2
Until I’d got that cablegram I now had in my bag, I had in some quite normal way entirely escaped the phenomenon of Reno. A lot of my friends were divorced, of course, but usually the time element hadn’t been urgently important, and when it had been they’d gone to Paris where they could get some clothes at the same time, not Nevada. I’d heard about Reno, about its divorce dens and the open flaunting of its sin and shame, and all the rest of it, but the only very clear picture I had in mind was of apparently respectable lawyers standing with their famous movie star clients in front of a classical-porticoed court house looking rather smugly pompous. Then on the plane coming out a plumbing salesman had called it The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and another salesman had showed me a piece in a sensational magazine calling it The Sodom of the West.
It looked like any other small Southwestern town as we rolled along past the Nevada Stock Farms, a series of pigmy post offices in gray stone with a beautiful sleek Palomino looking over the fence, and down the highway past fruit stands and neat white-fenced houses set in groves of silver-backed cottonwoods—except, of course, for the enormous billboards advertising penny roulette and various hot spots where one dined and danced and gambled. Then it changed as we came closer to the town; it was more prosperous, and busier, as we came into Virginia Street with its elaborate garages and service stations, and the Washoe County court house with its green velvet lawn accented with spears of scarlet cannas, and the Riverside Hotel on one side, and on the other the shady public park in front of the Auditorium, and the handsome new post office, and then, between the post office and the Truckee River, Reno’s other fashionable hotel, the Washoe.
The limousine turned in, a doorman in a purple rayon shirt and blue denims and a kelly-green handkerchief took my bag.
“Hello,” he said. “You just come?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Well,” he said, “you’ll like it here when you get used to it.”
I said, “I’m sure I will.”
A frightful din of cowbells and honking of horns came up the blazing hot street, fighting with the roar of the steam shovel that I could see tearing at the rocky bed of the Truckee River. A second doorman, dressed in blue denims and a purple rayon shirt with a kelly-green kerchief at his neck, took my bag.
“Just come?” he shouted.
I nodded.
“You’ll like it when you get used to it!” he bellowed.
“I’m sure I will!” I shouted back . . . momentarily surer that I certainly wouldn’t.
He put my bag down in front of the desk. The clerk wore a bright red rayon shirt with a brighter yellow kerchief. “You register from Reno,” he said politely.
I must have looked as bewildered as I felt.
“You register from Reno. There—where it says ‘Address’.”
I know I looked definitely feeble-minded. He smiled as at an especially low-grade child, and said patiently, “You register from Reno—to establish yourself as a permanent resident of Nevada.”
I said, “Oh,” blankly.
He frowned, a definite glint of suspicion coming into his eye.
“You are here for a divorce, aren’t you?”
I had the dreadful feeling that I was being subversive—like going to a party during Prohibition days and refusing a drink. He looked at me very much the way one’s host would have looked then, as if you were plainly implying the liquor was so much poison, and said “Oh.”
“I’m here to stay with Mrs. Bonner,” I explained hastily, and rather apologetically, I’m afraid.
The change was instant.
“Oh, of course—you’re Mrs. Latham, Mrs. Bonner’s aunt. We thought you’d be somewhat older, Mrs. Latham.—But you’re expected!”
He didn’t actually waggle his finger at me, but almost, and he positively trilled the last part of the sentence.
“Jack!”
He summoned a bell hop with black sleeked-down hair, also done up in cowboy boots and blue jeans. “Take Mrs. Latham’s bags up to 308, adjoining Mrs. Bonner’s apartment, and open the connecting door.—Thank you, Mrs. Latham!”
I followed Jack to the elevator. The girl running it had on frontier pants and boots and a pink shirt, and she was chewing gum.
“Mrs. Bonner’s gone riding,” she said. “Who’d she go with, Jack?”
Jack shook his head. “Dunno,” he said. “Some new guy I never saw before.”
The girl smiled reassuringly at me.
“She’ll be back pretty soon,” Jack said. “Did you look in the bar? That’s the place to look in if you want to find anybody in Reno.—Did you see who just blew in?”
For a startled instant I thought he was still talking to me, but he wasn’t. The elevator girl said, “Do you mean the blonde with the silver foxes?”
He nodded. “That’s Kaye Gorman. Baby, did she burn this joint up when she was here three years ago!”
“That was before I came,” the girl said. “But she’s sure going to town with Mr. Cromwell.”
She laughed an odd little laugh. In the narrow oblong mirror in front of her I saw the warning wink the bell hop gave her, and the sudden scared look in her eyes as she brought the car to with a jolt at the third floor. I didn’t need to be psychic to realize that Kaye Gorman was the blonde girl who had stared moodily out the window of the plane all morning . . . or to see, as clearly as if it had been written on the elevator wall, that this was something that involved Judy Bonner.
That sentence in her father’s cablegram—“Reports from Reno disquieting”—flashed into my mind, more disturbing than anything I’d heard from Polly Wagner. And it wasn’t five minutes later—when my bell hop had flung up the windows in my room, opened the door to Judy’s apartment, pocketed his tip and got rather hurriedly out—that I saw, on the chromium and glass table in the center of her charming rose-and-gray sitting room, the gossip sheet of one of the more sensational New York papers, with flamboyant red crayon marks all over it. I picked it up. It had a photograph of Judy Bonner in a white low-cut evening frock, seated at a roulette table with what seemed to me a very large stack of chips in front of her, laughing and having a grand time, while over her bare shoulder, in black tie and dinner jacket, leaned the man I’d seen meeting Kaye Gorman at the airport.
The photograph was captioned “Playboy Meets Girl?” Below it, heading the daily gossip column, was the following:
“Will the lovely Judith Bonner, now doing time in the divorce capital, take another chance at the wheel of matrimony with Playboy Dex Cromwell when she’s free?
“Rumor, which tells the truth—like a lot of well-known liars—when you least expect it, has it that Clem Bonner, who’s been given the air by the beautiful Judy, will patch it up with the first Mrs. Bonner again . . . now that she’s free . . . with one-third (dower right) of the four million dollar fortune of the tobacco king who dropped dead at the Kentucky Derby last year. Maybe that’s what they were talking about so earnestly at Armand’s opening the other night (Picture on Page 4.)”
I turned to Page 4. Smiling up at me, under the caption “Widow of Tobacco King Does the Hot Spots,” was the girl whose unsmiling sullen profile I’d been looking at ever since we’d left Omaha that morning. It said below: “Kaye Gorman, former show girl, widow of Lem Gorman, well-known sportsman who dropped dead at the Kentucky Derby, on her first appearance since the tobacco magnate’s death. Her first husband was Clem Bonner, whose second wife, Judith Bonner, is in