The Only Girl in the Game

by John D. MacDonald

  “Thank you, kind sir.”

  “It would be a hell of a lot less pay than you’re going to ask for, but we’d throw in the room and meals right here in the hotel. But we can talk about that when you got your agent with you, if it gets to that point. Right now I want to arrange some good way for you to audition for some of the owners. If it was just a case of booking you in for six weeks or eight weeks, I could go right ahead with it, but I got to check my idea out with them. I’d want to put you on late in the Afrique Bar, with the idea of getting the locals in the habit so they say before they go home, ‘Let’s go over to the Cameroon and catch Betty Dawson’ You see what I mean? We’d promote you that way.”

  “It sounds good.”

  “I want Al Marta to hear you someplace where he can sit down and really listen, without interruptions. He’s got a sort of interest in the Playland Motel, and there’s a good room there empty now with a piano in it. So what I want you should do is move in out there for a few days and that’ll give me a good place to bring people around to hear you and check me on my thinking.”

  She remembered that she had felt wary and had said, “Why don’t you just phone me where I am and I can go over there any time?”

  “I maybe won’t get enough warning when these people can take a little time off, and we can’t do it here because there’s something going on here all the time. So would it hurt you to cooperate a little? I can tell you’re thinking there’s some kind of an angle on this, and maybe I’m setting you up for a playmate. You see this phone right here? I can pick it up and I can order me an absolute dead ringer for Liz Taylor or Marilyn Monroe any time I feel like it, at no direct expense to me whatever, and neither of them can play the piano. And so who cares?”

  “All right, Mr. Hanes. When do I move in?”

  “As soon as you can, kid. Here’s the key. Number 190. It’s way in the back of the place. You drive right through to the back and you’ll see the number.”

  And so, vibrant with new hope after the dirty months of insecurity and panic, she had moved into 190, in a dancing way, laughing at herself in the mirrors, pleasured by the return of confidence, running sparkles of music off the keys of the piano. And for forty hours there was no contact. She was having her meals sent in. Some arrangement must have been established, because they would not take her money for the meals. The few motel-staff people she saw seemed very remote and unfriendly, and had she tried to classify their attitude toward her, she would have seen it was one of ironic, understanding contempt. She phoned Max Hanes and he told her with annoyance and impatience to sit tight.

  Max phoned her back the next evening at seven and said he and Al Marta would be over later on. She spent two hours on her appearance, getting more and more nervous, before they arrived. There were three of them. Max Hanes, Al Marta, and a man named Riggs Telfert. She knew Al Marta by sight, but she had never before been introduced. He had been pointed out to her one night at the Mozambique. Riggs Telfert was a great, raw-boned, laughing man of about forty in expensive and beautifully tailored clothing which he wore with considerable assurance in spite of his piney-woods cracker twang, his big red wedge of ugly face, and his joyous, boisterous, and completely innocent air of a man having the most wonderful time of his life.

  Riggs Telfert, when they were introduced, held her hand in his far too long, oblivious of her futile attempts to get it back, beaming at her with great approval as he said, “It’s the Telferts from the Florida cattle country, ma’am. God knows there’s enough of us now, the way we been breedin’ ever since great-grandpappy moved on down from Bell County, Georgia, and grabbed hold of the biggest piece of nothin’-type swampy old land you could lay an eye on, and raised scrub cattle onto it, doin’ no good at all ‘til they got those tics licked by dippi’ and fencin’ some thirty year back. Since then, believe me truly, ma’am, all us Telferts have been livin’ as high off the hog as we could reach to bite.”

  She backed away from him and said, “My goodness!”

  Al hastily explained that if they were going to audition new talent for the Cameroon, it was only fair to bring along one of the favorite guests of the hotel, and Riggs Telfert was certainly one of his favorite people.

  “I’m lovable clear through,” Riggs bawled at her. “I hope you dance some, because I love to watch a beautiful woman dancin’, Miss Dawson.”

  She had the curious feeling that if he insisted she dance, she would have to change her act. There was an uncanny force about the man, a purpose and power that was simultaneously fascinating and repelling. She recognized it as the rare impact of undiluted masculinity. He had made an erotic and a frightening appeal, which made her feel like a Sabine woman who suddenly knew she wasn’t going to be able to run fast enough. And, in some strange way, the trio made her think of an animal act she had seen long ago, where two visibly apprehensive men guided, in a gingerly way, a huge, amiable, cream-colored bear into a carnival ring and made him dance. To the small girl she had been at the time, the bear seemed to be enjoying it hugely, and she could not understand why his two trainers were not having a good time too, instead of sweating and skulking around.

  She tried to help Max put the three chairs in the place that seemed best, but Riggs Telfert would not let her try to move a chair by herself. She fixed the lighting the way she had planned it, sat at the piano, smiled at them broadly, winked, and chorded her way into her first number.

  Riggs Telfert made her continue long after it became difficult for Max Hanes and Al Marta to conceal their growing boredom. After each number he banged his big palms together with the sound of pistols. He chuckled and roared at the lines, and kept time by thumping his heel and slapping his thigh

  “And that,” she finally said, firmly, “is the end of the show, gentlemen.”

  Telfert stood up and said, “Al, by God, iff’n you don’t hire this little gal to sing in your hotel, I swear you’ll never get me or anybody I know back into your place ever again. And I mean that sure as I can see that bottle of bourbon settin’ right over there, which I’m about to pour me some more of. And you pay her good, too, hear?”

  “I’m sold. Max,” Al Marta said. “We can use you, Betty.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Marta.”

  Al beamed at her and said, “Step on out to the car with Max a minute, honey. There’s an option out there we want your signature on.”

  “But.…”

  She had no chance to say more as Max took her by the arm and walked her out into the night. He walked her ten feet, whirled her around and pushed her back against the wall of the building.

  “What the hell are you trying to …”

  “Shut up and listen. We haven’t got much time, kid. Get the picture first. This is about his fourth trip here. He and a bunch of his cracker pals come over in a chartered plane. They usually contribute. They get the red carpet. He’s been here a week. They leave tomorrow morning. He’s had one hell of a run of luck. That jackass has over a hundred and sixty thousand of casino money.”

  “What has that got to do with me?”

  “You want the job, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but.…”

  “He took a shine to you, kid. Now it’s your move. I want you to change his mind about leaving so fast. You can do it.”

  “Now wait a minute!”

  “There’s no time for pretty talk, baby. Make the move after we go back in so that he stays and we go. And you walk back in there smiling.”

  “I’m not going to.…”

  “If you do it right, if you get him back to the hotel after his pals are gone, he’ll feed the money right back, and you’ll get a nice cash bonus, and you’ll get the job you need so damn bad you can taste it. Shut up and listen. If you don’t want to do this little favor, honey, I can guarantee that in one day I can fix it so you’ll never get a job in Vegas, and in four days there won’t be a joint in the country that’ll book you. And to make it a little more convincing, I can have a couple of boys pick you up off the street a
nd take you out in the desert and give you a face you can’t tell from a runover jackrabbit. You’re in the big bind, kid, and you’re going to have to play it our way. What the hell is it to you, anyway? He isn’t a bad guy, for that kind of a guy. What’s it costing you? Have fun.”

  She stood there with her back against the wall. It was still faintly warm from the heat of the day. She could feel the heat against her bare shoulders. Max Hanes was in silhouette against flootlighted shrubbery fifty feet away.

  What the hell is it to me, anyway? she asked herself. What’s left of me that’s so terribly terribly special—after Jackie and his fat friend? Who needs me? What am I saving, and who am I saving it for?

  “How much bonus?” she asked in a dead voice.

  He squeezed her arm and said, “Now you’re using your head, girl. Two per cent of what he gives back.”

  “Suppose … no matter what I do … he leaves with his friends.”

  “Then we can’t blame you, can we? It’s a business proposition. You do your best … you get the job, whatever.”

  “But if this sort of thing is going to be part of the job, maybe it’s a job I don’t want, Mr. Hanes.”

  “Call me Max, cutie. Who said it would be part of the job? This is like an emergency. He just didn’t like any of the gals who usually help me out. It would probably never happen again.”

  “So now I’ll walk back in. Smiling,” she said.

  She went back in. They all had another drink. She said she had a few more songs she hadn’t done. Al looked at his watch and said he had to get back. Max said, “I got to go along too, but that’s no reason you got to shove off, Riggs. Look, you listen to the songs and before you leave in the morning, write a note and leave it for me, telling me which ones you like best. It’ll be a help. I’ll appreciate it. I think you’ve got a good eye for talent, Riggs.”

  So then she was alone with him. The bargain had been made. He began the traditional pursuit. She saw that this was a man who would place a low value on anything that came too easily to him, and so she smiled and laughed and evaded him, coldly pacing the tempo of this obligatory affair. When she saw that she might not be able to handle him, she insisted that they go out, and they went by taxi to small places she knew, with that ageless combat between them becoming ever more intense as they sat close together in quiet places—he telling her all the reasons why she should, and she giving him all the reasons why she could not. He talked with great sentiment of his ranch lands, his kids, and with weariness of his socialite wife and her continual disapproval of his habits and his friends, but who dearly enjoyed spending his money.

  She sensed the times when he was thinking of abandoning the whole thing, and chose those times to nourish his faltering hopes. When it was the edge of dawn, she made the sounds of sweet and unmistakable surrender, attributing it, of course, to his charm. She sat in another taxi outside the Cameroon while he went in and left a note at the desk for his friends, telling them to take off without him. They went back to Unit 190, the Playland Motel.

  They were together five days and five nights before he flew back to Florida. His winnings, by the time he left, had dwindled to a little less than twenty thousand dollars. The loss annoyed him, but he had explained with his unshakable exuberance that he had turned so lucky in love all of a sudden the other kind of luck naturally had to go a little bad for him.

  For Betty Dawson it was like taking the lead in a long and rather monotonous play where all her lines had to be ad libbed. She had soon learned everything was a lot more endurable if she stayed a little bit drunk. There was no emotional involvement with him. Yet she had to pretend an emotional involvement, and she learned the cynic’s truth, that it was easier to keep him contented through pretense than it would have been had she been sincere. So she faked her way through the hundred and twenty hazy hours of Riggs Telfert, bemused by her own ability to delight him with lines she took out of the grab bag of her mind, lines from old songs, old movies, old plays. She stood flankwarm against him by the rail of the gaming table, telling him his luck was good while she watched it go bad.

  Had she been able to fake her way through every aspect of it, drinking herself close to the edge of control, mouthing tritenesses spiced with fond smiles that made her lips feel stiff and forced, perhaps she would have been able to convince herself that she had gone through all of it without being touched or reached in any significant way.

  But his virility was a dark persuasion she could not resist. She tried but could not hold herself apart from that, succumbing each time more readily to a tumultuous reality that crumbled the walls of her pretending. It was a loss of self, like a drug that she took in a mood of defiance, using it in massive doses to get even with a world that could contain Jackie, the fat man and Max Hanes. The drug took her far back into the wastelands of sensation where she became a mindless wanderer, blinded, used, only vaguely aware of her own acts and devices.

  Telfert, who treated her with a grave, sweet, measured courtesy in all small things, the light poised for her cigarette, the chair held, the door opened, the wrap gentled onto her shoulders, making her feel treasured and precious, came to her in their pentathlons and decathlons of the flesh with a compulsive, aching, greedy violence which always alarmed and astonished her before, as a result, perhaps, of that violence, she was swept into her own fierce, unwilled responses. He lamed her grievously, collapsed her into athletic exhaustion, and would then return immediately, incongruously, to that attitude of hovering, earnest courtesy which implied she was a precious and delicate vessel, fragile and tender, requiring a manly protection.

  And there was, to her, a strange schism in his attitude toward her. No matter how abandoned their love-making had been … and he was compulsively addicted to experiment … he did not care to make the slightest retrospective allusion to their sport, apparently considering any such reference an indecency in which a gentleman of his stature could not indulge.

  On the last evening, she learned—and it made her heartsick—that she could marry him if she wished. He had gone out for a little while in the afternoon alone, creating mystery by being overly casual, and in the evening he gave her what he had bought for her, a pair of antique gold earrings in perfect taste, delicate, set with tiny cabochon emeralds.

  He cracked the knuckles of his big hands and looked at her pleadingly and said, “I don’t want it should be like a good-bye forever kind of present to you, Betty. This is something I don’t want to give up, honest to God. I want you should give me some little time to kind of switch my life around so you can fit in, and I can come for you or send for you. I mean legal. I guess this is a proposal, kind of, if a man who hasn’t cut hisself loose yet has got any right to ask, even.”

  After she had convinced him, with difficulty, that she preferred her “career” to marriage, he told her about some good ocean land he owned north of Fort Lauderdale, and the good friends he had and the good mortgages he held in Lauderdale. He could build her a good little house on the ocean and make sure she had a good job in one of the clubs in Lauderdale for as long as she wanted it, and that would be a second-best thing, but better than nothing.

  After she made him understand that she would not feel right in such an arrangement, he asked her if it was all right if he came back to see her now and then, whenever he could get away, and she had no plausible objection to that.

  He never came back, because he went down into the ’Glades after turkey, and in the autumn dusk he was squatting in the brush using a turkey call, and a young attorney in the party thought he was the right size in that half light to be a big wild turkey, and tore his throat away with the first snap shot. Max Hanes showed her the clipping from the Los Angeles paper, a two-inch wire service pickup, and when she was in her bed she cried a little for Betty Dawson and for Riggs Telfert and for everyone’s world of what-might-have-been.

  After she watched his morning flight take off, she taxied back to Playland, packed her things, left them off at Mabel’s Comfor
t Motel, and took the key to 190 back to Max Hanes.

  “Siddown and rest yourself, cutie. Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  “It was just as easy as cutting your own throat, Max,” she said, pleased that she had selected the attitude which gave her the greatest feeling of protection. Bitter, brittle, ironic. The hardcase broad. Jackie Luster had been the rest of her college education. His fat buddy had been graduate school. Riggs Telfert had been her first formal employment based on her educational record.

  “You and me, we can get along, Dawson. You got to understand I could give you a very short end, but that would be stupid and I didn’t get where I am being stupid.”

  “Your record of success should be an inspiration to every American boy.”

  “People you are going to work with, there has got to be fair play. You take fair play and a few laughs and the money coming in, and what more is there in life? This here is for you.”

  She opened the envelope and looked at the packet of bills and saw they were hundreds, and put the envelope in her purse. “Thank you, kind sir.”

  “Don’t you want, to count them?”

  “I’ll get around to it later in the day.”

  “There’s thirty-five of them in there. Thirty-five bills, kid. It’s more than I agreed and more than I had to give you. Right?”

  “Right!”

  “Would it for chrissake hurt you to smile once? Maybe I don’t have to tell you this, but don’t go depositing that money in an account. It’s off the top, so it isn’t reported from this end. Maybe you’d get away with it, but if you run into a spot-check audit, then there’s a fraud rap for failure to report income, because they check out bank deposits. What you do, you put it in a lock box, and then if you want to take a risk of feeding it into a checking account a little at a time so you can live better, that’s your risk. But the safest deal is spend it for fun things, in cash. They can’t trace that.”

  “Tax evasion, hey? My next step in a life of crime.”