Grifter's Game (11 page)

I played the let’s-wipe-away-our-fingerprints game again, then slipped out of the office and left the building. I was beginning to think of it as my office and my building. Hell, I spent more time in it than he did.

I walked a few blocks, pitching my attaché case in a convenient trash can. I didn’t need it any more. I wasn’t lugging heroin around town now. It was planted properly. A fortune in heroin. An amusing plant, I decided. An expensive investment.

I was too tired for the subway. I hailed a cab and sank back into the seat, suddenly exhausted. It had been a busy day. Too busy, maybe. I wondered how busy the next few days were going to be. Very busy, probably.

Then I thought some more about those four phone numbers. The son-of-a-bitch probably knew his own handwriting. He probably remembered tearing up those numbers once already, and he probably knew damn well that he hadn’t written them the second time around. He was probably suspicious, and that was fine. Maybe he’d push the panic button. Maybe he’d call people and let them know something was funny. That was fine, too. It would make everything else seem that more plausible.

Because no matter what happened, he wouldn’t be going back to the office that night. He’d be going home to Mona. And those four little phone numbers would be around the next day.

I had to make sure that he wouldn’t.

8

After dinner I packed my suitcase and checked out of the Collingwood. I found a locker at Grand Central and shoved the suitcase into it. The gun, loaded, stayed in my inside jacket pocket. It bulged ridiculously and jiggled up and down when I walked. In the washroom of the train to Scarsdale I switched it from the jacket pocket to the waistband of my trousers. That felt a hell of a lot more professional, but it worried me. I was afraid the thing would go off spontaneously, in which case I wouldn’t be much good to Mona. I tried to think about other more pleasant things.

By the time we hit Scarsdale I was beginning to shake inside. There was too much time to kill and no convenient way to kill it. I wondered whether I had taken the wrong turn. Maybe it would have been better to stay overnight at the Collingwood, then grab an early train up.

That would have given me a night’s sleep. But it left too much to chance. I had to pick up a car, which meant I had to hit Westchester while it was still dark out. And it was safer if I came in on a crowded train, which ruled out 4
A.M.
trains. So I had picked the best way, but I still wasn’t feeling too good about it.

I found a movie house a block from the train station, paid my half a buck and went in to be hypnotized. I took a seat in the back and tried to get used to the feeling of the gun in my pants. The metal wasn’t cold any more. It was body temperature, or close enough, and I’d been wearing it so long it felt as though it was a part of me. I stared at the screen and let time pass.

I saw the complete show at least twice. This was not difficult. My mind couldn’t stick with the picture but rambled all over the place. Even the second time through, the movie’s plot sailed far over my head into the stratosphere. The movie was a thoroughly anonymous and relatively painless time-killer. It was after midnight when the last show let out and I followed the crowd out onto the empty streets of Scarsdale.

It started to get easier. The movie had turned me into the machine I had to be. Gears shifted. Buttons were pushed and switches were thrown. I found a bar—bars stay open later than movies, maybe because eyes are weaker than livers. I took a stool in the back all by myself and nursed beers until closing. Nobody talked to me. I was a loner and they were people who drank every night in the same bar. That might have been dangerous, except that they could not possibly remember me. They never noticed me in the first place.

The bar closed at four, which was fine. I went into an all-night grill for a hamburger and a few cups of coffee. It was four-thirty almost to the minute when I left the grill, and that was just about right.

It was good weather, just beginning to turn from night to day. The air was fresh and clean, a good change from New York, with just enough of a trace of bad smells mixed with the good to keep you from forgetting that you were in the suburbs, not the country. The sky was turning light, anticipating the sun which would rise in an hour or less. There were no clouds. It was going to be one hell of a nice day.

I walked off the main street to a side street, off the side street to another side street. The neighborhood was not bad at all. It wasn’t rich Scarsdale but middle Scarsdale—fairly ordinary one-family homes that cost in the mid-twenties solely because they were in Scarsdale, trees in front, hedges, the white-collar works. I had a long walk because too many people kept their cars in their garages. Then I found what I was looking for.

On the left-hand side of the street a green Mercury was parked snug against the curb. On the right-hand side there was a black Ford a year or so old. The Ford was the car I wanted. I wanted it for the same reason that the hired killer I was pretending to be would want it. It was ordinary, inconspicuous. If you are going to steal a car for a murder, you steal a black Ford. It’s one of the rules of the game.

There was only one problem. The Ford’s owner might wake up early. If he drove into New York every morning, he’d probably get up around seven. If he saw the car gone, and if he called the cops, the alarm for that Ford would go out before I wanted it to.

That’s where the Merc came in.

I worked fast. I took the plates off the Merc, carried them to the Ford, took the plates off the Ford and put the Merc plates in their place, then crossed the street once more and put the Ford plates on the Merc. That sounds complicated—all I did, of course, was switch plates. But it would make a big difference. While the Ford owner would report his car missing, the Merc owner wouldn’t report his plates missing. The chances were that he wouldn’t even notice, not for a good long while. How often do you check your license plates before you get into your car?

So, even if the Ford owner reported the car stolen and some hot-shot cop checked my car, it would have different plates. Which might make a difference. Then again, it might not. But I was taking enough chances as it was. Whenever there was a chance to minimize the risk, that was fine with me.

I wiped off both sets of plates with my handkerchief, then slipped on a pair of ordinary rubber gloves, the kind they sell in drugstores. I’d bought them before I left New York, and now I was going to need them. They were good gloves—not surgical quality, but sheer enough so that my hands didn’t feel like catcher’s mitts. I took a good look around, prayed in silence, and opened the door of the Ford. I settled myself behind the wheel and set about jumping the ignition. It wasn’t hard. It never is. I was fourteen years old when I learned how easy it was to start a car without a key. It’s not the sort of thing you forget.

The car purred kittenishly. I let it scurry along to the corner. Then we took a turn and another turn and still another turn, and then we were on the main road north in the general direction of Cheshire Point. I left Scarsdale with no regrets. It was a nice place for auto theft but I would hate to live there.

The Ford was fine for murder but strictly garbage on the open road. The engine knocked gently from time to time and the pickup was several seconds behind the accelerator. The car moved like a retarded child. It was further encumbered with automatic transmission, which keeps you from shifting gears at the proper time, and power steering, which is an invention designed to drive anybody out of his mind.

I pushed the Ford along and thought about the car Mona and I would have once the whole mess was cleaned up. A Jaguar, maybe. A big sleek beast with a dynamo under the hood and an intelligent over-all approach to Newtonian mechanics, automatic division. I wondered if anybody had ever made love to her in the back seat of a Jag. I didn’t think so.

Cheshire Point made Scarsdale look like Levittown. I drove around and looked at one-acre plots with half-acre mansions and smelled money. The streets were very wide and very silent. The trees lining them were very tall and very somber. It was a suburb created by expatriate New Yorkers who had fled with only their money intact, and because it was such an artificial town at the surface it was hard finding my way around. The place had very little sense to it. Streets wandered here and there, evidently intent solely on having a good time, and directions became meaningless.

I found Roscommon Drive after a struggle. It was wider than most of the streets and a parkway ran down the middle of it, a five-yard strip of shrubs and grass and greenery. I looked for house numbers, figured out where I was, and drove until I found Brassard’s house. It was what I think they call Georgian Colonial. Mostly stone with white wood trim. A rolling lawn kept short and green. A large elm in the middle of the lawn. Very impressive.

I had pictured the home before. But I had never seen it, and seeing it did something to me. I gently brushed away the picture of L. Keith Brassard, Lord Of the Dope Trade, and replaced it with the illusion of complete respectability. I looked at rolling lawn and the big old elm and I saw that nice old man rolling along the Boardwalk in a rolling chair with his pretty young bride beside him. It would be fiendish to kill that man. It would be a foul, despicable crime to murder L. Keith Brassard, Pillar Of Cheshire Point.

I had to shake myself to get rid of the illusion. I had to work hard to remind myself that he wasn’t a nice old man, that the fine old house was held together with needle marks and rubbery veins, that his pretty young bride was the woman I loved. I had to remind myself that he was a rotten old bastard and that I was going to murder him, and I told myself again what I had told myself a countless number of times—that the fact that he was a rotten old bastard made murdering him altogether fitting and proper.

But it was hard to believe when I looked at that house. Not the splendor of it—successful crooks live more like kings than most kings do. But the utter respectability …

I shook myself, more violently this time. The next step was to find the railroad station. According to Mona, he walked to the station every morning and left the car for her. That meant it was close by, and I had to figure out just how close by, and I had to know how to get there in a hurry. It would be important.

The Ford found the station; I really can’t take any credit for it. The Ford nosed around until it turned up at the standard brown shed with rails running past it. Then the Ford, demonstrating a wonderful memory, found its way back to Roscommon Drive, put two and two together, and doped out the precise amount of time required to drive from the house to the station along the shortest possible route. It took about seven minutes.

It was still too early. I thought about parking in front of Brassard’s house and waiting for him. I thought about Brassard looking out the window, seeing me, and coming out with a gun of his own. Then I looked around for a diner.

I found one. It had a parking lot and I nestled the Ford in it, then stripped off the gloves and pocketed them. The coffee was hot and black and strong.

I needed it.

I put the gloves back on later, then opened the door and slid in behind the wheel once again. If anybody had seen me I would have looked very strange to them. How often do you see a guy put on a pair of rubber gloves before he gets into his car? But nobody did, and I started the car and headed back to Roscommon Drive. It was around 8:30. He’d be working his crossword puzzle now, sitting at the breakfast table with pencil in hand and newspaper before him and cup of coffee at right elbow. I wondered if he was using the dictionary this time around, if the puzzle was hard or easy for him.

Three doors from his house I braked to a stop, plopped the Ford into neutral and pulled up the hand brake. I left the motor running. From where I sat I could see his house—the heavy oak door, the flagstone path. And, hopefully, he couldn’t see me.

I wanted a cigarette. And, while I knew there was no reason in the world for me to go without that cigarette, I remembered what crime labs did with cigarette ashes. I knew it didn’t matter, they could know everything there was to know about me including what brand of cigarettes I smoked and what toothpaste I used to keep my mouth kissing-sweet and whether I wore boxer shorts or briefs, and they still wouldn’t be anywhere close to knowing who I was. There was nothing to link me to Brassard, nothing to make the cops think of me in the first place or second place or third place. They could have a full description of me and still get nowhere.

But I didn’t smoke that cigarette.

Instead I straightened my tie, which was straight to begin with, and studied my reflection very thoughtfully in the rear-view mirror. The mirror image was cool and calm, a study in poise. It was a lie.

I waited. And wished he would hurry up with his puzzle. And waited.

I rolled down the window on the right-hand side of the car. I opened my jacket, took out the gun. I wrapped my hand around it, curled my finger around the trigger. It was a very strange feeling, holding the gun with a glove on my hand. I could feel it perfectly, but the presence of the glove, a thin layer between flesh and metal, seemed to remove me a little from the picture of violence. The glove rather than my hand was holding the gun. The glove rather than my finger would pull that trigger.

I understood why generals didn’t feel guilty when their pilots bombed civilians. And I was glad I was wearing the gloves.

8:45.

The oak door swung open and I saw him, dressed for work, briefcase tucked neatly under arm. She was seeing him to the door, looking domestic as all hell with her hair in curlers. He turned and they kissed briefly. For some reason I couldn’t begrudge him that last kiss. I was almost glad he was getting the chance to kiss her good-bye. I wondered if they had made love the night before. A few days ago the thought would have sickened me. Now I didn’t mind it at all. It was his last chance. He was welcome to all he could get.

She turned from him. The door closed. I released the emergency brake and threw the car into gear. I did not breathe while he walked down that flagstone path to the sidewalk. She would be in another room now, maybe with one of the maids. Or she would be expecting it, maybe at the window to watch in morbid fascination. I hoped she wasn’t at the window. I didn’t want her to watch.