“I met him at a chamber music concert.”
“Come on, Manny, this is serious business.”
“Let’s just say I was innerduced to him. I cultivate athletes. That’s how I get my edge. That’s how any gambler gets his edge.”
“He knew you were a gambler?”
“Sure,” he grinned.
“Manny,” I said, “why are you sticking to this preposterous story? Do you think I’m trying to trick you into telling me the real one so I can go tell your mob or something? I mean, I don’t understand you.”
“I don’t give a fuck who you don’t understand, mister, I’m telling you what happened.”
“The gun again, Manny.”
He had unconsciously raised it and waving it around for emphasis. To my relief, he set it down again in his lap.
“I’m telling you, I call Richie and I says to him, ‘Let’s get together.’ So we get together and I tell him I have a proposition that could make him twenty-five large ones. All he has to do is hold the score under 15. He says, ‘For fifty you got it.’ So I call my people and they bet everything but their first-born on Kentucky. And that cocksucker scores 48 points.”
I had to laugh, it was so incredible. “Manny, leaving aside for the moment the fact that your story makes Watergate look like the gospel truth, why would Richie double-cross you?”
“Because someone paid him more money. A lot more money.”
“You mean another syndicate or something?”
“That’s right.”
“And who might that be?”
“Provenzano. He personally won two million on that game, I happen to know—and I can tell you he don’t bet a quarter on anything that ain’t rigged ten ways from the middle.”
“And you think some of that went to Richie?”
“Damn right. How else you gonna explain it?”
“How about this one: that you’re a big fuckup? That you’ve invented this... this story to take the heat off you with your people?”
Ricci gave me a pathetic look. “Christ, won’t nobody listen to me!” He pounded the steering wheel with his fist. “Anyway,” he sighed, “I don’t have Richie Sadler.”
“I’d already figured that out. Do you have any idea who does?”
“I ain’t heard nothin’, not word one.”
“There’s a healthy reward for you if you should find out anything about his whereabouts.
“He looked at me sadly. “You could offer me Chase Manhattan, I wouldn’t know where to begin. But I’ll tell you one thing: it ain’t the mob. The mob don’t operate that way.”
“So everybody keeps telling me.”
“I’ll drive you back if you want.”
“I’d be obliged.
He threaded the Buick back to Queens Boulevard and pulled up in front of the Continental Avenue station, an express stop. As I reached for the door handle, he said, “Just out of curiosity, how much are they asking for Richie?”
“A hell of a lot of loot.”
“You gonna pay it?”
I believed that the question was asked out of simple curiosity, but I decided not to give him an honest answer anyway. To tell him yes was to invite an epidemic of kidnappings.
“We’re disinclined.”
“Good. I hope they bury him alive and pull out the air hose.”
“You sure are good folks,” I said, opening the door and stepping out. Then I remembered something. “I don’t suppose you can keep our little meeting quiet?”
He looked at me with dead eyes. “Mister, you don’t seem to understand, I got nobody to tell.”
Chapter VIII
I got back to the office around 3 to find Trish in a rampaging tizzy. Her desk was a litter of undecipherable messages, unfiled folders, unopened mail, an uneaten sandwich, and an untouched cup of coffee. Her hair was uncombed, her clothes unkempt, and her temper unkept. She held the phone under her chin and was burrowing through the mess looking for a pen and something to write on. “Okay, got it!” she shouted, writing a message down on a paper napkin and slamming the phone down. The ink blotted into an oval blob.
She looked up and saw me. “Jesus, what a day you picked not to come to the office!”
“Anybody call?”
“Anybody? Everybody! The Pope, the Queen, Lee Duc Tho, the Messiah, they all called. I haven’t had a bite to eat and I couldn’t get to the post office and if I don’t pee this second there’s gonna be an accident.”
I brushed a wisp of hair out of her eyes. “All right, all right, calm down. Just tell me, did Vreel or the commissioner call?”
“No. They’re the only ones who didn’t call.”
“Okay, go pee.”
“It may be too late,” she said, scattering paper until she found the powder-room key.
She dashed out and I shuffled the papers around, separating telephone memo slips from the rest and examining them as they surfaced. There were a lot of them, mostly urgent ones from clients. I set them aside. They could wait. When a client calls you urgently, it means he needs an advance.
Three messages aroused my curiosity, all from nonclients. One was from Sondra Sadler, another from my best friend Roy Lescade, the New York Post sportswriter, and third was from my pal up in Harlem, Tatum Farmer. All were marked Urgent, and the one from Lescade said, typically, “Call me back or you die!”
I loved Roy better than a brother. He was a good old boy from Brownsville, Tex. He’d played for Texas A&M, linebacker; and every year for three years whenever the Aggies played the Longhorns we’d beat each other’s asses off. He was drafted by the Chicago Bears, but was essentially lazy and failed to make the cut. His daddy wanted him to run the ranch but Roy loved sports too much—and besides he’d discovered a hidden talent for writing. So he set out to be a sports reporter. He’d become one of the best, for my money, and one of the few I liked to read because he was honest. He boasts he makes up only 10 percent of what he writes, which is an incredible display of integrity.
He also cares, not just about sports and athletes but about people. He’s always going after the human-interest side of a story, and it was one such story, about a former Dallas Cowboy who’d dropped out of football after an injury and almost destroyed himself with drink, that led to the rescue of the author of this account. It was Roy who got me a job in the front office of the Cowboys, and Roy who suggested I had a good feel for the agency business. Shit, it was even Roy who suggested I ought to write down some of the things that have happened to me and try to get them published. So you can see how much I owe Roy Lescade.
I called him first, and slipped easily into my cowboy bag.
“You leave this message for me, you old turd?”
“Dave! Hiya, buddy!”
“What’s up?”
“I wanted to tell you the one about the Polack who’s making love to his girl friend?”
“The Polack who’s making love to his girl friend,” I repeated, searching my mind. “No, I don’t think I heard that one.”
“Well,” Roy said, chuckling, “she says to him, ‘Kiss me where it smells.’”
“Yeah?”
“So he drove her to Gary, Ind.” He broke into an explosive hissing giggle.
“Good one, Roy. What’d you call about?”
“Oh, I thought you might help me puzzle out a weird thing that’s going on. You know I been taking out Commissioner Lauritzen’s secretary, Connie?” Roy ended most sentences with a question mark.
“Sure I know. You took her away from me, remember, buddy-fucker?”
“Bullshit! You said you were through with her. Anyway, I was talking to her last night—uh, to tell the truth, I was bailing her ass off—and she told me there was some big kind of hassle concerning Richie?”
“No trouble, Roy,” I extemporized, silently cursing both of them. �
��A hitch came up, that’s all. We were dickering over some small print and the parties got a little sore at each other; it don’t amount to nothing more’n that.” I waited to see if Roy would buy it. If I knew him, he wouldn’t.
“Didn’t sound that way to me, but Connie refused to tell me anything more. I called Richie at his hotel? Got his sister, the one you were talking to at the party? Pretty little thing, she is.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said he’s ‘in seclusion.’ Dave, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“He’s got to bone up for his final exams, that’s all. Too many damn reporters hounding him, if you get what I mean.”
“That’s what she said, he’s studying. And what Vreel said, too.”
“You’ve spoken to Vreel?”
“Uh huh.”
“Busy little reporter, ain’t you?”
“Got to earn those Yankee dollars, buddy. I also had an interesting conversation with Tommy Brent?”
“Tommy Brent?” I frowned. Tommy was the owner of the St. Louis Gateways of the ABA.
“Yeah, he was bitching about being hit up for an extra assessment for Richie Sadler?”
“But Roy, all the owners...”
“This is a second assessment. Now, can I come over?”
“I don’t really have the time, Roy. Ever since Richie Sadler I been busier’n a sow with four tits and eight piglets.”
“That’s what I call a buddy.” He sighed. “All right, I guess I’ll just have to print my speculations.”
“What kind of speculations?”
“Oh, that the deal is about to fall through, maybe?”
That was what I’d hoped Roy would say, not because I wanted that printed but because it indicated he was still in the dark as to what the problem was with Richie. The best thing to do was to string him along.
“You sure are one smart sumbitch,” I said, trying to sound a little awestruck.
“Aw shit, Dave, it’s just that I’ve seen so many contracts tore up in my time, I can hear one ripping five miles away.”
I played him like a hooked fish. “Tell you what, Roy, you git your syph-ridden ass up here in half an hour, I’ll give you the poop—on the condition you don’t release it till I say go. Fair?”
“Fair.”
“And don’t breathe a word to nobody, hear?”
“Shucks, and I was just about to call Dick Young at the News.”
My next call was to the St. Regis Hotel. I asked for the Sadler suite and got Sondra.
“Any news?” she asked. She sounded terribly tired and strained.
“Not yet.”
“Nothing yet,” she repeated to her parents.
“What about you?” I asked. “You called, said it was urgent.”
She hung fire so long I thought we’d been cut off. “Well, yes.”
Something suddenly occurred to me. “Are you free to talk, Sondra?”
“Not really,” she said in a level voice.
“Are you all right?”
“Oh sure,” she singsonged.
“Are you free to come and go?” My heart was pumping hard. I wondered if someone was holding a gun to her head.
“Of course.”
“All right. Meet me at my apartment at 7. We’ll have dinner and talk.” I gave her the address.
“That’ll be fine.”
I hung up and scratched my head. Someone in the room with Sondra had inhibited her from speaking freely, yet she was free to come and go and didn’t seem overly uptight. Maybe she wanted to tell me something she didn’t want her parents to hear. I hearkened back to what had happened yesterday when I’d asked them if they could think of anything else that might be helpful. Sondra and her father had exchanged a funny look. I hadn’t thought anything of it then, but now I wondered if there was some skeleton in the family closet that was rattling the doorknob. I speculated on what it might be, but found my speculations drifting to another possible outcome of dinner with Sondra at my apartment. Had Trish not returned, grinning the grin of one who has found a blissful relief, it’s hard to say where my fantasies would have carried me.
Trish began cleaning up her desk but I didn’t want her around when Roy came by. Roy could charm the birds out of the trees. He’d already jollied enough out of Connie, Commissioner Lauritzen’s gal Friday, to jeopardize the secrecy of our situation. I felt Trish was made of sterner stuff than Connie, but I wasn’t about to put this hypothesis to the test. I pressed two dollars into her hand for a taxi and sent her home. She looked at the deuce and said, “Wow, boss. Ever since you took on Richie Sadler the money has been flowing like—silk.”
“If you think that’s small, wait till you see your severance pay,” I said holding the door open for her.
While I waited for Roy, I called Tatum Farmer. Tatum called me regularly with tips about interesting ballplayers coming up in Harlem, but this was the first time he’d said it was something urgent. I thought maybe he simply had an urgently interesting ballplayer coming up, but as soon as I heard his voice I knew something was seriously wrong.
“Dave? Aw, thanks for calling me back, Dave,” he said as if I’d just rescued him from the gallows. His voice was nasal and mournful and seemed to be fogged from crying.
“Jesus, what is it, Tatum?”
“Oh it’s bad, Dave. Bad, bad, bad.”
“Tell me, for Christ’s sake.”
“Timmie Lee, the kid we played with the other day?”
“Yeah?”
“They got him, Dave. They beat him up somethin’ terrible.” He started snuffling and I waited nervously. “They broke him up so bad he’ll never play basketball again. Fuck, the hospital says he may never even regain consciousness.”
“Who did it, Tatum? Who’s ‘They’?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I can guess.”
“Slakey?”
“That’s who I think.”
I lowered myself into my chair. “Tell me just what happened.”
I drummed the desk while he blew his nose and lit a cigarette. “You saw him that day, how he had his arm around Timmie and all that shit?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he been sweet-talkin’ Timmie the last couple of weeks, I mean, rushin’ him hard, you understand? Tryin’ to get him to sign an agreement, like an exclusive contract?”
“Why, those are worthless, Tatum. For one thing, the kid’s only a minor.”
“The kid don’t know that, and Slakey wouldn’t care anyway. Once he’s got a kid signed up, he’s got him locked.”
“Is that what happened?”
“Yes. Last week Timmie told me he was gonna ‘sign up’ with Slakey as soon as he could come up with the ‘consideration’ of five hundred bucks Slakey required. I think Timmie was thinking of hitting me up for that five, but I set him straight fast enough. I tried to talk him out of it. I tried to make him go see you and talk it over with you, but you know, some of these kids don’t trust The Man, you understand. Well, two days later he calls me and says, ‘Hey, Tatum, do you think Slakey’s jivin’ me?’ I says, ‘What do you mean, boy?’ He says, ‘Well, I come up with five bills Tuesday and today Slakey calls me and says I owe him another two hundred and fifty.’ I says, ‘What for?’ He says, ‘On account of Slakey says he talked to John Wooden of UCLA.’”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “What does one thing have to do with another?”
“Don’t you see?” Tatum said, sniffing. “John Wooden is the most famous coach in the country. Even the dumbest kid in Harlem knows who he is. What Slakey was saying was, for getting through to Wooden, he deserved kind of like a bonus.”
“What did you tell Timmie?”
“I told Timmie, ‘Boy, you been fucked over for fair. Get out of this before he owns you.’ And you know what Timm
ie says? Timmie says, ‘I think you may be right, Tatum.’ And that’s the last thing he said to me.”
“Last night he told his mother he was gonna have a talk with Slakey. He never come back. This morning some kids found him on some rubble in a lot on 133rd Street. They’d taken a pipe to his arms and legs and for good measure stomped on his head. Aw, Dave, he was a good boy...”
Tatum’s voice cracked again and he began sobbing. I felt sympathetic tears filling my eyes and I sat quietly in my darkening office waiting for Tatum to get control. Finally he said, “Dave?” His voice had an ominous quality.
“Yes?”
“I’m going after him.”
“You’re gonna do no such thing, Tatum.”
“I’m gonna kill that motherfucker.” He was frighteningly calm and I knew he meant it.
“Listen to me, Tatum. You take this upon yourself, many things can happen, all of them bad.”
“What am I supposed to do, stand by and watch him rip these kids off and beat them into vegetables? There’s a beautiful boy layin’ in Harlem Hospital tonight who ain’t gonna be good for playin’ jacks let alone basketball, if he comes out at all. Ain’t no way I’m gonna sit for that!”
“There’s a better way.”
“Don’t hit me with any ‘Work Within The System’ jive. That may work downtown but up here it don’t buy a thimbleful of shit. They sent a couple of detectives around. The detectives said, ‘The kid must have been dealing dope,’ and went back to the precinct. I’m telling you true, Dave, I’m gonna go after that motherfucker and I’m gonna lace his face with my kitchen knife.”
“Come on, Tatum. I know you know the difference between right and wrong, and what you’re talking about is wrong, uptown or down. I know what kind of pain you’re in, but you take action blindly and you’re gonna end up in a gutter or a prison cell or a wooden box and you won’t have made the world a better place by the thickness of one hair.”
Tatum breathed heavily into the phone for a minute, negotiating in his grief-stricken mind between vengeance and common sense. Finally he said, “You got a better plan?”
“I think I can come up with one.”
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