The Only Girl in the Game (27 page)

But I know damn well that Max Hanes could have worked his telephone deception without my ever knowing about it. That switchboard operator could not have been more obviously for sale. But he went through me, and now there are ten one-hundred-dollar bills in the locked drawer of my desk, and that is an absurd price to pay for the cooperation I gave him, particularly knowing it was not needed.

I am being purchased? No. I can let him think I am being purchased. One thousand dollars will build a good and solid piece of the dock where the sports cruisers will stop, long after I have forgotten the name Max Hanes. He thinks he is deviously entangling me in his web of deceit, but in truth it is the other way around. I am using him. I have become a realist. I stand, smiling, under the money tree.

Homer G. Gallowell sat in his big suite in his vest and shirtsleeves, his feet propped up, sipping good bourbon and watching with a patronizing contempt the details of a half-hour western on the television screen. He made no attempt to follow the story or listen to the lines written for the actors. It was a hobby he indulged himself in from time to time, relishing his own professional indignation. He would see them dally a line in a way that would pinch the fingers off a legitimate cowhand. He’d snort at a Miles City rigging or a center-fire rigging on a cow pony carrying a man who was supposed to be from Montana, or a split-ear headstall on a horse supposedly from south of the border, or a remuda containing mares that was supposed to be in Wyoming.

He got up and, carrying his glass, went to the door to answer a knock.

“Well now, Miz Betty!” he said with sudden pleasure. “Just you come on in and set.”

She came in wide-eyed, hesitant, nervous, closing the door behind her in a rather furtive manner. She had a skittish look, like a mare in rattler country.

“I don’t want to stay here more than one minute, Homer.”

“You look like a drink would help some,” he said, walking over and turning off the western.

“No. No thanks, really. Do you remember when we first met and after we’d decided to be friends, you got the idea I was under some kind of pressure or compulsion? You said you’d be willing to help if I ever asked for your help.”

“I can remember that. I remember it well, because it isn’t a thing I’ve said often in my life to many people. You said something about phoning Texas if you ever had the need of a white knight on a horse. And there’s no need to ask me if it still holds good, because once I say a thing like that, I don’t take it back. Now if you’re ready to tell me who’s got you messed up, and how, I’ll get you loose of it one way or another.”

“I can’t talk here, Homer. I can’t risk talking to you here. I’ve lined up a place where we can meet, where I can talk to you privately.” She glanced at her watch. “Would you meet me there at about seven-thirty?”

“Anything that’s got you this unsettled is worth listening to, Betty.”

“It’s the Playland Motel, Number 190. I’ll be there first. You can come right on back to the room. It’s in the rear. You won’t have to stop at the office.”

“I’ll be proud to help any way I can, and you know it.”

She left with a haste that was like flight. Homer frowned at the closed door after she left. The flavor of secret assignation set off alarm warnings in the back of his mind. Over the years many clever and unscrupulous women had attempted the entrapment of so much raw power and money. But he was not vulnerable to the scandal lies could create, and his lawyers moved with a gifted ruthlessness in such matters, shredding and flattening all guileful hopes.

This Betty Dawson was not of that breed. He knew he had nothing to fear from her. She had not simulated her own distress.

After she was back in her room, Betty felt emotionally drained. It had worked, just as she had known it would. The old man would come to the Playland Motel, and she would open the door and let him in, and the unseen reels of tape would begin to turn. But she had no idea of what she
would do next, what she could say to him. She would lie, and sooner or later he would sense what she was up to, and, depending on his whim, he would either make use of her or walk out. In either case it would be the death of a friendship and a respect she valued highly. But this was a loss you took to avoid taking a much greater one. You cast off the small loves to protect the big ones.

In a few minutes it would be time to drive over there and wait for him. She touched her hair and fixed her lips, and looked, with neither contempt nor curiosity, into her own dead eyes.

When the phone rang she picked it up and said, “Yes?”

“I have a long-distance call for you, Miss Dawson.”

Another operator said, “Is this Miss Elizabeth Dawson?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Go ahead, please. Your party is on the line.”

“Betty? Betty, darling, is that you?” It was a husky voice, familiar from all the childhood years, but now broken with anguish.

“Lottie! What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

“It’s him. Oh, God, darlin’, it’s him. Gone in the twinkling of an eye. After the last patient, he went out to look at the roses in the back the way he does always. My Charlie was at the far side of the yard, and saw the doctor fall and went running to him. The doctor was trying to get up again and got up only as far as one knee, his face like paper, holding his fist against his heart, and he fell again just as Charlie reached him. Dr. Wellborn was here in two minutes, I swear, ready with his needles and all, and your father lived to be loaded on the ambulance, but him unconscious entirely. They went screaming off through the traffic, Charlie and me following in the car, not even locking the house, but he passed away before they got there. Doctor Wellborn was telling us there was no saving him in any case, child. We have just come back here, and I haven’t even had the chance to cry yet, the way I will for the dear man, gone so sudden from us.… Betty? Betty, darling?”

“I’m here, Lottie.”

“It’s the blessing of the Lord you two made up so nice these last couple of years. I keep thinking of that and you keep thinking of it too, darling. He was happy, and it’s a blessing these days to die fast and easy when it’s your time, because we see enough of the other kind around here, dragging on in the agonies. He was struck down in the midst of life, child, and he was in happiness when it came.”

“I … I’ll fly home tomorrow, Lottie.”

“It’s a bitter sad thing, child. You should be able to stay here for a time and not go back into that singing and funning.”

“I may be able to stay … quite a long time, Lottie.”

She sat by the phone after she had hung up. She was stricken by such an incomparable feeling of aloneness it seemed to her she could not breathe. The wheel of the world had stopped, and there were no sounds in the dust.

Not
that
way, she thought. I wanted to be free. Not
this
way. I didn’t ask for it, thinking it could happen this way.

She felt that she was straining for comprehension, but that it could not all come to her at once, that this was only a partial knowing, and all the rest of it would come, and soon.

She tried to get back into the world, and after a long time she looked at her watch and made slow sense of the position of the hands. She had a nagging sense of obligation, of a routine to be followed, and suddenly remembered Homer and the Playland Motel.

She even stood up in preparation to go, moving in a way like that of a semi-blind person in an unfamiliar environment, picking up her purse and her wrap, actually reaching her door before she remembered that the obligation no longer existed. Her father had passed beyond their ability to reach out and sicken him. The leverage was gone.

• • •  ten

It was a minute or two before seven when Homer Gallowell answered the knock at the door of his suite.

“Well now, hello, Miz Betty!” he said, surprised.

“Homer,” she said, and walked slowly in.

He closed the door and waited for some word of explanation, studying her, intrigued by the change in her. All tensions and anxieties seemed gone. She seemed placid. But it was a placidity that disturbed him in some way he could not define. She turned and looked calmly at him.

“I was getting about ready to go keep that date.”

“What?”

“That Playland Motel place, Room 190, like you told me,” he said irritably. “You want we should go there together?”

She frowned. “Oh, no. We don’t have to do that now.”

“You wanted me to help you, dammit.”

“It wasn’t that.”

“You know, you don’t make much sense along about here,” Homer said.

She smiled in a tentative, almost apologetic, way, and said, “We don’t have to go there now because he died. Lottie phoned me, you see, and she told me he’s dead.”

And, at last, Homer Gallowell knew what he was dealing with. He had seen it several times in his life. Of the memories of those times, the most vivid was of the young wife who, twenty years and more ago, had driven out to a drilling rig in East Texas in an old pickup truck to wait for her husband and drive him back home. Homer had happened to be there, checking on the progress of the drilling of this wildcat venture. The woman’s husband was local labor, a farmer interested in picking up extra cash.

She had arrived before quitting time and parked next to Homer’s dusty Packard, and so she had a ringside view when the hoist cable snapped and the length of casing took one awkward, diabolical bounce before sledging the life out of the young farmer. She had come running to stare, whimper once, then walk slowly and woodenly away, heading with the stubborn blindness of a wind-up toy toward the meaningless horizon line. They had caught her and turned her and led her back, and he remembered how her eyes had been, and how she had worn this same timid, apologetic smile.

He moved Betty Dawson back toward a chair. She sat, obedient as a child. He poured two ounces of straight bourbon and took it to her. She drank it down, shuddered, and gave him the empty glass.

Homer pulled another chair close and took her hand in both of his. They liked their hands held. They liked the touch of the living.

“Who died?” he asked in a gentle voice.

“My father.” Her hand lay placid in his.

“So now we don’t have to go to that there motel?”

“Oh, no. I had to do whatever Max told me to do, or they’d send the pictures to my father.”

“That’s Max Hanes?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of pictures you talking about?”

He felt her hand tighten in his and then relax. “Horrid pictures, Homer. Of me and … a man. I didn’t know
they were taking them. Max tried to show them to me. I threw up. I couldn’t let my father ever see them. You can understand that? I would do anything to keep him from seeing them.”

“Sure you would, honey. So now we don’t have to go to that motel?”

She frowned. “It was stupid anyway. I kept telling Max it was a stupid idea, that it wouldn’t work with you, but he kept saying you’ve got so much of their money it’s worth trying anything. So you see, I had to do like he said. Because of the pictures.”

“It wouldn’t work with me?”

“No. You wouldn’t go to bed with me.”

He released her hand. “That’s right smutty talk, girl.”

“He thought it might happen. That’s where they take the pictures. Movies. And they record everything you say. Al Marta owns it, somehow, I think. It’s all fixed up so they can put everything on film and tape, and Max told me they use it for a lot of different reasons.”

“So what was he trying to gain, girl?”

She looked at him with blank surprise. “To get the money back, Homer. So you’d gamble it all back. They fixed it so you couldn’t get hold of your pilot, faking the phone calls or something, and then if you were … attracted to me, you’d stay in town longer and I’d have to sort of tease you into gambling some more. I told Max it wouldn’t work with you, but you see he knows we’re friends, and because you’re … rich and important he didn’t dare try anything that might make you so mad you’d try to get back at the hotel somehow.”

“Has this Max made you do this kind of thing often, child?”

“Just three times, Homer. This would have been the fourth. But is three any different than three hundred?” She reached toward him and he took her hand again. “You see, I had no way to fight. You couldn’t have helped me. Nobody could have helped me.”

He looked at her with mingled compassion and anger. “I have done a lot of things in my life,” he said. “I have grabbed them where I knew it was tender and I have made them do things my way. They have come at me from all the directions there are, and I have broken the ones that would break, and I have tooken the weapons off the ones with guts, but I have never done and I would never do to any human thing what has been done to you. There is maybe five thousand people cuss my name while going off to sleep
and the first thing waking up, but I have never put myself in the way of cussing my own soul. When I was a boy child there was Indians still remembered ways a man like Hanes could be given ten days’ dying, but that knowledge has gone out of the world. I could have a grandbaby your age, girl. If I had to think up how she would be, I’d settle for you.”

“But I got myself into this … that first time.”

“You remember why?”

“Broke, proud, scared. And I thought I didn’t care what happened to me. I thought I didn’t give a damn. And I kept myself just drunk enough so I could … go through with it.”

“Show me one human thing hasn’t been a damn fool at one time or another. But most don’t get caught up on it. About your father, have you done your crying yet?”

“I can’t. Not yet.”

“It’s something you should get over and done with.”

“I know.”

“This little airplane takes four and you could come back.… No, you’d have to go to the services. Didn’t you tell me once you came from San Francisco?”

“That’s right. I’ll fly home tomorrow.”

“When that’s over and done, you come out. You let me know, I’ll send an airplane after you.”

“Thanks, Homer. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll do. But thanks.”

She looked a little better. He studied her for a few moments and suddenly thought of something else. “That glorified desk clerk you got your eye on, that Darren feller, he know about your … movie career?”