But there was no reel of tape inside. Instead there were a lot of little plastic bags, each filled with whitish powder.
“My God,” she said.
“What is it, Barbara?” But without being told, I already knew, and a cold chill went up my back and across the top of my head.
“Jesus,” she said. She lifted out one of the plastic bags, unfolded the top, and sniffed inside. “Cocaine,” she said.
My mind was sort of stopped and I felt cold and weak. “Are you sure?”
“I ought to know what it is. When my boyfriend got busted, he had a jar full of coke hidden in the spice rack.” She put the top back on the tape box and quickly we checked the rest of the boxes. They were all filled with the same thing—little plastic bags filled with cocaine. “Wow,” Barbara said. “You’re sitting on a fortune.”
“How much is it worth?”
She shrugged. “All I can do is guess. I’d say you might have a kilo of the stuff here, more or less.”
“A kilogram?”
“Yeah,” she said, “about two pounds. It’s probably worth twenty-five thousand dollars, maybe more. That’s wholesale. By the time it reaches the street, it’ll be worth a hell of a lot more—maybe a quarter of a million dollars.”
I gulped. “A quarter of a million dollars?”
“I don’t know exactly,” she said. “Since my old boyfriend got busted, I’ve been out of touch.”
She put the tops back on the boxes and stacked them up. Then she began waving the wrapping paper in the air. “We’ll give the turps a few minutes to dry,” she said.
“Barbara,” I said, “the whole thing is crazy. Why would Superman give me the stuff to carry around?”
“Why not?”
“I’m just a kid. I might lose the stuff. I might leave it on the subway or something.”
“That’s true. On the other hand he probably figured that if he told you it was tapes of your music you’d be pretty careful about it. Anyway, I guess he figured it was a lot safer than carrying the stuff around himself.”
“Why?”
She lit up a cigarette and thought about it a minute. “Does this Superman or whatever he calls himself travel abroad a lot?”
“All of these A. and R. guys do. Camelot has got a couple of English groups under contract, and some Latin bands from Mexico. He goes all over the place to record them.”
“That’s it, then,” she said. “Probably he’s acting as some kind of funnel for drugs coming into the country. He’s in a good position for it. There have always been a lot of drugs mixed up in the music business; there are always dealers hanging around. So Superman would have contacts here for getting rid of the stuff. The problem would be getting the drugs in—cocaine from Mexico or South America, heroin from Europe.”
“Why would he do it? He’s got a big job.”
“Maybe he’s a user himself. Maybe somebody’s got something on him and they’re blackmailing him, maybe he’s just greedy. Who knows? But traveling around like that with a lot of luggage—amplifiers and recording equipment and so forth, he’d have a lot of places to hide drugs. After awhile the customs people would get to know him. I mean he’s a big record company executive, who’s going to suspect him? So one way or another he gets the stuff in, and then his problem is to move it around New York.”
“I can’t see why that’s a problem, if he’s got the stuff disguised as tapes.”
She shook her head. “He doesn’t want to walk around New York carrying cocaine himself. Suppose his contact gets busted; the narcs stake the place out and there’s your buddy Superman walking in with a kilo of cocaine. They’d lock him up and throw away the key. In fact, if he can avoid it, he doesn’t even want his contact to know who he is. A lot of times when they nail the contact, they’ll let him off with a light sentence if he’ll finger the guy above him. So the best thing is for nobody to know who you are.”
“But I know. I could finger him.”
“Sure,” she said. “If you got caught with the stuff undoubtedly you would, and Superman knows that. But he’ll just deny it. The only way they can get him is if they actually catch him handing the drugs over to you.” She took a long pull on her cigarette. “Okay, suppose you get caught making the delivery. So you finger Superman. Now what they have to do is set it up so that there are some undercover agents in the room when Superman gives you the drugs, or at least they’re staked out where they can come bursting in at the crucial moment. That isn’t going to be easy up there in the Camelot offices. Strangers can’t come wandering around without him knowing about it, and you can’t very well bring in an undercover guy disguised as your Pop—Superman just won’t produce the drugs with somebody else around.” She shook her head. “It isn’t a hundred percent foolproof, nothing is, but it’s a lot safer than moving the drugs around himself.”
“So I get busted instead of him.”
“Georgie,” she said, “that is one big problem. We’re going to have to do some thinking about that.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “I guess the turps is dry. Let’s wrap the stuff up.” She wrapped the boxes back in the paper, scotch-taped them and tied them up with the twine. Because she was an artist she could do it practically perfectly, with all the creases in the brown wrapping paper exactly in the right places. When she got finished it looked as if it had never been opened.
“That’s pretty good,” I said.
“I’ve got good hands,” she said. “I should have been a thief. The main question, Georgie,” Barbara said, “is what are you going to do about it?”
“I know,” I said. “I know that’s the main question.”
“And there’s only one answer. Take that box to the police.”
I sighed. “Yeah.” I was feeling pretty gloomy. “There goes George Stable, the Boy Next Door.”
“It’s better than going to jail.”
“They don’t put kids my age in jail, do they?” “They sure as heck will do something when they find out you’re hauling a kilo of cocaine around New York. Besides, you don’t want to be mixed up in this stuff anyway. It isn’t healthy work.”
To tell the truth, the idea of squealing to the police on Superman scared me a lot. It seemed to me that he was more dangerous than the police. I mean if the police caught me with the stuff, why I’d explain what had happened, and I didn’t think they’d put me in jail. But Superman could do anything; there wasn’t any knowing what he would do. Boy, did I ever wish I hadn’t got curious about my tapes.
“Barbara, I’m scared of squealing on Superman.” “I can believe that, Georgie. He sounds pretty bad.” “Damon Damon says he probably murdered some guy.”
“Murdered somebody?”
“Well, they don’t know that for sure. Damon Damon said they couldn’t pin it on him, but during the time that Superman was being busted somebody got killed. Damon Damon says he was stabbed in the back with some kind of pointed thing.” “A knife?”
“That was the funny thing, Damon Damon says it didn’t seem to be a knife so much as a sort of spear wound.”
“And they think Superman did it?”
“I guess they could never prove it,” I said.
She lit a cigarette and sat there thinking for awhile. Then she said, “Well look, Georgie, there’s one other thing you could do. You could just take the stuff back to Superman tomorrow and tell him the guy you were supposed to deliver it to wasn’t home. It’s true, isn’t it? You weren’t lying about that, were you?”
“No, honest, that’s true. I rang his bell about six times and nobody answered.”
She went on smoking and thinking. “That’s funny,” she said. “I don’t see why he’d have sent the stuff over if he wasn’t sure the contact was home.” She smoked some more. “Well, listen, Georgie. It’s up to you. If it were me, I’d go to the police. But if you decide to just take it back to Superman, I’m not going to squeal on you.”
“You think he’ll be able to figure out we opened the package?”
She picked it up and looked it over carefully. “No,” she said finally. “I did a pretty good job. If you take it back to him and tell him the guy you were supposed to deliver it to wasn’t home, he ought to believe you.”
“I guess I better think about it,” I said.
She got up. “I was planning to go to the movies,” she said.
I didn’t want to stay there alone with a quarter of a million dollars worth of cocaine. “Is it okay if I go, too?”
She grinned. “As long as you’ve got your own money, fella.”
So we went to the movies. All the way over I kept turning it over in my mind, whether I should go to the police or whether I should just give the stuff back to Superman and forget about it. There were a lot of problems either way. If I went to the police there’d be a big mess, and I figured I was already in enough trouble as it was. I mean it was likely that Uncle Ned had called the cops to tell them I’d run away; that was just to begin with. And then of course the cops would want to know where Pop was, and they’d call him up in Paris and the next thing I knew he’d be flying home with Denise, good and sore at me for spoiling their vacation. And it’d be the end of The Boy Next Door, that was for sure.
On the other side of it, suppose I took the package back to Superman, and he gave it back to me and just said to take it over to the guy that night. I’d be right back where I started from, only worse off, because I’d know it wasn’t tapes I was delivering, but cocaine, and that was illegal for sure. I went on thinking about it all the way over to the Waverly Theatre and even during the movie it kept popping up, even though it was the Marx Brothers in The Big Store. And when we came out of the movies I went back to thinking about it again, although Barbara bought me a peanut butter fudge cone at Baskin and Robbins to take my mind off my troubles. I still hadn’t decided anything by the time we got home. I walked up the stairs in front of Barbara thinking about it. My mind was occupied so that at first I didn’t realize that the door to the apartment was unlocked when I pushed it open.
But Barbara did. “Georgie,” she hissed.
Then I realized, and stepped back. “Didn’t we lock it?”
“We sure did,” she said. “Get ready to run, they may still be in there.”
I stood back, and she kicked the door open. It swung back on its hinges, and there was silence. We stood there waiting. But there were no sounds. “I guess they’re gone,” she said. “I hope they didn’t get my Nikkon,” she said. “They probably got your father’s high fidelity.”
But when we walked in, the high fidelity was there, and so was Barbara’s Nikkon, sitting on Pop’s taboret. There was only one thing missing—the package of cocaine from the table where we’d left it.
Chapter
It was a good thing I was sleeping in my own bed that night, because if I’d been sleeping anywhere else I wouldn’t have slept any all night, whereas in my own bed I was able to sleep some, at least. Oh, how I wished I’d never heard of Camelot Records and The Boy Next Door, and being rich and famous; I wished I was just some ordinary kid who was bored all the time and had nothing to do but wait around until he was grown up. But it was too late for that. The cocaine was gone, and what was I going to tell Superman? I went on thinking about it all night. First I’d tell myself that Superman would believe me. I’d explain that somebody broke into the apartment and swiped a lot of stuff, and naturally he’d believe me. Thinking that would make me feel a little better, and I’d sort of doze off. And then all of a sudden I’d shoot right up awake again thinking, what if he didn’t believe me, he’d probably torture me or something to find out what I’d done with the cocaine. Then I’d tell myself that was crazy, nobody would ever do a thing like that. And after awhile I’d get myself calmed down and doze off again; and then something else would cross my mind and I’d shoot awake. It went like that all night, and what with all that stuff going back and forth in my mind, I didn’t remember until I actually got up and was eating some eggs that Barbara Feinberg made for me that I was supposed to go up to Sinclair’s house that morning and get my picture taken being The Boy Next Door. Suddenly, what a relief. The minute I showed up there Uncle Ned would capture me and turn me over to the police. That would be the end of Superman and The Boy Next Door and all the rest of it.
“Listen, Barbara,” I said. “Uncle Ned is bound to keep me from going back to New York. He’ll make me stay there. And Woody’ll tell Superman that I was in trouble with my family and couldn’t be The Boy Next Door, and Superman won’t be able to do anything about it.”
“What about the cocaine?”
“I’ll just say the guy wasn’t at home so I left it by the door. I mean that’s a pretty dumb thing for anybody to do, even a kid, but kids do a lot of dumb things.”
“Well, maybe,” she said. “He might believe it.” She lit a cigarette and leaned over her coffee, thinking about it. “It depends on how crazy he is. If he isn’t crazy, he’d probably believe it. There isn’t any reason not to.”
“Well, that’s what I’m going to tell him,” I said. “If he ever catches up to me and asks.”
“You think your Uncle Ned will keep you from coming back to New York?”
“Oh, God yes. That’s his big thing, making sure that everybody is perfect.”
By the time I got up to Camelot, I was feeling a lot better—pretty nervous all right, but not scared completely to pieces. Woody was there with the two public relations guys and a photographer. We milled around for awhile, and then we milled down the elevator and got into a Rolls Royce that was waiting out front of the Camelot Building. Woody and the photographer and I got into the back seat, and the two P.R. guys got in front.
I didn’t have much of an idea how to get to Pawling but one of the P.R. guys figured it out from a map. Off we went up the West Side Drive. “I’ve never been in a Rolls before,” I said.
“It’s for the image,” the round P.R. guy said.
“I would have thought The Boy Next Door would have some cheap old car,” I said.
“Not your image. Our image.” he said.
“I used to have a Rolls once,” the skinny one said. “A Rolls-Canardly.
“A Rolls-Canardly? What’s that?” I said.
“Rolls down one hill, can hardly get up the next.”
“Oh boy,” Woody said.
The round one drove and the skinny one sat beside him fooling around with the map. As we went up the West Side Drive away from New York and all my problems, I began to feel a little better. The more I thought about wheeling up to Sinclair’s house in the Rolls with the photographer and these other people swarming around me, the better I liked it. It was going to be star time finally, even if it was only going to last for a day. Sinclair and his straight A’s and his damn computer were going to look like pretty small potatoes. He’d have to stand around and watch me get photographed and envy me and sulk. It served him right for boring me to death.
“Listen,” I said. “If I’m the star, how come I have to sit all crowded up in the back?”
“Calm down, George,” the skinny one said. “We’ll tell you when you’re famous.”
“Better not mouth off,” the fat one said. “He might get lucky and they always take their revenge when they get famous.”
“How come I never got famous?” the skinny one said. “I was supposed to be a famous writer, and look at me— a public relations man.”
“I had my disappointments, too,” the round one said. “I wanted to be a public relations man.”
“I thought you were a public relations man,” I said.
“He thought he was making a joke,” the skinny one said.
Woody sighed. “If you guys are going to keep the wit going all the way up to Pawling, I’m getting off here,” he said. “Let’s talk about something sensible. Did anybody see the Mets last night?”
So we talked about the Mets, and then everybody began telling music business stories, which are crazy and fascinating and made me laugh. And on we drove in th
e Rolls-Royce, going seventy and eighty miles an hour up the various parkways, and about an hour later we reached the outskirts of Pawling.
Around then I began to get kind of nervous again. What was Uncle Ned going to say when he saw me?
“Where do we go?” the round one asked.
„I’m not sure,” I said.
“I thought this was your hometown.”
“I haven’t lived here much since it got to be my hometown,” I said.
“We could ask somebody directions,” the skinny one said, “but I’d rather not. The Boy Next Door shouldn’t have to ask directions to his own house. It doesn’t sing, if you get what I mean.”
“I think it’s down this way,” I said. We made the turn and drove along for awhile and soon I began to recognize where I was; and all of a sudden we pulled up to Uncle Ned’s house. I got out, walked up onto the porch, opened the front door and, my heart pounding, shouted, “Anybody home?”
Nobody answered. Where was everybody? I was counting on being recaptured. I walked into the kitchen. “Anybody home?” I shouted again. But still nobody answered. So I went back out the front door. The photographer was taking his equipment out of the trunk of the Rolls and Woody and the P.R. guys were milling around, looking at the house.
“I thought you said the place burned down,” the round one said.
“I guess they got it fixed up already,” I said.
“That was fast work,” Woody said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, it was coming up to their twentieth wedding anniversary and they had this big party planned, so my uncle hired a lot of extra men to get the job finished in a hurry.” I could tell by their faces that they were having a hard time believing that, but they didn’t say anything. “My uncle and my aunt aren’t at home.”
“That’s a shame,” the skinny one said. “I was looking forward to meeting Aunt Bob.”
“Cut that stuff out,” the round one said. “You want us to get thrown off the place?”
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