Grifter's Game by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

closet, but this was beside the point. The point, simply enough, was that the cat was halfway out of the bag and it couldn’t hurt to bring it out the rest of the way.
    “Don’t interrupt me at all,” I told her. “This is a long story. It won’t make sense to you until you’ve heard all of it.”
    I started with getting off the train from Philly and needing luggage. It went back farther than that, went years back, but the rest of it wasn’t important. Not for the time being, anyway. If things broke right I would have a whole lifetime to tell her the story of my life. If they didn’t, then nothing much mattered.
    I told her that I took his luggage at random, checked into the hotel under a phony name, met her, opened his bags, and found the heroin. She didn’t believe that part of it at first but I went over it again and again until it made sense. There was a hysterical expression on her face when the news soaked in. She was seeing old Keith in a new light now. He was a dope peddler, not a nice guy. She had managed to live with him for two years without tumbling to this juicy little fact, and she couldn’t have been more surprised if I had told her he was a woman.
    I ran it from alpha to omega and then I stopped because there was no more to tell. Her hubby was a crook and I had his supply in the hotel safe. We were together in my room and the world was taking us for a joy ride.
    “This changes things, Lennie. Joe, I mean. I guess I have to call you Joe now, don’t I?”
    “I guess so.”
    “Joe Marlin instead of Lennie Blake. All right. I like it better. But this changes things, Joe. Doesn’t it?”
    “How?”
    “Now I don’t want his money,” she said. “I couldn’t stand living with him anymore. Now all I want is you. We can forget him and just run away and be together forever.”
    It sounded good but it didn’t work that way. She wasn’t seeing the whole picture yet. He was still old Keith. Now he made his money in a dirty business and it sickened her. But she didn’t see that the man himself was different.
    “We’d be killed, Mona.”
    She stared at me.
    “We’d run and we’d be caught. He’s a gangster, Mona. You know what a gangster is?”
    Her eyes went very wide.
    “You’re his woman,” I went on. “He bought you and he’s been paying heavily for you. Ermine coat, sable coat, chinchilla stole. Those things run into money.”
    “But—”
    “So now he owns you. You can’t run away. He’ll catch you and he’ll have you killed. Do you want us to die, Mona?”
    I saw the look in her eyes and I remembered the slight contempt in her voice when she talked about Brassard’s physical exams. She had said that maybe he was afraid of death. He wasn’t the only one. She was afraid of dying herself. That made two of us.
    “We can’t run,” I said. “We wouldn’t get away.”
    “It’s a big world.”
    “The mob is a big mob. Bigger than the world. Where do you want to run?”
    She didn’t have an answer.
    “Well?”
    She bit her lower lip. “The accident,” she said. “Before you said he could have an accident. Didn’t you?”
    “I worded it a little differently.”
    “But that’s what you meant. I suppose he could still have an accident, couldn’t he?”
    “I thought you didn’t want to think about things like that.”
    “It’s different now, Joe. I didn’t know what kind of a man he was. Now it’s different.”
    It wasn’t the least bit different. Before he was kind and generous and now he was mean and vicious. This was the wrapper. It was a game to make murder a little bit easier to swallow. Sugar on a pill. But the pill was the same no matter how goddamned sweet it tasted. The pill was still murder.
    “Joe?”
    I was starting to sweat. Atlantic City was getting too warm for us and the air conditioning in the room could never change that. I cupped her chin in my hand and tilted her head up so that she was looking at me.
    “When are you and Keith going back to