Lucky at Cards (8 page)

I drove slowly. She was quiet, sitting with her head back and the wind playing with her hair. I switched on the radio and we listened to rock and roll for a horrible moment. Then I switched off the radio.

She said, “Bill?”

I waited.

“I had a nice time,” she said.

“So did I.”

“It was a strange evening.”

“How?”

“Staged. All set up and arranged. At first I had the feeling that we were all reading dialogue that somebody else had written out for us ages ago.”

She stopped talking. I turned at the corner and she told me when we were at her house. I stopped the Ford and took her to the door and she didn’t say anything until we were standing on the steps.

Then she said, “Married couples do that all the time. They think they have to take people like us and bring us together so that we can get married and make babies and live fuller lives. Even if—if it worked, well, it would make a person feel as though someone else were arranging his life for him.”

I didn’t say anything. Her eyes were directed at me but she was staring past me, off into space. Her lips parted slightly. She looked as though she wanted to be kissed and it seemed like a good idea, so I kissed her. She was stiff at first. Then she relaxed slightly and then I let go of her. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. Barb said, “That was—nice, Bill.”

“I’ll call you soon.”

“You don’t have to, you know.”

“I know. I’ll want to.”

“I think I’d like that,” she said.

I turned away and drove home. I would call Barb, of course. The action would be a good cover. If I were dating a girl, people would be less likely to imagine anything between Joyce and myself. So I would call Barb Lambert, and I would go out with her.

In another world I would have married her, and we would have sold beautiful syndications together, and she’d be the beneficiary of my life insurance policy. She was living in that world. I wasn’t.

I slept late on Sunday. It was past noon when I awoke and I was hungry. I made it around the corner and bought breakfast food at a deli, lox and bagel and instant coffee. I ate, showered, and fancied a different set of clothes.

The second-hand Broadway suit was a little tight on me. That was fine. I took off the jacket, dropped it and walked on it. I picked up the jacket, then, and brushed it off and slipped it on again. I tossed the hat down and stepped on it, grinding some dirt into the felt. I straightened the hat out again, wiped it fairly clean. When I was finished, the chapeau looked as though I had owned it for ages.

I knotted the loud tie and toned it down with coffee stains. I stuffed my feet into the broken-down shoes and tied them. I checked myself in the mirror, tugged the hat down over my eyes. I looked shabby and seedy and not at all like me.

In a drugstore I bought a pair of glasses with plain lenses. They added a final touch. I carried my valise a few blocks south and a few blocks east. There were six hotels in a row on the cheap street and all looked appropriate for the second-hand suit and the battered hat. I tried three hotels before I found just what I wanted.

The third one was the charm. It was called the Glade, and the rooms rented for two bucks a night or ten bucks a week. I walked through what passed for a lobby with my head tossed back and my shoulders hunched forward. I leaned a shoulder against the desk and looked at the desk clerk. When I talked to him my voice sounded like all the wrong parts of Brooklyn, and my lips didn’t move much.

“I need a room,” I said. “Only I got no use for stairs. You got anything on the first floor?”

The other hotels hadn’t. The Glade did. The clerk showed me to a room in the back. There was a cigarette-scarred dresser, an army cot, a washbowl, a cracked hunk of linoleum on the floor.

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

Out front the clerk said the room would run me two dollars a day or ten a week, payable in advance. I reached into a pants pocket and came up with two worn dollar bills. He wanted a dollar deposit for the key. “You think I’m gonna run off with your key?” I said. “Hell—”

I gave him the deposit, but not before I had haggled with him for a few minutes to preserve appearances. He passed me a registration card and gave me a ball-point pen. I leaned on the counter, studied the card, tapped the pen on the counter, glanced up at him.

“A few days,” I said, “I won’t have to stay in dumps like this one. A few days and I pull out of this town in a Cadillac. You believe that, Charlie?”

He started to tell me his name wasn’t Charlie, then decided not to bother.

“You better believe it,” I said. “You just better believe it. Little Augie is going to do fine.”

Then I took the pen and filled out the card.
August
Milani
, I wrote.
New York City
.

9

I stayed at the Glade for an hour or so, then returned to my place on College Street and belted away some sleep. In the morning I drove downtown and to work.

Two salesmen were at their desks and poring over a brochure, and another salesman was jawing with someone on the phone. Perry Carver was in his private office. I made a few calls, filed three or four prospects under Call-Again-Some-Time, managed to make two appointments for the evening. Then Perry Carver called me on the intercom and I stepped into his office.

“Well,” he said. “How’s it going, Bill?”

“Fine.”

“So fine you have to work weekends?” Carver grinned. “I’m a detective, saw your desk rearranged. That’s always a good sign. This is no business for a clockwatcher, Bill. A man has to be willing to work long hours when the work is there for him and take it easy when the going is slow. I like the way you operate, Bill.”

We said a few more nice things to each other. I took off about eleven, grabbed a cup of coffee at a drugstore soda fountain. There was a men’s mag on the rack with a cover streamer touting an article on how to beat the crap tables at Vegas. I picked up the magazine and scanned the article. It was one of those bonehead jobs pushing the old double-up system—you double your bet every time you lose, and eventually you come out a winner. There was only one little flaw. Sooner or later you were bucking the house limit and the casino had you by the throat. I put back the magazine and crossed over to the phone booth.

Murray’s girl answered the phone. I put Brooklyn back into my voice and told her to let me speak to Rogers. She asked who was calling.

“August Milani,” I said. There was a pause while she checked with Rogers.

Then she said, “Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Milani. Could you tell me what your call is in reference to?”

“Sure, honey,” I said. I chuckled lewdly. “Tell Rogers I want to talk to him about Whitlock.”

Maybe Murray’s curiosity was aroused. At any rate, he was on the line a few seconds later, asking what he could do for me. I waited until I heard the receptionist click herself off the line. Then I dropped the Brooklyn accent.

“My name’s Milani,” I said. “August Milani. Sam Whitlock suggested you might be in the market for some life insurance, Mr. Rogers. I’d like to make an appointment with you—”

“I’ve got all the coverage I need,” he said.

“Now, that’s always a moot point. If we could get together for an hour or so, Mr. Rogers—”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not interested.”

I was still talking earnestly when he broke the connection. I put the receiver on the hook and stayed in the booth long enough to light a cigarette. I thought of Murray telling the court that Milani was just an insurance man, a pest trying to sell him a policy, while Murray’s receptionist contradicted him and said that Milani sounded like some kind of gangster.

It was getting cute.

I sat on the Carver office telephone most of the afternoon. One man thought he might buy a half-unit but he wanted to discuss the matter with his wife first. Another was interested but hadn’t been able to read the brochure thoroughly yet. Would I call him in a day or two? I made a notation to do so. By four-thirty I had called everybody I felt like calling. I leaned back in my chair and smoked a cigarette. It would have been nice to call Joyce, let her know what was happening, make some plans and talk out some dreams.

Nice, but also foolish. We wouldn’t be seeing much of each other for the next two weeks. That was the way it had to be. If we were connected, the whole mess would cave in on us.

So I flipped through the phonebook and dialed a number. The phone rang four times before she reached it, and her hello was on the breathless side.

“Hello yourself,” I said. “This is Bill Maynard.”

“Oh,” Barbara Lambert said. She sounded surprised.

“I didn’t know if you’d be home from school yet or not. I thought I’d give you a try.”

“I was just walking through the door when the phone rang.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute and the silence stretched. I pictured her in her small house, a comfortable blonde who lived alone, holding the telephone to her ear and waiting a little nervously to find out what I wanted. It didn’t seem altogether fair to make her part of the wrapping paper on a frameup.

“I was wondering,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Are you busy tomorrow night, Barb? I thought we could have dinner and take in a movie.”

She said that would be very nice. She sounded pleased and maybe just a little bit giddy. I told her I would pick her up around seven. Then I cleared off my desk, said goodbye all around and left the office. I drove home. The telephone people had installed a phone for me and I called a few people to let them know my new number. Then I took a breath and called the Glade Hotel.

“Milani,” I said. “August Milani. Is he in?” My voice didn’t sound quite like Rogers’ voice. But it was as close as I could come. I waited while the desk clerk checked. Milani wasn’t in. This didn’t exactly surprise me.

“I’d like to leave a message,” I said.

“Sure.”

“My name is Rogers,” I said. “Tell Mr. Milani his terms are impossible and I’m afraid we cannot do business.”

I made him read the message back to me. Then I thanked him and broke the connection.

I took care of my evening appointments by ten. I drove the Ford back to the apartment, switched to the shabby suit and the loud tie. On the way to the Glade I pulled the hat down over my forehead and added the glasses. The desk clerk gave me the message from Rogers. I chuckled nastily and said something to the effect that the bastard wouldn’t get off so easy, that he was going to pay off sooner or later. The desk clerk tried to keep a poker face but I could tell that the words had registered. He wouldn’t forget them.

Tuesday and Wednesday, I kept feeding dimes into telephones. I called Murray Rogers’ office four or five times, each time giving my name as Milani and asking in a hoodish tone to talk to Rogers. I got through to him once and fed him the life insurance pitch all over again and he hung up on me almost at once. The other times I didn’t get past the receptionist. The poor girl must have had an interesting picture of me by then. I got nastier and nastier, and if she asked Murray about me he could only say that I was some nutty insurance salesman, a little stupider and a little more persistent than most. The girl wouldn’t believe it. She was a perfect receptionist, starched and prim and proper. But she couldn’t swallow a pitch like that.

I called my hotel a few times, leaving messages from Rogers, and I picked up the messages at the hotel and cackled triumphantly. The stage was setting itself up neatly.

Tuesday night I took Barb Lambert to dinner at an Italian restaurant. She had veal mozzarella and I had lobster fra diavolo and we knocked off a bottle of chianti together. The restaurant was the sort of place where David Niven and Jean Simmons always had dinner as a prelude to an illicit affair in a Hollywood bedroom farce. Candles burned in straw-covered wine bottles. Violin music melted forth from a public address system. The lights were dim.

Reality slipped away. Barbara became a little prettier, a little cleverer, less the unsure schoolteacher and more the vibrant woman. My hand crossed the table and covered hers. Her fingers were cool, soft. Her eyes shone.

“I’ve missed this,” she said.

“This?”

“Romance. I like it, Bill.”

“So do I.”

“We should have met more romantically,” she said lazily. “We could have been seat-partners in a transatlantic jet. You could have rescued me from a rapist in the park. Something like that. But instead we were fixed up by a pair of meddling matchmakers. That’s not very romantic, is it?”

“We could always pretend.”

She picked up her wine glass with her free hand and finished her chianti. “Let’s,” she said. “Let’s pretend. Let’s be different people. Instead of a schoolteacher I’ll be something exciting. I’ll be a call girl, all right?”

“I’ll be a customer, then.”

She laughed wickedly. “No, no, no,” she said. “That’s not romantic. I’ll be a high-priced call girl. And what will you be?”

“A wealthy prince?”

“I don’t think so. How about a master criminal?”

“A jewel thief?”

“Mmmmm,” she said. “Perfect. And do you know how we got together? You just finished robbing a horrid old woman of a fortune in emeralds, and I just finished breaking off with my wealthy old lover, and now we’re having dinner together in an intimate little spot on the Italian Riviera. Isn’t that romantic?”

A movie wouldn’t have been romantic enough. Instead we drove around searching for something exciting. We wound up in a jazz club. We were the only non-beats in the place and we drew stares that would have made Barb uncomfortable if it hadn’t been for the wine. As it was, she didn’t mind at all. We sat at a small table in front and drank dubious scotch and listened to a hard-bop quartet play funky blues.

“Romantic,” she said.

A fat girl tried to sing like Dinah Washington. A uniformed cop strolled into the club, stood for a few moments surveying the place, then turned and left. Our waitress brought fresh drinks. The musicians took a break, then came back on again.

“It’s getting late,” Barb said.

“Close to twelve.”

“And I have school tomorrow. Isn’t that silly? A call girl with school tomorrow. And my handsome jewel thief has to go to the office and sell pieces of buildings, or something. I guess we’re just turning into pumpkins, aren’t we?”

I paid the check and left too big a tip. We ducked out of the smoky club and gulped fresh air on the street outside. In the car I started to turn the key in the ignition but she put her hand on mine and stopped me. I turned. Barb’s eyes were closed, her mouth pouty. I picked up my cue and kissed her and her body shivered in my arms. Her mouth tasted of liquor and tobacco and sweet hunger. I kissed her again and she stirred in response, shifting her weight and locking her arms around my neck. My hand moved to the side of her breast. My fingers pressed the firm softness of her and she gasped with excitement.

I felt like ten different kinds of a bastard.

We didn’t talk on the way back to her place. Barb sat very close to me, her head on my shoulder, her eyes shut. She was breathing heavily. I forced my mind on my driving and tried not to think about other things. It was like struggling not to think of a white rhinoceros. The thoughts were there and I couldn’t shove them aside.

I stuck the Ford in her driveway and walked her to her door. I stood at her side while she opened the door. She turned to me, slowly, and I kissed her. Partly because I was supposed to, partly because I wanted to. The kiss lasted and built up a small head of steam, and then she shuddered slightly and drew back.

“Damn it,” she said, “I wish I were a call girl, Bill.”

It would play either way. I kissed her again and felt the warmth and intensity of her embrace. I stroked the side of her face, let my hand trail lingeringly down the front of her fine body. Then I tensed up and let go of her and forced myself to step back. “I’ll call you,” I said softly. I let go of her hand and she turned into the house and closed the door and I went back to my place and tried to sleep. It wasn’t easy. I thought about two girls, a girl named Joyce and a girl named Barbara. I thought about two ways of life, a life of back rooms and fast action, a life of hard honest work and straight living. Dangerous thoughts for a man called Wizard.

I made more calls Wednesday, two to Murray’s office, one to the Glade. I made them automatically, working like a programmed computer, speaking automatic words in my two mechanical fake voices. I left work early that day for my apartment. I took out the three onionskin copies I had typed up in Murray’s office and read them through. The second one had Thursday’s date at the top—tomorrow.

I took my Milani costume from the closet, spread it out on the bed. I looked at the snap-brim hat, the shabby suit, the loud and food-stained tie. I read through the letters again. Then I picked up the phone and dialed a number.

She answered it herself.

“Bill,” I said.

“I’ve been wishing you would call,” Joyce said. “I wanted to talk to you but I didn’t know when it would be safe. How is it going, Wizard?”

“It’s going all right.”

“Tell me about it.”

I lit a cigarette first. I took a deep drag, held the smoke in my lungs until I was slightly dizzy.

“Listen,” I said.

She waited.

“I don’t want to go through with it,” I said. “I don’t want to job the guy. I want to call it off.”