He took the check to an industrial bank nearby. A sweet-faced female teller turned it into cash in the swift, flawless, automatic way of someone who took no risks and did not dream. Risks and dreams; a man or a woman without them was more dead than alive, an empty recepticle waiting for a time and a place to lie down in an endless sleep. Some people never saw or found the light in the depths of their darkness.
DuVol saw light in his own darkness when he examined the fresh figure of his worth in dollars and cents: $4,690. He’d crossed that invisible mid-point barrier. He’d make the $9,000. Somehow, and in a variety of ways, he’d make it.
He divested himself of his gold wristwatch, a ruby ring, a matched set of good golf clubs, his stereo setup including tapes and records. Beau Jack LaBeau usually gave DuVol the best price on merchandise that could not be traced.
“I can give you a thousand for the lot, Quentin,” Beau Jack was saying apologetically to DuVol an hour later in his nice appointed shop in Pasadena.
“The stuff is not hot, Beau Jack,” said DuVol, containing his indignance. “It’s mine. It belongs to me.”
“I’m not buying it, Quentin. I’m loaning you capital on it. You don’t read neon signs when you walk into shops? You want to sell the stuff, Quentin, take out an ad in the Herald-Examiner.”
“I need two thousand for it, Beau Jack.”
“I give you twelve hundred fifty and go have my head examined in the morning.”
“I’m in trouble, Beau Jack. Some big trouble and maybe it is the kind of trouble I won’t be able to handle. I need the full two thousand. Call the rest of it a loan. You know I’m good for it. You’ll get it back. And I don’t think you’ve ever known me to break a promise.”
“Only animal on the face of this earth guaranteed not to tell a lie is maybe a lie detector. But I give you the two thousand. I’m an old man. Okay, so maybe I see the son, in you I never had, maybe the fool I’m buying off with tribute. Here. Don’t count it. I don’t lie. Me and lie detectors. Only two of us left in this thieving world with any ethics. Now go away, Quentin.”
DuVol went away. He went in search of a minor miracle and he’d found it in Beau Jack LaBeau. He was just $2,300 short of buying back his life. He looked around for Stortini’s man as he came from Beau Jack’s pawn shop, the man who called himself Kurt. He couldn’t spot him anywhere, but DuVol knew his every move was being watched.
He went directly back to his apartment building and dropped in on Mr. Damoran, the building’s business agent and manager. “I’ve just been notified of an important business opportunity in Europe,” DuVol told Damoran, “and it requires my presence there immediately.”
Damoran nodded knowingly. “Yes, I thought something of an important nature was developing when I saw the movers take out a few of your pieces this afternoon.”
“I wonder,” said DuVol, “are you authorized to buy furnishings and the like on behalf of the owners? Television sets, bedroom groupings, liquors, condiments, canned goods and the like?”
“Yes, we do that every so often. What price did you have in mind for the remainder of your furnishings and the like, Mr. DuVol?”
“Anything reasonable will be agreeable to me.”
“Well, let’s go upstairs and have a look.”
DuVol didn’t quibble over the $1,500 check Damoran made out for the rest of his things and his damage deposit. Dignified acceptances were a rule-of-thumb with DuVol. He would argue over the quality of filet de boeuf, sauce Bearnais but never over its price.
The clock had reached six p.m. by the time DuVol was standing in a barren apartment. That men like Stortini were capable of doing a thing like this to another human being still heated DuVol with the fire of revenge. But he was presently a running man and running men could not put, up much of an offense. For the moment he would pay his debt, meekly sequester himself in another state until this embarrassing matter of the drugged race horses had run its course. Then he would see about the arrangement, of Stortini’s death.
He was just $800 short of this chain of events. DuVol sat down on the floor and snapped open a steel telephone register. He found the number he sought and dialed.
“Downtown Olympic Hotel.” “Mr. Carlisle’s suite, please.”
A moment lapsed.
“Hello?”
“Jonathan? Quentin DuVol. I find a need tonight for some prestidigital recreation in the company of honorable gentlemen.”
The Downtown Olympic was the city’s newest high-rise midtown hotel. DuVol occasionally employed Jonathan Carlisle, the hotel’s maître d’, to locate high-stakes poker games for a percentage of his winnings.
“Call you back in a half-hour,” he told DuVol and hung up.
He called DuVol back at six-thirty on the dot.
“Tomorrow night, eight p.m., Suite thirteen thirty-three. Three furriers from Kansas City. I told them you’re in beef cattle. What’s good for the hide is good for the hindquarters.”
“Tonight,” DuVol told him. “The game has to be played tonight.”
“Nothing tonight, Mr. DuVol. I checked the whole building.”
DuVol could feel the perspiration building in his pores, a cold sweat of fear. He couldn’t risk a stop at the athletic club; he couldn’t wait for a poker game to develop, foster the beginnings of one, cajole three or four businessmen into one. That was dead-time to him. If he failed, he would be caught $800 short, without even having had a good run at making that amount.
“Jonathan, I need $800,” he said into the phone.
Carlisle’s tone was as hapless as rain in a dead man’s face. “You need eight hundred and I need Ann-Margret. How are we going to get together on that?”
“There are people after me, Carlisle.”
“And you don’t think there aren’t people after me? I pay alimony and support to Carla, you know that. I see so little of my check after she gets her cut, it could just as well shoot itself right from the hotel’s business office to her. Sorry, Quentin. I can’t help you out.”
The phone went dead in his ear and in his hand. Numbly DuVol put it up. He expected this end, in a way. The network of his life, it had been woven of threads too short and too few. His distrust of street people precluded the making of friends — and the distance he kept from his marks lent him no friends among these either.
He neither borrowed money nor lent it, his current beggings aside. He had chalked up no credit beyond the credits from loan sharks and ephemeral backers. He now stood alone, painted into a tight corner by his own hand.
The time was getting later — minutes short of seven o’clock. He went to his window and saw the city beginning to light and sign with the sounds of night. He had no sons, no daughters, no living relatives who might come to his aid with the haste required. A man so dependent upon himself could turn to no one for help, to no one for blame. That had been the cardinal mistake of his life. Not crime, not deceit, only that.
Below his patio he could see the sedan that was unfamiliar to his neighborhood. Through the windshield, beneath the car’s steering wheel he could see a pair of male legs, an occasional hand and arm as the man behind the wheel reached forward to flick ashes into an ashtray on the dashboard.
Time seemed to have ground to a halt, a thing suspended and completely without properties of motion. Stortini was waiting, Kurt was waiting — and now, with no clear options left open to him, DuVol was waiting.