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

with a sallow, fleshy face. He was almost exactly half bald, with no hair growing forward of an imaginary line drawn from ear to ear across the top of his skull. He had a thick growth of long black eyelashes, a small snub nose, a broad sensuous mouth, liquid brown eyes.
    He owned, in the patois of Vegas, thirty points in the Cameroon. Thirty per cent of the corporate stock. Though it had been some sixteen years since he had suffered the indignity of an arrest, he had what is called a heavy record. Twenty-six arrests, three convictions. He drew probation on two of them, and had served one year out of three on the third. The criminal record should have kept him from owning anything in Nevada, but he had gotten in well before the so-called cleanup of 1955, and by then it was too late to move him. Nominally he was the largest shareholder in the Cameroon, but no one could say exactly how much of that was actually his own. And on the total list of shareholders, no one could say who was fronting for someone else and who was not. The quiet word in town and in Los Angeles and New York was that the Cameroon was Al Malta’s place, and thus a syndicate operation.
    He knew a thousand people in the entertainment world by their first names, and most of them were such fools as to be flattered by this hoodlum attention. He smiled readily, laughed loudly and easily, listened with flattering attention, and told jokes with an almost professional timing. He livedwell, dressed well, entertained well. No, there was nothing at all sinister about Al Marta. He remembered birthdays and sent expensive presents, and if you were in any kind of a jam he was always glad to help out.
    Al Marta used the Cameroon as a base of operation. In downtown Las Vegas, in a new office building, was X-Sell Associates, the nerve center for a random collection of corporations dealing in real estate, transportation, communications, wholesale supply houses. In one sense, Al Marta owned X-Sell. In a truer sense, and in one that would never be unraveled because of the obfuscating skills of the attorneys and accountants employed, Al Marta was a regional manager, taking his orders from a Los Angeles district headquarters which in turn was directed, through a Chicago setup, by the national council on syndicate policy, operating on the eastern seaboard.
    A portion of every dollar, legal and illegal, declared and undeclared, eventually ended up in the war chest of the national council, where it was expended with such thought and care that people like Al Marta had been able to go for sixteen years without an arrest. Some percentage of each dollar was sidetracked for each station along the way. Nobody could say how much Al kept. But it was enough for a new Lincoln each year, a twenty-thousand-dollar wardrobe, lavish presents, luxurious entertaining, the maintenance of a special staff of “assistants” not covered by either the casino payroll or the hotel payroll, and the procurement of and proper entertainment of those young women who pleased him.
    “No action today,” Al grumbled.
    He stared with habitual wonderment at the operational technique of Wilbur “Beaver” Brownell. Beaver was a gaunted, spindly, fragile-looking man somewhere in his forties. His cheeks were so hollowed he had a death’s head look. The protruding angle of his large yellow teeth had supplied his nickname. His hair was dyed a curiously unreal shade of brown, like the color of cheap shoes. He had a reedy, monotonous voice, a sparrow-chested stance, and some mysterious source for the type of clothing that was called sharp during the thirties. He wore too many large yellowish diamonds, and he doused himself liberally with cologne, and yet this ridiculous man was never known to have less than three women on the string at the same time. Nor were they dogs in any sense of the word. And their inexplicable love for Beaver kept them in a state of torment.
    The intensity of Beaver’s focus on the new blonde gave