Grifter''s Game

  And then it would begin to happen. She would remember being Mrs. L. Keith Brassard and living in Cheshire Point with her ermine coat and her sable coat and her chinchilla wrap, with a big solid house and heavy furniture and charge accounts. She would remember how it felt not to be afraid, and she would realize that she had never been afraid before she met me; that she was always afraid now, a little bit more afraid with every passing day. Then she would begin to hate me.

  And I would remember an uncomplicated life, where you left one town when things became overly difficult, where the biggest threat was a watchful hotel manager, and the biggest problem the next meal. I would look at the soft sweetness of her and I would think about death—a slow and unpleasant death, because the men he would send would be experts at that sort of thing. And, inevitably, I would begin to hate her.

  I couldn’t have her and I couldn’t have the money, not that way. I drank more bourbon and thought about it and drew blanks. There had to be a way, but there wasn’t.

  The bottle was half-gone when I thought of the way, the only way. Another person might have thought of it at once, but my mind has certain established channels in which it runs and this was out of known waters. So it took a bottle of Jack Daniels before I got around to it.

  Brassard could die.

  That scared the hell out of me, and I had two more quick drinks, got out of my clothes and into bed. I fell asleep almost at once. Maybe the liquor was responsible for that. I don’t know. Maybe I slept because I was afraid to stay awake.

  I was dreaming, but it was one of those dreams you forget the minute you come awake. The knocking at the door woke me up and the dream slipped away from me. I opened my eye very tentatively. I wasn’t hungover and I felt fine. At least I would have, given a few hours more sleep.

  The knocking began again.

  “Who is it?”

  “Chambermaid.”

  “Go away.” Great hotel, when the chambermaids wake you up in the middle of the morning. “Come back next year.”

  “Open the door, Mr. Blake—”

  “Go play in traffic. I’m tired.”

  The voice changed to a coo. “Lennie,” it said, “please open the door.”

  For a minute I thought the dream was back again. Then I jumped out of bed and wrapped up in a sheet. She looked cool and fresh in a white cotton blouse and a pair of sea-green clam-diggers. She came right on in and I closed the door.

  “You’re nuts,” I said. “For coming here. But of course you know that.”

  “I know.”

  “He could have seen you. He’ll wonder where you went. It wasn’t too brilliant of you.”

  She was smiling. “You look silly,” she said. “Wrapped up in that sheet like an Arabian sheik. Were you sleeping?”

  “Of course. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Middle of the day, you mean.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost noon,” she said. “And he couldn’t have seen me, anyway. He was out of the hotel at the crack of dawn. Business, he said, something unexpected. Even in Atlantic City he has business. Business before pleasure. Always.”

  I knew what business he had. A whole boxful of business that had neatly disappeared.

  She pouted. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  “You know the answer to that one.”

  “You don’t seem glad. You didn’t even kiss me hello.”

  I kissed her. And then it all came back, all the way back, and it was the night on the beach all over again. One kiss did that. She was that kind of woman.

  “That’s better.”

  “Much better.”

  Very deliberately she removed the blouse and the clam-diggers, kicked her shoes under my bed. She wasn’t wearing anything else. I couldn’t stop looking at her.

  Her eyes were laughing. “You silly man,” she said. “You don’t need that silly sheet, do you?”

  I didn’t.

  Much later I opened my eyes. She was curled up like a sleeping kitten with her blonde hair all disorganized on the pillow. I reached out a hand and ran it over her body from shoulder to hip. She didn’t stir.

  I reached over for the pack of cigarettes on the table at the side of the bed. I found a match and lit a cigarette. When I turned back to her she had her eyes open.

  She smiled for an answer.

  “You’re pretty great, you know.”

  Her smile widened.

  “I’m going to miss you.”

  She bit her lip. “Lennie—”

  I waited.

  “Remember what I told you on the beach? That I couldn’t give up the money?”

  I remembered.

  “I found out something today. Here. With you.”

  I waited some more.

  “I … still can’t give up the money.”

  The cigarette didn’t taste right. I took another drag and coughed on it.

  “But I can’t give you up either, Lennie. I don’t know where we go from here. I want the money and I want you and I can’t have both. I’m a spoiled little girl. I can’t do anything. All I can do is want.”

  I knew what the answer was and I knew that I was scared to hand it to her. But the die was cast. I couldn’t see the spots, couldn’t tell whether we had come up with seven or whether we had crapped out royally. Either way, the pattern was there already. It couldn’t be changed from here on in.

  “How old is Keith?”

  She shrugged. “Fifty,” she said. “Fifty-five. I don’t know. I never asked him. That’s silly, isn’t it? Not knowing how old you own husband is. Fifty or fifty-five or something around there. I don’t know. Why?”

  “I was just thinking.”

  She looked at me.

  “I mean … he’s not a young man, Mona. Men his age don’t live forever.”

  I left it like that, hanging in the middle of the air, and I watched her face try not to change expression. She didn’t quite make it. It was terrifying, in a way. We were a little too much alike. We had both been thinking of the same thing. I guess it had to be that way.

  “Maybe his heart isn’t too good,” I went on, talking around the whole thing. “Maybe some day he’ll fall on his face and it’ll be all over. It happens every day, you know. It could happen to him.”

  She fed my own words back to me. “If this bed had wings we could fly it, Lennie. Or if it were a magic carpet. His heart’s in perfect shape. He goes to the doctor for a physical three times a year. Maybe he’s afraid of dying. I don’t know. Three times a year he goes to the doctor, spends the whole day there getting the most complete physical examination money can buy. He went less than a month ago. He’s in perfect physical shape. He was bragging to me about it.”

  “He could still get a coronary. Even when you’re in perfect shape—”

  “Lennie.”

  I stopped and looked at her.

  “You don’t mean he could have a heart attack. You mean something else.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You mean he could have an accident. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  I drew on the cigarette. I looked hard at her and tried to figure out a way to fit all the pieces together. If there was a way to do it, I couldn’t find it. The pieces had jagged edges and they didn’t mesh at all.

  “I wish we weren’t us,” she was saying now. “I wish we were other people. Other people wouldn’t think rotten things. This is rotten.”

  I left it alone.

  “I don’t love him, Lennie. Maybe I love you. I don’t know. All I know is I want to be with you and I don’t want to be with him. But he’s … a good man, Lennie. He’s good to me. He isn’t mean or cruel or vicious or—”

  He was a dope peddler on a grand scale, an import-export cookie who imported the wrong thing. He was a top link in a cutie-pie game that sent high-school kids out doing armed robbery to pacify the monkey he put on their shoulders, a game that had caused more human agony than all other cutie-pie games comb
ined. But she didn’t know this, and I didn’t know how to tell her about it. And therefore he was a good man, not mean or cruel or vicious.

  “What do you want to do now?”

  What she wanted to do was change the subject. She had a good way to do it. She put out her arms for me and forced a smile.

  “We’ve got a few more hours,” she said. “Let’s spend them in bed.” It seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. But after awhile I dropped off to sleep and she didn’t. I shouldn’t have done that, I guess. It was a mistake. But I wasn’t in any condition to do too much deep thinking at the time, and that was a shame.

  Because when I did wake up she was shaking me by one shoulder and looking at me all wide-eyed and frightened. I didn’t catch on to it right away. I had to hear it before it soaked in.

  “Lennie—”

  I sat up on the edge of the bed and took her hand off my shoulder. Her nails had been digging into me. I don’t think she realized it at the time.

  “The bags—”

  I don’t think too cleverly when I wake up. I was still lost.

  “Lennie, what are you doing with Keith’s bags in your closet?”

  It was a hell of a good question.

  She was so confused she couldn’t think straight. She stood there bubbling and babbling. I had to slap her twice across the face to calm her down. I didn’t hit her very hard, but each time I slapped her it hurt me. Finally I got her to sit down in a chair and keep her ears open and her mouth shut.

  There were a lot of things I didn’t want to tell her just yet and a few more I’d have preferred never to tell her. But I didn’t have any choice. She had seen the L. K. B. bags in the closet. God alone knew what had prompted her to rummage through my closet, but this was beside the point. The point, simply enough, was that the cat was halfway out of the bag and it couldn’t hurt to bring it out the rest of the way.

  “Don’t interrupt me at all,” I told her. “This is a long story. It won’t make sense to you until you’ve heard all of it.”

  I started with getting off the train from Philly and needing luggage. It went back farther than that, went years back, but the rest of it wasn’t important. Not for the time being, anyway. If things broke right I would have a whole lifetime to tell her the story of my life. If they didn’t, then nothing much mattered.

  I told her that I took his luggage at random, checked into the hotel under a phony name, met her, opened his bags, and found the heroin. She didn’t believe that part of it at first but I went over it again and again until it made sense. There was a hysterical expression on her face when the news soaked in. She was seeing old Keith in a new light now. He was a dope peddler, not a nice guy. She had managed to live with him for two years without tumbling to this juicy little fact, and she couldn’t have been more surprised if I had told her he was a woman.

  I ran it from alpha to omega and then I stopped because there was no more to tell. Her hubby was a crook and I had his supply in the hotel safe. We were together in my room and the world was taking us for a joy ride.

  “This changes things, Lennie. Joe, I mean. I guess I have to call you Joe now, don’t I?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Joe Marlin instead of Lennie Blake. All right. I like it better. But this changes things, Joe. Doesn’t it?”

  “How?”

  “Now I don’t want his money,” she said. “I couldn’t stand living with him anymore. Now all I want is you. We can forget him and just run away and be together forever.”

  It sounded good but it didn’t work that way. She wasn’t seeing the whole picture yet. He was still old Keith. Now he made his money in a dirty business and it sickened her. But she didn’t see that the man himself was different.

  “We’d be killed, Mona.”

  She stared at me.

  “We’d run and we’d be caught. He’s a gangster, Mona. You know what a gangster is?”

  Her eyes went very wide.

  “You’re his woman,” I went on. “He bought you and he’s been paying heavily for you. Ermine coat, sable coat, chinchilla stole. Those things run into money.”

  “But—”

  “So now he owns you. You can’t run away. He’ll catch you and he’ll have you killed. Do you want us to die, Mona?”

  I saw the look in her eyes and I remembered the slight contempt in her voice when she talked about Brassard’s physical exams. She had said that maybe he was afraid of death. He wasn’t the only one. She was afraid of dying herself. That made two of us.

  “We can’t run,” I said. “We wouldn’t get away.”

  “It’s a big world.”

  “The mob is a big mob. Bigger than the world. Where do you want to run?”

  She didn’t have an answer.

  “Well?”

  She bit her lower lip. “The accident,” she said. “Before you said he could have an accident. Didn’t you?”

  “I worded it a little differently.”

  “But that’s what you meant. I suppose he could still have an accident, couldn’t he?”

  “I thought you didn’t want to think about things like that.”

  “It’s different now, Joe. I didn’t know what kind of a man he was. Now it’s different.”

  It wasn’t the least bit different. Before he was kind and generous and now he was mean and vicious. This was the wrapper. It was a game to make murder a little bit easier to swallow. Sugar on a pill. But the pill was the same no matter how goddamned sweet it tasted. The pill was still murder.

  “Joe?”

  I was starting to sweat. Atlantic City was getting too warm for us and the air conditioning in the room could never change that. I cupped her chin in my hand and tilted her head up so that she was looking at me.

  “When are you and Keith going back to Cheshire Point?”

  “Joe, I don’t want to go with him. I can’t go with him, Joe. I have to stay with you.”

  “When are you going back to Cheshire Point? Just answer the questions, dammit.”

  “A week. Six days, I don’t know.”

  I played mental arithmetic. “Okay,” I said. “First off, you don’t see me anymore. If we pass on the Boardwalk you don’t even look at me. No matter where Keith is, understand? Because he has friends here. I don’t want any connection between the two of us. Nobody can see us together or the game is over.”

  “I don’t understand. Joe—”

  “If you kept your mouth shut you might have a better chance of understanding.”

  Her eyes were hurt. But she shut up.

  “I’m leaving here the day after tomorrow,” I said. “I’m checking out bag and baggage and I’m going to New York. I’ll find a place to stay under another name.”

  “What name?”

  “I don’t know yet. It doesn’t matter. You won’t have to get in touch with me. I’ll get in touch with you. Just stay put. As far as you’re concerned, nothing has happened. Keith is good old Keith and you never met me. Got that?”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “Don’t forget. You have to keep saying it over and over to yourself so that you don’t slip out of character. You’re Keith’s wife. I never happened to you. You’re going to go back with him and you’re going to be the same woman he took with him to Atlantic City. The same all across the board. You don’t know a thing. You got that? You understand the part you’re going to have to play?”

  “I understand.”

  Now came the harder part. Hard to tell her, hard to think about. “You’ll have to sleep with him,” I said. “I … wish you didn’t. I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Maybe you can tell him you’re sick,” I said. “It might work. But just remember that if this breaks for us you’ll never have to sleep with him or look at him or think about him again for the rest of your life. That might make it a little easier.”

  She nodded.

  I hesitated, then looked around for the pack of cigarettes. She wanted one too, whic
h was understandable. I gave her one and took one for myself and lit them both. We smoked for a few minutes in relative silence.

  “Mona,” I said, “I’ll need money.”

  “Money?”

  “To pay the hotel bill,” I said. “I can’t afford a skip-tracer on my tail. And I have to get the package of heroin back from the desk.”

  “How much will it cost?”

  “I don’t know. And I’ll need money to operate on in New York. Not much, but as much as I can get. I hate to ask you for it—”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  I grinned. “How much can you spare?”

  She thought for a moment. “I have a few hundred in cash. I can let you have it.”

  “How will you explain it?”

  “If he asks I’ll tell him I saw some jewelry and wanted it. I don’t think he’ll ask. He’s not that way. He doesn’t care what I spend or how I spend it. If I told him I lost it at the track he wouldn’t mind.”

  “You’re sure it’s safe?”

  “Positive.”

  “Put as much as you can spare in an envelope,” I said. “One of the hotel’s envelopes. Don’t write anything on it. Sometime this evening pass my room. The door will be closed, but not locked. Open it, drop the envelope inside, then beat it. Don’t stop to say anything to me.”

  She smiled. “It sounds like a spy movie. Cloak and dagger. Bob Mitchum in a trenchcoat.”

  “It’s safer that way.”

  “I’ll do it. After dinner?”

  “Whenever you get a chance. I’ll be here until I get the envelope. I’ll leave for New York the day after tomorrow. I don’t want to rush things. Good enough?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Get dressed,” I said. “I’ll see you in New York.”

  We both got dressed in a hurry. Then I motioned her back, walked to the door and opened it. A chambermaid was strolling down the hall, taking her time. I waited until the maid got out of the way.

  Before I sent Mona out I grabbed her and kissed her very quickly. It was a strange kiss—passionless, and surprisingly intense at the same time. Then she was out in the hall heading for the elevator and I was closing the door and walking back toward the bed.