He tried it on Helene the first time he saw her in the bar at the Roosevelt, knocked out by her profile, her bare legs crossed beneath a short green skirt, told her he was from Paree, and Helene said, “Is that by any chance near Morgan City?”
She told him it wasn’t a bad approach, it was different, but how far could he take it? Or was his life so boring he had to pretend he was someone else?
He told her, without the French accent, she had the most beautiful nose and brown eyes-he threw in the eyes-he had ever seen and that his life, his profession, was far from boring.
“What do you do?”
“See if you can guess.”
“Do you live here?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a lot of money?”
“Enough.”
“You sell dope.”
“I don’t sell anything.”
“You buy things.”
“No.”
“You steal things.”
“Right.”
She hesitated. “What do you steal?”
“Guess.”
“Cars?”
“No.”
“Jewels.”
“Right.”
She said, “Sure you do.” She said, “Really? Come on.” She said, “What do you do with them, the jewels?”
“I sell ’em to a guy for about a quarter of what they’re worth.”
She said, “I don’t know whether to believe you or not,” with a different tone now, softer, hesitant.
Jack turned half around on his stool, looked over the room, and came back to Helene. “What’re you doing tomorrow?”
“I work. For a lawyer.”
“Stop by here during your lunch hour. I’m in 610.”
“What if I’m not hungry?”
“You see the lady in the blue net?”
“Chiffon.”
“The guy has on a tux.”
“What about her?”
“You see the ring she’s wearing?”
It was about one-fifteen the next day, the hotel room silent except for faint street sounds, when Helene turned her head on the pillow and said, “Jacques, I think I’m falling in love with you.”
Buddy Jeannette had told him, “Always look nice and always ride the elevator. You run into somebody on the stairs they gonna remember you, ’cause you don’t see nobody on the stairs as a rule. But a elevator, man, you so close to people they don’t see you.”
So Jack rode an empty elevator up to the fifth floor of the St. Louis Hotel in his navy-blue work suit, got off, and there was 501 in the elevator alcove, out of sight from the courtyard below. He stepped over to the door and knocked three times, waited, giving the man plenty of time if he was in there, then used the key to enter the suite.
The fundraiser had left lights on, even the one in the bathroom. Little One told Roy he had checked on the man at seven, phoned to see if he could pick up the room-service table and there was no answer; but the man and two other Latinos were there at five-thirty when Little One said he brought up the champagne and booze and snacks, and a couple white girls had come in while he was there that looked like whores.
The party mess was in the sitting room, bottles and glasses and a tray with a few canapés left on it, tiny sandwiches, deviled eggs, and a bowl of melted ice and shrimp tails. There were shrimp tails in ashtrays, napkins on the floor, wet spots on the red carpeting… several envelopes on the desk addressed to Col. Dagoberto Godoy, c/o the St. Louis Hotel, postmarked Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The letters were typed in Spanish. Jack saw himself in the mirror over the sofa as he crossed to the phone on the end table. He remembered letters from his dad with the Honduras postmark; he had soaked off the stamps and saved them. There was nothing by the phone; a few shrimp tails.
This was like an afternoon scouting trip, not even close to what the real thing felt like, going in when you knew the people were there in the dark, hearing their breathing and more different kinds of snoring sounds than anyone could imagine.
He’d said to Helene, “Did you know women snore as much as men? I’ve made a study. Women aren’t as loud, but they’re more original. Some of ’em go, ‘chit… chit,’ like a little sneeze. Some of ’em go, ‘pissssss,’ on the exhale.” Helene said, “You fascinate me,” shining her brown eyes at him, chin resting on her hand with the blue stone, the sapphire. He had told her she was the only person in the world, outside of Buddy Jeannette, who knew what he did. She liked that; she hunched her shoulders. He told her he knew he was going to tell her; as soon as they started talking that night he knew it. She said she knew right away there was something different about him, mysterious. She said, “It’s real scary, huh? Doing that.” He said, sometimes, when it was quiet, he would imagine the man and woman lying there listening and that was really scary. She said, “That’s why you do it, huh? ’Cause it’s scary.” He said he didn’t think too much about why he did it. But he did think, every once in a while, that maybe if he’d gone to Vietnam he wouldn’t be doing it. Strange? He was turned down when he took his physical, he had mono; then after that was just never called. He told her that sometimes after he left the room with his flight bag and would be standing there waiting for an elevator, that was scarier than being in the room. The best part was when he got to his own room and closed the door, or when he walked out of the hotel, if he wasn’t staying there. Jesus, the relief. Helene said, “Like it doesn’t have anything to do with robbing people.” He said, well, there had to be something in it for you; you weren’t gonna put your ass on the line just for thrills. That was part of it, though. Doing it. Yeah, because he never thought of it as… you know, just a robbery. Did that make sense? Helene said, “I want to go with you. Once, that’s all. Please?”
It took a few weeks to let himself be talked into it. Then spent the next thirty-five months wondering how he could have been so fucking dumb. When he told Roy, Roy said, “Jesus, you deserve to be in here. Take a fall just on stupidity alone.”
They went into a suite at 3:00 a.m. and weren’t even across the room before Helene bumped into something and giggled, Jesus Christ, and a voice said from the bedroom, “Who’s in there?” and a light came on and they ran down the stairs from the fifteenth floor, no elevator ride this trip, and hotel security was waiting in the lobby. Jack opened his eyes wide and said, “What’s this about?” Looked puzzled as he said, “You have the wrong party.” Put on a pissed-off look as he said, “We’re staying in this hotel.” The guy in the bathrobe said, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s them.” Jack told hotel security they were going to hear from his lawyer. Only the lawyer they heard from was Helene’s, the guy she worked for, a lawyer who specialized in divorces and didn’t know shit about plea bargaining on a criminal justice level. But that’s what he did, stuck his nose in and offered them a deal when he didn’t have to: immunity for Helene if she’d put Jack Delaney in that hotel room and the cops and the district attorney could’ve kissed him. They got a search warrant and found his fire keys and an alligator attaché case with the initials RDB he’d picked up months before, stuck in his closet, and forgot he had. They tried to hit him with thirty burglaries over the past two years; so Jack and his Broad Street lawyer made their own plea deal. Okay, he’d give them the thirty and they could close the files in exchange for one Unlawful Entry, look at five years, and be out in three if he was a good boy. Helene said, “Jack? I’m awful sorry.”
There were wet towels on the floor in the bathroom, two pair of Jockey briefs, both bright red; five $100 bills rolled tightly together and a 35-millimeter film container of cocaine in the fundraiser’s shaving kit. His bed was unmade, thrashed apart it looked like, pillows and spread on the floor. There were at least a dozen pair of Jockeys, all that bright red, in the dresser; a Beretta automatic tucked away beneath the shirts.
The good stuff was on the desk in the bedroom, by the phone. Bank deposit slips, a stack of them in different pastel shades… Wait. Some of them were withdrawal receipts. Here was the same amount deposited, withdrawn, and deposited again on different dates… and realized there were four or five different Whitney and Hibernia branch banks involved. The guy wasn’t putting everything into one account. Jack copied the figures, with plus and minus signs, on a hotel memo pad.