The Only Girl in the Game (21 page)

After she had convinced him, with difficulty, that she preferred her “career” to marriage, he told her about some good ocean land he owned north of Fort Lauderdale, and the good friends he had and the good mortgages he held in Lauderdale. He could build her a good little house on the ocean and make sure she had a good job in one of the clubs in Lauderdale for as long as she wanted it, and that would be a second-best thing, but better than nothing.

After she made him understand that she would not feel right in such an arrangement, he asked her if it was all right if he came back to see her now and then, whenever he could get away, and she had no plausible objection to that.

He never came back, because he went down into the ’Glades after turkey, and in the autumn dusk he was squatting in the brush using a turkey call, and a young attorney in the party thought he was the right size in that half light to be a big wild turkey, and tore his throat away with the first snap shot. Max Hanes showed her the clipping from the Los Angeles paper, a two-inch wire service pickup, and when she was in her bed she cried a little for Betty Dawson and for Riggs Telfert and for everyone’s world of what-might-have-been.

After she watched his morning flight take off, she taxied back to Playland, packed her things, left them off at Mabel’s Comfort Motel, and took the key to 190 back to Max Hanes.

“Siddown and rest yourself, cutie. Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“It was just as easy as cutting your own throat, Max,” she said, pleased that she had selected the attitude which gave her the greatest feeling of protection. Bitter, brittle, ironic. The hardcase broad. Jackie Luster had been the rest of her college education. His fat buddy had been graduate school. Riggs Telfert had been her first formal employment based on her educational record.

“You and me, we can get along, Dawson. You got to understand I could give you a very short end, but that would be stupid and I didn’t get where I am being stupid.”

“Your record of success should be an inspiration to every American boy.”

“People you are going to work with, there has got to be fair play. You take fair play and a few laughs and the money coming in, and what more is there in life? This here is for you.”

She opened the envelope and looked at the packet of bills and saw they were hundreds, and put the envelope in her purse. “Thank you, kind sir.”

“Don’t you want, to count them?”

“I’ll get around to it later in the day.”

“There’s thirty-five of them in there. Thirty-five bills, kid. It’s more than I agreed and more than I had to give you. Right?”

“Right!”

“Would it for chrissake hurt you to smile once? Maybe I don’t have to tell you this, but don’t go depositing that money in an account. It’s off the top, so it isn’t reported from this end. Maybe you’d get away with it, but if you run into a spot-check audit, then there’s a fraud rap for failure to report income, because they check out bank deposits. What you do, you put it in a lock box, and then if you want to take a risk of feeding it into a checking account a little at a time so you can live better, that’s your risk. But the safest deal is spend it for fun things, in cash. They can’t trace that.”

“Tax evasion, hey? My next step in a life of crime.”

“I’m telling you, don’t declare it, baby. If you do, I don’t know where the hell you got it. It didn’t come from me. I can prove that by the auditors.”

“The job, Max. The job. When do I go to work?”

“Soon, cutie. I got to do some shifting around. I’ll get hold of you.”

“This wouldn’t be a brush off, Max? It better not be.”

“You’re too suspicious, kid. You’re going to work here. You can bank on that.”

She paid Mabel Huss her back rent. She bought some pretty new clothes. She bought the little Morris Minor off a used-car lot, for cash. She told herself quite firmly that it had turned out to be a different world than she had been led to believe it was, and so she had made a logical and rational adjustment to the state of things-as-they-are, and given up any juvenile wistfulness about the-way-things-should-be. She had been running full tilt into a wall and knocking herself down. So they had noticed her and opened
a doorway in the wall and she had walked through and gravely accepted their brass ring, good for another ride, her order of merit.

She had to adjust to the stranger she had suddenly become. She decided that if you have built a structure in your mind and it comes tumbling down, you are under no obligation to rebuild it. You can merely cart the debris away, smooth off the area and keep it carefully swept. In that way you avoid the danger of having something else collapse on you. And it is quite neat.

She had to overcome the nagging suspicion that she had changed in some visible way. Men seemed to regard her with a more knowing interest. Did her hips swing with a new provocative arrogance when she walked down a street? Was there a sluttish contour to her lips? Had the line of her breasts become coarsely obtrusive? There was a B.T. world, (before Telfert) and an A.T. world, and she watched her friends narrowly, almost hoping to detect any slightest flavor of knowing contempt.

But she finally, in her honesty, found her friends unchanged. She caught unexpected glimpses of herself in mirrors and store windows, and was reassured. She knew that the changes in her, and they were unavoidable, were subjective changes. She was drinking a little bit more than was her habit. She, who had always appreciated the restorative effects of being alone, went to rather absurd lengths to avoid being alone. At night she slept long and heavy and awakened unrefreshed.

Max called her in at the end of a week. “You’ll start two weeks from tomorrow, cutie, on the midnight to six. Four shows a night. They’ll have a room in the house you can move into next week. The room will be free, and you’ll sign for all meals and drinks, and we’ll stake you to the kind of outfits I want you wearing for the act, and pay you a hundred fifty a week.”

“I don’t know if Andy will let me take that kind of money.”

“Add the value of the room and food and it’s far enough over minimum scale so there’s no union squawk, and there’ll be no squawk from you, kid.”

“How can you tell that?”

“I can tell because I got a pretty good idea of the kind of gal you are, Dawson, and because you had a tour of duty in Playhouse 190.”

She stared at him, wondering at the subconscious warning
that had suddenly turned her mouth dry. “What … what does that mean?”

“It means that Al Marta, through X-Sell Associates, has got his thumb in a hell of a lot of pies. There’s some little unions, laundry workers and so on over into Arizona, and there’s some trade associations that’re into this and that, and in lots of cases Al’s people can make things run a lot smoother if there’s ways to put on pressure. Not the old-fashioned kind, like you bust a few arms, even though that can still be arranged, but the modern kind. Social pressure, Al calls it. One of the corporations operating out of the X-Sell offices downtown owns that Playland Motel, so when it was expanded a while back, they brought in the experts. You want to use modern methods, you get the experts. That whole unit in the back was designed for that special purpose, kid. You know, it really knocks me out the things they can do. Two-way mirrors, special lighting, concealed camera ports, superfast film. You know, they’ve got that playhouse bugged with induction mikes that can pick up a whisper from twenty feet, and they can amplify it loud enough to blow your head off. Al uses it twenty-thirty times a year, but even if it was only three times it would have paid itself out. There’s a hundred-thousand nut just in the electronics in that place, kid.”

She tried to moisten her lips. She had that feeling of remoteness which precedes fainting. “I don’t … understand.”

“Why we should have used it this time? Not because of you, baby. You’re like incidental. The way Al explained, there’s land operations in Florida, and that Telfert has pretty good holdings. Maybe some day there’s some deal that he might want to block, and then they got a print of the film and they got a copy of the tape in the vault in Miami, and he all of a sudden gets cooperative. It’s like insurance.”

“The film?” she said in a fainting voice.

He stood up. “Come on back here, kid. I had Brownie set it up on the projector for me. I figured you’d want a quick look. It’s all sixteen-millimeter black and white, and this is edited down to take out all the dull stuff.”

She followed him into a small room behind his office, shut the door behind her at his suggestion. A projector squatted on a low table, aiming at a wall a little over six feet away.

He checked the projector, clicked it on. “There’s no sound on this print. Sometimes they dub it on from the tape, but it’s expensive. Click off that light behind you, kid, and I’ll get this thing adjusted down sharp.”

She turned off the light. The bright square on the wall came into focus. She looked through a window at the grotesqueness of her shame, stood with ice forming around her heart and looked down from a high place upon the ultimate catalogue of dishonor. Max’s casual voice came from far away, barely audible over a roaring in her ears and the dutiful whirr of the projector.

“The air conditioning in that place is just a little bit noisy on purpose to cover up any camera shutter sound, kid. That guy on the camera is a real artist, you got to admit. That’s a zoom lens he uses to come in for the close-ups and then back away again. You need a lot of close-ups to make sure of identification, so you can tell it wasn’t faked in any way. He worked in Hollywood and got canned on a narcotics thing. By God, that Telfert is all man, isn’t he? Baby, one thing you don’t have to ever worry about is anybody peddling these for the smoker trade. I’m not saying they wouldn’t go over pretty good, but this is a confidential deal, and no prints ever get out of our hands unless the parties involved cross us up, and then who would blame us for making the extra buck? Now on this next part the camera is shooting from a different location and the lighting isn’t quite so good, but it’s.…”

Without warning the heavy saliva ran into her mouth. Her throat filled and she bent over and, clinging to a chair with one hand for support, she vomited endlessly, agonizingly, onto the unseen rug. Max cut the projector, turned on the light and showed her to his private lavatory.

When she was alone, trying to clean herself up, the reel began to run against a wall in the back of her mind and she was sick again. It was a long time before she felt strong enough to come out. She gave herself a last look in the mirror. Her face looked gaunted and yellow-gray, and she could not bring herself to look into her own eyes.

“You look pretty raunchy, honey. You better sit down.”

“No thanks,” she said in a toneless voice.

“I didn’t know it would get you that bad, kid.”

“Who … who else has seen it?”

“Just me and Al and the guys in the lab. And the two guys on duty while you were at 190. That’s all. I’m leveling with you, Dawson. It wouldn’t do us any good to show it around. I’d figure that would be a dirty trick.”

“A dirty trick,” she echoed, unable to comprehend this code of behavior.

“But just keep one thing clear. I own you, Dawson. You
take the job I offer at the price I offer. And if I tell you to jump over the hotel, I want to see you out there trying as hard as you can until I decide to tell you to stop.”

He came around his desk and moved close to her. “I’ll be easy to get along with, but the first time you ever cross me up, I’ll clip the best ten minutes out of that film strip and see they’re delivered to that doctor daddy of yours in San Francisco. Have you got the whole picture now?”

She made a strangled sound of assent, turned and fumbled the door open and fled through the casino, aware that people were looking at her in a startled way. Once she was out in the incomprehensible sunshine she discovered that tears were running down her face, and she had bitten her underlip until it was bleeding.

Back in her dingy room in Mabel’s Comfort Motel, motionless on the sagging bed, she accepted the fact she would have to kill herself. No matter how she tried to solve the equation, it always came out the same way. She spent two days in bed, unable to eat, unable to go out into the world, unable to answer Mabel’s cautious worried questions.

And then Mabel Huss, ignoring her protests, took her out into the desert to the absolute solitude of the stone house.

“I’m leaving you here with this grub. Mabel said. “I’ll be after you in a few days. Don’t know what’s chewing you to pieces. But if there’s anyplace you can settle it, it’s right here. Soon as I go you’ll be finding out there’s nobody here but you and God. So get squared off with Him and yourself.”

She rattled away in her old car, neither looking back nor waving.

Betty Dawson mended herself in four days—or, more accurately, she adjusted herself to a future of living with what could never be mended. Mabel picked her up after the fifth day. After the first long anxious look, Mabel smiled with relief and approval.

On the way back to town Mabel said, with startling perception, “I guess you found out it’s hard to think of anything you can’t get along without somehow, except life itself, Elizabeth. If you have to, you can make do without legs, eyesight, freedom or love. People always have, always will.”

“You just sort of … add up what’s left, I guess.”

“And keep telling yourself it’s important.”

“One thing, Mabel, I’ve got time before I have to go to work to fly home and spend a couple of days with my father. It’s overdue.”

“It makes a good place to start, Elizabeth.”

So you build a new life within the limitations of the irreparable mistake, and do as much with it as you can. You bemuse yourself with the symbols of your own gallantry. You work hard and well at your profession, and you cherish your friends and amuse your acquaintances, and try hard to forget that you are, in the dirtiest sense of the word, on call. Just when you are beginning to wonder if that special mortgage on your soul requires no payments, Max assigns you the problem of the lucky man from St. Louis, a fat foolish man with a streak of slyness in him.