$3 Million Turnover

by Richard Curtis

  That put me in mind of the fact that I didn’t even have a weapon. I’d rushed out of the house without arming myself with so much as a hatpin. Fuckin’ sons of bitches who wake you up at 5 and make you rush-ass out of the house without a shave and coffee.

  After what seemed like miles of lizarding over the dunes, I came to a halt about 25 yards away from the trestle. I hunkered down so that my head would not be silhouetted against the horizon and searched the four points of the compass for a sign of my antagonists. I was rewarded only with a glimpse of a pair of gulls who hovered over me, concluded I was neither fish nor garbage, and veered off to the sea for a more appetizing morsel.

  It wasn’t particularly cold, yet I was so hungry, tense, and caffeine-deprived that I began to shiver and twitch as I squatted on the planks waiting for something to happen. Ten minutes passed before something did, during which time the sun palely rimmed the eastern horizon. I cursed it, because it brought no heat but as I was the highest point in Amagansett it must have illuminated me like the Statue of Liberty at daybreak. I flattened myself against the plank walk, and as I did I saw my man.

  He was a short, thin figure, a man I could easily take were it not for the object that glinted purple in his right hand. He wore a heavy dark sweater and a wool mariner’s cap, and he’d been waiting almost directly underneath me at the foot of the palisade, on the beach. He moved in jerky, mouse-like spurts, like a Walt Disney cartoon figure, pausing cautiously to sniff the wind for danger. I hugged the boardwalk and made like I was scenery. I watched him pause at the entrance to the tunnel and peer in stealthily. From the way he never looked back I was fairly certain he was alone; if he’d had a confederate he would have signaled him. Still, I scanned every tussock of grass for signs of another person. If there was one and I didn’t see him, the male lineage of the Bolt dynasty would come to a halt in about 2 minutes.

  Satisfied that he was alone, I crept up to the trestle and peered through the cracks in the planks. There he was, pulling random packets of bills out of the bag to make sure the ransom hadn’t been padded with newspaper. Then he pulled the cords of the satchel tight.

  I was not too happy, to say the least, about his having a gun and my being unarmed, but I figured there was no time like that moment to make my move, preoccupied as he was with his triumph. I rolled off the trestle and swung down, aiming my boots for the hand bearing the gun. They connected and the gun went off. The report was thunderous, and not just because we were in a tunnel. It must have been one helluva big gun, a sawed-off shotgun or a .45. My hearing became a high dial tone.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst part was that I’d failed to kick the gun out of his hand. I can testify to this because the man brought it down on my cheekbone, not enough to put me down but more than enough to check me momentarily. My head lit up with starlight, but I reasoned that at least he’d chosen slugging me over putting a slug in me. I think he thought I was going under because he relaxed to watch me stagger. I darted out a hand and grabbed the wrist with the gun and shook it like a riata. The gun spun out of his hand and while he reached for it with his other hand I got a lick in with my left fist, a good cross to his temple.

  Unfortunately, it was the only lick I got in. The next thing I felt was this volcanic pain in my testicles where his knee had connected. I heard myself groan. I tried not to lose contact, but that’s easier said than done. He pulled loose and snatched up a handful of sand and smacked it into my eyes, rubbing it maliciously. I have no compunctions about fighting dirty, but this guy was doing all the things I wanted to do to him, only sooner. I folded up on the sand and there was an eerie pause, as if he were groping around for the gun. Obviously he didn’t find it, because he muttered, “Fuckin’ shit, fuckin’ shit.” I guess that frustrated him, because he kicked me in the face. Warm ugly blood flowed into my mouth and I hit the sand, arms around my head, waiting for the brain-splintering coup de grace. But it never came.

  As I lay on the sand rolling around helplessly, choking and wondering if there were any charitable organizations specifically designed for blind, deaf, and toothless eunuchs, I heard him dragging the sack off, cursing. It was impossible to say for sure with the siren still blaring in my ears, but I thought I knew that voice.

  I got to my feet as rapidly as my throbbing scrotum permitted and staggered out to the surf. I waded in up to my knees. It was bitterly cold as I scooped up several handfuls of salt water and washed the sand out of my eyes, ears, nose, and throat. The salinity stung my cheek and gums where my assailant had lacerated them, but a cursory tooth-check with my tongue indicated all the little fellows were snug in my jaw where they were supposed to be.

  I blinked several times, but despite a lot of gritty particles still lodged under my eyelids I could see all right. I sloshed out of the tide and stumbled back through the tunnel and up to the beach and my car. There was no sign of my quarry, but I still had a chance of picking up his trail. I flipped on the transponder and gave off a faint signal. I twiddled a dial the way Bo Bowen had shown us and the directional said “east.”

  Burning rubber, I dragged onto the Montauk Highway heading toward the town of Montauk. I found myself on a barren stretch of highway about four miles long. The bleeps began to get stronger. The needle on my speedometer swung to 100 miles per hour.

  A sign that whipped past indicated I was coming to a fork that divided the Old Montauk Road, which I remembered to be a narrow and winding one that followed the beach, from a new, well-paved blacktop. Here the transponder couldn’t help, since both roads went east more or less, but I chose the new highway, figuring that if I was wrong I could reverse my error faster than I could on the poorer road.

  Luckily, this time I had chosen the right road. The signal grew so loud I had to turn the volume down on my little black box; a few moments later it reached a crescendo when I zoomed over a hill and whizzed past the town garbage dump on my left. Then it began to fade and I realized I’d overshot. I made a swerving U-turn that would have warmed the heart of a Grand Prix driver, and headed back to the garbage dump. The signal was really wailing now, like a Geiger counter in a uranium mine, and it reached deafening proportions as I jounced over the cratered road through a stand of runty pines that opened on an immense land fill overlooking the Long Island Sound.

  The place smelled precisely the way garbage dumps are supposed to, and no better for belonging to one of the wealthier communities in the country. Overhead a flock of huge squealing gulls flapped, darkening the morning sky while their brothers lit on everthing in sight. I came up behind a parked Caterpillar tractor that blocked my view of the landfill. Then I bounced past it and saw a gratifying sight.

  Close to the edge of a plateau, a sort of artificial hill of sand piled on top of garbage, sat a green car of recent vintage, encircled by other automobiles including a gray Caddy I recognized as belonging to Mr. Lauritzen. My assailant was stretched over the hood of the green car surrounded by the commissioner, Stanley Vreel, and the gallant men of the American Basketball Association’s First Commando Group.

  As I coasted down the hill to the plateau, I fixed my eyes on the figure bent so ignominiously over the hood of his car. I simply wanted to confirm what I now had concluded from the memory of his voice and the sight of his car. He looked up as he heard my car approach. I got out and walked up to him.

  “Hello, Manny.”

  “Hello, cocksucker,” he spat out. Somewhere along the way he’d lost his wool cap. His right temple had an egg-sized purple bruise where I’d clipped him. Otherwise, he was the same Ratso-Rizzo looking creature I’d whiled away an unpleasant half-hour with in Queens a few days ago.

  Niles Lauritzen came up to me and looked pityingly at a face that must have looked as if its maker had finished it off with O-grade sandpaper.

  “Jesus, what did he do to you?”

  “Nothing, commissioner. I always look this way before I’ve had my first cup
of coffee. Did you get the money back?”

  “Sure. That bleeper worked so well the guy might as well have sent up flares telling us where he was.”

  “What about Richie? Did he say where Richie is?”

  “We’re trying to elicit that information now.”

  Dennis Whittie had Ricci’s arm twisted so hard behind his back it was almost touching the nape of his neck. Ricci screamed, “I don’t know, I don’t know, you fuckin’ nigger son of a bitch.”

  I gestured to Dennis, who gave Manny one last sadistic jerk of the arm for “nigger,” then let go. Manny’s eyes were flooded with tears of pain. He slowly unbent his arm, rubbed his eyes and wiped his nose with the sleeve of his sweater. Then he looked at me. “I could of killed you back there, you know.”

  “They’ll reduce your sentence by ten years for that,” I said. “That’ll leave you with eighty-nine to go. Where’s Richie?”

  “I tell you, I don’t know, Bolt. I don’t got him. Break my arms, I don’t know.”

  I shrugged. “Dennis, break his arms.”

  “Wait a minute!” he shrieked. “Wait a minute, listen to me! I didn’t snatch the guy.”

  “Wasn’t that you who called me this morning?”

  “Yeah, yeah, that was me.”

  “So?”

  “So it was a bullshit story. I don’t have the kid and never did.”

  “Then what’s this all about?” Stanley Vreel demanded.

  “It’s about robbing the ransom money. Hijacking it, you understand?” He looked at me. “After you told me Richie got snatched? Well, I started tailing you.”

  “Me? What for?”

  “Because I figured sooner or later you was gonna walk out of a bank or something carrying a sack full of money. Money to get Richie back with. I’d follow you to where you left if, then I’d walk off with it. Now do you see? Buddy, I been your shadow for days. And you never had clue one. At least, not until yesterday.”

  It made sense, unfortunately. It explained why Ricci had phoned me this morning instead of Vreel. If Ricci were the real kidnapper, he’d have known that Vreel was the one to contact. “That was you who followed me up to Connecticut.”

  “Right. I thought yesterday you was making the drop, but I guess you was just taking that broad for a picnic. After you chased me out of the park, I went back and tramped all over those fuckin’ woods, but I didn’t find the dough. So I drive back to New York, and while I’m driving I suddenly realize, Jesus, there’s an easier way to hijack the money than tailing Bolt! So I called you and said I was the kidnapper.”

  I looked at Commissioner Lauritzen. “And just about the time he was calling me, sir, the real kidnapper was calling Vreel to cancel the Connecticut drop. Pure coincidence.”

  “See?” Manny grinned. “That proves I don’t have Richie.”

  “Yes,” Lauritzen breathed, looking like he was going to cry. “But it doesn’t prove who does.”

  Chapter XIV

  It was only midmorning when I returned to my apartment, but I felt as if I’d been up since the turn of the century. I showered quickly, sending great eddies of beach sand into the drain, then shaved. Looking into the mirror was an act of sheer masochism. My face looked like the last days of Pompeii. My eyes were a network of ruptured capillaries, and I could still feel tiny sand grains under the lids. My lower lip had a long gash in it from where Manny had kicked it into my teeth, and both lips were swollen. My cheekbone had a nasty bruise the color of a lemon, and almost as large. Small wonder the doorman had gaped at me like something obscene washed up on a beach by a flood tide.

  I was ready to kill for a cup of coffee, but I didn’t have time. I dressed hurriedly and grabbed a taxi to the office, ardently hoping to rehabilitate my business affairs, which had shriveled to a shrunken caricature of their former selves.

  Trish almost passed out when she caught sight of my realigned face. “Jesus, where have you been?”

  “Down in the dumps. Anybody call?”

  “Yeah, but wait a sec and let me do my Florence Nightingale number.”

  She went to a file cabinet, stretching her pert figure to its utmost to reach a first-aid kit jammed in at the rear. Her tight little ass, smartly encased in thin slacks, and her jersey-clad breasts were a sight for sore eyes, and believe me, I overqualified for the role. She returned and with a great clamor of solicitous noises dabbed the last stubborn grains out of my eyelids with a cotton swab.

  “Poor bubby,” she murmured, pressing close to me. Her tongue flickered over her lower lip in concentration.

  “Is the bump and grind necessary?” I said. “I mean, Marcus Welby doesn’t dry-hump his patients while he’s swabbing their eyes.”

  “Marcus Welby isn’t a specialist. I am. Look up.”

  I rolled my eyes toward the ceiling and she deftly dipped the swab into my lower lids.

  “Who called?” I asked.

  “Sondra, for one. She wants to know what’s up. What is up, anyway?”

  “If you don’t put some distance between us, you’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Gosh, I’m sorry.” She gently rotated her hips and pressed her thighs close to mine. So much for distance. The only thing that went down was my resistance.

  “So? What happened this morning?” she asked.

  “We thought we had our kidnapper, but he turned out to be just another shitass trying to make a dishonest dollar. I’ll call Sondra. Who else?”

  “Your newspaper friend with the wandering hands, Roy Lescade, to remind you Timmie Lee’s funeral is today.”

  “Oh God, I really need a funeral today. What do you mean, wandering hands? Has he tried anything with you?”

  “Only if you call grabbing my boobs and feeling me up trying something.”

  “That son of a bitch. What time are the services?”

  “Noon.”

  I was hardly up to it, but I felt I should go. “Book me a reservation on the A-train.”

  She shrugged. “It’s your funeral.” Her tongue flicked faster as she applied the finishing touches to my face. Her breath was sweet and her perfume heady. She pressed herself against me aggressively and the laughter was rapidly fading from her eyes. She was starting to take the game seriously. So was I.

  “There, that about does it. Look up. Now look down. Now to the left. Now right. Now stick out your tongue.”

  I did, and she engulfed it with warm, hungry lips and sucked it like a licorice stick. It almost drove me up the wall and for half a minute I accepted the gambit, curling my tongue around hers and cupping her ass with my hands. But it was no good, and for the same old reason: she was more valuable to me as a secretary than as a lay, difficult though it was to order my priorities with an erection. I slid out of her embrace. “I’m sorry, darlin’. The same guy who sandblasted my face also kicked me in the groin and my equipment has to go back to the shop for a few days. If you really want to satisfy my appetites, how about calling down for two burgers, two French fries, and enough coffee to float a Japanese supertanker.”

  Her body trembled with frustration and she panted like she’d just come off a quarter-mile sprint. “Bastard! He didn’t kick you hard enough.” She plopped down in her chair, phoned in the order, and started typing like a machine gun. You’d have to say the girl was mad.

  I went into my office and phoned Sondra with the bad news that the operation had been called off. I didn’t bother to tell her about Manny Ricci. I told her I’d call her later. Then I shuffled some correspondence, dickered a little on the phone, and brooded till Trish came in with a green paper bag with my food order and dropped it on my desk from a prodigious height. I pounced on it like a loose football and glommed it down with obscene murmurs. I belched, sipped my third cup of coffee, and brooded some more. What I brooded about was why the real kidnappers had canceled this morning’s drop. Had they, lik
e Manny Ricci, observed me checking out Macedonia Park? There was something important here, but I had an awful headache and now I was developing indigestion from having eaten too fast too late—and besides it was 11:30 and I had to leave for the funeral.

  I walked west on 42nd Street and caught the subway to 125th. The funeral parlor was on the corner of 126th and Seventh Avenue, around the corner from the Apollo Theater. It was a well-kept little building that stood out among its tatty neighbors as if to remind passers-by that the only way to go first-class in Harlem is to die.

  The turnout was impressively large. The parlor where Timmie lay in state was thronged, particularly with kids. There was a lot of laughter and jiving, but somehow it didn’t sound irreverent. Even Timmie’s mother, a sturdy, handsome woman in a black satin dress and pillbox hat with veil, was joshing with some of Timmie’s friends. It reminded me of a New Orleans wake I once attended.

  This respite from grief was short-lived. The funeral director, a corpulent, grim-faced man in tails, shouldered through the crowd and summoned Timmie’s mother, two little daughters, and the rest of the immediate family to the chapel. The poor woman shuddered and wailed and the hubbub stopped stone-cold, as if death itself had trailed its cape over the throng.

  As the family filed out I walked up to the coffin. They’d done a good job of fixing Timmie’s face up, but I could still see the purple lacerations on his cheeks, chin, and temples beneath the make-up. The kid must have been worked over by Slakey’s goons something awful. Timmie’s face wore the same frown as the day I’d played ball with him. He was a morose kid and not very sociable, but my last memory of him was his coming up to Richie and shaking his hand. At that moment he’d been bigger than Richie, especially in the light of what Richie had told me afterwards about really having tripped Timmie, and intentionally too. I plucked a white carnation from a large floral wreath standing at the head of the coffin and dropped it in the coffin. “I’ll see what I can do, Timmie,” I said softly. I felt real bad.