Lucky at Cards

by Lawrence Block

  The window stuck the first time I tried it. I worked on it, got it open. The courtyard in back was littered with trash and broken wine bottles. In the back of the courtyard there was a driveway that ran through to Tupper on the other side of the block. I closed the window. I tried it again, and this time it opened easily.

  It would open as easily on Monday.

  Monday.

  Monday was going to be an important day. The last letter on Murray’s typewriter had Monday’s date on top. And Monday was the day when I would wear the shabby suit and the snap-brim hat for the final time. August Milani was going to die on Monday. Murray Rogers was going to kill him.

  11

  Friday I sold a unit and a half of our current syndication during the morning without leaving my desk.

  I had a lazy lunch in the Panmore Men’s Grill with Jack Kimball, another of Perry’s salesmen. We ate Welsh rarebits and drank Dutch beer and talked shop for two hours. I spent the afternoon looking over some brochures on new syndicates Perry was thinking about handling. There was a bowling alley in Baltimore with a fifteen percent payout, a shopping center in New Rochelle, a St. Louis apartment house. I thought the shopping center offered the safest return and would be the easiest to push, and I typed up a memo to Perry with my recommendation. At five o’clock he handed me a check for my commissions on sales to date. Even with the five-hundred buck advance chopped off, the sum was a decent amount.

  I won money at the poker game that night. We played at Ed Hart’s place in a downstairs game room similar to Murray’s. I wound up eighty bucks ahead, mostly by honest play with a few assists from sleight-of-hand. The cheating, such as it was, was almost automatic. Like the palmed-off five spot at the lunch counter a week or so earlier. That sort of habit is a hard one to break. I played fairly well and the cards ran my way, so even without a little of the best of it I would have cleared fifty bucks or so. The cheating was worth the extra thirty to me.

  Saturday I slept late, soaked in a tub, cracked a fresh fifth of scotch, drove around town aimlessly, took Barb to dinner. We wound up going to a movie, finally. I held her hand through the show, and now and then she gave me a little squeeze.

  Would I hold hands with Joyce? No, of course not. We might leave the movie in a hurry and find a hotel room. We might watch the movie all the way through without any contact at all. But we would never sit holding hands in a theater balcony.

  We were too damned hip for that.

  After the show I suggested going some place and drinking. Barb said she had scotch at her place. “The seats are comfortable and the privacy can’t be beat,” she said. “And the prices are eminently reasonable, Bill.”

  So at her house we sat on her couch and drank her scotch out of coffee mugs because she couldn’t find appropriate glasses. We pretended it was Prohibition and we were in a subtle speakeasy. She did a terrible imitation of Walter Winchell announcing The Untouchables, and I poured fresh scotch into our cups, and we put Ella Fitzgerald records on the player.

  I don’t remember who suggested dancing. We wound up giving it a whirl. I held her a little closer than necessary and clomped around ponderously and tried to remember how long it had been since I’d done any dancing. That had been a big thing with Carole before we had been married. After the marriage had ended I didn’t have anyone to dance with. A card sharp doesn’t take his girls dancing or dance with them in a living room. He lets them lose his money on the dogs or the horses, takes them to hip parties or clip-joint nightclubs, and once in their apartments he beds them down as soon as possible. But I was dancing with Barbara now, and I was enjoying it.

  I kept enjoying it more. Barb’s cheek stayed next to mine. Her perfume was subtle but distinctive, a fresh, cutely sexy scent. I held her close and felt her breasts press against my chest. My arm was around her waist. Somewhere along the way my arm moved a few inches lower and pressed her flanks. They were marvelous. I drew her close and felt the warmth of her loins. She began breathing a little harder. I kissed her and she purred.

  We continued dancing. I stroked her and she danced with delicious little hip motions that racked her loins against mine and had the right effect on both of us. I wanted her with a sweet tender ache that improved as it developed. There was no urgency, just the sure feeling that sooner or later the record would end and I would have this girl and she would be divine.

  The record ended. The player shut itself off. I still held her and I still stroked her and she still made those delicious movements with her delicious hips, but we were not dancing any more. We slipped into her bedroom, and we took off all our clothes and put them neatly aside, and we rolled into bed.

  Her flesh was sweet and yielding. We took a long time loving each other. I touched all of her body, marveling over her beauty, and each caress pitched her passion higher. I kissed her breasts, teased them with my tongue. I found her with my fingers and she shivered and quivered and surged with delight.

  I sought her and found her and we were together and she moaned and she held me. We rocked together and the whole earth sang.

  Afterward Barbara cried a little, giggled a little, said that maybe she was a call girl after all, then cried some more. I drew her close and told her that everything was all right. She rolled on to her side, supporting her weight on an elbow, and looked at me.

  “It’s been so long,” she said

  “Barb—”

  “So very long…”

  I returned to my apartment and took a bottle to bed with me. The next day I didn’t do much of anything. I spoke to a few people on the phone—Barb, Joyce, Sy Daniels. I put in an appearance at the Glade and wound up spending the night there. Early Monday morning I left, changed clothes at my apartment, and went to the office.

  It was a dull day. Then it was night, and time to work.

  I stuck around the Black Sand office until Murray left. Then I carried the three onionskin copies upstairs to his office and tucked them away in a file drawer under M for Milani. I made it out of there on the double and dropped the duplicate key into a sewer. I didn’t need it anymore.

  After dinner I headed for my room at the Glade and waited for the desk clerk to go across the street and return. He made the trip every evening around eight—ducked across to the Silver Dollar and had a shot and a beer, sometimes a few extra shots if he felt like it. He was a quickie drinker, but it still took him fifteen or twenty minutes and the desk was untended during that time. This time he left at five to eight and stayed away for half an hour.

  Murray was home alone. Joyce had taken the younger daughter shopping and the older one had a date.

  When the clerk was back behind the desk everything was ready. I rolled up my left sleeve, took a penknife from my pocket, killed the germs on the blade with my cigarette lighter flame and made a good gash halfway up my forearm. It took me three tries before I could force myself to make the cut. I sprang a capillary or two and started bleeding. I bled on the bed, dripped beads of blood onto the floor. After a few seconds I opened up a band-aid and slapped it on the cut.

  Then I took a pair of hundreds from my wallet. I opened up the dresser drawer, dropped the bills on top of a flashy sport shirt and left the drawer open. After the way I had flashed money at the clerk, robbery might look like a possible motive. With money lying around like this, the cops could cross robbery off their list.

  I flipped the hat on the floor, caved in the crown with my foot. I dropped the drugstore eyeglasses and stepped on them hard enough to break both lenses. I put the frames in a pocket for the time being.

  My arm was beginning to throb a little. I gave a check to see if the cut were bleeding through the band-aid. No blood.

  There was a glass ashtray on the little table next to the bed. I knocked it to the floor. The damned thing bounced around crazily without breaking and wound up somewhere under the bed. I dug out the receptacle and tried again. It shattered.

  I picked the phone off the hook, set it down. The desk clerk started babbling hello a
t nobody in particular. There was a fifty-nine cent cap pistol in my pocket, a recent purchase from a notions store. I took out the pistol and squeezed the trigger. It made a nice noise, left a gunpowder smell hanging in the air. Then I picked up the telephone, and the voice I used was Murray Rogers.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just knocked the phone off the hook, that’s all. Forget it.”

  I hung up before he could think it over. In a minute or two, if he had half a brain, he would put two and two together and deliver the desired five. I took a quick breath, then tugged the pillowcase off the pillow the management had stuck at the head of the bed. I used the pillowcase to wipe up some of the blood from the floor. Then I threw open the window and dropped down into the courtyard.

  I had the pillowcase in a pocket, the hat and eyeglass frames in one hand. I tossed the hat to the ground, flipped the frames near it. The next step hurt like hell. I yanked off the band-aid, opened up the cut on my forearm and left a trail of blood leading away from the window toward the rear of the courtyard. Then I re-fastened the band-aid over the gash and took off my jacket and dragged it along the ground for twenty or thirty yards. I put on the jacket again and got the hell out of there. I didn’t run. I walked quickly to the back of the courtyard and out through the driveway. So far as I could determine, nobody had observed me.

  My car was parked at the curb. I drove away from the neighborhood as fast as you can drive without risking a ticket. When I reached Murray’s house, I parked a few doors down the street. I hurried up his driveway to the rear of the house, opened a gun-metal garbage can, stuffed the bloody pillowcase into it. I put the lid on, clambered into the car and headed for my apartment.

  I didn’t start to shake until I was inside my apartment with the door shut. Then my hands trembled and my heart pretended it was a triphammer. I poured a shot of scotch and spilled half of it on the way to my mouth. The second shot steadied me.

  The cut on my arm had opened up again. The blood had soaked through the band-aid to the shirt and through the shirt to the jacket. That didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have much use for shirt or jacket again. I tried to make sure of the cut now. I washed it out with scotch since it had a higher alcohol content than anything else in the house, and then I fixed up the wound with a gauze pad and a few strips of adhesive.

  The Broadway suit and the shirt and the loud tie all were dumped into the incinerator. There would be traces there—buttons that didn’t burn, things like that. That wouldn’t much matter. The police wouldn’t be looking in my incinerator for Milani’s clothing. The police would be looking for Milani himself, for one thing, and they wouldn’t have any interest in one William Maynard to begin with. The shoes I put into the closet along with the little cap pistol. In a day or two I would flip them into a trash barrel somewhere.

  I poured another drink and tossed it off. The gash in my arm felt better now, either because the cut was healing or because the liquor was anesthetizing it. I sat down on the couch and turned on the radio, dialing in a station that gave you music and spot news twenty-four hours a day. There was a news flash at nine but it had nothing about Milani.

  The hell—the plan couldn’t really miss now. The stage was set perfectly. The desk clerk at the Glade would tell the cops about a seedy criminal type from Brooklyn named August Milani who had acted as though he were going to come into a fortune, who did come into the fortune, and who told the clerk that he, Milani, made the fortune by keeping a secret for a lawyer named Murray Rogers. The cops would toothcomb Milani’s room and find the aftermath of a murder. Room knocked around, bloodstains, a broken ashtray, shattered eyeglass lenses, the faint smell of gunpowder. The desk clerk would admit he had been away for half an hour or so, obviously the logical time for Rogers to move in on the scene.

  And there would be plenty more. Rogers’ receptionist would tell the police about a nasty-voiced man who had kept trying to talk to Rogers, and Murray would try to explain that the man had been some nutty insurance salesman. The authorities would find the letters in the Rogers file. Murray would deny writing them. The authorities would find the bloody pillowcase in the Rogers garbage can, and the blood would match the stains in Milani’s hotel room. Murray would say he didn’t know how the pillowcase had found its way into the garbage can. The police would ask Murray who Whitlock was and what hold Milani had over him. Murray Rogers couldn’t tell the police because he wouldn’t know anything about Whitlock or a “hold.” The authorities would keep on asking and Murray would never be able to come up with the answers.

  The desk clerk would remember the messenger. The messenger would tell the cops he picked up a bundle at Murray’s office and gave it to Milani in person. Murray would say he didn’t know anything about it. The police would ask him what he did with Milani’s body and he would try to make them believe he never met any Milani, that Milani was just a persistent voice on the telephone.

  Murray Rogers, the poor bastard, didn’t have a chance.

  I caught a news flash at nine-thirty. A man had been assaulted or possibly murdered at a downtown hotel. Police were working on the case and had several good leads. They expected to wrap it up quickly. No names were mentioned, but the confidence was obvious. The cops had this one in the bag already and they didn’t care who knew it.

  I sat there and listened to more music and wondered what was going to go wrong. Something had to go wrong. This wasn’t a deal off a stacked deck in a bust-out joint. This was a big one. One little snag somewhere along the way would blow the works to hell and back.

  The telephone rang at ten minutes of ten like a small bomb and the noise shattered the comparative silence of the apartment. I reached over, switched off the radio. I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear. Her voice was music.

  “It worked,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “It worked like a charm. The cops just left and they took Murray along with them. I didn’t hear much of it. They asked him if he knew anybody named Milani. He said he didn’t. They asked again and he said that Milani was some insurance salesman but he had never met the man.”

  “And?”

  “And they zipped him up and took him to jail,” she said. “I have to hang up now. He wanted me to call his lawyer, but I decided to call you first.”

  I didn’t say anything. I felt numb now. The scheme had worked so far, it was going nicely, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

  “Darling?” A soft chuckle. “You’re a wizard, darling. You really are.”

  12

  From there on, it was everybody’s ball game. The whole town was busy for the next ten days. Murray found himself the best criminal lawyer in town, a man named Nester who handled most of the important cases in the area. He had two sets of clients—rich men in trouble, and hoods. Murray was a rich man, and he was sure as hell in trouble.

  He hired Nester. Murray also hired the local agency of a national detective outfit. He drove the lawyer and the detectives out of their minds. According to what I learned through Joyce, both Nester and the detectives took it for granted that Murray was guilty. All Nester did was try to persuade Murray to level so a way could be found to break the case. Murray kept on shouting that it was all crazy, that some bastard was framing him. And the more the detectives dug around, the guiltier Murray appeared.

  The district attorney was digging around, too. It was a colorful case—wealthy killer, shocked and pretty young wife, and enough elements of mystery to give the theory-builders a kick or two. The newspapers gave it a big play, one daily screaming for Murray’s head, and the other staying more on the solemn side.

  It was the sort of case that a politically ambitious district attorney would be well advised to win. This public prosecutor was ambitious as hell.

  Every joker had a different notion. Somebody suggested that Milani hadn’t been killed, that he was wounded and was biding his time in a gangland hideout, ready to wreak revenge on Murray as soon as he was released. Other geniuses in
sisted that Rogers hadn’t done the job himself at all, that he had hired professionals and that Milani was in the river wearing a cement overcoat. The music went round and round, and I sat back and tried not to listen.

  The grand jury was to meet on Thursday, ten days after the arrest had been made. I was out with Barb Lambert Wednesday night. We had dinner and then went over to her place for records and conversation, and I was in a mood. She misread it as concern for a close friend. She asked me what would happen to Murray Rogers.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Will he—”

  “Go to the electric chair?” I said.

  She shuddered.

  “No,” I said. “There’s not much chance of that. The prosecution has a good case, but the evidence is all circumstantial. It’s probably enough to send him to prison, but not enough to—to hang him. Or electrocute him.”

  “But how can they call it murder? Don’t they need a corpus delicti?”

  “They’ve got that.”

  “You mean Milani’s body was found?”

  “You don’t need a body for corpus delicti. All corpus delicti means is evidence that a particular crime was committed. And there’s plenty of that, body or no body.”

  There was enough for the grand jury to return an indictment, at any rate. I was in the courtroom for the hearing, along with Joyce and a few of Murray’s other friends. The prosecution’s case sounded even more damning in a courtroom with a judge and jury and batteries of lawyers on either side.

  If Murray had actually been guilty, he might have been in a position to make a better case for himself. By telling how Milani had been blackmailing him and bleeding him white, Murray could have built up a lot of sympathy, and by a little legal footwork he could have had the charge reduced all the way down to manslaughter, with a possible bid for temporary insanity or self-defense, the two traditional refuges for the accused having committed murder with extenuating circumstances.