The Ethical Assassin: A Novel (17 page)

And sure, the money was good, but it wasn’t going to be enough—not when he began to decline.

He’d been forced to leave off working for the Greek in Vegas when the freezing started. He probably ought to have gone to a doctor right away. You’re in the middle of kicking someone’s ass and you just freeze, bat over your head, like you’ve turned into an action figure—that’s usually a sign to head for the doctor. But it was an isolated incident, a freak thing, so he forgot about it. Then it happened again three or four months later, out on a date with a showgirl. Ruined the whole thing. Then three months after that, this time while playing golf. Midswing—and frozen, just like that.

He’d been with the Greek that time, and the Greek had wanted to know, reasonably enough, what the fuck was going on.

Five doctors later, it was confirmed. ALS: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Lou Gehrig’s disease. A form of muscular dystrophy. He was now one of Jerry Lewis’s fucking kids. It could start in any number of ways—muscle spasms, loss of coordination, slurring of speech, clumsiness, and the Gambler’s own freakish freezes. It would progress until he was a complete physical nothing, unable to move, even to breathe or swallow on his own, while his mind, meanwhile, remained in perfect working order.

It could happen slowly or it could happen quickly. No one knew. In the Gambler’s case, the progress appeared to be slow, so that gave him time to get his shit in order. It wasn’t the death he feared. He knew that death wasn’t the end; he’d seen those pictures of ghosts, heard the recordings of voices from the other side, even been to a medium who let him speak to his dead mother. Knowing that the body was but a shell and the soul lived on had helped him in his enforcement work in Vegas. It’s not so hard to beat someone to death if you know you’re not doing any permanent damage. What scared him was the time leading up to death, when he was alone and helpless, and the only thing that was going to keep him from being abused and tormented was money. He needed money.

If he told B.B. the truth, B.B. would be sympathetic, understanding, and he would send him on his way. Maybe with a nice little bonus, but not nearly enough. The Gambler needed money, piles and piles of money, enough money to pay for the bills, to pay for a personal nurse and pay the nurse so well that she would do anything to keep him happy and healthy.

The way things were going, the cause was in trouble. In the last six months, B.B. had been more distracted than ever. Business was falling off, and he didn’t seem to care. And Desiree, that sneaky bitch, was up to something. He was sure of it. Maybe she was planning a takeover, to cut out the Gambler entirely. But there was no way he was going to work for her, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let her get rid of him. If anyone was going to take over for B.B., it would be the Gambler.

Desiree kept her eyes straight ahead. Next to her, in the passenger seat, B.B. sat quietly, his head tilted slightly away from her. She couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not or maybe pretending. His tape of Randy Newman’s
Little Criminals
had finished playing a minute ago, and now there was only the hissing silence of the radio. She wanted more music, the radio, anything to help keep her awake. Her fatigue, the darkness of the highway, the glare of oncoming traffic, lulled her into a hypnotic stupor.

“You had a good time with Chuck?” she asked at last.

B.B. stirred. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, did you have a good time?”

“We had a productive dinner,” he said. “He’s a good kid. Bright. Ready for mentoring. Could be more if, you know, he’s willing to open himself up.”

She let that hang there. “Okay.”

They said nothing for a few more minutes. Desiree winced when they passed a pair of squashed raccoons in the roadside.

“I never wanted to be like this,” B.B. said.

Desiree felt herself suck in her breath. In a way, she’d been waiting for this, the big confession, and she’d been dreading it. Once he told her of his shame, of how his desires controlled him, of how he had been victimized as a boy—whatever it was that he would say—she was afraid she would feel pity and sympathy, and the will to leave would be lost in a tangle of guilt and obligation.

“I never wanted to be in this business, you know. It just happened to me.”

Relief passed over her. He didn’t want to talk about his thing for boys, he wanted to talk about being a supplier. “I’m in no position to judge anyone, B.B.”

“I never wanted to do this,” he said again. “I don’t like it. I’d live off the hogs if I could, except I’ve gotten used to the money now. But it’s like a stain on my soul, you know? It’s a blackness. I keep thinking that I want to get rid of it.”

“So walk away,” she said. “Just walk away. No one is stopping you.”

“I was thinking something else,” he said. “I was thinking that maybe someone could take over for me. That
you
could take over for me. I’d cut you in on the profits, and I could retire from it all, work at the Young Men’s Foundation full-time. Live a decent life.”

“That’s very flattering,” she said. “It’s really incredible that you trust me so much, B.B. But I need to think about it.”

“Okay,” he said. And he fell into silence again.

Desiree had no desire to think about it. B.B.’s idea of cleaning the stain off his soul was to hand the dirty work to someone else and just take the profits. Ever so slightly, she shook her head. She didn’t want him to see it, but she felt she needed to offer the universe a gesture. Her decisions were getting easier all the time.

Chapter 15

T
HE ALARM WENT OFF AT SEVEN A.M.
Normally, after hanging out by the pool, people would begin to drift off to sleep between one and two, and hardly anyone was left by three. That meant you could get four hours of sleep easy, which Bobby said was all you needed. He ought to know. He was always among the last to leave the pool area, and he never once looked tired. I couldn’t remember ever having seen him yawn.

I had grown used to the fatigue in the way you might grow used to having a tumor on the side of your face—you never forgot about it, but not forgetting about it didn’t mean you were actually thinking about it. I woke up each morning exhausted, fuzzy, slightly dizzy, and the feeling never quite went away.

Bobby tended to breeze into our room about twenty after seven, swinging the door wide and bounding in like a character in a musical about to break into song. He would make sure everyone was awake and chitchat with whoever had been the first to shower and was by then usually dressed, since they had to rush if four people were going to get showered and have breakfast in time for the prep meeting at nine.

As it turned out, I was the first to hit the showers, though I was the last to go to bed—bed being a euphemism for a spot on the floor. I’d crawled into the room just before five in the morning, undressed quietly, and gone to sleep in the space between the television and the doorless closet, resting my head on a dirty undershirt. No one had left me a spare pillow.

I’d slept, I was almost certain of it, but it had been a fitful sleep in which I dreamed, mostly, of lying awake on the floor and trying to sleep. At least I hadn’t dreamed about selling books, and it was the first time in weeks that I could say that. And I hadn’t dreamed about Bastard’s and Karen’s bodies, which was some kind of mercy.

When the alarm went off, I jumped up as only someone who’s had chronically little sleep can, and headed for the bathroom. By the time I showered and put on my other pair of khaki pants, a light blue button-down and a narrow tie, noontime sun yellow, I was feeling almost like myself again. I could forget what happened in the trailer, the evening with Melford, and the events back at the trailer. I could almost forget that I had been involved in a double murder, a third murder implicating a crooked cop and the head of the company for which I worked.

I sat on the bed, staring at my vaguely trembling hands, trying to summon the desire for breakfast, when the door opened and Bobby came bobbing in.

“Up first, and I’m not surprised,” he said. “Glad to see it, Lemmy. I scoped out today’s area already, and I have a moochie spot for you. But you’ve got to promise me a double. You’re getting out there by eleven this morning. You’ll have twelve hours. You think you can promise me a double? At least, that is. A double at least.”

“I can try,” I said lamely.

“Hell, he’s too tired,” Scott said. He was lying on the bed, shirtless, and his pale gut and pale tits were hanging out at us. “I don’t know how much sleep he got last night. Maybe you should give that moochie area to someone else, Bobby. Someone who ain’t gonna let it go.”

Bobby grinned at him as though Scott had just told him that he liked his haircut. “Lemmy here has earned the mooch. You produce like Lemmy, you’ll share the spoils like Lemmy.”

“Now, how’s that gonna happen if you’re every time giving him the best areas?”

Bobby shook his head. “A good bookman can sell anywhere. And when Lemmy came up, he didn’t get the cream, just like none of the green guys get the cream. You didn’t get any special treatment when you came up.”

“And I still don’t,” he mumbled.

“That’s where Lemmy proved himself. You want a share of the mooch, you have to show me you deserve the mooch.”

“All he done was get lucky,” Scott said. “Ain’t nothing but a rich Jew that wants more money for hisself.”

“C’mon, Scottie,” Bobby said. “Lemmy’s a good guy.”

“Yeah, good at what? Butt fucking, I guess,” said Ronny Neil, lying still on the other bed, his arms and legs out as if he were making a snow angel. “You good at butt fucking?” he asked me.

“Define ‘good,’ ” I said.

“Holy bananas, you guys are cranky this morning,” Bobby said. “But I’m glad you’re dressed, Lemmy. The Gambler wants to see you.”

Ronny Neil, who had been sprawled out dreamily, suddenly shot upright. Like Scott, he slept shirtless, but unlike Scott, Ronny Neil had a tightly muscled body. He had small but hard pecs, and his back muscles shot out like wings. On his left shoulder he had a cross tattoo—it had been done by hand and in ink, the kind prisoners give each other.

“What’s the Gambler want with him?” Ronny Neil demanded.

Bobby shrugged. “I guess you’ll have to take that up with the boss yourself, Ron-o.”

Ronny Neil narrowed his gaze at Bobby. “He don’t have nothing to do with the Gambler. I ain’t gonna stand for the Gambler bringing him in.”

“Bringing him in to
what
?” Bobby demanded.

“I don’t want him talking to the Gambler,” Ronny Neil said. It wasn’t quite sulky, more like a growl.

The fact that I didn’t want to talk to the Gambler either didn’t seem to count for much. I felt a wave of dizzying panic. Had the Gambler somehow learned that Melford and I had been hiding in the closet? He had the checkbook, which meant they knew someone from the company had been there, and by now he’d probably figured out that the someone in question was me.

“Let’s go, Lemmy,” Bobby said. “Don’t want to keep the big boss man waiting.”

“He gets too cozy with the boss,” Ronny Neil said, “I’ll stick a knife up his ass.”

“Does that count as being good or bad at butt fucking?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t be that way, Ronster.” Bobby put a hand to my shoulder and led me out the door.

I couldn’t believe he was going to leave it at that. Maybe he thought that if he came down harsher on them, it would be worse for me. Maybe he thought that leaving it alone wouldn’t affect how many books were sold. Maybe he was off on Planet Bobby and didn’t understand that Ronny Neil was a scary asshole and Scott was a scary and pathetic asshole.

Was such a thing possible? Had Bobby skated so blithely through life with his salesman grin and good cheer that he didn’t know what it meant to be picked on, to be humiliated by bigger or meaner guys who got their rocks off by reminding you that you walked around unscathed at their pleasure? Was Bobby like Chitra, insulated from the cruelty of the world, not by his looks but by an impenetrable armor of optimism and generosity?

If that was the case, it meant that Bobby and I lived in entirely different places—the same to an outside viewer, but utterly unalike to our particular perspectives. Where I saw danger and menace, Bobby saw only innocent ribbing—a little on the harsh side, perhaps, but still innocent.

What if Bobby lived in this wondrous world precisely because he believed in it? I had seen how Melford had defused a certain whumping the night before in the bar, but he’d done it consciously. What if Bobby did that sort of thing all the time, only he didn’t know he was doing it? He assumed the best in people, and he got kindness and leeway in return.

If that was true, it meant that I was in some way responsible for Ronny Neil and Scott hating me so much. I assumed the worst about a couple of ignorant rednecks, they picked up on it, responded to it, acted on it. Did it work that way?

What troubled me about this idea, truly troubled me, was not so much that I had to shoulder the blame for Ronny Neil threatening to stick a knife up my ass—though that was undeniably distasteful—as that it seemed to be too much like what Melford had been talking about last night. We all see the world through a veil of ideology, he’d said. Melford thought that the veil came from outside of us, the system or something, but maybe it was more complicated. Maybe we made our own veils. Maybe the world made us, and we, in turn, made the world.

Surely Melford couldn’t be the only person thinking about this stuff. He’d mentioned Marx and Marxists, but there had to be others—philosophers and psychologists and who knew what. If I had been on my way to Columbia, instead of being on my way to see the Gambler, the dead-body-hiding and evidence-concealing Gambler, I might have a hope of finding out someday. But unless the sample volume of the
Champion Encyclopedias
I carried around with me took up the issue, I’d probably not find out anytime soon.

Chapter 16

W
E WALKED ALONG
the motel balcony as if it were the corridor to the electric chair. At least I did. The morning was bright and sunny, with only a few wispy streaks of white in the sky, and the extreme, mind-numbing heat hadn’t started to get going yet, so Bobby appeared to be in a good mood. He had his hands thrust into the pockets of his khaki chinos and his lips pursed in a soft whistle. Maybe something by Air Supply.

“So, what does the Gambler want with me?” I ventured.

“I guess you’ll find out soon enough,” Bobby said. “I sort of figured you’d know.”

Fat chance. I was about to ask something paranoid and foolish: Did he seem angry when he asked you to get me? Did he say that he found something, perhaps? Something in a checkbook he took from a dead person’s trailer? I choked back all those questions. What would Melford do? I wondered. Melford, I decided, would tell himself that the Gambler was not about to kill me, not when there were half a dozen people who knew I was going into his room. Melford would figure that the Gambler was looking for information. Melford would see this as an opportunity to get some information for himself.

We were only about four doors down from the Gambler’s room, so I stopped. “What’s the Gambler’s deal, anyhow?”

Bobby stopped, too, but reluctantly. He looked at me and looked at the Gambler’s door, as though he couldn’t believe I was in one place and not the other. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, he works for this company Educational Advantage Media, right? But they’re not part of Champion Encyclopedias. How does all of this work?”

“There’s no time for a civics lesson, Lemmy. The boss man is waiting.”

“Come on,” I said, trying to sound relaxed. “I just want to know how all of this works.”

“You want to know
now
?” But he must have decided it would be more expedient to answer than argue, so he pursed his lips and emptied his lungs. “Educational Advantage Media contracts with Champion, okay? They contract for various cities and their surrounding areas, and in Florida, they contract for Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, and Gainesville. That’s why we go to those places over and over again.”

“Who owns Educational Advantage Media? The Gambler?”

Bobby shook his head. “No, but he’s high up, maybe even the number two guy. The boss is a guy named Gunn, who I’ve never met. The Gambler talks to him all the time, and he’s been out to visit us on the road a few times, but he never bothers to meet with us little people.”

“So is this guy, you know, okay?”

Bobby shrugged. “Probably. I guess. I’ll tell you one thing, though.” He looked around conspiratorially. “He’s got this woman who works for him. She’s kind of hot, and she always wears a bikini top, but she’s got this nasty scar down her side, like she was in a motorcycle wipe-out or something. It’s really pretty ugly, but she loves to show it off. I don’t want to judge someone for being unfortunate or anything, but ouch. Don’t show the world. You know?”

I said I knew, though I didn’t know at all.

“Okay, enough piddling.” Bobby clapped his hands together with cheerful finality. “Let’s go see the boss.”

The Gambler sat at the peeling particleboard desk in his room, looking over some credit apps. He wore greenish-tinted chinos, a white oxford with no tie, and brown loafers. He had perched on his nose a pair of glasses that made him look like a nineteenth-century accounting clerk, an effect only increased by his hair, straight and thick and just a tad long. All he needed was a high collar and some muttonchops.

“Sit,” the Gambler said. He gestured with his head to a chair by the window.

I walked over and sat. The chair rested on thick wooden legs and was upholstered with a leather worn so thin that it threatened to burst like a soap bubble. My heart thumped violently, and my hands shook. I stared up at my boss, having no idea what to expect. I probably should be trying to think of what sorts of things the Gambler might ask so I could come up with good answers, but I couldn’t think clearly. Everything swirled around me in gray eddies.

“You can leave us alone now,” the Gambler said to Bobby.

“Okie.” Bobby bounced on his feet, almost a heel-clicking salute, and then walked out.

The Gambler continued to peer at the paperwork, gazing over his perched glasses. What were they there for if not for reading?

“How have you been, Lem? Everything all right?”

“Terrific,” I said, though I didn’t sound terrific. I sounded like I knew I was in trouble.

“Terrific, huh? I guess we’ll see.” He stared at me until I looked away. “You know, Bobby says you’re a born bookman. A real power hitter. You got that grand slam that fell through a while back, didn’t you?”

“That was me.”

“Shame about it. I mean, you do good work, you should get your reward, right? A more experienced bookman might have seen those guys for deadbeats, but you can’t blame yourself for not knowing what only years on the job can teach you.”

“I guess not.” I hadn’t been blaming myself, and I couldn’t think of what a more experienced bookman might have picked up on. Sure, Galen had lived in a relatively run-down place, but he’d had a pretty nice truck, his wife had some decent jewelry. His friends all looked okay, too. None of them were going to be extras on
Knots Landing,
but nothing suggested that they were off to the welfare office the next day, either.

“But I’m more concerned about this,” the Gambler said. He now held up a credit app: Karen’s. Not that I could read it from across the room. But I knew what it was. “Bobby tells me you got all the way through and they balked at the check. Is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“That shouldn’t happen.”

“I know.”

“You get that far, you should close. You should have been closing the minute you walked through that door. The check should have been a formality, not a deal breaker. You understand what I’m saying?”

The Gambler’s voice remained calm through all of this, but there was an urgency there, too, a kind of growing gravity. And anger, too, maybe.

“I understand what you’re saying. The words, the ideas behind the words. The whole thing.” I had the distinct feeling that I was talking too much, but I didn’t know what he wanted from me, and my mouth switched into running mode.

“If you understood,” the Gambler answered, “then we wouldn’t be having a talk about this bullshit, would we?” He smiled thinly. “So I want you to tell me what happened with these people. You had them, they filled out the app, they were ready to go, and then what?”

“They balked.” I sounded a little shrill, so I looked at my hands to hide my embarrassment. And my fear. This Gambler, the Gambler in front of me, had nothing to do with the old-time revival preacher who sermonized to us about selling. This was not the supersalesman Gambler. This was the Gambler who disposed of corpses in the middle of the night.

“They balked. Tell me something I don’t know. Why? Why the fuck did they balk?”

Maybe anger wasn’t the right way to go when speaking to an accessory to murder, but there it was. Besides, I was myself an accessory to murder, so I had to figure that leveled the playing field. “Look, Bobby told you I’m a power hitter, and I am. I sell a lot of books. I’ve never had people balk at the check before, and there’s no reason to think it’s going to happen again. It was just one of those things.”

“Just one of those things, huh? Well, how about we don’t do anything about it, Lem, and then it becomes two of those things and then three of those things? How about you tell me how many sales you have to blow before I’m supposed to care about it? How many? Tell me.”

I let it hang in the air for a moment before I spoke. “More than one.” I wanted to look away, but I told myself to keep my eyes steady. This was his problem, not mine.

“More than one? Okay. More than one. But I don’t want it to be more than one. I want it to be less than one. It’s a little late for that, I know, but I’m thinking—and maybe I’m crazy here—I’m thinking it might be better to stop this in its tracks so you don’t sit in someone’s house for three fucking hours, have them fill out the app, and then fuck up the close. That’s what I’m thinking, Lem. So tell me what happened.”

I bit my lip. This wasn’t the principal’s office. I wasn’t in danger of my mother getting a phone call. I was in danger of being executed, like Bastard and Karen. I had seen it. I knew what it meant, and I had to come up with something.

Based on the conversation I’d overheard, I could feel reasonably confident that the Gambler had known Bastard and Karen, knew something of their personalities, so whatever story I came up with would have to sound plausible.

“When the wife was filling out the app, the husband was making trouble. He was kind of a clown, you know, trying to distract her, insult her, insult me. With him carrying on, I could see the wife was having problems. She looked nervous. She started talking about money.”

“What money?” the Gambler demanded. “How much money?”

I knew I’d hit a nerve. He and the police chief had been looking for money. From what I could tell, a lot of money. I took a deep breath and concentrated on acting as though I had no idea what he was talking about. “Just money. You know. Then when it came time for the check, she said she didn’t want to do it.”

“Yeah?” the Gambler said. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

I felt pretty sure I was bombing. “So I, uh, tried again. I went over all the stuff they’d seen, I told them about how I had asked them to let me know if they weren’t interested. I did all the things we’ve talked about in training, but she still wouldn’t budge. I guess the husband got angry, and then I knew it was pretty much lost.”

“This is bullshit,” he said. “Why the fuck would they want encyclopedias?”

I stared at him. “Um, I don’t know,” I said. “Why would anyone want encyclopedias? I mean, they’re great books and all—”

“Spare me the bullshit. What did you do then?”

I shrugged. “I left.”

“You left?” the Gambler repeated. “You just walked out of there? Did you say, ‘Hell, I don’t need two hundred dollars. I made me that already, so I don’t need it again.’ Is that what you told them?”

“Do you think that would have been helpful?”

His face reddened, but he didn’t say anything. It was clear now that the Gambler wanted some other kind of information, information he didn’t know how to excavate. So I bit back my irritation. The thing to do, I realized, was to use his confusion, his desperate fishing. I needed to figure out a way to make all of this work for me.

“I didn’t know what else to do. I got the feeling they wanted me to leave, like I was getting on their nerves. I didn’t know how to turn it around.” I sighed. “So, can you tell me what I should have done?”

“What?” the Gambler sneered at me, astonished at the audacity of the question.

“I mean, if this is about keeping me from losing them at the check ever again, I need to know how to handle it. How would you have handled it?”

The Gambler’s eyes narrowed, and his face pinched inward. “You tell me, Lem. You think about it for a while, then you come back and tell me. Right now I’m more interested in what you did. So you left? Were they doing anything when you left?”

I felt like I was gaining some ground, so I pushed it further. “Why? What does that have to do with my having lost the sale?”

“Just answer the question, would you?” The Gambler looked away.

“I don’t think so. They were sitting at the kitchen table, smoking, too angry with each other to talk.”

He stared at me blankly. Then I felt the smack of inspiration. Ideally, I would have had more time to think it through to be certain it wasn’t an amazingly stupid idea, but I didn’t have time, and I decided to run with it.

I paused and peered away as if in thought. “Before I went in there, I saw this creepy guy hanging around.”

The Gambler now sat up straight. “What creepy guy?”

I shrugged, as if the story were no big deal. “Just a guy who stopped me, wanted to talk to me. He drove a dark Ford pickup and he had a strange haircut—short all over, but longish in the back. He had weird teeth, too. I think he might also have been the guy who was hanging around in the dark outside the trailer when I left, but I’m not sure. I didn’t see whoever it was lurking around the trailer, but it was just a feeling I had, you know?”

I tried to look more puzzled than pleased with myself. The Gambler and this other guy, Doe, were clearly working together on this—and had been working with Bastard and Karen. Now I had the Gambler suspecting Doe. If I could cook up enough
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
tension between the two of them, they’d forget all about me and the check that never got written.

“All right,” the Gambler said. “Get out of here.”

I stood up and started to walk toward the door. “I won’t let it happen again,” I chirped like a good little bookman.

The Gambler didn’t even look up. “That’s just fucking great.”