Some Form Of Promotion

Crime Fiction by Zach Dundas

Tobias Carlton, owner of Carlton’s, where I tend bar and catch mice and keep court with a diverse citizenry, favors white linen in summertime. He favors a silken ascot. He favors a sort of English accent. I think he’s from Rhode Island but attended one of those schools with a rugby team and a fellow called “headmaster” who harbors a juicy secret. He favors a pencil mustache.

I like Carlton. I just prefer he stays out of my hair. I unlock the door at 3 o’clock every afternoon but Monday, and under my tutelage Carlton’s never fails to be dimly inviting, just nine stools along an old wooden bar, like a paneled corridor. If we have twelve people, that’s a crowd, and I offer a shining face to every one. A poetic type or a frazzled office boy will come in and read a novel or the racing form, whatever they like, and I leave them to it. A man and a woman will drift in before a show and I will make them each a Manhattan, and love will be made in the city that night.

This all falls under my department. Tobias Carlton comes in early evenings, pays the bills, slides me an envelope containing my weekly cheese and bread and then tootle-oo, ta-ta for now. His department. Separation of church and state, and it works well—when Tobias respects it. Sadly, one summer evening, he had something to say.

“My boy, it seems to me we must pursue some form of promotion.”

“You got it, boss—I’ll walk the streets with a sandwich board.”

“In all seriousness.” He held his small ledger like a prayer book. “It does not look good, I am afraid. And as you know, this enterprise unfortunately must maintain financial relationships with some very, very unpleasant creditors.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” Carlton often rambled about this.

“Dangerous men.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“No, I am very much afraid we are for it, lad, if we don’t pursue some form of promotion.”

“I’ve been busy as hell with the after-work crowd.”

“But the trouble is the week-end. Yes, I am very much concerned with the week-end, once such a staple.”

“It’s just the summer lull.”

“No, old son, I very much fear a change in society. Some fundamental shift, you see. There is literature on this. People have turned inward—a great turning inward. They prefer to watch television in the comfort of their own homes, surrounded by the conveniences of the modern kitchen and so forth. The bright lights of town no longer beckon as once. We no longer compete with Schmitty’s Tavern and the Temperance League, but with Jack Parr, the rumpus room and air-conditioning.”

“This is getting somewhat scientific for my taste.”

“To thrive in this environment without promotion seems almost unimaginable to me. Some way to put the establishment’s name before the larger public.”

“Draw a larger public and we’ll have the fire marshall in here.”

“No, my friend, the situation cannot be ignored. I very much fear we cannot survive as a cinq a sept affair. Without promotion, I very much fear Carlton’s will not see the New Year. We will close. Or worse.”

He tells me this on a Sunday night, which I need like a punch in the face. Monday’s my one day off, and I spend it walking and smoking in the crisp early light. I spend it dawdling at the antiquarian booksellers. I spend it sketching with colored pencils and writing odd lines of verse. I spend it listening to the latest in modern jazz and visiting the cinema in the hot afternoon. I spend it on my tiny verandah with a long, cool drink. In other words, I spend Monday fucking relaxing. And that Monday, I could not relax. Carlton had me stewing, furrowing my brow, and I took it as an invasion.

 The week was normal, nice gatherings manifesting along my bar as the offices and shops breathed their last, our two ceiling fans struggling manfully with the heat. I shook a lot of ice that week. I didn’t use the hot plate at all. At Carlton’s, we can cook you an egg if you insist, but it wasn’t egg weather.

Carlton kept mostly scarce, but appeared on Friday to rattle around his office, a back room behind the bar. He complained about the water meter and paid my wage. And here we have the real reason he owns this place: he loves to squirrel around in his nook, counting beans, working himself into a neurosis over fancies that he’s about to be rubbed out by the Black Hand or what have you. Then I spirit in and set an old fashioned on his desk, and he’s lord of the manor again. It’s his retreat. I, on the other hand, work here.

On Saturday afternoon, a prickly hot wind reeled around the city, the kind that makes folk touchy, with animal emotion in their eyes. The sidewalks did feel desolate, smoke and grit in the air. I opened as normal, and my slim paperback and I had the place to ourselves for many a minute. It occurred to me that Carlton might be onto something with his grand socio-cultural theory, and I didn’t like that thought.

At ten minutes to five, a woman in a gray suit came in alone. It happens, as I make it my business to create a welcoming atmosphere. She took a stool and I saw the sweat beaded below her pillbox. I saw that what I took as a gray suit was a white suit with grime worked in around the seams and buttons, and what I’d taken for its texture was a degree of unraveling. I saw that she’d chewed off a patch of her own lipstick. She had brown eyes, like coffee with a touch of milk (how I prefer it, incidentally). She fished a cigarette case out of an enormous bag and asked for a light, with a tremble. She put a dollar on the bar and asked for a dry martini. I approved and set to my craft.

She put a second dollar next to the martini glass. “Say, I hate to be a bother, but you strike me as a good sort of guy. Is there a backway out of this place?”

“I’m afraid not, ma’am.”

“Some alley where you take out the trash, that kind of thing?”

“I have to haul the bins right out to the curb out front. Filthy business.”

She drummed the bar with bitten-off nails. “It’s just that, I do hate to be a nuisance, but it’s my husband, you see.”

“I don’t believe I know the chap.”

“Well, silly thing, really, but we had one of our awful fights at the Fritz & Schneider department store. And he just gets so hot under the collar.”

“Begging your pardon, it sounds like a situation I don’t want in my bar.”

“I’m sure that Howard is going door to door til he finds me. It’s just like him.”

“And then what?”

“Well, there will be one of our awful scenes.” She’d somehow finished her drink.

“Sounds to me like you need a priest or a lawyer, two trades I’ve never practiced.”

“If there’s just somewhere I could be out of sight for a little while? Howard just needs a bit of time to cool down. He’s a swell guy, really, Howard, but he needs to take a deep breath before he’s quite himself.”

I polished one of the shinier spots on the bar, which is how I do my thinking. “Look, lady,” I said, since I felt we were growing in intimacy, “see that door down there? It’s the boss’s office. The boss won’t be coming in today, so I guess it’s all the same to me if you want to cool your heels in there for a little while.”

“Do you really think that will be all right?” She was doing wet, blinking eyes.

“Say you put one more bill on the bar, and sure, it’ll be fine.”

“Oh! I see. Certainly.”

“Maybe this time the bill has a different face on it? I get tired of George.”

 She scrambled around in that bag of hers and dredged up a $5. “Thank you, thank you so, so much. You really are a saint, you really are.”

She made for the office door with a sort of wild, swaggering walk, a gait from a silent-film comedy. “I’ll just sit tight for a bit, okay? Just for a bit. Won’t make a peep.”

“Any message for Howard?”

“Nothing in particular. Howard’s really quite a card, once you get to know him.”

She closed the office door. I put her two dollars in the till and her five dollars in my pocket and only just cleaned up her glass before the man walked in.

He was a big hullabaloo of a fellow with lardy jowls. Another sweaty one, breathing athletically, a stained felt hat shoved all the way back on a balding pink head, dark patches all over his tan suit. He traveled in a nimbus of failing cologne. When he started to talk, the first thing I noticed was that his teeth were the color of European cheese. I didn’t immediately like him.

“Say, partner, you see a woman in a white suit come in here?”  

“You could offer more detail.”

“A slim number, brunette, brown eyes. Handsome, you could say.”

“Regrettably that does not ring a bell.”

He plunked himself on the same stool the woman used. I was growing wistful for less complex patronage. He pulled out an oval, gilt badge.

“Louis Dalbridge. House detective at Fritz & Schneider.”

“Okay.”

He left the badge sitting on my bar. “The department store,” he added.

“I’m familiar. I bought an overpriced necktie there once. Ex-police, I suppose?”

“Twenty years.”

“You get done for bribery, or just run out of heads to crack?” I tapped his badge. “And are you putting this up for barter? Or should it go away?”

“Heh, all right, mister, so you’re not impressed. Suit yourself. Ask yourself if you care about this neighborhood and how it’s going downhill fast.” He produced a folded newspaper clipping from his breast pocket and showed it to me. It was a photo-story bearing the headline WOMEN HELD IN SHOPLIFT RING, the picture showing a pair of ladies with blank expressions sitting behind a deal table strewn with loose merchandise. “We ran these two in, a couple days back. Damnedest thing you ever saw—a whole team of ‘em, at it on every floor, trying to go at it so fast and in so many places, the boys and me couldn’t track ‘em. But we tracked ‘em. We sure did. But then their little friends are back again today. The damned nerve of doing that in my store.”

“The damned nerve.”

“Crack wise if you want. That’s just the kind of racket that cuts a department store’s business to the point where, one of these days, it goes under. And just ask yourself where this damned neighborhood would be if the Fritz goes under.”

“You’ll have me tossing and turning all night.”

“Heh.” He held the newspaper piece up again. “Two’s company, three’s a crowd, and this gal I’m looking for makes three. And you’re sure you ain’t seen her.”

“If I do, I’ll run right over.”

“You’re sure she ain’t been in here.”

I looked hither and yon, hither and yon again, and shrugged at him.

“You strike me funny, bub.”

I opened my mouth to issue a patented smart retort but the telephone behind the bar rang. This was not in the usual run—that phone rang maybe six times a year.

“Carlton’s.”

“Is that man out there?” She was speaking in a huffy stage whisper.

“Sweetheart. I wasn’t expecting you to call.”

“I found the number in the directory. It’s him, isn’t it? The man.”

“Sure, that’s fine. I can’t really talk right now, darling, I’ve got a customer in.”

I kept my expression placid and my eyes on the house detective. He gazed back with jaw slightly agape in an unflattering way.

“You’ve got to make him go away. Just make him go away. I’ll—I’ll do anything.”

The detective noticed the ashtray on the bar. He hooked it with a fat paw. He noticed the cigarette with the last of her lipstick on it. I experienced a small brainwave.

“Well, that’s swell, darling. Oh, say—I left the thing you were looking for in that upper right-hand drawer. You know the place.”

“What?”

“I’m ringing off now, sweetheart. Speak to you later.”

I put the receiver down and so did she—too hard, raising a clatter behind the closed door.

“Something not right here,” the detective said.

Then came a sound I knew to be the rasp of a desk drawer.

“Something hinky.”

“Might be time for you to leave, sir,” I said. But the store dick heaved himself off his stool and made for the end of the bar. I went the other direction, towards the front. He came around the end and smashed a hand to the office doorknob. He flung the door open like she’d be surprised to se him.

The pistol made a sound like a falling brick hitting pavement. The detective made a sound like a pillow being punched, took a big step backwards, and fell like tall timber coming down, shaking the floorboards.

I clicked the front door locked and walked down the bar’s length. His rank cologne now mixed with cordite. His big face had assumed a Classical dignity absent in life, like the bust of a lesser emperor. I turned to the open office door. The woman stood in front of Carlton’s desk, pointing the pistol the boss kept in a desk drawer as a totem of safety against the possibility of a rub-out, or whatever Carlton imagined.

“Put your hands up and don’t move,” she said in a wobbling voice.

“Which is it?”

“I mean, don’t move!”

“Oh sister,” I said, “save it. He never keeps more than one bullet in that thing.”

She clicked the trigger once or twice, to be sure. I checked the detective’s neck, dewy, bristly and still.

“You killed him, sure enough. Congratulations, lady. When you hear the old saw about a better class of criminal, now you can look in the mirror.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s all right. He was practically assaulting you. Listen, here’s a few things we’re going to do. Come out and close that door. Let’s see if we can shift House Detective around just a bit here—trajectories and so forth. And then you’re going to walk out of here, down the block, take a left and keep going seven blocks to the Greyhound bus station. I don’t care where you go on the Greyhound bus, as long as you go and that gun goes with you. It’ll be much safer here without it. Only a matter of time before someone gets popped, what with one of those contraptions around.”

“You—you’ll let me go?

“I’m not on retainer to the police. There is just one thing, though.” She stood there at the back of my bar, eyes darting this way and that. “Just one small favor. You’re going to slug me.”

“In hell’s name are you talking about?”

“With the butt of that gun. Good and hard—let me have it with interest. Haul off like you’re aiming to kill, which you won’t but that will put proper feeling behind it. Here. I’m going to get down for you, over here behind the bar. Put some leverage into it. Put your strongest shoulder into it. Make this one count and be on your way.”

I knelt there. She hesitated, but then I heard her take her first step toward me. I closed my eyes and awaited the crack, happy and confident that Carlton’s Bar would have its moment of promotion, its name before an eager and curious audience. After this, we’d keep Tobias in white linen, keep my Mondays peaceful and serene. After this, no doubt about it, I would have more glasses to fill.

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Bio: Zach Dundas is the author of “The Great Detective” a cultural history of Sherlock Holmes, and editorial director at the travel and culture publisher Wildsam. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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