The Last Number

The DetectiveThe pavilion out on the waterfront had been running a dance marathon for six hundred hours, and every one of them was hanging in the air like sweat. A live band ground it out in the corner, a nickel got you in to watch, and the crowd came for the same reason they slow down for a wreck. Winter was locked outside the fogged-up glass. In here it was August that never ended.

The DetectiveIt was the kind of room Frankie Slim would have worked, back when he was still working rooms. Then the horn dropped for the rest period, the couples sagged where they stood, and a woman came off the floor toward the rail on feet that weren't hers anymore, and she waved me down like I was the last dry land in the harbor.

The DameYou're the detective. Somebody pointed you out, said you take work. My name's Ruth. That's my husband out there, the tall one holding the wall up. We've got eleven minutes before the horn and then we're back on the floor, so I have to talk fast, mister.

The DetectiveSlow enough that I can follow. What is it you think I can do for you in here, Ruth?

The DameOne thing. One plain thing. Tell me if this contest is straight. There's twelve hundred dollars in that prize and I have watched four couples get carried out on the promoters' say-so, always the ones close to winning, always some rule nobody read us. I need to know if it's real before I let him spend what's left of himself chasing it.

The DetectiveAnd if I find out it's crooked? You'll walk him off that floor?

The DameHe hasn't eaten a real meal in a month. His heart does a thing at night I don't have a word for. If it's a fix, I carry him home and we're just poor again, and I can live with poor. But if it's straight, mister, I will hold him up on that floor with my own two arms till the last couple drops. Whatever it takes. I mean that the way you don't say things you don't mean.

The DetectiveI've had a hundred clients swear they'd do anything, and most of them were lying to me or to themselves. She wasn't doing either. She said she'd hold him up on that floor with her own two arms if it came to it, and God help me, I believed every word.

The DetectiveThe Chronicle newsroom ran on cold coffee and hot copy, and at this hour it was all clatter and no conscience. Flynn had a desk in the corner and a story in his teeth, and when Flynn had a story in his teeth you couldn't have pried it loose with a crowbar.

FlynnWell, look what the fog dragged in. Sit down, sit down — you're just in time. Flynn of the Chronicle is about to make a dance marathon into the sweetest thing you ever read. Kids with nothing left, holding each other up for the grand prize. Depression in three-quarter time. The desk'll eat it with a spoon.

The DetectiveThat the story, Flynn, or the pitch? I came about the promoter. Word is his contest runs a little crooked at the finish. Somebody wanted to know if it's straight.

FlynnStraight? Nothing that man touches is straight, but who prints that? I'll trade you — I know the operation cold. He rigs the rest breaks, salts the floor with a ringer couple, keeps the mob dancing till they can't stand so the paying customers get their money's worth. But I'm not chasing the ugly angle. The ugly angle doesn't sell hankies.

The DetectiveDance till they can't stand. That ever go further than a fainting spell?

FlynnAw — couple weeks back, sure. Girl on the floor just folded, right between numbers. Natural causes, they said. Carted her off quiet so the band never stopped. Bad luck, nothing in it. Anyway — you want the mob-fixing stuff, it's yours, but leave me my sob story, huh? That's the one with my name on it.

The DetectiveNatural causes. Flynn said it and moved right past it, hungry for the tender story, blind to the hard one sitting under it. But I stopped where he didn't. A hoofer doesn't drop dead of natural causes at twenty-six — not unless somebody got paid to sign it that way.

The DetectiveSix hundred hours in, the hall didn't smell like a ballroom anymore. It smelled like sweat gone stale and floor wax and something underneath that a body learns to recognize. The band played slow so the couples could keep shuffling, and out on the boards forty people held each other up because the rules said if your knee touched the floor, you were out. I watched the fixed couple in the middle — fresh shirts, easy smiles, a house team that was never going to fall. Then I found the doctor's cot in the back, and the woman kneeling beside it, and I understood I'd been asking the wrong question all night.

The DameYou're the one been asking after Sam. I saw you talking to the floor doctor. Whatever he told you, he clears everybody. Man could be blue in the face and that doctor stamps the card and sends you back out for the gate money. He cleared the fella that went down Tuesday, too — right before he stopped getting up.

The DetectiveThat's what I came to hear, ma'am. The contest's crooked — there's a house couple that takes the prize and a doctor who signs off on the dying so the crowd keeps buying tickets. Tuesday's man wasn't an accident. But that's not what's got you on your knees back here.

The DameHis heart. A doctor told me two days ago, a real one, in the rest room where they give you your eleven minutes. Said get him off the floor, said it plain. Two days. And every hour since I've had him up on my feet and mine, walking him through the slow numbers, holding his weight so the judges don't see how he leans.

The DetectiveYou could stop. Right now. Walk him out that door.

The DameWalk him out to what? The prize is a thousand dollars and a roof for a year. There's no room and no work and no train out of this that we haven't already spent. I keep telling myself one more night. I told myself that Tuesday. I told myself that an hour ago. I don't know how to be the one who quits, mister. I only know how to keep dancing him.

The DetectiveShe went back out and took his weight like she'd taken it a thousand hours running, and the band slid into something slow enough to die to. She wasn't playing an angle. She was a woman who'd made one desperate choice and couldn't find the door out of the next one. She'd known he was dying for two days. And every hour of those two days, she'd danced him anyway.

The DetectiveDawn came up grey over Calloway Bay, the color of dishwater, the color of a thing you already know and don't want to. Dale was at her desk before the light was, coat still on. She'd read what I had on the fix. She had the folder closed under her hand like she was keeping it from getting out.

DaleSo you give this to Flynn at the Chronicle, and it runs. The fix, the promoter, the doctor who signed the wrong line. All of it. And she reads it over her coffee, sunshine — the widow — that her husband died so a fixed card could pay out.

The DetectiveThe dancer gets his name back. That's not nothing, Dale. A man died a nobody. Print it and he's a man they killed.

DaleAnd she loses the prize, the house, and every night for the rest of her life she hears you handed a reporter the reason her husband's gone. You want to give a dead man his name. Fine. You'd be taking hers to do it.

The DetectiveAnd if I bury it, the hall keeps turning. Same promoter, same doctor, next card, next fighter. Nobody up top pulling the string on this one, Dale. No boss, no machine. Just the town doing what the town does.

DaleThere it is. You've been doing this all season — finding the true thing and holding it under till it stops kicking, because the person in front of you can't carry it. You keep telling yourself it's mercy. One of these days you're going to run out of drawer.

The DetectiveI've already decided.

DaleYeah. I can see which way by your face. I just want it on the record I didn't like it.

The DetectiveShe was right, the way she's always right — the way she remembers things the rest of us are busy forgetting. There was a true thing on my desk with a dead man in it, and a way to say it out loud that would cost a living woman everything she had left. I knew which way I was going. That was the trouble with knowing. It didn't make the walk any shorter.

The DetectiveIt took a phone call I made up out of nothing. A sister taken bad across town, a cab already waiting, and a floor judge glad to wave them off rather than carry a second body out the side door. They disqualified him for leaving the floor. He left it breathing. That was the whole prize.

The DetectiveThe rest I buried where the city keeps its warm things. The promoter kept his contest, the house doctor kept his little black bag, and the fellow who went down last week stayed dead of natural causes forever. Flynn of the Chronicle got a story about a girl fainting from the heat. He wired it in and it wasn't worth the ink. She came to the doorway to find me, still in her number, forty-one hundred hours on her feet and every one of them showing.

The DameThere wasn't any sister, mister. I don't have one. I stood right there and heard you invent her.

The DetectiveThere was tonight. That's all a story needs. You go on home and let the man sleep. He's got a real doctor and a bad heart and a wife who dragged him off the floor a winner. Nobody's going to ask you what you knew.

The DameI know what you paid to keep my name out of it. It's not the kind of thing a person gets to say thank you for. So I won't. But I know.

The DetectiveGood. Keep it where you keep the blisters. Now go on. He'll want your face when he wakes up, not mine.

The DetectiveShe went, holding him up the way she'd held him up all week, and the cold took them both before they reached the corner. It was better out there than in. The street doesn't run a clock on you, and it doesn't pretend the floor is fair. Behind me the band found the next number, and in all that heat another couple leaned into each other and kept dancing for nothing at all.