The Only Girl in the Game

by John D. MacDonald

  He raised himself up on his elbow. “It isn’t the way I thought it would be. How about grabbing my cigarettes off the bureau over there?”

  “I don’t want to keep you up. You’re very tired.”

  “I want to talk about it, Betty.”

  She brought the cigarettes and ash tray, lit his cigarette for him, snapped the lighter shut with more force than necessary and said, “Me, I have this lousy honesty about my opinions, Hugh. They can be your dearest friends in all the world, but I think she is a dumpy, vicious little pig.”

  “She’s made Temp a good wife, Betty.”

  “And lived damn well while doing it, I presume.”

  “Sure. But I never felt close to her, particularly. I’m fond of Temp.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “And they aren’t at all the way they used to be.” As Betty listened, he explained the whole thing to her. He finished the story, stubbed out his cigarette and lay back on the pillow. “So he came here for my help.”

  “And you’ll set it up with Al Marta?”

  “There isn’t much else I can do.”

  “If any deal is made, Hugh, it won’t be as nice for Temp as he wants it to be.”

  “He’s at a point where he hasn’t got a hell of a lot of choice. Time is running out for him. He can’t go to reputable money. They’d take a year to case a deal this size. He has to have the fast money, and so he has to deal with the kind of people who have it.”

  “Don’t get caught in the middle, Hugh.”

  “How could I?”

  “I don’t know, but be careful.” She looked down at him with her warmth and with a look of wry curiosity. “I suppose she found a chance to badmouth me?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What was the general drift of it?”

  “Oh, how you wouldn’t stack up so well anywhere else but here.”

  “If I could be guaranteed an all-female jury, I’d strangle that little monster. They’d never convict me. How do you think I’d stack up elsewhere, friend?”

  “Wherever they put you, old buddy, you’re well-stacked.”

  She stood up. “And on that note of reassurance, I shall take to my lonely bed and cry my eyes out, I betcha.”

  He lunged and caught her wrist and pulled back, bringing her down upon him. “There are better kinds of reassurance, girl.”

  “No, Hugh. Really! I didn’t come in here to.…”

  He stilled her struggles with a kiss, and when it ended she looked owlishly down at him, their noses an inch apart. “I’ve got no character,” she whispered.

  “When somebody tries to cast a shadow over our beautiful friendship,” he said, “I figure it gives us a sort of obligation to reaffirm it just as soon as humanly possible, don’t you?”

  “Your thesis is unarguable, sir.”

  She went into his bathroom and sponged away the theatrical makeup, came out and, in the rosy-gray light of dawn that leaked through the almost-closed slats of the blinds, rid herself of the golden gown and two wisps of nylon and her diaphanous hosiery and her tall golden sandals. Then, standing there, she undid the blackness of her hair until it fell about her shoulders, and came to him, bringing to him in special pride the deft abundance of her love.

  • • • five

  Gidge Allen told Hugh over the phone on Saturday morning that eleven o’clock would be a pretty good time to talk to Al. When Hugh took the small private elevator up to the penthouse at the stated time, he found a dozen people milling around the big living room, most of them working on Whisky Sours and Bloody Mary’s. Morning television was on full blast, ignored by everyone. A slight Negro with a mustache sat at a small electric organ, seeking out lugubrious chords. Two men argued heatedly over a racing sheet. A redhead was proving to a mildly interested group how long she could stand on her head. Hugh nodded to those he knew as he worked his way over to the windows where Al Marta stood talking to a dumpy swarthy little man in a cheap suit of electric blue, a dirty striped shirt, and shoulders thick with dandruff.

  As soon as Al noticed Hugh’s approach, Hugh heard him say, “All you’re doing is wasting my time, Mario. I can’t give you no answer. Go away and get it set up and come back with it all laid out and maybe we can talk about it.”

  As the man trudged sadly away, Al gave Hugh a wide white grin of welcome and said, “You don’t come up here enough, Hugh. You should come around any time. We always got some kind of action going. We always got laughs. You work too hard down there, you know that? Take it easy sometimes. Everybody’s going nuts about the wonderful job you’re doing. We got Jerry off your back, right?”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “And another bump in pay. You heard about that?”

  “Max told me, Mr. Marta.”

  “Mr. Marta was my father. He’s dead a long time, God rest his soul. If you don’t call me Al you get me sore, Hugh. Let’s go where we can hear ourselves think.” He took Hugh through the bedroom and into the small study beyond. The walls were almost solid with framed photographs of celebrities, fervently inscribed to Al Marta.

  Al settled himself in a deep chair, put one foot up against the edge of the pink desk and said, “Sit right there, Hugh. You know, boy, the way we got it set up now, we got the strongest team on the Strip. You and Max. The way you two are working together, everybody is nuts about the operation we’ve got. Thank God I got the sense to stay out of it. All I do is represent the owners, being one myself. And thanks to you, I’m living better here every day. I wanted to get that across to you, Hugh, how much everybody thinks of you. Now what is it you got on your mind?”

  “It’s an investment opportunity, Mr.—I mean Al. I don’t know if you or any of your associates would be interested in it. There’s an old friend of mine in the house right now. He asked me to … vouch for him.”

  “Sometimes I’m interested in putting money in something good. How much is involved?”

  “Seven hundred thousand. And it would have to be cash.”

  With no change of expression, Al said, “Until you said that, kid, I was ready to reach for the brush. You better give it to me slow and careful.”

  Hugh explained what he knew of the deal. He outlined Shannard’s background. Suspecting that careful checking would be done, Hugh did not make the mistake of minimizing Shannard’s current difficulties.

  “Temp has maps and all the facts and figures, and he can talk to you at your convenience, Al.”

  “This is prime land, you say. And you’ve worked out there.”

  “You can’t find Island land that desirable now, in tracts that size.”

  “Suppose it went through, kid. Maybe you got your heart set on a finder’s fee? Or do you get your end from Shannard?”

  “I get nothing at all. I wouldn’t want anything.”

  “You don’t like money?”

  “It isn’t that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I’m just doing a favor for an old friend. That’s all.”

  Al studied him with quiet amusement. “Sure, kid. We understand each other. Tomorrow your pal gets the chance to make his pitch. Some time tomorrow afternoon. I know some guys who’d like to listen to it. They got to have time to get here. I’ll let you know when to set it up. You want to sit in?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Tell your buddy the wheels are starting to turn. Okay? Now why don’t you go out and have some fun and drinks with the kids while I make a couple calls?”

  “Some other time, Al. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “You’re way ahead of the game already, so why don’t you relax a little?”

  When he got back downstairs he called Temp’s suite, but there was no answer. He put a note in a sealed envelope and left it in Temp’s box at the desk. He had a very late lunch after a long and bitter conference with a food wholesaler who had been trying to squeeze George Ladori for special kickbacks. He was able to take a break at four o’clock and make a quick chang
e to swim trunks and go out to the pool.

  When he located Betty he walked over to her and said, “Why don’t you pick the same place every day?”

  “I love having you hunt for me, darling. It keeps you off balance. I finished breakfast not ten minutes ago. I am truly a slob.”

  “A lovely slob, with little telltale shadows under her eyes.”

  “You don’t exactly look as if you were bristling with energy yourself, friend.”

  “Hell, something woke me up at dawn, and it was quite a little while before I could get back to sleep. You know how it is.”

  “No I don’t, really. How was it?”

  “Keep that up, and we could get thrown off the premises for bad behavior.”

  “Braggard!”

  He noticed the towel spread on the grass by her chair. “You found a friend?” he asked, with an edge of annoyance in his voice.

  “Your friends are my friends. It’s Temp. He’s swimming at the moment. Vicky has gone shopping. He’s much nicer sober. But, then, aren’t we all? Did you talk to Al?”

  “It’s all set up for tomorrow afternoon.”

  Temp joined them, grinning, thumping the side of his head to get the water out of his ear. “You showed up too soon, Hugh. I was just about to start the sweet talk.”

  “She’s listened to experts. She doesn’t need beat-up types from Nassau.”

  “I’ll decide what I need, gentlemen.”

  “Get the note?” Hugh asked.

  “Yes, and thanks. Today I’ve got my confidence back.”

  Hugh looked at him. Nothing bad would happen to this brown man who sat in the expensive poolside sunshine, droplets of water shining against the brown of his shoulders. Temple Shannard would not be defeated.

  Homer G. Gallowell of Fort Worth, Texas, arrived in Las Vegas in his own Piper Apache at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, piloted by a prematurely bald young man called Scotty. Homer had dozed most of the way. Scotty felt more at ease when the old man was asleep. It seemed a little better, somehow, than having him sitting there beside you not saying a word, just sitting and staring straight ahead, never looking down or to the side.

  In his four years of employment by the Gallowell Company, this was only the second time he had ever piloted the old man himself, and the first time he had ever been alone with him in so small a ship. Parker, the chief pilot, had given Scotty his instructions.

  “You fly by the book, boy. You run that check list like you had an inspector with you. And in your landing patterns, you make those turns loud and clear. You pretend like you’re wheeling seventy people commercial, and you’ll have no trouble. Don’t you say a word to him you don’t have to say. And for God’s sake, don’t try to help him in or out of the airplane. When he says something to you, you give him the shortest damn answer you can come up with, and give it fast. When he gives orders, you listen so good you hear everything.”

  “You make him sound rough, Joe.”

  “Man, I mean he is rough. He’s got twice as many million dollars as you have years on you, and he didn’t get ’em by being a nice guy, that’s for sure. He’s an old lizard, baking hisself in the sun, dreaming about foxy tricks, and he doesn’t miss a thing goes on around him. He’s tough and spry as an old lizard too.”

  “Why’s he want to go to Vegas?”

  “How do I know? Maybe he owns it. He could have owned the whole place for years and nobody would ever know about it. He pays smart men four times what he pays us just to keep his name out of the papers, Scotty. You just bear down on the flying, and let him think about why he has to go to Vegas.”

  As they came over the mountains Scotty was thinking how little the old man looked like the traditional image of the rich Texan. He was spare, fairly tall, and he had the look of one who had been powerful in his youth, but the years had shrunken the slabs of muscle to hard gristle and string. He wore a rusty black suit and a vest with a gold watchchain looped across it, and steel-rimmed glasses that rested in a slightly crooked way on the sharp old beak of a nose. He wore high black shoes, bulbous at the toes, a cheap bright necktie soiled in the area of the knot from many tyings, and a black ranch hat, old and worn and dusty. He had the hard, lean, grooved, wind-bitten face of a man who has spent the front half of his life sleeping on the ground. His hands, thickened by the toil of years ago, rested on his thighs, scarred, red-knuckled, looking too big for the rest of him.

  See him in a bus station, Scotty thought, and you’d figure him for an old ranch hand on his day off. You’d never guess about all that damn oil and more land than he’s ever had a chance to ride across, and the other stuff they say he owns—newspapers, radio and television stations, chemical companies down on the Gulf, oil-well-supply outfits. You could never guess it from the way the old son of a bitch looks.

  They say he married once and she took sick a year later and lived twelve years in pain before she died, and that was the end of it for him. They say if you cross him, he’ll wait until he’s got you set up just the way he wants you, and then he’ll grind you down into rubble. Power is what he lives off, they say. He eats it and drinks it and rolls in it. Most times he travels with all those serfs around him, bowing down, yessiring, doing the paper work for his big deals. They say he used to have a U.S. Senator he tamed and treated Like a dog. But sometimes, like now, he moves alone.

  Scotty made his tower contact, waited his turn, brought the plane around and set it down, and taxied to where they told him.

  The old man dropped down lightly and Scotty handed his old square-cornered suitcase down to him.

  “You get the aryplane checked over good and gassed to go and put in a place that suits you, Scott. I’m going to be at the Cameroon. You locate you a place and phone the name of it and phone number to the Cameroon for them to put in my box so I can get you when I need you. You stick close by that number up to five in the evenin’ every day, and from then on do like you please because we wouldn’t be leavin’ later. Don’t get yourself too drunk to fly the aryplane, and beyond that I don’t give me a damn what you do.” He took a long black old bill case out of the inside pocket of his jacket and gave Scott a hundred-dollar bill. “You’ll charge gas to the company, and you’ll get expenses back from the company, and this here hondred dollars is to amuse yourself with on account of you kept your gawddamn mouth shut and flew good and steady.”

  By the time Scotty could open his mouth to thank him, the old man was fifteen feet away, lugging the heavy bag without apparent effort, heading toward the cab rank at the terminal.

  As Homer Gallowell rode toward the Cameroon in the cab, he felt a cold and savage excitement in his belly, strong enough to outweigh his own dry amusement at himself. It had been too many years since he had felt this way. He was walking right back into the polished machine that had taken one fifth of a million dollars away from him the last time he was here. He had come to Vegas the previous time because it had been selected as neutral ground, and there had been some dickering to do. He had not been interested in the gambling. He had found himself with unexpected time on his hands, and he became interested in the mechanics of the crap table as he watched, with contempt, the sweaty fools being parted from their money. In time he thought he saw a way the odds could be beaten, and so he had tried it and suffered a humiliating defeat. The damage to his cold pride had hurt much worse than the loss of the money.

  And now he had come back, prepared for a laboratory experiment in the methods that had made him an enormously powerful man. And what was sweeter to him was the knowledge that he was bucking somebody else’s system. It had been too many years since he’d had a chance to do that. Men challenged him from time to time, but he knew all the uses of power in the areas where he was challenged. They had to play his game, and their defeat was so inevitable it often bored him. Long long ago he had whipped other men at their own games, and the memories of those times were still sweet. This was a rather childish opportunity to try it again.

  The men at the Camer
oon would be delighted to see such a valuable sheep come back for a second shearing, he knew. And they had no reason to suspect it would not go exactly as it had gone the previous time. Possibly they thought him senile. And, he thought, possibly I am. And this return visit is a sign of it.

  But there were some things they could not know. They could not know that he had installed a crap table at the old ranch south of Dallas and he had spent a few hundred hours estimating odds and methods of play before calling in one of the bright young mathematicians from the Gulfport outfit. Once the young man got it through his head he was to take this seriously or get fired, he settled down. He compiled figures, took them back and checked them against the electronic calculator at Gulfport, then came back to the ranch.

  The problem was to find the most plausible way to win three hundred thousand dollars with the smallest chance of loss. All systems of doubling up except one were eliminated, and that one would only work if Homer Gallowell could achieve a very generous hike in the limit on any one bet. After intensive study, that system was also eliminated. The critical factor seemed to be the provable assumption that the more bets placed, the better the house percentage against the bettor. Patient and bewildered ranch hands, who wondered if the old man had begun to lose his mind, threw dice for hours. The opinions of professional gamblers were secretly sought. And the final plan was an apt combination of the sterility of higher mathematics and the superstitions of the accomplished gambler.

  It had as good a chance of working as Gallowell had hoped for. It depended on his exercise of a rigid discipline. He knew he would not deviate from the program in any way. Yet, in spite of all the planning and all the caution, the casino might take his money just as easily as before. It was that chance which kept him in a state of cold anticipation as the cab pulled up under the marquee of the Cameroon. He had grown weary of sure things in the last decade.