“You can, if you don’t collapse early. I start at midnight.”
“Hugh has been telling us you’ve been here for years.”
And that, Betty thought, is a sharp switchblade you carry around, little blonde. “If I can hold out for ten, they’ll give me a gold watch and a testimonial banquet.”
“I should think your agent would want you to have bookings in other places.”
Betty looked at her with amusement. “I didn’t know you’d ever been with it, pal. That’s an inside comment, isn’t it?”
“It was all a very long time ago.”
“What did you do?”
Vicky gave a little lift of her snug, padded shoulders. “A spot of singing and dancing. I wasn’t very good, actually. My voice is too small.”
“What sort of places, Vicky?”
The blonde’s little smile was very bland. “Oh, you wouldn’t know any of them, darling. I never worked in this country.” She sipped her drink. “As a matter of fact, I gave it all up when I was twenty, over three years before I met Temp. My guardian was always raising such a horrid fuss about it, you know. He didn’t think it a suitable thing for me to do. And I guess it wasn’t, really.”
“Performers are socially unacceptable, of course.”
“But I didn’t mean it that way, darling! Don’t be cross with me. It’s really very different in this country, you know. People have so much more chance to do what they want to do. Without criticism. It must give you such a wonderful sense of freedom.”
“Oh, it does!” Betty said. “I’m a free spirit, all right. Self-expression Admiration. Free meals.”
At that moment one of the desk clerks approached the table. Hugh apologized and stood up quickly. They talked in low tones and Hugh said he would be back in a few minutes, to go right ahead. Their dinner was being served. With Hugh gone. Temp found it necessary to explain to Betty how you went about getting a ketch built at Abaco, ignoring Vicky’s attempts to divert him to a more suitable pattern of conversation. In spite of her absolute indifference to how you went about getting a boat built, Betty found herself liking the man. He was deeply troubled by something. He was trying to sustain a flavor of holiday in his own way.
When Hugh came back he seemed upset. “What was it?” Betty asked.
“Some damn foolishness in the parking lot. The problem was to find the quietest way to handle it. A married man
from San Diego is in town with his girl friend. Somebody tipped the wife off. She’s been laying for them. She tried to run them down in the parking lot when they were walking out to his car. She missed him, broke the girlfriend’s leg, and clobbered the hell out of three parked cars.”
“How veddy violent!” Vicky said.
“The police in this town are good. They have to be,” Hugh said. His mouth twisted in a sardonic way. “Nothing must upset the fun times of the merrymakers, or bring any realistic note to fantasyland. My people are trained to put the lid on as quickly as possible. And so I had to coordinate how three very chastened people should be handled. Attempted murder by motor vehicle isn’t an attractive story. So a lady lost control of her car. That’s all.”
“Do you have this sort of thing often, actually?” Vicky asked.
Hugh looked at her patiently. “Vicky, dear, when you give people the maximum opportunity to make damn fools of themselves, sexually, financially and alcoholically, in an environment that makes movie sets look like low-cost housing, all sorts of things happen often. We get one fat spectrum of trouble out here along the Strip, and down in town they get all the other kinds. Down in town they have fun with the floaters, the winos, the junkies, the bums and tramps and sharpshooters who drift in looking for enchantment. The thing that spices the whole pudding is the divorce-mill operation. The severed ones have a kind of emotional trauma that makes them reckless.”
With a sidelong glance at Betty, Vicky said, “You must be getting a
very
extensive education here, you poor boy!”
Betty turned directly toward Vicky Shannard. “At least, darling, he’s learning to identify a phony at forty paces, and that’s something that will benefit him all his life.”
“But I think Hugh always had good instincts about people,” Vicky protested.
“In that case, we should both be proud to be his female friends, darling,” Betty said, and enjoyed the sudden pinkness of Vicky’s dainty little ears.
After dinner the four of them sat at a good table in the Afrique Bar, and at a little after eleven Betty excused herself to go change for her night’s work.
“What do you think of her?” Hugh asked, and then cursed himself for his illuminating display of eagerness.
“All in all,” Vicky said judiciously, “I think she’s quite
nice, Hugh. It must be very … satisfying to you to have a close friendship with her. But I rather suspect she is considerably more attractive in … this particular context than she would be, say, in the Islands. She seems so … suitable to this sort of a place.”
“
Murrroooww
,” Temp said.
“Do be quiet, ducks,” Vicky told him firmly. “Hugh asked us, and I felt an obligation to give him my opinion, my veddy honest opinion. If I suspected for one moment that he had more than a … casual interest in this … entertainment person, I would certainly be much less kind in my remarks.”
“How do you mean?” Hugh demanded.
She smiled at him and reached to touch his cheek. “You’re so wonderfully loyal to your friends, my dear. It’s very earnest and becoming. But shall we drop it, please? She is really, as I said, quite nice. But it would take a very long search to find any girl nice enough for you. Remember how I used to try?”
“She’s still trying,” Temp said. “She’s still giving you the hard sell in Nassau.”
When Betty did her first forty-minute session, Hugh was conscious of a subtle lack of control and conviction. She lacked her usual ability to silence her audience completely, so that at times it was difficult to hear her. Her timing seemed slightly off.
After she rejoined the table he eventually excused himself and said goodnight to them. He had been up for twenty hours, and they had not been easy hours, and no week end was ever without constant demands on his energies and attention.
He clambered slowly up and out of sleep at six-thirty, squinting through the glare of his bedside light until he could make out Betty’s smiling face. She sat close to him on the edge of his bed in her skin-tight gold lame costume, wearing her professional makeup. She bent over and kissed him.
“This is a brutal invasion of privacy, my dearest,” she whispered. “But I was lonely. I didn’t get to say word one to you all evening.”
He found her hand, turned it and kissed the palm. “I’ll give you a special medal for each invasion, lady.”
“Now I
know
you’re awake! Darling, I am sorry I was so lousy on the first set. I think that female got to me. I shouldn’t have let her, but she did.”
“I couldn’t understand why she was using the needle.”
“Can’t you? That one is an acquisitive bitch. She has to keep a firm hold on everything in sight. I got back into the swing when I went on again. But I didn’t rejoin them. I didn’t have a chance. I had to stop at the bar a moment on my way back to the table to do the greeting-old-fans bit, and when I looked over I could tell they were having one of those grim quarrels, so I prolonged the stay at the bar. She marched out and Temp came over and said a very gracious goodnight. You know, I like him, Hugh. But what the hell is eating him?”
He raised himself up on his elbow. “It isn’t the way I thought it would be. How about grabbing my cigarettes off the bureau over there?”
“I don’t want to keep you up. You’re very tired.”
“I want to talk about it, Betty.”
She brought the cigarettes and ash tray, lit his cigarette for him, snapped the lighter shut with more force than necessary and said, “Me, I have this lousy honesty about my opinions, Hugh. They can be your dearest friends in all the world, but I think she is a dumpy, vicious little pig.”
“She’s made Temp a good wife, Betty.”
“And lived damn well while doing it, I presume.”
“Sure. But I never felt close to her, particularly. I’m fond of Temp.”
“I can understand that.”
“And they aren’t at all the way they used to be.” As Betty listened, he explained the whole thing to her. He finished the story, stubbed out his cigarette and lay back on the pillow. “So he came here for my help.”
“And you’ll set it up with Al Marta?”
“There isn’t much else I can do.”
“If any deal is made, Hugh, it won’t be as nice for Temp as he wants it to be.”
“He’s at a point where he hasn’t got a hell of a lot of choice. Time is running out for him. He can’t go to reputable money. They’d take a year to case a deal this size. He has to have the fast money, and so he has to deal with the kind of people who have it.”
“Don’t get caught in the middle, Hugh.”
“How could I?”
“I don’t know, but be careful.” She looked down at him with her warmth and with a look of wry curiosity. “I suppose she found a chance to badmouth me?”
“Sort of.”
“What was the general drift of it?”
“Oh, how you wouldn’t stack up so well anywhere else but here.”
“If I could be guaranteed an all-female jury, I’d strangle that little monster. They’d never convict me. How do
you
think I’d stack up elsewhere, friend?”
“Wherever they put you, old buddy, you’re well-stacked.”
She stood up. “And on that note of reassurance, I shall take to my lonely bed and cry my eyes out, I betcha.”
He lunged and caught her wrist and pulled back, bringing her down upon him. “There are better kinds of reassurance, girl.”
“No, Hugh. Really! I didn’t come in here to.…”
He stilled her struggles with a kiss, and when it ended she looked owlishly down at him, their noses an inch apart. “I’ve got no character,” she whispered.
“When somebody tries to cast a shadow over our beautiful friendship,” he said, “I figure it gives us a sort of obligation to reaffirm it just as soon as humanly possible, don’t you?”
“Your thesis is unarguable, sir.”
She went into his bathroom and sponged away the theatrical makeup, came out and, in the rosy-gray light of dawn that leaked through the almost-closed slats of the blinds, rid herself of the golden gown and two wisps of nylon and her diaphanous hosiery and her tall golden sandals. Then, standing there, she undid the blackness of her hair until it fell about her shoulders, and came to him, bringing to him in special pride the deft abundance of her love.
• • • five
Gidge Allen told Hugh over the phone on Saturday morning that eleven o’clock would be a pretty good time to talk to Al. When Hugh took the small private elevator up to the penthouse at the stated time, he found a dozen people milling around the big living room, most of them working on Whisky Sours and Bloody Mary’s. Morning television was on full blast, ignored by everyone. A slight Negro with a mustache sat at a small electric organ, seeking out lugubrious chords. Two men argued heatedly over a racing sheet. A redhead was proving to a mildly interested group
how long she could stand on her head. Hugh nodded to those he knew as he worked his way over to the windows where Al Marta stood talking to a dumpy swarthy little man in a cheap suit of electric blue, a dirty striped shirt, and shoulders thick with dandruff.
As soon as Al noticed Hugh’s approach, Hugh heard him say, “All you’re doing is wasting my time, Mario. I can’t give you no answer. Go away and get it set up and come back with it all laid out and maybe we can talk about it.”
As the man trudged sadly away, Al gave Hugh a wide white grin of welcome and said, “You don’t come up here enough, Hugh. You should come around any time. We always got some kind of action going. We always got laughs. You work too hard down there, you know that? Take it easy sometimes. Everybody’s going nuts about the wonderful job you’re doing. We got Jerry off your back, right?”
“I appreciate that.”
“And another bump in pay. You heard about that?”
“Max told me, Mr. Marta.”
“Mr. Marta was my father. He’s dead a long time, God rest his soul. If you don’t call me Al you get me sore, Hugh. Let’s go where we can hear ourselves think.” He took Hugh through the bedroom and into the small study beyond. The walls were almost solid with framed photographs of celebrities, fervently inscribed to Al Marta.
Al settled himself in a deep chair, put one foot up against the edge of the pink desk and said, “Sit right there, Hugh. You know, boy, the way we got it set up now, we got the strongest team on the Strip. You and Max. The way you two are working together, everybody is nuts about the operation we’ve got. Thank God I got the sense to stay out of it. All I do is represent the owners, being one myself. And thanks to you, I’m living better here every day. I wanted to get that across to you, Hugh, how much everybody thinks of you. Now what is it you got on your mind?”
“It’s an investment opportunity, Mr.—I mean Al. I don’t know if you or any of your associates would be interested in it. There’s an old friend of mine in the house right now. He asked me to … vouch for him.”
“Sometimes I’m interested in putting money in something good. How much is involved?”
“Seven hundred thousand. And it would have to be cash.”
With no change of expression, Al said, “Until you said that, kid, I was ready to reach for the brush. You better give it to me slow and careful.”
Hugh explained what he knew of the deal. He outlined Shannard’s background. Suspecting that careful checking would be done, Hugh did not make the mistake of minimizing Shannard’s current difficulties.
“Temp has maps and all the facts and figures, and he can talk to you at your convenience, Al.”
“This is prime land, you say. And you’ve worked out there.”
“You can’t find Island land that desirable now, in tracts that size.”
“Suppose it went through, kid. Maybe you got your heart set on a finder’s fee? Or do you get your end from Shannard?”
“I get nothing at all. I wouldn’t want anything.”
“You don’t like money?”