By about nine in the evening, when he knew the drinks had gotten solidly to her, and she had begun to make loose-mouthed hints about maybe they should have some food sent in before everybody starved to death, he deliberately encouraged a mood of confession by inventing some of his own and pretending to be very stirred by them.
And so Muriel Bentann, undone by this mood, lay in his arms and blubbered her way into full confession, telling all, calling herself a tramp, a bum, a hustler, hooked by the wheel, lying to everybody, hoping only to hit the table big and leave town forever.
He told her how much he respected her for telling him the truth, and then he gently and cautiously opened up an area she had not touched on by saying, “The trouble is, honey, when you’re so down and out, it leaves you vulnerable to the sharpshooters. Then those guys can get you to do things that are a little bit outside the law, just because it’s good money and you need it.”
She sighed and turned to kiss the corner of his mouth and said, “You’re not just whistling Dixie, lover. Honest to God, it can scare you. But the thing you do, see, is you don’t think about what could happen. You just go ahead and do it and keep your mind on the money, see?”
“But you don’t do anything worth getting scared about.”
“The hell you say, lover!”
“Oh, sure, sure, sure. Big deal.” He forced a yawn.
She rolled up onto an elbow to stare down at him, her barbarian hair hanging black and wild. She hiccupped—an echo of her recent tears. “Listen. One time I got expense money and instructions all written out to remember by heart and then burn. I flew down to Monterey and I was there two days until the box of cosmetics showed up in my hotel room, and I flew back and left it where I was supposed to. Two days after that a thousand bucks cash came in the mail.”
“Which you fed to the tables.”
“Sure, but what do you suppose I brought back here?”
“Drugs?”
“I don’t know what the hell it was, but if I’d been picked up I wouldn’t be here now.”
“So you do things for the boys when you don’t even know what you’re doing?”
“Maybe it’s better that way, lover. Like a couple of months back, I had to take a plane to San Francisco, put on an act, then take a bus down the coast and a flight back here from L.A. Five hundred bucks, and do as I’m told and ask no questions, see? You and me, lover, we’re just little people. Somebody else knows all the reasons.”
“Who asked you to fly to San Francisco?”
“Well, I was out digging for gold and this flying saucer landed and these little guys with the blue stalks on their heads got out and started giving me the word.” She plunged against him and nuzzled his throat, saying, “Mmmm, you are such a sweetie, cutie guy, and this is enough talk about my troubles, huh? Lover, you’ve got to phone for some food, or I’m going to be too weak to do any of us any good.”
There was a light on in the room when he left, quietly, at one in the morning. She was snoring as sturdily as any stevedore when he scribbled his note to her, composing it with care so as to forestall any suspicion that might attend her morning sobriety. “Honey, here is the fifty-dollar loan to tide you over, plus a little more for breakfast and a taxi. I’ve got to go back to work now. You told me to give your regards to Gidge Allen, but I think I’ll skip that, because then you might be tied up the next time I get a day off, and I do want to see you again soon; we had so much fun. Hugh.”
He got into his car and sat there behind the wheel for a few moments, feeling used and sad and dreary. Then he drove through silent streets and turned back onto the Strip, into a sudden press of traffic and yelping of neon, back past all the boiler-room roarings of the casinos. The big machine never faltered, chomping and grinding that innocent flesh, spewing out disillusion—and keeping the money.
Hugh Darren saw Al Marta privately at five o’clock that afternoon in Al’s bedroom. Al sat by the window draped in a sheet while a barber who looked enough like him to be his brother trimmed his hair.
“It’s okay with me if you take some time off, kid,” Al said. “You been working without a break, that I know. And if you say it’s set so it runs okay without you for a week, okay. I guess you need a rest.” “Does it show?”
“Not on you. Maybe on the operation down there it shows. Things don’t go as smooth as they did a while back. I hear the food is off a little. I hear we had some guests get sore and check out. I hear one of the conventions really got bitched up on arrangements. So maybe you’re stale, kid. It can happen. You want a real change, you should fly to Hawaii, and Gidge has got connections there to line you up a broad and a pad, both spectacular, that won’t cost you a dime. You give him the word. We like you, boy, and we want you should keep on doing the job you’ve been doing for us. Cut the hair, not the ear, stupid!”
“I’ll just go find some quiet place and hole up, thanks.”
He was in Dallas on Tuesday. For the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday and most of Thursday he made an unsuccessful series of attempts to get in direct touch with Homer Gallowell. Money can build a high wall. His plea that it was urgent and personal bounced off the undented formal facade of underlings who had rebuffed approaches considerably more imaginative. Late on Thursday afternoon he got in touch again with the highest echelon he had been able to reach. He said to the man at the other end of the line, “If you have any chance to get in direct touch with him yourself, please say this name to him. Betty Dawson.”
Ten minutes later his phone rang in his room at the Baker Hotel and he was given an address to go to at nine that evening, and an apartment number. It was a new building, and the ground-floor apartment, listed in the name of G. L. Wells, was spacious, austere, impersonal. A robotic man who neither introduced himself nor used Hugh’s name, admitted him, led him back to a small sitting room, and said that Mr. Gallowell had been unavoidably detained and would be a little late. He brought Hugh the drink of his choice and a new magazine, and then disappeared.
Homer Gallowell walked quietly into the room at ten minutes of ten, in his dark, unpressed suit, carpenter shoes, cheap bright tie, dusty black ranch hat, looking like just another one of those mild, leathery old men who sit in the heat of the sun on the park benches in Fort Worth and San Antone. But the eyes behind the slight distortion of the lenses were prehistoric, cold as geometry, merciless as a drill bit.
He settled himself into a dark-blue couch, placed the black hat beside him, and said, “You’re the one she’s got eyes for. I seen you behind that desk that time. You put five years onto your face since then. She send you?”
“No.”
“Then, son, you better have a damn good reason for hauling me way the hell up from Corpus.”
“If you give any kind of a damn about her or what happened to her, the reason is good enough. I got the impression, from her, you two were friends. But maybe a man like you hasn’t got time for friendships. Maybe you can’t afford it, Mr. Gallowell.”
“There’s no reason I should tell you this, or anything else, son. I can afford friends that don’t figure on using me somehow. I got five I can count. Two are women. She’s one of the two. One time I had a friend got hisself killed getting into the way of something meant for me. I would do the same for any one of those five, if that’s the way it had to be. So speak your piece, hotel man.”
“I’m after information, Mr. Gallowell. Not help. If that’s the way you felt about her, I’ll tell you the whole thing, just as it has developed. Then you’ll know why I want to know exactly what happened that last evening you spent in the hotel. Have you got time now to listen to the whole thing?”
“If’n I couldn’t do what I want to do with my time, I wouldn’t be gettin’ the full suption out of my money, son. It sounds long, so let’s get some talkin’ whisky in here first, if I can find that idiot I keep around here.”
Darren told the old man the full story, everything he had learned. And when he was through, he said, “I think they … k
illed her. But there’s a big part missing. Why would they? The death of her father meant they’d lost control over her, but why would they have to kill her?”
He had been looking down at his clenched fist. He looked over at Gallowell and saw how shrunken the spare old man looked, saw the astonishing glints of the tear tracks on the hard and ancient face. Gallowell reached to a hip pocket and pulled out a blue bandanna. He took off his glasses, wiped his face, blew his nose strenuously into the handkerchief and put his glasses back on.
“I feel like half the light went out of the world,” he said, almost inaudibly.
“What happened that night?”
“You haven’t come right out with it, son, but you hinted on it pretty strong. Surely, they sicked her onto me on account of I took my own money back from them they’d held so long they got to thinking it was theirs. For me it was just a game, kinda. I get so goddam bored on this end of my life. Now let me say that if it had gone like that Max Hanes wanted it to go, and she’d tried to hustle an old man like me into bed, it would have been so far out of line with the kind of girl I knew her to be I would have been too suspicious to even try to go along with it, though you can keep on finding live coals in a fire you think is dead. You set out a plate of steak for a fox, and he might circle it forty times, keeping his distance, but he won’t touch it. She come to that free suite of mine twice that evenin’, and it was like being visited by two different people, and here is just how it was.”
After Gallowell had finished the story, Hugh said, “Just three times, then, and you were to be the fourth. The Playland Motel. Movies and tapes. So that’s the mechanics of it. And the lever they used. Damn them—God damn them all.”
“She loved you, son.”
“That’s fine. That’s just jimdandy. Life is the process of finding out, too late, everything that should have been obvious to you at the time.”
“I haven’t told you all of it,” the old man said slowly, “and maybe this is the part that’s hard to tell. It riled me some, those fellers thinking they could get me to make a fool of myself over a woman. That Hanes phoned me, and I swear to God, son, I didn’t even stop to think of the spot I might be putting her in, so I let him know that I knew what they had all rigged for me. And the onliest way I could have found out was from her, of course.
“I guess I figured she was out of it, and safe. So I peeled him down some. I drew him a pitcher of just what was going to happen to him, and it was so far from anything he’d ever heard of, it shoved his voice right up to a squeak, and he maybe isn’t getting a good night’s rest even yet. But it was a damn fool way to enjoy myself, and maybe that’s what killed her, them knowing she’d crossed them before she had a chance to get out of town. If she talked to me, then maybe she’d talk to other people too.”
“But wouldn’t they have learned that anyway? She would have had to give some kind of report, some reason why she didn’t go to the Playland Motel.”
Homer Gallowell looked slightly relieved. “Hadn’t thought of that. Hell, all I’ve done for you, son, is make it look more and more like Miz Betty is dead. But now I’m in this all the way, son. You got a partner.”
“I … I just don’t know what to do next, Mr. Gallowell.”
The old man stared at him with open astonishment. “It looks like they killed your woman, didn’t they? You only got one direction you can go. You didn’t have to tell me it’s no good going to the police. It’s all covered up too good for that. You only got one direction left, haven’t you, son?”
“What I’d like to do, and what I can do, are two different things. This isn’t the Old West, Mr. Gallowell. I could get close enough to them so that if I didn’t drop the gun, I could hit at least one, and maybe two. And I might have two whole seconds of satisfaction before somebody else would blow the top of my head off. All very gallant and bold, I guess.” He leaned forward slightly. “I want all of them, Homer. Hanes, Marta, Allen, Brownell and Charm. And, like the old Spanish toast, time to enjoy them. And there might be more people involved, and I’d like to get them too. But I’m not going to kid myself. I’m not the same kind of a man you are. If I held a gun against Max Hanes’ head, I don’t know—I couldn’t be sure I could pull the trigger. I don’t feel any less of a man because of that. But before I do anything, I had damn well better be aware of my own limitations, so I won’t get into something I haven’t got the instinct to finish.”
Gallowell blinked slowly. “First things first. Got to make sure of exactly who all was in on whatever it was, and at the same time break our own hearts by provin’ we’re guessin’ right. Of the five you named, son, which one do you guess would bust open easiest with a little pressure on him?”
Darren thought for a moment. “Brownell. Beaver Brownell. Do you really understand what I mean about … not knowing if I could pull a trigger even if.…”
“Had me a hand one time, way back, couldn’t gun a rabbit or spur a horse. Couldn’t bring himself to draw on a man, no matter what he got called. One night over Kerrville way a bunch of the boys were funnin’ him and made like to take his britches down to get a close check on whether he was a man. Before they busted his left wrist he fixed three of them up for the hospital, and after the wrist was broke, he took care of the other two. He still couldn’t gun a jack rabbit or stomp a toad, but the word got around he was a man in his own way. If you wasn’t a man, Darren, she wouldn’t have give you a minute of her time, so don’t apologize to me about not being able to handle it in an old times’ way. Like they say, your ul-tim-ate ob-jec-tive is jes’ fine. Now the thing to do is to leave this Brownell up to some of my people and we’ll find out just what happened and who all was in on it.”
“And where do we go from there?”
Gallowell’s smile was slow and thin. “What is the one thing in the world most important to those fellers? What do they love the best?”
“Money.”
“And what’s the greatest weapon in the world?”
“Money.”
“Now you tell me every damn thing in the world you happen to know about this Beaver Brownell.”
• • • thirteen
Beaver Brownell disappeared on the last day of June. It wouldn’t have been noticed so soon had he not been told to report to Harry Charm for orders at eight that evening. That was the one obligation he would never forget—those infrequent assignments that made possible the lush life. Someone, probably Al Marta, ordered an immediate and thorough but unobtrusive investigation. When Max Hanes questioned Hugh Darren, Hugh was able to say, truthfully, that he had no helpful information whatever.
As near as it could be pinned down, Brownell was in the Afrique Bar at one in the afternoon and had struck up a quick and apparently warm association with some unknown woman, a handsome and mature blonde, richly and smartly dressed. After much murmured conversation and some laughter, they had walked out to the big parking lot and had driven off together, heading west, in a large, shiny car, make and plate unknown, with the woman at the wheel.
By Monday, the fourth of July, if the search was continuing Hugh could see no evidence of it. He did hear one rumor, which seemed a little too pat, that Brownell had been sent East on business and would be gone a long, long time.
At six o’clock that evening Hugh found a sealed note on his desk. On the envelope it said, in Jane Sanderson’s hand, “Delivered 5:22 by special messenger.” The note inside consisted of a local phone number and a request to call a Mr. Wells. He was reaching for his phone when he remembered the name plate on the Dallas apartment. He drove down into town and phoned from a drugstore booth. “Sandspun Motel,” a woman said. He asked for Mr. Wells. An unfamiliar male voice answered. He gave his name and was answered almost immediately by Homer Gallowell, who sounded very wary until Hugh said he was phoning from a booth in a drugstore.
“Good boy! Get on out here. You can’t tell what nervous people will do, so make sure nobody is following you around. If you don’t know where this place is, lo
ok it up. I’m in Twenty. Last one on the right-hand side as you face it.”
“I know about where it is. It should take me ten minutes.”
It was a new motel, on the main highway east. He drove by at a good speed and on into the empty land. Then he pulled off and stopped, watched traffic while he lit a cigarette, and drove back to the Sandspun.
Homer admitted him to Number 20 when he knocked. The old man was alone.
“Fix yourself a drink afore you set, son.”
“It’s bad?”
“I’ll wait until you get yourself ready to set and listen.”
Gallowell started with Brownell. “A good gal I known most all her life noosed him easy and led him away like a little child, and it don’t matter to you where she took him to. But when he walked in there with his chest stuck out, all smiles and set for one hell of an afternoon, he got hisself greeted by a couple of good boys I sent over to work with the gal. They’re wild boys that have worked for me on Ayrab matters. I won’t exactly say they’re purposeful, but if you closed a door on either one of them they’d walk through it, and they got a natural dislike for people like that Brownell.
“Anyhow, Brownell, he didn’t crack for ten whole minutes. About the end of that time he come to realize this was a brand of man he hadn’t never run into before. He even figured it for some kind of a bluff, when they were getting him ready to geld him like you would a stallion that’s turned too mean to handle. But when it come to him these boys were in dead earnest, it about turned him into an idiot right then and there, because he figured it for that fate worse than death they keep talking about.”
“Is she dead?” Hugh asked.
The Only Girl in the Game Page 27