Cinderella Sims, page 5
When you dream you might as well go all the way. But that’s the whole point of writing it down. That way it isn’t just a dream—it’s there on paper when you’re done mooning over it and you can’t just look away and forget it. It had worked before—one fine day I made a list and two days later landed my first newspaper job, a copyboy slot on the Louisville Courier. A year later I was on the Times, and a year after that I had a desk of my own.
And, I swore up and down, it was going to work again. Or my name was not Ted Lindsay.
It was all there in black and white—money, a business, a family. Now it was time to get some of the specifics on the list.
I wrote: Now I have to—
1. Find some foolproof scheme for getting money in a hurry.
That was going to take a little thought: If a person could just sit down with a pencil and paper and wind up with a hatful of money, nobody in the country would have to work for a living. That might be nice, but as sure as God made little green spiders there was more to it than that. I went on to the next point, the paper. I sat around for a while but I couldn’t think of anything more compelling than Buy a newspaper, and at the moment the only sort of newspaper I could buy was the kind you pick up at a candy store. Step two couldn’t be solved until step one was all tied up with a pink ribbon.
Step three?
Hmmmmmm.
I was beginning to get a message. It had no logic behind it, but there was an intuitive impulse that said the same thing over and over, and a reporter’s intuition is the next best thing to a woman’s intuition—much as, as a wag once remarked, a reporter is the next best thing to a woman. I’m not sure what the bastard meant by that. Let’s forget it for the time being.
The intuitive impulse went along these lines. A certain doll had a whole bunch of things going. A certain doll was the key to a whole host of appealing possibilities. This babe could figure quite prominently in steps one and two and three.
Three guesses what chick I’m talking about.
Well, it wasn’t Rosie Ryan.
Nor was it Grace.
It wasn’t Mrs. Murdock either.
Give up?
The intuitive impulse said, over and over, Get a line on Cinderella Sims.
So, printing as neatly as any third-grader, I wrote on my list:
2. Get a line on Cinderella Sims.
I can’t explain the intuitive impulse. Intuition, by definition, is illogical. Rather, it’s extra-logical. There may well be logic involved, but if so it is a form of logic that operates without the knowledge of the human brain. An intuitive logic, if you will.
What the hell.
What had happened? I’ll tell you what had happened. I was walking down the street, minding my business, when out of an orange-colored sky a girl came along who knocked me far enough out of orbit to make me take a flier with a sexed-up bomb like Rosie. There was an aura about this girl that was more than beauty and more than sex, a fascination that hovered over her like a halo, except, somehow, not like a halo at all.
Call it chemistry, or biology. Call it any damned thing you please, but there was a legitimate impulse telling me that the fascination meant that my path and Cinderella Sims’ path had to cross, that she was the key to everything I wanted and that I, somehow, was the key to everything she needed. Call it stupidity, or insanity, or catatonia, in the language of the incomparable Dr. Strom. Call it whatever you damn well please, I believed it.
I went over to the window and stared through the rain at the basement window across the street. There didn’t seem to be any lights on—either she wasn’t home, or she was sleeping, or in the dead of night she had moved to Saudi Arabia. Still, looking at her window gave me something to do.
I stared so intently at the window that I did not hear the footsteps in the hallway.
Nor did I hear my door open.
But I heard the voice, sweet as honey, soft as dewdrops, malicious as a scandal sheet.
The voice said: “Put up your hands, Mr. Lindsay. And turn around. Slowly.”
I put up my hands. I turned around, slowly.
And I caught my breath.
And stared.
There was rain in her hair and color in her cheeks. She was dressed in a man’s flannel shirt and a pair of blue jeans but no man ever looked half so good in them. Her eyes were filled with fire and her pretty chest was heaving like mad, probably because the damned stairs were so damned steep.
There was a gun in her hand and it was pointed at the spot in my chest where my heart is supposed to be.
I will give you three guesses who she was. Not Rosie Ryan. Not Grace. Not Mrs. Murdock either.
The girl with her finger on the trigger was, inevitably, Cinderella Sims.
“Mr. Lindsay,” she said. “Mr. Ted Lindsay. You’d better talk fast, Mr. Lindsay. You’d better tell me everything there is to tell me and you’d better do it in a hurry or so help me God I’ll kill you.”
“But—”
“I’m not kidding,” she went on, her eyes burning and her hands trembling a little. If her hands trembled too much that howitzer she was pointing at me could go off, and if it went off it could make a perfect mess of the room. Hell, there would be blood all over the ratty carpet. My blood. And I had grown kind of attached to my blood over the years.
“You’d better explain, Mr. Lindsay. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”
“I do?”
Her face hardened, if that was possible. For a second I was scared she wasn’t going to give me a chance to explain. But what in the name of God was I supposed to explain?
“What should I explain?”
“How you found me, Mr. Lindsay. Why you’re after me. Who you are. Whom you’re working for. What the rest of them know about me.”
She had to be insane. There was no other explanation for it—she simply had to be out of her mind. Either she was nuts or I was, and in a minute it wasn’t going to make much difference which one of us had marbles missing. In another minute that gun was going to go off and I was going to turn into a not-too-vital statistic.
“Hey,” I said. “Look. I mean, give me a chance to explain.”
“Go ahead.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I’m just a broken-down old reporter taking a rest cure in the big city. I’m not working for anybody. I mean, I sling hash at a diner on Columbus Avenue. Grace’s Lunch. You can call them and ask them. They’ll tell you.”
She sighed.
“And I saw you yesterday for the first time, and I don’t know anything about you, and I’m damned if I can understand why you’re holding a gun on me, and—”
She sighed again.
“Look, I—”
“Mr. Lindsay.” she said. “Mr. Lindsay, the sight of me yesterday afternoon was enough to stagger you. You recognized me, and I must say you were obvious enough about it. Then you followed me.”
That much was true. I followed her, all right. Like a rat following the Pied Piper. But what in hell—
“Then you started investigating,” she went on. “Checking the nameplate in the hall. Sneaking subtle glances through my window. Keeping my apartment under constant surveillance from the building across the street. How can you deny it when I caught you in the act?”
I didn’t even try to deny it. I was too busy wondering where they were going to ship the body. I’d made a big mistake, not giving Mrs. Murdock my Louisville address. They’d probably plant me in Potter’s Field instead of sticking me in my native earth.
“I’ve waited long enough, Mr. Lindsay. Start talking. And you’d better make it good.”
4
I made it good.
There was this book I read once called The Screaming Mimi written by a guy named Fredric Brown. It was about this newspaperman, you see, and I have always been partial to novels about newspapermen, much as I have always been partial to novels by Fredric Brown.
Anyway, at one point in this book this newspaperman is alone in a room with this girl, and this girl is out of her skull, as well as being out of her clothing, and in her hand there is this knife. In order to avoid getting this knife between his ribs, this newspaperman begins talking. Talk, it seems, keeps this girl from doing much of anything, such as stabbing this newspaperman. He talks about everything under or over the sun, quotes Shakespearean soliloquies, rattles off farm prices, anything so long as he doesn’t stop talking. And finally someone comes and takes the girl away, and all is well, and that is that.
Which, more or less, is what I did. Since I didn’t know just where to start I started at the beginning, and if I left anything out I can’t remember what it might have been. I told her everything there was to tell about me and Mona and Louisville and Grace’s Lunch and oriental philosophy and God knows what else. Somewhere along the way I managed to talk her out of pulling the trigger, though just what it was that I mentioned that did the trick is something I’m afraid I will never know. Whatever it was, it worked, and I will be forever thankful to it.
Oh, yes. There was one part I didn’t bother recounting to her. I left out Rosie. For some reason I didn’t think she would understand, and even if she did, I wasn’t altogether proud of my participation in that particular bedroom farce. By all rules I acquitted myself nobly in that little battle of the sexes, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to dwell on.
I finished, finally, and I looked at her, timidly, and the gun was no longer centered upon my chest. It was pointing at the floor.
I felt a good deal better about the whole thing.
First she lowered the gun; then she lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mr. Lindsay,” she said, her voice one hell of a lot softer now, her tone downright apologetic. “It seems I’ve made a mistake. But it was a logical mistake. I have to be very careful.”
I started to tell her what the hell, mistakes happen, it’s all in the game. Then it occurred to me that maybe it was my turn to seize the advantage and push a little. After all, it was my room she was standing in with a cannon in her fist. If anyone had the right to demand an explanation, I did.
I said: “Your turn.”
She just looked at me.
“You came in here with a gun,” I told her. “You pointed that gun at me and scared me out of several years’ growth. And I’m a growing boy. Or at least I was.”
“But—”
“So it’s your turn to talk. It’s your turn to tell me just what in hell is making you so suspicious about everything. I think I have a right to know.”
She pursed her lips and I waited. Her hair was lovely now, the water making it all sleek and shiny, and her eyes had a feathery softness to replace the fire that had been in them when the gun was aimed at me.
“No,” she said finally. “It wouldn’t interest you.”
“Try me.”
“It’s not important,” she said. “I made a mistake and I’m sorry. Can’t we let it go at that?”
“No.”
“Pardon?”
“No, we can’t let it go at that. I want to get to the bottom of this, dammit. You’d better explain.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll take the gun away from you and spank your behind for you.”
She looked at me. “You know,” she said after a minute, “I believe that’s just what you’d do. That’s just the sort of thing a man like you might do.”
“So do I get the brass ring?”
“Pardon?”
“Are you going to tell me what all this nonsense is about?”
“Well,” she said thoughtfully. “Well, I guess I have to, don’t I?”
I took the gun from her, looked at it cautiously, sniffed at the barrel the way the police always do in the movies and dropped it into the bureau drawer. Once the gun was in the drawer and the drawer shut I felt one hell of a lot better. Guns make me nervous.
Then I made her sit down on the bed, found a cigarette for her and a cigarette for me and lit both of them. I sat down on the chair—which no longer faced her window, but faced her instead—and took a deep drag on my cigarette. It was her show now and I waited for her to say something.
It took her awhile, and while I waited I could see how nervous she was. There was one hell of a lot of tension inside that pretty little body and it would probably be a good idea for her to talk some of it out. I was ready to listen. That was me—Lend-an-ear Lindsay, always willing and able to help out a damsel in distress.
“I’m in trouble,” she said. “Bad trouble.”
“Police trouble?”
She hesitated, then shook her head no.
“What kind?”
“Money trouble.”
“There’s another kind?”
She shrugged. “It’s hard to explain, Mr. Lindsay.”
“Ted.”
“Ted. I don’t know how to start.”
“Just plunge in. And by the way, what do I call you? Cinderella Sims sounds too good to be true.”
“It’s my real name. People generally call me Cindy.”
“Cindy Sims,” I said, trying it out. It sounded fine. I liked it.
“There were six of them,” she said, getting started again. “Five men and a girl. I had a job as a cashier at West of the Lake—that’s a gambling joint at Tahoe in Nevada. It’s called West of the Lake because there’s Lake Tahoe and the club is to the west of it.”
“Go on.”
“They were a confidence mob. You know, con men. Only I didn’t know it at the time. I thought they were just a party of tourists. That’s what they told me and I didn’t see any reason why it should be anything else. They said they were playing a practical joke on this other guy but they were actually trying to bilk him. I didn’t find this out until later.”
I digested this. She put out her cigarette and went on a little further.
“The man’s name was McGuire. I don’t know what he did. He was from Texas and I think somebody said he was an oilman or something. Everybody from Texas is an oilman. At least it seems that way. One of the men, a man named Eddie Reed, came to me and told me they were playing a joke on McGuire. They were offering him phony chips at a discount for him to turn in. He’d come in, buy a few thousand dollars’ worth of chips, fool around at the roulette wheel, and then cash the stack.”
“So?”
“So he would come in with chips that he hadn’t paid for. Say he comes in with three thousand dollars’ worth in his pocket, buys another three thousand worth, and breaks even on the wheel. When he cashes I give him six thousand. He’s three thousand ahead, minus what he has to pay for the chips.”
I thought it over. “Okay,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense. You can’t make phony chips that pass a Vegas house. They work pretty hard on monogram and color and everything else in the book. Those chips are as individual as fingerprints. I don’t get it.”
She grinned. “Neither did McGuire,” she said. “And the girl—she was a busty blonde named Lori Leigh—she kept him from getting much of anything, except what she had to offer. She was working with them from the inside, living with McGuire and wearing him out at night so that he couldn’t think straight during the day. I found this out later, you see. I didn’t understand any of it at the time. I thought it was a joke, the way Eddie Reed said it was.”
“Okay,” I said. “Go on.”
“The thing about the chips,” she said, “is that you couldn’t tell them from real ones.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Let me finish. You couldn’t tell them from real ones because they were real ones. Reed and the others had bought them from the house and hadn’t bothered to cash them in. Now do you see it?”
“No.”
“I’m glad, because neither did I. Not then. You see, Reed told me it was all a joke on McGuire. They were pretending to give him this method of cheating the house, when actually the house wasn’t losing a nickel. Reed wanted me to act like everything was perfectly okay when McGuire cashed in his chips. I was supposed to take it in stride if he seemed nervous or anything, instead of pushing the panic button the way we’re supposed to if something seems strange.”
“So?”
She stroked her chin. “Now it gets complicated.”
“It can’t get any more complicated than it already is.”
“It does, though. Want to hear more?”
“Go on.”
“After McGuire and Lori Leigh were steady bed partners, Reed got to work on McGuire. Played the slots next to him and got to talking with him. He played it just right, made McGuire look like a big man in front of the girl and McGuire ate it all up. They had dinner a couple times and Reed let it slip that it didn’t matter how much he gambled, he couldn’t lose anything. McGuire wanted to know why and Reed told him how he bought perfect fakes at fifty cents on the dollar. That way he had to come out ahead, even with the normal house percentage against the player.”
“And McGuire bit?”
“Evidently. He kept asking Reed to let him in on it. He was the kind of gambler who doesn’t belong in a house, always looking for a little of the best of it. He liked to gamble, but he liked it better if he couldn’t lose.”
“I know the type.”
“So did Reed. After a while he let himself be persuaded to buy some chips for McGuire. McGuire really had to talk hard to get him to agree. He was so completely sold it was ridiculous.”
“Keep talking.”
“Reed sold McGuire a hundred dollars’ worth of chips, ones he’d bought himself at the house a few days back. McGuire played with them, came out as little ahead, and cashed them in. They were perfectly legitimate, so naturally I cashed them. That was easy enough.”
“And?”
“More of the same. Next night it was two hundred bucks’ worth and McGuire was really getting hungry. He was loaded, but that kind of guy never has as much money as he’d like to have. He wanted more and he must have figured this gimmick as a steady source of income.”
