The Only Girl in the Game

by John D. MacDonald

  The old man’s face changed, the narrative light fading out of his eyes, leaving them as lifeless as pebbles.

  “She’s dead,” the old man said, gently. “I’m sorry, son.”

  Hugh carefully set his drink aside and lowered his face to his cupped hands. There was a long silence in the room. He lifted his head and picked up his drink. “Go on with it.”

  “I’ll get rid of that Beaver first, son. After my boys milked him empty without quite knocking his brain off center, they drove way out to check on where she’s buried. We want to steer the police to the exact place, when this is all over, without the police knowing who told it. There was a question about what to do with Beaver and how to handle it quiet, but he fixed all that for himself. He’d had all he could take and a little more, so all of a sudden he yanks himself loose and starts running across that empty land, giving a couple of yelps at first but then saving everything for running.

  “One of my boys took off after him, sprinting to catch up at first, and then just loping along right behind him, nice and easy, grinning like a young wolf lapping vinegar. Ever’ time Beaver would begin to lose his top speed, my boy would make some appropriate speech about just what Beaver was going to lose when he caught him. The information kinda spurred that man on. All of a sudden Beaver stopped running at top speed and pitched onto his face and slid a little ways, probably dead before he hit the ground.

  “My boys aren’t doctors, but they guess his heart blew up.

  “He was carrying a good piece of money on him, and I let the boys keep it as extra pay for having to work out there in that hot sun with sticks and stones, scraping a groove deep enough to bury him in. He made it maybe a whole half mile into that desert, up and down little rises in the ground, before he come abrupt to the end of himself. We had no more need of him anyhow, having the whole story by then.”

  “Don’t edit it for me, Homer.”

  “I wasn’t fixing to. Hanes, Marta and Allen had a little conference after I talked so damn fool free to that Hanes, and they had found out, somehow, her daddy was dead, and so they had to find some other way of controlling her. So it was agreed that Allen, Charm and Brownell would take her to Al Marta’s ranch, about thirty-five miles out, and break her down to the point where from then on she’d do like she was told.

  “But when they went up to the room to take her out, there was a scuffle and she tried to break loose and got knocked down and hit her head bad, so bad you don’t have to ever think about her knowing a thing from then on. They wheeled her out in a laundry cart, along with her luggage. Allen talked to Al Marta about what happened, and they plain couldn’t risk putting her in a hospital where they couldn’t get to her, even if she could have recovered, which didn’t seem promising. And if she died in the hospital it was going to make a lot of awkward questions being asked by police and such. So they took her out to that private road leading to Al Marta’s ranch and … she was dead by the time they got her there and so they buried her and her stuff, come back and parked her little car at the airport, and sent that Bentann woman to San Francisco on her ticket.”

  “Have you left anything out, Homer?”

  “Only if that Beaver happened to leave anything out, and from what my boys said, there wasn’t anything in the whole world he wasn’t right anxious to tell them all about. We know the five that were in it, and now there’s four. Having that Beaver run hisself to death sorta cancels off any idea of bringing in the police, even if we’d ever had that in mind. So we got to go at it in our own way, son. You give any thought to how we can use the weapon I spoke of?”

  “I have a few ideas, but.…”

  “Slide that there satchel out from under the bed and open it up, son.”

  Hugh opened the small suitcase on the bed. It contained packets of currency, neatly banded and labeled.

  Gallowell walked to stand beside Darren. He took one packet out of the suitcase, bounced it in the palm of his old misshapen hand, and flipped it back with contempt. “Pretties,” he said. “Toy things. The whole sad batch of human kind sweatin’, strainin’, cheatin’, bustin’ their sorry guts trying to pile this here stuff up so high they can’t see over it. But it was this stuff killed Miz Betty. And it killed that Beaver. And … it’s got some more killing to do.”

  “It looks like … quite a lot.”

  “I got me a deal coming up later on this year that’ll take cash money, so to save trouble I forsook the interest, money on what I flew away from here with, and this is part of it. It’s still banded up like they done it in that money room over at your hotel. I separated out the packages of hundreds they wrapped up personal, no new bills and no serial order. There’s twenty-two of them, fifty in each package, which makes a hundred ten thousand. It should be enough to make all the trouble we got to have. Now look here, at this one. It’s just like all the others. This is the type band they get from the bank, saying five thousand, right here. Now here’s two sets of initials, so you can figure one man counted it and wrapped it and initialed it and another man checked up on him and initialed it. This here is the date, writ in pencil, so it’s no trouble for you to change the date some. Anybody like Hanes or Marta looking at one of these would know right off it come out of the money room. So you can see how all the rest of it is up to you, once you get this cash money smuggled into that hotel and hid.”

  “All hundreds?”

  “It’s the logical kind of cash money to stick to a man’s fingers. Smaller bills are too bulky. Bigger ones get checked too close and they don’t spend so easy.” Gallowell walked back to his chair and sat down. Hugh closed the suitcase lid over the money. He turned and looked at Gallowell.

  “I want to know what you think of the risk of turning it over to me.”

  Gallowell chuckled. “You mean like you taking off with it? I thought of that, sure enough. You fixin’ to?”

  “God no!”

  “So let’s stop talking kid stuff and get down to a little planning, son. You know what’s possible and what’s impossible, so you try the ideas you’ve had on me and I’ll see what holes I can pick in them.”

  When Hugh Darren returned to the Cameroon at ten o’clock that evening, he was carrying the money in a large brown paper bag, with the top securely crimped. He shrugged off the offer of one of the bellhops to carry it for him. He had the feeling that anyone who glanced at the bag would know at once what it contained. He felt sweaty and short of breath by the time he reached his second-floor room. After he had locked and bolted the door and adjusted the blinds, he dumped the money out onto the bed and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. When he discovered he could not think clearly with the money in plain view, he covered it with his robe.

  After he had sat for a time in the big chair by the window, he was able to control his random thought patterns and force himself into a logical evaluation of those factors necessary to the plan. There was no need for all the money to be hidden in one place. The hiding places had to be safe, yet so readily available to him that he could quickly take advantage of unanticipated opportunities. It might be wise to carry a couple of packets on his person, he thought.

  In Gallowell’s room they had carefully erased the penciled 2’s, 3’s and 4’s that indicated the month in the written dates, substituting 6’s and 7’s according to the indicated day, so as to label the packets as having been bundled in the money room during the latter part of June and the early part of July. The dates had to be very recent, because it was logical to assume that a thief would place such a packet in a temporary hiding place with the idea of moving it to a better place, such as a lock box, as soon as was convenient. And during that second transfer remove the band.

  After a careful evaluation of all possible hiding places in his room, he settled on the trite device of concealing a dozen packets, $60,000, in the bottom of an ancient musette bag that hung on a hook in the back of his closet. He stuffed an old shirt in on top of the money. After a few rehearsals he found that it took a very few seconds
to enter the closet, slide his hand down past the shirt and select, by touch, one to four packets to transfer to his pockets. At eleven o’clock he went down to his office, with the rest of the money packed in the briefcase.

  The office hiding place was logical and obvious. He maintained one drawer in a safe file for personal matters, letters, credentials, tax forms, confidential reports. He had the only key. That particular file stood in the corner behind his desk, and his was the bottom drawer. He packed the money into the front of the file and relocked it.

  He sat at his desk and realized his jaw was clamped so tightly the muscles ached. Now all doubt was gone. And because doubt was gone, so was hope. Death is a wind slamming a door that can never be opened again.

  Hanes and Allen. Marta and Charm. Max, Gidge, Al and Harry.

  Here I come. Ready or not.

  There is no living space in any hotel which is off limits to the hotel manager. Improvements, repairs and redecoration can always be arranged by order of the manager. And there is no reason why he should not, during his inspection tours of the hotel, look at the work he has ordered done.

  During the balance of the week of July 4th, three projects were begun. Al Marta’s penthouse apartment was scheduled for redecoration. Al’s current showgirl helped him make the color selections. Work was begun in Gidge Allen’s room.

  On the second day, Hugh Darren went to see how the work was coming. He said to the boss painter, “How about the interior of the closet over there?”

  “Well, it looked okay to me. I checked it.”

  Darren stepped into the large closet. He found Gidge Allen’s topcoat hanging near the back of the closet. He took the six packets of bills from his pockets and slipped them quickly into the deep pockets of the topcoat.

  He stepped out and closed the door and said, “It’s good enough, Hank. We’ll catch it the next time around.”

  It was summer, and the desert city lay dazzled under the white torch of the sun. It would be months before Gidge Allen would touch that coat.

  In the room occupied by Harry Charm, and in the three adjoining rooms, the scuffed and battered floor of asphalt tile was torn up and replaced. When Hugh Darren left Harry’s room, after a perfectly normal inspection visit, he left two packets of bills in the flap pocket of a heavy red-and-black mackinaw.

  When one wall was torn open in Max Hanes’ suite, Darren found the quiet and swift opportunity to leave eight of the packets divided between the two pockets of a black overcoat with a fur collar.

  When he had disposed of the sixteen bundles of currency, he had six left. Five of them were locked in his file.

  It seemed to Hugh to be a satisfying irony that he was able to set up his crucial appointment with Al Marta on a Monday. It was the twelfth Monday since Betty had been killed.

  It was six o’clock. Al had had a couple of drinks. Al locked the door of his small personal office and said, “So you want it private, you got it private, kid. The place isn’t bugged. Now what the hell is on your mind you got to put on an act like this?”

  “You’ve been very fair to me, Al.”

  “You trying to quit or something?”

  “I … I think I might be in serious trouble, Al.”

  “So tell me what it is and we’ll get it fixed up.”

  “I can’t even convince myself I’m doing the smart thing in telling you.”

  Al looked at him with impatience and annoyance. “I was having fun, kid. You’re taking up time. So get off the dime.”

  “You see, I want to handle this in such a way, Al, that I won’t get what Beaver got.”

  It seemed to Hugh that Al Marta stopped breathing for a moment. The shape of his mouth changed and flattened.

  “What do you know about Beaver?”

  “I know a little and I’ve guessed a little.”

  “Do I get somebody to come and slap it out of you?”

  Hugh reached into his side pocket. He took out the packet of bills and tossed them onto the table. “This should tell you something about the reason.”

  Al Marta picked up the bills and suddenly slammed them down. “Oh, dammit, no! Oh, goddammit, no! It would have to be some way through Max. You better do some talking, Darren.”

  “I’m no part of whatever has been going on, Al. I’m coming to you with it. I’ve been sitting on the information for some time. I want to make a deal.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “I want protection. I don’t want to be put in the middle on this. I’ll tell you everything I know, and based on that, you can probably make better guesses than I can. I want to keep on running this hotel, and I want the pay and title of manager. In return for that, I’ll never tell another soul what I’m about to tell you.”

  “If what you tell me is worth it, it’s a deal, Darren.”

  “I think it’s worth it. You’ll have to be the judge. Three days before he disappeared, Beaver Brownell came to my room at four in the morning. He acted furtive and peculiar, but he wasn’t drunk. He said he had something important on his mind, but he couldn’t seem to get to the point. He acted nervous but confident. He kept telling me he had decided he could trust me. He said he had a big deal working for him. He said it was a money-room deal. I said I wasn’t involved in that part of the operation. He said that was why he had come to me.

  “Now I’ll try to say it in his words. ‘Harry and me found out about it, like by accident, way back, and so the two guys working this deal, they had to cut us in, and they cut me in small, less than Harry. So now I’m putting the squeeze on. Harry says I’m wrong. But I’m telling them I get cut in equal, or I go to Al. So what I want from you is, you take this here envelope and don’t open it and put it in a safe place. It’s my protection. If something happens to me—and I think it won’t on account of I got those guys bluffed good—you take this to Al because it’s the proof, and you tell Al that Max and Gidge are taking him. You tell him to move in on them real slow and he’ll find they hide the take in their clothes in their closets until they get the chance to move it out to a safer place. Tell him Harry is in on it too. Tell him they’ve took a fortune off that money room.’ ”

  “And he disappeared … eleven days ago? Where have you been?”

  “Thinking. I opened the envelope and the money was in it. That’s the proof he was talking about, I would say.”

  “It sure as hell is!”

  “I didn’t want to get mixed up in a thing like this. And I couldn’t understand why Beaver didn’t let the others know that he’d arranged for somebody to tell you all this as soon as anybody started to get tough with him.”

  “So why didn’t he?”

  “I think he started to tell it, Al, but he didn’t finish his story.”

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe they roughed him up a lot before he was given a chance to say anything. And you remember his bad heart.”

  “Bad heart?”

  “I know he was ordered to go on the wagon and leave women alone. I forget who told me.”

  “I just can’t believe Gidge would.…”

  “There’s more.”

  “You’re giving me the worst night in ten years already, kid.”

  “I don’t know what he said or how he said it, but I think somebody has the idea I know something about all this.” He glanced toward the door. “Could anybody hear what.…”

  “This room is soundproofed, kid. For business reasons.”

  “Good. Somebody got into my room this morning, probably with a passkey. They pried open the locked drawer of the small desk in my room, and broke the lock. Everything is mussed up in all the other drawers. Maybe they were looking for that money, or a letter written by Beaver. I wouldn’t know. But I don’t like it. I want protection, Al.”

  “And if you hadn’t started to get nervous, you would just have held onto this five grand. That’s right, isn’t it? Isn’t that why you waited so long, figuring you could keep the money?”

  “I could have kept it anyway.” />
  “How?”

  “I could have given you a different package, even. Maintenance is laying a new floor in Harry Charm’s room. I had a chance to check his closet. It was locked, but I have a key that opens that type lock in all the rooms. He’s got ten thousand dollars, I think, in two packages like this one, in an old red-and-black jacket.”

  “Harry Charm has ten thousand dollars!” “I didn’t want to risk checking either Gidge’s closet or Max’s. I’m no hero, Al. I’m in over my head. I’m sorry I ever came out here. And I wish to God Beaver hadn’t picked me to trust.”

  “He picked pretty good,” Al said softly. “He picked pretty good.”

  “Does my deal stand, Al?”

  “What? Oh, hell, yes. Now stay right there a minute.”

  Al went out and closed the door. Hugh sat and stared at the pursed and pulpy mouths of the actresses in the fondly inscribed photographs on Al Marta’s office wall. When Al returned, a full ten minutes later, he slammed the door, emptied his pockets and tumbled six packets of bills onto the table.

  “I sent him into town on an errand. And I was thinking what a damn fool thing to do. I knew Gidge couldn’t be on the clip. Maybe Max, even. But not Gidge. Jeez! All the laughs we’ve had. All the years of kicks. All the broads and all the bottles.”

  He spun around, hands spread in a gesture of appeal, his face contorted like a child fighting tears. “But I had to look, didn’t I? I didn’t have any choice about that. I had to know Gidge was okay, didn’t I?”

  Hugh sat silently, knowing Al did not want an answer.

  Al picked up a bundle of money and dropped it. “All these were taken in the last ten days,” he said wonderingly. “I loved that guy. I trusted that guy. Why should he do this to me?”

  “Maybe he … was just bored,” Hugh said cautiously.

  “I got this soft heart. I treat everybody too good. So that makes me good old Al. Some kind of dummy, maybe. I think they’re laughing with me and all the time they’re laughing at me. For chrissake, they figure me for such a meathead, they even do a sloppy job! He’s so confident he doesn’t even take the wrappers off and hide it better! And they just don’t give a damn how bad I look if it ever comes out.”