The Only Girl in the Game

by John D. MacDonald

  “We haven’t talked about anything for weeks and weeks. Given the opening, I would have said it before now.”

  “Maybe I stopped giving a damn when Betty Dawson left.”

  “I could have said that too. For a week you were like a sleepwalker—a sleepwalker with one ugly disposition.”

  “She was important to me.”

  Her voice was suddenly softer. “I know that. I liked her, Hugh. Just about everybody liked her around here. A fine, warm, generous girl—who never belonged in this kind of place.”

  “Did you know her father died the day she left here?”

  “I heard about that later.”

  “How much later?”

  “Three days. Four, maybe.”

  “Did she spread that word originally?”

  “I don’t know. She could have. Then again, it came as a long-distance call. The girls on the board are always curious about the entertainers. The operator could have listened in. Why, Hugh?”

  “I didn’t hear anything about it until that lawyer told me today. She’s missing. She never showed up at the funeral. Nobody seems able to find her.”

  Jane’s eyes went round. “No! Isn’t that strange! I wondered what that neat little man wanted.”

  “I keep wondering why I didn’t hear anything about her father dying that same day.”

  She lit a fresh cigarette. “I think I can tell you why, Hugh. Everybody in the hotel knew you and Betty were having an affair. Don’t look indignant. You know you had no hope of keeping it a secret. Everybody knows she left you a note and took off, without seeing you to say good-bye.”

  “How the hell would they know that?”

  “Don’t shout at me.”

  “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

  “You wouldn’t be told because, in the first place, people would tend to assume you knew it. In the second place, you are the boss man, and the help doesn’t come running to you with gossip. In the third place, you haven’t been what anybody in his right mind would call approachable lately. Frankly, you’ve been an almost unbearable grouch, and when you have a few drinks, your disposition doesn’t improve a bit. And there is a sort of fourth reason. You’ve been a little closer to Hanes and Marta and those people than you used to be, which sort of puts you in a different camp. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes. So what else have you heard about Betty?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But, actually, I wouldn’t hear very much. You brought me in here. I share a minor version of your … executive isolation.”

  “Can you do some digging?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything at all concerned with the way she left here. She left Monday evening and took a Tuesday-afternoon flight. Maybe you can dig up some rumors about where she spent the night, that sort of thing.”

  She frowned. “I can try, Hugh, and I will, of course, but—I don’t know—I lack the conspiratorial touch. I get lead-footed about this sort of thing. And people tend to snap shut like an alarmed clam when I bear down on them.”

  “Jane … uh … stick around a while, will you?”

  She smiled. “Somehow, for no reason at all, I feel better about this job already. Maybe because we seem to be on speaking terms again. If you should get around to taking a personal interest in managing this hotel again, take my word that our system of setting up for these conventions stinks. Attendance keeps running as much as fifteen per cent above and below estimates, and both ways it’s costing money. And when you get that little dandy solved, I have some more for you, boss.”

  One hour later Hugh Darren parked his blue second-hand Buick by the office of Mabel’s Comfort Motel and went inside. It was a tiny room with a plywood counter, frayed straw furniture, a window air conditioner that sounded like a small truck on a long hill. He tapped the bell beside the dime-store registration book.

  A bloated woman with colorless hair, without a trace of expression on her dough-gray face, wearing a faded cotton housecoat, opened the door behind the counter and said, “I don’t take no overnights. Just by the week or longer.”

  “Are you Mrs. Huss?”

  “Everything in the world I need I get mail order.”

  “I want to talk to you about Betty Dawson.”

  There was still no flicker of expression of any kind. “Your name Hugh something … begins with a D?”

  “Darren. Yes.”

  “She described you pretty good one time. Come on in.”

  He went in. She closed the door. He followed her as she waddled back into the gloom, toward the sound of shots and yelpings and horses galloping hard across the picture tube. All the blinds were closed, and one lamp with a weak bulb and a fringed shade was lit. She twisted the sound off and left the picture on.

  “Set anywhere,” she said, lowering herself into a chair. “She write you to come and call on me? Not one word have I heard from her.”

  “I haven’t heard from her either. She talked about you. I’d hoped maybe you’d heard from her, Mrs. Huss. I know she thinks a lot of you.”

  “Not enough to write, seems like. I think a lot of that girl. It was like seeing myself all over again, all them goddam dirty lost years.”

  “I don’t exactly know what.…”

  “One day every six months I feel like saying more than two words in a row, so you just have to set and take it, mister. ’Course she came from more than I did. I come from nothing, but the family was close, and that’s what counts with a family, especially once you start out breaking their hearts. Don’t make no polite sounds when I tell you you couldn’t hardly guess it, but I was a hell of a good-looking piece a long time ago. If I hadn’t thrown all that stuff out, there’s pictures I could show. I was stage struck, all right. Sixteen I was when I took off, and I thought it was a romantic world, just like Betty did.

  “I got to be twenty-three—along about there—before I finally took a real good look at myself. I’d had seven years of show business by then, mister, and at twenty-three I was a wore-out bag. I’d been used too hard by cruel men, and the glamor was gone out of it, and nothing was worth what I’d gone through. So I had seven more years of it because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. When I was thirty and looking forty, I had the blessing of God and found a sweet, dear man who loved me so much he didn’t care what I’d done, and it didn’t matter to him that I was beyond having any kids ever. I had sixteen years of heaven on earth until he died in my arms, so I’m way ahead of most folks, no matter how bad it all started for me. So when I see her, and she in the middle of her black years, it was seeing myself again.”

  “She told me how much it helped her—when you took her out to that little house in the desert and left her there.”

  “I know you were out there, mister. She asked me if it was okay before she asked you. I figured from her voice you must be somebody it would be right to take out there. I thought in my fool way she was going to have the luck I had, and find her man. Neither of us could guess you’d turn out gutless.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Listen how full of insult the man gets! What the hell do you think it means? If you weren’t a ninny, you would have married her. In this town you make up your mind and fifteen minutes later you’re married, day or night.”

  “It never … got around to marriage.”

  “If she loves you, what’s wrong with marriage?”

  “But it wasn’t love! I mean, not then.”

  She shook her head. The harsh brilliance of the silent picture tube was reflected on her moon face. Her tone was heavy with contempt. “Sleeping with her, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, but.…”

  “No buts, mister. You think she slept with you on account you used the right shaving lotion? Or ran a hotel? That’s an honest to God woman, mister. Love is the only thing in the world that would have her crawling into the sack with you of her own free mind and will. I can tell you just why you didn’t marry her. You thought you were t
oo damn good for her, whereas it was the other way around. You knew she had peddled her tail when Max Hanes told her to, and so that dirty word ‘whor’ had snuck into your mind and you were too goddam pure and clean to stop for one minute and try to figure out some good reasons why she had to do what Max told her to. Oh, you were willing to eat all the fruit off the tree, but you didn’t want to own the orchard. All guys like you want is nice safe.…”

  “Shut up! You’ve got something all wrong. You’ve got something terribly wrong here, Mrs. Huss. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. What’s this talk about her … doing what Max Hanes told her to?”

  “You can act real innocent, can’t you?”

  “Mrs. Huss, believe me. I actually, truthfully don’t know what you’re talking about. Did she actually.…”

  “Let me think! Hush up a minute.”

  A heavy truck rumbled through the silence and he could hear faint music coming through one of the walls.

  Mrs. Huss sighed audibly. “I’m sorry. I guess it could have been that way. I guess she wouldn’t have wanted you to know a thing like that about her.”

  “She’s gone now. Can you tell me?”

  “I will because she should have. She phoned me that night she left. Crying. She was all packed. She told me about her father dying so sudden, and she told me she was free and she wouldn’t ever have to come back. I asked if you were going with her and she said she was breaking it off with you. She cried a little harder then so I missed some of it, but it was about loving you and being too cheap to get your life all messed up. So that would sound like she hadn’t told you, I guess.”

  “Told me what?”

  “I don’t know nothing specific, but it’s an old pattern. That Max Hanes, he got something on her, some kind of proof of something she did. I’d figure he trapped her, the way men like that trap women, and after he had it to hold over her, then he could make her do things that would help him in a business way. I guess the son of a bitch is smart enough so he saw she was too valuable a piece to use real often, but when he had some big money reason why she should hop into bed with somebody important enough, he had her set up so all he had to do was say Hop!

  “When they trapped her, that’s what got her so low down I took her out to the desert place, having to take the chance she’d kill herself out there, but knowing her only chance in God’s world was finding the strength inside herself to endure. She didn’t tell me right out, but from the way she said she was free now her father was dead, it would have been something Hanes could send or show to her father. That’s something a loving daughter can’t let happen. After she’d done Max’s little favor for him, she’d come here to me. She would hardly talk about it, but I could guess all of it. Once she was pretty bad beat by some foreigner he gave her to.”

  “But why would he do that?”

  “Come now! You’ve been in Vegas the best part of a year. You blind and deaf too? Business reasons, boy. Big gambling reasons.”

  “Would you know … when the last time was that Max … used her?”

  “Oh, that was a long time back. I told you it wasn’t often. Before you came to town, even. Way last summer sometime. I don’t hardly think she could get up out of your bed and git into another one and come right on back to you, smiling and happy. She’s a decent woman, and that kind of trick would just be plain beyond her.”

  “That vile son of a bitch!”

  Mrs. Huss chuckled. “Why sure he is! And he’s proud of it. It helps in the kind of job he’s got. Pretty women and big money—the world has a habit of working one against the other, and it’s the woman seems to take the loss. So I guess if you had known all this, you wouldn’t even have took the trouble coming here asking an old woman about her, would you?”

  “I can’t live in a world as empty as the world has been for the last six weeks. That’s all I know.”

  “You mean that?”

  “With all my heart.”

  She gave a snort of derision. “Mister, if what you’re saying wasn’t just a mess of empty words, you wouldn’t even be here. You’d be with her, wherever she is. Being with her would mean more to you than the fancy job you’ve got.”

  “I’d made my decision to chuck the job and go after her, Mrs. Huss. But I found out that isn’t so easy.”

  “Why not?”

  He told her all he had learned from the lawyer, James Wray. Mabel Huss listened carefully, interrupting him with questions from time to time.

  “Lord, I don’t like the sound of it. I don’t like the sound of it at all, mister. What’s your name? Hugh? I’m calling you Hugh and you’re calling me Mabel on account of we’re the only two friends she’s got in this town. Oh, there were hundreds liked her to pieces, but friends is a different word.”

  “So she didn’t stay here with you that last night.”

  “I got her call saying good-bye and that was the last I heard.”

  “Do you think she stayed at your place in the desert?”

  “I think she would have said she was going to if.… Say! I remember now she did say she was mailing the keys back to me. And I never got them and never thought about it until this very minute. She said she hoped I’d forgive her for not bringing them by, but she had so much to do in the morning cleaning up all her affairs, she felt she wouldn’t have much time to spare.”

  “The bank, getting rid of the car, those are the things she was going to do. But something stopped her, Mabel.”

  “So why didn’t she get to the funeral, and even if she didn’t, why hasn’t she come back and taken care of those things she left undone?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I knew.”

  “And if she’d gone out to the place, she’d have gone in that little car, and that lawyer from San Francisco said it’s sitting at the airport right where she left it?”

  “That’s right. But I think I’ll go out there and take a look around tomorrow, if you don’t mind, and if you’ve got a key I could take.”

  “I’ll give you one when you go, Hugh. This thing is going to worry me right out of my mind, wondering about her. I know in my bones that little lawyer man is right. If nothing bad had happened to her, she would have wrote me at least a postcard, because she’s thoughtful that way. She’s … me all over again, the way I was shaming myself and no way out of it at all, being bounced on those old iron beds in every crummy hotel from Akron to Atlantic City, just for the chance to walk on stage in sequins and hand some half-drunk magician his goddam top hat and trick cane for money they either didn’t pay or borrowed back. It’s a life to turn your heart to stone. But at the end I found me a man and, slow and easy, he brought me back to life again, so everything that came ahead of him was just a bad dream that almost hadn’t happened at all.”

  He took the key with him when he left, and early the next afternoon he drove out to the little stone lodge in the desert. The silence and the emptiness of the place depressed him. He could see Betty all too clearly, every move and pose and expression, and far beyond the silences he could hear the cadence of her voice. Here love had reached its first inevitable completion, and it had been so much more than either of them had expected.

  There was too much of her here, too personal, too specific, too memorable. He saw no sign that she had stopped there the last night, but if she had she would have left it as she found it.

  He drove too fast when he left, punishing his car on the rough road. He left the key with Mabel and told her he had found nothing.

  When he was back in his office he knew what he would have to do. He could not know whether it would work. But he knew he had to do it.

  • • • twelve

  A large hotel is, in its most significant sense, an intricate functioning relationship of hundreds of human beings. The staff world is entirely apart from the world inhabited by the guests. Hotel workers are a special breed. They soon learn devious arts. If the most cretinous transient operator of one of the dishwashing machines cashes out a two-dollar bet
on a long shot, the spinster housekeeper in charge of the fourth floor will know it ten minutes later. The day following the rabbit test, the most elderly gardener will know that the young wife of the second pastry chef is pregnant.

  Hugh Darren was the son of hotel workers. He had been raised in that special atmosphere. And he knew that the competent hotel manager ignores such trivial things except when they threaten to affect the operation of the hotel. He felt a contempt for those managers who developed and carefully maintained an espionage network, using whatever unsavory bits they picked up as blackmail weapons not only to control the staff but, in many instances, to set up kickback procedures on both wages and purchases. In such hotels the guest sees the effect of bad management without knowing the cause—surly personnel, dirt, indifference.

  But now he knew his personal reasons were strong enough so that he would take the risk of destroying, without giving it a second thought, the smooth operation he had built up.

  He knew that, fragmented among the memories of the hundreds of employees, was, if it could be assembled, all parts of the story of what happened on the night of April twenty-eighth, as well as all parts of the two-year story of how Hanes had blackmailed Betty Dawson. Only through force, fear and coercion could he assemble that random factual material into one complete picture.

  He began on Tuesday afternoon, the last day of May.

  He called George Ladori into his office, and spoke to him privately. “George, I’m making a few policy changes. From now on your recommendation for hiring and firing of your personnel will not be automatic. I’ll review every case personally.”

  “What if you keep somebody on I don’t want in my department?”

  “Then you’ll have to make up your own mind whether to quit or stay on, won’t you?”

  Ladori stared out from under heavy brows. “Who’s giving you orders to do this? You know better. The hotel runs smooth, now you bitch it up.”

  “In addition, George, I’ll reserve the right to raise the pay of any person in your department without reference to you.”