The Friendship of Criminals

by Robert Glinski

  “Joking?”

  “Yeah, baby. Joking is all that was.”

  Hand on the doorframe, ready to run, she said, “You joke like that with your cousin’s asshole?”

  He ran his fingers across the velvet, smoothing its wrinkles and resetting the edges. “So that’s the way it’s going to be.” The head butt was one thing. Slapping down his olive branch was sedition. Shop etiquette dictated forgiveness.

  “I don’t like you touching me.”

  His eyes narrowed enough to stop any blinking. “You think you’re some kind of hot thing, so let me tell you how your story ends. Ten years from now, I still own this shop and two dozen counter girls will have passed through. Some will think they’re better than me, like the way you do. Some—the smart ones—will see it for what it is and give a little extra of themselves. But you? The one with all the answers? You’ll have a fat pasta ass and three or four rats sucking your titties flat. Your life will be so awful that you’ll look back at Roth’s Fine Diamonds as the good old days. I’ve seen pieces like you before, and this is the best it gets. Look around and make a memory.”

  While not fond of the forecast, Angie was more concerned with mutating Derek’s work fantasy. Fearing the combustible nature of that variety of shame, she turned toward the back of the shop, clocked out, and retraced her steps before the boss could block her exit.

  Passing the private showroom, she kept her eyes straight and pace controlled. The wrong vibe would only antagonize his battered ego. Two steps past the doorway, half-expecting a chase scene, Angie heard him yell, “Be back in an hour or keep walking.” Maybe he thought she was taking an early lunch. Or maybe he just didn’t give a damn.

  Out on Walnut Street and wary of using her cell phone, Angie turned west for a pay phone three blocks away. Finding a couple of dimes in the bottom of her purse, she dialed the number and held her breath through four rings. “Hi.”

  “This you?”

  “I found what we talked about.”

  “Slow down … where are you?”

  “At a pay phone near work. He can’t see me.”

  “You alone?”

  She overread the word choice, hearing doubt where none existed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He ignored the defensiveness, asking what she had.

  Angie hesitated, knowing her answer was a graduation. “Marcek…”

  “Yeah, I’m here, Angie. I’m right here. Take your time.”

  “There’s fifteen thousand coming in tomorrow. The appointment is just after lunch.” She wasn’t sure why she low-balled the number.

  “You okay?” Hearing the answer he needed, Marcek asked about the mark.

  Angie hit the details straight and quick, explaining that the buyer was an Irish lawyer named O’Bannon. He usually bought a significant piece whenever he found a new girlfriend, which was two or three times a year. O’Bannon was partial to diamond earrings and bracelets but never rings because of the connotation. Angie said he usually combined the purchase with a little something for himself, like cuff links. This go-around was a watch.

  Marcek had heard of the lawyer. O’Bannon was the kind of criminal defense attorney that pulled microphones from reporters’ hands so they couldn’t walk away. While he possessed decent trial skills, his niche wasn’t cross-examinations or closing arguments. O’Bannon’s brilliance was once a year securing lead chair in a high-profile trial where the defendant was too poor to pay. The best cases involved race and the Philadelphia Police Department so he could swap his retainer for airtime on the nightly news.

  Marcek asked, “You usually around when he pays?”

  “I’m in the shop, but the routine has him giving the money to my boss. O’Bannon comes in, flirts with me or one of the other girls, runs a finger down the display cases, and then heads for the back room. That’s where his purchase is showcased on the velvet and money exchanged.”

  “Have you ever seen the cash?”

  Angie thought maybe Marcek was doubting the job or her appraisal. “Of course I’ve seen it. He pays with cash. Every time.”

  “Just casting a wide net, okay? Now, I need to know more about the money. Small or big bills?”

  “Lots of tens and twenties. My boss is always bitching that O’Bannon is worse than the strippers.”

  “How’s the dough come in?”

  Angie said she didn’t understand, so Marcek explained he needed to know if O’Bannon used an envelope, a rubber band, or his pockets.

  “One time,” she said, “he came in singing about a big trial. I remember him waving a stack of money and saying we should celebrate.”

  “No envelope?”

  “No. The money was folded, almost too thick to bend in half.”

  “Did he pull the dough from his pants or his suit coat?”

  Angie tried remembering back to the lawyer’s jaunty entrances, when a caricature artist would have painted him as a cat burping up bird feathers. “Honestly, I’m not positive,” she said. The rising register betrayed her anxiousness. “Maybe it was his suit. Yeah, I think that could be right.”

  “Not for sure, though?”

  She wished they were face-to-face so a headshake could stand for her answer. “I mean, I can’t swear to it.”

  “One more thing,” said Marcek, not seeing much point pressing her. His line of work assumed human inaccuracies. “How does he get to the shop? Does he walk from his office? Maybe you’ve seen him get out of a cab? Or maybe you’ve called a cab when business is done?”

  Angie knew O’Bannon’s car all too well and turned hopeful Marcek was thinking about carjacking him. She wanted maximum infliction of pain. “No taxi. He drives a blue Mercedes, which he parks in the tow-away zone. Before he heads to the private showroom, the asshole tosses me the keys and tells me to watch for meter maids, like I’m his little guardian angel.”

  “Fair enough. You’ve given me a good sketch. Usual finder’s fee is fifteen percent.”

  She said okay, not knowing what was expected or quite understanding the formality.

  “But you’ve done more than finding. And taking this O’Bannon dude isn’t like I’m knocking off Tiffany’s. So I’m figuring we split the take.”

  “Really?”

  “Down the middle. Let’s meet up after I roll him. We’ll do the split, and I want to see you before I head out of town.”

  She sat on the conversation’s longest pause. “Where you going?”

  “Boca.” He wanted her to come, but it had to be her choice. “I’m needed in Florida for a couple months,” he said, not sure how long he was supposed to stay. His dad had been vague on the details. “There’s work for me down there.”

  “That’s a place I’ve always wanted to go.”

  “You’ve never been to Florida?”

  “No.”

  Marcek couldn’t help himself. “Interested?”

  12.

  SONNY WONDERED IF THE ALARM clock was synched with the hotel’s wake-up service and why he bothered with either. His mind refused any sleep beyond five hours, often insisting on less. Not that he didn’t need or wouldn’t appreciate more—it was just that some part of him, a dark spot formed long ago, was always on guard.

  Regardless, after a year of planning and two trips to Japan, Sonny was ready for the payoff. Every fall, he met Anton Bielakowski at Molly Ollie’s Tavern on Cherry Street. The purpose was for Sonny to sell—and Bielakowski to buy—an idea. Two if Bielakowski was so inclined, or all three, as was happening with greater frequency. After the transaction, when the proposals were culled and price negotiated, they reminisced over a meal and bottle of wine.

  Sonny dialed the hotel’s front desk to cancel his wake-up call and order steak and eggs. By most standards, it was early for sixteen ounces, but Sonny stayed at the Ritz because the hotel committed to cooking his request at any hour. Ten years earlier, the Four Seasons was his choice until its kitchen balked. Sonny took the rejection personally, thinking it wasn’t so much
the meal but the class of people ordering it. His response merited a visit from the police and cost him donation checks to the Philadelphia Police Athletic League and the night manager’s personal account.

  With time to kill before the food arrived, Sonny prepped the shower and spent a few moments staring at his reflection. While public confidence was not an issue, bathroom mirrors challenged his esteem. Only recently had he found some measure of psychological relief from his scarred skin. Instead of ugly markers, Sonny began seeing them as proof the living world—after three chances—still wanted him around. That had to count for something.

  His first wife used to say the scars were rivers on a map. She traced the re-formed tissue with her finger, reassuring Sonny she accepted them as a part of the greater package. His third wife, a religious French Canadian, had an equally warm take. She said the scars were God’s work, like he’d taken a personal interest in designing Sonny only to get distracted during finishing touches. It was the second wife, the one Sonny recalled in moments of deepest doubt, who stoked his inadequacies. One night in bed, as Sonny started explaining how he earned his back scar in Korea, she rolled away, saying she assumed he’d been burned as a baby and was happy to leave it at that. Sonny kicked off the sheets, packed a bag, and spent the night in his divorce attorney’s parking lot.

  At Bonnie’s Whiskey Room, if a married guy carried on about wife troubles, Bonnie would say The opposite of love isn’t hate—the opposite of love is disdain, and if that’s what she holds in her heart, the party is over. When Sonny’s wife said she didn’t care about his scars, he knew in two seconds what Bonnie had preached for twenty years. The party was over, indeed.

  Shower steam shrinking the bathroom mirror, Sonny stood high on his toes to examine the rib scar beneath his right elbow. Even though it was a gruesome meld, the memory surrounding its acquisition made him grin. On his fifteenth birthday, anxious to test his grit, Sonny went out of his way to cry foul during a back-alley dice game. His target was cheating. He was also half-mad from World War I mustard gas and turpentine consumption.

  Sonny compounded the blunder by assuming his adversary would refute the charge. The cheater, uninterested in words, smashed his booze bottle and jammed the exposed edge into Sonny’s ribs. When he tried withdrawing for a second stab, with every intention of killing Sonny, the bottle held fast, in turn making Sonny panic and run for the tavern. Bonnie took one look at the protrusion and figured the kid was screwing with him. The growing puddle of blood on the floor told a different story.

  Sonny didn’t joke about the second scar. He felt like, with as close as he came to dying, making light was thumbing his nose at the Lord’s generosity. He wasn’t born again or any of that, but he also didn’t dismiss the Good Book as wasted ink on a page. The scar, two inches below his left nipple, convinced him, once and for all, that he wasn’t cut out for the rough stuff. He’d be the idea guy, the one who handled the big-picture planning, above the fray and living decades longer than if he toted a gun or blackjack.

  Anton Bielakowski was with Sonny for that moment of clarity and probably saved his life, though neither recalled it in those terms. Bielakowski’s old man sent them to collect from a grocery near Temple’s campus. The grocery’s owner—a mouselike man with short arms—didn’t owe on a lost bet or illegal loan. He was in the books for three dozen ropes of kielbasa. Anton was a semiregular on the collections circuit, so the assumption was that between him and Sonny, they could handle a man who spent his days pricing cans.

  The only part of the operation that went right was the ride over. The rest was a box of bullets in a hot car. Anton’s responsibility was clearing the store. Sonny took point. Chin up and eyes wide, he started by shoving the smaller man into a display of oranges. After explaining the purpose of their visit with a few prepackaged, tough-sounding lines, Sonny added a bit of flair by rapid-firing three oranges into the wall and shouting, “Now give me the money you little shit.” The ripe fruit splattered and filled the room with an almost visible aroma of citrus.

  Years of orphanage living should have taught him about inflated expectations. He should have been wary of the grocer, like maybe he wasn’t reaching behind his back for a billfold. But Sonny, by nature, was an optimist who underestimated the darkness of men’s hearts. When the grocer withdrew an ice pick and stabbed him in the chest, he was genuinely surprised.

  To the grocer’s credit, he didn’t go for any extra thrusts. One was enough. He let go, stepped back, and stared at the wooden handle. An error had been made and each man began plotting a strategy for surviving the consequences.

  Bielakowski said they should leave it alone—like a finger in the dike. Sonny understood the logic but couldn’t stop himself. Wrapping one hand atop the other, he pulled the ice pick out and waited. The first sensation was a droplet of blood down his chest. The second was a hiss pitched somewhere between baby-bird tweets and a kid whistling through a missing tooth.

  “Heaven’s mercy,” said the grocer. “It got you in the lung. That’s air blowing out of the hole. I did it this time. I killed Bielakowski’s kid.”

  Sonny would always remember that twenty seconds. Not because the grocer had mistaken him for Bielakowski—that’d happened before. And not because the grocer said he was going to die—what the hell did a dummy that’d stiffed a mobster over sausage links know about dying? No, Sonny would never forget because it was the first time he’d ever been speechless. Holding a hand to his chest, Sonny tried screaming for Anton to get the car and take him to the hospital. All he could manage was the chest whistling and two fingers pointed outside. Problem was, Anton Bielakowski was done paying him any attention.

  Facing the grocer with his back to Sonny, Anton said, “Money, asshole. Get the money.”

  The grocer looked back and forth between the two collectors, struggling where to focus.

  Anton Bielakowski solved the dilemma by striking him with an open hand. “You hear me now?” The grocer backpedaled into the counter as Bielakowski stepped forward for a second slap. “We came to collect. Nobody’s leaving until that happens. So go into whatever hole your nuts are buried and get the money.”

  “But your friend, he’s dying.” The grocer peered around to see Sonny leaning against a display of onions. “Please, please take him to the hospital. I swear I’ll get you the money. Just don’t let him die. Not in my store.”

  Bielakowski pivoted his stance, a foot aimed in each man’s direction. “Him dying is on you. Your ice pick, your decision to stick him. Collecting the dough is on me, and my old man won’t see it different. I don’t want Sonny dying, but I gotta get the money.”

  “Wait. You … you’re the Bielakowski?”

  “I’m Anton.”

  “Who’s that?” said the grocer.

  “Him?”

  “Yeah, I thought he was the Bielakowski boy.”

  “No, that’s Sonny.”

  “Sonny? Oh, thank God.”

  Sonny missed the exchange, his descent gaining too much momentum. His left lung sagged inside his ribs while both arms hung like untied shoelaces. The whistling had slowed only because his breath had weakened. His life depended on getting to a doctor, but Anton was slapping around a guy for what amounted to a night’s drinking tab.

  The grocer sat on the counter, swiveled his legs, slid off the back side with a thud, and stayed low. Anton followed, wanting to make sure the grocer wasn’t going for a hidden sawed-off or snub-nose. What he saw was the grocer using a putty knife to pry up a floorboard. After getting it loose and tossed aside, he reached between the joists and pulled free a flour sack.

  “There’s what you owe for the kielbasa,” said Anton, “and what you need to make good with Sonny. After paying me, you stuff whatever’s left in his belt.”

  It was when the grocer opened his mouth and Bielakowski shushed him with a finger that he saw the coolness in his eyes, a void that said the fight was over but not the damage if that’s how he wanted to play it out. The little ma
n nodded his compliance, paid Bielakowski, and knelt by Sonny’s side. Shoving a handful of bills into the dying teenager’s jacket, he crossed himself and said a prayer.

  Sonny had two more memories before passing out. The first was Anton Bielakowski lifting him up and carrying him through the grocery’s front door. The second was Bielakowski sliding a hand inside his jacket. “I think you may die,” he whispered. “Let me hold your money so the hospital scum doesn’t steal it. They’re all thieves, you know.”

  A ringing cell phone brought Sonny out of his street adventures and back to the Ritz hotel room. Scrambling to find the phone, he recognized his son’s number. “What’s up, buddy?”

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I need help.”

  Sonny paused. “I thought you were in recovery.”

  “Stop, just shut up for a second. Didn’t you hear me? I need help.”

  The script was a familiar one. Either Sonny agreed to wire money or Michael revved red and hung up. His son didn’t allow for any peaceful, guilt-free middle ground. Problem was, Sonny was short himself until the Bielakowski meeting. “Bad timing. I haven’t gotten paid yet this year.”

  “It’s bad, Dad. Different than before, I swear on my life. What word don’t you understand? I need fucking help.”

  So many things Sonny wanted to say but didn’t because they’d all been said a dozen times. “Doesn’t matter. I won’t have a cure until I get back to Florida. Let me call you in a couple days. We’ll get this straightened out.”

  The response was unequivocal. The dead silence of a disconnected line.

  13.

  WHEN NICK MARTIN WAS CONTEMPLATING zero gravity, a veteran federal agent summed up the mission as a damn simple job. Dangerous, sure—the mortality rate for undercover work rivaled helicopter tail-gunners in Vietnam, and those boys averaged fourteen minutes. “But, hand on the Bible,” he said, “this business is a small space with just a few rules. Be a people person. And make them money. That’s all because it’s enough.”