$3 Million Turnover

by Richard Curtis

  “Like what?”

  At that moment the door opened and the hulking, rain coated figure of Roy Lescade tramped in. “I got someone in my office now, Tatum. Give me till tomorrow. I want to speak to some people. Will you do that?”

  “Till tomorrow, all right. But you better come up with something good, because I’m gonna take that motherfucker off.”

  I hung up and swung around in my chair. Roy was standing in the anteroom poking his head into my darkened office like a suspicious bear. His was a massive presence that threw a huge shadow across the carpet. Roy was an inch shorter than me, but he had the shoulders and chest of a buffalo. Had he wanted to work at it, Roy could have been one of the greatest defensive football players of all time; I think he could have been an even better linebacker than Dick Butkus. But he just didn’t have that desire.

  “That you, lardass?” I said.

  “What you doin’ in the dark, Dave?”

  “Playin’ with myself.”

  He ambled in and walked straight to my liquor cabinet. “Seems kind of silly considering that piece of poon you keep for a secretary. Where is she? I’m workin’ on that, you know.”

  “I know. I lock her up when you come over.”

  He helped himself to a bourbon and reached behind a bookshelf where he knew I kept my branch water, something I save for drinkers with civilized palates. He made me one without asking if I wanted it, and we quaffed in silence for a couple of minutes before getting down to serious conversation.

  “Now then, Thunder Bolt, what is going on with Richie Sadler?”

  “Well,” I said, digging in for a good bluff, “like you guessed, the negotiations came apart at the last minute. Not fatally, you understand. Let’s just say the contracts are on the runway but I can’t quite get ‘em into the sky.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Richie is asking for a loan.”

  “A loan? How much?”

  “Yea much.”

  He polished off his drink and lumbered to the cabinet for a refill. “Must be an awful lot, Dave. He’s got people running around like wild ponies trapped in a box canyon.”

  “Seven digits, not counting the two on the other side of the decimal point.”

  “What for?”

  “He wants to build a sporting-goods store,” I said, congratulating myself on my inventiveness. “You know, something he can count on for income when he retires.”

  “Retires! He ain’t even started yet!”

  “Oh, you know how these kids think nowadays.”

  He shook his head and nattered like a horse. “Sporting-goods store.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I told you, in seclusion, and that’s the truth. He’s got to hit the books for exams or he won’t get his diploma, and won’t that be embarrassing?”

  “Can’t I at least...?”

  “Interview him? No. But as soon as this thing gets cleared up, I’ll give you the exclusive, I give you my word as a white man.” I raised my hand in a solemn vow.

  He looked unhappy, but accepting. Then he suddenly cried, “Hey, you ain’t a white man, you sumbitch!” He threw an ice cube at me. “You’re part black!”

  “And you better remember it, honky.”

  We refilled, or more properly re-refilled, clowned a little, and reminisced about growing up in Texas. Roy spun a long and probably apocryphal yarn about his first sex experience, with Paloma, his Mexican nanny. “She was a handsome widow that was always being eyed by the hands,” Roy said, “and they would have caught her too, except my daddy had warned them he’d cut the pecker off the first man that touched her. Actually, daddy was saving her for himself. Anyway, one day, we were walking near the corral, Paloma and me, when I saw something I’d never seen before. My daddy was feeding the cock of this inexperienced stallion into a mare’s pussy. I’d seen plenty of animals mating, you understand, but this was new to me. Well, I felt myself getting hard and Paloma noticed the bulge in my trousers.

  “Suddenly my daddy spied us and chased us away; he thought I was too young to be witnessing this business. So Paloma and I went back to the ranch house. Ain’t nobody there. Paloma says, ‘You want play horse?’ I says sure. So she undoes my pants and takes out my whang and lifts her skirts and does like my father did with the stallion. Then she showed me another way, and a couple of others. That gal had one big repertory, I’ll tell you. We played horse every chance we got until daddy, on account of Paloma was indifferent to his advances, got suspicious that some hand was banging her regular. One day I was riding high on Paloma when guess who busts into my room? Well, he gives me a whipping so bad I still got stripes on my ass. And Paloma? He drug her out to the corral, screaming, ‘You like to play horse, I’ll give you a real stallion to hump!’ It was too dark for me to see proper, but the sound of her screams—I still dream about them. Never saw her after that.”

  I listened to Roy’s tale with attention divided by concern. Richie was uppermost, but the sound of Tatum’s sobs still echoed in my head. In a way the problem of heading off Tatum was even more pressing than Richie, because if I didn’t do something about it tonight, he was going to do something about Slakey tomorrow. I had to stop him.

  Suddenly I looked at Roy and realized he might hold the answer. “Hey Roy, how would you like to cover a real story?”

  He tilted his head. “You don’t call Richie Sadler’s contract a real story?”

  “Hell,” I sneered, “Anybody can write that big headline shit. I’m talking about a human interest story, the kind you do so well.”

  He looked askance at me. “You wouldn’t be trying to divert my attention from the Sadler story, would you?”

  “With all we been through together, you still distrust me?” I said indignantly.

  “With all we been through together, you should thank your stars I’m talking to you at all. What’s this human interest story?”

  I began relating the story of Timmie Lee and Warnell Slakey, and the deeper I went into it, the more attentive and sober he became. When I came to the beating he held his breath and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. His eyes took on a distant cast as if he were framing the story in some larger context in his mind. When I finished he swallowed hard.

  “Well?” I said. “What do you think?”

  He sighed. “I got to admit, it’s a heckuva story, Dave.” He asked me a few questions, then reflected quietly. “Funny thing, but in my mind there’s some sort of link-up between the Timmie Lee story and Richie Sadler’s, as if... as if Timmie’s is the other side of the coin. The coin...” He closed his eyes and visualized it. “The coin is ambition and greed and folly. It’s the common currency of the privileged white kid from Midwest suburbia and the disadvantaged black from the deep ghetto of Harlem. Here’s a white kid with a three million-dollar contract that ain’t good enough for him. And here’s a black kid who’d be happy to have 1 percent of that and will go to any lengths to get it. Ambition and greed and folly. Christ!”

  I looked away from Roy, ashamed of myself for having misled him about Richie, yet strangely touched anyway, as if Roy’s interpretation, with only a few adjustments, might be true. Because for every Richie who accepted life’s bounty with humility and gratitude, there were a dozen vain, arrogant athletes who believed nobody could ever pay them what they were worth. I knew: I represented some of them.

  “How would you like to help me put Warnell Slakey out of business?” I said to Roy.

  “Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

  “Okay. Call me tomorrow. I’ll have my strategy thunk about by then.”

  “I’d like to visit Timmie Lee tonight.”

  “You got it.” I phoned Tatum Farmer and let Roy speak to him. They arranged to meet at Harlem Hospital.

  Roy left quickly, leaving me sittin
g in the shadows, depressed about the human condition and filled with a longing for sleep or some other kind of oblivion that would remove me from the vileness I’d seen the last few days. I looked at the bottle of bourbon on the liquor cabinet. There was more than enough to narcotize myself for 10 or 12 hours. It was my first strong temptation in a decade. Then I remembered I had a date with Sondra Sadler at 7. I looked at my watch. It was 7.

  The mere thought of her, oddly, chased the bogeys out of my brain. I put the bourbon back in the liquor cabinet, locked up the office, and hurried out of the darkened building.

  I hailed a cab. It was still light out and the evening was still warm. We headed up Third Avenue. It was swarming with carefree couples reveling in the simple splendor of a perfect spring evening in New York. My driver, a long-haired kid, stopped for a light and we watched a thousand pleasure-seekers bustle past us heading for Bloomingdale’s and Alexander’s and Yellowfingers and Daly’s and the movie theaters that line Third Avenue between 57th and 60th Streets. The cabby looked over his shoulder at me and said, “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “Life can be real nice.”

  “Gee, I’d have expected something more profound from a guy like you.”

  “There’s nothing profounder,” he said.

  I thought of Sondra and my pulse quickened. “Maybe you’re right about that.”

  Chapter IX

  As we swung into the pretentious blue-fountained portico of the Pavilion I saw Sondra pacing the cavernous lobby looking in bewilderment at her wristwatch. It was almost 7:30. She looked very fetching in a clingy jersey dress, an interesting departure, I reflected, from her customary modest and unrevealing attire.

  I thanked the driver and gave him a 15-cent override on my traditional quarter tip for his reaffirmation of life, and hopped out. The uniformed doorman gave the revolving door a push for me and I took Sondra’s arm.

  “Sorry I’m late. It’s been one of those days.”

  “Any news?”

  “No. A few possibilities eliminated, but I’m afraid nothing on the positive side.”

  She nodded in a kind of mute resignation and we got on the elevator. The ride up was awkward and we kept our eyes forward as if to reassure each other that this was not a social engagement. It was unthinkable to me that our concern for Richie could be tainted by thoughts of a romantic nature. So why did I have these thoughts of a romantic nature?

  “I’m afraid I’m not prepared for guests,” I said unlocking my door. “Place is kind of a mess and I don’t have any meat defrosted.”

  “Oh, we can rustle something up.”

  “I’m good on short-order stuff,” I said eagerly.

  “You’re a man of many parts.”

  “Shoot, a plateful of bacon and eggs doesn’t make someone a man of many parts.” I pushed the door open. “Well,” I said with a sweep of the hand, “there it is. The rent was ridiculous when I moved in four years ago and they’ve raised it twice since then, to Fantastic and then to Drop Dead. But at least it’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter and you can’t punch a hole in the wall unless you’re real mad.”

  She looked around appraisingly, made some obligatory “oohs” and “ahhs” about my view of the Triboro Bridge, which at that moment was picking up the last glint of the setting sun, then turned to my lithographs. She studied them with a professional, hands-behind-the-back posture. “These are quite nice,” she said. There was a note of surprise in her voice.

  “Oh, just something an artist friend gave me.”

  “Who is he?”

  “She,” I corrected her, feeling an unaccountable flush of embarrassment suffusing my cheeks.

  “Ah.”

  “Will you have something to drink?”

  “Maybe some white wine on the rocks.”

  “You got it.”

  I uncorked a bottle of Chablis and poured out two glasses. I opened a jar of smoked walnuts and dropped into my pony-upholstered sling chair opposite the suede sofa where Sondra sat with her feet curled beneath her. I raised my glass “To Richie’s safe return.”

  “Yes.”

  I sipped my wine. “You sounded pretty uptight on the phone.”

  “I couldn’t talk.”

  “Because of your father?”

  She raised one eyebrow. “Why, yes. How did you know?”

  “What was so secret you couldn’t discuss it in front of him?”

  She compressed her lips. “Just something I’ve been thinking. My father... well, you see... um, when I think about it, it seems so . . . why don’t we forget about it?”

  She sipped at her wine and shook her head in disgust.

  “Look,” I said, “maybe it’s silly but maybe it’s not. Why don’t you tell me? I promise not to have you executed.’’

  She swished her wine around for a minute, then sighed. “It’s something—a remark my father made last year when everybody was talking to us about the fantastic salaries ballplayers make, you know?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, we were sitting around the dinner table and daddy said—it was only a joke, you understand—he said, ‘You know, with all these valuable ballplayers around, it’s a wonder nobody’s ever kidnapped one and held him for ransom.’”

  My mouth dropped open. “Your father said that?”

  “Yes, but jokingly. You have to understand, he’s always saying things like that.”

  “But in this context...” I said, wondering. “He didn’t want you to tell me this, did he?”

  No, because he knew it would sound suspicious in view of what’s happened.”

  “That’s for sure. And yet—well, why would a man have his own son kidnapped? For money, maybe, except your dad is well fixed. Hell, he even said he could raise half a million himself, toward the ransom. No, I think it’s just what it appears to be—an innocent remark that turned out to be a dead-on prediction.”

  “Yes, she said, “except...” She picked at a piece of rug lint on my sofa. There was something more.

  “Except what, Sondra?”

  “Except that his behavior... he’s been doing an odd thing since we came to New York.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, he goes out in the afternoon or evening for hours at a time, and nobody knows where.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  “Yes. He says he’s been seeing business associates, but he gets very evasive when mother or I try to pin him down. And two days ago, the day before Richie disappeared? Daddy went out in the afternoon and when he came back he said he’d been having drinks with this old friend of his, Paul Gaines of Mutual of New York. Well, mother called Paul and Paul didn’t even know we were still in town!”

  “Where do you think he goes?” I asked.

  “Well, Paul jokingly implied that daddy must have a...” She made a face.

  “A lady friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think?”

  “He’s never struck me as... that kind. And mother says, to her knowledge daddy’s never... daddy’s always been true.”

  “Tell me about the relationship between Richie and your father.”

  She shrugged and stared. “Isn’t it obvious? They’re like this.” She held up two intertwined fingers. “Of course, it wasn’t always that way. In fact, they used to fight a great deal.”

  “About what?”

  “About a lot of things, but somehow they always boiled down to basketball. See, daddy had this idea that Richie could be the greatest—I mean, the greatest. But Richie had other interests besides basketball. For a while he was interested in becoming an actor. Then he talked about traveling. But whatever he wanted, daddy would say no, you’ve got to be a basketball player.

  “It all came to a head over this girl Richie started seeing, Shawna
Parks. Richie was really in love with her and talked about marrying her in his junior year and then going into daddy’s insurance business when they graduated. Well, daddy made his life so miserable they finally broke up. Richie was heartbroken for about six months. Then daddy took him fishing and they talked and Richie realized daddy was right, that with hard work he really could become the greatest basketball player of all time. Since then, they’ve been—well, as I said, great pals.”

  “What does your mother do every day?”

  “She goes out shopping. And she really does. She comes back with something every day. It’s almost a compulsion with her.”

  “Yes, but that she comes back with something every day doesn’t necessarily mean...”

  “My mother?” Sondra laughed. “Forget it. My mother is dingbat city, she hasn’t got a larcenous cell in her body.”

  “And you’re pretty certain you’re reading your parents right?”

  She laughed nervously. “Gee, I think so. I mean, I don’t think I have too many hang-ups about them.”

  “No, your hang-up is about Richie.”

  She frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that—well, you’re pretty crazy about him.”

  “Shouldn’t I be?” Her voice quavered defensively warning me I was probing what this psychiatrist friend of mine calls sensitive material.

  “Sure, but I suspect you deny yourself a lot of things on account of him.”

  “Yes, I guess I do. In many ways he’s the most important man in my life.” She fixed me with an intense emerald gaze. “You think he’s keeping me from getting involved with other men?”

  “You do sink an awful lot of energy into that boy. Do you, uh, go out much?”

  “Of course I go out. It’s just that there’s never been anybody...”

  “As good as your brother.” As soon as I said it I could have bitten my tongue. She withered me with a flamethrower look and fingered her purse as if thinking of leaving.

  “You sound almost jealous,” she said.

  “Me? Jealous?” I laughed. “What have I got to be jealous of?” But even as I said it I knew she was right.