The Only Girl in the Game

by John D. MacDonald

  Harry Charm, with a rusty reflex unused for many years, perhaps partially triggered by the fact that he was on his knees, crossed himself. There was not much blood. The sight of blood would not have awed Harry Charm. It was the deep groove in the right side of her forehead that startled him into the reflex of a forgotten piety of his youth. The groove was horizontal, midway between black brow and hairline, and over a half inch deep. Her eyes were one third open, showing only the whites.

  “Honest to God, Gidge, I didn’t mean to.…” Harry whispered.

  “Shut up. I’m trying to think.”

  Gidge Allen stood up. He felt very tired. He went to the door, opened it cautiously, looked up and down the corridor, pulled the wheeled hamper in, and closed the door again. He went over to the small desk. The light was on. It shone down on a plain sealed envelope. He ripped it open and read the short letter it contained. He gave a small grunt of satisfaction and put the letter in his pocket. He looked around the room. She had packed in haste. Discarded clothing was heaped on the closet floor. Her two suitcases were packed but still open, as was her overnight case.

  “Stay right here until I come back,” Gidge ordered. “I’ll send Beaver in to keep you company.”

  “Where are you going?” Harry asked in a small voice. Gidge did not answer. Five minutes later he was in Al Marta’s small office with the door shut.

  “It was one of those things,” he said.

  Al slapped his palm on the desk and said, “All I get lately are foulups. Honest to God, I can’t ask anybody to go bring a glass of water that something doesn’t.…”

  “It happened too fast, Al.”

  “Did it finish her?”

  “What difference does it make? I know she’s bad off. But the way it stands, we can’t afford to have her get well, can we? And talk to the law?”

  “So how does it look if she just disappears? How about that Darren? How about her missing the funeral?”

  “She’s all packed, Al. Getting rid of the luggage is a small problem. I know what flight she’s taking. The ticket is on her desk. So let’s have Muriel use the ticket, then take a bus to L.A. and fly back here.”

  “Hmmm. Not too bad, kid. Who can tell two pretty, good-sized brunettes apart?”

  “And this will fit just right,” Gidge said, handing Al the letter. “This was on her desk too.”

  Al read it aloud. “Hugh, my darling. Suddenly I have my chance to shuck this dream village forever, and I am taking it. We’ve had so darn much fun, you and I, that I don’t want to botch the ending with a lot of sticky nonsense in the farewell department. So take this good-bye forever bit in the warm way that I am writing it. It would depress me if you should try to get in touch with me, really, darling. I hope you do indeed fare well. You deserve the best there is, and I know you will make it your way, and reign over that little hotel on Peppercorn Cay. When you get sentimental on those balmy Bahama evenings, drink a tall one for me. And please, dearest, get out of this wretched place just as soon as ever you can. It is more foul than you yet realize, and it can do bad things to you if you let it. Of course you know that had we not been nonconformists, we would have fallen hopelessly in love. But this was our way, and, for us, the better way. So remember me in kindly ways, and stay fond of the memories … as I will, I promise. Good-bye, sweetie. Betty.”

  “It’s spelled c-a-y but it’s pronounced ‘ke’,” Gidge said.

  “Thank you so much. Okay. It all fits better than you deserve, boy. So take it the rest of the way. Use Beaver and Harry, and you go along so they won’t pick a spot that’ll get washed out, and they won’t quit too shallow.”

  “How about where we put the Hooker twins?”

  “Okay. It’s your baby, so get moving on it.”

  Gidge went back to the woman’s room. She was still breathing. He sealed the note into a fresh envelope. Beaver tied a towel around the bleeding wound. They bundled her into the laundry hamper, stripped the bed and piled the sheets onto her. Beaver brought the elevator back to two. They wheeled her in, and brought her luggage along. They went down to the cellar, wheeled the hamper back to a rear-entrance ramp, out and down the service alley to the waiting car. They put her on the floorboards in back and covered her with a dark robe. Beaver took the hamper back and, on the same trip, slipped her letter under Darren’s door.

  They rode, three in the front, with two folded entrenching tools tucked under the front seat. Their tension did not ease until Gidge, at the wheel, forty minutes later, made the turn into the two miles of private sand road that wound across rocky and uneven country to Al’s hideaway ranch.

  It was a chill bright night with the overabundance of stars that hang over dry desert lands. Gidge found the remembered place about halfway along the road, and he backed and filled until the headlights were bright on the area where they would dig. It was sand, loose and dry, and, except for being unable to lift very much at a time on the blades of the shovels, easy digging. In a short time the diggers shed their jackets. They had dragged the woman over near where they were digging. She was in the shadows of the night.

  When Beaver had complained long enough, Gidge spelled him. After five minutes he shed his coat. As he moved to lay it aside, he heard a quiet sound in the shadows. He stepped toward it, straining his eyes, and then with a yell of pure fury and outrage, he took two steps and swung his leg. Beaver rolled across the sand, screaming with pain.

  When he became coherent he moaned, “You hurt me bad, Gidge. You hurt me real bad, you mean son of a bitch.”

  “Who gave you the word you could mess with her, you goddam spook? She’s dead.”

  “She isn’t dead, honest. I wouldn’t even touch her if she was dead. Whataya think I am, anyhow? She’s breathing and her heart is beating. I listened.”

  Gidge Allen felt a disgust that was close to madness, a disgust for Beaver Brownell, and for himself, and for what life had done to both of them. He looked down at the woman, at the darkness of her hair against the starlit sand. He raised the short-handled shovel in both hands and with all his strength he brought the flat of it down on that sleeping skull. It was a monstrous sound in the night silence.

  He took a deep breath and let it out. “She’s dead now, Beaver. Here’s your shovel. Get back to work.”

  “I can’t dig. You busted me all up inside.”

  “You dig, boy. You dig right now and you dig hard and fast, or by God, you’ll go right into the hole with her.”

  Beaver hobbled humbly over and took the shovel. Gidge put his coat back on. He stood, smoking, watching them. When it was deep enough he had them put the luggage in, and drop the woman in on top of it. They covered her up, spread the excess sand, rolled two heavy stones onto the grave in a random pattern and then returned to the car. Beaver got into the back. It was obvious he would sulk all the way back to the city, and for days to come.

  Halfway back Harry Charm broke the long silence by saying, “I don’t know. A young woman, it seems like a waste, you know? It’s a dirty way to die.”

  “Any way is a dirty way,” Gidge said.

  “Some more than most. Tonight I get drunk, Gidge. Stinking drunk.”

  “I got to see a doc,” Beaver said, a whine in his voice. No one answered him.

  It was almost midnight when Hugh Darren returned to his room. He walked across the note and did not see it until he had turned his lights on and noticed the whiteness of it out of the corner of his eye. He thumbed it open as he walked over to the light.

  At first he could not make anything of it, believing, or trying to believe, it was some complicated joke. But suddenly loss was in him like a knife slammed home, then slowly turned. He went down the hall to her room, striding long, and thumped her door, waited, thumped again, and opened it with the extra key he kept on his key ring. The lights were out, and even in the dark as he groped for the switch he felt the emptiness. The lights confirmed it.

  He looked stupidly at the clutter of her hasty packing, at intimacies dis
carded. A wastebasket was piled high with the discards from dressing table and bathroom cabinet. He stooped and picked up from the floor a small topless vial that had held perfume. He held it to his nostril, and it was a sweet lost scent of her, faded, hurtfully nostalgic.

  “But why?” he said aloud.

  Atop discarded clothing, on a pile half in and half out of the closet, was a pair of worn whipcord slacks, stretched and faded, yet holding in slackness the faint warm hints of the long shape of her. A bra with a broken strap lay across the thigh of the whipcords, and it seemed to him a great sadness, forlorn and infinitely touching, so that in an instant the outline of it blurred and the corners of his eyes stung.

  He whirled and snapped the lights, slammed the door, and returned to his own room. As he entered he realized he still held the empty vial. He set it carefully on his desk as though it were of great value.

  He hesitated for one moment, then placed a call to Max Hanes’ office extension. When there was no answer, he called the casino cashiers’ cage. A bored voice said Mr. Hanes was still out on the floor, and he would be given a message to call back.

  Hugh sat by his phone, elbows on his knees, the heels of his hands against his eyes. He snatched up the phone at the first sound of the ring.

  “What’s on your mind, baby?”

  “Max, I got a crazy note from Betty Dawson. I don’t understand it. She says she’s left for good.”

  “You got the right message, boy. That’s just the way it is.”

  “But why?”

  “You tell me. She left me hung up on the late shift, buddy. That’s one of the bad things about depending on the showbiz types. You’d think she was settled in here for good, happy as a clam, but they get that restlessness and what can you do? I tried to talk her out of it, Hugh. She draws, not in any big way, but nice and steady.”

  “Did you have any warning at all, Max?”

  “None. She gave me the word … let me see … around five o’clock this afternoon. She’s walking out on a contract with no notice, but what the hell. There’s no point in trying to bitch her up.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “To San Francisco, I think. That’s where her old man.…”

  “I know. She’s told me about him. Damn it, it doesn’t seem like her to just take off and leave me this lousy note.”

  “Don’t get yourself in a sweat, Hugh, buddy. The wide world is full of playmates, and the ones you wish would stay take off on you, and it’s hell to shake the ones you get tired of, and that’s the way the ball bounces. Look, I got some potential trouble on the floor and I should be.…”

  “Okay, Max. Thanks anyway.”

  “Her mind was made up. There was no keeping her here.”

  He undressed slowly. He searched back through memory until he found her father’s name—Dr. Randolph Dawson. He wrote it down.

  “It would depress me if you should try to get in touch with me, really.”

  One thing about that girl—when she knocked it off, she struck a very clean blow.

  At seven o’clock on Tuesday morning, Scotty got clearance from the tower, pulled the Apache up off the assigned runway, tucked up the gear and headed toward the sun.

  The old man sat beside him, blinking slowly in the glare, the cheap dusty old hat tilted low over his eyes.

  One additional piece of luggage had come aboard, a plump old-fashioned satchel, so typical of the rest of the old man’s possessions that Scotty suspected it had made the westbound trip collapsed limply inside the big old suitcase. It was a small torment to add to a mild hangover to keep wondering what was in the satchel and to be unable to ask. If you asked the old lizard he’d turn his head toward you slowly and blink his eyes a couple of times and turn his head back, and after you set the ship down, you’d be looking for work. That was for sure.

  Now wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing if the satchel was full of money? Wouldn’t it be one son of a bitch of a thing if this dried-up old crock had clipped those slick bastards for a big piece of money? But that was a dream. Old Homer wasn’t human enough to gamble. He had some private deal working, and so he met somebody secretively at Las Vegas, and skinned them clean so the Gallowell Company would be able to pick up another couple million. Maybe in the satchel he had the hearts and livers of the people he’d met with.

  “How long did you stay by the phone at that motel yesterday, son?”

  “All day until I got your message you wouldn’t need me, at about three-thirty, sir. Then I went out.”

  “Had yourself some fun?”

  “Huh? Yes, sir. I guess I did.”

  Answer the questions. Don’t volunteer anything. Don’t, for God’s sake, chatter. Not if you want to keep the job.

  It was almost a thousand air miles, right on the button. He topped the tanks at Albuquerque and they ate lunch there. After Albu-Q the old man dozed while Scotty wondered why he had taken the satchel into the lunchroom and ate with it right under his foot. Scotty wished he could stop thinking about the damned satchel. He was glad when he could begin to let the plane down onto the rough strip at the old ranch. Most of the way from the old ranch down to the company field, he sang at the top of his lungs, wonderfully alone in the aircraft.

  Muriel Bentann caught the two o’clock flight out of Vegas. She checked no luggage aboard. She carried a small overnight case. The stewardess on the gate check ripped away part of her ticket and called her Miss Dawson.

  She found the kind of seat she liked, just behind the wing. She kept her eyes tightly shut throughout takeoff. When she knew they were safely up in the air, she lit a cigarette, opened her magazine, and began to study the fashion ads.

  Honest to God, the crazy things they tell you to do. That crazy Gidge, with all the orders. Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t pick anybody up. Take a cab into town. Tell the driver your father, Dr. Dawson, died yesterday and ask him if he knew him. Cry a little, if you can make it look good. Go to the bus station after you get rid of the cab. Get the first damn bus to L.A. Then get back here any way you want.

  They always had something crazy working for them. So the pay was real good, and they knew you did exactly like you were told and never asked any questions and never told anybody about what they had you doing. One beating had been plenty. More than enough for a lifetime. Anything the cops could do to you was nothing compared to the going over they could give you.…

  It was good pay, and by God, this time you are going to beat that wheel, Muriel, and you’re going to get it all back, kid, every dime, because you’re not going to get off the system. You’re going to ride that system and you’re going to get it all back, starting with that lousy divorce settlement and continuing right up through every dime you’ve earned and lost in Vegas. Then you get back the mink and the Cad, and you go the hell back East where you belong, away from this lousy hot sunshine and being broke half the time so you have to hustle the drunks for food and rent and write those lousy lying letters back to Mother about what a ball you’re having every minute of the day.

  I’m still pretty, she thought. I’m still real damn pretty, so I can keep staking myself until sooner or later I hit, because, O Lord, I’ve been so close so many times, and it has to come true.

  • • • eleven

  Hugh Darren lasted through Tuesday and most of Wednesday, conducting an unending argument with himself, doing his job poorly, and on Wednesday in the late afternoon he placed a person-to-person call to Miss Elizabeth Dawson at the phone listed for Dr. Randolph Dawson in San Francisco.

  She was not there. He heard a fragment of the other end of the conversation before the operator closed him off—enough to know it was not her voice, but the voice of an older woman who sounded breathless and excited.

  “Do they expect her there, Operator?”

  “That’s the way it sounded, sir. It sounded as if they have been expecting her since yesterday. I left a message for her to call you as soon as she arrives.”

  “Thank you, Operator.”
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  On Thursday he placed a call to her shy and ineffectual agent, Andy Gideon. Gideon rented desk space downtown. When he returned the call he sounded depressed and hurt. No, she’d left without any word to him at all. No note. Nothing. As soon as he heard about it, he had wired her home address, but there’d been no answer. He had no suggestion about how to contact her. Maybe if Mr. Darren would put a personal in Variety. … He knew he could get her a booking with no trouble at all, but it wasn’t smart to stay away too long.

  Hugh phoned San Francisco on Friday, on Saturday and on Sunday, leaving a message each time. On Monday he placed a person-to-person call to her father.

  The operator, with an odd note in her voice, said, “Sir, that person is no longer living.”

  “What?”

  “They say he died last week, quite suddenly. Is there anyone else you would care to speak to?”

  He asked for Betty once more, but she was not there, and once again he left the message.

  In a sense he gave up. Giving up was not the same as forcing her out of his mind. She was there for keeps, in a vividness that would not diminish. The world had moved into May, and the sun came down like molten copper. Vegas had moved into the long hot season of cut-rate conventions, with strange banners hung across main entrances up and down the Strip, and there were little clots of people in comic hats, with big badges and fines for any failure to use first names, and big luncheon meetings in the Safari Room, and political wranglings in the convention hall.

  The Sales Promotion Manager for the Cameroon had done a splendid job. There were very short gaps between conventions, and thus the slack of the hot months was taken up. Some conventioneers won a very little, and lied about it grandly, and some few won respectable amounts and kept it to themselves, and a great many lost hurtful amounts and lied about that and fretted in secret, and some few lost so much it was beyond lying. The money machine chomped the conventioneers, and smashed the ones who caught the bug, and continued to enrich the owners.