Sinner Man

by Lawrence Block

  “I’m a very dramatic hood.”

  “Uh-huh.” She had her head cocked and she was looking at me in a special way she had—sizing me up, trying to look through me. It was a habit of hers. Sometimes it bothered me a little.

  “A dramatic hood,” she said. “Too dramatic. You play games with words, Nat.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I don’t know. Where did you go to college?”

  “Tuskegee Institute,” I said. “I’m passing.”

  “Uh-huh. You’re an odd one, Nat.”

  We always fenced verbally. Sometimes I thought of it as a rather involved form of foreplay. It wasn’t just that, though. And it was less fencing than wrestling. We used words like half-nelsons.

  I said, “I’m just an organization man, ma’am.”

  “The hood in the gray flannel suit?”

  “Uh-huh. The modern mobster. It’s all a business now—haven’t you heard? You need a college diploma to rob a filling station. That’s what happens when you get mass education and automation going for you.”

  “Did you explain all that to Baron when you shot him?”

  She said it casually, but it was like a casual stroke with a shiv.

  “I read about that,” I said. “The Mafia murdered him. It said so in the papers.”

  “And all you know—”

  “—is what I read in the papers. Put your head down, Annie. Relax.”

  She put her head down. I can’t say she relaxed. I took the skyway into the city, then drove around aimlessly for a while. We stopped somewhere on the north side and had a drink in a quiet neighborhood bar. There was an old Bogart movie on the television set but the picture kept rolling and the bartender kept trying to fix it. We left.

  Back in the car again I said, “I’m taking a vacation. A week or two in Las Vegas. Why don’t you come along for the ride?”

  She thought it over. “I don’t want to,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Reasons.”

  “It would be a break. A lot of sun, a comfortable hotel suite, a different floor show every night. Fifty different ways to lose money legally. All-expense-paid vacation for two. How about it?”

  “Thanks but no.”

  “Why not?”

  She asked me for a cigarette. I took out two, lit them both and gave one to her. She smoked half of it before she said anything. “Because I don’t want to be kept.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m independent. I live in a dump. Not because I have a big romantic love for dumps or for wearing a dress too many times or for working. But because it’s better that way. It would be easy to let you pay all the bills, Nat. Move in on you, let you take care of rent and clothes and everything else.”

  She finished the cigarette and threw it out of the car. “Then you’d own me,” she went on. “Then you’d have that hold, that upper hand. And I don’t want that.”

  “So pay your own way.”

  “I can’t afford it. I’m just a working girl.”

  I didn’t exactly get it. “I’m not hiring you as a slave girl. I’m just selling you a free trip to Las Vegas.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But it’s no sale, Nat.”

  I got mad. “Do you really think you can say no to me anymore? In this town?”

  She shook her head. “Because you’re such a big man now, is that it? Have you forgotten what you were when I first met you, Nat? Other people might not remember, but I do. No,” she said, “it’s not hard to say no to you, Nat. You make it easy.”

  She was wrong.

  I didn’t sleep with her that night. I went upstairs to her apartment and we had a few drinks. Then we called it a night. I left her there, went back to my car and drove back to the Stennett. I put the car away and elevated to my own apartment. It was a pretty impressive place now. Not too long after Baron’s death I had had the management get rid of their furniture and replaced it with furniture of my own. I had gone to one of the better furniture stores and picked out French Provincial pieces, expensive but worth it. The place made a good show when we had important people in from out of town and it was comfortable when I was there by myself. The hotel-room feeling was gone.

  I got a bottle of rye from the bar and poured myself a drink. I stirred it with a silver stirrer and drank most of it in a few minutes.

  Then I got on the phone.

  I called the club where Anne worked and asked for Lundgren, the skinny Swede who managed it. It took them a few minutes to find him. Then he said hello to me.

  I said, “Annie Bishop works for you. Right?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Crowley.”

  “Yeah. Well she doesn’t work there anymore.”

  “She’s quitting?”

  “She’s quitting. When she comes in, you tell her she’s quitting. You understand?”

  He understood. I hung up while he was still trying to tell me how glad he was to do me a favor. I called Noomie’s.

  “If Anne Bishop comes in,” I said, “she doesn’t get served.”

  They didn’t ask why. It was an order and their business consisted in part in obeying orders from certain people. I was one of those people. They assured me she wouldn’t be served.

  I put down the phone and finished my drink. I lit a cigarette and wondered why I was going to all this trouble just to take a girl to Las Vegas. It would have been easy enough to find some other broad who was tickled to go. It would have been even easier to tell Tony that Gordon should arrange a girl for me. They have pretty girls in Las Vegas, obliging girls, friendly girls. Girls who don’t go for verbal wrestling matches but keep their wrestling on a purely physical plane.

  So why all this trouble for Annie Bishop?

  Hell, she had it figured right. It was all a business of holds, of getting the upper hand. That was the way she saw it, the way she played it. That was the code of the jungle, or whatever the hell you want to call it. So that was the way it would go.

  I picked up the phone book again and thumbed through it. I put in a call to a man named Hankin. He was a slum landlord with tenement property all over town. He happened to own a few run-down buildings on the street Anne lived on. Including hers.

  “Nat Crowley,” I said. “You busy?”

  He’d been sleeping and he still wasn’t exactly awake. But I was Nat Crowley and he had to be nice to me if he were going to stay in business. He had tenements with too many violations in them. We fixed these things for him, and he was nice to us.

  “What can I do for you, Nat?”

  “About one of those rockpiles of yours,” I said. I gave him the address. “Do the tenants have leases?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t like leases.”

  He didn’t like leases or rent control or lots of things. I said, “There’s a tenant of yours who ought to get evicted. Anne Bishop.”

  “I know who you mean. She pays her rent first of every month, like a clock.”

  “Call her in the morning and tell her to move out within a week. Can you do that?”

  “She pays by the month, Nat. So she’s paid up through the first of October. But I can tell her to get out by then.”

  “Do that,” I said.

  “Sure, Nat. Anything I can do—”

  “I appreciate it.”

  I hung up on him and built myself a fresh drink. Then I went back to the phone and made a few more calls.

  * * *

  It took three days.

  She called me at the Stennett. It was around noon and I was asleep when the phone rang. I yawned, lit a cigarette, answered it.

  “You’re a son of a bitch, Nat,” Anne said.

  I laughed softly.

  “A real son of a bitch. Why didn’t you have a few goons come over and beat me up? Or something subtle, like acid in the face?”

  “I like your face.”

  “Uh-huh. All of a sudden I don’t have a job. All of a sudden I don’t have a roof over my head. All of a sudden I can’t even buy a dri
nk in this goddamned town. Isn’t that cute?”

  I dragged on my cigarette. “It sounds rough.”

  “Doesn’t it? You don’t issue invitations, Nat. You issue ultimatums. I don’t like ultimatums.”

  I didn’t say anything. I smoked my cigarette and let her dangle on her end of the phone.

  “No place to live, no job, nothing to do. What am I supposed to do, Nat?”

  “You should leave town.”

  “Should I?”

  “Sure. You should come to Las Vegas. With me.”

  A pause. “An ultimatum, Nat?”

  “Call it an invitation.”

  Another pause, followed by a question: “When, Nat?”

  “Pack. I’ll call the airport.”

  15

  We had a nonstop jet complete with pretty hostesses, a silken takeoff and a featherbed landing. Somebody’s hireling met us at the airport and drove us to the High Rise in a Cadillac that was still shining. Everybody drove Cadillacs in Las Vegas. They weren’t even status symbols. Just union cards.

  The High Rise was one of the big ones—a lot of glitter, a lot of lushness, big names for entertainment and roulette wheels that never quit turning. The manager called me by name and gave me a heavy handshake. He helped me sign in while a sharp-eyed kid went away with our bags. The manager took us to our suite all by himself. It was on the fifth floor and it was big. There was a private bar stocked with liquor and a private slot so I could throw away quarters without getting out of bed. He said he hoped everything was all right. I wondered if I were supposed to tip him but he went away before I could give the problem too much thought.

  I opened a suitcase and started hanging things in a closet. Without saying anything, Annie went over to the bar and I heard ice clinking. She came over and handed me a glass of rye and soda. She had gin and tonic. We touched glasses and drank.

  “You’re all right,” I said. “Every room should come with an in-house cocktail waitress.”

  “Maybe they all do.”

  “Something wrong?”

  Her eyes were hard to read. “Nothing,” she said. “I’m just dazzled. The VIP treatment is a new one.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “Will I? How long did it take you to get used to it, Nat?”

  “Not too long.”

  “Not long at all. And how long did it take you to get used to murder, Nat?” My eyes hardened, but she went on. “Was that hard to do? Or did it come easy? Did you find you liked it…?”

  I finished my drink and put the glass down on a table. I looked at her and she stopped talking. There was anger in her eyes now, anger and contempt and maybe a little fear.

  “You shouldn’t talk about things you know nothing about,” I said. “You’re in no position to talk.”

  “I’m not?”

  “You’re not. You know how we’re registered at this hotel? Not Mr. and Mrs. Just plain Nathaniel Crowley. You don’t count at all, honey. You’re just part of the luggage.”

  I was sorry the minute I said it. I should have apologized but I didn’t. I got out of my clothes and took a shower.

  * * *

  I met Dan Gordon after dinner that night. He came over to our table while we were being bored by the floor show, introduced himself, stuck out a sweaty hand and then sat down with us. He had a platinum chorus-line pony with him. She had good legs, big breasts and a blandly bovine face. She didn’t say anything. I had the feeling, just from spending some time at the same table with her, that it was better that way. She was purely decorative.

  “I heard a lot about you,” Gordon told me. “Tony and I are tight for years. He says you’re a big help to him.”

  “We get along.”

  He laughed loudly and too long. “I guess you do,” he said. “Tony says you’re in town a week, two weeks. He says make you happy, show you a big time. My boys treating you all right, Nat?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. “This is quite a place.”

  “You like it?”

  I nodded. I didn’t—it was a little too goddamn glittery. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

  “We try to give the customer his money’s worth,” he was saying. “We run a hell of a place. Can’t find a better place in the whole damned town, and this is a hell of a town. Right, Pigeon?”

  Pigeon was the pony. She sat there for a minute trying to figure out what was supposed to be right, then gave a half-hearted nod. He patted her on one of her pretty knees and told me what a great kid she was.

  “A hell of a town,” he said again. “You meet my manager? Smoothest guy going. Went to hotel management school up at Cornell, then ran a summer place on Cape Cod for a year. I was up there, happened to see the job he was doing, offered him full-time here. I pay big dough. He couldn’t afford to turn me down. He does a hell of a job.”

  “Fine service,” I said. I had to say something.

  “You said it. And we don’t make a dime on the hotel, Nat. Our money comes right out of the casino—the tables, the wheels, the cards, the slots. The hotel is charity.”

  A pretty waitress came by with fresh drinks. Gordon pinched her and she smiled benignly at him. On the stage, a strip act had given way to a comic telling sick jokes. He had a reputation for hysterical hip cynicism, and the unconscious comedy of the Las Vegas audience inspired him to greater heights. He was very unpleasant, very sick and very funny. I missed most of the punch lines because Gordon talked too much.

  “Vegas,” Gordon said reverently. “First you make it legal. Then you keep it honest. Then you wrap it up nice and put a pretty ribbon around it, so it’s a vacation instead of a chance to roll dice. And you watch the money come in. It just keeps on coming.”

  I lit a fresh cigarette and wished he would go away.

  “What kind of action you like, Nat?”

  “I don’t gamble much.”

  He guffawed. That was one of his favorite tricks. “Not much of a gambler, huh?”

  “I don’t like to take chances.”

  Another guffaw. “Sure,” he said. “You like sure things, huh? You like a little edge. You’re all right, Nat.”

  There was more of this. Finally he found other things to do. He left, taking his platinum pony with him. The comic finished up and went away. We tried the casino. I wasted a few dollars on craps while Annie went away to worry one of the slots to death. The crap table bored me. I took Annie away from the machine and we went upstairs.

  * * *

  It was restful, anyway.

  The High Rise pool was a sort of lake with a concrete bottom. It was nicely surrounded by deck chairs, with or without sun umbrellas, and each deck chair had a little round white table beside it. That was where your waiter put your drinks.

  We had deck chairs without umbrellas. I wanted a suntan and Annie didn’t seem to care too much one way or the other. We spent three days doing very little outside of soaking up sunlight. The sun was one of Las Vegas’s constants—every day, from six in the morning until six at night, the sun was undeniably there. The clouds never got in its way. The sun sat up there, burning, and I let it darken my skin. Every once in a while I would go loll in the pool. I couldn’t swim worth a damn, but nobody at the High Rise did much swimming. The pool was something to be in between drinks, between gambling, between sex and liquor. I would lower myself into water always the right temperature, walk around, paddle around, float on my back like a corpse. Then, when it got monotonous, I would clamber out of the pool and let the sun bake me some more.

  We spent our nights gambling or being entertained, or both. There were a pair of meets with people Tony had wanted me to see, silly affairs where we sat around in a private room sipping whiskey and talking amiably, if guardedly. We didn’t deal in specifics. It all had its point and I could see the point easily enough. Tony was a man with friends, but he wasn’t that firmly established. He had taken over from Baron, had killed Baron to do it. So we had to be nice to people, had to firm up friendships her
e and there. I was a sort of gangland liaison man, Tony’s personal ambassador to the world.

  Annie and I maintained relations that were generally cordial, sometimes almost warm, occasionally chilly. She was moody a lot of the time. She let herself drift away from the world and sat for hours listening to music on the radio or reading from any of several slim books of poems. I picked up one of the poetry books when she was busy in the can. The stuff was harsh and dry. The images were vivid but the taste of it all was as acrid as marijuana smoke.

  Sometimes I wondered why I had brought Anne along. Before this there had been something of a special quality to our relationship, something that made it a little more than the usual story of a hood and his girl, and that quality was gone now. I had killed it.

  The worst part was that I had screwed up the thing we had had between us and I didn’t even want what I had gained. For three days and three nights I didn’t touch her. I owned her, she belonged to me and I could have had her any way I wanted her. But I wound up not wanting her at all. I couldn’t figure it out.

  There were two double beds in the room. She slept in hers and I slept in mine. And that was the way it was. She would give me funny looks at bedtime, looks that asked whether I wanted her or not, and I would pretend I didn’t notice the looks and would mumble something about how tired I was. Then I would go to bed and toss for a few hours, wanting her but not wanting her, needing the release she could bring me but unable to go over there and take it.

  The third night we went up to the room together and I made drinks for both of us. I sat in a cushy chair and worked on my drink. She put hers down on a table and took off all her clothes. She usually undressed methodically, putting everything neatly away in turn. Now she let her clothes pile up on the floor.

  “Look, Nat,” she said.

  I looked. She had as chokingly lovely a body as I had ever seen. She wasn’t big enough in breast or butt to make a Playboy foldout, but there was something about the soft sweet curves of her flesh that caught me deep in my throat.

  “This is yours, Nat. You bought it, even when it wasn’t for sale. You’re paying for it. Don’t you want it anymore?”

  She held her breasts in her hands, cupping them from below as if offering them for my approval.