Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

I smoked a few cigarettes and kept reaching for the phone and changing my mind. She’d be sleeping by now. I had no real reason to wake her, nothing to tell her that wouldn’t keep. Around two-thirty I gave up, showered, shaved, got dressed and went out. The wind had a sharp cold edge to it. I found an all-night place, had coffee and a ham sandwich. The coffee wasn’t bad. I chain smoked and smelled my sweat, the special perspiration of very late hours. A human body too long without sleep, held awake by nerves and little more, is somehow unclean no matter how recent its shower or how close its shave. I had cold feet, and literally so; it was damp down there, with not enough blood circulating.

The greasy spoons draw a greasy crowd at that hour. There were a few night workers, but only a few; Toronto, big and bustling, is still a daylight city. There were drunks either sobering up or waiting for the bars to re-open — it was anybody’s guess. There were men and women who had no particular place to go and no pressing reason to go to sleep. There were two or three women who might have been prostitutes and three teenagers who were either faggots or junkies. Sometimes you need a scorecard. Everything looks alike these days.

I lit the last cigarette in the pack and thought about the air in Colorado.

When I was a kid I told stories. People called it lying. It really wasn’t; I had a fairly wicked imagination and a tendency to embellish things. I got punished occasionally, but I was not always caught. I became a fairly good liar.

I read some psychology years later in Q. I had remembered something from a college psych course that I wanted to check out, and in the prison library I learned that I had not been what they call a pathological liar. I was always aware that my stories were not true. I was simply good at the game.

So skip a few years. I got fair grades in school — they wrote things like Could do better with effort on the margins of the cards. My guidance counselor tried to talk me out of applying to Yale. I had visions — Yale, Yale Law, an apprenticeship with some genius like Geisler or Leibowitz, then back to New Mexico to be the hottest criminal lawyer on the rapidly expanding frontier. Sometimes in the dreams I wound up staying in the big city. Sometimes I went into politics. I always came out Very Important.

Yale turned me down. I wound up at the state university at Santa Fe and coasted for most of three years. I don’t remember many of the courses that I took. I was pre-law, but that generally leaves you a lot of room.

Oh, hell. I couldn’t stay off probation. During my junior year there was a girl — there is always a girl — and I buckled down and tried harder. We had it figured. I was going to go to Yale Law, she was going to marry me and work to put me through law school, and then segue into the dream for a big finish, hearts and flowers, over and out.

Everything hit the fan at once. Yale Law said no by return mail, the girl missed her period and got scared, and although it turned out to be a false alarm it managed to kill things for us. I went on a too-long drunk and came out of it in time for a mid-term. I wasn’t prepared for it, and they caught me with the book open on my lap.

Maybe I could have talked my way out of it. I didn’t try, didn’t even wait for the news that the Dean wanted to see me. I could have gone home. You always can, they say, but you don’t realize this until later. I did not want to go back to Springer. I did not want to make up a fresh story en route and look at their faces and wonder whether or not they believed it. I packed one suitcase and went into town. I started off flat broke, and the few things I hocked — my typewriter, my radio — did not fatten my wallet.

In the Greyhound station men’s room I put on my good suit and a clean shirt and a tie. I checked my suitcase and let a yassuh-boss kid shine my shoes. Then I went shopping in the best department store in Santa Fe.

I spent half an hour in the second-floor men’s department. I looked at a few suits and some sport jackets. I tried things on but didn’t buy much, just a couple of shirts and a five-dollar tie. I paid cash and looked at my watch while the clerk was wrapping the packages. The California bus was due to take off in fifteen minutes.

“Better hurry it,” I said. “I’ve got a bus to make.”

He gave me my package and my change. I walked quickly to the escalator, and I took one step, and then I fell down the full flight and landed in a heap on the floor.

It caused quite a stir. I stayed put for the first few seconds and let them make a fuss over me. One woman had screamed tentatively while I was falling, and then a bevy of nervous clerks made properly nervous sounds. I gave them a minute, then shook my head groggily, gulped air, said something unintelligible, started to get up, stopped, got up, slipped, righted myself, and stood there finally looking as out of it as I possibly could.

They hustled me into the manager’s office as fast as they could. If anything had been wrong with me this would have been a very bad move, but they were not anxious to have me lying sprawled out at the foot of the escalator; it was rotten public relations. They sat me down and checked me inexpertly for broken bones and asked me how I felt.

“Gee,” I said, “I don’t know. My back’s twisted all to hell and gone.”

“It probably shook you up. You should watch your step, son.”

You watch your stepson, I thought. I’ll watch my fairy godmother. But what I said was, “I could swear that stair moved when I stepped on it.”

“Of course it did. It’s an escalator.”

“No, the tread slipped sideways. I put one foot square on it and it slipped sideways and I... whew, that was some feeling.”

The silence was almost embarrassing. I looked at my watch. It had broken in the fall, and I mentioned this. I asked what time it was. They told me.

“Oh, terrific,” I said. “I just missed a bus.”

“Where are you going?”

“San Francisco. I live there.”

“You go to school at State?”

“That’s right.”

The room cleared a little. Two of them stayed around, and they played the game as though they knew it very well. Their watch department would repair my ticker free of charge, they explained. And they would put me in a cab to the airport so that I could fly to San Francisco.

That was very decent of them, I said.

“Just sign right here, Mr. Hayden—”

I got the pen almost to the paper, then stopped. “Wait a second,” I said. “Suppose I really racked myself up?”

“Well—”

“Listen, my roommate’s old man is a lawyer. He’s got this big negligence practice in Albuquerque. The stories Ray told me, say, I’m not signing anything .”

They would fix my watch and put me in a cab? Sure they would. I put the pen down and they opened up a little. Nobody wanted to talk about lawyers, I was assured. Nobody wanted to spend weeks or even months in a courtroom. I was all right, and if anything turned up I had his personal guarantee that my medical expenses would be taken care of, but it was very important to him personally that they get the paperwork out of the way. All they needed was my signature. They sweetened the pot. Just as a token of their concern for my welfare, they would throw in a suit. I could pick any suit in the store, with their compliments.

“Well, I already looked at every suit in the store,” I told them, properly baffled. “I couldn’t find anything I even wanted , for God’s sake. I mean, my Dad buys me all the suits I want.”

I let them make the deal. We closed for a new watch, air passage to S.F., and a flat hundred bucks in cash. I wrote my name on the line and that was that.