Collected Short Fiction, page 147
Smiling, Alice bent down and whispered in his ear. But there was no smile in her voice. “Do you realize what you’re doing? You’re cheating. Morally if not any other way.”
“Oh, yes? They owe me ten thousand dollars!”
“Sure, but with what you’ve got in front of you, you could use ten-thousand-dollar-bills for cigarette lighters.”
Arthur beamed. “It’s a nice thought, isn’t it?”
“Can you open?” Miss Cynthia asked.
Arthur fanned his cards with little concern, studying them. Then, suddenly, he hoped the expression didn’t show on his face. He’d drawn his first spectacular hand of the evening. Four—count them—Aces. Alice gaped.
“Stop that,” Arthur whispered. “And how’d you find me?”
“Who said I came looking for you?”
“Well, didn’t you?”
“I—I guess so. I wanted to see what would happen to you. I felt responsible because they wouldn’t believe me at the hospital.”
“Responsible? What could possibly happen to me? And you still haven’t answered my question.”
“Oh, that. You talked about a man at the Golden Heron who owed you ten thousand dollars for your planeload of Central American orchids. It was obvious you’d come here.”
“Can you open?” Miss Cynthia repeated.
“Oh,” Arthur said offhandedly, “I guess so. “Say, twenty thousand dollars?”
Oo’s and ah’s floated up from around the table. Arthur tossed a handful of blue chips to the center and Miss Cynthia counted hers out carefully. “Wouldn’t be trying to bluff right back at little old me, Daddy, would you?” she demanded.
“Who,” said Arthur, “me?”
Alice whispered: “I still say that morally you have no right—”
“O.K.,” Arthur beamed at her. “I’ll play this one without you-know-what. Promise.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” said Arthur.
Alice looked at his fanned cards again and whispered, “Big deal. How can you lose?”
“Cards,” Miss Cynthia said.
“I guess I’ll play these,” Arthur told her.
“One to the dealer,” said Miss Cynthia, unperturbed. She discarded and drew the top card from the deck. Arthur had an impulse to read it through the back, but fought it down. After all, he’d promised, hadn’t he? Besides, the chances of Miss Cynthia drawing to beat four aces were astronomical.
“Well?” Miss Cynthia said after a while.
“Twenty more,” Arthur said. He meant twenty thousand, and everyone knew it. Everyone watched and waited, hardly breathing. Even the croupiers at the deserted roulette wheels came over to watch.
“Let’s say your twenty, and twenty better,” Miss Cynthia told him quietly.
With meticulous care, Arthur got a cigarette going, inhaled, blew smoke, studied the table through it. He fought down an impulse to use his X-ray vision.
“You promised,” Alice said triumphantly.
“Yeah,” Arthur admitted. “I promised.” What was the difference? he asked himself. He was sweating for nothing. Say Miss Cynthia held two pair. Say she was lucky and drew a full house. Arthur’s four aces still would beat her. Or say she’d also drawn four of a kind pat—unlikely as it was—and had called for one card to throw him off. Whatever four of a kind she had couldn’t beat his four aces. Or say she’d held four cards to a straight or a flush and had filled it. She still lost, didn’t she? The only hand that could beat his was a straight flush, and who ever heard of a straight flush and four aces in the same draw.
“I’ll call your raise,” Arthur said slowly, “and bump you back twenty thousand more.”
Miss Cynthia grunted, called him Daddy, and raised again. “You promised,” Alice said once more.
Everyone thought she was telling Arthur he’d promised to bump Miss Cynthia back. He did so. And so did Miss Cynthia. Soon the mound of chips at the center of the table was enormous. By the time Miss Cynthia contented herself with just calling him, Arthur had very few chips remaining in front of him.
He unfolded his hand dramatically and said, “Four bulls.” He began to rake in the money.
“Read ’em and weep,” a man behind him said. “Read and weep, house gal!”
Miss Cynthia smiled her canine-tooth smile for the first time at the table. “I’m sorry for you, Daddy,” she said in a voice which told everyone she was really not sorry at all, “but you’d better put your little old hands back in your pocket or wherever you keep them.” She dropped her cards face up on the table.
There was a stunned silence, then groans of sympathy for Arthur. The nearimpossible had happened. Miss Cynthia had drawn a single card in the face of Arthur’s four Aces and had filled a straight flush, Queen high, with it. She was the winner.
“I—I’m sorry,” Alice said. “But I guess maybe it serves you right.”
Arthur counted his chips disconsolately. He had a little more than seven thousand dollars left. “Not quitting, are you?” he asked Miss Cynthia.
“Not if you aren’t, Daddy.” The crowd settled back expectantly.
At that moment a huge man in a monkey suit drifted over to the table with the receptionist in the man-tailored suit. “That’s him, Otto,” the receptionist said in her icy voice. “I’m sure of it. Arthur Turpin.”
Otto wrapped fingers as big as salamis around Arthur’s elbow. “I’m sorry, folks,” he said in a surprisingly mild and cultured voice, “but this gentleman is all finished playing for the moment. Will you come with me, sir?”
“I don’t see any reason why I should,” Arthur protested.
“You’re sure, Louise?” Otto asked the receptionist.
“Positive,” Louise said.
“Boss wants to see you, Jack,” Otto said, the cultured smoothness fading from his voice and leaving more than a suggestion of menace.
“He been cheating?” one of the previous losers at the poker game demanded almost gleefully. “Might a known it.”
“Didn’t say a thing about cheating, folks,” Otto said. “Everything’s going to be fine. Just fine. Go right ahead playing as if nothing happened.” He whispered so only Arthur could hear: “You coming without trouble, Jack, or do I break your arm off and let you carry it back to Mr. Morny’s office? How about it?”
“I’ll go with you,” said Arthur, deciding that the big man could probably do just that.
“Listen, please!” Alice cried earnestly. “If he’s in some kind of trouble because of what he’s done, it’s probably my fault. I’m a nurse.
I’m—his nurse. I can explain everything. May I come too?”
“Sister,” said Otto, “if you can explain everything then you got no choice. You don’t have to ask. You just come along with us, and no fuss, huh?”
Arthur stood up. Otto’s free hand took Alice’s elbow, and the big man steered them both away from the poker table. Several patrons who’d wanted to play for stakes considerably smaller than those Arthur had been playing for, immediately sat down at the table. Miss Cynthia dealt as if nothing had happened.
Chester Morny was a trim little man with a moustache and a Nevada suntan and hard cold eyes as expressive as agates. His hair was rumpled. So was his tuxedo jacket. “You’re Arthur Turpin?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Arthur, “I am. And if you’re Chester Morny, you owe me ten thousand dollars.”
“You want I should hit him, boss?” Otto asked.
Chester Morny shook his head and said: “Louise, will you please repeat what Mr. Turpin told you.”
“He said you were in the office counting money, chief.”
Chester Morny nodded. “Could he possibly have known that?”
“No, sir. Only you and Otto and I know that Friday night’s your time for recording the weekly gross. Only the armored truck driver and guard—”
“But there weren’t any,” Chester Morny said coolly. “That is, they were a phoney driver and a phoney guard, Mr. Turpin. Your confederates, may I suggest?”
“My confederates?”
“Yes, Mr. Turpin. It’s pretty clear that you used the planeload of orchids as a front, as an excuse to get in here and—”
“That’s absolutely ridiculous!”
“—as they say, case the joint.”
“I never did any such thing.”
“No?” Louise asked sweetly. “Then how did you know that Morny was in there counting the money? Can you tell us that?”
“You’re darned right I can,” Arthur said hotly. “I can see through walls and doors and things, that’s how.”
“He can see through walls and doors and things,” Morny said dryly.
“You want I should hit him, boss?” Otto asked, more hopefully this time.
“I will let you know,” Morny told the eager henchman, “when such a possibility interests me.” He turned smiling to Arthur. “Now surely, Mr. Turpin, you can’t expect me to believe that.”
Arthur scanned the room quickly, nervously. On the wall behind the desk was a picture showing the facade of the Gold Heron in full color. Behind the picture with his X-ray vision Arthur saw a safe. “I’ll prove it to you,” he said. “Your safe is—” he pointed dramatically at the picture—“over there.”
“That doesn’t prove a thing,” Louise sneered. “Can you think of a better place for a safe?”
“Wait a minute,” Arthur said. “I’m not finished. In the safe is—let me see—a manilla envelope containing IOU’s written by several prominent people, some jewelry, and a file drawer of letters.”
Arthur stepped back, turned away from the picture, and stared triumphantly at Chester Morny. “There, doesn’t that prove my point?” he demanded.
“Hit him, Otto,” Morny said.
The big man’s club-like fist lashed out, the room tilted, there was a numbness in Arthur’s jaw, and he sat down against the wall. He struggled slowly but angrily to his feet: it was one thing when the Army doctors hadn’t believed Alice Davenport’s story of his wild talent; it was another thing altogether when he demonstrated it and was doubted. He rushed at Otto, but the big man fended him off easily with one hand and asked Moray: “You want I should really cool him, boss?”
Moray shook his head. “You outsmarted yourself, Turpin,” he said. “You just proved—if there ever was any doubt—that you masterminded the robbery. For who but one of the thiefs would have known the contents of the safe? No, Turpin, you can’t get away with any cock-and-bull stories about seeing through walls. A hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars was stolen from this safe. I want that money.”
“Don’t look at me,” Arthur said. “Call the cops.”
Otto snorted. “Who do ya think the cops is in Paradise B?” he asked. “I’m the cops.”
“What he means,” Moray explained, “is that since the townships of Paradise A and B were incorporated for the convenience of the hotels, the hotel private detectives make up the police forces.”
“And I’m the house dick here,” Otto declaimed. “You want the cops—You got ’em here.”
Moray went on: “As you may have noticed when coming into the Golden Heron, there is a stone and barbed wire fence—the barbed wire masked in shrubbery—surrounding the hotel. All exits through this fence are now closed. Somewhere in the hotel or on its grounds are your confederates. I want them and I want the money, but I don’t want the publicity of a major robbery. Therefore,” finished Moray in a cold, precise voice, “find your confederates, find the money, return it to me, and you’re free to go.”
“But I want my money!” Arthur protested. “I won seven thousand dollars at the poker table. If they’re still holding that for me, I’ll count it as part of the unpaid bill. That means you still owe me three thousand dollars for delivering a planeload of orchids from Yucatan.”
Moray ignored him. “The girl stays with me,” he said. “Security, you might say.”
“But she’s only a nurse at the—”
“Sure, and you can see through walls and I read tea leaves. Now, will you be good enough to get going, Turpin? Are your confederates guests at the hotel? Are they hiding on the grounds somewhere?”
“I demand that you release Miss Davenport.”
“Jack,” growled Otto, “you ain’t in a position to demand nothing.”
“May I tell him something?” Alice asked Morny.
And, when Morny nodded, she went over to Arthur and whispered: “Don’t worry about me. If the real crooks are hiding out in the hotel somewhere, you ought to be able to locate them with your X-ray eyes. So locate them and we’re free to go. Please, Arthur. Will you try?”
“Please? Don’t be silly, I’ve got to.”
In spite of their plight, Alice smiled. “Well, here’s your chance to be what the psychologists say is everybody’s secret desire: a Peeping Tom to end all Peeping Toms.”
“Very funny,” Arthur said. But buried somewhere at the back of his mind was a pleasant, almost a tingling, sensation at the thought of seeing the idle rich—most of them from Hollywood’s fabulous movie colony on the other side of the high Sierras—at play.
“Chief,” the receptionist told Morny suddenly, “I think someone ought to go with him.”
“Otto will be watching him at all times, Louise. But if you were going to volunteer, thank you just the same.”
“Otto’s plenty busy, isn’t he? Besides, I don’t mean to follow Mr. Turpin. I mean to accompany him, to be with him at all times and make sure he doesn’t contact or warn his confederates in any way. I’ll be perfectly safe. Turpin wouldn’t dream of trying anything with his moll in your custody.”
“I’m not his moll!” Alice cried.
Morny nodded slowly. “You have a point, Louise. Yes. Yes, indeed. You may accompany him.”
With a cold smile, Louise found Arthur’s elbow and tucked her hand under it. “Shall we go?” she said, almost sweetly.
“Unfortunately,” Arthur told her, “yes.”
They left so swiftly that Alice did not even have a chance to say good-bye.
Twenty minutes later Louise told Arthur: “That’s the swimming pool sundeck ahead there.”
Arthur heard the sound of happy voices, laughter, splashing water. “But it’s almost midnight,” he protested.
“We have midnight swims at the Heron.”
They stepped out on the hard surface of the sundeck. Blue spotlights gleamed on the surface of the water. A waiter came by with a tray of cocktails and Louise plucked two martinis off. “Here,” she said, giving one to Arthur, “to us.”
“What do you mean, to us?”
Louise clinked glasses with him. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“Not to me, it isn’t.”
“Then I’ll tell you. Mr. Morny assumed you had, as he put it, cased the joint. But if you cased it so thoroughly that you knew the complete contents of the safe, that would mean that you’d already opened the safe. If you already opened it, you wouldn’t have needed any confederates to do the actual job for you while you were out front playing poker. Conclusion is,” she went on coldly, precisely, “you knew the contents of the safe without opening it. Either I told you, or Otto told you, or Mr. Morny told you himself. But I don’t believe that for a minute. Result: that means you actually can see through walls and things.”
Arthur sighed. “I’m glad somebody believes me. Will you please go back and tell Mr. Morny so Miss Davenport and I can get out of here?”
Louise smiled at him. It was quite a smile. It did things to her cold, aloof face. It made her beautiful. “Not on your life,” she said. “That’s why I volunteered to go along with you.” She drew Arthur off into a stand of yellow oleander bushes masking the sundeck. She came close to him in the darkness.
“Delightful fragrance,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Arthur.
“It’s my perfume,” said Louise.
“Oh,” said Arthur.
“Here,” said Louise.
Arthur felt his head drawn forward and down. The fragrance of musk and oleander and jasmine came closer, enveloping him. Something soft prodded his face and the next thing he knew he was being held by warm soft arms and kissed by warm, moving, parting, exciting lips.
“Arthur,” Louise murmured. “Arthur, don’t you see? With your ability to see through walls and things, there isn’t anything we couldn’t do. We could clean out every gambling casino in Vegas, and then—”
Arthur took a deep breath. Louise’s kissing had stirred him. Her cold, aloof look was only a front: a hot-blooded girl, if a coldly calculating one, hid behind it. He interrupted almost reluctantly: “I already thought of that possibility.” He leered, trying a cold front of his own. “I didn’t think a partner was necessary. In fact—” as the aura of Louise’s fragrance came toward him again—“I think I’d better get out of here right now.”
He turned and took three strides across the sundeck and collided with something big and unyielding.
“Where ya think ya going, Jack?” Otto demanded.
Louise came out of the oleanders. “Over to the cottages,” she suggested quickly. “We may have a lead.”
“Yeah? What kind of lead?”
“I’ll tell you when I’m sure myself,” Louise said in her frostiest voice. “Meanwhile, if you’ll just leave us alone . . .”
“Boss said I ought to keep an eye on you.”
“Oh, yes? You’re going to ruin everything. Go back and tell the chief I said so.”
“Well, I dunno—”
“Come on, Arthur,” Louise said, and took his hand, and ran.
Their feet flew on the sun-deck, then along a lamplit path bordered by more oleanders, by hibiscus and fragrant sand verbena, then across an expanse of sand and through a parking lot in which rows of five-thousand-dollar sedans and more expensive sports cars were lined.
“We’re not going to the cottages,” Louise panted. “We’re going to the main building. They’ll never think of looking for us there. Besides, that’s where my room is.”
And, not many moments later, Louise shut the door behind them, crossed the floor to the window wall and drew the draw drapes, then turned on the light. The light, which came from hidden recesses in the wall, was faintly blue. It was a blue room, with blue amorphous carpet strips on a blue tile base, blue drapes, even blue tinted furniture, reflected in a blue-tinted mirror wall and a blue-tinted mirror covering the ceiling. Only the bed—a large Hollywood bed—was dazzlingly white.
