The Only Girl in the Game (36 page)

“Keep talking.”

“I want protection. I don’t want to be put in the middle on this. I’ll tell you everything I know, and based on that, you can probably make better guesses than I can. I want to keep on running this hotel, and I want the pay and title of manager. In return for that, I’ll never tell another soul what I’m about to tell you.”

“If what you tell me is worth it, it’s a deal, Darren.”

“I think it’s worth it. You’ll have to be the judge. Three days before he disappeared, Beaver Brownell came to my room at four in the morning. He acted furtive and peculiar, but he wasn’t drunk. He said he had something important on his mind, but he couldn’t seem to get to the point. He acted nervous but confident. He kept telling me he had decided he could trust me. He said he had a big deal working for him. He said it was a money-room deal. I said I wasn’t involved in that part of the operation. He said that was why he had come to me.

“Now I’ll try to say it in his words. ‘Harry and me found out about it, like by accident, way back, and so the two guys working this deal, they had to cut us in, and they cut me in small, less than Harry. So now I’m putting the squeeze on. Harry says I’m wrong. But I’m telling them I get cut in equal, or I go to Al. So what I want from you is, you take this here envelope and don’t open it and put it in a safe place. It’s my protection. If something happens to me—and
I think it won’t on account of I got those guys bluffed good—you take this to Al because it’s the proof, and you tell Al that Max and Gidge are taking him. You tell him to move in on them real slow and he’ll find they hide the take in their clothes in their closets until they get the chance to move it out to a safer place. Tell him Harry is in on it too. Tell him they’ve took a fortune off that money room.’ ”

“And he disappeared … eleven days ago? Where have you been?”

“Thinking. I opened the envelope and the money was in it. That’s the proof he was talking about, I would say.”

“It sure as hell is!”

“I didn’t want to get mixed up in a thing like this. And I couldn’t understand why Beaver didn’t let the others know that he’d arranged for somebody to tell you all this as soon as anybody started to get tough with him.”

“So why didn’t he?”

“I think he started to tell it, Al, but he didn’t finish his story.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe they roughed him up a lot before he was given a chance to say anything. And you remember his bad heart.”

“Bad heart?”

“I know he was ordered to go on the wagon and leave women alone. I forget who told me.”

“I just can’t believe Gidge would.…”

“There’s more.”

“You’re giving me the worst night in ten years already, kid.”

“I don’t know what he said or how he said it, but I think somebody has the idea I know something about all this.” He glanced toward the door. “Could anybody hear what.…”

“This room is soundproofed, kid. For business reasons.”

“Good. Somebody got into my room this morning, probably with a passkey. They pried open the locked drawer of the small desk in my room, and broke the lock. Everything is mussed up in all the other drawers. Maybe they were looking for that money, or a letter written by Beaver. I wouldn’t know. But I don’t like it. I want protection, Al.”

“And if you hadn’t started to get nervous, you would just have held onto this five grand. That’s right, isn’t it? Isn’t that why you waited so long, figuring you could keep the money?”

“I could have kept it anyway.”

“How?”

“I could have given you a different package, even. Maintenance
is laying a new floor in Harry Charm’s room. I had a chance to check his closet. It was locked, but I have a key that opens that type lock in all the rooms. He’s got ten thousand dollars, I think, in two packages like this one, in an old red-and-black jacket.”

“Harry Charm has ten thousand dollars!” “I didn’t want to risk checking either Gidge’s closet or Max’s. I’m no hero, Al. I’m in over my head. I’m sorry I ever came out here. And I wish to God Beaver hadn’t picked me to trust.”

“He picked pretty good,” Al said softly. “He picked pretty good.”

“Does my deal stand, Al?”

“What? Oh, hell, yes. Now stay right there a minute.”

Al went out and closed the door. Hugh sat and stared at the pursed and pulpy mouths of the actresses in the fondly inscribed photographs on Al Marta’s office wall. When Al returned, a full ten minutes later, he slammed the door, emptied his pockets and tumbled six packets of bills onto the table.

“I sent him into town on an errand. And I was thinking what a damn fool thing to do. I knew Gidge couldn’t be on the clip. Maybe Max, even. But not Gidge. Jeez! All the laughs we’ve had. All the years of kicks. All the broads and all the bottles.”

He spun around, hands spread in a gesture of appeal, his face contorted like a child fighting tears. “But I had to look, didn’t I? I didn’t have any choice about that. I had to know Gidge was okay, didn’t I?”

Hugh sat silently, knowing Al did not want an answer.

Al picked up a bundle of money and dropped it. “All these were taken in the last ten days,” he said wonderingly. “I loved that guy. I trusted that guy. Why should he do this to
me
?”

“Maybe he … was just bored,” Hugh said cautiously.

“I got this soft heart. I treat everybody too good. So that makes me good old Al. Some kind of dummy, maybe. I think they’re laughing with me and all the time they’re laughing at me. For chrissake, they figure me for such a meathead, they even do a sloppy job! He’s so confident he doesn’t even take the wrappers off and hide it better! And they just don’t give a damn how bad I look if it ever comes out.”

“I guess they didn’t expect you to find out, Al.”

Al seemed lost in brooding thought for a long minute. He
sighed. “I got to stop kidding myself about there being any other way of handling a thing like this.”

“How will you handle it?”

Al grinned without mirth. “You got yourself into this sideways, kid. This has tired us both out.” He looked at his watch. “We need a rest. Use all the pressure you got to get us a couple of airplane tickets for tonight, to two different places. Set me up for El Paso, and get me out of here before midnight, and make it a round-trip first class. Get a reservation to come back, say, next Sunday. Better make it for two people. I’ll take a broad along. I got friends there, and they’re going to see a lot of me. You take your choice where you go, kid, but stay at least until Sunday, and if you got friends you can move in with, it’s good policy. Phone me the word soon as you line up the tickets.”

“Okay.”

“I like the way you don’t start asking questions. This is like an impulse, kid. I don’t even get time to say good-bye to anybody, not to any of my old buddies.”

“You haven’t proved that Max.…”

“He’d
have
to be in it. It’ll be checked out. Everybody gets every break, Darren. I’m a very fair guy. I’m very warm hearted. For old friends I’ll do one big favor. I’ll put in the request it don’t hurt.”

Al Marta picked up the money and dropped it into a desk drawer. He hesitated, then flipped one bundle into Hugh’s lap. “Wherever you go, buy yourself a big week, kid.”

“Thanks. Is there anything else I can.…”

Al sat down. “Now you can just get out. Thanks for everything. I am a guy who always likes the action, and I like a lot of people around, having fun, laughing it up. But right now for one time I am going to sit right here all by myself for a little while.”

Just as Hugh pulled the door shut as he left the small study, he caught an incredulous glimpse of tears shining and quivering on thick black lashes.

The newspapers, television and radio and, a little later, the news magazines hit the incident heavily—as though the men who edited the news realized that it would never be a continuing story, that nothing else would ever be discovered to keep it alive. An itinerant laborer spotted the gray sedan at dawn next to the main highway, just twelve miles west of Phoenix, Arizona, on a Friday morning, the fifteenth day of July. The car had California plates and was later identified
as having been stolen in Los Angeles the previous Wednesday noon. It had been driven off the shoulder and parked behind a fringe of small trees.

The three men sat in the back seat, wedged upright by their own bulk, with wrists, ankles and mouths bound with wide surgical tape. Their three heads were bowed. In each forehead, almost perfectly on center in each case, was a single dark hole, ringed by powder burns. There was no identification on the bodies, and all surfaces on the sedan that could have taken fingerprints had been wiped clean.

The autopsies disclosed a misshapen .32-caliber pellet deep in the torn brain tissue of each body. Aside from the fatal wounds, there were no marks of violence on the bodies. The autopsies disclosed the presence of alcohol and barbiturates in sufficient quantity to have rendered the three men helpless, if not unconscious, at the time of death.

The routine check on the fingerprints taken from the bodies and relayed to the Central Files of the FBI identified the three men as Maxwell Hanes, Harold Charm and Dillard “Gidge” Allen.

All three men had criminal records, and it was soon learned that all of them had been connected in one way or another with the Cameroon Hotel in Las Vegas. When Al Marta was located and questioned about these men, he said that to the best of his knowledge the three of them had left Las Vegas together on Tuesday night en route to Los Angeles to investigate personally some sort of investment proposition in which they all seemed to be interested. Marta told the reporters that it had evidently turned out to be a bad investment. The reporters laughed. Al Marta was a very funny man.

• • •  fourteen

The blue shadows of the late September dusk had begun to stretch across the flatlands of Texas.

There was a wind-beaten porch along the west side of the old ranch house, and Homer Gallowell sat there with the black hat tilted to shade his eyes, wearing a wool shirt and stained work pants, the heels of his riding boots hooked onto the railing, his chair tilted back precariously.

“So what did you do about your own job?” Homer asked.

Hugh Darren sat lean on the railing, his back braced against a pillar. He sipped his drink slowly. “I don’t know why I had to give a damn about the hotel. But I’d put a lot of thought and time into it. I’d put a good staff together. And so—when it was all finished—that thing we had to do—I knew I had to stay around for at least a month and work along with the new people who came in. But I thought I’d just put in time.”

“But you couldn’t do that?”

“No. Hell, I had to get things back on the track. My gestapo technique did a lot of damage, Homer. I weeded out all those bad apples. I had no more use for them. I made my peace with the top people on my staff, who just couldn’t figure out what had happened to me. Ladori, Trabe, Welch, Sanderson, Rice. Decent, capable folk. Maybe I owed them that final effort. It took more than a month. When I left, three days ago, it was a good, tight operation, just about ready to show the first operating profit on the hotel, food and liquor end since the place was built.”

“Where do you go from here, son?”

“I couldn’t say, Homer. Everything I own in the world is in two suitcases, if you don’t count that car out there. I’ve got more money in hand than I’ve ever had before, and I was piling it up to use for a special purpose, but that little dream has gone sort of dead on me.”

“What’s the dream you were saving for?”

Hugh explained it all, and then said, “Nothing is going to be any good without her, I guess. Maybe for a long time. Maybe forever. Right now I’m sick of people. I’m sick of hotels. I’d go crazy trying to loaf, and I have the feeling I ought to work with my hands. Can your empire offer me some brute labor, Homer?”

“Get you something real different if you want a big change in your life. Put you on an oil rig out in the Gulf, boy. It’s good money and it’ll either toughen you complete, or kill you dead.”

Hugh thought it over. “Sounds about right, if you mean it.”

“Gave up saying things I don’t mean long ago. I got to talk to Gulfport in the morning. I’ll fix it then.”

“Thanks.”

“When you got enough of it, you come on back here and we’ll talk about that Peppercorn Cay of yours. It might look better to you, say, by next year this time.”

“It might. Right now I couldn’t say.”

The two men sat in a long silence watching the slow violent explosion of the sunset.

“We did it,” Homer said. “Just the right combination, you and me, each needing just what the other feller could provide to get the job done. Maybe it don’t make her rest any easier way off there in San Francisco next to her maw and her daddy, but it sure makes me grin like a snake.”

“Your idea of how to work Beaver’s death into the story I told Al was what made it work.”

“All my life I been good at thinking up the stories men are likely to listen careful to. But it was you had to make it sound just right, or you’d be long dead by now. You know, there’s just one thing wrong with the whole business, son. It’s like missing the best part of it. I don’t so much mind those other fellers not knowing why their life was over, or knowing it was you and me cooked them on account of what they done to Miz Betty. But I sure wish that top man, that Al Marta, could have knowed.”

“I think he did know, Homer.”

“Now how the hell could he know?”

“Because he had time to realize that what was happening to him was just another variation on what had happened to the others. And he got it in the spine, so he was a long time dying—maybe longer than what they planned for him. It would have given him time to tie me into it. He would remember letting me know the name of the man he reported to, the man responsible for all operations on the West Coast.”

“What did you say in the note you sent that man, son?”

“I wrote it over and over until it sounded right, and then I printed it, using a ruler. I said something like ‘Al had my man Beaver and those others killed to shut them up, because he was in it too. Before they killed him, Beaver told me Al keeps getaway money in a coin locker at the airport. The key is taped to the underside of the middle drawer of his desk. He is a dirty thief and murderer and he had my man killed’ And so on. A woman after revenge.”