Grifter's Game (15 page)

But why pay me at all?

Not as a sop to her conscience, because I knew full well she didn’t have one. Not to even things out, because three thousand dollars was hardly a fair share.

Why?

I thought about it, and I came up with two answers that seemed to fit. One of them was sensible enough. Without some kind of word from her, I’d panic. I’d wonder where she was and I’d try to get in touch with her. Eventually I’d find some way to bollix things up. She didn’t want that to happen, so she had to let me know I was being brushed off. Her way was perfect—no note, no call, no wire. Just properly anonymous money.

The other answer could make sense only to Mona. She was a girl who was used to having things break right with her. Maybe, if she gave me a little piece of change, I would go away and disappear. Maybe I’d be happy with my tiny cut and leave her alone. Maybe I’d take the dough, given to me out of the goodness of her heart, and skip with it. Wishful thinking. But Mona was a wishful person.

Three thousand dollars. I could forget all about her with three thousand dollars. I could use the money to cruise Miami Beach good and hard until I found myself a rich divorcee and parlayed her into a life-long meal ticket. I could buy a fresh start with three grand, and that was what she was counting on me to do.

She didn’t know me at all.

Somehow the thought of sea and surf had lost its charm for me. So had the thought of food. But the bar was open, and liquor was far from unattractive. I drank but did not get drunk. I was too busy listening to small voices located somewhere deep inside my brain. They did not stop talking.

I think I would have been able to forget her if the money had been the main thing. But it hadn’t. I shot holes in Keith Brassard because I wanted his wife, not his money. And I had been double-crossed not by a temporary partner in crime but by the potential reward of the crime itself. Two things—I couldn’t let her get away with it. And I couldn’t let her get away from me.

I drank bourbon and thought about murder. I thought of ways to kill her. I thought of guns and knives. I looked at my hand, fingers wrapped tight around an old-fashioned glass, and I thought of barehanded murder. Strangling the life out of her, beating the life out of her. I drank some more bourbon and remembered a face and a noise and five bullets, and I knew that I was not going to kill her.

For one thing, I was certain I could never kill anybody again. The thought came to me, and I accepted it at once as gospel, and then I began to wonder why it was so. Not because killing Brassard had been difficult, or frightening, or even dangerous. But because I did not like killing. I didn’t know whether or not that made sense and I didn’t care. I knew it was true. That’s all that really mattered.

I was not going to kill her. Because I did not want to kill, and also because that would not solve anything. There would be a risk for no reward but revenge. I would get vengeance, but I would not get that money and I would not get Mona.

I still wanted the money. And I still wanted the woman. Don’t ask me why.

“Do you have a match?”

I had a match. I turned and looked at the girl who wanted a match. Brunette, mid-twenties, chic black dress and good figure. Dark lipstick on her mouth, a cigarette drooping from her lips, waiting for a light. She didn’t want a match.

I lit her cigarette. She was poised and cool but not at all subtle. She leaned forward to take the light and to give me a look at large breasts harnessed by a lacy black bra. Eve learned that one the day they got dressed and moved out of Eden. It has been just as effective ever since.

I remembered the whore in Cleveland and the snatch of song from Mandalay. I paraphrased it now in my mind:
I’ve a richer, bitchier maiden in a funny money land
. Mona was rich and a bitch and in Vegas. Bad verse but accurate.

The
neater sweeter
routine was an empty dream. The girl on the stool beside me was pretty. I didn’t have to pretend I was a priest any more.

I returned her smile. I caught the bartender’s eye and pointed meaningfully at her empty glass. He filled it.

“Thank you,” she said.

The conversation was easy because she did all of it. Her name was Nan Hickman. She played jockey to a typewriter for a New York insurance company. She had two weeks’ vacation. The rest of the stenos used their two weeks to hunt a husband in the Catskills. She didn’t like the Catskills and she didn’t want a husband. She wanted to have fun but she wasn’t having any.

She was sweet and warm and honest. She was not cheap. She wanted to have fun. In two weeks she would go back to the Bronx and turn into a pumpkin. Her mother would know who she went out with and when she came in. Her aunts would try to find husbands for her. She only had two weeks.

I put my hand on her arm. I looked at her and she didn’t look away.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I said. “Let’s make love.”

I left change on the bar. We went upstairs, to her room, and we made love. We made love very slowly, very gently, and very well. She’d been drinking something with rum in it and her mouth tasted warm and sweet.

She had a good body. I liked the way her body was pale white from her breasts to her thighs and tan on arms and legs and face. I liked to look at her and I liked to touch her, and I liked to move with her and against her. And afterward it was good to lie next to her, hot and sweaty and magnificently exhausted, while the earth shifted slowly back into place.

For a while there was no need to talk. Then there was, and she said little things about herself and about her job and about her family. She had an older brother, married and Long Islanded, and younger sister.

She didn’t tell me that she was the closest thing in the world to a certified virgin. She didn’t apologize for picking me up and sleeping with me. She wanted to have fun.

And she didn’t talk about tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or the days after that. She didn’t talk about home or family or marriage or little white houses with green shutters. Nor did she ask me any questions.

I looked at her pretty face, at her breasts and belly. I thought what a good thing it would be to fall in love with her and marry her. I wished I could do just that and knew that I couldn’t.

I’ve a richer, bitchier maiden . . .

I waited until she was sleeping. Then I slipped out from under the sheet and got dressed. I didn’t put on my shoes. I did not want to wake her.

I looked down at her. Some day somebody would marry her. I hoped he would be good enough for her, and that they would be happy. I hoped their children would look like her.

I walked out, holding my shoes in one hand, and went back to my room.

After breakfast the next morning I checked out of the Eden Roc. The desk clerk was sorry to see me go. Sorry or not, the smile never left his face.

He checked my account. “You have a refund coming, Mr. Martin. A little over thirty dollars.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “Didn’t have a chance to leave anything for the chambermaid. Why don’t you hang onto the money, spread it around here and there?”

He was surprised and pleased. I wondered how much of the money would stick to his fingers. I didn’t care. I didn’t need the thirty-odd dollars and it didn’t make any difference to me who got it.

Surprisingly few things made any difference to me.

I found a phone booth at a bar—not the same one I had used before but pretty much the same. It was a complex proposition. I called Cheshire Point Information and asked for the largest realtor. I got through to his office and asked if 341 Roscommon Drive was on his list. It wasn’t. Could he find out who had it? He could, and would call me back collect. I waited.

I had never before had the experience of accepting a collect call in a pay phone. The operator ascertained that it was really me on the line, then told me to throw money into the machine. I did.

“Lou Pierce has the property on the board,” he told me. “Pierce and Pierce.” He gave me their number and I jotted it down.

“High asking price,” he said. “Too high, if you ask me. I can give you the same sort of property, same neighborhood, maybe five thousand dollars cheaper. Good terms, too. You interested?”

I told him I didn’t think so but I’d let him know. I thanked him and told him he’d been a big help. Then I rang off, threw another dime in the hole and got the operator. I put through a call to Pierce and Pierce and got somebody named Lou Pierce on the phone almost immediately.

“Fred Ziegler called me,” he said. “Told me you’ve got your eyes on the 341 Roscommon Drive place. Believe me, you couldn’t do better. Beautiful home, lovely grounds. A bargain.”

I almost told him Ziegler had said different but checked the impulse. “I’ve seen the property,” I said. “I’m not interested in buying. I’d like some information.”

“Oh?”

“About Mrs. Brassard.”

“Go ahead,” he said. Part of the warmth was gone and his voice sounded guarded.

“Her address.”

There was a pause, a brief one. “I’m sorry,” he said, not sounding all that sorry at all. “Mrs. Brassard left strict instructions to keep her address confidential. I can’t give it out. Not to anybody.”

That figured.

I was prepared for it. “Oh,” I said, “you don’t understand. She wrote to me herself, told me where she was staying. But I lost her Nevada address.”

He was waiting for me to say more. I let him wait.

“She wrote you, huh? Told you where she was staying, but you lost the letter?”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” he said. “Well. Look, I’m not saying I don’t believe you. Seems to me if somebody wrote me the name of a hotel in Tahoe it wouldn’t go out of my head, but I got a better memory than a lot of people. But all I can do is what she told me. I can’t go giving out confidential information.”

He already had.

I put up a minor bitch to preserve appearances. Then I acknowledged his position, thanked him anyway, and hung up on him. I hoped the conscientious objectionable didn’t realize how many beans he had spilled.

I picked up my bags, left the bar and found a cab to dump them into. I climbed in after them and sat down, heavily.

But I lost her Nevada address.

It must have been luck, saying Nevada instead of Vegas. I’d been angling for the address itself, not the name of the town. Somehow the possibility that she might mail the letter out-of-town hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been hunting the address, and I hadn’t gotten it. Now I didn’t need it any more.

Tahoe. Not Vegas. Good old Lake Tahoe, where I had never been in my life. But I knew a little about Tahoe. I knew it was small enough so that I could find her with ease whether I knew the name of her hotel or not.

Tahoe.

And I got another part of the picture, a picture of Mona Brassard throwing dice in a posh club in Tahoe and laughing her head off about the poor clod searching all over Vegas for her. It made a funny picture.

She would be surprised to see me.

They didn’t have a direct flight to Lake Tahoe. TWA had one to Vegas with one touchdown in Kansas City en route. That was good enough for me. I didn’t want to get to Tahoe before I was ready, anyhow. There was plenty of time.

The flight was a bad one. The weather was fine but the pilot hit every air pocket between Miami and Kansas City. There were a lot of them. The flying didn’t do anything to me other than annihilate my appetite. It had a stronger effect on a few passengers; most of them managed to hit the little paper bags that TWA thoughtfully provided, but one got the floor by mistake. It kept the trip from getting too dull.

I was very calm, considering. Again, it was that weird calm that I seem to get possessed by when I ought to be tense, by all the standard rules. The machine bit was coming on again. I had a function, a purpose. I didn’t have to worry over what I might do next because I knew full well what I was going to do. I was going to wind up with Mona and the money. It was that simple.

Why on earth did I want either of them? A good question. I wasn’t sure, but I was entirely sure that I did, and that was the only relevant question. So I stopped worrying about the whys.

The pilot surprised everybody with a smooth landing in K.C. I spent the twenty-five minutes between landing and takeoff in the Kansas City airport. It was a pretty new building that smelled of paint and plastic. There was a pinball machine that I took a shine to. I used to be good on pinball machines and this was an easy one. I had seven free games coming to me, and then suddenly it was time to get on the damn plane again. I found a bored little kid and told him he could play my games off for me. He stared at me in amazement and I left him there.

The rest of the ride was better. They had either changed pilots or found a brand-new atmosphere for us to fly through because the trip to Vegas was smooth as silk. I let the waitress serve me a good dinner and permitted her to refill my coffee cup two or three times. The food went down easily and stayed there. Maybe air travel was coming into its own.

I laughed, remembering the airline slogan. You know the one.
Breakfast in London, lunch in New York, dinner in Los Angeles, luggage in Buenos Aires.
That one.

It didn’t work that way. My luggage and I both wound up in Las Vegas in time to watch the sun set. We got together, my luggage and I, and we took a cab to the Dunes. I’d phoned ahead for a room and it was ready for me. They don’t play games in Vegas. The luxury is incredible, the price fair. The gambling brings in the money.

I took a hot shower, dried off, dressed, unpacked. I went downstairs and found the casino. The action was heavy—no town in the world has as many bored people as Vegas. Bitter little girls sitting out a divorce action, mob types looking for relaxation and not finding it, nice people like that.

Red came up six times straight on the roulette wheel, in case you care. A man with buck teeth put a twenty-five-dollar chip down at the crap table, made seven straight passes, dragged off all but the original twenty-five, and crapped out. A stout matronly type with a silver fox stole hit the nickel jackpot on the slot machine, cashed the nickels in for half-dollars, and put every one of them back into the box.