The Promoter Read online

  I told him that I would be happy to spend some time with him, smiled pleasantly, said good night and left.

  On the way back to the hotel, I stopped in at a little bar and had a couple of drinks.

  2

  I GOT out to Call’s house about nine-thirty the next morning. Actually I hadn’t intended to arrive there before noon but an air compressor working on one of the back streets had awakened me early and I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. Judith Call met me at the door.

  She was dressed in blue slacks and a black sweater. Her face was freshly made up and a narrow red ribbon held her dark hair back from her ears. She looked very much like an innocent high school junior on her way to a picnic.

  “I’ll get the key,” she said.

  I waited out on the porch for her a few moments. The sun gleamed bright and warm and the sky was clear. She came out presently, wearing a gray coat thrown carelessly across her shoulders. She handed me a piece of cheesecloth.

  “The car may be a little dusty,” she said. “You may want to wipe it off before you take your pictures.”

  Dust wouldn’t make very much difference, but I took the cloth anyway. The primary purpose of the photos was to catch the lines of the car and not the finish. My theme for the article would be strictly non-technical, simply an account of how a group of youthful churchgoers, under the direction of their minister, had restyled an old jalopy.

  The car was in a shed at the rear of the church. The light in there was incredibly bad, even with the doors open, and I was glad that I’d brought along a husky supply of flash bulbs.

  I saw right away that it was a good car, well put together and rather practical for road use. “Slick,” I said.

  I walked around the car, jumping over paint buckets and tools, inspecting it carefully. The chassis was a forty-nine Ford but that, with the exception of the steering mechanism, was all of the Ford that remained. The front grille, which had been worked in between two Olds fenders, had been taken from a fifty-six Chevy. The whole car had been lowered and channeled and the doors on either side, operated by electric push buttons, appeared squat and long. At the rear the car resembled a fifty-seven Chrysler with high sweeping fins and recessed trunk. A full continental spare-wheel kit exaggerated both the length of the car and its extreme lowness.

  “Slick,” I repeated again. “If it runs.”

  “Oh, it runs all right,” Judith Call assured me. “Wait until you see the engine.”

  She reached inside the car, pushed a button and an electric motor began to hum. Very slowly the entire front of the car, hood and fenders, began to elevate. The motor stopped only when the hood had reached a forty-five degree angle.

  “Well,” I said.

  “They installed the hydraulic lift from an old tractor,” Judith told me. “Getting it to work like this caused more trouble than anything else.”

  The Olds motor was full house, complete with high compression heads and dual four-barrel carbs. I guessed that underneath all that chrome was a high-speed cam and a balanced assembly.

  “Well,” I said again.

  The car was even better than I had hoped and I decided, without asking, that much of the work had been done by professional help. Perhaps the boys and Dr. Call had rendered moral support. Undoubtedly, they had accomplished many of the minor tasks, such as disassembly and rubbing the body down for final finish. But only good mechanics, and experienced ones at that, could have fashioned such a terrific showpiece. Almost immediately I was sorry that I had sold the idea to Car Skill on a one-shot basis. Properly handled, the car was good for half a dozen articles.

  “You do any of this work?” I asked the girl.

  “Only because I had to.”

  I wondered what she’d done but I didn’t ask. She seemed disinterested, bored with the whole thing, and I didn’t want her to dampen any of the enthusiasm which I felt. Enthusiasm is a free-lance writer’s stock in trade. He has to have it while he’s on an article or he won’t be able to sell a line he writes.

  Most article writers use a fancy camera with a lot of gadgets and gimmicks but I’ve never gone in for that. In the first place, a collection of lenses and levers always confuses me and, secondly, I’ve never had a hundred bucks to toss away on a camera. My favorite is a Brownie, using a filter for close-up shots. When a flash attachment was required, as it was with this car, I used a number eight bulb and a plastic jar cover over the flash to cut down the light. If you work close to each section, say about forty inches, you get usable pictures. Of course, the magazine has to work from the negatives but you get just as much money as though you had sent them fifty-dollar prints. And article writing is just like any other business; you spend as little as possible and make as much as you can.

  I took about thirty pictures, some of the exterior and some of the interior, and a couple of the full car, one with the hood up and another with it down. By the time I finished the twelve o’clock whistle was rattling the windows along the block.

  “You really think those pictures will be good enough to sell?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said.

  A lot of people take one look at my little Brownie and they lose confidence in me right away. But, of course, it isn’t only the pictures that sell an article. You have to come up with some good copy, something fresh and alive. The church theme which surrounded this particular project was a natural.

  “Your father should be along pretty soon,” I observed.

  Until that moment Judith Call had been standing around watching me, not saying much of anything. But the mere suggestion that her father might put in an appearance aroused her from her indifferent attitude.

  She came over to me, smiled and held out her hand.

  “Well, it’s been nice meeting you, Mr. Morgan. Good luck.”

  Her hand was soft and warm. I said, “You running away?”

  The smile left her face as she pulled her hand away. “How did you know?”

  “It’s just an expression of mine,” I said. “Don’t be offended.”

  She turned and walked quickly to the door. She swung about slowly and faced me. The sun washed through her dark hair.

  “But you’re so right. I am running away.” I didn’t know exactly what to say, or if I should say anything. I’d felt the tension that existed between Judith Call and her father the night before and I remembered what she had told me about her girl friend in the city. Her decision, I suppose, was inevitable.

  “I’d think it over,” I said.

  Her pretty face held the look of a child in pain. Great pain.

  “I have thought it over. I’ve thought it over for a long, long time. I’ve thought about all the things I want “to do, and can’t do, and I’m sick of it. Did you ever get sick of anything, Mr. Morgan?”

  “Quite often.”

  “But you don’t know what it’s like to take the place of a minister’s wife — a minister who won’t let you smoke or go out with boys or do any of the things that other girls do. You don’t know what that’s like.”

  I could see she was upset, distraught, her mind crowded with a thousand and one anxieties.

  “I’m sure I don’t,” I said gently. “But I do know that all things can’t be the way we want them. Some things have to be different.”

  Different, I thought. That’s the way it had been with Sandy. Beautiful and different and terrible. But you couldn’t generate hate or mistrust because of it. You had to try to understand and do the best you could.

  “My life is a clock,” Judith Call said. “A time clock. I get up in the morning and I fix breakfast. Orange juice. Every day there has to be orange juice. Not the canned juice but the kind you squeeze. And I mustn’t waste any. We have to save because Daddy doesn’t make very much and he won’t accept a raise because he thinks the money should be used for something else. The youth of our church, he keeps saying. And, all the time, he forgets that he has a daughter. When he had that fly-tying class last summer I had to help him with it. Me
! A girl! What do I know about tying flies?”

  I placed my camera on the seat of the car and walked toward her slowly.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m just an outsider, Miss Call. It’s none of my business. But maybe if you talked with your father things would be better. You might be able to show him how he can do more in his church, how he can help the young girls, too.”

  She had tried it, she said. But it hadn’t done any good. As far as her father was concerned the problems of the young man and the young woman were identical. They had to be kept off the streets, out of taverns, away from possible harm. And that was all.

  “He’s driven the young girls away from the church,” she said. “Hardly any of them ever comes out for Youth Night. What is there for them? They don’t want to tie flies. They don’t want to build cars. There isn’t a girl in New Rockford who wants to know about that stuff.”

  But there was one girl in New Rockford who knew, who had learned the hard way. Judith Call. She knew how to tie a Royal Coachman and she knew about the functions of a selonoid in an electric door kit. And she knew something else, knew it even better. She knew that her father had really wanted a son, that he treated her like a son, and that she wasn’t a son at all.

  “Elsa got me a job in the city,” she said, lifting her head defiantly. “And I’m going to take it. I’m going to take it before I wither up and blow away.”

  There was nothing more I could say to her, no reason why I should try to stop her, so I just stood there in the garage doorway and watched her walk toward the house. When she reached the kitchen door she turned and waved once before going inside.

  I went back to the car and made a few notes on its construction. The body seams had not been leaded in, but built up with plastic, and these were nice and smooth. Hours of rubbing, I thought. Hours and hours of rubbing. The interior was English leather and it had been gathered in tiny, regular folds. Expensive. Somebody, a lot of somebodys, had contributed plenty of money and time to the success of this effort.

  I was still going over the car when a figure appeared in the doorway and cast a shadow on the floor.

  “What do you think of it, Mr. Morgan?”

  I dropped my notebook into my pocket and straightened up.

  “I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” I said. “Believe me, Doctor, this is a masterpiece.”

  My comment pleased him and he smiled. I wondered, idly, if he would appear so happy when he found out about his daughter.

  “Did you have lunch? If not, you might care to join me. We could talk.”

  I had to ask him a few questions about how the project had started, how long it had required and things like that. I told him, yes, I’d be happy to have lunch with him. I gathered up my equipment, waited for him while he locked the doors and then we walked to the house.

  “I’m not much of a cook,” he explained. “But I guess I can whip up bacon and eggs.”

  Lunch was a rather dull affair. We ate in the kitchen and the eggs he turned out were hard and greasy. I didn’t enjoy the meal but while we were eating we talked about the car and I obtained most of the information I needed. The results seemed to be worth the effort. It would take me only three or four hours to knock out the article and when I returned to the city I’d be able to pick up a check almost the same day.

  “I never drink coffee,” Dr. Call said, placing an old-fashioned tea pot in the center of the table. “There’s nothing like a spot of good tea to give a man a lift.”

  We drank the tea, which was pretty strong, and discussed the weather, the growth of New Rockford and a dozen other things that were unimportant. It occurred to me that the Reverend had something serious on his mind and that he was seeking an opportune moment in which to reveal it.

  “I don’t know where your daughter disappeared to,” I said finally. “I had hopes of getting a picture of her standing alongside the car.”

  “She’s gone,” he said. “That’s why I had to cook the eggs.”

  “Oh.”

  “She left a note. She said she was going to the city. To stay. She said she had a job.”

  He stared at me, blinking, as though he were fighting back tears, but there was no real emotion in his voice.

  “Well, I guess that was unexpected,” I said.

  “No. I’ve seen it coming for a long time. Judith is a fine girl but she’s like most of the girls her age. She has no appreciation of values. Life is something to seek, to conquer, not a luxury to enjoy — but she doesn’t realize that.”

  I lit a cigarette and waited.

  “Believe me,” Dr. Call said, “our youth of today is deteriorating, wasting its future and vigor in a cesspool of sin and corruption.”

  That shook me and I took a deep drag on my cigarette. Hell, I was only twenty-six, not old by any standards, and I didn’t feel as though I were thoroughly disreputable. Of course, I drank some, lived a little, had enjoyed probably more than my share of women in one form or another, but I didn’t feel as though I was a lost cause. It was, I was forced to admit, a tough verdict.

  “Judith is no worse than other girls,” Dr. Call said. “I have to admit that. All young girls today are weak, insecure.”

  I didn’t say anything. He was over my head, a mile above it, and I didn’t understand his angle at all.

  “I’d like to talk to you, Mr. Morgan. Seriously.”

  His elbows were on the table and he leaned forward, looking straight into my eyes.

  “All right.”

  “I’m sure you won’t mind if I tell you that I called your magazine this morning, inquiring about you. I spoke with the editor, a Mr. — ”

  “Sam Terry!”

  “Yes, Mr. Terry. He had high praise for you, Mr. Morgan. He said you were a fine young man, a competent writer and that you could be trusted with almost any assignment.”

  I grinned and waited. Sam and I were pretty good friends and once in a while when he came up with an issue of Car Skill that was running short I was able to help him out with a quick story. Sam would get quite a kick out of a minister calling to check on me. He might even insist that I buy him a drink for the free plug.

  “I have worked for a long time in New Rockford for the betterment of youth,” Dr. Call said. “I am not alone in this, of course, because every church group is interested. But our problem, from the start, has been to get the cooperation and the ideas of the young people themselves. Whenever we’ve asked them what they want to do, they’ve always told us they want to dance and have fun. Just what does that mean?”

  “Pretty close to what it says, I guess.”

  He shook his head and poured another cup of tea.

  “No. You’re wrong, young man. It simply means that our youth of today is unable to plan a truly worthwhile future.”

  I hadn’t thought much about it before, but there was something to what he said. Hardly anybody, it seemed, knew where they were going or what they were going to do after they got there.

  “Take our young boys, for instance. Years ago, they spent their leisure time playing healthy games, or fishing, or doing something of that nature. But what do they do today? I’ll tell you what they do. They gather in little groups on the street corners, or in stores, and talk about girls. Every magazine you pick up is filled with pictures of half-nude women, pictures cleverly titled to arouse only the basest instincts of the male. Isn’t that true, Mr. Morgan?”

  “Some of them are pretty exciting,” I admitted.

  “Yes. And you, yourself. You just mentioned that you had hoped to be able to take a picture of that car with my daughter alongside it. Why? Well, I’ll tell you why. Not because the girl had anything to do with the car, but because the presence of sex — at least some hint of it — has become a necessary tool with which to attract attention.”

  “It’s a trend,” I said. “You can’t fight it.”

  “It is a trend,” he agreed. “It is getting worse and worse as time goes on. The more female figures a young man sees, th
e more he wants to see. And the more he wants to see them, the more girls there will be who will accommodate him. It is a vicious circle, Mr. Morgan. It is a circle that can close tighter and tighter until it finally strangles the morals of all of us.”

  This guy was really on a reform kick, I thought. No wonder his daughter had packed her satchel and run off to the city.

  “I don’t believe we can reshape the reading habits and the desires of millions of young people,” he said. “No one could be foolish enough to believe that. But I have, through my own efforts, interested a substantial group of business people in financing an effort to unmask the more ruthless types of commercialized sex. The money is available, Mr. Morgan. It has been for some time. We have been merely waiting until we could find the right young man to work with us. I have hopes that you might be the man.”

  This was a surprise! I felt flattered.

  “I’ve never done anything like that before,” I said. “But if it pays money I don’t see any reason why we can’t talk about it.”

  His plan, it developed, was rather vague. In fact, he didn’t have a plan. All the Reverend Doctor Call knew was that a few of the stores in town sold pictures of un-draped women. Some of the pictures were called “art studies” while others made no pretense of being anything except filthy pictures of men and women engaged in natural and unnatural acts. Many of the photos had been seized in the local schools but the police had been apathetic about it and nothing had come of the incidents.

  “A month ago,” he went on to say, “one of the hotels in the area held a smoker. Reports say that degrading movies were shown at the affair. Not only that, but later some of the girls who had taken part in the movie offered their services to all those men who were interested. I believe, Mr. Morgan, that you will agree with me that such things are unnecessary in a civilized world.”

  I told him I did and I meant it. I’m the kind of guy who’s been around and seen more than my share but I still like my sex straight.