Savage Lover [= Sinner Man]

15

We had a nonstop jet complete with pretty hostesses, a silken takeoff and a featherbed landing. Somebody’s hireling met us at the airport and drove us to the High Rise in a Cadillac that was still shining. Everybody drove Cadillacs in Las Vegas. They weren’t even status symbols. Just union cards.

The High Rise was one of the big ones — a lot of glitter, a lot of lushness, big names for entertainment and roulette wheels that never quit turning. The manager called me by name and gave me a heavy handshake. He helped me sign in while a sharp-eyed kid went away with our bags. The manager took us to our suite all by himself. It was on the fifth floor and it was big. There was a private bar stocked with liquor and a private slot so I could throw away quarters without getting out of bed. He said he hoped everything was all right. I wondered if I were supposed to tip him but he went away before I could give the problem too much thought.

I opened a suitcase and started hanging things in a closet. Without saying anything, Annie went over to the bar and I heard ice clinking. She came over and handed me a glass of rye and soda. She had gin and tonic. We touched glasses and drank.

“You’re all right,” I said. “Every room should come with an in-house cocktail waitress.”

“Maybe they all do.”

“Something wrong?”

Her eyes were hard to read. “Nothing,” she said. “I’m just dazzled. The VIP treatment is a new one.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“Will I? How long did it take you to get used to it, Nat?”

“Not too long.”

“Not long at all. And how long did it take you to get used to murder, Nat?” My eyes hardened, but she went on. “Was that hard to do? Or did it come easy? Did you find you liked it...?”

I finished my drink and put the glass down on a table. I looked at her and she stopped talking. There was anger in her eyes now, anger and contempt and maybe a little fear.

“You shouldn’t talk about things you know nothing about,” I said. “You’re in no position to talk.”

“I’m not?”

“You’re not. You know how we’re registered at this hotel? Not Mr. and Mrs. Just plain Nathaniel Crowley. You don’t count at all, honey. You’re just part of the luggage.”

I was sorry the minute I said it. I should have apologized but I didn’t. I got out of my clothes and took a shower.

I met Dan Gordon after dinner that night. He came over to our table while we were being bored by the floor show, introduced himself, stuck out a sweaty hand and then sat down with us. He had a platinum chorus-line pony with him. She had good legs, big breasts and a blandly bovine face. She didn’t say anything. I had the feeling, just from spending some time at the same table with her, that it was better that way. She was purely decorative.

“I heard a lot about you,” Gordon told me. “Tony and I are tight for years. He says you’re a big help to him.”

“We get along.”

He laughed loudly and too long. “I guess you do,” he said. “Tony says you’re in town a week, two weeks. He says make you happy, show you a big time. My boys treating you all right, Nat?”

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “This is quite a place.”

“You like it?”

I nodded. I didn’t — it was a little too goddamn glittery. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

“We try to give the customer his money’s worth,” he was saying. “We run a hell of a place. Can’t find a better place in the whole damned town, and this is a hell of a town. Right, Pigeon?”

Pigeon was the pony. She sat there for a minute trying to figure out what was supposed to be right, then gave a half-hearted nod. He patted her on one of her pretty knees and told me what a great kid she was.

“A hell of a town,” he said again. “You meet my manager? Smoothest guy going. Went to hotel management school up at Cornell, then ran a summer place on Cape Cod for a year. I was up there, happened to see the job he was doing, offered him full-time here. I pay big dough. He couldn’t afford to turn me down. He does a hell of a job.”

“Fine service,” I said. I had to say something.

“You said it. And we don’t make a dime on the hotel, Nat. Our money comes right out of the casino — the tables, the wheels, the cards, the slots. The hotel is charity.”

A pretty waitress came by with fresh drinks. Gordon pinched her and she smiled benignly at him. On the stage, a strip act had given way to a comic telling sick jokes. He had a reputation for hysterical hip cynicism, and the unconscious comedy of the Las Vegas audience inspired him to greater heights. He was very unpleasant, very sick and very funny. I missed most of the punch lines because Gordon talked too much.

“Vegas,” Gordon said reverently. “First you make it legal. Then you keep it honest. Then you wrap it up nice and put a pretty ribbon around it, so it’s a vacation instead of a chance to roll dice. And you watch the money come in. It just keeps on coming.”

I lit a fresh cigarette and wished he would go away.

“What kind of action you like, Nat?”

“I don’t gamble much.”

He guffawed. That was one of his favorite tricks. “Not much of a gambler, huh?”

“I don’t like to take chances.”

Another guffaw. “Sure,” he said. “You like sure things, huh? You like a little edge. You’re all right, Nat.”

There was more of this. Finally he found other things to do. He left, taking his platinum pony with him. The comic finished up and went away. We tried the casino. I wasted a few dollars on craps while Annie went away to worry one of the slots to death. The crap table bored me. I took Annie away from the machine and we went upstairs.

It was restful, anyway.

The High Rise pool was a sort of lake with a concrete bottom. It was nicely surrounded by deck chairs, with or without sun umbrellas, and each deck chair had a little round white table beside it. That was where your waiter put your drinks.

We had deck chairs without umbrellas. I wanted a suntan and Annie didn’t seem to care too much one way or the other. We spent three days doing very little outside of soaking up sunlight. The sun was one of Las Vegas’s constants — every day, from six in the morning until six at night, the sun was undeniably there. The clouds never got in its way. The sun sat up there, burning, and I let it darken my skin. Every once in a while I would go loll in the pool. I couldn’t swim worth a damn, but nobody at the High Rise did much swimming. The pool was something to be in between drinks, between gambling, between sex and liquor. I would lower myself into water always the right temperature, walk around, paddle around, float on my back like a corpse. Then, when it got monotonous, I would clamber out of the pool and let the sun bake me some more.

We spent our nights gambling or being entertained, or both. There were a pair of meets with people Tony had wanted me to see, silly affairs where we sat around in a private room sipping whiskey and talking amiably, if guardedly. We didn’t deal in specifics. It all had its point and I could see the point easily enough. Tony was a man with friends, but he wasn’t that firmly established. He had taken over from Baron, had killed Baron to do it. So we had to be nice to people, had to firm up friendships here and there. I was a sort of gangland liaison man, Tony’s personal ambassador to the world.

Annie and I maintained relations that were generally cordial, sometimes almost warm, occasionally chilly. She was moody a lot of the time. She let herself drift away from the world and sat for hours listening to music on the radio or reading from any of several slim books of poems. I picked up one of the poetry books when she was busy in the can. The stuff was harsh and dry. The images were vivid but the taste of it all was as acrid as marijuana smoke.

Sometimes I wondered why I had brought Anne along. Before this there had been something of a special quality to our relationship, something that made it a little more than the usual story of a hood and his girl, and that quality was gone now. I had killed it.

The worst part was that I had screwed up the thing we had had between us and I didn’t even want what I had gained. For three days and three nights I didn’t touch her. I owned her, she belonged to me and I could have had her any way I wanted her. But I wound up not wanting her at all. I couldn’t figure it out.

There were two double beds in the room. She slept in hers and I slept in mine. And that was the way it was. She would give me funny looks at bedtime, looks that asked whether I wanted her or not, and I would pretend I didn’t notice the looks and would mumble something about how tired I was. Then I would go to bed and toss for a few hours, wanting her but not wanting her, needing the release she could bring me but unable to go over there and take it.

The third night we went up to the room together and I made drinks for both of us. I sat in a cushy chair and worked on my drink. She put hers down on a table and took off all her clothes. She usually undressed methodically, putting everything neatly away in turn. Now she let her clothes pile up on the floor.

“Look, Nat,” she said.

I looked. She had as chokingly lovely a body as I had ever seen. She wasn’t big enough in breast or butt to make a Playboy foldout, but there was something about the soft sweet curves of her flesh that caught me deep in my throat.

“This is yours, Nat. You bought it, even when it wasn’t for sale. You’re paying for it. Don’t you want it anymore?”

She held her breasts in her hands, cupping them from below as if offering them for my approval.

“These belong to you now. You didn’t get very much for your money, but they’re yours.” She spread her legs and stroked herself. “So is this. Aren’t you going to use it?”

“Cut it out.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Crowley.”

“Dammit—”

“Anything I can do to arouse you? Any new position you’d like to try? We can do it standing on our heads in a closet if you want, Mr. Crowley. Just say the word.”

I slapped her. I hadn’t meant to hit her that hard and she rubbed the side of her face.

“I’m sorry, Annie.”

“Why? You’ve got the right.”

“Annie...”

She turned from me. “I gather you don’t want me in bed tonight. And that you’re not too taken with my company. I’d like to get dressed and go downstairs and feed a slot machine.”

“There’s one here.”

“I know. I’d like to get dressed and go downstairs and feed a slot machine. Is that all right with you?”

“Whatever you want,” I said.

“And may I have fifty dollars to gamble with, Mr. Crowley?”

I gave her a hundred.

That was the third night. She went downstairs and I stayed where I was and drank myself to sleep. That was the third night, and it was a bad one.

Then there was the fourth night.

It started with her having too much to drink. She had been doing a lot of drinking since we got off the plane but the fourth night was heavier than usual. She was lapping up gin and tonic as though somebody were passing the Volstead Act all over again. We were downstairs in the casino and I was having a good run with the dice. I made a lot of passes — six, I think, which is a long string — and then sevened out on an easy point. I walked away from the table and took a drink away from her.

“Enough,” I said.

“Never enough. You a cop?”

“No. Let’s go upstairs, Annie.”

“Want my drink.”

I took her arm and she pouted at me. “Goddamned gangster. Steal a drink from a girl. You bum, Nat.”

I got her into the elevator. She had a few more choice words on the way up but the kid who ran the elevator was used to it. He managed not to hear a thing. We left the elevator and I took her to our suite, opened a door and led her inside. “C’mon,” I said. “You’re going to bed.” She shook my hand away and took a step backward. Her blue eyes were glassy now. Her lipstick was mostly gone.

“I just don’t get it,” she said.

“Don’t get what?”

“There has to be a line somewhere. You get to a point where you know about things, you understand things, you have this — this awareness. Of what’s going on. But then you wind up tolerating everything. You put up with things the squares couldn’t stomach. You play around with crooks just to prove how hip you are. And you sleep with a rotten mindless killer—”

I slapped her, hard.

She stepped back. Her hand went to her face where I had hit her. The eyes were wide now and the glassy look was gone. She was sober, or close to it.

“You hit me again, Nat.”

I didn’t answer that one.

“I suppose I had it coming,” she said. “I’m supposed to be part of the luggage, right? Something decorative. Something to carry around, something to leave in the bedroom. Not something to talk to or to be decent to. I didn’t stay in my place, Nat, and I had it coming.”

“Annie...”

Her next words came in a low whisper. “I’ll make you sorry, Nat. I’m a person, goddamn it. I don’t have to get stepped on.”

I reached for her. Instead of catching her I caught her hand with my face. Something snapped.

“You damned—”

“I’m a whore, Nat. Nothing more, nothing less. You made me your whore and that’s just what I am.”

“Then strip!”

Her eyes flashed. “You want your money’s worth?”

“I want my money’s worth.”

“Money for the airlines,” she said. “Money for food and money for the hotel. Money to gamble away. Money for clothes and money for gin and gin and gin. I hope you get your money’s worth, Nat.”

She was wearing a black evening gown, simple and attractive. I watched her grip the gown at the top, in front, and rip. The dress was silk and it tore like children shrieking. It ripped all the way down. She stepped out of it and left it on the floor.

There was a bra, which went next. Then a pair of sheer panties. And then she stood in front of me quite naked and quite ridiculous in high-heeled black shoes.

She kicked off the shoes. She kicked hard and they sailed across the room, past me. One of them bounced off a wall. I looked at her again. She very deliberately drew the sheet and covers off the bed, then stretched out upon her back. Her eyes were still furious.

“Come on,” she taunted. “You’re paying for it.”

I got my clothes off and went to her.

It was like that earlier time — all the anger, along with something that verged on hatred. I felt this wild need to possess, this strong urge to dominate. As for her, at first she played the cold machine, the automaton, the hired servant. Then something happened as I worked myself inside her. Something like war and again like murder. Not like love, not at all.

She made the small noises that an animal might make in a steel trap. She screamed once, and once she spoke my name — Crowley’s name — with loathing.

But that doesn’t mean she didn’t respond physically in spite of herself. Her head rolled from side to side. Her body arched in such a way that she became a target I couldn’t possibly miss. I became a sort of automatic revolver whose barrel kept sliding back and forth.

Her breathing was a rasp. Her thighs clenched. For me the sensation was something like being in a cushioned vise. Anne was hoarse and I was hoarse — from calling out gutter names to one another. And at last there was the explosion: the trigger pulled, the chambers emptied.

There were no words when it was over. I rolled away from her, exhausted, maybe a little afraid. My eyes closed by themselves. I listened to her ragged breathing. My back hurt, now, where she had scratched me with her nails. Before I had not even noticed the pain.

I thought I heard her crying quietly, sobbing. And then I didn’t hear anything.

I slept soundly and completely. I hardly dreamed at all.