Chapter 6
Think about Lee Fallon.
Go ahead-think about him. Toss him around in your mind. He's not a very pleasant guy. He hurts people, and he takes things that don't belong to him, and he makes girls do things they don't want to do. and he murders. That's the big thing-he kills people. And he does it because it gives him a thrill.
Think about him, why don't you?
Maybe it's not fun thinking about him. Maybe it would be more fun thinking about the show on television, or the last time you made love, or the time you made the honor roll in sixth grade, or the broad next door, or any other things you may have made that were especially memorable. There are things in this world that are more enjoyable to dwell on than Lee Fallon, but what the hell, you can't always do what you want to do. So think about him.
Let's suppose for a moment that you-yeah, you, buddy-were Lee Fallon. Now, that's not the sort of thing you want to think about at all, is it? Probably not, unless you're some kind of a nut. Say you're an average Joe, you work hard, you like the same things every other average Joe likes, you want to live a good life without stepping on anybody, want to get yours without hurting anyone else more than you have to. Hell, a guy like you, you don't even want to think about changing places with a guy like Lee Fallon.
Or do you?
Well, suppose you were him. Suppose you had done what he had done, and suppose you were in the position that he was in. What in hell would you do next?
Shoot yourself? That's a pretty natural answer, and it's one that Fallon thought of. But it doesn't work that way. It didn't for Fallon, and it probably wouldn't for you. It's not a question of being scared to commit suicide, because it doesn't take too much in the way of bravery to knock yourself off. It's a question of wanting to take your own life. And Fallon wanted to live, and so would you, old pal.
Skip town? But that doesn't make much sense either. No one was looking for him in New York. He had committed crimes, and the police would have liked to get their hands on the guy who committed those crimes, but they didn't know he was the guy so they weren't bugging him at all. He wasn't even hiding. So why leave New York? He was as safe there as he could have hoped to be any place else, and he liked the town. Remember, it wasn't New York that made a killer out of him. So what would you do?
All things considered, you would probably do this-you would probably go right on, drifting with the tide, floating whichever way the wind blew, to mix a metaphor beyond repair. Most people do this. Water doesn't flow uphill, of course, and leopards do not change their spots-you can pick whichever cliche you like the best, because they all apply. A person does what he does, and that, actually, is all there is to it.
So you would probably bide your time, doing what you had to do, robbing when you wanted money, raping when you wanted to, killing when you wanted to see fresh blood. That, old friend, is very probably what you would do if you were Lee Fallon.
Anyway, it's what Fallon did.
That night, he met another resident of the King William.
The help all knew him, of course, and they all very dutifully said hello to him, and they were always pleasant. But until then it had been as though he were the only person living at that hotel, at least insofar as he was concerned. There were others there, of course. The King William did not exactly operate at capacity, but it wasn't empty either, and he passed other guests in the lobby and in the hallways and rode with them on the elevator. Still, none of them had ever made any impression upon him, or he upon them. He did not talk to them and they did not talk to him, or nod. Their paths crossed but their personalities did not, and it was as though he were living in a comfortable vacuum, devoid of human contact.
That night he met someone.
He was coming back from a fairly tasteless dinner, a flank steak at a place called Abner's, and he walked through the lobby and rode upstairs in the elevator and walked to his door, key in hand. He stuck his key in the door and started to turn it when a voice spoke his name.
Not his real name. His alias.
"Oh, Mr. Fullmer?"
One of the maids, he thought. He turned toward the voice and looked, and he saw right away that, whoever this was, it was most definitely not one of the maids. Maids wore uniforms, and this one wore a black cocktail gown cut low enough to let the tops of her breasts show. Maids were usually old and/or ugly, and this one was neither. And maids did not wear blood-red lipstick, or Cleopatra hairdos. This one wore both and on her they both looked good, so it was fairly reasonable to assume that she was not a maid. She may have been made-any number of times-but she was not one.
"You are Mr. Fullmer," she said. "Aren't you?"
"Yes," he lied.
"And I am Janice Lawler. Jan to friends, Miss Law-ler to enemies, of which I have few, thank the Lord. Aren't you going to ask me in for a drink, Mr. Fullmer?"
A hooker, he decided. A fairly expensive one, and certainly a fairly classy one, but she was hustling strangers in hotel corridors and that didn't fit in with the class routine.
"Well," he said.
She smiled archly. A good-looking one, he thought Maybe twenty-eight, maybe thirty, something like that Not too tall and not too short, not too heavy and not too thin. Heavier than skinny-a little too heavy for the fashion magazines, with her big breasts and her ample hips and her rounded rump. She wouldn't make the cover of Vogue or Harper's Bazaar, but she might be good for a fold-out in a man's magazine. Her figure wasn't fashionable, he thought, but what it promised was something that never went out of style. Love.
In capital letters. "Mr. Fullmer?"
But did he want her in his room? He wanted to love her, all right, but it was a desire that he could control for the time being. But one bang would lead to something more than that, and he knew it. He would get so that he wanted to beat her up, and then he would probably wind up maiming or killing her.
Not that he had anything against the idea of killing her. But he wasn't in a West Side apartment now, and he wasn't in Central Park either. He was in his hotel, his own hotel, the King William, and he was standing out in front of his own damned room, and it didn't make one perfect hell of a lot of sense to rape and kill some tramp in your own room.
You didn't dirty where you ate-which is an argument against a great deal of things. You didn't mix business with pleasure, either. The hotel was a front, an ideal front, and he didn't want to jeopardize it by getting eager for some twenty or fifty or hundred-dollar tramp.
He said: "I better take a rain-check. I'm kind of beat."
"I'm disappointed."
"In me?"
"Mmmmm."
"You got nothing to worry about," he said. His eyes went to her breasts. "You'll find somebody else, won't be much trouble for you. Probably do a lot better with somebody else."
She looked at him, a long and level look, and her mouth formed a little O. She said. "Oh, how silly. Why, you think I'm a prostitute, don't you, Mr. Fullmer? "You're not?"
"Oh, no. Not even on the make."
"A kindred spirit, Mr. Fullmer."
"A what?"
"A bird of the same feather. You're gtm is a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson police positive, isn't it, Mr. Fullmer? I wonder how many notches you have in it. What's the matter, Mr. Fullmer? Don't you feel well?"
He didn't feel well at all.
"And I'm not even a blackmailer," she went on. "Or a fink, for that matter, to drift into the vernacular. Mr. Fullmer, are you going to invite me into your room or am I going to stick a finger in your solar plexus? You're being very unmannerly, Mr. Fullmer."
He got the door open. Things were happening very quickly now and he couldn't keep up with them, didn't understand them. This broad knew things about him that shouldn't be known and she was coming on like Gang-busters and he suddenly didn't know which end was up, and wasn't even sure how to go about finding out. This broad knew things and he didn't even know how much, and she had an angle and he had no way of knowing what that angle was, and-
She followed him inside.
And locked the door.
"Drinks," she said. "Mr. Fullmer, that bottle must be Jack Daniels. I recognize the shape. Is it?"
"Yes."
"Pour some in a glass for me, no water, no ice. And some for yourself, because you surely look as though you need it. You do have two glasses, don't you?"
He did. He rinsed them both out and poured a good three ounces of bourbon in each of them. He took a glass and he gave her a glass and she touched her glass to his. They clinked. She sipped her drink and he sipped his drink and she asked him when, pray tell, he was going to invite her to sit down. He invited her to sit down. She sat on the edge of his bed and he sat down in the room's only armchair.
"That's better," she said over the rim of her glass. "Mr. Fullmer, you have a gun, the one I described. You come and go at reasonably odd hours and you do not seem to be gainfully employed, or even ungainfully employed, for that matter. You carry no sample case, no brief case, no attache case. All in all, I can come to only one conclusion. You are a criminal, Mr. Fullmer."
He did not say yes and he did not say no. He did not even nod, just went on looking at her and drinking his drink.
"I'm a criminal, too," she said. She finished all the bourbon in her glass and put the empty glass on the bedside table. She asked him for a cigarette and he gave her one of his. She stood there-sat there, to be more accurate-and waited until, after some several seconds, he got the message and scratched a match and lit her cigarette for her. She dragged on the cigarette and blew out a large cloud of blue-gray smoke.
"I'm a criminal, too," she said again. "And I need a partner, Mr. Fullmer, and you're elected."
She had to give him the whole thing, very slowly. She was cooling it in New York, long or. clothes and manners but very short on ready cash. She was the former partner of a good but small-time confidence man who was now cooling it far more thoroughly than she was, cooling it in a place called Dannemora, doing five-to-fifteen for fraud and grand larceny and a few miscellaneous charges which had been thrown in for the hell of it. They had been working a pigeon drop, the old lost-wallet gambit which still worked, though she couldn't imagine why, and the mark had tipped just in time and the law came down like the wolf on the fold, and she got away and he, being the roper, got nailed. Hard.
So she was in New York with no partner and no money and she did not work solo, had never wanted to and did not feel like starting now. She wanted big money fast, but the only person she had known in New York was the guy who was now doing his bit in Dannemora, and she felt very out of things.
But she knew Fallon was crooked, was sure of it, could tell it, and he was at the same hotel with her and she thought, well, why not, because what could be more natural than teaming up? They would work together, she assured him, and they would make a lot of money, and how nice that would be!
"But I'm not a con man, Jan."
"I'm sure you're not. Not smooth enough, and I do not mean that as an insult, Lee." She knew his first name now and called him by it, but she didn't know about the Fallon-Fullmer bit. "You do not seem to be a confidence man, and I can often tell."
"What do you think I do?"
"Something heavier than that. Let me see." She moved closer to him, her eyes narrowing carefully. She searched his eyes and his face and said: "You've done time."
"Not heavy time."
"No, of course not. But you've been in, I can tell that much. Let's see." He took a breath.
"You're not a professional killer. Not a gun, not you. I had that feeling at the very first, which made me think you would be not much help for me, but I changed my mind, because that type is not one which fits you. But ... oh, yes, you have killed, haven't you, Lee?"
"You can tell that?"
"I think so, yes."
"I didn't know it showed."
"It does. I think some kind of stealing, like payroll robbery, games of that ilk. Am I right?"
There was no point hiding things from this one. She knew too damned much already. "Nothing that big," he said. "Small things. Liquor stores."
"I was close."
"Yeah, close."
She found her empty glass and held it out to him. He poured a fresh drink for her but did not take any more for himself, not just yet. With this one, he thought, it would pay to be on his toes. Liquor would only confuse things.
"We'd be a good team," she said.
"What do I need with a team, Jan? All a partner is is someone to split the take with. I go in, I get the money, I get out and that's the ball game. Why a partner?"
She smiled.
"I mean except the obvious reasons," he said, his eyes on her body. "Except for them."
"Forget the obvious reasons. How much to you make in a stick-up, Lee?"
"It varies."
"A grand a shot? An average of a thousand dollars every time you point your gun at somebody?"
"Nothing like that, no. But pretty good."
"Wouldn't a grand be better? With less work and less risk out of the deal? What does it matter if you have to split the money when you make a lot more money with me?"
"How?"
"I haven't worked that out yet. Not entirely."
He laughed. "When you work it out, you call me."
"Lee."
"You could do a lot better selling that can of yours than being partners with me, Jan."
"No I couldn't. Lee, I'm not kidding around. I want to team up. I'll have ideas that'll make you reel, I swear it. Listen, there's no law after you, is there?"
He shook his head.
"Or me either. Lee, we can't miss. I have ideas, I have angles."
"Tell me about them."
She reeled off three quick plans, each of them guaranteed to yield a rock-bottom minimum of twenty-five hundred dollars. She did not give him details or names or places. Just the ideas. He could not pull the jobs without her, and he could tell from the way she talked that these were real jobs, that they were not just phonied up. The broad was nice and sharp. The broad had ideas and they sounded like good ideas, and she had more of a brain that he did. And at least he was smart enough to recognize a smarter person when he found one.
He said: "Sold."
"All the way?"
"Yeah. How do we split?"
"Half-and-half on every job."
"Fine, I'm not greedy. Well, let's shake on it, partner."
He reached out a hand and she took it. Then he moved in after the hand and sat beside her on the bed and reached for her to kiss her. She turned her head defdy aside and he kissed at air. He groped for her with eager hands and she stood up and moved away from him and shook her head. Her lips were tightly compressed and there was no mistaking the message in her eyes. She was not playing hard to get. She was not teasing. She simply did not intend to let him do anything.
"I figured on sealing the bargain," he said.
"No."
"I mean, partners-"
"Partners only in crime."
"Why?"
"Because I don't want to."
"You got some other guy?"
"No."
"Then what?"
She didn't answer him. He got his breathing back to normal, found a cigarette, got it going. He filled his lungs with smoke and sat down heavily on the edge of his bed.
"I don't get it," he said.
"That's what I've been trying to tell you. You don't get it. Not today, not tomorrow, not at all."
"Why?"
"I told you. I don't want to."
"It has to be love for you?"
"It doesn't have to be love."
"You can't enjoy it?"
"That's ... closer."
"What is it?"
She thought about it for a long time. Then she sat down in the chair where he had been sitting and said: "I guess I can say it; I might as well. If we're to be working together you would learn sooner or later, and you might as well learn now. Because sleeping together is not going to be part of our partnership, it can't be, and I'll have to explain why or you'll never let me alone, will you?"
He didn't answer her.
"All right. I'm not frigid, but that's close. When I like it it's with girls."
He stared at her. "Girls," she said. "You're a dyke?"
"Lesbian is a nicer word."
"Nicer. Nobody who looks like you is a dyke."
"Thanks for the compliment, but you'd be surprised."
"This other partner of yours, the one who's in stir now. You didn't sleep with him?"
"Never."
"What was it?"
"No, he was married, as a matter-of-fact, but not to me. And I don't think he would have slept with me if I had wanted him to. He was faithful to his wife, though that may seem strange to you." She grinned. "It's not that strange. He has a pretty wife. I'd be glad to get her myself, to be truthful."
"What would you do with her?"
"Use your imagination."
He used his imagination and his mind turned over. He said: "I'd like to get you, too, and you can use your imagination what I'd like to do to you."
"I can imagine."
"Yeah, sure. But if it's out then it's out, and you don't have to worry about me pushing it. Somebody's got a particular kick, that's her kick. You can't argue about that. Everybody works his own way, far as the love part is concerned. You can't spit on a person just because he works different."
"That's a pretty speech, Lee."
"Yeah-You're a Lesbian. It's too bad, but you're entitled." He thought of the pervert he had beaten in Central Park. Well, a pervert and a Lesbian were two different things. "You're entitled," he repeated, "and we're still partners. Partners out of bed but not in it, the way you said. Deal?"
"Deal," Jan Lawler told him.
So he didn't spend the night with her after all. He had more or less planned on it from the minute she brought up the partner schtick, and he had itched to have her the minute he saw that lush body of hers, but he wasn't going to push it. And, surprisingly enough, once she was out of his room and he was alone with himself he realized that he was just as glad that she was not available to him.
Because it was better that way.
Much better.
If she let him have her, it wouldn't be long before he wanted to do more than that. He knew how he worked and what made him tick. He was a sadist and a sex-killer, and any broad that he had he would pretty shortly want to do some pretty terrible things to, and she would wind up dead, and if he managed to kill his partner-in-crime there would be hell to pay in nothing flat. You didn't mix business with pleasure, especially if you were the type of clown who mixed pleasure with pain. If you did, you wound up with a pain in the business. It was almost algebraic in its simplicity.
So it had all worked out for the better. It would be as though they were both men who worked together. They would pull a few jobs, they would have occasional dinners together, they would be good, friends, and that would be all.
No love.
Or plenty of love, maybe. But not between them. Love with girls for her, and love with girls for him, but no love with each other.
Her body would be something of a distraction. That much was obvious, because a man would have to be funny or dead to avoid getting eager just from thinking about her. But it was something he could overcome. There were forces that he couldn't resist, and he could recognize them, but this was not one of them. He could hold off. He could work with her without surrendering to the strong impulse to work on her.
He would get his love on his own.
And now he was on his own.
She was gone and he was alone in his room with liquor perking in his system. And the stimulation she had given him was not entirely gone; it merely redirected itself, away from her and toward some faceless and unknown woman somewhere in the city. He did not know who he was going to get, but he would get someone, and soon. That night.
Now.
He got dressed all over again, putting on a plaid flannel shirt he had bought the other day and a pair of gray gabardine slacks. He wanted to look casual this time, not at all formal and not especially well-dressed. He combed his hair, took a quick shave, and went downstairs and out of the hotel.
A cab took him where he wanted to go.
And where he wanted to go was not the west side, or Central Park, or back to Brooklyn. Where he wanted to go was a place where it is better not to go, maybe. A place not to go after dark, anyway, and a place which by definition gets dark quite early.
He went to Harlem.
There was a reason. He wanted action and he wanted speed and he wanted something exotic, and for all three of those things you cannot pick a better spot to look than Harlem. Harlem is the part of the city where they shove the Negroes and Puerto Ricans in and let them rot there. The people who run the city don't care what happens there, just so long as the Negroes don't move into then-own lily-white neighborhood, just so long as aqui se habia espanol doesn't appear over their properly Anglo-Saxon doorway. The powers-that-be don't care what happens in Harlem, and so the police don't care either. They look the other way, their eyes fully open only to pick up any quick money that comes their way with no questions asked.
And, because nobody cares what happens in Harlem, just about everything does. In spades.
The cabby, a Negro with long sideburns, dropped Fallon at Seventh Avenue and he gave the driver some money and started to go away and the driver said: "Hey, baby."
Nobody called Fallon baby. But he turned around anyway.
"Dig, you looking for something special?"
Fallon didn't answer him.
"I mean, you come up here for a reason?"
"Everybody has a reason," Fallon said.
"I mean, to meet a friend or something? To talk some business, hear some music, any of them things? Or did you have something else in mind, man?"
"Why?"
"Like I didn't figure you to be meeting friends, is all."
"You don't think I've got friends?"
"Not uptown, man. You don't come on like a gray cat, man, which is a cat who is white but who hangs with spades. You come on more like you are looking for a certain commodity."
Fallon didn't say anything.
"Like love," the cabby said.
Fallon still didn't say anything. But he didn't turn and go away, either. He waited the cabby out.
"If I am wrong," the cabby said, "just say so, baby, and I leave. I'm not one of those pushy drivers."
"Go on."
"Solid. You go to that bar down the block, that Rita's Roost. You see the place?"
"Yes."
"With all the neon. Spells out the name big as life. Rita's Roost."
"I see it." Fallon cleared his throat. "If you think I need your help to find love in Harlem, you must have straw for brains."
"Oh, now," the cabby said.
Fallon started to walk away. The cabbie said: "Now easy, baby. I don't mean just a tramp, if I figured you had eyes for just a tramp you are right, why, I would of let you find that just-a-tramp all by yourself. I figured you wanted some special dish of tea."
"Marijuana? No thanks."
The cabby's eyes rolled. "Hell, man. No. I was talking like in images, dig? I will tell you quick. You go to Rita's and you ask for a girl named Carmen. Carmen is about three inches taller than you and outweighs you three-to-two. Carmen is about the same color as coffee when it's all-the-way black and strong as ink and boiled too many times."
Fallon looked at him.
"Now you get more than Carmen, like. Because Carmen has this friend, her name is Lily. That's a pretty name, that Lily. Pretty girl, too. Real small, like five feet tall and thin. Real thin. And light, too. Like about the color of coffee when you mix three cups of milk with one cup of coffee. Like a very high yellow, so high she is close to flying. Dig?"
"So?"
The cabby frowned. "How you mean, so?"
"I mean so what."
"Man, this is a sister act," the cabby said. "These two little girls, Carmen and Lily, now you probably wouldn't believe it but they're sisters."
"You're a hundred per cent right," Fallon said. "I don't believe a word of it."
"Damn, course not. Too smart for that, aren't you, baby? No, they not sisters. But they sweeter than sisters. See, you pay your money, see, and like they take you back to their pad and the three of you get a little high and maybe you watch some movies, or maybe they put on a little act for you, and then they both take you off to bed. A black-as-ink one and a high-yellow one. and what more could an ofay cat like you want on a night like this, anyway?"
"Go to hell," Fallon said. And he walked away, and the cabby said something unpleasant about Fallon's mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and drove off with his tires squealing.
What the hell, Fallon thought. What the hell. A doubles team, a two-for-the-price-of-one act. Two girls to take turns with.
Well, it might be fun.
Plenty of fun.
Special Lee-Fallon-style fun.
He lit a cigarette mc looked around at Harlem. Just like any other place, he thought. Only a different color He sucked on the cigarette and wondered what kind of a guy the caboy had figured him for, anyway. Somebody with bread, in the first place. And somebody who was square enougn to get taken six ways and backward, and panting at the cabby's description of the fun and games.
Well, damn the cabbj.
Grinning just slightly. Fallon walked across the street and a few doors down to a bar called Rita's Roost.