Grifter's Game

by Lawrence Block

  “Shut up.”

  She looked as though she had been slapped.

  “You don’t have to talk,” I said. “I’ll talk. But first we get rid of your friend.”

  “He wasn’t my friend.”

  “You looked pretty friendly there for a few seconds.”

  She swallowed. “He wasn’t like you, Joe. Nobody was. You were always the best. You—”

  “Save it,” I said. I was annoyed at her for trying that. She should have been able to do better. “We’re getting rid of your friend,” I said again. “Then we talk.”

  I walked over to the phone, picked it up and asked for the bell captain. He was there in no time.

  “Upstairs,” I said, “in eight-oh-four. A little job I’d like you to do for me. A favor.”

  “This is the jealous lover?”

  “The same.”

  “Still feeling generous?”

  “Very. Still greedy?”

  A low chuckle. “Be right up,” he said, and rang off.

  I checked Hair-and-Shoulders. He was still out. “Dress him,” I told her. “In a hurry. Get his clothes on. You don’t have to make him look beautiful but get him dressed.”

  She went to work.

  “The bell captain’ll be here in a minute,” I went on. “Don’t get cute. You won’t be able to carry it off. I’ll take us both to the chair if I have to.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “You sure of that?”

  No answer. She went on dressing him and I waited for the bell captain. A few minutes later there was a knock on the door, quite discreet, and I let him in.

  I gave him another hundred. “Our friend had an accident,” I said. “Too much to drink. Then he fell down and hurt himself. Somebody ought to take him home.”

  He looked at Shoulders, then at me. “A lovely accident,” he said. “It couldn’t happen to a more deserving fellow. Not stiff, is he?”

  I shook my head. “But tired,” I said. “I’m tired, too. I’d carry him back to his apartment but I really need my sleep. I thought maybe you’d take care of him for me.”

  He smiled.

  “One more thing,” I said. “The lady and I would like a certain amount of privacy. For quite awhile. No phone calls, no knocks at the door. Can you take care of that?”

  He looked at Mona, then back at me. “A cinch.”

  I waited there while he picked up Shoulders. He draped him over his own shoulder and smiled sadly at me. Then he carried him out of the room like a sack of wet laundry and I closed the door after him and slid the bolt home.

  She turned to look at me. This time her eyes were very wide with the fear showing through them. Breathing wasn’t easy for her.

  “Are you going to kill me, Joe?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then what do you want? Money? You can have half of it, Joe. There’s so much. More than I need, more than you need. You can have half. Is that fair enough? I’ll give you half, I was going to give you half anyway, and—”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “It’s the truth, Joe. I—”

  “Don’t lie.”

  She stopped talking and looked at me. Her eyes were hurt. She was telling me with her eyes that I shouldn’t call her a liar, it wasn’t nice. I should be nice to a pretty girl like her.

  “No lies,” I said. “We’re going to play a brand new game. It’s called To Tell the Truth. Like on television.”

  She looked very nervous. I lit a cigarette and handed it to her. She needed it.

  “You were damned good,” I told her. “You were so good that you didn’t even have to cover all the loopholes. You let me see the holes in your story and I wrote them off as coincidences. That was very good.”

  I remembered the Hitchcock movie I saw in Cleveland. You can get away with coincidences if your direction is tight enough. And Mona was a fine director.

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” I said. “Keith was supposed to be a heroin importer. That was his business. And you weren’t supposed to know a thing about it. That should have sounded fishy right at the beginning. How in the hell would he run a game like that without you knowing? And why would he take you along to Atlantic City while he was working a deal? He wasn’t on vacation—he was hauling a load for Max Treger and you knew the score right from the start. That was a cute bit.”

  She looked unhappy.

  “Here’s the way I figure it,” I went on. “You were at the station. You saw me pick up Keith’s bags. He didn’t, but you did. You could have stopped me right then and there but that was too easy. Your mind was starting to buzz, wheels were turning. There might be an angle in it for you. So you didn’t say a word.

  “So I picked up the luggage, and then you picked me up. You took your time, maybe, but you sure as hell didn’t sit on your hands. You found me on the beach, made a date with me, and met me on the beach that night. And you let me figure out who you were by inches. L. Keith Brassard’s pretty little wife. You let me take two and two and put them together until they came up five.”

  “I liked you.”

  “You were nuts about me. You were right on hand the next morning with the chambermaid routine. You knew I had the heroin but that was all you knew. Somewhere there had to be something for you. You were sniffing around. Hell, even the way you woke me up was beautiful. You shook me and blabbered about finding Keith’s bags in my closet. It was lovely. You didn’t even have to fake being confused. You were confused, all right. You couldn’t find the horse and that confused the daylights out of you.”

  I stopped and shook my head. Saying it aloud was somehow different from running it through my mind. Everything fit perfectly into place and there was no room left for doubt. It all added up with nothing out of place.

  “If the horse had been there you probably would have disappeared with it. God knows what you would have done with it—maybe tried to swing a deal on your own, maybe tried to sell it back to Keith or something. God knows. But you saw that you couldn’t get it back. And your mind went on working. Maybe you could use me, get me to kill Keith for you. That was a good idea, wasn’t it?

  “And you played it perfectly, made me suggest it, let me act as though it was my idea from the beginning. You were tired of him. He was beginning to get in the way and you wanted out. But you wanted the money and maybe I could get it for you. You were cool about it, Mona. You were perfect.”

  “It wasn’t like that, Joe—”

  “The hell it wasn’t. It was that simple. So simple it never occurred to me. You faked everything beautifully. Even the bed part. You pretended to fall in love with me. You acted so perfectly I fell on my face.”

  Her face was funny. Very sad, mournful. I looked into her eyes and tried to probe. They were opaque.

  So I let go of it. I sat there and looked at her and she looked back at me. I smoked another cigarette. When she talked, finally, her voice was just a little bit more than a whisper. There was no pretense left. I knew that she would tell me the truth now because there was no longer any reason for her to lie. I knew, I understood. And, as a result, I could no longer be lied to. The lies would only bounce at her.

  She said: “There’s more, Joe.”

  “There is?”

  A slow nod.

  “Then tell me about it. I’m a good listener.”

  “You’d like to believe it was just the money,” she said. “It wasn’t. Oh, in the beginning the money was most of it. I’ll admit that. But then … then we were together and it was … more … than just the money. It was us, too. I thought about what it would be like, you and me together, and I thought about it and—”

  She broke off. The room was noisy with silence. I drew on my cigarette.

  “And somewhere along the line it turned into just the money again. Because you didn’t need me anymore.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What else?”

  She thought it over for a moment or two before answering. “Because you killed him,”
she said.

  “Huh?”

  “You killed him,” she repeated. “Oh, we were both guilty. Legally, that is. I know all that. But … inside, when I thought about it, you were the one who killed him. And if I went to you I killed him, too. But if I was alone by myself it didn’t work out that way. I could pretend he just … died. That somebody killed him but that I myself had nothing to do with it.”

  “Did it work?”

  She sighed. “Maybe. I don’t know. It was starting to work. Then I thought about you and I knew you were waiting for me in Miami and wondering what was wrong. And I thought that you had to get something for … what you did. That’s when I sent you the money. The three thousand dollars.”

  “I didn’t know you had a conscience.”

  She managed a smile. “I’m not that bad.”

  “No?”

  “Not that bad. Bad, but not rotten. Not really.”

  She was right. And I realized, somehow, that I had known this all along. A strange sensation.

  “What now, Joe?”

  Her words shattered silence. I knew what was coming next but it didn’t seem right to tell her. I wanted to stretch the moment out for half of eternity. I didn’t want what now to come up just yet. Neither of us was ready for it.

  “Joe?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You said you weren’t going to kill me. Did you change your mind, Joe?”

  I told her I wasn’t going to kill her.

  “Then what do you want?”

  I put out my cigarette. I took a breath. The air in the room was very thick, or seemed to be. Breathing was difficult.

  “What I wanted all along,” I heard myself say.

  “To marry me?”

  I nodded.

  “You want to marry me,” she said. Her voice had a light, almost airy quality to it. She was talking as much to herself as to me, testing the words. “Well, all right. I … it’s not very romantic. But if that’s what you want, it’s all right with me. I won’t argue.”

  I heard her words and listened past them. I tried once more for a picture of marital bliss and once more it wouldn’t come into focus. The only image I got was the one I’d visualized earlier. It wouldn’t work the way she wanted it.

  I wished to heaven it would. But it wouldn’t, not without my little solution. My method was the only way, much as I was beginning to dislike it.

  So I sat next to her, close to her, and I smiled gently at her. She returned the smile, hesitantly. Her world was beginning to return to focus now. There we were, smiling at each other, and pretty soon everything was going to be all right. A slight change in plans, of course, but nothing drastic.

  I said: “I’m sorry, Mona.”

  Then I hit her. I got the right spot, just over the bridge of the nose, and I did not hit too hard. A hard blow there breaks off parts of the frontal bone and sends it into the brain. But I was gentle. All I did was knock her out—she lost consciousness at once and fell very limp into my arms.

  When she came to a few minutes later there was a gag in her mouth. Strips of bedsheet tied her feet together and other strips held her hands behind her back.

  She stared at me and the expression on her face was one of sheer and unadulterated terror.

  “Someday you’ll adjust to this,” I told her. “Someday you’ll understand. I don’t expect you to understand now. But you will, in time.”

  I took the two packages from my jacket pocket. The paper sack, tightly rolled, and the neat leather kit. I unrolled the paper sack and took out one of the little black capsules. I opened the leather kit and let her see what was inside.

  She gasped.

  “Funny,” I said. “The way we always come back to this. Keith sold it, I bought it. You know the funniest part of it? I had to pay good money for this stuff. I threw away a boxful of it to frame Keith, left a fortune’s worth to make things look groovy for the New York cops. And here we are again. Full circle.”

  I took the small spoon from the leather kit. It was the kind of spoon you stir your coffee with in a café espresso in Greenwich Village. I settled the capsule on the spoon, then got out my cigarette lighter and flicked it. I held the spoon over the flame and watched the heroin melt. My hand was surprisingly steady.

  I looked at Mona. Her eyes on the flame from the lighter were the eyes of a cat in front of a fire. Hot ice.

  “You’re just too independent,” I said. “You live inside yourself. And when people take too much from you, too much of you, you run away and hide. That’s no good.”

  She didn’t answer, of course. Hell, there was a gag in her mouth. But I wondered what she was thinking.

  “So you’re going to be a little less independent. You’re going to have something to depend on.”

  I picked up the hypodermic needle. I pushed the plunger all the way in, stuck the tip of the needle into the melted heroin on the spoon. When I let the plunger out again the needle filled with liquid heroin.

  The needle looked very large. Very dangerous. Mona’s eyes were round and I could hear the wheels turning in her head. She didn’t want to believe it but she had to.

  “Don’t be frightened,” I said, stupidly. “It isn’t that bad, not when you have money. You take so many shots a day and you function almost as well as a normal person. You know what group has the largest percentage of addicts in the country? Doctors. Because they have access to the stuff. They’re morphine addicts, generally, but it’s about the same thing. And they get all they need. If you never have withdrawal symptoms it’s not so bad. Not as rough on your system as alcohol, for example.”

  She didn’t even hear me. And I was being cruel, taking too much time to do what I had to do. I stopped talking.

  I found a good spot in the fleshy part of her thigh. Later I could graduate her to the main line, one of the big veins that lead straight to the heart. But skin-popping was fine for the time being. I didn’t want to get her sick from an overdose.

  I held up the needle. I stuck it into her and rammed the plunger all the way in. She tried to scream when it hit but the gag was in her way and the only sound that came out was a small snort through her nose.

  Then the heroin hit and she went off to Dreamland.

  14

  It took her an hour to come out of it. She was still slightly drugged so I took the gag off. There wasn’t much chance of her giving out with a yell. I asked her how she felt.

  “All right,” she said. “I suppose.”

  We talked for a few minutes about very little. I put the gag back on and went downstairs. There was a newsstand in the lobby and I picked up a few paperback books. I went back to the room and sat around reading until it was time for her next shot.

  She didn’t fight the second quite as much as the first.

  That set the pattern. We stayed there for three days, with me going down intermittently for food. Every four or five hours she got her shot. The rest of the time we stayed in the room. Once or twice I untied her completely and we made love, but it was not very good at all. It would get better.

  “I’m sick of Tahoe,” I told her one morning. “I want a few grand. I’ll buy a car and we’ll go to Vegas.”

  “Use your own money.”

  “I haven’t got enough.”

  “Then go to hell.”

  I could have hit her, or threatened her, or merely ordered her to give me the money. But this was as good a time as any for the test. Instead I shrugged and waited. I waited until her shot was half an hour overdue. Then she called my name.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I … want a shot.”

  “That’s nice. I want four grand. Where are you keeping it?”

  She shrugged as if it didn’t matter. But I could see the need beginning to build in her, the nervousness behind those eyes, the tension buried in those muscles. She told me where the money was. I found it, then got out the kit and cooked her up another fix. This time she was visibly grateful when the heroin took hold. I
t was a mainline shot this time and it reached her faster than the others.

  I paid cash for the car, a nice new Buick with a lot under the hood and so much chrome outside that it looked like a twenty-fifth-century cathouse on wheels. I loaded her into the car and we drove back to Vegas. She was very docile on the trip. We got to Vegas, reclaimed my room at the Dunes, and it was time for her shot.

  I do not know how long it takes to turn a person into an addict. I do not know how long it took with Mona. Addiction is a gradual process. I merely pushed the process along, let the addiction pile up. She became a little more nearly hooked with every passing shot. Hooked physically and emotionally. It’s a double-barreled thing. But sooner or later, it happens.

  “I’m leaving,” she said.

  I looked at her. It was two in the afternoon, a Friday afternoon. We were still at the Dunes. Two hours ago she had had a shot. In two hours she’d be due for another. She was wearing a red jersey dress with a simple string of pearls around her neck. Her shoes were black suede with high heels. And she was telling me that she was leaving.

  I asked her what she meant.

  “Leaving,” she said. “Leaving you. Walking out, Joe. You don’t tie me up any more. It’s very sweet of you. So I’m walking out on you.”

  “And not coming back?”

  “And not coming back.”

  “You’re hooked,” I told her. “You’re a junkie. Try walking out and you’ll wind up crawling back. Who do you think you’re kidding?”

  “I’m not hooked.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “I know it.”

  “Then I know who you’re kidding,” I said. “You’re kidding yourself. So long.”

  She left. And I waited for her to come back, waited past the time when the shot was due.

  And she came back.

  She did not look like the same girl. Her face was a dead fishbelly white and her hands couldn’t stay still. She was twitching uncontrollably. She hurried into the room and threw herself into a chair.

  “You walked out,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re back already. That’s a pretty quick trip.”

  “Please,” she said. Just that—please.