HCC 115 - Borderline

by Lawrence Block

  A little excitement. That was all she needed—just a little excitement. A little stacked-blonde excitement, to be precise.

  She laughed, wondering what it would be like. She tried to imagine herself walking into Delia’s Place and asking the headwaiter to fix her up with the blonde. He’d probably sell tickets.

  What would he do, for God’s sake? What would he say? Well, she would find out soon enough.

  * * *

  They had his picture on the front page. It was a two-column cut about four inches square and it wasn’t a good likeness at all, the same picture they had run in the Tulsa papers. But he was glad to see any picture at all. The early editions hadn’t even had his name let alone his picture. And here it was, right smack dab in the middle of the front page.

  He read the article all the way through. Outside of the identification, it didn’t have much that was new. The police were working, it said, on a wide variety of clues. He felt like laughing aloud. Clues? He had spelled it out for them by leaving bloody fingerprints on the wall over Audrey’s bed. What more did they need in the way of clues? They knew everything they had to know. Everything but where he was, and they’d have to work some to find that out.

  Of course, he thought, it was only a matter of time. They would block roads, would throw a cordon around El Paso and Juarez, and gradually they would draw the net tighter until they had him in it. Any day they would check the hotel he was in right now, and when they did they would have him. No sense sitting around waiting to be captured. No time.

  That night he had placed his razor under the mattress. Now he took it out and opened it, rubbing his thumb across the blade. It was duller than it had been when he had bought it. The blade had done hard work cutting through the bones of Audrey’s toes and fingers. Naturally it had lost a certain amount of its keenness. Maybe he should have bought the leather strop after all.

  He got to his feet, put his clothes on again. It was dinner time and he was hungry. He wondered if they would recognize him outside from the photo in the papers. He guessed that they wouldn’t. The picture showed him with a prison brushcut and he didn’t look like that at all. Besides, if he stayed in his room all the time he would die slowly of starvation.

  Outside he found a chili joint and had a howl of hot chili with cheese and a cup of soup. The razor was not under his mattress now. It was in his pocket, ready for action.

  Because, he thought, it was time. Killing time. He left the chili joint and began walking around the city. It was early and the sky was light, but he had learned something the night before, had gained a valuable lesson during the wonderful time he had spent with Audrey. The lesson was this—you did not need the cloak of darkness, did not need silent and unlighted streets. You needed only privacy.

  He knew where to find privacy. You walked until you found a certain type of street, and then everyone was all too happy to offer you privacy. From there on, it was easy.

  When he had walked for half an hour he found the area he was searching for. Crib Row, the cheap-whore section of town. There were row upon row of one-room shanties, each painted the same drab gray, and each with a woman in front seated upon either a cane chair or an upended orange crate. They shouldn’t have started that early in the evening, he thought. In the light, they were too ugly. They should wait until darkness.

  But it didn’t matter.

  He walked along a crib-lined street, waiting. A woman clutched at his arm, her dull eyes bright with promise. She told him in poor English just what she would do for him.

  She was too old, and pregnant as well. He kept walking.

  “Frenchie, Joe?”

  Last night he had been Mac; today, he was Joe. The girl who offered herself was younger than the rest, maybe twenty-five, maybe even less. Her face was not pretty at all and her chest was flat, which explained what she was doing on Crib Row. But she was young.

  “Frenchie,” she said eagerly, earnestly. “Ony a dollar, Joe. You wanna hot frenchie?”

  So his name was Joe, for a while. He put his hand in his pocket. Misreading the gesture, she reached forward and patted him with her fingers. His hand found the razor and held it.

  “Let’s go,” he said. She stood up and he followed her into the shack and closed the door.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Simon was a big man, red in the face, thick in the middle. His hands were pudgy. A few of the blood vessels in his nose were broken, suggestive of high blood pressure rather than alcoholism. He stuck out a hand and Marty shook it. A dead-fish handshake, Marty thought. The kind that made you want to go and wash your hands.

  “You’re Granger,” he said. “Right?”

  “Right.”

  “l got a pair of decks here. Bicycle brand, unopened. Good enough for you?”

  “Fine.”

  “What do they call you? Marty?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Have a drink, Marty? Room service sent me up a bottle of Chivas and a pail of ice. Join me?”

  “Not just yet.”

  They sat down in folding chairs on opposite sides of a small card table, evidently also provided by room service. Marty watched as Simon broke open a deck and shuffled it. He riffled the cards elaborately. All right, Marty thought. So you’ve seen a deck before. I’m duly impressed.

  “Marty? Not to offend you, but when I play with a stranger I like to see some front money. You understand?”

  “You want to be able to collect when you win. It makes sense.”

  He took out his wallet and spread bills on the table. There were a lot of them. Simon smiled graciously and waved a pudgy hand at the bills. Marty stuffed them back in his wallet.

  “Now if you want the same privilege—”

  “Forget it,” Marty told him. “You’re driving a Cad, the way I hear it. A Cad is worth more than either of us is going to win or lose.”

  Simon was still shuffling the cards. “The game is Hollywood,” he said. “Spades double, twenty for gin, ten for undercutting. Hundred and fifty points makes a game, ten points a box, a hundred for game. A dollar a point.”

  “That’s a big game.”

  “Too big?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Simon put the pack on the table. “Cut for deal,” he said. They cut. Marty drew an eight of hearts, while Simon cut to the jack of diamonds.

  “Deal,” Marty said.

  * * *

  Weaver was strangely calm now. He was in the shanty with the young prostitute, and his hand was in his pocket, holding onto the razor. The shanty was a mess, underclothing heaped in a corner of the little room. The place stank.

  Again, he thought, he was doing a favor for a girl. This Mexican whore had less of a life than Audrey. She sold herself for a dollar, sat in front of her filthy crib begging men to make a tramp out of her. Death would probably be a pleasure for her. The poor thing had nothing to lose.

  “Frenchie,” she said.

  He decided that she didn’t know much English. She had a feeble-minded look about her. He told her to take off her clothes and she stared at him. He made motions to go with the words, pulling vaguely at his own clothing and then pointing to her. She got the idea and smiled hugely at him. Her teeth, he saw, were worse than his own. Yellow and decayed. It made him a little sick to look at her teeth.

  She began to undress and he studied her body dispassionately. Small breasts, still fresh with youth but not much to look at. Thin, bony legs. Hips almost boyish. She was somehow sad when fully dressed, but she was far more pathetic with no clothes on. Poor creature, he told himself. Death would release her from her chains.

  “Frenchie,” she said again. “A dollar, Joe.”

  He gave her a dollar. She crumpled it into a paper ball and kept it in her hand, while her other hand went to his clothing. She sat down now, on the edge of the bed, and he stood in front of her. Her one hand still held tight to the crumpled dollar while her other hand made itself busy.

  Her hand did not excite him. It was wei
rd now, he thought. There was very little excitement connected with the whole affair. He was going to have sex with this girl, and he was going to kill her, and yet the primary motivation was not overtly sexual. He had not sought out this woman because of any great physical need. He had been sexually satisfied, not excited or keyed-up at all.

  Something was different. This same sort of calm, to a lesser degree, had been present when he had first taken Audrey to her room. It was more secure within him now. He had a duty to perform, and the duty was Death. This was his job, his role which he had to play. His enjoyment of the task was secondary at best.

  The girl was still handling him. Now she raised her eyes to meet his. She smiled, briefly. Then her mouth opened, and closed.

  The caress was one that Weaver had never received before. He let himself relax, let enjoyment wash over him. His hand moved from his pocket, still holding the razor. The girl did not notice it. He flipped it open with a flick of his wrist, and still she did not notice it.

  She did notice it, however, when he was holding it against her throat.

  Her eyes came up again, and this time they rolled in terror. She tried to move her head away, move it from the razor, but his other hand was at the back of her neck and she was unable to move her head at all.

  “Keep going,” he said gently. “Don’t stop.”

  She went on with what she had been doing but her eyes were on Weaver’s face. Now he was doubly excited; the caress, combined with the look of abject terror in the poor girl’s eyes, was too much to bear. Desire welled up within him and his brain swam in lust.

  “Keep going,” he said to her, again. “Keep going, whore, slut, tramp. Keep going.”

  She probably did not understand the words. But she did understand what was expected of her. She followed his orders while he held the edge of the razor at her tender throat.

  He watched her. He saw the horror in her eyes. He looked down past them and saw her poor little breasts. A day ago he would have slashed at those breasts, would have cut them to ribbons until blood dripped from them. But now he was able to restrain himself. Such extra touches were unnecessary, extraneous—just wrapping paper on the main theme. He would not hurt this girl, would not mutilate her.

  No.

  She caressed him and his passion mounted. He reached the peak in a short amount of time. And, at the precise moment, he struck quickly with the razor, slashing neatly through the girl’s throat.

  She died quickly, almost instantly. He watched her death throes with interest then dressed himself. He stopped for a moment to dip his fingers into her blood and leave fingerprints on the wall of the shanty. There was a small water pot in one corner and he used the water in it to wash the blood from the tips of his fingers.

  Then, anonymous as the customer of any inexpensive prostitute, he left her shack and closed the door after him.

  He was two blocks away before he heard the shrill screams of the girl who had discovered his victim. He walked on without even quickening his pace and an automatic smile spread across his face. His hand touched his pocket, noting with approval that the razor was still there. He kept smiling and kept walking.

  * * *

  Marty picked up his cards, fanned them, arranged them. He glanced quickly at the score pad and saw he was a little over a hundred dollars down. Nothing much at a dollar a point. Hell, they were just getting started. If the final count didn’t run a thou one way or the other, it would be a hell of a tight evening.

  They had been playing for half an hour, and Marty was beginning to get a line on Simon’s game. Simon wasn’t a bad player. Marty would have been surprised if he had been; bad players can’t play dollar-a-point gin very long without running out of money. Simon played a tight game. He knew the mathematics of the game and he had a good card memory. Those were the two main ingredients.

  But Marty was confident. Simon may have been a gin player, he thought, but he himself was a gambler. When card ability was even, you had to play the man along with the cards. You had to case his game and find a way to throw him off stride. This was half of poker, where the cards didn’t mean as much as what you could do with them. But it was also part of gin, if only a small part. It was enough to make a difference.

  Simon liked to lie back and wait for gin. With the gin bonus twenty-five points and the box bonus only ten points, it wasn’t a bad notion. But there was a way to knock it askew. A few fast knocks would get Simon worried. Then, with the right timing, he could get undercut a few times. And by then he’d start to wobble on the ropes.

  Marty knocked early, won the hand and picked up all of five points. He got down quick the next hand for fifteen points. The next hand he did the same thing, getting just two points that time.

  Simon came back the next hand, or tried to. He knocked with three, and Marty was sitting pretty on two points for an undercut.

  “You play a funny game,” Simon said.

  “I don’t play too much gin. My game is poker.”

  “I never liked it.”

  Marty riffled the cards. He dealt, turned up the twenty-first card. It was the five of spades.

  “This hand’s double,” he said. He picked up his hand, fanned it, and concentrated on the game.

  * * *

  Meg had dinner at Giardi’s, the Italian restaurant where she had eaten her first day in El Paso. She sat alone at a small table at the rear and ordered scampi fra diavolo with a bottle of the best chianti. The shrimps were delicious and the spaghetti was fine. She ate a full meal, drank the whole bottle of sour wine, and left the waiter a good tip. When she went outside the air was far cooler. The rain had stopped shortly after Marty awakened her, and the afternoon had been warm, but now it was fine, not too cool and not too hot.

  She took Marty’s advice, in part. She left Giardi’s and got out of El Paso. She went across the border, to Juarez. In a small cafe near the plaza she ordered tequila and ignored the stares of the cafe’s other customers. She drank her tequila and tried to think straight.

  As well as she could remember, the lesbian act at Delia’s Place had started around ten at night. It was hard to determine how long the act lasted, since it wasn’t the sort of thing you could watch while paying attention to the time. But she guessed that it lasted somewhere between fifteen minutes and a half hour. Maybe closer to half an hour, since they made quite a production out of the number.

  So she figured on the blonde being ready for action around ten-thirty. She didn’t want to watch the floor show again; it would be a little too much, seeing it two nights in a row. She wasn’t interested in watching, anyway. She was interested in getting into the act.

  In a way, it was less than ridiculous. She was a normal, healthy American woman who, up until a very short time ago, had been married to a rich man in Chicago. But she had since come a long ways from Borden Rector. The four years of sexual and emotional stagnation had made a different woman out of her. Everything had been repressed, bottled up, and now everything was exploding now that someone had taken the cork out.

  Where had it started, exactly? There were a dozen answers to that one, but the most logical was the simplest. It had started the minute the divorce decree had come through. Once she was legally free of Borden Rector, once she was no longer his wife and no longer a married woman at all, she was able to let herself go. All the rest had been inevitable.

  If she had not bought the pictures in Juarez, she would have been excited elsewhere, by something else. A movie or a magazine would have done what the pictures did. And if she had not been picked up by Marty Granger, some other man would have found her and would have taken her to bed. The floor show at Delia’s Place took the top off a lot of things, but some other stimulant would have had the same effect upon her sooner or later. The blonde—the little girl with chunky breasts and a schoolgirl face—was the final object of desire. But the instincts had been there all the time, and would sooner or later have come to the surface, no matter where Meg went or what she did.

&nbs
p; She sipped her tequila, lit a cigarette. A man at the bar, a very thin Mexican, was looking her up and down and smiling seductively. There was something very sexy about him but at the moment she was not interested. She wished he would look somewhere else.

  Instead, he approached her table. In mildly accented English he asked if he might sit with her.

  “I’m waiting for a friend,” she said.

  “May I wait with you?”

  “I’d rather wait alone.”

  He took the hint and walked sadly back to the bar. She sipped more tequila. Maybe she should have let him sit down, she thought. Maybe she didn’t want the blonde after all. Maybe the lesbian bit was just a reaction to the way Marty had acted that morning, just a plate of forbidden fruit with a sign on it that said Eat Me.

  There was a way to find out. All she had to do was find another man and let him take her to a bed. Afterward, she would know whether or not she wanted the blonde. Maybe the man would erase any lesbian desires that she had. If that was the case, it would be pointless to find the blonde. She could stick to men.

  She did nothing about it, because she didn’t have to. She finished a cigarette and started another, and as she was finishing that one the Mexican came once again to her table, a hopeful light in his eyes. He rested his hands on the top of the table and leaned over.

  “Your friend has not arrived,” he said.

  She leaned forward, too, letting him look down the front of her dress. She could feel his eyes burning the tops of her breasts and this excited her. It seemed to excite him as well. His eyes were gleaming.

  “May I join you, now?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No,” she said again, getting to her feet. “No, I’m bored with this bar. Have you a place where we can go?”

  He smiled broadly now and took her arm.

  * * *

  Cassie said, “I can hardly wait, Lily. I mean, to do it again tonight. I get a bang out of it. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” Lily said.

  “I can’t wait at all, is what it is. I want some now, Lily. Before we go over to Delia’s.”