The Only Girl in the Game

by John D. MacDonald

  “If it’s less than fifty million, I’ll eat his biggest ranch with a tin spoon.”

  Al clapped him on his solid shoulder. “So let’s take it all.”

  “We’ll take all we can get of it, boss.”

  At ten o’clock, while Hugh Darren was checking the front desk, Max Hanes said he’d like a minute in private, so Hugh took him back to the office and turned on one hooded desk lamp.

  Max walked over and sat at Jerry’s desk in the far shadowy corner, sighing as he sat down. “Jerry is out of your hair, kid. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “It’s a good thing to know, Max. It makes everything a hell of a lot easier for me. Thanks.”

  “We can talk things over together once in a while, and it should all run smooth. Right?”

  “No reason why not,” Hugh said guardedly.

  “You get a hundred a month bump as of May first, Darren.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you think you’re worth it to the joint?”

  “I know damn well I’m worth it.”

  “Then that could be the reason you’re getting it, couldn’t it?”

  “For a minute there, Max, I had the idea you were recruiting me for extra duty.”

  Max Hanes chuckled in the darkness. “A clean-cut American boy like you, Darren? Hell, you’d write an indignant letter to the governor. We’re a bunch of thieves, like you learned all about on the TV. Dirty gangsters. Mafia, maybe.”

  “I didn’t say that, Max.”

  He heard the chair squeak as Max stood up. He came over into the cone of light. “Bill the casino account for everything on Homer G. Gallowell of Fort Worth.”

  “I saw his name on the reservation list and I checked him back and saw that he got the best, on the house, before, so I set it up that way. But I planned to check with you, of course.”

  “When you’re set on the suite you’ll give him, tell my assistant, Ben Brown, the number. I’ll have him put a one-dollar slot up there, and a hundred silver dollars to play around with.” He strolled toward the door, an apelike figure in a yellow raw silk sports jacket. “See you around, Mister Manager.”

  “Max … this is just idle curiosity, but when you put a one-dollar slot in a room like that, is it the same payoff you have on the floor?”

  “I like the way your mind works, kid. The state doesn’t like for us to rig the slots too lean. But they don’t care at all if we make one real fat. It gives a man a lot of confidence, pulling that handle, listening to the payoff crash into the scoop. It makes him happy. That’s why we’re here. This is a happy little city, full of fun and games.”

  “I know. That’s why, on some of the checkouts, I have to charge the freight to the casino account, because somehow the happy people haven’t got one dime left. They’re so happy they can’t stop smiling.”

  “You’ve got to learn that a mark is going to give it away to somebody, kid. There’s no way to stop a real mark. So when he’s ready, you just try to be first in line.”

  By the time Bunny Rice, the night manager, reported in at eleven, everything was so well under control that it required only a ten-minute briefing to catch him up on the problems in process of solution.

  Hugh had tried to make himself stop thinking of Betty Dawson, but by the time he walked down the corridor toward his room he had a good vibrant alive feeling, as though his skin fitted particularly well, as though he could do front flips all the way down the empty corridor. There was a prickling of the skin on the backs of his hands and the nape of his neck. Her burlesque bikinied strut came into his mind and it seemed to him that he was unable to take a deep breath.

  He fitted his key into the lock and opened the door as quietly as he could, and made himself close it again with the same stealth and shoot the night bolt before he let himself look at her. She lay tousled in his bed in a sweetness of sleep. She had thrown a towel over the bedside lamp, and there was a soft orange-pink glow against her sleeping face. She was on her side, facing him, both hands under the crumpled pillow, with a crow wing of her dark tumbled hair curling down her cheek and around to her throat.

  There was a note for him under the light, a sheet with large printing on it, one corner under the lamp base. SLIPPING BEAUTY it read, AWAKEN WITH TENDER KISS. A crude arrow pointed toward her. Her slacks, cardigan, big purse and wisps of underwear were arranged in severe order on a straight chair beyond the foot of the bed. She wore a nightgown, pale blue-and-white net and lace, as evanescent as a mirage, a tenderness against the brown of her throat and shoulders. Her lips were slightly apart, and the thickety lashes were closed over the secrets of her eyes.

  Moving without sound, he undressed in the sweet silence of the room, he paused once when he caused a harpsichord jangle of hangers, but she was not awakened. He went to her then with eagerness, but paused and sat slowly, with the patience of a thief, on the edge of the bed, so he could watch her for a little while and enjoy the gentle guilt of one who watches the face of a sleeping friend or lover. By forestalling his own hunger he sharpened his desire.

  It was, he thought with a proper humility, a rare kind of luck, and a seldom thing. Back in August when he had begun work, he had been tense about the size and complexity of the operation and the almost total lack of proper administrative controls. There had been no one to break him in on the job. Buckler was a compulsive fool, obviously jealous of the assistant who had been forced upon him. And Hugh could define the limits of his authority only by testing them.

  The employee situation was difficult. The good ones were glad to see the change, and the thieves were frightened. He had no one to confide in, no one whose judgments he could trust. And so his first project was to familiarize himself with every aspect of the operation, from linen inventory, to printing receipts for guests, to rejuvenation of wilted lettuce, to window-washing schedules, to shot-glass dimensions, to the uniforms of maids, to furniture repair and replacement. He worked a fifteen and sixteen hour day, roaming, watching, scribbling notes, assessing personnel. He knew they were all watching him, wondering when he would suddenly stop being an observer and start chopping off heads.

  It was during the nights of his roving that he became aware of Betty Dawson. She worked the Afrique Bar just off the main casino floor to the right as you came into the casino from the lobby. She was working the midnight to six, doing her four shows in alternation with other entertainers. He found that she could provide the closest thing to relaxation and forgetfulness for him, and he fell into the habit, when he was around during the small morning hours, to go in and sit at the curve of the bar nearest the small stage and listen to her. She had a limited range. She talked her way through a lot of her songs. But her face was very alive and, at times, wonderfully comic, and she had the refreshing trait of seeming to be sourly amused by her own antics. The lyrics of her songs were quick and tart—and blue without being tasteless.

  He began to have a preference for some of her songs and to await them with pleasure. He liked ALICE WAS AS BLUE AS HER GOWN, and THEY’RE STILL RECRUITING GIRLS FOR THE NAVY and THE GIRL OF THE WEEK CLUB. She seemed to enjoy truly horrible puns, and he wondered who wrote her material, and he was more pleased than he should have been when he learned she wrote it herself.

  By a quiet question here and there, never betraying more than the most casual interest, he learned that she was the nearest thing to an entertainment fixture the Cameroon had. She had been there almost two years, and her room was but three doors from his. Knowing that Max Hanes handled the entertainment, with approval, when necessary, he made the obvious assumption that there was a special relationship between Betty and Max, between that curiously sinister apelike old man with his playboy wardrobe and this handsome woman who, behind the practised facade of an entertainer, had the ineradicable perceptions and instincts of a gentlewoman.

  With that nagging question still unanswered, he had begun to move, doing the things that needed doing, installing checks and controls, weeding out and strengthening the
staff. In this process he had learned he could trust Bunny Rice. One dawn while they were discussing individuals, Hugh casually mentioned Betty Dawson as being Max Hanes’ girl.

  Bunny looked pained. “No, it isn’t that way, Mr. D. I’ve never known of Max to take that kind of interest in any girl, or any boy either, in case I’m giving you the wrong idea. Max is maybe in love with the money room.”

  “I guess I got that idea because Miss Dawson has been here so long.”

  Bunny had shrugged. “She’s not a big draw, but she’s got a following. She’s on the tab for room and food, so what Max pays her makes hardly any dent in his budget. She doesn’t make any kind of trouble, and she knows how to handle a drunk.”

  “Shouldn’t she get better hours after being here so long?”

  “Betty likes that shift, Mr. D. She really does. She has a point. She can sleep late, get up in time to catch some sun, have herself a nice evening before she has to go on. Other entertainers, you keep them on that shift too long, they start to bitch about it. Not Betty.”

  “So she’s found her home away from home.”

  “I guess she’ll stay quite a while.”

  “Bunny, you gave that little remark a strange sort of emphasis.”

  “There’s some kind of an edge working for her.”

  “I’m getting goddam tired of the little hints about wheels within wheels around this place. What kind of an edge? What kind of an angle?”

  “Don’t get sore. I didn’t mean anything by it. And it isn’t just this place. It’s the whole town. You hear things, that’s all. I don’t know anything specific about Betty Dawson. But I’ve gotten the impression that … there’s some other kind of tie-up with Hanes and Al Marta, something that makes it unlikely they’ll fire her or that she’ll quit. I think she comes from a good family. I guess you can tell that. She’s a doctor’s daughter, they say, and she went to college, and for quite a while she had an act with Jackie Luster, and nobody ever got mixed up with him without coming out on the short end. He can pack any room in town and name his own price, but nobody in show business who knows him well can stand being in the same room with him except when working.”

  And so Hugh Darren had added all the bits of information together, but it was not until nearly the end of his second month on the job that he got to know her. They had nodded and smiled and said the appropriate greetings whenever they met in the corridor or on the staircase or in the elevator.

  He came out of his room at dawn one morning in October just as she was walking slowly toward her room.

  “It’s time I thanked you, Mr. Darren.”

  “For?”

  “Nice little things going on. Nice, and appreciated. Better food, better service, and the whole gaudy joint is cleaner and smarter, inside and out. And all your little service people are … I don’t know how to say it … getting a better attitude about working. They act less like they’re doing you an enormous favor to fill your water glass or hand you your mail.”

  “I didn’t know whether it was beginning to show, Miss Dawson. I’ve been too close to it to really see it.”

  “Oh, it’s showing. And it’s wonderful. Living here was beginning to seem a hell of a lot like camping out, or like one of those collection points for refugees from disasters. You’re a pro, Mr. Darren.” She smiled at him. “And do you know what I like best?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The way you kinda drift around, no sweat, no strain. Just ambling around in a slow smiley way.”

  “I keep pretending I’m not getting an ulcer.”

  She yawned. “ ’Scuse please. I guess I hate fidgety, nervous little managers who trot to and fro, bobbing and wringing their hands. It wears me out watching them. You apparently get no rest at all, but you’re still restful.”

  “And thanks for that too, Miss Dawson.”

  “If it wouldn’t be showing too much familiarity with the hired help around here, you could make me more comfortable by calling me Betty.”

  “And Hugh, if you please.”

  “Hugh when we meet in the corridor. Mr. Darren in front of the troops, sir.”

  “I like your work, Betty.”

  “I know you do.”

  “How?”

  “You laugh at exactly the right places. And you keep coming back for more. So it hasn’t been any secret. So thanks, Hugh. And this is just about all the mutual admiration I can take at the moment. Seventy-one seconds from now I either fall into bed, or flat on the floor. It’s a delicate problem of timing. And a good morning to you, and a good night to me.”

  From then on it was very easy to talk to her, so easy and so pleasant that he found himself making little adjustments in his schedule so that it would happen more often. He learned the likely time to find her out by the pool, or in the coffee shop, or having dinner in the Little Room. His was a lonely job and a hard job, and she was the only person he could talk to in an unguarded way. He learned that she was observant, and he found it to his advantage to check some of his conclusions about members of his staff with her. In one way it surprised him that she should know so much about the personal problems, the domestic situations of bartenders, bellhops, waitresses; she seemed to have little time to learn such things. But on the other hand she was a warm and sympathetic person, and her interest in other people was not forced, and so they talked about themselves to her. He found himself doing the same thing.

  By Christmas their friendship was close and comfortable, and very probably it would have leveled off at that point had she not decided he was looking a little too drawn and weary. She did not work on Wednesday nights. She talked him into taking a Thursday off, and she was most mysterious about the whole project. They left the hotel early in the morning on the seventh day of January, in her stodgy, elderly Morris Minor which she called Morris in a way that turned the designation into a personal name. There was a giant picnic basket resting on the back seat. She drove thirty miles out of town, and then three more miles over a track so primitive the small car moaned and sighed at each hump and dip. They were in the burned and ancient land on a morning clear and bright, dazzlingly new.

  In country where for reasons unknown even the shacks of the desert rats are fashioned of boards brought from far away, the place where she stopped, at the end of the road, was of the red-and-brown native stone. It was a small place, which blended against the lift of a small, angular hill.

  She had a key for the crude, heavy door, and she was very much at home in the place. There was wood stacked for a big fireplace. There was a deep well gasoline pump with manual controls and a big pressure tank, a gauge to be watched carefully. There were propane tanks for a small stove and a gas refrigerator. There were gasoline lanterns.

  Most of the interior was one big room—living room and bunk room, with the kitchen at one end, and a small bath. She enlisted his aid in getting the utilities operating. When all chores were done she looked at him with a pride in this feat, in this special place, and said, “See? Like for hermits.”

  She stood, smiling at him, wearing pale tailored whipcords, a bulky white cardigan, and soft desert boots, her black hair ponytailed with a thick white length of yarn. Mirrored sunglasses made her eyes unreadable.

  “It’s exactly ten thousand years from the Cameroon,” he said.

  “And so it is exactly what we need, Mr. Darren dear. And first comes the picnic-type breakfast, and you build a fire to take the chill off this place, and then comes a walk to places I know, and then back here for drinks, and then lunch out on the picnic table in the sun, and a nap for the weary ones, and more drinks and the final eating, and some more fireplace-type atmosphere, and then back through the night to the tired old workaday smell of money. I’m going to schedule the hell out of your day, truly.”

  She did. They were in the middle of fifty thousand years of silence, and it was a restoring thing. They moved the luncheon table to a sunny place out of the chill wind. They ate like wolves, and later they talked and they nap
ped, Betty on the fireplace couch, he atop a gray blanket in one of the wide deep bunks.

  It wasn’t until after dinner, sitting on the Indian rug in front of the fireplace flames, that he said, “Okay, so you won’t volunteer any information until I ask. Or, if it’s a secret, I’m out of order. But is this your place?”

  “In a funny kind of way, I guess it is, Hugh.” Her voice was soft and thoughtful, and she was looking at the flames and mesquite coals, half frowning, hugging her legs, chin on her whipcord knees.

  “Mabel Huss actually owns it,” she said. “She’s a fat, sloppy, ignorant woman, Hugh. Ignorant in book ways. She runs a motel in Vegas, a little old junky place on one of the old streets, all crowded in between a furniture store and a big shiny operation with a name that haunts me because the neon used to flash in my window. Super-Drug, Super-Drug, Super-Drug, it said, all the night through. It was a cheap place, the cheapest I could find, and I was way down, Hugh. There are little pockets of despair in Vegas for people who are way down, Hugh. Down as far as they can get. The thing is, in Vegas or anywhere, you aren’t put down by the cruel world all by itself. You have to get in there and help the bastards bring you low. That’s something hard to learn. It’s so easy to blame everything and everybody else.

  “I can skip the stinking details, except to say Mable was carrying me on credit for no good reason in the world, and there was one way I could get out of the whole dreary deal, but it was a way that made me feel a little sick to my heart to think about. But I was scared, and even though it wasn’t long ago, I was inconceivably younger than I am right now. I had that special kind of stupid pride which made me feel I couldn’t get on the collect phone and yell help to my father in San Francisco. So I decided to be real hardcase about it, and I told myself it was that kind of a world, and I walked right through the door the bastards were holding open for me. And it was worse than I had thought, Hugh. Don’t ever romanticize evil.

  “I solved my problems in what they call one fell swoop, buddy, and I caught the brass ring, and it was so damn bad, every implication of it, I knew I had to die. I had lost myself. And though I didn’t have to, though I could have started going first class right away, I went crawling back to Mabel’s Comfort Motel, knowing that all the trouble I’d thought I was in before was nothing at all. I spent twenty hours in a stupor of self-disgust, and then that fat woman, without saying much of anything, loaded me and some cartons of food in her old car and drove me out here and left me. It was a special kind of wisdom, Hugh. This is the kind of aloneness you need when you have to mend yourself, when you have to form some kind of adjustment to the sort of person you have suddenly become through making a bad error.