The Grifters

by Jim Thompson

  Why don’t you finish your water, dear? she said. And gratefully, welcoming this brief respite, he raised the glass. And Lilly, her grip tight on the heavy purse, swung it with all her might.

  It’s my fault, she told herself; the way I raised him, his age, my age, wrestling and brawling him as though he were a kid brother; my fault, my creation. But what the hell can I do about that, now?

  The purse crashed against the glass, shattering it. The purse flew open, and the money spewed out in a green torrent. A torrent splattered and splashed with red.

  Lilly looked at it bewilderedly. She looked at the gushing wound in her son’s throat. He rose up out of his chair, clutching at it, and an ugly shard of glass oozed out between his fingers. He said bubblingly, “Lil, I—w-whyy—” and then his knees crumpled under him, and he doubled over and pitched down upon the carpet of red-stained bills.

  It was over that quickly. Over before she could explain or apologize—insofar as there was anything to explain or apologize for.

  Matter-of-factly, she began to toe the unstained money to one side, gathering the bills into a pile. She tied them up in a towel from the bathroom, stowed it inside her clothes, and took a final look around the room.

  All clear, it looked like. Her son had been killed by Moira, by someone who didn’t exist. Sure, her own fingerprints were all over the room, but that wouldn’t mean anything. After all, she’d been a visitor to Roy’s room before his death, and, anyway, Lilly Dillon was officially dead.

  And maybe I am, she thought. Maybe I wish to God that I was!

  Bracing herself, she let her eyes stray down to her son. Abruptly, a great sob tore through her body, and she wept uncontrollably.

  That passed.

  She laughed, gave the thing on the floor an almost jeering glance.

  “Well, kid, it’s only one throat, huh?”

  And then she went out of the room and the hotel, and out into the City of Angels.

  About the Author

  James Meyers Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in 1906. In all, Jim Thompson wrote twenty-nine novels and two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films The Killing and Paths of Glory). Films based on his novels include The Getaway, The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet.

  …and After Dark My Sweet

  In November 2011, Mulholland Books will publish Jim Thompson’s After Dark My Sweet. Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.

  After Dark, My Sweet

  I rode a streetcar to the edge of the city limits, then I started to walk, swinging the old thumb whenever I saw a car coming. I was dressed pretty good—white shirt, brown slacks and sport shoes. I’d had a shower at the railroad station and a hair-trim in a barber college, so all in all I looked okay. But no one would stop for me. There’d been a lot of hitchhike robberies in that section, and people just weren’t taking chances.

  Around four in the afternoon, after I’d walked about ten miles, I came to this roadhouse. I went on past it a little ways, walking slower and slower, arguing with myself. I lost the argument—the part of me that was on-the-beam lost it—and I went back.

  The bartender slopped a beer down in front of me. He scooped up the change I’d laid on the counter, sat down on his stool again, and picked up a newspaper. I said something about it was sure a hot day. He grunted without looking up. I said it was a nice pleasant little place he had there and that he certainly knew how to keep his beer cold. He grunted again.

  I looked down at my beer, feeling the short hairs rising on the back of my neck. I guessed—I knew—that I should never have come in here. I should never go in any place where people might not be nice and polite to me. That’s all they have to do, you know. Just be as nice to me as I am to them. I’ve been in four institutions, and my classification card always reads just about the same:

  William (“Kid”) Collins: Blond, extremely handsome; very strong, agile. Mild criminal tendencies or none, according to environmental factors. Mild multiple neuroses (environmental) Psychosis, Korsakoff (no syndrome) induced by shock; aggravated by worry. Treatment: absolute rest, quiet, wholesome food and surroundings. Collins is amiable, polite, patient, but may be very dangerous if aroused…

  I finished the beer, and ordered another one. I sauntered back to the restroom and washed my face in cold water. I wondered, staring at myself in the mirror, where I’d be this time tomorrow and why I was bothering to go anywhere since every place was just like the last one. I wondered why I hadn’t stayed where I was—a week ago and a thousand miles from here—and whether it wouldn’t be smart to go back. Of course, they hadn’t been doing me much good there. They were too overcrowded, too under-staffed, too hard up for money. But they’d been pretty nice to me, and if I hadn’t gotten so damned restless, and if they hadn’t made it so easy to escape…It was so easy, you know, you’d almost think they wanted you to do it.

  I’d just walked off across the fields and into the forest. And when I came out to the highway on the other side, there was a guy fixing a tire on his car. He didn’t see me. He never knew what hit him. I dragged him back into the trees, took the seventy bucks he was carrying and tramped on into town. I caught a freight across the state line, and I’d been traveling ever since…No, I didn’t really hurt the guy. I’ve gotten a little rougher and tougher down through the years, but I’ve very seldom really hurt anyone. I haven’t had to.

  I counted the money in my pocket, totting it up mentally with the change I’d left on the bar. Four bucks. A little less than four bucks. Maybe, I thought, maybe I ought to go back. The doctors had thought I was making a little progress. I couldn’t see it myself, but…

  I guessed I wouldn’t go back. I couldn’t. The guy hadn’t seen me slug him, but what with me skipping out about that time they probably knew I’d done it. And if I went back they’d pin it on me. They wouldn’t do it otherwise. They probably wouldn’t even report me missing. Unless a guy is a maniac or a kind of big shot—someone in the public eye, you know—he’s very seldom reported. It’s bad publicity for the institution, and anyway people usually aren’t interested.

  I left the rest room, and went back to the bar. There was a big station wagon parked in front of the door, and a woman was sitting on a stool near mine. She didn’t look too good to me—not right then, she didn’t. But that station wagon looked plenty good. I nodded to her politely and smiled in the mirror as I sat down.

  “Rather a warm day,” I said. “Really develops a person’s thirst, doesn’t it?”

  She turned her head and looked at me. Taking her time about it. Looking me over very carefully from head to foot.

  “Well, I’ll tell you about that,” she said. “If you’re really interested in that, I’ll give you my theory on the subject.”

  “Of course, I’m interested. I’d like to hear it.”

  “It’s a pronoun,” she said. “Also an adverb, conjunction and adjective.”

  She turned away, picking up her drink again. I picked up my beer my hand shaking a little.

  “What a day,” I said, kind of laughing to myself. “I was driving south with this friend of mine, Jack Billingsley—I guess you know the Billingsleys, big real estate family?—and our car stalled, and I walked back to a garage to get help. So I get back with the tow-truck, and darned if that crazy Jack isn’t gone. I imagine what happened is—”

  “—Jack got the car started himself,” she said. “That’s what happened. He started looking for you, and somehow you passed each other on the highway. Now he doesn’t know where you are, and you don’t know where he is.”

  She finished her drink, a double martini, and motioned to the bartender. He fixed her another one, giving me a long hard glare as he placed it in front of her.

  “That darned crazy Jack,” I said, laughing and shaking my head. “I wonder where in the world he can be. He ought to know I’d come in some place like this and wait for him.”

  “He probably had an accident,” she said. “In
fact, I think I read something about it.”

  “Huh? But you couldn’t—”

  “Uh-huh. He and a young lady called Jill. You read about it too, didn’t you, Bert?”

  “Yeah.” The bartender kept on staring at me. “Yeah, I read about it. They’re all wet, mister. They got their heads busted. I wouldn’t wait around for ’em much longer, if I was you.”

  I played it dumb—kind of good-natured dumb. I said I certainly wasn’t going to wait very much longer. “I think I’ll have just one more beer, and if he hasn’t shown up by then I’m going to go back to the city and catch a plane.”

  He slopped me out another beer. I started to drink it, my eyes beginning to burn, a hedged-in feeling creeping over me. They had my number, and hanging around wasn’t going to make me a thing. But somehow I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t any more than I could have walked away from the Burlington Bearcat that night years ago. The Bearcat had been fouling me, too, giving it to me in the clinches, and calling me all kinds of dirty names. He’d kept it up—just like they were keeping it up. I couldn’t walk away from him, just like I couldn’t walk away from them, and I couldn’t get him to stop, just like I couldn’t get them to stop.

  It came back with neonlike clarity. The lights were scorching my eyes. The resin dust, the beerish smell of ammonia, were strangling me. And above the roar of the crowd, I could hear that one wildly shrieking voice. “Stop him! Stop him! He’s kicking his brains out! It’s murder, MURDER!”

  Now I raised my glass and took the rest of the beer at a gulp. I wished I could leave. I wished they’d lay off of me. And it didn’t look like they would.

  “Speaking of planes,” she was saying. “I heard the funniest story about a man on a plane. Honestly, I just thought I’d die laughing when I—” She broke off, laughing, holding her handkerchief to her mouth.

  “Why don’t you tell it to him?” The bartender grinned, and jerked his head at me. “You’d like to hear a real funny story, wouldn’t you, mister?”

  “Why, yes. I always enjoy a good story.”

  “All right,” she said, “this one will slay you. It seems there was an old man with a long gray beard, and he took the plane from Los Angeles to San Diego. The fare was fifteen dollars but he only had twelve, so they dropped him off at Oceanside.”

  I waited. She didn’t say anything more. Finally, I said, “Yes, ma-am? I guess I don’t get the point.”

  “Well, reach up on top of your head. Maybe you’ll feel it.”

  They both grinned at me. The bartender jerked his thumb toward the door. “Okay, Mac. Disappear.”

  “But I haven’t done anything, I’ve been acting all right. You’ve got no right to—”

  “Beat it!” he snapped.

  “I haven’t asked you for anything,” I said. “I came in here to wait for a friend, and I’m clean and respectable-looking and polite. And—and I’m an ex-serviceman and I’ve been to college—had a year and a half of college and—and—”

  The veins in my throat were swelling. Everything began to look red and blurred and hazy.

  I heard a voice, her voice, say, “Aah, take it easy, boy. Don’t race your motor, kid.” And from what I could see of her through the haze, she didn’t look so bad. Now, she looked rather gentle and pretty—like someone you’d like to have for a friend.

  The bartender was reaching across the counter for me. “Don’t, Bert! Leave the guy alone!” she said, and then she let out a scream. Because he’d grabbed me by the shirt front, and when he did that I grabbed him. I locked an arm around his neck and dragged him halfway across the counter. I slugged him so hard it made my wrist ache.

  I let go of him. He slid down behind the counter, and I ran.

  Books by Jim Thompson

  After Dark, My Sweet

  The Alcoholics

  Bad Boy

  The Criminal

  Cropper’s Cabin

  The Getaway

  The Golden Gizmo

  The Grifters

  Heed the Thunder

  A Hell of a Woman

  The Killer Inside Me

  The Kill-Off

  The Nothing Man

  Nothing More than Murder

  Now and on Earth

  Pop. 1280

  Recoil

  The Rip-Off

  Savage Night

  South of Heaven

  A Swell-Looking Babe

  Texas by the Tail

  The Transgressors

  Wild Town

  Acclaim for Jim Thompson

  “The best suspense writer going, bar none.”

  —New York Times

  “My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.”

  —Stephen King

  “If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it.…His work casts a dazzling light on the human condition.”

  —Washington Post

  “Like Clint Eastwood’s pictures it’s the stuff for rednecks, truckers, failures, psychopaths and professors.…One of the finest American writers and the most frightening, Thompson is on best terms with the devil. Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell.”

  —New Republic

  “The master of the American groin-kick novel.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 1963 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1991 by Alberta H. Thompson

  Excerpt from After Dark, My Sweet copyright © 1955 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1983 by Alberta H. Thompson

  Cover design by Julianna Lee copyright © 2011 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  www.hachettebookgroup.com

  www.twitter.com/mulholland

  First e-book edition, November 2011

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-316-19593-5