“Gates,” said Mingo as the champagne was poured, “you sure are funny.”
“Ha ha,” Raleigh agreed. His concern that he and his brother had already eaten was solved when Mingo ordered enough for three. His concern that they shouldn’t take up a table reserved for someone else was solved when a short, loud, truculent man, who claimed to be Daniel Austin (and was accompanied by two blondes young enough to be his daughters but bearing no family resemblance), caused such an unseemly disturbance when he was seated at a cramped inside table that the bartender asked him to leave.
“What a ruckus,” Gates sympathized with the hostess.
“I’m sorry, sir, but he insisted he was you. And a guest here in Suite C.”
Gates gave his hotel key a quick shake. “If that dudden’t beat all. That’s our suite, idden’t it, Rawley? That feller tried to mosey up to me in the bar a while back. Now it looks like he’s trying to rustle up some mischief with those little ladies. I call that lowdown, don’t you, Mingo?”
Raleigh stared at the stars; they winked at him, as if, like Mingo, the universe above him was amused by his younger brother. Okay. Serves him right. Now, what’s he going to do?, thought Hayes, as a waiter solicitously strolled the aisles calling, “Gates Hayes? It there a Mr. Hayes here?”
“Fuck a duck,” whispered the party in question. He pointed a surreptitious finger at the two men who stood looking around at the top of the stairs leading down to the tables. One was slim and foppishly dressed, with alabaster skin, straight black hair, a narrow face above bee-stung lips. Spinning in his pale thin hands was a bone cane. The other was three times the size and strained the seams of his garish suit. He had red skin, a flat face with an enormous nose, and blond hair. He was cracking his knuckles, which were already as big as a wrist.
“Is there a Mr. Gates Hayes here?”
“Stand up, Mingo.”
“Gates, are you crazy?”
“Raleigh, cool it. Mingo, stand up, go over there, and say I’ll be right over.”
Mingo gulped, but so deep was his admiration of the adventurer that he went and stood head to head with Big Nose Solinsky, who recognized him immediately—to judge from his flaring nostrils. In a moment, Mingo came back in a huff. “They want you,” he told Gates. “Boy, I don’t like that Big Nose guy. He said he was going to tear my ears off, for no reason.”
Gates was rubbing his mustache as if it were a rabbit’s foot. “Raleigh, do me a favor. You and Mingo go down to the room. There’s a package under the bed. Bring it to that bar where we had the drinks. Wait for me there.” He laughed. “If I don’t show, give my love to Daddy. And, oh, I borrowed fifty bucks from you to send Sara a few flowers. Right. Fine. Roll out. You leave the tip. I’ll grab the check.”
Distraught, Hayes threw five dollar bills on the table. “Gates, for God’s sake, don’t go anywhere with those two.”
“Worried about your suit?” Gates bounced out of the chair. “Listen, go on. Everything’s jake, folks.”
So, with his stomach muscles spasming, Raleigh led Mingo out of the revolving restaurant; too soon to see his brother scrawl “Daniel Austin, Suite C” across the foot of the bill. Too soon, also, to see the well-dressed man at the bar, who’d been watching them since the waiter had paged Gates Hayes. This man nodded at another welldressed man, who quietly followed the Thermopyleans out. Gates didn’t see these men either, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have recognized them, because in arranging his trips on “Easy Living,” he had dealt only with the lowliest and most dispensable members of a large, discreet organization.
As it took Raleigh some little while to persuade Mingo of the absurdity of walking down thirty flights of stairs to their room, ten minutes passed before he opened the door and heard the telephone ringing. He crawled quickly across the wide bed to answer it. “Hello? Yes?”
“Raleigh? This is your aunt Victoria Anna Hayes.” She always introduced herself as if he’d never heard of her, nor suspected a relationship. Her voice was furious. “I’ve been calling you for hours!”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Vicky. I’ve been in and out all evening with Gates. I’m sorry you didn’t call person-to-person. Excuse me a second.…”
Sheffield, having given the room his customary ooh-and-ah inspection, was pantomiming his desire for his luggage by hoisting and shaking an invisible suitcase. As Raleigh pointed at the closet, he thought he heard his aunt say she was in Atlanta, but of course he must have been mistaken. “Pardon, Aunt Vicky?”
“I said, I’m at the airport. Can you hear me?”
“At the Atlanta airport?”
“My plane leaves in twenty minutes.”
“Plane leaves?”
“Stop repeating me, Raleigh. I’ve got to go. Now, listen, Aura explained a little of what’s been going on. I’m flying to New Orleans to find Earley. I’m not about to sit on that porch and wait till Thursday just because he’s decided to play games with you and everybody else.”
Shock rolled Hayes off the bed and stood him upright. “What? What are you talking about? You’re going to New Orleans?”
Exasperation blew into the phone. “Raleigh, would you mind not making me miss my plane. Just answer me. One, do you know where Earley’s staying? Two, last time you talked to him was this…this…” He heard her pull in her breath. “…was this young person from the hospital still with him?”
Hayes was now pacing the thick carpeting, dodging Mingo who was trying to hop out of his pants while reading the room service menu. “Aunt Victoria, honestly, really, I can handle this alone. This is too much for you—”
“If I can get out of Singapore after the Japanese took over, and find my way to New Guinea, I hope you’ll have the sense to admit I can find my way around New Orleans, Louisiana.”
“Of course, that’s not what I…But there’s no need for—” “Raleigh, dammit, answer me!”
Stunned by this unprecedented profanity, Hayes blurted into speech. “I don’t know where Daddy’s staying, but probably the French Quarter, somewhere near Jackson Square, don’t you think? All I know is that’s where I’m supposed to meet him Thursday. And I don’t know if that black girl’s still with him, but I bet she is. He gave me some crazy message I had to go pass on to Flonnie’s nephew, you know, this man called Jubal?”
“Yes, yes, Aura told me. And?”
“The message about a girl named Billie, somebody who’s called ‘Josh’s child’? I think she’s got to be the girl from the hospital and that’s why Daddy wants Jubal Rogers in New Orleans. The first time I could get Rogers—and Aunt Vicky, you wouldn’t believe what a horrible experience I had trying to talk to that man—the first time he would even do me the courtesy of looking at me, was when I gave him Daddy’s message about somebody called Billie. I cannot tell you what I went through with—”
“Is he with you?”
“Who? Rogers?”
“…Yes.”
“Are you kidding? I won’t even repeat to you what he said I could tell Daddy from him! Absolutely no, thank God, he isn’t with me, and he is not coming to New Orleans because—”
“Raleigh, listen to me, they’re calling my plane. When you told him ‘Josh’s child’? Did he know, did he say he knew where Josh was?”
“If he did, he certainly didn’t tell me. You don’t understand. This man wanted nothing to do with me or Daddy, or, I assume, whoever this Billie is. He hates Daddy. What the hell is going on? What’s Daddy doing? Do you know?”
She snapped, “He’s not doing what he should have done about this, which was tell me, instead of running away from the hospital. And he’s not going to do it to me again. Raleigh, it’s last call. I’ll be at the St. Ann’s Hotel on Ursulines Street. Write it down.”
“…Aunt Vicky?” Hayes clicked the phone repeatedly. “Aunt Vicky?” But he knew he was talking to a dead line. Well, there was no sense in rushing out to the Atlanta airport. If Victoria were going, she would have gone long before he could reach her. And if a se
venty-two-year-old woman wanted to wander the streets of a strange city looking for her seventy-year-old idiot of a brother, well, how could Raleigh stop her? But it was disturbing, very disturbing, to think that not only was his father endangering his life, now, here was his aunt crazily taking off as well. What if something should happen to her? What was the matter with all these old people? This isn’t the way they were supposed to act. They were supposed to sit still quietly while their lives drew to a close. They weren’t supposed to rush around in an emotional maelstrom like Caroline and Holly, for God’s sake. And then Raleigh thought, “Who are these people? Earley? Victoria? Jubal?” And he had to admit, “I haven’t the foggiest idea.”
“Raleigh, did you get the package?” Sheffield had changed into his madras jacket, with a green cravat tucked into his open shirt. “Gates is waiting.”
“What?” Hayes still had his hand on the phone. Flopping to the floor, Mingo swept his arm under the bed and pulled out an oblong brown-wrapped parcel. “Gollee, this weighs a ton,” the fat man said. “It feels like a bomb.”
When the Thermopyleans (on an ordinary elevator) reached the lobby, Gates was not waiting. They ordered drinks from a waiter who resembled Timothy, but announced that his name was Russ. “It’s nine forty,” said Raleigh. The next thing he said was, “It’s ten-o-five.”
“Don’t worry,” Mingo said at 10:15, when he returned from phoning the hospital to tell Mrs. Yonge he’d be back over in the morning to give Little Vera a few little things before they checked out.
“Have another drink,” Mingo said at 10:35.
“This may surprise you,” said Hayes, “but I wish Simon Berg were here.”
It didn’t surprise Mingo. “Weeper’ll be here tomorrow. But Gates doesn’t need any help, Raleigh, he can do anything.”
“Where is he?” said Raleigh. He walked to the edge of the pool. He walked down the ramp to the lobby desk and back. He walked to the elevators and back. “He’s dead,” decided Raleigh at 10:45.
Meanwhile, among the drinkers chatting together in the handsome modern lounge chairs, sat one well-dressed man who was neither drinking nor talking. He was just watching Mingo Sheffield (or, as he thought, from the paging in the restaurant atop the Plaza, he was just watching “Gates Hayes”).
Raleigh threw himself back in the chair. He stared at the blinking digital numbers on his watch; second by second, time vanished and was replaced. The sound of his heart throbbed in his ears. His pulse was racing. Checking it, he was amazed to find it was 125. He might as well be jogging! Raleigh Hayes sat there, shaking his crossed leg, and suddenly realized how he felt. The discovery surprised him. He felt exactly as he had the hideous afternoon when he’d sat in the emergency waiting room at the pediatrics ward and waited for the doctor to come back to tell him whether or not the eight-year-old Caroline had spinal meningitis. He’d sat there with his stomach tight, his mouth bitten, his pulse racing—just as he was sitting now—until the doctor came out to admit he’d been wrong: all Caroline had was a severe abdominal flu (and a very theatrical personality). Hearing this, Raleigh’s muscles had untensed so quickly, his legs had given way and Aura had caught him when he stumbled.
“Wait here, Mingo.” Raleigh stood up. “I’m going to look for Gates.” Now there was another sound in Raleigh’s ears. A sound twenty-eight years old: the squeal of tires skidding and the deadened thunk of the car hitting the bike. And the shrieks of his cousins leaping in the sprinkler on the flat lawn in Cowstream changing to Lovie’s endless scream. And everyone running to the corner of the block where the seven-year-old Gates lay unconscious under the twisted bicycle, his black curls red with blood. Raleigh felt now that he could still smell the strong odor of the Toni permanent Lovie had been in the middle of giving herself before she ran out of the house. He felt he could still hear the terrified voice of the young male driver, “I didn’t see him! He just flew right out in front of me!”
Mingo pulled on Hayes’s arm. “Gollee, Raleigh. Just calm down.” He patted him. “But, I guess if it was my baby brother, I’d go completely to pieces too.”
“For Pete’s sake, I have not gone…” But at that moment, across the pool, an elevator opened, and the giant man known as Big Nose Solinsky pushed Gates out into the lobby. The bodyguard, in his illfitting tan suit, carried a small leather box. He looked carefully around for some time; finally, he waved his hand. Then Cupid Parisi Calhoun came out of the elevator, his arm linked through that of a striking young woman taller than he was. She was very svelte in skintight leather pants, high-heeled boots, a quilted jacket with pointed shoulders, and short hair coated with gelatin. She was sucking on a plastic swizzle stick in an extremely nervous way.
By the time this group reached the bar, a composed Raleigh Hayes was quietly seated behind the glass coffee table, scotch in hand. He stood, and remained standing after the introductions, for the—what should he call them? plaintiffs?—declined to sit with them. In fact, Cupid Calhoun declined even to focus his eyes on the Thermopyleans, or on anything else except the knob of the bone cane, where he rested both slender pale hands. Calhoun’s coal-black eyes were such glazed, dreamy eyes, his skin was so deathly white, his mouth so dainty, his black velvet tie and ruffled shirt so nineteenth century, that Raleigh was oddly reminded of a schoolbook picture of the poet Edgar Allan Poe.
And in fact, Calhoun did share a habit of Poe’s, for he was (as Gates later explained, but Raleigh already suspected) “stoned out of his gourd” on opium. He was even more stoned than usually, because hotel lobbies made him nervous. His grandfather, Antony Parisi, had been shot to death in the lobby of a seaside resort many years ago, just after his new young wife had placed in his buttonhole the yellow rosebud he always wore. He’d been seventy-nine at the time (quite an advanced age for a bootleg czar), but still it was a startling way to die, and his grandson, who’d often been told the story by his long-widowed grandmother, never entered a lobby until his bodyguard Solinsky had walked through it first to draw any gunfire. Cupid had been raised on fanciful stories about Antony Parisi: how he’d dined with Valentino, fought with Dion O’Banion, danced with Fanny Brice; how he’d kept D.A.s and judges in one pocket, and raw diamonds like worry beads in the other, and how at a party once he’d thrown a handful of these diamonds into his swimming pool to watch women in evening gowns dive for them; how hundreds of mourners, all wearing yellow rosebud boutonnieres, had walked behind his armored hearse. It was this life that Cupid longed for. He was a hopeless romantic, and therefore fairly dangerous. But, fortunately, the glamour of bygone crimes and the bygone South that mingled in him kept him too busy at bookstores and movies and antique shops to do much damage. In Atlanta, he had a 1930s Warner Brothers apartment (all Art Deco whites and blacks); in Charleston, he had an 1860s antebellum apartment (all bronzed claw-feet and brocade sash-pulls). What he couldn’t alter into the past with his grandmother’s generous allowance, he blurred with heroin, unable to tolerate modernity anywhere but in his girlfriends. Stories about the past had spoiled any interest the young (and— even Mrs. Parisi admitted—not very intelligent) Calhoun might have taken in current business. Organized crime today was too organized; it was all lawyers, accountants, and laundered cash flows. For example, the association of cocaine importers, whom he knew to be meeting in this same hotel this very weekend, was a drab, merciless group who might as well be running General Motors as far as Cupid was concerned. He’d much rather kill or be killed in a duel any day.
Calhoun leaned on the girl. The rest stood in a circle around the coffee table. “These are my associates.” Gates grinned, his arms around Raleigh and Mingo. “Mr. Hayes. Mr. Sheffield. Let me introduce C. P. Calhoun of Charleston, and Mr. Big Nose Solinsky of the Black Lagoon.”
“You want your face, you watch your mouth,” rumbled the huge blond man, his neck stretching open his shirt collar beneath the fat orange knot of his tie.
“Sorry,” Gates shrugged.
“You watch it.”
&n
bsp; “Fine, fine.” Gates rolled his eyes. “Okay, here’s the plan.”
Solinsky poked him in the shoulder with a sausage-thick finger. “That pretty face could end up not so pretty, you know that?”
“All right, all right, I hear you! C.P., will you call off this goon?”
Solinsky’s horrible toilet-flush of a gurgle was stopped by the bone cane’s flicking across his ankle. Until then, Raleigh had thought, from the otherworldly look in Calhoun’s eyes, that the man was in a coma and secretly held upright by the girl who was luridly sucking the plastic stick. But apparently some of the young mobster’s faculties were functional.
Gates now instructed Mingo to put the oblong wrapped package on the table. “There’s that,” he said succinctly. The bodyguard started to rip at the tape, but the cane flicked his hand away. Calhoun languidly removed the brown paper, revealing a shiny brass urn, at the sight of which Raleigh gasped so loudly that everyone looked up. He yanked his brother aside, and hissed at him in a whisper, “For God’s sake, Gates! Is that Roxanne?”
“Sort of.”
Behind him, Calhoun was unscrewing the metal lid. He stuck his finger inside, then licked off the white powder clinging to the tip, then nodded, then closed the urn.
Staggered, Raleigh swayed against his brother. “I…I…I don’t believe you did that! You mixed cocaine with your dead mother’s ashes?”
Gates shrugged, and whispered back, “The one thing everybody said about old Roxanne was, she was a party girl, right? I figured maybe she’d like to go out that way, one last high.”
“I have to sit down.”
Gates looked at his brother’s greenish face. “Aw, Big Bro, I was just kidding you. Sorry. Roxanne told Sara she wanted her ashes sprinkled over this lake right outside Midway. We did it the day before I left for Charleston. Okay? The urn was just a safe place to stash the goods. Sorry.”
Handling Sin Page 54