by Troy Conway
I tried soft-soaping him.
I tried browbeating him.
Nothing worked.
He was determined that I wasn’t going to exercise my constitutional right until he felt like letting me exercise it.
Fifteen minutes passed. Another group of hippies was herded into a cell next to ours. Fifteen more minutes passed. A second group was herded in.
Soon it was seven thirty.
Then it was seven forty-five.
I remembered how I had prevailed upon Walrus-moustache to have Egbert held incommunicado at the Federal Detention Unit so that I could question him.
I remembered also Walrus-moustache’s comment that the American Civil Liberties Union wouldn’t like it.
I suddenly required a new respect for the American Civil Liberties Union and due process of law.
Finally, at eight fifteen, a police sergeant came back to the cellblock and announced that each prisoner would be permitted to make one phone call. I scurried to the cell door and made sum I was first in line.
Out at the police sergeant’s desk I was asked for the number I wanted to call.
I replied with Aunt Matilda’s number in Arlington, Virginia.
“Sorry, pal,” said the sergeant. “you’re entitled to a local call only.”
“But I don’t know anybody in town. Let me call Arlington and I’ll pay for it.”
“Sorry, pal. The law says one local call, period”
“Then let me make my call from a phone booth—a pay phone booth.”
“Sorry, pal. The law says one local call on this phone. And you can’t dial the number yourself. We’ve got to dial it for you.”
I tried the soft-soap routine.
Then I tried the browbeating routine.
I might as well have tried flying through the stationhouse roof. The sergeant wouldn’t budge.
I glanced at my watch. Eight thirty.
“Look,” I said, “I’m a researcher and I’m engaged in a very important project. I’m working very closely with the federal government. If you’d like to check my story, phone Detective Marbello at the Federal Detention Unit. it’s imperative that I get out of here as soon as possible. There’s a great deal at stake.”
“Sorry, pal. You can’t get out until bail has been set. And bail won’t be set until you show up in court tomorrow morning.”
I gulped.
Then I gulped again.
I was sure that Walrus-moustache could cut through the stationhouse red tape if I could get in touch with him, but how could I get in touch with him? The only number I had was Aunt Matilda’s in Washington.
I decided to try a long shot. I gave the sergeant, Egbert’s number. With luck, he’d be home, and all I’d have to do was tell him to phone Aunt Matilda with the bad news.
No luck.
He wasn’t home.
“Well,” said the sergeant, “when you call a number that doesn’t answer, you get a chance to call another number. Anybody else you’d like to try?”
I tried another long shot.
I gave the sergeant Marbello’s number at the Federal Detention Unit.
Strike two. The p h e was answered, but Marbello was out.
“Well, That’s it, pal,” said the sergeant. “you’ve had your call. See you in court tomorrow morning.”
I went through the soft-soap routine and the browbeating routine one more time.
No luck.
A lanky man in blue took me by the arm and led me down a corridor to the street. In handcuffs, I was tossed into the paddy wagon along with a full complement of hippies. Then the wagon bumped off to New York’s detention center, The Tombs. I was shoved into a cell with three other hippies. I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances. I climbed onto the wooden plank that served as my bed and went to sleep.
I was in the middle of my third nightmare when the cell door was opened and I was dragged out. Two cops led me down a long sun-drenched corridor that opened up into a large courtroom. I was told to sit near the front of the room and wait until my name was called.
Half an hour later my turn came to approach the bench. I noticed that most of the people being arraigned weren’t hippies. They were drunks, bums and petty hustler-types. I wondered why I’d been separated from the crowd I was arrested with Then I remembered. The crowd I was arrested with hadn’t been caught with pants at half mast in a paddy wagon.
The court officer read the charges. Disturbing the peace, inciting a riot, resisting arrest, unlawful possession of narcotics, vagrancy, lewd and indecent behavior. Bail was set at two thousand dollars.
Once again I was led back to my cell. A joe-college type wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and horn-rimmed glasses came to interview me. He was from the Legal Aid Society. and he wanted to know if I had a lawyer.
I pow-wowed with him and finally persuaded him to place a call to Aunt Matilda. Then I lay back on my plank to await further developments.
An hour passed.
Then another hour.
Then a third.
Finally. after three and a half hours, a cop opened the cell door. “You can go now,” he said. “Your bail has been posted.”
Another cop led me through a couple of doors. I found myself in the lobby of the stationhouse. I looked around for Walrus-moustache, all set to gin him a piece of my mind for taking so long to come to my rescue. He was nowhere in sight But Dm Grey was.
“I figured it was my fault you got in all this trouble,” she smiled, “so I posted bond for you.” Her fingers found the collar of my shirt and she straightened it. “Would you like to have lunch with me? You must be starved.”
I glanced at my watch. It was three fifteen and I had missed my appointment with he Big Head. There was no telling what else I had missed. For all I knew, the hippies could have polluted the Potomac and swung into action on The Big Freak-Out while I was playing games with the desk sergeant.
I gave Dina a polite but quick brush-off, then dashed into the street.
I realized that The Big Head might still be waiting for me, so I skipped my usual phone call to Aunt Matilda and hailed a cab for his apartment.
Halfway there I changed my mind and told the cabbie to take me to my own apartment instead. The reason I changed my mind was simple. On the seat of the cab was a copy of the afternoon newspaper. The headline was about New York’s fifth garrote murder in less than three weeks. Beneath the headline was a photo of the victim.
The victim was The Big Head.
The cab pulled to the curb in front of my apartment. I paid my fare and started up the stain. Sitting on the first landing was Lola, the love-doll who started it all.
“I’ve been waiting all afternoon for you,” she said. “Egbert told me to get in touch with you. He said it’s urgent.”
“Where is he?”
“he’s in Aruba.”
I did a triple-take. “WHERE?”
“Aruba. In the Caribbean. He phoned me from there this morning. He said to tell you that he wants you to fly down there immediately.”
“Did he say why?”
“Yeah. He said The Big Freak-Out is ready to go. he’s down in Aruba now with Chiquita, her sister and another girl. he’s——”
“What other girl?”
“Her name is Corinne LaBeIle, he said. I don’t know who he means.”
CHAPTER 11
Aruba isn’t much of an island. Only seventy square miles’ worth. Its capital, Ornamented, is even less of a city. About as glamorous as Hoboken.
But the tourists who flock there in droves twelve months a year aren’t looking for glamour or excitement. They come for the climate. And what a climate it is. Annual average temperature: seventy-eight. Annual average low: sixty. Annual average high: eighty-nine. Annual average humidity: sixty-one per cent Average condition of skies: sunny. Average status of barometer: steady.
When I got there, it was an average day. I clambered down the gangway of my plane and into a scene that could have come s
traight from a travel folder. The sun was setting, and its deep red rays bathed the airport with soft, mellow light. A gentle breeze whispered through the swaying palm trees. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
What a change from the bad-weather capital of the world, New York! But I didn’t let myself get too wrapped up in the beauty of Aruba, I had more important things to do.
I collected my luggage and hailed a cab for Hotel Ortega, where Lola had said Egbert would be waiting for me. He was—right in the lobby. And he didn’t waste time with formalities. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got four minutes to catch a ferry.”
We dashed out of the hotel and into the back seat of a waiting taxi Egbert barked a few instructions at the tiny West Indian driver. The cab shot off.
Silver-trunked palm trees whistled by as we raced down spacious Avenida Garcia Lorca . I glanced at the dashboard. The speedometer registered sixty-five.
“How far is the dock?” I asked Egbert
His eyes were riveted to the street in front of us. “Another half a mile.”
I breathed easier. “We should make it in no time.”
He frowned. “don’t be too sure.”
The cab turned a corner and I realized why he was being pessimistic. Avenida Garcia Lorca had been a smoothly paved boulevard. The street we just turned into was nothing more than a dirt road, barely wide enough for two cars to pass.
We roared down the mid, leaving a sandstorm behind us. The cab bounced like a hopped-up exercycle.
Suddenly the cabbie jammed on his brakes. Just in time. Another cab was corning at us.
We swung to the far right of the road as the other cab maneuvered to the far left. The brush on our starboard side hammered against the windows. Still we had only inches between us and the other cab.
The pass having been accomplished, we picked up steam again. But we just as quickly lost it as we closed in on a man on horseback.
The mangy steed loped along the center of the road as if he owned it. Our cabbie honked the horn. The nag didn’t budge. There was another honk. Then another. The horse’s rider turned and shook his fist at us. But the horse stayed right on course.
The cabbie tried a flanking maneuver. As if out of spite, the horse angled over to block our path.
The horn honked again, then again. Finally the horse got out of the way and we shot by him, but precious time had been lost. A glance at my watch told me we had only a minute and a half to make it.
The minute and a half wasn’t enough. It would have been, except that we encountered a pickup truck. He was going in the same direction we were, but at five miles an hour.
He obligingly moved to the right when he saw us coming. But our cabbie was so eager to roar past him that we went off the road and into a ditch. A minute later we were out of the ditch, and a minute after that we were on the dock—just in time to see the ferry sail gracefully toward the horizon. We headed back to the hotel.
Egbert had booked a double room and thoughtfully furnished it with Scotch and soda. I poured out a healthy one. Then I flopped down on my bed and asked him to fill me in on what was happening.
“They’re on Karlota,” he said. “That’s why we were trying to catch the ferry.”
“Whoa,” I interrupted. “Who’s Karlota? And who’s on her?”
He chuckled. “you’ve got too much sex on your mind, Damon. Karlota’s not a she. it’s an it”
I remembered my conversation with him at the Federal Detention Unit in New York. He had said that Swami Swahili, presumably the originator of The Big Freak-Out plot, was rumored to be living on a Caribbean isle owned by a cult of free-love enthusiasts who had emigrated from the United States and set up a commune there. The name of the isle was Karlota
“Okay,” I said, “Karlota’s an it. Now who’s on it?”
“Chiquita. And that broad you showed me the picture ofCorinne LaBelle.”
I looked at him incredulously. “And you and I were going there to meet them?”
“Not exactly to meet them. To spy on them.”
“How do you know They’re there?”
“I saw them get on the ferry this afternoon.”
How do you know they haven’t left?”
Because there’s only one ferry, and they weren’t on it when it came back. It just left again now, and it’ll be back at ten.” He glanced at his watch. “We have an hour and a half and the next trip is tomorrow morning.”
I scratched my head. “This is getting confusing.”
“Then maybe I’d better start at the beginning.”
He took a long swallow of Scotch, then stared at the ice cubes in his glass. “Things started happening as soon as I got home from Tompkins Square Park. About six thirty a Chinese guy came by my apartment. He said that Ray Devaney wasn’t in on The Big Freak-Out anymore and that he was taking over Ray’s platoon. I asked him how soon we were going to swing into action and he said in a couple of days. He told me to stand by until I heard from him again. Then he left. I figured you’d want to hear about it right away, so I went to your apartment. You weren’t there. I figured you might still be at the park, so I went there. That’s when I heard about the arrests.”
“How did you know I was arrested.”
“I didn’t. All I knew was that the cops had picked up fifty people. The guy who told me about it said that Dina Grey was one of the fifty, and I remembered that when I left you you were sitting in the grass near where she was. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I went down to the stationhouse and asked about you. The sergeant there said that you’d been busted and that you wouldn’t be arraigned until the next morning. I figured you’d want me to keep an eye on things for you while you were tied up, so I went over to The Church of the Sacred Acid to see what was happening.”
I smiled. “you’ve really got this spy game down cold.”
He shrugged. “What the hell. You do something, you might as well do it right” He took a long swallow of Scotch. “Anyway, when I gat to The Church, it was closed up tighter than a drum. The front door was locked, and there wasn’t anybody around. I knew that The Big Head ran a show every night except Monday, and this wasn’t Monday. So I figured something was up.
“I tried the back door. It was open and I went inside. The Church was empty, but I heard voices coming from the hallway in the back where The Big Head changes for his performances. I sneaked up to the door and listened. There were three broads talking. I couldn’t catch everything they said, but the gist of it was that somebody had messed things up and now the situation was getting out of hand. One of the broads said that Ray Devaney was out of the picture and another guy was taking his place. They mentioned a few other changes too. Then they started putting down The Big Head for not being able to take care of himself. One of them said he couldn’t be trusted anymore because he knew too much. They haggled awhile about who could take his place. They must’ve talked about this for fifteen minutes, and they suggested twenty or thirty different names. But all the guys they suggested were either needed in some other part of the operation or else weren’t right for some other reason. Finally one of the broads said something like, ‘Why don’t we use his lover?’ Right away the other two said that this’d be a great idea. Then they started talking about The Big Head again and what they could do with him. Somebody said something about exiling him to Karlota, but one of the other ones wouldn’t buy it. She said he should be eliminated. That was her exact word ‘eliminated.’ And when one of the others put up a squawk about it, the one who made the suggestion said, ‘If we could do it with Jimmy , we can do it with Man’ I guess ‘Matt’ was what they called The Big Head sometimes.”
“Yeah,” I interposed. “His middle name is Matthew.”
“Anyway, they agreed to knock off The Big Head. Then they started talking about who was going to dump the LSD into the Potomac. The way I understood it, they had this barge somewhere on the river with a big vat on it. The vat contained the LSD, plus whatever chemicals and other things the
y had mixed with it to keep it from evaporating. According to what this one broad said, the guy who was supposed to dump it originally couldn’t do it because they had pulled him off the job to take Ray Devaney’s place in the Treasury Department platoon. I guess this meant that the Chinaman who looked me up was the guy who originally was going to dump the acid. Anyway, they mentioned a few other guys they might’ve tapped to dump the acid, and finally this one broad said they’d use a guy named Chang. There was some discussion about whether he’d be willing to do it. It seemed that he was a very big guy in the operation and that he’d want to stay at the organization headquarters to coordinate things instead of going out to dump the acid. But the broad who first said that they should use him said not to worry about whether he’d be willing, because now that everything was all screwed up he’d have no choice. That settled that matter. Then they started talking about you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. One of them said she had sent a guy to kill you, but he couldn’t find you. He was still looking. Then the other two started talking about how great you were in bed. They said it’d be a shame if the other broad killed you before she had a chance to rack out with you herself. She made a joke about it and they started talking about different platoon leaders—like who could be trusted and who couldn’t. Finally they agreed that everybody could be trusted except the guys in charge of the platoons who were going to take over the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior. One of them said that these platoons didn’t really matter very much anyway, and they dropped the subject. Then they agreed to meet at The Church the next morning to fly here to Aruba There was some talk about whether they should take their private plane or go by commercial jet. One of them said that the private plane would be needed for a trip to the West Coast, so they’d go commercial, but the private plane’d come down for them when it was time to fly back. I could see that they were getting ready to break up the meeting then, so I left the door where I was listening to them and went to a dark corner of the loft where I could watch them when they came out. A few minutes later, the first one came out. It was The Big Head’s mistress, Chiquita A few minutes after that, the second one came out. It was Chiquita’s sister Carla Then the third one came out. It was the broad you showed me the picture of—Corinne LaBeIle.”