She said something about a headache. He said something about girls who had convenient headaches all the time. She said it wasn’t like that at all. He said, and she said, and he said, and they wound up in the hay and I had to stand there and listen to it.
It is not supposed to bother you. It is, after all, part of the game; a con artist can no more be jealous of his girl’s mock-lovers than a pimp can resent his lady’s clients. You are not supposed to give a damn. It is, after all, business and nothing more. It is push-button sex, it means nothing, it is, in fact, part-and-parcel of The Game.
I wanted to kill him.
When he was through I heard her saying something about a headache, a really bad headache, and maybe it would be better if he left her alone. He didn’t seem to mind. He had gotten what he came for, what he paid for. He was a long time getting dressed, but he left, finally, and I heard his heavy feet on the stairs.
I crept out of my perfumed closet. She was sitting on the bed, her back to me. I went into the kitchen and put the dishes in the sink. When I came back she faced me and shook her head from side to side.
“I could throw up,” she said.
“Easy.”
“I’m awful. I’m a damn whore.”
“Stop it.”
“I am!”
I slapped her harder than I’d intended. Her head snapped back and she put one hand to her face. “That hurt,” she said.
“Sorry. But you did what you had to do.”
“I know that.”
“All right, then.”
“But I can’t help the way I feel about it. I’m selling myself.”
I took a breath. “Maybe,” I said. “But just think what a sweet price you’re charging. Because he’s going to get hurt. He’s going to bleed money.”
She brightened up after a while, but the evening was permanently shot. We struggled through an hour’s worth of conversation — or five minutes’ worth, stretched to fill an hour. Then I put on my jacket and straightened my tie and left. No woman should have to put out for more than one man in one night.
“It’ll be a while,” I told her. “Call me if anything happens. Or if you get nervous. Or just because you want to.”
I kissed her and left.
Ten
Doug said, “We must have crossed a wire or two, Johnny. I was expecting to see you yesterday.”
“I wound up staying an extra day.” I stirred my coffee. “It looked as though it would play better that way.”
“You should have called. I thought maybe a wheel came off.” He put a match to a cigarette and winked at me. “You got something going with Evvie?”
“Hardly.”
“No? I didn’t figure you to pass up something like that.”
“Not my type,” I said. “And never when I’m working.”
He laughed. “Work or play, some kinds of games are always in season. What do you think of her?”
“She’s all right.”
“Is she holding up her end of it?”
“Sure, I’ll give her that.” Then, grudgingly, “She’s got the talent. She plays the game like somebody who knows the rules.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“She’s still getting too damned much of the pie,” I told him. “She’s getting about double what she ought to get.”
“We needed her, Johnny.”
I allowed that we probably did, after all, and we let it lie there. We were in a coffeepot around the corner from the Barnstable office. I needed a shave and a shower, but I didn’t have to impress anybody just now. I lit a fresh cigarette and finished the coffee and we switched into a rundown on the way the play was heading.
One thing you try hard not to do is lie to your partner. It’s not a particularly good policy. You generally have enough lies to keep track of without creating new muddles for yourself.
This was an exception. Evvie didn’t want him to know about us, and that would have been reason enough; if he had struck out with the girl, he wouldn’t be tickled to hear that I was swinging for the bleachers and connecting. And there was more to it than that.
Evvie and I had suddenly become a team. If he thought of us as a combination, he was going to become very unhappy about the split. It was still the same split, still the same money going into the same pockets, but I knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t see it that way. He’d see himself dragging down forty thou while the team of Hayden & Stone walked off with fifty between them.
So I’d let him have the glory. Afterward, when it was all over, it would not matter much anymore. Doug would be too busy getting rid of forty thousand dollars over a dice table to worry about his personal prestige. And Evvie and I would be back in Colorado, with Bannion’s place in our pockets and the world swinging for us from a yo-yo string. Once it was over, we would have more important things on our minds than Doug Rance.
I signaled our waitress and scouted down two more cups of coffee. Doug wanted to talk and talk and talk; he had to cover every angle of the operation once again to make sure we were rolling free and easy. He didn’t have to bother, but he didn’t have anything else to do and it’s hard to do nothing day after day, putting in your time at the store and waiting for the game to catch up with you.
They always say that the waiting is the hardest time. They always say this on television and in the movies, and they are always wrong; the hardest time, naturally, is when you walk that little tightrope that stretches from just before the score on halfway through the blow-off. That’s the hardest time because it’s the only time you can get hurt. If things cave in before then, you get the hell out of there. And you stay the hell out of jail.
But the waiting time is when you keep looking for trouble spots, and dreaming of disaster. You can’t keep busy because there’s nothing for you to do. You have to sit tight and wait, and this is a pain in the neck, and Doug had had enough of it so that he wanted to hash things over more than he had to.
I’d be the same way myself in a few days. We had to let Gunderman hang by his thumbs for a few days, and I could already see where it might begin to get on my nerves.
First I had to wait for Gunderman to call me. He couldn’t call me at the office, and I wasn’t at my room much, so it took him four days to reach me.
“Not much so far,” I told him. “Not enough to call you on, anyway. I did find out two things. I couldn’t swear to them, they’re just hunches so far, but—”
He broke in. Hurry up, hurry up, tell me everything. He wanted to know it all and know it fast.
“Well, they’re definitely buying for the purpose we thought, Wally. They won’t develop and they aren’t buying as anyone’s agent. They’re picking up land for capital gain.”
“And?”
“And I don’t think they want to sit on it very long. I have a feeling that they’re looking for a fast turnover.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“If I can get in on this, John—”
I let him swim back and forth with it. He stayed on the phone for another ten minutes asking questions while I told him I didn’t know the answers. Couldn’t I just come out and ask Rance about it? Not yet, I explained. But was there time? And did I feel I was getting anywhere? Oh, he was all full of questions.
“Better hurry up and get those answers,” he said finally, back to his genial old self again. “Better let us both make a pile of money, John. I think my girl Evvie misses you something terrible.”
Oh, I could have killed him then. I could have reached through space to strangle him long-distance with the phone cord. I tried to keep all of this out of my voice while I got rid of him, and then I went downstairs and around the corner for a pint of Scotch. I came back to the room and called Evvie. A nightly habit of mine. We talked long enough for AT&T to split their stock again, and we said not a word about Gunderman or Rance or Toronto or Olean. We talked about Colorado.