Lucky at Cards hcc-28

by Lawrence Block

  Black Sand’s office was closed Saturdays but Carver had given me a key and had told me to use the office any time I felt like it. I unlocked the door. Nobody was around. I rearranged some junk on my desk just to show I had been there, then left to climb seven flights of stairs. It would have been easier to use the elevator, but elevator operators occasionally remember people and I didn’t want to be remembered. I was tired by the time I hit the twenty-fourth floor. I leaned against a wall and let my breathing go back to normal.

  The lights were off in Murray’s office. The door was locked. I waited until the hallway was empty and silent, then used the duplicate key. The door opened. Once inside, I closed the door. The same key opened Murray’s private office, next on the agenda. I didn’t turn the light on. There was enough light to see by, and it was no time to attract any attention at all. I sat behind his desk. There was a typewriter in a well to the left of me. I swung it out, took onionskin and letterhead and carbon paper from the center drawer, made a sandwich out of them and put it in the typewriter. A cigarette would have been nice. I didn’t light one.

  I put Monday’s date on the top of the page. Then I typed—

  Jack:

  What do you know about a man named August

  Milani? He called me in reference to the Whitlock

  matter and demanded payment. Have you any idea

  who he is? Please let me know immediately as to the

  best course of action.Murray Rogers

  I rolled the sandwich out of the typewriter and slipped the carbon paper between a fresh sheet of letterhead and a fresh piece of onionskin. I read the letter through again and nodded. It had the right tone.

  The second letter was dated four days later. It read—

  Jack:

  Milani seems to have us over a barrel. He says

  he’s fully prepared to go to the IRS boys, since the

  department will pay a percentage of recovered

  funds to informers in cases of this nature. I’ve

  decided to agree to his terms in the hope that this is

  the last we’ll hear from him.Murray

  The third letter was dated the following Monday. It was the hardest to write, and I gave it three tries before I got the phrasing just the way I wanted it. It wound up like this—Jack:

  Don’t worry about A.M. The man’s not willing to

  settle for what I’ve given him thus far, and seems

  to possess an insatiable appetite. By the time you

  receive this letter he’ll have been accommodated in

  the only manner possible.M.R.

  I put away the typewriter and straightened up the desk. I took the carbons and the letterheads and the onionskins with me and slipped out of the office, locking it behind me. I walked down seven fights of stairs—it was easier going down than up. The elevator came. I rode to the lobby and walked out to my car. I ran the Ford to my new apartment, stuck the car in a parking place. The apartment felt like home already. I had a cigarette then and smoked it all the way down.

  I re-examined the letters. They were on his stationery and were worded just as he would write them. The letters had been typed on his typewriter. They didn’t have his signature, but nobody signs carbons. And I was interested in the copies, not the originals. I shredded the sheets of letterhead and flushed them down the toilet. I did the same with the carbons.

  Then I put the onionskin copies away in a bureau drawer. They would be useful, but for the time being I didn’t need them. They were props. When the rest of the stage was set I could put the props to use.

  I drove across Main Street just before the shops closed for the day. I turned off, parked in a store lot and visited a few shops and bought a few things. The neighborhood was one of those marginal areas you find near the downtown business section of any good-sized city. Main Street was a few blocks to the west. Skid Row was around the corner. The Negro neighborhood ran north and east. In the middle was a snatch of surplus stores and hockshops and numbers drops and cheap bars. I didn’t figure to run into any business friends around there.

  I bought a third-hand valise and a second-hand Broadway suit. I stuffed the valise with the suit and added a few shirts and a pair of beat-up shoes. I bought a new hat, black with a very short brim, which I crammed into the valise. The more beat-up the hat looked, the better. I added a flashy half-dollar tie, a showy and cheap signet ring. I stuffed everything into the valise and tossed it into the Ford and drove home.

  From a drugstore phone booth I called the telephone company and asked them to install a phone in my apartment on Monday. Then I dropped another dime in the slot and called the Panmore to find out if there were any messages for me. There was one—I was supposed to call Seymour Daniels as soon as possible. I did. Mary Daniels answered and said hello very happily when she found out who was calling.

  “Just a minute,” she said. “I’ll let you talk to Sy.”

  I waited, started a cigarette. Then Sy was on, cheerful and noisy.

  “Good to talk to you,” he said. “Got stung a little last night, didn’t you?”

  “I gave a little money back.”

  Sy laughed. “Pretty good game,” he said. “Say, I was wondering. Do you play bridge or is poker your only game?”

  “I’ve played bridge,” I said. “Why?”

  “Well, this girl Mary’s friendly with is dropping over tonight, see, and I thought you might like to make a fourth. It won’t be a very exciting evening, just cards and drinks and conversation. But the girl’s nice. You might enjoy yourself.”

  It was the old conspiracy of the married against the single. There was a friend of Mary’s and there was me, and why not get the two of us together? I don’t need your friend, I thought. I’m busy making it with Murray’s wife.

  “Sounds fine,” I said.

  “We’ll expect you around nine?”

  “Right. I don’t know how good my game will be, though. I haven’t played in a hell of a while.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said heartily. “It doesn’t make much difference how you play.”

  I managed to slip off the line before he could realize how funny his last statement was. It was true—it didn’t make a hell of a difference whether I played like Charlie Goren or the North Park Every-Other-Tuesday Ladies’ Bridge League. Bridge wasn’t the important part of the evening. I was being fixed up with somebody, and that was more important than a deck of cards.

  My bridge game turned out to be lousy. This didn’t surprise me. I had never played the game honestly in my life. Bridge happens to be the easiest game in the world for a cheater if only because communication between partners is a significant element in the play. You can cheat with a million various signals, and you don’t have to rely on card manipulation or anything of the sort. I would have played the game more often if there hadn’t been such difficulties in arranging a stakes game. Anyone who plays money bridge with strangers deserves whatever happens to him. You can be cheated forever and never know it.

  All of which is intended to explain the fact I played a lousy game at Sy’s house. We played in the living room with soft music in the background, and Sy and Mary partners against Barb and me. That was my partner—Barbara Lambert, thirty-two, high school English teacher, married once and divorced now, no children.

  She was a pretty blonde with a settled look to her. At the outset of the evening she seemed every bit as uncomfortable as she had every right to be, given her situation. She was an unmarried gal who was being fixed up by a friend, and this is not exactly a position of strength. But she warmed up and relaxed as the evening went on. Maybe my lousy playing encouraged her.

  We played three rubbers of bridge, and in each one Sy and Mary beat us silly. They seemed a little embarrassed by the time they polished us off for the third straight time, so we put the cards away and sat around playing conversation. That wasn’t difficult. Barb was a sweet kid, intelligent if not especially hip, and we managed to keep the verbal ball going
. Sy and I locked into a long discussion about the relative merits of mutual funds and syndications, and at the end of all this Mary poured coffee. We drank up and called it an evening. Mary had driven over to pick up Barb, a clever move designed to leave me with the chore of trucking her home again. I didn’t mind.

  I drove slowly. She was quiet, sitting with her head back and the wind playing with her hair. I switched on the radio and we listened to rock and roll for a horrible moment. Then I switched off the radio.

  She said, “Bill?”

  I waited.

  “I had a nice time,” she said.

  “So did I.”

  “It was a strange evening.”

  “How?”

  “Staged. All set up and arranged. At first I had the feeling that we were all reading dialogue that somebody else had written out for us ages ago.”

  She stopped talking. I turned at the corner and she told me when we were at her house. I stopped the Ford and took her to the door and she didn’t say anything until we were standing on the steps.

  Then she said, “Married couples do that all the time. They think they have to take people like us and bring us together so that we can get married and make babies and live fuller lives. Even if—if it worked, well, it would make a person feel as though someone else were arranging his life for him.”

  I didn’t say anything. Her eyes were directed at me but she was staring past me, off into space. Her lips parted slightly. She looked as though she wanted to be kissed and it seemed like a good idea, so I kissed her. She was stiff at first. Then she relaxed slightly and then I let go of her. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. Barb said, “That was—nice, Bill.”

  “I’ll call you soon.”

  “You don’t have to, you know.”

  “I know. I’ll want to.”

  “I think I’d like that,” she said.

  I turned away and drove home. I would call Barb, of course. The action would be a good cover. If I were dating a girl, people would be less likely to imagine anything between Joyce and myself. So I would call Barb Lambert, and I would go out with her.

  In another world I would have married her, and we would have sold beautiful syndications together, and she’d be the beneficiary of my life insurance policy. She was living in that world. I wasn’t.

  I slept late on Sunday. It was past noon when I awoke and I was hungry. I made it around the corner and bought breakfast food at a deli, lox and bagel and instant coffee. I ate, showered, and fancied a different set of clothes.

  The second-hand Broadway suit was a little tight on me. That was fine. I took off the jacket, dropped it and walked on it. I picked up the jacket, then, and brushed it off and slipped it on again. I tossed the hat down and stepped on it, grinding some dirt into the felt. I straightened the hat out again, wiped it fairly clean. When I was finished, the chapeau looked as though I had owned it for ages.

  I knotted the loud tie and toned it down with coffee stains. I stuffed my feet into the broken-down shoes and tied them. I checked myself in the mirror, tugged the hat down over my eyes. I looked shabby and seedy and not at all like me.

  In a drugstore I bought a pair of glasses with plain lenses. They added a final touch. I carried my valise a few blocks south and a few blocks east. There were six hotels in a row on the cheap street and all looked appropriate for the second-hand suit and the battered hat. I tried three hotels before I found just what I wanted.

  The third one was the charm. It was called the Glade, and the rooms rented for two bucks a night or ten bucks a week. I walked through what passed for a lobby with my head tossed back and my shoulders hunched forward. I leaned a shoulder against the desk and looked at the desk clerk. When I talked to him my voice sounded like all the wrong parts of Brooklyn, and my lips didn’t move much.

  “I need a room,” I said. “Only I got no use for stairs. You got anything on the first floor?”

  The other hotels hadn’t. The Glade did. The clerk showed me to a room in the back. There was a cigarette-scarred dresser, an army cot, a washbowl, a cracked hunk of linoleum on the floor.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

  Out front the clerk said the room would run me two dollars a day or ten a week, payable in advance. I reached into a pants pocket and came up with two worn dollar bills. He wanted a dollar deposit for the key. “You think I’m gonna run off with your key?” I said. “Hell—”

  I gave him the deposit, but not before I had haggled with him for a few minutes to preserve appearances. He passed me a registration card and gave me a ball-point pen. I leaned on the counter, studied the card, tapped the pen on the counter, glanced up at him.

  “A few days,” I said, “I won’t have to stay in dumps like this one. A few days and I pull out of this town in a Cadillac. You believe that, Charlie?”

  He started to tell me his name wasn’t Charlie, then decided not to bother.

  “You better believe it,” I said. “You just better believe it. Little Augie is going to do fine.”

  Then I took the pen and filled out the card. August Milani, I wrote. New York City.

  9

  I stayed at the Glade for an hour or so, then returned to my place on College Street and belted away some sleep. In the morning I drove downtown and to work.

  Two salesmen were at their desks and poring over a brochure, and another salesman was jawing with someone on the phone. Perry Carver was in his private office. I made a few calls, filed three or four prospects under Call-Again-Some-Time, managed to make two appointments for the evening. Then Perry Carver called me on the intercom and I stepped into his office.

  “Well,” he said. “How’s it going, Bill?”

  “Fine.”

  “So fine you have to work weekends?” Carver grinned. “I’m a detective, saw your desk rearranged. That’s always a good sign. This is no business for a clockwatcher, Bill. A man has to be willing to work long hours when the work is there for him and take it easy when the going is slow. I like the way you operate, Bill.”

  We said a few more nice things to each other. I took off about eleven, grabbed a cup of coffee at a drugstore soda fountain. There was a men’s mag on the rack with a cover streamer touting an article on how to beat the crap tables at Vegas. I picked up the magazine and scanned the article. It was one of those bonehead jobs pushing the old double-up system—you double your bet every time you lose, and eventually you come out a winner. There was only one little flaw. Sooner or later you were bucking the house limit and the casino had you by the throat. I put back the magazine and crossed over to the phone booth.

  Murray’s girl answered the phone. I put Brooklyn back into my voice and told her to let me speak to Rogers. She asked who was calling.

  “August Milani,” I said. There was a pause while she checked with Rogers.

  Then she said, “Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Milani. Could you tell me what your call is in reference to?”

  “Sure, honey,” I said. I chuckled lewdly. “Tell Rogers I want to talk to him about Whitlock.”

  Maybe Murray’s curiosity was aroused. At any rate, he was on the line a few seconds later, asking what he could do for me. I waited until I heard the receptionist click herself off the line. Then I dropped the Brooklyn accent.

  “My name’s Milani,” I said. “August Milani. Sam Whitlock suggested you might be in the market for some life insurance, Mr. Rogers. I’d like to make an appointment with you—”

  “I’ve got all the coverage I need,” he said.

  “Now, that’s always a moot point. If we could get together for an hour or so, Mr. Rogers—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not interested.”

  I was still talking earnestly when he broke the connection. I put the receiver on the hook and stayed in the booth long enough to light a cigarette. I thought of Murray telling the court that Milani was just an insurance man, a pest trying to sell him a policy, while Murray’s receptionist contradicted him and said that Milani sounded like some
kind of gangster.

  It was getting cute.

  I sat on the Carver office telephone most of the afternoon. One man thought he might buy a half-unit but he wanted to discuss the matter with his wife first. Another was interested but hadn’t been able to read the brochure thoroughly yet. Would I call him in a day or two? I made a notation to do so. By four-thirty I had called everybody I felt like calling. I leaned back in my chair and smoked a cigarette. It would have been nice to call Joyce, let her know what was happening, make some plans and talk out some dreams.

  Nice, but also foolish. We wouldn’t be seeing much of each other for the next two weeks. That was the way it had to be. If we were connected, the whole mess would cave in on us.

  So I flipped through the phonebook and dialed a number. The phone rang four times before she reached it, and her hello was on the breathless side.

  “Hello yourself,” I said. “This is Bill Maynard.”

  “Oh,” Barbara Lambert said. She sounded surprised.

  “I didn’t know if you’d be home from school yet or not. I thought I’d give you a try.”

  “I was just walking through the door when the phone rang.”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute and the silence stretched. I pictured her in her small house, a comfortable blonde who lived alone, holding the telephone to her ear and waiting a little nervously to find out what I wanted. It didn’t seem altogether fair to make her part of the wrapping paper on a frameup.

  “I was wondering,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you busy tomorrow night, Barb? I thought we could have dinner and take in a movie.”

  She said that would be very nice. She sounded pleased and maybe just a little bit giddy. I told her I would pick her up around seven. Then I cleared off my desk, said goodbye all around and left the office. I drove home. The telephone people had installed a phone for me and I called a few people to let them know my new number. Then I took a breath and called the Glade Hotel.