The Only Girl in the Game (31 page)

“No, I haven’t seen her. Remember on that Monday night, the night she left, I talked to you and you had no idea why she’d left so abruptly. Did you ever find out why?”

“Yes. Her old man died. But she didn’t tell
me
that. If she had I wouldn’t have been so sore.”

“How did you find out?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Somebody told me, maybe the next day. I don’t remember who.”

“So why didn’t you tell me? You knew we were good friends.”

“Kid, that broad took off and you were gloomy about it, and why should I start talking about something that makes you gloomy? Anyhow, you never brought her up in the conversation. If you had, maybe I would have said her old man died, but hell, I thought you knew it, the way I knew it. Did you just find out?”

“Yes. That young lawyer told me.”

“Now there’s a square type. Apparently she turned up missing or something. I told him there’s no cause to sweat. She’s just shacked up someplace. Maybe had a couple drinks and didn’t make the old man’s funeral, so she’s having a ball someplace until she has to go back to work. Forget her, sweetheart. Why don’t you come up here? We hardly ever see you up here. At this very moment, boy, the males are outnumbered and there is a couple of French broads from the show at the Mozambique who are getting upset because of not enough guys. So come on the run before the word gets around.”

“Some other time, Max. Thanks anyway.”

A few moments after he had hung up, his secretary, Jane
Sanderson, entered the big office and gave him a fragment of smile as she strode briskly to her corner desk, a sheaf of papers in her hand—departmental reports to be consolidated and summarized.

She put the reports in her working file, hooded her typewriter, took her purse from her desk drawer.

“Jane?” he said.

She turned toward him with a look of mild surprise. “Signed all that glop already?”

“I haven’t even looked at it. Have you got something planned, or can you spare a few minutes?”

She came to his desk, her head tilted to one side, quizzical, moving more slowly than usual. She sat in the chair beside his desk and lit a cigarette with his desk lighter. “I have a horribly important engagement with a swim suit, a tall drink, a long novel, and the folding chair I lug out to my favorite spot beside the apartment-house pool. But I’d rather talk. It’s nice to know you. What did you say your name is?”

“Darren. It’s painted on that door over there.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe I’ve been away.”

“That’s one way to put it, Hugh.”

“How do you like it here, Jane?”

She pursed her lips. “I don’t suppose you want the snow treatment.”

“Of course not.”

She frowned. “Not as much as I did. You transplanted me from the City of the Angels to the City of the Angles—there, I’ve been waiting ever since I made that up for a chance to say it. Anyhow, as you know, I didn’t like it at all the first couple of months. Then I adjusted, and liked it a lot better. Now it’s getting a little tiresome again. I’ve even been feeling wistful about smog. I don’t know. I’m good, Hugh. You know that. Why shouldn’t I be? What the hell else have I got but the work I do? So I can write my own ticket. It’s getting to the point where I have a pretty fair income from my own investments, so money isn’t going to hustle me into any job not attractive to me.”

“Isn’t this job attractive?”

“I liked it better when we were starting from scratch, junking the old systems and putting in the new ones, fighting with everybody. Golly, I was working sixty and seventy hours a week and loving every minute of it. The pay is good, and I guess it’s an interesting sort of place to work if a
person likes abnormal psychology, but … it’s pretty much a routine lately.”

“The point was to get it running smoothly.”

“I know that, Hugh. But there’s something else that.… Oh, the hell with it.”

“I want to know what you think, Jane.”

“It may turn out to be a little more frankness than you want to take, boss.”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“The most critical part of any job, Hugh, is who you work for. You were the tops.”

“Past tense?”

“Definitely. After I came here I heard how this town can change people. I was sure it wouldn’t change you. But it has—in the past month or so. It’s as if you’ve lost interest. You’re drinking too much. You’re getting that puffy look. You’re beginning to do things the easiest way instead of the right way. And I don’t know where or how, but I do know you have a few of those little angles working for you. You’re on the make, Hugh. You’re … beginning to look and act and think just like all the rest of the fat cats around here. It isn’t a change I particularly wanted to see, and maybe I don’t want to hang around and watch it continue. Maybe I’m one of those dull folk who must be able to give total respect to whoever I work for. You had that respect, Hugh. And now—forgive me—I feel a little patronizing about you. A little sad, too.”

He wondered if his face looked as flushed as it felt. “You come on pretty strong when you get an opening, Jane.”

“We haven’t talked about anything for weeks and weeks. Given the opening, I would have said it before now.”

“Maybe I stopped giving a damn when Betty Dawson left.”

“I could have said that too. For a week you were like a sleepwalker—a sleepwalker with one ugly disposition.”

“She was important to me.”

Her voice was suddenly softer. “I know that. I liked her, Hugh. Just about everybody liked her around here. A fine, warm, generous girl—who never belonged in this kind of place.”

“Did you know her father died the day she left here?”

“I heard about that later.”

“How much later?”

“Three days. Four, maybe.”

“Did she spread that word originally?”

“I don’t know. She could have. Then again, it came as a
long-distance call. The girls on the board are always curious about the entertainers. The operator could have listened in. Why, Hugh?”

“I didn’t hear anything about it until that lawyer told me today. She’s missing. She never showed up at the funeral. Nobody seems able to find her.”

Jane’s eyes went round. “No! Isn’t that strange! I wondered what that neat little man wanted.”

“I keep wondering why I didn’t hear anything about her father dying that same day.”

She lit a fresh cigarette. “I think I can tell you why, Hugh. Everybody in the hotel knew you and Betty were having an affair. Don’t look indignant. You know you had no hope of keeping it a secret. Everybody knows she left you a note and took off, without seeing you to say good-bye.”

“How the hell would they know that?”

“Don’t shout at me.”

“I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

“You wouldn’t be told because, in the first place, people would tend to assume you knew it. In the second place, you are the boss man, and the help doesn’t come running to you with gossip. In the third place, you haven’t been what anybody in his right mind would call approachable lately. Frankly, you’ve been an almost unbearable grouch, and when you have a few drinks, your disposition doesn’t improve a bit. And there is a sort of fourth reason. You’ve been a little closer to Hanes and Marta and those people than you used to be, which sort of puts you in a different camp. Do you understand that?”

“Yes. So what else have you heard about Betty?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But, actually, I wouldn’t hear very much. You brought me in here. I share a minor version of your … executive isolation.”

“Can you do some digging?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything at all concerned with the way she left here. She left Monday evening and took a Tuesday-afternoon flight. Maybe you can dig up some rumors about where she spent the night, that sort of thing.”

She frowned. “I can try, Hugh, and I will, of course, but—I don’t know—I lack the conspiratorial touch. I get lead-footed about this sort of thing. And people tend to snap shut like an alarmed clam when I bear down on them.”

“Jane … uh … stick around a while, will you?”

She smiled. “Somehow, for no reason at all, I feel better
about this job already. Maybe because we seem to be on speaking terms again. If you
should
get around to taking a personal interest in managing this hotel again, take my word that our system of setting up for these conventions stinks. Attendance keeps running as much as fifteen per cent above and below estimates, and both ways it’s costing money. And when you get that little dandy solved, I have some more for you, boss.”

One hour later Hugh Darren parked his blue second-hand Buick by the office of Mabel’s Comfort Motel and went inside. It was a tiny room with a plywood counter, frayed straw furniture, a window air conditioner that sounded like a small truck on a long hill. He tapped the bell beside the dime-store registration book.

A bloated woman with colorless hair, without a trace of expression on her dough-gray face, wearing a faded cotton housecoat, opened the door behind the counter and said, “I don’t take no overnights. Just by the week or longer.”

“Are you Mrs. Huss?”

“Everything in the world I need I get mail order.”

“I want to talk to you about Betty Dawson.”

There was still no flicker of expression of any kind. “Your name Hugh something … begins with a D?”

“Darren. Yes.”

“She described you pretty good one time. Come on in.”

He went in. She closed the door. He followed her as she waddled back into the gloom, toward the sound of shots and yelpings and horses galloping hard across the picture tube. All the blinds were closed, and one lamp with a weak bulb and a fringed shade was lit. She twisted the sound off and left the picture on.

“Set anywhere,” she said, lowering herself into a chair. “She write you to come and call on me? Not one word have I heard from her.”

“I haven’t heard from her either. She talked about you. I’d hoped maybe you’d heard from her, Mrs. Huss. I know she thinks a lot of you.”

“Not enough to write, seems like. I think a lot of that girl. It was like seeing myself all over again, all them goddam dirty lost years.”

“I don’t exactly know what.…”

“One day every six months I feel like saying more than two words in a row, so you just have to set and take it, mister. ’Course she came from more than I did. I come from nothing, but the family was close, and that’s what counts
with a family, especially once you start out breaking their hearts. Don’t make no polite sounds when I tell you you couldn’t hardly guess it, but I was a hell of a good-looking piece a long time ago. If I hadn’t thrown all that stuff out, there’s pictures I could show. I was stage struck, all right. Sixteen I was when I took off, and I thought it was a romantic world, just like Betty did.

“I got to be twenty-three—along about there—before I finally took a real good look at myself. I’d had seven years of show business by then, mister, and at twenty-three I was a wore-out bag. I’d been used too hard by cruel men, and the glamor was gone out of it, and nothing was worth what I’d gone through. So I had seven more years of it because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. When I was thirty and looking forty, I had the blessing of God and found a sweet, dear man who loved me so much he didn’t care what I’d done, and it didn’t matter to him that I was beyond having any kids ever. I had sixteen years of heaven on earth until he died in my arms, so I’m way ahead of most folks, no matter how bad it all started for me. So when I see her, and she in the middle of her black years, it was seeing myself again.”

“She told me how much it helped her—when you took her out to that little house in the desert and left her there.”

“I know you were out there, mister. She asked me if it was okay before she asked you. I figured from her voice you must be somebody it would be right to take out there. I thought in my fool way she was going to have the luck I had, and find her man. Neither of us could guess you’d turn out gutless.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Listen how full of insult the man gets! What the hell do you think it means? If you weren’t a ninny, you would have married her. In this town you make up your mind and fifteen minutes later you’re married, day or night.”

“It never … got around to marriage.”

“If she loves you, what’s wrong with marriage?”

“But it wasn’t love! I mean, not then.”

She shook her head. The harsh brilliance of the silent picture tube was reflected on her moon face. Her tone was heavy with contempt. “Sleeping with her, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but.…”

“No buts, mister. You think she slept with you on account you used the right shaving lotion? Or ran a hotel? That’s an honest to God woman, mister. Love is the only
thing in the world that would have her crawling into the sack with you of her own free mind and will. I can tell you just why you didn’t marry her. You thought you were too damn good for her, whereas it was the other way around. You knew she had peddled her tail when Max Hanes told her to, and so that dirty word ‘whor’ had snuck into your mind and you were too goddam pure and clean to stop for one minute and try to figure out some good reasons
why
she had to do what Max told her to. Oh, you were willing to eat all the fruit off the tree, but you didn’t want to own the orchard. All guys like you want is nice safe.…”

“Shut up! You’ve got something all wrong. You’ve got something terribly wrong here, Mrs. Huss. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. What’s this talk about her … doing what Max Hanes told her to?”

“You can act real innocent, can’t you?”

“Mrs. Huss, believe me. I actually, truthfully don’t know what you’re talking about. Did she actually.…”

“Let me think! Hush up a minute.”

A heavy truck rumbled through the silence and he could hear faint music coming through one of the walls.

Mrs. Huss sighed audibly. “I’m sorry. I guess it could have been that way. I guess she wouldn’t have wanted you to know a thing like that about her.”

“She’s gone now. Can you tell me?”

“I will because she should have. She phoned me that night she left. Crying. She was all packed. She told me about her father dying so sudden, and she told me she was free and she wouldn’t ever have to come back. I asked if you were going with her and she said she was breaking it off with you. She cried a little harder then so I missed some of it, but it was about loving you and being too cheap to get your life all messed up. So that would sound like she hadn’t told you, I guess.”