"Thompson, Jim - Grifters, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thompson Jim)

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, fingerwoman; 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 rn-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, 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 hangon her: a cruel moral toa 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 GrosvenorCarlton, 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-around 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-C arlton'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.
"Oh, I tell you, Mr. Dillon. I've hotelled all over this wonderful land of ours, and I'm telling you that hookers and hotellin' just don't mix. It's against God's laws, and it's against man's laws. You'd think the police would be too busy catching real criminals, instead of snooping around for hookers, but that's the way the gravy stains, as the saying is, and I don't fight it. An ounce of prevention, that's my motto. If you keep out the chicks, you keep out the hookers, and you've got a nice clean respectable place like this one, without a lot of cops hanging around. Why, if a cop comes in here now, I know he's a new man, and I tell him he'd better come back after he checks with headquarters. And he never comes back, Mr. Dillon; he's damned well told that it ain't necessary, because this is a hotel not a hook shop."
"I'm pleased to hear that, Mr. Simms," Roy said truthfully. "I've always been very careful where I lived."
"Right. A man's got to be," Simms said. "Now, let's see. You wanted a two-room suite, say, parlor, bedroom, and bath. Fact is, we don't have much demand for suites here. Got the suites split off into room with bath, and room without. But . . ."
He unlocked a door, and ushered his prospective tenant into a roomy bedroom, its high ceilings marking its prewar vintage. The connecting door opened into another room, a duplicate of the first except that it had no bath. This was the former parlor, and Simms assured Roy that it could be converted back into one in short order.