The middle linebacker of the Eagles, who was known as one of the toughest in the business and had been quoted as saying “anyone who doesn’t like to hit and be hit shouldn’t play pro ball,” came over to the applicants’ table and asked them how they liked their lunch. He volunteered that pro football was really hard work and sometimes he wished he could make his living at something else. This broke the ice and other players came over to chat but the head coach broke it up, saying the players were there for work, not socializing.
Lerone Marion Bettee, six-foot-six, 267 pounds, and built like a clothes hamper, complained loudly that the players should never have spoken to the applicants because the applicants belonged in the stands, not on the playing field or in the players’ dining room.
By mid-afternoon when all the newsmen had gone, Remo and another man had still not played. An assistant coach told them to come back next year and that they would now be given an Eagle pennant as a souvenir.
“I came to play and I’m going to play,” said Remo.
“Tryout day is over.”
“Not for me,” said Remo. “I’m not going until I get a chance.”
“It’s over.”
“Not for me.”
The assistant coach trotted to the head coach, who shrugged, mumbled a few words, and sent the assistant coach back to Remo.
“Okay. Get out there at cornerback. We’ll run an off-tackle play and you can stand on the field. Don’t get in the way of the runner if he should get by Bettee, because you’ll get hurt.”
“I play middle guard,” said Remo. “I played it in high school.”
“You can’t go into the pit. You won’t get out in one piece.”
“I want to play middle guard,” said Remo.
“Look. So far, no one has gotten hurt real bad. Don’t spoil our record.”
“I’m playing middle guard,” said Remo and trotted out to the scrimmage line. For the first time in football history a real killer was on a football field. If the coach had known what was really entering the scrimmage, he would have locked his team up in Fort Knox to protect them. But all he saw was a little nuisance, so he waved to his offensive center and right guard to gently box in the intruder on the next play so everyone could get back to work.
Remo got down in the four-point stance he had learned in high school, but it now felt unnatural for his body. It was a bad placement of the centrality of his being, so he stood up. His shoulders barely topped the crouching center and guard, who were just an arm’s height from the playing surface.
The cleats felt unnatural on the hard-packed summer grass so Remo kicked them off. He could smell the sharp sweat of bodies before him and even the meat on their breath. The quarterback who looked so small on television was a good four inches taller than Remo. The center snapped the ball, the quarterback rammed it into the stomach of Bobby Joe Hooker, whose bulk churned to right tackle. Center Raymond Wolsczak and guard Herman Doffman rose to gently box in the little man in stocking feet, lest he get between the runner Hooker and the defensive tackle, Bettee, and wind up in the hospital. Or the morgue.
But as they moved, the little man was not there. Doffman felt something brush by him and so did the quarterback. Hooker felt the ball hit his stomach as the quarterback handed off, and then felt what he later described as a sledgehammer in the stomach and somehow the intruder was casually trotting toward the goal line with the football tucked under his arm, straight-arming imaginary opponents. Remo Williams, Weequahic High School middle guard, who had never even made all-Newark,
“He slugged me,” gasped Hooker, pointing at the quarterback from his kneeling position. “He slugged me.”
“All right. You with the football,” yelled the head coach. “Give it back and get your pennant.”
“This is a tryout,” said Remo, returning for scrimmage. “I’m not going until you prove to me I haven’t made the team. Just once, prove it,” said the former Weequahic mediocre.
“Okay,” said the head coach, a tall man whose paunch filled out a white sweat shirt at girth. “Wolsczak and Doffman, move the little guy already. Same play. Off tackle. Hooker, get off your damned knees.”
“I can’t move, coach,” said Hooker.
“Well then, run it out, Hooker,” yelled the coach and the trainer and water boy helped him from the field. “You there. Bettee. What are you doing lining up behind the middle guard? You’re the left tackle, dummy.”
With a grunt, and a malicious smile, Lerone Marion Bettee sidestepped to the left but kept his eye on the frail, shoeless middle guard.
“Leave him alone,” the all-pro middle linebacker whispered to Bettee and when the ball was snapped, he blocked Bettee, his own defensive teammate, to stop him from pulverizing the little guy without shoes.
The caution was not needed.
There was the amateur, wiggling down the field again and second-string fullback Bull Throck was on his face, three yards behind the line of scrimmage. Doffman was holding his shoulder and wincing in pain and the center was still looking for his blocking assignment.
“What is the matter with you?” yelled the head coach. This time he called for a right side sweep and Lerone Marion Bettee couldn’t wait for the little man without shoes to get in his way. But all he saw was the flash of white socks and Willie Jeeter scurrying around the right side of the line was dumped precisely two yards behind the line of scrimmage. Jeeter did better than the fullbacks. He held on to the ball.
By the fourth play, five men had been injured and the little fellow in white socks had made four tackles in a row, two of them stealing the ball. The head coach, known for his shrewdness in judging talent, began to suspect he might have something here. He promptly bawled out an assistant coach for not spotting the guy earlier.
“You,” he yelled at Remo. “What’s your name?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Remo, whose mouth was again deliciously free of salt. “I’ll take my pennant now and go.”
Remo walked toward the sidelines and the coach yelled out, “Stop that man,” which was all Lerone Marion Bettee had to hear. With awesome speed for his overpowering bulk, Bettee was charging across the field to clip the little fellow from behind. But what Bettee did not realize was that every man, and especially someone of his size, creates air pressure when he runs and while most people, especially those with eyesight, are not sensitive to those pressures, the frail little guard was sensitive even unto his muscle fibers. Bettee plowed down into the man and kept on plowing into the ground. The man kept walking away. Bettee’s right forearm, which had been a weapon of war in the National Football League, was numb. It would remain that way for eighteen months. Bettee lay on the ground paralyzed. In a week, he would be able to move his head, and in a month, he would begin to walk again.
“You there, Bettee,” yelled the coach. “Run it out.”
He turned to one of the assistant coaches. “Well, we got that little fellow signed anyhow.”
“All we have are liability releases, coach. You said we shouldn’t waste the other forms on the tryouts.”
“You’re fired,” said the coach. He scrambled across the field after Remo. He said the young man showed promise and since the coach liked him and he seemed to be a real team player and the team could go all the way this year, he was offering Remo a chance to get in on the ground floor. The minimum contract, which left him all that wonderful room for salary growth.
Remo shook his head. He shook his head as he put on his street clothes, all the way through three final offers, the last two of which the coach assured him priced him out of the National Football League.
“We can always draft you and then you go nowhere.”
“Draft away,” said Remo. “You don’t even know my name.”
“Yes, we do,” said the coach, looking at a release form. “We have your signature, Abraham, and you’re ours. You really are. Now be reasonable, Mr. Lincoln. You’ve eaten our food, soiled our uniforms, you owe us something.”
&nb
sp; Back at the hotel, Smith was furious. He sat stone-faced as Remo entered. Chiun was watching his daytime serials. Remo and Smith went into the bedroom, so as not to disturb the Master of Sinanju.
“Chiun seems to think your disappearance when you were supposed to be here is some sort of a progression,” said Smith. “I consider it undependable.”
“Have an Eagle pennant,” Remo said.
“I hope you’re happy,” Smith said. “Because you are going to bodyguard someone whom we are not even sure is alive, whose whereabouts we do not know, and who has to be guarded against assassins we do not know.”
“Your unparalleled intelligence service is up to par, Smitty,” said Remo.
“We have one lead,” Smith said. “One possibility. What do you know about acid rock?”
“It’s loud,” Remo said.
CHAPTER THREE
“I DON’T LIKE THAT KIND OF MUSIC,” said Willie “The Bomb” Bombella.
Morris Edelstein made sure the intercom that connected him to his secretary was off. For a little final security he ran a small metal detector around his office walls again. He locked his telephone in his top desk drawer which was lined with lead, because, as anyone knew, even a dead telephone receiver could be a line for a bug.
“What’re you doing?” asked Willie the Bomb.
“Shut up,” said Morris Edelstein.
“You think every place is bugged. You’d think your own bathroom was bugged to catch your farts, Mo,” said Willie the Bomb.
“It so happens I found a bug in the hamper last year,” Edelstein replied.
“The feds?”
“No. My ex-wife. But it could have been anything, anyone.”
“You worry a lot, Mo,” said Willie the Bomb, and he placed his two giant hands on his massive belly that stretched the middle of his size eighteen extra-large silk shirt. A small gray fedora topped a craggy face made craggier by a scar across his nose, suffered when an union dispute was settled with baseball bats. Against Willie the Bomb’s face, the bat finished second. It broke, Along with its wielder’s left arm and back. When the bat-wielder was released from the hospital, he found out something very strange about his front door lock. It did a funny thing when you turned the key. It took off the front of the house.
Police in St. Louis attributed this to a bomb and questioned Willie “the Bomb” Bombella at length. But Willie said nothing, on advice of his attorney, Mo Edelstein, who triumphed once again over the unfair police harassment of his client, reinforcing the constitutional concepts of men like Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton, and making it possible for at least three St. Louis citizens a year to get surprises when they started their cars, opened their front doors, or peeked into unexpected packages.
“I wanna see my lawyer, Mo Edelstein,” were the words used over and over again by Willie the Bomb, who had a good thing going, except for one little flaw. Which was what Edelstein had called him into the office about that morning.
Edelstein locked the metal detector in another drawer and lowered the shades, shutting out what might charitably be called the St. Louis skyline, but more accurately the surviving remnants of a city that went from frontier outpost to slum with barely a pause at civilization.
“First of all, Willie, I am not broaching this subject because I think you like acid rock.”
“I don’t like it at all,” said Willie, “but I own a piece of Vampire Records.”
“Which doesn’t make you much money, right?”
“It’s only a little piece,” said Willie.
“I understand,” said Mo Edelstein. “You’re a good client, Willie.”
“Thank you, Mo.”
“And only one thing would make you a perfect client. One small little thing, Willie.”
“What is it, Mo?”
“Do not take offense at this, Willie. Please. But sometimes, Willie, you don’t exactly come up with the full bill.”
“I pay often,” said Willie, leaning forward in his seat.
“You do. You do, Willie, you pay very often. You’re one of my most-often paying clients, except for those who pay all the time.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” said Willie.
“Right,” said Edelstein. “Not even the people who pay you. I do not mean to cast aspersions on your employers or anything.”
“What’s an aspersion?”
“A not nice thing, Willie. But you should be a rich man.”
“I’m loyal to the people I work for,” said Willie and his dark brown eyes narrowed.
“I am not suggesting you betray any of your employers, Willie,” said Edelstein, smiling as wide as he could. He wiped the perspiration from his forehead. “I am suggesting a way to make a lot of money. Lots and lots of money. More money, Willie, than you ever made in your whole life.”
“’Cause I wouldn’t never betray the people I work for.”
“I know you wouldn’t, Willie. That’s why I’m giving you this great opportunity. How would you like to make almost a million dollars? Do you know how much that is, Willie?”
Willie the Bomb Bombella’s eyes rose. He thought very hard. And what he thought was This man is lying to me.
“It’s a lot,” said Willie.
“I’m telling you the truth, Willie. Almost a million dollars. It’s waiting out there for you and just a little bit for me. Just what you owe me, Willie. A hundred and twelve thousand dollars.”
Willie’s eyes opened wider. He nodded. If there was $112,000 in it for Edelstein, maybe this man was not lying to him. When there was so much money for Edelstein in anything, everything seemed to happen.
“My employers have done me some injustices I can think of,” said Willie.
“No, no. It has nothing to do with them. I have a second cousin who lives on the West Coast . . .”
“There is nothing worse than blood betraying blood,” Willie interrupted.
“No, no, Willie. Listen to me. He is a funeral director. He buried someone recently and a strange thing happened. There was money in a funeral wreath. It was not his money so he did not keep it.”
Willie’s eyes narrowed. This man is lying to me, he thought again.
“He didn’t keep it because he was afraid.”
Willie nodded. Edelstein might be telling the truth, he thought.
“But a strange thing happened. A voice on the telephone asked him one night if the money had reached the family of the dead man.”
Willie nodded and Edelstein continued.
“My cousin is smart. He found out what the money was for. The word is open contract.”
Willie’s eyes narrowed.
“An open contract. You’ve heard of a contract on someone’s life?” Edelstein paused and laughed nervously. “Of course you have. Well, this is the sort of contract where anyone can fill it and collect the money. See?”
This man is lying to me or setting me up or is a fool. No, thought Willie, Edelstein is no fool.
“You mean you get paid after the job?”
“Right.”
“What if no one wants to pay you?”
“I don’t think that would happen. Already more than $100,000 has been thrown around for failures. Real money. My second cousin wasn’t the only person this happened to. Other funeral directors had the same thing happen. Most of them aren’t as smart as my cousin. He got a phone number.”
Willie watched Edelstein take a piece of paper from the center desk drawer.
“You get financial details from that number,” Edelstein said.
“Did you call this number, Mo?”
“That is not my sort of thing, Willie. I’ve got to stay here to protect you in case there is any trouble. I should not even tell you that the girl’s name is Vickie Stoner, she is nineteen, and she will be at an acid rock concert in Massachusetts in two days, if she is still alive.”
Willie blinked. “Let me get this straight. I am supposed to try to do a job on somebody who might not be alive for someone I never saw for money I do
not get until the hit is good. Is that what you are telling me, Mo?”
“A million dollars, Willie. A million dollars. Can you think of a million dollars?”
Willie tried to think of a million dollars. He thought of it in cars, in ready cash, in owning pieces of companies, but he could not imagine it. Another thought was crowding it out. This man may be crazy.
“I’m not crazy, Willie,” said Edelstein. “If it weren’t so strange, why would so much be offered? A million dollars, Willie.”
Willie looked at the piece of paper in Edelstein’s hand. “How come there’s ten numbers?”
“Area code.”
“I do not know this area code.”
“Chicago.”
“Why is it you know the girl’s name?”
“My cousin.”
“Give me your phone,” said Willie, taking the piece of paper from Edelstein’s hand.
“No, Willie. Not from here. We don’t want that. We don’t want our defense lawyer to be connected, because he has to stay free in case something goes wrong. We want to be able to say, ‘I want my attorney, Mo Edelstein,’ not, ‘Guard, I have a message for Inmate 79312.’ That’s what we want, Willie.”
“We want you to come with us,” said Willie.
“No, no. That’s what we don’t want,” yelled Edelstein.
“That is what we want,” said Willie. As they left the office for a street phone, Mo Edelstein took two Maalox and a Seconal. After the phone conversation, he popped a Nembutal. He was still nervous, so he took a Librium.
“You know, if they put booze in a pill, Mo, you’d be an alcoholic,” said Willie the Bomb.
Edelstein’s face eased somewhat as he watched Willie the Bomb load his Lincoln Continental. Edelstein’s curiosity was aroused. Here was a man with an IQ that probably never saw the high side of retarded, but when it came to making and setting bombs, knowing what they would do and how they would do it, Bombella was the Michelangelo of the blast.
Bombella sensed this newfound respect and although he had never before explained how he did things, he did so for Edelstein. He knew Edelstein would never use his trade secrets. Edelstein could do more, Willie knew, with a briefcase than Al Capone with a thermonuclear warhead.
Acid Rock Page 3