by Jim Thompson
“Now, honey. It’s getting pretty late…”
“Hush!” she said. “Music!”
“Well, okay then. Just a little.”
He had never had music lessons. But he had an excellent memory and, naturally, a sensitive touch. Sitting down at the piano, he pressed the soft pedal, considered the keyboard for a moment and brought his hands down on it. Very softly, he swung out with a swaggering barrel-house version of “It Must Be Jelly, ’Cause Jam Don’t Shake Like That.”
Red did a low-down grind, turning completely around. She kicked backwards, and one of her house slippers sailed into the air. Turning and grinding, she kicked again and the other slipper sailed free.
Mitch moved both hands down to the bass. The piano became a tom-tom, and Red’s face took on an ecstatic look. Head flung back, leaning backward from her knees, she writhed out of her robe.
The lacy negligee went next. And that was all for a minute or two.
Mitch moved up the keyboard, his fingers insistent, demanding. Red’s hands went to her bra, seeming to struggle with themselves, to fight against the action. Then, as the piano sobbed and pleaded, she suddenly ripped it off.
The panties went next. Then…
Then there was nothing more. Only Red.
Ripe, full-bodied, a living dream of pulsing pastel.
They looked at each other silently. Then, she turned slightly, pointing to an almost invisible bruise on her flank.
“See?” she said. “That’s what you did when you spanked my bottom.”
“Into each life,” Mitch said, “some rain must fall.”
“Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”
“Well, I might,” Mitch said, “if I was sure you weren’t one of those phony redheads.”
Red said he could surely see for himself that she wasn’t, but Mitch said it was not something that could be determined with the naked eye.
“Why, I knew a blonde one time who passed herself off as a brunette. Her boyfriend was a coal miner, you see, and he was allergic to soap and water.”
Red made her eyes very large. “My goodness gracious,” she said. “Not to mention heavens-to-Betsy. So there’s no way of knowing whether I’m a phony or not?”
“Well, yes there is,” Mitch said. “It’s a method I’ve developed over the years, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. How are you fixed for time?”
“Well, I don’t have anything on tonight…”
“So you don’t,” Mitch said. “But I’m afraid tonight wouldn’t be nearly enough. How about the next forty or fifty years?”
Red said oh, sure, she could manage that all right. What were forty or fifty years when the interests of science were at stake?
Mitch stood up and pointed firmly to the bedroom. “Just step into my laboratory, madam. The tests will begin immediately, and I don’t mean perhaps.”
15
Winfield Lord’s reservation at the hotel had been for three days, including the day of his arrival. But perversely and for no apparent reason he remained for six. He made no attempt to reach Mitch. Quite possibly, with his long training in blanking-out, he did not remember being with Mitch. But that was only a possibility, not a certainty. It was also possible, where anyone as tricky as he was concerned, that he was merely biding his time, waiting for the proper moment to spring one of the near-riots for which he was famous, or rather, infamous. Some brannigan that would attract the attention of the police and newspapers.
Mitch couldn’t risk that, naturally. Neither could he risk the demand from Lord for another game. Even the thirty-three thousand was an uncomfortably large amount to take from such a character. Turkelson would have his neck out to there if he continued to play cashier for Mitch. You could always get bit by riding a good thing too far.
Lord kept pretty much to his suite, consuming great quantities of liquor, eating sparsely, receiving occasional visits from call girls and the house physician (in that order). Of necessity, then, Mitch and Red remained in their suite. Lord would forget them in time, if he hadn’t already. For the present, they could not take the chance of encountering him.
This cooling out on a chump, of course, is routine in any hustle. Ordinarily, it would have been accomplished by jumping town. Since that was impractical here, they could only remain in hiding. Which, Mitch reflected, wouldn’t have been at all hard to take normally. What was so tough about being holed up in a fancy penthouse with a beautiful doll and a big bundle of the green? Red thought it was just fine and dandy—and proved it by hardly letting him out of her sight. Mitch—well, Mitch would have thought it was fine too, if he could ever have stopped thinking for a moment about Agate.
He had already broken one promise to the banker. Now, since more than two days had gone by, he had broken another. And Agate knew things about him, things which could be very dangerous if he chose to reveal them.
Mitch doubted that Agate would be appeased by anything less than cash. But on the third afternoon, while Red was showering, he managed a quick call to him.
“All right,” the banker snapped, as Mitch began a hasty explanation. “You couldn’t get in. When can you?”
“Well, I’m not sure, Lee. I hope I can make it tomorrow, but—”
“Forget tomorrow, then. What about the next day?”
“Well, I—I—”
“Or the day after that?”
“Well—Lee, I just can’t say for sure. But—”
“I know. You’ve got something big on the fire, and you want to keep me quiet until you can pull it off.”
“Aah, no, Lee! It isn’t like that at all. I—”
Agate slammed up the phone. Mitch didn’t bother to call him back. Nor would it have done any good if he had.
There was nothing to do but wait and worry.
The end of Lord’s stay coincided with the weekend. Thus, it was Monday before Mitch could notify Agate that the fifteen thousand was waiting for him.
Agate seemed stunned to hear his voice on the phone. “But—but I thought that—”
“Well, now you know you were wrong,” Mitch said. “Same place, same time, okay? We’ll have lunch.”
“Well, uh, I’m not sure that—uh—”
“You can have a drink with me if you’re tied up for lunch. Or I can drop the dough off at the bank for you.”
“No. No, don’t do that,” Agate said, and he seemed to sigh. “We’ll make it for drinks.”
They met at the same quietly luxurious restaurant they had lunched in the previous week. Mitch handed him an envelope, and he looked at it almost blankly for a moment. Then, he opened the flap, thumbed through the contents, and slowly raised his eyes again.
“Well?” Mitch said. “It’s all there, isn’t it?”
“What?” Agate blinked. “Oh, yes. Yes, it’s all here.” He tapped thoughtfully on the table with the envelope. Then, his lips tightening peevishly, he added that Mitch was very late. “Inexcusably late. You couldn’t blame me at all if I’d blown the whistle on you.”
“Well, as long as you didn’t,” Mitch shrugged.
“You just can’t do things like this, Mitch.” Agate shook his head fretfully. “You of all people should know that you can’t. You break one promise to me. Then, you come right back and break another one. You just let everything slide, and then you show up when you’re damned good and ready and expect everything to be all right.”
“Isn’t it, Lee?” Mitch said. “Isn’t it all right? If it isn’t you’d better tell me right now.”
But Agate continued his nagging. He had to. It was a mask for the confusion, the uncertainty, the fear which teemed through his mind. It was a rationalization—an attempt to blame Mitch for his own betrayal. And how could he possibly tell the truth, anyway? He needed this fifteen thousand. He was terrified of what Mitch might do if he knew the truth.
“Well, Lee,” Mitch was saying. “Isn’t it all right? Does this square us up, or doesn’t it?”
“Now, that’s not the po
int,” Agate said doggedly. “You’ve got to admit that—”
“Never mind.” Mitch gestured curtly. “I can’t sit here all day while you scold me. How much more do you want—two-fifty, five? I thought the fifteen was damned plenty, but I’ll sweeten it if you say so.”
“Now, I said nothing about sweetening it,” Agate muttered. “I didn’t say a thing about wanting more money.”
“But you do want it, don’t you?” Mitch studied him carefully. “If you don’t, what the hell is this all about?”
He took a sip of his vermouth cassis, keeping his eyes on the banker. Agate gulped down the last of his double Scotch, sat twirling the glass nervously. God, why couldn’t he have waited? Why had he had to be in such a hell of a hurry? Why—how—
Suddenly, he saw a way out, or thought he saw one. It was a stupid way, actually no way at all. But desperation and the abrupt infusion of whiskey made it seem brilliant. Smiling, he tucked the money envelope into his pocket, and held out a hand.
“The fifteen is plenty,” he said, “and excuse me if I’ve given you a hard time. I had a rough morning at the bank.”
Mitch hesitated, studying him a moment longer. But the explanation sounded reasonable, and he could think of no other. Blue Monday—a hard morning after a hard weekend. It figured, didn’t it?
“It happens to the best of us,” he said. “Then we’re all set? Still friends?”
“Of course we are. Certainly we are, Mitch. Just give me a holler the next time you need help. I’m afraid I can’t do anything for you in that Zearsdale matter, but anything else…”
Mitch nodded, not particularly disappointed. The Zearsdale option had been a longshot, something he had had to try for without really expecting to hit. It was enough that he had been able to square himself with the banker, and he was very relieved to have done it.
A dress-suited waiter approached, looked expectantly from one to the other of them. Mitch suggested lunch, but Agate shook his head.
“I think I’ll just settle for another drink, another double, please,” he said. “And don’t let me keep you, Mitch. I’ve got some things to think out, and I’d just as soon be alone for a while.”
Mitch took the hint and excused himself. As he departed, the waiter brought Agate’s second drink, and the banker took a grateful gulp from the brimming glass. With a sigh, he settled back in the upholstered booth. For the moment, at least, he could almost see himself as the suave man of large affairs, the shrewd and imposing executive, which only drink or dreams had ever permitted him to be.
His wife and children had no use for him. His employers and co-executives gave him neither liking nor respect. Fortuitously, he had been available at a time when death and war had vacated increasingly desirable positions, and thinned the ranks of those aspiring to them. He had been there—when no one else was there—so now he was here. And no one knew better than he that he had no right to be here, the assistant vice-president of a large bank. Mere chance was responsible; chance and a lack of imagination were responsible; a mental laziness which had kept him in the same rut it had led him to—a normally dead-end rut—for more than thirty years.
He had come straight from high school to the bank. Now nearing fifty, he was increasingly conscious of his inadequacies and decreasingly able to repair or conceal them. Time had shrunk him even as it had expanded the responsibilities of his job. The noise of his rattling around in it was drawing frequent and frightening looks from his superiors.
It would be extremely awkward, of course, almost impractical, to dispose of a thirty-year man who was an upper-echelon executive. And Agate’s appearance was a constant contradiction of the errors which could only occasionally be traced to him. How could one believe that there was virtual emptiness behind the impressive, banker-like exterior with which he daily faced the world? With so much on display, then, logically, there had to be a great deal more underneath; as with an iceberg, whose greatest mass is below the surface.
Logic and had-to-be’s to the contrary, however, there was daily evidence that his employers were at last seeing him for what he was. As literally nothing compared to what he should have been. As a very vulnerable link in a chain which needed to be strong. Now, if somewhat belatedly, they were discovering the real man…a discovery which the first of a long series of hustlers had made almost fifteen years before.
Those were the facts on Lee Jackson Agate.
In the bemusing glow of alcohol he ignored them, becoming one of the highest and mightiest among the high and the mighty. He argued pleasantly with a readily acquiescent self, pointing out that he was a success, wasn’t he? However it had come about, he was a success.
He had a fine home, two fine cars, a comfortable quantity of stocks and bonds. He was quite a little in debt, having unwisely followed the same market advice he had given various customers of the bank. But why niggle over trifles? What was debt to a man with such an impeccable credit rating that he had been able to acquire liabilities which were more than double his assets?
His house was in his wife’s name, darn her, as were his blue chip stocks. But the nagging and henpecking which had brought about this arrangement could not change Texas law. In effect, a married woman in Texas could not own property, her assets being under the legal control of her husband. He could do just about as he pleased with what she had hoped to do as she pleased—darn her!—so he would just go into this Zearsdale stock-option deal, and he would split a fast one hundred and fifty thousand with Mitch. And then afterwards, when his wife saw how truly brilliant he was…
Well, things had been quite good with them at one time. Back in the beginning they had been good. Then, his parents had come to live with them, having no other way of living, and the good had rapidly become bad. His wife had resented them. She had resented him for being too namby-pamby to let them starve. They were well-meaning—what parents are not?—but they were also woefully ignorant, and in their anxiety to be amiable, good comp’ny, they provided their daughter-in-law with the means of wreaking vengeance on Agate for the rest of his life.
“Pa”—his mother would say. “Do you remember the time when you sneaked up on Lee when he was out in the privy, an’…”
Or, “Ma”—his father would say. “You remember the time when Lee got sent home from school f’r havin’ lice in his pants? ’Pears like someone told him if he set on a hen’s nest long enough he could lay aigs, an’…”
Or, “Yessir, that Lee was really a case. Fell t’sleep in church with his mouth open, an’ a big ol’ Juney-bug flew down his throat. Had to knock him out with a prayer book before we could get him calmed down…”
That was the way it went. That was the way, with Lee Agate trying to smile, unable to chide his own parents; his wife listening, eyes sparkling maliciously. And later, when passion or tenderness mounted in him, when his being cried out for the understanding he had so freely given himself, then, then a chilling snigger, a gesture of simulated disgust, a suggestion that he go on out to the privy, the repeated implication that he was stupid or perverted or clumsy or nasty or vicious, any and all of the unpleasant things which the senile anecdotes of his parents had painted him as being.
Naturally, his wife’s attitude carried over to his children. He had never been able to correct them or even to suggest a course of conduct to them without arousing their derision. It had been a very long time since he had tried to, just as it had been a very long time since he had made any gesture of love to his wife; anything more than the merest peck on the cheek. She resented this, of course, and his children resented his abandonment of his proper role in the family. Perhaps, in the final analysis, he was at fault rather than they.
It is an unquestioned tradition in the lore of the American family that the adult male would go the way of the buffalo except for the protection and guidance of his wife and children. He may be trusted to perform brain surgery, but never to sharpen a pencil. He may be a chef, but in his own home he cannot boil water. He may be a writer, but
his help on a freshman theme is a virtual guarantee of a failing grade.
Possibly there is an inverse relationship between the low rating of the American male in his own home and the alarming increase in impotence, insanity, alcoholism, homosexuality, suicides, divorces, abortions, murders, censorship, and educated illiterates. Still, the male is holding out rather well against the loved ones who want only to tear him apart and gobble him up. He makes his office his home, his work his pride. Undistracted, he proves his worthwhileness over and over, eventually garnering so much moral muscle that even his kiddies are impressed and refrain from cursing him in front of strangers, and his little woman gives him a little of what little women have to give without first making him confess that he is a walleyed son-of-a-bitch and that she is the nicest, sweetest, darlingest, generousest, beautifulest, unselfishest, perfectest, ad infinitum, ad nauseum something-or-another that ever dwelt south of heaven.
Unfortunately for Lee Agate (and his family) he had no job. Not in the true sense of the word. A creature who looks like a duck, makes noises like a duck and is generally duck-like in its behavior, may safely be presumed to be a duck. But Agate, who bore all the outward aspects of a bank executive, was no more than an implausible facsimile of one. He found fear and not satisfaction in his position. His crisp mannerisms, his sternness, were only an aggressive cover-up for that fear, a growing conviction of inferiority which the job nurtured in him.
So…
So he’d just take the afternoon off, goddamn ’em! That’d show ’em, right? Right?
Right!
Thirty-year man, wasn’t he? ’Zecutive. Apisstant rice-vedizent. Hee, hee, hee-hee-hee. Uh, uh, heee-hahaha…
Agate suddenly sat erect and made his face stern. He looked around the now sparsely occupied room, lips thinned severely, eyes flashing sharply behind his glasses. But no one had been watching him apparently…unless perhaps they had looked away very quickly. Or if they had, it was certainly understandable. Ob’sly big man. Capt’n of Commerce. ’D’ realize big man had to relax a little, an’ get away from his cares.
