God Save the Mark

by Donald E. Westlake

  Apartment 3-B was to my right when I got off the elevator on the third floor. I rang its bell and the door immediately opened and standing there was the girl from Madison Square Park, wearing red canvas slacks and a sleeveless blouse in a kaleidoscope design. She was barefoot, and a highball glass in her right hand tinkled its ice at me.

  “You’re ten minutes late,” she said. “I had a little trouble,” I said.

  “Well, you’re here,” she said, “and that’s the important thing. Come on in.”

  I entered a white hall, at the end of which I could see a portion of the living room. Miss Smith closed the door and said, “You’re worth fifty bucks to me, do you know that?”

  “What?”

  “Come on along,” she said, and preceded me along the carpeted hall to the living room.

  There was nothing to do but follow. As she entered the living room she said to someone out of sight, “Okay, smart boy, pay up. You lose.”

  Something was wrong. I stepped hesitantly into the living room, ready to flee.

  But it wouldn’t do any good to flee. Reilly heaved his big frame up out of the sofa, put his drink down on the coffee table, and said to me in great disgust, “Okay, you silly bastard, explain yourself.”

  11

  EXPLAIN MYSELF, he said. Well, he also had some explaining to do, and so for a while the apartment was knee-deep in explanations, as I described to them my having been shot at and they told me what they’d had in mind in inveigling me up here.

  It seems Miss Smith, whose first name was Karen, was a friend of Reilly’s, and he’d put her up to this. They had been talking about me—my ears burned at the idea—and it had been Reilly’s contention that the windfall I had just received would make me, at long last, cautious in my dealings with strangers. Karen Smith had insisted she could work her wiles on me, inheritance or no inheritance. Reilly had said that if she could do it—that is, if I was still the same incorrigible sucker I’d always been—he wanted to know about it. If Karen could talk me into coming to this apartment tonight, without telling me any truth other than her last name and address, Reilly would owe her fifty dollars. If she failed, she owed Reilly fifty dollars.

  I believed them about this harebrained bet, because that’s the sort of plot that just naturally springs up around me, but Reilly for a long time wouldn’t believe me about the shooting. When finally he did come grudgingly around to accept it, he wanted to know why I hadn’t reported it to the police. “I’m not the only cop in the world, you know,” he said.

  “You’re the only cop in the world I know,” I reminded him. “And I kept calling you, but you weren’t home.”

  “So you thought you’d come up here.”

  “Well, Miss Smith had said—”

  “Karen,” she said, and smiled at me.

  I smiled back at her. “Karen,” I agreed. To Reilly I said, “She’d talked in the park there as though my life was in danger and she knew what it was all about. So I thought I’d come up and find out.”

  He sighed heavily and shook his head. “Let me give you a for instance, Fred. For instance, Karen is a gun moll in cahoots with the people that shot at you. So you come up here, and they’re here.”

  “Well,” I said. I looked helplessly at Karen. “I didn’t think it could be like that,” I said. “You just weren’t that kind of girl.”

  She laughed and said, “Thank you, Mr. Fitch, thank you very much.”

  “Fred,” I said.

  “Fred,” she agreed.

  Reilly said, “Fred, that’s just the kind of thing always gets you in trouble. When will you get it through your head that people aren’t what they look like?”

  “Sometimes they are,” I said.

  “Which times?”

  I didn’t have an answer, and Reilly was a little mad at me—the fifty dollars he owed Karen had something to do with that, I believe—so the conversation stalled there for a minute, with everybody looking at nobody, until Karen said brightly, “Let me get drinks for everybody. Fred?”

  “Oh, Scotch, I suppose.”

  “Ice?”

  “Please.”

  While she was away in the kitchen rattling ice-cube trays, Reilly said to me, “I don’t suppose you got the kid’s name.”

  I had no idea what he meant, and so said, “Who?”

  “The kid,” he said, not very patiently. “The one told you you’d been shot at.”

  “Oh. No, he didn’t tell me. He was just a boy, one of the boys from the neighborhood.”

  He sighed again. “Fred,” he said softly, “may I tell you how you should have handled this?”

  “I wish you would.”

  “Then I will. You should have collared the kid and taken him straight to a phone and called your local precinct. The kid might have been able to describe the car. He might even have seen the people inside it.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You don’t think so. In any case he was your witness. So you call the precinct, and when the officers arrive you tell them, ‘This kid says somebody was shooting at me.’ It’s simple.”

  “It sounds simple,” I admitted, “the way you say it. But I don’t know, it just didn’t seem to work out that way.”

  “It never does, with you,” he said. He sighed, and shook his head, and heaved to his feet. “I’ll make the call now,” he said. “I don’t suppose there’s any detail you forgot to tell me, is there? Like the license plate of the car, for instance.”

  “Don’t get sore at me,” I said. “After all, you’re a professional at this, I’m not.”

  “God knows,” he said. He went away to another room to use the phone, and for a while I could hear him muttering and murmuring in there. Karen came back from the kitchen during this, carrying drinks, and the two of us sat in the living room and made small talk about the weather and television and so on while waiting for Reilly to come back.

  I found that I liked Karen Smith very much. She was a stunningly beautiful girl, and normally I think stunningly beautiful girls have a way of cramping conversation on first meeting—not that it’s their fault—but Karen was different. She had such an open manner, such easy humor, that it was easy to relax with her, as though we’d been casual buddies for years.

  Reilly spoiled the mood, on his return, by being gruff and impatient, exactly as he’d been when he’d left. “They’ll want to talk to you again,” he said, coming in, and sat down next to Karen on the sofa.

  I said, “Who? Those detectives?”

  “Right. Call them in the morning and make arrangements. Early in the morning.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  He said, “The other thing is, you better find some place else to stay for a while.”

  “You mean, not go home?”

  “They’ve got your place staked out,” he said. “That’s obvious. With any luck you’ve shaken them now, let’s try and keep it that way.”

  “You think I ought to go to a hotel?”

  “Some friend’s place would be better,” he said. “Somebody they wouldn’t think of.”

  “If it’s a friend,” I said, “they’d think of it.”

  Karen said, “You could stay here, if you want. The sofa’s comfortable.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to put you out.”

  “No problem,” she assured me. “I have more space here than I need, we wouldn’t get in each other’s way at all.”

  “I’ll stay in a hotel,” I said. “That’s all right. Thank you anyway.”

  Reilly said, “Wait a second, wait a second.” He turned to Karen. “You sure it’s okay?”

  She spread her hands. “Why not? I work all day, half the time I’ve got dates in the evening, the place is empty practically all the time.”

  I said, “Really, I appreciate it, but—”

  “Shut up,” Reilly told me. He leaned closer to Karen, lowered his voice slightly, and said, “You know one thing it means.”

  Sh
e blushed, and smiled, and then we all knew the one thing it meant. She turned toward him and murmured, “There’s still your place.”

  I was beginning to be embarrassed. “Uh,” I said. “I’ll stay at a hotel. I’d really rather stay at a hotel.”

  Reilly turned to me and said, “You would. Listen, Fred. Number one, nobody knows you even know Karen, so nobody will look for you here. Number two, you’re already here, so you won’t have to do any traveling out on the streets. Number three, if you’re here Karen and I can both keep an eye on you.”

  I said, “You want me to stay?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” he said. “But I know it’s best. So do it.”

  I looked at Karen. “Are you sure?”

  “The place is yours,” she said.

  “Well. Thank you.”

  She got to her feet. “Shall I get you another drink?”

  “I think you’d better,” I said.

  12

  THE TWO DAYS I spent in Karen’s apartment were among the oddest of my entire life. She did have a large place, as she’d said, but even a large apartment is a relatively small area when two people are living in it, and the first part of my stay was full of abrupt embarrassments, flashes of leg, confusions in the hallway, and excessive politeness on all sides.

  The embarrassments began promptly on Saturday night, about half an hour after it had been decided I would stay there. Reilly and Karen began to look cow-eyed at each other, I began to get very much a fifth-wheel feeling, and when finally Reilly suggested to Karen that they “go out” for a while I was as relieved at the idea as they were.

  After they left, of course, I felt a little eerie being alone in a strange apartment, and with some sheepishness I went around to every room and turned all the lights on. I spent a fruitless hour or so trying to figure out why anyone would want to kill Uncle Matt and me, and wondering why after two weeks the police couldn’t seem to manage to solve the case. As boredom began to get a really good grip on me, I scrounged around the apartment until I found paper and pencil, then sat down in the living room and began to make up a crossword puzzle, something I hadn’t done since high school. Back when I was fifteen and sixteen years old I actually sold a number of crossword puzzles to magazines specializing in that sort of thing. I still remember the definition of which at the time I was the proudest: “The poet’s on the pumpkin.” Five letters.

  After a while I gave up the crossword puzzle, watched television instead, and ultimately went to sofa about midnight, falling asleep with less trouble than I’d anticipated.

  And Karen, heels in hand and a trifle drunk, inadvertently woke me a little after two when she came in and switched on the living-room light before she remembered she had a house guest. Then, as long as I was awake anyway, and since she had a hankering to talk, we sat awhile and chatted, me in underwear and blanket and she in tight knit dress and stockinged feet.

  She wanted to talk about Reilly, mostly, wondering how long I’d known him and what did I think of him and so on. “I can’t help it,” she told me. “I’m out of my mind for that man, absolutely off my head.”

  “Are you two going to, uh, get married?”

  “Ah, well,” she said, and looked tragic, and I knew I’d just made a bad mistake.

  I tried to save the situation, saying, “Yes, I remember the first time I ever met Reilly, in the Bunco—” But it was too late; I’d pushed the button and I was going to get the recorded announcement whether I wanted it or not.

  “Don’t you know about Jack?” she asked me. Because she was tipsy, her speech had great precision in the middle but got fuzzy out around the edges. “Don’t you know about his wife?” she asked.

  “You mean he’s married? Now? Already?”

  “Separated. For years and years and years.” She gestured, waving away hosts of years. “Separated, but no divorce.” She leaned toward me, making her balance in the chair precarious, and whispered confidentially, “Religious problems.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know that. Reilly never mentioned—but I guess he wouldn’t—I mean, he doesn’t—uhhh—it wouldn’t come up, I suppose. Between him and me.”

  “Religious problems,” she whispered again, and winked at me, and sat back in the chair. “So here I sit,” she said. “Completely out of my skull over that man, and nothing to be done. Nothing to be done.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. What else can you say to something like that at two in the morning when you’ve been awakened in a strange living room by a beautiful woman who’s had too much to drink? And who isn’t yours?

  Well, we talked awhile longer, and then she staggered off to bed, and I disarranged myself on the sofa once again and slept poorly but dreamlessly until seven in the morning, when someone began to dent garbage cans in the areaway.

  That was Sunday, the morning our ménage scaled undreamed-of heights of awkwardness. It seemed as though I couldn’t turn a corner without running into Karen dressing or undressing or adjusting or bathing or scratching or burping, and it also seemed as though every time she lurched through a doorway I was on the other side just about to put the second leg of my pants on.

  In the long run, though, this rotten morning was beneficial. After a couple of hours of it, we were so inured to one another’s presence that by mutual unspoken agreement we just stopped getting flustered about it all. No more gulps, no more pardon mes, no more abruptly slammed doors. We relaxed with one another, and promptly the embarrassing situations themselves came to a stop.

  After breakfast we made up a shopping list. I was going to be needing things—all sorts of things from socks to a toothbrush—and Karen thought it best if I kept out of sight, so we made up a list and she went shopping for me. The doorbell rang while she was gone, but I didn’t answer it. It kept ringing and I kept not answering it. Finally it stopped, and when Karen came back in a minute later Reilly was with her. Reilly said to me, “What’s the matter with you now? You deaf?”

  “I was playing it safe,” I said.

  He grumbled.

  I asked him if the police were getting anywhere, and how much longer he thought I’d have to stay here, and he told me grumpily he didn’t think anyone in the world was getting anywhere with anything, and he supposed I’d be living in Karen’s apartment the rest of my life. He then took Karen away with him—for a ride in the country, they said—and I was left to my own devices.

  I had the apartment to myself again, and wandered around it with all the boredom I could muster. I read a Cosmopolitan, I read a Cheerios box, I read the medicine cabinet. I turned on the television set and switched back and forth for a while without finding anything. I stood at the living-room window and looked out at the gray brick walls and black windows facing me all around, looked down at the concrete areaway at the bottom with its array of dented garbage cans, looked up at the angular triangle of gray sky visible above the roofs, and wound up looking at my own pale reflection in the glass. Even that got dull after a while, so I went to the bedroom and opened the closet doors and poked through all the dresser drawers; not to be nosy, but just for something to do. Karen had what I would consider a lot of clothes. There was also a faint and musky perfume hovering over all her things, and it soon drove me back to the neuter corner of the living room again, where I set to work once more on the crossword puzzle, in which I found myself tending to use words I shouldn’t use.

  Karen came back at about one-thirty in the morning, arriving just as I was taking the second leg of my pants off. Since Reilly wasn’t with her, since I was going to bed no matter what, and since we weren’t worrying about that sort of thing any more, I continued to take my pants off, hung them over a chair, and said, “How are you?”

  “Dreadful,” she said, and began to weep buckets.

  Well, what could I do? I went over and put my arms around her and consoled her, and there I stood in my shorts while Karen wept onto my shoulder and told me how she couldn’t stand it any more, being with Reilly but n
ot of Reilly, having to lead this double-life or half-life or whatever it was, and I said, “That’s too bad,” which seemed to be the only thing I ever said to her after sundown, and in a while she raised her tear-stained face and I kissed her.

  It wasn’t actually a long kiss, but it would do. When it was over we stood looking at each other, wide-eyed, and I said, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.”

  She smiled wanly and said, “You’re very sweet, Fred,” and turned away and went snuffling off to bed, and I went to sofa, and silence reigned.

  Monday morning, nothing was said about last night’s kiss. In fact, about all Karen said to me was, “I forgot to tell you, Jack says the two men from Homicide are coming to see you today.” She also said she was going to be late for work, but I think she was talking to herself rather than me; in any case, five minutes later she’d torn out of the apartment and I was alone again. Back I went to the sofa, to rest and wait for my vaudeville team from Homicide.

  The doorbell rang about quarter to ten, but when I went to the voicebox and asked who was there, I got no answer. I kept saying, “Hello? Hello?” until the doorbell rang a second time, and I realized it was the hall door they were at, not the door downstairs.

  Except it wasn’t them. I opened the door and an elderly Jewish man was there, dressed in black, with a flat black hat and a long gray beard. He squinted at me and muttered something in what I took to be Yiddish, and I said, “I think you’ve got the wrong apartment.” He consulted a grubby scrap of paper in his palm, turned away from me, and went shuffling toward an apartment across the hall. I shrugged, shut the door, and went back to sofa. But I was awake now, so I turned on the television set and watched a quiz show with celebrities.

  The bell rang again ten minutes later. The upstairs bell. I switched off the set, went to the door, and once again it wasn’t the police.

  Instead, it was a chipper young man with a clipboard. “Hello there, sir,” he said brightly, and consulted his clipboard. “I believe a Miss Karen Smith lives here?”