HCC 115 - Borderline (15 page)

Hell, she had the shape and the face. In New York, with the right connections, she
could turn one trick a night and make twice the dough. They didn’t have wide-open
pervert shows in New York, but they had out-of-town buyers getting the soft-soap routine
from New York salesmen, and they paid call girls long bread for being handy in bed.
There wouldn’t be any sex-on-the-stage crud, and there wouldn’t be any thirteen cats
a night, and, more important, there wouldn’t be any Cassie.

But she couldn’t make it without dough. She needed plane fare to New York, first of
all, and she needed working capital when she hit town. Money for some really decent
clothes, and for a good apartment in a good neighborhood. With that kind of a front
she wouldn’t have any trouble getting started. A grand would do it neatly.

How was she going to save up a grand in Juarez?

At thirty-five or forty bucks a night, it wouldn’t be too easy. It would cost her
ten a day to stay alive, so she could save, with luck, around a hundred fifty a week.
But there would be extra expenses, and there would be four or five days a month when
work was biologically out of the question. It would take ten weeks at a minimum, with
twenty more like it. That was a hell of a long time to spend in Juarez.

Well, she thought, maybe something would turn up. As things stood, she had a gig which
wasn’t too horrible. She would save as much bread as she possibly could and wait for
her break to come. When it came, she’d grab onto it fast and not let go.

She hoisted her Cuba Libre and drained it.

* * *

Meg sat on her bed in the Hotel Warwick and studied the front page of the El Paso
evening paper.
SEX FIEND TORTURES
,
KILLS WOMAN
, the headline shrieked. She read through the story and shuddered. A woman had been
murdered, her breasts and belly and thighs slashed in a few hundred places, her fingers
and toes sliced off, her body covered with burns. The paper was explicit, mentioning
the toothmarks on the woman’s breasts and sex organs. It said, in a masterpiece of
understatement, that the murder victim had been criminally attacked.

Now wasn’t that something? A bizarre euphemism, she thought. Burn a girl’s breasts,
slash her to ribbons, shear off her fingers and toes, and you have to give her a medical
examination to tell that she’s been
criminally attacked
. Say
rape
, for Christ’s sake and to hell with euphemisms. The poor girl had been criminally
attacked, all right, whether she was raped or not. How criminal could you get?

She tossed the paper away and lit a cigarette. She felt rotten and the cigarette tasted
about as good as she felt. Leave El Paso, Marty had told her. Well, to hell with him.
She would stay where she goddamn pleased, and to hell with him.

The bastard. He had a hangover, he was disgusted with himself, so she got stuck with
the blame for it. What in hell had she done? She’d let go, she’d gotten hotter than
hell and higher than heaven, and so she’d released all the tension that had been bound
up within her. She didn’t blame herself and she didn’t blame Marty. As far as she
was concerned, blame never entered the picture.

She had a hangover herself, of course, but that didn’t mean she felt bad. Alcoholic
remorse, or post-alcoholic remorse, struck her as a load of crap. She had made her
hangover easier with a double of Beefeater on the rocks instead of sitting around
and taking the pledge. And, instead of crying about how whorishly she had acted, she
was pretty well pleased with herself. It had been a lot of fun. It was something she
would do again, when the mood struck her. The simple fact that she had let herself
go sexually was not going to make her run to the nearest doctor for a hysterical hysterectomy.
Her mind didn’t work that way.

Leave El Paso? To hell with you, Marty Granger. To hell with you, and go screw yourself,
and so forth. She would leave El Paso when she was goddamn good and ready. If she
felt like it, she’d spend the rest of her life in this rotten town.

Marty Granger. Who was he, anyway? Just a tinhorn gambler, just a punk with a lot
of style and not much more. For a while there she had thought maybe she was falling
in love with him. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t love. He was a stylish guy
and he was good in bed, but you couldn’t take something like that and make a thing
called love out of it. And what the hell was love, anyway? A big word that added up
to nothing.

She chucked the cigarette in the toilet and lit a fresh one. Love? You could get in
trouble confusing a bad case of hot pants with love. What she’d had for Marty had
been hot pants. It was what she had now. She was sure as hell not in love.

Hot pants? Yeah, that was what she had, all right. But not, thank God, for Marty Granger.

She stood up and began to pace the room.

It was unnatural, she thought. But what was natural, anyway? She had hot emotions,
and she had them for a honey blonde with big breasts. If someone had suggested two
days ago that she might want to make love with a girl, she wouldn’t even have slapped
him. She would have laughed aloud, because the idea would have been so ridiculous
that she couldn’t so much as take offense.

But now it seemed far less ridiculous. Last night she had watched a redhead and a
blonde make love, and watching the two of them had been the most exciting experience
of her life. Before that, a picture of two lesbians going at it was the most arousing
picture in a folder of filth. And last night, after the show, she had watched Marty
and a Mexican tramp having a go at it, and watching had made her hot. But she hadn’t
been hot for Marty. She’d been itching to fill her own hands with the Mex girl’s breasts,
had itched to get down on her knees and kiss the little slut.

That blonde, she thought. That big-boobed blonde. Now wouldn’t that be something?
God in heaven!

What the hell, she thought. She was in El Paso, and a Mexican hot spot was just a
few hundred yards away across an artificial border. Get out of El Paso? Not on your
life, Marty Granger. She could cross that imaginary border, and she could find out
just what it was like to have a lesbian fling. It wasn’t as though it would turn her
into a dyke or anything, it would just be an experiment.

A little excitement. That was all she needed—just a little excitement. A little stacked-blonde
excitement, to be precise.

She laughed, wondering what it would be like. She tried to imagine herself walking
into Delia’s Place and asking the headwaiter to fix her up with the blonde. He’d probably
sell tickets.

What would he do, for God’s sake? What would he say? Well, she would find out soon
enough.

* * *

They had his picture on the front page. It was a two-column cut about four inches
square and it wasn’t a good likeness at all, the same picture they had run in the
Tulsa papers. But he was glad to see any picture at all. The early editions hadn’t
even had his name let alone his picture. And here it was, right smack dab in the middle
of the front page.

He read the article all the way through. Outside of the identification, it didn’t
have much that was new. The police were working, it said, on a wide variety of clues.
He felt like laughing aloud. Clues? He had spelled it out for them by leaving bloody
fingerprints on the wall over Audrey’s bed. What more did they need in the way of
clues? They knew everything they had to know. Everything but where he was, and they’d
have to work some to find that out.

Of course, he thought, it was only a matter of time. They would block roads, would
throw a cordon around El Paso and Juarez, and gradually they would draw the net tighter
until they had him in it. Any day they would check the hotel he was in right now,
and when they did they would have him. No sense sitting around waiting to be captured.
No time.

That night he had placed his razor under the mattress. Now he took it out and opened
it, rubbing his thumb across the blade. It was duller than it had been when he had
bought it. The blade had done hard work cutting through the bones of Audrey’s toes
and fingers. Naturally it had lost a certain amount of its keenness. Maybe he should
have bought the leather strop after all.

He got to his feet, put his clothes on again. It was dinner time and he was hungry.
He wondered if they would recognize him outside from the photo in the papers. He guessed
that they wouldn’t. The picture showed him with a prison brushcut and he didn’t look
like that at all. Besides, if he stayed in his room all the time he would die slowly
of starvation.

Outside he found a chili joint and had a howl of hot chili with cheese and a cup of
soup. The razor was not under his mattress now. It was in his pocket, ready for action.

Because, he thought, it was time. Killing time. He left the chili joint and began
walking around the city. It was early and the sky was light, but he had learned something
the night before, had gained a valuable lesson during the wonderful time he had spent
with Audrey. The lesson was this—you did not need the cloak of darkness, did not need
silent and unlighted streets. You needed only privacy.

He knew where to find privacy. You walked until you found a certain type of street,
and then everyone was all too happy to offer you privacy. From there on, it was easy.

When he had walked for half an hour he found the area he was searching for. Crib Row,
the cheap-whore section of town. There were row upon row of one-room shanties, each
painted the same drab gray, and each with a woman in front seated upon either a cane
chair or an upended orange crate. They shouldn’t have started that early in the evening,
he thought. In the light, they were too ugly. They should wait until darkness.

But it didn’t matter.

He walked along a crib-lined street, waiting. A woman clutched at his arm, her dull
eyes bright with promise. She told him in poor English just what she would do for
him.

She was too old, and pregnant as well. He kept walking.

“Frenchie, Joe?”

Last night he had been Mac; today, he was Joe. The girl who offered herself was younger
than the rest, maybe twenty-five, maybe even less. Her face was not pretty at all
and her chest was flat, which explained what she was doing on Crib Row. But she was
young.

“Frenchie,” she said eagerly, earnestly. “Ony a dollar, Joe. You wanna hot frenchie?”

So his name was Joe, for a while. He put his hand in his pocket. Misreading the gesture,
she reached forward and patted him with her fingers. His hand found the razor and
held it.

“Let’s go,” he said. She stood up and he followed her into the shack and closed the
door.

Simon was a big man, red in the face, thick in the middle. His hands were pudgy. A
few of the blood vessels in his nose were broken, suggestive of high blood pressure
rather than alcoholism. He stuck out a hand and Marty shook it. A dead-fish handshake,
Marty thought. The kind that made you want to go and wash your hands.

“You’re Granger,” he said. “Right?”

“Right.”

“l got a pair of decks here. Bicycle brand, unopened. Good enough for you?”

“Fine.”

“What do they call you? Marty?”

“That’s it.”

“Have a drink, Marty? Room service sent me up a bottle of Chivas and a pail of ice.
Join me?”

“Not just yet.”

They sat down in folding chairs on opposite sides of a small card table, evidently
also provided by room service. Marty watched as Simon broke open a deck and shuffled
it. He riffled the cards elaborately. All right, Marty thought. So you’ve seen a deck
before. I’m duly impressed.

“Marty? Not to offend you, but when I play with a stranger I like to see some front
money. You understand?”

“You want to be able to collect when you win. It makes sense.”

He took out his wallet and spread bills on the table. There were a lot of them. Simon
smiled graciously and waved a pudgy hand at the bills. Marty stuffed them back in
his wallet.

“Now if you want the same privilege—”

“Forget it,” Marty told him. “You’re driving a Cad, the way I hear it. A Cad is worth
more than either of us is going to win or lose.”

Simon was still shuffling the cards. “The game is Hollywood,” he said. “Spades double,
twenty for gin, ten for undercutting. Hundred and fifty points makes a game, ten points
a box, a hundred for game. A dollar a point.”

“That’s a big game.”

“Too big?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Simon put the pack on the table. “Cut for deal,” he said. They cut. Marty drew an
eight of hearts, while Simon cut to the jack of diamonds.

“Deal,” Marty said.

* * *

Weaver was strangely calm now. He was in the shanty with the young prostitute, and
his hand was in his pocket, holding onto the razor. The shanty was a mess, underclothing
heaped in a corner of the little room. The place stank.

Again, he thought, he was doing a favor for a girl. This Mexican whore had less of
a life than Audrey. She sold herself for a dollar, sat in front of her filthy crib
begging men to make a tramp out of her. Death would probably be a pleasure for her.
The poor thing had nothing to lose.

“Frenchie,” she said.

He decided that she didn’t know much English. She had a feeble-minded look about her.
He told her to take off her clothes and she stared at him. He made motions to go with
the words, pulling vaguely at his own clothing and then pointing to her. She got the
idea and smiled hugely at him. Her teeth, he saw, were worse than his own. Yellow
and decayed. It made him a little sick to look at her teeth.

She began to undress and he studied her body dispassionately. Small breasts, still
fresh with youth but not much to look at. Thin, bony legs. Hips almost boyish. She
was somehow sad when fully dressed, but she was far more pathetic with no clothes
on. Poor creature, he told himself. Death would release her from her chains.