Pushover

By Orrie Hitt

A girl had put brash Danny Fulton into business - and maybe a girl would put him out. Because the whole sweet sucker game depended on girls . . .

Like that cop’s daughter, pretty Gloria, who dreamed up the big pitch after a couple of nights of love. Or Madeline, fond of giving Danny a nice present after every job - a very special present. And Sandy, not only ravishing, but rich. And, for casual 'deals,' such innocent you things as Sally Grafton . . .

They made a strange assortment of bedfellows, but did have some things in common. Each was wildly beautiful. And each, for Danny Fulton, was just a - Pushover!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Jan 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781440539664

Book preview

Part One

EASY COME, EASY GO

1

I FELT hot, as if I was burning up, but it was summer, just as Al said, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Nothing, that is, unless I picked up the Grafton check for three grand, grabbed the other three out of the bank and took off for the Canadian wilds. Alone. No Al. No Madeline. Nobody but me.

Hell, I thought getting into my car, a guy has to be nuts to go to Canada in July. So who wants high trees and pretty flat lakes? Any guy, and especially a guy who’s thirty-one and single, would rather look at something high on the chest and flat in the belly. They could keep that nature stuff and shove it up their St. Lawrence. By tomorrow morning I’d be in Atlantic City, where the breezes are cool and the women are hot.

I drove out past the hotel and turned right into Center Street. A big white banner hung across the street, one end of it anchored to a bank and the other to a hardware store. I got a real bang out of the bold red letters:

HELP BUILD TOMORROW’S YOUTH — TODAY

Get Your Copy Of The History Of Waverly

ONLY $2.00

(Sponsored by Grafton Manufacturing Company)

Suckers, I thought, holding the Buick at the red light. Over six thousand suckers who had been so stupid that they had swallowed their own bait.

I grinned and shot the Buick across the intersection.

Several people waved at me and I waved back. Suckers. A whole city full of them. Too bad, I thought, that it was winding up.

Where’s the next stop? Madeline had asked me a couple of days before.

I don’t know, I’d said. I haven’t heard from Al.

We’d been having lunch in a diner, one of those crummy little places that throws the food at you and then takes all afternoon to drag the dirty dishes back to the sink.

I haven’t seen much of you, Danny, she’d said, making a face at the coffee. Not since we got the book out.

Getting the book out is the easiest part of it, I’d reminded her. Knocking off the sales is something else again.

We’d argued a while about that, as to which was the most important, and Madeline had acted hurt but, then, she always acted that way when she thought somebody was throwing a hook at her writing ability. Actually, she was a lousy writer but that didn’t make very much difference because the fund-raising books that we turned out did not have to be literature.

You could put crayon marks on wrapping paper, staple a fancy cover on every handful and sell them if you’re good enough, I told her. It’s the sales that mean something in this business. Everything else is secondary.

She’d asked me again where we were going next, where AI was, and I’d kept telling her I didn’t know. I’d wondered, not really caring, what she would do when she found out that I, Danny Fulton, had left little old Waverly all by himself. Maybe she’d go back to her home in Amsterdam, New York, or out to San Diego with her husband, who was in the Navy. It didn’t matter to me, one way or the other. As far as I was concerned, Madeline Jackson was a twenty-two-year-old blonde who could type accurately if she couldn’t write well, who had worked for me a little more than two years and who put out every once in a while and thereby kept her glands in operating condition.

We’ll knock it off here Thursday, I’d said later, driving toward her apartment on the South Side. You know how long we been in this stinking place?

Almost eight weeks.

Yeah.

But it’s been fun, Danny. She’d leaned back against the seat, the wind driving into her hair, the material of the light blue dress melting over her body. It’s always fun. And you meet so many nice people.

Like hell, I thought now, driving crosstown toward the Grafton Manufacturing Company offices. Like hell you meet a lot of nice people. You meet a bunch of slobs, that’s what you meet. Occasionally, like here in Waverly, you meet a slob with money. That, of course, changes things. A slob with money is a fund raiser’s definition of a nice person.

We don’t want you to lose any money on this venture, Harvey Grafton had assured me. You’ve made a great contribution to our community, Mr. Fulton. I feel that you and your associates should be amply rewarded.

Sure, it sounds easy, the way I tell it here, as if all I had to do was drive over there to Grafton’s office, hang around his desk until he filled my fist with a check and then blow. But it doesn’t happen just like that. Not quite. You make it happen. You set it up good, watching yourself every step of the way, and then you take them so fast that they don’t even have the privilege of experiencing the sensation.

It hadn’t been easy in Waverly but it hadn’t been awfully hard either. Al Castle had spent ten days in the town, getting the ducks lined up so they could be shot down. AI was good at that and he earned his hundred and fifty every week. He wasn’t the sort of guy who could follow a deal through to the end but he could start you off by building castles in the sky that made everybody happy. He’d built a dilly for the Waverly Home Improvement League and by the time I’d gotten to the city, population 17,640, there hadn’t been much selling to do. After I’d listened to comments from some of the leading citizens I’d gotten the impression that they were convinced that Community Enterprises — Daniel Fulton, president — had been commissioned by God to save the world from itself.

It’s the most wonderful idea I’ve ever heard, Ethel Grafton had told me the first time we’d met. And it will do everybody so much good.

I guess she wasn’t aware that it would do the most good for Danny Fulton.

Danny Fulton, born October 27, 1925, in Port Jessup, New York, the son of a hard-working mother and a paper-hanging father who hit the jug so much that half the wallpaper he hung was upside down.

Danny Fulton, fund-raiser deluxe who had one particular fund in mind always.

His own …

The city of Waverly had been a natural. To begin with it had first been settled some two hundred years before and this tended to give the city a long and colorful history. Secondly, the Waverly Home Improvement League, composed mostly of the country club set who liked to dabble in the lives of the peasants, recognized the drastic and immediate need to wage a relentless war against juvenile delinquency. Of course, the Waverly Home Improvement League had decided that the middle and lower class homes in the community spawned ninety-eight percent of all lawlessness, though the League neglected to add that this was only ninety-eight percent of those who got caught. The League failed to consider that the West Side school girl who got herself in trouble and had a kid, was no more guilty than the lawyer’s daughter who got the hush-hush treatment and secret medical assistance. The League also failed to recognize that the teen age sex club which had been caught at the height of activity in a cellar on the West Side had been caught simply because the kids didn’t have any cars and couldn’t go anywhere else, say a place like the picnic grounds back of the sixth hole at the country club. No, the League didn’t think of these things, or perhaps it deliberately kept quiet about them, but it hadn’t been any of my business and I hadn’t worried about it. My job had been to finish selling the League on Community Enterprises and the services it could render.

Our plan is very simple, I’d told them at the first meeting. We will write and publish a history of the City of Waverly. We will go back to the Indian days and write a history that tells the whole wonderful story of your fine community. You will have no financial obligation. All we ask is your cooperation. We will solicit all advertising which, by the way, will only be in sufficient amount to pay our expenses in creating and publishing the book. If we make any money it will be only because the book is good. If the book is not good, the public will not buy it; we will not make any money. The more money we make the more you will make — the more money you will have to use in your fight against juvenile crime. Our plans is as simple as that.

There had been about a hundred at the meeting and they had gone for it like a hound dog after a bitch in heat. The selling price of the book, two dollars a copy, and the profit breakdown had met with their approval. There was no reason why they shouldn’t have liked it. They were all smart businessmen and we looked like a bunch of jerks. All they could do was make money. All we could do was go broke. That’s the way it had looked.

The League had named Harvey Grafton as chairman of the project and I’d met with him the next day to iron out the details. We were to get a dollar and a quarter on each copy of the first five hundred sold, a dollar a copy on the next one thousand copies, and seventy-five cents on all remaining copies. In exchange, the League got the balance. They furnished us with a letter, authorizing us to use their name when soliciting ads and we agreed to deliver the book within six weeks. There was no mention of the size of the book or how it was to be manufactured. Nobody in the League seemed to care about that. All they seemed to be interested in was letting the town know that they were noble souls who wanted to see the youth of the city grow up in a better tomorrow. It had been a natural all the way through, all except the behavior of Grafton’s daughter, Sally, who had been as unnatural as you can get and still run around loose.

Getting the ads in Waverly had been easy. Sometimes you have to do all the selling yourself, because the suckers are either tough or near broke, but in Waverly business was good and everybody climbed on the bandwagon. At the beginning of the second week I’d put on two phone girls, plus a kid with a car who went out and chased contracts.

This is Community Enterprises, I’d taught the girls to say on the phone. Undoubtedly you have heard about the forthcoming publication of the History of Waverly. This is to be a handsome book, covering the fabulous record of the city, and it is to be sold to the general public at two dollars a copy.

At this point the girl was to pause for any comment her listener might wish to make. Regardless of what he said, or if he said nothing, the next pitch was always the same.

You know, she would continue, the money derived from this book is to be used for the betterment of youth within the City of Waverly. Now, we are not selling ads in the true sense of an ad — that is, we do not have any display ads — but we do have a couple of sections set aside which say, This book has been made possible through the help of the following business people of the City of Waverly. We respectfully request that you support them as they have supported us. You get your name and address listed on one line. You get one copy of the book, which will sell for two dollars, free with your listing. And the whole thing, book and all, costs you only seven dollars and fifty cents.

This may not sound like the greatest pitch you ever heard but four out of five of the suckers went for it and, once in a while, a guy would call back, say he was sorry he had said no, and that he wanted to be counted in. As soon as the phone girl had made her sale she listed the name of the business and the address in the triplicate sales book. The next day the kid would set up his route, take the sales books with him and go around and collect the money. The advertiser got one copy of the sales ticket, one remained in the book and the other was used as a mailing sticker when the book came out. The girls made a dollar a sale, the kid fifty cents for collecting the money and that left Community Enterprise six bucks. In less than two weeks we nailed down five hundred contracts.

We’re going to lose money on the publication, I’d told Grafton one night. I’d given him a tight little smile, like we were out on a limb at the moment but that we had plenty of confidence. But I think the book will sell. I think it’ll sell fine.

That’s another thing about this community betterment fund-raising business — you don’t have to pay for any advertising. The radio stations and newspapers always give you all the free space you want. You pick something hot in a town, like juvenile delinquency or a new church or a pitch for the local fire department and what else can local publicity mediums do?

Don’t worry about it, Grafton had assured me. I’ll see that you don’t lose anything. Sally keeps telling me about all the work you’re putting into it and I’m sold on the idea that you’ve gone all out for our city, Mr. Fulton.

Sally Grafton had been out with me for three days while I ran around town and interviewed about a gross of old bags who thought they knew a lot about local history and who, in reality, knew hardly anything at all. We’d looked at dozens of old pictures — This was my grandfather, Mr. Fulton: you can use the picture if you want to — and I’d made pages of notes which I had later burned.

I don’t know when you’ll find time to write it, Sally had told me that third night. It’ll take weeks just to get all of the information.

We’ll be out on time, I’d told her. Don’t worry about that.

At the time Sally and I had been talking the book was two-thirds done. The woman in the local library thought that Madeline was a staff writer for a nature magazine and that she was busy in the historical room looking up the shrubs of the area. Actually, Madeline and her IBM electric were busy punching out the History of Waverly as previously compiled by the WPA back in the early thirties. Of course, she didn’t use all of the material, just the highlights of it and enough to fill sixty-eight pages of legal size paper single-line spaced.

Later, these pages were reduced by camera and the whole book was run on offset, directly from the typing. We used our usual number of photos in Waverly — forty good shots dealing with the past — and the whole job cost us nine hundred and forty dollars for ten thousand copies. That left more than two thousand dollars profit from the advertising, since the sales of the book had more than paid Al’s and Madeline’s salaries plus the other expenses.

I think you’re going to lose money on this, Sally had told me another time. We’d been sitting in my car, out in front of her house, and the night had been dark. And I don’t want you to lose any money, Danny. You’re too nice a guy.

Fund-raising is like any other kind of selling; once you’ve sold yourself, the rest comes easy.

It’s okay, I’d told her. You have to take a beating once in a while.

We’d talked some more about it, the same old bunk about what a great thing this was that the League was supporting, and she’d been real close and her perfume had been in my nostrils. Somehow my arm had gone around her down in the darkness. She’d sort of lifted her head, wanting me to, and then I’d kissed her. When my hand had come around to her back, she’d sighed and let her breasts swell out soft and free.

I don’t do this with every fellow, she’d whispered.

Maybe she hadn’t done it with every fellow, or even every other one, but she hadn’t been lonesome all these years either. She knew how to make the front seat of a car have as much room as a three-quarter bed.

The next time had been the night the books were delivered in Waverly, about an hour after I’d given the first copy to His Honor the Mayor. This time we had parked further down the street, away from the house.

That night had been the last with Sally, though I’d seen her almost every day since. She would come down to the hotel around noon, where I had two girls selling books by phone, and now and then we’d have lunch together. She would ask me about the sales and I’d tell her they weren’t too bad but they weren’t what I’d call good, either. I didn’t bother explaining that I had six other girls working in other spots of the city and that, counting everything, sales were going faster than we could deliver the books. On the other hand, the League would get an accounting only of the books sold from the hotel so any further explanation of the situation seemed unnecessary.

I parked the Buick near the office entrance of Grafton Manufacturing Company