Gigolo Johnny Wells

by Lawrence Block

  He considered. He didn’t want five or ten or twenty, not from her. He wanted more than that. He wanted the dough that would buy him a front, the dough that would put him in business. Dough for a suit, a place to live, a haircut and clothes and business expenses.

  He wasn’t going to get that kind of dough from her. But he could — if he was willing to take chances. How great a chance would he be taking?

  “What’s your price?”

  He ignored her question, calculating the risk quickly. She didn’t know his name or where he lived. She didn’t live in his neighborhood. She could describe him to the cops and tell them where he picked her up, but that was about all she could do.

  And the odds were strong that she wouldn’t say a word to anybody. She’d be pretty goddamned ashamed of what she’d done, and she’d be glad to be rid of him. She might miss him a little on cold nights, but she’d be happy enough never to see him again. That much was sure.

  And this way he would get his stake. This way he would have that suit and those shirts and shoes, and a place to live and a foot in the door of every bar on 59th Street.

  So why not?

  “Well, whore.”

  The word didn’t anger him. He wasn’t at all angry when he hit her, but he couldn’t have done a better job if he’d been madder than hell.

  He drove his fist into the pit of her stomach. She doubled up in pain, not making a sound, and he hit her again. The second punch was an uppercut to the jaw, not too hard because he didn’t want to knock her teeth out. Her teeth clicked together metallically and she was lifted six inches by the blow. Then she slumped to the floor and lay there in a heap. He checked her. She was unconscious, and she’d stay that way for a while.

  He wasted no time at all. First he went through her purse in a hurry. He took sixty dollars in fives and tens from her wallet and found another dollar-eighty in silver plus three singles in a cloth change-purse. There were also six pennies in the change-purse but he left them there for her. He remembered the way he had thrown the nickel and eight pennies into the gutter that evening and grinned at the memory.

  There was no more money in the living room bureau, but he struck paydirt in the bedroom. The top drawer of her dresser contained another hundred dollars in twenties plus a small diamond solitaire engagement ring and a flat gold wristwatch with a black suede band. He got another less expensive watch from her wrist. He tried to take her wedding ring, more for the hell of it than because it was worth anything, but gave up when he saw that it fit too tightly. He could have cut her finger off, he thought, grinning, but that would be a little too much. What the hell — she’d been lots of fun in the rack.

  He went through the apartment and took anything that was small and that could be converted easily into cash. He found a table lighter, a gold charm bracelet, a man’s alligator billfold. It must have belonged to old Dave, he decided. He could use it to keep his own dough in.

  He put the money in his new wallet and stuffed it into his back pocket. He hesitated at the door for a moment, then dipped into his pocket and came out with the dollar and eighty cents in silver. What the hell, he thought. So she can get to work tomorrow.

  He looked at her. She was breathing normally, sound asleep and dead to the world. He jingled the coins in his hand, then tossed them underhand at her. A nickel glanced off the side of her face but she did not move.

  “Live it up,” he said to her. “And thanks. You’ve been swell.”

  Chapter Three

  HE HOTFOOTED IT OVER to Central Park West and crossed the street to get a cab heading uptown. The air was cooled now and he buttoned the leather jacket. A cab drew up and he hailed it. It pulled to the curb and he opened the door and slid into the back seat. “96th and Broadway,” he said.

  The cab started up and Johnny studied the driver. He was a small round-shouldered man with sad eyes and a weak mouth. Johnny guessed that the crumb would have given ten years off his life for a piece of Mrs. David Nugent. And he’d just had the broad for nothing. Hell, he’d come out miles ahead.

  He took out the billfold, admired the leather, and counted the money. It came to one hundred sixty-three dollars. That was the cash alone, he reminded himself. The watches and the ring would bring more, plus the table lighter and the charm bracelet. Say an absolute minimum of a hundred clear for the stuff — and Beans could do better than that, he was sure of it. That made better than two and a half yards, which wasn’t bad for a quick night’s work.

  It wasn’t just the money, he thought. It was what he could do with it. He had the looks and the talent to make it in the Pretty Boy circuit. He’d needed the working capital and now he had that. There wouldn’t be any more scrounging around on Broadway for a quick broad who’d pay for dinner and cough up another five when he twisted her arm. He could be choosy now. He could take his time and come on strong for a heavy score.

  He was no dope. There were things he had to learn. You couldn’t move where the big money was unless you knew how to act. You had to have manners and polish. You had to talk like a gentleman and act like one.

  But those were things he could learn. You couldn’t learn looks and you couldn’t learn sex appeal. But if you had them to start with, plus a little gray matter upstairs, then you had it made. That guy Bernie — he hadn’t been born with any spoon in his mouth. He was just a Rivington Street punk who played it smooth and got lucky. If he could do it, so could Johnny Wells.

  Look out, world — here comes Johnny!

  The cab dropped him at 96th and Broadway. The meter read seventy cents; Johnny gave the cabby a buck and told him to keep the change. What the hell, he thought — he could afford the thirty cents.

  He hurried up the flight of stairs to the pool hall, hoping the guys were still there. He saw Ricky at a table on the far side busy proving that a fool and his money are quickly parted, especially over a table of eight-ball. The mark had a Joe College look about him and Johnny guessed that he was hot stuff at the pool table in the Columbia student lounge. But that didn’t mean he could give any competition to a shark like Ricky.

  He didn’t say hello to Ricky, since that wouldn’t have been too tactful while Ricky was fleecing the mark. It might tip things. Instead he nodded, and Rick flicked his head toward the back of the room. Johnny nodded in reply and headed for the back. Beans and Long Sam were playing rotation. Long Sam was working on the four ball. He had a one-cushion shot to play and he was lining it up carefully.

  Beans gave him a nod. “We missed you,” he said. “Pull up a cue and sit down. This game won’t last long.”

  “I got to talk to you.”

  “To us or to me?”

  “Just you. Nothing personal, Sam. It’s in Beans’s line of work is all.”

  Long Sam nodded. Johnny and Beans headed for the men’s room. The pool room was a clean place; you didn’t flash hot merchandise there and expect the management to love you. The two of them went into one of the booths in the john and locked the door.

  “You got something to fence?”

  “You read me right. Not just something. A couple things.”

  “Like what?”

  Johnny took one watch and the charm bracelet out of his pocket. “Like this,” he said. He reached in again and came up with the table lighter. “And like this.” He tried another pocket and hauled out the other watch and the engagement ring. “And this.”

  Beans whistled “You scored heavy.”

  “That’s about it.”

  “Where’d you get ’em?”

  “Off a broad.”

  “Nice.”

  “Can you sell ’em?”

  “Oh, no problem,” Beans said. “This is the kind of stuff Moe likes for me to bring in. It’s easy to turn over.”

  “What’s it worth?”

  Beans shook his head. “Hard to say.” he said. “What it’s worth and what it’ll bring is two different things. Moe’s an honest guy. I work with him regular and he pays fair because he knows me. But it’s st
ill tough to say. These watches could be worth ten bucks or two hundred and I couldn’t tell you the difference.”

  “This one says seventeen jewels.”

  “Don’t mean a thing, Johnny. You know what those jewels are?”

  “Diamonds, aren’t they?”

  “Industrial diamonds.” Beans said “Worth eleven cents a piece. It can have twenty-one jewels and still be junk. It depends on the movement and the casing. And what you can get from Moe depends on how easy an item it is for him. One time I brought him a necklace he told me straight out was worth maybe four hundred retail. And he told me he couldn’t give me more than thirty bucks for it. Something like that is tough to re-sell. He has to ship it to a guy across the country so it won’t be identified by insurance guys.”

  “This stuff is safe,” Johnny said. “The broad won’t squeal. She wouldn’t report me.”

  “Maybe not. But if she’s insured you can bet she’ll report the theft. She’ll say it got burglared or something, but she’ll report it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So I don’t know what I can get, Johnny.”

  “To hell with it,” he said, shrugging. “You can sell it? You can turn it over tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  “Take it now,” Johnny said. “I’ll meet you up here tomorrow night. I got things to do.”

  Beans stuffed the loot into his pockets. “I’ll get what I can,” he said. “You don’t want to hang for a game or two?”

  “No,” Johnny said. “No, I can’t. I got to move.”

  His own room was just as he had left it. He kicked the door shut and propped a two-by-four under the knob so that it wouldn’t open. In a dump like that he wasn’t taking any chances. Anybody saw he had better than a hundred bucks and he might be in for a rough time.

  He didn’t want a rough time. The two-by-four had stood him in good stead in the past; he used it as a lock whenever he had a broad up to the room. Now he had money, and that was more important than a broad. He sat down heavily on the bed and took the wallet from his pocket.

  He counted the money four times.

  A hundred and sixty-two goddam bucks. A beautiful hundred and beautiful sixty-two beautiful bucks.

  It was more money than he’d ever had at one time in his life. It was a huge roll — and at the same time it wasn’t enough to get going on until he got the extra dough from Beans. A suit alone would run him close to a yard all by itself. Shoes were fifteen or twenty, shirts five or six bucks apiece, socks a buck a pair. And he’d need an extra pair of pants and a sport jacket, plus a decent suitcase to keep his clothes in. You couldn’t check into a hotel with a paper sack under your arm.

  Then there was the hotel. If he was going to come on strong he wasn’t going to live in a craphole. He’d need a hotel, and it would have to be at least average and probably better than that. That would cost money.

  But if Beans brought back anywhere from a C-note on up, then he could swing it. And as soon as the front was set up he wouldn’t have to worry about money. It would come in as fast as he needed it.

  He smiled.

  They’d pay, he thought. The goddamned broads would pay through the nose, just the way Fancy Pants Nugent had paid. They’d get what they paid for — he’d teach them what sex was all about and make them feel like a million dollars.

  But they would pay for it.

  He sat around planning until well past midnight. Then he stashed the alligator wallet between his mattress and the spring, pulled off his clothes and crawled into bed. He was tired now. The Nugent dame had been fun and the money was nice, but he was exhausted. She had really known how to wiggle that cute little rear of hers. She was choice stuff.

  He smiled happily, remembering how it had been with her, how he had made her beg for it. They were going to do worse than beg, he thought. All the rich bitches with itches, they’d beg and more. They would come crawling to him, crawling on their hands and knees and crying like babies.

  The picture pleased him.

  He slept easily and well. He dreamed about money and women and power.

  It was a few minutes past noon when he awoke. He didn’t know this, though. He had no idea what time it was, and he realized that he was going to have to get a watch as soon as he could afford one. It was a shame Nugent’s widow hadn’t kept his watch as a souvenir. He would have kept it and worn it himself.

  He got out of bed and his skin felt dirty. It wasn’t surprising. He’d worked up a good sweat in the rack with the Nugent broad and he hadn’t taken a shower since then. He wrapped himself up in a towel, grabbed a small chunk of dirty yellow soap and headed for the bathroom down the hall.

  He opened the door without knocking, mainly because it never occurred to him that somebody might be inside. As far as he knew, nobody else in the stinking building ever got washed.

  He opened the door and saw a flash of pink flesh. Then the pink flesh squealed and disappeared behind the shower curtain. The curtain was plastic and he could see a silhouette through it.

  The silhouette was pleasantly female.

  “Who is it?”

  He recognized the voice. It was the girl who lived down the hall. Her first name was Linda and her last name was something unpronouncably Polish. She lived with her mother, a fat old slob who washed other people’s floors and drank cheap wine.

  He saw the bottles piled outside the door every morning. But he’d never paid any attention to Linda before. She was fourteen or so, which made her a little too young for Johnny to be interested in her.

  Now, however, he wasn’t so sure. What he had seen of her had been pleasantly pink. And the silhouette gave him a nice view of breasts that jutted out sharply from her young body.

  Maybe —

  “Johnny Wells,” he said. “Sorry I charged in on you. You should have locked the door.”

  “The bolt broke.”

  He looked at it and saw that she was right.

  “I’ll be through in a minute or so,” she said. “Then you can have the bathroom.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “You can go now. I’ll be done soon.”

  “Fine,” he repeated. But he made no move to go and she didn’t say anything.

  What would the best move be? He smiled. He could take off all his clothes and step into the shower with her. That would scare the daylights out of her, but it ought to work. She’d be scared first, and then he’d grab her and give her a hug and she’d get excited, and from there it would be easy.

  And fun. He could kill two birds with one stone. First they could soap each other up and have some fun in the process, and then he could turn off the shower and fill the tub with water and take her in it. It was supposed to be a kick in a bathtub.

  Suddenly he was ashamed of himself. For Christ’s sake, the broad was all of fourteen years old! What the hell was the matter with him?

  Noiselessly he stepped out of the bathroom and closed the door. He padded back down the hall to his own room and waited there until he heard her open the door.

  “All ready,” she called.

  He wrapped himself up in his towel again, picked up the soap and opened the door. He passed her in the hallway. She was wrapped up in a towel of her own but she had a different problem. He only had to cover himself from the waist down. Her towel was the same size as his and it had more ground to cover. He saw the tops of her breasts and he saw her legs clear to her thighs.

  “It’s all yours,” she said cheerfully. “Have a nice shower, Johnny.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

  He got under the shower and let the hot water lash at him. Hell, he thought, she was only a kid. But the trouble was that she just plain wasn’t put together like a kid. Kids didn’t have boobs like she did. Kids didn’t have legs like that.

  Maybe he should have tossed her a pass. Something easy, though, so he wouldn’t scare her if she wasn’t having any. It might have been worth a try.

  But fourteen, for God’s sake!
<
br />   He said to hell with it and finished his shower.

  The day was a drag. He bought himself a breakfast of waffles and bacon at the luncheonette on the corner and washed the food down with a large glass of milk. He wandered around for an hour or so but there was nothing he wanted to do and nobody he felt like running into. He didn’t even have eyes to shoot pool. He was marking time, waiting for Beans to come back from his fence with money for him.

  Until then there was nothing to do. He couldn’t start moving without the money, couldn’t even plan until he knew how much bread he would have to get started on. He shot the rest of the afternoon at a movie. There was a double feature playing at a movie house on Broadway between 88th and 89th and he hadn’t seen either picture, so he went.

  One was a cops-and-robbers thing called The Mercenaries, and the screen credits said it was based on a book that had won the Edgar, whatever the hell that meant. The other was A Sound of Distant Drums and it was about a group of young actors and actresses trying to get ahead in Hollywood. It bored him stiff. He sat through both pictures waiting for them to end, munching popcorn and smoking cigarettes in direct violation of fire department rules and regulations. Finally the pictures were over and he left the theater and wandered back toward 96th Street.

  It was time for dinner almost, but he wasn’t particularly hungry. He thought maybe he’d go down to Times Square for an hour or so and bum around down there. But he decided not to. He wanted to be around whenever Beans made the scene. He had no idea how much dough was coming to him and he was dying to find out. He wondered whether Beans would clip ten or twenty bucks off the top for himself. It was possible, and he would never find out one way or the other. But it was worth it if he did. Beans would get more than Johnny could have, even if he’d been able to find a fence willing to take a chance on him.

  He checked the pool hall on the off-chance that Beans was there early. He wasn’t. A guy named Phil talked Johnny into a game and they played for time — the loser picked up the tab for the games. Johnny got lucky and ran a string of six balls one time and eight the next, and from there it was easy. His eye held up and Phil wound up paying for both of them.