There was more. It went on like that, and I sat there telling her she was wrong and trying to make myself believe it. Maybe the good life hadn’t worked for her. It could still work for me. I had floated into the gray world of the card mechanic pretty much by accident, and I could float out just as easily and just as accidentally. I didn’t feel that much of a commitment to dishonesty.
But she had another argument, and it was more persuasive. She stood up and planted herself in front of me, and before she delivered it she put her hands at the sides of her breasts and ran them slowly down the length of her body. Then she grinned at me.
“You can’t get out,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’ll damn well ruin you. Do you think Perry Carver would keep a crook on his payroll? Do you think Sy and Murray and the others would want a card sharp in their game? And they would find out, Wizard. I’d make sure they found out. Your new friends wouldn’t have any use for you. Neither would your new little lost love. Are you laying that schoolteacher, Wizard?”
I didn’t mean to slap her. My hand moved by itself, rising fast and landing over her left cheekbone. She reeled backward and for a moment I thought she was going to fall over. But she only smiled.
“You can have the teacher,” Joyce said levelly. “You can keep your job. Some day you’ll wake up, but you can sleep as long as you want, if that’s the way you want it. But first you’re going to take care of Murray for me.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She turned on her heel and stamped out of my apartment, hopped into her car, took off fast enough to leave a rubber patch on the street outside.
It must have been around five-thirty when Joyce left. I had a few drinks after that. I went out for a bite, ate a third of a hamburger and left the rest. It didn’t taste right. I don’t suppose there was anything wrong with the hamburger. It just didn’t taste right.
So I went back to my place and had a few more drinks and I stared at the onionskin letters some more and looked at the Milani costume. I squinted at myself in the mirror, too. But not for very long.
And then I called Joyce. She must have been sitting on top of the phone because she picked it up before the first ring was finished.
I said, “All right. I’m in.”
“Of course,” she said. “Because there’s no way out.” I called Murray’s office at nine o’clock the next evening. There was no answer. I let it ring long enough to make sure that no one had stuck around. Then I drove to the Rand Building on the double. I followed the established routine—I took the elevator to the seventeenth floor and walked the rest of the way. I let myself into his office, thumbed through the Yellow Pages, found a twenty-four hour messenger service. I called them and told them to send a kid over for a pick-up and delivery.
During the day I had picked up a batch of singles from the bank, along with a couple hundreds. While the kid was on his way over I made a bundle of money, a sheaf of singles with two one-hundreds at the top and bottom of the roll. I stuffed the money into an envelope and started to scrawl A. Milani on it. Then I changed my mind and typed the name on Murray’s office typewriter. I sealed the envelope and dropped it on the table in the outer office. I left the hall door open and retired to Murray’s private office and sat in his chair, with the door closed.
When the kid came in I called to him through the closed door. “There’s an envelope on the table there,” I said. “Run it over to the Hotel Glade near the station. It’s for a man named August Milani. Make sure you give it to him in person.”
I had left a five-spot on the table along with the envelope. I told the kid to help himself to it. As soon as he left I got the hell out of Murray’s office, ran down seven flights of stairs and caught an elevator the rest of the way. I drove home, changed into my Milani costume, hurried over to the Glade. I made myself slow down on the way in, forced myself to walk with the head-back, shoulders-slouched swagger of my man Milani.
The kid was there when I reached the hotel. He leaned up against the desk, waiting to deliver Milani’s envelope in person. I took it from him, gave him a quarter and watched him go. Then I turned to the desk clerk, a buddy by now—I’d been cultivating him carefully. I winked at him, then ripped open the envelope and snatched up the stack of bills. His eyes bugged.
“Money,” I said.
I fanned the bills for him. He saw the hundreds on the top and the hundreds on the bottom, and all the singles in the middle were just a big flash of green ink.
“Money,” I said again.
And I started dealing the bills out, slapping them one after the other onto the top of the counter. The basic principle is pretty much the same as the one used in a second deal or a bottom deal. Each time I was slapping down two bills, a hundred on top and a single under it. Each time fast fingerwork brought the hundred back on to the top of the stack for the next shot. By the time I was finished there wasn’t any question in the desk clerk’s mind. Quite obviously I had a stack of hundred-dollar bills.
“Jesus,” he said.
“I told you, didn’t I? I leave this town in the longest Caddy Detroit ever made.”
“How did you get that kind of dough?” the clerk said.
I winked at him. “A guy named Rogers,” I said. “The one who left me all them nasty messages.”
“Yeah?” I nodded solemnly. “Yeah,” I said. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Sure.”
“So can I.” I laughed aloud. “And that’s where all this wonderful bread came from. I get paid for keeping secrets. I get paid real nice.”
“What did he do?”
“Who?”
“Rogers,” the clerk said. I was glad to see he could remember the name. “What the hell did he do?”
“Nothing.”
“But—”
“He’s a real nice guy,” I said. “A big-time lawyer. It’s just that he’s got this little secret, see? And he’ll pay to keep it.”
I slapped the roll of bills against the palm of my hand. “And I’ll tell you a secret,” I said. “He ain’t done paying yet. That bastard just started.”
I left him there and went to my room at the rear of the hotel. I closed the door, locked it. I tucked the bills into my pocket, dropped the envelope on the floor in a corner of the room. The envelope had Murray Rogers’ return address on it. It would probably still be there in the room on Monday, since the personnel at the Glade weren’t too fanatic about housekeeping.
The window stuck the first time I tried it. I worked on it, got it open. The courtyard in back was littered with trash and broken wine bottles. In the back of the courtyard there was a driveway that ran through to Tupper on the other side of the block. I closed the window. I tried it again, and this time it opened easily.
It would open as easily on Monday.
Monday.
Monday was going to be an important day. The last letter on Murray’s typewriter had Monday’s date on top. And Monday was the day when I would wear the shabby suit and the snap-brim hat for the final time. August Milani was going to die on Monday. Murray Rogers was going to kill him.
11
Friday I sold a unit and a half of our current syndication during the morning without leaving my desk.
I had a lazy lunch in the Panmore Men’s Grill with Jack Kimball, another of Perry’s salesmen. We ate Welsh rarebits and drank Dutch beer and talked shop for two hours. I spent the afternoon looking over some brochures on new syndicates Perry was thinking about handling. There was a bowling alley in Baltimore with a fifteen percent payout, a shopping center in New Rochelle, a St. Louis apartment house. I thought the shopping center offered the safest return and would be the easiest to push, and I typed up a memo to Perry with my recommendation. At five o’clock he handed me a check for my commissions on sales to date. Even with the five-hundred buck advance chopped off, the sum was a decent amount.