Grifter's Game

by Lawrence Block

  There was a drink or two or three in the bottle of Jack Daniels. I finished off the bourbon and felt a little better.

  4

  I got the money a few minutes after six. It was a very strange feeling—I was lying on the bed with the light out, riding along on the slight edge the bourbon had been able to give me. The air conditioner was whirring gently in the background. Then the door opened less than six inches, an envelope flopped to the floor, and the door closed.

  I hadn’t even seen her hand. And this made the entire affair so impersonal it was startling. The door had opened by itself, the envelope had come from nowhere, and the door had closed. There were no living creatures involved in the process.

  I picked up the envelope, shook the contents down to one end and ripped open the other end. Tens and twenties and fifties. I counted them twice and got a total of $370 each time.

  They went in my wallet and the envelope went in the wastebasket.

  It hit me all at once and I fell on the bed trying not to laugh. It was funny, and at the same time it was anything but funny, and I muffled my face with a pillow and howled like a hyena.

  If it was anyone but Mona, it would be so simple. I would smile a happy smile, walk out of the hotel, and catch a train for Nowheresville with three hundred and seventy hard-earned dollars in my kick. When you looked at it that way it was the simplest and deftest con I had ever pulled in my life. Sweet and easy, without a problem in the world.

  Except that I wasn’t pulling a con. Now, with the money handed to me on a solid gold platter, I was going to pay my hotel bill, play my cards properly, and wind up going to New York and waiting for her. I don’t know whether it is funny or not, but I was laughing my fool head off.

  When I ran out of laughs I grabbed a shower and shave and went to the hotel next door for dinner. Nobody goes to the hotel next door for dinner. You either eat in your own hotel or you go to a restaurant. That was what I was bargaining on. I didn’t want to run into Mona and I didn’t want to run into Keith. Not until I was ready for them.

  The dinner was probably good. Big hotels cook dependably if not imaginatively. They don’t ruin steaks, which was what I ordered. But I didn’t taste my dinner. I thought about him and I thought about her and I tasted murder instead of meat. I kept a cigarette going throughout the meal and paid more attention to it than to my steak. I sat staring into my coffee for a long time. Then when I started to drink it, it was room-temperature and horrible. I left it there and went to a movie.

  The movie made about as much sense to me as if the actors had been speaking Persian and the subtitles were done in Chinese. I remember nothing about the story, not even the title. The show was there to kill time and that is all it did. I looked at the screen but I didn’t see it. I thought. I planned. I schemed. Call it what you want.

  I would have liked to get out of Atlantic City then and there. Staying around was a risk that grew greater every minute that I spent in the miserable town. And, now that I had decided to pay for my room, every extra day was an expense that I couldn’t quite afford. Mona’s contribution to my welfare, combined with the little money of my own that was left, gave me a drop over four hundred dollars. It was going too fast to suit me.

  But I couldn’t leave yet. I needed a look at my man, my L. Keith Brassard. I needed to know the enemy before I would decide how and when and where to kill him.

  The movie ended and I went back to the hotel. The Boardwalk was a little less heavily populated then usual but as raucous as ever. I stood for a moment or two watching a pitchman explain how you could live an extra ten years if you squashed vegetables in a patented liquifier and drank the crap you wound up with. I watched him put a cabbage through the machine. It started out as a head of cabbage. Then the machine went to work on it. The pitchman flipped the pulpy remains into a garbage pail and proudly lifted a glass of noxious-looking pap to his lips. He drained it in a swallow and smiled broadly.

  I wondered if you could do the same thing to a human being. Put him in a patented liquifier and squeeze the juice out of him. Flip the pulp in a garbage pail. Close the lid tight.

  I walked on and drank a glass of piña colada at a fruit juice stand. I wondered how they made it and got a frightening mental picture of a pineapple and a coconut waltzing hand in hand into a patented liquifier in a sort of vegetarian suicide pact. I finished the piña colada and headed for the hotel.

  A man walked out as I walked in. I caught only the quickest of looks at him but there was something familiar about him. I had seen him before, somewhere. I had no idea where or when, or who he might be.

  He was short and dark and thin. He had all his hair and it was combed neatly and worn fairly long. His black moustache was neatly trimmed. He dressed well and he walked quickly.

  For some reason I hoped to God he hadn’t recognized me.

  I saw him the next day.

  I woke up around ten, got dressed in slacks and an open shirt and went down to the coffee shop for breakfast. I was starving, strangely enough, and I wolfed down waffles and sausages and two cups of black coffee in no time at all. Then I lit the morning’s first cigarette and went out to wait for him.

  I went to the hotel terrace where I’d had a drink the first night. I found a table under an umbrella. It was close enough to the Boardwalk to give me a good view and far enough away so that nobody would notice me unless they worked at it. The waiter came over and I ordered black coffee. It was a little too early for drinking, although the rest of the customers didn’t seem to think so. A garment-district type and a broken-down brunette were knocking off daiquiris and whooping it up. Getting an early start, I thought. Or still going from the night before. I forgot all about them and watched the Boardwalk.

  And almost missed them.

  After your first day in Atlantic City you stop watching the rolling chairs that plod back and forth along the Boardwalk. They’re part of the scenery, and it is out of the question that anybody you know might ride in one of them. I had forgotten the chairs, concentrating on the people who were walking, and I barely saw them. Then I got an eyeful of yellow hair and took a second look, and there they were.

  He was short and he was fat and he was old. He was also every inch the good burgher from Westchester, and it was no longer hard to see how he had fooled Mona. Some honest men look like crooks; some crooks look like honest men. He was one of the second kind.

  He had a firm, honest chin and a thin-lipped, honest mouth. His eyes were water-blue—I could see that even from where I was sitting. His hair was white. Not gray but white. There is something very regal about white hair.

  I watched that nice-looking honest old man until the chair stopped in front of the Shelburne and they got out of it. Then I drank my coffee and wondered how we were going to kill him.

  “More coffee, sir?”

  I looked up at the waiter. I didn’t feel like moving and I didn’t feel like more coffee.

  “Not just yet.”

  “Certainly, sir. Would you care for something to eat, perhaps? I have a menu.”

  When they want you to defecate or abandon the toilet they make no bones about it. I didn’t want food and I didn’t want coffee. Therefore I should pay the man and go away. They had fifty empty tables on that terrace and they wanted fifty-one.

  “Martini,” I said, tired. “Extra dry, twist of lemon.”

  He bowed and vanished. He re-appeared shortly thereafter with martini in tow. There were two olives instead of one and he had remembered the twist of lemon, which most of them don’t. Maybe he wanted to be friends.

  I don’t know why I ordered the drink. Ordinarily I would have left about then. I didn’t want a drink, didn’t want a meal, didn’t want more coffee, and I had already seen Brassard. These factors, combined with my thorough lack of love for both terrace and waiter, should have sent me on my way.

  They didn’t. And I got another look—a longer and closer one—at L. Keith Brassard.

  I don’t know how he got there.
I looked up and there he was, three tables down, with a waiter at his elbow. My waiter. He was giving me the profile and he looked as solidly respectable as ever.

  I sat there feeling obvious as all hell and wished I had a newspaper to hide behind. I didn’t want to look at the man. There’s an old trick—you stare hard and long at somebody and they fidget for a minute or two, then turn and look at you. It’s not extrasensory perception or anything like that. They catch a glimpse of you out of the corner of an eye, something like that.

  I was positive that if I stared at him he would turn around and look at me. I didn’t want that to happen. Whatever way we played it in New York, I was coming on with one great advantage. I knew him and he didn’t know me. It was a trump card and I hated like hell to lose it in Atlantic City.

  So I nursed the drink and watched him part-time. The more I watched him the harder he looked at me. You have to be very hard inside if you can get away with looking soft. It’s much easier to be a success as a gangster if you look like a gangster. The closer you are to the Hollywood stereotype, the quicker acceptance comes to you. If you look more like Wall Street than Mulberry Street, Mulberry Street doesn’t want to see you. He was going to be a hard man to kill. I was chewing the first olive when he got company. There had to be a reason more pronounced than thirst for him to be biding his time on the terrace, and the reason appeared in short order. The reason was short and thin, well-dressed with long hair neatly combed and black moustache properly trimmed. The reason was the man I had half-recognized the night before walking out of the Shelburne. Now I remembered him.

  And almost choked on the olive. His name was Reggie Cole. He worked for a man named Max Treger, and so did half of New Jersey. Treger was a wise old man who occupied a secure and nebulous position at the top of everything that happened in the state of New Jersey on the uncouth side of the law.

  Treger I knew solely by reputation. Reggie Cole I had met once, years ago, at a party. Reggie was smaller then, but the years and Max Treger had been kind to him. Reggie had risen—he sat at the right hand of God, according to rumor.

  Now he sat at the right hand of L. Keith Brassard. I got him full-face that way and I was worried. It had been a long time since that brief meeting, but I recognized him. There was all the reason in the world for him to remember me. I had taken a girl away from him. The girl was a pig and I’m sure he hadn’t cared much at the time, but it wasn’t something he would forget.

  I waited for him to look up and see me. But he and Brassard were busy—they were talking quickly and earnestly and I wished I could hear what they were saying. It wasn’t hard to guess the topic of conversation. Brassard was supposed to be delivering enough heroin to keep all of New Jersey stoned for a long time. The horse had miraculously disappeared. Which was sure as hell something to talk about.

  I swallowed the second olive whole. I put enough money on the table to cover the martini and the coffee and the waiter, tucking the bill under the empty glass so that it wouldn’t blow away.

  Just as I was starting to get up, a head came up and small eyes looked at me. A short, puzzled look—probably exactly the same as the one I had given him the night before. A look of vague and distant recognition. He remembered me but he didn’t know who I was. The next time around he would know. I hoped the conversation with Brassard was serious enough to take his mind off me.

  I got up and tried not to run. I walked away with my back to the two of them and hoped to God they weren’t looking at it. The sweat had my shirt plastered to my back by the time I reached the Shelburne. And it wasn’t even a particularly warm day.

  There was no point in staying around any longer. I had already gotten more than I’d bargained for—a look at him and a hint of who his buddies were. As well as I could figure it, Brassard had come running to Atlantic City with a cargo of heroin. He wasn’t a delivery boy—it was his heroin, bought and paid for and ready for resale. Nobody was going to accuse him of welching or anything of the sort. His only headaches were financial ones.

  If anything, Max Treger was the man who looked bad. From Brassard’s point of view, the only man who could have picked him so neatly was the man who knew what he was carrying. Treger had a solid reputation for honesty-among-thieves and all that, but with that big a bundle hanging fire Brassard was undoubtedly suspicious. I hoped he would raise enough hell so that somebody would get mad and shoot holes in his head. It would save me a lot of work.

  But I didn’t think it would happen. In a few days Brassard would convince Treger that he wasn’t playing heroin hopscotch and Treger in turn would convince Brassard that he had better rackets under his thumb than petty larceny. The two clowns would put their crooked heads together and come up with an unknown quantity. They would start looking for this unknown quantity, at which time it would be very unhealthy to be me.

  I wanted to run but it was too early. The big headache was the goddamned luggage. The bags were ordinary enough but they could be recognized especially when the Red Alert went out on them. I didn’t give a damn if somebody remembered them in a week or so—by that time I’d be snug in New York with my trail as well-covered as it was ever going to be. But I didn’t want anybody to tip until I was as far as possible from Atlantic City.

  I gave the railway station a buzz from my room and found out that there was a train to Philly every morning at 7:30. There was another every afternoon, but the morning train was a hell of a lot safer. Everybody is properly asleep at that hour, and at the same time there’s nothing suspicious about checking out then, as there would be for a train leaving at, say, four in the morning.

  The less people who saw my bags on the way out, the better I would feel about it. The less chance of Brassard being around, the happier I was.

  I called the desk in the middle of the afternoon to leave a call for six the following morning, which must have puzzled the hell out of them. Then I phoned room service for more Jack Daniels and let the afternoon and evening spend themselves in a mildly alcoholic fog. It was gentle drinking. I had nothing better to do, and at the same time I had no overwhelming compulsion to get stoned to the earlobes. I paced myself properly and kept a comfortable edge on until I felt tired enough to sleep. Then I threw down a few extra shots and slipped over the edge so that sleep would come a little more quickly.

  Which it did.

  My eyes opened the second the phone rang and I came thoroughly awake at once. I took a salt water shower, this time on purpose, and then chased away the salt with cold fresh water. I used up three little towels before I managed to get dry.

  I dressed and went downstairs. There was a different monkey behind the desk but he was just as obliging as the first. He gave me no trouble at all. He handed over the attaché case and I gave him my nicest smile in return.

  All the way back through the lobby to the elevator and up too many flights to my room I felt as though half the English-speaking world was staring at the attaché case. I actually tried to open it, then remembered locking it and consigning the key to limbo. It was a shame. I couldn’t very well leave either of Brassard’s bags lying around. If the case were open I could transfer the heroin to one of his bags and let the case lose itself. This way I had three bags to carry. It would be no problem at first, but it might be trouble when I switched trains.

  I packed all of my stuff and all of Brassard’s stuff into his two suitcases. Since I had come with next to nothing, this wasn’t the hardest thing in the world. Then I went back down to the lobby, let a bellboy carry my bags to the inevitable waiting taxi, and wandered over to the desk. The monkey hoped I had enjoyed my stay.

  “Wonderful town,” I told him, lying in my teeth. “I needed the rest. Feel like a new man.”

  That much was true.

  “Going back home now?”

  “Back to Philly,” I told him. I’d used a good address off Rittenhouse Square when I checked in.

  “Come back and see us.”

  I nodded. He should sit on a hot stove until I came
back. He should hold his breath.

  I went out the side entrance. The cab was there with my bags nestled together in the trunk. I gave the bellhop a buck and hoped he would forget all about the luggage.

  At the railway station I bought a ticket straight through to Philadelphia. I carried my baggage on the train. It was tough to lug three pieces without looking awkward but I managed it somehow. The conductor came by, took my train ticket and gave me a seat check good to Philadelphia. I settled back and let the train chug its way past Egg Harbor and Haddonfield. Then we were in North Philly and I was leaving the train. Me and my three little suitcases. I remembered the story of Benjamin Franklin as a young man running through the streets of Philadelphia with a loaf of bread under each arm and another one in his mouth. I knew precisely what he looked like. And I hoped Philly was used to the sight by now.

  I tried to get excited but I couldn’t raise the necessary enthusiasm. There was no problem, no sweat, no headache. Who was going to remember another proper young man with three suitcases? Who would Brassard’s men question—commuters? Conductors?

  No problem.

  If some cutie-pie figured out the orthographic relationship between L. Keith Brassard and Leonard K. Blake, he might trace me through to the railway station, might find a clerk who knew I’d bought a ticket to Philly. But nobody in the world was going to figure that I’d gone to New York.

  No problem.

  In less than three minutes I was off the train, down the stairwell, through the tunnel, and on the opposite platform. I waited there for less than five minutes before a train for New York pulled up and I got on. I put my suitcases up on the luggage rack and relaxed in my seat. When the conductor came by I let him sell me a ticket straight through to Boston. It wasn’t necessary, not in the least, but I wanted to play everything to the hilt.

  It sounds like a spy movie. Cloak and dagger. Bob Mitchum in a trenchcoat.

  I thought about Mona and wondered how long it would be before I saw her again. I thought about the first time on the beach, and the times in my hotel room. I thought about the way she moved and the tricks her eyes played.