Grifter's Game

by Lawrence Block

  I kept putting it together and it kept coming out wrong. My thoughts went in the usual places. I wanted to kill a man and get away with it. There are a few standard ways of doing this, and I ran them all through my head and looked for one that would fit. None of them did.

  I could make it look like an accident. But the trouble with that is that there is no margin for error. When you fake an accident, or a suicide, you make one mistake and the ball game is over. One mistake and it’s no longer an accident or a suicide. It’s a murder, and you’re it.

  Cops are too good. Crime labs are too good. I could slug that fat bastard behind the ear, load him into his car and drive him over the nearest convenient cliff. Then the snoops would begin snooping. I’d leave a fingerprint somewhere, or some little punk would figure out that he’d been hit over the head before he went over the cliff, or any one of another thousand things.

  Or I could get a gun, and I could stick the barrel in his fat mouth, and I could wrap his lousy hand around it and pull the trigger for him and blow his brains all over the nearest wall.

  And something would be wrong, something somewhere, and somebody would know it wasn’t suicide. Then they would take Mona and they would lean on her. She’d do fine at the beginning. She’d throw it back as hard as they threw it at her.

  For a while.

  But they wouldn’t be able to let go, because it would be murder and she would be their only suspect. They would push it as hard as they could, and she would crack before they did. Maybe she wouldn’t confess, but they’d get my name out of her and pick me up, and then they would play both sides against the middle. They would scare us and make us mad, and they would break us.

  They have capital punishment in New York State. They use an electric chair. In first degree murder, the chair is mandatory unless the jury recommends mercy.

  They wouldn’t. Not for us.

  I added it up again, and each time it came out death. I worked it around again and again, over and over, and it wouldn’t break properly. It wasn’t fair—he had her, and he had all that money, and I wanted both of them.

  There had to be a way.

  I slept on it and dreamed about it. The bad dreams took up most of the night. There was an aggravating sameness about them—dreams of running, with or without Mona, running madly away and not getting away at all. We were running through a coal-black tunnel most of the time, with something very frightening chasing us and gaining on us. We would be reaching the end of the tunnel, with the darkness opening onto a pool and green grass and a picnic table, and the evilness behind us would snatch us up just as we approached the mouth of the tunnel. I never found out what the pursuer was planning to do to us, because each time, I awoke sweating at the moment of capture.

  At 8:30 I got out of bed with a new angle. It was taking shape, and I sat on the edge of the bed with the day’s first cigarette turning to ashes between my fingers while I let the idea play itself out. It was an intriguing idea, and it took into consideration the one salient point I hadn’t stopped to consider the day before.

  Brassard was a criminal.

  I remembered what Mona had said. Let’s not kill him, Joe. Let’s frame him and have him sent to jail.

  But that wouldn’t work. I’d handed her a bucket full of all the arguments against that one. It didn’t stand a chance.

  Something else did. Brassard, alive, could not be framed. Not in a million years.

  Brassard, dead, was another story.

  I sat there and thought it through. Every once in a while something would get tangled up and I had to start in at the beginning all over again. But all the tangles smoothed themselves out. The more I thought about it, the better it looked. When it was just about perfect I got up from the bed and went into the bathroom to shower and brush my teeth.

  I sang in the shower.

  I dressed in suit and tie and clean white shirt. I went downstairs and had two scrambled eggs and two cups of black coffee at the lunch counter down the street. Then I walked over to Thirty-fourth street and caught a cross-town bus to Third Avenue. The bus was crowded and I had to stand all the way. I didn’t mind.

  The pawnshop I was looking for wasn’t the one I’d picked to hock my suitcases at. It was on Thirty-second and Third, a hole in the wall behind the inevitable three golden balls. The owner was a small, unassuming man with wire-rimmed glasses and frown lines in his forehead. His name was Moe Rader and he was a fence.

  There was a kid in his shop when I walked in. The kid was trying to sell Moe a watch. I pretended to look at a saxophone while they dickered over the price. The kid settled for ten bucks, and I waited for him to take his money and go home while I wondered who the watch had belonged to, and how much it was really worth.

  Then the kid was gone.

  “I want a gun,” I told Moe.

  “Rifle or handgun or shotgun?”

  “Revolver. A .38 or thereabouts.”

  “You have a permit, of course?”

  I shook my head. He smiled sadly, showing teeth filled with gold.

  “If you do not have a permit, I cannot sell you a gun.”

  He used the tone of someone explaining an obvious fact to a very small child.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It’s the law,” he said.

  I still didn’t say anything. I took out my wallet and found a pair of fifties. I took them out and put them on the counter.

  He looked at me, at the money, at me again. He was trying to figure out who I was.

  “People,” I said. “Augie Manners, Bunny DiFacio, Ruby Crane. People.”

  “You know these people?”

  I nodded sagely.

  “Tell me something about them.”

  I gave him the names of two night clubs that August Manners owned unofficially. I told him when Bunny DiFacio went to Dannemorra and why. I started to tell him something about Ruby Crane but he held up a hand.

  “Enough,” he said. “The back of the store, please.”

  I walked past him and into the back room. He went to the door, turned the lock, pulled down the window shade. Then he came after me, searched a shelf, produced a gun. It was a .38 revolver, Smith and Wesson. Just what I’d ordered.

  “This have a history?”

  He smiled the same sad smile. “Perhaps,” he said. “A young boy found it in somebody’s glove compartment. He brought it to me for sale. The original owner has not seen fit to report the theft to the police. We get a listing of stolen goods, you know, and I checked it carefully. I have a suspicion that this gun is not registered at all. Is that what you want to know?”

  That was what I wanted to know. The gun was clean. It couldn’t be traced to Moe, much less to me.

  “I’ll need ammunition,” I said.

  “A box?”

  “Enough to fill the gun. Six bullets.”

  “You only intend to use it once?”

  I didn’t answer that one. He didn’t really expect me to. He put half a dozen shells in a small cloth bag like the ones Bull Durham comes in. He put the bag in a little box and gave it to me.

  I left the store without saying good-bye. I had a gun and six bullets and he had two fifty-dollar bills. It was that simple.

  I was sitting on the edge of the bed again. The gun and the bullets nested snugly in one of my drawers in between a couple of shirts. I was thinking again. It was getting to be a habit.

  If we faked an accident, we were dead. If we faked a suicide, we were dead.

  We had to fake a murder.

  Respectable Westchester burghers don’t get killed often. When they do, if they are old men with young wives, it is not hard to figure out why they were killed or by whom.

  But crooks are different. Crooks get killed all the time, for any number of reasons. And crooks get killed professionally. They get killed by gunmen from out of town, flown in for the job and flown out when the job is over.

  Gangland hits don’t get solved. Gangland hits are perfect crimes. The cops don�
�t kill themselves trying to find the killer. It would be a waste of their time.

  In a sense, L. Keith Brassard was a respectable burgher. In another sense, he was a crook.

  I had to kill the crook. I had to make it look like a mob hit, professionally planned and professionally carried out. I had an untraceable gun, and that was the first step. There were other steps. But when they were done, it would be simple. It wouldn’t make page three in the Daily News. It would be on the front page, and it would say that a Westchester gangster with a solid-gold front had been bumped by the boys. The world would leave the widow alone. They’d feel sorry for her.

  They’d leave her for me.

  I opened my drawer, took another look at the gun, and smiled. I closed the drawer, left the hotel, grabbed lunch. Around three that afternoon I decided to call Brassard’s office and see if he was in. I looked through my wallet for his number, trying to remember whether or not I had jotted it down. I hadn’t, but I had four other numbers which I stared at for several minutes. Then I remembered copying them from a slip of paper in Brassard’s office.

  I called them in turn from a pay phone.

  The first two didn’t answer. The third was a bar on the East Side in the sixties, the fourth a Greek night club in the Chelsea district. I rang off on both of them.

  I guessed that the numbers were drops, contacts for Brassard’s heroin business. This didn’t do much for me one way or the other. It made it a little more certain Brassard was in the business, but I already knew that. I started to tear up the slip of paper, then changed my mind and returned it to my wallet.

  A phone book gave me his number. I dialed WOrth 4-6363 and let it ring itself hoarse. Then I hung up and went back to my room. I used a knife blade on the lock of the attaché case and it popped open in less than a minute.

  The package was still there.

  I looked at it, shook a little, put it back in the case and locked it up again. I dropped my penknife into my pocket and hefted the attaché case.

  I felt very shaky carrying all that heroin on the subway. But I managed it. I got off the elevator at the fifth floor, looking very much the picture of the aspiring young businessman. My suit was pressed and my tie was straight and my attaché case was held as casually as all hell. The door was open over at Zenith Employment but nobody was looking out of it.

  I let myself into Brassard’s office. I closed the door behind me and looked around. The office was unchanged. I browsed around carefully. The only thing missing was the slip of paper with the four phone numbers. I thought about that one for a minute and decided to do it up brown. I found a pencil in a drawer, then got the slip from my wallet and copied the numbers on his desk pad. I came as close to his handwriting as I could remember.

  Then I opened the attaché case again. I took out the small box of heroin lovingly and put it on top of the desk. Then I opened a desk drawer and took out four plain white envelopes.

  I filled each of them in turn about a third of the way with heroin. I sealed them, put three in the top center drawer and wedged one into the space between the desk blotter and the leather desk set that kept the blotter in place. I let the envelope stick out a bit. Then I opened one of the bottom drawers and put the big box of heroin in the back.

  That way, I figured, they’d have to look for it a little, and at the same time they couldn’t help spotting it. It was sort of like a treasure hunt for little kids. The first envelope was hanging there in plain sight. No detective could possibly miss it. The other three were in the center drawer, the first place they would look. After that, of course, they would turn the office upside-down and inside-out. Then they’d find the main box and the ball game would be over.

  Then the telephone started to ring.

  I turned green. I backed away from the desk as though it was wired for electricity. I flattened out against the wall for no imaginable reason and counted rings.

  It rang twelve times.

  Somebody was trying to reach him. Somebody who was fairly sure he was there. Unless, of course, it was a wrong number. There was always that possibility. It could be a wrong number.

  Then it started to ring again.

  I got a quick mental picture—Brassard coming into his office any minute, finding the heroin. I got that picture and my knees started to shake. The envelopes were a nice gimmick but I couldn’t risk them. I snatched the one from the desk blotter, then grabbed three more from the desk drawer. I crammed them into my pockets and prayed that he wouldn’t look in the bottom drawer.

  And that the cops would.

  I took a look around and prayed again for salvation. Then I got out of that office and rang for the elevator.

  There was a fruit juice stand across the street. I found a free stool, ordered a hot dog and a glass of piña colada, and watched the doorway to his office building. It was almost five, and I started regretting the moment of panic. I should have left the envelopes there. He wouldn’t head for the office, not at this hour.

  I looked down at my attaché case. No heroin, not any more. Now I had heroin in my pockets instead. A lot of it. I worked on the hot dog and sipped the piña colada through a narrow straw. I watched the entrance, watched office girls head home from work, watched cleaning women get set for haphazard mop-up operations. Then a cab stopped and he got out of it. He paid the driver and the cab went away. My eyes stayed on him while he vanished into the building.

  He was there for fifteen minutes.

  It was a nerve-wracking, stomach-knotting quarter of an hour. On top of everything else, I had to justify my presence at the fruit juice stand by consuming two more hot dogs and two more piña coladas. Food had a tendency to stick in my throat, and it was hard.

  Waiting was harder. Waiting, and wondering what he was finding, and what he was thinking, and what mistakes I had made. Waiting, and wondering where in the world to go from here. Waiting.

  He came out, looking the same. I wondered if he was worried, or if I should be worried. I wondered how I was going to do it if he had discovered the boxful. There would be no way then. If my pigeon had tipped, there was only one thing to do. I had to throw up the whole thing, leave New York, forget Mona. It ought to be easy enough. I’d left many cities, forgotten many women. You just got up and went.

  I remembered her, and what she was like, and what it was like to be with her. And I knew that I couldn’t leave, couldn’t give it up. We were in it no matter what happened.

  I watched him get in a cab and go away. I finished slurping my piña colada and took a very deep breath of stale air. I walked across the street, walked into the building, rode the elevator to the fifth floor. I jimmied the door again. It was getting tiresome. I opened the desk drawer and checked. He hadn’t found the heroin. It was still there, the contents of that bottom drawer undisturbed.

  A world of tension drained out of me. I reached into my pocket, rescued the four envelopes, returned them to their places. I glanced at the desk pad—the numbers weren’t there anymore. He’d torn up my slip of paper. I sighed. It was a weird little game all right. I hauled out my wallet, found the slip of paper again, copied the numbers back onto the desk pad.

  I played the let’s-wipe-away-our-fingerprints game again, then slipped out of the office and left the building. I was beginning to think of it as my office and my building. Hell, I spent more time in it than he did.

  I walked a few blocks, pitching my attaché case in a convenient trash can. I didn’t need it any more. I wasn’t lugging heroin around town now. It was planted properly. A fortune in heroin. An amusing plant, I decided. An expensive investment.

  I was too tired for the subway. I hailed a cab and sank back into the seat, suddenly exhausted. It had been a busy day. Too busy, maybe. I wondered how busy the next few days were going to be. Very busy, probably.

  Then I thought some more about those four phone numbers. The son-of-a-bitch probably knew his own handwriting. He probably remembered tearing up those numbers once already, and he probably knew da
mn well that he hadn’t written them the second time around. He was probably suspicious, and that was fine. Maybe he’d push the panic button. Maybe he’d call people and let them know something was funny. That was fine, too. It would make everything else seem that more plausible.

  Because no matter what happened, he wouldn’t be going back to the office that night. He’d be going home to Mona. And those four little phone numbers would be around the next day.

  I had to make sure that he wouldn’t.

  8

  After dinner I packed my suitcase and checked out of the Collingwood. I found a locker at Grand Central and shoved the suitcase into it. The gun, loaded, stayed in my inside jacket pocket. It bulged ridiculously and jiggled up and down when I walked. In the washroom of the train to Scarsdale I switched it from the jacket pocket to the waistband of my trousers. That felt a hell of a lot more professional, but it worried me. I was afraid the thing would go off spontaneously, in which case I wouldn’t be much good to Mona. I tried to think about other more pleasant things.

  By the time we hit Scarsdale I was beginning to shake inside. There was too much time to kill and no convenient way to kill it. I wondered whether I had taken the wrong turn. Maybe it would have been better to stay overnight at the Collingwood, then grab an early train up.

  That would have given me a night’s sleep. But it left too much to chance. I had to pick up a car, which meant I had to hit Westchester while it was still dark out. And it was safer if I came in on a crowded train, which ruled out 4 A.M. trains. So I had picked the best way, but I still wasn’t feeling too good about it.

  I found a movie house a block from the train station, paid my half a buck and went in to be hypnotized. I took a seat in the back and tried to get used to the feeling of the gun in my pants. The metal wasn’t cold any more. It was body temperature, or close enough, and I’d been wearing it so long it felt as though it was a part of me. I stared at the screen and let time pass.