Kaleidoscope

  Kaleidoscope

  By the Author

  A Rock and a Hard Place (1999)

  Dead Man’s Bay (2000)

  A Tinker’s Damn (2000)

  Strawman’s Hammock (2001)

  Pepperfish Keys (2007)

  The King of Colored Town (2007)

  Darryl Wimberley

  KALEIDOSCOPE

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©2008 Darryl Wimberley

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-61218-120-2

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  A thick fog clings like a dirty nightshirt to the flanks of the Alafia River. An Indian-summer scent rises from the water. Cottonmouths that would in cooler seasons eagerly feed on bream and bullfrogs fast in wait of deliverance from dog days gone too long even for reptiles to endure. To the west lies Tampa, swathed this summer of ’29 in a gauze of mosquitoes and fruit flies, those plagues only somewhat abated among the palmetto and conifers bordering the banks of the Alafia.

  An unlikely caravanserai convenes along the river’s sluggish bend, a coven of vehicles clinging to a single, serpentine road, two ruts submerged beneath the fog in a pan of loam. Road wagons of all sorts drift in the miasma that attends—circus wagons, gypsy tugs, car homes, and trucks, their wooden beds sheltered by parasols of tarpaulin.

  A handful of cottages and tents mingle with their mobile cousins on this boulevard of sand. Kerosene lamps are mostly wicked out for the night, though in one residence a signature illumination shimmers through needles of pine and shrouds of moss. It’s a vast structure in comparison to the cramped quarters which are propped on wheels or stumps on all sides, a two-poled pavilion rising high above the neighboring canvas roofs. The bigtop tent glows like a Chinaman’s lantern, illuminated from within by a necklace of white-hot globes. You could be drawn like a moth to that enticement. And if you were, you would see, cast onto the canopy’s unsteady screen, an enormous silhouette.

  An Amazon’s shadow ripples with a sluggish breeze, perfectly proportioned, naked. She is bathing. A tub casts its own firmly delineated shadow with avatars of steam.

  “It’s all right,” her voice coaxes from within. “You can come.”

  A pair of breasts lift huge and pendulous. The slap of flesh on water.

  “Come on. Don’t be afraid.”

  A runt-sized man hangs onto a tent pole inside the Amazon’s palace. His larynx bobs with a swig of gin. His tie is loose and filthy and sopping sweat.

  “You want me,” she says. “It’s natural. Can’t be helped.”

  He shatters his hooch against the tent’s pillar and an alarmed snort signals the presence of the tent’s second, permanent resident; a chain shackles an enormous, African elephant to the bigtop’s second pole.

  The beast snorts once again, tossing a pair of well-worn tusks.

  “It’s all right, Ambassador,” she says.

  The aging bull’s ears flap like mammoth fans to cool the woman whom, until now, we’ve only imagined in shadow. She’s not what we expect. She bathes, first of all, this Amazon, not in a tub but in the elephant’s watering tank, an immense, iron-riveted cistern.

  And her figure is not anticipated by the shadow cast onto the cloth of her tent, for this woman is huge. Six hundred and fifty pounds of wallowing flesh, her arms are the size of kegs. Her eyes recede like raisins pressed into a face as large as a pie. A mop of corn silk hair presses flat against a pail-sized skull. She sinks back into the steaming water and her breasts swell like buoys.

  “Come on!” she urges her visitor. “Come on!”

  He sheds his pants, first, as he clambers to the lip of the tank. An erection preposterously out of proportion to his stunted frame stands like a flag.

  “Oh,” she purrs. “Hurry.”

  “Goddamn!” the runt exclaims and dives in.

  He surfaces like a toy between her legs.

  “Hurry!” she moans.

  He plunges into her. Buries himself.

  “Yes…” she hisses. “Yes, there you are! There!”

  Ambassador jerks alarmed against his length of chain—

  —and distorts the silhouette cast onto the canvas outside. A confused play of light and shadow casts the mismatched lovers onto a billowing screen. They sink into the outsized tub. Water thrashes furiously. A groan of effort or passion bursts from the tent’s interior. And then the enraged trumpet of an elephant.

  “AMBASSADOR!”

  The canvas tent explodes outward with a wall of water. The Amazon gushes from her ruptured tank. Ambassador charges through a mangle of iron and, as the Fat Lady screams, stomps her toy-like lover into the sand outside.

  Chapter one

  “Play The Streets”—To set up on the street for an engagement.

  Jack Romaine tamped a sprinkle of Prince Albert along the length of a bummed paper as he scanned the Enquirer for the only news that mattered. There it was. Reds Lose in Late Innings.

  “Damnation.”

  Another fiver wasted on the hometown team. A less compelling banner chronicled the latest effort to clean up City Hall—George Remus Endorses End to Crony System in Cincinnati Government.

  Good old George. Was king of the bootleggers before he got busted. Before he killed his wife. Got away with that one, with the murder. And now here he was a Respected Citizen. A hotshot.

  Some guys truly did have all the luck.

  Jack struck a match to his cigarette and sucked hard. Fucking warm this morning. No breeze off the river. Thank God for the fountain. Jack frequently started his mornings here, on Fountain Square, with a smoke, a newspaper, and a hangover, idling beneath the fountain’s bronze goddess, facing east over what was once the Fifth Street Market but had become a modern boulevard bustling with automobiles and people. A democratic mix. Stock brokers and pipefitters, bankers and hotdog vendors milling up and down the wide street.

  But mostly it was the women kept his attention. Jack liked looking at the women on the street. Flappers with straight skirts and beads. Stockings pulled halfway down, some of ’em. Hair short as a boy’s and capped with a cloche. You’d see ’em in the speakeasies buying drinks with their own cash, cigarettes prominent. Petting some sheik on the sly. It was smokin’ in the boy’s room, for sure. Some real lookers, too.

  And looks were important to Jack. About the only thing he had, really, a movie star’s face and physique. Marquee looks, the girls at Gilberts’ said. A set of peepers the color of hazel set in a wide, square-jawed face which Jack took pains to keep unbroken, unspindled and without obvious mutilation. He had good skin. Smooth as a spanked baby’s fanny, some Josephine once told him. And hair. A thick mane of hair parted straight down the middle and combed b
ack slick and black with Brylcreem. Razor cut to taper at the nape.

  As for threads, he did alright. Always second-hand, but that was peach, you never wanted too much of an air. You saw a lot of knicker and argyles, but Jack favored suits. He owned two. The rags he’d donned for the morning’s business fit him best, a single-breasted sack coat in an Oxford summer wool over a double-breasted waistcoat. Shirt was a little long, a solid-white bosom starched stiff as a board, but he could bunch it up into the sleeves of his coat. No bowtie, he knotted a four-in-hand every morning to set off the wing collar. Trousers were corded and cuffed, though showing a little shine. Shoes were second-hand low-quarters always saddle-soaped and buffed. Of course, anybody with class needed some kind of lid and Jack had one, a black fedora he’d pinched right across the street at Gibson’s.

  Not much in the way of jewelry. A wedding band, which didn’t signify much in these heady times. Not that Jack was obliged to wear a ring; his wife had died with the influenza nearly five years earlier. But it didn’t feel right taking the thing off. Perhaps he needed to be reminded. Perhaps it was just the familiar weight.

  Something.

  Jack had a watch fobbed at a vest pocket, but it was just for show, the timepiece having been broken near the riverfront subsequent to some disagreement or another. Who needed watches, anyway? There was time enough for anything important. Always. Everything else could wait.

  The only accoutrement of value besides his wedding ring was foreign, a kind of broach or pin acquired his last few weeks in the army. Jack kept that brass polished and fixed on his jacket’s wide lapel. It wasn’t like being a Mason or anything, nothing like that. In fact, Jack wasn’t sure just what it was. Some herald embossed with a coat of arms, the inscription etched in a language with which Jack, apart from the empty rituals of Mass, was entirely unfamiliar. There was a story there if anybody wanted to hear it. Which nobody did.

  Get back to normalcy, the president had urged after the war and people ever since were trying like mad to oblige. Nooses give…Gas smells awful…You might as well live.

  Jack slipped his free hand into his pocket to finger a deck of cards. He tried to tell himself he wasn’t worried about work. You could always get by with cards if you were good. If you were lucky.

  Hey, it was good times all around, wasn’t it? Roaring.

  He wanted a drink. For a dime a streetcar would take you anywhere you wanted to go, but Jack was getting shy of dimes. He decided to hoof it. Anywhere along McMillan and Vine would do, but Jack decided on Wielert’s Café. Wielert’s was a dependable place. Boss Cox used to run the show from there, back when the Boss was still mayor. As he approached the café, Jack nodded to the familiar if nameless congregation loitering outside.

  “’Lo, fellas,” Romaine said, slipping through the knot of men to reach the not-well-disguised sally port that provided a boundary between the street and the goings-on inside.

  “Minute, there.”

  A redhead rose slender as a reed from a cane-backed chair. A cane hat and knickers. Jack knew this one, at least.

  “Murdock, what? You working doors, now?”

  “Staponski says you don’ come in.”

  “Hey. We’re old friends.”

  “Staponski says you owe him.”

  Christian Nicholas Staponski. Nickname of Spuds. He ran the place.

  “I owe the man, sure,” Jack shrugged. “So’s half the city.”

  “Yeah, well, your half ain’t welcome.”

  “Look, I got a fiver. You chase me outta here, Spuds is not gonna like it.”

  “Give it to me. I’ll give it to Spuds.”

  “I didn’t fall off a turnip truck, Murdoch.”

  “The fuck you didn’t,” a voice rasped from behind.

  Jack turned to find Nick Staponski filling the speakeasy’s rude foyer.

  “Well, you comin’ in or what?”

  Staponski turned back inside before Jack could reply, rolling on that bad hip. A narrow corridor opened onto the bar. Lots of foam-topped glasses along that polished run of hardwood. Smaller shots of moonshine or in some cases real whiskey scattered in between. A handful of stiffs killing time at the bar. Some sheik alongside a flapper trading shots and cigarettes like she was Diana Mayo.

  “…’Tain’ nobody’s biiiiiiznesssssss…”

  Spuds led Jack past a colored girl cooing beside a quintet of Negroes, to reach a peep-holed door. A single knock opened it. Jack passed into a low-ceilinged room cured with the odors of yeast and tobacco and sweat. Here’s where you got the real action. Cards, numbers, horses. A Crosley radio buzzed on a long counter serving duty as the backroom bar, its vacuum tubes snatching a ballgame from the aether.

  “…should remind you fans that the Reds are scheduled to play a regular season game with the National League champs in October—! Can you believe it? Next thing we’re gonna be pitching strikes past Christmas trees. Incredible…”

  “Who we playing today, the Pirates?” Jack asked almost on instinct.

  “You don’t care,” Spuds growled, shoving Romaine against his rail-less bar. “Now where’s my five?”

  Jack’s mouth dry as sandpaper.

  “I got it for ya, Spuds.”

  “Not honestly, you didn’t.”

  “I’m a working man, now. Got a job.”

  “Where?”

  “Out in Norwood—‘Playing Cards’. I’m a cutter.”

  “You’re a cutter, all right.”

  “Got a pay check to prove it.”

  His first in months. And his last, too, Jack now fingering the deck of cards he lifted when he was fired.

  “C’mon, Spuds. At least give me something to wet my whistle.”

  Staponski shrugged. “If you can pay.”

  “Gimme a beer,” Jack replied and planted his last dollar on the bar.

  Spuds nodded to his bartender. “Set him up.”

  Jack accepted his suds and turned his attention to the radio.

  “…top of the eighth, it’s a tied ball game, but there are no outs and the Reds have a man on second base.”

  “Who’s at bat—? Dresser?” a fob-suited swell queried a couple of stools down. “If it’s Dresser, forget it. Dresser can’t hit the sack.”

  Fully a dozen men and a couple of women now gathered close to the radio. Money changing hands.

  “Who the Pirates got on the mound?” Jack inquired mildly.

  “Dawson,” an emaciated elder coughed into his handkerchief. Jack spotted the red stain.

  Jesus. A lunger.

  Jack took a long draught of homebrew.

  “Dawson’s due,” he announced. “Gonna get a hit, mark my words. Reds are gonna win.”

  Staponski hooted derision. “That’s Romaine. Never saw a bet he didn’t like.”

  Jack shrugged. “Put some money down.”

  “Not ’til I see my green first.”

  “C’mon, Spuds. Red’s already got a guy on base. And no outs! Besides—you heard who the Pirates got pitching.”

  “Who cares?”

  “A rookie. Joe Dawson. Guy’s never won a game in late innings. Never.”

  Spuds maundered over that information, turned finally to his hired help. The bartender shrugged.

  “It’s better than his usual.”

  Staponski rested arms hairy as an ape on his bar.

  “Okay, Romaine, I’ll stake ya. Reds to win.”

  A chorus of voices chimed in, bets shouted out on either side. Jack penciling down wagers and odds on the margin of an Enquirer. Spuds leaning in close.

  “It’s my stake. Whatever you get comes to me, you understand, Jack?”

  “Sure, sure,” Jack took a buck from the lunger. “My plan all along.”

  But a newcomer’s voice cut the action short.

  “Don’t count your money, pretty boy. The fat lady ain’t sung yet.”

  Fist Carlton filled the bar’s interior door, hands hanging white and scarred from the sleeves of a badly frayed overcoa
t. Everybody knew Fist Carlton. Everybody knew Fist’s boss.

  “You comin’ quiet, Jack? Or I gotta work?”

  Romaine knew, then, why he had been allowed with so little proof of currency into Staponski’s back room.

  Jack turned to his host.

  “Didn’t know you were running errands, Spuds.”

  “Big fish eat the little ones, Jack. You know that.”

  “Somebody better goddamn hold my bets, then,” Jack protested. “I got a straight-up deal here, Spuds. You goddamn better not welch.”

  A massive, scarred fist snaked around Jack’s neck like a noose.

  “The fuck are you to complain?”

  Chapter two

  “White Money”—regular currency, U.S. or Canadian.

  Jack Romaine propped himself up stiffly beside Fist Carlton in a Duesenberg’s vast interior, his intestines curdled in knots. There was no conversation, no explanation offered for Mr. Bladehorn’s summons, which left Jack free to anticipate a wide variety of modes of hospitality. The steeple of Phillipus Church came into view, a golden hand and gilded finger extended toward the brooding belly of heaven. Jack judged that Fist was taking him somewhere toward Dayton Street, which he tried to tell himself was auspicious. They didn’t kill you in places like Dayton Street, did they? For that sort of thing they drove you to the riverfront or out of town. And then when Fist stayed north on Vine, Jack was further relieved, calculating a destination somewhere in the Clifton heights of the city.