Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

Hotel room locks are nothing at all, not in the fleabags, not in the good places either. I popped the bolt back and turned the knob and pushed the door open.

“If he’s in there—”

If he was, he hadn’t bolted the door. You can’t snick back the inside bolt that way. You only get the one that spring-locks the door from the outside.

I pushed the door open. I went inside, and Doug came after me, and I remembered to shut the door after us. We went inside, and there was the bed and the chair and the dresser and some clothes scattered, and there was what I had somehow known we would find. Because I must have dreamed it all one night, dreamed it and forgotten it somewhere in the dark places of the night.

There was Gunderman, sprawled on the floor between the bed and the wall. He was in his pajamas, loud blue cotton pajamas. He had been shot twice at fairly close range. There were two holes in his chest, quite close together, and one of them must have placed itself in his heart because there was not much blood around. Almost all of it was on his pajamas, with just a little soaking into the rug.

Doug was making meaningless sounds beside me. I looked back stupidly to make sure that the door was closed. It was. I looked around the room. The gun was not too far from the body. I went over to all that was left of our pigeon and knelt down beside him. I touched the side of his face. His flesh was cool but not cold, and the bits of blood were drying but not yet dry. Someone with a better background than mine could have said with assurance just how long dead he was. It was out of my line. I never had all that much to do with dead men.

“Oh, Johnny—”

I walked over to where the gun lay. A good manly gun. Guns were not my line either, but I knew the make and model of this one. A .38 Smith and Wesson with a three-inch barrel and a safety on the grip. I knew it well.

“Don’t touch it, Johnny.”

I picked up the gun.

“Brilliant,” he was saying. “Oh, brilliant. Now you’ve got your prints all over the damned thing, Johnny.”

I knew better. They were already there. I’d put them there long ago in another town in another country. Get me one of my cigarettes, John — and that gun in her purse, waiting to be found, waiting to be gripped. She’d never touched it after that. She let me unload it and put it away myself. She never laid a finger on it — until later, alone, with gloves on, once to load it and once this morning to fire it, twice. I looked down at that dead man and envied him.

“She killed him,” I said. I was a little shaky and my eyes weren’t focusing properly. “This... I put my prints on this gun a week ago. It was her gun, she conned me into picking it up and playing with it.”

“Where did you see her?”

“Olean. She—”

“You took a trip a week ago? You didn’t tell me.”

“She was—” the words came slow, “nervous, she said. She thought things were falling in. It turned out to be a false alarm, but in the middle of it she set me up to find the gun for her.”

“You never said a thing.” His tone was flat, hard.

“She didn’t want me to.”

“She what ?”

“I was hung on the girl,” I said.

“Give me that again.”

I turned on him. “I was in love with the bitch,” I said, “and I was taken. But how the hell did she get here? I talked to her last night. She called me last night, dammit, and she called long-distance. I don’t get any of this.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“What?”

“I thought she was calling Gunderman.”

I grabbed his arm. “Give me that again. From the beginning.”

It was his turn to look worried. “She flew into town yesterday afternoon,” he said. “So she would be here after the job was over.”

“After the job—”

“We were going to fly to Vegas. The two of us.” I did not say anything. “Well, she’s a good piece, damn it. She didn’t want you to know because she said you tried and struck out.”

“I got the same line.”

“You’re kidding.”

“The hell I am. What kind of a damn fool are you, flying her to Toronto? What’s the brilliant point of that?”

“Johnny—”

“I talked to her last night. First an operator, person-to-person, and then—”

He was just shaking his head. “I thought it was Gunderman, Johnny. Oh, Jesus. She said she wanted to call Gunderman and make it seem like a long-distance call. I sat right there in the room with her. I told her how to fake the operator’s voice. She held a handkerchief over the phone and talked very distinctly and a little nasally with the phone about six inches from her mouth. And then took the handkerchief off and got close to the phone when she was playing Evvie again. Oh, she is cute.”

“Yeah.”

“And I sat there in the room and thought she was talking to him.”

She was very cute. I thought back to the conversation, trying to remember. “She asked for me,” I said. “By name. Were you in the room when she played the operator bit?”

“I must have been.”

“Then—”

“No, she wanted a drink. I went into the kitchen. I thought I heard — oh, damn it.”

I’d admired her timing before. The slipped kiss in front of his office building, the sweet way she had of playing things like a true-blooded professional. And I had thought she was only playing one side. She’d played all three of us, and played us off the wall.

She had never mentioned my name. And she had thrown me a conversation that she could as well have thrown to Gunderman. How she missed me, and how she hoped everything would go all right, and how she couldn’t wait to see me again. I remembered now that she had sounded a little less hip than usual. No grifter argot. It wouldn’t have done the necessary double duty. She never missed a trick.

“Johnny, if you had said something—”

“Me?”

“You said she didn’t mean a thing to you. If I knew she did I would have seen her angle. You blew this one, Johnny.”

I forced myself to stay steady. “You’re a pretty one,” I said. “You’re so in love with yourself you can’t see straight. You’re so damned busy being the hottest puff of smoke since the Yellow Kid. You put this on the screw from the beginning.”

“How?”

“You balled her in Vegas, didn’t you?”

He told me so with his eyes.

“You should have said it then. You should have let this thing play straight from the beginning, but you had to be goddamned cute about it. I’d like a chance at you, Rance.”

“Any time.”

I almost swung. I don’t know what stopped me, but I almost swung, and that would have torn it for good. It’s not a good idea to start a fight and draw a crowd, not when you’ve got a corpse on the floor and the murder gun carries your prints.

I looked at him and said, “Later.”

“All right.”

“We’ve got to dig out from under.”

“Pick up the gun and leave.”

He was full of bright ideas. I told him how far we’d get. We were tied to Gunderman a hundred different ways. There were too many papers in his office with our names on them, too many connections. This had to be staged just as neatly as any blow-off operation. We were blowing off a dead man instead of a live one. That was the only difference. It took just as sure a touch, just as firm a sense of the game.

It took two cigarettes. Then I had it. I said, “There’s a way. You’ll need a suitcase. And a wallet with fake identification.”

“I’ve got both at the apartment.”

“Good. You leave the hotel now. Go out a back entrance, grab a cab, go to your place.” I went over to the window. “I hope your fake ID sets you up in some far-away place.”