Grifter's Game (18 page)

“And you played it perfectly, made me suggest it, let me act as though it was my idea from the beginning. You were tired of him. He was beginning to get in the way and you wanted out. But you wanted the money and maybe I could get it for you. You were cool about it, Mona. You were perfect.”

“It wasn’t like that, Joe—”

“The hell it wasn’t. It was that simple. So simple it never occurred to me. You faked everything beautifully. Even the bed part. You pretended to fall in love with me. You acted so perfectly I fell on my face.”

Her face was funny. Very sad, mournful. I looked into her eyes and tried to probe. They were opaque.

So I let go of it. I sat there and looked at her and she looked back at me. I smoked another cigarette. When she talked, finally, her voice was just a little bit more than a whisper. There was no pretense left. I knew that she would tell me the truth now because there was no longer any reason for her to lie. I knew, I understood. And, as a result, I could no longer be lied to. The lies would only bounce at her.

She said: “There’s more, Joe.”

“There is?”

A slow nod.

“Then tell me about it. I’m a good listener.”

“You’d like to believe it was just the money,” she said. “It wasn’t. Oh, in the beginning the money was most of it. I’ll admit that. But then … then we were together and it was … more … than just the money. It was us, too. I thought about what it would be like, you and me together, and I thought about it and—”

She broke off. The room was noisy with silence. I drew on my cigarette.

“And somewhere along the line it turned into just the money again. Because you didn’t need me anymore.”

“Maybe.”

“What else?”

She thought it over for a moment or two before answering. “Because you killed him,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You killed him,” she repeated. “Oh, we were both guilty. Legally, that is. I know all that. But … inside, when I thought about it, you were the one who killed him. And if I went to you I killed him, too. But if I was alone by myself it didn’t work out that way. I could pretend he just … died. That somebody killed him but that I myself had nothing to do with it.”

“Did it work?”

She sighed. “Maybe. I don’t know. It was starting to work. Then I thought about you and I knew you were waiting for me in Miami and wondering what was wrong. And I thought that you had to get something for … what you did. That’s when I sent you the money. The three thousand dollars.”

“I didn’t know you had a conscience.”

She managed a smile. “I’m not that bad.”

“No?”

“Not that bad. Bad, but not rotten. Not really.”

She was right. And I realized, somehow, that I had known this all along. A strange sensation.

“What now, Joe?”

Her words shattered silence. I knew what was coming next but it didn’t seem right to tell her. I wanted to stretch the moment out for half of eternity. I didn’t want
what now
to come up just yet. Neither of us was ready for it.

“Joe?”

I didn’t answer.

“You said you weren’t going to kill me. Did you change your mind, Joe?”

I told her I wasn’t going to kill her.

“Then what do you want?”

I put out my cigarette. I took a breath. The air in the room was very thick, or seemed to be. Breathing was difficult.

“What I wanted all along,” I heard myself say.

“To marry me?”

I nodded.

“You want to marry me,” she said. Her voice had a light, almost airy quality to it. She was talking as much to herself as to me, testing the words. “Well, all right. I … it’s not very romantic. But if that’s what you want, it’s all right with me. I won’t argue.”

I heard her words and listened past them. I tried once more for a picture of marital bliss and once more it wouldn’t come into focus. The only image I got was the one I’d visualized earlier. It wouldn’t work the way she wanted it.

I wished to heaven it would. But it wouldn’t, not without my little solution. My method was the only way, much as I was beginning to dislike it.

So I sat next to her, close to her, and I smiled gently at her. She returned the smile, hesitantly. Her world was beginning to return to focus now. There we were, smiling at each other, and pretty soon everything was going to be all right. A slight change in plans, of course, but nothing drastic.

I said: “I’m sorry, Mona.”

Then I hit her. I got the right spot, just over the bridge of the nose, and I did not hit too hard. A hard blow there breaks off parts of the frontal bone and sends it into the brain. But I was gentle. All I did was knock her out—she lost consciousness at once and fell very limp into my arms.

When she came to a few minutes later there was a gag in her mouth. Strips of bedsheet tied her feet together and other strips held her hands behind her back.

She stared at me and the expression on her face was one of sheer and unadulterated terror.

“Someday you’ll adjust to this,” I told her. “Someday you’ll understand. I don’t expect you to understand now. But you will, in time.”

I took the two packages from my jacket pocket. The paper sack, tightly rolled, and the neat leather kit. I unrolled the paper sack and took out one of the little black capsules. I opened the leather kit and let her see what was inside.

She gasped.

“Funny,” I said. “The way we always come back to this. Keith sold it, I bought it. You know the funniest part of it? I had to pay good money for this stuff. I threw away a boxful of it to frame Keith, left a fortune’s worth to make things look groovy for the New York cops. And here we are again. Full circle.”

I took the small spoon from the leather kit. It was the kind of spoon you stir your coffee with in a café espresso in Greenwich Village. I settled the capsule on the spoon, then got out my cigarette lighter and flicked it. I held the spoon over the flame and watched the heroin melt. My hand was surprisingly steady.

I looked at Mona. Her eyes on the flame from the lighter were the eyes of a cat in front of a fire. Hot ice.

“You’re just too independent,” I said. “You live inside yourself. And when people take too much from you, too much of you, you run away and hide. That’s no good.”

She didn’t answer, of course. Hell, there was a gag in her mouth. But I wondered what she was thinking.

“So you’re going to be a little less independent. You’re going to have something to depend on.”

I picked up the hypodermic needle. I pushed the plunger all the way in, stuck the tip of the needle into the melted heroin on the spoon. When I let the plunger out again the needle filled with liquid heroin.

The needle looked very large. Very dangerous. Mona’s eyes were round and I could hear the wheels turning in her head. She didn’t want to believe it but she had to.

“Don’t be frightened,” I said, stupidly. “It isn’t that bad, not when you have money. You take so many shots a day and you function almost as well as a normal person. You know what group has the largest percentage of addicts in the country? Doctors. Because they have access to the stuff. They’re morphine addicts, generally, but it’s about the same thing. And they get all they need. If you never have withdrawal symptoms it’s not so bad. Not as rough on your system as alcohol, for example.”

She didn’t even hear me. And I was being cruel, taking too much time to do what I had to do. I stopped talking.

I found a good spot in the fleshy part of her thigh. Later I could graduate her to the main line, one of the big veins that lead straight to the heart. But skin-popping was fine for the time being. I didn’t want to get her sick from an overdose.

I held up the needle. I stuck it into her and rammed the plunger all the way in. She tried to scream when it hit but the gag was in her way and the only sound that came out was a small snort through her nose.

Then the heroin hit and she went off to Dreamland.

14

It took her an hour to come out of it. She was still slightly drugged so I took the gag off. There wasn’t much chance of her giving out with a yell. I asked her how she felt.

“All right,” she said. “I suppose.”

We talked for a few minutes about very little. I put the gag back on and went downstairs. There was a newsstand in the lobby and I picked up a few paperback books. I went back to the room and sat around reading until it was time for her next shot.

She didn’t fight the second quite as much as the first.

That set the pattern. We stayed there for three days, with me going down intermittently for food. Every four or five hours she got her shot. The rest of the time we stayed in the room. Once or twice I untied her completely and we made love, but it was not very good at all. It would get better.

“I’m sick of Tahoe,” I told her one morning. “I want a few grand. I’ll buy a car and we’ll go to Vegas.”

“Use your own money.”

“I haven’t got enough.”

“Then go to hell.”

I could have hit her, or threatened her, or merely ordered her to give me the money. But this was as good a time as any for the test. Instead I shrugged and waited. I waited until her shot was half an hour overdue. Then she called my name.

“What’s the matter?”

“I … want a shot.”

“That’s nice. I want four grand. Where are you keeping it?”

She shrugged as if it didn’t matter. But I could see the need beginning to build in her, the nervousness behind those eyes, the tension buried in those muscles. She told me where the money was. I found it, then got out the kit and cooked her up another fix. This time she was visibly grateful when the heroin took hold. It was a mainline shot this time and it reached her faster than the others.

I paid cash for the car, a nice new Buick with a lot under the hood and so much chrome outside that it looked like a twenty-fifth-century cathouse on wheels. I loaded her into the car and we drove back to Vegas. She was very docile on the trip. We got to Vegas, reclaimed my room at the Dunes, and it was time for her shot.

I do not know how long it takes to turn a person into an addict. I do not know how long it took with Mona. Addiction is a gradual process. I merely pushed the process along, let the addiction pile up. She became a little more nearly hooked with every passing shot. Hooked physically and emotionally. It’s a double-barreled thing. But sooner or later, it happens.

“I’m leaving,” she said.

I looked at her. It was two in the afternoon, a Friday afternoon. We were still at the Dunes. Two hours ago she had had a shot. In two hours she’d be due for another. She was wearing a red jersey dress with a simple string of pearls around her neck. Her shoes were black suede with high heels. And she was telling me that she was leaving.

I asked her what she meant.

“Leaving,” she said. “Leaving you. Walking out, Joe. You don’t tie me up any more. It’s very sweet of you. So I’m walking out on you.”

“And not coming back?”

“And not coming back.”

“You’re hooked,” I told her. “You’re a junkie. Try walking out and you’ll wind up crawling back. Who do you think you’re kidding?”

“I’m not hooked.”

“You really believe that?”

“I know it.”

“Then I know who you’re kidding,” I said. “You’re kidding yourself. So long.”

She left. And I waited for her to come back, waited past the time when the shot was due.

And she came back.

She did not look like the same girl. Her face was a dead fishbelly white and her hands couldn’t stay still. She was twitching uncontrollably. She hurried into the room and threw herself into a chair.

“You walked out,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re back already. That’s a pretty quick trip.”

“Please,” she said. Just that—
please
.

“Something wrong?”

“I need it,” she said. “I need it, damn you. You’re right, I was wrong. Now give me a shot.”

I laughed at her. Not out of cruelty, not because I was pleased. I laughed at her so that she would get the full picture. She had to know, inside and out, that she was hooked. The sooner she knew it, the more deeply the addiction would run.

I watched her twitch with pain and sheer need. I listened to her beg for the shot and I pretended not to hear her. I watched her scramble around on her hands and knees looking for the hypo. I’d hidden it. She couldn’t find it.

Then she stood up and tore that fine red dress all the way down. She removed her bra, her underclothing. She cupped her breasts in her hands and offered them to me.

“Anything,” she said. “Anything—”

I brought out the needle and fixed her. I watched the pain drain from her features and I stroked her body until she stopped shivering. Then I held her very gently in my arms while she cried.

After that it was all downhill. I didn’t even have to threaten her in order to get her to agree. Whatever I said, went. It was that simple.

A justice of the peace married us in Vegas. He asked us the time-honored questions. I said I did and she said she did, and he pronounced us man and wife. We moved out of the Dunes and into three rooms and a kitchen on the North side of town. She transferred her money to a Vegas bank and opened an account with a Vegas broker.

And I built up a close relationship with the big man who hangs out in the café and drinks cold coffee. Every five days he sells me one hundred dollars’ worth of capsules. Every four hours Mona takes a shot. Six capsules a day. A thirty-pound monkey, in junkie argot. A twenty-pound monkey for us, because I get wholesale prices. The quantity buyer always has the edge, even when the commodity is an illegal one.

As if it made a difference. As if ten dollars a day or twenty or thirty or forty dollars a day could have the slightest effect on us. My wife has an alarming amount of money. And it looks as though it’s going to last forever, too, because the broker took good care of us. He put part of the dough in bonds, part in common stocks, the rest in high-yield real estate. We can live big on income and never look at the principal. There is a point where you stop counting money; it is wealth then, not just money. Ten dollars, twenty dollars, thirty dollars—it couldn’t matter less.