The Only Girl in the Game by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

erotic detail, and thus comforted, baked by a slanting sun, she slid off into a cat nap right in the middle of the bison’s explanation of how it had practically stolen the tract of land on which it had erected its third shopping center.

• • •  three
    As Betty Dawson was drifting into her cat nap down by the pool, Al Marta, in his penthouse apartment atop the east wing of the Cameroon, was awakening from his afternoon siesta. The master bedroom was of sufficient luxuryto remind Al Marta, each time he returned from dreams of ancient violence, that he was safe and well and rich. The decor affirmed his heavy ownership—even though it was partially a front—of the Cameroon. It spoke of his freedom from the indignity of any kind of arrest for many years. It was safe harbor, rich, protected, loaded with all the niceties of the standard hoodlum dream. With Max Hanes down there operating the casino, and the Darren kid running the hotel, and with good talent running the other aspects of his local operations, the days were made of silk and broads, bourbon and laughs, and there were a thousand important people who loved him and called him Al.
    He checked and learned he had napped alone, knuckled his eyes, dug at the coarse gray thatch on his chest and got up, yawning so vastly that he tottered. He pulled on a pair of rumpled linen slacks, smoothed his thinning hair back with the palms of his hands, fired up a cigar and walked barefoot out into the main living room of the apartment to see who was around. There had to be someone around. He had arranged his life so there would be. He had to have people near him. He needed them close, where he could touch them, look at them, laugh with them.
    The music was turned low. Gidge Allen and Bobby Waldo were playing gin. Beaver Brownell was slumped on a low couch, soft-talking, with practiced insistence, a young blonde broad from the chorus line of the current show in the Safari Room. She sat, glass in hand, her expression rapt and blank, while the Beaver emphasized the highlights of his muted lecture by touching, lightly and often, the golden convexity of her right thigh just below the hem of her shorts.
    Jerry Buckler was asleep on one of the other couches, blowing small bubbles in the corner of his mouth.
    Al went over to the control panel and boosted the volume of the music. He wandered over and watched Gidge throw the seven of hearts. Bobby Waldo hesitated over his next discard, then threw the seven of diamonds. Gidge snatched it up to fit right in the middle of a diamond run, and Bobby Waldo mumbled, “Advertising son of a bitch.”
    “Stay alert, son,” Gidge said smugly.
    Al made himself a light highball and said to the group at large, “Where’s the action? Who’s ahead?”
    “The home team,” Beaver told him.
    “What’s the score? Don’t tell me. Nothing to nothing, the way it looks around here. You people are dragging it. Where the hell is Artie?”
    “He ought to be along any minute,” Gidge said. Gidge Allen had been with Alfred Addams Marta for over twenty years, serving in various capacities, all of them relatively confidential. Allen had the voice rasp and knowing eye of the carny pitch man. He had a shock of gray Will Rogers hair, a strong youthful body, and a saddle-brown face so deeply seamed and lined it was like some strange new kind of corduroy, contrasting in a startling way with glassy white dentures and eyes the color of mercury.
    “Make it a three-way game,” Al said. “We’ll play Captains, okay?”
    “Okay, soon as I finish out this blitz,” Gidge said. “I got a pigeon here and I need the money.”
    Bobby Waldo snorted with exasperation. “Gimme some cards one time,” he demanded. He was young, huge, bulging, sun-raw, with an eighth of an inch of carroty bristle on his square skull, invisible eyebrows and lashes, extravagant fading tattoos on his fleshy freckled arms.
    Al Marta felt annoyed with all of them. He was a stocky, powerful man