Shirley

by Howard Fast

  Shirley stared at them. She knew precisely what she planned to do; she knew how foolish it was; and she also knew that having placed herself in this position, there was no turning back. But she was also herself, a condition she could not alter upon a moment’s notice, and she found herself saying:

  “I’ve turned up rocks and found better than you under them.”

  “Just what does that mean?”

  “Guess!”

  Santela moved toward her, his face hard and cruel now, his eyes blinking rapidly. Shirley did not give an inch, but said to him quite flatly and unemotionally, “Don’t try anything like that, Joey. I am all you got. I am your whole deck of cards. So don’t rub me the wrong way.”

  Suddenly he swung on Soames and demanded shrilly, “What kind of a bitch is this, Albert? Suppose you explain yourself! Suppose you tell me just what kind of a bitch you have here. Whose side is she on?”

  “She’s on our side,” Soames replied.

  “You’re sure? You’re sure?” Santela cried. “Stupid punk—”

  Soames face reddened. His throat swelled as he said to Santela, “I take a lot from you, Joey, but don’t start talking like that, because if you do—”

  Smiling, Santela went over to Soames and took one of the boy’s hands between both of his. “Forgive me, Albert. I lack restraint, be my restraint for me.”

  “Crud,” Soames muttered. “Sometimes, you make me sick.”

  “Poor Albert. I press him too hard.”

  “Oh, Jesus, cut that out,” Soames groaned.

  “It will be better after you’re married to each other,” Shirley said.

  Santela whirled on her again, but Soames grabbed his arm and said, “What’s the use, Joey? What’s the use of knocking yourself out? That’s the way she is. That’s the way this God damn dame was from the moment I laid eyes upon her. She’s a snotnose. I think you could kill her, and she’d still be a snotnose. She knows everything. She knows all the answers. So what’s the difference? As long as she does the job, what’s the difference? Believe me, I’d like to give her something. I’d like to mark her until she’s like the twin sister of the tattooed lady. But it’s just not in the cards, so the hell with her. As long as she has a sweet tooth for a buck, she’s going to play ball with us.”

  Santela had regained control of himself by now, and he spoke softly as he told Shirley, “Fair’s fair, Shirley. I couldn’t have been more of a gentleman with you, could I?”

  “You’re a gentleman,” Shirley agreed.

  “I’m only asking that you be a lady. Janet Stillman was a lady.”

  “Oh?”

  “For twenty-four hours.”

  “All right, Buster, for twenty-four hours.”

  “And don’t call me Buster.”

  “All right,” Shirley shrugged.

  “That’s the way she is,” Soames said. “The hell with her! That’s the way she is. What did you expect with something you picked out of the Morris High School yearbook—Princess Margaret? It’s a lot more important, it seems to me, to decide what we do.”

  “I’ve decided, Albert.”

  “What? Jesus Christ, what? You give up the seventy million! You blow the whole thing to the old man! So he wants to see his daughter, so what?”

  “So hell pay for it. I promised him that Janet would see him. In fact, I promised him that I would bring Janet and her husband to his house for dinner tomorrow night. But I said only if he was prepared to turn over her trust fund to her—the entire sum in cash, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash.”

  “And he fell for that?”

  “Of course he did. What does money mean to him now—against a chance to see his daughter? He believes me. Have I ever given him reason not to believe me? I’m not asking for money. I’m not pulling wool over his eyes. All I say to him is that I can bring his daughter to his house. Why should he doubt me?”

  “And the cash?”

  “It’s in the safe in his house right now. He telephoned the bank yesterday and had it sent up.”

  “A lousy two hundred and fifty thousand bucks—”

  “Suddenly it’s a lousy two hundred and fifty thousand bucks. An unemployed actor who never had three square meals a day, and suddenly it’s a lousy two hundred and fifty thousand bucks.”

  “Lay off that business about three square meals a day!” Soames shouted.

  “Just lower your voice.”

  “I got news for you. I come from a good home. My old man had money. We lived with some class. Who the hell are you to talk to me like that?”

  “Always the temper, Albert,” Santela sighed. “If you would think about it a bit, you would realize-that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, tax free, is a lot of money—a God damned lot of money. How much do you think is left of an inheritance when the feds finish taking their bite out of it? Furthermore, the jewels that belonged to Janet and her mother are worth a fortune. If we play our cards right, we can have those jewels—or most of them—and if we sell them carefully, they should bring close to three or four hundred thousand dollars. Do you know what that kind of money means in Brazil?”

  “Who the hell wants to live in a lousy hole like Brazil?”

  “Ah,” Santela smiled. “There talks the voice of inexperience. You have never seen Rio, Albert, or you would not talk like that. And who says that we must live in Brazil permanently? Only for long enough to make sure that we left no loose ends hanging, to make sure that the old man is dead and that we are clear. Then—any place, here, Paris, the Greek islands—the whole world is our oyster.”

  “Then, if that’s the case,” Soames said, pointing to Shirley, “what do we need her for?”

  “Score one for Charles Alexander,” Shirley muttered.

  “Oh, use your head, Albert. What we’re going to do is not a crime—providing we play it cool. There’s no reason why the old man should ever know that she isn’t his daughter. He wants so much to believe that she is that he’s ready to believe anything. And if he does, we walk out of that house clean, no cops after us, no bens ringing, no feds to make things hot in Brazil—”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Then it’s too bad, but he’s very sick and he hasn’t long to live in any case.”

  “You’re both cute,” Shirley said. “It’s going to be cozy, just the three of us down there in Brazil. But don’t I need a passport or something?”

  “I have Janet Stillman’s passport. That should do.”

  “You think of everything, don’t you, Joey,” Shirley smiled.

  “I try. I also thought of the possibility that you’re here thinking that you can make patsies out of the whole lot of us. But if I were you, I would give up the thought. You’re playing with grownups, and this means a lot to me, Shirley. I spent over a year planning this and working it out.”

  “I always wanted to know a master criminal,” Shirley said sweetly. “Someone who uses brains instead of muscle.”

  “You don’t stop talking like that,” Soames began, and Santela interrupted him, “Leave her alone, Albert. She amuses me.”

  “Sure, she amuses you. Well, just look at the way she’s standing there. She’s not human, that bitch.”

  “We all call each other nice names,” Shirley nodded. “But just let me tell you this, James Charles—nobody ever called me a bitch without living to regret it.”

  “She gives me the creeps.”

  “All right, Albert—she gives you the creeps. Suppose we leave it there. We’ve got a long night ahead, and I have to convince her that she’s Janet Stillman and that she knows what Janet Stillman knows.”

  “And what about Flint?”

  “I’m sick and tired of Flint,” Santela said. “What would Flint do in Brazil?”

  “He could talk.”

  “People like Flint don’t talk. If he opens his stupid mouth, he puts a rope around his neck.”

  “You know what I’d do,” Soames said, the petulance of the small boy showing thro
ugh, “I’d—”

  “Don’t be tiresome, Albert. I know what you’d do. But you can’t go around murdering people. I don’t like it. I don’t want anyone’s blood on my conscience. Cheap thugs murder people; men of intelligence use their intelligence.”

  A few minutes later, Flint returned to report that the car was securely in the garage.

  “What now, boss?” he asked Santela.

  “Now a pause in our preoccupation,” Santela replied, smiling with pleasure at his bon mot. “We want a week or so to teach this young lady how to become Janet Stillman.” Santela took a pad of bills out of his pocket and peeled off five twenties. “Here’s a hundred dollars, just to tide you over. Find a small, quiet hotel downtown and then call me when you’re settled. Take a rest. Play some solitaire. Enjoy yourself. I’ll let you know when we’re ready to move. You won’t mind being rich, will you, Flint?”

  “Just don’t doublecross me, boss,” he said, looking at Soames as he spoke.

  “Flint—my dear fellow.”

  “OK. OK.” Then he left.

  “Oh, how I hate him,” Soames said.

  “Hate is profitless, Albert.”

  “What about the car?”

  “Sold. I sold it today, and I leave it at the airport for the buyer tomorrow night. Now, Albert, Shirley and I have a lot of work to do. How about you going to a movie? Let me suggest a British film—both amusing and calming.”

  “I’ll stay, if you don’t mind.”

  Santela shrugged. “By all means, stay if you wish. I simply thought it might bore you. But perhaps you could help iron some of the rough edges off her speech.”

  “In one night?”

  “That’s all we have, Albert.” He turned to Shirley then. “And now, my dear, are you ready for some hard work?”

  From the chair she had dropped into, Shirley stared at Santela.

  “Anything wrong, my dear?” he asked.

  “Wrong? No. Oh, no. How could anything be wrong? I’ll just never tell myself again that I know them all. I don’t. You two—you two are a couple of cards. Yes, sir.”

  “And how am I to take that?”

  “Easy, Joey. Let’s go to work,” Shirley said briskly.

  9. The Ways of a Lady

  “No, no, no, no,” said Santela. “No. Absolutely no! Never the rising inflection. Never. The rising inflection is the symbol of one long step from Rivington Street.”

  “I come from the Bronx,” Shirley sighed. “I have never been near Rivington Street. Well, I have been near it, but that’s only lately.”

  “I said one long step from Rivington Street. No—rising—inflection!”

  “Drop dead,” Shirley said.

  ‘It doesn’t help us for you to tell me to drop dead,” Santela pointed out with extraordinary patience and restraint. “It doesn’t help one bit, Shirley. I’m breaking my back to try to give you some preparation for what may well be something of an ordeal tomorrow. The least you can do is to co-operate.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “I say it will.”

  “Look, about my mother, may she rest in peace, suppose you found some old bag who was her twin. Do you mean to tell me I wouldn’t know she wasn’t my mother?”

  “If the likeness was good enough.”

  “You’re a nut, Joey.”

  “I don’t intend to be provoked, Shirley, and I don’t intend to fall into any more arguments. Now once more. Where are you going? Notice how I drop down on the word ‘going.’ Instead of the rising inflection, we reverse it. We have a falling inflection, so as to speak. We throw half of the word away. That’s very cultured.”

  “I am not cultured,” Shirley said firmly. “Furthermore, I am exhausted, and the air in here stinks.”

  “Albert, open a window,” he called to Soames.

  “Tell him to jump out of it while you’re at it,” Shirley suggested.

  “Go to hell,” Soames said, as he went to open the window.

  “Sweet boy! Look, Joey,” Shirley said. “I want to go outside for a walk. I have been cooped up in this miserable hotel room for five hours now, and I’m ready to choke. Suppose I go out for a little walk.”

  “Suppose you don’t.”

  “What do you mean, suppose I don’t?”

  “I mean just what I say. Here you are and here we stay, until we leave here to go to Morton Stillman’s house.”

  “You mean I’m a prisoner here?”

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  “Joey, be reasonable,” Shirley wheedled. “I came here of my own free will, didn’t I?”

  “Shirley, I wasn’t born yesterday. You came here because you saw the gun under Albert’s arm, and because you’re a good enough judge of character to know that he would use it”

  “Then what’s my game?” Shirley demanded indignantly.

  “If you’re going through with this, and if you play it dirty anywhere along the line, we’re going to kill you.”

  “Come off it.”

  “I couldn’t be more serious, my dear Shirley.”

  “Stop playing games. I said I’d go through with it. But you don’t go around killing people. You said that yourself.”

  “Not killing people,” Santela smiled. “One. You. What else? You know everything.”

  “You’re sick,” Shirley said.

  “Just as you wish. I don’t know what you’re playing for—maybe for a time, maybe you’re caught, and maybe you like money. That’s why I think you’ll be sensible, Shirley. There’s at least a hundred thousand dollars as your share. You’re a strikingly good-looking girl. You could do a lot with money. I say that objectively. It just happens that you don’t attract me. Women don’t attract me. I don’t think I like women very much—any women. So don’t imagine that I would be in the least sentimental.”

  “I know. You’re romancing me in reverse, Joey.”

  “A smart aleck remark doesn’t solve anything, Shirley.”

  “For crying out loud, Joey, you’re not going to kill me, and you know it. It would louse up your whole scheme if you did.”

  “Not entirely. The money is at Stillman’s house. I’d have to get it the hard way, but I think Albert and I could without too much trouble.”

  “What would you do with my body?” Shirley asked desperately.

  “That’s the least of my problems, my dear. I’d simply put you in a closet and lock it. The rent is paid here for the rest of the month. I’d tell them that I was going off for a while and that no housekeeping is necessary. When they got around to opening the closet door, Albert and I would be old Rio hands and you, my dear, would smell pretty rank.”

  Shirley shuddered, and Santela nodded appreciatively. “I’m pleased to see that you have some human reactions, Shirley. Now suppose we drop this morbid subject and return to work. Where are you going—without the rising inflection.”

  “Where are you going?” Shirley repeated, without a rising inflection.

  On a bridge table, Soames had set out a sort of improvised dinner service. He sulked over the work. It was half past two o’clock in the morning, and as the night progressed, he became even more irritated and more petulant than he had been earlier. Twice, he had corrected Santela on questions of pronunciation, where Santela was instructing Shirley, and twice Santela had snapped at him that he would do best to mind his own damn business and that two teachers were worse than none.

  “Well, you don’t say ‘charmed,’” Soames said disgustedly. “Even I know that, Joey. For Christ’s sake, no one has used ‘charmed’ that way since World War One.”

  “You know,” Santela snorted.

  “Yes, I know. I learned something as an actor. You put her up to these silly things, and she’s going to sound like that half-witted dame in the Marx Brothers pictures.”

  “Suppose you let me decide.”

  All Shirley pleaded was a desire for sleep. “I can’t keep my eyes open,” she protested. “I had a long hard day. It’s bad enough when
you come out of your eight hours at Bushwick Brothers, and then I had that crazy Seppi trying to cut me up and a ballet number on the roof with your two lover boys—”

  Santela sent down for coffee, while Soames set the table, using whatever was available in the small pantry that came with the hotel suite.

  “No, no, no!” Santela cried, watching Soames out of the corner of his eye while he had Shirley do an exercise in “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”

  “I want two forks,” Santela said, “and for someone who was brought up in the annex to the Vanderbilt mansion, you might have picked up the knowledge that the forks go on the left, always on the left, the forks on the left, the knife on the right, the spoons with the knife—always, the spoons with the knife. I want two forks, one is the salad fork, one is the meat fork. I want a soup spoon and two small spoons.”

  “Why don’t we all knock it off for the night,” Shirley said. “Anyway, I feel like the Prisoner of Zenda. You got me locked up here. I register a dissent and you scrag me and fold me into the closet, so I got to convince this guy that I’m his daughter—but anyway it won’t help with the rain in Spain. I can tell you that. I saw My Fair Lady twice. That’s par for the course with any girl who dates. They want to impress you, so they buy tickets for My Fair Lady. But let’s face it, Joey. I’m no Covent Garden flower girl. Until I got hooked up with you two bird-brains, I took a bath every night—”

  “You see that,” Soames cried shrilly. “Birdbrains! That lousy bitch does nothing but stand there and insult us!”

  “Drop dead,” Shirley said, hanging onto her complex train of thought. “What I mean is that the Bronx is not London. What good does it do for me to wander back and forth telling you that the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain? It’s not even good geography. Whoever this Morton Stillman is, he must have a little bit of common sense to put together such a bundle like seventy million dollars. Even if he’s groggy, he’s going to know who his daughter is.”

  Spreading his arms, Santela said placatingly, “Shirley—Shirley, my dear, I tell you that I, who knew his daughter for three years, would not be able to tell you apart. Of course, he will be troubled and puzzled. We expect that. All we require is that he should be sufficiently confused not to holler copper. And we can do that. Now about the lower lip. Janet had a mannerism, biting her lower lip. Please. Try to make a habit of it”