Grifter's Game (12 page)

He reached the sidewalk and turned away from me, heading for the railroad station. I drove up behind him. Slowly.

He walked well for a man his age. If he heard the Ford he didn’t show it. One arm held the briefcase, the other swung at his side. The gun felt cold now, even with the rubber glove.

I drew up even with him, braked quickly, leaned across the seat toward him. Now he turned at the sound—not hurriedly, not scared, but wondering what was coming off. I pointed the gun at him and squeezed the trigger. Before there had been the total silence of a very quiet street. The noise of the gunshot erupted in the middle of all that silence, much louder than I had expected. I felt as though everybody in the world was listening.

I think the first bullet was enough. It hit him in the chest a few inches below the heart and he sank to his knees with a very puzzled, almost hurt expression on his face. The briefcase skidded along the sidewalk. I did not want to shoot him again. Once was enough. Once would kill him.

But the professionals don’t work that way. The professionals do not take chances.

Neither did I.

I emptied the gun into him. The second bullet went into his stomach and he folded up. The third bullet was wide; the fourth took half his head off. The fifth and sixth went into him but I do not remember where.

I heaved the gun at him. Then I put the accelerator on the floor, for the benefit of any curious onlookers, and the Ford took off in spite of itself. I drove straight for two blocks with the gas pedal all the way down, then took a corner on two wheels and relaxed a little, slowing the Ford to a conservative twenty-five miles an hour.

I was sweating freely and my hands itched inside the gloves. I had to struggle to keep from speeding. But I managed it, and the ride to the station took the estimated seven minutes.

I parked the car near the station. I cut the motor, pulled up the handbrake. I stepped out of the car, closed the door, peeled off the rubber gloves and tossed them into the back seat. I wiped my hands on my pants and tried to keep calm.

Then I walked to the station. There was a newsstand on the platform and I traded a nickel for a copy of the
Times
and waited for the train to come. I had to force myself to read the headlines. Castro had confiscated more property in Cuba. There was an earthquake in Chile. No murders. Not yet.

The train came. I got on, found a seat. The car was a smoker and I got a cigarette going, needing it badly. I opened the paper to the financial pages and studied row upon row of thoroughly meaningless numbers.

I glanced around. Nobody was looking at me. Dozens of men in suits sat reading the
Times
, and none of them looked at me. Why should they?

I looked exactly the same as they did.

9

In all of life it is the little things that stay with you. I first made love to a woman several months after my seventeenth birthday. The woman has disappeared completely from my memory. I do not know what she looked like, what her name was, only that she must have been close to thirty. Nor do I remember anything about the act. It was probably pleasurable, but I can’t specifically recall pleasure and I don’t think pleasure had anything to do with it. It was a barrier to be crossed, and the pleasure or lack of pleasure in the crossing was, at the time, immaterial.

But I remember something she said afterward. We were lying together—on her bed, I think—and I was telling myself silently that I was a man now. “God,” she said, “that was a good one.” Not
That was good
but
That was a good one.

I must have mumbled something in the affirmative, something stupid, because I remember her laugh, a curious mixture of amusement and bitterness.

“You don’t know how good it was,” she said. “You’re too damn young to know the difference. Young enough to do a good job and too young to know what you’re doing.”

I don’t know what that proves, if anything. Except that the mind is a strangely selective sort of thing. The act itself should have been significant, memorable. But the act, once finished, left no impression that I can still remember. The conversation remains.

It was the same way with murder. I’m talking now about impact, not memory, but it comes out pretty much the same. I had killed a man. Killing, I understand, is a pretty traumatic thing. Soldiers and hired gunsels get used to it, sometimes, but it takes a while. I had never killed before. Now, after careful planning and deliberate execution, I had pointed a gun at a man and emptied it into him. True, he was socially worthless—a parasite, a leech—but the character of the man himself did not alter the fact that I had murdered him, that he was dead and I was his killer.

But the mind is funny. I had planned his death, I had killed him, and now it was over. Period. The simple fact of murder seemed to be something I could live with. I would not be plagued by guilt. As a result either of strength or weakness of character, I was a killer with a reasonably clear conscience.

And now the rest of it. Three things stayed with me, stuck in the forefront of my mind. The very weird expression on his face the instant before I shot him, first of all. A total disbelief, as if he had suddenly wandered into a different time-continuum where he did not fit at all.

Then there was the noise of the first gunshot. It rang so loud in my ears that the other four senses, smell and sight and taste and touch, disappeared entirely into the portion of time when the shot dominated the morning. All that sound in the middle of all that sensory silence—it was impressive.

The third thing was the utter stupidity of putting all those bullets into that very dead body. I think shooting a dead man may well be more emotionally offensive than shooting a live one. There’s a concentrated brutality about it, which may explain why the newspapers and the public go wild when a murderer hacks up a corpse and stuffs it piece by piece into subway lockers, or whatever. Murder, at least, is rational. But the ridiculous mental picture of a killer emptying a gun into a man with a hole in his head is senseless, stupid, and much more terrible. The look in a man’s face. The sound of a gunshot. The waste of three or four or five bullets.

These were significant, important.

More so than murder.

The commuter train unloaded us at Grand Central. I folded the
Times
and tucked it under my arm, then followed the fold out to the lower level of the station. I was confused for a few seconds; then I got my bearings and headed for the locker where I had left my suitcase. I found it, fished out the key, unlocked the thing and picked up my bag. I carried it to the ticket office where a stoop-shouldered old man with shaggy gray hair and thick, almost opaque eyeglasses sold me a one-way coach ticket to Cleveland. The human robot at the Information Desk informed me that the next train to Cleveland left in thirty-eight minutes from Track 41. I found Track 41 without too much trouble and sat down on a bench with my suitcase between my knees.

The train was a comfortable one. It called itself the Ohio State Limited, passed through Albany and Utica and Syracuse and Rochester and Erie and Buffalo, and was due at Cleveland at 9:04 in the evening. I added thirty mental minutes to the time of arrival and settled down with my newspaper. In due course the conductor appeared, snatched my ticket and replaced it with a narrow red cardboard affair with numbers on it. He punched one of the numbers and tucked the cardboard slab into the slot on the seat in front of me. Shortly thereafter another kind gentleman made his appearance. He sold me two pieces of bread with a sliver of American cheese between them and a paper cup of orange juice to wash the sandwich down with. I handed him a dollar and he returned a nickel to me. There’s nothing quite like the railroads. No other mode of transportation since the covered wagon has been able to cover such a short distance in so long a time at such a high cost. It’s an accomplishment.

We hit Albany on time. We were five minutes late getting into Utica and seven more minutes behind by the time we got to Syracuse. We lost eight minutes on the road to Rochester and an additional five getting to Buffalo. Then we waited for some obscure reason in the Buffalo terminal. Maybe there was a cow on the tracks. Something like that.

It was a quarter to ten when we made Cleveland. The train was supposed to swing south next, heading for Cinci by way of such unlikely places as Springfield and Columbus and Dayton and similar silliness, and I didn’t want to think how far behind it would be when it finally made port in Cincinnati. I got off in Cleveland, suitcase in hand, and looked for a hotel and a restaurant in that order.

The hotel was at the corner of Thirteenth and Paine, rundown but respectable, reasonable but not cheap. The room had a stall shower, which helped, and a big bed which looked inviting. I changed to slightly less Madison-Avenue clothing and went out for dinner.

The restaurant was one of those let’s-pretend-it’s-1910 places—imitation gaslamps, sawdust on the floor, waiters with white coats and broad-brimmed straw hats. The food made up for it. I had a steak, a baked potato, a dish of creamed spinach. I drank bourbon and water before dinner, black coffee after. The coffee came in a little pewter pot with a wooden handle. What do murderers eat? What do they drink?

The Cleveland
Press
didn’t have the story. It was a veritable storehouse of information about Cleveland, starting with fires and municipal corruption and finishing off with a little Conning-Towerish column of sloppy homespun-yet-sophisticated verse that almost made me throw up the steak. Here and there a reader could discover that there was a world outside of Cleveland, by George, with things happening there. There was a rocket doing something at Cape Canaveral, a revolution in Laos, an election in Italy. There was a murder in New York but the Cleveland
Press
didn’t know it.

I found a trashcan to stuff the
Press
into and looked around for a newsstand that stooped to carrying New York papers. Most of them didn’t. One of them did and I let him sell me the
Telly
. I took it back to the hotel, opened it up and plowed through it.

It took a lot of plowing. I started with the front page and worked toward the back, and suddenly I was on page 22 and so was the story. It filled six paragraphs in the third column and was topped neatly by a two-deck eighteen point head that read like so:

MAN SHOT DEAD OUTSIDE
HOME IN WESTCHESTER

Gunfire shattered the early-morning calm today in residential Cheshire Point when five bullets fired from a moving car felled a prominent importer steps from his own door.

The victim was Lester Keith Brassard of 341 Roscommon Drive, 52-year-old importer with offices in lower Manhattan. He was killed as he left his home for his office. Local police recovered a stolen car, believed to be the murder vehicle, several blocks from the scene of the crime.

Mona Brassard, the victim’s wife, was unable to advance any information as to a possible motive for the slaying, conducted in typical gangland fashion. “Keith didn’t have an enemy in the world,” she told police and reporters. She admitted that he had seemed nervous lately. “But it was something about business,” she said. “He didn’t have any personal problems. None that I knew about.”

Arnold Schwerner, detective on the Cheshire Point police force, agreed that the slaying seemed pointless. “He could have been hit by mistake,” he theorized. “It looks like a pro job.”

Schwerner’s statement was in reference to the method of murder—several shots from a stolen car. This method has been in vogue among gangsters for years.

Cheshire Point police are working on the killing in close cooperation with detectives attached to Manhattan’s Homicide West.

The last paragraph was the kicker. If Homicide West was tied in already, that meant the cops were looking for a business motive for the murder. That, in turn, meant that the office would get some sort of going-over. I couldn’t be positive they’d hit the heroin, but the odds were long that they would. Homicide West is by no means a lousy outfit.

I re-read the part where they quoted Mona and I couldn’t help grinning like a ghoul. She had carried it off perfectly, hitting just the right tone.
Keith didn’t have an enemy in the world
—except for his lovely wife and her boyfriend.
He seemed a little nervous lately. But it was something about business. He didn’t have any personal problems. None that I knew about.

The right tone. She hadn’t tried to explain things for them, but had given them a few hints and let them reconstruct it for themselves. I’d staged the job right—a slaying conducted in typical gangland style. Now she had reacted properly, and the heroin was the next link in the chain. When they found that, the ball game was over. That made it a gangland slaying, all right. What the hell else could it be?

I folded the newspaper and put it in the wastebasket. Then I set a cigarette on fire and found a chair to sit in. I wanted to get some plans made, but it wasn’t easy. I kept seeing that look of total disbelief on the face of Lester Keith Brassard. I hadn’t known his name was Lester. It explained why he preferred Keith. So would anybody in his right mind.

I would see the face, and I would hear the shot. Then I would see myself stretched across the front seat of that black Ford pumping bullets into a corpse. According to the papers, the police thought the car was moving at the time. That was fine with me. That meant two killers, one firing the gun and the other handling the driving. The crime lab could probably figure out that it hadn’t happened that way, but by that time it would be a moot point. For the time being, let them figure on two killers. Or five. Or a damned platoon.

The face, and the shot, and the exercise in studied stupidity. They paraded in front of me, and I wondered if maybe this was what they meant by guilt. Not sorrow for the act, not a feeling that the act was wrong, not even a fear of punishment—but a profound distaste for certain memories of the act, certain sensory impulses that lingered persistently.