“I’m sure it will. Statewide campaigns have become, how should I put this, prohibitively expensive recently. Sometimes I wish we could pass a law against television advertising by political candidates, and return to the days of speeches at Kiwanis clubs and American Legion posts.” The other man takes a deep breath. “Just wishful thinking, I guess.”
“In the meantime, we need good people like you in government,” says Frankie Stillman. “We can’t let a little thing like money stand in the way of progress, can we?”
“That’s what I’ve always said.”
“I hear the polls look good. This time next year, you’ll be in the governor’s office, no problem.”
Frankie Stillman shoves the briefcase across the table. The other man opens the briefcase. Stacks of cash held together with rubber bands fill it.
The other man snaps shut the briefcase, stands and extends his hand to Frankie Stillman. The two men shake. The other man turns to walk to the door.
Sam jumped to his feet, his eyes still fixed on the screen of the Sony. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he watched the man in the suit and Frankie Stillman walk off camera in the direction of the door. He heard the sound of the motel door open and shut, then he watched the man called Frankie Stillman walk back into the middle of the motel room, turn directly toward the camera lens, and say:
“You got enough on the Congressman, the two-faced little prick? Can we go home now?”
The screen went blank.
Sam kept staring at the blank screen.
“What’s up, man?” asked Johnny Gee.
“… I was raised to believe in guys like him. If you can’t believe in a United States Congressman, who can you believe in?”
“Yourself.” Johnny Gee said the word and looked away. He thought for a moment, then he said:
“You come into this world, all you got is your naked little body and your name. When you leave this world, that’s all you are gonna take with you. You can’t take your house or your car or your bank account. All you really got in the meantime is yourself. It ain’t much, but it’s enough, Major.”
“That’s a pretty bleak way of looking at things,” Sam said, watching the other man.
“Most of the time, all you got to look at is pretty fuckin’ bleak.”
“You two philosophers want to watch any of the rest of this shit?” asked Spicer, pointing to the stack of surveillance tapes. In the background, the VCRs could be heard clicking off. The Burt Reynolds movie had ended.
“I still want to see the whorehouse tape,” said Johnny Gee. “At least that tape will be funny. I wonder who they caught with their trousers down. C’mon, Spicer, put that fucker on the machine and let it roll.”
Spicer picked up the tape marked Corrine’s and slid it into the VCR. He punched play and sat back.
Blank screen, flickering, flickering. Time signature: Sept. 3, 10:15 P.M. Black and white.
Camera looking down on room from ceiling overhead through wide angle lens. Door to room at bottom of screen. A mahogany armoire to right of door. Another door next to armoire on right edge of screen, half open, showing sink in bathroom. Kingsize bed at top of screen, covered with a fur throw. Large mirror on wall along left edge of screen. Persian rug on floor. Armchair in corner. TV set at bottom of bed directly under camera lens, VCR on top of TV.
“Look at that shit,” said Spicer. “They got the television set up to watch porno in that cathouse.”
Minutes ticking by on time signature. 10:16. 10:17. 10:18.
Sound of voices outside the door, muffled. Sound of door opening.
Sound of woman’s voice:
“You just go right on in and sit down, and I’ll be right back.”
Sound of man’s voice:
“I want the same girl as before, now. What’s her name?” Sound of woman’s voice:
“Don’t you think I know what you like by now? You just relax. Wendy will be right with you.”
Man walks into room, looking around, loosening tie. Walks over to bed, presses on mattress, smiles to himself.
“Who’s that? We seen him before?” Johnny Gee squinted at the screen. The man’s face wasn’t completely visible from the overhead camera. He walked over to the armchair and sat down, his face now fully visible.
“I know I seen him before. I just can’t place him. Wait a minute. Nah. Can’t place him. How about you, Major? Can you place him?”
“I’m not sure …”
Man sitting on chair, fiddling with his tie, looking around.
He’s about forty, receding hairline, dark features, long, straight nose. He’s wearing a suit and dark loafers with tassels.
Minutes tick by. 10:21. 10:22. 10:23.
Sound of door opening.
Young woman walks in, dressed in short skirt, high heels, leopard-print camisole top. Man stands up.
“Hi, Wendy,” says the man, sounding a bit hesitant.
“Hi, Mr. Bosco,” says the woman.
“Call me Lou, like before,” says the man.
“Fuck! It’s Lou Bosco!” said Johnny Gee. “He was one of the guys beating on us at the diner!”
“Shh,” Sam said, pointing at the screen.
Another young woman is coming through the door, this one with a big bouffant hairstyle, wearing a satin robe with a fur collar and high heels.
“Who’s this?” asks the man. The two young women stand next to each other, posing.
Woman walks into the room, dressed in a short skirt and red blouse. She has a distinctive streak of gray in her dark hair, which is short and swept back in a modern style.
The woman walks into the room and stands directly beneath the camera, so all that can be seen is the top of her head, her shoulders, and her hands as she gestures.
“I brought you a little surprise, Lou,” says the woman in the suit.
“Well, what have we got here, Sheila?” asks the man, expressing mock surprise.
“This is Brenda. Now go on and say hello to Mr. Bosco, Brenda.”
The second young woman glides over to Lou Bosco and rubs her hand along the side of his thigh. “Glad to meet ya, Mr. Bosco,” she says in a husky whisper.
“I hear you all have got lots to celebrate tonight. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble celebrating with Brenda and Wendy.” The woman in the suit turns and walks out the door, closing it behind her.
“Just a minute,” said Johnny Gee. “Reverse the tape. Show me that again.”
“Which shot?” asked Spicer.
“Where the woman is walking in the door, when she stops. Right there. Can you freeze it?”
“Sure,” said Spicer. He froze the frame.
“That’s Sheila all right,” said Johnny Gee. “She’s got a few miles on her, but that’s Sheila.”
“What?”
“See the little scar on her cheek?”
“Yeah.”
“I was there when a dude clipped her, opened her up. Blood all over the place.”
“What’d you do?” asked Spicer.
“I picked up a pipe and split his head.”
THE THREE MEN stared at the image frozen on the Sony’s screen.
“Kill the tape,” said Johnny Gee.
“Are you sure you …” asked Spicer, hitting the button on the VCR.
“ ‘Course I’m fuckin’ sure it’s her. I had a thing going with Sheila for a year … almost two years. Kind of an angle we come up with on our own. She was hookin’, like usual, you know? And what we’d do, we’d watch out for really straight guys who were in the dough. She’d find a way to catch a look at their wallets and get a look at their driver’s license and memorize the address. Then I’d cruise by, check it out, follow the guy to work, get an angle on how much he had to lose. Sometimes the guy would be a local banker, sometimes a lawyer, always the pillar-of-the-community type dudes, they were the ones we hit. Anyway, once we had the guy specked, I’d start generatin’ letters, sendin’ them to his place of business first
, then to his house. We never threatened anything, just sent letters askin’ for a job, askin’ for references, anything to rattle the guy. Sheila, she’d sign the letters. What we’d do, we’d rattle the guy good with maybe twenty letters, so his wife was askin’ what was goin’ on, maybe his boss was wonderin’ why he’s gettin’ so much mail, then Sheila’d arrange to meet the guy on the street, catch him on his way to lunch, somethin’ like that, and she’d tell him maybe she’d stop askin’ for references and shit if she had enough scratch to get outa town, like maybe a grand, maybe two. They’d usually come across. If they didn’t, we just moved the con to the next guy and ran the same thing.”
“Where’d you pull the con, Johnny?” asked Spicer.
“We were in Akron for a while, then Cinci, then Miami, then Zanesville, Wheeling, Peoria, Cleveland, Cape Girar-deau … we moved around. We even jacked up a banker in Hannibal. Jeez. I remember when we drove outa town I told Sheila I felt just like Huck Finn, and she said, who? She didn’t have a clue.”
“What made you stop?”
“You can’t run a con like that very long. You got to keep movin’. Even then it’s gonna catch up with you. It was good while it lasted, though. Sheila. I ain’t thought about her in months. She was somethin’, though. I met her at Corrine’s place in Springfield, and she wasn’t a day over seventeen, man. I had some minor shit goin’, nothin’ big, but I was gettin’ by, operatin’ out of a bar on Market Street called the Short Stop, down near the train station. She was hookin’ for Corrine’s and hung out in the bar when she wasn’t at the whorehouse. We got to be friends, you know? She had me over to her place a coupla times for spaghetti, and one time, on a Sunday, we drove out in the country to a lake for a picnic. I remember. We had chicken salad sandwiches and chips and beer. I had a hell of a nice short in those days, a ’65 Mustang. It was like she’d tell me her troubles, I’d tell her mine. ‘Fore either of us knew it, we were runnin’ that shit on her super straight johns. It was better than workin’. Know what I mean?”
“I’m afraid I do,” Sam said.
“You get it on with her?” asked Spicer.
“Me and Sheila was friends and everything, you know, but we wasn’t lovers. I mean, she was gettin’ into a lesbo thing. Lotta hookers go the other way, you know? And I was busy, man. I was savin’ up so I could get my own little book to run, and I had my short, and I had ambitions. We was both movin’ fast. Lots of stuff gets away from you. I never really thought about it much. She drifted on, and I drifted, we stayed in touch for a while, then I lost track of her.”
“Tell me about this place in Springfield,” said Sam.
“The whorehouse?”
“What do you know about it?”
“Hell, everybody knows about Corrine’s. I don’t know how it got the name … maybe someone named Corrine ran it once. Been there forever. It’s a big old house up on the north side of town.”
“How long ago were you there?”
“Must be almost a year, now. At least that. It’s some place, lemme tell you. Got silk fabric on the walls, and mirrors on the ceilings, and fancy furniture, you know, with velvet cushions and the like. Corrine’s has always been a first-class establishment. It had to be. Every goddamned politician in the state’s gotten his rocks off on those four-poster beds over the years.”
“Politicians?”
“Don’t you know anything, man? What you think these dudes do when they leave their little home districts and head off to the capital to conduct the state’s business? You think ’cause you’re elected state rep, those votes mean you got to keep your pants zipped? Christ. Corrine’s is an institution. It’s like, you’re not really sworn in until you been up to Corrine’s with the boys to get your pipes cleared. It’s, what you call it … rite of passage.”
“So how do you figure this whorehouse … Corrine’s … became involved with these videotapes?” asked Sam.
“She owed somebody.”
“What do you mean?”
“You run a place like that, man, you’re always gonna owe somebody. How you think that joint has stayed open all these years? All these pols in and outa there every session of the legislature, it’s gotta be protected. Besides, Corrine’s has always served a kinda noble function in state government.”
“What might that be?”
“Well, it’s kind of a variation on the old you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours thing. You know. With the lobbyists and all. You vote my way on this bill, and I’ll see you tonight at Corrine’s, and the party’s on me.”
“They use whores to buy votes?” Sam’s voice sounded as incredulous as he was.
“Hey, loose women been valid currency in Springfield for years, man. Get over it. The sky ain’t fallin’. They had places like hers in Athens and Rome, man. You musta studied about it in college.”
Sam paused before he spoke, spinning his empty beer can in a circle on the floor with the toe of his shoe.
“How close were you to the woman who runs this place?” he asked.
“Not very. My action was with Sheila and she was just workin’ there then. What can I say? But we was tight for a long while … I mean, tight as you get with a hooker. She went back to Corrine’s when we split up. Now it looks like she’s runnin’ the place.”
“Do you think she’d tell you who’s behind the tapes? I mean, who is taping whom?”
“The question is, does she know anything? I don’t know. She was pretty sharp. She’d probably help us out, for old times, like.”
“What are you driving at, Sam?” Spicer looked at him warily, puffing on his cigarette.
“Technically, if we’re in possession of evidence of a felony, and I think we are, it’s our duty to turn it over to the proper authorities. But the problem here is self-evident: with so many ‘proper authorities’ on these tapes, who do we turn them over to?”
“So where does that leave us?”
“I was hoping maybe your friend Sheila could help us tell the good guys from the bad guys, but I understand what you’re saying about her. Why should she jump ship in a storm? You might be an old friend, but given the stakes here, that’s probably not reason enough for her to tell us what we need to know.”
“You’re right about that, Major,” said Johnny Gee. “So what do you think we ought to do?”
“I say we wrap up these tapes and mail them to the state attorney general and be done with them.”
“That ain’t a bad idea, Sam. I can do that for you, first thing in the morning,” said Spicer.
“As for me, I’m a major in the army. Who’s going to believe I have anything to do with political corruption in the state of Illinois? I’m not that worried about it. The army is a great insulator. People have a natural reluctance to accuse an officer in the service of his country. Moreover, we’ve committed no crimes. I jumped in to help you and Howie tonight because the two of you were getting the shit pounded out of you, and you needed help. That isn’t a crime. They shot at us, we didn’t shoot at them. All I wanted to do was what was right, and I did it. I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I see what you mean. So what are you sayin’? We leave the tapes with Spicer and bolt?”
“Essentially, yes. I’m due at Fort Campbell on Monday morning, and if I’m not there, I’m AWOL. For an officer of my rank, that’s a serious offense. So I’m going on to Campbell. I’ll be glad to tell my story to any law enforcement authorities who want to hear it when the time comes, if the time comes. I’ll be more than glad to give whatever testimony I have to give if charges are ever filed against the men who beat you up and shot at us. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to get charged with AWOL and ruin my career in the army. This is the thing I’m getting at: as long as I wear the uniform, I belong to the army. My allegiance is down there at Fort Campbell. I’ll give whatever testimony is necessary after I’ve reported for duty.”
“What do we do now?”
“I thought Spicer could drop us off at the bus depot down
in Paducah. You can catch a bus somewhere … anywhere but back home … and I’ll catch one to Campbell.”
“Yeah, that sounds okay, but we’ve got a problem,” said Johnny Gee.
“What’s that?”
“You forgot about the all-points out on us that Spicer said he heard about. You know what? We’ll never make it out of this county. We’re dangerous as long as we’re vertical and talkin’, man.”
“That is a problem.”
“I can get you guys outa here, Butter,” said Spicer. “No problem.”
“How, Spicer?” asked Sam. “I’ve watched you blow by me and disappear around the turn in quite a few races, but I don’t quite see how you’re going to disappear the two of us.”
“I’ve got a pickup over there behind the dish,” said Spicer. “Got a camper on the back and everything. I could stash you two back there until we’re out of the county. Make it look like I’m headin’ out huntin’. Nobody’ll give me any trouble.”
Sam glanced at Johnny Gee and turned to Spicer.
“If you say it will work, that’s good enough for me, Spicer,” he said. “Give me a couple of minutes. I’ve got to get my stuff out of the car.” He stood up and headed for the door. Johnny Gee followed.
Outside, Sam reached into the Caddy’s back seat for his overnight bag.
“What do you think, Major? You think we’ve got a chance?” asked Johnny Gee.
“Spicer knows this country better than the ruts on the dirt tracks we used to drive,” Sam said. “If anybody can get us out of this county, he can.”
“I sure as hell hope so.”
“Let’s go back inside and get the tapes.” Sam grabbed his overnight bag and they stepped back into the trailer.
“Give me a minute to set things up for the next taping,” said Spicer. “And I got to leave a note for Victor. He’ll be by in the morning.”
Spicer pointed toward the back of the trailer.
“You two can give me a hand reloadin’ the recorders. Just grab some blanks in the hallway and pop out the Burt Reynolds movie and pop in a new tape.”
They reset the recorders, and Spicer took a minute to fiddle with the buttons on the console. “There’s some foreign flick comin’ on at two in the morning, somethin’ about the gods bein’ crazy. They say it’s doin’ pretty good business.”
Rules of the Road Page 13