Chapter 5

After two weeks on the job Jim was beginning to understand Doreen's complaints. The salary was ridiculous. Jim was nothing more than an office boy. He ran errands, he picked up and distributed mail, he went out for coffee for the boss and the other employees, he swept the floor when there was nothing else to do for the moment.

He didn't really mind the menial tasks. His Army stint had accustomed him to the drudgery of housekeeping. In the Army the first hour of the day was always spent sweeping and mopping floors, making beds, cleaning bathrooms. Those were dull, dirty jobs that had to be done and you did them as quickly as possible. No, what bothered Jim most of all was the attitude of Conklin and the other men in the office.

Conklin was a cheapskate; perhaps the biggest cheapskate this side of Scotland. In Conklin's office you didn't just dump the wastebaskets. First you went through them in search of carbon paper which might be used again. Crumpled sheets of paper with only a few lines of typing on them had to be smoothed out and set aside to be reused as scrap paper, for making notes, and for the first draft of copy which would be rewritten anyway.

This was not the only sign of cheapness. The office fixtures were dilapidated relics. There were nine typewriters in the office, the youngest of which was more than twenty years old. And every one of them had at least one minor thing wrong with it. The desks were chipped, scarred, and burned from a thousand cigarettes laid aside in the heat of creation. Some of the desk drawers had no bottoms in them and the lighting was underpowered and flickering. The filing cabinets swayed from side to side in the draft when the door was opened. One solid thump on the floor would probably flatten every stick of furniture in the office.

That was Harry Conklin. He was editor-in-chief, publisher, and part owner. Jim never saw any of the other owners and neither had anyone else in the office ever seen them. Conklin seemed to have complete responsibility and total authority. And his only interest was in getting the paper out at the cheapest possible cost. Quality was a word which did not appear in his dictionary. A five dollar difference in cost could make up his mind for him.

Of course, the other employees used this characteristic as a basis for all their complaints. In the unguarded moments during a coffee break, or when Conklin was out of the office for one reason or another, the employees spent their time telling one another what a cheap louse Conklin really was.

Jim didn't like his fellow employees any more than he liked Conklin. They were a close-mouthed group and in the two weeks he'd been working there not one of them had made the smallest gesture of friendship toward him.

The only person in the office Jim really talked to was Doreen, and even she was much more formal in the office than she was after hours. In the two weeks Jim had seen her half a dozen times. Those six dates had been more expensive than he would have liked.

He would pick her up at her apartment, take her out to supper somewhere, and then take her dancing, or to a night club. Somehow it never cost him less than fifteen dollars for an evening's entertainment. Fifteen dollars was a lot of money when you were making the kind of money he was being paid. Still, it seemed worth it.

Every date ended the same way. They would go back to Doreen's apartment, have a few more drinks, and go to bed together. After six dates he had not tired of her charms. She was always eager, demanding, and inventive. Just when he thought he'd experienced every possible sensation, she would show him some new trick or technique. Actually, for fifteen dollars a night he was getting an education in the ways of love which was priceless. Doreen was more skilled and experienced than the most famous temple prostitute of ancient times. And she was more exciting.

Jim wondered how many of the other men in the office she'd been with. There was Turner, the Ivy League Kid, only a couple of years older than Jim and as phony as they come. He was supposed to have graduated from one of the big schools with a degree in journalism. But after watching him for two weeks Jim doubted it. Jim also doubted that Doreen had gone to bed with him.

Then there was Wilson, the nervous little man who looked for all the world like a bookkeeper. He was thin and fidgety and about fifty years old. Wilson always wore suits with vests. Steel-rimmed spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose and his head was bald except for a grizzled fringe around the sides.

Doreen couldn't have gone to bed with a thing like that.

Baxter, though, was another story. He was a heavy-set man in his early forties who wore rumpled suits and gravy-spotted ties. His shoes were badly scuffed and run down at the heels. And he always reeked of liquor. In the two weeks Jim had never seen him sober.

Baxter smelled of whiskey when he came into the office in the morning. The odor was stronger by noon and almost overpowering by five o'clock. When Jim brought him a container of coffee he would pour half of it out and refill the container with whiskey from a bottle he kept in the bottom drawer of the desk. Every couple of days Baxter would come in in the morning with a package which was unmistakably a fresh bottle for the desk drawer.

If he was drinking half a quart a day during working hours his total input for the day must have been somewhere around a quart and a half to two quarts. And he looked it, too. The skin of his face sagged in dull, lifeless folds. There were heavy, blackened pouches beneath his eyes. His nose was as red as a winter apple and his eyeballs looked like road maps.

Baxter was the broken-down old newspaper man from every other Hollywood movie made between nineteen thirty-five and nineteen forty-five. He kept his job only because the drunker he was the faster he could turn out copy. His specialty was the gory rape or murder case which led every issue. He had a way of writing the story up that always made it gorier than it really was.

Doreen had told Jim something about Baxter. He'd been a police reporter on one of the daily tabloids. One night when he was out chasing down a story his wife had been attacked, raped, and tortured to death. She'd left their apartment late in the evening to go down to the drug store for something or other. Three men had grabbed her, dragged her into a car, driven her into Central Park, and worked their evil with her. A suspect had been apprehended a few days later but had been released for lack of evidence.

So that was Baxter the Drunk. The only thing was that, after watching him for a while, Jim made up his mind that the old man was living up to the Hollywood image of the broken-down reporter.

It was entirely possible that Doreen had slept with him. She knew more about him than any of the others. And she was just the type to fall for that Hollywood image.

The other man in the office was Charlie Foster. Foster looked like the rising young executive. He was about thirty, slim and blond and handsome. He had a wife and kids and a house in the suburbs. He flirted jokingly with Doreen but Jim didn't think there was anything to that.

Despite his quick look through a copy of the newspaper before he'd come for the job interview Jim had been amazed by the content of the paper when he'd seen some of the material to be included in a future issue.

The articles and stories were as bad as could be expected, with the slant alternating between love and gore. On one page there would be a story about interracial orgies or fourteen-year-old prostitutes or incestuous relationships. On the next page there would be a story about blood, a murder, a violent rape, something like that. Of course, the best stories of all were the ones in which both love and gore could be combined.

This aspect was less shocking than it was disgusting. The Gotham Whisper, despite its name, had national distribution. It was a twelve or fourteen page weekly that sold for fifteen cents on newsstands. Supposedly only adults read this newspaper. Why would adults read such tripe?

The answer, of course, was that most of the readers weren't interested in the news stories and articles. No, most of them were interested in the advertisements. This was probably the only paper in the world that was bought by readers solely for access to advertisements.

There were all kinds of ads, pages and pages of them. The largest single product offered for sale was nude photographs. Probably sixty per cent of the ads concerned themselves with photographs of the unclothed human body in one form or another.

If your tastes were so inclined you could buy atrocity and oddity photos; a woman with three perfectly developed breasts, a woman with a third leg growing out of the middle of her spine, a man with no jaw, a man or woman with no buttocks. And somewhere, somehow, several people seemed to have gotten hold of pictures taken in the Nazi concentration camps. You could buy a picture of an entire family in the last stages of starvation. And they were nude of course.

But if your tastes were more normal, you weren't necessarily disappointed. You could buy pictures of Negro girls, Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, German, Philippine, Scandinavian, Balinese, Korean, or just plain old American girls. You could buy either pictures or films, or both. The girls posed singly, in pairs, and in groups.

You could buy pictures of lady wrestlers, boxers, football players. You could buy pictures of women in bra, panties and boots, all in black leather. And they all carried the most delicious little whips, or big whips if you didn't go in for subtlety.

If your desires went off on another tangent you would still do all right to buy the Gotham Whisper. You were a woman but you didn't like men? No problem. You could buy pictures of other women. There were handsome young girls posed with their abnormal muscles bulging all over the place. There were pictures of women dressed in men's clothes on the off chance you did go in for a little subtlety.

The ads, all of them, were very cleverly written. They were intended to give the impression that the material offered was illegal. Jim, of course, knew this not to be true. He didn't know it for an absolute fact, but he reasoned that illegal material would not be offered so blatantly.

And, in case you had very, very normal tastes, you could buy photos and films of nudists at play. The ads described shots of men and women and children cavorting about in the altogether in broad daylight.

Most of the ads had United States addresses, but there were plenty from foreign countries. You could buy pictures and books and films from Canada, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Denmark, Mexico, Japan, Nationalist China, and even South Africa, though the foreign advertisements only represented about ten or fifteen per cent of the total advertising. you didn't care for pictures or films or books you could still buy what was aptly termed "unusual products." There were creams and other assorted pharmaceuticals for specific purposes. Some ads stated only that unusual products could be obtained. All you were required to do was write to the advertiser and send along a dollar to cover the cost of mailing and handling. By return mail you would receive an illustrated brochure with pictures and descriptions of the ominous sounding unusual products, whatever they were. There were still more ads.

Several times on every page of advertising you were exhorted to join a correspondence club. These clubs were only for modern, liberal-minded individuals who were interested in the exotic and bizarre. Although it seemed that nothing could be more exotic and bizarre than the newspaper itself.

All this advertising, of course, was the main source of income for the newspaper. But there were other gimmicks. There was a Lonely Hearts page which contained names, addresses, and descriptions of persons advertising for husbands and wives. It cost a minimum of five dollars to place an ad on the Lonely Hearts page and there were at least a hundred and fifty of those ads. That one page in the newspaper brought in at least seven hundred and fifty dollars a week. The income from that page alone probably met the salaries for" the entire office staff.

But the sweetest little gimmick in the whole newspaper, the sweetest little moneymaking gimmick in all of publishing, was the personal advertisements. An individual who wished to contact other people and yet retain the maximum of privacy and discretion could place an ad at a minimum fee of ten dollars per issue. Everything but the advertiser's name and address would appear in the paper. Instead of the name and address there would be a box number. Any reader replying to one of those personal ads would write his reply, write the box number in pencil on a stamped envelope, insert the reply, and seal the envelope. Then he would take that envelope and put it in a larger envelope which would be addressed to the newspaper. He would include a dollar bill to cover costs.

When the newspaper received nn envelope like that the dollar was removed, the box number erased, and the true address written in. Then the enclosed, stamped, and now addressed, envelope would be dropped into the mail again. The Gotham Whisper guaranteed that the files of personal advertisers would never be opened to anyone for any reason whatsoever.

In this manner an advertiser could screen all replies and reject those which didn't appeal to him. The advertiser could continue a correspondence with someone for an extended period without having to reveal his address or phone number.

This kind of security was highly sought after because of the nature of the advertisements in the personals column. Bachelors advertised for free-thinking women interested in the pursuit of pleasure. Couples sought other couples for so-called "friendship" or "parties." Women advertised for women. Meek men sought dominant women, expressing a belief in the superiority of the female. Some couples looked for a single man or a single woman in order to form a menage a trois.

Even a fourteen-year-old idiot would have been able to read between the lines of those advertisements. To all intents and purposes this was advertising for bed partners right in broad daylight. Many of the advertisers even went so far as to delineate the specific spheres of their interests.

When Jim discovered the exact nature of the personal advertisements he was at first disgusted and repelled, then intrigued. This sort of thing was in direct opposition to the culture and morals which the country professed. Yet it was flourishing out in the open. The sheer numbers of the advertisements and the bulk of mail which came into the newspaper office every day convinced him that it couldn't be a gag or a con.

It was one of Jim's duties to go to the post office at least twice a day and pick up the mail that came into a numbered box there. There was never less than a full mail sack, and often there were two or three full sacks. This mail related only to the personal ads. All other mail to the newspaper came in the regular deliveries.

When Jim came into the office with the mail he took it right into Harry Conklin's office. There he would open the bags, dump the letters out on a long table, and take the empty sacks out with him. Conklin and Foster were the only ones who had anything at all to do with that part of the operation. They would remain locked in the office for at least an hour after the mail came.

When they were finished Jim would go back inside with the mail sacks, fill them with the envelopes to be mailed, and set them aside to wait for his next trip to the post office.

Perhaps the sweetest thing about the entire operation was that there was nothing illegal about it. A statement appeared in every issue of the paper saying that the correspondence service was not to be used for illegal, immoral, or obscene purposes. The publishers requested that anyone having knowledge of violation of that rule notify the newspaper so that proper action could be taken.

Of course, they'd never received such notification. The persons who corresponded weren't stupid enough to kill the golden goose.

In the middle of his third week on the job Jim got a phone call at the office. He was sweeping up when Doreen waved him over. He looked up at her and raised one eyebrow in a question. She pointed at the switchboard and then at him.

A phone call?

Who could be calling him at work? Who would be calling him at all, for that matter? He set his broom to one side and hurried up to Doreen's desk. "You sure it's for me?" he asked. She nodded.

"Hello," he said into the receiver. "Jim? This is Tom ... Tom Guising." Jim hadn't seen Guising since the week he'd started on the job. "Hiya, Tom. What's up?"

"I got a problem. I need help." His voice was in dead earnest.

"What happened?"

"I'm in jail."

"Jail I"

"Yes, jail. I got picked up late last night and I need somebody to come down and bail me out."

"What's the charge?"

"Look, I don't want to waste time talking about it over the phone. Can you come down here and get me out?"

"Gee, I don't know. I haven't got much money on me and the banks are already closed. How much is the bail?"

"It's five hundred dollars," Guising said. "But don't worry about the money. All I want to know is can you get off work and come down here?"

"Hold on a minute," Jim said. 'I'll find out."

He set the receiver aside and glanced at his watch. It was a little after four in the afternoon.

"What are my chances of getting out of here a little early?" Jim asked Doreen.

The receptionist shrugged. "It depends on how important it is and what kind of a mood Old Scrooge is in. But even if he lets you go he'll dock your pay for the hour."

"I don't care about that," Jim said, heading for the door to Conklin's office.

He knocked loudly and went inside. Conklin and Foster were working at the big table. The floor was littered with empty envelopes, several of the file drawers were open, and there was a big pile of money at the end of the table.

"Whadda ya want, Benton?" Conklin asked, looking up briefly, then turning back to his work.

Jim didn't approach too closely. "I need the rest of the afternoon off, Mr. Conklin. A friend of mine is in trouble and I have to help him out."

Conklin pushed a stack of envelopes to one side and looked up at Jim. "Say, whadda ya think this is, a hotel or something? You work here. If I didn't need you here I wouldn't have hired you. This isn't the Salvation Army, you know."

"This is something special, Mr. Conklin. This is the friend of the friend who recommended me for the job. It's a special favor and it won't happen again."

"Well, all right, Benton. But don't expect to get paid for time you aren't here working. And you better make darned sure it doesn't happen again. For the same money, you know, I could have somebody here the full eight hours a day."

"Thanks, Mr. Conklin."

Jim turned and left. Throughout the entire conversation Foster had never once looked up from his work. One after another, with machine-like regularity, he was slitting envelopes, removing the contents, and dumping the empties on the floor. Inside every envelope there was at least one dollar bill and one smaller, sealed envelope. Foster would add the money to the stack at the end of the table, check the front of the smaller envelope and put it with others. There seemed to be some sort of system to the placing of the envelopes. Jim guessed it had something to do with the box numbers.

Tom Guising was still waiting at the other end of the line.

"Tom? It's all right. I can get off. But what about the money?"

"Good man," Guising said. "I knew I could count on my old buddy. The money is at my apartment. You'll have to come down here to pick up the key first."

"Where are you?"

"I'm at the City Jail. And look, don't waste any time. Take a cab. I'll pay you back for it."

"Right," Jim said. "See you in a few minutes."

He hung up the phone and grabbed his coat.

"Fine friends you have," Doreen commented, a teasing smile on her face. "Are they all jailbirds?"

"You're a friend of mine," Jim shot back. "You tell me."

She laughed. "Sometimes I think that's exactly where I belong," she said as he hurried out of the office.

Cabs are pretty scarce in New York after four o'clock in the afternoon and Jim was fortunate to find one just discharging a passenger on the corner. He hopped in and slammed the door in the faces of two other men who'd been running for the same taxi.

"Where to, buddy?" the driver growled.

"Downtown," Jim said. "City Jail. And there's an extra couple of bucks in it for you if you don't waste any time."

The taxi darted forward like a jack rabbit, pulled into the line of traffic amidst the outraged shrieking of horns and the squeal of protesting tires of the vehicles behind.

They made the trip in less than five minutes and when the taxi pulled to the curb outside the municipal building Jim said, "Look, I'll be in there only a couple of minutes. Then I have to go to the upper East Side for a couple of minutes and come back again. I'll give you a five spot for yourself if you'll wait for me and make the entire trip."

"Sorry, pal. I've been had on that dodge before. You go in that building and I never see you again. I could wait till midnight and you'd never show up."

"Wait," Jim said, taking out his wallet.

He handed the driver a twenty dollar bill.

"You hold on to this until I come out again. If I don't show you're twenty ahead. How's that?"

"You got a deal, mac."

Jim hurried up the stone steps and went inside. A uniformed officer just inside the main door directed him. The office he wanted was at the back of the building and one floor down.

It was a squad room just like in the movies. There was a high desk behind which sat a uniformed sergeant. There were other desks and interrogation tables. And the place was as busy as a railroad station during World War II. Jim could see several drunks, a couple of juvenile delinquents, three or four streetwalkers, and a couple of peddlers.

He walked right up to the desk sergeant. "I'm here to bail out a Mr. Tom Guising."

The sergeant looked at him for a minute, grunted, leafed through several pages of a ledger, and said, "Bail's five hundred."

"I've got to get a key from him to go and get the money," Jim said.

"I can't release a prisoner's personal property."

"How about getting him down here and letting him give me the key himself?"

"All right," the sergeant said. "Wait over there." He waved his hand at a long bench nearby.

Jim walked over to the bench and sat down. He saw the sergeant pick up a phone, dial two numbers, and speak into the receiver. Jim lit a cigarette and leaned back.

A woman got up from one of the desks where she'd been talking to an officer. She looked around the room, spotted Jim, and strolled slowly over. When she got closer Jim found he could see beneath the heavy layer of make-up. She was a lot younger than she was trying to appear. She was a big, soft-bodied girl with wide, ample hips and mountainous breasts. Her brown hair was worn long, down to her shoulders. Beneath the hard set of her expression Jim could see her fear.

She sat down a few inches away from him. "Got a cigarette?"

He took out the pack and shook one loose for her. When it was tucked between her lips he struck a match. She took several quick, deep drags and sat back with a sigh.

"What'd they pick you up for?" she asked. "I'm just waiting for somebody," he told her. "How about you?"

"Soliciting!" she said in a disgusted voice. "The lousy fink cops. I'm minding my own business when this guy comes up and offers to buy me a drink. Why not? He buys me a couple of drinks and offers me twenty bucks for a quickee. When we get into the hotel room and I got my dress off he flashes his badge and hauls me down here. Soliciting, he says. He asked all the questions. I never even gave him the high sign. I wasn't even working that bar. It doesn't pay to start until around eight o'clock in the evening. The lousy fink cops."

"That's too bad," Jim said. "What happens to you now?"

"I hang around here for a couple of hours until night court opens. This is my second offense so it'll probably mean sixty days in the can. The lousy fink cops."

"Maybe you'll get off with a fine."

"Naw."

"Would a lawyer do you any good?"

"Not in this town. Not for a second offense. I'll give the judge a sob story. I might get lucky. I wouldn't mind the sixty days. The problem is once they throw me in a cell I'm going to need a fix. Once they find out I'm on the stuff it'll mean six months in the Federal Hospital at Lexington. You haven't got some junk on you, do you?

Just enough to hold me until I can make a contact in the Women's House of Detention?"

"I'm afraid not," Jim said, amazed. "You mean you can get narcotics while you're in jail?"

She looked at him for a long moment. "Narcotics! Say, how square can you get?"

Just then Tommy Guising came through a double set of barred and locked doors. He was flanked by two brawny, red-nosed policemen with tremendous paunches. Tommy looked like hell. His hair was mussed and his eyes were-rimmed with the red of fatigue. His tie and belt were both gone and he was forced to use one hand to hold up his trousers. His shoes, without laces, scuffled on his feet. His suit was wrinkled and his white shirt was soiled. Also there was a growing bruise on his right cheekbone.

Jim hurried over to him. One of the flanking cops stepped between them. Tommy grinned and winked and all four men approached the sergeant's desk.

"Give me your property receipt," the sergeant said.

Tommy pulled the receipt out of his shirt pocket and handed it across. The sergeant rose from his swivel chair crossed to a filing cabinet and came back with a large manila envelope which was both glued shut and stapled closed. He put the envelope down before Tommy and put alongside it a release form and a pen.

"Sign here that there's nothing missing," the sergeant said.

"I'll check it first, if you don't mind," Tommy retorted.

He opened the envelope and spilled out the contents: wallet, keys, ring, watch, tie, shoelaces, assorted papers, forty-eight cents in loose change.

"Sign," the sergeant said.

"Hold on there a minute."

Tommy opened his wallet and counted the money inside. "Hey! I had seventy-five bucks in here. Now there's only twenty-five. I want to know what happened to my money?"

"There must be some mistake," the desk sergeant said in a suddenly oily tone. "Your property list says there was only twenty-five." He hadn't even checked the typewritten sheet of paper which had been inside the envelope.

"I don't care what that piece of paper says. I know what I had in my wallet. I counted it right in front of you when you made me turn my stuff in."

"I don't remember any seventy-five dollars."

"You thieving louse ... uhhh!" Tommy began a tirade, but cut it off with a grunt of pain as one of the two flanking cops shoved a sharp elbow directly into his kidney.

"If you want to fill out a complaint we'll have to hold everything here," the sergeant said smoothly. "We can't release any property when there's a complaint filed."

Anger at his friend's predicament bubbled inside Jim. He started to say something, then thought better of it. If he blew his top they might just throw him in the same cell with Tommy. Then there'd be nobody to get either of them out.

"All right. All right," Tommy said at last. "Have it your own way. Keep the lousy fifty bucks."

He picked up his key ring and wallet and handed them both to Jim, telling him where to find the money in his apartment. The sergeant drew lines through both items on the property list and gave Tommy the pen. "Initial those two places," he said.

Tommy scribbled his initials. The sergeant put the remaining property into a new envelope, tore off the receipt tab, and sealed the envelope. "What about the other stuff I had with me when I was picked up?" Tommy asked.

"That's evidence. You'll have to talk to the D.A. about it. If you ask him real nice he might just give it back to you because you've been such a very good boy."

"Aw, you dirty...."

"Tommy!" Jim said, interrupting before his friend got another shot in the kidney. "I've got a cab waiting for me. I ought to be back here with the money in less than half an hour. Take it easy. Don't give them any excuses."

Tom Guising clamped his mouth shut and let his hate and frustration show only in his eyes. Jim hurried out of the municipal building and directly into the waiting cab.

"I thought you were serving a sentence," the cabby said when Jim slammed the door.

"Those lousy cops. Never mind, though.' He gave the driver Guising's address and settled back for the ride uptown. Traffic was quite heavy now and the going was slow. It took more than five minutes to go four blocks in the honking mass of inching automobiles.

"Say, isn't there a much faster way uptown?" Jim asked.

"We might make better time on the East Side Drive," the cabby said. "But I'll have to go ten blocks past the address before I could get off."

"I don't care. Try it."