by A. W. Gray
Money showed a hard-nosed, my-way-or-the-highway look. “That’s what you’ve got to do, babes. And I’m not just playing I’ve Got a Secret here. The entire operation depends on the outside connect being just my deal. I know who it is. Nobody else can.”
Basil finished off the potatoes, pushed his plate away, and started in on the salad. “I better not find out the fringe guy is you, trying to fuck us out of more money.”
Money blinked. “I don’t know what you’d do about it if you did find that out. But you won’t. It’s a real guy.”
“Who’s just going to grab the money and sprout wings,” Darla said. “Vanish or something?”
Money had a sip of Perrier and didn’t answer.
“We’re putting a lot on the line,” she said, “not to know any more. They’ve done away with parole since we got out, you know. Beginning nineteen eighty-seven, you get twenty years federal you do it all. No more coed prisons, either. A girl could get randy.”
“I’ve said all I’m going to about the outside connect,” Money said. “Now. You two in, or you two out?”
Darla looked off. Basil chewed lettuce.
“That’s better,” Money said. “Anything else? We won’t be meeting down here again.”
Darla put on her sunglasses. “I’m not sure I go along with the bit about waiting till April.”
Money scratched his chin. “No way can we get set up any sooner. You’ve got to move down there, get a place to live…”
“Which will take until the end of the month,” she said.
“Besides which, cutes, there’s the weather. Spring’s nice in Texas. I’m never doing anything again where I’m freezing my ass. The rest of the winter’s going to be a bitch. Springtime, that’s when we’re moving. So. We know all the dates and times, what each of us is charged with doing, right? Be sure on this. We won’t have any more contact until the whistle blows. Darla, this guy you’re using. He’s not going to go nuts on us, right?”
Darla played with the purple strip between her breasts. “I can handle him.”
“And the Theater Center guy down in Dallas? Come on, Darla, you’re talking about trusting me, what about me trusting you? This is a guy I know nothing about.”
“I’ve never met him either, but I’ve got ways to know about him. He’s a man,” Darla said.
“Which in your case should be enough said, right? So okay, I’m not worried about that particular guy, I’ve got all the confidence in you. It’s another male person I’m concerned with.”
Darla looked at him.
“It’s delicate, babe,” Money said.
Darla raised a hand like, So what? “You’re talking about Frank.”
“Painful as it may be to you, we’ve got to talk about Frank.”
“So what’s to talk about? He’s another guy.”
Basil continued to eat, his gaze alternating between Money and Darla like a tennis fan’s.
Money ran his fingers through his hair, looked at his knees, then back up. “I judge people, and I’m pretty good at it. I got the impression, you and Frank, he was more than just another guy. This is something we’ve got to talk about. Every successful deal I ever saw, somebody’s getting screwed. That’s Frank’s role in this, the one getting screwed. If you’re going to have a problem with that, we need to know now.”
Darla’s ice-blue gaze was suddenly hostile. She put her L.A. Eyeworks on. “You think I’m carrying a torch or something? It was just a little thing. I’ve had things before. I’ve had things since. ‘Stand by Your Man’ isn’t my favorite song.”
Money studied her, the classic jaw, athletic body arched in an all-business attitude. Finally, Money said, “Emotions are what mess things up, Darla.”
“I’ve got no emotion.” Darla said. “And if I did, it wouldn’t be for him. Frank’s just a means to an end in this.”
“You’re sure of that.”
She looked away like, Why are we talking about this?
“So I’m taking you at your word,” Money said, grinning around. “And that’s all we’ve got to talk about, as I see it.”
2
As the stout lady approached the counter, Frank White made the following assessment: rocky road, two scoops, marshmallow topping. Whipped cream, nuts and a cherry, the works. He touched his white paper hat. “Help you?” Frank said.
She slid onto a stool, stone-faced. “Mr. White?”
He immediately altered his assessment to: Federal government. “Yes, ma’am.”
She hefted a big brown shoulder bag onto her thigh, lifted the flap, and handed him a business card. He held the card between his thumb and forefinger and squinted. Marjorie Rapp, United States Parole and Probation Officer. He dropped his hand, said, “Yes, ma’am,” a second time, then motioned to the two teenagers down the way who were clamoring for service. Frank raised his voice. “Be with you in a minute.”
Marjorie Rapp was thirties, with short brown hair and a faint mustache on her upper lip. She wore no makeup; brown eyes with grainy lids. “I’m your new person, Mr. White.”
Frank wiped his hands on his apron. “Yes, ma’am. What happened to the other guy?”
“Mr. Berger?”
“I suppose. In two years I’ve reported to three different people.”
“Mr. Berger took a job in the private sector.”
“Yeah, I remember he was talking about some security service. Listen, you care for a cone? Cup or something?” Frank gestured at the drums of vanilla, cookies ‘n’ cream, chocolate decadence, all labeled with little white pasteboard signs and fronted by a display window.
She clutched her purse. “Only if I pay.”
“Certainly, certainly. Hey, I wouldn’t want you to think…”
She scanned the rows of two-gallon containers, concentrating briefly on the sherbets. “Fudge ripple, then.”
One of the teenagers shouted, “Hey, we’re in a hurry.”
Frank smiled apology at Ms. Rapp. “You mind?” he said.
“Not at all.” Brief and brusque, impersonal. “You don’t seem to have that much business.”
“We’ve just opened up for the day. Plus it’s winter. Things’ll pick up once it warms up.” He raised a finger. “Be just a second, ma’am.”
He went down the way, retrieving a scoop from milky water, grinning, showing jutting cheekbones and a shock of brown hair poking out from underneath his hat. “Hi, kids.”
The boys wore loose jeans and Doc Marten boots. Their hair was dreaded, a couple of freakers. Gangbangers, Frank thought, way out of place in the Loew’s Anatole lobby, amber skylight forty stories above, balconied rooms ascending on all four sides. One kid said, “How much is a cone?”
Frank continued to smile. “Scoop, buck-eighty you want it in a cup. Cone’s fifty cents more. Two scoops, three dollars.”
One boy, a skinny blond wearing a black Oakland Raiders jacket, wrinkled his nose. “Shit, mister, you’re trying to fuck us.”
Frank’s grin felt frozen on his lips. Pisswilly, he thought, gearing up to start something. “It’s Haagen-Dazs,” Frank said. “Gourmet ice cream.”
The other kid was even blonder than the first, bleached hair greased and stroked up into points. He wore a black T with the letters “F.U.C.T.” emblazoned across the front. He nudged his buddy. “How ‘bout if we pissed in them containers, man? You think the price’d go down?”
Frank cut his gaze to his left, where Marjorie Rapp watched intently. Visible beyond her was the entrance to the high-style French restaurant, jacketed waiters hustling to and fro with lunches hidden under chrome half-spheres. Frank bent close to the counter. “Look, can you guys cut me some slack? That lady down there…”
The boy in the Raiders jacket wore a skater cut, sides shaved with a Number One guard, hair sprouting long on top and drooping down over his ears. “Sh
e somebody you’re fucking?”
Frank’s smile faded. “No. No, she’s not. Cup a buck-eighty. Cone two-thirty. Which do you want?”
Skinny licked his lips. “Maybe we just take it, huh?”
Frank wondered how this pair had made it into the lobby, security guards posted at every door. “You don’t take it. If you get it, you pay for it.”
“Hmm. How ‘bout if we hassle your lady friend?” The kid wore one gold earring, left lobe.
“I don’t think you’d like that much,” Frank said. “She’s not my lady friend. She’s—”
“Maybe your sister then. Got a—”
“—my parole officer.”
“—big ass. Huh?” The boy looked down the way, eyes widening.
“And the way they handle punks like you in the joint,” Frank said, “is bend them over and take turns. What they do on the street is shoot the little bastards.” He brandished the scoop. “Cup, buck-eighty. Cone, fifty cents more. What’s your pleasure, gentlemen?”
The boys exchanged glances, all the toughness fading, confused now. Finally the skinny one said, “Two-scoop cup, sir. We can split that, can’t we?”
• • •
Frank carried the sugar cone stuffed with fudge ripple down to Marjorie Rapp. He’d scooped a little extra, not that Rapp would notice. She took a small lick, watching the teenagers over her shoulder, the two kids at a small round table sharing a cup with two plastic spoons. “Friends of yours?” she said.
Frank bunched up his apron, drying his hands. “First time I ever saw them.”
“You’re sure of that.”
“They’re high school kids, ma’am. I’m thirty-Five.”
“You have to watch your associates,” she said. “My experience is, it’s one of the most important things. Running around with felons is grounds for reincarceration.”
He clenched his jaws, nearly losing it, forcing his tone to be mild and matter-of-fact as he said, “I know about associates, but I have to sell ice cream to anybody that comes up. It’s the job.”
Her eyes narrowed. “And I suppose you don’t ever see any of your old penitentiary friends. Do tell.”
“I’ve seen exactly one, in all the time I’ve been out. I didn’t do my time in Texas is one reason I never see anybody. A guy named Wilbur Dale came by here one day and had a shake. I talked to him maybe Five minutes, total, and he was a customer. I know the rules, ma’am.”
Her tongue flicked out, scraping a ribbon of dark chocolate cream into her mouth. “Working in major hotels is a problem. A lot of drug trafficking going on. Wasn’t there a bust here recently?”
“I read about it in the paper,” Frank said, “same as everybody else. One of the upper floors, around one in the morning. I’m off at four p.m.”
“Did Mr. Berger approve this employment?” Her mouth tightened suspiciously.
Frank picked a cup up from the counter, fished in a drawer, dropped more plastic spoons into the cup, and replaced it near the register. “No, actually it was…Miss Cree, I think. Three parole officers ago—sometimes I get confused.”
“We transfer a lot,” Ms. Rapp said. “Get promotions.”
“Good for the officer,” Frank said, “but makes it sort of tough on the parolee. You get used to one officer’s likes and dislikes…”
She looked across the lobby, at two chicly dressed women window-shopping at New York Duds. “This hotel environment is the major problem I have.”
“I try to stay clear of the riff-raff, ma’am.”
She smirked. “Is that what you call having one of your prison friends drop by for ice cream?”
Frank bent down, pretending to check the Freon pressure while expelling air through his nose. He straightened up. “I didn’t invite Wilbur Dale by, ma’am. He just showed up. While he was eating his ice cream he did ask a lot of questions about where I was living and what I was doing. I might’ve told him too much—I’ll plead guilty to that—but I was trying not to be rude. I’ve never seen him since.”
“That doesn’t mean you won’t.”
“If I do I’ll give him the brush-off.”
A rivulet of chocolate ran down the side of her cone; she snatched a napkin and wiped the runny stuff away. “I was reading your file, Mr. White. What reason did you give for transferring here from California?”
“Well, it wasn’t really a transfer. You should look again. I’m from Dallas, but I was doing time in California, at Pleasanton.”
“That far from home?” Showing her surprise, just a hint of wind leaving her sails as she realized that she wasn’t entirely up to date on this guy.
“Yes, ma’am,” Frank said. “Federal regs are, they parole you to your sentencing district. This was mine.”
Her tone assumed a snappish edge. “I know the rules, Mr. White. What kind of drugs were your specialty?”
He looked at her.
“Your crime,” she said. “Was it cocaine or something worse?”
Frank swabbed the counter with a damp towel. “I’ve never been involved in drugs in my life, Ms. Rapp. You must have been reading someone else’s file.”
“I don’t make that kind of mistake.”
“Well, someone’s made a mistake. I was in law enforcement.” He laid a handful of napkins in front of her, the melting ice cream now dribbling onto her fingers.
“Oh? Maybe we should update.”
“That would be nice,” Frank said.
She wiped her fingers as Frank drew her a cup of water from the spigot. “Were you local or federal?” she said.
“Dallas Police Department. That’s why they shipped me to Pleasanton. The Bureau of Prisons sends cops they convict of something as far from home as possible, to keep them from running into people they busted on the job. It’s for protection purposes.”
She soaked a napkin in water and finished cleaning her hand, then licked melt from around the cone’s edges and bit off a mouthful of fudge ripple and sugar crust. “This is messy. I’m familiar with BOP rules, too. So you were a policeman. Bribes, or…?”
“I never took any bribe.”
“Maybe I should read up, then.”
“Maybe you should. It would save a lot of trouble.”
“Well, was your crime job related?”
Frank tugged at his ear. “Yes, ma’am, if you want to call it a crime. I shot a guy.”
“It’s something they’re cracking down on,” Ms. Rapp said. “Trigger-happy cops.”
“I wasn’t particularly happy. The guy was sort of trying to stab me.”
She licked ice cream and watched him.
“He was black,” Frank said.
“Oh. A racial crime.”
“I don’t notice a man’s race when he’s coming at me with a pig-sticker, ma’am. But that’s what they made of it. The guy’s father was on the city council, and there were a lot of demonstrations. Internal Affairs cleared me, but then the feds stepped in.”
“They have to,” she said. “A lot of whitewashing goes on.”
Frank averted his gaze. “If it was a crime, I’ve paid my debt. Embarrassed my family…”
“Your debt isn’t paid,” she said, “until your parole is finished.”
“I know all that, ma’am. I’m working and doing what’s expected of me.”
“What about your wife? Is she employed?”
Frank did a double take. “I’ve never been married.”
“Your file says…”
“That’s what I’m trying to clear up, Ms. Rapp. Evidently when they shipped my file from California some mistakes crept in. Suddenly I’m a married drug dealer instead of a single cop. Every parole officer I’ve had since then, they were going to straighten out the record. But so far no one has.”
“So you’re not married. Involved?”
“In my
job.”
“No women?”
Frank wondered why this was any of the Parole Commission’s business. “There’s one girl I’ve been seeing.”
“I frown on cohabitation, Mr. White. A lot of problems there. Your woman, she’s not into drugs?”
“We don’t live together, and she teaches school. And I don’t know if I’d call her my woman. We only met a couple of months ago.”
“A teacher. That’s a plus.”
“She lives at the school,” Frank said, “as dorm mother. Counselor, or whatever. Riverbend School for Girls.”
“Ooo, that’s sort of an uppity place.”
“It’s expensive. A lot of rich people’s kids.”
“Is she a Christian woman?” Ms. Rapp smiled, a line of chocolate above her upper lip.
Frank wondered if that was a good description of Meg—a Christian woman. He’d never thought about it. “She’s Presbyterian,” he finally said, and then added, “We worship together.” He supposed it was worship, tuning in occasionally on a church service telecast while changing channels, lying around on Sunday morning.
“That should be good for you,” Ms. Rapp said.
“It seems to help.”
“I think we may have a foundation here that I can work with. Without you changing jobs.”
“I sure do hope so,” Frank said. “And see if you can do something about correcting my records, will you? I think that’ll go a long way toward helping me get rehabilitated.”
She arched an eyebrow. “And you’re sure this one person is the only one you knew in prison, that you’ve had contact with?”
“Wilbur Dale?” Frank pretended to think. “Yes, ma’am, he’s the only one. If I see anyone else I knew in California, I’ll let you know.”
“See that you do,” Ms. Rapp said.
3
When the big quake hit, Gerald Hodge rode tall in the saddle. Eeee-hah.
He lifted his ass high to drive it home, the woman writhing beneath him with her head turned to one side, eyes shut tight, graying hair spread out over the pillow, biting her lip to hold back her screams. She loves it, Gerald thought. Shit, they all do. Then all at once the vibrations began, low at first, building to a crescendo. Rum-ble. RUM-ble. BOOM.