The Only Girl in the Game (35 page)

“Good boy! Get on out here. You can’t tell what nervous people will do, so make sure nobody is following you around. If you don’t know where this place is, look it up. I’m in Twenty. Last one on the right-hand side as you face it.”

“I know about where it is. It should take me ten minutes.”

It was a new motel, on the main highway east. He drove by at a good speed and on into the empty land. Then he pulled off and stopped, watched traffic while he lit a cigarette, and drove back to the Sandspun.

Homer admitted him to Number 20 when he knocked. The old man was alone.

“Fix yourself a drink afore you set, son.”

“It’s bad?”

“I’ll wait until you get yourself ready to set and listen.”

Gallowell started with Brownell. “A good gal I known most all her life noosed him easy and led him away like a little child, and it don’t matter to you where she took him to. But when he walked in there with his chest stuck out, all smiles and set for one hell of an afternoon, he got hisself greeted by a couple of good boys I sent over to work with the gal. They’re wild boys that have worked for me on Ayrab matters. I won’t exactly say they’re purposeful, but if you closed a door on either one of them they’d walk through it, and they got a natural dislike for people like that Brownell.

“Anyhow, Brownell, he didn’t crack for ten whole minutes. About the end of that time he come to realize this was a brand of man he hadn’t never run into before. He even figured it for some kind of a bluff, when they were getting him ready to geld him like you would a stallion that’s turned
too mean to handle. But when it come to him these boys were in dead earnest, it about turned him into an idiot right then and there, because he figured it for that fate worse than death they keep talking about.”

“Is she dead?” Hugh asked.

The old man’s face changed, the narrative light fading out of his eyes, leaving them as lifeless as pebbles.

“She’s dead,” the old man said, gently. “I’m sorry, son.”

Hugh carefully set his drink aside and lowered his face to his cupped hands. There was a long silence in the room. He lifted his head and picked up his drink. “Go on with it.”

“I’ll get rid of that Beaver first, son. After my boys milked him empty without quite knocking his brain off center, they drove way out to check on where she’s buried. We want to steer the police to the exact place, when this is all over, without the police knowing who told it. There was a question about what to do with Beaver and how to handle it quiet, but he fixed all that for himself. He’d had all he could take and a little more, so all of a sudden he yanks himself loose and starts running across that empty land, giving a couple of yelps at first but then saving everything for running.

“One of my boys took off after him, sprinting to catch up at first, and then just loping along right behind him, nice and easy, grinning like a young wolf lapping vinegar. Ever’ time Beaver would begin to lose his top speed, my boy would make some appropriate speech about just what Beaver was going to lose when he caught him. The information kinda spurred that man on. All of a sudden Beaver stopped running at top speed and pitched onto his face and slid a little ways, probably dead before he hit the ground.

“My boys aren’t doctors, but they guess his heart blew up.

“He was carrying a good piece of money on him, and I let the boys keep it as extra pay for having to work out there in that hot sun with sticks and stones, scraping a groove deep enough to bury him in. He made it maybe a whole half mile into that desert, up and down little rises in the ground, before he come abrupt to the end of himself. We had no more need of him anyhow, having the whole story by then.”

“Don’t edit it for me, Homer.”

“I wasn’t fixing to. Hanes, Marta and Allen had a little conference after I talked so damn fool free to that Hanes, and they had found out, somehow, her daddy was dead, and so they had to find some other way of controlling her. So it was agreed that Allen, Charm and Brownell would take
her to Al Marta’s ranch, about thirty-five miles out, and break her down to the point where from then on she’d do like she was told.

“But when they went up to the room to take her out, there was a scuffle and she tried to break loose and got knocked down and hit her head bad, so bad you don’t have to ever think about her knowing a thing from then on. They wheeled her out in a laundry cart, along with her luggage. Allen talked to Al Marta about what happened, and they plain couldn’t risk putting her in a hospital where they couldn’t get to her, even if she could have recovered, which didn’t seem promising. And if she died in the hospital it was going to make a lot of awkward questions being asked by police and such. So they took her out to that private road leading to Al Marta’s ranch and … she was dead by the time they got her there and so they buried her and her stuff, come back and parked her little car at the airport, and sent that Bentann woman to San Francisco on her ticket.”

“Have you left anything out, Homer?”

“Only if that Beaver happened to leave anything out, and from what my boys said, there wasn’t anything in the whole world he wasn’t right anxious to tell them all about. We know the five that were in it, and now there’s four. Having that Beaver run hisself to death sorta cancels off any idea of bringing in the police, even if we’d ever had that in mind. So we got to go at it in our own way, son. You give any thought to how we can use the weapon I spoke of?”

“I have a few ideas, but.…”

“Slide that there satchel out from under the bed and open it up, son.”

Hugh opened the small suitcase on the bed. It contained packets of currency, neatly banded and labeled.

Gallowell walked to stand beside Darren. He took one packet out of the suitcase, bounced it in the palm of his old misshapen hand, and flipped it back with contempt. “Pretties,” he said. “Toy things. The whole sad batch of human kind sweatin’, strainin’, cheatin’, bustin’ their sorry guts trying to pile this here stuff up so high they can’t see over it. But it was this stuff killed Miz Betty. And it killed that Beaver. And … it’s got some more killing to do.”

“It looks like … quite a lot.”

“I got me a deal coming up later on this year that’ll take cash money, so to save trouble I forsook the interest, money on what I flew away from here with, and this is part of it. It’s still banded up like they done it in that money room
over at your hotel. I separated out the packages of hundreds they wrapped up personal, no new bills and no serial order. There’s twenty-two of them, fifty in each package, which makes a hundred ten thousand. It should be enough to make all the trouble we got to have. Now look here, at this one. It’s just like all the others. This is the type band they get from the bank, saying five thousand, right here. Now here’s two sets of initials, so you can figure one man counted it and wrapped it and initialed it and another man checked up on him and initialed it. This here is the date, writ in pencil, so it’s no trouble for you to change the date some. Anybody like Hanes or Marta looking at one of these would know right off it come out of the money room. So you can see how all the rest of it is up to you, once you get this cash money smuggled into that hotel and hid.”

“All hundreds?”

“It’s the logical kind of cash money to stick to a man’s fingers. Smaller bills are too bulky. Bigger ones get checked too close and they don’t spend so easy.” Gallowell walked back to his chair and sat down. Hugh closed the suitcase lid over the money. He turned and looked at Gallowell.

“I want to know what you think of the risk of turning it over to me.”

Gallowell chuckled. “You mean like you taking off with it? I thought of that, sure enough. You fixin’ to?”

“God no!”

“So let’s stop talking kid stuff and get down to a little planning, son. You know what’s possible and what’s impossible, so you try the ideas you’ve had on me and I’ll see what holes I can pick in them.”

When Hugh Darren returned to the Cameroon at ten o’clock that evening, he was carrying the money in a large brown paper bag, with the top securely crimped. He shrugged off the offer of one of the bellhops to carry it for him. He had the feeling that anyone who glanced at the bag would know at once what it contained. He felt sweaty and short of breath by the time he reached his second-floor room. After he had locked and bolted the door and adjusted the blinds, he dumped the money out onto the bed and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. When he discovered he could not think clearly with the money in plain view, he covered it with his robe.

After he had sat for a time in the big chair by the window, he was able to control his random thought patterns and
force himself into a logical evaluation of those factors necessary to the plan. There was no need for all the money to be hidden in one place. The hiding places had to be safe, yet so readily available to him that he could quickly take advantage of unanticipated opportunities. It might be wise to carry a couple of packets on his person, he thought.

In Gallowell’s room they had carefully erased the penciled 2’s, 3’s and 4’s that indicated the month in the written dates, substituting 6’s and 7’s according to the indicated day, so as to label the packets as having been bundled in the money room during the latter part of June and the early part of July. The dates had to be very recent, because it was logical to assume that a thief would place such a packet in a temporary hiding place with the idea of moving it to a better place, such as a lock box, as soon as was convenient. And during that second transfer remove the band.

After a careful evaluation of all possible hiding places in his room, he settled on the trite device of concealing a dozen packets, $60,000, in the bottom of an ancient musette bag that hung on a hook in the back of his closet. He stuffed an old shirt in on top of the money. After a few rehearsals he found that it took a very few seconds to enter the closet, slide his hand down past the shirt and select, by touch, one to four packets to transfer to his pockets. At eleven o’clock he went down to his office, with the rest of the money packed in the briefcase.

The office hiding place was logical and obvious. He maintained one drawer in a safe file for personal matters, letters, credentials, tax forms, confidential reports. He had the only key. That particular file stood in the corner behind his desk, and his was the bottom drawer. He packed the money into the front of the file and relocked it.

He sat at his desk and realized his jaw was clamped so tightly the muscles ached. Now all doubt was gone. And because doubt was gone, so was hope. Death is a wind slamming a door that can never be opened again.

Hanes and Allen. Marta and Charm. Max, Gidge, Al and Harry.

Here I come. Ready or not.

There is no living space in any hotel which is off limits to the hotel manager. Improvements, repairs and redecoration can always be arranged by order of the manager. And there is no reason why he should not, during his inspection tours of the hotel, look at the work he has ordered done.

During the balance of the week of July 4th, three projects were begun. Al Marta’s penthouse apartment was scheduled for redecoration. Al’s current showgirl helped him make the color selections. Work was begun in Gidge Allen’s room.

On the second day, Hugh Darren went to see how the work was coming. He said to the boss painter, “How about the interior of the closet over there?”

“Well, it looked okay to me. I checked it.”

Darren stepped into the large closet. He found Gidge Allen’s topcoat hanging near the back of the closet. He took the six packets of bills from his pockets and slipped them quickly into the deep pockets of the topcoat.

He stepped out and closed the door and said, “It’s good enough, Hank. We’ll catch it the next time around.”

It was summer, and the desert city lay dazzled under the white torch of the sun. It would be months before Gidge Allen would touch that coat.

In the room occupied by Harry Charm, and in the three adjoining rooms, the scuffed and battered floor of asphalt tile was torn up and replaced. When Hugh Darren left Harry’s room, after a perfectly normal inspection visit, he left two packets of bills in the flap pocket of a heavy red-and-black mackinaw.

When one wall was torn open in Max Hanes’ suite, Darren found the quiet and swift opportunity to leave eight of the packets divided between the two pockets of a black overcoat with a fur collar.

When he had disposed of the sixteen bundles of currency, he had six left. Five of them were locked in his file.

It seemed to Hugh to be a satisfying irony that he was able to set up his crucial appointment with Al Marta on a Monday. It was the twelfth Monday since Betty had been killed.

It was six o’clock. Al had had a couple of drinks. Al locked the door of his small personal office and said, “So you want it private, you got it private, kid. The place isn’t bugged. Now what the hell is on your mind you got to put on an act like this?”

“You’ve been very fair to me, Al.”

“You trying to quit or something?”

“I … I think I might be in serious trouble, Al.”

“So tell me what it is and we’ll get it fixed up.”

“I can’t even convince myself I’m doing the smart thing in telling you.”

Al looked at him with impatience and annoyance. “I was having fun, kid. You’re taking up time. So get off the dime.”

“You see, I want to handle this in such a way, Al, that I won’t get what Beaver got.”

It seemed to Hugh that Al Marta stopped breathing for a moment. The shape of his mouth changed and flattened.

“What do you know about Beaver?”

“I know a little and I’ve guessed a little.”

“Do I get somebody to come and slap it out of you?”

Hugh reached into his side pocket. He took out the packet of bills and tossed them onto the table. “This should tell you something about the reason.”

Al Marta picked up the bills and suddenly slammed them down. “Oh, dammit, no! Oh, goddammit, no! It would have to be some way through Max. You better do some talking, Darren.”

“I’m no part of whatever has been going on, Al. I’m coming to you with it. I’ve been sitting on the information for some time. I want to make a deal.”