The Only Girl in the Game

by John D. MacDonald

  “Okay, Max. Jeez, you’re touchy lately.”

  “How does that goddam Gallowell stand now?”

  “Just the same as he did at eight o’clock. He’s still into us for one twenty-five. The dice have been too cold to give him another chance. Dom says a couple of shooters have made seven passes, but that old bastard is like a machine. You’d think he’d get impatient, wouldn’t you?”

  Max looked at him with contempt. “That old bastard started out at fourteen with a bedroll and a twenty-dollar horse. And I should have remembered that. He didn’t pile it up as high as he did by getting impatient.”

  One of the floor men drifted up, whispered something to Ben Brown and moved on.

  “Now it’s one fifty, Max,” Ben said. “The shooter rolled boxcars, so it was a standoff, and then he came back with a six he couldn’t make.”

  “Oh, fine!”

  “That old bastard is making a good bruise.”

  “Why do you talk so goddam much lately? Get away from me! Wait a minute! Get me that Dawson broad. I want to see her in my office right now.”

  Brown looked blankly astonished. “You mean you think that old.… Okay, okay, Max. I didn’t say a word.”

  • • • seven

  At a little after ten o’clock on that same Sunday night, Betty Dawson had finished her dinner and was dawdling over her coffee, alone at a table for two in the coffee shop. She took out the letter that had come on Saturday from her father, Dr. Randolph Dawson of San Francisco, to read it again. Slowly, tentatively, in their own careful ways they had been mending the rift caused by the years with Jackie Luster.

  Since she had had her own single he had come down to Las Vegas three times to visit her. He had given advance warning each time, and Max had been very decent about approving less revealing costumes and somewhat milder songs. And the staff in the Afrique Bar, alerted to the situation and understanding it, had been quick to intercept the infrequent drunk, and to explain to her special fans why she couldn’t sit with them and why some of their requests had been ignored.

  He was a widower, a G.P. with a large tiring practice. He still lived and had his office in the old house on the quiet street where she had grown up, and he was still cared for by Charlie and Lottie Mead, who had come to work for him when Betty was an infant. Nurses and receptionists came and went, but the Meads stayed on forever.

  She had long since given up the barren exercise of wondering how it had been possible for her to hurt him so cruelly. But she had done it, and it was something she would have to live with, and the only sensible objective now was to do everything possible to heal that ancient wound and cause no fresh ones. She wrote regularly and phoned him at least once a week, and flew up to stay a day or so with him whenever it was possible.

  His script had a legibility foreign to most doctors. She turned to the last page of his letter, to that part which made her uncomfortable. There was never a letter that did not contain the old question she could not answer.

  “Tonight, my dear, I have once again found myself wondering why you give every evidence of remaining in that, to me, alarming community forever. As you know, I have made my reluctant adjustment to the curious fact that my only child is irrevocably established as a public entertainer. But when I peruse the newspapers here, I see that there are many places in this much more satisfactory city where you could exercise your talent. And certainly, if you lived here as I hope you would, you could make enough money to satisfy your strong desire for independence. I cannot help but feel that you are surrounded by altogether too many cheap and superficial people. I guess you would run into the same types in the night life of this community, but they certainly would not form as large a percentage of the total population. I am exempting from this indictment your Mr. Darren, who seems to have insinuated himself into both your correspondence and your telephone conversations of late. I look forward to meeting this young man.

  “At the risk of imposing my talent for sentimentality upon you, I must tell you that I keep remembering you are in your twenty-seventh year. Your mother and I were married thirteen years before you were born. I am now sixty-two, and reasonably sound of wind and limb, but I have a senile anxiety to become acquainted with my unborn grandchildren. If I have not misjudged the importance of this young man to you, could you not, in the immemorial way of woman, bring him rapidly to a point of decision which might gratify my wishes?

  “Enough of complaint. I should be so grateful that we are once again close, after those bad years, that I would have the sense to leave well enough alone, I suppose. Things move along here with relatively little change. Charlie insists he will paint the house himself when the weather improves. We are now bickering about color. Have you any ideas I can use to silence his yearning for a rather virulent yellow? Dr. Wellborn continues to work out quite well, but somehow the arrangement does not give me the fragments of leisure I had anticipated. I suspect him of feeling some juvenile obligation to humor me. Take good care of yourself, my dear. Your hours of work and your environment could easily break the constitution of an ox. But you keep telling me you are accustomed to it. Under separate cover I am mailing you a new vitamin complex which has shown good results among my more debilitated patients. In all fairness I must credit David Wellborn for bringing these pills to my attention.

  “Sometimes when I awaken toward dawn and the entire world seems hushed, I suddenly realize where you are and what you are doing. I realize that the unending noise of that place is affronting your ears, and it seems difficult to believe.”

  She folded the letter and put it back in her purse. There was no way, of course, to answer that last page, because the only answer was the truth, and the truth was nicely calculated to kill him. So I take refuge in pretending a fondness for this life that I have never felt.

  I would like to go home, but I can’t. I put myself in eternal hock to a horror named Max Hanes, father dear, and he won’t let me go because I seem to be useful from time to time. But, because of Hugh, it is not as bad as it used to be. You wouldn’t approve of the relationship, but it is all I am permitted to have, so I have taken it in such a way that the only person who will be hurt is me. And that is careful justice indeed.

  “Max wants to see you in his office right away.”

  She started violently and looked up into the monochromatic face of Ben Brown.

  “What’s a matter with you, Dawson? Were you asleep?”

  “Run along, little man. Consider your message delivered.”

  “He said right away.”

  “If he raises the question, I’ll quote you word for word.”

  “He’s ugly all day, like a goddam bear. I’m warning you.”

  She finished her coffee without haste, signed her dinner tab and went to Max’s office.

  “Siddown, cutie. Buy you a drink?”

  “No thanks, Max. You’re being very gracious and charming in the inimitable Max Hanes manner. Ben said you had the gritty uglies.”

  “For him I got them. Not for you. Never for you, sugar.”

  “Let me just say I’m underwhelmed, Max.”

  “The reason I wanted to see you, I got to toss you to a mark again, and this one can be tough.”

  “Max, for God’s sake, think of some other way. Think of somebody else this time. Please.”

  “Now excuse me for saying I know the reason why you’re dragging your feet. I know the whole deal with you and Darren. It’s very sweet and very touching, but it isn’t something that’s going to get in my way, and I’m not going to let it get in your way either.”

  “Why don’t you sell that spy system to the Russians?”

  “There’s no reason in the world why he should have to know a thing about it. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  “Max, I won’t do it. I just won’t do it.”

  He leaned back and laced his thick fingers across his broad stomach and shook his head in a sorrowful way. “How many times has it been? Only twice, not counting the
first time. You didn’t put up this fuss the first time, cutie.”

  “That’s when I should have. I was sick and broke and desperate, and you knew just how to put the squeeze on me, didn’t you?”

  “You were glad to help out, sweetie. You scratched my back so I’d scratch yours. And I did, didn’t I? You’ve been living fat, dumb and happy ever since.”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve been deliriously happy, Max. Unspeakably content.”

  “So the other two times I get this same jazz—No, Max, I won’t do it. And then I have to get rough with you, and it’s such a damn waste of time. Okay, I’ll go through the routine, if that’s what you want. I’ve got over twenty minutes of sixteen millimeter black and white, in perfect focus. The first time you raised a fuss I tried to run the film for you to prove I had it, and you only took three minutes of it before you threw up. So, like I told you with that kraut from St. Louis and that spic from Venezuela, I own you, pretty Betty. The day after you cross me in any way by either taking off without warning or refusing to do any little favor, a special messenger delivers ten juicy minutes of that film strip to your old man and tells him to rent a projector and watch the fun.”

  “I guess I like to hear myself say I won’t do it,” she said wearily. “Lesson one—how to tame a whore.”

  “That’s your word, cutie, not mine. I don’t tell you the approach, do I? I don’t care if you spend your time singing hymns to him. All I care about is he gets to like the town so well he can’t leave. So he stays and gambles some more and gives us our money back, and he does his gambling right here.”

  “It just seems to come out the other way, Max. In some mysterious fashion.”

  Max put his heavy arms on the desk and glowered at her. “Honest to God, it’s easy to get annoyed at you, Betty. You’d think I was using you in some stupid way. I don’t ask a hell of a lot of you. If I was real dumb I could be asking you to take care of my friends when they come to town. And I could use you on those guys who have a run of small-time luck and try to walk away with twenty or thirty grand. But for jobs like that, I can hire any number of hundred-dollar broads. If I put you to work too often, it would show on you, kid.”

  “Gee! Thanks a lot.”

  “That spic got into us a year ago and …”

  “Ten months.”

  “Okay, so it was almost a year. You’re special, kid, so the way I see it, the smartest thing I can do is save you for special deals, the big ones. It puts them off guard, you being an entertainer. They don’t figure it’s a setup. And best of all, you don’t look and act like you’d shill for the house.”

  “Thanks again. All these compliments are going to my head.”

  “I’ve used you just three times, cutie, and you’ve brought better than three hundred grand back into the vault. And in the process you’ve made yourself twelve thousand in bonuses, right?”

  “Oh, I’m a very well-paid whore, Max. I can’t object to the rates. But if you won’t let me retire, what’s the good of having a bank account?”

  “Can’t you relax?” he pleaded. “Can’t you stop being snotty one time?”

  “Do you want me to pretend I’m enjoying this? I despise you, Max, and I despise myself. And this time it’s going to … spoil something very precious to me.”

  “How can it, if he doesn’t find out?”

  “It would be impossible to explain that to you, I am sure.” “What the hell is the use of arguing with a broad? The way it looks, it ought to take shape by tomorrow, kid. So take tonight off. I’ve got a fill-in for your shows. Move some of your stuff over to Playhouse 190 tonight.”

  “Does it have to be.…”

  “Shut up and listen once. I’m telling you what you’re going to do. Then you come back and stay in your room where I can get hold of you fast. And you’re a very smart girl, so you can spend your time dreaming up an approach that’ll work.”

  “And just who is the lucky, lucky fellow?”

  “Homer G. Gallowell. A buddy of yours, I believe.”

  She stared at him. “Max, you are out of your mind! Believe me, you are completely out of your mind!”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s just … too grotesque to think there is any way in the world I could influence that old man. The others were fools. That old man is tough-minded, Max. He’s shrewd.”

  “When they get real old, they get real young ideas.”

  “Not Homer. Believe me, not Homer. I think he likes me because I don’t bow and scrape. But at the first hint, the very first hint that he was being jobbed in any way … he’ll be gone like the wind.”

  “Then it’s up to you to make it look good, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not that clever, Max.”

  “Me, I say you can be awful goddam clever when you’ve got enough motive. You don’t want a piece of that movie delivered to your daddy, do you? And you don’t want me asking Darren back here for a private snowing either, do you?” “You enjoy every minute of this, don’t you?”

  “Listen, I don’t understand why the fuss. All I’m telling you to do is try. I don’t care what you try or how you try it. That’s your business. I just want you to work that old guy into a mood where he wants to hang around and keep trying his luck. Why this big fuss all the time? You’d think I was asking you to kill somebody. What does it cost you, anyway? Just a little time. You put on an act. That’s all. When it’s over—win or lose—forget it.”

  “How nice! How easy! Just forget it. My God!”

  “The way you’re sitting, you ought to be the world’s happiest broad.”

  “That’s why I keep laughing all the time, Max.”

  “The playhouse is empty, baby. Take along enough stuff to give it that homey look.”

  “I’ll take my needlework.”

  “You know, an old guy like that might dig the sewing bit pretty good.”

  “Skip it. Max.”

  “Don’t get shy, baby. Those guys have seen so much there’s nothing you could do they won’t yawn at, believe me. It’s like they were doctors. Take your stuff over there, then stay in your room until I clue you in. Okay?”

  “Whatever I try isn’t going to work.”

  “With this kind of money, anything is worth trying, Betty baby.” And, winking at her, he handed her the key to Unit 190 in the Playland Motel.

  She packed a suitcase, drove three miles back toward town, and out to the Playland. She felt a gray and hopeless lassitude, a familiar sickness of the soul. It was one of the glossiest motels in Las Vegas. The night lighting was expensive and dramatic. There were wide stretches of asphalt, lush planting areas, small fountains and rock gardens. Privacy was achieved by the placement of the luxury units, by the opaque ceiling-to-floor draperies across the window walls, by plantings and soundproofings—and also by that special and insidious anonymity of all wide-open cities everywhere. Playland even had its own small cocktail lounge and casino, and a full supply of foul-mouthed comedians.

  She parked by the door of 190 and carried her suitcase in, found the familiar light switches, and unpacked with a numbed efficiency, settling herself in. She looked around, trying to be objective about the place. It was a most pleasant room, actually, and very large. Large enough for the big bed and the divans and the upholstered chairs and the small bar and the baby grand and all the draperied windows without looking cramped, without losing that upholstered spaciousness that coarse pieces of money can buy.

  She checked the liquor supply, the towels and linens, the ice supply in the kitchen alcove, and the piano to see if it was in tune, knowing it would be.

  She lit a cigarette and stood, her shoulders hunched, elbow in her palm, her face dulled and unhappy, looking at nothing, thinking, this is where they installed the button. They operate without anaesthesia. And once you’re wired, girl, everything is easy. All they have to do is press the button, and you jump up and salute. And all you have to do is save your money and invest it wisely, because when you are at last too old and
too broken down for their fun and games, they’ll cut you loose, and the old lady will need a retirement income.

  But I was so acutely, astonishingly innocent. I can think of that girl and cry.

  Over two and a half years ago, after Jackie Luster had made his deathless statement, “Who needs you?” she had worked up her single, and, with the tireless and loyal and intelligent help of little Andy Gideon, the nervous agent, she had polished it and rehearsed it until they were both satisfied it was time to try to book it. Andy had set up the audition with Max Hanes. Max knew, of course, that she had been with Jackie Luster and he had cut her loose. She remembered Max’s completely impassive way of listening to her routines, and she remembered she had thought him an almost comically sinister type. Bald shining head, clumsy powerful torso, squatty little legs, face half ape and half Mongol, diamonds agleam amid the flashiness of his kollege-kut klothing—he seemed more a triumph of type casting than an actual casino manager. His air of complete indifference had nearly broken Andy Gideon’s heart.

  But two days later Max had had her called to the phone at Mabel’s Comfort Motel. “I wanna talk to you, Dawson, and I’m sending a guy to bring you over here. He’ll be there in ten minutes, so be ready.”

  “But if you want to talk about a booking, Mr. Hanes, my agent should be there too, don’t you think?”

  “Have I said anything about signing anything? It hasn’t got to that stage yet, honey. I just want to talk to you.”

  She dressed in her hasty best and was taken to Max’s office. “Siddown, Dawson. Since I caught your act I’ve been thinking maybe it would be a good thing for us to take on something like what you’ve got for a fill-in on a long-term sort of deal. I mean you’ve got a lot of material right now, and so it wouldn’t be like people getting tired because they heard the same old stuff before.”

  “I can keep changing it, too.”

  “You’re built good and showing that off as much as we can won’t hurt anybody, and you got a good-looking face, and I don’t figure you’d be against circulating around, sitting with the marks and talking up a storm.”