Payback

by Sam Stewart

  “Gary Gilmore,” Billy said, “said ladies love outlaws. You think that’s a fact?”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said. “I guess Bonnie loved Clyde.”

  “That gun at the bottom there? With the pearl? That’s an eighteen-eighty-one Remington. Supposed to’ve belonged to my namesake.”

  “Oh?” The girl cocked her head.

  “William H. Bonney, known as Billy the Kid.—You want to see it?” Billy said. “I paid a small fucking fortune. C’mere.” She obeyed and came over to the cabinet. Wide-eyed. Interested. He opened the cabinet, using the key that was dangling from the lock, and then pointed it out among the twenty-three pistols and the half a dozen rifles and the Uzi, now lying on the red velvet shelf. “She’s a big mother, huh?” He pointed at a couple of black lead marbles. “That’s the ammo,” Billy said. “They didn’t have bullets back then, they had balls …” He looked at her. See if she had a sense of humor. Okay. A little smile.

  “That’s fascinating.” Big pretty eyes looking up. He handed her the glass with the tonic and the lime and then clinked it with her. “Here’s to fascination,” Billy said. She smiled, met his eyes. Oh Jesus. He could play her like a player piano. Like “Chopsticks,” he thought, gesturing at the door and then heading for the living room.

  The telephone rang. Billy, right next to it, hesitated, then cupped his hands around his mouth and tried hollering. “Consuela …? Get the goddam phone …?” The telephone stopped.

  “Servants,” Billy said. “Jesus. Where were we?” He plopped on a wing chair and studied her, watching as she settled on the couch. Brown leather notebook waiting in her hand, little Tiffany pen, pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the table, good-looking legs and that Orphan Annie hair. He pulled at his drink. “So you wanted my opinion on the M-word, huh?”

  She looked at him.

  “I don’t like to say the word ‘Mitchell.’” He grinned. “No surprise.—Have you talked to him?”

  “Briefly.”

  “And? What’d you think?”

  “Me?”

  “Why not? You’re the Eyes of the Beholder. You’re the camera. I want to take a look at what you see.”

  “Oh. Well … not much,” the girl said. “He seemed a little …” Thinking now, groping for the word.

  “Smug,” Billy said.

  “Bland. Too good to be true.”

  “Ah,” Billy said. “So you want to hear the bad part.”

  “Maybe. I know about the lawsuit,” she said. “You were shafted by him, huh?”

  “And by the press. And by the law. And by the Feds. And by the whole fucking country,” Billy said. He was silent. Awed by the breadth of his betrayal. “See it started with the Feds. Only Mitchell’s the bastard that snitched me to the Feds. Pushed me—okay?—till my back’s against the wall and I had to sell the company. Clever?” Billy said.

  The girl wrote it down. “Can you prove it?”

  “I know it in my heart,” Billy said. “And I tell you something else—these deaths’re going down?”

  “The poisonings?”

  “Yeah. You want to guess who’s been doing it?”

  The girl just looked at him. All eyes. Head cocked. Red mouth a little open. “Mitchell?” Incredulous but … no, he could see it now … ready to believe. “Go on.” She leaned forward. Notebook in her hand again. Pen poised. Waiting.

  Waiting, Joanna felt a shiver up her spine. Aware she was sitting in a room with a psycho, a man around the bend.

  “One,” Billy said, and watched her write 1.) “He controls a lot of stock but he’s not allowed to sell it, he only gets the dividends. Two: If he’s canned, then he loses it—everything—lock, stock and dividends. Three.” Billy watched her. “He’s about to get canned. I have it on good, very solid authority, that Mitchell’s gonna dive. Which gets us up to four. Here’s a guy—get the picture now—his life is down the tube. No job, no bread. So I ask you.” Billy looked at her. “What’s he gonna do?”

  She waited. “Kill people?”

  “Sure. Why not? Guys’ve killed guys over radios and bikes. This is four million dollars. Tax-free,” Billy said. “This is fuck-you money on a major kind of plane.”

  Joanna held her breath. “How’s he get the four million?”

  “From the options,” Billy said. “And then—I want you to follow this—he sent himself a letter. A burn letter, right? I mean he blackmailed himself.”

  Joanna didn’t move. The story of the blackmail had never hit the news. “You know this? For a fact?”

  He looked at her and laughed. “I know everything,” he said. “Or nothing. What I’m saying is …” He stopped and looked up. Joanna turned around.

  A thin Tom Selleck, Hawaiian shirt and all, was standing in the open archway from the hall. He had a couple of boxes from the Calle San Diego and he dropped them on a chair. “I don’t mean to interrupt you …” The voice was sarcastic, patronizing. Billy said, “But don’t let it stop you,” and smiled again. “Jackie—say hello to Joanna.”

  “Say good-bye,” Jackie said. “We gotta talk.”

  “In a while. Joanna’s a reporter.”

  “That a fact.” Jackie looked at her with definite suspicion, then shifted it to Billy. “What’s she doing here?”

  “Reporting my opinions,” Billy said. “On death and taxes. On sealing wax and kings. Hey listen—when I was a kid—you know what I used to think sealing wax was? It’s like a wax for the ceiling. Like the opposite of floor wax. Ceiling wax. I’m really not kidding,” Billy said.

  Jackie looked at him. “You know what time it is in New York?”

  “Offhand,” Billy said. “Because my watch—are you ready?—is off … my … hand.” Billy smiled.

  Joanna looked at Jackie who looked, in context, like a Man of Reason. Jackie said patiently, “Seven minus five. Okay? You want to try for the Cadillac DeVille … you take a guess about the day.”

  Billy said, “Oh. Jesus. We’re supposed to call Slovo in New York.”

  Jackie shot a look.

  “You believe it? I forgot?”

  “I believe it,” Jackie said. He looked at Joanna. “You’ll excuse us?”

  She nodded. “Of course.” She stood up without gathering her things. “You want me to wait on the patio or—”

  “Yeah. Be a darling,” Billy said. “There’s a phone on the desk. Would you bring it to me?”

  “Anything to help,” Joanna said.

  ***

  She circled around the house, a kind of casual amble. It was dark now, the crickets were chirring in the grass, but the moon was pretty bright and a couple of lanterns were pitched around the lawn.

  Joanna walked softly on the manicured grass. At the front of the house, she looked over at the squared-off shape of the garage, two stories high with a stairway leading up. She wondered what was up there—the chauffeur’s apartment? a workroom? storage? She looked at the Jeep, where she’d parked it on the drive. Added to it now was a red Maserati. The moon shining down. The crickets on the make. A lawn about the size of a football stadium that ended in the hedge-lined shadows of the wall. She looked at her watch. In the note, she’d told Mitchell she’d be back around eight. Plenty of time.

  ***

  Billy hung up and said, “Jesus. No answer.”

  “Well,” Jackie said, “maybe something came up. Maybe he forgot.”

  “Forgot?” Billy said. “How could he forget?”

  Jackie raised his eyes. “Hey listen. He won’t forget to sell at three o’clock.”

  “And send the money to Vienna?”

  “If he doesn’t, then he isn’t forgetting,” Jackie said, “he’s absconding.”

  “Terrific. You think he’s absconding?”

  “No,” Jackie said. “Slovo’s pretty cool.”

  “So what else can go wrong?”

  “Your mouth,” Jackie said. “How much’ve you been doing?”

  “Me? Not a thing, kid.” Billy popped a lude and t
hen swallowed it with vodka. “I was up. I was scudding on a natural high.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know. If you want to know the truth, I don’t know. I don’t know if I did or if I didn’t. If I did—what’d I do?”

  “Does it worry you?”

  “No. Dr. Strangelove,” Billy said. “How I learned to stop worrying.… No. Right now what I worry about is Mitchell.”

  “Take it easy,” Jackie said.

  “I don’t want to take it easy. If I wanted to take it easy,” Billy said, “I wouldn’t bother doing coke.”

  Even Jackie had to laugh.

  “But seriously, folks. I want to call him.”

  “Uh-huh. And do what? Do your Bela Lugosi imitation?”

  “Couldn’t hoit,” Billy said.

  “Maybe … I don’t know.” Jackie flipped the humidor and reached for a cigar. “I think we hold it till tomorrow. If he doesn’t pay tomorrow—”

  “We don’t call,” Billy said. “We strike. As in the headline ‘Killer Strikes Again.’” He laughed. “So I hope you’ve been creating in the lab. And if not, start tonight.”

  “Doing what?” Jackie said. He picked up the lighter that the girl had left lying on her Carlton 120’s.

  “I don’t know,” Billy said. “However, what I know is what Mitchell knows too. He pulled the sweetener off the market? Everywhere? Fine. We can doctor something else. Do a tablet,” Billy said. “Because people think you can’t do a tablet so we’ll do it. Do an aspirin. Do a children’s aspirin. Kill a kid,” Billy said. “And then watch it how he pays. No. I’m not worried.”

  Jackie said nothing, but he gave a little look. Jackie, who used to wear outfits from Sears, from Barneys when it used to be Barneys Boystown, and shitty white shirts. Jackie giving looks, a little roll of the eyeballs, and glancing through the big dark windows at the pool.

  “What’s she doing?” Jackie said.

  “Who?”

  “Lois Lane. Brenda Starr. Whatever.”

  “Joanna … Reese, I think she said.” Billy looked up and saw her walking past the pool. “She’s from Entrepreneur. She’s doing an article about Mitchell and she asked about the lawsuit. My perspective.”

  “That was it?”

  “Pretty much.” Billy stood now and paced around the chair. “What’s the matter there, Toots. You don’t trust me anymore?”

  “Not at the moment,” Jackie said. “You’d get a speeding ticket, talking. What else did you tell her?”

  “Nothing,” Billy said. He laughed. “Okay. I said—this is cute—I said Mitchell might’ve done it. The poisonings?”

  Jackie looked up at him.

  “Well … what the hell,” Billy said. “The little broad wrote it down. I told her he might’ve sent a letter to himself. Which he might’ve,” Billy said. “I mean, think about it.”

  Jackie just looked at him. “Shit.”

  The telephone rang.

  ***

  Joanna felt chilly now, standing at the cliff, leaning her elbows on the low iron gate, looking over at the beach, her eyes going over to the upended ladder and the lever on the rail. She wondered, if she pushed it, if the ladder would descend. And if anybody’d notice. She thought, I have to try. She turned and then rested with her back against the rail and looked casually around, as though she were dreamily gazing at the house, and then reached back and pushed it. She didn’t have to look because she heard it, a series of mechanical creaks. She stood there and waited. Then she walked away again, casually, idly, aware of the enormity of what she’d just done, feeling pleasure and the first cold inklings of fear.

  ***

  Jackie hung up and said, “He rented it this morning. Diego said a dark blue eighty-eight Wrangler. Like the one I saw in front.”

  “Wait a second,” Billy said. “Wait a second, wait a second.”

  “Why? They’re together. The guy’s name is Mitchell and the girl’s name is Reese.”

  “No,” Billy said.

  “No?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not ready for this. Christ.” Billy paced around the chair. “Call the Punta Hotel.”

  “What for?”

  “To make sure,” Billy said. “Diego, I gotta tell you, his marbles ’re in his ass.”

  “You should’ve talked to him yourself.”

  “Just do it,” Billy said. “The number’s in the book.”

  Jackie took his time. “What’s she doing by the cliff?”

  “Hector,” Billy hollered, then waited while Jackie got up and got the book. Billy listened to him dial. Like mysterious music. CLICK pa-pa-pa-pah. CLICK pa-pa-pa-pah. His hearing so acute he’d hear raindrops falling on the other side of town. Jackie said, talking to the telephone, “Yeah. Hablar English? Yeah,” and then Hector dragged it in; Hector, wearing just about half of his uniform—the black serge pants and the shirt with no tie. Hector, who looked like a vicious busboy in a restaurant in hell.

  Billy said, “I want you to go out and check the ladder. No. Get the lady. No. Just go out there and talk to her. Politely.”

  Hector stared him down. “Abou’ wha’?”

  “About the fucking weather,” Billy said. “And I want you to get dressed. Like a decent human being in a jacket and a tie.”

  “Aroun’ here?” Hector said.

  “What is this—Spanish Harlem? Yeah, around here.”

  Billy watched him go. Slowly. With a swing in those toreador buns.

  Jackie hung up and said, “They’re registered together.”

  Billy said, “Jesus.” It hit him like a rock. Like a rock going into a television set. Sparks going everywhere. Glass cracking up. “Sweet Jesus,” Billy said. “What the hell’re we gonna do?”

  Jackie got up and went over to the bar. “Have a party,” Jackie said.

  33

  Jackie left the bedroom where the girl slept fitfully with Technicolor dreams. Downstairs, he heard Billy talking patiently to Rocky. Billy saying, “Listen—we left the ladder down so he will climb the cliff. Because we want him, okay?”

  Jackie, very quietly, hurried to his bedroom where he picked up the phone, got the number for La Punta, and asked for Mr. Mitchell. Figuring Mitchell would be waiting by the phone for a signal from the girl. That, or he’d be waiting on the turf around the house. So Jackie was a little surprised and then puzzled that Mitchell was on the phone. In the bar, the clerk said. He said he’d hold on and then waited, pacing, for three long minutes while he thought of another plan. Good. He hung up.

  ***

  Mitchell held the phone while a Latin Liberace played an endless lugubrious arrangement of “Perfidia.” Mack sipped his Coke. Finally the guy in the downstairs garage came back and said, No señor, the Wrangler wasn’t there. He remembered señora took it out around six. Mitchell checked his watch. It was 7:35. Mack said, Relax. Women do that. You’re late, they get pissed and take a walk. Mitchell said, It’s possible, and ordered a tequila martini and a steak.

  ***

  Billy, in the den, had a pistol on the desk—the old Remington.

  “You gotta be kidding,” Jackie said. “You doing cowboys and Indians?”

  “Symbolic,” Billy said. He was charging it with powder.

  “That antique gunpowder?”

  “New.” Billy said. “And I can do without your attitude.”

  “Attitude.”

  “Negative ions,” Billy said, his foot doing nervous little rhythms on the floor. “Negative ions put water in your brain. I’m serious. You get a lot of water in your brain, it’s like thinking under water. It’s contagious,” Billy said. “Because you put it in the air.”

  “The ions,” Jackie said.

  “The ions. Yeah.” Billy had the six lead balls on the desk. “So basically,” he said. “I wish you’d get the fuck out.”

  “Of the house?”

  “Of the room.”

  Jackie took a pad of paper and a pen from the shelf below the desk. “Let me try to understan
d. If he comes, you’re gonna kill him.”

  “Cut the ‘if,’” Billy said. “His lady doesn’t show, he gets nervous, he arrives.”

  “And you kill him.”

  “How it goes.”

  “If he’s dead, then he doesn’t pay the money,” Jackie said.

  “But he’s paying—okay? You don’t want to let greed start to ruin your perspective.”

  “Right.” Jackie moved to the living room and sat with the paper in his lap. Through the window at the back, he saw Rocky and Hector on a moonlight patrol. Billy, in the den, started whistling while he worked. Billy was a loon. Bad disintegration. Drugs, Jackie thought, really fucked you in the head, turned your brains into beans.

  He looked at the window, checking his lamplit reflection in the glass. He had cool steady eyes. He had calm steady hands. He had a marketable talent so what was he doing? and why was he always getting short ends of sticks? While a guy like Billy, no matter what happened, landed squarely on his feet—rich; he thought the money was a slow second prize.

  Shit, Jackie thought.

  And Slovo’d said they couldn’t even touch it for a year, and the way they’d set it up, it took all three signatures to make a withdrawal. All three signatures of three phony names, only none of them could know what the other names were. That was Billy’s idea. Billy at his rock-bottom paranoid best, and afraid of being zapped. Only meanwhile, Billy sat gnawing at his navel while Jackie did the work. And Slovo made the calls. It was just like at college. Billy and Slovo played the entrepreneurs and Jackie played the worker—took the risks and the falls, and got thirty-three percent. He’d tried to get more. Made a call from the middle of a party in New York, said to Frangie, buy the stock. Only Frangie, that fried-out fucker, didn’t care; he’d explained with that sleepy little smile, “I forgot.”

  Jackie shook his head.

  You go to bed with smokers and you wake up with smoke.

  Jesus, Jackie thought.

  He checked his reflection and squinted in the light. Jackie was looking at the big Three-Five, and a man of thirty-five without his first million dollars was a man who’d lost out. The boat sailed at dawn of your thirty-fifth birthday, Jackie’s coming up now on May thirty-first and he had to be aboard.