Afterward, more silence. She lay motionless on her side with an arm curved under the swell of a breast. Her eyes were closed. She did not move. I bent down and kissed her mouth. I straightened up and tried to think of something to say. Nothing fit. I turned, strode out of the bedroom and out of the house and out of her life.
I drove off with the car radio blaring. I just wanted noise, and static would have served as well as the music. I was tuned to one of those stations that shouts at you. They’re supposed to be very big with the teenage set. These stations tell you their call letters every two or three minutes, and they hit you with spot news about pedestrians run down on local streets and kittens rescued from trees and other bits of excitement. I half-listened and half-drove and found a whole load of things I didn’t want to think about.
No reason to stay in town. No reason at all. I had found a bad girl, and she had made me do something I shouldn’t have done, made me make a big play for the money and the girl—that age-old American dream.
I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the girl and I didn’t even want either of them very much anymore.
And then I’d found another girl, a good girl, and I had to run away and leave her. I didn’t want to, but I had to, because that was the only way it would play.
Beautiful.
There was a bottle of Cutty Sark somewhere around the apartment, but I would be alone there, and solitary drinking didn’t appeal. I found a bar on Orchard close enough to empty to be reasonably quiet. I sat as far from the jukebox as I could get and I had a couple of drinks. At first I tried to work things out in my mind, but it didn’t take me long to see I wasn’t going to get anywhere that way. I gave up and let the liquor do the job it was hired for.
A long time ago life had been infinitely simpler.
A long time ago, doing magic tricks in third-rate strip joints and fourth-rate hotels with an occasional birthday party or bar mitzvah thrown in. A long time ago, Maynard the Magnificent instead of Wizard the Mechanic. A long time ago.
There was never much in the way of money in those days. There was never the big score, never the feeling of being on the inside of a swinging operation. But it was cleaner then, and fresher, and you never wound up putting yourself in a box. A person can become too hip, too much with it.
The squares have a better time.
Maynard the Old Philosopher. I scooped my change off the bar top and left the tavern. I drove home, parked the car. The drinks had not done their job. I was still sober, and it was a bad time to be sober. I parked the Ford and headed for the apartment.
My key in the lock, turning. And a funny feeling, hard to describe, harder still to explain. A feeling that someone somewhere had taken the play away from me, that I wasn’t reading the backs right. Coin your own cliché? brother. An itchy, uncomfortable feeling.
I opened the door.
He was there, in my chair, his hands in his lap and his feet on the floor and his mouth set in a firm thin line. He should have had a gun in his hand, maybe, but he didn’t. He just sat there like a boulder and stared at me.
Murray Rogers.
He said, “Close the door.”
I didn’t move. I read his poker face and I felt the grim hard brittle tension in the air and I stood in place like a statue.
“Close the door,” he said. “Come in, close the door, sit down.”
I came in, closed the door. I did not sit down.
“Hello,” he said. “Hello, you rotten bastard. Hello.”
16
I don’t remember sitting down. I must have, because I remember being on the couch later on. And listening while Murray Rogers talked.
“You were very damned smooth,” he said. “So polished, so clever. And such a thoroughgoing bastard every step of the way. A card cheat. That’s a very noble occupation, Maynard.”
I didn’t say anything. I watched him take a cigar from his breast pocket, trim the end, light the cigar.
He shook out the match and dropped it carelessly to the floor. He filled the room with cigar smoke and talked through it.
“You stole money from me with a deck of cards. You cheated me at the poker table and you cheated me at gin rummy. You took my wife to bed. You let me get you a job and introduce you around. And then you framed me for a murder that never happened. You’re a very sweet guy, Maynard.”
“When did you tip?”
“You mean when did I catch on?”
I nodded.
“You’ll have to excuse me, Maynard. I’m not up on criminal argot. I caught on a few hours before I decided to plead guilty. I knew all about it by the time you visited me in jail. I’ve known all along.” He chewed the cigar. “You seem surprised.”
“Why did you plead guilty?”
“Why not?” He shrugged massively. “I hired detectives the day they jailed me. I had one advantage, you know. I knew I was being framed because I knew very well I was innocent. I had the detectives check on Joyce. They turned up something to the effect that she’d been seen with you earlier. I had men run a check on your background, and I had men get a picture of you and show it round to a few people. One of the men they tried it on was the desk clerk at that hotel. He identified you as August Milani, naturally.
That made it fairly obvious.”
And there, of course, was the whole hang-up in a nutshell, the whole trouble with the frame. We’d built up a house of cards—marked cards, maybe, but just as flimsy. One little push and everything went to hell in a handcar.
“I almost blew up when I found out,” he went on. “Viper in my bosom, all of that. The old story of the newfound friend and the younger wife. I could have called the district attorney and tipped him off, and I would have been out of jail in an hour.”
“Why didn’t you?” He eyed me carefully. “What would it get me?”
“Freedom.”
“Freedom,” he echoed. “Yes, I suppose so. And you and Joyce, what would the pair of you have got? A short prison sentence at the most, and even that might have been hard to arrange if you had the foresight to provide yourselves with a top-grade lawyer. I’d have had freedom, Maynard. And no more than that.”
He smiled. “Now think that over,” he said. “You’ve played cards with me. I don’t play to get even, you know. I play to win.”
He stopped talking and the room was still as death. Smoke hovered in the air. I wanted a cigarette but I didn’t reach for my pack, as if a false movement might cause him to shoot me. Which was plainly ridiculous—he didn’t have a gun. But the atmosphere was like that.
“I play to win,” Murray Rogers said again. “Getting out from under a murder rap isn’t winning. It’s breaking even. Winning is a matter of turning the tables. It wouldn’t be enough to see you and Joyce in jail.”
I took out a cigarette. I had trouble lighting the match, but I managed it, and I sucked smoke into my lungs and coughed. I blew out the match and flipped it to the floor and took another drag of the cigarette and choked again, coughing spasmodically.
I said, “What do you want, then?”
“I want to see you dead,” he said.
In Chicago, in the smoky back room where they had caught me dealing seconds, there had been a moment like that one. The moment between accusation and action, between discovery and punishment. A flat, cold, brittle moment, timeless and vacant. And there had been such a moment long ago, ages ago in the second-rate magician days, when a car I was riding in went off the road and rolled twice. That time we had skidded on gravel on the shoulder of the road, and the car had gone into its spin, and I had sat nervelessly and thought I was going to die and wondered how it would feel. That moment ended when we had crashed—I had emerged unscratched, as it had turned out. The moment in Chicago had ended when the hoods had taken away the money and hauled me out into the alley. The moment now, in this town, was like those other two.