The Only Girl in the Game (37 page)

“It worked just fine, son.”

“I was very unsure about it. I was afraid Al would talk too fast and make too much sense, and be too well trusted. But now I think I know a couple of reasons why it worked. When they checked it out and found that cash in the locker, there was enough of it to numb their minds. Thirty thousand, Homer. Because I donated the five he’d given me in return for exposing the others.

“But suppose it didn’t daze them enough so they swallowed
the story whole? Suppose they figured it as a plant, a frame-up?” Hugh said. “Would it have mattered too much? Al was losing control of the operation. They knew that the men closest to him had crossed him. They all give high points to this love and loyalty and old-buddy bit, but there is no such thing as firing any executive personnel. There’s just one way to get rid of a top man. The decision was made and they had a job to do, so there was no reason to give Al time for any summit conference.”

“I read about how they found him in that ditch,” the old man said.

“He had time to think about it, Homer. They tumbled him out into a deep ditch not far from Riverside, California. When the body was found they saw how stubbornly he had clawed at the wall of that ditch, trying to pull himself up so one of the passing motorists might see him in the headlights.”

The two men sat in the silence of the evening, in the changing light as the afterglow of the sun diminished.

Hugh thought: That night while Al was dying, and tonight too, it is all just the same back there. The cabs are bringing the marks in from McCarran Field to fill up the twelve thousand bedrooms. At all the places in the gaudy roster of the Strip—El Rancho, Sahara, Mozambique, Stardust, Riviera, the D.I., Sands, Flamingo, Tropicana, Dunes, Cameroon, T’Bird, Hacienda, New Frontier—the pit bosses are watching all the money machines. Smoke, shadows, colors, sweat, music, the bare shoulders of lovely women, the posturings of the notorious—and that unending, indescribable, clattering roar of tension and money. I shall never see it again, but I will always know it is going on, without pause or mercy, all the days and nights of my life.

The old man sighed and said, “Wish that damn woman would ring for supper.”

Just as he sighed again, they heard the clang of the triangle calling all hands. The sun was gone; the long land was purple dark. They stood up together and went into the old house where the smiling Mexican woman awaited them. The screen door slapped shut behind them as they walked into the orange glow of the lights.

About the Author

John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.