The Grifters
Jim Thompson
Little, Brown and Company
New York Boston London
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1
As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was a sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony. A hard blow in the guts can do that to a man, and Dillon had gotten a hard one. Not with a fist, which would have been bad enough, but from the butt-end of a heavy club.
Somehow, he got back to his car and managed to slide into the seat. But that was all he could manage. He moaned as the change in posture cramped his stomach muscles; then, with a strangled gasp, he leaned out the window.
Several cars passed as he spewed vomit into the street, their occupants grinning, frowning sympathetically, or averting their eyes in disgust. But Roy Dillon was too sick to notice or to care if he had. When at last his stomach was empty, he felt better, though still not well enough to drive. By then, however, a prowl car had pulled up behind him—a sheriff’s car, since he was in the county rather than city of Los Angeles—and a brown-clad deputy was inviting him to step out to the walk.
Dillon shakily obeyed.
“One too many, mister?”
“What?”
“Never mind.” The cop had already noticed the absence of liquor breath. “Let’s see your driver’s license.”
Dillon showed it to him, also displaying, with seeming inadvertence, an assortment of credit cards. Suspicion washed off the cop’s face, giving way to concern.
“You seem pretty sick, Mr. Dillon. Any idea what caused it?”
“My lunch, I guess. I know I should know better, but I had a chicken-salad sandwich—and it didn’t taste quite right when I was eating it—but…” He let his voice trail away, smiling a shy, rueful smile.
“Mmm-hmm!” The cop nodded grimly. “That stuff will do it to you. Well”—a shrewd up-and-down look—“you all right, now? Want us to take you to a doctor?”
“Oh, no. I’m fine.”
“We got a first-aid man over to the substation. No trouble to run you over there.”
Roy declined, pleasantly but firmly. Any prolonged contact with the cops would result in a record, and any kind of record was at best a nuisance. So far he had none; the scrapes which the grift had led him into had not led him to the cops. And he meant to keep it that way.
The deputy went back to the prowl car, and he and his partner drove off. Roy waved a smiling farewell to them and got back into his own car. Gingerly, wincing a little, he got a cigarette lit. Then, convinced that the last of the vomiting was over, he forced himself to lean back against the cushions.
He was in a suburb of Los Angeles, one of the many which resist incorporation despite their interdependence and the lack of visible boundaries. From here it was almost a thirty-mile drive back into the city, a very long thirty miles at this hour of the day. He needed to be in better shape than he was, to rest a while, before bucking the outbound tide of evening traffic. More important, he needed to reconstruct the details of his recent disaster, while they still remained fresh in his mind.
He closed his eyes for a moment. He opened them again, focussing them on the changing lights of the nearby traffic standard. And suddenly, without moving from the car—without physically moving from it—he was back inside the shop again. Sipping a limeade at the fountain, while he casually studied his surroundings.
It was little different from a thousand small shops in Los Angeles, establishments with an abbreviated soda fountain, a showcase or two of cigars, cigarettes, and candy, and overflowing racks of magazines, paperback books, and greeting cards. In the East, such shops were referred to as stationers’ or candy stores. Here they were usually called confectionaries or simply fountains.
Dillon was the only customer in the place. The one other person present was the clerk, a large, lumpy-looking youth of perhaps nineteen or twenty. As Dillon finished his drink, he noted the boy’s manner as he tapped ice down around the freezer containers, working with a paradoxical mixture of diligence and indifference. He knew exactly what needed to be done, his expression said, and to hell with doing a bit more than that. Nothing for show, nothing to impress anyone. The boss’s son, Dillon decided, putting down his glass and sliding off the stool. He sauntered up toward the cash register, and the youth laid down the sawed-off ball bat with which he had been tamping. Then, wiping his hands on his apron, he also moved up to the register.
“Ten cents,” he said.
“And a package of those mints, too.”
“Twenty cents.”
“Twenty cents, hmm?” Roy began to fumble through his pockets, while the clerk fidgeted impatiently. “Now, I know I’ve got some change here. Bound to have. I wonder where the devil…”
Exasperatedly, he shook his head and drew out his wallet. “I’m sorry. Mind cashing a twenty?”
The clerk almost snatched the bill from his hand. He slapped the bill down on the cash register ledge and counted out the change from the drawer. Dillon absently picked it up, continuing his fumbling search of his pockets.
“Now, doesn’t that get you? I mean, you know darned well you’ve got something, but—” He broke off, eyes widening with a pleased smile. “There it is—two dimes! Just give me back my twenty, will you?”
The clerk grabbed the dimes from him, and tossed back the bill. Dillon turned casually toward the door, pausing, on the way out, for a disinterested glance at the magazine display.
Thus, for the tenth time that day, he had worked the twenties, one of the three standard gimmicks of the short con grift. The other two are the smack and the tat, usually good for bigger scores but not nearly so swift nor safe. Some marks fall for the twenties repeatedly, without ever tipping.
Dillon didn’t see the clerk come around the counter. The guy was just there, all of a sudden, a pouty snarl on his face, swinging the sawed-off bat like a battering ram.
“Dirty crook,” he whinnied angrily. “Dirty crooks keep cheatin’ me and cheatin’ me, an’ Papa cusses me out for it!”
The butt of the bat landed in Dillon’s stomach. Even the clerk was startled by its effect. “Now, you can’t blame me, mister,” he stammered. “You were askin’ for it. I—I give you change for twenty dollars, an’ then you have me give the twenty back, an’—an’ ”—his self-righteousness began to crumble. “N-now, you k-know you did, m-mister.”
Roy could think of nothing but his agony. He turned swimming eyes on the clerk, eyes flooded with pain-filled puzzlement. The look completely demolished the youth.
“It w-was j-just a mistake, mister. Y-you made a m-mistake, an’ I m-made a m-m-mistake an’—mister!” He backed away, terrified. “D-don’t look at me like that!”
“You killed me,” Dillon gasped. “You killed me, you rotten bastard!”
“Nah! P-please don’t say t-that, mister!”
“I’m dying,” Dillon gasped. And, then, somehow, he had gotten out of the place.
And now, seated in his car and re-examining the incident, he could see no reason to fault himself, no flaw in his technique. It was just bad luck. He’d simply caught a goof, and goofs couldn’t be figured.
He was right about that. And he’d been right about something else, although he didn’t know it.
As he drove back to Los Angeles, constantly braking and speeding up in the thickening traffic, repeatedly stopping and starting—with every passing minute, he was dying.
Death might be forestalled if he took proper care of himself. Otherwise, he had no more than three days to live.
2
Roy Dillon’s mother was from a family of backwoods white trash. She was thirteen when she
married a thirty-year-old railroad worker, and not quite fourteen when she gave birth to Roy. A month or so after his birth, her husband suffered an accident which made her a widow. Thanks to the circumstances of its happening, it also made her well-off by the community’s standards. A whole two hundred dollars a month to spend on herself. Which was right where she meant to spend it.
Her family, on whom she promptly dumped Roy, had other ideas. They kept the boy for three years, occasionally managing to wheedle a few dollars from their daughter. Then, one day, her father appeared in town, bearing Roy under one arm and swinging a horsewhip with the other. And he proceeded to demonstrate his lifelong theory that a gal never got too old to whip.
Since Lilly Dillon’s character had been molded long before, it was little changed by the thrashing. But she did keep Roy, having no choice in the matter, and frightened by her father’s grim promises to keep an eye on her, she moved out of his reach.
Settling down in Baltimore, she found lucrative and undemanding employment as a B-girl. Or, more accurately, it was undemanding as far as she was concerned. Lilly Dillon wasn’t putting out for anyone; not, at least, for a few bucks or drinks. Her nominal heartlessness often disgruntled the customers, but it drew the favorable attention of her employers. After all, the world was full of bimboes, tramps who could be had for a grin or a gin. But a smart kid, a doll who not only had looks and class, but was also smart—well, that kind of kid you could use.
They used her, in increasingly responsible capacities. As a managing hostess, as a recruiter for a chain of establishments, as a spotter of sticky-fingered and bungling employees; as courier, liaison officer, finger-woman; as a collector and disburser. And so on up the ladder…or should one say down it? The money poured in, but little of the shower settled on her son.
She wanted to pack him off to boarding school, only drawing back, indignantly, when the charges were quoted to her. A couple thousand dollars a year, plus a lot of extras, and just for taking care of a kid! Just for keeping a kid out of trouble! Why, for that much money she could buy a nice mink jacket.
They must think she was a sucker, she decided. Nuisance that he was, she’d just look after Roy herself. And he’d darned well keep out of trouble or she’d skin him alive.
She was, of course, imbued with certain ineradicable instincts, eroded and atrophied though they were; so she had her rare moments of conscience. Also, certain things had to be done, for the sake of appearances: to stifle charges of neglect and the unpleasantness pursuant thereto. In either case, obviously, and as Roy instinctively knew, whatever she did was for herself, out of fear or as a salve for her conscience.
Generally, her attitude was that of a selfish older sister to an annoying little brother. They quarreled with each other. She delighted in gobbling down his share of some treat, while he danced about her in helpless rage.
“You’re mean! Just a dirty old pig, that’s all!”
“Don’t you call me names, you snot!”—striking at him. “I’ll learn you!”
“Learn me, learn me! Don’t even have enough sense to say teach!”
“I do, too! I did say teach!”
He was an excellent student in school, and exceptionally well-behaved. Learning came easily for him, and good behavior seemed simply a matter of common sense. Why risk trouble when it didn’t make you anything? Why be profitlessly detained after school when you could be out hustling newspapers or running errands or caddying? Time was money, and money was what made the world go around.
As the smartest and best-behaved boy in his classes, he naturally drew the displeasure of the other kind. But no matter how cruelly or frequently he was attacked, Lilly offered only sardonic condolence.
“Only one arm?” she would say, if he exhibited a twisted and swollen arm.
Or if a tooth had been knocked out, “Only one tooth?”
And when he received an overall mauling, with dire threats of worse to come, “Well, what are you kicking about? They may kill you, but they can’t eat you.”
Oddly enough, he found a certain comfort in her backhanded remarks. On the surface they were worse than nothing, merely insult added to injury, but beneath them lay a chilling and callous logic. A fatalistic do-or-be-damned philosophy which could accommodate itself to anything but oblivion.
He had no liking for Lilly, but he came to admire her. She’d never given him anything but a hard time, which was about the extent of her generosity to anyone. But she’d done all right. She knew how to take care of herself.
She showed no soft spots until he was entering his teens, a handsome, wholesome-looking youth with coal-black hair and wide-set gray eyes. Then, to his secret amusement, he began to note a subtle change in her attitude, a softening of her voice when she spoke to him and a suppressed hunger in her eyes when she looked at him. And seeing her thus, knowing what was behind the change, he delighted in teasing her.
Was something wrong? Did she want him to clear out for a while and leave her alone?
“Oh, no, Roy. Really. I—I like being together with you.”
“Now, Lilly. You’re just being polite. I’ll get out of your way right now.”
“Please, h-honey…” Biting her lip at the unaccustomed endearment, a shamed flush spreading over her lovely features. “Please stay with me. After all, I’m—I’m y-your m-mother.”
But she wasn’t, remember? She’d always passed him off as her younger brother, and it was too late to change the story.
“I’ll leave right now, Lilly. I know you want me to. You just don’t want to hurt my feelings.”
He had matured early, as was natural enough. By the time he was seventeen-going-on-eighteen, the spring that he graduated from high school, he was as mature as a man in his twenties.
On the night of his graduation, he told Lilly that he was pulling out. For good.
“Pulling out…?” She’d been expecting that, he guessed, but she wasn’t resigned to it. “B-but—but you can’t! You’ve got to go to college.”
“Can’t. No money.”
She laughed shakily, and called him silly; avoiding his eyes, refusing to be rejected as she must have known she would be.
“Of course, you have money! I’ve got plenty, and anything I have is yours. You—”
“‘Anything I have is yours,’” Roy said, eyes narrowed appreciably. “That would make a good title for a song, Lilly.”
“You can go to one of the really good schools, Roy. Harvard or Yale, or some place like that. Your grades are certainly good enough, and with my money—our money…”
“Now, Lilly. You know you need the money for yourself. You always have.”
She flinched, as though he had struck her, and her face worked sickishly, and the trim size-nine suit seemed suddenly to hang on her: a cruel moral to a life that had gotten her everything and given her nothing. And for a moment, he almost relented. He almost pitied her.
And then she spoiled it all. She began to weep, to bawl like a child, which was a silly, stupid thing for Lilly Dillon to do; and to top off the ridiculous and embarrassing performance, she threw on the corn.
“D-don’t be mean to me, Roy. Please, please don’t. Y-you—you’re b-breaking my heart…”
Roy laughed out loud. He couldn’t restrain himself.
“Only one heart, Lilly?” he said.
3
Roy Dillon lived in a hotel called the Grosvenor-Carlton, a name which hinted at a grandeur that was wholly non-existent. It boasted one hundred rooms, one hundred baths, but it was purely a boast. Actually, there were only eighty rooms and thirty-five baths, and those included the hall baths and the two lobby restrooms which were not really baths at all.
It was a four-story affair with a white sandstone facade, and a small, terrazzo-floored lobby. The clerks were elderly pensioners, who were delighted to work for a minuscule salary and a free room. The Negro bellboy, whose badge of office was a discarded conductor’s cap, also doubled as janitor, elevator operator, and all-arou
nd handyman. With such arrangements as these, the service left something to be desired. But, as the briskly jovial proprietor pointed out, anyone who was in a helluva hurry could hurry right on out to one of the Beverly Hills hotels, where he could doubtless get a nice little room for fifty bucks a day instead of the Grosvenor-Carlton’s minimum of fifty a month.
Generally speaking, the Grosvenor-Carlton was little different than the numerous other “family” and “commercial” hotels which are strung out along West Seventh and Santa Monica and other arterial streets of West Los Angeles; establishments catering to retired couples, and working men and women who required a close-in address. Mostly, these latter, single people, were men—clerks, white collar workers and the like—for the proprietor was strongly prejudiced against unattached women.
“Put it this way, Mr. Dillon,” he said, during the course of their initial meeting. “I rent to a woman, and she has to have a room with a bath. I insist on it, see, because otherwise she’s got the hall bath tied up all the time, washing her goddamn hair and her clothes and every other damned thing she can think of. So the minimum for a room with a bath is seventeen a week—almost eighty bucks a month, just for a place to sleep and no cooking allowed. And just how many of these chicks make enough to pay eighty a month for a sleeping room and take all their meals in restaurants and buy clothes and a lot of frigging goo to smear on the faces that the good Lord gave ’em, and—and—You a God-fearing man, Mr. Dillon?”
Roy nodded encouragingly; not for the world would he have interrupted the proprietor. People were his business, knowing them was. And the only way of knowing was to listen to them.
“Well, so am I. I and my late wife, goddamn—God rest her, we entered the church at the same time. That was thirty-seven years ago, down in Wichita Falls, Texas, where I had my first hotel. And that’s where I began to learn about chicks. They just don’t make the money for hotel livin’, see, and there’s only one way they can get it. By selling their stuff, you know; tapping them cute little piggy banks they all got. At first, they just do it now and then, just enough to make ends meet. But pretty soon they got the bank open twenty-four hours a day; why the hell not, is the way they see it. All they got to do is open up that cute little slot, and the money pours out; and it’s no skin off their butts if they give a hotel a bad name.