The Betsy (1971)

by Robbins, Harold

  Cindy stood there at the foot of the bed, almost shyly watching us. I think it was the first time she had ever seen an Italian family in action. It really was something to see.

  Finally, when Mother had kissed practically every part of me, including my feet, she straightened up. “Cindy, come here,” she said. “Angelo wants to thank you.”

  My mother turned back to me. “She’s a good girl, your friend. She saved your life and brought you home to us. I thanked her a thousand times. Now, you thank her.”

  Cindy leaned over me and kissed my cheek chastely. I returned her kiss, equally chaste on her cheek. “Thank you,” I said gravely.

  “You’re very welcome,” she said formally.

  “Now, that’s a good boy, Angelo,” my mother said proudly.

  Cindy and I had all we could do to keep from breaking up. We didn’t dare look at each other.

  “Who sent all the flowers?” I asked.

  “The story about your mugging was in all the papers,” Cindy said. “They started arriving yesterday. Number One, Duncan, Rourke, Bancroft. Even Number Three and Weyman sent flowers.”

  “Angelo has good friends,” my mother said proudly.

  “Yeah,” I said dryly, looking at Cindy.

  “Number One called you from Palm Beach,” Cindy said. “He said not to worry. He would see you on Monday when he came up here.”

  Suddenly it all came back to me. Monday was only five days away. I had lost one precious day of time sleeping. I looked up at my father. “How long do I stay in here?”

  “I figure over the weekend,” he answered. “If everything checks out all right we could let you go Monday or Tuesday.”

  “If I left the hospital for one day and then came back, would I do any damage?”

  My father studied me. “Is it that important?”

  “Yes. This was no mugging and you know it. Nobody took my watch or wallet.”

  He also knew a professional beating when he saw one. You didn’t practice in Detroit hospitals for over forty years without learning about that. He was silent.

  “There’s something I must do,” I said. “It’s the only chance I have to keep them from taking the company away from Number One.”

  A strange expression came to my father’s face. “You mean old Mr. Hardeman?”

  I nodded.

  He thought for a moment. “You’ll come back within one day?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be in agony every minute,” he said.

  “Give me pills.”

  “All right.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll give you one day. I have your word. You’ll be back.”

  “No!” Mother cried. “You mustn’t let him! He’ll hurt himself!” She started for me, crying. “My baby!”

  My father held out his arm to stop her. “Jenny!” he said sternly.

  Mother looked at him in surprise. It was a tone that I doubt she had ever heard from him.

  “Leave man’s work to men!” Father said.

  Sicilian women know where it’s at. “Yes, John,” my mother said meekly. She looked at me but spoke to him. “He’ll be careful?”

  “He’ll be careful,” my father said.

  I woke up the next time in the cabin of the big, chartered DC-9. The stewardess was looking at me, Gianno standing next to her.

  “We’ll be landing in Phoenix in fifteen minutes, Mr. Perino,” she said.

  “Raise me up,” I told Gianno.

  He bent down beside the stretcher bed and turned the crank, raising the back of the bed until I was in a half-reclining position. “That okay, Angelo?”

  “Fine,” I said. The afternoon sun was brighter at thirty thousand feet here than it was in Detroit. The seat belt sign went on with a pinging sound.

  Gianno bent over me to tighten the straps. That done he checked the floor locks on the bed. Satisfied, he returned to his seat and fastened his belt. The stewardess went forward to the pilot’s cabin.

  I leaned back with a good feeling. Father really had it all arranged. It had begun that morning when I asked Cindy to check the flights to Phoenix while I put in a call to Uncle Jake.

  “Forget it,” Father said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  “But I have to get to Phoenix today.”

  “You will. You just rest. I’ll call Jake and get you to Phoenix today.”

  “But how are you going to do it?”

  “Stop worrying,” he smiled. “It’s time you learned there are some advantages to being rich.”

  After he had gone, Cindy came over to the bed. She stood next to Mother who was seated in a chair watching my every motion with an eagle eye. “I think I’ll go back to the hotel and get some sleep,” she said. “I’m beat.”

  “I don’t want you to go back to the hotel. They know you were with me and I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “Nothing will happen to me,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Cindy can stay at our house,” Mother said quickly. “She can have the guest room she had last night.”

  I looked at Cindy. She nodded. “I don’t want anyone to know where you are,” I said.

  “Okay,” she answered. “I’ll tell Duncan to keep it quiet.”

  “No, you’ll tell him nothing. You won’t even call him or anybody else for that matter. I don’t trust any of the telephones in the plant.”

  “But I promised to let him know how you are,” she said.

  “The hospital will give him the information. You just keep out of sight until I give you the word.”

  “She’ll do what you say, Angelo,” Mother said. “Won’t you, Cindy?”

  “Yes,” Cindy answered.

  “See?” Mother said triumphantly. “I told you she was a good girl. Now don’t worry about her. I’ll take care of her every minute. Nobody will know where she is.”

  I could see the beginning of a smile come to Cindy’s lips. But it wasn’t a funny ha-ha smile. It was the kind of smile you have when you find a friend.

  I nodded my head. “Thank you, Mamma.”

  My father came back into the room. “Well, it’s all arranged,” he said, obviously pleased with himself. “I spoke to Jake and he’ll meet you in his office at five o’clock.”

  He really did have it arranged. A private ambulance took me from the hospital to the airport where it rolled right onto the field up to the chartered jet. Gianno rode with me and in the plane made sure that the stretcher bed was securely locked into place. Five minutes after we were airborne, he came over to me, a hypo in his hand.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Sleep shot,” he said. “The Dottore wants you to rest until you get to Phoenix.”

  “I’ll rest,” I said.

  “The Dottore said if you give me trouble I turn the plane back to Detroit.”

  “Okay,” I said wearily. “Hit me.”

  Father taught him well. I think I was asleep before he got the needle out of my ass.

  There was an ambulance waiting on the tarmac when the big plane rolled to a stop. Thirty-five minutes later we pulled into Paradise Springs. I had to say one thing for it. It was a hell of a way to beat the traffic problem.

  We were directed to the private entrance to Uncle Jake’s office. It was through a screened-in garden facing the golf course.

  Uncle Jake was behind his desk in the large, wood-paneled room. Logs crackled in the fireplace, fighting a losing battle against the air-conditioning.

  Uncle Jake saw me looking at it, as Gianno cranked up the bed. He got out of his chair and walked toward me, his snow-white Stetson startling against the dark wood walls. “This air-conditioning is so goddamn efficient in here that sometimes I find myself freezing,” he said. “And I’m still enough of an Easterner to like a log fire at which to warm my hands.”

  I smiled at him. “Hello, Uncle Jake.” I held out my hand.

  He took it. His grip was as strong and friendly as it had always been. �
�Hello, Angelo.” He turned to Gianno. “Good to see you again, Gianno.”

  Gianno bowed. “Good to see you, Eccellenza.” He moved to the door and left the office.

  Uncle Jake turned back to me when the door had closed. He pulled a chair from in front of the desk and sat down, looking at me. “Do you always travel like this?” he smiled.

  “No,” I laughed. “Only when I’m too tired to get out of bed.”

  “Your father told me you really caught it,” he said, still smiling. “You should have learned to duck.”

  “I did,” I said. “Right into a kick in the teeth.”

  The smile left his face. The drooping, heavy lids over his large eyes, the large, curved, Roman nose almost reaching the center of his upper lip above his wide, thin-lipped mouth and pointed, dimpled chin, all combined to give him the dangerous, hooded look of a hunting falcon. “Who did it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, deliberately pausing for a moment. “But I can guess.”

  “Tell me.”

  I went through the whole story from the beginning. From the very first call I got from Number One almost three years ago. I left nothing out, business or personal, because that’s the way I knew he would want it and that’s the way it had to be. An hour and a half later I came to the end of my story with the conversation I had with my father that morning.

  He was a good listener, interrupting me only a few times to clarify a hazy point. Now he got to his feet and stretched. He was in fantastic shape for a man in his late sixties; physically he looked more like a man in his fifties, and not late fifties at that. “I could use a drink,” he said.

  “So could I.”

  “What will be your pleasure?”

  “Canadian on the rocks.”

  He laughed. “Your father said you would ask for that, but all I’m allowed to give you is two ounces of cognac neat.”

  “Father knows best.”

  There was a bar hidden in the wall which came out at the touch of a button. He poured cognac into two snifters and gave me one.

  “Cheers,” I said. The cognac burned its way down my throat. I coughed and winced as the pain ran through my side.

  “You’re supposed to sip it, not gulp it,” he said. He sipped his drink. After a moment he looked down at me. “Okay, now that I’ve heard your story, exactly what do you want from me?”

  “Help,” I said simply.

  “In what way?”

  “There are two things I want you to do. If you can. One is to find out where Simpson got the money to push his campaign against us. If he got it legitimately, good and well, I’ll forget about it. But if it came in any way from someone in our company, I want to know it.

  “Two, I want that suicide note that Loren Three has in his home safe.”

  “What good do you expect that to do you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just have a hunch it may be the key to all of this if I can get it out into the open.”

  “You’re not asking for very much, are you?” Without waiting for me to reply, “A little bit of detective work and a little bit of safecracking, that’s all.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “How much time do we have?” he asked.

  “Until Monday night,” I answered. “I need the information for the stockholders’ meeting on Tuesday morning. That’s our last chance.”

  “You know you’re asking me to participate in an illegal act with full, prior knowledge,” he said. “That’s something I’ve never done. I’ve been a lawyer all my life and the only thing I’ve ever done was defend my clients to the best of my ability after they committed the act.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “And you still ask me to do what you want?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re a lawyer, you shouldn’t have to ask that question,” I said, looking steadily at him. “You made a lifetime contract with my grandfather to handle my business affairs. And this is my business.”

  He thought for a moment, then he nodded. “You’re right. I’ll see what can be done. But I’m not promising anything. My contacts in Detroit may not be as good as they used to be.”

  “That’s good enough for me, Uncle Jake,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He looked at his watch. “Time I got you back on the plane. It’s after seven and I promised your father you would be on your way by then.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. But I wasn’t. The pain was beginning to dance around inside me.

  “Where will you be nine o’clock, Monday night?” Uncle Jake asked.

  “Either the hospital or home,” I answered. “Depends on what Papa will let me do.”

  “Okay,” he said. “At nine o’clock, Monday night, wherever you are, someone will contact you. They will either have what you want or tell you they haven’t.”

  “Good enough.”

  He walked to the door and opened it. Gianno was standing just outside. “Okay, Gianno,” he said. “Take him back.”

  “Si, Eccellenza.” Gianno took a small metal box from his breast pocket. He tore the wrapper from the disposable syringe and began filling it from a small vial.

  “I can understand why your father let you come to see me while you’re like this,” Uncle Jake said. “But I don’t see why you’re doing it, what you’re getting out of it.”

  “Money for one thing. That stock could be worth ten million dollars someday.”

  “That’s not it,” he said. “You have five times that by now and you never paid attention to it. There has to be another reason.”

  “Maybe it’s because I gave my word to the old man that we would build a new car. And I don’t consider the job done until that car comes off the assembly line.”

  He looked at me. There was approval in his voice. “That’s more like it.”

  Then I had a question to ask him. Something that had been puzzling me. “You said you knew why Papa let me come down here. Why did he?”

  “I thought you knew,” he said. “It was old Mr. Hardeman who got your father into the hospital as a resident after every one of them had turned him down because he was your grandfather’s son.”

  “Turn on your side a little bit,” Gianno said.

  Automatically I did as he asked, still looking up at Uncle Jake. I felt the faint jab in my buttock.

  Uncle Jake began to smile. “The wheel never stops turning, does it?” Then right in front of my eyes he began to disappear.

  That had to be one of the world’s greatest shots. I slept all the way from Uncle Jake’s office in Phoenix until nine o’clock the next morning when I awoke in my hospital bed in Detroit.

  Chapter Ten

  By Saturday afternoon in the hospital, I was going cuckoo. The aches and pains had subsided enough so that I could handle them with an abundance of aspirin, and I paced up and down my room like a caged animal. I flipped channels on television and spun the radio dial until it came off in my hand. Finally the nurse fled the room and came back ten minutes later with my father.

  He looked at me calmly. “What’s the matter?”

  “I want out!”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “You can’t keep me in here any more,” I said, not listening to him. “I’ve had it!”

  “If you’d pay attention instead of running off at the mouth,” my father said, “you’d know I said ‘Okay.’”

  I stared at him. “You mean it?”

  “Get dressed,” he said. “I’ll be back to pick you up in about fifteen minutes. As soon as I finish my rounds.”

  “What about my bandages?”

  “You’ll have to keep your ribs taped for a few more weeks, but I’ll be able to replace your head and face bandages with a couple of Band-Aids.” He smiled. “I’m really very pleased. I just saw your X-rays and lab reports of this morning. You’re fine. Now we’ll give Mamma’s miracle drug, pasta, a chance to do a little work on you.”

  Of course Mamma c
ried when I came home. And so did Gianno and my father. I looked over my mother’s head at Cindy. Even she stood there, tears welling in her eyes.

  I grinned at her. “I see Mamma’s been giving you instructions on how to become Italian.”

  She made a face and turned away. When she turned back, she was fine. “Also spaghetti sauce,” she said. “We’ve been in the kitchen ever since this morning when your father told us he was bringing you home.”

  I looked at him. “At least you could have told me, Papa.”

  He smiled. “I wanted to check the reports first just to be sure.”

  “Gianno, you help him upstairs,” my mother said.

  “Si, Signora.”

  “Undress him and get him right into bed,” she continued. “I want him to rest until it’s time for dinner.”

  “Mamma, I’m not a baby,” I protested. “I can manage myself.”

  My mother ignored me. “Gianno, don’t pay any attention to him,” she said firmly. “Go with him.”

  I started up the steps, Gianno following me.

  “And don’t let him smoke in bed,” my mother added. “He’ll set himself on fire.”

  By the time I got to bed, I knew I wasn’t as strong as I thought I was. I was grateful for Gianno’s help. I fell right asleep.

  Cindy came by before dinner just in time to catch Mother forcing a shot glass full of Fernet Branca down my throat.

  I swallowed about half of it, almost gagging at the lousy taste it left in my mouth. I made a face. “That’s enough!”

  “You’ll drink it all,” she insisted. “It will do you more good than all those little pills.”

  I stood there stubbornly, the shot glass in my hand. My mother turned to Cindy.

  “You make him finish it,” she said. “I have to go down to the kitchen and start the water for the pasta.” She went to the door and stopped there. “You make sure that he finishes it before he comes down for dinner.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Perino,” Cindy said obediently. My mother went down the hall and Cindy turned back to me. “You heard your mother,” she said with a smile. “Finish it.”

  “She’s something, isn’t she? Her trouble is that she really believes it when I tell her that a boy’s best friend is his mother.”