The Empty Trap (12 page)

And with a sound quite like a sob she came back into his arms.

His feeling of apprehension did not come until later, until the sun was lower, until they lay dreamy, languorous and sated, sharing a single cigarette. He tried to push the cold knowledge of danger out of his mind, the awareness that this was an incident of monumental foolishness. It had always been his practice to avoid any emotional relationship with a guest. There had always been ample opportunity to be a fool. He had slipped once, on his first hotel job. A merciful manager had put the fear of God into him, explaining in detail exactly what could happen to his career.

The implications of this were far worse. This was the wife of the owner. It did not matter that she was lonely, unhappy, abused and beautiful. It did not matter that she was passionately demanding and shatteringly exciting. This was Harry’s wife.

He began to dress hurriedly. She left the room, carrying
her clothing, moving quick and tall and gracefully. She came back wearing the plain yellow dress he had seen before.

“Don’t go for a minute,” she said. “We have to talk.”

They were both sobered, both apprehensive. This was a way to commit suicide. They told each other with deliberate emphasis that this was an unfortunate incident, and the sane, adult thing to do was to forget it ever happened, and certainly never let it happen again. Yes, it was just one of those things. If they tried, they could easily get back into their previous relationship. Perhaps even that relationship was too friendly. They told each other these things as though they were arguing on the same side against a third party. And, as the sweeping statements began to lose emphasis, they both began to realize they were whistling into the wind. And they stopped talking.

“What you said about hotels,” she said.

“Yes?”

“We’ll have to be
so
careful, Lloyd. So terribly careful.”

“I know.”

“And we’ll have to keep our heads. We can’t ever get overconfident, and careless.”

He was very alert during the next few days for any change in attitude toward him on the part of the staff. He knew that if there was talk, if he had been seen going to Harry’s place and staying there for two hours on a Sunday afternoon while Sylvia was alone, he would surprise a look of speculation, see whisperings.

One thing favored the intrigue. He had never maintained a regular work routine. He inspected every segment of the operations at least once a day, but at unexpected times. And he covered the ground twice or three times often enough in one day so that one visit was no guarantee that he might not stop again. It made for a taut house. But there was one serious handicap to the intrigue. He had made it a practice to keep his secretary informed of his whereabouts at all times, so he could be reached at once in case of an emergency. This
had to be altered. He did it gradually, and when finally she complained, he told her that things were now running so smoothly that the old routine could be relaxed. He was with Sylvia twice more before Harry returned, once at dawn on a Tuesday, once at midnight a few days later. Each episode was as carefully planned and timed as a military operation.

After Harry came back it was impossible. It sickened him to think of Harry with her. One day she slipped him a note saying she would be at that place in the village, the beer place, at three in the afternoon. She was in the back booth when he came in. Her smile was brilliant.

“What’s up?”

“I just wanted to see you, Lloyd, and talk. I wanted to tell you things are easier for me. I can handle the marriage better now. I’m not as vulnerable as I was. I’m not so alone.”

“Does he seem to have any kind of suspicion?”

“Oh, no. None at all. Anyway, he’s too damn busy being sore at Charlie Bliss.”

“What about?”

“More state people smelling around. Charlie got too hungry during the holidays. I heard him give Charlie his orders. No more grift for six months. So Charlie has to operate on the legal house percentage no matter how big a mark comes in. He looked as though someone had run over his dog.”

He stared at her. “I don’t think I understand.”

She stared back. “My God, you poor dunce! I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Darling, this is the flossiest clip joint in the world. Did you think for one minute Harry and his partners would settle for the legal house take all the way down the line? There’s nothing rough about it. The little people with two or three hundred to bet get the same break here they’ll get anywhere in Nevada. But once in a while they’ll get a mark. Remember those two men from Houston
in the middle of December? They dropped a hundred and eighty thousand.”

Lloyd remembered them. “They were cheated?”

“They sure as hell were.”

“How is it possible? There are inspections. The books are open. If the casino nets too much, can’t they close it down and take the equipment apart?”

“First item. There are three sets of books. Three, because Harry is giving the partners just enough to keep them quiet. Second item. Charlie Bliss is the greatest mechanic in the business, and some of his men are almost as good as he is. This is the electronic age. Some of Charlie’s gimmicks will fit in the palm of your hand. Readily detachable. No heavy wiring. No crude stuff like in Havana at the Tropicana and the National Casino. This is a slick operation. The casino will stand a complete inspection at any time. But you won’t find any big smart money gambled here. The word is out.”

“Couldn’t they have gotten enough money off those men from Houston anyway?”

“No, my innocent lamb. They might have dropped fifteen or twenty thousand and quit. With a gimmicked game, if the control is perfect, and Charlie’s always is, you can use psychology. They lost it on the wheel. Charlie saw they were using a system, a doubling system on red and black. So he let their system work. He let them win thirty thousand and then eased them back down to even, and then let them come up to thirty-five and pushed them back down again, and then let them come up to fifty. That was nearly a mistake, because one wanted to quit then and they nearly did. After he pushed them up and down about eight times, they got the idea he wanted them to get. They doubled their opening stake, figuring the system was working and they could get up to maybe a hundred thousand by playing twice as heavy. He had them then. He let them get up to sixty thousand and by then neither of them had any desire to quit. They’d been drinking and playing the wheel for five hours. They were ripe and he dropped the boom on them. They were on black then. So he hit
the red three times, then the zero, then the red four times, then the double zero, and then three more reds. That put them ninety thousand down and they were pretty sick. Charlie stopped the wheel to give them a chance to write checks. They put ninety thousand on the black, so Charlie fed them another double zero. Those were two sick Texans. Thirteen spins and no black. One character playing the double zero with twenty dollar chips got very healthy, picking up all of fourteen hundred bucks.”

Up until then Lloyd had taken pride in the hotel, pride in what he had done. He had not thought much about the gambling or the casino. It was spoiled for him. He saw that all he had done was built a very superior web, so that Charlie could crouch in a dark corner and wait for the juiciest flies to blunder in. Clip joint. A very superior clip joint, but that did not matter.

He told himself that it was none of his business. His job was to run a renowned hotel and run it as well as he could. But the taste was gone. What good did it do to fight for Triple A beef to feed the innocent about to be trimmed? It did not help to know that Charlie had shelved his toys for six months. Six months would end and there would be another mark to be taken, more false entries to be made. He knew he did not care any more, yet he forced himself to be diligent.

When Harry took a trip in February he was with Sylvia again. She seemed the only desirable thing in a tasteless world. Their hunger for each other was great, and hunger bred daydreams. “Darling,” she said softly, lips close to his throat, “we don’t belong here. We’ll go to some place where no one can ever find us.”

His disgust with his job was like a sickness. He had become more irritable with the staff. They responded by becoming slightly slack in their work. Only an expert could have seen the tiny changes. A smear of grease on the stainless hood over the main range. A spot on linen. A noisy bushing in an electric motor.

“Some place far away,” he said. “An island in the south seas. Swim in the surf. Live on cocoanuts.”

It was Sylvia who said, quite casually, “Of course we could manage it if we took off with enough money, enough of Harry’s lovely money.”

They were sitting then, on opposite sides of a small table. Her words seemed to hang in the air for a long time. They looked at each other and looked uneasily away. Her laugh was nervous. “That is an idea we’d better drop,” she said. “And fast.”

But the idea stayed with him, and grew. It was stolen money. What harm to take it from a thief. He found many pretexts to go to the Copper Casino. It was completely staffed by Charlie’s people, with the exception of the food handlers and bartenders. Lloyd soon saw that he would have no more chance of acquiring any of that money than would an outsider. Charlie had thought of every possible protection against a stickup.

Yet the idea persisted. When he finally saw how he could take money, it was ridiculously simple. Winners felt uneasy about having cash on their persons, or in their rooms. They put it in the hotel safe, a stout modern box in the office behind the reservation desk. As he put a thick envelope away one evening, he wondered why he had not thought of the guests’ money. The head cashier, Mrs. Boyer, had one key to the safe and he had the other. They were the only two keys, and they had to be used simultaneously. Harry had a complete set of two keys locked away somewhere. When Mrs. Boyer went off duty, she turned her key over to Harmon, or whatever other person was on night desk duty. Lloyd never let his key out of his possession. It was a nuisance to have to come down to use the key, but it seemed safer. When the safe was unlocked, the door hung open. It was designed that way as a precaution against leaving it accidentally unlocked. He had heard of taking an imprint of a key and getting another made, but he did not know how to go about getting such an imprint, or where to go to get a key made. When he was with Mrs. Boyer, she would hand her key over and he would work both of them, give hers back to her. When the house was full and play was heavy, there was often a good deal
of money in the safe. He tried to think of the easiest way to manage it. It would not take a great deal of tension to keep the door closed. If it remained closed it would look as though it were locked.

When, in April, Harry went on a three day visit to Los Angeles, Lloyd explained his idea to Sylvia. She was very nervous about it. They had talked about it enough times so that it was not difficult to talk, and at times the talk seemed academic—it seemed to be talk of something that would never occur.

“Would he contact the police?” he asked. “It isn’t his money.”

“Never. He wouldn’t yell cop. He’d make the losses good. And then he’d send people after us.”

“They’d never find us. Not if there’s enough money.”

“There’ll have to be enough. Will your idea work?”

“I think so.”

“You’ll have to rehearse it. You’ll have to actually go through with it once without taking the money.”

“I know.”

She clung to him. “I’m scared, Lloyd. I’m terribly frightened.”

“What else can we do? What else is there in the world for us to do?” he asked, his voice dull.

The rehearsal worked perfectly. When he had a chance to tell her she said she had decided she couldn’t go through with it. In May Harry became more brutal with her. And Harry complained to Lloyd about bad service in the hotel. Things were moving toward the inevitable showdown. On the first of May Harry left for two weeks on a business trip to New Orleans, Miami and San Juan. They held each other tightly in the grey of a long dawn and said it would have to happen now. They told each other it was what they had to do. She said she would pack. He packed what he would need. He managed to get their suitcases into the back end of the Pontiac without being observed.

They coordinated it carefully. The best time seemed to be early morning, right after Mrs. Boyer came on. He came down carrying the empty blue canvas bag. He went
through into his own office. His own secretary was at work. He said good morning to her, and spent the next five minutes looking over departmental reports. He did not see or understand a figure he looked at.

“Betty.”

“Yes, Mr. Wescott.”

“I’d like you to go get hold of Tony Arco and check liquor stores against this inventory list. Don’t bother with back bar stock. Just the cases. It shouldn’t take over an hour.”

When she had gone, he took a deep breath. He took an envelope out of his desk drawer, went out into the other office where Mrs. Boyer worked alone and said, “Let me take your key, please.”

As usual, she handed him the whole key ring, first separating the safe key from the group. He went to the safe. His back was to her. He opened the door, put his envelope inside, and then, as he closed the door, inserted the rubber window wedge he had purchased in the village and shaved down with a razor to the proper thickness. It was out of sight when the door was closed, and made sufficient tension to hold it closed. He made a mock of turning the locks, took her keys back to her. As he handed them to her he said, “I sent Betty off on something that will take at least an hour, Mrs. Boyer.” She looked up at him inquiringly, face and expression like that of an aged and truculent pug dog. “Would you do me a favor and go find Foster and give this to him?” This was a report from the heating contractor recommending the installation of another blower in one of the longer airconditioning ducts. Foster, head of maintenance, had been waiting for the report for days.

“Of course, Mr. Wescott,” she said, getting out of her chair. “Do you know where he might be. I
know
he won’t be in that little office of his.”