King Suckerman

by George Pelecanos

  “Sounds good,” said Marchetti. “If you see my girl, maybe you could persuade her to come on back, too.”

  “Maybe so. Might just throw her in on the bargain.”

  Marchetti head-motioned Tate. “Clarenze, you were gonna ask around, see if you could dig up an address on that Clay character, or the Greek.”

  Tate had made some calls that morning, talked to a couple brothers he had kept in contact with who had played Interhigh ball in the midsixties and still played pickup around town. Tate told them he owed Marcus Clay a few bucks, that he was trying to locate Clay to pay him back. Both of them knew Clay, but the first guy he talked to didn’t fall for that old game and said nothing further. The second brother, who was slow from a five-year love affair with a bottle of Tango, told Tate that Clay owned a record shop called Real Right on Connecticut above Dupont.

  Marchetti said, “You turn up anything yet?”

  Tate said, “Nothing yet.”

  Cooper smiled. “No matter.” He unrolled the detail map, held it up so Tate could see. “It’s a trip, man. With a phone book and one of these, you can find damn near anyone you want real easy. See, I remember that Karras dude talking about his high school—Wilson, if I recall. He did play for Wilson, didn’t he, Clarence?”

  “What the man said.”

  “So I looked up the high school on the map, then all the Karrases in the phone book who lived in that area. Wasn’t but one. His folks, I’d guess. Thought I’d slide on over there, see what I could dig up on my own.”

  “That’s a start, then,” said Marchetti happily.

  “Real slick, how you did that,” said Tate.

  “Oh, I’m on it, blood,” said Cooper, sliding off the desk and standing straight. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled free a slip of notepaper, tossed it onto Marchetti’s desk. “Thought you might like to know where me and B. R. gonna be at the next few days. Decided we’d check out of our motel, stay close to the Thomas brothers, kind of double up in their cousin’s place. More convenient and shit.”

  Marchetti looked at the scribbling on the paper. “You put your phone number on here. Good.”

  “Case you need to reach me. Mind, I don’t think you ought to be giving out the number to anybody else. Might make me… misunderstand our relationship. Dig?”

  “Solid, Wilton,” said Marchetti.

  “Yeah,” said Cooper, winking at Tate. “Solid as a motherfucker, Spags.” Cooper jerked his head in the direction of the door. “Let’s go, B. R. Time you and me was headin’ uptown.”

  A few minutes later, Tate tracked Cooper and Clagget from the window as they walked to the red Challenger out on the street.

  “Hey, Eddie.”

  “What.”

  “You talk to your biker friend Larry today, see how he liked the way the deal went down?”

  “I called him a couple of times, but I couldn’t get through. The phone must be fucked or somethin’. Why?”

  Tate studied the collapsed front end on the Dodge. “No reason.”

  “You worry too much, Clarenze.”

  “Cats like Cooper—”

  “Look, you’ve got to deal with guys like Cooper once in a while if you want to score. I been around the block enough times to know Cooper’s dangerous. But, hey: No balls, no glory, right?”

  Right, thought Tate. And no brains, no headaches, either.

  THIRTEEN

  Dewey Schmidt shot off on the magazine photograph of a girl named Tracey who liked guys with muscles and candlelit dinners and long walks on the beach. He opened his eyes, shivered, looked down at his manhood as he gave himself a few more strokes to squeeze out the excess jam. Most guys felt a little blue after, but Dewey could go a couple of times a day easy without a bit of remorse. He really loved to jerk off.

  Dewey closed the magazine, put it in the bottom of the stack. You had to rotate the Swanks, otherwise you’d ruin them fast. Dewey had his favorite magazine girls, but once you got a good ten-hut going, one naked chick was as good as the next, and by then Dewey had forgotten about Tracey anyhow and shifted his fantasy to Lindy, one of his Magnificent Seven at Einstein High. Dewey kept a list of seven girls tacked to his bulletin board next to his lobby card of Clint Eastwood from Magnum Force. The list changed frequently, Lindy having bumped a girl named Betty Dasch—Dewey called her Betty Gash—after Dewey had seen Lindy on the last day of school in her imitation leopard-skin shorts. It was those shorts, and what lay black and steaming beneath them, that had made Dewey dump Betty from the list and get dizzy in love over Lindy.

  Dewey pulled his jeans up from down around his ankles, zipped his fly. He picked up a dumbbell, did curls with his right arm until the vein in his bicep popped up nice, repeated the action with his left. Looking in the full-length mirror that hung on the back of his bedroom door, he shook out his straight black hair.

  “Schmidt the Snake,” said Dewey, smiling rakishly as he ran a thumb along the cat hairs of his mustache.

  Dewey went to the living room, left a note for his mom, a secretary at the Department of Transportation, in case she came home early. He slipped the note under a Harold Robbins paperback called The Adventurers that his mother had been reading for the last year. Going out the door, he pulled on the crotch of his jeans, separating it and his fishnet underwear from where his cock had begun to stick.

  He took the steps down to the garden apartment parking lot. The Green Ghost was in its spot, ready to strike, slanted a little and shining in the sun.

  Dewey Schmidt picked Jerry Baluzy up out front of Ferdinand’s, the restaurant on Grandview Avenue in Wheaton where Jerry had a summer job busing tables at lunch. Jerry was waiting on the corner, playing with his matted, frizzy black hair. He wore shorts and a black T-shirt, with a pair of Chucks, once-black highs now gone gray, on his long feet. It was a hot day, and Dewey wished he could have worn shorts like Jerry instead of his heavy jeans. But Dewey thought shorts looked faggoty on a guy, so he only wore them around the apartment in front of his mom.

  Jerry dropped into the passenger seat. “Dude.”

  “Jer. Nice shorts, man.”

  “Gimme a break, Dewey.”

  “Okay.”

  “Man, guess who was in the restaurant today.”

  “I dunno, who?”

  “Fuckin’ Roy Jefferson, man!” Jerry smiled, waiting for Dewey’s response. He knew how much Dewey loved the Skins.

  “Aw, shit, you shoulda called me! What’d he look like?”

  “You know. Bad lookin’ motherfucker with muttonchop ’burns. He smokes, though.”

  “He smokes?”

  “Yeah. Kool one hundreds.”

  “Damn.”

  “But listen. About halfway through lunch, this blond chick comes over from another table, asks for Roy’s autograph, next thing you know she’s sittin’ on his lap. Funny as fuck, man, this blond sittin’ on Roy Jefferson’s johnson. You know he was feelin’ good and shit. He was smilin’…. I’m tellin’ you, you shoulda seen those pearly whites.”

  “You know what they say about Roy Jefferson, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Roy Jefferson don’t like white people, but he sure does like them white girls.”

  “Huh,” honked Jerry.

  They drove over to Jerry’s Subs, a little dive on University Boulevard owned by a cool old Jewish guy named Max. Both of them had the roast beef sub with special sauce and raw onions, in their opinion the best sandwich in town. They talked to Max some, but kept it low, since there were some Northwood boys eating at the counter, and if they found out Dewey and Jerry were Einsteiners, you never knew, maybe the Northwood boys might follow them outside and try to kick their asses. It was like that up in Wheaton, with guys from different high schools all around.

  Dewey and Jerry got back in the Firebird and drove up University. Out of the Wheaton business district, Jerry reached into the backseat and grabbed a light that spun around in a glass dome, like the cherry on top of a cop car, only yello
w. Jerry’s dad worked for a road construction company named F. O. Day, and earlier in the day Jerry had boosted it out of the bed of his father’s F-150.

  “Plug that shit in,” said Dewey.

  “Should we?” said Jerry.

  Dewey said, “You’re fuckin’ A right.”

  Jerry pulled the cigarette lighter out of the dash, plugged the light’s cord in the empty socket. He reached out the window, placed the bubble light with its magnetized base on the roof of the car. Dewey landed on the horn, punched the gas. He put some play in the wheel, swerved the Firebird like he had seen it done on TV when cops were responding to a call. A Ford Maverick up ahead pulled over to the side of the road and let them pass.

  “Ha!” said Jerry.

  Dewey pulled an imaginary microphone from the dash, leaned forward, spoke into his cupped hand. “One Adam twelve, one Adam twelve. We have a two eleven in progress… shhhhhhhhhhh.”

  Jerry rocked back and forth with laughter. A Tavares single came on the radio, and Dewey turned the volume way up. The chorus went, “It only takes a minute, girl,/To fall in love, to fall in love.” Dewey and Jerry sang, “It only takes a minute, girl,/To get a nut, to get a nut….”

  Dewey and Jerry laughed, slapped each other five.

  “Where we goin’, man?” said Jerry.

  “Pick up Toothpick,” said Dewey.

  The traffic parted for the Green Ghost.

  Jimmy Castle crushed his cigarette in the tin ashtray he had lifted from Red Barn, blew his last lungful of smoke out the open window of his room. He had lit a cone of incense, which burned in the mouth of a ceramic frog, to cover any of the nicotine smell that remained. Not that his mother would be anywhere near his room for a while; Mom was upstairs in her bedroom doing her daily traction, and Jimmy’s room was down two floors from hers in their split-level house.

  Jimmy turned up the V on the Miida compact stereo he had purchased from a fast-talking salesman named Stehman up at the Luskin’s-Dalmo in Wheaton. The Miida put out good sound. Jimmy had been listening to Brain Salad Surgery up until a few minutes ago, and now he had switched the mode button over to the radio, where WGTB was playing The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway today in its entirety. GTB played the most progressive shit, especially late at night. Jimmy would often lie in bed listening to the station well after his parents had fallen asleep. It was on those nights, when Jimmy was really tripping on some good THC, that he had been introduced to groups like Can and freaked-out bands like Gong, whose album You was his current favorite. “One Nation Underground” was the station’s slogan; Jimmy had the bumper sticker Scotch-taped to the dust cover of his turntable.

  Jimmy dug hanging out in his room. He still had his childhood dresser and still slept in the same single bed he had always slept in. On the wall was a fluorescent Ravi Shankar poster, handed down to him by his older brother, Noah, that had Ravi sitting cross-legged, playing sitar against what looked like a giant orange bumblebee. Next to the dresser sat an old cushioned chair on which he mostly threw his dirty clothes, and beside the chair was a wicker wastebasket that he kept by his bed on weekends in case he needed to lean over in the middle of the night and puke.

  Over his bed hung a black light; Jimmy never used it when he was alone, since all his friends told him it would radiate his nuts and make him shoot blanks. But he turned it on when he could get a chick over the house to get high during school hours while his parents were at work. Not that this happened a lot—it had happened exactly twice, with two different girls. After they’d smoked a joint, Jimmy and the girl had gone to the bedroom to “check out some tunes,” and Jimmy had turned on the black light, thrown his one Barry White record—Stone Gon’—on the platter, and made his move. Due to a hair-trigger problem, though, Jimmy had still not busted his cherry. On both occasions he had shot his load into his jeans as soon as he touched bare nipple, enduring the awful pffft, pffft, pffft sound of his jiz spurting over the elastic band of his briefs, the sound reddening his face. But Jimmy was determined to fuck a girl before his eighteenth birthday, and he would continue to try.

  Jimmy dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T. He would’ve liked to put on a pair of shorts, but he knew Dewey would call him a faggot if he did. He’d rather be hot than take a bunch of Dewey’s shit.

  Jimmy slipped his cigarette pack behind his sock, went upstairs, stood in the foyer. He could see his mom in her bedroom, facing the door, sitting in a chair in her paisley housedress and wearing a neck brace on a cord run through a pulley and balanced by a water-bottle weight on its other end.

  “Bye, honey,” she said, unable to turn her head. She had slipped on the stairs a year ago and fucked up her back real bad. “Have fun.”

  “Okay.”

  Dewey’s horn sounded, and Jimmy Castle went outside.

  Jimmy sat in the back of the Firebird as he always did, Jerry riding shotgun with Dewey driving. Dewey sat low in the seat, steering with the wrist of his right hand on top of the wheel. They drove down University toward Sligo Creek Park.

  “I was lookin’ at Led Zeppelin Three this morning,” said Jerry, “before I went to work.”

  “What,” said Dewey. “You were playin’ with the cover again?”

  “Naw, not the cover. I was lookin’ at the album. This guy at school, Randolph Seman—”

  “Randolph Seman? Go ahead, man. You know I’d change my name.”

  “Yeah, no shit. So Randy’s this Zep freak, and he’s telling me that they put messages in the vinyl. You know, that smooth place between where the last cut ends and the label begins?”

  “So?”

  “So he was right, man! It’s etched in cursive, right there: ‘Do What Thou Wilt,’ it says. Whaddaya think that means?”

  “Sounds British,” offered Jimmy.

  “He knows it sounds British, Toothpick,” said Dewey. “He asked what it means. I’ll tell you what that motherfucker means. Bet you Jimmy Page put that shit on there himself. Got something to do with the devil and shit.”

  “Like the Houses of the Holy cover,” said Jerry, “with all those naked little girls climbing up that pyramid or whatever it is, trying to get to the top, and then you open up the cover and on the inside there’s a guy holdin’ up one of the girls over his head, gettin’ ready to sacrifice her or somethin’.”

  “Put a whole bunch of ’em on his dick first, prob’ly,” said Dewey. “Like a shish kebab.”

  “No question,” said Jerry.

  He and Jerry gave each other skin.

  “ ‘No Quarter’ is bad,” said Jimmy, but no one replied.

  Dewey rifled through his eight-track box while Jerry pulled an amber-colored vial from his pocket.

  “Where in the fuck’s my Uriah Heep tape?” said Dewey.

  “Demons and Wizards?” said Jerry.

  “Yeah.”

  “I dunno,” mumbled Jerry, who had borrowed the tape without asking and left it out in the sun. “Hey, let’s check out some of this.” He held up the vial.

  Dewey found a Mahogany Rush tape and slapped it into the deck. “What’s that, Jer, perfume?”

  “Naw,” said Jerry. “This dishwasher at work gave it to me, got it at some head shop on Route One out in College Park. Heart On, it’s called. This dishwasher, he’s one of those disco boys on the weekends, goes down to Last Hurrah and the Pier and places like that.”

  Dewey said, “He pull that out of some guy’s tar pit?”

  “He ain’t no faggot, Dewey,” said Jerry. “This guy gets more pussy than you ever had a dream about gettin’. Looks like Travolta and shit. He likes to dance, that’s all. Anyway, he said this stuff is a rush.”

  Jerry unscrewed the top, put the vial under his nose, snorted in some fumes. His eyes widened, and he sat back in his seat. “Whew. You gotta try this shit, maaan.”

  Dewey hooked a right into the park. Jerry passed the vial back to Jimmy, who inhaled a deep hit of the amyl nitrite. Jimmy threw his head back, closed his eyes. He felt his heartbeat accelerate
and then a pounding in his head. The pounding wouldn’t stop. He thought his head might explode. For a moment he was scared.

  “It is too fuckin’ Hendrix,” Jimmy heard Jerry say.

  “Bullshit,” said Dewey, who turned up the volume on “Child of the Novelty,” the tape’s title cut.

  “I’m tellin’ you, man,” said Jerry, raising his voice over the music. “Frank Marino was in this car crash, dude. He never sang or played guitar or nothin’ before. But after the crash he woke up out of his coma and just started playin’. They say the spirit of Hendrix entered his body—”

  “Bullshit,” said Dewey Schmidt.

  Jimmy opened his eyes. The pounding had gone away. He wiped sweat off his forehead. “That was a rush.” He smiled with relief and handed the vial up to Jerry.

  “You want some?” Jerry said to Dewey.

  “Yeah, right,” said Dewey. “And then I’ll put in a Bee Gees tape. And right after that maybe I’ll have you put your tongue in my ass.”

  Dewey and Jerry laughed.

  “Hey, Toothpick,” said Dewey. “Where we meetin’ this guy?”

  “By that footbridge down near the basketball courts.”

  “He got good weed?”

  “My brother says he does.”

  “What’s his name, anyway?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Jimmy. “Dimitri Carrots, some shit like that.”

  Dimitri Karras drove out of Northwest toward the District line. He turned the dial of his radio to 102.3, found his station, WHFS. The deejay played a road-themed set: Lowell George’s “Willin’,” Elvin Bishop’s “Travelin’ Shoes,” and Danny O’Keefe’s “Drive On, Driver” in succession. The station had broken artists like Little Feat and Springsteen early on in Washington, the latter sparking Karras to catch Bruce one night at the Childe Harold, a club date that truly lived up to its subsequent legend. HFS had turned Karras on to new music he otherwise would have missed; he always said that HomeGrown Radio was just another reason he would never leave D.C.

  Karras stopped on Cameron Street in Silver Spring, went into Eddie Leonard’s for one of their messy steak-and-cheese subs. He had heard their ancient jingle (“Eddie Leonard’s Sandwich Shops/You should tryyyyy ’em”) on the radio a few minutes earlier, and something primal had been awakened in his gut. He ate his sub, studying the robin’s-egg blue wall on which cartoon drawings of all the sandwiches ran circularly around the store. There were two Latinos at the next table and a family of Latinos across the room.