$3 Million Turnover

by Richard Curtis

  “Is Richie with you?” she asked without salutation.

  “No, is he supposed to be?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “When did he go out?”

  “Last evening.”

  “Last evening? You mean he’s been gone since then?”

  “Yes.”

  I felt a slight tremor of anxiety, but we still had a long way to go before pushing the panic button. “Where was he going last evening?”

  “Nowhere, at least not that he mentioned. He just excused himself after dinner and said he was going out for a while.”

  “Ah,” I laughed. “Cherchez la femme. He probably met someone and is conducting what my people like to call a dalliance.”

  “He’d have called. He isn’t shy about telling us he’s spending the night with someone.”

  “I still wouldn’t be concerned,” I said, concerned. “When is your flight?”

  “This evening at 8.”

  “He’ll show up, you’ll see. What do your folks say?”

  “Oh, they think he’s—um, shacked up too.”

  “There you go. Not to worry.” I drummed the desk. “Tell you what. If you don’t hear from Richie by noon, why don’t you drop up to the office and we’ll make some phone calls.”

  I plunged into a pile of work I’d neglected the last week, as much for therapy as anything else. Like barbarians at the walls of Rome, a host of disquieting fantasies were shouldering the gates of my normal tranquility, and only the distraction of hard work kept them out. Every time the phone rang I jumped, expecting Lord knows what: perhaps the city morgue asking me if I had a client whose feet extended half a yard over the end of a standard coroner’s slab, or Sondra reporting that Richie had just ambled into the hotel with a shit-eating grin, reeking of perfume and graffitied with lipstick. But no such calls came in. What did come in, at 12:30, was Sondra herself—and that’s when I got my first attack of the scaries.

  One thing I had to say for her, she was a good dresser. Unlike most of your Midwestern gals, she followed the fashion magazines and wasn’t two years behind the times or even two minutes. She was wearing a brown denim pantsuit over a ribbed T-shirt, Italian sandals and the latest bangles, and she could have been a native New York chick out on her lunch hour. I liked that; most of the time they come in from St. Louis or Kansas City wearing those nubby white linen suits, white shoes and pillbox hats.

  What I didn’t like about Sondra was her expression. She’d obviously been biting her lip all morning for there was a sore in the corner; her eyes were puffy with sleeplessness, and their look was one of distress bordering on fear.

  It was infectious, but I waved casually and fought to keep a lid on my own nervousness. “Still no sign of our bonus baby?”

  “No.”

  “The girl must be good.”

  “I’m telling you, he’s not with any girl. Something’s happened to him.”

  “We’d have heard by now.”

  “Not necessarily. He could have been mugged and stripped of all his identification cards.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “In the first place, most muggers can’t reach high enough to hit your brother on the head. And in the second, Richie isn’t that hard to identify when you get right down to it.”

  This time there was no making her laugh. “I don’t think you’re taking this very seriously, Mr. Bolt. I’d have thought that if for no other reason than to protect your commission...”

  “Ouch, that’s a low blow, honey! It’s just that I’m not going to be stampeded. New York City is the biggest fleshpot in the world, and I’ve seen some pretty God-fearing boys go wild once they got here. And your brother’s got more reason than most to take himself on a lost weekend, what with the way he’s been hounded by the press and all.”

  “You said you’d make some phone calls.”

  “I did, but I’m a little reluctant about it for the moment. It might only upset a lot of people unduly, generate some lurid publicity, and spatter egg on our faces when Richie walks in and says he’s simply been locked in the arms of a particularly possessive sports groupie. So I think we should wait a few hours more... Have you had lunch yet?”

  “No, and I’m not hungry.”

  “A person’s got to eat.”

  “A person’s got to smoke.” She surveyed the littered top of my desk until she found a cigarette box.

  I struck a match for her. “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “I do, under stress.”

  “There must be something less destructive you can do under stress.”

  She sucked in a big lungful of smoke. “I look at pictures.”

  “I have a print of Deep Throat back at my apartment.’’

  She glared at me. “Why do you feel so compelled to try to make me laugh?”

  “Why do you feel so compelled to frown?”

  She inhaled again. “By pictures I meant paintings.”

  “You’re in the right city for paintings.”

  “I’ve been to just about every museum in New York since we got here.”

  “Some of our best art isn’t in museums. You like Kandinsky?”

  She looked at me with contempt. “What do you know about Kandinsky?”

  That ticked me off. “Believe it or not, there’s some folks from Texas who know more about the world than roping steers.”

  She pressed her knuckles to her brow. “I’m sorry, that was stupid of me. I don’t know what I’m saying today.”

  “Just say you’d like to see some Kandinskys most people don’t know about.”

  “Yes, I would, if...”

  I buzzed Trish. “Call Morty Tepper and ask him if I can bring someone over to see his collection.”

  “Who’s Morty Tepper?” Sondra asked.

  “He owns a large piece of the New York Nets. And he’s a collector. Picks up painters when they’re cheap, same as he does basketball players.”

  Trish buzzed back and told me Morty had said it would be fine, his wife would be home to show us around the gallery.

  Sondra hesitated. “What if...?”

  “Don’t worry.” I instructed Trish to phone us at Morty’s the second she heard from Richie.

  We left the Lincoln Building on the 42nd Street side, crossed the street and got a cab easily in front of Grand Central Station. I told the driver to take Sixth Avenue, then head north through Central Park.

  The park was resplendent in the deepening green of maturing leaves, and the warmth of a shimmering May morning had brought out throngs of lovers, softball players, mothers and toddlers, kids and dogs. I looked at Sondra and was gratified to see the tension in her face start to fade.

  “Do you like Kandinsky?” she asked, studying my face with interest for the first time.

  “He’s a little too subtle for me. I like flashier stuff. Like Vasarely.”

  She greeted this with a mixture of distaste for Vasarely and surprise that I had any opinion at all.

  “Are you seriously interested in art?”

  “I would be if I had more time. Still, I’ve managed to pick up some opinions here and there. Same goes for books and music. My problem is, most of the people I deal with are athletes—athletes and what you might call athletic supporters—owners and agents and sportswriters.”

  She made a wry face at the pun.

  “Anyway, with all these jock types around,” I continued, “I don’t get much of a chance to talk about anything besides sports—except maybe women.”

  “You study women?” Though she was still boycotting smiles, there was amusement in her eyes.

  “I try to make time for that.” I hesitated, then said, “I’ve been studying you, a little.”

  “Me? I’m a short course. A half hour and you know everything.”

  “I think there’s a
lot more than that.”

  She shifted on her seat. “What has your study revealed?’’

  “Aside from how beautiful you are, you mean?”

  “Mr. Bolt...”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I really meant ugly.”

  “Why don’t you stop trying to be the chivalrous southerner and just say what you mean.”

  “Okay, then. I would say your guiding character trait is responsibility,” I said.

  Her eyebrows raised and I could see I’d struck close to home.

  “In fact, I’d say you sometimes wish you weren’t so responsible.”

  “You’re a good student, Mr. Bolt.”

  “You wouldn’t want to drop the ‘Mr. Bolt’ routine would you?”

  She looked out the window, apparently thinking it over carefully as if it were a major decision. And perhaps it was, for when she turned back she said, “Not yet, if you don’t mind.”

  “Suit yourself,” I shrugged.

  “And what’s your guiding trait?” she asked.

  “You haven’t been studying me?” I said it mockingly, but I really was disappointed at her aloofness.

  “I wouldn’t say studying, but I have observed you, I suppose.”

  “And what’s your observation?”

  “Mmm—that you may be a little more complex than I thought.” She looked at me and hastily added, “Now, don’t look so smug. Anyone who prefers Vasarely to Kandinsky is not that complex.”

  “You sure do give up ground grudgingly,” I said.

  We exited the park at 90th Street, swung right at Fifth Avenue and then left at 88th Street. The cab pulled up beside a turreted mansion of smudged marble, decorated with gargoyles and seraphim and saints and prophets. I ran down the building’s history for Sondra—it originally had been built by the Schupfs of diamond fame, and was now an official landmark—and rang the bell.

  Morty’s wife Suzanne, a dark, vivacious, and thoroughly unpretentious woman, greeted us warmly. We chatted for a few minutes over tea and finger sandwiches that she had thoughtfully prepared in advance. Then she escorted us to the gallery and left us on our own.

  We strolled through it at a leisurely pace, and Sondra really began to open up, discoursing authoritatively out of what was apparently an astonishing store of information. Her face became animated and she gestured gracefully with flowing hands and fingers, helping me visualize the artists’ conceptions and judge how well those conceptions had been translated onto canvas.

  We stopped before a large Kandinsky, and after expatiating on the significance of the three shaded brown squares in a medium of yellow—which without Sondra’s interpretation would have been little more to me than three shaded brown squares in a medium of yellow—she said, “Do you still prefer Vasarely?”

  “Vasarely?” I sneered. “That cheap magician?”

  She touched my arm. “You certainly make your mind up fast!”

  “About certain things, I do.” I gazed at her and held her eyes for a deliciously long moment.

  “Dave...”

  She brought the curtain down again over her eyes, as she’d done in the cab. But this time I had reason to feel encouraged. She’d unwittingly called me by my first name.

  I was about to bring this to her attention when the gallery door opened. It was Suzanne Tepper. “Dave? Your office just called.”

  We both stiffened. For a few minutes we’d forgotten about Richie. Now we were seized with apprehension. “What did my secretary say?”

  Suzanne handed me a slip of paper on which she’d jotted down Trish’s message in a scrupulous hand. “You’re to call Niles Lauritzen right away at this number.”

  “She didn’t say anything more?” Sondra asked her.

  “Only that the commissioner said it was urgent.”

  Suzanne led us to a room off the gallery that served as an office. There was a desk with a telephone. I sat down and dialed the commissioner’s number. Sondra stood over me, her hand resting heavily on my shoulder for support. I pointed to a chair in the corner but she didn’t want to sit.

  Connie put me right through to the commissioner, and his voice trembled when he said hello. A surge of fear swept through my stomach. “Dave, you’d better get down here right away.”

  “Is this about Richie?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it on the phone. Just get down here.”

  “Is he all right? Can you at least tell me that?”

  “Dave, will you just get the hell down here?”

  “Right.”

  I looked at Sondra. Her face was white and she was biting the back of her hand. I can’t imagine I looked any less terrified.

  Chapter VI

  As the taxi inched maddeningly through the institutionalized traffic jam that is the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, I pleaded with Sondra to let me drop her off at her hotel or even at my office, where she would have her parents or Trish to hold her hand until I could phone in the news. But she refused and slid out of the cab with me when we pulled up before 666 Fifth Avenue’s aluminum facade.

  The commissioner came out of his office to greet me personally when Connie buzzed him on the intercom, but scowled when he saw Sondra and raised his hand before she could speak. He pulled us into a carpeted corridor and said, “I don’t want Connie or anybody else to know something’s wrong.”

  “What is wrong?” Sondra shot at him. “What’s the matter with Richie?”

  He grimaced and looked at me. “Did you have to bring her?”

  “She was with me when I called you from Morty Tepper’s.” He shook his head as if this created a bothersome complication, and I added, “She is his sister, commissioner.”

  He gestured toward his office and ushered us in. I wrinkled my nose at the odor of stale cigar smoke still clinging to the walls three days after the party.

  A short, solid man in a tailored dark suit stood by the windows with his back to me, pounding his thigh with his fist. He turned when we came in. It was Stanley Vreel. His grave face lengthened when he saw Sondra. “She insisted on coming in,” Commissioner Lauritzen explained.

  “Great! That’s all we need!” Vreel snorted. “Why don’t I just call Time? Maybe we can make the cover.”

  Sondra’s body tensed but I cut her off before she could retort. “Why don’t you tell us what this is all about?”

  Lauritzen and Vreel looked at each other and their eyes finally conceded there was no way short of main force to remove Sondra from the room.

  “Your brother seems to have been uh, abducted.”

  “Abducted? Kidnapped?” she gasped rocking on her feet. I tried to ease her into a chair but she pushed me away.

  “Kidnapped, abducted, what the hell difference does it make what you call it?” Vreel snarled, tugging at the knot in his tie and pacing like a caged puma from trophy case to the windows and back to the trophy case.

  The commissioner picked up a shot glass of bourbon sitting on the coffee table and chugged it neat down his throat, then went over to the bar and refilled it.

  “What exactly happened?” I asked accepting his offer of a glass for myself.

  It was Vreel who answered. “I was packing to return to Boston with the contracts. That was a little more than an hour ago, a few minutes after 2, at the Plaza. The phone rang and it was this man telling me he was holding Richie a prisoner.”

  “What did he sound like?” I asked. “What exactly did he say?”

  “His voice was kind of a deep baritone, a little gravelly, no one I’ve ever spoken to before, I don’t think. His exact words were, ‘I’ve got Richie Sadler. If you want him back, you’ll have to pay for him.’”

  “You told me it was, ‘If you want him back alive you’ll have to pay for him,’” the
commissioner corrected him.

  “I was only trying to spare Miss Sadler’s feelings,” Vreel said.

  Sondra was swaying. “Did he say Richie was all right?”

  “He actually let me speak to him,” Vreel said. “He sounded fine, a little nervous. He said, ‘Tell my folks and my sister I’m okay, but please get me out of here. These men aren’t fooling around.’”

  “You’re sure he said ‘These men’?”

  “Yes, I’m quite sure. Then I said to him, ‘Can you give me a hint about where you are?’ But the other voice interrupted me. The guy said, ‘I’m on the extension, so forget about that shit.’”

  “Did it sound like a long-distance call?” I asked.

  “No, but not really local either. There was some crackle.”

  “You mean, like it could have been coming from Long Island or Westchester or somewhere like that?” I said.

  “Yes, but that still covers a lot of territory,” Vreel answered. “Anyway, I said to the man, ‘What do you want?’ He said, ‘What do you think we want, pal?’ I said, ‘All right, then, how much?’”

  Apparently we were coming to the hard part. Vreel went to the bar and fixed himself a tall, undiluted scotch and sipped it morosely. Our eyes followed his every move, as though there would be some clue in one of his motions.

  “Well?” Sondra finally snapped. “How much?”

  Vreel pounded his thigh once again. “The, uh, the man said to me, ‘The newspapers say the kid is worth three million. Fine. We’ll take three million.’”

  Sondra looked shaky so I helped her to a chair. I was none too steady myself. The commissioner just mumbled the figure aloud. Vreel looked at his shoes.

  “What’d you say to him?” I asked.

  “I said, ‘Come on now, be reasonable,’ but he said, ‘I’ll give you a couple of days to round up the money, then I’ll call you back with instructions.’”