Grifter's Game (8 page)

I called her that evening.

It was a warm night and the fan in the phone booth did not work. I put in a dime and dialed her number and got an operator who sent back my dime and told me to deposit twenty cents. I dropped in the original dime and another one and the phone rang. A man’s voice said hello to me.

“Is Jerry there?”

“I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”

“Isn’t this Jerry Hillman’s residence?”

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

He hung up on me and I sat there in the hot booth hearing his voice again in my mind. It was a cultured voice. He spaced his words and talked pleasantly. I left the booth and walked around the block. They were home. I took out a cigarette and smoked it in a hurry. I had to get in touch with her and I wasn’t sure how to do it. I wondered if his phone was tapped. Most likely it was. I figured he probably tapped it himself. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I called again from the same booth and this time she answered it. When she said hello I saw her in my mind and felt her in my arms. I started to shake.

“Is Jerry Hillman there?”

“No,” she said. “You must have the wrong number.”

She recognized my voice. I could tell.

“Isn’t this AL 5-2504?”

“No,” she said.

I sat in the phone booth for over fifteen minutes. I held the phone to my ear with one hand to make it look good while I held the hook down with the other. Then the phone rang and I lifted the hook and said hello.

“Joe,” she said. “Hello, Joe.”

“How has it been?”

“All right,” she said. “I suppose. I missed you, Joe.”

“I’ve been going crazy waiting for you. I was afraid you wouldn’t catch the number. Where are you calling from?”

“A drugstore,” she said. “I … I was ready for your call. Keith answered the first time and said it was a wrong number. But I knew it was you.”

I took a breath. “I have to see you,” I said. “Can you get into Manhattan tomorrow?”

“I think so. He’s going to the office. I’ll ride in with him and tell him I have to do some shopping. I can get in sometime between nine and ten. Is that all right?”

“Perfect.”

“Where are you staying?”

“A hotel,” I said. “The Collingwood. Just east of Herald Square.”

“Should I meet you there?”

I thought about it for a minute. “Better not,” I said. “There’s an Automat on Thirty-fourth between Sixth and Seventh. Meet me there.”

“Thirty-fourth between Sixth and Seventh. I’ll be there. I love you, Joe.”

I told her I loved her. I told her how much I wanted her.

“I have to get off now,” she said. “I came down to the drugstore to buy Tampax. He’ll wonder what’s taking me so long.”

“Tampax?”

I must have sounded disappointed because she giggled at me with a very sexy giggle. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It was two birds with one stone, Joe. It was an excuse to go to the drugstore and an excuse to keep Keith away from me tonight. I don’t want him touching me tonight, Joe. Not when you’re this close to me. I couldn’t stand it.”

She hung up and I stood there with a receiver in my hand. I walked out of there and tried not to shake visibly. I stopped at a little bar on the way home and tossed down a double shot of bourbon, then sipped the beer chaser very slowly.

The bartender was a big man with a wide forehead. He was listening to hillbilly music on a portable radio that blared away on top of the back bar. The song was something about a real grade-A bitch who was causing the singer untold heartache. The bartender polished glasses in time to the not-very-subtle rhythms of the song. Two or three guys were doing solo drinking. A man and a woman were drinking and playing footsie in a back booth.

How long since I’d seen her? Less than a week. Five or six days. But you can forget a lot in that amount of time. I remembered what she looked like and what she sounded like and how it felt to hold onto her. But I had forgotten, in part, just how much I needed her.

The sound of her voice had brought all of it back to me. Brought it back forcibly.

I wondered how I would kill him. I would have to be the killer, of course. And I would have to do it alone. She’d be the prime suspect, the first one the cops would get to, and I’d have to make sure she had a perfect alibi.

I could kill him at home or at his office. At home might be better—Manhattan homicide cops are too damned thorough. Westchester homicide would be a little less likely to know what was doing.

How? A gun or a knife? The proverbial blunt instrument? Or would I wring his neck with my hands? I tried to remember whether or not you could get fingerprints on a human being’s neck. I didn’t think you could.

I started to shake some more. Then I had another double bourbon and another beer and went back to the hotel.

6

I got to the Automat at nine. The girl in the cashier’s cage dealt me a stack of nickels and I wandered around playing New York’s favorite slot machines. I filled a tray with a glass of orange juice, a dangerous-looking bowl of oatmeal, a pair of crullers and a cup of black coffee. Then I found a table that gave me a good view of the entrance and started in on my breakfast.

I was working on a second cup of coffee when she showed. I looked at her and my head started spinning. She was wearing a very simple blue-gray summer dress that buttoned up the front. She looked sweet and virginal and lovely, and I waited for her to rush over to my table and wrap herself around my neck.

But she was so cool it almost scared me. She looked right at me and the shadow of a smile crossed her face. Then she swept on past me, broke a quarter into nickels and invested the nickels in coffee and a glazed doughnut. Then she stood with the tray in her hands, looking around for a place to sit. Finally she walked over to my table, unloaded the tray and sat down.

“This is fun,” she said. “The cloak and dagger stuff, I mean. I’m getting a little carried away with it.”

I had too much to say and there was no convenient place to begin. I started a cigarette to go with the coffee and plunged in somewhere in the middle. “Have any trouble getting here?”

“None at all. I rode in with Keith on the train. I told him I had to do some shopping. Remind me to do some shopping later. I’ll buy a pair of shoes or something. Anything.”

“It must be nice to have money.”

I just threw the line out; maybe it was a mistake. She turned her eyes on me and her eyes said a great many things that cannot be translated too easily into English. Sure, it was nice to have money. It was nice to be in love, too. Many things were nice.

“Joe—”

“What?”

“I was thinking that maybe we don’t have to kill him.”

“Not so loud!”

“No one’s paying any attention to me. Look, there’s another way that I’ve been thinking about. We won’t have to kill him if it works out.”

“Getting soft?”

“Not soft,” she said.

“What then?”

“Maybe scared. I understand they electrocute murderers in New York. I … don’t want to be electrocuted.”

“You have to be convicted first.”

Her eyes flared. “You sound as though you hate him,” she said. “You sound as though killing is more important than getting away with it.”

“And you sound as though you’re trying to back out. Maybe that’s what you want. Maybe we should forget the whole thing. You go your way and I’ll go mine. Buy yourself all the shoes you want. And a few more furs. And—”

And a man sat down at our table. An old man, broken by time, with a frayed collar on his clean white shirt, with spots on a wide polka-dot tie. He very solemnly poured milk over a bowlful of corn flakes and sprinkled two tablespoons of sugar on top of the mess while we watched him with our mouths open.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Come on.”

No matter where you are in Manhattan there is a bar around the corner. There was a bar around the corner now and we went to it. We found the most remote of the three empty booths and filled it. I hadn’t wanted a drink; now I needed one. I had bourbon and water and she had a screwdriver.

“Well?”

“You’ve got everything wrong,” she said. “I’m not trying to get out of anything. You can be pretty saintly about this, can’t you? You don’t have to live with him. You don’t—”

“Get to the point.”

She took a sip of her drink and followed it with a deep breath. “The heroin,” she said. “Do you still have it?”

I nodded.

“We can use it,” she said.

“Sell it and run?” I got ready to tell her all over again why that wouldn’t work. But she didn’t give me a chance.

“Plant it,” she said. “Put it in his car or around the house or something. Then you or I would call the police anonymously and tip them off. They would search and find the heroin and arrest him.”

A bell rang somewhere but I ignored it. “Just like that?” I said. “Plant it, tip the fuzz, and send hubby off to jail?”

“Why not?”

“Because it wouldn’t work.”

She looked at me.

“Let’s see just what would happen, Mona. The police would run the tip down and find the heroin. Then they’d ask him how it got there, and he’d say he didn’t have the vaguest idea. Right?”

She nodded.

“So they’d take him in and book him,” I went on. “The charge would be possession with intent to sell. In ten minutes a very expensive lawyer would have him out on bail. Ten months later his case would come up. He’d plead not guilty. His lawyer would tell the court that here was a man with no criminal record, no illicit connections, a respectable businessman who had been framed by person or persons unknown. They would find him not guilty.”

“But the dope would be right there!”

“So what?” I took a sip of the bourbon. “The jury would acquit him forty-nine chances out of fifty. The fiftieth—and that’s a hell of a long shot—they’d find him guilty and his lawyer would file an appeal. And he’d win on the appeal unless an even longer long shot came in. Even if both long shots broke right—and I’m damned if I ever want to buck odds like that—it would still be two to three years before he saw the inside of a jail for more than five consecutive hours. That’s a long time to wait, honey. And there’s a damn good chance that sometime during those two or three years he would figure out who tipped the cops. At which time he would find a very capable gunman who would shoot a large hole in your pretty head.”

She shuddered.

“So we have to kill him.”

“I didn’t want to.” Her voice was very small.

“You know another way?”

“I thought—But you’re right. There isn’t any other way. We have to … kill him.”

I drank to that. I ordered another round and the bartender brought the drinks, bourbon and water for me, another screwdriver for her. I paid for them.

“How?”

I didn’t answer her.

“How will we—”

“Hang on,” I said. “I’m trying to think.” I put my elbow on the table and rested my forehead in the palm of my hand. I closed my eyes and tried like hell to think straight. It wasn’t particularly easy. Brassard and money and Mona and heroin were chasing one another around a beanpole with my face. There had to be a way to fit all the pieces together and come out with a plan. But I couldn’t find it.

“Well?”

I lit a cigarette, then studied her face through a cloud of smoke. I rested the cigarette in a small glass ashtray and took her hands in mine. All of a sudden whatever plan I might have thought of became quite unimportant. It was like the first time. And the second time, and every time. I guess
electric
is the right word for it. It was exactly that effect.

Electric. One time I saw a man pick up a lamp cord that had frayed right through to the bare wire. The current glued him and the cord together. He couldn’t let go. The voltage was a little too low to kill him, but he remained stuck to that wire until some young genius cut the power.

That’s how it was.

“Joe—”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Where are we going?”

“My hotel.”

“Is that safe?”

I stared at her.

“Someone might see us,” she said. “It would mean taking a chance. And we can’t afford to take chances.”

She knew how much I needed her. And now she was teasing, playing games. I looked at her and watched her turn into a sex symbol in front of my eyes. She did not look sweet and virginal and lovely any more. I looked at the very simple summer dress and saw breasts and belly and hips. I looked at her eyes and saw lust as naked as my own.

“I’ll go shopping now,” she said. “I’ll buy a pair of shoes so that Keith won’t wonder why I came to the city. Meanwhile you go back to the hotel and think up a jim-dandy plan. Then you call me and tell me all about it and we’ll see what we can work out. That’s the safe way.”

“To hell with the safe way.”

“But we can’t afford to take chances. We’ve got to do it the safe way, Joe.
You
know that.”

They were just words and she didn’t mean them at all. I stood up without letting go of her hand, crossed over to her side of the booth and sat down next to her. Our eyes locked.

“Joe—”

I put my hand on the very soft skin of her throat. I ran it down slowly over her breasts to her thighs. I pressed her.

“Now,” I said. “Now tell me about the safe way.”

We caught a cab right outside the bar. It was less than three blocks to the Collingwood but we were in too much of a hurry to walk.

It was almost too good.

Maybe the tension was responsible for it, the tremendous mutual need for something that would push the fear away and postpone the immediacy of what we were planning to do. Maybe some grain of morality imbedded within us both made our adultery as amazingly gratifying as it was.

Whatever it was, I was all in favor of it.

I lit cigarettes for both of us and gave one of them to her. We lay side by side and smoked them all the way down without saying a word. I finished mine first and stubbed it. It took her a few seconds more. Then she flipped the butt out the open window.

“Maybe I’ll set fire to New York,” she said. “Maybe the whole city will burn.”

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe it landed on somebody’s head.”