The Grifters

by Jim Thompson

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think it might not have been suicide? That someone killed her?”

  “No,” the captain frowned, hesitantly. “I can’t say that I think that. Not exactly. There’s nothing to indicate murder. It does seem strange that she’d come all the way from Los Angeles to kill herself and that she’d get into her nightclothes before doing it, but, well, suicides do strange things. I’d say that she was badly frightened, so afraid of being killed that she went out of her mind.”

  “That sounds reasonable,” Roy nodded. “Do you think someone followed her to the motel? The person who’d frightened her, I mean.”

  “Possibly. But the place is on the highway, you know. People are coming in and out at all hours. If the guilty person was one of them, it would be practically impossible to tab him, and short of getting his confession to making a death threat, I don’t know how we could stick him if he was tabbed.”

  Roy murmured agreement. There was only one thing more that he could say, one more little nudge toward Moira that he could safely give the captain.

  “I’m sure you’ve already looked into it, captain, but what about fingerprints? Wouldn’t they, uh—”

  “Fingerprints,” the officer smiled sadly. “Fingerprints are for detective stories, Mr. Dillon. If you dusted this office, you’d probably have a hard time finding a clear set of mine. You’d probably find hundreds of smudged prints, and unless you knew when they were made and just who you were looking for, I don’t know what the devil you’d do with them. Aside from that, criminals at work have an unfortunate habit of wearing gloves, and many of the worst ones have no police record. Your mother, for example, had never been mugged or printed. I’m sorry—” he added quickly. “I didn’t mean to refer to her as a criminal. But…”

  “I understand,” Roy said. “It’s all right.”

  “Now, there are a few items of your mother’s personal property which you’ll want. Her wedding ring and so on. If you’ll just sign this receipt…”

  Roy signed, and was given a thin brown envelope. He pocketed it, the pitiful residue of Lilly’s hard and harried years, and the captain escorted him back to the waiting police car.

  The undertaking establishment was on a side street, a sedately imposing building of white stucco which blazed blindly in the afternoon sun. But inside it was almost sickeningly cool. Roy shivered slightly as he stepped into the too-fragrant interior; the manager of the place, apparently alerted to his coming, sprang forward sympathetically.

  “So sorry, Mr. Dillon. So terribly sorry. No matter how we try to prepare for these tragic moments—”

  “I’m all right.” Roy removed his arm from the man’s grasp. “I’d like to see my mother’s—my mother, please.”

  “Shouldn’t you sit down a moment first? Or perhaps you’d like a drink.”

  “No,” Roy said firmly. “I wouldn’t.”

  “It might be best, Mr. Dillon. It would give us a little time to, uh…Well, you understand, sir. Due to the unusual financial involvements, we have been unable to, uh, perform the cosmetic duties which we normally would. The loved one’s remains—the poor dear face—”

  Curtly, Roy cut him off. He understood, he said. Also, he said, enjoying the manager’s wince of distaste, he knew what a bullet fired into a woman’s mouth could do to her face.

  “Now, I want to see her. Now!”

  “As you wish, sir!” The man drew himself up. “Please to follow me!”

  He led the way to a white-tiled room behind the chapel.

  The cold here was icy. A series of drawers was set into one of the frostily gleaming walls. He gripped a drawer by its metal handle and gave it a tug, and it glided outward on its bearings. With an offended gesture, he stepped back and Roy advanced to the crypt and looked into it.

  He looked and looked quickly away.

  He started to turn away. And then, slowly, concealing his surprise, he forced his eyes back on the woman in the coffin.

  They were about the same size, the same coloring; they had the same full but delicately-boned bodies. But the hands! The hand! Where was the evil burn that had been inflicted on it, where was the scar that such a burn must leave?

  Well, doubtless it was on the hand of the woman who had killed this woman. The woman whom Moira Langtry had intended to kill, and who had killed Moira Langtry instead.

  23

  It was late evening when the dusty Cadillac reached downtown Los Angeles; pulled up a few doors short of the Grosvenor-Carlton. The driver leaned wearily over the wheel for a moment, limp with exhaustion, a little dizzy from sleeplessness. Then, resolutely, she raised her head, removed the tinted sunglasses, and studied herself in the mirror.

  Her eyes were strained, bloodshot, but that didn’t matter. They would probably be a hell of a lot worse, she suspected, before she was safely out of this mess. The glasses covered them, also helping to disguise her face. With the glasses on, and with the scarf drawn tightly around her head and under her chin, she could pass as Moira Langtry. She’d done it back at the Tucson motel, and she could do it again.

  She made some minor adjustments on the scarf, pulling it a little lower on her forehead. Then, throwing off her weariness, subjecting it to her will, she got out of the car and entered the hotel.

  The clerk greeted her with the anxious smile of the aged. He heard her request, a command, rather, and a touch of uncertainty tinged his smile.

  “Well, uh, Mr. Dillon’s out of town, Mrs. Langtry. Went to Tucson this morning, and—”

  “I know that, but he’s due back in just a few minutes. I’m supposed to meet him here. Now, if you’ll kindly give me his key…”

  “But—but—you wouldn’t like to wait down there?”

  “No, I would not!” Imperiously she held out her hand. “The key, please!”

  Fumbling, he took the key from the rack and gave it to her. Looking after her, as she swung toward the elevator, he thought with non-bitterness that fear was the worst part of being old. The anxiety born of fear. A fella knew that he wasn’t much good any more—oh, yes, he knew it. And he knew he didn’t always talk too bright, and he couldn’t really look nice no matter how hard he tried. So, knowing in his heart that it was impossible to please anyone, he struggled valiantly to please everyone. And thus he made mistakes, one after the other. Until, finally, he could no more bear himself than other people could bear him. And he died.

  But maybe, he thought hopefully, this would be all right. After all, Mrs. Langtry and Mr. Dillon were good friends. And visitors did sometimes wait in a guest’s room when the guest was out.

  Meanwhile…

  Entering Roy’s room, the woman locked the door and sagged against it, briefly resting. Then, dropping the sunglasses and her modishly large handbag on the bed, she went resolutely to the four box-framed clown pictures. They had caught her attention the first time she had seen them—something that struck a jarring note; entirely incompatible with the known tastes of their owner. They couldn’t have been there as decoration, so they must serve another purpose. And without seeing the symbolism in the four wisely grinning faces; Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos, and a fourth self-nominated Fate, Roy Dillon—she had guessed what that purpose was.

  Now, prying loose the backs of the pictures, she saw that her guess was right.

  The money tumbled out, sheaf after sheaf of currency. Stuffing it into her bag, she was struck with unwilling admiration for Roy; he must be good to have piled up this much. Then, stifling this emotion, telling herself that the theft would be good for him by pointing up the fruitlessness of crime, she finished her task.

  Large as it was, the bag bulged with its burden of loot. She could barely close the clasp, and she wasn’t at all sure that it would stay closed.

  She hefted it, frowning. She put it under her arm, draping an end of the stole over it, checked her appearance in the mirror. It didn’t look bad, she thought. Not too bad. If only the damned thing didn’t fly open as she was passing through th
e lobby! She considered the advisability of leaving some of the money behind, and abruptly vetoed the idea.

  Huh-uh! She needed that dough. Every damned penny of it and a lot more besides.

  She gave the mirror a final swift glance. Then, the purse clutched tightly under her arm, she crossed to the door and unlocked it, pulled it open. And fell back with a startled gasp.

  “Hello, Lilly,” said Roy Dillon.

  24

  The basic details of her story were just about what Roy expected them to be…

  First there had been the warning call from Baltimore; then, responding to it, her frantic, unreasoning flight. She drove as hard as she could and as long as she could. When she could go no further, she turned in at the Tucson tourist court.

  The place had a garage, rather than individual car ports, and she hadn’t liked that. But she was too tired to go farther; and since a garage attendant was on duty at all times, she could not reasonably object to the arrangement.

  She put the loaded gun under her pillow. She undressed and went to bed. Yes, naturally she had locked her door, but that probably didn’t mean much. Those places, motels and tourist courts, lost so many keys that they often had them made interchangeable, the same keys unlocking different doors. And that was doubtless the case here.

  Anyway, she awakened hours later, with two hands clutching her throat. Hands that silenced any outcry she might make as they strangled her to death. She couldn’t see who it was; she didn’t care. She had been warned that she would be killed, and now she was being killed and that was enough to know.

  She got the gun from under her pillow. Blindly, she had shoved it upward, into the face of her assailant. And pulled the trigger. And—and—

  Lilly shuddered convulsively, her voice breaking. “God, Roy, you don’t know what it was like! What it means to kill someone! All your life you hear about it and read about it, b-but—but when you do it yourself…”

  Moira was in her nightclothes, an old trick of nocturnal prowlers. Caught in another’s room, they lay it to accident, claiming that they left their own room on some innocent errand and somehow strayed into the wrong one.

  There was a tagged key in Moira’s pocket—the key to a nearby room. Also, it was the key to Lilly’s predicament. It pointed to a plan, ready-made, and without thinking she knew what she must do.

  She put Moira in her bed. She wiped her own fingerprints from the gun, and pressed Moira’s prints upon it. She spent the night in Moira’s room, and in the morning she checked out under Moira’s name and with the dead woman’s clothes.

  Naturally, she couldn’t take her own car. The car and the money hidden in it now belonged to Moira also. For Moira was now Lillian Dillon, and Lilly was Moira Langtry. And so it must always be.

  “What a mess! And all for nothing, I guess. I was jake with Bobo all the time, but now that it’s happened…” She paused, brightening a little. “Well, maybe it’s a break for me, after all. I’ve been wanting out of the racket for years, and now I’m out. I can make a clean start, and—”

  “You’ve already made a start,” Roy said. “But it doesn’t look very clean to me.”

  “I’m sorry.” Lilly flushed guiltily. “I hated to take your money, but—”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Roy said. “You’re not taking it.”

  For a long moment, a silent second-long eternity, Lilly sat staring at her son. Looking into eyes that were her eyes, meeting a look as level as her own. So much alike, she thought, and the thought was also his. Why can’t I make him understand? she thought. And he thought, Why can’t I make her understand?

  Shakily, a cold deadness growing in her heart, she arose and went into the bathroom. She bathed her face in the sink, patted it dry with a towel, and took a drink of water. Then, thoughtfully, she refilled the glass and carried it out to her son. Why, thank you, Lilly, he said, touched by the small courtesy, disarmed by it. And Lilly told herself, He’s asking for it. I helped him when he was in a bind, and if he tries to hold out on me now, well he just hadn’t better.

  “I have to have that dough, Roy,” she said. “She had a bankbook in her purse, but that doesn’t do me any good. I can’t risk tapping it. All she had on her was a few hundred bucks, and what the hell am I going to do with that?”

  Roy said she could do quite a bit with it. A few hundred would get her to San Francisco or some other not-too-distant city. It would give her a month to live quietly while she looked for a job.

  “A job!” Lilly gasped. “I’m almost forty years old, and I’ve never held a legit job in my life!”

  “You can do it,” Roy said. “You’re smart and attractive. There are any number of jobs you can hold. Just dump the Cad somewhere. Bury it. A Cad won’t fit in with the way you’ll be living, and—”

  “Save it!” Lilly cut him off with an angry, knifing gesture. “You sit there telling me what to do—a guy so crooked that he has to eat soup with a corkscrew—!”

  “I shouldn’t have to tell you. You should be able to see it for yourself.” Roy leaned forward, pleadingly. “A legit job and a quiet life are the only way for you, Lil. You start showing up at the tracks or the hot spots and Bobo’s boys will be on you.”

  “I know that, damnit! I know I’ve got to lay low, and I will. But the other—”

  “It’s good advice, Lilly. I’m following it myself.”

  “Yeah, sure you are! I see you giving up the grift!”

  “What’s so strange about it? It’s what you wanted. You kept pushing it at me.”

  “Okay,” Lilly said. “So you’re on the level. So you don’t need the money, do you? You don’t need it or want it. So why the hell won’t you give it to me?”

  Roy sighed; tried to explain why: to explain acceptably the most difficult of propositions; i.e., that the painful thing you are doing for a person is really for his or her own good. And yet, talking to her, watching her distress, there was in his mind, unadmitted, an almost sadistic exulting. Harking back to childhood, perhaps, rooted back there, back in the time when he had known need or desire, and been denied because the denial was good for him. Now it was his turn. Now he could do the right thing—and yes, it was right—simply by doing nothing. Now now now the pimp disciplining his whore listening to her pleas and striking yet another blow Now now now he was the wise and strong husband taking his frivolous wife in hand Now now now his subconscious was taking note of the bond between them, the lewd, forbidden and until now unadmitted bond. And so he must protect her. Keep her from the danger which the money would inevitably lead her to. Keep her available…

  “Now, look, Lilly,” he said reasonably. “That money wouldn’t last you forever; maybe seven or eight years. What would you do then?”

  “Well…I’d think of something. Don’t worry about that part.”

  Roy nodded evenly. “Yes,” he said, “you’d think of something. Another racket. Another Bobo Justus to slap you around and burn holes in your hand. That’s the way it would turn out, Lilly; that way or worse. If you can’t change now, while you’re still relatively young, how could you do it when you were crowding fifty?”

  Fifty? There was an ancient sound about it and the odor of haggishness and the mouse-mouthed look of death…

  And Carol? Ah, yes, Carol. A dear girl, a desirable girl. Perhaps, except for the until-now-unadmitted bond, THE girl. But as it was, only a ploy, a pawn in the game of life, death—and love—between Roy and Lillian Dillon. So—

  “So that’s how it is, Lil,” Roy said. “Why I can’t let you have the money. I mean, uh—”

  His voice faltered weakily, his eyes straying away from hers.

  After a moment, Lilly nodded. “I know what you mean,” she said. “I think I know.”

  “Well—” he gestured, his hands suddenly awkward. “It’s certainly simple enough.”

  “Yes,” Lilly said. “It’s simple enough. Very simple. And it’s something else, too.”

  There was a peculiar glow in her eyes, a strange
tightness to her face, a subdued huskiness to her voice. Watching him, studying him, she slowly crossed one leg over the other.

  “We’re criminals, Roy. Let’s face it…”

  “We don’t have to be, Lil. I’m turning over a new leaf. So can you.”

  “But we’ve always had class. We’ve kept our private lives fairly straight. There’s been certain things we wouldn’t do…”

  “I know! So there’s no complications! I can—we can—”

  The leg was swinging gently; hinting, speaking to him. Holding him hypnotized.

  “Roy…what if I told you I wasn’t really your mother? That we weren’t related?”

  “Huh!” He looked up startled. “Why, I—”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. You don’t need to tell me. Now, why would you like it Roy?”

  He gulped painfully, attempted a laugh of assumed nonchalance. Everything was getting out of hand, out of his hands and into hers. The sudden awareness of his feelings, the sudden understanding of himself, all the terror and the joy and the desire held him thralled and wordless.

  “Roy…” So softly that he could hardly hear it.

  “Y-Yes?” He gulped again. “Yes?”

  “I want that money, Roy. I’ve got to have it. Now, what do I have to do to get it?”

  Lilly, he said, or tried to say it, and perhaps he did say some of what he meant to. Lilly, you know you can’t go on like you were; you know you’ll be caught, killed. You know I’m only trying to help you. If you didn’t mean so much to me, I’d let you have the damned money. But I’ve got to stop you. I—I—”

  “Maybe—” she was going to be fair about this. “You mean you really won’t give it to me, Roy? You won’t? Or will you? Can’t I change your mind? What can I do to get it?”

  And how could he tell her? How say the unsayable? And yet, as she arose, moved toward him with the tempting grace with which Moira had used to move—Moira, another older woman, who had in essence been Lilly—he tried to tell her. And jumbled as it was, it was enough for Lilly.