The Only Girl in the Game

by John D. MacDonald

  “I was getting about ready to go keep that date.”

  “What?”

  “That Playland Motel place, Room 190, like you told me,” he said irritably. “You want we should go there together?”

  She frowned. “Oh, no. We don’t have to do that now.”

  “You wanted me to help you, dammit.”

  “It wasn’t that.”

  “You know, you don’t make much sense along about here,” Homer said.

  She smiled in a tentative, almost apologetic, way, and said, “We don’t have to go there now because he died. Lottie phoned me, you see, and she told me he’s dead.”

  And, at last, Homer Gallowell knew what he was dealing with. He had seen it several times in his life. Of the memories of those times, the most vivid was of the young wife who, twenty years and more ago, had driven out to a drilling rig in East Texas in an old pickup truck to wait for her husband and drive him back home. Homer had happened to be there, checking on the progress of the drilling of this wildcat venture. The woman’s husband was local labor, a farmer interested in picking up extra cash.

  She had arrived before quitting time and parked next to Homer’s dusty Packard, and so she had a ringside view when the hoist cable snapped and the length of casing took one awkward, diabolical bounce before sledging the life out of the young farmer. She had come running to stare, whimper once, then walk slowly and woodenly away, heading with the stubborn blindness of a wind-up toy toward the meaningless horizon line. They had caught her and turned her and led her back, and he remembered how her eyes had been, and how she had worn this same timid, apologetic smile.

  He moved Betty Dawson back toward a chair. She sat, obedient as a child. He poured two ounces of straight bourbon and took it to her. She drank it down, shuddered, and gave him the empty glass.

  Homer pulled another chair close and took her hand in both of his. They liked their hands held. They liked the touch of the living.

  “Who died?” he asked in a gentle voice.

  “My father.” Her hand lay placid in his.

  “So now we don’t have to go to that there motel?”

  “Oh, no. I had to do whatever Max told me to do, or they’d send the pictures to my father.”

  “That’s Max Hanes?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of pictures you talking about?”

  He felt her hand tighten in his and then relax. “Horrid pictures, Homer. Of me and … a man. I didn’t know they were taking them. Max tried to show them to me. I threw up. I couldn’t let my father ever see them. You can understand that? I would do anything to keep him from seeing them.”

  “Sure you would, honey. So now we don’t have to go to that motel?”

  She frowned. “It was stupid anyway. I kept telling Max it was a stupid idea, that it wouldn’t work with you, but he kept saying you’ve got so much of their money it’s worth trying anything. So you see, I had to do like he said. Because of the pictures.”

  “It wouldn’t work with me?”

  “No. You wouldn’t go to bed with me.”

  He released her hand. “That’s right smutty talk, girl.”

  “He thought it might happen. That’s where they take the pictures. Movies. And they record everything you say. Al Marta owns it, somehow, I think. It’s all fixed up so they can put everything on film and tape, and Max told me they use it for a lot of different reasons.”

  “So what was he trying to gain, girl?”

  She looked at him with blank surprise. “To get the money back, Homer. So you’d gamble it all back. They fixed it so you couldn’t get hold of your pilot, faking the phone calls or something, and then if you were … attracted to me, you’d stay in town longer and I’d have to sort of tease you into gambling some more. I told Max it wouldn’t work with you, but you see he knows we’re friends, and because you’re … rich and important he didn’t dare try anything that might make you so mad you’d try to get back at the hotel somehow.”

  “Has this Max made you do this kind of thing often, child?”

  “Just three times, Homer. This would have been the fourth. But is three any different than three hundred?” She reached toward him and he took her hand again. “You see, I had no way to fight. You couldn’t have helped me. Nobody could have helped me.”

  He looked at her with mingled compassion and anger. “I have done a lot of things in my life,” he said. “I have grabbed them where I knew it was tender and I have made them do things my way. They have come at me from all the directions there are, and I have broken the ones that would break, and I have tooken the weapons off the ones with guts, but I have never done and I would never do to any human thing what has been done to you. There is maybe five thousand people cuss my name while going off to sleep and the first thing waking up, but I have never put myself in the way of cussing my own soul. When I was a boy child there was Indians still remembered ways a man like Hanes could be given ten days’ dying, but that knowledge has gone out of the world. I could have a grandbaby your age, girl. If I had to think up how she would be, I’d settle for you.”

  “But I got myself into this … that first time.”

  “You remember why?”

  “Broke, proud, scared. And I thought I didn’t care what happened to me. I thought I didn’t give a damn. And I kept myself just drunk enough so I could … go through with it.”

  “Show me one human thing hasn’t been a damn fool at one time or another. But most don’t get caught up on it. About your father, have you done your crying yet?”

  “I can’t. Not yet.”

  “It’s something you should get over and done with.”

  “I know.”

  “This little airplane takes four and you could come back.… No, you’d have to go to the services. Didn’t you tell me once you came from San Francisco?”

  “That’s right. I’ll fly home tomorrow.”

  “When that’s over and done, you come out. You let me know, I’ll send an airplane after you.”

  “Thanks, Homer. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll do. But thanks.”

  She looked a little better. He studied her for a few moments and suddenly thought of something else. “That glorified desk clerk you got your eye on, that Darren feller, he know about your … movie career?”

  She gave him a shocked stare. “Oh, no!”

  “Seems funny this happens all of a sudden and you come to me, not him.”

  “That’s over, Homer.”

  “Is it?”

  “He’s fine and clean and good. I knew it could last only until Max … needed me again. Hugh deserves more than a whore.”

  “Maybe he ought to have the say on what he deserves.”

  “No. Can’t you see it, Homer? If I let it … be as important to me as I want it to be … it would just give Max another hold over me. It’s ended. I’ll never come back here, Homer. I’ll never see him again.”

  “He might come looking.”

  “It won’t do him any good. Homer, please get your money and your pilot and fly away from here and don’t come back. These people are wicked animals. Go away and don’t come back.”

  “We both go away in opposite directions, and nothing at all ever happens to that monkey-looking Max Hanes? Don’t you think you and me, we ought to get together and bust him right down into the ground some way? Simplest thing would be to pay some fellers to come here and kill him off, but that isn’t right satisfying, somehow.”

  “If it hadn’t been Max, it would have been somebody else.”

  “Don’t you hate him, girl?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know about hate, I guess. Fear, yes. Love, yes. I love Hugh. I love him so much, I can … give him up.” She stood up.

  He came to his feet, looked at her narrowly, and said, “You all right now, girl?”

  “I’m … better, I think.”

  “Anything I can do for you? Anything in the world?”

  “I don’t think so, Homer. Thank you.” />
  “Get your crying done,” he said. He walked her to the door. In a clumsy yet courtly way, he planted a leathery kiss on the softness of her cheek. “You’re too much woman to let yourself get wasted,” he said gently. He watched her walk down the corridor toward the elevators, tall, staunch, graceful, her black hair glinting with health in the soft corridor lights. He sighed and closed the door and made himself a drink. So damn old, he thought. There was no fairness in it. When you got all your juice and bounce, you range the world and you can’t tell brass for gold and so you grab it all and spend it all in wild ways. Then by the time when you know, when you truly know what is worth all that scrambling, there is the grave yawning, two strides ahead of you, and no time left to use what you learned in hard ways.

  He paused with the drink in his hand, and he felt as if a sudden cold wind had blown across him. He wondered if this time he was, at last, going home to die.

  Max Hanes took the phone call from the technician.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m telling you again I don’t know why nobody showed up, and I’m telling you again you stay right the hell there until somebody comes to tell you to knock off. You’re getting paid, aren’t you? All I can say is it was all set up and I don’t know what happened.”

  He hung up. By his silver desk clock it was quarter after eight. He sat in brooding silence for one long minute, then phoned Betty Dawson’s room. There was no answer. He hesitated and then phoned Homer Gallowell’s suite.

  “Yup?” Homer said.

  “Uh … this is Max Hanes, Mr. Gallowell.”

  “Something on your mind?”

  “Well … I just thought I’d tell you the dice are running hot against the house tonight. Thought maybe you might want to get in on it and make that satchel of yours a little heavier than it is already.” He forced a laugh.

  “That’s what was on your mind, friend?”

  “Why … yes!”

  “Want to know what was on my mind when this here phone rang?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Funny thing, I was thinking about you.”

  “You were?”

  “I was thinking about something happening to you, and you know, I could see it and smell it, just as plain as the monkey nose on your face.”

  “What?”

  Max Hanes listened to the leathery, sardonic old voice with growing incredulity. It went on and on. It was graphic, specific, and horrible. Max Hanes had been in many places and had seen many things. And it had been a long time since anything had made his hands sweat and had turned his belly to ice.

  “What’s the gag?” he yelled into the phone. “What’re you trying to do, you old bastard?”

  “Now you’re all excited,” Homer said chidingly.

  “I don’t get the point!”

  “I was just telling you what you got coming, what you can look forward to, after I get it all planned out proper, Mr. Hanes. It’s a little return for bitching up Miz Betty’s life for her, then tryin’ to force her to see-duce an old man and take movies of it so as you could get the old man to give back the money he tooken away from your casino. So you should know, like the feller says, what the future holds in store, so you can think on it some.”

  Max Hanes held the dead phone for incredulous moments, then slammed it down, scrambled out of his chair and scuttled out of his office.

  Ten minutes later, in Al Marta’s small office up in the penthouse apartment, Al Marta sat staring at Max Hanes with a mixture of irritation, contempt and astonishment. Gidge Allen sat on a low table gazing quizzically, speculatively at Max Hanes. The ivory door was closed.

  “You cracking up, for chrissake?” Al asked harshly.

  “Listen. You didn’t hear that old guy. I heard that old guy. If he wants me over in Texas, he’s got the money to.…”

  “Settle down, Max,” Gidge said in his pitchman’s voice. “This don’t sound like you, baby.”

  “Let’s think this thing out,” Al said. “Maybe we got us a little problem here. Now from what you say the old man said to you, the only way to figure it is to agree the Dawson broad cued him to the whole bit. Right? And that Dawson broad comes in your department, Max. Right? So how did you lose control?”

  “I don’t understand it, Al,” Max said. “I just don’t understand it. I got her locked up tight.”

  “Your big problem, Max,” Al said, “is you like to lean too hard. You put on too much pressure, so sometimes people crack open from that pressure. And when they know as much as the Dawson broad knows, you’ve got problems. Right?”

  “You’re exactly right, Al,” Gidge said.

  “But this Betty has a level head,” Max complained. “We get along fine. She can read the score card. She’s known all along that the minute she gets hairy, we could give her old man the kind of jolt he wouldn’t like, seeing his only kid.…”

  Al Marta smacked his own high forehead with the heel of his hand. “Why do I have to figure these things out?” He picked up the phone, asked the switchboard operator some questions, listened, hung up. “She got the call from San Francisco a while back. Half the hotel knows it, but you don’t, Max. Her old man is dead. So where’s your lock?”

  “I didn’t count on anything like.…”

  “Shut up. I’m still thinking. She tells the old guy from Texas. She’s been banging Darren, and maybe now she tells him and we can lose him. Maybe she wants to open that big mouth and tell some reform type of a newspaper. Maybe with the pressure suddenly off, she wants to talk to everybody that listens. And I won’t have that, goddammit! Publicity like that stinks. The industry don’t like it. I want that mouth closed up fast, Max. Has this broad ever been jolted around some? Has she ever been sharpened up on exactly where she stands, Maxie?”

  “Uh … no, we’ve never had to do that, Al, but.…”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “Well, she isn’t just any broad, Al. This one is gutsy.”

  “So then it just takes a little longer, doesn’t it? You seen one yet that couldn’t be brought into line? Now we know where we’re going, so let’s move fast on this. Fast but careful.”

  “She’ll be going to San Francisco for the funeral, Al,” Gidge said. “Should we wait until after?”

  “There’s too many chances in that I don’t want to take. Anybody out at my ranch right now?”

  “Those Miami guys left two days ago. It’s been cleaned up. No.”

  “Where is she right now?” Max said he didn’t know. Al cursed him heartily, made two quiet phone calls, hung up, grinned broadly and said, “So right now she’s in her room, packing maybe. What time is it? Twenty to nine. Gidge, you move fast on this. Get with Harry Charm and pick one other guy. You go along too, because I don’t want this getting out of hand, and I don’t want her marked up. Three guys should be able to get one broad out of the hotel in a quiet way. You got all night with her and as much of tomorrow as you want to use, and I want you should turn her into one polite, obedient, humble little doll. I want her in a condition where if she ever even thinks of opening her mouth, she gets the cold nightmare sweats. I want her tamed so good she’ll be okay to go to the funeral and come running right back here all ready to stand at attention and salute any time Max here gives her any extra duties in the future. I don’t care what you boys do to her, but I don’t want you turning her into a crazy, like happened to that singer that time. Just teach her who owns her, Gidge, in all the ways that’ll make it stick. Now move.”

  “What about that … Gallowell?” Max asked.

  “You get this stupid one more time, Maxie, and maybe we wrap you up and ship you to Texas.”

  “Come on, Al. Honest to God.”

  “In all these years I never seen you like this before. That old boy will take his money and run, I figure. You going to dream up a new way to stop him?”

  Max Hanes’ smile looked wooden. “I will carry him and his pilot piggyback to the airplane, with the suitcases in my teeth. I will pack that sa
tchel all the way full for free. I wisht I didn’t know all of a sudden how you can skin and salt a man down without killing him too quick.”

  Gidge Allen, with a casual authority that belied a crawling tension in his belly and a sweatiness of his palms, set it up so that Betty could be taken from the hotel with no fuss whatsoever. He had agreed with Harry Charm’s suggestion that the three of them, Gidge, Harry and Beaver, could handle it properly. He had Harry bring the Lincoln around and park it in the shadows behind the convention hall. They went up in the service elevator from the basement, riding up to the second floor of the old wing, the three of them sharing the service elevator with one of the larger laundry hampers on rubbertired wheels.

  He left Beaver to hold the elevator door open and also act as a lookout. Harry wheeled the hamper to the Dawson woman’s door, and parked it where it would be handiest the moment they would need it. Gidge knocked. She opened the door. The moment it opened they went in quickly. As Harry moved toward her, arms outspread, Gidge closed the door and took the braided leather sap from the side pocket of his jacket. He was an expert with the sap, knowing where to strike and just how heavily. It was Harry’s mission to grab her and hold her just long enough for him to stun her. She would awaken in the swift black car on the way to Al’s ranch house.

  Her dark hair hung to her shoulders. She wore a shiny green robe. Her eyes were reddened and puffy. She backed away, startled and frightened, and in that moment when she was immobilized, Harry should have grabbed her. But he was old and tired and heavy, and she was a strong, agile woman. His reflexes were slow. As Gidge moved in quickly, she sidestepped Harry’s lunge, and she began to scream. Gidge saw that she was going to try to run by him to reach the door, and he planned to spin with her and tap her solidly behind the ear as she went by, and try to ease her fall.

  But as she started by, Harry Charm, half panicked by the loudness of the screams, regained his balance and turned and lunged again. She was almost out of his reach but he half fell, caught her agile thighs in a clumsy tackle and brought her down. Her head smacked with a sickening solidity against the edge of the night table and she lay silent, looking suddenly much smaller. Harry pushed himself back up onto his knees. She was face down. Gidge squatted and turned her over gently. The orange light spilled across her face.