There was a silence.
“And then?”
“Well, like I said, it’s a sad story. How it went was, the dirty bastards that stuck him up, they were so rotten they croaked his wife anyhow, just for laughs. He was real broken up about it. Everybody felt sorry for him. And thanks to the Banking Act, the bank got its money back from Washington, so at least his job didn’t suffer.”
“I see.”
Willoughby got out a cigar and made a lengthy ritual of lighting it. By the time he had it going to his satisfaction, he had made his decision.
“Would you care for a cigar, Mr…uh, Slick? Cigarette, Sherry? Coffee for either of you?”
As we were leaving, we passed by Miss Tweed’s desk. She got up and caught my arm. “Excuse me, Miss?”
The Professor continued on. “Yes?”
She hesitated, then took the plunge. “I hate that jerk in there. Forgive me, I know this is a rude question, but…does it really pay as well as they say? I mean…do you enjoy your work?”
I had a split second to make a decision. It was all I needed. I let my eyelids flutter and my mouth tremble. “I’d kill myself if they’d let me,” I whispered.
Her eyes widened in shock and she stared at the Professor. He was waiting for me by the door, and met her gaze with the expressionlessness that only sunglasses can achieve. A look of fascinated queasy horror came over her face. I turned on my heel and half ran to join him.
It was an easy decision. There were no openings at Lady Sally’s House, and nowhere else in the five boroughs will you find a happy hooker.
Except for the ones that have just fixed.
CHAPTER 11
WILLOUGHBY, WEEP
FOR ME
The afternoon shift had ended and the evening shift wouldn’t begin for a while yet. We were the only ones in the Parlor except for Mary, taking a break from the Snoop Room, and Robin, cleaning the place up under the stern eye of Mistress Cynthia, happy as a pig in Congress. (Since there were no other clients in-House now, he was allowed to dress as he preferred, and I could see that he was welting up nicely.) Mary smiled when she saw me, gave me the eyebrow lift that means, Okay if I join you two?, and I gave her back the wink that says, Sure. As she was freshening her own coffee, I said hi to Cindy and politely insulted Robin, who preened. Then the Professor and I hugged Mary hello.
“How goes the hunt?” she asked when the three of us were seated.
“The quarry has taken the bait,” the Professor said. “It’s just a matter of time now before it turns into a ten-pound hairball on him.”
I gave her a quick summary of the day’s events. “Prof played it brilliantly,” I concluded. “Willoughby thinks we’re bright enough to pull off the job, but he also thinks he’s smarter than we are.”
“The fact that those two statements are incompatible escapes him,” the Professor put in. “He thinks he can put one over on us. You could see it in his eyes when he asked how I wanted the money.”
I nodded, smiling at the memory. “Prof just said, ‘tens,’ and then there was this pause.”
“You could hear the wheels turning in his head. ‘This jerk is so dumb he didn’t even ask for used bills, with no serial-number sequences. So I will give the jerk brand new bills in numerical sequence, and in a matter of days he’ll be in custody. What can he do then? Implicate me in murder? It’ll be my word against his.’ The man has all the cunning of…well, of a bank manager.”
“—and new bills in sequence is exactly what you need,” Mary said, seeing the joke and grinning.
“Well, we’d have trouble persuading Tony Donuts that Prof’s pigeon personally fondled each of five thousand bills,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he mused. “Tony is easily that dumb.”
“Really?” Mary said. “That could be a problem.”
He looked puzzled. “You lost me.”
“Well, look, I’m only familiar with your work by reputation—but on that basis alone I’m prepared to bet you don’t often sting morons. No challenge in taking candy from babies, right?”
“I admit I do appreciate the battle of wits even more than the money that comes from winning,” he admitted. “I have an emotional conviction that evil is inherently stupid, and I enjoy proving it to myself. And so the greatest enjoyment comes from outwitting a clever opponent.” He grimaced. “In the case of Tony Donuts, of course, the minimal mental exertion required is compensated for by the risk factor. Even against the cleverest mark, all you risk is ten to life, with an excellent chance of sneaking out of prison. With Tony Donuts, you risk a horrid and degrading death. It balances out.”
“But you’re at a disadvantage in conning someone as stupid as him. Don’t you see? From force of habit, you’ll keep expecting him to react intelligently—and he won’t always oblige.”
The Professor frowned ferociously. “Oof! Buddha’s bloody boody-butt, I never…” He broke off and extended his hand to Mary. “My sincere thanks, you rotten bitch.”
Now it was her turn to look puzzled.
“You may have just saved my life and Maureen’s…by forcing me to spend this evening re-examining every rivet on a scam I was sure was airtight. It is relatively foolproof—but you’re right, I forgot to make it moronproof. And I was looking forward to an evening of recreational debauchery upstairs. Oh, well—can’t be helped. Really, thanks, Mary; I’ll be more careful from now on. I owe you one.”
“Thinking like a moron shouldn’t be much trouble for you,” I said pleasantly.
Mary raised an eyebrow.
“On the way home, he tried to stiff a cabbie,” I said. “After giving him this address.”
Mary glared at him.
“Dammit, Mo, I said I was sorry!”
“Half a second’s thought would have told you that Lady Sally would value the good will of cabdrivers, for God’s sake—”
“Were we supposed to walk here from the—”
“—I took care of it, didn’t I—”
“—it’s not my habit to let my dates pay for my cabs—”
“—it’s not my habit to let my dates screw up Lady Sally—”
“—I-said-I-was-sorry, I said—”
“WHOA!” Mary said with enough volume to override us. Robin and Cynthia were pointedly not staring at us. “You know the rules. No fighting below the third floor. And especially not in a place of eating. But before you go…Maureen, you did pay off the hack?”
“After a fashion,” the Professor said sourly.
“I just did the same thing he’d been doing to cabbies all day,” I told her. “Only literally.”
“And who donated the handkerchief?” he demanded.
“As long as he was happy,” Mary said. “All right, beat it, the both of you.”
Rules are rules. We kept silent until we reached my apartment, and then resumed the argument.
“Dammit,” I said finally, laying back on the bed, “this is exactly why I left you.”
He winced, and slumped in his chair. “You left me because you outgrew me,” he said.
“And I’ve been waiting ever since for you to outgrow you. Instead you’ve been regressing.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“This thing you used to have about only shafting people who deserve it—”
“—what do you mean, ‘used to have’?—”
“Used to have. Or can you explain what makes all cabdrivers fair game?”
He snorted. “Have you ever ridden in a cab?”
“Have you ever driven one?”
“Eh?”
“I sure haven’t. I’d rather walk the streets. In two years on the street, I only got knifed once. If you know a lonelier, more dangerous, more frustrating job in New York City, tell me what it is.”
“Mo…dammit, conning people is what I do.”
“And you’ve always been so proud of conning only people you dislike. The trouble is, I’ve never been comfortable with your criteria fo
r dislike—and I see they’ve gotten looser since I left.”
He squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. “Okay, look, I’ll concede that you may have a point about cabbies; I’ll have to rethink my position on that. But when else have you ever known me to burn anyone who didn’t have it coming?”
“How about the last guy we took together?”
“Flanders? My God, the man was a pimple—”
“He was ugly and dull and tasteless and he had more money than he deserved. None of those things was his fault. There was no evil in him anywhere; he wasn’t imaginative enough. And you didn’t just take his money, Prof, you took his dignity too.”
“But—”
“I could understand distaste for him…but he hadn’t earned dislike. When I first joined up with you, I thought we were going to be Patricia Holm and Simon Templar, outlaws who preyed on criminals, punishers of the ungodly. And all too often, it seemed we were punishing the unfortunate—those unlucky enough to have been born displeasing to you. That’s why I walked out on you. Stinging Flanders was like laughing at a fat girl.”
That wounded him. “Hey—did I back you up today with Mrs. Willoughby, or not?”
I softened slightly. “Yes, you did. And that earns you points, even though I forced your hand. But you’re still at least two cabdrivers and a Flanders in the hole.”
He opened his mouth and then closed it again and frowned.
I stood up, skinned out of my clothes quickly, got back into bed and turned my back to him. After ten or fifteen minutes, he got up, undressed himself and lay down beside me on the bed, keeping carefully to his side. Three or four hours of pretending to sleep tired us both out so much that we fell genuinely asleep sometime after ten—I did anyway.
I woke exhausted, sweaty, stiff, thirsty, and depressed. And, dammit, horny. The latter two, at least, are rare in Lady Sally’s House. I eased out of bed and peered dolefully out my window at a disgustingly sunny day. He did not wake while I showered; I slipped into a robe and slippers, and went downstairs to the dining room.
People awake at eight in the morning are rare in the House, too; I had the place to myself. I made a pot of coffee, drank a solitary cup with a corn muffin while listening to the radio play Bach. I thought about pleasuring myself, but decided against it. In the day to come, edginess could be an asset. I poured more coffee into one of the insulated cups Lady Sally stocks, put it and an orange and a selection of muffins and pastries into the dumbwaiter on a tray, and sent the lot up to the third floor. Then I cleaned up after myself and went back upstairs, stopping at Wardrobe for a maternity outfit.
He was still asleep as I let myself back into the room. He’d kicked the covers nearly off himself. I stood there in the doorway with the tray in my hands and my clothes under one arm, watching the sunlight roll like mercury around his snoring chest, for a long time. Oh, it couldn’t have been long, the smell of coffee must have woken him in less than a minute. A long time for me. Why is the sight of a sleeping loved one so tender? I wished—not for the first time in my life!—that I had not been cursed with scruples.
“Oog.”
“Good morning. I know you like to work on an empty stomach, but you should have a little breakfast.”
“Thanks.” He sat up and pulled the sheet over his morning rampancy. I set the tray down on it with some care and went into the john to dress and do my face and hair.
When I emerged he was nearly dressed himself, just affixing a false mustache so enormous and ugly that no one who saw him today would remember anything else about him. “Excellent,” he said, looking me over carefully. “Let’s complete the illusion.” He selected the fattest of my feather pillows. “Come here.”
I let him position it under my maternity clothes. Halfway through the job he froze. I sighed.
“Maureen—”
“Professor—”
“You don’t have to do that—”
“Look, I debated a long time before I put the stuff on, okay? Hopefully this is all going to go smoothly, you’ll give Tony his money, he’ll let you walk away, and neither of us will ever see him again. But if it goes sour somehow, and he gets his hands on me…well, maybe if I’m wearing what he told me to, he’ll be pleased enough to kill me quickly.”
He frowned fiercely, but couldn’t argue with my logic. I almost wished he had. Most black lace underwear is uncomfortable to wear for any length of time, worse under street clothes, and the damned pillow didn’t help any. But it was the prudent course.
He let me pay for the cab to the Chemical Corn Exchange Bank. With money. The cabbie looked at me so oddly as I paid him that I wondered if somehow he sensed how lucky he was.
Willoughby’s secretary the Tweed Lady smiled politely at us, but failed to recognize us from the day before. Not surprising; we now resembled Ozzie and Harriet more than Bonnie and Clyde. We killed a few minutes asking her about transferring our bank account from out of state. Then it was the appointed time, and I went into labor.
Willoughby was alert; at my first yell he came bustling out to take charge. He had the old fat security guard help me back to his office, then dismissed him, retaining Miss Tweed as a witness. The guard would have made a good additional witness, but Willoughby had warned us yesterday that the man was just the type to try and play hero, and one witness was sufficient. As soon as the door had closed behind the guard, the Professor pulled his toy gun.
We sketched out the tale for the benefit of the secretary. Willoughby registered, in turn, shock, outrage, quick acceptance of the new state of affairs, manly courage, and a heroic concern for Miss Tweed’s welfare: she bought everything but the last two. The Professor picked up the phone, got an outside line, and dialed a number, announcing loudly that it was Willoughby’s home number. Only I knew he was lying. He handed the phone to Willoughby. On the other end, I knew, was my dear friend Phillip, doing his George Raft impression. Willoughby went through a convincing charade with him. Who the devil are you? You monster, if you’ve harmed my wife I’ll—Let me speak to her.
The rest of us could then clearly hear the sound of his wife’s high distant voice pleading, and then screaming. The secretary went pale, and stared at the Professor and me.
We listened with Willoughby until the tape chopped off at Mrs. Willoughby’s shriek. Willoughby kept listening intently. In addition to his George Raft, Phillip does sound effects well; I’m sure his imitation of a silenced gun firing, following closely after the shriek, was perfect. The secretary, of course, could not have heard it. I saw Willoughby buy it; his face strained with the effort of not smiling. “All right,” he said gruffly, “don’t do anything hasty, I’ll cooperate. Damn you.”
He hung up. As far as he knew, the job was done, his wife murdered. Now it was just a matter of stiffing the hirelings with traceable money, and his morning’s work would be through. “They have my wife hostage,” he told Miss Tweed. “I have to get fifty thousand dollars from the vault for them. For God’s sake don’t do anything rash while I’m gone—they’re desperate characters.”
“Fifty thousand?” Miss Tweed said. “Why not the whole damn vault full?”
He glared at her, then looked hastily at the Professor, afraid he would approve of the revision.
“Shut up,” the Professor explained.
Willoughby took an attaché case from a closet, and left to get the money from the vault. While he was gone an idea came to me. I gestured the Professor near, and whispered in his ear while he held the toy gun on Miss Tweed. After a minute he smiled broadly, and nodded. “You’re right,” he murmured, “that’s even better.”
“Lady,” I said to her, in the bimbo-voice I’d used the day before, “do you really hate that bag of shaving cream?”
Her eyes widened as she recognized me. But she was quick on the uptake. “Want to see the pinchmarks on my butt?” she replied sourly. She frowned…then smiled. “Why? Can I help you two out some way?”
“Can you act?”
“Try me.”
“When he comes back with the cash, we’ll leave, and tell you both not to stir from this office for fifteen minutes. Once the time is up, you just go back out to your desk and go back to work. And when the cops arrive, play dumb. You don’t know what the hell Willoughby is talking about. Robbers? What robbers? The pregnant lady had a glass of water and a short rest and left with her husband fifteen minutes or so ago.”
She looked thoughtful. “But won’t the wife back him up?”
“His home phone hasn’t rung all day. Phone records will support that.”
She smiled broadly. “I don’t know how you managed that…but I like it. Sure, I’m in. I can’t wait to see his face.”
“Thanks. You’ve improved a good day.” I hesitated, weighing debt against risk. “Look…if you were really serious, yesterday…I’ll call you in about six months.”
“It’s not like you said? You really like the life?”
“The place where I work is great. The boss-lady doesn’t tolerate sleaze. I lied yesterday because there are no openings right now, and all the other houses in town are awful. But in a year, one of my friends is leaving on her honeymoon, and six months is long enough to train you as a sub. Just don’t do any free-lance experimenting in the meantime, or you’ll have a lot to unlearn. Besides, it’s dangerous.”
She chewed on her lip—then scribbled down her home phone number and gave it to me. “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”
“Good plan. Wups—places!”
Willoughby came back in with the briefcase. The Professor examined the contents. Fifty thousand dollars in crisp new tens, serial sequence, still in the wrappers. “Fine,” he said, and Willoughby again hurt his face not smiling. He riffed a few lines for Miss Tweed’s benefit about exacting a terrible vengeance if we had harmed his wife; we riffed a few lines for his benefit about not budging until we’d been gone for fifteen minutes. During all this boilerplate I busied myself replacing pillow feathers with fifty thousand dollars—leaving just enough feathers to round off corners—and tucking the resulting bundle back under my maternity clothes. The leftover feathers rolled in a scarf were malleable enough to tuck up between my thighs, helping me to walk like a pregnant lady. It was a shame to break up such a happy group: all of us were pleased, and two of us were ecstatic. But the two who were merely pleased had a pressing engagement with Tony Donuts…
Callahan's Lady Page 19
