$3 Million Turnover

by Richard Curtis

  “This is federal business,” I said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “I said it was federal business, porky, not your business.’’

  He smiled a sordid little smile. “Look, boys, if it’s just a little nooky you want, we do that all the time for our friends down at New York’s Finest.”

  “We might take you up on that, pal, but right now we’ll be satisfied with a look around.”

  “Help yourselves. Just don’t go busting into the rooms. I mean, at least wait till the customers are through.”

  “We don’t have time for that,” Dennis said.

  Porky inflated his chest and stepped in our path. “You got a warrant?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Dennis, show him the warrant.”

  Dennis brought his knee up and caught the poor bastard in the cubes. I’d never heard a guy’s nuts crack before but so help me, that’s the sound they made. Porky made this pathetic braying sound as he sank to his knees. Dennis looked at me and shrugged apologetically, then dragged Porky, still trumpeting like a ruptured bull elephant, into his office, yanked the phone out of the wall and tied him up with the phone cord.

  I looked at him admiringly. “Christ, where’d you learn that?”

  “Mostly playing against the Kentucky Colonels,” he said. “Never could get to the playoffs any other way.”

  Nub-nippled Melanie was standing against the wall with her fist in her mouth, and several hennaed female heads were poking through a gap in a curtain to our right. “What’s this, a bust?” one of them chirped.

  I walked over to her and poked her in the tit. “No, this is a bust, sugar. How much do you charge to rap?”

  She was a frizzy-haired broad, plump and blotchy-skinned and distinctly not my type. She looked at Melanie, then back at me. “Twenty-five dollars for 15 minutes. You want to rap longer, it’s another twenty-five for every quarter-hour or part thereof.”

  “Is there a mileage charge, too, sister?” Dennis asked Melanie.

  The fear started to drain from Melanie’s face and she looked Dennis over as a potential rapper. “It depends on how far you want to go. You want to ride around the world, you can’t get out of here for less than a yard.”

  “Look,” I said, reaching for my billfold, “we’re looking for someone. Let us stick our heads in the doors and we’ll pay you for your trouble.”

  “And if I don’t?” Melanie said resigned to the inevitable.

  “Then we’ll huff and we’ll puff,” I said. I laid a hundred dollars on her palm and gestured to Dennis to do the same.

  “Come with me,” she said. The girls crowding around the curtain backed away and retreated into a kind of parlor. They were all scantily clad and most of them were awful, ranging from plucked chicken types to over inflated pool-float replicas.

  “I seen better in Amarillo, and that’s a vile town,” I said to, Dennis.

  “You see who you’re looking for?” Melanie asked.

  “We’re not looking for a woman,” I said.

  She squinted at me. “We don’t run that kind of place.”

  “Just show us the rooms,” I said.

  We passed through a door at the back of the parlor and stepped into a narrow corridor lined with corrugated vinyl doors with latches on them. We paused at the first door. I’ve done a few weird things in my life, but this came close to copping the giant-sized fruit cake. We listened and heard low muttering sounds. I took a deep breath, shrugged, flipped the latch and looked in.

  It was a windowless room, maybe 8 by 10, painted canary yellow and lit by a dim floor lamp in one corner. It had a tiny alcove with a toilet and sink. The air was pungent with the cloying aroma of grass, plus a smell nowhere as agreeable.

  Against the far wall there was a bed occupied by a young naked couple sitting facing each other in the lotus position. Their hair was equally long and their chests equally flat, and for a moment it was hard to say which was male and which female. It didn’t matter, except academically. What did matter was that neither was Richie Sadler. “Oops!” I said, backing out. “Sorry, kids. Thought this was my room.” They looked at me through bleary eyes.

  I slid the door closed and glared at Melanie. “What the hell kind of rap parlor is this, anyway? Those people were rapping.”

  She smiled. “Maybe you’ll have better luck in here.” She gestured at the next door.

  It sounded that way. A baritone voice was grunting something that came out, “Yumm, yumm, yumm.” Melanie drew the door back herself, and if we’d been perverts we’d sure have been in luck. In the darkness it was almost impossible to sort out what we were looking at, for there seemed to be arms where the legs should have been, and vice versa. Then I realized we were looking at what the Elizabethans called The Beast With Two Backs. It also had two heads, one at each end.

  Melanie boldly switched on the light and two figures disengaged with one mighty frightened leap. The man, a pink little shrimp, was definitely not Richie. The girl, a flabby number with pendulous boobs, hissed, “Get out of here, you cocksuckers.”

  We apologized and retreated in confusion. Then I got sore and whipped open the corrugated door again. “Listen, sweetheart, you’re not really one to call somebody else a cocksucker.”

  Dennis yanked me back and hauled me down to the next room. “Your turn,” I told him.

  He wrinkled his face. “If Krafft-Ebing could see me now,” he sighed, sliding the door open. I looked over his shoulder and for a second I thought we’d struck pay dirt. A long, sandy-haired youth was astride a redhead, the prettiest gal I’d seen so far in this chamber of horrors. In the frail light, her lover could have been Richie. His head darted around and he stopped in mid-stroke. It wasn’t Richie.

  The girl looked at him. “What’s the matter?”

  “There’s someone here.” She stared at us. “You cops?”

  “Uh uh,” Dennis said. “Just walked into the wrong room. Don’t mind us, folks.”

  She shrugged. “Stick around and watch if you want to.” She gazed up at her john. “Finish me,” she sighed, squirming beneath him.

  He looked uncomfortably in our direction. “I’ve never done it in front of anybody.”

  “Forget about them. Just fuck me.” She grabbed his ass and pulled him down hard on top of her. For a few moments he was torn between private pleasure and public exposure, but the girl reached around and tickled his balls and helped him make up his mind. Soon he was banging away at her like a lumberman who’s just had his tot of rum. He was hung with one fine big rammer, and though they say hookers aren’t supposed to feel anything, her heavy panting sounded pretty authentic to me. Dennis began to back out, but I edged him back into the room. “I’m really enjoying this,” I whispered.

  It lasted another minute or so, his long strokes quickening and the couple’s sighs and murmurs and grunts and groans rising in volume until it sounded like Marshall, Paige, Larsen and Eller working out on the blocking sleds. To tell the truth, though I’ve done as much balling as the next dude, I’d never watched anyone else that close up, except in fraternity skin flicks. I was amazed, for instance, that anyone with a tool that long could work it so damned fast. He finally came with a long wolf-like howl, and if she was faking her orgasm, she should soon replace Helen Hayes as First Lady of the Theater. Her body virtually lifted all two hundred pounds of this cat off the bed, her eyes rolled, her breasts heaved and her tongue rolled around her lips. She said things to him that I haven’t heard since boot camp, and after another frantic minute or two of post-coital wriggling, he collapsed heavily on top of her.

  She turned to us, panting in flute-like wheezes. “How was that, boys?”

  “If he has a hook shot, sign him,” Dennis said as we backed out and slid the door shut.

  I won’t detail the rest of our tour. Suffice it to say it was your standard rap-parlor survey,
a lot of people running through the basic 15-minute rap and a few taking overtime with some interesting variations. The long and short of it was that Richie was not there, and Richie’s father apparently went there for the very best of reasons—to get fucked and sucked like any other red-blooded butter-and-egg man.

  All that bearing witness had instilled a strong desire in Dennis and me to try the merchandise ourselves. Dennis asked Melanie herself, who by this time had warmed considerably to his cool line of jive and went willingly to room No. 3 for a roll in the kip with him. I didn’t see anybody who really turned me on, but I finally settled for a doe-eyed teen-ager who hadn’t quite yet acquired the hard gloss of a mature hooker, though in all other respects she was thoroughly professional. She was also an excellent judge, telling me I was the very best she’d ever gone to bed with, oh yes indeed.

  Chapter XIII

  I was so bloody bushed when I got home I think I fell asleep brushing my teeth. For a change I slept soundly, unmolested by the bogeys that had tormented me the last couple of nights. But this solid rest was to be short-lived. The morrow arrived at the particularly gruesome hour of 5 AM, with the jangle of my telephone. How long it had been ringing I don’t know, but I knew it was trouble. The commissioner had arranged for his task force to be awakened at 6:30. This wasn’t any 6:30.

  “Bolt?” It was a strange voice, a contrived voice, a voice deeper than it was supposed to be.

  “Armpf,” I recall myself replying.

  “You want Richie Sadler back?”

  “Yeah, but at a decent hour,” I said.

  “Get a pencil and paper.”

  I put the phone down and creaked out of bed, went to the sink and dashed some cold water on my face. Then I got a pad and pencil. My movements were automatic, but my mind was quickly passing out of the fog. By the time I returned to the telephone I was alert and the juices were beginning to flow.

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “No bullshit, Bolt. You do like I tell you and you’ll have Richie back by noon.”

  I gritted my teeth. There was a timbre in that stagy voice that I thought I recognized, but I couldn’t place it. “Go ahead.”

  “You know where Montauk is?”

  “Yop.”

  “All right, you’re gonna bring the dough out there, starting the minute I hang up. I’ll be timing you, and if you’re so much as 10 minutes later than I think you should take, it’s good-bye Richie. I don’t want you settin’ up no traps.”

  “It’s gonna take me a little while to get the money, my friend. I mean, it’s not lying around on my dresser, you understand.”

  He paused to think about that. “All right. But no tricks. Try to fuck me and I’ll mail Richie’s brains back to you in a Baggie. Just you and the money, Bolt.”

  Then he gave me instructions for a drop underneath a boardwalk on a beach at the eastern end of Long Island, outside a town called Amagansett. Then he rang off.

  I hung fire before calling the commissioner. Something was wrong, something weird. Why had the guy called me? Up to now he’d been calling Stanley Vreel. I pressed my temples to squeeze an explanation out but it wouldn’t drop. I phoned Niles Lauritzen at home.

  “Dave? Hi, I just tried to get you and your line was busy.”

  “You tried to get me?

  “Yes. Stanley Vreel just called. As you suspected, the kidnappers have called the drop off. They know you were up in Connecticut yesterday checking the place out.”

  I could hardly speak. “But Mr. Lauritzen, I just got a call from the kidnappers. I’m supposed to drive out to Amagansett right away to drop the money out there!”

  There was a long, flustered silence. “Either these guys are brilliant or their left hand doesn’t know what their right is doing.”

  “Or there’s two sets of kidnappers.”

  “Two sets? But there’s only one Richie Sadler.”

  “Look, Mr. Lauritzen, I don’t understand it any better’n you, but this guy wants his money in two hours, and he sounded very sincere. Can we get it pronto?”

  “I’ve got to go to the safe in my office. I can be there in 10 minutes.”

  “See you then.”

  I climbed into a pair of blue jeans, boots, and a polo shirt and grabbed a sweater in case it was cold out at the beach. I was about to leave when I remembered that transponder gadget Bo Bowen had issued me. I found it on my coffee table and took it along, forgoing my shave and my coffee.

  I took the elevator down to the garage and roared out in the Camaro feeling uglier than a wart hog in menopause, mostly because I’d been deprived of my shave and coffee. I don’t pamper myself much, but those two things are my sine qua non for getting the day off on the right foot. Take them away from me and I’m a very hostile lad. When I played for the Cowboys, I never drank coffee or shaved the day of a game. By game time I was so fucking mean I was ready to break telephone poles over my knee.

  It was pitch dark at 5:15 as I drove up to Fifth Avenue and down to 666 at 53rd Street. At that hour even New York’s famed night people are in bed. But there were four cars in front of the building. I pulled up and saw Dennis Whittie. He ran over to the car.

  “Morning, Dave. Any symptoms of the clap yet?”

  “Not yet. What’re you people doing here?”

  He looked puzzled. “Why, the commissioner called and said there’d been a change of plans, that we were going to follow you out to Long Isand.”

  “Ah.” I’d forgotten to tell the commissioner the kidnapper’s warning that this must be a one-man operation, but a moment later he came out of the building, lugging a big sack with the help of Red Lipsett and Stanley Vreel. I got out and opened the trunk and we dumped the sack in. “Commissioner...”

  “You got that whatsamajigg?” he said.

  “It’s in the car.” We hunched over my front seat and turned on the transponder. It issued a sharp beep, and two seconds later another. I turned it off. “Looks good, but commissioner, this guy told me, just me and the money. If they see your all-pro panzer division we’re gonna blow this gig and maybe get Richie killed. Now, I think I can track this cat on my own, then contact you when he’s led me—”

  “Uh uh,” the commissioner said. “We’re coming with you.”

  “But commissioner...” I started to argue, then looked past him to Stanley Vreel. Vreel was looking at me with suspicion written all over his face. Suddenly I understood what was going on. “Commissioner, you don’t think I concocted this story, do you? You don’t think that I...?”

  “We’ll be a safe distance behind you, Dave,” he said.

  I looked at Vreel and mentally called him a truly terrible name. Then I cut out.

  The fastest way to the Long Island Expressway from midtown is via the Queensboro Bridge. With the lights of four other cars strung out behind me, I took off over the upper roadway and once in Queens weaved along the approach to the Expressway. I was really furious with Stanley Vreel for putting a bug in the commissioner’s ear that I had made up the story about a phone call from the kidnappers and was going to hijack the ransom money myself. I was also furious with the kidnappers for denying me a good night’s sleep, my shave and my coffee. I turned on the radio and all I could get at that hour was news and Latin music, and that just made me madder. The news was bad, as always, and I hate Latin music before 9 AM.

  By 7, as the eastern sky started to fill with pearly light and patchy pink clouds scudded over the Atlantic to the south of me, I’d calmed down somewhat. My partners’ cars were not far behind me, but didn’t have to keep in visual contact with me because of the exceeding light traffic. I rolled down the window. It was chilly but the tang of salt air was bracing. The Hamptons, the main body of towns at the tip of Long Island were beautifully etched in blue night-light as I rolled silently through them. I’d spent a few weekends out here with a girl I used to g
o with and the memory of one night on the beach with her, under the blankets on the dunes that fringe the Hampton beaches, came back to me vividly, too vividly. I slapped my cheeks to restore meanness. It’s a bad idea to go tracking kidnappers with a hard on.

  The last town in the Hampton string was Amagansett, a colony of arty-looking but expensive beach houses scattered at odd angles like toys kicked by a kid. I turned right onto the dirt road and drove slowly through the colony. Many of the houses were deserted, Memorial Day weekend, which traditionally kicked off summer, was still weeks away. A month from now, at least on weekends, the joint would be hopping with more free pussy than a convict’s daydream.

  I came to a chain marking the frontier of civilization, as we know it. I could hear but not see the beach, since the view was blocked by low rolling dunes tufted with scrubby grass. A few hundred yards west, however, where the dunes rose to a crumbly palisade, was a notch covered by a boardwalk, a kind of mini-tunnel through which bathers not intrepid enough to scramble over the dunes walked to get to the beach. It was there that I’d been instructed to leave the money.

  I hauled the big post office canvas bag out of the trunk of the Camaro. It was heavy as a bitch and I wondered why the commissioner hadn’t been able to come up with anything bigger than fives, ones, and rolls of quarters. At least it felt that way, but then I’d never hefted three million dollars before. I half-carried and haft-dragged the sack down to the tunnel and found a hollowed-out timber in the wall supporting one of the dirt sides. I jammed the sack in there, then paused to listen and look. I heard no sound but the surf and saw no sight but the seagulls and terns wheeling around the froth looking for washed-up clams, dead fish, and the usual mung sea birds eat. My flesh felt creepy because I knew I was being watched, but by whom and from where I didn’t know. My orders were to drop the sack and get back in my car and go.

  I returned to the car and went.

  I drove a hundred yards down Montauk Highway and parked. Then I dashed into a little grove of mangy trees behind the colony until I came up on the dunes, several hundred yards east of the drop, and started slithering back along the boardwalk. I was in good shape, but I hadn’t done this sort of thing since basic training at Fort Sam Houston.