Free The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin Page B

pressed my
coat pocket and felt the little square that the snapshots made under
the fabric. When this was just a market town, maybe Cindy Ann could
have afforded to come here wide-eyed and unwary. But cities grow up
like psychopathic children. They grow up and become delinquents. Even
cities as strict and unglamorous as this one. Years pass and what is
just a smirk or a piece of conventional wisdom out in the farmlands
becomes an industry in the flats.
    I paid my check at the register and walked down Fifth
to the bus terminal. The meter was just running out as I got to the
car. But that was all right. I had a trip to make anyway. : had a
captain of industry to see.
    From the Ohio side, Newport, Kentucky, seems a small,
colorful hamlet nestled in green hills. On the river bank the posh
marinas reach baby-white fingers out into the clear run of the Ohio.
Speedboats chase up and down the shore, towing an occasional skier in
their wakes. Above the water's edge Newport rises in a talus of shale
and seems to keep rising gently in a sweep of white and red roofs
that have the sleepy look of adobe and sunbaked tile. And everywhere
that isn't white or red is green with the maple trees that cascade
down from the surrounding hillsides and flood through the hamlet in a
wave that stops just short of the river bank. From the Ohio shore,
Newport has the look of one of those vacation communities that people
like Cox and Meyer plant on the edges of newly dredged lakes and call
Sunwood or Lake of the Four Pines. From the Kentucky side, it's a
different view entirely.
    For one thing, you're suddenly aware that there is a
big city behind you--a clean expanse of bright glass and structured
steel and china-red brick. The little one and two-story businesses
that dot the main drags of Newport seem very small indeed, by
comparison. And the age that shows on them is anything but
picturesque. Once you've settled down in the garden streets that
criss-cross the town proper, the summery look of vacation quickly
fades. The houses are frame and the paint is peeling everywhere and
the streets are littered with broken glass and in need of patching.
And the men and women who live on the streets have the unmistakable
look of the urban poor--so pinched and chalk-white in the face and on
the arms and legs that you would think, in Newport, that a suntan was
something you had to be able to afford.
    The "poor cousin" look of Newport is
deceptive. There is money in the city, but it's concentrated and
virtually hidden away in the auto dealerships that proliferate like
cement ponds along the riverfront and in the night clubs that seem to
occupy whole blocks of the business district. It doesn't take a
trained eye to discover where most of the dollars have gone. Not when
the City Hall is an old brick firehouse and the Pink Kittycat Club
looks like a small Vegas hotel. The men who work that stretch of town
never lack a tan, even in the dead of winter. And the clothes they
wear have creases in them that could cut bread.
    Every city has a reason for being where it is. And
Newport's reason is to service Cincinnati, to provide the gambling,
the prostitution, and the sin that the good elders of our town have
turned out of the city limits. Newport is an open secret, a dirty
little joke that nobody laughs at because there's too much muscle and
money in Newport to make it a fun or a funny place. It's a tough,
leering border town, with a wide-open police department and a
come-hither night life. And every one of those good Cincinnati
burghers is very glad it's around. There has to be some place for the
convention trade to go. There has to be some place for the
businessmen from Elkhart and Louisville and Dayton to blow off a
little steam. And Newport is the place. Let the conventioneer dine in
Cincinnati, put up in a good Cincinnati hotel. Let him cheer the Reds
in the early evening and grab a drink or two downtown. And, then, let
him cross the river, with the city's blessing, and