More Good Old Stuff

by John D. MacDonald

  Her anger faded. She looked rueful. “You know, he doesn’t even know I’m alive. As a woman, I mean. I’m just an efficient piece of office equipment. Sorry I flared up. I guess—well, I guess I am in love with him.”

  There was no reason under the sun why her words should irritate me. But they did. It was certainly none of my business who she was in love with.

  To cover up, I asked quickly, “Where does he live?”

  “In a little room in the Stanley Hotel. It’s a horribly bare little room. He doesn’t seem to care about his environment. He’s so wrapped up in his work.”

  That gave me a jolt. Fosting right in the same hotel with me. It might be a break.

  “Any wine, women and song?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I sometimes wish he’d—well, get out sometimes. He looks so tired. But he says that there’s too much for him to do.”

  “You live with who?” I asked.

  She tilted her head to one side. “What has that got to do with your write-up, Tom?”

  “I just wondered who you’d have to call to tell them I was taking you to dinner.”

  “Are you?”

  “You heard the Chief’s orders, Janet.”

  Her smile was a little-girl grin. It wrinkled her nose and made me want to kiss her. “Okay,” she said. “Chief’s orders. If you must know, I live all by myself in an apartment complex for singles on Maple Terrace. And now you can take me back there so I can change.”

  I compromised by putting her in a cab and promising to call for her in an hour.

  TWO

  I found myself singing in my shower, and wondered why. I picked the answer up an hour later.

  Funny how it happens to you. You think you have the world cased, have yourself all set from here on in. And then somebody throws a blond monkey wrench into the machinery. I decided that I was silly to keep the car out of circulation. So I took it out of the garage and called for Janet.

  Janet came down looking like one of the girls they should put on magazine covers and don’t because they can’t find them often enough.

  “Yours?” she asked when I opened the car door for her. When I told her it was, she said, “Writing must be pretty profitable. Maybe I’m in the wrong business.”

  The steak house she suggested was fair, and, over the coffee, in order to make my story look good, I hauled out the notebook again.

  I asked her to describe each of his movements on an average day. The guy was a bear for punishment. To the office by seven-thirty, on foot. Half an hour for lunch. Usually not through until nine. I casually worked in the idea that, since he had clamped down so hard on gambling, he must fear personal reprisals and go around with a bodyguard.

  She laughed at that one. “Heavens, no! Jim—I mean Chief Fosting has put the fear of God into all the sneaking little men in this town. He’d consider it beneath his dignity to go around with a guard.”

  I smiled. “Maybe I hadn’t ought to put that in the article. It might encourage somebody to potshot him.”

  “I think he’d like them to try. He carries his own revolver and he’s an expert shot with it.”

  That was an important fact to file away. Not that I was going to gun him down. I had better plans.

  I folded the notebook, slipped it into my side pocket. “Working day over?” she asked.

  “No. Not by a long shot. Now you’ve got to give me some of the local color. I can’t write a good chapter on Fosting until I know what the city is like. Where do we go from here?”

  “I’m going to demand overtime!”

  “Am I that bad?” I asked her.

  “You’ll do, Quinn,” she said softly.

  Some dregs of a long-forgotten conscience stirred me. Maybe some of it showed on my face.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  I smiled. “Where do we go?”

  “There’s one place I’ve always wanted to go,” she said, “and I’ve never had an excuse before. But this could come under the heading of local color. I want to go to the Key Club.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I said. “What is it?”

  She had a pixie look in her eyes. “A disco where they gamble upstairs,” she said in a conspiratorial tone.

  “Hey, I thought your boss closed those all up!”

  “He did. All of the ones inside the city. This one is over the line.”

  From the way the place was running, I knew that the fix was in, but good. Thus the peephole setup to get to the upstairs games was just so much thrill for the suckers, plus insurance against somebody knocking the place off with profit in mind.

  It was a penny-ante outfit, with a dapper male cashier dispensing chips at the one, five, ten and fifty levels. There weren’t many fifties in play. I tried to stake Janet, but she shook her head, took a twenty out of her purse and bought twenty one-dollar chips. I did the same.

  They were getting a college crowd at the place, plus the old-lady business, plus the beer-salesmen set. There was a bar in the corner.

  Roulette, birdcage and the crap tables were getting a decent play. Janet stared around like a school kid in the principal’s office. The sign near the birdcage said that they would take a maximum fifty-dollar bet with a limit of six doubles. Thus the most that could be placed on a number on one turn of the cage was thirty-two hundred. Not good and not bad. The limit on doubles made the house percentage high enough to keep it honest.

  I don’t know why I felt so proud to be with Janet Calder. She made all the other women up there look like harpies. She was like a fresh breeze blowing through the stale smoke.

  She settled for the crap table. When I saw that the table posted no limit, I knew that the house had it gimmicked. With the education Chowder gave me, it didn’t take long to figure it out. They were set up to handle a routine switch of the dice, and they were playing on an oilcloth surface. That spelled trippers. It is the simplest dice fix.

  The dice can be square and true and properly weighted, but on the side opposite the one they don’t want to come up, they have some sticky stuff, not noticeable to the touch. The dice will always roll, tumble and slide to a stop. They don’t slide on that sticky stuff. It will trip the dice over.

  We found a place at the table wide enough for the two of us, and the pressure of her shoulder against my arm was very sweet indeed.

  A florid yokel across the way was betting heavy, the sweat standing on his upper lip.

  I told Janet to follow my lead and I started betting the other way, with the dice. The switch was pulled so smoothly that I didn’t see it. Sure enough, the red-faced citizen threw two aces, deuce-ace the second time, then tossed a six followed by a seven, while both Janet and I let our bets ride to a happy little total, which we dragged in.

  Janet’s face was flushed with excitement. She didn’t understand what was going on, but she liked winning. I knew that if I was running the game, I’d feed her dice that build up a few naturals, so when they came to her, I told her to try five dollars. I was beginning to get on to the switch. Seven came out and I told her to let it ride. Seven again, the same way, and there was twenty in front of her. Suckers along the table piled on, hoping she was having a run, and I made a quick estimate, decided the stick man would let her get one more natural. Eleven came out and he paid off nearly all the way around. A lot of them were letting it ride, so I reached out and hauled in all but one chip for her.

  “Whyn’t ya let the li’l lady play her own game, doc?” the stick man said.

  I didn’t bother to answer him. He’d already pulled the switch. The dice came to a four, and then a seven. I passed them along. We’d each picked up fifteen bucks on the florid man’s bad luck, and thirty-four more on Janet’s passes. Total of ninety-eight.

  It looked like the sort of bust-out house that would hate to have you walk out with even that much. I didn’t want a fuss, so I decided to drop my share and get out. A floor man had his eye on us and I guessed that the stick man had tipped him that I might be a
little too wise for their good.

  I wanted to drop the few bucks at the same table, but then Janet saw a poker game getting underway over in an alcove.

  “There’s my game,” she said. “Come on!”

  I didn’t like it. At first I was going to sit it out, but then I began to wonder just how far they’d go.

  There were eight of us. The house dealt and took a cut of each pot. I took a long look at the other six players. They really had that game stacked. Two of them were house men, though trying not to look that way. The dealer had a mechanic’s grip on the deck.

  It was five-card stud. No ante, of course. Five-buck bet, and after that it was pot limit. No limit on raises.

  To warm the game up, the cards were dealt honestly the first few hands. The house boys were getting the feel of the six suckers. I folded my hand the first few rounds, and watched Janet handle her cards. She seemed to know what she was doing. When she had a ten of hearts in the hole, a nine of hearts up, she stayed once, and folded when her third card turned out to be the trey of spades.

  Then the house began to go to work. A skinny citizen across the way, who kept biting his lip, got an ace up. He peeked at his hole card and bet five. A house man bumped him, and when it came around, Skinny advertised his aces back to back by bumping again.

  It cost Skinny a hundred bucks to look at his last card. The house man came through, of course, with three sevens, whereas Skinny didn’t improve on his original pair of aces.

  The next few hands were dull, and then I felt the kill coming. After the opening bet, Janet and me and the two house men were left. I had eights backed. She was on my left with a queen showing. The house man was on my right with a jack showing. The other house man had a ten showing.

  I guessed that everybody had them back to back. Janet, with queens back to back, was looking down everybody’s throat. And, with my eights, I had to follow. The man with the jack showing bumped, and Janet bumped back, catching me in the middle.

  The next card, the third card, didn’t help anybody but me. It gave me three eights. To make it look good, I bet fifty. Everybody stayed. The fourth card didn’t help me a bit, but it gave Janet three queens, gave the guy on my right his third jack and the other house man his third ten. At that point the two house men started bumping each other, with both Janet and me caught in the squeeze. Janet took the last of her money out of her purse, and I slipped her two hundred over her protest, telling her that she could pay it back out of the pot—if she won.

  There was well over a thousand bucks in the pot by the time the flurry stopped. Janet’s hands were shaking. I was cold inside, figuring an angle.

  It all depended on the first card dealt. That went to the house man with the three tens. If he collected the fourth, we were licked. He got a four. The next card came to Janet. An ace. No improvement.

  My timing had to be just right. I waited until the card was free of the pack, the card that I suspected would give me the fourth eight. As soon as it was free, I slapped my cards over and said, “Folding!”

  I kept my eye on that card that was free of the pack. I wanted to laugh at the expression on the face of the dealer. It was a stupid thing for me to do, as I could have called Sid in the morning and gotten my losses back. But I had to show off for Janet.

  The dealer couldn’t stick the card back in the pack. It was frozen in the air for a moment and he said, “You can’t fold while the cards are coming.”

  Without taking my eye off the card he held, I said, “I can fold anytime, brother.”

  He had to give it to the other house man. My fourth eight. And the unused card on the top of the deck, I felt certain, was the fourth jack that the house man didn’t get.

  Janet took another hundred, pushed it out into the pot and whispered to me, “Stupid! You threw in the winning hand!”

  The house man didn’t call. Janet pulled in the big pot. The dealer gave me a long look.

  We walked slowly to the desk and converted the chips into cash. The usual bouncer stepped up to me and said, “Sir, there’s a call for you on the phone in the office.”

  “Wait down in the lounge,” I told Janet, and followed the guy. He opened the door, stepped in right after me and leaned against it. An ex-cabby type sat behind the desk, picking his teeth with a split match.

  They gave me the silent treatment. I smiled amiably.

  “Wise guys we don’t go for around here,” he said, favoring me with a black scowl.

  I thought there was more to come, so I was off guard. The bouncer’s fist, cased in brass, caught me on the mastoid bone, and the edge of the desk hit me across the bridge of the nose as I went down.

  Through a swirling mist, I heard the man behind the desk say, “Clean him, Al, and roll him down the back stairs.”

  Al rolled me over onto my face. He started to fumble at my pockets. His necktie hung free. I got it in my hand and yanked down hard as I brought my knee up. The middle of his face made a sound like a ripe apple being run over.

  As he fell across me, I reached through the kneehole of the desk, got one of the ex-cabby’s ankles in my hand and dragged him under there with me. He didn’t seem eager to join me. But he stopped objecting when I got him by the throat and banged his head against the leg of the desk a few times.

  When they began to stir, I was seated at the desk talking to Sid. Al held a large handkerchief to the middle of his face. I smiled at them.

  I finished my conversation and hung up. I put my fingertips together, my elbows on the desk. “You two shouldn’t have any trouble finding a job,” I said. “In some other town. Mr. Marion has just advised me that he’s replacing you, as of tomorrow night. You can pick up your pay from him. The new man will clean out these thumb-handed mechanics you’ve got in here and put in some artists. This place could net twice as much, if you let the public win once in a while.”

  As I came around the desk, they started to make their apologies. I pushed my way out, glad that the brass hadn’t broken the skin, and wondering how soon I’d have to cover my black eyes with dark glasses.

  Janet stood up as I appeared in the doorway of the downstairs lounge. In her eyes was mirrored the surprise that I had seen in the eyes of the boys on the upstairs door.

  “What on earth did—?”

  “Not here, baby,” I said. I took her arm, and we went out the side door to the floodlighted parking lot.

  She didn’t speak until we were a half mile away, and picking up speed. Then she said, “You’ve got to explain, Tom.”

  I found a quiet spot near a country crossroad, and pulled over. I cut the lights and motor, and held a match for her cigarette. She moved around in the seat so she could face me. “What happened back there?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “A horrible little man came up to me in the lounge and said that you’d fallen and hurt yourself and that in a little while you’d be out in the car. I told him I’d wait right where I was. He shrugged and went away. I was getting scared. I didn’t know what to think of that phone call.” She paused. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Tom.”

  There was enough pale moonlight so I could see the lovely planes of her face, the delicate hollows at her temples.

  “I did fall, but I wasn’t as badly hurt as they thought, Janet,” I said quietly.

  “What happened at that dice table?” she asked. “What happened in the card game? Why did they act so funny? It was as though they knew something, and so did you, and they didn’t like your knowing it.”

  I was right about those smart eyes of hers. She saw things, and her mind meshed very nicely. By trying to be Mr. Smooth, I had put myself neatly out on a limb.

  There seemed to be a very good answer. I put my hands on her shoulders, pulled her toward me, slipped my arms around her. She ducked her lips away from me. But I caught her and kissed her. She went limp and dead, her lips firmly compressed. It’s as good a defense as any. I kissed her ummoving lips until I began to feel silly. Then I felt her stir
in my arms, felt her arms creep up and circle my neck. And suddenly she was the most alive creature in the world. It lasted while the car seemed to spin like a crazy top, and then she tore herself away and planted a stinging slap, high on my face.

  “Damn you!” she whispered. “Damn you!”

  She moved over into the corner of the seat near the door and said in a small voice, “Take me home, please.”

  No words were spoken on the trip back to her place. I let her out and walked up to the foyer door with her. She had been fumbling in her bag. In the darkness, after she had unlocked the door, she turned and thrust a wad of bills at me. As I bent to pick up the ones that fluttered to the porch, the front door shut firmly.

  I shrugged, stuffed the money in my side pocket, parked the car in an all-night lot near the hotel and went up to my room.

  While I was in the shower, the phone rang. I went to it, lifted it off the cradle and said cautiously, “Yes?”

  Her voice. “Tom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Good night, darling.” She hung up.

  Once again I found myself humming in the shower. I went to sleep thinking of her.

  She must have changed her mind again. During the three days that followed, she gave me, in cool and precise tones, the answers to my questions. She refused to go out with me. I began to run out of questions. I had become an expert on James Fosting. I knew his shirt size, brand of toothpaste and next dental appointment.

  On the fourth day, she broke down.

  We were awkward with each other during dinner, with more things being said with our eyes than with our empty words.

  Then we got in the car and, as I drove out of town, she leaned her head against the back of the seat. Her blond hair was tossed by the wind. We didn’t talk.

  I found a secluded spot, and she came into my arms with a little sob that started deep in her throat. When I kissed her, I felt the tears on her cheeks. It wasn’t the sort of kiss I was used to. It was sort of a dedication. There’s no better word.

  In my arms, she looked up at me and said, “Who are you and what do you want?”