Frag Box

by Richard A. Thompson

  “What are you practicing?”

  “Three-cushion banks.”

  “Wow. Tough stuff.”

  He didn’t know the half of it.

  I left the rack with eleven balls in it on a windowsill, putting only the cue ball, the eight, and three striped balls on the table. I picked the shortest cue stick I could find and chalked the tip until there was a little cloud of blue dust floating around it. Then I swallowed a slug of beer, put an unshelled peanut in my mouth so I could suck on the salt, and began.

  I started out with a simple draw shot, hitting the cue ball below center and giving it enough backspin to go straight away from me, then change its mind and come straight back. It didn’t work very well. The amount of backspin I was able to give the ball was different every time. I pulled an emery board out of my pocket, turned my back to Lefty to hide what I was doing, and proceeded to rough up the cue tip. After that and some more chalk, it worked a lot better. I got in the habit of chalking after every shot, which everybody knows you should always do anyway and nobody ever does.

  I did a dozen more draw shots, progressively increasing the angle of the cue stick with the horizontal. As it approached dead vertical, I could get the ball to come back beyond the place where it had started. Sometimes it skipped and bounced a little along the way and sometimes it wobbled a bit, but mostly it worked.

  This was pretty exciting stuff. I wondered if they knew about it at MIT or Cal Tech.

  It was also pretty trivial, compared to what I had come here to try. I took another slug of beer, shelled and ate a bunch of nuts just to stall a little longer, and finally got down to hitting the ball off-center in two directions at once.

  That’s kind of a slippery concept, and it doesn’t do to think about it too much. But not thinking about it wasn’t working worth sour owl shit, either. I could get the ball to go away to the right and come back to the left or vice-versa, but there was no way I could get it to go away a little to the left and come back even more to the left.

  I decided it was all a matter of point of view, and I tried the shot with the cue in the same place but with me facing a different way. That was a little better.

  Finally, I set up all five balls in their original locations, closed my eyes for a moment, and meditated on the mystical state of being Minnesota Fats and a Zen archery master, all at once. Then I tried the massé shot exactly fifty times. I almost made it twice. The odds were getting better, though I seriously doubted if my muscles had learned a thing yet. I decided it was time for another beer.

  As I was heading back to the bar with my empty mug, I was met by a short, pasty-faced blimp in a rumpled three-piece sharkskin suit and a striped dress shirt with a pin collar. He also had a hat that I don’t know how to describe. A real independent thinker. I hadn’t seen pin collars since the mid-nineties, or sharkskin since never mind when. And I had never seen a hat like that, though I thought it might have been what was once described as a pork pie.

  “I was told I might find Herman Jackson here. Would that be you?”

  “That would be me, yes.” And I was told a fat guy in a suit and a hat went down in the gulch last night. Would that be you? “And you are?”

  “G. Harold Mildorf, Attorney at Law. My card.” He pulled a business card out of his vest pocket, showed it to me, and then put it back, just as the Persons in Black had done with their plastic ID cards.

  “You have a client who needs a bond, Mr. Mildorf?”

  “You mean a bail bond? Certainly not. I don’t practice criminal law. In fact, I try not to even practice civil law with people who might possibly be criminals. Is there someplace private where we could talk?” He looked at the cane-backed spectator chairs around the perimeter of the hall as if they might be about to attack him, his bushy eyebrows nearly meeting as he formed them into a frown.

  “Lefty’s in the morning is about as private as anything you’re liable to find. Pick up a stick and pretend you’re shooting pool, and I guarantee you nobody will pay the slightest attention to us.” Not that there was anybody else around anyway.

  He obviously didn’t like the idea, but he took a cue stick off a rack on the wall and walked back to the table. I suddenly became aware of the empty beer mug in my hand.

  “I was just going to get myself another beer. Would you like anything?”

  “Do they have food?”

  “They have the usual bar food. Fried stuff, microwave pizza, that sort of thing. The burgers are pretty good.”

  “I’ll have two burgers and fries and a large beer.”

  “The beer, I’ll get you. The other stuff, I’ll order, and Lefty will bring it over when it’s ready.”

  “Lefty. So there really is such a person. How fearsomely droll.”

  “You’re holding the cue stick by the wrong end, by the way.” I left him to ponder the subtle geometry of tapered wood and went back to the bar, where I ordered his little snack.

  “On your tab?” said Lefty.

  “No way. I don’t even know this guy.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, he knows you. He was watching you shoot pool last night.”

  “Really?”

  “Almost the whole time. Came in after you’d already started, asked me to point you out. Another beer?”

  “I suddenly lost my taste for the light buzz. Give me a new mug of beer for my spectator friend and a cup of coffee for me.”

  “Is that on your tab or not?”

  “The drinks, yes. For everything else, G. Harry there is on his own.”

  “Got it. I’ll collect cash when I bring the stuff.”

  “Can’t say I blame you.”

  We were talking about a lawyer, after all.

  I went back over in the corner and found G. Harold Mildorf pushing the eight ball around the table with his stick, scowling at it in intense concentration.

  “I don’t believe you’ve stumbled onto your secret vocation, Mr. Mildorf. There’s nobody here to impress, so why don’t we just sit down and wait for your food?”

  “Really? I thought I was doing rather well.”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to enter any high stakes tournaments.” I gestured to a couple of chairs over by the windows, and we ambled over that way and sat down. I found a small round table that was only slightly wobbly and pulled it over in front of us.

  “I don’t really have any papers to lay out,” he said.

  “How very un-lawyerlike. But you do have about four and a half pounds of food on the way.”

  “Oh, yes. Well then, a table by all means.”

  “While we’re waiting for it, why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”

  He looked around the entire place, working his mouth in odd ways and squinting, as if some silent spy might have snuck in while we were looking at chairs. Then he leaned over close to me and said in a low, conspiratorial tone, “Charles Victor.”

  “He’s dead.” I think I upset him by speaking in a normal voice. He deepened his already monumental scowl.

  “The body on the sidewalk?”

  I nodded.

  “I feared as much. The whole point of my being here, in fact. You see, I am the executor of his estate.”

  Good thing I wasn’t sipping my coffee at the moment, because I would have definitely choked on it.

  “Estate? Charlie had an estate?”

  “But of course.”

  “Get the hell out of here.”

  “Excuse me? My food hasn’t arrived yet.”

  “It’s an expression, Mr. Mildorf. It means ‘I can’t believe what you’re saying.’”

  “Oh, I see. Get out of the hell, yes, um… Let me assure you, I am entirely in earnest. He had an estate, and you, Mr. Jackson, are his sole heir. I am empowered to give you this.” From an inside jacket pocket, he produced two or three pieces of paper that had been folded into business-envelope size. As he handed them over, he again scanned the room in all directions.

&n
bsp; “A copy of his will,” he said. “Only two pages, and not terribly eloquent. But it definitely names you as his one and only beneficiary. He even mentions his father, someplace up in the northern part of the state, so there can be no question of him merely forgetting that he had one. He mentions him, curses him, and excludes him. All very legal. You get everything, as you can see.”

  I stuffed the papers in the inside pocket of my suit coat without looking at them.

  “Besides his cardboard box and some occasional walking-around money, what does ‘everything’ consist of, exactly?”

  “Ah yes, well, therein lies the problem. I don’t honestly know, you see. Not exactly how much, and not where it is, either. I know he had something, because he paid my fee in cash and didn’t quibble about the amount. And he claimed to have something he called a frag box, which he said contained thirty thousand dollars, but I never saw it. Aren’t you going to read the will?”

  “What’s the point? Aren’t we exactly where we would have been if you had never talked to me?”

  “We most certainly are not. I have now delivered the will, as I am legally charged to do. That is not a trivial thing, you know. Don’t you at least want look at it?” He pointed with an index finger, looking as if he really wanted to pull the papers back out of my pocket.

  “Later, maybe. Tell me about this frag box thing.”

  “You realize, of course, that if you weren’t his sole heir, I wouldn’t be able to discuss it with you at all.”

  “But you just said that I am.”

  “And so you are, sir. Do you know what a frag pot is, by the way?”

  “I know what it was in Vietnam. Charlie told me.”

  “Enlighten me, if you would.”

  “Basically, it was a pile of money to pay for an assassination. Usually it was kept in an extra helmet, which is where the name ‘pot’ came in, but it could have been kept anywhere. When some troop had an officer who was really despised, they would start the collection. And every time the guy pissed somebody off again, a little more cash would get thrown in. When the pile was finally big enough to be worth risking a prison sentence, somebody would waste the officer in question and collect the reward. The preferred method of killing was with a grenade or a mine, which would leave no fingerprints or ballistic evidence.”

  “Aha. A fragmentary weapon, and hence the word ‘frag,’” said Mildorf, nodding.

  “I believe the word you want is ‘fragmentation.’”

  “Just so. Mr. Victor assumed I already knew all that, which made him a little hard to follow at times. Tell me, do you think this practice actually did happen?”

  “Some people say it was really quite common, especially toward the end of the war, when the morale was all in the toilet.”

  “Well, then, maybe the box is believable, too, who knows? Mr. Victor claimed to have a box in which he was accumulating money to buy a political assassination.”

  “Really? Did he say who the target was?”

  “He did not. And since it involved a criminal activity, I didn’t ask.”

  “But whomever it was for, now the money is all mine.”

  “Exactly so.”

  “But only if I can find it.”

  “Correct again. I think there were supposed to be some instructions to you in the box, as well. As his executor, it would be up to me to enforce them. But since I cannot ethically enforce an illegal behest, and since I don’t have the box anyway, I think it’s safe to say all that is moot. Unless, of course, you already have the box?”

  He took a large drink of his beer, which immediately reappeared as sweat on his forehead and cheeks. He took a tissue out of a back pocket and mopped at his brow. But through it all, he kept his eyes on me. If he was looking for a “tell,” I disappointed him utterly. Then his hamburgers arrived, he paid Lefty, and nothing else could compete for his attention for a while.

  “I don’t suppose you have any idea why Charlie didn’t tell me all this himself?”

  With his mouth full of hamburger and onions, he nodded absently, then looked around and held both hands up with greasy fingers spread. I handed him a napkin, and he wiped first his hands and then his mouth before he spoke.

  “Thank you. He might have wanted to, but he was trying to stay out of sight, as it were. When he came to see me, he snuck in the back way, through the fire escape stairs.”

  “That’s not like him.”

  “If you say so, I believe you. But when I met him he was definitely running scared.”

  “Do you know of what?”

  “I think he knew he was about to be murdered.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “In a roundabout way. He found it ironic. He said, as I recall, ‘After all these years, somebody is keeping a frag pot on me.’ And then he used one of those colorful expressions I can never seem to remember. Something about a card.”

  “A death card, maybe?”

  “Yes, that’s it. Thank you. He said somebody had a death card for him. Or he himself had one; I don’t remember which. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “The ace of spades,” I said. “Usually from a deck of cards with a military unit insignia on the back. Have you told the police any of this?”

  “I have told you, Mr. Jackson. My legal duty is now discharged.”

  He gulped down the rest of his food and beer, stood, belched in a most undignified way, and started to leave.

  “Stay a second,” I said. “What about Charlie’s body?”

  “I’ll play your ridiculous game. What about it?”

  “What happens to it? Do I need to make some kind of arrangements?”

  “You are the heir, not the next of kin. If you made some kind of arrangements, I’m sure nobody would argue with you. But you don’t have to do anything. I assume they will keep the body for evidence for a while and then do whatever they do with homeless dead people.”

  “Which is what?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  He turned to go again, and this time, I let him. He did not look back at me, but he continued to cast hunted looks everywhere else.

  I watched him leave, and wondered what, if anything, I should do about him. Even more, I wondered what I should do about Charlie’s body. I hoped they wouldn’t burn it. Then I remembered the will.

  I pulled the papers out of my pocket and unfolded them. The first page seemed to be all preamble, with Mildorf’s business address and Charlie’s military service number, which was all he had in the way of ID. There were a lot of wheretofores and inasmuchas-es and ipso factotums that finally got us to the second page, where the real meat was. Once you got to it, it took only about half a page more for Charlie to call himself sane and me his heir. His scrawling signature, in real lawyers’ blue ink, took up half of the remaining space, leaving a couple inches at the bottom that had something else written on it.

  Printed in block letters, all caps, in pencil, it said simply, “YOU ARE BEING WATCHED.” If it was true, it was definitely too bad, because somewhere out there was a box that might just contain thirty thousand dollars. And I rather badly needed twenty-five.

  I decided I had hit enough pool balls for one day.

  Chapter 7

  Fox and Geese

  As I stepped out of the door from Lefty’s, I scanned the sidewalk and the parked cars for a tail, but I couldn’t spot one. But then, if it was any good, I wouldn’t, would I? In a standard cougars-and-rabbits operation, there would be at least four shadows, two on each side of the street. Of course there was also the distinct possibility that G. Harold Mildorf was a babbling lunatic, which would also mean that I wouldn’t spot a tail, because there wouldn’t be one. But my gut instinct was that G. Harold was correct. And at some other level, I think I wanted him to be. Maybe I had acquired a will in more ways than one. It was time to engage the enemy.

  I paused in front of Lefty’s a bit longer, to let a couple of young black wome
n pass in front of me. One was tiny and fragile-looking and incredibly pretty. From her size alone, I would have said she wasn’t yet a teenager, but she had an air of quiet sorrow and dignity about her that made her look much older. She was pushing a baby stroller. Her friend was bigger, and there was nothing either pretty or quiet about her. She was also pushing a stroller, walking with something between a waddle and a swagger, gesturing wildly, and running her mouth non-stop. Since they were going in my direction, I fell in about ten paces behind them. But I could have heard the big one from a block away.

  “So I says to her, ‘What you trippin’ on me about, bitch? Cramped chickenhead like you ain’t got no call to be dissin’ me. Shit, you ain’t even got no call to live.’ An’ she couldn’t think of nothin’ to say to that. Humph!”

  She looked over at the small woman with a flash of triumph in her eyes. But the other one made no reply of any kind. She simply continued to look down and push her stroller at a slow, deliberate pace.

  Getting no reaction, the big one decided to try again, with a slightly amped-up script.

  “So I says to her, ‘You better back off, bitch. You think you so phat, but I munna take you…’”

  I decided that ten paces hadn’t been nearly far enough. I stopped and took out a cigarette that I didn’t really want and took my time lighting it, as if I couldn’t concentrate on such a complicated task and walk at the same time. The stroller pushers were going awfully slowly, but I was determined to stall around long enough to let them get at least a half a block ahead of me.

  That was when I spotted the first one.

  Across the street and a little behind me, a tallish, nondescript guy in a dark nylon windbreaker and a mad bomber hat was suddenly taking a great interest in a storefront window. Innocuous enough, except the particular glass he was looking into belonged to a store that had been out of business for some three or four years. Now the place was used to store furniture that had never been taken out of its shipping cartons.

  If they were running a classic box, Mr. Windbreaker’s partner would be on my side of the street, maybe a half a block back. I looked back that way and saw a medium-height man in a crumpled raincoat walking away from me. He hadn’t come out of Lefty’s, or I would have noticed him there. And there weren’t any other businesses in that block. Cougar number two. Three and four would be another half a block back.