Savage Lover [= Sinner Man]

4

Wednesday and Thursday were waiting days, walking days, wandering days. Wednesday morning I took a rambling walk along the downtown east side. I watched the winos drink muscatel in broken-down bars. I passed through the fringe district, the borderland between Skid Row and Buffalo’s version of Harlem. I looked at fag joints and porno bookshops and dubious nightclubs, all of them sad and slightly soiled in the daylight.

I stopped at a pawnshop and bought a gold signet ring that fitted nicely on the fourth finger of my right hand. I stopped at a cigar store and bet five dollars on a horse.

When I got back to the hotel the morning was mostly gone. The maid was making up my room.

“I’ll come back later,” she said.

“Go ahead and finish,” I told her. “I’ll stay out of your way.”

I closed the door. She had already made the bed and was busying herself with a dustcloth, straightening up the dresser. I stretched out on the bed and watched her. She was a Negro girl, maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty. The contrast of her starched white uniform and her soft brown skin was dramatic. There’s something about girls in uniforms that has always turned me on, Barshter or Crowley. Airline stewardesses, nurses — they always get to me. Maybe it’s the lure of the forbidden or the idea that they’re around to be of service.

So I watched the lines of her body, the taut muscles in her calves when she bent over to pick up something from the floor, the way her breasts pushed out against the front of the neat uniform.

The rush of desire surprised me. It was more than the lazy wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-get-into-that feeling that any man gets when he looks at a pretty girl. My feeling was hunger, raw and intense.

Don Barshter had never believed in the sanctity of the marriage vows. But Don Barshter had somehow never got around to cheating. He never started affairs because he was afraid they would be messy. And he didn’t go to prostitutes because he was afraid of making his pitch to the wrong girl. If a girl had come along with the word whore tattooed in blue upon her forehead, square old Barshter would have taken her up on it. But he could go to a bar and sit next to a painted lady and never have the nerve to approach her.

But I wasn’t Don Barshter anymore.

So I said, “You’re a real pretty girl, honey. You know that?”

She looked at me. It was a look that would have scared hell out of Barshter but Crowley knew how to handle it.

“There’s a fifty-dollar bill in my wallet,” I said lazily. “Wouldn’t take you more than ten or fifteen minutes to earn it.”

Her eyes narrowed as she thought it over. She said, “Fifty?”

“Yeah.”

“Anybody finds out, my butt is in a sling.”

“Lock the door and close the drapes.”

She locked the door and closed the drapes. She turned to me, her eyes uncertain, and said her name was Brenda. I grinned at her.

“Now let’s see what’s under that uniform, Brenda.”

There was a lot of pretty brown skin under that uniform. She undressed quickly and I lay there watching her, enjoying the show. She wasn’t wearing a bra, which I had suspected from the happy way she had bounced as she moved around. She didn’t need a bra. Her breasts were young and upstanding examples of the form, coral at their tips. They were just a shade lighter than the rest of her, as if she’d lain out in the sun on her day off with the top of a bikini swimsuit covering them.

She stepped out of her panties and came over to me. She sat down on the edge of the bed and helped me out of my clothes. I smelled the hot female redolence of her. The girl stretched out on the bed beside me and our naked flesh touched. I let my hands enjoy the contours of her body. She lay obediently still, submissive, while I touched her breasts, cupped them, felt their weight. I ran my hands over her sweetly rounded buttocks and then traced them up the insides of her thighs where, for all that she was doing this for money, there already was the evidence of passion. My fingers found that tender spot and played their cunning game.

She purred like a lusty cat.

And then, because I was not Donald Barshter trying to coax love from his wife, because I was Nat Crowley being professionally serviced by an accommodating sweetness just out of uniform, I showed her how she would earn her money — to begin with. I put my hand on the top of her pretty head and eased her gently downward until she lay with her fine brown chest over my legs.

Then her eyes sought mine.

“Pretend you’re a French girl, honey.”

She knew the game as though she’d played it since kindergarten. Her lips were angel’s wings, her tongue a ribbon of fire, her mouth a bowl of hot honey. She made it last a long time. And then I took over — Brenda had primed me. If she had primed me a moment more I wouldn’t have been able to take anything over. As it was, I had to exert great control even though I was now taking Brenda in the most conventional of ways.

I wanted to end it up conventionally. The French stuff was fine for a long preliminary, but for the payoff I wanted to be strictly in control, strictly in the saddle.

It was some saddle. It bucked and slipped all over the place and drove me nearly crazy. Which is the same as saying that Brenda wouldn’t rest. Her hips were constantly in motion. Molten motion — and I think we were both practically delirious by that point.

We groaned together — and then we both lost control.

It was a moon shot with the softest of landings, and the last of it was an earth shot with an even softer landing because by then we had both had it.

When she was dressed and ready to go I grinned at her and gave her the fifty-dollar bill and an extra twenty. “For being so good,” I told her.

Brenda paused at the door. “I make this room up the same time every day,” she said.

“I’ll remember that.”

She started to open the door, hesitated and turned to face me. “I don’t usually do this,” she said.

“I know.”

I showered, dressed and went down for lunch. I thought about the girl, how good she had been, how easily I had had her. And I thought about her last remark, that she didn’t usually play for money. I believed her. Because not many men would have propositioned her that way. They would have thought of it, they would have wanted her, they would have formed the words of the proposition in their minds, but the words would never have been spoken and the girl would never have been possessed.

Donald Barshter would have ached for her. He’d have had her a thousand times in his mind and not once in the flesh.

It was a hell of a lot more fun being Nat Crowley.

After lunch I killed a few afternoon hours in a barbershop a few doors from City Hall. Donald Barshter used to save money on barbers — a haircut every three weeks, two bits for a tip and that was that. Nat Crowley ordered the works. The barber improved on my own shave, cut my hair, baked my face with hot towels. The manicurist held my hands and buffed my pretty nails. The shoeshine lad shined my shoes. It was a kick.

Then, Wednesday night, I found the bar.

It had taken a little looking but was worth the search because sooner or later I was going to make connections and the odds were good that this was going to happen in a bar. The right bar, the bar where Nat Crowley’s kind of people hung out.

Well, this bar was called Cassino’s. Red neon told me this. A slab of cardboard in the window supplied additional information — a jazz trio made noise weekends starting at nine-thirty, there was no minimum or cover charge, and Canadians were welcome.

And there we were. It was a quiet hole in the wall, an unobtrusive ginmill two blocks off the main drag. If you weren’t looking closely, Cassino’s was the same as bars on either side — nothing special, nothing remotely sinister.

I was looking closely. I saw four people inside. The bartender, a fat man who polished glasses as though they were the queen’s jewels. A big flat-faced type who could only be a cop. Two thin dark knifeblades in flat black suits who could have played adjoining roles in Hollywood’s latest exposé of the Mafia.

I went inside and took a stool at the bar. I ordered rye and soda and nursed it when it arrived. At nine-thirty a few more quiet little men filtered through the door from the street and took stools at the bar. At a quarter to ten the flat-faced cop stood up abruptly and left. At ten the bartender turned on the television and we watched the fights. Two welterweights were fighting at Saint Nick’s in New York. I watched two dull rounds, then turned my attention back to my drink.

“You ought to watch this round,” the voice said.

I looked up at the man talking to me. He was maybe forty-five, with soft, tired gray eyes, and he was twenty or thirty pounds overweight.

“There’s no action,” I said.

“This round,” he told me. “The third. Porter gets to him in the third and the Mex goes to bed.”

I lit a cigarette.

“The Mex dives,” he explained. “And all I could get down is two C’s on Porter. Watch. It ought to be cute.”

It was very cute. We both glued our eyes to the set and watched Porter and the Mexican slide neatly into their act. I watched the Mexican miss a right cross and catch a left jab with his face. He stepped back sharply, looked shaky — and Porter went in for the kill. An overhand right put the Mexican down once for an automatic eight count. He got up, managed to wander into a left and two more rights and then go down and out gracefully.

The crowd loved it.

I said, “Pretty.”

My friend turned and nodded thoughtfully at me. “So now my two bills is three-fifty,” he said. “I had to give four-to-three. Porter’s going places. They’re moving him along slow, setting him up to keep the pot boiling. He ought to be ready for a title shot in eighteen, twenty months.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I think I missed your name,” he said.

“Nat Crowley.”

“Tony Quince,” he said. We didn’t bother shaking hands. “You new in town, Nat? I never saw you around.”

“I’m new.”

“New York?”

“I’ve been there,” I said.

He digested this. “How about Chi? You been there?”

I nodded.

“And Vegas? And Miami?”

“All those places,” I said.

“Who do you know in Buffalo?” Tony asked.

“Not a soul,” I said. “I’m a stranger.”

The bartender brought me a fresh drink. Tony Quince was drinking sour red wine. He emptied his glass and the bartender poured him another. Tony took a small sip, put the glass down and ran his tongue over his full lips. I found a new cigarette and put a match to it.

“You working, Nat?”

“Vacation,” I said.

“Just passing through?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I’ll stick around. It’s a nice town.”

He worked on his drink and I worked on mine. The television set was off now and the room was quiet. A couple of high school kids wandered in and the bartender told them he wouldn’t serve them. They left.

I finished my drink, picked up part of my change and stood up. I put out my cigarette.

“Later,” I said to Quince.

He looked at me. “Sure,” he said. “I figure we’ll run across each other now and then.”

I walked back to the Malmsly. There was no tail this time.

Thursday morning’s paper told me that I was out five bucks. My horse had run third in a field of eight. I had my usual brunch in the Men’s Grill and stepped outside. There was a pool hall on the second floor of an old building on Main next to a bus terminal. I walked up a flight of creaking wooden stairs, picked out a table and found a cue. A Puerto Rican kid racked the balls for me and I tossed him a quarter. He caught it in one hand, flipped it to the other and found a pocket to keep the coin in. I chalked my cue and broke the balls.

The place wasn’t crowded. A few sharks tried to hustle each other. Two antique Italians who looked like retired barbers played three-cushion billiards. They were pretty good.

I wasn’t. I stuck to aimless pocket pool and was lousy. I poked the balls around the table for half an hour. Nobody tried to hustle me for a game. A few kids, including the one who juggled quarters, looked me over out of the corners of their eyes. They were admiring my shoes.

When the game got boring I paid for my time and left. There was mail for me at the Malmsly desk. Two of my idiot letters had made the return trip, one from Chicago and one from Philly. The bank had sent over my checkbook, twenty-five pretty green checks, the name Nathaniel Crowley neatly imprinted in the lower right-hand corner of each. I stuck the checkbook in my pocket.

That night I went to a movie. I don’t remember what it was about or who was in it. I sat in the balcony and thought about Nat Crowley and the way his little world was developing. I didn’t waste much time thinking about Donald Barshter. There wasn’t very much to think about. In four days he had managed to fade away to a shadow. Sometimes it was hard to remember what he was like, how his mind worked, how he spent his time.

It occurred to me that Barshter couldn’t have been much of a guy. Too thin, too empty. In four short days he was all gray, all fuzzy at the edges. He must have been pretty useless to begin with.

I wondered if they had found Ellen yet. If they had buried her. And then I let those thoughts trail off. There were better things to worry about.

After the movie I stopped at a short-order restaurant for ham and eggs. Then I dropped in at Cassino’s for a bottle of German beer. Nothing much happened there. I recognized a few men from the night before but nobody bothered to talk to me. Tony Quince wasn’t there.

On Friday the wool farm came through with my new clothes. I put on a new shirt and a new tie and new shoes. I put on the gray sharkskin and left the lamp black and my original suit hanging in the closet. I got rid of my own shirts — they still had a Barshter laundry mark and there was no way I could keep wearing them. I scorched out the laundry marks with the end of a cigarette and stuffed the shirts into a paper bag. I carried the bag outside and found a trash can to dump it in.

The last concrete physical link with Donald Barshter was gone now, stuffed into a trash can and forgotten. I walked over to my bank and cashed one of my nice new checks. My wallet had been gradually emptying itself and I had to fill it up again. On the way out a little vice-president stopped me with half a smile and asked how Buffalo’s weather compared with Miami’s. I told him it was warmer down there but I couldn’t complain.

I spent the afternoon going through motions that were becoming almost too familiar. I found a horse in the paper and bet another five on him. I walked around some more, catching an occasional nod from people I’d seen at Cassino’s, people who had seen me. The picture was encouraging but hardly exciting.

There was a newsstand near my hotel that sold out-of-town papers. I resisted the temptation to ask for Barshter’s home town paper and settled for a New York sheet instead. I went through it twice but couldn’t find anything about Barshter and murder. I threw the paper away and ate a meal.

It was getting boring. I was slipping into a role neatly enough, putting on a new personality the way I had put on my new pearl-gray suit. But nothing was happening. I wasn’t making the connections yet, wasn’t hooking up with the people I was looking for. They nodded at me now and one of them had talked to me and somebody had taken the time to follow me once. But that was about all.

And something had to pop soon. For one thing, I had to find a way to earn a living. Nat Crowley spent his money freely and had to have it to spend. More important, I had to have a somewhat more permanent cover than the hard-stranger-in-town gambit. The gambit was effective but you couldn’t make a lifetime out of it.

Anyhow, I treated myself to a thick rare steak in a wood-and-leather steakhouse and then headed for Cassino’s. What the hell — at least that bar had music on weekends. I could drink my rye and soda with music behind it. And maybe something would happen.

Something happened.

But not at the bar.

As I was passing a basement coffeehouse that sent forth twelve-bar blues from somebody’s guitar, a car pulled to a stop alongside me. An unmarked car, black, a year or two old. The driver pulled up the emergency brake but left the motor running. The man with him opened the door on his side and got out of the car. I waited for him, my hands at my sides.

He walked over to me. He was my age, my height. His hat had a longer brim than mine. His shoes were heavier and older.

I watched him put one hand into a pocket and come up with a wallet. He flipped the wallet open and let me look at the flashing silver of a badge. He was a cop.

“Come on,” he said roughly. “Get in the car.”

I hunched into the car and sat next to the driver. The other cop came and sat next to me. I was the meat in the sandwich. The driver put the car in gear. We took off.

Nobody said anything. I wondered where I had gone wrong, how they had figured me out. And whether or not they still had the death penalty for murder in Connecticut.