The Only Girl in the Game (26 page)

“Albert, if you want to be a success in the trade, you must stop thinking the worst of people. It’s a good thing you aren’t the one compiling our local mortality statistics. The desert is the healthiest place in the world. Now coil your hose and hang it up and let’s get out of here.”

Hugh Darren and George Ladori stand in the largest walk-in cooler in the hotel. George is showing Hugh the sides of
beef that have been delivered this day. With a keen and slender knife he makes a shallow slice into a flank and holds the layer of fat back. There is a quality in the hard artificial light which makes the meat look slightly blue.

“It’s got the Prime stamp, Hugh, but it’s on the low side of Prime. You can see. It isn’t marbled the way it should be. It’s more like the very best level of Choice. But we’re paying Prime. What the hell do you think I should do?”

“Are all sixteen sides that came in like this?”

“Well … there’s not a one of them
real
good looking.”

“How many of them disturb you?”

“I’d say six.”

“I’d say get Krauss over here in person and tell him the facts of life. Get a concession on replacement or price on those six sides. If it’s price, or if you get nowhere, use these six on your convention specials, and don’t menu them out to the regular trade.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say.”

Hugh gives him a half smile and says, “So next time you don’t have to ask, do you?”

Out back in one of the small rooms off the shower room used by the lifeguards, Beaver Brownell and Bobby Waldo are playing three-handed gin with Harry Charm, another one of those specialists whose names, like Waldo and Brownell, appear on the payroll of one of the corporations administered out of the X-Sell offices downtown. Their started pay is fattened by cash from Al Marta at irregular, unpredictable interviews.

“Gin!” Beaver says.

“How you making out with that showgirl, that Gretchen?” Bobby asks slyly.

“I don’t know why she’s so sore. I can’t get near that stupid broad.”

“So give up,” Bobby suggests.

Brownell exposes all of his outthrust teeth in a long yellow grin. “The Beaver never gives up, men.”

Harry Charm finishes checking the score. Beaver is dealing to him. “What’s this about some girl?” Harry asks heavily. He is a puffy, scarred, asthmatic old hoodlum who frets endlessly about minor matters. He looks at his hand. “All my life, I never held cards. All my life, losing.”

Charm has been both cop and convict. He is trusted. In the customary channel of command, when some punitive action seems necessary, Al Marta speaks to Gidge Allen, who speaks to Harry Charm, who gives the orders to Brownell
or Waldo or whoever he thinks can best handle the particular operation.

“There’s this Gretchen, madly in love with Beaver, only she don’t realize it yet,” Bobby explains.

Beaver wins the hand and the game. Bobby Waldo gets up restlessly. “Enough for me. Goddam, I get restless lately. We haven’t had anything to do in a long time, you realize that?”

Beaver grins. “You bucking for sergeant, Bobby?” He turns to Harry. “Bobby wants we should get sent back to Phoenix and smack some more of those laundry workers back into line. That’s the line of work he likes.”

Bobby flushes and stands over Beaver, who looks up at him calmly. “The kind of work I would like, Beaver, is they decide you got too much mouth and I get to take you out on the desert and close it for good.”

“Shut up, both of you,” Harry says irritably. “Deal the cards, Beaver.”

Jerry Buckler, the manager of the Cameroon, sleeps, bare to the waist, on the tile floor of his bathroom. The tile is cool against chest and cheek. There is a purple knot on his forehead where he struck the edge of the toilet in falling. He is still damp with the water Max Hanes sprayed upon him by holding one thick thumb against the lavatory stream, deflecting it. Jerry Buckler glides swiftly down a long snowy hill of sleep. He is on a red sled in a long-ago time, and his father is on the sled behind him, steering it, holding him safe and close, and laughing into the wind in his giant voice. The wind whips cold against their faces. But suddenly his father is gone. He cannot turn the sled. The hill steepens and the wind howls in his ears, and the hill tilts downward into some great blackness of a night that cannot end. It is late, and it is past time to go home, but all he can do is cling to the red sled, and cry unheard.

Gidge Allen is holed up back in his own room in Al Marta’s penthouse apartment, and he is once again pleasuring Miss Gretchen Lane, and finding her needs to be as strenuous as before. He had found himself liking the look of her when, because of Al’s lies, she had become furious with Beaver. So he had quietly sought her out, and found her quite ready to be persuaded. In just a little while now, they will rest and dress, and pick up drinks turned tepid, and wander, with some attempt at casualness, out to the random party going on in the big living room.

Gidge knows that Al will kid him again about never seeing a man work so hard to win a hundred-dollar bet, and just as the flesh beneath him begins the hungry tumult of its throes of completion, he wonders dolefully if all this is not merely an act of bravado. He wonders if he has not, at last, grown too old for all these prime young wenches who all seem to say and do exactly the same things, as though they were all graduates of the same huge underground school, veterans of endless drill teams, letter perfect in all their obligatory lines.

Vicky Shannard lies naked and alone, brushed, curled, perfumed, annointed, alone on the big bed, the draperies closed against what is left of the day, alone in the still hum of the air conditioning, her eyes closed, arms at her sides, her eyelids expertly touched with blue shadow. She has made her phone calls. Tomorrow she will fly to New York. Dicky will meet her there, bringing from Nassau the first of the many papers to study and sign.

Hugh has suggested he move her into other quarters in the hotel, but she has thanked him and told him it is really not necessary. He has thanked her for the gold lighter she sent down to his office.

She has had a long hot tub. She has scrubbed and brushed and curled and creamed and enameled herself.

She is alone. The lids hide the bland childish innocence of the slightly protruding blue eyes. She wets her lips with the sharp pink tip of her tongue. She sighs. It is a long sound in the stillness. She raises one leg and braces it there, the knee sharply bent.

She brings her hands up and presses them with a painful strength against her firm, heavy, white breasts. Something begins to well up inside her, creating a noticeable pressure. It is a feeling very like that final inevitability of sexual completion once the point of sensory endurance has been passed, but it is without any of those delicious overtones. She cannot imagine what is happening to her until the feeling wells up to its crisis. And suddenly she gives a long thin quavering cry of utter desolation and the tears burst from her eyes.

It is the first time in her life she has wept for any reason other than a reaction to physical pain. Her astonishment does not still her torment. She rocks her curly head from side to side and the tears run tickling down her cheeks to the percale pillow, and her body spasms under the continuous blows of the hard sobbing. She weeps for what she is and
what she has been, and for all the empty time ahead of her, and for her sudden recognition of her beloved, too late, too long after it tumbled down through the bright morning toward the soft, horrid sound of impact.

Max Hanes led Al Marta out to the relative quiet of the foyer of Al’s apartment and stood with him near the door of the private elevator.

Al said, “You see the way that boy moves? You see those goddam shoulders? He’s a welter from the waist down and a light-heavy from the waist up. You want to come in on him, Max, I’ll sell you a piece of my piece. Thirty-four bouts, twenty-one knockouts. I tell you, this boy is going to go all the way. I got a hunch.”

“Thanks, but you know about me and the fighters, Al.”

Al laughed and thumped him on the arm. “So you dropped a little on a couple of canvasbacks. Okay, you stick to the singers and the platter outfits, but don’t ever forget, baby, I either get a piece of every new deal you like, or you don’t get the jukebox pressure nationwide.”

“I’m not that stupid, Al. What I wanted to tell you, I got Dawson set to work on Gallowell.”

Al frowned, lost in thought for a few moments. “Okay. She’s a good smart kid. But if she doesn’t swing it, I don’t want you should push too hard. Here we’re not messing with some car dealer or real-estate-promotion guy. I mean if it gets obvious, here we got a guy with a lot of weight, one way and another. You’ve got to keep in mind that a quarter million—a little less—is going to make just one thin-type week on the books, and it isn’t worth a guy with so much weight maybe getting sore and moving against us some other way.”

“Like what?”

“How the hell should I know? He’s maybe a little on the senile side, so he gets childish about you trying to push him around. Maybe he uses some of those millions he’s got to put pressure on the Feds to give us the kind of undercover audit and investigation we could do without. He employs a hell of a lot of smart tough people, Maxie. He could just give out orders to bitch up the Cameroon any way they can think of, and some of those people could come up with something we haven’t even figured on. I’m just saying you’ve pushed it about as far as you should, and if he don’t get the hots for the Dawson broad, just let it go. Just let it go.”

“Okay, Al.”

“How is it with Darren?”

“He’s joining the team, a little bit at a time. A little off the top looks just as good to him as it does to anybody. I overpaid him just to bring him along a little. Was that okay?”

“You know damn well it was, Max. He’s worth sewing so tight he’ll never leave the organization.”

“What was the reaction in L.A. to Shannard taking that dive?”

“They were disappointed. It would have been good property to pick up.”

“The little blonde won’t sell?”

“She doesn’t have to and she doesn’t want to. I talked to her before I made the call. The insurance takes her off the hook.”

“Maybe there’s some way to change her mind, Al.”

“You’re a little late, Maxie.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d make book she’s going to meet a very interesting guy in the next few weeks. And I bet he knows just how to make a pretty little widow forget her terrible sorrow. And I’ll bet he has some plans for her.”

“He better be good.”

“So why shouldn’t he be good?”

“That one is rough, Al. She knows every score they ever added up.”

“If it’s out of my territory, baby, I sure as hell know it’s out of yours. So get your mind back on what the hell you’re being paid for. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Tomorrow or the next day, Gidge is going to take Jerry over to Riverside and stick him back in that funny farm for a while. He’s in bad shape, the worst I’ve ever seen him, so it may take a long time to dry him out good. Can you operate okay through Darren?”

“In another month he’ll shill for me if I ask him.”

“How about what I hear about him and Dawson?”

“When we own them both, Al, it’s just that much easier, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes you kill me, baby. Honest to God.”

“I just like things to run smooth.”

Hugh Darren stood behind the registration desk. He hefted the solid-gold lighter in his hand, conscious of its unusual weight. It was engraved with block initials spelling
T.A.S. They could be ground off and replaced. He wondered if he should do that. Would it be a morbid affectation to leave them?

“Was that all right?” the desk clerk asked.

“Was what all right?”

“What I just said, Mr. D. Mr. Hanes asked me to check Eight-fifteen to see if Mr. Gallowell was staying over. I saw no reason not to, so I did, and he is. Was that all right?”

“Yes. Yes, that was all right. But you must remember, Jimmy, that Mr. Hanes has nothing to do with the operation of the hotel as such.”

“Yes sir,” the man said, with a slightly skeptical expression.

“You can give him information.”

“Yes sir.”

“But if there is any request for any sort of … action on your part that you do not understand, or possibly think is not right.…”

“Such as?”

“Do I have to draw you a picture? Such as letting one of Mr. Hanes’ people read a message that might be in the box for any hotel guest.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that!” the man said, with telltale forcefulness.

“No. You wouldn’t do that. Of course you wouldn’t. You check with me on the innocent acts, but not the other kind.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“You can create the impression of loyalty without cutting off the supply of little gifts of money.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” the man said, red and uncomfortable.

Darren slipped the lighter into his pocket. “Skip it,” he said wearily. “Working here hasn’t changed you at all. You just help out a little during the Saturday-night rush.”

“What?”

“In the larger sense, Jimmy, this is a house of ill fame. We all make our own adjustments.”

The man, looking baffled, tried to laugh at what he suspected was a joke he should have understood. As Hugh walked back toward his office he sensed that the man was still standing there, staring at him.

I am adjusting, Hugh told himself. That’s all. When your stance is too rigid, they knock you down. So you stand loose, ready to bob, weave and sidestep. Flexibility is the clue to local survival. So I shall stand under the money tree and hold my pockets wide open, and if some falls in, it isn’t my doing.
It’s just gravity. This doesn’t have to touch me in any basic way. I’ll make what I have to make, and then I shall pack up and leave, and run my own show in my own way.

There are good people here. Most of the entertainers are warm, sturdy, wonderful folk, like my Betty. And the little people on the hotel and casino staffs, most of them are solid and good. In a smaller job I could afford their integrity. But I am on the level where I have to deal with people like Hanes. And so I have to adjust to his methods, or get out. Adjustment does not have to imply approval. It is only the realistic approach. Bend or break. That’s the choice they give you. Only a fool would refuse to bend a little.