Читать книгу Reno Rendezvous - Leslie Ford - Страница 5

Until I’d got that cablegram I now had in my bag, I had in some quite normal way entirely escaped the phenomenon of Reno. A lot of my friends were divorced, of course, but usually the time element hadn’t been urgently important, and when it had been they’d gone to Paris where they could get some clothes at the same time, not Nevada. I’d heard about Reno, about its divorce dens and the open flaunting of its sin and shame, and all the rest of it, but the only very clear picture I had in mind was of apparently respectable lawyers standing with their famous movie star clients in front of a classical-porticoed court house looking rather smugly pompous. Then on the plane coming out a plumbing salesman had called it The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and another salesman had showed me a piece in a sensational magazine calling it The Sodom of the West.

It looked like any other small Southwestern town as we rolled along past the Nevada Stock Farms, a series of pigmy post offices in gray stone with a beautiful sleek Palomino looking over the fence, and down the highway past fruit stands and neat white-fenced houses set in groves of silver-backed cottonwoods—except, of course, for the enormous billboards advertising penny roulette and various hot spots where one dined and danced and gambled. Then it changed as we came closer to the town; it was more prosperous, and busier, as we came into Virginia Street with its elaborate garages and service stations, and the Washoe County court house with its green velvet lawn accented with spears of scarlet cannas, and the Riverside Hotel on one side, and on the other the shady public park in front of the Auditorium, and the handsome new post office, and then, between the post office and the Truckee River, Reno’s other fashionable hotel, the Washoe.

The limousine turned in, a doorman in a purple rayon shirt and blue denims and a kelly-green handkerchief took my bag.

“Hello,” he said. “You just come?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Well,” he said, “you’ll like it here when you get used to it.”

I said, “I’m sure I will.”

A frightful din of cowbells and honking of horns came up the blazing hot street, fighting with the roar of the steam shovel that I could see tearing at the rocky bed of the Truckee River. A second doorman, dressed in blue denims and a purple rayon shirt with a kelly-green kerchief at his neck, took my bag.

“Just come?” he shouted.

I nodded.

“You’ll like it when you get used to it!” he bellowed.

“I’m sure I will!” I shouted back . . . momentarily surer that I certainly wouldn’t.

He put my bag down in front of the desk. The clerk wore a bright red rayon shirt with a brighter yellow kerchief. “You register from Reno,” he said politely.

I must have looked as bewildered as I felt.

“You register from Reno. There—where it says ‘Address’.”

I know I looked definitely feeble-minded. He smiled as at an especially low-grade child, and said patiently, “You register from Reno—to establish yourself as a permanent resident of Nevada.”

I said, “Oh,” blankly.

He frowned, a definite glint of suspicion coming into his eye.

“You are here for a divorce, aren’t you?”

I had the dreadful feeling that I was being subversive—like going to a party during Prohibition days and refusing a drink. He looked at me very much the way one’s host would have looked then, as if you were plainly implying the liquor was so much poison, and said “Oh.”

“I’m here to stay with Mrs. Bonner,” I explained hastily, and rather apologetically, I’m afraid.

The change was instant.

“Oh, of course—you’re Mrs. Latham, Mrs. Bonner’s aunt. We thought you’d be somewhat older, Mrs. Latham.—But you’re expected!”

He didn’t actually waggle his finger at me, but almost, and he positively trilled the last part of the sentence.

“Jack!”

He summoned a bell hop with black sleeked-down hair, also done up in cowboy boots and blue jeans. “Take Mrs. Latham’s bags up to 308, adjoining Mrs. Bonner’s apartment, and open the connecting door.—Thank you, Mrs. Latham!”

I followed Jack to the elevator. The girl running it had on frontier pants and boots and a pink shirt, and she was chewing gum.

“Mrs. Bonner’s gone riding,” she said. “Who’d she go with, Jack?”

Jack shook his head. “Dunno,” he said. “Some new guy I never saw before.”

The girl smiled reassuringly at me.

“She’ll be back pretty soon,” Jack said. “Did you look in the bar? That’s the place to look in if you want to find anybody in Reno.—Did you see who just blew in?”

For a startled instant I thought he was still talking to me, but he wasn’t. The elevator girl said, “Do you mean the blonde with the silver foxes?”

He nodded. “That’s Kaye Gorman. Baby, did she burn this joint up when she was here three years ago!”

“That was before I came,” the girl said. “But she’s sure going to town with Mr. Cromwell.”

She laughed an odd little laugh. In the narrow oblong mirror in front of her I saw the warning wink the bell hop gave her, and the sudden scared look in her eyes as she brought the car to with a jolt at the third floor. I didn’t need to be psychic to realize that Kaye Gorman was the blonde girl who had stared moodily out the window of the plane all morning . . . or to see, as clearly as if it had been written on the elevator wall, that this was something that involved Judy Bonner.

That sentence in her father’s cablegram—“Reports from Reno disquieting”—flashed into my mind, more disturbing than anything I’d heard from Polly Wagner. And it wasn’t five minutes later—when my bell hop had flung up the windows in my room, opened the door to Judy’s apartment, pocketed his tip and got rather hurriedly out—that I saw, on the chromium and glass table in the center of her charming rose-and-gray sitting room, the gossip sheet of one of the more sensational New York papers, with flamboyant red crayon marks all over it. I picked it up. It had a photograph of Judy Bonner in a white low-cut evening frock, seated at a roulette table with what seemed to me a very large stack of chips in front of her, laughing and having a grand time, while over her bare shoulder, in black tie and dinner jacket, leaned the man I’d seen meeting Kaye Gorman at the airport.

The photograph was captioned “Playboy Meets Girl?” Below it, heading the daily gossip column, was the following:

“Will the lovely Judith Bonner, now doing time in the divorce capital, take another chance at the wheel of matrimony with Playboy Dex Cromwell when she’s free?

“Rumor, which tells the truth—like a lot of well-known liars—when you least expect it, has it that Clem Bonner, who’s been given the air by the beautiful Judy, will patch it up with the first Mrs. Bonner again . . . now that she’s free . . . with one-third (dower right) of the four million dollar fortune of the tobacco king who dropped dead at the Kentucky Derby last year. Maybe that’s what they were talking about so earnestly at Armand’s opening the other night (Picture on Page 4.)”

I turned to Page 4. Smiling up at me, under the caption “Widow of Tobacco King Does the Hot Spots,” was the girl whose unsmiling sullen profile I’d been looking at ever since we’d left Omaha that morning. It said below: “Kaye Gorman, former show girl, widow of Lem Gorman, well-known sportsman who dropped dead at the Kentucky Derby, on her first appearance since the tobacco magnate’s death. Her first husband was Clem Bonner, whose second wife, Judith Bonner, is in Reno getting a divorce.”

I am not normally a drinking woman, but I poured myself a stiff shot of scotch from a half-empty bottle on the lacquer-and-chromium bar built neatly in between the long windows and drank it practically straight. Then I stepped out on the narrow balcony into the sun, and stood leaning weakly against the terra cotta balustrade, looking down into the Truckee River, thinking—for the first time in the twenty years I’d known Judy’s mother—that she had a good and sufficient reason to be in a real state of collapse . . . whether she knew it or not.

Then quite suddenly it dawned on me, standing there, why Judy hadn’t met me at the plane, why she’d had her friends meet me, why she’d been out riding when I got to the hotel. She’d left the paper, open and red-marked, where I’d have to see it, see it before I saw her . . . not knowing whether I knew all the gossip and rumor that was flying about or not. I felt a sharp sting of pity. What would she do—brazen it out? Or wasn’t there anything, really, to brazen out? Was it just that Clem Bonner was going back to the blonde girl he’d married his last year in Harvard, and she was letting him go? Or was it all something quite else? Was Polly Wagner right in thinking she was still desperately in love with Clem? And if so, did that explain Dex Cromwell . . . ?

But chiefly—and I think, looking back on it, it’s what actually was worrying me more than anything else—what was Kaye Gorman, Clem’s first wife, doing in Reno? She’d divorced Clem there, but that had been almost four years before. And it couldn’t have been the climate that brought her back. It was hardly fit for anything but a salamander.

I balanced my empty glass on the balcony rail and stared down on the flag-decked streets, sharp and objective there in the brilliant scorching sun. The air was as crystal-clear as the shallow swift-running water of the narrow river, and as heady as fine champagne. Ander the red and yellow and white and blue pennants strung over the streets, the people, dressed in Western clothes as unrestrained as the decorations, moved gaily, dodging in and out among cars parked at angles against the curbs. An old man on a pinto pony leading a procession of small children on ponies of varying sizes paraded solemnly down the middle of the street toward the Park. And somewhere in all this carnival town—The Biggest Little City in the World, the street sign said—was Judy Bonner.

“Did you look in the bar?” the bell hop had asked. I glanced back at the array of half-empty bottles on the cocktail bar between the windows, and thought of that picture of Judy with the stack of chips at the roulette wheel, the man bending down over her, almost touching her bare shoulder.

In the street below me a sudden appalling din rose over the crashing roar of the steam shovel in the River. A crowd collected around a big gray truck with bars like a jail, with horns honking and cowbells clattering uproariously. I saw a woman in white being hustled up the steps and inside the truck with several other women.

“That’s the Kangaroo Court,” a voice near me said. “They put you in it and fine you a box at the rodeo, if you haven’t got something Western on.”

I looked around. A man in well-cut riding breeches and a white shirt open at the neck was standing in the next little balcony, about ten feet from me.

“Oh,” I said.

“You’ve just come, haven’t you?”

I nodded.

“For the cure?”

I looked blank.

“That’s what they call getting a divorce,” he said, and I said “Oh” again.

He laughed. He had several gold teeth that showed when he opened his mouth, and there was something about him—about his sun-tanned baldish head and about his eyes, the whites slightly bloodshot and the lower lids a little puffy, and about the way he looked at me, that wasn’t awfully attractive.

“Did you come on the plane?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Well, let me give you a tip. Don’t trust anybody in this hole. They’re all out to get your money. That’s all they care about. Be careful of your lawyer’s wife, just for instance, if she invites you out to dinner and a little game. Don’t go—not if you don’t want to be taken for a couple of hundred before the evening’s over.”

He flicked his cigarette into the air and watched it hit the water.

“My name’s Ewing, Steve Ewing,” he said. “I’ll be glad to take you around till you know the ropes. I’m getting my divorce in a couple of weeks. I wouldn’t have come out here for it, but my wife and I haven’t lived together for eight years, so I just decided to get it over with quick. Let her marry him.”

He shrugged.

“I suppose you’re like all the rest—getting married again the minute you get your decree?”

I swallowed. “I’m not getting—”

“You’re wise, Mrs. Latham—very wise,” he said earnestly. I hadn’t had a chance to say I wasn’t getting a divorce, and I was so startled at his knowing my name that I didn’t try to correct him.

He laughed again.

“You see I know your name—I asked the elevator girl who you were.”

He leaned over his balcony and fixed his eyes earnestly on mine.

“You won’t believe it, little lady, but you’re the first woman I’ve seen out here that I wanted to look at twice.”

He shrugged again.

“I go around, of course. A man can’t just sit in his room all day. But I’m fed up with the girls you see here. Bar flies—nothing but bar flies. I’d given up, absolutely, till I saw you get out of the elevator just now. Do you know, that one minute changed my whole life?”

I’m afraid I stared at him quite open-mouthed. He leaned closer over the pink terra cotta balustrade.

“You won’t mind, will you, if I can’t help feeling sorry for your husband, poor devil—and glad there’s no lucky man I’ve got to start hating before I’ve ever seen him?”

“Do be careful,” I said weakly. He was leaning at an alarming angle over the rail.

“My dear, I’ve already fallen so hard a few hundred feet wouldn’t make the least difference.”

If I’d ever thought that being a widow had taught me poise in such a situation, I was quite wrong. I simply stared at him. I had no way of realizing, of course, that this was a most harmless and naive example of how fast people work in Reno. They usually say it’s the altitude, and perhaps it is. I wouldn’t know.

“Would you like another drink?” Mr. Ewing said. He was looking at the glass in my hand.

“No, thanks,” I said hurriedly. “I’ve got to go unpack.”

“Then I’ll see you in the lobby in . . . shall we say, half an hour?”

He gave me what I imagine was intended for a seductive glance, and said, “Do you know, I’ve been looking for you all my life . . . and isn’t it strange I should find you in Reno, of all places?”

“It certainly is,” I said. I staggered back into Judy’s sitting room and sank down on the gray-and-rose sofa, and put my glass on the floor.