The Grifters

by Jim Thompson

  “Oh, I tell you, Mr. Dillon. I’ve hotelled all over this wonderful land of ours, and I’m telling you that hookers and hotellin’ just don’t mix. It’s against God’s laws, and it’s against man’s laws. You’d think the police would be too busy catching real criminals, instead of snooping around for hookers, but that’s the way the gravy stains, as the saying is, and I don’t fight it. An ounce of prevention, that’s my motto. If you keep out the chicks, you keep out the hookers, and you’ve got a nice clean respectable place like this one, without a lot of cops hanging around. Why, if a cop comes in here now, I know he’s a new man, and I tell him he’d better come back after he checks with headquarters. And he never comes back, Mr. Dillon; he’s damned well told that it ain’t necessary, because this is a hotel not a hook shop.”

  “I’m pleased to hear that, Mr. Simms,” Roy said truthfully. “I’ve always been very careful where I lived.”

  “Right. A man’s got to be,” Simms said. “Now, let’s see. You wanted a two-room suite, say, parlor, bedroom, and bath. Fact is, we don’t have much demand for suites here. Got the suites split off into room with bath, and room without. But…”

  He unlocked a door, and ushered his prospective tenant into a roomy bedroom, its high ceilings marking its prewar vintage. The connecting door opened into another room, a duplicate of the first except that it had no bath. This was the former parlor, and Simms assured Roy that it could be converted back into one in short order.

  “Sure, we can take out this bedroom furniture. Move back the parlor stuff in no time at all—desk, lounge, easy chairs, anything you want within reason. Some of the finest furniture you ever saw.”

  Dillon said he would like to take a look at it, and Simms conducted him to the basement storeroom. It was by no means the finest he had ever seen, of course, but it was decent and comfortable; and he neither expected nor wanted anything truly fine. He had a certain image to maintain. A portrait of a young man who made rather a good living—just good, no better—and lived well within it.

  He inquired the rental on the suite. Simms approached the issue circuitously, pointing out the twin necessities of maintaining a high-class clientele, for he would settle for nothing less, by God, and also making a profit, which was goddamn hard for a God-fearing man to do in these times.

  “Why, some of these peasants we get in here, I mean that try to get in here, they’ll fight you for a burned-out light globe. You just can’t please ’em, know what I mean? It’s like crackerjacks, you know, the more they get the more they want. But that’s the way the cinnamon rolls, I guess, and like we used to say down in Witchita Falls, if you can’t stand posts you better not dig holes. Uh, one hundred and twenty-five a month, Mr. Dillon?”

  “That sounds reasonable,” Roy smiled. “I’ll take it.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Dillon. I’d like to shave it a little for you; I ain’t saying I wouldn’t shave it for the right kind of tenant. If you’d guarantee, now to stay a minimum of three months, why—”

  “Mr. Simms,” said Roy.

  “—why, I could make you a special rate. I’ll lean over backward to—”

  “Mr. Simms,” Dillon said firmly. “I’ll take the place on a year’s lease. First and last month’s rent in advance. And one hundred and twenty-five a month will be fine.”

  “It—it will?” The proprietor was incredulous. “You’ll lease for a year at a hundred and twenty-five, and—and—”

  “I will. I don’t believe in moving around a lot. I make a profit in my business, and I expect others to make one in theirs.”

  Simms gurgled. He gasped. His paunch wriggled in his pants, and his entire face, including the area which extended back into his balding head, reddened with pleasure. He was a shrewd and practiced student of human nature, he declared. He knew peasants when he saw them, and he knew gentlemen; he’d immediately spotted Roy Dillon as one of the latter.

  “And you’re smart,” he nodded wisely. “You know it just ain’t good business to chisel where you live. What the hell? What’s the percentage in chiselling a hotel for a few bucks—people you’re going to see every day—if it’s going to make ’em a little down on you?”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Dillon said warmly.

  Simms said he was damned tootin’ he was right. Suppose, for example, that there was an inquiry about a guest of the peasant type. What could you honestly say about him anyway, beyond saying that he did live there and it was your Christian practice to say nothing about a man unless you could say something good? But if a gentleman was the subject of the inquiry, well, then, honesty compelled you to say so. He didn’t simply room at the hotel, he lived there, a man of obvious character and substance who leased by the year and…

  Dillon nodded and smiled, letting him ramble on. The Grosvenor-Carlton was the sixth hotel he’d visited since his arrival from Chicago. All had offered quarters which were equal to and as cheap or cheaper than those he had taken here. For there is a chronic glut of rooms in Los Angeles’s smaller hotels. But he had found vaguely indefinable objections to all of them. They didn’t look quite right. They didn’t feel quite right. Only the Grosvenor-Carlton and Simms had had the right feel and look.

  “…one more thing,” Simms was saying now. “This is your home, see? Renting like you do, it’s just the same as if you were in an apartment or house. It’s your castle, like the law says, and if you should want to have a guest, you know, a lady guest, why you got a perfect right to.”

  “Thank you for telling me,” Roy nodded gravely. “I don’t have anyone in mind at the moment, but I usually make friends wherever I go.”

  “O’ course. A fine-looking young fellow like you is bound to have lady friends, and I bet they got class too. None of these roundheels that crumb a place up just by walking through the lobby.”

  “Never,” Dillon assured him. “I’m very careful of the friends I make, Mr. Simms. Particularly the lady friends.”

  He was careful. During his four-year tenancy at the hotel he had had only one female visitor, a divorcee in her thirties, and everything about her—looks, dress, and manners—was abundantly satisfactory even to the discriminating Mr. Simms. The only fault he could find with her was that she did not come often enough. For Moira Langtry was also discriminating. Given her own way, something that Dillon frequently refrained from giving her as a matter of policy, she wouldn’t have come within a mile of the Grosvenor-Carlton. After all, she had a very nice apartment of her own, a place with one bedroom, two baths and a wet bar. If he really wanted to see her—and she was beginning to doubt that he did—why couldn’t he come out there?

  “Well, why can’t you?” she said, as he sat up in bed phoning to her. “It’s no further for you than it is for me.”

  “But you’re so much younger, dear. A youthful female like you can afford to humor a doddering old man.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere, mister”—she was pleased. “I’m five years older, and I feel every minute of it.”

  Dillon grinned. Five years older? Hell, she was ten if she was a day. “The fact is, I’m a little under the weather,” he explained. “No, no, it’s nothing contagious. I happened to trip over a chair the other night in the dark, and it gave me a nasty whack in the stomach.”

  “Well…I guess I could come…”

  “That’s my girl. I’d hold my breath if I wasn’t panting.”

  “Mmm? Let’s hear you.”

  “Pant, pant,” he said.

  “You poor thing,” she said. “Moira’ll hurry just as fast as she can.”

  Apparently, she had been dressed to go out when he called, for she arrived in less than an hour. Or, perhaps, it only seemed that way. He had got up to unlock the door preparatory to her arrival, and returning to bed he had felt strangely tired and faint. So he had let his eyes drift shut, and when he opened them, a very little later seemingly, she was entering the room. Sweeping into it on her tiny, spike-heeled shoes; a billowing but compact bundle of woman with glos
sily black hair, and direct darkly-burning eyes.

  She paused just inside the threshold for a moment, self-assured but suppliant. Posing like one of those arrogantly inviting mannequins. Then, she reached behind her, feeling for and finding the doorkey. And turning it with a soft click.

  Roy forgot to wonder about her age.

  She was old enough, was Moira Langtry.

  She was young enough.

  His silent approval spoke to her, and she gave a little twitch to her body, letting the ermine stole hang from one shoulder. Then, hips swaying delicately, she came slowly across the room; small chin outthrust; seemingly tugged forward by the bountiful imbalance within the small white blouse.

  She stopped with her knees pressed against his bed, and looking upward he could see nothing but the tip of her nose above the contours of her breasts.

  Raising a finger, he poked her in one then the other.

  “You’re hiding,” he said. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  She sank gracefully to her knees, let her dark eyes burn into his face.

  “You stink,” she said, tonelessly, the blouse shimmering with her words. “I hate you.”

  “The twins seem to be restless,” he said. “Maybe we should put them to bed.”

  “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to smother you.”

  He said, “Death, where is thy sting?” and then he was necessarily voiceless for a while. After an incredibly soft, sweet-smelling eternity, he was allowed to come up for air. And he spoke to her in a whisper.

  “You smell good, Moira. Like a bitch in a hothouse.”

  “Darling. What a beautiful thing to say!”

  “Maybe you don’t smell good…”

  “I do, too. You just said so.”

  “It could be your clothes.”

  “It’s me! Want me to prove it to you?”

  He did, and she did.

  4

  When he first settled in Los Angeles, Roy Dillon’s interest in women was prudently confined by necessity. He was twenty-one, an oldish twenty-one. His urge toward the opposite sex was as strong as any man’s; flourishing even stronger, perhaps, because of the successes that lay behind him. But he was carrying light, as the saying is. He had looked around extensively and carefully before choosing Los Angeles as a permanent base of operations, and his capital was now reduced to less than a thousand dollars.

  That was a lot of money, of course. Unlike the big-con operator, whose elaborate scene-setting may involve as much as a hundred thousand dollars, the short-con grifter can run on peanuts. But Roy Dillon, while remaining loyal to the short con, was abandoning the normal scheme of things.

  At twenty-one, he was weary of the hit-and-get. He knew that the constant “getting”—jumping from one town to another before the heat got too hot—could absorb most of the hits, even of a thrifty man. So that he might work as hard and often as he safely could, and still wind up with the wolf nipping at the seat of his threadbare pants.

  Roy had seen such men.

  Once, on an excursion special out of Denver, he had run into a “mob” of them, poor devils so depleted in capital that they had had to pool their resources.

  They were working in a monte swindle. The dealer was cast as the “wise guy,” whom the others were determined to take. While he turned his head to argue with the two shills—holding the three cards open on his palm—the roper had drawn a small mark on the top card, winking extravagantly at Roy.

  “Take him, pal!” His stage whisper was ridiculously loud. “Put down that big bill you got.”

  “The fifty or the hundred?” Roy whispered back.

  “The hundred! Hurry!”

  “Could I bet five hundred?”

  “Well, uh, naw. You just better make it a hundred to start.”

  The dealer’s conveniently outstretched hand was getting tired. The shills were running out of arguments to distract his attention. But Roy persisted with his cruel joke.

  “How big is the marked card?”

  “An ace, damnit! The other two are deuces! Now—”

  “Does an ace beat deuces?”

  “Does an—! Hell, yes, damnit! Now, bet!”

  The other passengers in the bar car were catching on, beginning to grin. Roy laboriously took out his wallet, and took out a C-note. The dealer counted out a crumpled mass of ones and fives. Then, he shuffled, palming the marked ace for a marked deuce, and switching one of the deuces for an unmarked ace. One that was unmarked, that is, to the naked eye.

  The showdown came. The three cards were slapped face down on the table. Roy studied them, squinting. “I can’t see so good,” he complained. “Let me borrow your glasses.” And deftly, he appropriated the dealer’s “readers.”

  Through the tinted glass, he promptly identified the ace, and pulled in the money.

  The mob slunk out of the car, to the jeers of the other passengers. At the next town, a wide place in a muddy road, they jumped the train. Probably they had no funds to ride farther.

  As the train pulled out, Roy saw them standing on the deserted platform, shoulders hunched against the cold, naked fear on their pale, gaunt faces. And in the warm comfort of the club car, he shivered for them.

  He shivered for himself.

  That was where the hit-and-get landed you, where it could land you. This, or something far worse than this, was the fate of the unrooted. Men to whom roots were a hazard rather than an asset. And the big-con boys were no more immune to it than their relatively petty brethren. In fact, their fate was often worse. Suicide. Dope addiction and the d.t.’s. The big house and the nut house.

  She sat up, swinging her legs off the bed, and got a cigarette from the reading stand. After it was lit, he took it for himself, and she got herself another.

  “Roy,” she said, “look at me.”

  “Oh, I am looking, dear. Believe me, I am.”

  “Now, please! Is—is this all we have, Roy? Is it all we’re going to have? I’m not knocking it, understand, but shouldn’t there be something more?”

  “How could we top a thing like that? Tickle each other’s feet?”

  She looked at him silently, the burning eyes turning lackluster, staring at him from behind an invisible veil. Without turning her head, she extended a hand and slowly tamped out her cigarette.

  “That was a funny,” he said. “You were supposed to laugh.”

  “Oh, I am laughing, dear,” she said. “Believe me, I am.”

  She reached down, picked up a stocking and began to draw it on. A little troubled, he pulled her around to face him.

  “What are you driving at, Moira? Marriage?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But that’s what I asked.”

  She frowned, hesitating, then shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m a very practical little girl, and I don’t believe in giving any more than I get. That might be pretty awkward for a matchbook salesman, or whatever you are.”

  He was stung, but he kept on playing. “Would you mind handing me my first aid kit? I think I’ve just been clawed.”

  “Don’t worry. Kitty’s had all her shots.”

  “The fact is, the matchbooks are just a sideline. My real business is running a whorehouse.”

  Overhead and income were always in a neck-and-neck race. One sour deal, and they were on the skids.

  And it wasn’t going to happen to Roy Dillon.

  For his first year in Los Angeles, he was strictly a square john. An independent salesman calling on small businessmen. Gliding back into the grift, he remained a salesman. And he was still one now. He had a credit rating and a bank account. He was acquainted with literally hundreds of people who would attest to the excellence of his character.

  Sometimes they were required to do just that, when suspicion threatened to build into a police matter. But, naturally, he never called upon the same ones twice; and it didn’t happen often anyway. Security gave him self-assurance. Security and self-assurance had br
ed a high degree of skill.

  In accomplishing so much, he had had no time for women. Nothing but the casual come-and-go contacts which any young man might have. It was not until late in his third year that he had started looking around for a particular kind of woman. Someone who was not only highly desirable, but who would be willing to—even prefer to—accept the only kind of arrangement which he was willing to offer.

  He found her, Moira Langtry, that is, in church.

  It was one of those screwball outfits which seem to flourish on the West Coast. The head clown was a yogi or a swami or something of the kind. While his audience listened as though hypnotized, he droned on and on of the Supreme Wisdom of the East, never once explaining why the world’s highest incidence of disease, death, and illiteracy endured at the fount of said wisdom.

  Roy was a little stunned to find such a one as Moira Langtry present. She just wasn’t the type. He was aware of her puzzlement when she saw him, but he had his reasons for being there. It was an innocent way of passing the time. Cheaper than movies and twice as funny. Also, while he was doing very well as it was, he was not blind to the possibility of doing better. And a man just might see a way to do it at gatherings like these.

  The audiences were axiomatically boobs. Mostly well-to-do boobs, middle-aged widows and spinsters; women suffering from a vague itch which might be scratched for a bundle. So…well, you never knew, did you?

  You could keep your eyes open, without going out on a limb.

  The clown finished his act. Baskets were passed for the “Adoration Offering.” Moira tossed her program in one of them, and walked out. Grinning, Dillon followed her.

  She was lingering in the lobby, making a business out of pulling on her gloves. As he approached, she looked up with cautious approval.