$20 Lust

8

“Good going, Lori. You, Lindsay — don’t move. Just stand there. And start talking.”

A bell rang somewhere in the back of my head. Lori? The bell murmured something about a girl named Lori Leigh. Cindy had described her as blonde and busty, which was certainly a pretty accurate description of my girl Rhonda. I’d given up Lori Leigh as a bad dream about the time when Cindy’s story started coming up roses. I had made a mistake.

“I found him in a bar,” Lori was saying now. “Told him I made it for money. He gave me a twenty.”

“A live one?”

“One of ours.”

The men laughed. “Too much.” Baron said. He was even bigger than I remembered, a mountain of a man with a head like a boulder. “Paying you off in queer. That moves me.”

Reed I’ve mentioned before — medium height, medium build, sandy hair. He looked as though he was the type who poured boiling oil on troubled waters. The guy who rounded out the party looked like the oil itself. A little greaseball with eyes that stared dead ahead.

Baron came up to me. He was smiling and I decided maybe they weren’t such bad guys after all. He held out a hand and I reached to take it.

I missed. And he hit me in the chest.

“Funny man,” he said. “You better talk, funny man. There’s a little bit of fifty grand you got and that we want. There’s a little frail named Cindy who has to be taken apart at the seams. You got talking to do.”

I felt around and found out my ribs were still there. It should have been reassuring. It wasn’t.

“Lindsay?” Reed’s voice. I looked up. “You got two choices, Lindsay. You can let us work on you until you spill or you can spill now and save us the trouble. That way you came out of it with your teeth in your head. Either way you want it, Lindsay. Just tell us.”

Choices, yet. I opened my mouth to tell him what he could go and do to himself, then thought it over for a minute and let my mouth drop shut. I was in a bind, trapped like a rat in a rat trap. And for what? A girl who conned me? Money I wasn’t planning on spending anyway?

Two dumb things to get killed for.

I stood up. Baron moved in, ready to pound my face in. He threw the punch before I could start talking and my head took off and waltzed around the room. I almost went out, but not quite. I went to the floor and stayed there while my head came back to me again.

“What do you say, Lindsay?”

“I’ll talk.” I said. “Hell, the broad conned me to begin with. I was ready to powder and leave her with the dough. I got no reason to hold out.”

Reed didn’t say anything.

I pointed at Baron. “You can tell this bastard a couple things. You can tell him he didn’t have to hit me. Not the first time and not the second time. You can also tell him that one of these days I’m going to kill him.”

Baron laughed.

“Look,” Reed said, “we want a couple things. We want the girl and we want the money. And some information.”

“I can take you to her. Or do you want the information first?”

He thought it over. “That makes more sense. Start talking.”

“Where do I start?”

“With the money,” Reed said. “How much of it is left?”

“There was fifty grand to start with?”

He nodded.

“Maybe a thousand of that is gone. Part of that in New York, the rest here in Phoenix. The rest is still in the little black bag the way it was when I ran into her.”

“Good. How did you meet her?”

I hesitated, then told him. I left out most of it, just giving him the picture of a good-natured slob who got tied up with a frantic frail without knowing entirely what was going on. I saw a few reasons for feeding him the story. For one thing, it happened to be pretty much the truth. For another, the less involved I was, the less chance there would be of them deciding to kill me. And, of course, Cindy had suckered them. This would put us both in the same boat. The boat would be rocky as New England soil, but it just might float.

“You thought the dough was straight?”

“That’s right.”

“How did you tumble?”

I told him that, too. I ran through it, told him how she was acting funny so I ran a check on her story and came out with more questions than answers. He got very interested when I went through the routine at the bank, how I checked the bill and managed to get away with it. I think he seemed impressed.

“For a mark,” he said, “you came out of it okay. You got a head, anyway.”

“And fists,” Baron said. “You did a job on Bunkie. That hasn’t nice.”

I told Baron where he should stick himself. He came on to me and I got ready to take another punch. But Reed motioned the big man away.

“Let’s get back to Cindy,” he said. “She’s got the dough?”

“She and the dough are in the room.”

“So let’s go.”

So we went. Down the stairs and out to the street and into the same damned car that Rhonda — I mean Lori — had used for fun and games. That, I decided, was one thing I would always regret. I hadn’t managed to knock off a piece of Lori. It was one hell of a shame.

In the car I had questions. “How did you find us?” I asked. “I don’t remember leaving a trail.”

“Cindy tipped us. A wire day before yesterday.”

It figured. “Another question,” I said. “You’re going to a hell of a lot of trouble for fifty grand in schlock. You’re spending that much more to get it back. Maybe I’m stupid, but I don’t get it. Wouldn’t it make more sense to spend the time printing up fresh stuff?”

Reed and Baron looked at each other. I looked at the two of them, then at the greaseball who was doing the driving, then at Lori. Lori was the only one who was any fun to look at.

“Might as well tell him,” Reed said. “Can’t hurt.”

He turned to me. “We were working together,” he said. “Cindy was part of the racket. You know about the paper, don’t you? The process?”

“I know what you do. Not how, but what. You bleach singles and print twenties on them.”

“That’s about it. We had the process, had a set of plates. The plates were good.”

“Very good.”

“But not perfect,” Reed said. “There were a couple errors there, nothing big, but big enough to make the bills obviously counterfeit to an expert with an eye in his head. We weren’t going to run those plates. I had a boy coming who was a hell of a touch with engraver’s tools. Give him a few days with the plates and no one in the world could tell the queer from the straight. You seen our bills?”

I nodded. Seen them? Hell, I’d been spending them.

“Then you know how good they are. The paper is good and the plates are close to perfect. We even have automatic switchers for the serial numbers so they can’t pull the bills by number. But the plates weren’t perfect and we were waiting until the boy could fix that for us.”

I was beginning to bet a glimmer.

“Cindy,” Reed said bitterly. “Big ideas and small brains. Her cut wasn’t enough for her. She had to put the plates on the rotary one night when everybody else was decked out. She was smooth, that girl. Stupid but smooth. She inked and rolled and churned out a quick fifty grand. And lammed before anybody woke up.”

I was beginning to see things. But it still didn’t add up, not all across the board. “Look,” I said, “it’s still only fifty grand. Once your boy makes the scene you can print up better stuff, as much of it as you want. So why chase her down for the fifty? Point of honor or something?”

Reed shook his head, impatient. “Same plates,” he said. “If the schlock she’s carrying turns up phony, some joker can compare it with our stuff and put two and two together. And come up with four.”

“Oh,” I said.

“See? She’s got fifty grand in counterfeit dough. She wants double that for it. It’s a real live one, Lindsay. For the first time ever counterfeit is worth twice as much as straight money. One for the books, huh?”

Now it made sense.

“This isn’t a minor-key operation, Lindsay. This isn’t a hit-and-run game, with one roll off the plates and no more. This is enough to keep a bunch of people for life. Cindy has us strangled.”

“So you have to get the money back.”

“Right,” he said. “She isn’t working a deal. She’s blackmailing us. She’s got us over a barrel but she’s over a barrel herself. Three times now she’s tried to make the connection with us. We get on the scene and she changes her mind, runs like a rabbit. We can’t roll our own stuff until we get hers back.”

“There’s already a thousand in circulation.”

“Peanuts,” Baron said. “It’s good schlock. Half of it won’t ever turn up. And without her holding it, nobody can connect it with us. So we’re clear.”

I had a pretty good idea what they were going to do to Cindy. She wasn’t going to stay alive, not for long. I was starting to feel sorry for her. Hell, she’d pulled some pretty switches on me. But I could see her point. She was desperate and I was handy. What else could she do?

That wasn’t all. She’d been good to me. She could have powdered, could have been less fun in bed — there were plenty of ways I could have wound up on the short end of the stick. She wasn’t being honest with me but that was her privilege. I didn’t want Baron working her over, killing her.

They were going to kill her, that was certain. And, I realized, they were probably going to do as much for me. That’s why it wouldn’t hurt to tell me all this.

My knees felt very weak.

“This the hotel?”

I nodded. The greaseball pulled the big car over to the curb and we got out of it. I walked first, with Reed right behind me. I wondered what chances I had of making a break for it. There was no gun showing but I knew there was one held on me. And they wouldn’t mind shooting.

“Don’t try it,” Reed said, reading my mind. “Walk straight into the lobby and into the elevator. Then go right into her room. Or you’re dead.”

I’m stupid, but only up to a certain point. I didn’t want a bullet in the back, not just then. I walked into the lobby and over to the elevator, trying to look suspicious. For once I wanted all the cops in the world to notice me. If the cops came, Reed wouldn’t shoot. He would be caught, and I would be caught, and being caught was greatly to be preferred to being dead.

But, of course, no cops came.

The elevator took us to our floor. We walked to the room and I stood in front of the door waiting for something nice to happen to me. Nothing nice happened.

“Knock,” Reed suggested.

I knocked, hoping that she wouldn’t answer the door. Maybe she would sleep nice and soundly, and not answer the door, and we could go away and let her live.

She didn’t answer the door. I turned to Reed, shrugged mightily, and he wasn’t amused. “You got a key,” he snapped. “Use it.”

I had a key and used it. I half hoped the key wouldn’t work, but the key did work, and I opened the door, and Cinderella Sims was nowhere to be seen.

“Not here,” Baron said. It was, for Baron, a pretty brilliant observation.

“Probably out shopping,” I suggested. “She goes shopping a lot.”

“Spending our money?”

“Generally.”

“We’ll wait,” Reed said. He made himself comfortable on top of the bed. I remember thinking that he was not the first person to be comfortable on that particular bed. Two others had been so — Ted Lindsay and Cinderella Sims. That made me very sad, thinking about what was going to happen to Cindy. And, for that matter, to me. There had to be something I could do, but whatever it was, I wasn’t aware of it.

Then I thought of something else. Reed was sitting approximately eighteen inches above the fifty grand he was so hot to get his pretty little hands on. That gave me something to think about. All he had to do was look under the bed and he didn’t need me around anymore. Reed or Baron would put me out of the way. Then they could wait for Cindy and kill her. We lost either way, but the longer I kept him from finding the money, the longer I stayed alive. And who was to say what could happen in the meanwhile? Maybe the police would break the door down. Maybe the Marines would land. Maybe Reed and Baron and Lori and Greaseball would tumble over with heart attacks. Maybe—

“Lindsay?”

I looked at him.

“The money,” he said. “The schlock: The little black bag. Get it now. Then we can all wait for the girl.”

“I don’t know where she put it.”

“Get it Lindsay.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t—”

Baron hit me and the rest of my sentence was forever lost. I came up mad and went at him. He clubbed me again and this time I stayed on the floor for quite a while.

“The money, Lindsay.”

I got up shakily, then pointed under the bed. “That’s where she keeps it. You want it so bad you can get it yourselves.”

Which is what they decided to do. Baron and Greaseball each took an end of the bed while Reed stood up and kept a gun trained on me. They picked up the bed, carried it out of the way, set it down again. I didn’t even watch. I was waiting for them to go into orbit when they saw the money.

They went into orbit, all right. They went into orbit when they didn’t see the money.

So did I.

My little Sunflower had taken it on the lam. Dough and all, sweet little Cindy Sims had run out on me. I didn’t feel too good all of a sudden.

“I’ll beat it out of him,” Baron was saying. “He’ll talk. He’ll talk through broken teeth, but he’ll talk.”

Baron wasn’t kidding. But he was wrong. He would beat me, and I would not talk at all. I wouldn’t have a thing in the world to talk about.

Which wouldn’t bother Baron. He’d just keep knocking the crap out of me, and he would keep on going until I was dead, then they’d go out hunting for Cindy, chasing the golden fleece of the fifty grand in queer that could put them away for the rest of their lives.

I watched Baron come in and got ready for another punch. Then something snapped inside me. I wasn’t going to take another beating no matter what happened. A bullet couldn’t hurt a hell of a lot worse than one of Baron’s punches. At least I would die trying. Either way I would be dead, but this would be faster and easier and a lot more exciting.

“Don’t hit me, Baron.”

“You ready to talk?”

“There’s nothing to say.”

He had a gun in one hand, Reed’s gun, and this time he decided to give me the gun in the teeth. I suppose he figured I would stand there and wait for it.

He figured wrong.

He swung and I ducked and came up under the arm, fastening my hand on it and pivoting. Baron went across the room and into the wall, landing head first. The gun remained with me, which was the general object of the whole thing.

Lori was close to me, which was her mistake. I grabbed her just in time, held her in front of me and kept my gun pointed at Greaseball. He had the only other gun in the room and he couldn’t shoot without hitting Lori. I held onto her and her fright was a live thing in the room. She was scared stiff, shaking and quaking.

I found out why.

Greaseball wasn’t the sentimental type. Lori was between me and his gun, so he did the obvious thing under that set of circumstances.

He shot her.

She let out a very sick moan, and then I was holding a heap of dead flesh instead of a live and lovely woman. It was something sick to think about but I didn’t waste time thinking. There were more important things to do.

I shot Greaseball in the throat and watched him die.

“Don’t do it, Reed.”

He was halfway to Greaseball’s gun when my voice stopped him. He hesitated for a minute, then straightened up. I had him cold.

“Don’t move,” I said. “Stay right there. It’s nice and cozy there. You can relax and enjoy yourselves.”

I kept my gun on them while I backed out the door, then slammed it fast and turned the key in the lock. I left the key there and hoped it would give them a hard time. With luck the police would get there just at the right time — before Reed and Baron got out and after I was far away.

With luck.

I passed up the elevator and took the stairs two and three at a time. I never moved so fast in my life. I was at the second floor when I heard the noise.

A gunshot. Reed, probably, shooting the lock off the door. I should have taken his gun.

The hell with it. You can’t think of everything.

I got out of the lobby and into the street. God knows how. If anybody looked suspicious, I did. And if anybody was all dressed up with no place to go, I was. No car, no money, no nothing. I should have stayed up there and let Baron beat me to death.

Their car.

That would do it — give me an out and take their car away from them all at once. Maybe they had left the keys in it. It always happens that way in the movies. But, dammit, I wasn’t in a movie. Still, you never could tell. I looked around and found their car and ran at the big Mercury at top speed, trying at the same time to look nonchalant as all hell. I don’t think I managed it.

The car was there. And the keys, God bless ’em, were still resting gently in the ignition.

That wasn’t all. There was another extra dividend in the car.

A woman.

“Get in, Ted. Don’t waste any time. There’s no time, hurry, you’ve got to hurry. I’ll explain later. Just get in the car.”

Cindy.

She drove even better than she made love. We got out of downtown Phoenix, out of residential Phoenix, out of suburban Phoenix, out of Phoenix entirely. She kept the gas pedal as close to the floor as she could and I looked out of the rear window for cops and robbers. It seemed inevitable that one or the other would catch up with us. We led a charmed life. We left Phoenix behind and I almost relaxed.

“Okay,” I said. “Now you talk.”

She sighed. “I suppose I have to. How much do you know already?”

“Most of it. I knew most of it before they picked me up. They filled me in on the rest.”

I told her what I knew and she nodded. There wasn’t anything more. I had all the details.

“You,” I said. “You were ditching me, huh? That makes sense, I guess. But why did you stick around and save my neck? That part doesn’t make any sense at all.”

She took a breath. “I wasn’t ditching you.”

“Sure. You were waiting for me to join you in the wilds of Transylvania.”

“Ted—”

“I’m a big boy now,” I said. “You can give it to me straight now, Cindy. You don’t have to play games with me anymore. The truth is plenty.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“Sure you are. You never told a lie in your life. Starting with the time you chopped down the cherry tree you’ve been a model of honesty. Sure.”

“Ted—”

“The truth is enough, Cindy. If you’d just—”

“Damn you!”

I looked at her. The damn you! line had almost sent the car off the road. She was steady now but her eyes were blazing and I could tell how mad she was.

“Listen to me,” she said. “Don’t interrupt and don’t play the little boy that’s been getting crapped on from all sides. Just shut up and listen to me.”

I shut up and listened to her.

“I wasn’t running out,” she said. “I knew what was happening the minute I saw you drive by with Lori. You and that perfumed panther.”

“De mortuis,” I said. “Speak well of the dead.”

“She’s dead?”

“Dead as silent movies.”

“You killed her?”

“Greaseball killed her. Then I shot Greaseball.”

“Greaseball? That must be Musso.” She described him and the description fit.

“I’m almost sorry Lori’s dead,” she said, not sounding the least bit sorry. “But you didn’t have to hop in with her. You didn’t have to be so hot to get next to her.”

“That wasn’t it,” I lied. “She had a gun on me.”

“Crap.” The word was an explosion. “I saw what you were doing to her in the car. I saw your hands on her.”

I looked ashamed.

“So there you were,” she said. “You and Lori. And I knew that any minute the whole batch of you were going to pour through the door. What in hell was I supposed to do, Ted? Wait for you? Wait for Baron to beat me to death? Is that what you wanted me to do?”

Strangely enough, I had nothing to say. This sort of changed things. She hadn’t been taking a powder on me. I had been two-timing her, and she had every right in the world to be sore.

“I took the bag and left,” she said. “I sat in the diner across the street and waited for them to come back. They went upstairs and I got in the car. God knows I shouldn’t have waited for you. I should have left then and there and to hell with you. But I waited.”

“And saved my life.”

“And saved your life. You saved mine once and now we’re even. You can leave now if you want. It’s been fun, Ted. I like being around you. Maybe I’ll drop you a postcard once in a while.”

“If you’re still alive.”

She stared at me.

“Where do you go from here?” I wanted to know. “Going to play the same game? Hide and tip them and run when they catch up with you?”

“Probably.”

“You’ll run forever,” I said. “Or they’ll catch you and kill you. Doesn’t sound so brilliant to me. Maybe I’m just a dull-witted type, but there has to be an easier way to make a living.”

“You got a better way?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe I should throw the money away,” she said. “Maybe I should toss it out of the car and to hell with it. A hundred grand. You want me to throw it away, Ted?”

A few hours back I would have answered yes to that. But that was before a lot of things, before Lori died in my arms and before I put a bullet in Musso’s throat. Before Baron hit me and before I decided that someday, somehow, I was going to kill him.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want you to throw it away.”

“Then what?”

I thought about it. I had an idea, a good idea. Maybe.

“Later,” I said to her. “Later, when we have more time to talk.”

“We? You’re still coming along for the ride?”

“I’m still coming,” I said. “Later.”

“Tell me more, Ted.”

I shook my head. “Two questions first. How many more in the mob?”

“Bunkie Craig, the one you put in the hospital. And Casper.”

“Who’s Casper?”

“A snake,” she said. “A weak little man with cold eyes. I never liked him.”

There wasn’t anybody in the mob worth liking. “Where’s Casper?”

“At the hangout.”

“And where’s that?”

“San Francisco. Why, Ted?”

“Later,” I told her. “When there’s time for it. You know how to get there?”

“Of course. Why?”

“Later,” I said again. “First there’s something else we have to get out of the way. See that motel?”

She nodded.

“Pull over,” I said. “Lock the schlock in the trunk. And come with me. We’re going to make love.”

She pulled over and locked the schlock in the trunk and followed me into the office.

It was life again, living again, seeing and hearing and tasting and smelling and touching again.

It was the world.

It had been good with her before. But now it was like nothing before, like nothing ever. Now she was hiding nothing, concealing nothing, holding nothing back from me. Now she was mine and I was hers, and we were together now and forever, and it was very good.

We made it take a long time. I undressed her, with the lights out in the motel room and soft light filtering through from the half-open closet door. I took off her clothes slowly and ran my hands over that body, that perfect body, letting my hands linger where they liked to linger.

Then she undressed me.

I kissed her and it was good. Her mouth was warm and wetter than wine. Her arms were around me and her body was very warm, very sweet, very firm and soft and perfect against my body.

“Ted—”

My hands found her breasts, held them, stroked them. The nipples stood at attention and saluted. I kissed them and she started to squirm.

“Now, Ted!”

But not yet. Not for a while, not for an eternity, not until neither of us could stand waiting any longer. Not until the world flew by at half-mast.

Then it was time. It began.

There were sounds outside that I did not hear. They didn’t matter. There was a world outside but it existed for me no longer. There was a woman beneath me and she was the only important entity in God’s world.

She moaned my name, moaned once and twice and three times. I clutched her and held her and loved her with every atom of my being. It was getting better now, getting to a peak where no adjectives applied, getting to perfection. And you cannot describe perfection.

You can only enjoy it.

The peak approached and blinded us. We were there together now, to the very top of the world. Then, all at once, there was no world beneath us.

Only Cindy and I, alone together, floating in free fall in space.

It was over. I held her while she cried salty tears.

I lay on my back and thought about things. I thought about the way I had led Reed and Baron to her, lead them to her room so that they could kill her.

And hated myself.

I knew something now. I knew that we were together as long as we lived, knew that nobody on earth could keep us apart. I knew that the world was our world now, that it belonged to us, that we had it by the tail.

“Ted?”

I took her hand.

“What you were going to tell me,” she said. “You can tell me now.”

She was right. Now we had no secrets.

I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. I reached over for the cigarettes on the night table, lit two of them and gave one to her. For several moments we smoked side by side in silence.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Here it is.”