Grifter's Game

by Lawrence Block

  The train was a comfortable one. It called itself the Ohio State Limited, passed through Albany and Utica and Syracuse and Rochester and Erie and Buffalo, and was due at Cleveland at 9:04 in the evening. I added thirty mental minutes to the time of arrival and settled down with my newspaper. In due course the conductor appeared, snatched my ticket and replaced it with a narrow red cardboard affair with numbers on it. He punched one of the numbers and tucked the cardboard slab into the slot on the seat in front of me. Shortly thereafter another kind gentleman made his appearance. He sold me two pieces of bread with a sliver of American cheese between them and a paper cup of orange juice to wash the sandwich down with. I handed him a dollar and he returned a nickel to me. There’s nothing quite like the railroads. No other mode of transportation since the covered wagon has been able to cover such a short distance in so long a time at such a high cost. It’s an accomplishment.

  We hit Albany on time. We were five minutes late getting into Utica and seven more minutes behind by the time we got to Syracuse. We lost eight minutes on the road to Rochester and an additional five getting to Buffalo. Then we waited for some obscure reason in the Buffalo terminal. Maybe there was a cow on the tracks. Something like that.

  It was a quarter to ten when we made Cleveland. The train was supposed to swing south next, heading for Cinci by way of such unlikely places as Springfield and Columbus and Dayton and similar silliness, and I didn’t want to think how far behind it would be when it finally made port in Cincinnati. I got off in Cleveland, suitcase in hand, and looked for a hotel and a restaurant in that order.

  The hotel was at the corner of Thirteenth and Paine, rundown but respectable, reasonable but not cheap. The room had a stall shower, which helped, and a big bed which looked inviting. I changed to slightly less Madison-Avenue clothing and went out for dinner.

  The restaurant was one of those let’s-pretend-it’s-1910 places—imitation gaslamps, sawdust on the floor, waiters with white coats and broad-brimmed straw hats. The food made up for it. I had a steak, a baked potato, a dish of creamed spinach. I drank bourbon and water before dinner, black coffee after. The coffee came in a little pewter pot with a wooden handle. What do murderers eat? What do they drink?

  The Cleveland Press didn’t have the story. It was a veritable storehouse of information about Cleveland, starting with fires and municipal corruption and finishing off with a little Conning-Towerish column of sloppy homespun-yet-sophisticated verse that almost made me throw up the steak. Here and there a reader could discover that there was a world outside of Cleveland, by George, with things happening there. There was a rocket doing something at Cape Canaveral, a revolution in Laos, an election in Italy. There was a murder in New York but the Cleveland Press didn’t know it.

  I found a trashcan to stuff the Press into and looked around for a newsstand that stooped to carrying New York papers. Most of them didn’t. One of them did and I let him sell me the Telly. I took it back to the hotel, opened it up and plowed through it.

  It took a lot of plowing. I started with the front page and worked toward the back, and suddenly I was on page 22 and so was the story. It filled six paragraphs in the third column and was topped neatly by a two-deck eighteen point head that read like so:

  MAN SHOT DEAD OUTSIDE

  HOME IN WESTCHESTER

  Gunfire shattered the early-morning calm today in residential Cheshire Point when five bullets fired from a moving car felled a prominent importer steps from his own door.

  The victim was Lester Keith Brassard of 341 Roscommon Drive, 52-year-old importer with offices in lower Manhattan. He was killed as he left his home for his office. Local police recovered a stolen car, believed to be the murder vehicle, several blocks from the scene of the crime.

  Mona Brassard, the victim’s wife, was unable to advance any information as to a possible motive for the slaying, conducted in typical gangland fashion. “Keith didn’t have an enemy in the world,” she told police and reporters. She admitted that he had seemed nervous lately. “But it was something about business,” she said. “He didn’t have any personal problems. None that I knew about.”

  Arnold Schwerner, detective on the Cheshire Point police force, agreed that the slaying seemed pointless. “He could have been hit by mistake,” he theorized. “It looks like a pro job.”

  Schwerner’s statement was in reference to the method of murder—several shots from a stolen car. This method has been in vogue among gangsters for years.

  Cheshire Point police are working on the killing in close cooperation with detectives attached to Manhattan’s Homicide West.

  The last paragraph was the kicker. If Homicide West was tied in already, that meant the cops were looking for a business motive for the murder. That, in turn, meant that the office would get some sort of going-over. I couldn’t be positive they’d hit the heroin, but the odds were long that they would. Homicide West is by no means a lousy outfit.

  I re-read the part where they quoted Mona and I couldn’t help grinning like a ghoul. She had carried it off perfectly, hitting just the right tone. Keith didn’t have an enemy in the world—except for his lovely wife and her boyfriend. He seemed a little nervous lately. But it was something about business. He didn’t have any personal problems. None that I knew about.

  The right tone. She hadn’t tried to explain things for them, but had given them a few hints and let them reconstruct it for themselves. I’d staged the job right—a slaying conducted in typical gangland style. Now she had reacted properly, and the heroin was the next link in the chain. When they found that, the ball game was over. That made it a gangland slaying, all right. What the hell else could it be?

  I folded the newspaper and put it in the wastebasket. Then I set a cigarette on fire and found a chair to sit in. I wanted to get some plans made, but it wasn’t easy. I kept seeing that look of total disbelief on the face of Lester Keith Brassard. I hadn’t known his name was Lester. It explained why he preferred Keith. So would anybody in his right mind.

  I would see the face, and I would hear the shot. Then I would see myself stretched across the front seat of that black Ford pumping bullets into a corpse. According to the papers, the police thought the car was moving at the time. That was fine with me. That meant two killers, one firing the gun and the other handling the driving. The crime lab could probably figure out that it hadn’t happened that way, but by that time it would be a moot point. For the time being, let them figure on two killers. Or five. Or a damned platoon.

  The face, and the shot, and the exercise in studied stupidity. They paraded in front of me, and I wondered if maybe this was what they meant by guilt. Not sorrow for the act, not a feeling that the act was wrong, not even a fear of punishment—but a profound distaste for certain memories of the act, certain sensory impulses that lingered persistently.

  I don’t think Brutus was sorry that he knifed Caesar. I don’t think he thought it was wrong.

  But I am positive the line Et tu, Brute haunted him until he ran upon the sword that Strato held for him. That line would do it for him, just as the blood did it for Macbeth and his good wife.

  I lit another cigarette and tried to think straight. It was not easy.

  According to plan, she would leave for Miami a week to ten days after the murder. It was Wednesday now, Wednesday evening, and by the Saturday after next she would be at the Eden Roc. I had told her I would be there before her. I could leave any time.

  The funny part of it was that I didn’t entirely want to. I had been a machine, oiled and primed for the murder, and now that it was over and done with I felt functionless. I was through. The easy part remained, but I didn’t even want a hand in the easy part of it. A weird thought nagged at me. I had better than five hundred bucks left. I could pack up and go—find a new town, use the dough for a fresh start. I could forget all that woman and all that money.

  And the face and the noise and the five useless bullets.

  It was an emotional reaction to murder, not
sensible, not logically considered. It wasn’t logical because then I would have killed L. Keith Brassard for nothing at all. The spoils belonged to the victor. I had won, and now Brassard’s wife and Brassard’s money were mine to keep. Both were desirable. It would be idiotic to turn down either of them.

  It came out the same way if you looked at the emotional set-up piece by piece. I still loved Mona, still wanted her, still needed her. Even if I had the money, I was nowhere without her. She made the difference. She was the New Life, the Higher Purpose, all of that crap. I had to laugh. A face and a noise and five extra bullets sat on one side. Mona and money were perched on the other. The choice was so simple, so obvious, that there really was no choice. I’d be in Miami by Saturday and she’d be there four or five days after that.

  I ground out my cigarette, glad that all that nonsense was settled. The air outside was heavy with industrial smoke and human perspiration. I forced myself through it, found a bar, had a drink. A whore sat there waiting for me to pick her up. The impulse was suddenly strong; the desire for a magical release from all that tension was tough to resist. I looked at her and she smiled, showing at least fifty-three teeth, none of them hers to start with. She was the kind of woman who looks fine if you don’t get too close. A hard, tough body built for action. A face camouflaged with too much of every cosmetic known to modern woman. Cheap clothes cheaply worn. And I remembered the line from Kipling: I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land.

  I turned away from her and paid attention to my drink. I finished it, scooped up my change and walked away from Mandalay. I thought about a movie and decided I really didn’t have the strength to sit through one. They were good time-killers, but enough is enough. Maybe someday I would be able to go to a movie because I wanted to go to a movie. Maybe someday I would be able to go to a movie and watch the damn thing.

  But not for a while.

  I walked around for a few more minutes, maybe half an hour altogether. I passed movie theaters, passed bars that I didn’t bother entering. I wandered past the Greyhound station and again the impulse came, the urge to get on the first bus and go wherever it went. With my luck it would have gone to New York.

  More walking. Then it occurred to me that, for one thing, I was dog-tired, and, for another, I had absolutely nothing to do. The obvious course of action involved going back to my hotel and hitting the sack. But I knew instinctively that I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep for hours. After all, I had recently finished committing a murder. You do any of several things after committing a murder, and falling asleep with ease is not one of them. It only stood to reason that, this being my first homicide to date, it would be sunrise before I could start thinking seriously about something like sleep.

  I decided not to be logical. The sleepy clerk tossed me my key and the sleepy elevator operator ran me up to my floor. I felt a kinship for both of them. I got out of my clothes, washed up, and crawled under the covers.

  I got all ready to count sheep. The sheep were little naked Monas and they did not look like sheep at all. They were only woolly here and there, and they were not built much like sheep. Nor were they jumping over a fence. Instead they leaped gaily over a corpse. You know who he was.

  By the time the fourth Mona got over the corpse, I had gotten over my insomnia. I slept like a corpse, and nobody jumped over me.

  10

  I made the front page of the Times. Not the lead story, which was devoted to the names somebody called somebody else in the Security Council of the United Nations. Not even the second lead, which was devoted to some new invention in the realm of municipal corruption. But, by Times standards, I got a big play—ten inches of copy set double-column in the left-hand corner of page one. That’s the equivalent of the front-page banner in the News or Mirror, which I found out later, I also made.

  The headline on the Times story read: NARCOTICS CONNECTION SEEN LIKELY IN CHESHIRE POINT MURDER. As is generally the case with New York Times headlines, that turned out to be the understatement of the year. The story, with ten inches of copy on the front page and fifteen more on page 34, made everything very nice indeed. I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

  Homicide West had located the heroin after what the Times graciously referred to as “a meticulous scrutiny of Brassard’s offices at 117 Chambers Street.” I didn’t see any need for meticulous scrutiny—not with an envelope of heroin sticking out from under a desk blotter and three more in the top drawer. But I didn’t want to quarrel with the Times.

  The cache of heroin, according to the Times, had a retail value in excess of a million dollars. What in the world that meant was anybody’s guess. By the time the stuff was retailed it would have passed through the hands of fifteen middlemen and would have been cut as many times. The retail value was pretty much irrelevant, and there was no way of figuring out what the wholesale value of the stuff might have been. Nor did it matter much, when you stopped to think about it.

  From there on, naturally, they had put two and two together. And, naturally, had come up with four. The phone numbers, said the Times, were those of several well-known narcotics drops. Why they were still open if they were known as narcotics drops was neither asked nor answered. What with the dope and the numbers, and a meticulous scrutiny of Brassard’s books, Homicide had managed to figure out that Lester Keith Brassard was an importer of more than cigarette lighters.

  This fact, coupled with the mode of murder employed, made the final conclusion inevitable. Brassard had been bumped by racket boys, either because he had crossed them or because they wanted to move in on his operation. The Times reporter, who had obviously seen a few too many movies about the Mafia, thought this might be an aftermath of the Appalachian meeting, with the mob moving out of the drug trade. According to this interpretation, poor Lester Keith was a high-ranking mobster who refused to go along with the shift in policy and had suffered the consequences of “bucking the syndicate.” It was a pretty fascinating theory and a marvelous example of interpretative journalism in action. I hoped the kid would cop himself a Pulitzer for it.

  There were three or four paragraphs about Mona in the story and they all said just what I wanted them to say. The distraught widow was completely taken aback by the new developments in the case. Any intimation that her husband was less than a solid citizen shocked the marrow from her bones. Of course she had never been quite clear on what he did for a living. He wasn’t the sort of man who brought his business home from the office. He made a good living, and that was as much as she knew. But she just couldn’t believe that he would be mixed up in something … something actually criminal. Why, it just wasn’t like Keith at all!

  She should have been an actress.

  I liked that article. What it left out was as important from my point of view as what it included. The Cheshire Point side of the case had disappeared almost completely. A few witnesses had popped out with the usual mutually conflicting stories. One insisted the three killers had called out This is for Al, you bastard before shooting. The rest came a little closer to reality, but not a hell of a lot. The important part was that nobody seemed to give a damn about the shooting itself any more. Brassard, unmasked as a scoundrel, would not be mourned. The police, busy chasing down narcotics leads, wouldn’t care about the killing as such. Mona would be left alone, except for the sob-sister reporters whom she’d quite justifiably refused to speak to. Nobody would be especially surprised when she put the house up for sale and headed for Florida to get away from it all. Nor would anybody take much notice when she married me four or five months later, on the rebound, so to speak. It would be perfectly consistent, and that was the important thing.

  Consistency. You can build a whole world of lies, as long as each lie reinforces every other lie. You can create a masterful structure of sheer logic if you begin with one false postulate. All it takes is consistency.

  That night I saw a movie. The whole day up to that point had been unreal. It was a waiting time and nothing was happen
ing. I felt only partially alive, hibernating without being able to sleep. The total lack of eventfulness was overpowering, especially after a time of planning and a time of acting and a time of running. So this time the movie was not a time-killer but a vicarious experience, an attempt to replace my own passiveness with the activity of the celluloid images.

  Perhaps this is why I watched the movie more closely than I would have normally. It was a Hitchcock film, an old one, and it was gripping. The switches from tension to comedy, from the terrifying to the ridiculous, were amazingly effective. But for a change I saw past the surface to the plot itself, and I saw that the plot was ludicrous—a web of preposterous coincidences held together by superior writing and acting and directing.

  Later, lying in bed and trying to sleep, I realized something. I tried to imagine a movie in which the hero steals two pieces of luggage, one of which is loaded with a fortune in raw heroin. Then the same hero happens to pick up or get picked up by a girl who subsequently turns out to be the wife of the guy who owns the luggage and the heroin.

  Coincidental?

  More than that. Almost incredible. At least as far-fetched as the picture—and yet I had been able to accept coincidence in life simply because it had happened to me. The fictional coincidences in the Hitchcock film were different. They had not happened in life, but only on the screen.

  It was something to think about. I had never looked at it quite that way before, and I spent a little time running it through my mind.

  “Would you care for a magazine, sir?”

  I shook my head.

  “Coffee, tea, or milk?”