“Was come for a school theeng,” Francisca said. “Small girls on bicycle. Teekits to send off the music somewheres. One dollar from the bockus I give. Hokay?”
After a pause for comprehension, Crissy said, “That was fine, dear. Would you do the bed now, please?”
She unfolded the morning paper. Friday. The twentieth day of May. Her heart tilted for a moment, and she felt sick. It was beginning to be too long. Garry had guessed it might be two days, certainly not more than four. God, if it had gone wrong somehow, then the big chance was gone, and it was the only one you’d ever get, girl. The years are running the wrong way for you. If Garry messed it up, then you’re back to sweating out the other choices, all of them bad. There’s only one big thing left to go, and that’s this house, and when you sell it, you have three choices. Live the way you like to live on the money you get, and it will last maybe four years and then you are forty and you can decide whether it will be the sleeping pills or a cruddy little job, a cruddy little room, sore feet from standing all day behind a cruddy counter. Or invest the money and get some funny little income for life, and go see if any of the old contacts were still in the business and, out of pity or sentimentality, wanted to make room in the circuit for a one-time upper-level hooker who’d retired too many years ago, at the personal request of State Senator Ferris Fontaine. Or take the house money and make the gamble of building a front with it, maybe the tragic, youngish widow, obviously well provided for, demure as hell, visiting Hawaii or Acapulco or some damn place to try to take her mind off her grief, and then sort out the possibles and take dead aim at some old goof with a fat portfolio and stampede him into marriage, hoping his heart isn’t too damned sound. But what if the pigeon turned out to be canny enough to get her checked out first? Or what if he happened to be putting on a front with money as small as hers? Or what if he kept living another twenty-five years, so that when she finally got it—the total freedom and total security she’d wanted all her life—she’d be over sixty years old?
No. Garry Staniker had worked it. It was the only way things would come out fair. The Senator had not really meant to cheat her. She knew she was probably the only toy the old boy had ever bought himself in his whole chinchy, skinflint life, the only time he had ever spent real money with any kind of pleasure at all. Over seven years of a good honest return on the investment too. You spend money on what’s important, and she remembered how strange it had seemed to her, when they had met, that an old guy with so much power and influence in the state would be so uneasy and ashamed and apologetic.
It had been one of those long weekend arrangements, six of the kids supplied on request and flown down to Key West where some kind of contractor had a big house with a wall around it and was putting on a special house party with the idea of softening up some politicians who were in a position to do him some good. It came to three hundred each after the usual cut was taken off the top, and that was better than good during the slow season, and there was some iced champagne on the company plane that ferried them down, so all the kids were in a mood to have fun.
When they were sorted out, she turned out to be Fontaine’s, and she remembered how, to the twenty-seven year old woman she was then, he seemed older than God, though later she found out he was sixty-one then. But as she got to know him, he seemed funny and sweet and nice. He was very courtly and old-timey. When they were alone was when he got all shy and strange and funny. She finally understood from what he was saying that it would not make any difference in the money arrangements, and he would just as soon have his friends believe that she was earning the money as expected, but it just wasn’t possible, and that was that, and he did not care to talk about it any further.
There was just the one double bed in the room they’d been given, a bed with a huge carved Spanish headboard. After the light was out she got him talking again and got him around to talking about the problem, which he seemed to find easier to do in the dark. He said, no, he hadn’t been sick. He had just gradually become—incapable a couple of years ago, and he did not care to go through the dreary experience of proving it again. He told her about his life. He had married young. There hadn’t been the time or the money for play. He said there had been some episodes, as he called them, during his middle years when he had become successful as a rancher. His home base he said was at one of his ranches, a long way east of Arcadia. Twenty-six thousand acres. Brahma and Black Angus.
She made her cautious beginning by explaining to him that she could get to sleep much easier if she was close to someone, and after certain reluctance he held her with his arm around her, and her head on his shoulder. She kept thinking of twenty-six thousand acres, and imitated deep sleep, a purring snore, but a restless sleep in which she shifted, burrowed against him, put her round arm carelessly across him, a great fan of her soft hair—much longer then—across his throat. She wondered at the increased knocking of his heart, but was not sure there could be any ultimate victory until, at last, she felt him with infinite stealth move his hand, bit by bit, until he could touch the strong round breast of the girl he thought asleep.
Ten days later at his telephoned request, she took a commercial flight to Miami where he had registered them both on the same floor of one of the big beach hotels. She sidestepped his attempts to talk of future arrangements until she had managed to prove to his satisfaction and hers that what had been thought impossible was becoming easier at each opportunity. The next day he sent her, alone, to look at the apartment he could arrange if it suited her.
Over dinner in his one-bedroom suite that evening they struck their bargains. She could count upon his visiting her for a couple of days on the average of once each month. It might be oftener at times or less frequent, but it would probably average out that way. He wanted total discretion on her part. He said he felt he did not have the right to demand physical faithfulness of her. He would leave that up to her, stipulating only that she was not to have anyone visit her at the apartment, nor was she in any direct or indirect way to sell herself. The apartment lease and the utilities would be taken care of. He would give her money to open a checking account, and she would give him the name of the bank and the account number, and a deposit would be made, untraceable, to her account each month. What did she think it should be?
“Fifteen hundred dollars a month,” she said.
“You trying to gouge me, girl?” he asked, scowling.
“Senator, I don’t think it’s nice to argue about money. I told you what I need. I don’t have to argue about money. I can remember from high school, from economics class, a monopoly can set its own rates because there’s noplace else to buy what it’s selling. I’m going to gouge you pretty good, but I’m going to give you fair value. If you don’t want it that way, let’s call the whole thing off right now.”
He stared at her, and he chuckled for a long time, shook his head, chuckled some more, and from then on did not deny her what she asked. By the time she picked out the land and the house was completed, he had regained a virility which, he claimed, seemed like unto what he could dimly remember of himself as a bridegroom. With the house went a stolid square humorless but efficient Swedish woman. Ferris Fontaine had hired her, and when Crissy made mild objection to her, she gathered that Fontaine had once done her delinquent son a favor of such magnitude the woman’s personal loyalty to the Senator was beyond measure. Crissy gradually became aware that Fontaine had been testing her discretion and her judgment in small ways for some time. When he had satisfied himself about her, the Biscayne Bay house, because it had been located and designed for total privacy, became a place where he held secret meetings of men with whom he was involved in various intricate business affairs. Crissy acted as hostess, knowing when to absent herself to let them talk, learning from the Senator which drinks she should make a little heavier than usual. Though the relationship between Fontaine and Crissy could not help but be obvious to all who were invited there, the Senator never permitted other girls in the house.
“Use it all you want and any way you want, honey. It’s registered to you, but I’ll be using it now and then. Some of the cagiest ones will loosen up a little when you get ’em off on the water.”
By then the Senator was sixty-seven. Though he seemed far more vigorous and vital than when she had first met him, she knew it was time to take the final step, and one evening when they were there alone, she brought it up with more of an air of casual confidence than she felt.
“It’s been six years, darling,” she said.
He sipped his ale, belched comfortably and said, “Six very wonderful years, little girl.”
“Thirty-three makes a pretty old little girl, Fer.”
“By God, you sure don’t show it a bit.”
“Thanks heaps, but the fact remains. Also the fact remains that I think about it. And I think about you being sixty-seven.”
“Mmmm. Let’s say I show it, but I don’t feel it.”
She went to him, sat crosslegged on the floor close to his chair, took his hand in both of hers and looked earnestly up at him. “Fer, I’m not going to bring out any violins and give you any crap about the best years of my life.”
“But?”
“I think the word is settlement. Some kind of a settlement. You are a tough old monkey and I think you are going to live forever, but I think you would feel better if you knew that if something did happen, you wouldn’t leave me behind cussing you up down and sideways for not setting up some kind of an arrangement to keep your little girl off the streets when the money runs out. Fair is fair.”
She waited in the silence while he thought it through. “Fair is fair, sure enough. It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to set up, Crissy. By God it isn’t. I can’t just go sticking you in my will. The wife and the kids and all the grand kids would rise right up and bust hell out of any codicil like that, especially if it was as big as what you’d need.”
“What do I need, Fer?”
“Pretty good piece.” He went inside to her desk and worked it out on scratch paper. He called her and she went and stood beside him, her hand resting on his shoulder. “Little girl, if you was to live exactly as good as now, with the upkeep to pay on everything and what you have to spend, and if it was set up so you’d live off investment income, it would take four hundred and fifty thousand dollars put away into a good balanced program.”
“Good Christ!”
“But that would mean you’d eventual leave behind a pretty fair estate, going to somebody I don’t owe spit. So it’s got to be worked out on a lifetime basis, so you live fat and die broke. Okay?”
“Sure, Fer.”
“Lump sum life annuity, I guess. And some way to transfer this house out of your name but giving you the right to live here as long as you live. That would pay some of the bite on the annuity. The thing to do is get ol’ Walker Waggoner scratching around seeing what he can come up with. Then the smart thing would be to get you started on it and me pay the gift tax or whatever, then there’d be no fuss from anybody after I’m gone. When I know what it will come to, then I can figure out the best way to scramble it together. Fair is fair, little girl. You said it true.”
Some months later she had to take a complete physical and sign insurance application papers. More months passed and when nothing happened she queried Ferris Fontaine.
It had irritated him. “Little girl, I am doing the damned well best I can, and it is going to get done when a lot of things that affect it one way and another get sorted out.”
Fifteen months ago he had come to stay with her on the middle days of a windy week in January. He complained of indigestion. She heard him get up in the middle of the night, and she could not tell how much later it was when she woke again, reached and found him still gone, and no body heat remaining in his side of the bed. She found the bathroom lights shining down upon him on the floor near the toilet, in the pale blue pyjamas she had once bought him. He had reached up and had unrolled an entire role of flowered toilet tissue, pulling it down upon him so that she had to brush it to the side to see his face and know that it was a dead face. He had told her once what she would have to do if he ever should become very sick at that house, or die. She did not think she could manage it. Then she remembered the loyalty of Bertha, the Swede. Bertha understood at once. The two women dressed the body, Bertha with silent tears running down her square pale face. Crissy packed his suitcase. They put the body in the front seat of the navy blue Continental, and the suitcase in the trunk.
Bertha got behind the wheel and Crissy followed at a cautious distance in her white sports car. They left the Lincoln on a dark street in downtown Miami. When no cars were coming, they tugged the body over behind the wheel. The motor was running, the windows down, the headlights on. Bertha tipped the Senator forward and as the horn began to blow, she trotted heavily to the sports car and climbed hastily in beside Crissy.
They did not speak all the way back. When they got out of the car Crissy said, “Thank you—for helping.”
Bertha said, “I’m giving you my notice now, M’am. I’ll stay thirty days if you haven’t found anybody by then, but then I’ll have to leave.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I came with him because he asked me to, only.”
“Don’t bother to explain.”
“But I am a decent woman.”
“Congratulations,” Crissy said and went into her house. She stripped the bed, remade it fresh, showered, made a stiff drink and went to bed and waited for tears. There weren’t any. She had liked him well enough. He had paid well for what he wanted from her. But the old floof had let her down where it counted most, maybe.
After the Senator had been buried by his family, with suitable fanfare and an attendance so large that it was rumored that half of them came not to mourn but to assure themselves he was dead, Crissy drove all over the state seeing in privacy those men who had been members of the inner clique, trying to use the leverage of her special knowledge to pry loose some promise of support.
But they seemed more amused than distressed, and she gave up quickly after one of them, eyes gentle as flint, alternately squeezing and stroking her shoulder, said that they sure didn’t want to upset anyone Fer had been fond of, but they’d have to rig up something to give her a nice long stay up to Chattahoochee to ponder it all out some. You had it right nice for a nice long time, considering …
So she had hurried back to the house, aware of having been a fool, of having attempted a dangerous game. She had to learn wariness all over again, after these past lush years. She knew it wouldn’t be difficult. The practice had started early, maybe way, way back when they took you from the grammaw-house to the Home, and you knew it was a terrible mistake and you were too little to explain it to them, but you knew somebody would remember you and fix the mistake. Then you gradually realized it wasn’t a mistake, and it wouldn’t be fixed.
You learned wariness when you were a child bride and the New Orleans cop bounced a slug off the pavement into the back of Johnny Harkinson’s curly head as he was racing off with a snatched purse. Wariness during the thousand nights Phil Kerna owned you, and you were his luck, sitting back out of the cone of light, watching the poker sessions. Owned you and then loaned you, when the markers came due. Wariness in New York, sharing the apartment with Midgie and Spook, the three of you modeling Frankal’s cheap wholesale imitations of high-fashion items, and hustling the buyers but giving them a fair and full return because Frankal didn’t want any repeat business ruined. New lessons in wariness when you pulled stakes and went down to Savannah with Midgie and used her contacts to get lined up with that Friendship Club, a telephone operation, hundred-a-week dues. Once they couldn’
t come up with it and spent ninety days working in the prison laundry, ruining their hands and teaming up to fight off the old bull dykes. From then on you make certain you always have your dues.
Drifted to Atlanta, where it was closer control, a straight percentage action. Wariness in the slow realization that it had stopped being something you were doing for just a little while for kicks. You were a seasoned hooker, and you’d turned twenty-seven, and because your score on repeats was falling off because of competition from the kid stuff just breaking in, you had no more choice left on who, and damn little choice left on what. So, in your wariness, you knew that a really big score was the only way out. So when you got picked for the Key West duty, one of the six packages picked up by the company airplane, one of the steadier types, and the chance with the Senator opened up, you begged and bargained your way loose, using tears and money saved up.
But in the end it was only a partial score, girl, because you turned soft and sweet and trusting. And that was the final lesson. The long years shot and no time to work on any score that would take more years. No time for mercy, girl, and who showed you any? The thing about this score, it had developed out of the Senator thing. You could say it was even a part of it—a chance to more than make up for not having really put the pressure on that old goat sooner and harder. Should have put security on a pay-as-you-go basis right from scratch, when finding out I could turn him back into a man was such a miracle to him, I could have made him crawl on broken glass all the way from his twenty-six thousand acres to where he had me stashed. Every year, old man, you lay fifty thousand on good, fat, blue chips in little girl’s name, or the fun stops.
Spilled milk. Oh God, Garry, if you messed up my second chance at the jackpot …
She heard the latch of the sliding glass door and turned her head and saw the boy, Oliver, peering in at her and sliding the door open as she had told him to do.
As he came in, closed the door, turned to her, she held both her hands out, her smile brilliant, and whispered, “Darling, darling, darling. Come here, dear. Sit right here where I can look at you.”
The Last One Left Page 9
