$3 Million Turnover

by Richard Curtis

  We slid into a frenzied, raucous tide of black kids joking about the sudden downpour as they changed classes. We followed the arrows to the principal’s office, where a beefy old-timer made out passes allowing us to visit the gym. I was sure she thought we were cops.

  “I visited Timmie Lee last night,” Roy said.

  “How is he?”

  Roy pressed his lips together. “I don’t think he’s gonna make it. And your friend Tatum—”

  “I know about Tatum,” I said.

  The unsmiling secretary gave us our passes and directed us to the gym. Attucks was a brand-new school, but despite some vandal-proofing innovations it was already beginning to show the handiwork of the world’s most prolific young artists. The gym, however, a bright, spacious, well-equipped one, was totally free of graffiti, as if it were the one place the kids revered too highly to desecrate.

  I caught Reggie’s eye in the far corner as he worked with a class on the rings. Nearby a group of gangly boys was playing half-court three-on-three, and the quality of the game was high. I studied the players as Reggie trotted over. Compulsively, I glanced at his right knee and noted the criss-cross of scar tissue where the croakers had put his patella back together. Reggie’s face was chocolate brown, round, and serious.

  I introduced him to Roy. Then I asked him if he’d ever heard of Warnell Slakey.

  Reggie’s gentle eyes hardened. “I sure have.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “I know that if I ever find that cocksucker within a hundred yards of this school I’m gonna cut his balls off. I told him so, too. Did you hear what happened the other night? There’s this kid Timmie Lee—”

  “That’s why we’re here, Reggie,” I said. “I want to nail Slakey for that little episode. I think you can help me. Roy here, who works for the Post, is going to cover the story.”

  “You just say how I can help, Dave. Whatever you need, you got it.”

  I glanced over at the game in progress. “We need a decoy, a first-rate prospect we can use for bait.”

  “I dig it, I dig it,” Reggie chuckled.

  “But the kid can’t just be a good ballplayer. He’s got to be a good actor, too. And he’s got to have balls, because this might be a little dangerous.”

  “Yes, yes,” Reggie said, rubbing his goatee. We watched the game for a couple of minutes. The kids were all over 6 feet tall, fast and aggressive, but one of them stood out. He was almost as tall as I am, thin but hard-muscled, and ferocious in action. He could leap to the top of the backboard, and knew all the schoolyard tricks like “pinning” the ball to the board, or slamming the rim so hard it vibrated an opponent’s shot out of the hoop.

  “That’s Mike Amos,” Reggie said, “He’s pro stuff for a certainty. Reminds me of Connie Hawkins.”

  He blew his whistle and the game stopped abruptly. “Hey, Frisbee! C’mere.” He turned to us and said, “They call him ‘Frisbee’ on account of he hangs in the air for so long.”

  Mike Amos left the game reluctantly and trotted over. He had a neat natural Afro with big, Clyde-like sideburns. His eyes were suspicious and his expression ultra-cool, but when Reggie introduced us his manner softened a little. “You the agent, right?”

  “Right.”

  He grimaced. “Uh, I wasn’t really givin’ it my best out there. Just foolin’ around, like.”

  “Your ‘foolin’ around’ looks pretty good to me,” I said.

  Reggie interrupted. “Mr. Bolt isn’t here to scout you, Mike.”

  “No?” he said, a little bewildered, looking from Roy to me.

  “It’s true I’m not here to scout you, Mike, but if you need any help when you’re ready to apply to college, you let me know. Meanwhile, I was wondering if you’d like to help us on a kind of special deal.”

  That perked him up. “Sure!” he said.

  “Don’t say yes till you’ve heard what it it’s about. There’s likely to be some personal danger involved—and you might get hurt.”

  “Sheeit,” he laughed. “I risk my life every time I go to the A&P.”

  I liked him. “You know who Warnell Slakey is?”

  “Uh huh. He hung around our schoolyard till Coach chased him away. Chased him good, too,” he said, grinning at the memory. I would like to have witnessed that little encounter. “You know about Timmie Lee?” he said turning serious.

  “What happened to Timmie Lee is what brought us here,” Roy told him.

  “You need help getting back at Slakey, you come to the right cat,” Frisbee said. He looked at Reggie. “Remember what you told us that day? You told us, ‘Boys, if you got to choose between Slakey and a drug-pusher, you take the pusher.’ I didn’t understand that until I heard about Timmie.”

  I felt Mike was right for the part of the eager but naive schoolyard basketball virtuoso dying to be discovered. I laid my proposition on him and he got a faraway look in his eyes, like a budding actor hearing he’s up for a lead in a Broadway production.

  I wasn’t even finished when he said, “I’ll do it.”

  “Maybe you ought to talk it over with your folks,” I said.

  “My folks haven’t told me what to do since I was 6,” he said. “If Coach thinks it’s all right, I’m ready to go.”

  Reggie still looked a little dubious, mainly, I think, because of the danger to Mike. Roy said, “Reggie, if we can nail Slakey in flagrante delicto, we can wipe him off the streets for years.”

  Reggie reflected a little longer, then said, “I don’t know about any delicto shit, but I do know I want that guy’s ass.” He looked at his protege.

  “That’s all I need to know,” Frisbee shrugged. “Now, how we gonna work this?”

  Chapter XI

  The rain had abated and the sun was breaking through high clouds when I got back to my office, and 42nd Street had that steamy translucence that reminded me of a long-lens movie shot that makes everything look shimmery and unreal. I had a gut feeling that something ominous had happened, and one look at Trish told me I was right. She sat round-shouldered at the desk, chin in hands, staring vacantly at her work.

  “All right,” I said, “first the bad news.”

  She finally looked up. “It’s hard to say what’s good news and what’s bad. The bad news is, Timmie Lee died this morning. But from what Tatum told me, Timmie was probably better off dead. So maybe that’s good news.”

  I searched within myself for an emotion. It wasn’t really sorrow, because I didn’t know Timmie very well. And it wasn’t anger, because I’d expended that already. What I felt was a kind of disgust, disgust for the senseless waste. You bring a human being into the world and you nurture him and sacrifice for him and invest your love in him and you see him flowering into something of value, something unique and useful, something that promises to reward you and perhaps even achieve some modicum of glory and bring honor to you and invest your life with a little meaning. And then some scum comes along and kills it and pisses on it. This is waste of such magnitude it’s tantamount to tragedy. I felt so disgusted I wanted to throw up.

  “God,” Trish sighed, as if she’d read my thoughts, “what a fucked-up world this is.”

  “How much money do we have in checking?” I asked.

  “Enough to pay our salaries for the next half hour.”

  “How about the emergency fund?”

  “About two thousand.”

  “Send a check for the whole thing up by messenger to Tatum and tell him it’s for the funeral. And tell him Roy’ll be in touch with him today about a plan.”

  “A plan?”

  “He’ll understand. Oh—and find out when the services are and tell Tatum I’ll be there. Now, what’s the good news?”

  “The commissioner called. Stanley Vreel has heard from the kidnappers. I guess you can call that good news. Anyway, the commissio
ner is on his way over.”

  “Did he say… ?”

  Before I could finish the sentence the door opened and Commissioner Lauritzen strode in. He was faultlessly attired, as always, but his face was pasty and drawn and I detected more than a trace of alcohol on his breath. I’m the last person to criticize a man for drinking in a crisis, but goddamn, there’s something indecent about doing it before one o’clock.

  “Can we go into your office?” he said clamping my hand briefly, more for support than anything else, and marching past me like a zombie. I followed him into my office, closed the door behind us, and opened the liquor cabinet. “Maybe just a little one,” the commissioner said. I fixed him a big one. I poured myself some club soda.

  The commissioner gulped half his drink down and said, “Stanley Vreel heard from them a little while ago. They gave him instructions.”

  “What are they?”

  “They want Vreel to bring the money up to some place in Connecticut.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “Some place called Macedonia. You ever heard of it? It’s in the western part of the state. Near the New York line. Here, I’ve got it all written down.” He pulled a leather-bound notebook and gold pencil out of his jacket and read me the instructions. They sounded like something out of Treasure Island: Vreel was to drive nine-tenths of a mile into Macedonia State Park, where he’d find a picnic table, Then he was to walk sixty paces north till he came to a certain tree. He was to leave the money under it and return to New York immediately. If he did this, Richie would be released that afternoon. There were to be no tricks—or else.

  I jotted down the instructions. “What are you going to do, Commissioner?”

  “I want to stake the spot out tomorrow.”

  “They said no tricks,” I reminded him.

  “I think we can do it unobtrusively. You know Bo Bowen?”

  “Bo? Sure. Guard, Detroit Pistons, 1968 through 1972.”

  “Good memory, Dave. Bo is an electronics expert. He does jobs for me. He told me it’s standard procedure in kidnapping cases to plant a tiny transmitter in with the ransom money. Then the FBI is equipped with these receivers and they can track the guy with the money for miles. Bo is rounding up the gear now. We can have our people planted in a wide perimeter around the drop so the bastards can’t detect us.”

  “That’s fine, but what about the guys that are holding Richie? Suppose they’ve been instructed to shoot Richie if they don’t hear from their confederates by a certain time?”

  “We’re not going to capture the men on the spot,” the commissioner explained. “We’re going to follow them to their hideout.”

  I went over the plan in my mind and shrugged. “I guess it’s as good a strategy as any I can think of. Is there anything you want me to do?”

  “Yes. Do you have any plans for the rest of the day?”

  “No sir. I’ve been keeping myself open.”

  “Good. I want you to drive up there at once and scout out every inch of that area. I want to know the layout around the drop. I want to know about paths and access roads, escape routes, the whole bit.”

  “Okay. Meanwhile, there’s something you can do for me.”

  What’s that?”

  “It’s gonna sound strange, but can you have a couple of your people follow Mr. and Mrs. Sadler today?”

  “Mr. and Mrs.—Richie’s parents?” He looked into his glass as if a genie had just risen out of the booze.

  “Uh huh. Sondra says her father goes out some days and doesn’t say where. Her mom supposedly goes shopping. I think we should check up on them.”

  “But what possible connection...? Well, why not? It’s no more crazy than the rest of this thing.” He helped himself to one for the road and left.

  I gave Trish some instructions for the afternoon and was about to leave the office when I decided it would be nice to have Sondra for company. I called the St. Regis and she answered. Her voice was husky and sensual. “Hello, Dave. I was just thinking about you.”

  “Reviewing last night?”

  “Yes. I get all squirmy when I think about it.”

  “Would you like to spend the afternoon with me?”

  “Very much,” she murmured.

  “Be under the canopy on the 55th Street side in half an hour, I’ll pick you up.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “What would you like to do?”

  She answered this with heavy breathing.

  “What else would you like to do?” I said.

  I taxied to the Pavilion and picked up my Camaro in the garage, drove down Second Avenue to 55th Street, and pulled up at the St. Regis. Sondra was waiting, looking shamelessly sexy in a kind of mock tennis outfit with a pleated white skirt and halter-top. Her bare midriff and long, tapered legs turned a dozen heads as she dashed in front of the car and hopped in.

  As we pulled into traffic inching toward the West Side, a curtain of discomfort seemed to descend between us. It was odd, but as intimate as we’d been a scant 12 hours earlier, we really didn’t know each other well enough for the sort of familiarities long-time lovers bestow on each other, the hello kiss or the teasing banter. I think she was wondering whether I was still interested in her after my “conquest.” I was wondering if she was mad at me for certain things I’d done with her which, in the bright light of the morning after, might make a nice girl like her feel a little unclean.

  She sat leaning against her door and I hunched over the wheel stealing peeks at her tanned legs as if I’d never seen them before.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Connecticut.”

  “I assume you haven’t heard from the kidnappers.”

  “We have. That’s why we’re going to Connecticut.”

  She spun around as if yanked. “Are we going to get Richie?”

  “No, we’re going to the place where the kidnappers want us to drop off the ransom money. The drop is set for tomorrow and the commissioner warns me to check the area out.”

  “Are you going to try to capture them?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What if...?”

  “We’re trying to cover every contingency,” I said. “Richie’s safety is the prime consideration.”

  She lapsed into a nervous silence and I turned on the radio. We got on the Henry Hudson Parkway at 57th Street, heading north, and listened to rock for half an hour as we drove along the stately Saw Mill River Parkway. Just before the highway widened into route 684, Sondra finally broke the silence with, “Why do I feel like a stranger with you?”

  “Maybe because you don’t know anything about me.”

  “Yes. Yes. I’d have thought that, um...”

  “Last night? What did last night tell you about me? That I’m good in bed, that’s all.”

  She slumped lower in her seat, embarrassed. Another ten minutes passed before she said, “Well, who are you, masked man?”

  I laughed. “That’s 35 years you’re asking about.”

  “We have time.”

  “Not for all of it, but I can run some highlights past you.” I told her my pedigree, going back to Northumberland and including the family crest. And I told her about my Texas boyhood, which had been divided between the ranch and the house in town. The result had been a young man divided. I loved the ranch, knew every inch of it by the time I was 6 and had mastered every task before I was 10. But I also loved the house in Fort Worth, with its fine library of leather-bound books dating back to the seventeenth century. When I got to high school I was the best-read kid in my class and my teachers started talking about grooming me for a classical education at an Eastern school. At the same time, my daddy started talking about my taking over the ranch.

  “An
d you?” Sondra said. “Which did you prefer?”

  “I preferred football,” I said. “And baseball and track and basketball and just about every other sport. And, to the dismay of all these folks who had some plan or another for my future career, I was a good athlete.’’

  “Trish says they used to call you Sleeper.”

  “Sleeper, that was me.”

  “A sleeper’s a player who lets the other team think he’s not very good, right?”

  “Right. Then, when they’re off guard, he burns ‘em.”

  She looked at me and seemed to be sizing me up. “You don’t strike me as a sleeper.” Then she clapped her hand over her mouth, embarrassed again. “I wasn’t referring to last night.”

  “It never crossed my mind that you were,” I said, fibbing. “See, in high school I was kind of rangy and uncoordinated. I moved like a marionette, arms and legs jerking every which way. People tended to underestimate me. Then I grew up and filled out.”

  Sondra reached out and touched my arm, sending goose bumps up it. “You’re still like that a little. I’m afraid. I underestimated you at first.”

  “That’s not hard to do,” I said.

  Just before Pawling, N.Y. we picked up 22 North. The countryside opened up like a panorama and we skirted some spectacular farmland. I talked about how I’d won all my letters and graduated with high honors and was inundated with sports scholarship offers. For, as Sondra well knew, the combination of athletic prowess and scholastic achievement turns college recruiters on like a bottleful of greenies. I chose the University of Texas, where I could play the best brand of football the nation has to offer but keep my hand in literature as well as take courses in ranch administration. The first I did well enough to set one or two records that still stand, the second, well enough to graduate magna cum laude.

  I looked at Sondra. “You impressed?”

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes I think it doesn’t amount to a pile of buffalo chips. Anyway, I found myself drafted by the NFL, the AFL, the New York Mets and the Detroit Tigers on account of I was also a pretty good catcher, by a basketball team that had never seen me play but figured I must be good at it, plus I had a boxing promoter tell me I could be the greatest white hope since Gentleman Jim Corbett.”