Loot for the Unlucky Lady

John D. MacDonald Loot for the Unlucky Lady

Chapter One Ninety-Grand Doll

She walked slowly, because walking is easier than standing, and attracts less attention. Slowly from the Astor Bar entrance up the few short blocks to Lindy’s and back. In the heart of the tourist crush. In the granular slush of December, by the corners where the lean scarecrow Santas warmed their fingers in their armpits and jangled the tired bells while the change dropped into the wire-covered pots. She was jostled and buffeted about, hearing the torn bits of conversation around her, fixing her mind on those overheard bits to keep from thinking of Al: “...So I tells him there’s holes in his head and...”

“She ought to pay more attention to...”

“It’s a lousy show and why it don’t close is more...”

“Okay, okay, so it was five drinks...”

“And this other one, the blonde, says...”

“Get off my feet, stupid...”

It was a crosstown wind and at the corners it whipped her thin, worn coat, and chilled her ankles where the taxi wheels had spattered her stockings.

There was nothing spectacular about her. She attracted little attention. She was a frail girl, almost thin, with a grave face and level eyes. She had quiet beauty, and sometimes a man in the crowd would glance at her and be faintly troubled as he walked on, because she started him thinking of the things that might have been...

Her pale hair had a soft wave, and her coat was two years old and it was the third set of heels on her black pumps.

Al had called her at the office on Monday morning, and the documents for file had been piled high and Mr. Scharry had frowned and said, “There is a personal call for you on my line, Miss Gerald.”

Al’s voice had been a tight, harsh sound, full of fear. “Bad trouble, Glory. I need you. Listen and get this the first time. I got to give you something. Quit your job and every day from now on, go to the Times Square section. Be somewhere around the Raglan Bar. Don’t speak to me when I show up.”

The line went dead. Mr. Scharry was glaring at her. She made her voice light and gay and said, “Thanks for calling, Marian.”

She had been paid on Friday. She left the office at lunch time and didn’t return. It wasn’t that she wanted to be thoughtless about not giving notice. It was just that Al Barnard was more important than anything else in her life, and the fear she had heard in his voice filled her mind so that there was no room for the common courtesies.

She walked slowly, and the crowd was such protective coloration, no one noticed that the same frail blonde girl never left those few short blocks.

In her small, dim scrupulously clean room on Eighty-eighth, there was a glossy eight by ten print of Al Bernard on her bureau. When she was in her room, she spent a great deal of her time looking at his picture. He was good looking in a conventional way. Clean lines of brow, temple, nose. But she failed to see that the mouth had an uncertain softness about it, that the eyes were perhaps a shade too small, a bit too close together.

The main thing was that Al was in trouble. She spent from eight in the morning until one the following morning on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. She ate only when she became faint with hunger, and then hurriedly. Al had asked her to be there. She would have walked those few blocks barefoot if the sidewalk had been made of crushed glass, and the pain would have been good, because it would have been for Al.

Always everything had been for Al. For the past year. Anything that happened before that time didn’t count.

In all of the great city the only reality for her was the sound of his voice, his arms around her.

He had always been evasive about his work. His hours were odd. Some weeks he didn’t work at all. She wanted to have a home and have his children, and yet she had learned that the vaguest reference to marriage brought that stubborn look onto his face, and she had learned to take the golden days as they came to her.

When he was drunk he was abusive. She had learned how to best avoid the blunt lash of his tongue, how to discount the contempt in his eyes.

Her legs ached and her feet were blistered and there were fine lines of fatigue around her mouth, puffy patches under the clear blue of her eyes. And yet she did not feel that he had asked too much of her, that what she was doing was particularly difficult. She was annoyed that it was necessary for her to eat and sleep.

On Friday the shrill alarm awakened her at seven. She dressed quickly, ate a large breakfast at the corner cafeteria, and took the subway down to the place where Al wanted her to be.

She had no idea what his trouble might be.