yourself in a box. A person can become too hip, too much with it.
The squares have a better time.
Maynard the Old Philosopher. I scooped my change off the bar top and left the tavern. I drove home, parked the car. The drinks had not done their job. I was still sober, and it was a bad time to be sober. I parked the Ford and headed for the apartment.
My key in the lock, turning. And a funny feeling, hard to describe, harder still to explain. A feeling that someone somewhere had taken the play away from me, that I wasn’t reading the backs right. Coin your own cliche? brother. An itchy, uncomfortable feeling.
I opened the door.
He was there, in my chair, his hands in his lap and his feet on the floor and his mouth set in a firm thin line. He should have had a gun in his hand, maybe, but he didn’t. He just sat there like a boulder and stared at me.
Murray Rogers.
He said, “Close the door.”
I didn’t move. I read his poker face and I felt the grim hard brittle tension in the air and I stood in place like a statue.
“Close the door,” he said. “Come in, close the door, sit down.”
I came in, closed the door. I did not sit down.
“Hello,” he said. “Hello, you rotten bastard. Hello.”
16
I don’t remember sitting down. I must have, because I remember being on the couch later on. And listening while Murray Rogers talked.
“You were very damned smooth,” he said. “So polished, so clever. And such a thoroughgoing bastard every step of the way. A card cheat. That’s a very noble occupation, Maynard.”
I didn’t say anything. I watched him take a cigar from his breast pocket, trim the end, light the cigar.
He shook out the match and dropped it carelessly to the floor. He filled the room with cigar smoke and talked through it.
“You stole money from me with a deck of cards. You cheated me at the poker table and you cheated me at gin rummy. You took my wife to bed. You let me get you a job and introduce you around. And then you framed me for a murder that never happened. You’re a very sweet guy, Maynard.”
“When did you tip?”
“You mean when did I catch on?”
I nodded.
“You’ll have to excuse me, Maynard. I’m not up on criminal argot. I caught on a few hours before I decided to plead guilty. I knew all about it by the time you visited me in jail. I’ve known all along.” He chewed the cigar. “You seem surprised.”
“Why did you plead guilty?”
“Why not?” He shrugged massively. “I hired detectives the day they jailed me. I had one advantage, you know. I knew I was being framed because I knew very well I was innocent. I had the detectives check on Joyce. They turned up something to the effect that she’d been seen with you earlier. I had men run a check on your background, and I had men get a picture of you and show it round to a few people. One of the men they tried it on was the desk clerk at that hotel. He identified you as August Milani, naturally.
That made it fairly obvious.”
And there, of course, was the whole hang-up in a nutshell, the whole trouble with the frame. We’d built up a house of cards—marked cards, maybe, but just as flimsy. One little push and everything went to hell in a handcar.
“I almost blew up when I found out,” he went on. “Viper in my bosom, all of that. The old story of the newfound friend and the younger wife. I could have called the district attorney and tipped him off, and I would have been out of jail in an hour.”
“Why didn’t you?” He eyed me carefully. “What would it get me?”
“Freedom.”
“Freedom,” he echoed. “Yes, I suppose so. And you and Joyce, what would the pair of you have got? A short prison sentence at the most, and even that might have been hard to arrange if you had the foresight to provide yourselves with a top-grade lawyer. I’d have had freedom, Maynard. And no more than that.”
He smiled. “Now think that over,” he said. “You’ve played cards with me. I don’t play to get even, you know. I play to win.”
He stopped talking and the room was still as death. Smoke hovered in the air. I wanted a cigarette but I didn’t reach for my pack, as if a false movement might cause him to shoot me. Which was plainly ridiculous—he didn’t have a gun. But the atmosphere was like that.
“I play to win,” Murray Rogers said again. “Getting out from under a murder rap isn’t winning. It’s breaking even. Winning is a matter of turning the tables. It wouldn’t be enough to see you and Joyce in jail.”
I took out a cigarette. I had trouble lighting the match, but I managed it, and I sucked smoke into my lungs and coughed. I blew out the match and flipped it to the floor and took another drag of the cigarette and choked again, coughing spasmodically.
I said, “What do you want, then?”
“I want to see you dead,” he said.
In Chicago, in the smoky back room where they had caught me dealing seconds, there had been a moment like that one. The moment between accusation and action, between discovery and punishment. A flat, cold, brittle moment, timeless and vacant. And there had been such a moment long ago, ages ago in the second-rate magician days, when a car I was riding in went off the road and rolled twice. That time we had skidded on gravel on the shoulder of the road, and the car had gone into its spin, and I had sat nervelessly and thought I was going to die and wondered how it would feel. That moment ended when we had crashed—I had emerged unscratched, as it had turned out. The moment in Chicago had ended when the hoods had taken away the money and hauled me out into the alley. The moment now, in this town, was like those other two.
“I was going to kill Joyce, too,” I heard Murray say. “I had that all set up. Do you remember a conversation we had a little while ago? I told you she was getting despondent, suicidal. Do you remember?”
I remembered.
“That was part of the plan,” he said. “I was just planting the idea in a few people’s minds. Then it would have been easy enough. All I had to do was tap her over the head with a poker, knock her cold. Then I would pry open her mouth and shovel the Demerol down her throat. It’s easy to make an unconscious person swallow something. You flip the pill to the back of the mouth and massage the throat until the person swallows. All I had to do was feed her a bottle of pills and let them carry her off.”
“You’re not—”
“No.”
I closed my eyes and pictured him doing it. Knocking her cold, then popping sleeping pills down her throat. And sitting by her side, waiting with his special kind of patience. Waiting for Joyce to die.
“I decided I wanted her,” he said. “I play to win—I keep saying that, but it sums things up. I play to win. I want Joyce.” He smiled. “Joyce and I had a long talk tonight,” he said. “Joyce will think very carefully before she looks at anyone else. Joyce is going to settle back into the role of loving wife again. She makes a good wife when she puts her mind to it.”
He had bought her and paid for her. Now he wanted to go on owning her. I looked at him and my mind searched for an out and I didn’t get anywhere. He wasn’t even pointing a gun at me. He wasn’t even threatening me. He was sitting there, calm and steady, explaining to me just how he had planned to murder his wife and just how he intended to murder me. A big-time tax lawyer, carefully summing up his case for the jury, being quite explicit, filling in all the blanks, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.
“Why tell me this?” I said.
“So you know what’s coming. So you can work up a sweat.”
