John D. MacDonald
Loot for the Unlucky Lady
Chapter One
Ninety-Grand Doll
She walked slowly, because walking is easier than standing, and attracts less attention. Slowly from the Astor Bar entrance up the few short blocks to Lindy’s and back. In the heart of the tourist crush. In the granular slush of December, by the corners where the lean scarecrow Santas warmed their fingers in their armpits and jangled the tired bells while the change dropped into the wire-covered pots. She was jostled and buffeted about, hearing the torn bits of conversation around her, fixing her mind on those overheard bits to keep from thinking of Aclass="underline" “...So I tells him there’s holes in his head and...”
“She ought to pay more attention to...”
“It’s a lousy show and why it don’t close is more...”
“Okay, okay, so it was five drinks...”
“And this other one, the blonde, says...”
“Get off my feet, stupid...”
It was a crosstown wind and at the corners it whipped her thin, worn coat, and chilled her ankles where the taxi wheels had spattered her stockings.
There was nothing spectacular about her. She attracted little attention. She was a frail girl, almost thin, with a grave face and level eyes. She had quiet beauty, and sometimes a man in the crowd would glance at her and be faintly troubled as he walked on, because she started him thinking of the things that might have been...
Her pale hair had a soft wave, and her coat was two years old and it was the third set of heels on her black pumps.
Al had called her at the office on Monday morning, and the documents for file had been piled high and Mr. Scharry had frowned and said, “There is a personal call for you on my line, Miss Gerald.”
Al’s voice had been a tight, harsh sound, full of fear. “Bad trouble, Glory. I need you. Listen and get this the first time. I got to give you something. Quit your job and every day from now on, go to the Times Square section. Be somewhere around the Raglan Bar. Don’t speak to me when I show up.”
The line went dead. Mr. Scharry was glaring at her. She made her voice light and gay and said, “Thanks for calling, Marian.”
She had been paid on Friday. She left the office at lunch time and didn’t return. It wasn’t that she wanted to be thoughtless about not giving notice. It was just that Al Barnard was more important than anything else in her life, and the fear she had heard in his voice filled her mind so that there was no room for the common courtesies.
She walked slowly, and the crowd was such protective coloration, no one noticed that the same frail blonde girl never left those few short blocks.
In her small, dim scrupulously clean room on Eighty-eighth, there was a glossy eight by ten print of Al Bernard on her bureau. When she was in her room, she spent a great deal of her time looking at his picture. He was good looking in a conventional way. Clean lines of brow, temple, nose. But she failed to see that the mouth had an uncertain softness about it, that the eyes were perhaps a shade too small, a bit too close together.
The main thing was that Al was in trouble. She spent from eight in the morning until one the following morning on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. She ate only when she became faint with hunger, and then hurriedly. Al had asked her to be there. She would have walked those few blocks barefoot if the sidewalk had been made of crushed glass, and the pain would have been good, because it would have been for Al.
Always everything had been for Al. For the past year. Anything that happened before that time didn’t count.
In all of the great city the only reality for her was the sound of his voice, his arms around her.
He had always been evasive about his work. His hours were odd. Some weeks he didn’t work at all. She wanted to have a home and have his children, and yet she had learned that the vaguest reference to marriage brought that stubborn look onto his face, and she had learned to take the golden days as they came to her.
When he was drunk he was abusive. She had learned how to best avoid the blunt lash of his tongue, how to discount the contempt in his eyes.
Her legs ached and her feet were blistered and there were fine lines of fatigue around her mouth, puffy patches under the clear blue of her eyes. And yet she did not feel that he had asked too much of her, that what she was doing was particularly difficult. She was annoyed that it was necessary for her to eat and sleep.
On Friday the shrill alarm awakened her at seven. She dressed quickly, ate a large breakfast at the corner cafeteria, and took the subway down to the place where Al wanted her to be.
She had no idea what his trouble might be.
The crowd was slim at first, but by eleven o’clock the sidewalks were thick with people. She was rudely jostled in the crowd, and something was thrust under her arm. She recognized him as he passed her, and her cry was stifled on her lips. The parcel under her arm was a shoe box, neatly wrapped, and quite heavy.
The thud of her heart was rapid. She angled out of the crowd, crossed over to the island in the middle and went down the stairs into the chill dampness of the subway.
She sat very straight on the worn fiber seat and the shoe box, neatly tied up in brown wrapping paper rested on her lap, her hands in the worn black gloves holding it tightly.
Back at the rooming house, she walked slowly up the stairs, locked herself in her small room, curbed her impatience as she took off her coat and hat, carefully hung up the coat in the shallow closet.
Only then did she sit on the bed and untie the string, unwrap the paper and lift the lid.
It was as though she had stopped breathing and her heart had stopped beating. The shoe box was packed neatly and solidly with currency. Worn, darkened bills, fastened in inch thick wads with rubber bands.
With trembling hands she unfolded the white note on top.
Glory, baby:
I trust you. You’re the only one in the world I do trust. Here is about ninety thousand bucks. It was the Candor Club job on Long Island. The bills aren’t marked, but don’t try to pass the big ones. Now do this for me. Buy yourself some clothes and hop a plane to Florida. Get a place there in Daytona and hide out. Get the Daytona Times every day. When I get there, I’ll put an ad in the paper. ‘Help Wanted — Competent file clerk, knowledge Spanish and Portuguese. Write box—’ Get it? And be careful, baby. Write to the box number and tell me where you are. Pick a new name, baby. Hide the dough real good. Use all you need, and then some. There’s a lot of it. When I show up we’ll figure a way to go someplace where they can’t extradite me. I know a good country. Don’t be scared and remember that I love you, baby.
Yours, Al
The box slipped off her lap, fell to the floor and spilled the packets of currency across the cheap, rose-colored rug.
She sat very still and looked at the far wall. The Candor Club job! There must be a mistake. Al wouldn’t...
Yet all the little half-understood things during the past year became clear in the light of his note. She suddenly knew that she would have to find out about the Candor Club and what had happened.
She knelt on the floor and picked up the currency and put it back in the box. Then she stood in indecision, the box in her hands, staring around at the four walls of her room. The money — an incredible amount to her — was an overpowering responsibility.
She bit hard on her underlip as she considered various hiding places. She kept her own room clean and so there was no reason for anyone to enter her room. Yet the door was frail and the lock was cheap.