Grifter's Game (13 page)

I don’t think Brutus was sorry that he knifed Caesar. I don’t think he thought it was wrong.

But I am positive the line
Et tu, Brute
haunted him until he ran upon the sword that Strato held for him. That line would do it for him, just as the blood did it for Macbeth and his good wife.

I lit another cigarette and tried to think straight. It was not easy.

According to plan, she would leave for Miami a week to ten days after the murder. It was Wednesday now, Wednesday evening, and by the Saturday after next she would be at the Eden Roc. I had told her I would be there before her. I could leave any time.

The funny part of it was that I didn’t entirely want to. I had been a machine, oiled and primed for the murder, and now that it was over and done with I felt functionless. I was through. The easy part remained, but I didn’t even want a hand in the easy part of it. A weird thought nagged at me. I had better than five hundred bucks left. I could pack up and go—find a new town, use the dough for a fresh start. I could forget all that woman and all that money.

And the face and the noise and the five useless bullets.

It was an emotional reaction to murder, not sensible, not logically considered. It wasn’t logical because then I would have killed L. Keith Brassard for nothing at all. The spoils belonged to the victor. I had won, and now Brassard’s wife and Brassard’s money were mine to keep. Both were desirable. It would be idiotic to turn down either of them.

It came out the same way if you looked at the emotional set-up piece by piece. I still loved Mona, still wanted her, still needed her. Even if I had the money, I was nowhere without her. She made the difference. She was the New Life, the Higher Purpose, all of that crap. I had to laugh. A face and a noise and five extra bullets sat on one side. Mona and money were perched on the other. The choice was so simple, so obvious, that there really was no choice. I’d be in Miami by Saturday and she’d be there four or five days after that.

I ground out my cigarette, glad that all that nonsense was settled. The air outside was heavy with industrial smoke and human perspiration. I forced myself through it, found a bar, had a drink. A whore sat there waiting for me to pick her up. The impulse was suddenly strong; the desire for a magical release from all that tension was tough to resist. I looked at her and she smiled, showing at least fifty-three teeth, none of them hers to start with. She was the kind of woman who looks fine if you don’t get too close. A hard, tough body built for action. A face camouflaged with too much of every cosmetic known to modern woman. Cheap clothes cheaply worn. And I remembered the line from Kipling:
I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land.

I turned away from her and paid attention to my drink. I finished it, scooped up my change and walked away from Mandalay. I thought about a movie and decided I really didn’t have the strength to sit through one. They were good time-killers, but enough is enough. Maybe someday I would be able to go to a movie because I wanted to go to a movie. Maybe someday I would be able to go to a movie and watch the damn thing.

But not for a while.

I walked around for a few more minutes, maybe half an hour altogether. I passed movie theaters, passed bars that I didn’t bother entering. I wandered past the Greyhound station and again the impulse came, the urge to get on the first bus and go wherever it went. With my luck it would have gone to New York.

More walking. Then it occurred to me that, for one thing, I was dog-tired, and, for another, I had absolutely nothing to do. The obvious course of action involved going back to my hotel and hitting the sack. But I knew instinctively that I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep for hours. After all, I had recently finished committing a murder. You do any of several things after committing a murder, and falling asleep with ease is not one of them. It only stood to reason that, this being my first homicide to date, it would be sunrise before I could start thinking seriously about something like sleep.

I decided not to be logical. The sleepy clerk tossed me my key and the sleepy elevator operator ran me up to my floor. I felt a kinship for both of them. I got out of my clothes, washed up, and crawled under the covers.

I got all ready to count sheep. The sheep were little naked Monas and they did not look like sheep at all. They were only woolly here and there, and they were not built much like sheep. Nor were they jumping over a fence. Instead they leaped gaily over a corpse. You know who
he
was.

By the time the fourth Mona got over the corpse, I had gotten over my insomnia. I slept like a corpse, and nobody jumped over me.

10

I made the front page of the
Times
. Not the lead story, which was devoted to the names somebody called somebody else in the Security Council of the United Nations. Not even the second lead, which was devoted to some new invention in the realm of municipal corruption. But, by
Times
standards, I got a big play—ten inches of copy set double-column in the left-hand corner of page one. That’s the equivalent of the front-page banner in the
News
or
Mirror
, which I found out later, I also made.

The headline on the
Times
story read: NARCOTICS CONNECTION SEEN LIKELY IN CHESHIRE POINT MURDER. As is generally the case with
New York Times
headlines, that turned out to be the understatement of the year. The story, with ten inches of copy on the front page and fifteen more on page 34, made everything very nice indeed. I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

Homicide West had located the heroin after what the
Times
graciously referred to as “a meticulous scrutiny of Brassard’s offices at 117 Chambers Street.” I didn’t see any need for meticulous scrutiny—not with an envelope of heroin sticking out from under a desk blotter and three more in the top drawer. But I didn’t want to quarrel with the
Times
.

The cache of heroin, according to the
Times
, had a retail value in excess of a million dollars. What in the world that meant was anybody’s guess. By the time the stuff was retailed it would have passed through the hands of fifteen middlemen and would have been cut as many times. The retail value was pretty much irrelevant, and there was no way of figuring out what the wholesale value of the stuff might have been. Nor did it matter much, when you stopped to think about it.

From there on, naturally, they had put two and two together. And, naturally, had come up with four. The phone numbers, said the Times, were those of several well-known narcotics drops. Why they were still open if they were known as narcotics drops was neither asked nor answered. What with the dope and the numbers, and a meticulous scrutiny of Brassard’s books, Homicide had managed to figure out that Lester Keith Brassard was an importer of more than cigarette lighters.

This fact, coupled with the mode of murder employed, made the final conclusion inevitable. Brassard had been bumped by racket boys, either because he had crossed them or because they wanted to move in on his operation. The
Times
reporter, who had obviously seen a few too many movies about the Mafia, thought this might be an aftermath of the Appalachian meeting, with the mob moving out of the drug trade. According to this interpretation, poor Lester Keith was a high-ranking mobster who refused to go along with the shift in policy and had suffered the consequences of “bucking the syndicate.” It was a pretty fascinating theory and a marvelous example of interpretative journalism in action. I hoped the kid would cop himself a Pulitzer for it.

There were three or four paragraphs about Mona in the story and they all said just what I wanted them to say. The distraught widow was completely taken aback by the new developments in the case. Any intimation that her husband was less than a solid citizen shocked the marrow from her bones. Of course she had never been quite clear on what he did for a living. He wasn’t the sort of man who brought his business home from the office. He made a good living, and that was as much as she knew. But she just couldn’t believe that he would be mixed up in something … something actually
criminal
. Why, it just wasn’t like Keith at all!

She should have been an actress.

I liked that article. What it left out was as important from my point of view as what it included. The Cheshire Point side of the case had disappeared almost completely. A few witnesses had popped out with the usual mutually conflicting stories. One insisted the three killers had called out
This is for Al, you bastard
before shooting. The rest came a little closer to reality, but not a hell of a lot. The important part was that nobody seemed to give a damn about the shooting itself any more. Brassard, unmasked as a scoundrel, would not be mourned. The police, busy chasing down narcotics leads, wouldn’t care about the killing as such. Mona would be left alone, except for the sob-sister reporters whom she’d quite justifiably refused to speak to. Nobody would be especially surprised when she put the house up for sale and headed for Florida to get away from it all. Nor would anybody take much notice when she married me four or five months later, on the rebound, so to speak. It would be perfectly consistent, and that was the important thing.

Consistency. You can build a whole world of lies, as long as each lie reinforces every other lie. You can create a masterful structure of sheer logic if you begin with one false postulate. All it takes is consistency.

That night I saw a movie. The whole day up to that point had been unreal. It was a waiting time and nothing was happening. I felt only partially alive, hibernating without being able to sleep. The total lack of eventfulness was overpowering, especially after a time of planning and a time of acting and a time of running. So this time the movie was not a time-killer but a vicarious experience, an attempt to replace my own passiveness with the activity of the celluloid images.

Perhaps this is why I watched the movie more closely than I would have normally. It was a Hitchcock film, an old one, and it was gripping. The switches from tension to comedy, from the terrifying to the ridiculous, were amazingly effective. But for a change I saw past the surface to the plot itself, and I saw that the plot was ludicrous—a web of preposterous coincidences held together by superior writing and acting and directing.

Later, lying in bed and trying to sleep, I realized something. I tried to imagine a movie in which the hero steals two pieces of luggage, one of which is loaded with a fortune in raw heroin. Then the same hero happens to pick up or get picked up by a girl who subsequently turns out to be the wife of the guy who owns the luggage and the heroin.

Coincidental?

More than that. Almost incredible. At least as far-fetched as the picture—and yet I had been able to accept coincidence in life simply because it had happened to me. The fictional coincidences in the Hitchcock film were different. They had not happened in life, but only on the screen.

It was something to think about. I had never looked at it quite that way before, and I spent a little time running it through my mind.

“Would you care for a magazine, sir?”

I shook my head.

“Coffee, tea, or milk?”

I shook my head again. The stewardess, as pretty and as faceless as Miss Rheingold, wandered off to bother somebody else. I looked out the window at the ground and saw clouds instead. They look very different from above. When you fly over them they are not white puffballs of cotton at all, just shapeless, moderately dense fog. I stared at them for a few more seconds, but they didn’t do a hell of a lot to hold my interest. I looked away.

It was Saturday morning. The plane was a jet, flying direct to Miami, and we would be landing a few minutes past noon. The night before, I had phoned the Eden Roc and reserved a single; it would be waiting for me. That was a piece of luck. There was a time when Miami Beach was empty in the summer. Now the summer season is as busy as the winter one, although the prices are a good deal lower.

“Attention please.” I listened to the male voice come over the loudspeaker and wondered what was wrong. I remembered that I was on a plane, and that periodically planes crashed for the sheer hell of it. I wondered, quite calmly, whether we were going to crash.

Then the same voice—the pilot’s—went on to tell me that we were cruising at an altitude of so many feet, that the temperature in Miami was such-and-such, that landing conditions were ideal and that we were destined to arrive on time. The pilot closed with a message advising me to select his airline for future flights and I thought what an idiot I was. We were not going to crash. All was well.

We landed on time, happily. I got off—the stewardess called it
deplaning
, a cunning word—and wandered away to wait for my luggage in the terminal. The sun was hot and the sky was cloudless. Good Florida weather, good beach weather. Mona and I could lie on the beach and soak up the sun. We could lie on the beach at night and soak up the moonlight, too. I remembered Atlantic City, the first time, on the beach at midnight. Life is a circle.

The luggage got there after ten minutes or so and I traded my baggage check for it, then carried it to the waiting limousine which would cruise northward to Miami Beach. The tall, rangy driver was a native of the state. There were two ways to tell—his speech, which sounded more like Kentucky or Tennessee than Deep South. Dade County natives have that hill inflection nine times out of ten. The other tip-off was his total lack of a suntan. The people who live in Miami know enough to stay out of the sun. Only the Yankee tourists are sun-worshippers. He was also a good driver. He made fine time, dropping me at my hotel sooner than I’d expected. A bellhop snatched my bags and I followed him to the front desk. Yes, they had my reservation. Yes, my room was ready for me. And welcome to the Eden Roc, Mr. Marlin. Right this way, sir.

I was on the fifth floor, a big single with a huge bathroom and a view of the ocean. I looked out the window and saw browned bodies dotting a golden beach. The sea was very calm—no surf at all, gently rippling waves. I watched a gull swoop for a fish, watched one little kid chase another little kid along the edge of the shore, watched two college-boy-types burying a college-girl-type with sand. Miami Beach.