Midnight Rain - Arlette Lees

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my reason for getting up in the morning and staying out of the bars at night. As a cop I can be a tough son-of-a-gun, trained in the school of hard knocks on the broken streets of Southie, but when I’m with Angel, I go soft in the knees and hard below the belt. She muffles a yawn and looks toward the window.

      “It’s awfully dark out there. You think the storm will hit today?” she says.

      “The weatherman says today, maybe tomorrow. I’m going to jump in the shower while the coffee’s perking.”

      “First come here,” she says, moving the covers aside with a sleepy smile, a lock of hair tumbling over one eye. She’s all peaches and cream, her thighs silky and smooth. “I’m perking too,” she says in a whisper.

      When I’m committed to a woman I’m in all the way, no games, no playing hard to get. I light two Lucky’s and carry them to the bed. The sheets carry Angel’s warmth and the scent of her dime store perfume. She takes a cigarette from my fingers, but sets it smoking in the ashtray on the bed stand. There’s something she wants more than a cigarette.

      I take a long drag, blow the smoke to the side and set my cigarette next to hers. She reaches out and I lower myself on my elbows. I kiss her and bury my face in her hair. It tickles and she laughs. Angel is beautiful inside and out. She’s also a girl with a past. Yes, that kind of past. You’d never know it. She’s sweet and fresh as the day she was born. You’ll get the whole story sooner or later…or not. I may not have the whole story myself.

      I’ve been hooked on Angel since I got off the Greyhound in the midnight rain with one suitcase, a gun and a few bucks in my pocket. I ducked out of the wind into the Blue Rose Dance Hall, a fancy euphemism for dime-a-dance joint. The room was so full of cigarette smoke you’d swear the building was on fire. Just my kind of place. A mirror ball on the ceiling threw silver darts of light around the room and men wearing everything from zoot suits, to sailor suits, to patched overalls, drank bootleg booze from flasks in the dark corners of the room.

      I handed all my dance tickets to the girl in the blue silk dress, the only one in the room who’d forgotten the heavy make-up and penciled beauty marks, the one who looked frightened and too young to be out after dark. She said her name was Angel Dahl, but I took it for Doll, and that’s the way I still think of her. My Angel Doll. Her hair smelled like roses that night, her mouth like the pink lipstick kiss on a love letter. I folded her in my arms with her head beneath my chin and we danced long and slow to Stormy Weather and a jazz rendition of The Shadow Waltz.

      The lights flickered on and off at the end of the last dance. Angel had a little-girl-lost look that got to me, so I walked her through the rain to the Rexford. She had a rented room at the end of the hall, but she spent the night in mine. Later, when we lay smoking in bed, she asked me if I was married. Most men my age are unless they’re total screw-ups.

      “She’s divorcing me,” I said. “She’s back on the east coast where my replacement sleeps on my side of the bed.”

      “Did you cheat on her?” she asks. She says it casually, without judgment.

      “Only with Jack Daniels.”

      She touched my cheek with her fingertips, a sad smile on her face.

      “I’ve never been with anyone like this before,” she said.

      I didn’t know what to say. I took a drag on my Lucky and watched the purple smoke rise from the tip of my cigarette. The colored lights from the movie marquee cast pink and purple reflections on the ceiling of the room. I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me.

      “I don’t know what that means,” I said.

      “Giving myself because I want to.” She said it matter-of-factly, but there was an infinite sadness in her eyes. “Everything’s been taken from me, ever since I was thirteen, ever since my parents died. Axel Teague runs the vice in this town and he runs me too.” A tear balanced on her eyelid and she tried to brush it away before I noticed. “I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me. I’m just letting you know how it is.”

      I whispered in her hair. “No one’s going to run you after tonight. How about we make this the first time for both of us, the only time that counts.” I pulled her close and felt her fear melt away in my arms. We’ve been together ever since.

      A flicker of dry lightning plays on the far horizon and brings me back to the moment. I hear the coffee perking, the early traffic on the street. Angel looks up at me, her face softly feline…a little more than kitten…a little less than cat. I feel her warm breath on my neck. She loops a slender ankle over my lower back. I know how to make her purr.

      * * * *

      I ride to the lobby in the elevator with a few rental aps. Out of six, I’ve rejected one, the guy who was kicked out of the flophouse by the railroad tracks for rolling derelicts who were more blitzed than he was.

      The Rexford, which consists of three floors above the lobby, twenty rooms per floor, isn’t the Ritz, but it’s clean and well-run and keeps Hank in gambling chips and Cuban cigars. With a few exceptions we cater to single blue-collar men, boxers from the gym, pensioners who fought in the Great War, a few elderly couples and a handful of Mexicans and Dust Bowl refugees who work at the cannery and packing house.

      Some of the tenants have misdemeanor warrants in other jurisdictions, or a skeleton or two they’d like to keep from leaping out of the closet, but as long as they pay their rent and don’t cause a ruckus they’re welcome. For the most part they’re a decent bunch, everyone struggling through the Depression, looking for the light at the end of the tunnel.

      The lobby looks like a million lobbies in a million towns…reception desk…oak woodwork…polished hardwood floors. There’s a cigarette machine inside the front door, a magazine stand out front and Kelly Green Cabs at the curb.

      The lounge by the front window has comfortable leather couches and chairs on a carpet with the requisite number of cigarette burns. Potted palms fan out at the foot of support pillars and sand buckets bristle with cigarette butts and dead matches. Men are waking up over coffee, cigarettes and newspapers, the radio tuned low to the weather report.

      Hank looks up from behind the desk, his bifocals low on his nose, pink scalp showing through his thinning hair. Hank was born in Little Ireland and lived most of his life out of Duffy’s Gym, first as welterweight, then as trainer and sometime manager. When the hotel went into foreclosure five years back, he picked it up for back taxes and quit the fight game for good.

      “Morning, Hank.”

      “Morning Jack. The weatherman says this could be the big one.”

      “Could be.”

      “Volunteers are out patching the levy.”

      “It’s a little late for that.”

      Hank holds up a whiskey bottle. “Eye opener?”

      “Better not.” I put the aps on the desk in front of him. “This one’s a rotten apple. The rest look okay.” He’s about to say something when the desk phone rings and he picks up. He listens, then covers the mouthpiece.

      “It’s Jim Tunney,” he says. “That rookie, just got hired on, is sprawled on the highway with his patrol car off to the side. Jim says, if you want to ride shotgun, you’ve got five minutes to get to the station.”

      “Thanks Hank. Tell him I’m on my way.”

      * * * *

      After Jack leaves, Angel sits contentedly in the easy chair, sipping a second cup of coffee with her feet tucked beneath her. On the street below the window a derelict hunches into the collar of his coat and a newspaper flies apart in the wind. Angel leans back and closes her eyes. She can still taste Jack’s nicotine kisses and feel where his rough cheek rubbed the sensitive skin of her throat.

      Before her parents died in a typhoid epidemic, she’d lived in a modest house in Banning, where her father worked as a mining engineer for a drilling company. She got good grades and took ballet lessons

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