“You’ll get used to it.”
“Will I? How long did it take you to get used to it, Nat?”
“Not too long.”
“Not long at all. And how long did it take you to get used to murder, Nat?” My eyes hardened, but she went on. “Was that hard to do? Or did it come easy? Did you find you liked it...?”
I finished my drink and put the glass down on a table. I looked at her and she stopped talking. There was anger in her eyes now, anger and contempt and maybe a little fear.
“You shouldn’t talk about things you know nothing about,” I said. “You’re in no position to talk.”
“I’m not?”
“You’re not. You know how we’re registered at this hotel? Not Mr. and Mrs. Just plain Nathaniel Crowley. You don’t count at all, honey. You’re just part of the luggage.”
I was sorry the minute I said it. I should have apologized but I didn’t. I got out of my clothes and took a shower.
I met Dan Gordon after dinner that night. He came over to our table while we were being bored by the floor show, introduced himself, stuck out a sweaty hand and then sat down with us. He had a platinum chorus-line pony with him. She had good legs, big breasts and a blandly bovine face. She didn’t say anything. I had the feeling, just from spending some time at the same table with her, that it was better that way. She was purely decorative.
“I heard a lot about you,” Gordon told me. “Tony and I are tight for years. He says you’re a big help to him.”
“We get along.”
He laughed loudly and too long. “I guess you do,” he said. “Tony says you’re in town a week, two weeks. He says make you happy, show you a big time. My boys treating you all right, Nat?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “This is quite a place.”
“You like it?”
I nodded. I didn’t — it was a little too goddamn glittery. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
“We try to give the customer his money’s worth,” he was saying. “We run a hell of a place. Can’t find a better place in the whole damned town, and this is a hell of a town. Right, Pigeon?”
Pigeon was the pony. She sat there for a minute trying to figure out what was supposed to be right, then gave a half-hearted nod. He patted her on one of her pretty knees and told me what a great kid she was.
“A hell of a town,” he said again. “You meet my manager? Smoothest guy going. Went to hotel management school up at Cornell, then ran a summer place on Cape Cod for a year. I was up there, happened to see the job he was doing, offered him full-time here. I pay big dough. He couldn’t afford to turn me down. He does a hell of a job.”
“Fine service,” I said. I had to say something.
“You said it. And we don’t make a dime on the hotel, Nat. Our money comes right out of the casino — the tables, the wheels, the cards, the slots. The hotel is charity.”
A pretty waitress came by with fresh drinks. Gordon pinched her and she smiled benignly at him. On the stage, a strip act had given way to a comic telling sick jokes. He had a reputation for hysterical hip cynicism, and the unconscious comedy of the Las Vegas audience inspired him to greater heights. He was very unpleasant, very sick and very funny. I missed most of the punch lines because Gordon talked too much.
“Vegas,” Gordon said reverently. “First you make it legal. Then you keep it honest. Then you wrap it up nice and put a pretty ribbon around it, so it’s a vacation instead of a chance to roll dice. And you watch the money come in. It just keeps on coming.”
I lit a fresh cigarette and wished he would go away.
“What kind of action you like, Nat?”
“I don’t gamble much.”
He guffawed. That was one of his favorite tricks. “Not much of a gambler, huh?”
“I don’t like to take chances.”
Another guffaw. “Sure,” he said. “You like sure things, huh? You like a little edge. You’re all right, Nat.”
There was more of this. Finally he found other things to do. He left, taking his platinum pony with him. The comic finished up and went away. We tried the casino. I wasted a few dollars on craps while Annie went away to worry one of the slots to death. The crap table bored me. I took Annie away from the machine and we went upstairs.
It was restful, anyway.
The High Rise pool was a sort of lake with a concrete bottom. It was nicely surrounded by deck chairs, with or without sun umbrellas, and each deck chair had a little round white table beside it. That was where your waiter put your drinks.
We had deck chairs without umbrellas. I wanted a suntan and Annie didn’t seem to care too much one way or the other. We spent three days doing very little outside of soaking up sunlight. The sun was one of Las Vegas’s constants — every day, from six in the morning until six at night, the sun was undeniably there. The clouds never got in its way. The sun sat up there, burning, and I let it darken my skin. Every once in a while I would go loll in the pool. I couldn’t swim worth a damn, but nobody at the High Rise did much swimming. The pool was something to be in between drinks, between gambling, between sex and liquor. I would lower myself into water always the right temperature, walk around, paddle around, float on my back like a corpse. Then, when it got monotonous, I would clamber out of the pool and let the sun bake me some more.
We spent our nights gambling or being entertained, or both. There were a pair of meets with people Tony had wanted me to see, silly affairs where we sat around in a private room sipping whiskey and talking amiably, if guardedly. We didn’t deal in specifics. It all had its point and I could see the point easily enough. Tony was a man with friends, but he wasn’t that firmly established. He had taken over from Baron, had killed Baron to do it. So we had to be nice to people, had to firm up friendships here and there. I was a sort of gangland liaison man, Tony’s personal ambassador to the world.
Annie and I maintained relations that were generally cordial, sometimes almost warm, occasionally chilly. She was moody a lot of the time. She let herself drift away from the world and sat for hours listening to music on the radio or reading from any of several slim books of poems. I picked up one of the poetry books when she was busy in the can. The stuff was harsh and dry. The images were vivid but the taste of it all was as acrid as marijuana smoke.
Sometimes I wondered why I had brought Anne along. Before this there had been something of a special quality to our relationship, something that made it a little more than the usual story of a hood and his girl, and that quality was gone now. I had killed it.
The worst part was that I had screwed up the thing we had had between us and I didn’t even want what I had gained. For three days and three nights I didn’t touch her. I owned her, she belonged to me and I could have had her any way I wanted her. But I wound up not wanting her at all. I couldn’t figure it out.
There were two double beds in the room. She slept in hers and I slept in mine. And that was the way it was. She would give me funny looks at bedtime, looks that asked whether I wanted her or not, and I would pretend I didn’t notice the looks and would mumble something about how tired I was. Then I would go to bed and toss for a few hours, wanting her but not wanting her, needing the release she could bring me but unable to go over there and take it.
The third night we went up to the room together and I made drinks for both of us. I sat in a cushy chair and worked on my drink. She put hers down on a table and took off all her clothes. She usually undressed methodically, putting everything neatly away in turn. Now she let her clothes pile up on the floor.
“Look, Nat,” she said.
I looked. She had as chokingly lovely a body as I had ever seen. She wasn’t big enough in breast or butt to make a Playboy foldout, but there was something about the soft sweet curves of her flesh that caught me deep in my throat.