One Night Stands; Lost weekends

by Lawrence Block

  The envelope was in his box. He removed it, closed the box, and took another cab back to Grand Central. He removed the key from the envelope without troubling to glance at the slip of paper, only noticing that the name and address were typewritten.

  He located the locker, opened it, and removed $5000, which he pocketed at once. Then he took a room at another hotel in the area.

  Once in the hotel, his whole mind and body slipped into the role of the killer, the comfortable and familiar role of the hired murderer.

  He had become a machine. The money was in his pocket; in a short while it would be in his bank account. He would now have to purchase a fresh gun from the pawnbroker on Third Avenue, pick up a silencer for the gun, place an ad in the Times announcing the change of address, and prepare himself for the job.

  The gun cost him $100. The silencer, purchased in another pawnshop a block further down Third Avenue, set him back another $25. The ad, which stated simply that Acme Services was located at 758 Grosvenor, cost very little. The ad meant, of course, that Harry Varden was now in room 758 at the Grosvenor. To avoid any confusion it was placed in the SITUATIONS WANTED, MALE column—the clients knew where to look.

  The next stop was the bank. The money was deposited to his account, quickly and easily. He walked out with a gun in his shoulder holster, a silencer in an inside jacket pocket, a slip of paper still in the envelope in his pants pocket, and the brown felt hat riding easily on his head. He was walking on familiar ground.

  The attack of nerves which the book said was inevitable at such a moment was entirely absent, and this worried him at times. Perhaps he ought to feel more. Perhaps the work should revolt him. But it didn’t, and he resolved that this was really something to be thankful for. Perhaps that was the secret of Harry Varden’s happiness; he invariably managed to mentally convert every apparent liability into an asset.

  He ate lunch before opening the envelope once again. He did this on purpose; experience had taught him that the longer he waited before learning even the victim’s name, the easier the whole process became.

  Lunch finished, he returned to the hotel room, sat down on the bed, and pulled the envelope from his pocket. He opened it, pulled out the small slip of paper, and unfolded the slip methodically.

  For a moment he was angry. For a moment the anger burned in him like a blue flame, but this was only for a moment, and the emotion passed quite rapidly. With it, the thought of a possible course of action vanished from his mind. He remembered the old maxim about a lawyer who tried his own case having a fool for a client.

  He picked up the receiver and asked for a number. When the phone was answered a soft voice said, “Hello,” in a guarded fashion.

  “Pete?” he said. “This is Harry. Look, I’ve a job for you—more work than I can handle. It’s got to be tonight. Okay?”

  “Right.”

  He smiled to himself. “Tonight at eight,” he said. “The mark’s a woman living at forty-three Riverton, in Mamaroneck. It’s exactly eight minutes’ walking time from the railroad station.”

  PSEUDO IDENTITY

  SOMEWHERE BETWEEN FOUR AND FOUR-THIRTY, Howard Jordan called his wife. “It looks like another late night,” he told her. “The spot TV copy for Prentiss was full of holes. I’ll be here half the night rewriting it.”

  “You’ll stay in town?”

  “No choice.”

  “I hope you won’t have trouble finding a room.”

  “I’ll make reservations now. Or there’s always the office couch.”

  “Well,” Carolyn said, and he heard her sigh the sigh designed to reassure him that she was sorry he would not be coming home, “I’ll see you tomorrow night, then. Don’t forget to call the hotel.”

  “I won’t.”

  He did not call the hotel. At five, the office emptied out. At five minutes after five, Howard Jordan cleared off his desk, packed up his attaché case, and left the building. He had a steak in a small restaurant around the corner from his office, then caught a cab south and west to a four-story redbrick building on Christopher Street. His key opened the door, and he walked in.

  In the hallway, a thin girl with long blond hair smiled at him. “Hi, Roy.”

  “Hello, baby.”

  “Too much,” she said, eyeing his clothes. “The picture of middle-class respectability.”

  “A mere facade. A con perpetrated upon the soulless bosses.”

  “Crazy. There’s a party over at Ted and Betty’s. You going?”

  “I might.”

  “See you there.”

  He entered his own apartment, tucked his attaché case behind a low bookcase improvised of bricks and planks. In the small closet he hung his gray sharkskin suit, his button-down shirt, his rep-striped tie. He dressed again in tight Levi’s and a bulky brown turtleneck sweater, changed his black moccasin toe oxfords for white hole-in-the-toe tennis sneakers. He left his wallet in the pocket of the sharkskin suit and pocketed another wallet, this one containing considerably less cash, no credit cards, and a few cards identifying him as Roy Baker.

  He spent an hour playing chess in the back room of a Sullivan Street coffeehouse, winning two games of three. He joined friends in a bar a few blocks away and got into an overly impassioned argument on the cultural implications of Camp; when the bartender ejected them, he took his friends along to the party in the East Village apartment of Ted Marsh and Betty Haniford. Someone had brought a guitar, and he sat on the floor drinking wine and listening to the singing.

  Ginny, the long-haired blonde who had an apartment in his building, drank too much wine. He walked her home, and the night air sobered her.

  “Come up for a minute or two,” she said. “I want you to hear what my analyst said this afternoon. I’ll make us some coffee.”

  “Groovy,” he said, and went upstairs with her. He enjoyed the conversation and the coffee and Ginny. An hour later, around one thirty, he returned to his own apartment and went to sleep.

  In the morning he rose, showered, put on a fresh white shirt, another striped tie, and the same gray sharkskin suit, and rode uptown to his office.

  IT HAD BEGUN INNOCENTLY ENOUGH. From the time he’d made the big jump from senior copywriter at Lowell, Burham & Plescow to copy chief at Keith Wenrall Associates, he had found himself working late more and more frequently. While the late hours never bothered him, merely depriving him of the company of a whining wife, the midnight train to New Hope was a constant source of aggravation. He never got to bed before two-thirty those nights he rode it, and then had to drag himself out of bed just four and a half hours later in order to be at his desk by nine.

  It wasn’t long before he abandoned the train and spent those late nights in a midtown hotel. This proved an imperfect solution, substituting inconvenience and expense for sleeplessness. It was often difficult to find a room at a late hour, always impossible to locate one for less than twelve dollars, and hotel rooms, however well appointed, did not provide such amenities as a toothbrush or a razor, not to mention a change of underwear and a clean shirt. Then too, there was something disturbingly temporary and marginal about a hotel room. It felt even less like home than did his split-level miasma in Bucks County.

  An apartment, he realized, would overcome all of these objections while actually saving him money. He could rent a perfectly satisfactory place for a hundred dollars a month, less than he presently spent on hotels, and it would always be there for him, with fresh clothing in the closet and a razor and toothbrush in the bathroom.

  HE FOUND THE LISTING IN THE CLASSIFIED PAGES—Christopher St, 1 rm, bth, ktte, frnshd, util, $90 mth. He translated this and decided that a one-room apartment on Christopher Street with bathroom and kitchenette, furnished, with utilities included at ninety dollars per month, was just what he was looking for. He called the landlord and asked when he could see the apartment.

  “Come around after dinner,” the landlord said. He gave him the address and asked his name.

  “Baker,” How
ard Jordan said. “Roy Baker.”

  After he hung up he tried to imagine why he had given a false name. It was a handy device when one wanted to avoid being called back, but it did seem pointless in this instance. Well, no matter, he decided. He would make certain the landlord got his name straight when he rented the apartment. Meanwhile, he had problems enough changing a junior copywriter’s flights of literary fancy into something that might actually convince a man that the girls would love him more if he used the client’s brand of gunk on his hair.

  The landlord, a birdlike little man with thick metal-rimmed glasses, was waiting for Jordan. He said, “Mr. Baker? Right this way. First floor in the rear. Real nice.”

  The apartment was small but satisfactory. When he agreed to rent it the landlord produced a lease, and Jordan immediately changed his mind about clearing up the matter of his own identity. A lease, he knew, would be infinitely easier to break without his name on it. He gave the document a casual reading, then signed it “Roy Baker” in a handwriting quite unlike his own.

  “Now I’ll want a hundred and eighty dollars,” the landlord said. “That’s a month’s rent in advance and a month’s security.”

  Jordan reached for his checkbook, then realized his bank would be quite unlikely to honor a check with Roy Baker’s signature on it. He paid the landlord in cash, and arranged to move in the next day. He spent the following day’s lunch hour buying extra clothing for the apartment, selecting bed linens, and finally purchasing a suitcase to accommodate the items he had bought. On a whim, he had the suitcase monogrammed “R.B.” That night he worked late, told Carolyn he would be staying in a hotel, then carried the suitcase to his apartment, put his new clothes in the closet, put his new toothbrush and razor in the tiny bathroom and, finally, made his bed and lay in it. At this point Roy Baker was no more than a signature on a lease and two initials on a suitcase.

  Two months later, Roy Baker was a person.

  THE PROCESS BY WHICH ROY BAKER’S BONES were clad with flesh was a gradual one. Looking back on it, Jordan could not tell exactly how it had begun, or at what point it had become purposeful. Baker’s personal wardrobe came into being when Jordan began to make the rounds of Village bars and coffeehouses, and wanted to look more like a neighborhood resident and less like a celebrant from uptown. He bought denim trousers, canvas shoes, bulky sweaters; and when he shed his three-button suit and donned his Roy Baker costume, he was transformed as utterly as Bruce Wayne clad in Batman’s mask and cape.

  When he met people in the building or around the neighborhood, he automatically introduced himself as Baker. This was simply expedient; it wouldn’t do to get into involved discussions with casual acquaintances, telling them that he answered to one name but lived under another, but by being Baker instead of Jordan, he could play a far more interesting role. Jordan, after all, was a square, a Madison Avenue copy chief, an animal of little interest to the folksingers and artists and actors he met in the Village. Baker, on the other hand, could be whatever Jordan wanted him to be. Before long his identity took form: he was an artist, he’d been unable to do any serious work since his wife’s tragic death, and for the time being he was stuck in a square job uptown with a commercial art studio.

  This identity he had picked for Baker was a source of occasional amusement to him. Its expedience aside, he was not blind to its psychological implications. Substitute writer for artist and one approached his own situation. He had long dreamed of being a writer, but had made no efforts toward serious writing since his marriage to Carolyn. The bit about the tragic death of his wife was nothing more than simple wish fulfillment. Nothing would have pleased him more than Carolyn’s death, so he had incorporated this dream into Baker’s biography.

  As the weeks passed, Baker accumulated more and more of the trappings of personality. He opened a bank account. It was, after all, inconvenient to pay the rent in cash. He joined a book club and promptly wound up on half the world’s mailing lists. He got a letter from his congressman advising him of the latest developments in Washington and the heroic job his elected representative was doing to safeguard his interests. Before very long, he found himself heading for his Christopher Street apartment even on nights when he did not have to work late at all.

  Interestingly enough, his late work actually decreased once he was settled in the apartment. Perhaps he had only developed the need to work late out of a larger need to avoid going home to Carolyn. In any event, now that he had a place to go after work, he found it far less essential to stay around the office after five o’clock. He rarely worked late more than one night a week—but he always spent three nights a week in town, and often four.

  Sometimes he spent the evening with friends. Sometimes he stayed in his apartment and rejoiced in the blessings of solitude. Other times he combined the best of two worlds by finding an agreeable Village female to share his solitude.

  He kept waiting for the double life to catch up with him, anticipating the tension and insecurity which were always a component of such living patterns in the movies and on television. He expected to be discovered, or overcome by guilt, or otherwise to have the error of his dual ways brought forcibly home to him. But this did not happen. His office work showed a noticeable improvement; he was not only more efficient, but his copy was fresher, more inspired, more creative. He was doing more work in less time and doing a better job of it. Even his home life improved, if only in that there was less of it.

  Divorce? He thought about it, imagined the joy of being Roy Baker on a full-time basis. It would be financially devastating, he knew. Carolyn would wind up with the house and the car and the lion’s share of his salary, but Roy Baker could survive on a mere fraction of Howard Jordan’s salary, existing quite comfortably without house or car. He never relinquished the idea of asking Carolyn for a divorce, nor did he ever quite get around to it—until one night he saw her leaving a nightclub on West Third Street, her black hair blowing in the wind, her step drunkenly unsteady, and a man’s arm curled possessively around her waist.

  His first reaction was one of astonishment that anyone would actually desire her. With all the vibrant, fresh-bodied girls in the Village, why would anyone be interested in Carolyn? It made no sense to him.

  Then, suddenly, his puzzlement gave way to absolute fury. She had been cold to him for years, and now she was running around with other men, adding insult to injury. She let him support her, let him pay off the endless mortgage on the horrible house, let him sponsor her charge accounts while she spent her way toward the list of Ten Best-Dressed Women. She took everything from him and gave nothing to him, and all the while she was giving it to someone else.

  He knew, then, that he hated her, that he had always hated her and, finally, that he was going to do something about it.

  What? Hire detectives? Gather evidence? Divorce her as an adulteress? Small revenge, hardly the punishment that fit the crime. No. No, he could not possibly do anything about it. It would be too much out of character for him to take positive action. He was the good clean-living, midtown-square type, good old Howie Jordan. He would do all that such a man could do, bearing his new knowledge in silence, pretending that he knew nothing, and going on as before.

  But Roy Baker could do more.

  From that day on he let his two lives overlap. On the nights when he stayed in town he went directly from the office to a nearby hotel, took a room, rumpled up the bed so that it would look as though it had been slept in, then left the hotel by back staircase and rear exit. After a quick cab ride downtown and a change of clothes, he became Roy Baker again and lived Roy Baker’s usual life, spending just a little more time than usual around West Third Street. It wasn’t long before he saw her again. This time he followed her. He found out that her lover was a self-styled folksinger named Stud Clement, and he learned by discreet inquiries that Carolyn was paying Stud’s rent.

  “Stud inherited her from Phillie Wells when Phillie split for the Coast,” someone told him. “She’s got s
ome square husband in Connecticut or someplace. If Stud’s not on the scene, she don’t care who she goes home with.” She had been at this, then, for some time. He smiled bitterly. It was true, he decided; the husband was really the last to know.

  He went on using the midtown hotel, creating a careful pattern for his life, and he kept careful patterns on Stud Clement. One night when Carolyn didn’t come to town, he managed to stand next to the big folksinger in a Hudson Street bar and listen to him talk. He caught the slight Tennessee accent, the pitch of the voice, the type of words that Clement used.

  Through it all he waited for his hatred to die, waited for his fury to cool. In a sense she had done no more to him than he had done to her. He half-expected that he would lose his hatred sooner or later, but he found that he hated her more every day, not only for cheating but for making him an ad man instead of a writer, for making him live in that house instead of a Village apartment, for all the things she had done to ruin every aspect of his life. If it had not been for her, he would have been Roy Baker all his life. She had made a Howard Jordan of him, and for that he would hate her forever.

  Once he realized this, he made the phone call. “I gotta see you tonight,” he said.

  “Stud?”

  So the imitation was successful. “Not at my place,” he said quickly. “One-nine-three Christopher, Apartment one-D. Seven-thirty, no sooner and no later. And don’t be going near my place.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Just be there,” he said, and hung up.

  His own phone rang in less than five minutes. He smiled a bitter smile as he answered it.

  She said, “Howard? I was wondering, you’re not coming home tonight, are you? You’ll have to stay at your hotel in town?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of work, but I hate to be away from you so much. Maybe I’ll let it slide for a night—”