Savage Lover [= Sinner Man]

14

As I said, things had changed at the top, and I had an office now on the eighteenth floor of a downtown office building. I had a free-form desk, a few soft chairs, a Modigliani reproduction on the wall and a taut-hipped redhead who answered the phone when it rang and typed things now and then. The redhead was somebody’s sister and the job was a soft touch for her — she spent most of her time either talking to her girlfriends on the phone or polishing her nails. She didn’t even have to put out for the boss, although I’d thought about giving her a tumble. But she was somebody’s sister and it wasn’t good form to fool around with someone’s sister even if you outranked him. Besides, I had enough going between Annie and Brenda. I might try the redhead on sooner or later, the way you try on any stray female who looks as though she might be fairly good at it, like an occasional hooker from one of our downtown houses, an occasional stripper from one of our nightclubs — and all of them more than happy to do it for free, because I was Nat Crowley. But for now I had my fill, and so far I’d let the redhead alone. She didn’t exactly know what I did in my office, only that she was supposed to keep her mouth shut. Whenever somebody important came around I sent her out for coffee. That’s where she was now.

Tony said, “You could have more interests, Nat.”

“I’ve got enough.”

“If you say so. You could meet people, do more things, make more dough. This way you just sit around and handle bookkeeping. That’s a job for a goddamn accountant.”

It was more than that but I didn’t bother saying so. Tony knew it anyway. I had my office and I handled all the paperwork that had to be handled. I kept the two sets of books — one for us and another for the government — and I made sure that both sets balanced neatly. I made sure that the right amount of dough was coming in from our various income properties and that not too much was getting siphoned off into private pockets. I looked at the bills and wrote the checks. We had a lot of things going for us and there were a lot of bills to pay and a lot of records to check.

The income came from three sources. There was the legitimate stuff, which took care of a big portion of our revenue. We ran jukeboxes and vending machines and a lot of local trucking. We owned a few construction outfits and a batch of nightclubs and smaller taverns. The ownership may have started because we used muscle a long time ago but now the whole routine was puritanically straight.

Then there were the rackets, everything from dope to dirty pictures, and we had a little of everything in those departments. They were illegal but they had to be run the same way as a legitimate business. The same rules applied — supply and demand, profit and loss, income and expenditures.

The third class was investments. You could buy a piece of a stock swindle or a satchel of hot money or anything else. You invested your dough and took a capital gain or loss the way Wall Street plays the market or the way Swiss bankers bet on Latin American revolutions. We had a lot going for us there, too, and I kept busy.

“There are people to meet,” Tony said. “You’ve got a little dough — you could get something going on your own. Open a club, start a business. The dough is there. All you got to do is take it.”

“I’m happy.”

“You sure?”

“Positive. I like to sit in the background, Tony. It’s quieter.”

“You hot?”

I shook my head. “I just hate flashbulbs. They hurt my eyes.”

“You must be hotter than hell,” he said. “What’s the charge?”

“No charge.”

“Nothing that can get fixed?”

He couldn’t fix murder in Connecticut. And that would be the charge if they started printing my picture in the papers. The captions didn’t have to call me a hood. They could refer to me as a captain of local industry and the payoff would still be the same. A trip to Connecticut and the end of the ballgame.

“Nothing you can fix,” I said.

Tony walked over to the window and looked out. He asked me if I had anything to drink. I kept a bottle of the red wine he liked in a desk drawer. I poured him a glass and he sipped it.

“You been working hard, Nat.”

“Not too hard.”

“It’s September,” he said. “You worked all summer without a break. I took a few weeks, went up in Canada to catch fish. Everybody takes a vacation in the summer. Even the slobs who work for a living get away for a week in the mountains. You stayed cooped up in a lousy little office...”

“It’s a good office. And I’m here a hot three days a week.”

“Still, you need a vacation.”

I didn’t say anything. I took out a cigarette and lit it with my lighter. The lighter was fourteen-karat gold and it worked perfectly. It was engraved, To Nat From Tony.

“Ever been to Vegas?” Tony asked.

“Not for a while.”

“You’re not hot there, are you?”

“I told you,” I said. “I’m not hot at all. Anywhere.”

“Sure,” he said. “I forgot. Vegas is a nice town, Nat. You’d like it there for a week. Everything on the company, of course. A paid vacation. Stay at a good hotel, eat good food and drink good liquor.”

“You mean there’s a job for me?”

He shook his head. “Strictly a vacation,” he said. “Oh, there’s a guy or two you should see. Just to talk to. It’s good to keep in touch with people, good for business. But I could send anybody down. Hell, I could go myself. I just think you could use a vacation.”

“Maybe I could.”

“Stay a week or two weeks. Put up at the High Rise. It’s a good place and I know the guy who runs it, guy name of Dan Gordon. A sweet guy — you’ll like him. When can you leave?”

“Any time.”

“I’ll call Gordon,” he said. “Tell him to have the red carpet ready. You want me to tell him to keep a broad on ice for you? Or do you want to bring your own?”

I put out my cigarette. “I’ll bring my own,” I said.

I saw Anne that night. I picked her up and we ran over to our favorite place for steaks and then drove out along the lakeshore. There was a summer-stock outfit out there and they were doing an Arthur Miller thing that she wanted to see. The meal was good, the drive cool and fresh, the play not too bad. It was a tight gutty script and even a bunch of amateurs couldn’t louse it up too badly. Annie enjoyed it.

The relationship we’d managed to drift into was a kind of cockeyed one. We didn’t talk about that night we’d had, after the killings. We hadn’t forgotten it — we just didn’t talk about it. It hung there between us, a violent moment I think neither of us wanted to face squarely. Instead, we kept things on the surface. We saw each other two, three times a week. I rarely called her. I would run into her at one of the spots she frequented or, occasionally, pick her up at the club where she worked. She waited tables there a few nights a week. It was a sucker trap. The pay was a joke but tips were good and she made enough to cover the rent on her apartment.

We ate together some of the time, saw a show together some of the time, drove around together some of the time, slept together some of the time.

So far as I knew, Anne wasn’t seeing anybody else.

Still, we weren’t going together exactly. We had no claims on each other, no strings to pull. She was pretty familiar with my apartment at the Stennett, but she still lived in her own humble flat and spent most of her nights with no bedroom company. It was loose and uncommitted, the rules not too well defined.

On the way back from the summer playhouse I had the Lincoln’s top down. The wind played with Anne’s hair. The air was cool and clearer than usual. The moon wasn’t around but there were a hell of a lot of stars in the sky. I draped an arm around her and she leaned against it.

“Good play,” I said.

“What would a hood like you know about plays?”

“I’m a very dramatic hood.”

“Uh-huh.” She had her head cocked and she was looking at me in a special way she had — sizing me up, trying to look through me. It was a habit of hers. Sometimes it bothered me a little.

“A dramatic hood,” she said. “Too dramatic. You play games with words, Nat.”

“Meaning?”

“I don’t know. Where did you go to college?”

“Tuskegee Institute,” I said. “I’m passing.”

“Uh-huh. You’re an odd one, Nat.”

We always fenced verbally. Sometimes I thought of it as a rather involved form of foreplay. It wasn’t just that, though. And it was less fencing than wrestling. We used words like half-nelsons.

I said, “I’m just an organization man, ma’am.”

“The hood in the gray flannel suit?”

“Uh-huh. The modern mobster. It’s all a business now — haven’t you heard? You need a college diploma to rob a filling station. That’s what happens when you get mass education and automation going for you.”

“Did you explain all that to Baron when you shot him?”

She said it casually, but it was like a casual stroke with a shiv.

“I read about that,” I said. “The Mafia murdered him. It said so in the papers.”

“And all you know—”

“—is what I read in the papers. Put your head down, Annie. Relax.”

She put her head down. I can’t say she relaxed. I took the skyway into the city, then drove around aimlessly for a while. We stopped somewhere on the north side and had a drink in a quiet neighborhood bar. There was an old Bogart movie on the television set but the picture kept rolling and the bartender kept trying to fix it. We left.

Back in the car again I said, “I’m taking a vacation. A week or two in Las Vegas. Why don’t you come along for the ride?”

She thought it over. “I don’t want to,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Reasons.”

“It would be a break. A lot of sun, a comfortable hotel suite, a different floor show every night. Fifty different ways to lose money legally. All-expense-paid vacation for two. How about it?”

“Thanks but no.”

“Why not?”

She asked me for a cigarette. I took out two, lit them both and gave one to her. She smoked half of it before she said anything. “Because I don’t want to be kept.”

“Huh?”

“I’m independent. I live in a dump. Not because I have a big romantic love for dumps or for wearing a dress too many times or for working. But because it’s better that way. It would be easy to let you pay all the bills, Nat. Move in on you, let you take care of rent and clothes and everything else.”

She finished the cigarette and threw it out of the car. “Then you’d own me,” she went on. “Then you’d have that hold, that upper hand. And I don’t want that.”

“So pay your own way.”

“I can’t afford it. I’m just a working girl.”

I didn’t exactly get it. “I’m not hiring you as a slave girl. I’m just selling you a free trip to Las Vegas.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But it’s no sale, Nat.”

I got mad. “Do you really think you can say no to me anymore? In this town?”

She shook her head. “Because you’re such a big man now, is that it? Have you forgotten what you were when I first met you, Nat? Other people might not remember, but I do. No,” she said, “it’s not hard to say no to you, Nat. You make it easy.”

She was wrong.

I didn’t sleep with her that night. I went upstairs to her apartment and we had a few drinks. Then we called it a night. I left her there, went back to my car and drove back to the Stennett. I put the car away and elevated to my own apartment. It was a pretty impressive place now. Not too long after Baron’s death I had had the management get rid of their furniture and replaced it with furniture of my own. I had gone to one of the better furniture stores and picked out French Provincial pieces, expensive but worth it. The place made a good show when we had important people in from out of town and it was comfortable when I was there by myself. The hotel-room feeling was gone.

I got a bottle of rye from the bar and poured myself a drink. I stirred it with a silver stirrer and drank most of it in a few minutes.

Then I got on the phone.

I called the club where Anne worked and asked for Lundgren, the skinny Swede who managed it. It took them a few minutes to find him. Then he said hello to me.

I said, “Annie Bishop works for you. Right?”

“That’s right, Mr. Crowley.”

“Yeah. Well she doesn’t work there anymore.”

“She’s quitting?”

“She’s quitting. When she comes in, you tell her she’s quitting. You understand?”

He understood. I hung up while he was still trying to tell me how glad he was to do me a favor. I called Noomie’s.

“If Anne Bishop comes in,” I said, “she doesn’t get served.”

They didn’t ask why. It was an order and their business consisted in part in obeying orders from certain people. I was one of those people. They assured me she wouldn’t be served.

I put down the phone and finished my drink. I lit a cigarette and wondered why I was going to all this trouble just to take a girl to Las Vegas. It would have been easy enough to find some other broad who was tickled to go. It would have been even easier to tell Tony that Gordon should arrange a girl for me. They have pretty girls in Las Vegas, obliging girls, friendly girls. Girls who don’t go for verbal wrestling matches but keep their wrestling on a purely physical plane.

So why all this trouble for Annie Bishop?

Hell, she had it figured right. It was all a business of holds, of getting the upper hand. That was the way she saw it, the way she played it. That was the code of the jungle, or whatever the hell you want to call it. So that was the way it would go.

I picked up the phone book again and thumbed through it. I put in a call to a man named Hankin. He was a slum landlord with tenement property all over town. He happened to own a few run-down buildings on the street Anne lived on. Including hers.

“Nat Crowley,” I said. “You busy?”

He’d been sleeping and he still wasn’t exactly awake. But I was Nat Crowley and he had to be nice to me if he were going to stay in business. He had tenements with too many violations in them. We fixed these things for him, and he was nice to us.

“What can I do for you, Nat?”

“About one of those rockpiles of yours,” I said. I gave him the address. “Do the tenants have leases?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t like leases.”

He didn’t like leases or rent control or lots of things. I said, “There’s a tenant of yours who ought to get evicted. Anne Bishop.”

“I know who you mean. She pays her rent first of every month, like a clock.”

“Call her in the morning and tell her to move out within a week. Can you do that?”

“She pays by the month, Nat. So she’s paid up through the first of October. But I can tell her to get out by then.”

“Do that,” I said.

“Sure, Nat. Anything I can do—”

“I appreciate it.”

I hung up on him and built myself a fresh drink. Then I went back to the phone and made a few more calls.

It took three days.

She called me at the Stennett. It was around noon and I was asleep when the phone rang. I yawned, lit a cigarette, answered it.

“You’re a son of a bitch, Nat,” Anne said.

I laughed softly.

“A real son of a bitch. Why didn’t you have a few goons come over and beat me up? Or something subtle, like acid in the face?”

“I like your face.”

“Uh-huh. All of a sudden I don’t have a job. All of a sudden I don’t have a roof over my head. All of a sudden I can’t even buy a drink in this goddamned town. Isn’t that cute?”

I dragged on my cigarette. “It sounds rough.”

“Doesn’t it? You don’t issue invitations, Nat. You issue ultimatums. I don’t like ultimatums.”

I didn’t say anything. I smoked my cigarette and let her dangle on her end of the phone.

“No place to live, no job, nothing to do. What am I supposed to do, Nat?”

“You should leave town.”

“Should I?”

“Sure. You should come to Las Vegas. With me.”

A pause. “An ultimatum, Nat?”

“Call it an invitation.”

Another pause, followed by a question: “When, Nat?”

“Pack. I’ll call the airport.”