Grifter's Game

by Lawrence Block

I shook my head again. The stewardess, as pretty and as faceless as Miss Rheingold, wandered off to bother somebody else. I looked out the window at the ground and saw clouds instead. They look very different from above. When you fly over them they are not white puffballs of cotton at all, just shapeless, moderately dense fog. I stared at them for a few more seconds, but they didn’t do a hell of a lot to hold my interest. I looked away.

  It was Saturday morning. The plane was a jet, flying direct to Miami, and we would be landing a few minutes past noon. The night before, I had phoned the Eden Roc and reserved a single; it would be waiting for me. That was a piece of luck. There was a time when Miami Beach was empty in the summer. Now the summer season is as busy as the winter one, although the prices are a good deal lower.

  “Attention please.” I listened to the male voice come over the loudspeaker and wondered what was wrong. I remembered that I was on a plane, and that periodically planes crashed for the sheer hell of it. I wondered, quite calmly, whether we were going to crash.

  Then the same voice—the pilot’s—went on to tell me that we were cruising at an altitude of so many feet, that the temperature in Miami was such-and-such, that landing conditions were ideal and that we were destined to arrive on time. The pilot closed with a message advising me to select his airline for future flights and I thought what an idiot I was. We were not going to crash. All was well.

  We landed on time, happily. I got off—the stewardess called it deplaning, a cunning word—and wandered away to wait for my luggage in the terminal. The sun was hot and the sky was cloudless. Good Florida weather, good beach weather. Mona and I could lie on the beach and soak up the sun. We could lie on the beach at night and soak up the moonlight, too. I remembered Atlantic City, the first time, on the beach at midnight. Life is a circle.

  The luggage got there after ten minutes or so and I traded my baggage check for it, then carried it to the waiting limousine which would cruise northward to Miami Beach. The tall, rangy driver was a native of the state. There were two ways to tell—his speech, which sounded more like Kentucky or Tennessee than Deep South. Dade County natives have that hill inflection nine times out of ten. The other tip-off was his total lack of a suntan. The people who live in Miami know enough to stay out of the sun. Only the Yankee tourists are sun-worshippers. He was also a good driver. He made fine time, dropping me at my hotel sooner than I’d expected. A bellhop snatched my bags and I followed him to the front desk. Yes, they had my reservation. Yes, my room was ready for me. And welcome to the Eden Roc, Mr. Marlin. Right this way, sir.

  I was on the fifth floor, a big single with a huge bathroom and a view of the ocean. I looked out the window and saw browned bodies dotting a golden beach. The sea was very calm—no surf at all, gently rippling waves. I watched a gull swoop for a fish, watched one little kid chase another little kid along the edge of the shore, watched two college-boy-types burying a college-girl-type with sand. Miami Beach.

  The beach was pleasant that afternoon, the sun warm, the water refreshing. I stayed out until it was time for dinner. The crowd thinned out as the day wore away. Fat middle-aged men from New York rubbed sunburn cream on themselves, changed into loud sportclothes and went to play gin rummy on the terrace. Mothers herded children back to their rooms. The sun went away.

  After dinner I caught the floorshow. The headliner was a busty female singer who was even worse in person than she was on records. But the comic was amusing and the band passable. Drinks were expensive. I wasn’t worried. When the time came to settle the tab, Mona would be on hand with half the money in the world. No sweat in that department.

  That was Saturday. Sunday was about the same, and Monday and Tuesday. My tan deepened and my muscles loosened up from all the swimming. Monday afternoon I spent awhile in the gym, working out gingerly. Then I went to the steamroom and sweated. A big Pole without a hair on his head massaged me for fifteen minutes and left me feeling like a new man. I had never been in better physical shape.

  I drank the nights away, always getting slightly high and never taking on too much of an edge. I kept turning down chances to sleep with the wives of other men. The need for a woman was strong, and the women were startlingly available, but one trick never failed me. I would look at them and compare them with Mona. They never came close.

  Wednesday I started to expect her. I spent most of the afternoon in the lobby, my eyes flashing to the desk every ten minutes or so. It was a full week since the murder and she would be around any time from then on. There were no complications. The murder was getting very little play in the New York papers—a few inches in a back page of the Times now and then, nothing much else. I waited for her.

  When she didn’t show on Thursday I got impatient. After all, I had told her a week, ten days tops. And with everything running so smoothly she didn’t have to waste any time. All was clear. To hell with cloaks and daggers, Mitchum in a trenchcoat. I wanted my woman.

  She didn’t show Friday, either.

  I drank too much Friday night. I sat in front of the bar and poured too many shots of straight bourbon down my throat. It could have been dangerous, but I became a silent drunk instead of a noisy one, which was fortunate. A bellhop poured me into bed and I woke up early with a brand-new hangover. There was a wire running through my head from one ear to the other. It was red hot and somebody was strumming it. A Bloody Mary made things a little better. Only a little.

  Saturday morning. A full week of Miami Beach, which is plenty. And no Mona. I waited all day long in the lobby and she did not show up.

  I started to sweat. I almost walked over to the desk to ask if she had a reservation, which would have been a new experiment in stupidity. Instead I went outside and walked down Collins to the first bar. It had a pay phone and I used it to call the Eden Roc. I asked for Mrs. Brassard.

  “One moment,” the clerk said. I waited more than a moment and he came back again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But we have no one staying here under that name.”

  “Could you check the reservations?”

  He could, and he did. There were no reservations for Mrs. Brassard, either.

  I went to the bar and had a drink. Then I went back and tried to straighten myself out. Maybe she forgot which hotel to stay at, or maybe the Eden Roc was full, or something. I made half a dozen calls. I checked the Fontainebleau and the Americana and the Sherry Frontenac and the Martinique and two other places I no longer remember. Each time I asked first for Mrs. Brassard, then asked if she had a reservation there. Each time I drew a blank.

  There was an answer, somewhere. There had to be. But whatever it was, I couldn’t figure it out. I was looking at things wrong, or things were happening wrong, and I felt like a rat in a maze. They have a cute little ploy at the psychology laboratories. They take a rat that’s been taught to solve mazes and they put him in a maze with no way out. The rat tries everything and nothing works. Then, inevitably, the rat reacts to all this frustration by sitting in a corner and chewing off his feet.

  I didn’t chew off my feet. I went back to the Eden Roc and took a cold shower and thought about the bill that was going to fall due any day. I wondered if I’d be able to cover it. And I wondered how long it would take her to show up. The only answer was that she hadn’t bothered with a reservation. Maybe she had had to stay in New York until the estate was settled. You read about things like that. Legal problems that can tie you up for a while. Little things.

  I told myself that story until I believed it. And the night came and went, and the next morning I hit the beach and let the sun bake a lot of bitterness and anxiety out of me. I swam and slept and ate and drank and that was Sunday.

  I was up late Monday morning. I went to breakfast, which they serve at the Eden Roc until three p.m., and then I headed for the elevator.

  The clerk was too quick for me.

  “Mr. Marlin—”

  I could have pretended not to hear him. But the bill was going to get to me sooner or later an
d there was no particular point in dodging it for a day or so. I could probably cover it anyway. So I went over to the desk and he smiled at me.

  “Your statement,” he said, handing me a folded hunk of yellow paper. I showed him I could be just as polite as he was and put it in my pocket without looking at it.

  “And a letter,” he added. He gave it to me. It must have been a reflex, because I put that one in my pocket without looking at it, and this was not easy.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Do you know how long you’ll be staying with us, Mr. Marlin?”

  I shook my head. “Hard to say,” I said. “Nice place you’ve got here. Enjoyable.”

  He beamed.

  “Few more days,” I said. “Maybe a week. Might even be two weeks. Then again, I might have to leave on a moment’s notice. Hard to say.”

  The smile remained. It seemed rude to walk away in the middle of such a nice smile but he held it so firmly that he left me no choice. I let him smile across the lobby while I rode upstairs in the elevator.

  First the statement. It was a honey, and it scared me. It came to an impressive $443.25. More than I’d figured. Too many days, too much good food, too much liquor. I didn’t have $443.25.

  I folded the yellow paper back on the original folds and made a place for it in my wallet. Then I took out the envelope and turned it over and over in my hands like a child trying to guess the contents of a birthday present. It was thick. No return address.

  I opened it.

  There was a sheet of plain white paper. It was the wrapper. It held money.

  Money.

  Hundred-dollar bills.

  I counted them, thinking how immaterial the hotel bill had suddenly become. There were thirty of them, each crisp and fresh and new, each a hundred. Thirty hundred-dollar bills. Thirty hundred dollars. Three thousand dollars.

  A lot of money.

  And all the worry drained out of me, because I knew that there was no longer anything to worry about. Mona had not forgotten I was alive. The estate was not tied up—not if she could ship me three grand in cash.

  There were no problems.

  I hefted the money. It was more than cash—it was a symbol. It meant very definitely that everything was all right now, no worry, no sweat. God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. It was her way of telling me this—an apology for her tardiness and a promise that she would be around soon. I felt myself growing warm at the thought of her. Soon, I thought. Very soon. Very, very soon.

  She had gotten tied up. Well, that sort of thing could happen. And she couldn’t chance a letter or a phone call or a wire. She had trusted me to wait for her, and now she was making sure that I knew all was well. I felt guilty suddenly for worrying. It had been rotten of me.

  But I would make it up to her.

  She was in New York now. But soon—any day now—she would be on her way to Miami.

  Any day.

  First things first. I put on swim trunks, threw a towel over my shoulders and picked the top six bills off the roll. I put the rest in the wallet and popped the wallet into the dresser drawer. I looked around for the wastebasket, then changed my mind and flipped the envelope in the drawer too.

  In Miami Beach you can take an elevator to the lobby in your bathing suit. The only formal part of the place is the financial end of things. And I was taking care of that now.

  The clerk had the same smile on his face.

  “Might as well get this out of the way,” I told him. And I pushed five hundred dollars across the desk.

  “You hang onto the change,” I went on, feeling richer than God. “Put it on my account. Just one pocket in these trunks and it’s too damn small to be much good.”

  I walked across the lobby to the beach entrance and felt seven feet tall and eight feet wide. It was Chamber of Commerce weather again and I was in the right mood for it. I found a spot to dump my towel, then ran straight into the ocean. The waves were higher than they had been and I dived right into the middle of one. It felt great.

  A funny-faced man with a very deep tan and a very large stomach was teaching his little daughter how to swim. He held his hand out, palm up, and she had her stomach on it while she flailed the water madly with her arms and kicked furiously with two small pink feet. I grinned at her and at him and felt happy.

  I swam around some more. I went over to the terrace and had a vodka collins. I stretched out on my towel and let the sun bake the vodka out again.

  It was a good thing I already had a pretty deep tan, because I fell asleep there with the sun going full blast. It was a nice way to fall asleep. There was all that warmth, and there was my head dancing with memories of Mona and thoughts about Mona and nice things like that. There was a cool breeze off the ocean and the pleasant babble of kids and an occasional skywriting plane droning away over the ocean.

  So I slept.

  The sun was gone when I woke up. So was the heat—the beach was cold and I was chilly. I wrapped up in the towel and headed for my room.

  The funny part of it was that a lot of the pleasant glow of well-being had set with the sun. Now, oddly, something seemed to be wrong, which was ridiculous. I shook myself angrily, not even amused this time around. What the hell—I’d drifted off to sleep dreaming happy dreams, and I’d gotten up feeling troubled again.

  What was it? The face and the noise and the five bullets? I still thought about them, once in a while, whenever I drank a little too much.

  But that wasn’t it.

  Something else.

  I let myself into my room, found a fresh pack of cigarettes and got one going. The smoke didn’t taste good but I smoked anyway, nervously, and ground the cigarette out with half of it still to go. What was wrong?

  I walked over to the dresser, opened the drawer. I took out my wallet and looked at all that wonderful green paper that had come all the way from New York. I looked at the plain envelope it had come in.

  Maybe I saw it before. You can do that—see things and not notice them consciously. They stick with you, deep in your mind, and they nag at you.

  Or maybe I was psychic.

  Or maybe something just smelled wrong. Maybe something didn’t add up no matter how nice I made it sound. Maybe a few hours in the sun made up for the rationalization and let the bad smell reveal itself. I looked at that plain envelope from New York. I looked at it until my eyes bulged.

  It was postmarked Las Vegas.

  11

  We made love in my room at the Shelburne. Then, while I was lying on my bed in the dark smelling the last traces of her perfume, the door had opened less than six inches. An envelope fell to the floor and the door closed at once. That envelope had contained three hundred seventy dollars.

  We made love in my room at the Collingwood. Just before she left she gave me an envelope. That one had contained somewhat better than seven hundred dollars. Maybe my performance was better that time, or maybe stud service gets increasingly more profitable as you go along.

  This time the pay was three grand and I hadn’t even made love to her.

  Now I remembered the bad feeling at the Collingwood after she gave me the money. The weird feeling that the money was a payment for services rendered. That was obviously what the three grand constituted—payment, probably in full, for the removal of her husband. I wondered what the market price was for husbandicide. Or was there a set price? Maybe it varied, because there were plenty of variables that deserved consideration. The net worth of the husband, for example, and the comparative misery of living with him. Those were important factors. It ought to cost more to kill an obnoxious millionaire than to bump a good-natured and uninsured pauper. It only stood to reason.

  Three thousand dollars for murder.

  Three thousand dollars.

  Three thousand dollars and not even a note that said good-bye. Three thousand dollars and not a word, not a return address, nothing. Three thousand dollars as a kiss-off, with a plain envelope plainly saying It’s ove
r, you’re being paid for everything, go away and forget me and to hell with you. Three thousand dollars’ worth of very cold shoulder.

  With three thousand dollars you can buy two hundred thousand cigarettes. I smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. Three thousand dollars would keep me in cigarettes, then, for almost fourteen years. With three thousand dollars you can buy four hundred fifths of good bourbon, or one fairly good new car, or three hundred acres of very cheap land. With three thousand dollars you can buy thirty good suits, or one hundred pairs of good shoes, or three thousand neckties. You can shoot pool for six thousand consecutive hours if you want.

  Three thousand dollars for murder.

  It was not nearly enough.

  What surprised me was the strange calm that had come over me, probably because the full impact hadn’t reached me yet. I was seeing everything in a different light—Mona, myself, the whole picture of the curious little game we had played. I was her pigeon all the way down the line. I killed for her, more for her than for the money. I ran to Miami and waited for her, and she ran to Vegas and forgot me.

  But why pay me at all?

  Not as a sop to her conscience, because I knew full well she didn’t have one. Not to even things out, because three thousand dollars was hardly a fair share.

  Why?

  I thought about it, and I came up with two answers that seemed to fit. One of them was sensible enough. Without some kind of word from her, I’d panic. I’d wonder where she was and I’d try to get in touch with her. Eventually I’d find some way to bollix things up. She didn’t want that to happen, so she had to let me know I was being brushed off. Her way was perfect—no note, no call, no wire. Just properly anonymous money.

  The other answer could make sense only to Mona. She was a girl who was used to having things break right with her. Maybe, if she gave me a little piece of change, I would go away and disappear. Maybe I’d be happy with my tiny cut and leave her alone. Maybe I’d take the dough, given to me out of the goodness of her heart, and skip with it. Wishful thinking. But Mona was a wishful person.