by Jim Thompson
He went days on end without shaving, weeks without a haircut. His soiled baggy clothes looked like they’d been slept in. He looked like a tramp—like a scarecrow out of a cornfield. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was what he’d let happen to himself mentally. He seemed to take pride in being absent-minded, in seeing how stupidly he could do the few things that were left for him to do.
Why, good God, Dusty thought. His father was only a little past sixty, and he was practically senile. He couldn’t be trusted with the simplest task. You couldn’t send him to the store after a cake of soap and have him come back with the right change.
“Well”—Dusty forced the frown from his face. “How’s it going, Dad?”
“Pretty good, Bill. Did you sleep well?”
“Not bad. As good as I could in this weather.”
Mr. Rhodes nodded absently. A streak of saliva curved down from the corner of his mouth, and he wiped at his chin with the back of his hand.
“I got another letter from the lawyers today, Bill. They think that—”
“Have we got anything to eat in the house?” Dusty interrupted. “Anything I can make a sandwich out of?”
“I wanted to tell you, Bill. They think—”
Dusty interrupted him again. He knew what the lawyers thought, the same thing they always thought: that his father’s case should be appealed to a higher court; that he, Dusty, was a sucker who could be conned indefinitely into paying their legal fees.
“Dad!” he said sharply. “We’ll talk about the lawyers another time. Right now I want to know why we don’t have any food. What did you do with the money I gave you?”
“Why, I—I—” The old man’s eyes were blank, childishly bewildered. “Now, what did I—”
“Never mind,” Dusty sighed. “Skip it. But you did get something to eat yourself, didn’t you? You did, didn’t you Dad?”
“Why—oh, yes,” Mr. Rhodes said quickly. Too quickly. “I’ve eaten very well today.”
“What, for example? You bought just enough groceries for yourself—is that what you’re telling me, Dad?”
“Ye—I mean, no.” Mr. Rhodes’ eyes avoided his son’s. “I ate out. It was too hot to do any cooking, so I—”
“You ate at Pete’s place?”
“Yes—no. No, I didn’t eat at Pete’s.” His father shied away from the trap. Dusty might check at the neighborhood lunchroom. “I went to another place, down toward town.”
Dusty studied him wearily. He refrained from asking the name of the restaurant. It was no use—at such times as this his father was like a sly child—and he just wasn’t capable of it. No matter how provoked you got, you shouldn’t badger your own dad.
“All right,” he said quietly, taking his billfold from his pocket. “Here’s a couple dollars. Go down to Pete’s and get you a good meal. Right now, Dad, before you go to bed. Will you do that?”
“Certainly. Of course I will, Bill.” Mr. Rhodes almost snatched the money from his hand. “Will it be all right if—if—?”
Dusty hesitated over the unspoken question. “Well,” he said, slowly. “You know what we decided about that, Dad. We both agreed on it, that it just wasn’t a good idea. When a man’s out of work, when he’s worried, it’s pretty easy to…”
“But I was just going to get a beer, just sit at the bar a while and watch television.”
“I know, but—”
“But what?” There was an unaccustomed sharpness in his father’s voice. “I don’t understand you, Bill. Why all this fuss over a bottle of beer? You know I’ve never been a heavy drinker. I just don’t have any taste for the stuff. But the way you’ve harped on the subject lately, you’d think I—”
“I’m sorry.” Dusty clapped him on the back, urged him toward the door. “I just get tired and worried, and I talk too much. Go on and have your beer, Dad. But get you a good meal, too.”
“But I’d like to know why—”
“No reason. Like I said, I talk too much. You run along, and I’ll see you in the morning.”
Mr. Rhodes left, still muttering annoyedly. Dusty remained in the house a few minutes longer, giving him time to get out of sight. The old man had gotten dangerously suspicious a moment ago. It wouldn’t do to feed those suspicions further by having him think he was being followed.
Dusty fixed and drank a glass of ice water while he waited. Ice, by God, was just about all there was in the refrigerator. He smoked a cigarette, pacing back and forth across the shabby living room. At last, after a nervous glance at his wrist watch, he hurried out of the house and jumped into his car.
At a drive-in restaurant, he gulped down a hot turkey sandwich and two cups of coffee. He parked his car at the rear of the Manton, hurried through the service entrance and on into the locker room. There was a sour taste in his mouth. The food he had eaten lay heavy on his stomach. He was tired, sweaty. He felt like he had never rested, never bathed.
Stripping out of his clothes, he took another shower—cold and necessarily quick. He dried himself, standing directly beneath the ceiling fan. He put on his wine-colored, tuxedo-like uniform, and hung his street clothes in his locker. He sat down under the fan, tapping the persistent sweat from his face with his bath towel. It was ten, no nine, minutes of twelve. There was time for another smoke, time to pull himself together a little before he went up to the lobby.
He lighted a cigarette moodily, broodingly, trying to escape from the feeling of sullen despair, of hopeless frustration, which crept over him more and more of late.
There was no way out that he could see. No exit from his difficulties. His mind traveled in a circle, beginning and ending with his father. The doctor bills, the medicines, the frittering away of money almost as fast as it could be made. Two dollars, five dollars, ten dollars, whatever you gave the old man, he got rid of. And he wasn’t damned bit hesitant about asking for more.
Dusty had considered taking a day job. But day bellboys didn’t make as much money, and they had to work split watches. He’d have to be away from home practically as much as he was now.…Hire a housekeeper? Well, how would that help? Thirty-five or forty bucks a week in salary, and you’d have to feed her besides. Anyway, dammit, it just wasn’t necessary. None of this nonsense, which kept him drained of money, was necessary. His father was sharp enough when he chose to be. He’d proved that tonight. The trouble was that he, Dusty, had just babied and humored the old man so much that…
“Hey, Rhodes! How about it?” It was the day captain, shouting down from the top of the service steps.
Dusty shouted, “Coming!” and left the locker room. But he ascended the long stairway unhurriedly, wrapped in thought.
His father couldn’t be losing and mislaying and generally mismanaging to the extent that he appeared to be. He must be spending the money on something. But what in the world would a man his age—
Suddenly, Dusty knew. The answer to the riddle was so damned obvious. Why the hell hadn’t he thought of it before this?
The day bellboys swept past him on the steps. Lighting cigarettes, peeling out of their jackets and collars as they hastened toward the locker room. A few spoke or nodded to him. They got no greeting in return. He was too choked up, blind with anger.
Those lawyers, those dirty thieving shysters! That was where the money was going.
Well, he’d put a stop to that. There would be no use in jumping his father about it; he couldn’t really blame his father for doing what he undoubtedly had. It was their fault—the lawyers—for holding out hope to him. And they’d darned well better lay off if they knew what was good for them. He’d write ’em a letter that would curl their hair. Or, no, he’d pay them a little visit. He wanted to tell those birds off personally.
Opening the door of the service landing, he entered the lobby, his anger dying and with it the sense of frustration. He paused at the end of the long marble desk untended now except by sour old Bascom—and looked down at the open pages of the room-call ledger.
Dusty didn’t know why he felt good about it, because of course—she couldn’t mean anything to him; he was shying clear of that baby. But somehow he did feel good. Here was proof positive that she wasn’t a hooker or spotter, proof that he was the only guy in the place that she had any interest in.
A cab honked at the side door. Grinning unconsciously, Dusty hurried across the lobby and down the steps.
3
As modern hotels go, the Manton was not a large place. Its letterheads boasted of “four hundred rooms, four hundred baths.” Actually, there were three hundred and sixty-two, and since any number of these were linked together into suites, the baths totaled far less than three hundred and sixty-two.
The Manton—or rather the company which operated it—had learned the advantage in renting two rooms to one person rather than two rooms to two persons. It had learned the vast difference in profit between renting two rooms at five dollars and one at ten dollars. It had learned that the man who pays five dollars for a room is apt to be much more demanding than the one who pays ten.
The Manton was seldom rented to capacity. It did not have to be. With only two-thirds of its rooms rented, its income was equal to that of a larger, fully-occupied—and less “exclusive”—hotel. Also, since the number of a hotel’s employees is inevitably geared to the number of its guests, its overhead was much lower.
Bascom was the sole front-office employee after midnight, performing—with Dusty’s assistance—the duties of room clerk, key clerk, cashier and night auditor. There was no night house detective. The coffee shop and grille room closed at one o’clock. By two, the lobby porters had completed their mopping and scrubbing and were on their way homeward. At two, the late-shift elevator operator left, and Dusty took care of his infrequent calls from then on.
It was a little before two when Tug Trowbridge came in. While his two companions—you seldom saw him alone—sauntered on a few steps, Tug stopped at the cashier’s cage where Dusty and Bascom were working. He was a big, almost perpetually smiling man, with a shock of red hair and a hearty, booming voice. Now, as Dusty grinned obediently and Bascom smirked nervously, he triggered an enormous forefinger at the clerk.
“Okay, Dusty boy”—he scowled with false menace—“I got him covered. Grab the keys and clean out those safety-deposit boxes.”
Dusty stretched his grin into an appreciative laugh. Tug’s joke was an old one, but he was the best tipper in the Manton. “Can’t do it, Mr. Trowbridge, remember? It takes two different keys for each box.”
“Now, by God!” Tug slapped his forehead in a gesture of dismay. “Why can’t I ever remember that!”
He guffawed, putting a period to the joke. Then, he dug a small, flat key from his vest and shoved it through the wicket. “A little service, hey, brother Bascom? Got something that’s kind of weighing me down.”
“Yes, sir,” said Bascom obsequiously.
There was a ledger, indexing the depositors in the chilled-steel boxes which formed the rear wall of the cashier’s cage. But it was unnecessary to consult this, of course, in the case of a regular like Tug Trowbridge. Bascom took a heavy ring of keys from his cash drawer, and selected one with a certain number—a number, incidentally, which did not correspond to the one on Tug’s key. Turning to the rear of the enclosure, he found Tug’s box number—and this also was different from that of either of the two keys—and unlocked its two locks. He pulled the box out of its niche, and set it in the window in front of Trowbridge.
Dusty averted his eyes, tactfully, but not before he had got a glimpse of the sheaf of bills which Tug casually tossed into the box. It was almost an inch thick, wrapped around at the ends with transparent tape. There was a thousand-dollar bill on top.
Bascom put the box back into place, and carefully relocked it. He returned Tug’s key, dropping the others back into the cash drawer.
“Well, Dusty”—Trowbridge gave the bellboy a wink “I guess you’re right. No use knocking over Bascom here unless we could get ahold of the other keys.”
“No, sir,” Dusty smiled.
“And how we going to do that, hey? How we going to know who’s got keys and whether they got anything worth getting?”
“That’s right,” said Dusty.
Bascom was trying to smile, but the effort was not very successful. Tug winked at Dusty.
“Looks like we’re making our pal a little nervous,” he said. “Maybe we better lay off before he calls the cops on us.”
“Oh, no,” Bascom protested. He had about as much sense of humor, in Dusty’s opinion, as one of the lobby sand-jars. “It’s just that when a man’s alone here at night—practically alone all night long—and he’s responsible for all this—”
“Sure,” Trowbridge nodded good-humoredly. “Jokes about hold-ups aren’t very funny.”
“As a matter of fact,” Bascom continued seriously, “I don’t believe there’s ever been a successful hold-up of a major hotel. You see—”
“No kidding,” said Trowbridge, his voice faintly sarcastic. “Well, thanks for letting me know.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that—”
“Sure, sure. I know.” Trowbridge laughed again, but not too jovially. “Come up to the suite after a while, huh, Dusty? Make it about a half hour. Got some laundry I want you to pick up.”
“Yes, sir,” said Dusty.
Trowbridge rejoined his two companions. Bascom watched them as they proceeded on down the lobby to the bank of elevators beneath the mezzanine. There was a drawn look about his prim humorless face. He was breathing a little heavily, his thin pinched nostrils flaring with annoyance.
Dusty studied him covertly, grinning to himself. Bascom had better watch his step. Tug Trowbridge definitely wasn’t a guy you’d want to get down on you.
Back in prohibition days, Tug had headed a statewide bootleg syndicate. His well-earned reputation for toughness was such as to make even the Capones shy away from him. During the war—though he had never been convicted—he had been the brains, and no small part of the muscle, of a group of black-market mobsters, men who specialized in the daylight hijacking of bonded whiskey trucks. At various times in his career, he had been involved—reputedly—in the loan-shark and slot-machine rackets.
These illegal and often deadly activities, or, more properly, these alleged activities, were now years behind him. His present and obviously profitable enterprises were confined to a juke-box company and a stevedoring firm. Still, and despite his brimming good humor, he obviously was not a man to be trifled with. Dusty knew that from the attitude of the men who accompanied him.
It wasn’t likely, of course, that Tug would ever rough up Bascom. He’d be too contemptuous of the clerk, and there was an easier way of showing his displeasure.
Tug paid seven hundred and fifty dollars a month rent. His bar and restaurant bills ran at least as much more. Neither he nor his associates ever created a disturbance. He made no special demands on the hotel. In short, he was the Manton’s idea of a highly desirable—a “respectable”—guest; and it would take no more than a word from him to get Bascom discharged.
…Dusty didn’t get up to the Trowbridge suite within the half hour suggested. First, he had a hurry-up call for some aspirin from another room. Next, he had to unlock the check room for an early-departing guest, locate a small trunk stored therein and lug it out to the man’s car. Then, there was a flurry of elevator traffic, now his responsibility since the operator had gone home.
It was Bascom, however, who was the chief cause of the delay. The clerk had insisted that Dusty give him the few minutes help he needed to complete the transcript. Then, with the task completed, he had pretended that the lock to the cashier’s cage was jammed. Anyway, Dusty wa
s convinced that it was a pretense. Bascom wouldn’t let him try to work the key. He couldn’t climb out of the enclosure, as he might have in any of the other front offices, because of the heavy steel netting across the top.
Finally, after almost twenty minutes had passed, the room clerk’s phone rang, and, lo and behold, the lock suddenly became unjammed. Bascom gave him a shrewish, over-the-shoulder grin as he sauntered out of the cage. Dusty shoved past him roughly as the clerk began relocking the door.
It was in his mind to tell Trowbridge what had happened. But he wasn’t quite angry enough for that, and, as it turned out, there was neither opportunity nor necessity to do so.
Tug and the other two men were lounging in the parlor of his suite, their coats off, brimming glasses in their hands. They were obviously unaware that Dusty was more than thirty minutes late.
“Here already, huh?” Tug beamed. “Now, that’s what I call service. Sit down and have a drink with us.”
“Thanks very much,” said Dusty. “I don’t drink, Mr. Trowbridge.”
“Sure, you don’t; keep forgetting,” the big man nodded. “Well, have a smoke then. Shake hands with my friends. Don’t believe you’ve met these gents.”
Dusty shook hands with them, and sat down. He’d never seen them before, but he felt that he had. There was something in the manner of Tug’s friends that made them all look a little alike.
“Dusty’s the lad I started to tell you about,” Trowbridge continued. “Ain’t that hell, though? Here’s a plenty smart kid, got almost four years of college under his belt, and he winds up hopping bells. Nice, huh? Some future for a guy that figured on being a doctor.”
The two men looked sympathetic. Or, rather, they tried to. Tug wagged his head regretfully.
“That’s about the way it stacks up, eh, Dusty? Your old man doesn’t stnad a chance of getting things straightened out?”