A Signet Society by Grant Tracey

The crowd in dark wool and gray parkas gathered around the body like a greasy lake.

Through perforated rain Eddie Sands caught a dim flash of emergency vehicles and a black-and-white with a lean cop directing traffic away from the Empress, the only hotel in Winsome.

“They say the fella took a high dive off the balcony—Fourth floor.” Eddie’s fare was an Indian who was leaving the Trent Inn for the rez on Curve Lake. “Some say he was pushed. Either way, pretty rough, innit?” He popped a Certs breath mint.

“Yeah—”

Eddie wanted to take a left at the T but access to Water Street was blocked so he did a tight U-turn, catching a white flash of a covered body on a stretcher, the corpse’s left hand occasionally tapping the ground with a series of inadvertent grace notes while being wheeled to the ambulance. On the fourth finger a signet ring, sterling silver, with an embossed cross on a pebbled oval background.

Eddie had seen it before. Many times. Around town. On people’s fingers.

And just two hours ago.

Her rigid shoulders said it all.

Lana Frost, WKLL’s weather girl, stood by the TV station’s side doors, shielding her eyes from the arc of Eddie’s headlights. She didn’t want to get in his cab. The heavy fella waiting with her was twenty years her senior. He wore a gray Dobbs fedora with a black feather and held firmly to her arm as he guided her into the backseat.

“The Empress—” He muttered, and then said something about necessary changes, Q ratings, and test audiences. She said something about getting a degree in literature and journalism from Queens University, not a degree in being a babe.

As they drove away from the station a new ’68 Opel GT followed them for several blocks, maintaining an even distance that verged on proprietary surveillance.

“Nielsen numbers aren’t good. Me and Harry will have to make some tough decisions.”

Eddie glanced up into his rearview. “Does Harry own a bronze Opel—?”

“Yeah,” Dobbs said.

“Hmm,” Eddie mumbled.

Lana’s eyes were downcast, the white part in her blonde hair a dim glimmering. The shadowy clouds in the dark sky resembled chunked-up asphalt.

They entered the sinewy fog of downtown, misty curtains of rain falling, as they passed storefronts on Water Street: Jameson’s Mens’ Wear, Miller’s Hardware, Wister’s Martinizing. All of the stores were owned by men who Eddie often saw, Thursdays, gathered outside the Armory for a night of poker, signet rings glinting under bright streetlights and red flashing neon. But once you headed south of downtown, along the river, streetlights were spare, spaced much farther apart, and there were no neon signs for businesses. There, storefronts were worn white bricks in need of a face lift.

Within minutes Eddie pulled up in front of the Empress, a late circa 1920s hotel with Art Deco marbled fronting and a gold gladiator standing watch over Winsome from the facade’s peak. The gladiator’s shield featured a cross in the same pattern and pebbling as the signet ring on Dobbs’s hand.

 “We’ll see what we can do,” he said, pulling Lana from the cab.

Around midnight Eddie had a request call at the laundromat on Franklin, several blocks west from the Empress.

Lana sat in a metal chair by a long narrow masonite table, reading a paperback. The left side of her face pebbled with faint scuff marks. “You remember me?” She pushed scraggly strands of hair from her eyes.

Eddie nodded. “Seen you on TV—”

“Can you forget you saw me, I mean tonight—?” Once you hear my story, you’ll want to help, she said. After all, “you were that guy that killed those two hitmen who were threatening that woman and her two kids—”

“Yeah, in Bingston—”

It was all headline fodder for a week or so a few months back in the Winsome Mercury.

“My boss—” she hesitated. “He ran the story on TV—he said you were primetime—”

“The guy in the Dobbs hat or the guy in the Opel—?”

“Yes.”

He pointed to the scuff marks. “Signet ring—?”

“Yes. Touch up will take care of it—” She’d be back on air, tomorrow.

“How long were you sitting here—?”

A couple of hours. She held up Peyton Place. “I’m a slow reader—”

“It’s a big book—you want to talk, there’s no one else here—”

“No—”

“Where to?”

Her apartment. It was in a block of tar paper flats, south along the river. 720 Eskridge.

“I know the area—” He suggested she report it to the police, they’d find traces of her skin in the dead man’s ring—

No, no way, she said. Tomas Mann was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the inner circle of power that runs Winsome. He played poker with the Chief of Police, Thursdays.

“Yeah. I know what you mean—” Two years ago, Irene Sizemore, a woman Eddie had been in love with, was “scuffling” with her husband. At least that’s how Vic Sizemore, who ran the local pulp and paper mill, defined the “altercation.” He was part of the country club set, bowled Wednesdays with three of Winsome’s high ranking personalities, and the night of the beating he stood on his manicured lawn, while Irene lay crumpled inside, and shared cigarettes with the responding officers, the same officers Eddie had seen the week before, driving home from the police station in suspiciously affordable new sedans. The police filed their report as “an accidental fall” and Vic was let off with a reprimand.

Eddie winced a little, drifting back to bright hexagonal lamps on brick streets, and the plum-tinted bruises around Irene’s pale blue eyes.

Lana’s apartment was powder blue with pink lamp shades and rows and rows of books on makeshift shelves of plywood and brick dividers. They ate donuts from Cohen’s, drank coffee, and she told her story: the late Tomas Mann, aka Mr. Dobbs, ran the station, coordinated advertising, and drove an Army-era jeep, with a large white star, because it promoted a patriotic image.

“That jeep has a wide turning radius,” she said. “The back of my neck and shoulders still hurts from riding around in that damn thing—”

The coffee was deliciously bitter. When Eddie first returned from Korea, it took awhile to adjust to the stronger aroma and taste, stateside. He was only nineteen over there, and the Instant Nescafé that came in little packets of rations was always watered down.

“Anyway,” Lana said, “Mann wasn’t happy with the responses from test audiences. They didn’t warm to her, said she was too smart, her hair too short, severe. ‘Men don’t want to fuck you,’ Mann said. ‘Well, they say you lack sex appeal, but it means the same thing—’” Mann insisted she get excited about the weather, like she does about the books she reads. Be ebullient—

“Honestly, I had to look up that word,” she now confessed.

Eddie found her self-deprecating vulnerability charming.

Pressured, she stayed behind after the broadcast, had some drinks in Mann’s office, and then he phoned for a cab. They needed to continue the conversation, at his other office, on the fourth floor of the Empress. “I knew where this was heading, Eddie, but I was afraid to say no, I was afraid of losing my job—”

“Why was Towns following us?”

She paused, gathering her words carefully. “Towns thought that Mann had designs on me—”

“He was right, wasn’t he?”

He’s the jealous sort, she said. “The bottom line for Towns is business. Nothing must interfere with business—” He’s always wanting me to show more cleavage on set, she said, as her gaze met Eddie’s. It quivered with a sort of defiance. “At his hotel suite, Mann got me talking about books again, and I got animated over Metalious and how Leslie Harrington maintains abusive control over working class families. I mean, the book is full of hypocrisy, and Mann said ‘could we see just a little bit of that excitement on TV?’” 

Eddie lit a Lucky.

“They don’t care about high pressure systems, they just care about raising the blood pressure of men’s libidos.” She shook her head and sighed into a hand tented by her lower lip. There was a bruise on her left wrist where they had probably struggled. “Thin is what’s in these days, and I ain’t got thin—” I’m no Jane Birkin, she said.

Lana was full-chested, big hipped, and carried herself as if she were skating for a team at a roller derby.  “And my nose isn’t exactly delicate—” Zaftig my mother said to describe my figure. Big, big girl, my father said, when he chose to be kind—

“Your looks are a lot more than okay—” Eddie slurped the last of the coffee and his feet shivered with the cold of Pork Chop Hill.  His feet were never comfortable over there. He was always looking for a good pair of boots. Sometimes he thinks, even now, he’ll never find footwear that fits right.

“What else could I do? I said, ‘yes, you’re right, yes, I need to win over our male audience.’ He was pleased that I saw things his way, and then somehow we were on the balcony and his hands were inside the buttons of my sweater, pushing me up against the wall, and I kneed him hard, and then he smacked me with the hand with the ring, two, three times, and I pushed, really pushed with all my legs and ass and back and he toppled, down, down, down.”

 Eddie believed her story.

When his shift ended at 6 a.m, he was asked to stop by the cop shop for a talk. They knew he was one of the last to see Tomas Mann alive.  “We understand there was a girl with him—”

Officer Davis asked the questions. He was a prosperous looking fella with a big belly, white hair and odd stray streak of yellow that the bluing had failed to touch. His coal, cold eyes never seemed to blink. His twenty-something partner jotting notes was Officer Mooney. He had a jarhead cut, hair full of iron filings.

“I drove him and him alone from WKLL to the Empress—So, you guys think he jumped, huh?”

“Where did you hear that—?”

“I’m a cabbie, remember?—word gets around—”

He had no history of depression, Davis said.

“I guess he won at poker on Thursday, huh? Maybe your Chief gave him a push.” Eddie’s shrug stretched to a smile.

“You’re a real character, aren’t you, Sands—real funny guy—”

“I try to be—” Eddie’s lopsided grin echoed the one on his hackie’s license.

“The guy working the Empress desk that night remembers a blonde—”

“Well, Mr. Dobbs and his signet ring must’ve met her in the hotel lobby—Maybe she had a signet ring, too?”

“What’s with all this signet ring jazz?”

“Fourth finger, left hand—” Like the one you’re wearing, Eddie said.

“There was no ring—not on the decedent—”

“No ring,” young Mooney echoed, his pencil scratching obscure runic symbols.

Yeah, and no domestic abuse, Vic Sizemore vis-a-vis Irene Sizemore, just scuffling and an accidental fall—Uh-huh.

“The blonde kept her face turned from the guy at the desk, but he thought he recognized her from somewhere—”

“Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m always recognizing people from somewhere,” Eddie said. “It’s an occupational hazard with us cab drivers.” A towel was stuck in his throat. “I’m sure it’s the same for guys working the front desk of a hotel—”

Three days later, Evelyn Williams was sitting at the Formica table, eggs, bacon, and coffee waiting for Eddie.

She had stayed over at his trailer court home on a weeknight, and they were circling around being a full-time couple. She had graduated from Polis College two years ago, and was getting her Masters in Library Science.

He kissed her. “Thanks—” He slumped in a chrome chair that once belonged in a diner.

“Rough night?”

“It was fine—the usual—” he lied. When Evelyn was fourteen, the man she babysat for drove her home, and on the way pulled over, and messed with her, and then forced her to remove her shirt and bra while he jerked off into a hanky. He owned Williston Pontiac Buick and Williston Ford, the only two car lots in town, and lived near Vic Sizemore’s place on Parkhill, a Lego-like stack of expensive Victorian homes, shining brightly under hexagonal lamps. People won’t believe you, he said, a girl who lives by the river.

Eddie never doubted Evelyn’s story because he too had  felt hisshare of brutality and pain, as a kid, courtesy of a series of “uncles” who smacked him and his Mom around pretty good, breaking her arm, and Eddie’s too, and his nose when he was seven. At seventeen, ran away from home, enlisted. At nineteen he was in Korea, and what he saw there was in many ways worse than life in Iowa, but Eddie vowed to never be a victim or let others he cared about be victims again. To protect Evelyn, he didn’t tell her about the fare that pulled a knife on him tonight, saying something threatening out of a B-movie, and how Eddie audibly mumbled, “Sure you’ll get in a couple of jabs, but I’ll kill you before you kill me.”

The fella knew about Eddie’s war record. Silver Star. Bronze Star. Two Purple Hearts.

He didn’t know about the gun that Eddie slept with under his pillow. Only Evelyn knew that, but the fare had heard something or other about the two hitmen who said their long goodbyes in Bingston.

So, they drove around for forty minutes and his fare talked about bowling, seven-ten splits, the watered-down product of the NHL, having expanded from six to twelve teams, and women who only wanted to fuck and how all women’s legs were a pair of fuckin’ scisssors, threatening, threatening—Eddie gently talked the knife away from the fella, bought him a coffee and donut at Cohen’s, and eventually delivered him to the hospital.

“You’re fine—?” Evelyn now asked.

“Yeah, yeah.” He knew that she knew he was holding something back. “In the pink. Couldn’t be better—”

“You seem distracted—”

“No, no. No, no. I was thinking about the guy three days ago in the Opel—following me—” And the girl, and her story—

“The police still think Mann was pushed from the balcony?”

“No, they seem to have dropped that angle, dropped the whole story—” Eddie shrugged. “I don’t get it—”

“They talking suicide now?”

“Seem to be—”

Evelyn wiped away small pebbles of bacon from the sides of her mouth. “Well, I take it you didn’t hear about your friend from the other night—”

“Lana?”

She did her weather forecast in a man’s black sportcoat and a sheer black turtleneck. After a station break, she returned to the weatherboard sans coat, and during the three-day outlook, there was a lot to look at. “We’re not talking about pressure systems. Low or high. She was braless, Eddie—braless—”

He blinked his tired eyes and tried to stretch away the kink in his neck. That didn’t seem like Lana at all.

“The turtleneck she wore? Had words written in glo-paint: No Adam in Eden—”

(space break)

Frankie (at least that’s what his name tag said) sat at the front desk of the Empress. He had no chin, and a hairline set three-quarters of the way back on his scalp. “I didn’t tell the cops nothing—” His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbows and whatever white the shirt once possessed had now turned to gray from too much bleach. His tie was frayed at the tip. Next to him: a Coke and half-finished bag of corn chips.

“You ID’d the girl—?”

“No. I just saw the girl—from a distance. She kept her face turned away.” Frankie glanced down at his copy of Who’s Who in Baseball. “Just today, I told the cops I was mistaken—the girl was waiting for him in the lobby. She was never in your cab, she never got out of your cab—”

“You changed your story—?” Eddie glanced around. The interior of the Empress looked nothing like the high polished facade with its proud gladiator. The chrome fixtures had faded and showed webbed lines of decay; the once bright sky of carpeting had dulled to light gray; and the  moulding and wainscotting needed more than just gentle touch ups to hide its liver spots. “She paid you off—?”

“Blackmail—?” He grimaced. “Worst people in the world. Blackmailers—I’m an opportunist.”

The last conversation Eddie had with Lana was yesterday at Cohen’s. There, she said she didn’t know why she did what she did, and when she thinks about exposing herself on TV in that way she gets hives. But ownership seemed to like it, her Q rating was up, and Harry Towns extended her contract. “He runs the car lots in town, gave himself a deal on the Opel GT?”

“Towns? I thought Williston owned the car lots—”

“No. That was the name of his grandpa, who turned the franchises over to Towns nine, ten years ago. Towns decided to keep the name. A familiar brand. Williston’s—”

“Hmm—”

“Anyway,” she said, as she dipped her sinker into black coffee, and watched it turn from beige to muddy brown, twice someone had called, demanding money, a $2000 dollar payoff to keep quiet.

“That someone was you—” Eddie now said, eyes darkening as he pointed at the desk jockey.

“It was. I got to thinking that she might be that girl on TV. The one with the—” He cupped his hands in front of his chest. “But I was mistaken—”

“Meaning someone gave you more money. Lana doesn’t have it. Towns?”

“That’s good. You’re good—”

“How much did you get from him, three thousand?”

He shrugged, like the king of the pool hall, proud of how he played a shot off the rail. “I let him off easy—”

“You know who I am—?”

“Yeah, yeah. I heard something about Bingston and a lady or something and her kids—”

“So you know what I’m capable of—”

Okay, okay, he said. I will tell you something, something I didn’t tell the cops. “Mann went upstairs with the girl from the lobby”—he winked—“and—there, there was a second man—”

“A second man? Towns?” The man who trailed them from the TV station in an Opel?

Towns. He runs the car lots in town, Lana had said. Towns. Ten years ago on the side of the road. Evelyn. Towns.

“I know nothing about no damn Opel, pal. But the guy was a big guy. Didn’t see his face, but he followed them upstairs and smelled of Turkish cigarettes—”

Eddie tried reaching Lana at her number but there was no answer. After 11 p.m. he gave up. He wanted to know about the second man, and what really went down, fourth floor, Empress.

Around three in the morning he stepped into Cohen’s for a couple of donuts and a coffee. It was a slow, cold Autumn night.

After checking the hockey scores, he headed to his hack. Leaves fluttered like the wings of bats.

They were waiting there for him, dark sportcoats and high angles to their faces and deep mean eyes. Shorty intermittently tapped a black jack against the palm of his left hand. “The boss says you have been asking too many questions and kindly requests that you drop your investigation.” The taller of the two talked in a calm, even-measured voice. It didn’t fit with the Jack Palance look, or for people living in an upstate New York border town of 58,000. His voice was full of Transatlantic affectation and National Review posturing.

“The boss? The second man, the one that followed the girl and Mann up to the fourth floor—?”

Shorty increased the tempo of the black jack against his hand—

The loquacious one pushed back his felt hat, right hand hovering near the lower buttons of his  sportcoat. “I was hoping things wouldn’t devolve into shallow inferences and tawdry leaps of speculation—”

Eddie turned sideways, knowing that leading with his shoulder, insead of both shoulders, presented less of a target to hit.

Before Mr. Loquacious could reach for the gun in his sportcoat, Eddie rushed him. Catch the enemy unawares, that’s what Audie Murphy wrote in To Hell and Back. Eddie dragged the shoulders of the sportcoat down around the man’s upper arms, immobilizing any movement, and then head-butted him. The fella crumpled against the cab, moaning, blood spilling from his nose. A blackjack swished, glancing off Eddie’s far shoulder. He moved outside the second arc and then inside, landing a sharp left jab toppling Shorty, his felt hat somersaulting into a cluster of curled leaves.

Eddie kicked him in the chin for good measure, a spray of red teeth filling the air. Eddie picked up the black jack at the edge of the street and the gun from inside the loquacious one’s sportcoat. One man held his nose, the other his mouth.

“Tell your boss, I don’t take kindly to guidance—”

Forty-five minutes later, Eddie placed a call to Harry Towns.

“Whom may I ask, is this?”

This fella, too, talked in a clipped Transatlantic accent. Eddie now knew who his boys took their lessons from. “Messed around with any underage girls lately, pal—?”

“Who the fuck is this?”

“Aw. That’s more like it. The name’s Eddie Sands. You’re going to have to get some new boys—”

There was a long pause on the other end. “What do you want?”

“Is that Turkish tobacco I smell through the phone?”

“Huh?”

“I want answers—It was you in the room. It was you who pushed Mann over the balcony—”

A longer pause. Towns gave up his address, and told the soldier boy to drop by.

The brightly lit living room was full of Eisenhower–era furniture: low coffee tables, Eames chairs, lamps with conical shades of varying colors, and a black-and-silver credenza, a Hi-Fi console with a radio receiver tuned to the BBC, no doubt.

Towns sat back on a tan Essex sofa. He wore a bathrobe and a sawed-off towel around his neck. He was a big fella, bigger than Mann. On his left hand a ring: a cross on a pebbled background. In front of him, across a long coffee table: a glass vase of black roses, a gold cigarette lighter, an aluminum ashtray, and a .45.

At the far end of the sofa, Lana, in a matching red bathrobe, no short towel. She couldn’t look at Eddie, her attention drawn to the pattern of asterisk-like snowflakes in a blue area rug.

Eddie gently plunked a black jack and a .38 on the coffee table next to the flowers. “Where those boys come from, anyway—?”

“Central Office, Michigan.” Towns nodded with disapproval. New boys were arriving from Wichita.

Eddie pushed back his fedora and glanced over at Lana. “So, why don’t you tell me what really happened?” She had appealed to his sense of chivalry for not-so-justifiable ends. Eddie was none too happy about it—

Towns crossed one leg over another.

Eddie lit a Lucky. “I figured the guy at the Empress, the guy you bought off for three thousand, good old Frankie, loyal Frankie, contacted you about my questioning him and you contacted them—the Central Michigan boys—”

“That’s some pretty good figuring—”

“It wasn’t that difficult to figure—Frankie is a punk. Don’t make this into some kind of Sherlock Holmes shit—What happened on the fourth floor of the Empress?”

It was Harry’s idea, Lana said. He insisted that she reach out to Eddie, asking him to forget about the car ride to the hotel, or at least, her place at the scene. “He suggested I play on your record of protecting women, like that mother in Bingston with the two daughters—”

Evelyn often teases Eddie over his attraction to alleged ingénues in distress—

“What happened is this—” Towns reached across the table for the gold lighter, and within seconds chuffed on a Turkish cigarette. A spicy, nutty aroma filled the spaces between them. It was a business meeting, and management was considering letting Lana go. But, as they got to talking, and drinking, Mann started touching the girl, “subtle like at first.”

“It wasn’t subtle,” Lana muttered, staring into a flurry of asterisks on the area rug.

“Mann encouraged Lana to talk about the weather as if it were a lover—” Eventually, Mann opened the doors to the damn balcony. And then he got intimate. Like really intimate. “Lana pushed back, and Mann hit her, again and again—”

“Hit her. With a hand full of a heavy signet ring—” Eddie rubbed at the sides of his mouth. I see you’re wearing a signet ring too.

“I didn’t hit the girl—”

“He didn’t,” Lana confirmed, lips pressed firmly.

“I intervened and he hit me—” Towns tossed aside the scrap of towel to show Eddie the full extent of scuff marks on his neck. “And then I pushed back, too, but there’s more to me than the girl, and we stumbled and then he stumbled over the railing—”

“Uh-huh—Stumbled? You saying Mann stumbled—?” Eddie shoved his hands in his pockets. “That railing can’t be that low for him to just stumble—”

“Okay, okay—” He gently waved a lazy hand, full of an ocean’s undertow. “I helped a little—”

“I’ll tell you what really happened—” Eddie smiled a sidewinder grin. “You guys had a three way going on, and things got rough. Lana, you talked earlier of the Jeep’s turning radius and getting a stiff neck. You’ve been in that jeep plenty of times before, haven’t you? Anyway, Mann started hitting Lana, he likes things rough. You, Towns, you just like to abuse women in a more straight-forward fashion, power, signet ring connections, underage girls on the side of the road, while the police turn a blind eye, watch me play with myself. Only this time you tried to do the right thing, and help, and you killed the bastard.” Eddie shrugged. “Not that I’m losing any sleep over Mann’s tumbling fall. And for Lana’s silence you promised her the weather girl gig, and extended her contract—”

Towns said nothing.

“And then for my silence—” Eddie turned to Lana, eyes full of scorpions. “You played me—”

She said nothing.

“I don’t like to be played—”

“Welcome to the club,” Lana said.

“Is that some kind of half-ass apology?” Eddie exhaled sharply, a stream of smoke snaking to the ceiling. “You worried about me, my feelings, is that why you’re here—”

She’s my occasional consort, Towns said, and smiled.

Rocks dissolved in Eddie’s stomach. “And Mann’s signet ring—?”

“The police gave it to me,” Towns said. “We have members of our club, the Chief of Police, on the force—”

Sergeant Davis too.  Eddie adjusted his fedora. “And now the girl has it—”

“Yes,” Towns said.

“I have it,” Lana said.

“She stole it from me. Leverage—” Towns shrugged as if to say, c’est la vie.

“Good for you, Lana—” Eddie smiled in her direction and tapped the ashes off his cigarette into the aluminum ashtray with a McDonald’s crest in its center. There were no McDonald’s Restaurants in Winsome. “I may be dumb and sentimental, but if anything happens to her, Towns, if she should happen to meet with an accident, let’s say, like maybe the break line to her car gets mysteriously cut and she runs off the road into a domino of birch trees, I’m going to come back here and I’m going to kill you.” Eddie took a long slow exhale off his cigarette for emphasis. “You heard about what I did to your boys. And I really don’t like you, dig?”

Towns leaned back into the comfort of the sofa. “I like your style, Sands. I do. Warning taken—” He butted his cigarette. “So you’re not going to talk—”

I don’t know why I’m helping you, Lana, but, no, I won’t talk—

“Fair enough. Let’s drink to that,” he said.

“I prefer drinking alone,” Eddie said.

They were eating grilled-cheese sandwiches, French fries with gravy, and drinking orange egg creams at Regehr’s, the local drugstore.

Eddie was still dissatisfied with the outcome to Lana Frost’s troubles.

He had been played.

“I don’t think that’s fair,” Evelyn said. Her gray-green eyes filled with kindness. “You’re being too hard on yourself.” When she asked for your help, she was desperate.

“Desperate?”

“If anyone’s to blame for the killing of Mann it won’t be Towns. It would be her. Remember the turtleneck she wore, the one with No Adam in Eden scrawled across it? The broadcast you missed?”

“The one the whole town’s talking about—?”

“Well, it’s the title to another Grace Metalious novel, the last one she wrote before succumbing to alcoholism and the pitfalls of sudden fame. It’s about women living without men, or trying to anyway—”

Eddie smiled. Maybe Lana was somewhat of an ingénue afterall.  “Hmm—”

Evelyn reached for Eddie’s hand. Hers was warm. “Seriously—What power does the girl hold?”

“She’s got Mann’s ring, and she’s Harry’s occasional—”

Evelyn picked at some fries, pushing aside the ones that were too crisp. “Compromises. She’s stuck but moving ahead—”

I don’t like it, Eddie said.

“Within relationships of power, women can sometimes find their own power—”

The signet ring? “I still don’t like it—consort—”

“That’s because you’re a romantic—”

“I’m a sap is what I am—”

“You belong in a different world, Eddie.”

He laughed.

“That broadcast—” Evelyn tapped Eddie’s pack of cigarettes against her hand, shook one out, lit it. “I think Lana wanted to get caught or have some miracle happen—”

“Thanks, Dr. Freud—”

“She wanted to be rescued—like you rescued me.” 

They had only talked about the incident in the car once.

“You made it so I could be touched again—”

“Okay, okay, enough. You’re making me blush—”

“I love you,” she said.

“You want to go to the movies—?” Eddie glanced at his Timex. “There’s a western playing at the Bijou—”

“I hate westerns—”

“Don’t worry it’s not John fuckin’ Wayne. It’s one of those Spaghetti westerns—you like foreign films.”

“That’s not what I have in mind when I suggest going to a foreign film. But, sure, okay.” She placed a hand by the side of her neck and tilted her head in the direction of Eddie’s lopsided smile. “I think it’s time I moved in. You asked me two months ago, and last month. I think I’m ready—”

“I haven’t got you a ring—”

“You will—” “Yeah, I will—”

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Grant Tracey 2025