A Girl Called Honey
A Girl Called Honey
Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake
this is for
DON WESTLAKE AND LARRY BLOCK
who introduced us
Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
A New Afterword by Lawrence Block
A Biography of Lawrence Block
ONE
Her name was Honour Mercy Bane and she was thoroughly confused.
She was a very beautiful girl. If she had been in New York, sitting at a table at Twenty-One with a whiskey sour at one elbow and a wealthy escort at the other, she would have been a good deal more beautiful, or at the very least a good deal more spectacular. Beauty, despite the histrionics of a handful of hysterical poets, is more than face and figure, more than eyes and lips and even teeth, more than breasts and thighs and buttocks. Beauty consists also in the trappings of the face and figure.
A well-lipsticked mouth is more attractive than an unlipsticked mouth or, god forbid, a sloppily lipsticked mouth. A well-dressed body is more lovely than a poorly dressed body; unfortunately, the bulk of womanhood being shaped the way it is, a well-dressed body is more lovely than a stark naked body. Just as clothes make the man, the proper clothes make the man want to make the woman.
These fundamental tenets seriously militated against the appearance of Honour Mercy Bane.
For one thing, she was not sitting in Twenty-One. She was standing in the Greyhound Bus Terminal in the town of Newport in the state of Kentucky, and that is a far cry indeed from Twenty-One. Instead of a whiskey sour at her elbow she had a ratty cardboard suitcase in her hand.
Instead of a glamorous Schiaparelli original, she wore a man’s plaid shirt open at the throat and a pair of faded blue denim trousers patched at the knees and worn at the cuffs. Her mouth had no lipstick to brighten it and her hair, instead of being done up in some exotic style or other, was completely uncoiffed. It just hung there.
But she was still a very beautiful girl, and this is striking testimony to the quality of eyes and lips and teeth, of breasts and thighs and buttocks.
Her hair was chestnut. The adjective is currently used to describe any shade that combines elements of red and brown, but in the case of Honour Mercy Bane it was the proper adjective. It was the color of ripe horse-chestnuts with the husk just removed and the nut still moist on the surface, a glowing red-brown that was alive and vibrant in the long hair that flowed freely over sloping shoulders.
Her face was virtually perfect. White and even teeth. A small nose that had the slightest tendency to turn up at the tip. Full lips that were quite red without lipstick. A complexion that was creamily flawless.
Superlatives could also be applied to the body which the man’s plaid shirt failed to conceal and which the tight blue jeans made very obvious. Breasts that were large and firm and that got along without benefit of brassiere—which was fortunate because she was not wearing one. Legs that tapered from swollen thighs to properly anemic ankles. A behind that silently screamed for a pinch.
These, then, were the separate components which, taken together, made up the entity known to herself and the world as Honour Mercy Bane. The total effect was enough to bring words of praise to the lips of a Trappist monk. Not even the stain of a tear on one cheek could spoil the effect.
Seeing her there in the Newport terminal of the Greyhound Bus Lines, a passerby might have wondered who she was, what she was doing, where she was headed. Observing her, with the suitcase dangling from her hand like an umbilical cord after a birth, with a lost look on her face and an incongruous set to her jaw, one well might have asked these questions. The answers are simple.
Who was she? Her name was Honour Mercy Bane. She was eighteen years old, the only child of Prudence and Abraham Bane of Coldwater, Kentucky.
What was she doing? Standing, waiting, planning, thinking. Getting her bearings, really.
Where was she headed? She was headed for a small diner at the corner of Third Street and Schwerner Boulevard, a diner called the Third Street Grill.
She was going to get a job in a whorehouse.
Cincinnati is a clean town.
This is an expression and little more. It does not mean that Cincinnati does not have garbage blowing around its precious streets, nor does it mean that Cincinnati juveniles do not write dirty words in lavatories. It means, in the coy jargon of twentieth-century America, that Cincinnati lacks prostitutes, gambling dens, dope parlors, and similar appurtenances of modern living.
The citizens of Cincinnati are no more virtuous than their brothers in Galveston or New York or Cicero or Weehawken or Klamath Falls. They are, on the contrary, as sinful and lowdown and sneaky and sex-crazed and vile as any other collection of people. But, fortunately for them, they have no need for prostitutes or gambling dens or dope parlors. Not in their home town.
They have Newport.
Newport is located directly across the Ohio River from Cincy. A streamlined bridge connects the two cities and makes it possible for Cincinnatians to get from Cincinnati to Newport in very little time. They don’t even have to pay a toll.
And Newport, fair city that it is, has everything that Cincinnati lacks. Cathouses by the dozen. Gambling dens by the score, a pusher on every corner, and bootleg whiskey sold over the counter in every drugstore.
Residential Newport is as pleasant a little town as anyone could want to live in. The schools are relatively good. The streets are wide and lined with trees. The cost of living is low; the gambling and whoring and drinking keep down taxes.
Commercial Newport is the living end. No loose women walk the streets—this is strictly forbidden to eliminate amateur competition which would harass houses that charge five to twenty dollars for a quick roll. Dice games can never be found in darkened alleyways; a Cleveland syndicate runs gambling in Newport and runs it with an iron hand. If a person were stupid enough, he could walk the streets from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn without seeing anything out of the ordinary. But if he so much as mumbled his wishes to a cabby, he could enjoy any form of gambling, according to Hoyle, or any form of sexual activity, according to Krafft-Ebing.
Newport is a going town.
Madge liked it that way.
She sat at the counter, her big body perched precariously on a stool, her fingers curled around a cup of very light coffee. There was an ashtray next to the cup of coffee and a filter-tip cigarette was burning in the ashtray. A thin column of smoke rose from the cigarette to the ceiling in one long and unbroken line. Madge glanced at the cigarette from time to time but let it burn without touching it. She smoked between two and three packs of cigarettes a day but rarely took more than two puffs from each one.
Madge finished her coffee in a single swallow, then waggled a plump finger at the woman behind the counter. The woman was a beanpole in her forties with stringy washed-out black hair and protruding teeth. Her name was Clara and she had come to Newport years ago to be a whore, failed at it and became a waitress instead. Now she filled the cup half-full of coffee and half-full of milk and gave it back to Madge.
Madge sipped the coffee. She looked as unlike Clara as was humanly possible. Her hair was bleached a raucous blonde, her body as plump as Clara’s was thin. She carried a tremendous amount of weight without being genuinely fat, and even though she was pushing fifty she remained sexually desirable, with a pretty kewpie-doll face and breasts that were still mildly appealing although they had lost their pep. Beautiful she wasn’t, but she thought contentedly that she could still have a man when the urge hit her without paying some young jerko to satisfy her. If only she could lose about thirty-five pounds….
But that, she realized, was out of the question. When you were a junkie who was no longer using junk, you ate. You had to eat or you would get nervous, and it wasn’t good to be nervous. Especially when you were a madam. A nervous madam made things hectic for the girls and set the customers on edge, and as a result the customers were occasionally impotent or at the very least enjoyed their turn in the saddle less than they would have otherwise. So you ate—it was better for your health and better for business, and at forty-eight you didn’t have to be a beauty queen anyway, so the hell with it.
Madge was a junkie. She hadn’t had a shot or a sniff in close to seven years, hadn’t touched the stuff since they let her out of the federal hospital at Lexington and told her she was cured. But she was still a junkie and she knew she would be a junkie until she was dead, at which time she would become a dead junkie. She didn’t call herself an ex-addict any more than members of Alcoholics Anonymous call themselves ex-alcoholics. She was well aware that at any time she might break down, might take a needle and load it up and pop it into a vein. The physical dependence was mercifully gone but the urge remained. It wasn’t a constant thing—for that she thanked God, because if it had been she would never have lasted almost seven years. But there were times when the craving for heroin came to her, times when all she could remember was how good she felt when the white powder had been cooked in a spoon and shot home into her bloodstream.
At those times she had to remind herself of the bad part of it, the times when she couldn’t score, the one abortive attempt at cold turkey when she locked herself in a cellar and clawed her own breasts raw when the full force of withdrawal symptoms hit her.
And each time she mastered the craving, and now the cravings were fewer and further apart.
Now she was an inactive junkie. She didn’t run around anymore, didn’t turn a quick trick when the money had run out and she needed a fix, didn’t have bad times like when she and Bill and Lucas had broken into that drugstore outside of Xenia up in Ohio to steal morphine, and the cops chased them for ten miles and they threw the stuff out of the windows of the car, and finally the fuzz caught them and she stood on her head in Lexington for a goddamned year….
No, now things were a hell of a lot better. Now she had a business of her own, and running a whorehouse was a damned good business to have in a town like Newport. You paid a certain amount every week to the right people, kept a lunch counter in the front of the house so that you didn’t look bad from the street, took good care of your girls, talked friendly with your customers, and generally ran a decent establishment. If a girl got sick she went out on her ear. If a girl got knocked up you saw to it that she got rid of her excess baggage in the office of a cooperative and enterprising physician. You made a good living, not enough to get rich on, but enough so that you’d be able to retire before too long, enough so that you ate too much and kept a nice apartment and dressed as well as you wanted to dress.
There were footsteps coming from the rear and Madge turned around slowly. A tall thin man in a tan wind-breaker and Levi’s was on his way out and she smiled at him automatically. He didn’t smile back and he had a guilty look on his face. Madge wondered idly who he was cheating on—his wife or his girl or his religion.
“Come back and see us,” she cooed.
He didn’t answer and the screen door banged after he had gone. “Surly son of a bitch,” she mumbled to herself, drinking more coffee and motioning to Clara for a hunk of Danish pastry.
Yes, she decided, it was a good life. The house was open from noon to four in the morning, seven days a week, and the girls worked eight-hour shifts. Long hours for whores, she thought, but there was plenty of time when they just sat around on their fannies with nothing to do. Made good money at it, too—half of every trick they turned, as much as they could get anywhere else. But they were worth it, damn it. A girl had to be a Grade-A hustler to get work at the Third Street Grill.
And they were damned good girls. Take the ones she had on the night shift now—Dee and Terri and Joan. She was one girl short ever since that tramp Lottie had run out on her, and the three of them were working like troupers to handle all the trade.
Take Dee, for instance. Dolores was her name, but that was too long a handle to be bothered with. Besides somebody had said that it meant sadness in Spanish and that was a hell of a name for a whore. Now Dee had been with her—she calculated quickly—God, Dee had been working there for a good four years, closer to five maybe. A hustler had to be one hell of a champion to last that long at one place, but as far as Madge was concerned Dee could work there forever.
Dee was tall, close to six feet tall, and she had the build to carry her height. High firm breasts that were about mouth-high for most of the customers. Legs and hips that were damn well muscled from good honest work. Thick black curly hair and a mouth that had a fine-looking smile on it even when she was working away for the fifth guy in an hour. And the men had told her how good Dee was, how she would do anything and do it perfectly. Dee was a jewel.
Not only that but the girl was good company. She wasn’t so god-awful dumb like the rest of them. Why, the pair of them could sit down and talk over coffee, talk about real interesting things. Dee had been to college for a year; she was no dumbhead like the rest.
Take Terri, now. Now Terri was stupid, so stupid she didn’t know her ass from her elbow. Fortunately there was another part of her anatomy which she was able to distinguish from her elbow, and which she used with remarkable skill. And Terri was easy to look at, damned easy to look at.
The bell rang and Madge eased herself off the stool and walked to the door. The man outside was a runt—a sawed-off little pipsqueak with a bald spot on the top of his dumb little head and a nose that was three sizes too big for him. He looked frightened.
“The counter’s closed just now,” she said breezily. “Would you like to go back and see a girl?”
He nodded quickly and she opened the door. He followed her lead and found his way to the parlor in the back where Dee and Terri were sitting. Joan was upstairs with one of her regulars. The sawed-off jerko picked Dee, just like all the little guys always headed for the biggest gal, and the two of them went upstairs.
Madge sat down again, bit off a hunk of Danish and washed it down with coffee. Let’s see, where was she? Terri—that was it. Terri was short and blonde, a little on the chunky side but not so’s anybody would mind it. The special thing about Terri was that she made a guy feel as though he was the greatest man in the world. Everybody who had Terri was firmly convinced that he had given her the thrill of a lifetime. This not only made the customers happy, but it brought them back for another go with the little blonde girl.
Joan was newer than the others and Madge hadn’t yet decided what was so special about her. She wasn’t hard on the eyes, but the little brunette wasn’t beautiful by any means. Nothing really special about her, all in all—but she was good at her work and easy to get along with. A good man, according to the song, is hard to find; a good hustler is harder to get hold of.
The man who had been with Joan left smiling. A truck driver who stopped there whenever he had a haul through Newport came in and took Terri upstairs.
Time passed.
Madge was working on a slab of chocolate cake when the bell rang again. She swore under her breath and got up to answer it.
“The counter’s closed,” she began, the suddenly stopped in amazement.
The person standing at the door was not the general run of customer.
It was a girl with chestnut hair.
Honour Mercy Bane sat with her hands in her lap and looked at her nails. There was bright red polish on them, and she had never had nail polish on before. For that matter, never before had she been wearing such a pretty dress as the red-and-blue frock she had on now, never before had her lips been lipsticked and her cheeks rouged, and never before had she sat in the parlor of a whorehouse at eight-thirty in the evening waiting for a customer.
It hadn’t been difficult getting the job. Madge needed a girl, needed one quite desperately with the weekend coming up and the rush sure to be literally backbreaking for Dee and Terri and Joan. Madge’s experienced eye quickly knew what Honour Mercy Bane would look like in a dress and what she would look like out of a dress.
Madge had been a little put off at the girl’s lack of experience. The madam preferred to hire a girl who had worked at a house before, or at least one who had done a little hustling. This was not the case with Honour Mercy Bane. She had had one and only one lover and that was hardly enough.
But she was beautiful, which made a big difference.
“Crap,” Madge had said. “Fust thing we’ll have to do is change your name. Can’t have a whore named Honour and Mercy. It’d keep the customers from feeling right about the whole thing. Hell, you look too much like a virgin as it is. How do you go for the name Honey?”
Honey was all right with Honour Mercy Bane.
“Straight’s ten bucks, half-and-half is fifteen, French is twenty,” Madge informed her. “Anything special, you make your own price. You want to cut your rate it’s your business, but you pay me half of the asking price, no matter how much you get. And don’t think you can hold out on me. You might try to give me ten bucks for a French where you collected twenty and tell me you turned a straight trick. You’ll get away with it for a while, but the minute I catch on you go out on your fanny.”
“I wouldn’t cheat you,” said Honour Mercy Bane. And she was telling the truth because she never cheated anyone.
“You’ll live in the Casterbridge Hotel down the street,” Madge told her. “Gil Gluck runs it and he gives all my girls a straight deal. Ten bucks a week for a private room with private bath and it’s a good clean place.”