Jim Thompson
A Swell-Looking Babe
ONE
He had dreamed about her. Now, waking to the sweaty southern night, he found both arms clasped around his pillow, the cloth wet with saliva where his mouth had pressed against it, and he flung it away from him with a mixture of disgust and disappointment Some babe, he thought drowsily, his hand moving from bed lamp to alarm clock to cigarettes. A dream boat – and that's the way he'd better leave her. Right in the land of dreams. He had to keep the money coming in. He had to keep out of trouble. And he had been sternly advised, at the time of his employment by the, Hotel Manton, that bellboys who attempted intimacies with lady guests invariably landed in serious trouble.
'This is what they call a tight hotel,' the superintendent of service had explained. 'A hooker never gets past the room clerk. Or if she does, she doesn't stay long and neither does he. It's' just good business, get me, Rhodes? A guest may not be everything he should be himself but he doesn't want to pay upwards of ten dollars a day for a room in a whore house.'
'I understand,' Dusty had said.
'We're not running any Sunday school, of course. 'As long as our guests are quiet about it, we'll put up with a little hanky-panky. But we don't – and you don't – mix into it, see? Don't get friendly with a woman, even if she does seem to invite, it. You might be mistaken. She might change her mind. And the hotel would have a hell of a lawsuit on its hands.'
Dusty had nodded again, his thin face slightly flushed with i embarrassment. That had been almost a year ago, 'back before he had lost his capacity for being insulted, before he had learned simply to accept… and hate. He had thought the job only temporary men, something that paid well, without the business experience and references usually required in well-paying jobs. Mom had still been alive. Dad had stood a chance of being reinstated by the school board. He, Dusty, had had to drop out of school, but it would be only for a few months. So he had thought – or hoped. He was going to be a doctor, not merely a uniform with a number on it.
He had nodded his understanding, blushing, trying to cut short the interview. And the superintendent's face had softened, and he had called him by his first name.
'Are you sure you want to do this kind of work, Bill? I can fit you in as food' checker of key clerk or something of that nature. Of course, it wouldn't pay nearly as much as you can make on tips, but…'
'Thank you,' Dusty had said. 'But I think I'd better take it, the job that pays the most money.'
'Don't forget what I've said, then.' The superintendent became impersonal again. 'It's only fair to tell you, incidentally, that periodic checks are made on all our service employees.'
'Checks?'
'Yes. By women detectives – spotters, we call 'em. So watch yourself when some prize looker makes a play for you. She may be working for the hotel.'
Dusty had mumbled a promise to watch himself. Until last night, he hat! strictly adhered to that promise. It wasn't because of any want of temptation. As me superintendent had pointed out, the Manton wasn't running a Sunday school. It was exclusive largely via its room rates. You didn't have to show a financial statement or a marriage certificate to get a room. The Manton insisted not so much on respectability as the appearance of it; its concern was for its own welfare, not the morals of its guests.
Actually, Dusty supposed, the Manton got more than its share of the fast crowd; they preferred it to hotels with lower rates and virtually no restrictions. In any event, more than one woman guest had given him some pretty broad hints, and he'd let them slide right on past. Not because they might be spotters. He just hadn't been interested. In his sea of troubles, there'd been no room for women.
Then, last night…
Dusty yawned, glanced at the clock, and swung his feet out of bed. For a moment he remained perched on the edge of the mattress, absently wiggling his toes against the semi-cool bare floor. Then he stood up and padded into the bathroom.
He took a quick cold shower. He came out of the shower stall, and began to shave.
Even with his face lathered, tautened and twisted to receive the strokes of the razor, he was good-looking, and, more important, intelligent-looking. As a youngster, when the other kids had dubbed him with such hateful titles as Pretty Boy and Dolly, he had detested those good looks. And while he had eventually become resigned to them, he had always resented them. They could get him nothing he wanted, nothing, with ten years of college study to complete, that he had time for. After all, he was going to be a doctor, not an actor.
A year ago he had gone to work at the Manton, and gradually, through the months since then, it had been borne home to him that he was never going back to college, that he would never be a doctor. But that had not changed his attitude about his appearance. It set him apart from the other employees, at once arousing their resentment and precluding the anonymity which he sought. It brought unwanted and dangerous attentions from certain of the women guests.
It spelled nothing but trouble, and he was already knee-deep in trouble.
Then, last night had come, and for the first time in his life he was glad that he was as he was. After he had seen her, after what had happened last night…
He dashed water over his face, dried it, stood frowning at himself in the medicine-cabinet mirror. Silently, he advised his image to forget last night. A dame like that didn't go for bellboys. She might tease you along a little, but that would be the end of it. Or if it wasn't the end of it, if you could actually get a tumble from her, what of it? Nothing. Just a big fat headache. He might not be able to drop her, and he certainly couldn't hang onto her. For something he couldn't really have – just a taste of something that would leave him hungrier than ever – he'd risk losing his job. Maybe something a hell of a lot worse than that.
He returned to the bedroom, and started to dress: grey trousers, black-and-white sport shoes, blue shirt and black tie. He donned a blue flannel coat, tucked a white handkerchief into the breast pocket. He buttoned the second button absently, still worrying. Step by step, he thought back over last night's events.
According to her registry card, her name was Marcia Hillis and she was from Dallas, Texas. Dusty supposed that she must have hit town on the 11:55 train since she arrived at the hotel a little after midnight, a few minutes after he had gone to work. He swung the cab door open for her, lifting her luggage from the driver's compartment. Then, he stepped across the walk to the lobby entrance, at this door without its doorman, and pulled open the door there.
Smiling perfunctorily, he turned and waited for her. She finished paying and tipping the driver. She came out of the dark interior of the cab and into the bright lights of the marquee. Dusty blinked. His heart pepped up into his throat, then bounced down into the pit of his stomach. He almost dropped her luggage.
Sure, he'd seen some good-looking women before, at the Manton and away from it. He'd seen them, and they'd made it pretty obvious that they saw him. But he'd never come up against anything like this, a woman who was not just one but all women. That was the way he thought of her, right from the first moment. All women – the personification, the refined best of them all. She was twenty. She was thirty. She was sixty.
Her face, with the serene brown eyes and the deliciously curling lips; she was twenty in the face but without the vacuousness which often goes with twenty. Her body, compactly mature, was that of a woman of thirty but with none of thirty's sometime flabbiness. Her hair was sixty, he thought of it that way – or, rather, what sixty is portrayed as being in story and picture. Completely gray. Gray, but soft and lustrous. Not the usual dead, crackling harshness of gray.
She wore it in a long gleaming bob which almost brushed the shoulders of her tailored suit. He stared down at it as she passed him, and then still half-dazed he followed her into the lobby.
Apparently she had something of the same effect on Bascom, the room clerk, that she had on him, for he was shoving a registration card across the desk and extending a fountain pen while she was still a dozen feet away. That was so unusual as to be unheard of. Dusty couldn't remember when Bascom had rented a room to an unescorted woman. He got a kick out of turning them down. With Miss Marcia Hillis, however, he was all welcoming smiles. Moreover, he did not treat her to an icy stare, as he usually did in such cases, when she hesitated over the price of the room.
'Well, now, of course,' he murmured, with unaccustomed unction. 'Fifteen dollars is rather high. I believe…
