This Town Called Winsome by Grant Tracey

This Town Called Winsome by Grant Tracey

–1–

Susan Norget was quiet, lost in shadows.

I was worried about her.

She arrived by train from Niagara Falls wearing a wool coat with an imitation fur collar, ankle-high boots, and a modest gray dress with a sash stretched across her body that read, “We’re United Postal Workers.”  She had been at a convention there to strengthen their union or something. She worked the desk at the Winsome PO.

“See the Falls?”

Seen them before, many times, no need, she said, her lips pinching with the dips of winged lines of street lights. Her glasses were small-framed and her blonde hair swept like a scarf to the right. “I just went to meetings and in my free time stayed in the hotel—ordered room service—” My cab filled with the tincture of whiskey.

I smiled my smudge of a grin. “You okay?”

“I will be—” Her voice was parchment thin. “Do I know you?”

There was a touch of push back to her tone so I shrugged with a hand. “Eddie Sands—you probably heard about me, I’m the guy who had his picture in the paper for rescuing Irene Sizemore from an ice house—” Vic, her abusive husband, had kidnapped and planned to kill her and frame me for the murder. With flares and a .45, I killed him, and two accomplices.

“Yeah, I read about that—who didn’t in a small city like this?”

Winsome’s pop is 58,000.

“Did you love her?”

“Irene? Yeah—”

“I remember where I saw you.” She snapped her fingers and the sash trembled. “You bought Girl Scout cookies from my daughters, twelve and ten, a few weeks ago, when you drove them to the Bijou to see a Tommy Kirk double feature.” A smile was in her words. “Saturday is their movie afternoon—” She looked down at her hands. “Live action Disney is awful—”

“Yeah, a four year old with Crayolas could write a better script—”

“Writers—” Her husband Harlan was publisher of The Advocate, a small twelve-page paper that came out on Tuesdays and Fridays, she said. It started off as a bi-monthly advertising supplement and then Harlan got the bright idea to get into the business, creating a radical alternative to the mainstream press. With his best friend, Lonergan Bauer, Editor-in-Chief, they tackled the tough questions: Reparations for the American Indian; the Negro Question and Real, Economic Integration; and What’s Wrong with Falling in Line with the Domino Theory? “The Advocate Club—that was their little group of intellectuals—” She made a face, her words drifting away, eyes clouded with amber, focused on some horizon that only she could see. “I was also seeing a man at the convention, not my husband, and we’re not on the same page—newspaper people—” Them and their spouses, she shook her head—artists, professionals, housewives—pushing boundaries, experimenting with drugs and questioning monogamy and—“The ice house rescue—You’re a good man—”

Moments later we pulled up at the Daws Motel. Susan didn’t have a suitcase or an overnight bag. She tossed a twenty on my front seat.

“I can’t break that—” My first four calls had cleaned out my cash reserves. Everyone was tossing me twenties tonight.

“Keep it,” she said. The drift of an inward gaze darkened her eyes. “I don’t need it—”

–2–

After changing a couple of twenties at a corner gas station and filling up my thermos with coffee, two quick calls followed: a liquored-up fella wanted KFC and a carton of cigarettes before returning to his trailer-court home; a young woman in fishnet stockings, a plaid skirt, and buzzed platinum hair, was headed to a Labor Day party, “Labor Day Observed.” She laughed. College kid.

My clientele, the six-to-six graveyard shift, consisted largely of alcoholics (so-so tippers); strippers (decent tippers so long as you flirted with them); and college kids (the absolute worst tippers in Winsome).

I couldn’t stop thinking about Susan Norget. Keep it. I don’t need it.

She was an X on the bed, breaths broken and barely there.

I had knocked and knocked and knocked and then kicked in the door like a TV cop. My foot hurt like fuck.

On the floor, an empty bottle of Jack and sleeping pills.

I called the front desk, “get an ambulance, pronto,” and then poured coffee from the thermos’s plastic cup into her. She coughed and gagged and coughed. “Wake up, wake the fuck up—” She slumped against me.

I slapped her four or five times.

Her eyes fluttered, fallen mascara lines now resembled black icicles.

Somehow I got her into the shower. Cold water thudded and I worked her mouth and throat. My fingers must have tasted like gasoline, coffee, and potato chips to her.

Quickly there followed the thick smell of stomach acid. “Eddie?”

“What you do a silly thing like this for—?”

“I am a silly thing,” she said.

–3–

The next day I visited Susan at the hospital. Her story wasn’t in The Advocate but it was second-page news in the Winsome Mercury. She had a private room and smiled gently in my direction, veils of hope crowding at the corners of her eyes. She wasn’t wearing glasses and I wondered how well she could see me.

She motioned me to sit next to her in a white wooden chair with blue padding.

We talked, for I don’t know, forty or fifty-five minutes: movies, books, and how funny Get Smart was. It was her daughters’ favorite show too.

They and their father had dropped by several times leaving pastel drawings and bright yellow flowers in a vase on the table. Susan’s friend Donna, a painter and the wife of The Advocate’s Editor-in-Chief, brought in an oil painting to cheer her up. It filled the space above a sink.

Donna’s painting featured a peasant woman nursing a baby in the middle of a recently plowed field. The sun wobbled in the sky like a communion wafer. The ochre-hued dirt was so real that I could almost smell the turning of the earth.

“My husband’s a good man, too—Lots of men are good to me. Some better than others—” Susan stared at the painting. “My origins were anything but  idyllic—” She grew up in Winsome’s east end, a tough, tough neighborhood, with bald lawns, short gravel driveways, and discarded auto parts in front yards.

I didn’t plan to have an affair, she said, but I did, and I loved him, like you loved Irene. “I really loved him.” It started at an Advocate Club gettogether, a goofy game of naked Twister. Donna was there. So, too, Donna’s husband, Lonergan. Harlan wasn’t. He was working late on the paper. After Twister the conversation turned to Victorian morality, Alfred E. Kinsey, and the women put their house keys in a hat and whatever key the fella picked—well—“Why do they call it wife swapping. It’s so patriarchal—”

I tented my fingers together. “Your husband doesn’t know, does he?”

“No—Why not husband swapping? Anyway—” I really don’t like the painting, she said. Too much wholeness and holiness and self-sacrifice. “The sun, the sky, should be flames on fire—”

“Take it down, if you don’t like it—”

“I can’t. Donna painted it—”

“Take it down—”

“Cordell Skinner, that bastard, is blackmailing me.” Skinner owned a chain of coffee shops throughout upstate New York. “He hired a detective to follow me and take pictures of me and my lover, together in restaurants, parks, in bed—several photos.” She gave Skinner hush jewelry, all her savings to keep quiet, but now he was threatening to tell her husband and take the evidence to the Mercury unless Harlan delivers a lot of cash.

“What does the Mercury care? Affairs—” I rubbed at the edges of my mouth.

Her husband is a radical publisher of a rival paper, she said. “His politics are left of left, and it’s all about advertising dollars. Shrinking the pie. He rounds up a lot of advertising for The Advocate. They’ll want to destroy him, to get those dollars back, and close his newspaper down.” She positioned a pillow behind her back and sat more upright. “The photographs—” Skinner got in good with Harlan because he bought up chunks of advertising in the paper for his coffee shops. From there, he got himself invited to our club’s activities. “It was all a clever sabotage plot—”

“Don’t worry. I’ll deal with Cordell—”

I offered her a cigarette.

“This is a no smoking area,” she said.

I lit it for her.

She inhaled and exhaled slowly.

“My dad was a cop, a crooked cop in Philly. I never really knew him,” I said. “After his death in 1934, my mom moved us to Iowa where a series of ‘uncles’ beat me regularly, one even broke my left arm—” I reached for her cigarette, took a drag, handed it back—“No one’s going to hurt you—”

–4–

It wasn’t until Saturday that I met up with Cordell Skinner. He lived up in Parkhill, a rich exurb with brick streets and turn of the century hexagonal lamp light. His home resembled a castle, loudly distanced from the Victorian homes that filled the block. Instead of square lines and stacked boxes, his home had a giant turret, a wide curve of a front porch, and an equally wide archway—

He was slunk back in a chair, a bruised plum rising under his left eye.

I have an unconventional way of knocking.

“You sonofabitch—” He readjusted his red kimono, tightening the sash. A dragon, precariously perched and ready to spring, filled his chest..

“Lay off Susan Norget. You talk to her husband, I’ll finish what I started—”

“It’s not her husband I’m after, it’s the paper—”

“So I hear—”

His eyes glazed over with a lazy days gaze.

His living room was crowded with Eisenhower–era furniture: a low-slung coffee table; black Hi-Fi unit with silver speakers; Eames chairs; and floor-to-ceiling lamps with five different colored cones of light. On the bookshelf: wood sculptures by Jose P. Alcantara.

I get the dope on his wife, a rival paper uses it, destroys the publisher’s credibility, he said. “His competitors want all of the advertising dollars—” He smiled. It was dirty. “And I hear the Advocate Club is into some kinky shit—”

I pulled him and his smug smile up out of his leather upholstered chair and tossed him sideways like he were an army duffle bag landing on a bottom bunk. I saw action in Korea, 1952–53. Pork Chop Hill. Radio operator.

He slammed against a coffee table.

A Howard Miller clock followed him down.

California lilacs, a heady smell, like boiling honey, filled the air. It wasn’t spring time. “You got a girl in here?”

“I’m generally working on something—”

The door across from us, nearest the kitchen, was locked. “He’s not worth it, sweetheart. He’ll take everything you own.” I turned to Skinner. “You threaten Norget or talk to her husband, you’ll be done talking, pal—”

“Is that a threat—?”

“Yes—”

He shook his head. “I take what I want—”

“That’s for sure,” said the female voice on the other side of the door.

–5–

Within hours, Cordell Skinner was dead.

The Mercury splashed his death in lurid headlines in Sunday’s dailies. Skinner was found in his upholstered chair by a business associate, late Saturday. Two in the chest. Two in the groin. .38 shells scattered throughout the room. “This kill was real personal,” the Chief of Police said. “Real personal.” One article made a passing reference to The Advocate and strange goings on in an exclusive  club that Skinner was a fringe member of and that his death might be related to an affair he allegedly had with the spouse of a prominent person on the Advocate’s editorial staff.

Cordell? I thought he was blackmailing Susan,not sleeping with her. This is who she loved?

There was no mention of yours truly in the stories, but the police had questioned me for two hours that morning. They knew I had rescued Susan from a suicide attempt and that I had visited her several times at the hospital.

They also knew I rescued Irene from her kidnapper husband. Killed the son of a bitch. And they connected the loose dots, as police will.

What they didn’t know? I had tossed Skinner about like a duffle bag. Threatened him. And there was a girl behind the door.

But if they found her, what might she say?

Hungover and my mouth full of dust that just wouldn’t go away, I visited Susan after my run-in with the gendarmes at the cop shop. Pain pounded behind my eyes. I dry swallowed two Anacin.

It wasn’t me, Susan, I said.

She was glad Cordell was dead. Blackmailers. And she hadn’t slept with him, ever. “My husband has an alibi. He was with his kids. A show at the Bijou. Some Disney shit.”

I sat in the chair next to her. “What happened to your hair—they do that?”

Gone was the soft swoop of a scarf. In its place: a jagged pixie cut.

“No, no I did.” She smiled a lopsided grin. “I cut it myself. I know, I know, don’t say it—it shows—” She laughed. “The cops have been asking you questions—?”

“Yeah.” I tapped my fingers together and absently shrugged. “They haven’t connected me with Skinner yet—I like your hair—”

“Liar—” She squeezed my arm.

I don’t know why, but at that moment, I think I fell in love with her. I know it’s weird, but I’m an impulsive fella. I wanted to kiss her—

“That’s not all I did—” She nodded in the direction of the wall above the sink.

The painting was gone.

“Good for you,” I said.

Suddenly a woman appeared at the threshold of the door. She wore a dress the color of autumn leaves, with purple paisley patterns floating around like so many amoeba. Pushed back on her fine dark hair was a Robin Hood hat.

Donna Bauer.

“So, you’re the gall–ant fella who rescued our Susan—from her excesses—” Her accent was slightly put on, a nod back to 1940s Mid-Atlantic with clipped words and em-dashes of Shakespeare.

They talked for twenty or so minutes about Harlan, how he still loves Susan, and Donna suggested several splendid ways, darling, to win back his trust. Feign interest in the paper—contribute to an article on postal rights and women workers—

“I don’t need ink on my hands to prove I love my husband,” she said.

“He knows about the affair, darling,—the cryptic hints in the Mercury—”  In a seam to her Robin Hood hat was a silver brooch that sparkled with chips of diamond: a dragonfly.

Susan shook her head sadly and eventually grew tired and dozed off. 

Donna and I headed to a vending machine for coffee.

After you left, Skinner told Harlan, she said, called him—on the phone. Gave him the damn photos. For a price—

“After I left—so, it was you behind the door—”

“Relax, handsome. I said nada to the cops—”

“You killed Cordell—”

“Oh, bless your heart. Don’t be a chump—”

“Where are you from, really? That accent is all Bette Davis or William F. Buckley in drag—bless your heart—” I put some apple pan dowdy into the last three words.

She said nothing. “People with Southern accents aren’t seen as credible—” She worked years at losing it—

“Uh-huh—” I directed her to a round table and four chairs. “The dragonfly. Cordell was into Oriental kitsch. He gave that to you—”

“He did—”

“He blackmailed your friend—”

She collapsed into one of the chairs. I loved him. Don’t ask me why, but I did. Have you ever loved someone so much that you forgive them their faults—?

Irene Sizemore. But killing her husband killed us.

“So you and Cordell?”

“Yes—”

“And Susan?”

Donna sat up, wiped the edges of her eyes and took a long slow drink of coffee. “I carried on with Cordell. Susan carried on with my husband—”

–6–

“You killed the wrong man—”

Harlan Norget flinched and his upper lip curled back slightly. He was middle-aged, wore Lombardi glasses, and what hair he had was a laurel cluster, tight Brillo curls running barely above the collar line of his freshly pressed shirt. The bright light of his home office shone a spit mark atop his head.

Beyond the closed mahogany door, in the living room, his two girls were playing RISK. Every now and then one of their voices rose to protest a move, a decision to conquer a continent.

Skinner was getting dope on your wife to use against you and your paper—advertising dollars—but Susan didn’t sleep with him, I said.

“Look, I don’t know what you’re talking—”

“Let’s not play this game. Your alibi won’t wash, Harlan. When you drive a cab you get to know a lot of stories, you get to know a lot of people. Believe me. Mary Swann works the ticket window at the Bijou on Saturdays. I drive her to Bingo, Tuesday nights—” I shook free a cigarette from my pack of Luckies. “She says the girls went to the show—alone—arrived in a taxi—alone. Cops can check that. We hackies log all our calls.” I shrugged. Lit my Lucky. “But the cops won’t check as long as I keep my yap shut—”

He shifted uneasily in his chair, reached for a cigar, left hand tapping a sloppy rhythm on his desk blotter. His bookshelves were full of best sellers and picture frames of commemorative postage stamps. He did love her. “What do you want?”

“I’m not putting the squeeze on you, I’m doing this for her—”

“You love her too, don’t you—?”

“Forgiveness—a chance for a new beginning—”

“Huh?”

“Forget what she did, and I’ll forget what you did—”

“I’m not following, not completely—”

“You killed Skinner. He was blackmailing your wife. You thought he was sleeping with her. He wasn’t. It was Lonergan. Only, Susan didn’t tell you it was Lonergan, because she loves you and values the friendship you two men have—”

He nodded, said it was possible, probably true. He couldn’t see the man’s face in any of the photos.

The room shrank in the silence that followed.

“I never thanked you for saving my wife’s life—”

I smudged an eyelash of tobacco off my tongue. “Forget about it—” Forgiveness for you and Susan, that’s what I want. “That’s my price—”

Somebody beyond the mahogany door had just conquered another continent.

Harlan quit rolling the cigar between thumb and finger, dropping  it on the blotter, unlit.

I couldn’t place Donna’s role in all this. How could she stand idly by while Cordell blackmailed her best friend? Did she secretly resent Susan for messing around with Lonergan and wanted to see her punished?

Sweat dotted Harlan’s upper lip. “What about you? How will you fix things if the police—make you—a person of interest—?”

I took a quick drag, sharply exhaled. “I’ll get by. I always have.” Susan tried to kill herself because she loves you, and hurt you. “Go see her—”

He said he would.

On the way out I waved at the girls and said they were playing a French game invented by Albert Lamorisse, a film director over there. “‘The Red Balloon?’”

The girls looked at each other, and then me, sideways smiles.

The things you pick up driving a hack in a small town like this, this town called Winsome.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Grant Tracey 2024