Lucky at Cards (9 page)

10

“No,” she said. “You’re not going to do this to me, Wizard.”

“Joyce—”

“You can’t weasel out. It’s all set up and we’re going to push it through. You can’t change your mind now.

We weren’t talking on the phone now. We had talked on the phone just long enough for her to be sure I wasn’t kidding. Now we were in my living room and her Caddy was parked at the curb in front. She was standing in front of me and her eyes were angry. I asked her if she wanted a drink. She said she didn’t. I made one for myself and she changed her mind and I made one for her. We sat at opposite ends of my living room couch and sipped scotch.

“Wizard?”

I met her gaze. She was angry now, and slightly desperate, and the combination of anger and desperation had deepened the lines at the corners of her mouth and pointed up the hardness of her face. And yet somehow her beauty was more striking than ever. My mind did what minds have a tendency to do, erected a little balance scale and put her on one side and Barb on the other. The contrast was vivid. Barb was soft and gentle, steady and sure, a good long-term investment. The other was fire and fury and handle-with-care, a much greater risk. And much more exciting.

“What changed your mind, Wizard? You were all ready to go, all set to job Murray and get the money and take me the hell out of this rotten town. What turned you off?”

“Things.”

“What things?”

I finished my drink, started a cigarette. “A few things,” I said. “In the first place, I don’t think it would work. Murray is a highly respected guy. Clean, established. And on top of that he happens to be a lawyer. There are a million holes in the frame, Joyce. If he were someone shady it wouldn’t matter, but a fellow like Murray could kick the prosecution’s case to hell and back.”

“You really don’t think it would work?” Joyce said.

“That’s right.”

“I don’t believe you, Wizard.” Her eyes challenged me. I glanced down at my drink, which was gone. I dragged on my cigarette. I raised my eyes and she was still watching me. “I don’t believe you at all,” she said. “If you thought the frame was wrong you’d look for another way, a fresh angle. What’s the real reason?”

I didn’t answer her.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I can figure it out. You’ve had a taste of respectable life and you like the flavor. You’re a salesman for Perry Carver. Or don’t you call yourself a salesman? Maybe you prefer to think of yourself as an investment counselor.”

“Joyce—”

“You play cards with the upper middle-class and you don’t even cheat. You go out with a brain-dead schoolteacher—yes, I heard about your new love, honey. You go out with her and think about marriage and respectability and what a cushy little life it will be. Are you going to marry her, Wizard? Are you going to settle down in the suburbs like an All-American success story?”

I said, “Stop it.”

“The hell I’ll stop it! You’re such a goddamned fool, Wizard. It’s a kick now, isn’t it? It was a kick for me, too. I didn’t just marry Murray for his money. I wanted a house with a lawn and a backyard. I wanted people to look at me without wetting their lips and wondering how much it would cost. Oh, it’s fine for the first little while. It’s a brand-new way to live. But it changes. It turns sour. It gets so damned dull you could scream.

“It doesn’t work, Wizard. It doesn’t work because it’s a lie, a stupid lie front to back. You wind up wasting your life on a bunch of fatheaded squares who don’t speak your language or think your thoughts. You shape yourself over and try to convince yourself you’ve managed to change inside, and then one day you wake up and realize you never changed at all and you’re a very round peg stuck in the squarest hole on earth. Your little schoolteacher won’t be much fun then. Your little job will be the biggest bore since Maynard the Magnificent. And if you think I’m going to let you blow a damned good chance for both of us you’ve got to be out of your mind.”

There was more. It went on like that, and I sat there telling her she was wrong and trying to make myself believe it. Maybe the good life hadn’t worked for her. It could still work for me. I had floated into the gray world of the card mechanic pretty much by accident, and I could float out just as easily and just as accidentally. I didn’t feel that much of a commitment to dishonesty.

But she had another argument, and it was more persuasive. She stood up and planted herself in front of me, and before she delivered it she put her hands at the sides of her breasts and ran them slowly down the length of her body. Then she grinned at me.

“You can’t get out,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll damn well ruin you. Do you think Perry Carver would keep a crook on his payroll? Do you think Sy and Murray and the others would want a card sharp in their game? And they would find out, Wizard. I’d make sure they found out. Your new friends wouldn’t have any use for you. Neither would your new little lost love. Are you laying that schoolteacher, Wizard?”

I didn’t mean to slap her. My hand moved by itself, rising fast and landing over her left cheekbone. She reeled backward and for a moment I thought she was going to fall over. But she only smiled.

“You can have the teacher,” Joyce said levelly. “You can keep your job. Some day you’ll wake up, but you can sleep as long as you want, if that’s the way you want it. But first you’re going to take care of Murray for me.”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She turned on her heel and stamped out of my apartment, hopped into her car, took off fast enough to leave a rubber patch on the street outside.

It must have been around five-thirty when Joyce left. I had a few drinks after that. I went out for a bite, ate a third of a hamburger and left the rest. It didn’t taste right. I don’t suppose there was anything wrong with the hamburger. It just didn’t taste right.

So I went back to my place and had a few more drinks and I stared at the onionskin letters some more and looked at the Milani costume. I squinted at myself in the mirror, too. But not for very long.

And then I called Joyce. She must have been sitting on top of the phone because she picked it up before the first ring was finished.

I said, “All right. I’m in.”

“Of course,” she said. “Because there’s no way out.” I called Murray’s office at nine o’clock the next evening. There was no answer. I let it ring long enough to make sure that no one had stuck around. Then I drove to the Rand Building on the double. I followed the established routine—I took the elevator to the seventeenth floor and walked the rest of the way. I let myself into his office, thumbed through the Yellow Pages, found a twenty-four hour messenger service. I called them and told them to send a kid over for a pick-up and delivery.

During the day I had picked up a batch of singles from the bank, along with a couple hundreds. While the kid was on his way over I made a bundle of money, a sheaf of singles with two one-hundreds at the top and bottom of the roll. I stuffed the money into an envelope and started to scrawl A. Milani on it. Then I changed my mind and typed the name on Murray’s office typewriter. I sealed the envelope and dropped it on the table in the outer office. I left the hall door open and retired to Murray’s private office and sat in his chair, with the door closed.

When the kid came in I called to him through the closed door. “There’s an envelope on the table there,” I said. “Run it over to the Hotel Glade near the station. It’s for a man named August Milani. Make sure you give it to him in person.”

I had left a five-spot on the table along with the envelope. I told the kid to help himself to it. As soon as he left I got the hell out of Murray’s office, ran down seven flights of stairs and caught an elevator the rest of the way. I drove home, changed into my Milani costume, hurried over to the Glade. I made myself slow down on the way in, forced myself to walk with the head-back, shoulders-slouched swagger of my man Milani.

The kid was there when I reached the hotel. He leaned up against the desk, waiting to deliver Milani’s envelope in person. I took it from him, gave him a quarter and watched him go. Then I turned to the desk clerk, a buddy by now—I’d been cultivating him carefully. I winked at him, then ripped open the envelope and snatched up the stack of bills. His eyes bugged.

“Money,” I said.

I fanned the bills for him. He saw the hundreds on the top and the hundreds on the bottom, and all the singles in the middle were just a big flash of green ink.

“Money,” I said again.

And I started dealing the bills out, slapping them one after the other onto the top of the counter. The basic principle is pretty much the same as the one used in a second deal or a bottom deal. Each time I was slapping down two bills, a hundred on top and a single under it. Each time fast fingerwork brought the hundred back on to the top of the stack for the next shot. By the time I was finished there wasn’t any question in the desk clerk’s mind. Quite obviously I had a stack of hundred-dollar bills.

“Jesus,” he said.

“I told you, didn’t I? I leave this town in the longest Caddy Detroit ever made.”

“How did you get that kind of dough?” the clerk said.

I winked at him. “A guy named Rogers,” I said. “The one who left me all them nasty messages.”

“Yeah?” I nodded solemnly. “Yeah,” I said. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Sure.”

“So can I.” I laughed aloud. “And that’s where all this wonderful bread came from. I get paid for keeping secrets. I get paid real nice.”

“What did he do?”

“Who?”

“Rogers,” the clerk said. I was glad to see he could remember the name. “What the hell did he do?”

“Nothing.”

“But—”

“He’s a real nice guy,” I said. “A big-time lawyer. It’s just that he’s got this little secret, see? And he’ll pay to keep it.”

I slapped the roll of bills against the palm of my hand. “And I’ll tell you a secret,” I said. “He ain’t done paying yet. That bastard just started.”

I left him there and went to my room at the rear of the hotel. I closed the door, locked it. I tucked the bills into my pocket, dropped the envelope on the floor in a corner of the room. The envelope had Murray Rogers’ return address on it. It would probably still be there in the room on Monday, since the personnel at the Glade weren’t too fanatic about housekeeping.

The window stuck the first time I tried it. I worked on it, got it open. The courtyard in back was littered with trash and broken wine bottles. In the back of the courtyard there was a driveway that ran through to Tupper on the other side of the block. I closed the window. I tried it again, and this time it opened easily.

It would open as easily on Monday.

Monday.

Monday was going to be an important day. The last letter on Murray’s typewriter had Monday’s date on top. And Monday was the day when I would wear the shabby suit and the snap-brim hat for the final time. August Milani was going to die on Monday. Murray Rogers was going to kill him.

11

Friday I sold a unit and a half of our current syndication during the morning without leaving my desk.

I had a lazy lunch in the Panmore Men’s Grill with Jack Kimball, another of Perry’s salesmen. We ate Welsh rarebits and drank Dutch beer and talked shop for two hours. I spent the afternoon looking over some brochures on new syndicates Perry was thinking about handling. There was a bowling alley in Baltimore with a fifteen percent payout, a shopping center in New Rochelle, a St. Louis apartment house. I thought the shopping center offered the safest return and would be the easiest to push, and I typed up a memo to Perry with my recommendation. At five o’clock he handed me a check for my commissions on sales to date. Even with the five-hundred buck advance chopped off, the sum was a decent amount.

I won money at the poker game that night. We played at Ed Hart’s place in a downstairs game room similar to Murray’s. I wound up eighty bucks ahead, mostly by honest play with a few assists from sleight-of-hand. The cheating, such as it was, was almost automatic. Like the palmed-off five spot at the lunch counter a week or so earlier. That sort of habit is a hard one to break. I played fairly well and the cards ran my way, so even without a little of the best of it I would have cleared fifty bucks or so. The cheating was worth the extra thirty to me.

Saturday I slept late, soaked in a tub, cracked a fresh fifth of scotch, drove around town aimlessly, took Barb to dinner. We wound up going to a movie, finally. I held her hand through the show, and now and then she gave me a little squeeze.

Would I hold hands with Joyce? No, of course not. We might leave the movie in a hurry and find a hotel room. We might watch the movie all the way through without any contact at all. But we would never sit holding hands in a theater balcony.

We were too damned hip for that.

After the show I suggested going some place and drinking. Barb said she had scotch at her place. “The seats are comfortable and the privacy can’t be beat,” she said. “And the prices are eminently reasonable, Bill.”

So at her house we sat on her couch and drank her scotch out of coffee mugs because she couldn’t find appropriate glasses. We pretended it was Prohibition and we were in a subtle speakeasy. She did a terrible imitation of Walter Winchell announcing
The Untouchables
, and I poured fresh scotch into our cups, and we put Ella Fitzgerald records on the player.

I don’t remember who suggested dancing. We wound up giving it a whirl. I held her a little closer than necessary and clomped around ponderously and tried to remember how long it had been since I’d done any dancing. That had been a big thing with Carole before we had been married. After the marriage had ended I didn’t have anyone to dance with. A card sharp doesn’t take his girls dancing or dance with them in a living room. He lets them lose his money on the dogs or the horses, takes them to hip parties or clip-joint nightclubs, and once in their apartments he beds them down as soon as possible. But I was dancing with Barbara now, and I was enjoying it.

I kept enjoying it more. Barb’s cheek stayed next to mine. Her perfume was subtle but distinctive, a fresh, cutely sexy scent. I held her close and felt her breasts press against my chest. My arm was around her waist. Somewhere along the way my arm moved a few inches lower and pressed her flanks. They were marvelous. I drew her close and felt the warmth of her loins. She began breathing a little harder. I kissed her and she purred.

We continued dancing. I stroked her and she danced with delicious little hip motions that racked her loins against mine and had the right effect on both of us. I wanted her with a sweet tender ache that improved as it developed. There was no urgency, just the sure feeling that sooner or later the record would end and I would have this girl and she would be divine.

The record ended. The player shut itself off. I still held her and I still stroked her and she still made those delicious movements with her delicious hips, but we were not dancing any more. We slipped into her bedroom, and we took off all our clothes and put them neatly aside, and we rolled into bed.

Her flesh was sweet and yielding. We took a long time loving each other. I touched all of her body, marveling over her beauty, and each caress pitched her passion higher. I kissed her breasts, teased them with my tongue. I found her with my fingers and she shivered and quivered and surged with delight.

I sought her and found her and we were together and she moaned and she held me. We rocked together and the whole earth sang.

Afterward Barbara cried a little, giggled a little, said that maybe she was a call girl after all, then cried some more. I drew her close and told her that everything was all right. She rolled on to her side, supporting her weight on an elbow, and looked at me.

“It’s been so long,” she said

“Barb—”

“So very long…”

I returned to my apartment and took a bottle to bed with me. The next day I didn’t do much of anything. I spoke to a few people on the phone—Barb, Joyce, Sy Daniels. I put in an appearance at the Glade and wound up spending the night there. Early Monday morning I left, changed clothes at my apartment, and went to the office.

It was a dull day. Then it was night, and time to work.

I stuck around the Black Sand office until Murray left. Then I carried the three onionskin copies upstairs to his office and tucked them away in a file drawer under M for Milani. I made it out of there on the double and dropped the duplicate key into a sewer. I didn’t need it anymore.

After dinner I headed for my room at the Glade and waited for the desk clerk to go across the street and return. He made the trip every evening around eight—ducked across to the Silver Dollar and had a shot and a beer, sometimes a few extra shots if he felt like it. He was a quickie drinker, but it still took him fifteen or twenty minutes and the desk was untended during that time. This time he left at five to eight and stayed away for half an hour.

Murray was home alone. Joyce had taken the younger daughter shopping and the older one had a date.

When the clerk was back behind the desk everything was ready. I rolled up my left sleeve, took a penknife from my pocket, killed the germs on the blade with my cigarette lighter flame and made a good gash halfway up my forearm. It took me three tries before I could force myself to make the cut. I sprang a capillary or two and started bleeding. I bled on the bed, dripped beads of blood onto the floor. After a few seconds I opened up a band-aid and slapped it on the cut.

Then I took a pair of hundreds from my wallet. I opened up the dresser drawer, dropped the bills on top of a flashy sport shirt and left the drawer open. After the way I had flashed money at the clerk, robbery might look like a possible motive. With money lying around like this, the cops could cross robbery off their list.

I flipped the hat on the floor, caved in the crown with my foot. I dropped the drugstore eyeglasses and stepped on them hard enough to break both lenses. I put the frames in a pocket for the time being.

My arm was beginning to throb a little. I gave a check to see if the cut were bleeding through the band-aid. No blood.

There was a glass ashtray on the little table next to the bed. I knocked it to the floor. The damned thing bounced around crazily without breaking and wound up somewhere under the bed. I dug out the receptacle and tried again. It shattered.

I picked the phone off the hook, set it down. The desk clerk started babbling hello at nobody in particular. There was a fifty-nine cent cap pistol in my pocket, a recent purchase from a notions store. I took out the pistol and squeezed the trigger. It made a nice noise, left a gunpowder smell hanging in the air. Then I picked up the telephone, and the voice I used was Murray Rogers.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just knocked the phone off the hook, that’s all. Forget it.”

I hung up before he could think it over. In a minute or two, if he had half a brain, he would put two and two together and deliver the desired five. I took a quick breath, then tugged the pillowcase off the pillow the management had stuck at the head of the bed. I used the pillowcase to wipe up some of the blood from the floor. Then I threw open the window and dropped down into the courtyard.

I had the pillowcase in a pocket, the hat and eyeglass frames in one hand. I tossed the hat to the ground, flipped the frames near it. The next step hurt like hell. I yanked off the band-aid, opened up the cut on my forearm and left a trail of blood leading away from the window toward the rear of the courtyard. Then I re-fastened the band-aid over the gash and took off my jacket and dragged it along the ground for twenty or thirty yards. I put on the jacket again and got the hell out of there. I didn’t run. I walked quickly to the back of the courtyard and out through the driveway. So far as I could determine, nobody had observed me.

My car was parked at the curb. I drove away from the neighborhood as fast as you can drive without risking a ticket. When I reached Murray’s house, I parked a few doors down the street. I hurried up his driveway to the rear of the house, opened a gun-metal garbage can, stuffed the bloody pillowcase into it. I put the lid on, clambered into the car and headed for my apartment.

I didn’t start to shake until I was inside my apartment with the door shut. Then my hands trembled and my heart pretended it was a triphammer. I poured a shot of scotch and spilled half of it on the way to my mouth. The second shot steadied me.

The cut on my arm had opened up again. The blood had soaked through the band-aid to the shirt and through the shirt to the jacket. That didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have much use for shirt or jacket again. I tried to make sure of the cut now. I washed it out with scotch since it had a higher alcohol content than anything else in the house, and then I fixed up the wound with a gauze pad and a few strips of adhesive.

The Broadway suit and the shirt and the loud tie all were dumped into the incinerator. There would be traces there—buttons that didn’t burn, things like that. That wouldn’t much matter. The police wouldn’t be looking in my incinerator for Milani’s clothing. The police would be looking for Milani himself, for one thing, and they wouldn’t have any interest in one William Maynard to begin with. The shoes I put into the closet along with the little cap pistol. In a day or two I would flip them into a trash barrel somewhere.

I poured another drink and tossed it off. The gash in my arm felt better now, either because the cut was healing or because the liquor was anesthetizing it. I sat down on the couch and turned on the radio, dialing in a station that gave you music and spot news twenty-four hours a day. There was a news flash at nine but it had nothing about Milani.

The hell—the plan couldn’t really miss now. The stage was set perfectly. The desk clerk at the Glade would tell the cops about a seedy criminal type from Brooklyn named August Milani who had acted as though he were going to come into a fortune, who did come into the fortune, and who told the clerk that he, Milani, made the fortune by keeping a secret for a lawyer named Murray Rogers. The cops would toothcomb Milani’s room and find the aftermath of a murder. Room knocked around, bloodstains, a broken ashtray, shattered eyeglass lenses, the faint smell of gunpowder. The desk clerk would admit he had been away for half an hour or so, obviously the logical time for Rogers to move in on the scene.

And there would be plenty more. Rogers’ receptionist would tell the police about a nasty-voiced man who had kept trying to talk to Rogers, and Murray would try to explain that the man had been some nutty insurance salesman. The authorities would find the letters in the Rogers file. Murray would deny writing them. The authorities would find the bloody pillowcase in the Rogers garbage can, and the blood would match the stains in Milani’s hotel room. Murray would say he didn’t know how the pillowcase had found its way into the garbage can. The police would ask Murray who Whitlock was and what hold Milani had over him. Murray Rogers couldn’t tell the police because he wouldn’t know anything about Whitlock or a “hold.” The authorities would keep on asking and Murray would never be able to come up with the answers.

The desk clerk would remember the messenger. The messenger would tell the cops he picked up a bundle at Murray’s office and gave it to Milani in person. Murray would say he didn’t know anything about it. The police would ask him what he did with Milani’s body and he would try to make them believe he never met any Milani, that Milani was just a persistent voice on the telephone.

Murray Rogers, the poor bastard, didn’t have a chance.

I caught a news flash at nine-thirty. A man had been assaulted or possibly murdered at a downtown hotel. Police were working on the case and had several good leads. They expected to wrap it up quickly. No names were mentioned, but the confidence was obvious. The cops had this one in the bag already and they didn’t care who knew it.

I sat there and listened to more music and wondered what was going to go wrong. Something had to go wrong. This wasn’t a deal off a stacked deck in a bust-out joint. This was a big one. One little snag somewhere along the way would blow the works to hell and back.

The telephone rang at ten minutes of ten like a small bomb and the noise shattered the comparative silence of the apartment. I reached over, switched off the radio. I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear. Her voice was music.

“It worked,” she said.

“What happened?”

“It worked like a charm. The cops just left and they took Murray along with them. I didn’t hear much of it. They asked him if he knew anybody named Milani. He said he didn’t. They asked again and he said that Milani was some insurance salesman but he had never met the man.”

“And?”

“And they zipped him up and took him to jail,” she said. “I have to hang up now. He wanted me to call his lawyer, but I decided to call you first.”

I didn’t say anything. I felt numb now. The scheme had worked so far, it was going nicely, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.