$3 Million Turnover

by Richard Curtis

  “That’s true. He could have been making it all up.”

  “That day in the commissioner’s office, after we packed you up and sent you back to the hotel with Trish? We were conferring, the commissioner and Vreel and me, and Vreel opposed bringing the FBI into it. Oh, he gave us good reasons, but maybe what was really on his mind was that his chances of getting away with the kidnapping would be better if there were no FBI and no publicity.”

  “That makes sense. Since the commissioner was relying on him for advice, he was in a position to manipulate all the commissioner’s decisions.”

  “And mine too.” I scratched my cheek. “Of course, he was opposed to paying the ransom, but that could’ve been an act. He knew that sooner or later, when all else failed, we’d have to pay the ransom, so he let the commissioner talk him into going along.” I shifted my thoughts to that morning. “He called off this morning’s drop because it was too dangerous. With that bleeper gadget stuck with the money, it was impossible for him to finesse the ransom away from us. Then later today he tells the commissioner the kidnappers called with a new rendezvous plan, but there must be absolutely no tricks or Richie is finished. The commissioner asks him what we should do and Vreel, naturally enough, says, ‘I think we’d better do what they say, because they sounded like they meant business.’”

  “And that scene in the commissioner’s office today, where he suggested you were collaborating with the kidnappers? That must have been aimed at diverting suspicion from himself,” Sondra pointed out.

  “That, and destroying our last hope of setting another trap.”

  “But isn’t some of that ransom money his own?”

  “Some, but not much—maybe one or two hundred thousand, and even that was probably advanced to him by the league. No, Vreel stands to make a tidy profit on this deal—certainly enough to pay your brother’s bonus.”

  Sondra lit another cigarette, but drew on it less frenetically than the others—more contemplatively, you might say, as if she were struggling with a heavy question. In fact, she started to ask it, but got only as far as, “Dave...?”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  I didn’t pursue it, I suppose because I was afraid to. Because the same question had occurred to me, and it raised so many disturbing possibilities my blood turned icy at the thought.

  We were now on the Harlem River Drive, and Vreel took the exit lane that linked up with the Cross Bronx Expressway. I stayed behind him some five hundred yards back. We swung east on the Cross Bronx. A swarm of cars momentarily cut the Caddy off from view and I accelerated to keep up with it. That proved to be a mistake, because traffic melted away and I found myself a car’s length behind Vreel just as he turned off abruptly onto the Hutchinson River Parkway. I had no choice but to do the same, and he could not have failed to notice the maneuver if he was looking for a tail in his rear-view mirror. As I’ve said, I’m no private eye, and this bonehead plan sure as hell proved it.

  It also proved Stanley Vreel’s undoing, however, because in the next few seconds he unthinkingly tipped his hand. What he did was, as soon as he hit the Hutchinson he swerved off it again gunning the Caddy up the cloverleaf ramp and onto the Cross Bronx Expressway and driving back in the direction from which we’d just come. Up to that moment, I didn’t know whether my theory about him was correct or just a crock of high-grade cowshit. I’d figured to follow him until he either dropped the ransom off for the real kidnappers or absconded with it himself. But by trying to shake me after discovering I was tailing him, he told me the answer. For if he were innocent he’d have flagged me down and bawled me out for disobeying the commissioner’s orders. Instead, his first impulse was to lose me—the impulse of a man with a guilty conscience.

  “Fasten your seat belt,” I commanded Sondra as Vreel, realizing he’d blown his cool, pulled away sharply in the hope of shaking me completely. At that hour, around 10:30, the Expressway wasn’t crowded and the Caddy pushed up to eighty effortlessly. I kept up with him, praying for a traffic cop to do my dirty work for me, but you know what they say about cops when you need them.

  I kept him in sight as the lights of the George Washington Bridge loomed up ahead of us. For a moment I thought I’d nail him at the tollbooths, then I remembered that there were no tollbooths, at least not for cars leaving New York for New Jersey. What they’d done was remove those booths, put them up on the inbound side, and doubled the tolls. It still cost drivers one buck to go out and come back, but the congestion on the outbound side was eliminated. Consequently, Vreel flashed over the bridge into New Jersey without even hitting his brakes.

  A few moments later he veered right onto the Palisades Parkway, a scenic highway paralleling the Hudson River on the New Jersey side. He then hit the throttle full out, and if you’ve never seen a late-model Cadillac accelerating from eighty, you’ve missed one of the marvels of the Atomic Era. Despite the fact that my foot was almost down to the floorboard, the Caddy simply pulled away from us as though we were standing still.

  I took the Camaro up to one hundred but Sondra started making gasping noises, and frankly even I had a slightly woopsy feeling in my diaphragm such as I always get when I forget what my daddy once told me, which is that if God wanted man to break the sound barrier, He’d have created him with rockets up his ass. I decided to try to keep Vreel in sight as best I could at a twenty mile-per-hour disadvantage. I knew he couldn’t escape me by speed alone, because at 120 m.p.h. about the only thing you can manage is staying on the highway; to get off, you’ve got to slow down.

  Vreel got around this problem, however, and damn near got us all killed in the process. The road curved to the left abruptly, and for a moment he disappeared. I expected to pick up his lights again as soon as the road straightened out, but when it did he was nowhere to be seen. At first I thought he was up ahead around another curve, but out of the corner of my eye I picked up the red glint of a tail reflector, and at once realized what he’d done. He’d turned his lights off the instant he entered that curve, braked sharply and skidded onto the broad grass sward bordering the highway, hoping I’d zoom past him. Actually I did, but a second later I hit the brakes and swerved over the curb. For a second we were actually airborne, and when we finally touched down the wheels clutched nothing but turf. We must have cut a swath slightly longer that the Great Rift.

  I’d overshot Vreel, but he’d skidded into some bushes and was having difficulty extricating the Caddy. I swung around and raced back before he could get turned around. I blocked his car with the Camaro, flipped off my seat belt and hit the door all at the same instant. I hoped to hell Stanley didn’t have a gun, but if he did it had better be a big one because I was coming like a rhino with a toothache.

  Vreel tumbled out of the door on the passenger side just as I was yanking open the door on the driver’s side. I dove across the seat and caught just enough of his heel to trip him up. He fell on the grass with a loud grunt. I scrambled after him, figuring he’d run for it, but instead he flipped over and lashed out at me with the same heel I’d just tripped. It caught me in the shoulder and I felt something wrench where my shoulder and left arm join. It was a good shot but no stopper. My right fist itched to express my towering anger, considering all the indignities I’d suffered at this man’s hand. I caught him just under the left ear. It was not exactly on target but, like a six-iron to the green, put me an easy putt away. Unfortunately, Vreel folded before I could get a second blow in. He buried his head in his arms and whimpered, “Okay, okay, okay.”

  I grabbed his shirt and hauled his face close to mine. “Where is he, motherfucker?”

  “I got him, I got him, don’t worry.”

  “Where?”

  “A motel.”

  “Take me there.”

  “I... I can’t.”

  “Can’t? CAN’T?” I drew my fist back. “Who’s in on this with you?”

 
; “I can’t tell you, Bolt. Kill me, I won’t tell you.”

  “It’s someone I know, isn’t it?”

  He looked at me and gave a kind of mocking snort. Then he said, “I’ll make a deal with you. I give the dough back, I have Richie released, and you forget about this.”

  I glared at him. “Forget!”

  “You’re getting your money and you’re getting the kid! Tally it up and it’s nothing won, nothing lost.”

  “Vreel, you’re absolutely beyond belief.”

  He began talking fast, like a salesman pitching high-quality goods, and I must admit I could see how he’d managed to talk himself into, or other people out of, several fortunes. “Look, Bolt, use your noodle. Once you tell the commissioner, he’s going to have to take some kind of action against me. That’s gonna mean publicity. Now maybe I stand to lose the most in terms of reputation, but don’t you think a lot of other people are gonna look like horses’ asses too, including you and the commissioner? Christ, you may end up going to jail for concealing a crime.”

  “I’m not making any deals with you, Vreel.”

  “I still have the power to have Richie killed.”

  “I doubt that very much, if your accomplice is who I think he is.”

  “But you don’t know who he is for sure, do you? You think you do—but suppose you’re wrong?”

  I tried not to show him that he’d scored a point with that thrust, but he picked up my hesitation and followed up hard. “You see, Bolt, I got nothing left to lose any more, so whether Richie lives or dies means shit to me. That ransom money was my last hope against bankruptcy. I needed it to carry me until fall. With Richie as my star attraction next season, I know I could have helped the league nail down a network television contract. But I needed operating capital until then. My credit lines are exhausted, Bolt. My creditors have all but picked my carcass clean. My only other source was the mob, and you know what that would have meant.”

  “You’re a man of unimpeachable integrity, Vreel.”

  “Integrity is all I want to hold onto, Bolt. Let me off the hook. I’ll be ruined, but at least I’ll be able to start again in some other line.”

  He looked up past me and I realized Sondra was standing over us. “This is your brother’s keeper,” I said.

  “I know. I heard.”

  “Reason with him, sweetheart,” Vreel urged her with a purr. “He wants to turn me in. He does that and your brother will be dead in two hours.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “My confederate has his orders: if I don’t call in by midnight, he’s to take Richie out into the woods and shoot him.”

  I looked at Sondra. “He’s lying, Sondra. He’s bluffing. Nothing’s going to happen to Richie.”

  I saw her frown in the reflected glow of the Camaro’s headlights. “How do you know?”

  “Because I know, that’s all.”

  “Tell her, Bolt,” Vreel said. “Tell her your cockamamie theory. Tell her who you think my confederate is.”

  I brought the back of my hand down across his mouth. “Shut up, you bastard!”

  His mouth filled with blood and he choked and sputtered, but he was relentless. “Tell her, Bolt.”

  “Tell me what?” Sondra said frantically. “What theory is he talking about? Who do you think his confederate is?”

  I looked away from her, away from Vreel, and up into the starlit night. I wished I could be transported to one of those stars, just for a few seconds, so that I could return to earth with this segment of time excised like a malignancy and lost to memory forever.

  “I think it’s Richie himself,” I said.

  I looked into Sondra’s eyes for a reaction, but it was not the one I’d expected: shock. My words didn’t strike her sensibilities so much as they were absorbed by them, as if she had been somehow prepared, as if she’d thought of it herself. This was the question that had hung on her lips in the car, then had been obliterated as too painful to conceive of. This was what I had tried desperately to protect her from, yet deep in her heart, in that one corner of objectivity that had not been flooded by her fanatical devotion to her brother, she knew I was right.

  But Vreel was the devil himself. “Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?” he chuckled through a blood-filled throat. He hawked and spit. “Why would Richie allow himself to be kidnapped? For money? For publicity? I mean, you gotta be out of your mind, Bolt.”

  “How about because he’s sick?” I hissed.

  “Sick?” Vreel laughed again. “He’s the healthiest specimen of young manhood I’ve ever seen. Where do you come up with this shit, Bolt?” He appealed with his eyes to Sondra.

  “Let him talk,” Sondra said.

  “On the surface,” I said, “Richie is Frank Merriwell himself, the All-American boy, every parent’s ideal. But way down deep I think that boy is hurting bad, because the pressure to be perfect, to be the greatest ever—nobody’s big enough to stand up to it. Something’s got to buckle. Forgive me for saying this, Sondra, but I think your father broke Richie somewhere along the line. He makes his decisions for him, what team he’s going to play for, how many eggs he’s going to have for breakfast, what virtues he’s going to be a paragon of, what girls he’s going to see or not see. And he’s been doing it since Richie was a toddler. That love affair of Richie’s you told me about—when your father broke that up, he broke Richie’s will as well. What took its place was this insatiable hunger to win and to be perfect. I’m not talking about a winning mentality, now—I’m talking about something pathological.”

  “Jesus, what crap!” Vreel croaked out.

  “I saw it with my own eyes the day I played basketball with Richie,” I said. “He fouled a kid intentionally just to keep the other team from winning, then didn’t have the guts to own up to it, at least not there. Then later he told me. And he told me how he uses his reputation to build up what did he call them? —’Honesty credits’ so that when he finally does cheat at critical moments, no one will believe it. That’s how he got away with double-crossing Manny Ricci and making himself a pile of money in the NCAA final. Who’s going to take Ricci’s word against his? And now this.”

  “But why?” Sondra pleaded. “He doesn’t need the money.”

  “He doesn’t need money per se, but he needs what the money represents—freedom from his father. The trouble is, his father presses him so hard, the only way for Richie to establish independence is by stealing and conning.”

  “But he must know he’ll get caught sooner or later,” Sondra said.

  “Know? Darling, he wants to get caught. He wants to fail. Because in failing, he punishes himself. And in punishing himself, he punishes his father.”

  I got to my feet and yanked Vreel to his. Sondra stood swaying back and forth like a tree that’s just weathered a storm. Vreel opened his mouth to speak to her, but I grabbed his cheeks with my right hand and squeezed till his lips looked like a fish’s. “You’ve said enough, you little shit.”

  I could see Sondra’s shoulders twitch several times and I knew she was quietly crying. Then she sucked in a deep breath, turned abruptly, and looked at me with hard eyes, eyes so crystalline and cruel they seemed to belong to someone else.

  “Vreel is right, Dave. Your theory is ridiculous.”

  I gasped. “But you know...”

  “I know it’s almost midnight. We’ve got to get Vreel to a phone to call his friend and tell him to free Richie. You will do that, won’t you, Mr. Vreel? If we promise to say nothing of this to the commissioner?”

  “I give you my word.”

  “Sondra,” I begged, “you couldn’t be so blind...”

  “I think I saw a public phone booth a few miles back,” she said tonelessly.

  Chapter XVI

  We sat in Georgie’s Coffee Shop in 130th Street nibbling on danishes and sippi
ng coffee and watching the action across the street. There was me, my buddy Roy Lescade and Lester Pardee, a black detective from the 28th Precinct who’d been assigned to the Timmie Lee murder case. He was off duty that morning, but I’d invited him to join us on what might turn out to be an interesting adventure.

  In the playground across the street, a number of half-court basketball games were in progress. One that had attracted a lot of attention was a rugged two-on-two match up between Tatum Farmer and Bo Bowen on one side and Dennis Whittie and Red Lipsett on the other. A bunch of kids and hoop buffs were lined up on the perimeter of the court, noisily rooting for the old-timers (who were all of 35 or so). It wasn’t like when Kareem or Nate Thurmond come around, but if you like good basketball there was plenty of it that morning.

  In an adjacent court another game was getting under way, involving younger players. One of them was Mike Amos—”Frisbee.”

  “That’s your sacrificial lamb?” Detective Pardee asked. “He’s pretty good, not afraid of contact.”

  “He’s got a basketball career locked if he wants to pursue one,” I said.

  The detective looked at his watch. “What makes you so sure Slakey’s gonna show up?”

  I looked at him. He was a big, squarish man with boxy shoulders, large hands and rough features. His hair was straight and shiny, his nose and lips bulbous, and his eyes yellow and mean. He was not the kind of man one fucked around with lightly, and I was very glad he was in the employ of the good guys and not the bad.

  “I’m not sure, but I think he will. If he lets Frisbee off without making him pay, he loses his juice up in Harlem.”

  He looked at his watch. “It’s 10:45 already.”

  “What’s your rush? It’s your day off.”