Grifter's Game (16 page)

Vegas.

I watched men win and I watched them lose. They were playing a straight house. Nothing was loaded. The house took its own little percentage and got rich. Money made in bootlegging and gunrunning and dope smuggling and whoremongering was invested quite properly in an entire town that stood as a monument to human stupidity, a boomtown in the state with the sparsest population and the densest people in the country.

Vegas.

I watched them for three hours. I had half a dozen drinks in the course of those three hours and none of them got close to me. Then I went upstairs to bed.

It was a cheap evening. I didn’t risk a penny. I’m not a gambler.

12

Las Vegas is a funny town in the morning. It’s strictly a nighttime town, but one where night goes on all day long. The game rooms never close. The slots, of course, are installed next to every last cash register in the city. Breakfast was difficult. I sat at a lunch counter, drinking the first cup of coffee and smoking the first cigarette. A few feet away somebody’s grandmother was making her change disappear in a chromed-up slot machine. It bothered me. Gambling before noon looks about as proper to me as laying your own sister in the front pew on Sunday morning. Call me a Puritan—that’s how my mind works.

I finished the coffee and the cigarette and left the hotel. It was a short walk to the Greyhound station where a chinless clerk told me that buses left for Tahoe every two hours on the half hour. I managed to figure out without pencil or paper that one would set out at 3:30. That would be time enough.

First I had something to do.

I had to find the man. So I went looking for him, and it could have been easier and it could have been harder.

I was searching for a man I did not know. I walked around the parts of Vegas that the tourists never see—the run-down parts, the hidden parts, the parts where the neon signs are missing a letter here and there, the parts where the legal vice of gambling gives way to wilder sport.

It took three hours. For three hours I wandered and for three hours I looked very conscientiously through another pair of eyes. But after three hours I found him. Hell, he wasn’t hiding. It was his business to be found. And you can always find men like him, find them in any town in the country. Waiting. Always waiting.

He was a big man. He was sitting down when I found him, sitting in a small dark café on the north side of town. His shoulders were slumped, his tie loose around his neck. He looked big anyway. He drank coffee while everybody else in the place drank beer or hard liquor. The coffee cup sat there in front of him while he ignored it and read the paper. Every once in a while when the stuff in the cup was room-temperature he would remember it was there and drain it. Seconds later a frowzy blonde would bring him a fresh one.

I picked up a bottle of beer at the bar, waved away the proffered glass and took a drink from the bottle. I carried it to his table, put it on the table and sat down opposite him.

He ignored me for a few seconds. I didn’t say anything, waiting for him, and finally the newspaper went down and the eyes came up, studying me.

He said: “I don’t know you.”

“You don’t have to.”

He thought it over. He shrugged. “Talk,” he said. “It’s your nickel.”

“I could use some nickels,” I said. “A whole yardful of them.”

“Yeah?”

I nodded.

“What’s your scene?”

“I buy. I sell.”

“Around here?”

I shook my head.

“What the hell,” he said, slowly. “If this was a bust I would have heard about it by now. A yard?”

A nod from me.

“Now?”

“Fine.”

He remembered his coffee and took a sip. “It’s a distance,” he said. “You got a short?”

I didn’t.

“So we’ll take mine. Ride together. The dealer and the customer in the same car. It’s nice when the right people run a town. No sweat. No headaches.”

I followed him out of the café. Nobody looked at us on the way out. I guess they knew better. His car was parked around the corner, a new, powder-blue Olds with power everything. He drove easily and well. The Olds moved through the main section of town, along a freeway, around to the outskirts of the south side.

“Nice neighborhood,” he said.

I said something appropriate. He pulled to a stop in front of a five-room ranch house with a picture window. He told me he lived there alone. We went inside and I looked at the house. It was well furnished in modern stuff that wasn’t too extreme. Expensive, not flashy. I wondered whether he’d picked it himself or found an interior decorator.

“Have a seat,” he said. “Relax a little.”

I sat down in a chair that was far more comfortable than it looked while he disappeared. The transaction was going almost too smoothly. My man was right—it was very nice when the right people ran a town. No headaches at all.

I looked at the walls and waited for him to come back. He did, holding a little paper sack neatly rolled. “Thirty nickels for a dollar,” he said. “Bargain day at the zoo. You picked a good time. The store is overstocked so we have a sale. You want to count ’em?”

I shook my head. If he wanted to cheat me, a count wouldn’t make any difference. I was reaching for my wallet when I remembered something else that I needed.

“A kit,” I said. “I could use a kit.”

He looked amused. “For you?”

“For anybody.”

He shrugged. “That’s a dime more.”

I told him that was okay. He went away again and came back with a flat leather box that looked as though it ought to contain a set of draftsman’s tools. I took the box and the sack and gave him one hundred and ten dollars—a dollar and a dime in his language. He folded the bills twice and stuck them into his shirt pocket. For small change, maybe.

On the way back to the center of town he became almost talkative. He asked me what I was doing in Vegas and I told him I was just passing through, which was true enough.

“I travel a lot,” I said. “Wherever there are people. Places get warm if you stay too long.”

“Depends how well connected you are.”

I shrugged.

“See me when you hit Vegas next,” he said. “I’m always in the same place. Or ask and they’ll take a message for me. Sometimes the price gets better than it was today. We can always deal.”

“Sure.”

Just before he let me out of the car he started to laugh. I asked him what was so funny.

“Nothing,” he said. “I was just thinking. It’s such a groovy business. Depressions don’t even touch us. Isn’t that a gas?”

I left my bags in my room at the Dunes. I wasn’t ready to check out, not for the time being. And at 3:30 I caught the bus to Tahoe. It was not crowded. Neither were the roads and we made good time. It was a good trip—hot sun, clear air. I sat by myself and looked out the window and smoked cigarettes. The bus was air-conditioned and the smoke from the end of my cigarette trailed up along the window pane and disappeared.

We hit Lake Tahoe in time for dinner. And I was hungry. I found the washroom in the bus station first, tossed a quarter in a slot and let myself into a private cubicle with fresh towels and a big wash basin. I washed up, straightened my tie and felt almost human.

I ate a big dinner in a hurry. But I barely tasted the food. Then I left the restaurant and made the rounds. It was too early at first but I was looking anyway. If she was in Tahoe she would be gambling. And there just weren’t that many casinos. Sooner or later we were going to run into each other.

In the first casino I went over to the crap table and made dollar bets against the shooter. When my turn came up I passed the dice and left. I was a few dollars ahead and could not have cared less.

In the second casino I put the crap table profits into a slot machine. I kept looking around for her but didn’t find her. So I left.

Then I passed a men’s shop, saw a hat in the window, and remembered that it might be better all across the board if I saw her before she saw me. A hat was supposed to be a good prop, altering the shape of your head or something. There are places where a man with a hat on stands out. The owners themselves don’t know enough to take their hats off inside.

I went inside and bought the hat. It was an Italian import, a Borsalino, and it was priced at twenty bucks. It seemed sort of silly, shelling out twenty bucks for a hat I was going to wear once and throw away. But I reminded myself that it no longer mattered what anything cost. A five-dollar hat might do as well, but I was not in a store that sold five-dollar hats. I bought the Borsalino and wore it out of the store.

It didn’t look bad. It had a high crown and a narrow brim. It was black, very soft.

I studied my reflection in the store window. I experimented until the hat looked good and did its job well. Then I went to the next casino.

I picked them up a few minutes past nine in the Charlton Room. I was nursing a bourbon sour and watching the roulette wheel when I saw them. They were at the crap table just a few yards away. I took my drink with me and moved off.

I had known he would be with her. I could even have told you what he looked like. Black hair—black, not dark brown—and broad shoulders and expensive clothes. Hair combed too neatly, hairs always perfectly in place. Clothes worn too well, too casual to be true. And an easy laugh. The looks and effect of two types only, gigolos and fags. He wasn’t a fag.

I knew the rules of the game. She would give him a certain amount of money to play with and he would keep it, win or lose. Of course he would tell her that he’d lost, and she could believe it or not, depending upon her own state of mind.

What she probably didn’t know was that he also got a cut of her net losses. This was the house’s idea, so that he would keep her playing as long as possible. She couldn’t have known this, but she wouldn’t have cared anyway. The money didn’t matter to her, not if she was getting all that she was paying for.

I tried to hate the gigolo and couldn’t. He wasn’t hurting me, for one thing. For another, the reason I knew so much about his particular method of earning a living was that I had played the same record myself from time to time. It’s tough feeling superior to yourself.

She had the dice now. But she wasn’t conforming to the stereotype of the woman with the kept man in her pocket. Usually a woman in that position is trying her damnedest to have all the fun in the world. A perpetual smile, wild gesturing and brittle laughter. And underneath it all a profound uneasiness. The last shows up in the hand clutching too tightly at an elbow, the laugh at something not at all funny, the general impression of being a semi-competent actress at a very important audition. Auditioning for what? The world? Or for herself?

But Mona wasn’t like that. She seemed so desperately bored it was astounding. The guy next to her was pretty as a picture and she hardly seemed to know he was there. The action at the crap table was as fast as it ever gets and it bored her stiff. She threw the dice, not as if she hated them, but as if she was trying to get rid of them.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I kept looking at her face and trying to reconcile the beauty and, yes, innocence, with the person I knew she was. I looked at her, stared at her, and once again took all the pieces of the puzzle and glued them together with library paste. I tried to imagine living with her, and then I tried to imagine living without her, and I realized that either alternative was equally impossible.

Looking at Mona made me remember the other girl, the girl at the Eden Roc. I had forgotten her name, but I remembered that she lived in the Bronx and worked for an insurance company and wanted to have fun on her vacation. I remembered the love we had made, and I remembered how she looked when she dropped off to sleep. I remembered thinking how good it would be to fall in love with her, and marry her, and live with her.

But I had forgotten more than her name. I tried to picture her face and failed. I tried to recall her voice and missed. The only picture I got was an abstract one composed of the qualities of the girl herself. They were fine qualities. Mona lacked almost all of them but beauty.

Yet everything about Mona stayed in my mind.

I found a slot machine that took nickels and gave it one of mine. I pulled the lever very slowly and watched the dials to see what would happen. I got a bell, a cherry and a lemon. The nickel slots, I discovered, were more fun than the dollar slots. I couldn’t win anything and I couldn’t lose anything. I could only waste time and watch the dials spin.

I tried again. This time I lucked out with three of something or other. Twelve nickels galloped back at me.

I could not live with her and I could not live without her. An interesting problem. I had imagined, earlier, what it would be like to have Mona for a wife. I knew how her mind worked. Keith was dead, not because she had hated him, not because she had wanted me, but because she no longer needed him. He was excess baggage. And, because he was excess baggage, he had been jettisoned in flight. It would make no tremendous difference if I took his place. Not that she would kill me, but that she would leave me, or do her damnedest to make me leave her. It would not be any good at all.

And I knew damn well what would happen if I tried living without her. Every night, no matter where I was or who I was with, I would think about her. Every night I would picture her face, and remember her body, and wonder where she was and who she was sleeping with and what she was wearing and—

One of the most common murder patterns in the world is that of a man who murders a woman, proclaiming
If I can’t have her, nobody can.
It had never made any sense to me whatsoever. Now I was beginning to understand.

But I had decided that I could not kill her.

I could not live with her or without her. I could not kill her. And I certainly did not intend to kill myself. It looked insoluble.

I dropped another nickel in the slot machine and thought that I was very clever to have hit the answer all by myself. I pulled the lever and watched the dials.

They hit one more casino after that one. It was midnight when they left the second one, midnight or a little after. They’d had a few drinks and they both seemed a little bit high. They walked and I followed them to the Roycroft. It was the best hotel in Tahoe and I had more or less figured all along that they’d be staying there.