That Night at the Palace by L.D. Watson Read Free Book Online Page A

the lobby next to what once was probably one of the finer restaurants in the little boomtown. He had to climb over the rubble to get there, but the section he used had a roof, and the walls seemed solid. All things considered, it was far better than sleeping on the damp ground in a shantytown.
    Shakes was a hobo.
    In the spring of 1921, Shakes, then known as Darnell, graduated at the top of his class from Rusk High School not fifteen miles away. That September he enrolled in Stephen F. Austin Teacher’s College in Nacogdoches where he studied mathematics. Most of the freshmen had their hands full just making grades, but for Darnell education was easy. When not in class he held down two jobs. Making money was important to Darnell. After two years he managed to save almost a thousand dollars and transferred to the University of Chicago where the tall, lean Texan earned a Bachelor’s degree in accounting.
    After graduation, Darnell Blankenship secured a job with the firm of Lockyer and Hornsby, two of the founding traders on the Chicago Stock Exchange. Darnell was on his way. The young man had a quick mind and calculated numbers like a human abacus. As a result he rose fast in the firm. In just two years Darnell had already been written up in the Financial Times as one of Chicago’s bright young minds in the world of finance.
    That same year he got word that both of his parents had been killed in an automobile accident on their way back to Rusk from a trip to visit relatives in Houston. Darnell wanted to go down there, of course, but he simply couldn’t spare the time. The firm was swamped with work. He knew that it would take at least a week to go down to Texas on a train, handle the arrangements, and travel back. A week at the Exchange was like a lifetime; things happened so fast in the market. More importantly, the competition for jobs like his was unrelenting. If he left, there was a good chance that there would be no job to come back to.
    So after a long, heated, and extremely painful telephone conversation with his sister, most of which he could hardly understand from all her sobbing, Darnell managed to talk his way out of the trip. But it was costly. He promised to turn over to her all of his inheritance, which amounted to a house, his father’s hardware store, and what little money his parents had saved. Still, that wasn’t enough for his sister, who never wanted to see him again. He had to promise that if he didn’t have time to pay his respects to his parents that he would never come back to Rusk.
    That part was easy. Darnell had no intention of ever going back to the little one-horse town.
    That same year, he met her. Dianna Montgomery Bagwell. She was beautiful. What she saw in him - well, he knew exactly what she saw in him. Darnell was an “up and comer,” and Dianna liked the best of everything. They dined in the finest restaurants and danced and gambled in the best speak-easies. If there was something expensive to do in Chicago, Dianna wanted to be in on it. They socialized with Chicago’s finest and most notorious. On one occasion they dined just a table over from Al Capone himself at Coq d’Or in the Drake Hotel.
    Their wedding was a simple affair. Only a few close friends and Dianna’s family were invited. Though having a taste for the finer things, Dianna, it turned out, came from quite humble origins.
    The couple took the train up the lake and honeymooned up on Mackinac Island. It was July fourth, and the Exchange was closed for part of the week, so Darnell only missed two days of real work. A man only gets married once, so he reasoned that he could miss a couple of days.
    Those first few months were the best of his life. They were newlyweds, and Darnell had a very healthy income. Dianna found them an apartment right on Michigan Avenue. It was expensive, but she argued it would do nothing but go up in value, and of course, a man of his stature couldn’t live just anywhere. She would have been