by Steve Fisher
“You mean it?”
“Of course I mean it.”
Mai added: “Cindy, baby, everybody wants you to stay here, all the employees.”
She stared at both of them, the tears drying in her eyes. “You don’t think bad of me?”
“We love you,” Joe said softly. “You’re our little character.” He climbed to his feet.
She got up then, too. “Thank you, Mr. Martin.” She moved to a mirror on the wall and hastily began repairing her face. “I appreciate it very much. I really do appreciate it more than you’ll ever know.”
“Need any money to tide you over?” Joe asked.
She turned from the mirror, making last touches at her hair. “Oh, no, sir; I save my money. I have quite a bit put away. It’s in the bank.”
“Good for you.”
That’s irony, Mai thought, if Shelby had known about her savings, he would have conned her a little harder, been nicer to her a little longer—piled lie on top of lie, and eventually would have had every penny of it. He looked over at Joe.
“There have been times,” he said, “when I thought you were solid iron.”
Joe grinned faintly. “I’m almost as human as you.”
“Now you’re going too far! How’s Sunny?”
“She’s fine.”
“Pretty fond of her, aren’t you?”
“Does it show?”
“Just on the edges.” He paused. “Anything wrong between you and Sprig?”
Joe sobered. “He say there was?”
“No, he just—I don’t know.”
“Mind your own business.” His voice was hard now, and he was frowning. “I have to get back to the game.”
“How is the game, Joe? Is Bello into you for very much?”
“Nearly two million.”
There was something in the way Joe said it that startled Mai, and then touched him: two million in the hole, and he’d taken time out to comfort a coffee shop waitress.
A few minutes later, he was moving through the casino when Kiki caught up with him.
“Mai—”
He turned, faced the long-legged showgirl, and for some reason he couldn’t understand seemed to flush with guilt. He hadn’t called her or seen her in the past couple of days, but he could alibi around that. Instead, he just stood here, flat-footed.
“Hi.”
She said: “That’s what I wanted to know.”
“What?”
She told him softly: “I read eyes.”
“And what are mine saying?”
“Goodbye.”
“Hey now—whoa—aren’t you jumping to wild conclusions?”
She seemed sad. “Am I?”
Her honesty withered him. “Kid, listen—”
She shook her head. “No, ever since the other night when we did the town and you were in that funny, low mood—I knew it was just about the end between us.”
“You amaze me.”
“I amaze myself,” she said, “the mistakes I make: like thinking that I was your girl.”
There was no use trying to lie to her. All he said was: “You came close.”
“I doubt that, Mai.”
She turned, hurried away now, and Mai stood there, fumbling for a cigarette, and somehow shaken. Yet he was grateful she had let him out so easy, and remembered times when it hadn’t been that easy—and then finally that one particular time in Palm Springs with Nina, who had spent two weeks there, most of it with him.
The place was called The Sunrise and he had played piano there for the season, not drawing a really sober breath in three whole months; but then, nobody else did either, so it seemed like the way to live; they’d had a crowd that just wouldn’t stop, stayed on and on—all of them rich, except for some of the women on the fringe who floated in and out, and always remained as long as they could. Whit, who owned the place, was as bad as the rest, and richer than any of them. He was the one who started pushing people into the pool with their clothes on, and after that everybody took it up, so that it wasn’t safe to go near the water unless you were ready to swim. The first time Mai got pushed in he was fully dressed and holding a highball glass in his hand which splintered on the side and cut his face; everybody had laughed, and so did he after he climbed out, but he still carried a small scar at the tip of his nose to show that he had been there and lived through those days. The nights, of course, had been fabulous; he had real attention when he was at the piano.
But Nina hadn’t belonged with that giddy-rich crowd, though at the time he had imagined just the opposite. She was a secretary for a firm in Portland, Oregon, and saved her money ever year to spend a two-week vacation in some glamorous resort. First it was Cuba, she’d told him, then New York, New Orleans and Sun Valley, Idaho. She was a tall, pretty girl with a dark complexion and long hair that she wore in a bun. When she unfastened it, it was hallway down her back: shiny, glistening black, and soft as silk. She was serious, but he hadn’t realized it until the last day when it was too late; so he’d seen her off on the Greyhound bus, and promised to write, telling her she could always reach him through his booking agency, and she wrote a couple of letters that he didn’t answer, and then a whole year later he got a postcard from Mexico City on which she had written, “Having a wonderful time on my vacation. And I don’t miss you one bit” and he thought it was sort of funny that she was so bitter, but a year after that a card came from Honolulu with the same message and he didn’t think it was funny any more. The last card reached him a month ago from Miami, Florida, and this time the message was different. It said: “Was married yesterday. Ha. Ha.”
It was always during the best times of your life that the worst things happened.
But Kiki wasn’t the type who would send him a card saying: “Just got married. Ha, ha.” She was a showgirl and a little more brittle than a secretary with long black hair down her back. Or was she? Was any woman really brittle?
He moved on through the casino now, trying to forget all the times he had loved when it wasn’t love; and all at once, as though the subject was related to this, he began to think of Dee, of Bello. What was the big plan they would devise to pull her away from him? Gently—without bloodshed? He stared at Bello, who was standing at the dice table: and all at once realized what he must have known all along. There wasn’t any way to pry Dee from him without some kind of bloodshed.
Thirty-one
11:23 P.M.
It was an old church, and small, yet its worn wooden floors had felt the soft, wet touch of more tear drops than many larger places of worship; it had heard wailing within its thin walls, and had known every human anguish ever suffered. It stood here on a dirty street, its own edifice streaked from rain and weather; yet it was cloaked in a quiet, pious dignity—and its doors were never closed: for the great tragedies and the small ones know no time or hour in Las Vegas. The need for solace is a continuous one.
It was dark, though; in total darkness save for the nickering candlelight at the feet of the images of saints. Dark and empty and silent—until the front door pushed open and the lamplight from the street silhouetted the figure of a young woman. She moved slowly forward, the door closing behind her, dropped to one knee, crossing herself before the altar, then groped past rows of seats on the outside aisle until she reached the statue of the Virgin.
Now Sunny s face was visible in the tiny lights of candles as she threw herself to her knees, crying in anguish, knowing a torment so great that she could not cope with it alone.
After the scene with Sprig, she had been unable to talk to Joe. He had returned to the dice table, and she knew that nothing must disturb him while he was there. Anyway, to tell him the truth while the game was in progress could demoralize and ruin him. He probably wouldn’t be able to concentrate any more—might not want to, might not care—and it’d be her fault. All of it would be her fault.
Later, when the game was ended and Bello was gone, she could explain: how certain men had been planted in the casino to wat
ch Joe, watch his every move, weeks and months before the big game started. They had been instructed to look for weak spots. And then, in the midst of that, she had arrived on that free weekend. They’d noticed her, but hadn’t paid much attention, until she returned the following week and Joe took her for a boat ride on Lake Mead.
She hadn’t intended going back ever again after that. For one thing, she couldn’t afford it. But then a “Mr. Wily” had appeared at her house in San Francisco, and introduced himself. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, looked businesslike; his voice had been pleasant, convincing. He was there, in her father’s house, saying how somebody had noticed Sunny, found out her name: and then had connected her with a boy named Al Guido who’d disappeared three years ago. Al, her brother, a bum, but still her brother, messing around on the fringe of Las Vegas. “They found him face down in the sand,” Wily had said, “eight bullet holes through his chest. The police never solved the case, but I know who killed him. Not the punk who fired the bullets but the big shot who hired him to do it. Joe Martin—Mr. Joe Martin himself. And for one reason only: he didn’t like the kid.” There had been great shouting in her father’s house that night: a storm that had lasted until daylight. “You can’t prove it,” Wily had said, “you won’t even be able to get close to him if you go up there. He has a human screen around him—men who guard him.” But her father swore he’d try and the next morning he bought a gun.
Wily was waiting that afternoon when Sunny left the school. He was worried about her father, he said; if the old man tried to tackle Joe Martin, he’d probably end up in the desert like his son Al. Now if he could promise him that someone else would take care of the job—somebody more experienced.
“Who?” she had asked.
“You.” And he had gone into long detail then. Murder is a cardinal sin. But Al’s death could be avenged. And Joe’s punishment could be meted to him another way: by losing his wealth, his power, his casino. Surely, then, on the way down, some little hoodlum would finish him off. A giant move was on to strip Joe of his worldly possessions and she could help.
All she had to do was spend a few more weekends at the casino and make him notice her. She was an offbeat girl for him, the only kind who might tempt him—a “decent girl” were Wily’s words. If she managed to get his attention when the “big operation” started, he’d be distracted and even if it was only a minor distraction, it would help. They wanted his mind to be on something besides dice. They’d do the rest.
She had refused the proposition at first, but that night when she realized that only Wily could deter her father from trying to kill Joe Martin, she changed her mind; she agreed on the stipulation that her father wasn’t to know, because he would never have permitted it. To him she was his baby daughter who had to be sheltered.
Wily had paid her expenses after that. She wasn’t required to see him again, nor to make reports to anyone. She was not a spy in any sense, just a “distraction.”
Her face lifted to the image of the Blessed Virgin above her and she whispered: “He’ll understand. He loves me and he’ll understand when I tell him. He’ll remember how, after that night in his office when he kissed me and I felt such a terrible attraction for him, I wanted to leave the next morning. He’ll remember that I tried to leave—tried to run away. But he said he needed me and when he said that I believed him, and I believed I could help him, and that’s what I’ve tried to do. I’ve tried to help him every time. Because would I hurt the one and only man I’ve ever loved? Would I do that? And last night, when he left the game to be near me, I nearly fought with him to make him go back to the dice. He’ll remember that, too, and all the other things. And eventually, he’ll even be glad Wily sent me, that it happened the way it did, because otherwise we would never have seen each other again.
“He’ll realize I know a lot more now than I did that day Wily showed up at our house. That I have since then recognized his deceit. Because Joe couldn’t have killed Al. It was just that the syndicate, or whoever it was, chose me because Joe liked me, then went to great bother to look up my family history and invented the story of Al’s death. For all we know, Al may still be alive somewhere—roaming the world. Joe can’t hate me (can he hate me?) because I was fool enough to believe all that?”
Yet her tears were unchecked.
She returned to Rainbow’s End shortly after midnight, and heard herself being paged on the loudspeaker. She hurried over to the desk, and found Joe standing there. “Where have you been?”
She glanced around, didn’t see Bello. “Is the game over?”
“No. Bello wants a break. One hour. Food time. And maybe a catnap.”
She tried to smile but her face felt wooden. “Last midnight it was you.”
“This midnight it’s Bello and me. Come on.”
“Where we going?”
“You’ll see.” He led her outside.
“Were you waiting for me long?”
“Five minutes,” he said. “Seemed like eternity.”
“I went to church.”
“Why?”
“Felt like it.”
“Is anything bothering you?”
“No.”’
They reached his car, and he held the door open. She repeated: “Where are we going, Joe?”
“A luau.”
“In Las Vegas?”
“I made special arrangements.”
“We will be back in an hour?”
“On the dot,” he said. They got in and he was backing the car. Now they moved forward. “The dice turned to ice these past few hours.” She didn’t understand the term and he explained: “When they’re cold, the house wins. I’m the house.” They were on the highway now, the lights shining directly ahead. “Had me winging for two million.”
“Two million!”
“It’s down to one million five. Million and a half,” he added, reading puzzlement on her face.
“A million and a half dollars,” she breathed, trying to comprehend that figure. “A million and a half dollars and you want to go to a luau?!”
“It’s all right—long as Bello’s gone, too.”
“How can you even think of anything except losing that much money?”
“It’s easy.”
“What happened between you and Mr. Sprig?”
“He won’t bother you again.” But she’d touched a raw nerve. “Why did you go to church?”
“I often go on weeknights.” That wasn’t true. She did sometimes go on weeknights but the times were not often. “Oh.”
“Won’t you tell me where the luau is?” It was safer to change the subject.
“Lake Mead.”
“How many people will be there?”
“Two.”
Even in the moonlight, she recognized landmarks and minutes before they got there guessed he was taking her to the same cove where they’d been yesterday. But when they arrived, when he parked just off the road and helped her out onto the soft earth, she felt a surge of disappointment.
“Someone is there,” she said. “They’ve built a fire.”
“Whoever is there will have to leave,” he told her softly. “Come on.”
The fire glow grew brighter as they approached; it flickered against the night sky like the flames from a small volcano and when, finally, they came to the rocky wall of the cove, she imagined she could feel its angry, red heat. They reached the opening and she stopped in amazed wonderment.
The cove lay revealed before them, a circle of sand bounded by the lake on one side and rough-hewn rocks on the other, and against the rocks, thrust into the sand, were a dozen torches on metal sticks. The sand flickered gold and crimson in their fitful flare and the still water of the lake glowed with rainbow ripples.
Several cushions were heaped on the sand; beside them stood a silver champagne bucket and a picnic basket.
“If you ask in the right way,” Joe said, “Rainbows End will arrange almost anything. They use those torches in Hawaii—at Waikiki. Like
it?”
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“I don’t know about you, bambino, but I’m starved.” He flopped down on a cushion, reached for the hamper.
But she hurried over, pulled his fingers away. “Just sit there,” she said, “I’ll serve you.”
“Slave girl.”
“Yes, darling. That’s me.”
There was cold turkey and potato salad and olives and vegetables in aspic. She spooned this out on blue plastic plates.
“Midnight luau,” he said. “Only there’s no roast pig or poi; and we have champagne instead of okoolehow.”
“Okoolehow?”
“Something the Hawaiians drink. It gives them a fat belly.” He was eating now.
“You must have planned all this hours ago.”
“No—I was thinking of us at Waikiki—and then decided—why wait? You recognize where we are, don’t you?”
“Yes, darling, the moment we got here.”
“I ought to build a fence around this spot and preserve it forever.”
“Joe, do you know I adore you?”
“Say it again.”
“I adore you!”
“Which reminds me why I brought you here.”
“Why?”
“Because I adore you, too.”
“Oh—is that why?”
“No, there’s another reason.” He set his empty plate down on the sand. “Something I want to ask you.”
She shivered, because it was coming now, she could feel it: Sprig’s suspicion had kindled one in Joe. And when he asked her point-blank, she wouldn’t be able to lie, to conceal anything from him.
“Go ahead,” she whispered, “ask.”
“Will you marry me?”
This was all he wanted to know? There was no suspicion in him toward her—only trust? She began to cry again, and he pushed her gently down, kissing away the tears, then kissing her mouth.
Thirty-two
1:40 A.M.
Mai reached the second floor of the Hotel Mammoth ten minutes late. Though there was no light under the door of room 203, he felt she was inside. Eagerly, he tried the knob. It wouldn’t turn. He spoke softly: “Dee.” There was no answer. He waited impatiently, then realized that speaking one word didn’t completely identify him. “Dee, it’s Mai. Diane, open the door.” No sound from inside. He stood there in the hall, feeling foolish, desolate.
