True Crime полностью

Earlier, before tumbling into bed, we’d sat in this living room, having martinis—a drink I hate, but when Sally Rand offers you martinis in her white art-deco suite before going off to bed with you, you can afford to suffer a little—and leafing through her big scrapbook of show biz clippings and such. There were stills of her in a silent called Paris at Midnight (she was wearing her natural light brown hair publicly in 1926) and another called Golf Widows (but by ’28 was blond); and some on-the-set shots with De Mille, as well as some publicity photos from her Orpheum circuit act, “Sally and Her Boys.” Then the huge front-page spread of her Lady Godvia entrance at the Fine Arts Ball, and the many court appearances her nude dancing earned her (she was given a year in jail, but won an appeal before serving a day) and several pamphlets complaining about her act circulated by “anti-indecency leagues” (anti-indeceny being a lot like pro-decency, I would imagine) and a few stills from the movie she’d made not long ago, with George Raft. I mentioned to her that I knew Raft, and she said, “Small world,” and left it at that. Never name-drop with celebrities.

Now, in the white, modern compact kitchen, where mosaic white tiles chilled my feet, she scrambled some eggs and put me to work squeezing some oranges; she made some American fries, too, and toast, and we sat in the big modern living room, the one little lamp on, the city lights coming through a wall of windows, with the plates on our laps and our feet up on an ottoman.

“Where’d you learn to cook like this?” I said.

“Back on the farm. And I’m a bachelor girl pushing thirty, Heller. If I can’t cook by now, I won’t ever learn.”

“You can cook,” I confirmed. “Why don’t you give up show business and marry me? I’d let you cook like this all the time. Hell, I make good money. It only takes me a year or so to make what you make in a week.”

She made a crinkly closed-mouth smile, while she dealt with a bite of breakfast. Then she said, “If that’s a serious proposal, I’ll give it some thought. But you might as well know I’ll never give up show business. You have to take me and my fans, too.”

“Which fans are those? Feathered, or men with their mouths open?”

“Fans in general. You don’t disapprove of what I do, do you?”

“No,” I said, meaning it. “It’s harmless. And you’re good at what you do. I admire that. It’s really very lovely, your act.”

“Thanks, Nate,” she said. Nibbling on a corner of toast. Eyes sparkling. Corners of her mouth upturned. “I could go for you in a big way. I really could.”

“I bet you say that to all the boys.”

Her smile faded; she wasn’t mad or anything, just all of a sudden serious. She put a soft, warm hand on my bare arm.

“You’re ‘all the boys,’ Nate. I’m no floozy.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest…”

“I know you didn’t. But you got a right to think I sleep around. Any man who had me on my dressing room floor’s got a right to think I might be a trifle…promiscuous. But I’m not. You’re the first man up here in a long time. That ‘oil millionaire’ you checked up on for me, he only dreamed of getting up here.”

“You mean you never cooked him breakfast?”

“Not an egg. Got me?”

“I gotcha.”

“Good. Just ’cause I take my pants off to make a buck doesn’t make me a…”

“No it doesn’t. And if I implied that, shame on me.”

She leaned over and gave me a buttery kiss, buttery from the toast.

“Thanks, Nate.”

“It’s okay, Helen.”

She smiled at that; she had a rather wide smile, too wide by some men’s standards, but I thought it was her best feature.

I figured we’d shut the book on this subject, but she went on, looking off distractedly toward the windows and the lights of the Gold Coast. “It’s just that I wasn’t raised to entertain men in my rooms. I was raised to believe in virtue triumphant, honesty prevailing…the old homilies, the old values. They don’t hold up in the real world too well, though, do they, Nate?”

“Not in Chicago they don’t.”

“Not anywhere. Not in these times. Not since the Crash. How can a man who’s been at his job thirty years suddenly not have a job? How can it be that businesses that have been around for generations suddenly aren’t anymore? I had friends jump out of windows, Nate. With accuracy.”

“Things are getting better, Helen. A little.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just feeling guilty.”

“Why?”

“For being a bad girl and taking off my pants to make a buck. It isn’t what my daddy wanted out of me, and it isn’t what I wanted out of me, either. I wanted to be a ballerina. I wanted to be an artist. An actress.”

“A girl’s gotta eat.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said, eating a last bite of American fries. She chewed somberly, swallowed and said, “Maybe I feel guilty ’cause I get thousands of dollars for strutting around with my pants off, while men with families are getting peanuts for working in a factory or something. Or getting nothing at all, ’cause they can’t even find a factory to work in. It just isn’t right.”

“Why don’t you give all your money to the poor, then?”