God Save the Mark
Page 21
It was Reilly. When he heard my voice he said, “Karen said you’d be there, but I didn’t believe it.”
“Why not? I told Karen when I talked to her—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Grumpily he said, “I suppose I owe you thanks for that.”
“For what?”
“For talking to Karen.”
“Oh,” I said. “Heck, I figured I owed you something, mistrusting you that way. And it was pretty much my fault that Karen broke up with you, so I thought I’d see if I could fix it up again.”
“I had it all wrong about you,” he said. “The way I saw it, you were out to get Karen for yourself.”
“Not me,” I said. “In the first place, she’s your girl. And in the second place, she really isn’t my type, and I’m not really her type. You’re her type.”
He said, “What do you mean, she isn’t your type?”
“She’s too—uhh—normal for me, Reilly. I’m more of a—”
Gertie came in from the kitchen, brandishing a table-knife covered with mayonnaise, saying, “What was that?”
“Just a second.” I turned to Gertie, saying, “I hate mayonnaise.”
“Not my mayonnaise. I make it myself, in a blender.”
I made a doubtful face, and turned back to the phone. “You and Karen were meant for each other, Reilly,” I said. Gertie went back to the kitchen.
Reilly said, “Well, I don’t know what you said to her, but it did the job, I’ve got to admit it. There’s no more trouble around here.”
“I just told her,” I said, “that you and she made a perfect couple and that men are like loaves of bread. Half is better than none. And when she said women also didn’t live on bread alone I told her about the phallic significance of the staff of life and suggested that we invent our lives for ourselves anyway, so why didn’t she live the romantic fantasy you were offering her, and she—”
“You did what?”
“It worked, Reilly,” I pointed out.
“I don’t know,” he said pensively, “it shouldn’t work.” He sighed and said, “All right, never mind that. The other thing I called about, your elevator operator confessed an hour ago. You were right on all counts. He caught Matt cheating, got mad, swore some, and Matt threatened to phone the doorman and have him thrown out. They’d been drinking, the two of them. The elevator man grabbed up an empty bottle, clubbed Matt with it, and left. He dropped the bottle down the elevator shaft. The lab boys are over there now, putting the pieces together.”
“What did he use on Gus Ricovic?”
“Eight ball from the pool table. Ricovic knew about the setup, and guessed it was the elevator man who’d killed Matt. He asked for an offer better than three thousand, but the elevator man didn’t have any money, so he took Ricovic into the apartment to talk it over, hit him with the eight ball, hid the body, washed the eight ball in the bathroom sink, and went back to work.”
“Where’d he get the apartment key?”
“From Matt. So he could come in any time, to play cards, or bring booze, or whatever.”
“So it’s all cleared up.”
“Right.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it.”
“But what about you? I heard you were going to give the money away after all.”
“I was considering it,” I said.
“Why?”
“Well, mostly because it was ill-gotten gains. Blood money. And I’d gotten along all right without it for thirty years.”
“So who gets it all?”
“I do.”
“You what?”
“Gertie explained it to me,” I explained to him. “She pointed out that I could still live my old life as much as I wanted, but much more comfortably now. Instead of paying rent on my apartment I could buy the house. That way nobody’ll ever buy it to build a parking lot there. And so on.”
“So you’re keeping it,” he said faintly.
“Gertie won’t let me do anything but.”
(Actually, what Gertie had said, more frequently than anything else, was, “Are you crazy? That’s money!”)
He said, “You aren’t buying any more gold bricks, are you?”
“Not too many,” I said. “I’m being a little careful.”
“But not paranoid any more.”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m trying for a balance.”
“Glad to hear it. Is Goodkind still your lawyer?”
“No, I let him go. Uncle Matt hired him because he was a crook and they could get along. I fired him for the same reason.”
“Who’s your new lawyer? Anybody I know?”
“Oh, sure. You know him pretty well. Prescott Wilks.”
“What?”
“Dunbar fired him, in a fit of pique. So I figured, there’s a man that really hustles for his clients. So I hired him. I think he’s going to work out all right.” I sniffed. There was a very odd and unpleasant odor coming from the kitchen. Gertie’s mayonnaise?
Reilly was saying, “You with Gertie for the same reason?”
I got a little offended at that. “Gertie and I,” I said stiffly, “are good friends. She’s teaching me some things.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Listen, Reilly, just because a girl dances at the Artillery Club in San Antonio doesn’t mean she has loose morals. Gertie is—”
“Whatever you say, Fred.”
“Well, she is.” The smell was getting worse.
“I’m sure of it.”
“I’ve got to hang up now, Reilly,” I said. “There’s something wrong here. I’ll talk to you later.”
I hung up, and started toward the kitchen, and met Gertie and a cloud of smoke coming out. I said, “What’s going on?”
“You tell me, buster,” she said, giving me the gimlet eye.
“Me? Why me?”
“Ten minutes ago I started to preheat the oven. I just looked in there now, and you know what’s in there?”
“It smells like naugahyde,” I said.
“ I don’t know about any of those places,” she said. “All I know is, in my oven there’s a burning Bible.”
“A bur—” I said, and the last of the cons perpetrated on me suddenly opened like a flower before my eyes.
Of course, it was too late to stop payment on the check. But at least it gave us a neat ending, and that’s one thing all good cons must have.
A neat ending.