'Why?”
“Right here? In his own house? It’s not safe, Wizard.”
“He’s at the game,” I said. “He won’t be leaving. And the girls will be out for awhile yet.”
“How do you know?”
“He mentioned it during the game. Don’t worry about it, Joyce. Don’t worry about a thing.”
“But—”
“Or don’t you want me?”
“Oh, God!”
I reached for her, caught her by her shoulders. She held back for a moment, then fell against me, all warm and trembling. I ran my hands over her body and her flesh quivered.
“The bedroom—” Joyce started to say.
We never made the bedroom. There was a couch on the other side of the living room, but we didn’t reach there, either. I kissed her and she tossed her arms around my neck and clung to me like ivy to a stone wall. The stone wall melted and we sank to the floor and held each other close.
I put my hand under her skirt and touched the silky perfection of her thighs. Her legs opened and I stroked her high on the inside of one thigh until she was moaning hysterically. She pushed me aside and yanked her skirt up around her waist. I took her panties off. She fell back on the floor, her eyes rolling, her forehead dotted with perspiration.
“Now,” she moaned. “Now, now, right now, Bill, now, now”
No kisses, no sweet caresses, no little bits and pieces. I fell on her like a tree.
There was all that aching, all that need, and it exploded for us like a truckload of nitro on a cobblestone road. There was nothing soft or gentle, nothing remotely sweet about our love-making. What we had was something you couldn’t deny or postpone, something you could never push out of the way or ignore. And it was not the sort of blissful idyll that would evolve easily and naturally into a pattern of three or four pleasant bangs per week in the master bedroom of a split-level shack. Fires that burn with the Bill Maynard-Joyce Rogers type of flame don’t simmer down.
Which could have been a hint, a clue, a flashed card. But maybe I wasn’t looking.
Afterward she pulled on her panties and pulled down her skirt and we sat on the couch and talked. She had most of my story already from Murray. I gave her the rest and slipped her a quick summary of the plan of action. She liked it. Her approval showed in her eyes, bright and excited.
I lit a cigarette. “Of course,” I said, “we could forget it.”
She said nothing, and that noncommittally.
“I’m all set up in business,” I told her. “I even enjoy my work. I could just stick to my job and make enough money to keep me happy. And you could go on being Murray Rogers’ loving wife. We’ve both got it fairly soft, you know. We’re not in an especially desperate situation.”
“And keep seeing each other like this?”
“Why not?”
“And never try for the brass ring? And stay tied up like this? You like your work because it’s temporary, Wizard. It’s part of the act, not something you’d have to be doing for the rest of your life. You might not like it so much that way.”
I avoided her eyes. The whole routine had started out as a joke, but somehow or other I had been saying things I partly meant. After all, I did like the work. And the idea of jobbing Murray Rogers was becoming less attractive the better I knew him.
“It was just a gag,” I said.
“Was it?”
“Sure.”
“It’s a bad kind of joke, Wizard.” She took one of my hands in both of hers. “This is too big for me to joke about it, Wizard. I’m in this all the way. We’ve both got to be in it all the way.”
On the way back to the game I tried to concentrate on driving the Corvair. That wasn’t easy. I kept telling myself that my semi-pitch to Joyce about playing our future straight had just been a gag. I was no real estate syndicator. I was a sharp, a quick-money boy, a guy whose world spun faster than the rest of the planet Earth. I wanted the fast money and the fast action and the fast women. Hotel rooms, ashes on the floor.
Back at the game I complained about a stupid foreman who couldn’t understand anything no matter how long you hammered it into his skull. I played poker until the game broke up around two-thirty and I wound up forty-five dollars in the hole. Then I drove back to the hotel and slept.
I looked at three apartments before I found the one I wanted. It was on College Street—two rooms and a bath and kitchenette, all furnished in Early American ugliness. The wallpaper was floral and the rugs were imitation Orientals. What the hell, I was renting the place, not buying it. The apartment might not be designed to turn on an interior decorator but it was roomy and comfortable and convenient and that was all I wanted. I paid a month’s rent, talked my way out of signing a lease. I moved my stuff over from the hotel and I was in business.
By midafternoon I had given back the Corvair to the Hertz people and had put a hundred dollars down on a two-year-old Ford. It wasn’t exactly a dream car either but it was way ahead of the Corvair and the payments were only a tiny gouge per month. At three o’clock I drove downtown and parked in a lot a block from the Rand Building. I rode the elevator to the seventeenth floor.
Black Sand’s office was closed Saturdays but Carver had given me a key and had told me to use the office any time I felt like it. I unlocked the door. Nobody was around. I rearranged some junk on my desk just to show I had been there, then left to climb seven flights of stairs. It would have been easier to use the elevator, but elevator operators occasionally remember people and I didn’t want to be remembered. I was tired by the time I hit the twenty-fourth floor. I leaned against a wall and let my breathing go back to normal.
The lights were off in Murray’s office. The door was locked. I waited until the hallway was empty and silent, then used the duplicate key. The door opened. Once inside, I closed the door. The same key opened Murray’s private office, next on the agenda. I didn’t turn the light on. There was enough light to see by, and it was no time to attract any attention at all. I sat behind his desk. There was a typewriter in a well to the left of me. I swung it out, took onionskin and letterhead and carbon paper from the center drawer, made a sandwich out of them and put it in the typewriter. A cigarette would have been nice. I didn’t light one.
I put Monday’s date on the top of the page. Then I typed—
I rolled the sandwich out of the typewriter and slipped the carbon paper between a fresh sheet of letterhead and a fresh piece of onionskin. I read the letter through again and nodded. It had the right tone.
The second letter was dated four days later. It read—
