By midafternoon I had given back the Corvair to the Hertz people and had put a hundred dollars down on a two-year-old Ford. It wasn’t exactly a dream car either but it was way ahead of the Corvair and the payments were only a tiny gouge per month. At three o’clock I drove downtown and parked in a lot a block from the Rand Building. I rode the elevator to the seventeenth floor.
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.