The Empty Trap

by John D. MacDonald

  “I wouldn’t marry her,” Benny said stubbornly.

  “And what pig would marry you?” Tulsa asked, deeply disgusted.

  When Harry phoned over and asked him to come over and meet the wife, Lloyd had a preconceived idea of just what she would be like. A brass-haired blonde going to seed, with the gutter voice of the blues shouter. He could remember Miss West in Maine, and he had seen several of Danton’s other women.

  Harry met him at the door. He was beaming and he had a glass in his hand. “Surprise you, kid? Suprised me too. Never thought I’d take the step. Come on and meet the bride. She’s out by the pool. We got in late. We just got up a little while back.”

  Sylvia sat by the pool in a chair of tubular aluminum and plastic webbing, reading. She wore crisp white shorts and a white halter. She was a long-bodied girl, medium tall, narrow of waist, sleek of leg. Her black hair was of a soft texture and it was pulled back into a bun.

  “Honey, this is the guy I was telling you about. Lloyd Wescott. Meet Sylvia, Lloyd.”

  She put the book aside, looked up at him and smiled and held her hand out to him. Her eyes were a deep brown, almost black, her face well-cut and delicate, her smile warm and personal. “I certainly have heard a great deal about you, Lloyd. Harry has told me a dozen times how pleased he is with what you’ve done here. I can’t wait to take the grand tour.” Her voice was low, well-modulated, her diction precise.

  “This is the best taste Harry has ever shown,” Lloyd said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Why don’t you show her around, Lloyd? I got some catching up to do.”

  “Should I change?” she asked.

  “For this time of day, you’re practically overdressed, Mrs. Danton.”

  “Sylvia—please,” she said.

  He showed her the entire layout, from sun deck to subbasement. It was a tour he had given others, but he enjoyed it more this time. She had a lithe and pleasing walk, and her questions were intelligent. When they came across Tulsa and Benny she seemed pleased to see them. They seemed almost formal in their attitude toward her.

  “That’s it,” he said when they were through. “Now you get a drink on the house. Pick your bar.”

  “That one where you look sort of down at the pool, I think. The little one. And something tall with rum and fruit in it.”

  On the way they passed a bank of slots, half of them in use. She held out her hand and said gravely, “A two bits for a gambling lady?” She pulled the lever, caught three bells, and twenty quarters came tumbling down. “Just call me lady luck,” she said with a hint of bitterness. “Say, these things do have a pocket. Ten for you and ten for me.”

  “No.”

  “I can get terribly cross. Here. Do you gamble at all?”

  “Sometimes as much as ten whole dollars a week.” They sat on bar stools. She ordered her drink.

  As she sipped it she looked at his glass. “Is that just plain ginger ale?”

  “While on duty, Sylvia.”

  “You are a good guide, Lloyd. I might even be able to find my way out of here. Did it shock you to hear Harry got married?”

  He watched her face. “Tulsa, Benny and I shared the news. We were all very intrigued.”

  There was a sudden look of hardness around her eyes. “I see. A lot of jolly speculation going on. Get a complete briefing on me, did you?”

  “Some scattered facts.”

  “How do I shape up, little boy scout?”

  “For some reason I can’t understand, all of a sudden you want to make me angry. I’m not angry. And if I was, I’d hide it so well you couldn’t see it, Mrs. Danton. I know Harry’s usual taste. Give him his head and he’d put diamonds in his front teeth. You aren’t what I expected. I’m agreeably surprised. And I’m glad for Harry’s sake.”

  “We’re both snobs, Lloyd. You see, once upon a time I was exactly what you expected.”

  “It doesn’t seem possible.”

  “I don’t know why I should tell you any personal history. Maybe it’s because I may need a friend at court some time. You look bright and talk bright and could possibly be bright. I couldn’t say yet.”

  “I’m bright, Sylvia. And I work at it.”

  “So take Sylvia at fourteen. She looked eighteen. A kid from Hell’s Kitchen. A tough bastard of a kid with a whore mother and an unknown father. She was tough through and through and you don’t lose that kind of toughness, my friend. Buy me another of these. She knew every filthy trick in the books and got picked up helping the other kids roll a lush, and got sent to one of those schools and got out by knocking out a matron with a Coke bottle. That was twelve years ago, Lloyd. How am I doing?”

  He was shocked by the whispered vehemence of her words. “You’ve come a long way.”

  “Before I was fifteen I was traveling with a syndicate car thief named Joey Tower. He got hot so they transferred him to the west coast and I went along. My hair was bleached white. I wore sweaters two sizes too small. I talked with a whine and the language would make a truckdriver shiver. But Joey’s boss saw something in the slut, and cut Joey out, with a little help from the slut, who was a very greedy child, and still is.”

  “Sylvia, I—”

  “You started the needle job, and you’re going to listen. Joey’s boss made some minor improvements, but it was the next guy up the ladder who used his head. He had the docks in S. F. He had a little education. I got on his nerves. He took me to a school. The Demming School, for young ladies. Miss Helen Demming. One look at me and she nearly dropped her teeth. That school was a hundred years old, nearly, and they’d never seen anything like Sylvia. I waited and he was in the office with her a long time and I was accepted, and booked for special tutoring on the side. I was nearly sixteen when he enrolled me. He’d take me out for the weekends. That used to shatter Miss Helen, but she didn’t have the nerve to yell cop. At first I wanted to take the place apart, and made a good start at it, but I was just barely smart enough to see what might happen. After six months Lennie wanted to take me out of there, but I kicked up such a storm he gave up. I stuck with it three years, Lloyd. And when I got out, I could walk into any place in the world and be mistaken for a lady. I knew how to dress, and I knew good grooming and good taste. I’d acquired a liking for good literature and good conversation. No matter how much silver at any place setting, they couldn’t confuse me. So I took three hundred out of Lennie’s wallet one night and went back to New York to meet a nice square, a rich young man of family. When I was down to less than five dollars, I looked up some old contacts. Am I boring you, boy scout?”

  “No. Keep going.”

  “The word was out that wherever I showed, Lennie wanted the favor of having somebody work me over, with special attention to the face. He wanted to present some plastic surgeon with a real problem. You see, there was never any more than one ladder for me, the only ladder I could climb. I went back and got on my own ladder. Before they could work me over, I said I wanted to deal. I said I had some dope about Lennie. I did. He had a grift on the side that wasn’t going into the pot and was pulling a bill a day. I wasn’t going to open up until my face came into it. A little big shot tried to get it all, but I’d only hint until I got passed all the way up to Frenchy. I gave it to him. He sent a specialist out and he checked and then he sent another kind of specialist and so now Lennie is somewhere halfway to Alcatraz with half a hardware store wired to him. By then Frenchy had married me. I think the education stoned him. I had a convertible and a duplex and a mink and a hatful of jewelry, but I also had Frenchy. He gripped a fork with his fist, and when he ate it sounded like buffalo stampeding through a swamp. But he was a sharp dresser. Class with a K. Shoulders out to here. When they moved him to the coast, he decided I could sing. Much to everybody’s astonishment, I nearly could. The voice is true, but the range is narrow and it’s weak. Don’t look so nervous. I won’t do any singing in your hotel, thank you.”

  “Am I looking nervous?”

 
“I’m on a talking jag on two drinks. Please order me another, noble boy scout. Frenchy was transferred to the coast. I’ve told you that. Where was I? Oh, yes. He had decided I was bright, and he asked my advice on little business problems. I buttered him good. He was about three grades down from the top, but I got him thinking he was the top. So they started to squeeze him. He fought back. They said they wanted to mediate. A meeting was fixed. In a high building. Frenchy forgot to wear his parachute. There was a stink. Grand jury investigation. Little congressmen pattering and panting about. They held me and asked me nine billion questions, and nine billion times I looked blank and said, ‘I don’t know. My husband never talked to me about business. I thought he was in investments.’ It didn’t work very well, because they could tie me to Lennie.

  “When they gave up I drove my convertible back to New York and reported into Windsalla, one more step up the ladder. I was a public figure, and I hadn’t talked. Windsalla approved on both counts. It was a fat year until they moved in on him and returned him to Mother Italia. He wanted me to come with him. Not Sylvia. The parting gift lasted two months. Next the mink. Then the jewelry started going. Through connections I got into some clubs, but I couldn’t last. Two weeks ago I was singing in a very sour little club in the east fifties, holding my own only because I had some very blue material. I was billed as the ex-darling of mobland. And I felt very ex indeed. Harry saw the billing and came in. We’ve known each other for years. Afterwards I went to his hotel. We both got off on a crying jag. Old times and old faces. It seemed a very solemn and wonderful idea to get married. By morning he still meant it. At the end of the waiting period, he still meant it. So here is Sylvia, back in the big feather bed after a cold bad time.”

  “A hard gal, through and through.”

  “Right down to bed rock, Lloyd. I’ve got a heart like a stone.”

  “Poor defeated woman. My addition says you’re all of twenty-six. Close to the end of your life. Slippers and rocking chair for you, Sylvia.”

  “Do tell me the exciting story of your life?”

  “Do you go for drama, conflict, tension?”

  “Oh, very much!”

  “Here it is. I was born twenty-nine years ago, the younger of two boys, in Royalsville, a thriving city of six thousand in eastern Ohio, near Youngstown. I attended the public schools there, starring in basketball, track and baseball. My father was a druggist. At the time of his retirement he owned three stores. My parents now live in Bradenton, Florida, in what is advertised as the largest trailer court in the world. My brother is married and has four children and operates a mill and lumber yard in Portland, Oregon. I attended a famed school of hotel administration, and was kept out of a couple of wars because of some healed spots on my right lung from a touch of tuberculosis I never knew I had. Upon graduation I worked for a large hotel chain, then got out to become an assistant manager of an independent. I’m a pretty good hotel man, and I’ve had breaks. I’m damn young for this job, and damn well paid. I save money. I exercise regularly. All my vices are moderate. My relatives all think I am in a wacky profession and they keep hinting I ought to get married. I came close once, but she was all the time smelling of spearmint, a flavor I can’t abide. She married an associate professor of philology, and my spies inform me that she weighs a bouncing hundred and ninety. I hope my story hasn’t been too gripping.”

  He smiled at her but the smile faded when he saw she was looking very solemn, almost sad. She had that shine in her eyes that indicates tears are close. “You know, you did that well. You did just what I deserve. I think you did just what I needed, Lloyd.”

  “What do you need?”

  “I need to stop feeling so damn sorry for myself all the time. I’ve felt that way for years. I wanted to shock you. I wanted you to come up with a lot of asinine questions. But you put me very neatly in my place. I thought I was being dramatic. I guess I was being silly.”

  “Just a little bit silly. Not enough to count.”

  “All I ever really wanted was a guy with one drug store who could maybe build it up to three. You’re going to be good for me, Lloyd. You have … balance.”

  “And you are the young wife of a man who owns the major piece of a very thriving hotel managed with imagination and integrity by a sterling young man who, back in the days of the tap center in basketball, was known fondly as Leaping Lloyd. So just be a young wife. Now you’ve gone legit. Now you’re as square as the rest of us.”

  “All right,” she said. “Young housewife. Shake, fellow square.”

  “Walk you back?”

  “You run along and manage the hell out of this place. I’m going to have this kind man mix up another of these juicy things.”

  5

  The naked bearded man lay in the sheltered space between brown rocks and thought of all the people he had been, of all the curious turns and twists of the road that had finally brought him to this place. Had it started when Danton came to Maine? Or when Dockerty had fired him? Or had it really started that first day with Sylvia when, for no reason that either of them could isolate later, they had reached very quickly a level of utter frankness.

  He knew when the other phase of it had started. After that first day he did not see her for a week, but he thought about her a great deal. She was in his mind more often than was reasonable or understandable. The thought of her married to Harry made him feel slightly queasy, yet there was no reason, he thought, to feel that way. She was certainly far from a virgin bride, probably as far as you could get.

  There was that Joey Tower and then somebody she didn’t name, and then Lennie and Frenchy and Windsalla. And God knows how many in between, or, earlier, how many sordid episodes in the alleys and hallways and staircases and packing boxes and parked cars of Hell’s Kitchen. She was certainly too hardened to feel squeamish about Harry’s flabby fifty-three-year-old body, or the hard round pot on the front of him. No matter how much polish had been added, this was still a cheap tramp, a consort of criminals, a hardened chippy, who had wearily, drunkenly, endured all imaginable orgy and debauch. And yet …

  Harry asked him to stop over at his place one evening and have a drink with them. One of Harry’s other business partners was there, a man who had no piece of the hotel, but operated a trucking line in the Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi area, a man named Guntry with a long red wrinkled face and neck, a harsh high-pitched voice, and three fingers of his left hand missing. Sylvia wore a very plain yellow cotton dress. She seemed sullen and remote. Her conversation, though polite, was limited. Guntry had no small talk. All he wanted to talk was tractors and trailers and cost per mile of operation and expansion to Pensacola and how much it would cost.

  Guntry wanted to write down some figures, so he and Harry moved to the far corner of the big living room. Sylvia sat on a chaise longue, ankles crossed, both hands holding her drink, looking down into it.

  “You’re not a bundle of cheer tonight,” Lloyd said.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t think I can whip up a nervous giggle.”

  “Anything wrong?”

  “Nothing special. It was just an extremely short honeymoon.”

  When Harry spoke to her there was a nasty-sweet edge to his voice that Lloyd found embarrassing. He left as soon as he could. The next day, in town, he saw Sylvia’s car, the baby blue MG Harry had bought her. He had been about to return to the hotel. Instead he walked around until he spotted her coming out of a dress shop, a package in her arm.

  “Coke, lady?”

  “Lloyd! You startled me. This is more a beer type day, isn’t it.”

  “That there place over there lady has got draft beer and yuh git to set on a saddle at the bar, by Godfrey.”

  She inspected the saddles and settled for a booth near the back. They got huge mugs of dark beer. “I was grim last night, I guess.”

  “Sort of.”

  “I can talk to you, Lloyd. I can talk to that nice boy scout face of yours. Your good deed is just to listen. I jumped at thi
s marriage, Lloyd. God, how I jumped. And I made it damn well clear to him it wasn’t love. He said he’d never been convinced there was any such thing anyway. So now he wants love. I’ve got to go all dewy when he’s around. Mist right up. Gasp and bleat and whinny. He is the sort of human being who has to have everything, every last atom and molecule of everything he touches. He gets sore when I do what he calls ‘hiding in a damn book.’ He tells me I’m cold. If I stop telling him what a great man he is, then I’m being critical. Damn it all, I was willing to marry him, but I don’t want my privacy invaded.” She laughed suddenly. “That sounds wild, doesn’t it?”

  “Is he in love do you think?”

  “With me? No. He just wants to whomp the spirit out of me. He wanted me out here. Marriage was my price. I said I was getting too old for coeducational vacations. I also said that if you do too much of that sort of thing, the vacations get shorter and shorter until finally when you’re forty they only last twenty minutes in some crib in Trinidad. It was my price and he paid it, and now I think he figures I’ve got some paying to do. I can do a lot of pretending, but it gets pretty wearing. Lennie had a bull pup once. It liked to grab one end of a towel and have you yank him around on the other end. Every chance he’d get, he’d snatch a little more towel until finally there wasn’t any room for your fingers. Harry is like that.”

  “He’s left me alone.”

  “Try to leave and see.”

  He stared at her. “I could give notice and leave. Why not?”

  “You could be desk clerk in a flea bag. You’ll never get a good job managing a good hotel. Not for long. Not in this country. And I know just how he’d fix you. Through the unions. Hiring you would be a guarantee of a walkout on some other pretext. Harry never lets people go. He likes them to try it, though, because he likes to have them crawl back.”