The Grifters

by Jim Thompson

  She drove off the lot, breathing heavily, wishing that she could get Lilly Dillon alone in a good dark alley. The more she thought about her recent visit the angrier she became.

  That’s what you got for trying to be nice to people! You tried to be nice to ’em and they made you look like a fool!

  “Please don’t tell me that I can’t really be Roy’s mother, Mrs. Langtry. I’m rather tired of hearing it.”

  “Sorry! I didn’t mean it, of course. You’re about fifty, Mrs. Dillon?”

  “Just about, dear. Just about your own age.”

  “I think I’d better leave!”

  “I can give you a lift, if you like. It’s only a Chrysler convertible, but it probably beats riding a bus.”

  “Thanks! I have my bicycle with me.”

  “Lilly. Mrs. Langtry drives a Cadillac.”

  “Not really! But don’t you think they’re rather common, Mrs. Langtry? I know they’re a very good car, but it seems like every overdressed hustler you see these days is driving a Cadillac.”

  Moira’s hands tightened on the wheel of the car.

  She told herself that she could cheerfully kill Mrs. Dillon. She could strangle her with her bare hands.

  At her apartment house, she turned the Cadillac over to the doorman, and went on through the lobby to the grille and cocktail lounge.

  It was well into the noon-hour now. Many of the tables were occupied, and waiters in smart white pea jackets were hurrying in and out of the kitchen with trays of delicately smelling food. One of them brought Moira an outsize menu. She studied it, hesitating over the filet mignon sandwich with stuffed mushrooms (6.75).

  She was hungry. Breakfast had consisted of her usual unsweetened grapefruit and black coffee. But she needed a drink more than she needed food: two or three strong, reassuring drinks. And she could allow herself only so many calories a day.

  Closing the menu, she handed it back to the waiter. “Just a drink now, Allen,” she smiled. “I’ll eat later on.”

  “Certainly, Mrs. Langtry. A martini, perhaps? Gibson?”

  “Mmm, no. Something with a little more character, I believe. A sidecar, say, with bourbon instead of brandy. And, Allen, no Triple Sec, please.”

  “Emphatically!” The waiter wrote on his pad. “We always use Cointreau in a sidecar. Now, would you like the rim of the glass sugared or plain?”

  “Plain. About an ounce and a half of bourbon to an ounce of Cointreau, and a twist of lime peel instead of lemon.”

  “Right away, Mrs. Langtry.”

  “And, Allen…”

  “Yes, Mrs. Langtry?”

  “I want that served in a champagne glass. A thoroughly chilled glass, please.”

  “Certainly.”

  Moira watched him as he hurried away, her carefully composed features concealing an incipient snicker. Now, wasn’t that something, she thought. No wonder the world was going to hell when a grown man pranced around in a monkey suit, brown-nosing dames who made a big deal out of ordering a belt of booze! Where had it all started? she wondered. Where the beginning of this detour which had sidetracked civilization into mixing drinks with one hand and stirring up bombs with the other?

  She thought about it, not thinking in those words, of course. Simply feeling that the times were out of joint with themselves, and that the most emphasis was put on the least-worthwhile pursuits.

  What it all boiled down to really was everybody giving everybody else a hard time for no good reason whatever. And the hell of it was that there seemed to be no way of getting on the right track. You couldn’t be yourself anymore. If a woman ordered a straight double-shot with a beer chaser in a place like this, they’d probably throw her out. Ditto, if she asked for a hamburger with raw onions.

  You just couldn’t march to your own music. Nowadays, you couldn’t even hear it…She could no longer hear it. It was lost, the music which each person had inside himself, and which put him in step with things as they should be. Lost along with the big, bluff man, the joking introspective man, who had taught her how to listen for it.

  Cole Langley (Lindsey, Lonsdale). Cole “The Farmer” Langley.

  Her drink came, and she took a quick sip of it. Then, with a touch of desperation, she half-emptied the glass. That helped. She could think of Cole without wanting to break up.

  She and The Farmer had lived together for ten years, ten of the most wonderful years of her life. It had been a kind of camping-out-living, the kind that most people would turn up their noses at, but it was that way by choice not necessity. With Cole, it seemed the only possible way to live.

  They always traveled by chair-car in those days. They wore whatever they felt like wearing, usually overalls or khakis for him and gingham for her. When it was possible to obtain, Cole would have a two-quart jar of corn whiskey in a paper sack. Instead of eating in diners, they carried a huge lunch wrapped in newspapers. And every time the train stopped, Cole would hop off and buy gobs of candy and cold drinks and cookies and everything else he could lay hands on.

  They couldn’t begin to eat so much themselves, naturally. Cole gloried in abundance, but he was a rather finicky eater and a very light drinker. The food and the booze were to pass around, and the way he did it no one ever refused. He knew just the right thing to say to each person—a line of scripture, a quote from Shakespeare, a homely joke. Before they’d been in the car an hour, everyone was eating and drinking and warming up to everyone else. And Cole would be beaming on them as though they were a bunch of kids and he was a doting father.

  Women didn’t hate her in those days.

  Men didn’t look at her the way they did now.

  Friendliness, the ability to make friends, was The Farmer’s stock in trade, of course. Something eventually to be cashed in on through small-town banks via a series of simple-seeming but bewildering maneuvers. But he insisted on regarding the payoffs as no more than a fair exchange. For mere money, a thing useless and meaningless in itself, he traded great hopes and a new perspective on life. And nothing was ever managed so that the frammis would show through for what it was. Always the people were left with hope and belief.

  What more could they want, anyway? What could be more important in life than having something to hope for and something to believe in?

  For more than a year, they lived on a rundown farm in Missouri, a rocky clay-soiled sixty acres with a completely unmodernized house and an outdoor privy. That was their best time together.

  It was a two-hole privy, and sometimes they’d sit together in it for hours. Peering out at the occasional passersby on the rutted red-clay road. Watching the birds hop about in the yard. Talking quietly or reading from the stack of old newspapers and magazines that cluttered one corner of the building.

  “Now, look at this, Moira,” he would say, pointing to an advertisement. “While the price of steak has gone up twenty-three cents a pound in the last decade, the price of coal has only advanced one and one-half cents per pound. It looks like the coal dealers are giving us quite a break, doesn’t it?”

  “Well…” She didn’t always know how to respond to him; whether he was just making an idle comment or telling her something.

  “Or maybe they aren’t either,” he’d say, “when you consider that meat is normally sold by the pound and coal by the ton.”

  Now and then, she’d come up with just the right answer, like the time he’d pointed out that “four out of five doctors” took aspirin, and what did she think about that, anyway?

  “I’d say the fifth doctor was a lucky guy,” she said. “He’s the only one who doesn’t have headaches.” And Cole had been very pleased with her.

  They got a lot of fun out of the advertisements. For years afterward, she could look at some nominally straightforward pronouncement and break into laughter.

  Beware the wiry zone…Are germs lurking in your nooks and crannies?…You, too, can learn to dance!

  Even now she laughed over them. But wryly, with sardonic bitterness. Not
as she and Cole Langley had laughed.

  One day, when he was trying to dig down to the bottom of the magazine pile, it toppled over, uncovering a small box-like structure with a hole cut in the top. A kid’s toilet.

  Moira had made some comment about its being cute. But Cole went on staring at it, the laughter dying in his eyes, his mouth loosening sickishly. Then he turned and whispered to her:

  “I’ll bet they killed the kid. I’ll bet it’s buried down there under us…”

  She was stunned, speechless. She sat staring at him, unable to move or speak, and Cole seemed to take her silence for agreement. He went on talking, low-voiced, even more impellingly persuasive than he normally was. And after a time, there was no reality but the hideousness he created, and she found herself nodding to what he said.

  No, no child should be allowed to live. Yes, all children should be killed at birth or as soon afterward as possible. It was the kindest thing to do. It was the only way to spare them the futile torment, the frustrating and senseless torture, the paradoxically evil mess which represented life on the planet Earth.

  Subconsciously, she knew she was seeing him for the first time, and that the laughing, gregarious Cole was only a shadow fleeing its owner’s convictions. Subconsciously, she wanted to scream that he was wrong, that there were no absolutes of any kind, and that the real man might well be fleeing the shadow.

  But she lacked the vocabulary for such thoughts, the mentality to string them together. They wandered about in her subconscious, unguided and uncohered, while Cole, as always, was utterly convincing. So, in the end, she had been persuaded. She agreed with everything he said.

  And suddenly he had started cursing her. So she was a faker, too! A stinking hypocrite! She could do nothing for herself and nothing for anyone else because she believed in nothing.

  From that day on The Farmer was on the toboggan. They jumped from the sticks to St. Louis, and when he wasn’t dead drunk he was shooting himself full of hop. They had a hefty hunk of loot—rather Moira had it. Secretly, in the way of many wives—although she was not legally his wife—she had been rat-holing money for years. But the substantial sum she had cached wouldn’t last a month at the rate he was going, so, as she saw it, there was only one thing to do. She took up hustling.

  There was no stigma attached to it in their professional circle. In fact, it was an accepted practice for a woman to prostitute herself when her man was low on his back. But whores per se were a dime a dozen, and only girls with “class,” the expensively turned-out dames, could pull down the big money. And Cole was infuriated by a classy Moira.

  He grew fanatical in his charges that she was a hypocrite and “unbeliever,” shouting down her pleas that she wished only to help him. Wildly, he declared that she was a whore at heart, that she had always been a whore, that she had been one when he met her.

  That was not true. In her early working life, as a photographer’s model and cocktail waitress, she had occasionally given herself to men and received gifts in return. But it wasn’t the same as whoring. She had liked the men involved. What she gave them was given freely, without bargaining, as were their gifts to her.

  So Cole’s false charges, insensibly made though they were, began to hurt more and more. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was saying, or perhaps he did. But even the innocent blow of a child can be painful, possibly more so than that of an adult since its victim cannot bring himself to strike back. His only recourse, when the pain becomes unbearable, is to put himself beyond the child’s reach…

  Moira’s last memory of Cole “The Farmer” Langley was that of a wildly weeping man in overalls, shouting “Whore!” from the curb in front of their swank apartment house as a grinning cab-driver drove her away.

  She wanted to leave the rat-holed money for him. Or half of it, at least. But she knew it was useless. It would either be stolen from him, or he would throw it away. He was beyond help—her help, in any event—and anything she might do would only prolong his agony.

  What had happened to him, she didn’t know. Deliberately, she had tried to avoid knowing. But she hoped that he was dead. It was the best she could hope for the man she had loved so much.

  11

  Moira took a long sip of her third bourbon sidecar. Feeling just a little skittish (she had a horror of actual drunkenness), she grinned at the man who was approaching her table.

  His name was Grable, Charles Grable, and he was the manager of the apartment house. Dressed in striped trousers and a black broadcloth morning coat, he had rather close-set eyes and a plump, peevish-looking face. His attempt to look stern, as he sat down, gave his small mouth a baby-like pout.

  “Don’t tell me, now,” Moira said, solemnly. “You’re Addison Simms of Seattle, and we had lunch together in the fall of 1902.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” Grable snapped. “Now, you listen to me, Moira! I—”

  “How is your wiry zone?” Moira said. “Are hidden germs lurking in your nooks and crannies?”

  “Moira!” He leaned forward angrily, dropping his voice. “I’m telling you for the last time, Moira. I want your bill settled today! Every last penny of it, your rent and all the other charges you’ve run up! You either pay it, or I’m locking you out of your apartment!”

  “Now, Charles. Don’t I always pay my bills? Aren’t they always settled…one way or another?”

  Grable flushed, and looked over his shoulder. A half-pleading, half-whining note came into his voice.

  “I can’t do that any more, Moira. I simply can’t! People staying over their leases, coming in ahead of their lease-dates—paying money that I don’t show on the books! I—I—”

  “I understand.” Moira gave him a sad, sultry look. “You just don’t like me any more.”

  “No, no that’s not it at all! I—”

  “You don’t either,” she pouted. “If you did, you wouldn’t act this way.”

  “I told you I couldn’t help it! I—I—” He saw the lurking mockery in her eyes. “All right!” he snarled. “Laugh at me, but you’re not making a thief out of me any longer. You’re nothing but a cheap little—little—”

  “Cheap, Charles? Now, I didn’t think I was at all cheap.”

  “I’m through talking,” he said firmly. “Either you settle up by five o’clock tonight or out you go, and I’ll hold on to every thing you own!”

  He stamped away with a kind of furtive indignation.

  Moira shrugged indifferently, and picked up her drink. He’s a secret sufferer, she told herself. Stop getting up nights, men!

  She signaled for her check, penciled on a dollar tip for the waiter. As he nodded gracefully, pulling back her chair, she told him that he, too, could learn to dance.

  “All you need is the magic step,” she said. “It’s as simple as one-two-three.”

  He laughed politely. Cloud-nine kidding was old stuff in a place like this. “Like some coffee before you leave, Mrs. Langtry?”

  “Thank you, no,” Moira smiled. “The drinks were very good, Allen.”

  She left the lounge, and passed back through the lobby. Recovering her car, she headed toward the downtown business district.

  All things considered, she had lived quite economically since her arrival in Los Angeles. Economically, that is, insofar as her own money was concerned. Of the boodle with which she had skipped St. Louis, she still had several thousand dollars, plus, of course, such readily negotiable items as her car, jewelry, and furs. But lately, she had had an increasingly strong hunch that her life here was drawing to a close, and that it was time to cash in wherever and whatever she could.

  She hated to leave the city; particularly hated the idea that it would mean giving up Roy Dillon. But it didn’t necessarily have to mean that, and if it did, well, it just couldn’t be helped. Hunches were to be heeded. You did what you had to do.

  Arriving downtown, she parked the car on a privately-operated lot. It was owned by a better-class jewelry store, one which she h
ad patronized both as a buyer and seller, though largely the last. The doorman touched his cap and swung open the plate-glass doors for her, and one of the junior executives came forward, smiling.

  “Mrs. Langtry, how nice to see you again! Now, how can we serve you today?”

  Moira told him. He nodded gravely, and led her back to a small private office. Closing the door, he seated her at the desk and sat down opposite her.

  Moira took a bracelet from her purse, and handed it to him. His eyes widened appreciatively.

  “Beautiful,” he murmured, reaching for a loupe. “A wonderful piece of workmanship. Now, let’s just see…”

  Moira watched him, as he snapped on a gooseneck lamp, and turned the bracelet in his clean, strong hands. He had waited on her several times before. He wasn’t handsome; almost homely, in fact. But she liked him, and she knew that he was strongly attracted to her.

  He let the loupe drop from his eye, shook his head with genuine regret.

  “I can’t understand a thing like this,” he said. “It’s something you almost never see.”

  “How…what do you mean?” Moira frowned.

  “I mean this is some of the finest filigreed platinum I’ve ever seen. Practically a work of art. But the stones, no. They’re not diamonds, Mrs. Langtry. Excellent imitations, but still imitations.”

  Moira couldn’t believe him. Cole had paid four thousand dollars for the bracelet.

  “But they must be diamonds! They cut glass!”

  “Mrs. Langtry,” he smiled wryly, “glass will cut glass. Practically anything will. Let me show you a positive test for diamonds.”

  He handed her the loupe, and took an eyedropper from his desk. Carefully, he dropped a miniscule amount of water on the stones.

  “Do you see how the water splashes over them, slides off in a sheet? With real diamonds it won’t do that. It clings to the surface in tiny droplets.”

  Moira nodded dully, and took the loupe from her eye.

  “Do you happen to know where it was purchased, Mrs. Langtry? I’m sure your money could be recovered.”