Nothing to Lose But My Life (3 page)

“Do I go through here?” I said.

He lifted his head, letting me see little brown eyes set in a greasy face. He had a toothpick in one corner of his mouth. “What you after?”

No, this wasn’t Nikke’s. I got sore. If this outfit wanted to play it rude, I would too. I had learned in the last five years that there were times and places where throwing my weight around was useful. This looked like one of the times and one of the places.

I said, “I’m lonesome and thirsty and ready to howl. And I’m loaded, bub.”

He shifted his toothpick. “That a fact?”

I walked up until I was pressed against the counter. “You hear me.”

He laid out one hand, palm up. He was expecting a bill. I gave him the edge of my hand down across his nose and lips so that the toothpick broke off short. He ducked back, his foot going for a button on the floor and his hand reaching under the counter. I reached, got his wrist, and threw him off balance. A knife dropped from his fingers. With my grip on his wrist, I held him forward, out of reach of the floor button.

“Just tell me the procedure,” I said.

“You register,” he said. “Name, address, fifty bucks initiation fee. This is a club.” He didn’t like saying it but I still had his wrist in my hand. I let it go. He rubbed the wrist and then his nose. He hated me.

I saw a half-pint girl staring at me from the checkroom. I said, “Is that right?”

“Yes, sir.” She whispered it.

I took fifty dollars from my wallet. I let my friend see that I had a lot more, enough more to make even his eyes widen. “Name, Lowry Curtis. Portview Motel.” I laid the fifty down and watched him fill out a card in duplicate, I got the top half.

“Let’s remember that name after this,” I said.

He pressed a button on the desk top, not answering me. The door opened and one of the biggest and strangest-looking men I had ever seen appeared. He stood close to seven feet and had a miniscule head perched on narrow, sloping shoulders and almost no neck in between. He went down to wide, womanish hips, thin shanks and too-small feet. When he walked, his balance was bad. His arms were long and his hands massive. He had blue eyes and tallow-colored hair, and he simpered when he spoke to me.

“This way.” His hair oil had a powerful “masculine” scent.

The man behind the desk said, “This is Curtis and—”

I picked up his magazine and slapped him across the mouth with it. “Mr. Curtis.”

“This is Mr. Curtis, Perly.” He was almost crying. “He’s lonesome and thirsty and ready to howl. And he’s loaded.”

“My,” Perly said.

“Take him in.”

Perly inclined his head. He looked at the man behind the desk and then at me. He was hating me too. I followed him through the door, giving up my hat and coat to the little girl on the way. We passed into a tinsel-and-glitter gambling room with harsh overhead lighting. A mixed and motley crowd was gathered around slot machines, roulette wheels, and chuck-a-luck tables. It was noisy and thick with smoke.

I said, “What’s his name?”

He knew who I meant. “Emmett,” he said. He rolled the word over his lips.

“My,” I said, and looked around for Enid Proctor as Perly left me.

THIS WAS A
far cry from Nikke’s place. There was nothing about it that recalled him to me—no sign of the old personal touch. That touch had been the kind to make even a deadbeat owing him ten thousand feel welcome. I had the feeling that a deadbeat would leave this place in a sack. There were hard-eyed, bent-faced men in tuxedos wandering around just looking for the would-be welcher.

I recognized just one of them, a character named Jake. He had been a two-bit hoodlum when I left, and despite his tuxedo, he looked about the same, scar on his cheek, bent nose, scowling mouth. I caught him looking at me a couple of times, but I couldn’t feel anything personal in the look. If he recognized me, he was keeping the fact out of his expression.

I got tired of wondering where Enid Proctor might be and bought a hundred in chips. I dallied over one of the roulette wheels while I hunted for the gimmick. The setup looked smooth and open, but I was sure there was a gimmick in it somewhere. This didn’t feel like the kind of place to be satisfied with a mere house percentage.

I lost most of my hundred and turned away. Enid Proctor was standing so close to me that I almost kissed her hairline. She held out her hand. “Play these. Maybe they’ll change your luck.”

I said, “Hello, there. Remember me?”

“Of course. Do you think I’d talk to a stranger?”

I gave her a grin for an answer and took the three chips she had in her hand. I added them to my eight and dropped the whole thing on eleven. She moved to my side and we watched the little ball slide into thirteen.

“You held out two,” I said.

“Why, so I did.” Her voice was low, with nice timbre. She gave me two chips.

“I’m flat—zeroed,” I said. “So two and zero are twenty.” I tried it and it paid.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Twenty-five.”

That wasn’t what my dossier said. “I’m putting our take on it,” I warned her.

She made a face. “Twenty-seven then.”

It won. I asked for the number of letters in her name. I bet and covered and collected. I was talking loudly enough so that people around us began to watch with interest and a certain amount of amusement. I bet on Enid Proctor’s shoe size, glove size, the number of fillings in her teeth, and on an estimate of the length of her nose in centimeters. When even the last one paid off, I was sure I had the gimmick. It was Enid.

I quit. No one objected. No one seemed concerned that I was walking away with over four hundred dollars of the club’s money. That meant I was being led carefully to the picking chamber. There one gamble would be whether I would come back to the tables or not. This was guesswork but as I took Enid’s arm to steer her toward the cashier’s cage, I knew I was right. The contact between her eyes and those of the croupier was faint but not faint enough. Anyway, I was watching for it.

I took my money and Enid to the far end of a small bar and ordered two drinks. She took what I had, rye and water. Half the money I put in my pocket. The other half I laid on the bar and placed my hand over it. I decided to work the role I had used on Emmett. But first I had a good look at Enid.

Close up she was even more interesting than she had been in the dining-room mirror. The irregularity of her features was more pronounced, and the simple black evening gown she wore showed off a well-proportioned figure. She had changed her hairdo. Now it was drawn back so that I could see what a pretty neck she had. I approved of everything except her eyes. They bothered me, and the more I looked at them, the more I was bothered.

I had known Enid fairly well before. But as she had spent most of her time away at college, our acquaintanceship was one of those hello-goodbye-wave-when-you-see-each-other type of things. I couldn’t remember her eyes from before at all.

They were a deep brown, wide and fringed with dark lashes. They should have been beautiful; they weren’t. There was no depth to them. Nothing of Enid Proctor showed through. She wasn’t hiding anything. Back, deep in, where the real she should have been revealed, there was just nothing but blank opaqueness. It was disconcerting.

I said, “When can you leave?”

She took her drink and gulped half of it. “Anytime. I came alone.”

I took my hand from the two hundred dollars. “Let’s not make a game of it. A drink, a steak. We go out together, we stay together for a while. None of this ‘Thanks for a wonderful time’ from your front porch.”

Nicely arched eyebrows went up. “From
your
porch, maybe?”

“I have no front porch,” I said. “Just a motel room.”

She laughed. “You’re so grim,” she murmured. “And not at all subtle.” She took the money, folded it neatly and put it into her bag.

I decided to stick to the role I had begun. It might pay dividends. “Need I be subtle?”

She didn’t answer but emptied her glass and set it down. When I finished my drink, she took both glasses and pushed them away. I knew then that I had won. And I doubted if I could have reached a Proctor by any of the more common approaches.

She said, “I could do with that steak now.”

I checked out my hat and her fur wrap. It was expensive fur, the kind a Proctor would have. Perly opened the door and followed us into the lobby as if to protect Emmett from me. As I went past, I put my foot down on Perly’s instep to let him feel nearly one hundred and ninety pounds. I wanted him to know that in my opinion he was only a cheap gunsel. His mouth made a round O but he didn’t say anything.

Emmett was staring at us. I took a half step in his direction and he ducked away. Perly’s voice fluted up: “Look what
he
won, Emmett.”

Beside me Enid Proctor took my arm as if to hurry me along. She needn’t have worried. I didn’t like Perly and I didn’t like Emmett, but I wasn’t sure that I needed Enid badly enough to start a hassle over her with two-second rate Syndicate boys.

She drove a maroon Cadillac with all the extras. I sank back in the seat and let her drive south along the highway to a steak house. It was a good one and neither of us had much to say while we ate. On leaving, she turned north.

I was letting her carry the affair along. I wanted to see what she would do, where she would go. It didn’t take me long to find out. We went on into the city and turned up the Slope. We turned along a road lined with eucalyptus, jacaranda, and little houses laden with bougainvillia. I wished some of it were in bloom.

We came to a fork. The narrow right branch went along the south edge of the Slope. The left was the more travelled road, going up to the crest of the Slope where there was a whole row of fancy apartment houses. Just below them and squatted far enough down so as not to block the view for the apartments, were little two-level duplexes set among the trees, each with its own personal outlook over the city and the harbor. They were old but very nice. I knew because Jen and I had spent our married life in one.

Enid took the road toward the duplexes. I began to grow nervous as it became obvious she was going to one. But she stopped near the middle of the row. If she had gone to the far end, I don’t think I could have taken it. There would have been too many memories. Enid lived on the ground floor and that helped too. Jen and I had lived on the upper level.

We went directly from the garage into the kitchen. Enid turned on the overhead light, showing me that everything was nice and white but no neater than necessary for comfort.

“All yours?”

“All mine—alone.” She looked gravely at me. “And only three other people know I have it. I want to keep it that way.”

“It’s not my business,” I assured her. We went into the living room where she turned on the electric fire in the fireplace. It soon started to heat, making the already comfortable room cozy and intimate. It was a nice place, the furniture neither too old nor too modern. But somehow it didn’t seem like Enid. With her, I associated bleached woods and chrome.

She took my hat and coat and hung them in the spare bedroom closet. “The bar is over by the TV. Help yourself and I’ll have the same.”

I made two ryes and water and handed her one when she came back. She left it and disappeared into the other bedroom. When she returned she had changed her evening dress for a short hostess coat. She wore no hose on her long legs and from the way the coat fit, nothing else. She had a good figure for that kind of outfit. I wished the emptiness in her eyes didn’t bother me so.

We sat side by side on the divan, the only light besides the glow from the fire a soft lamp in a far corner. I was tired and I enjoyed the semi-dark and the quiet. But Enid wasn’t having any. She said casually, “Remember the view from these places?”

I almost answered “yes” just as casually when I saw the trap. I wondered who had put her up to this. Or had I underestimated her? I said, “It’s a long way from Texas,” and offered her a cigarette.

When I held the lighter for her, those opaque eyes met mine over the flame. There was nothing at all to be read in them.

“Do you know why I brought you here, Lowry?”

I could have been crude and said, “Sure, to earn the other two hundred dollars,” but there was something in her tone of voice that told me she wasn’t in the mood for this kind of talk. I said, “No, but it’s very nice.”

She answered very slowly, “I brought you up here because when I was in college I used to dream about coming home and having you alone with me.” Her face was very close; her lips were warm, parted in a faint smile.

“You didn’t know that I’ve always had a crush on you, did you, Lowry?”

From the way she was sitting and from her expression, she obviously expected to be kissed. But even if I had been in the mood, I would have balked. I wasn’t ready to start that yet. The fact that she knew who I was bothered me. I wanted to know how she had figured it out and how many others might know. Also, I wanted her to realize that she wasn’t one up on me.

Deliberately, I said, “Do I pay you the rest now?”

She took a moment to let that soak in. Then she moved a good two feet back from me, but her smile was wicked, not angry.

“How much am I worth? More than I was before I made my little confession?” I didn’t answer. She said, “Let’s not play ostrich, Lowry. I told you that I know who you are.”

“Mutual,” I said. “Do you like working for Nikke?”

“Me—work for Nikke?”

“Let’s not play ostrich,” I mocked her. “I’ve been around enough gambling dives to spot a shill.”

She winced. “That’s not very kind.” Then she laughed. “But I guess I asked for it. And here I thought you’d picked me up because you remembered me from years back.”

I wasn’t giving her any satisfaction, not yet. “I told you why I picked you up.”

She set down her glass, empty, and leaned toward me, propping on one elbow. “Do you think of me as a pushover, Lowry? Is that one of the things you remember?”

“Let’s leave my memory out of it,” I said. “I know you work for Nikke. Isn’t that enough?”