by Stephen King
“I’d like to discuss a rather large sports-oriented business proposition with Mr. Frati.”
“Yeah? Is that a bet when it’s at home with its feet up?”
“Are you a cop?”
“Yeah, I’m Chief Curry of the Dallas Police. Can’t you tell from the glasses and the jowls?”
“I don’t see any glasses or jowls, ma’am.”
“That’s because I’m in disguise. What you want to bet on in the middle of the summer, chum? There’s nothing to bet on.”
“Case-Tiger.”
“Which pug?”
“Case.”
She rolled her eyes, then shouted back over her shoulder. “Better get out here, Dad, you got a live one.”
Frank Frati was at least twice Chaz Frati’s age, but the resemblance was still there. They were related, of course they were. If I mentioned I had once laid a bet with a Mr. Frati of Derry, Maine, I had no doubt we could have a pleasant little discussion about what a small world it was.
Instead of doing that, I proceeded directly to negotiations. Could I put five hundred dollars on Tom Case to win his bout against Dick Tiger in Madison Square Garden?
“Yes indeedy,” Frati said. “You could also stick a red-hot branding iron up your rootie-patootie, but why would you want to?”
His daughter yapped brief, bright laughter.
“What kind of odds would I get?”
He looked at the daughter. She put up her hands. Two fingers raised on the left, one finger on the right.
“Two-to-one? That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s a ridiculous life, my friend. Go see an Ionesco play if you don’t believe me. I recommend Victims of Duty.”
Well, at least he didn’t call me cuz, as his Derry cuz had done.
“Work with me a little on this, Mr. Frati.”
He picked up an Epiphone Hummingbird acoustic and began to tune it. He was eerily quick. “Give me something to work with, then, or blow on over to Dallas. There’s a place called—”
“I know the place in Dallas. I prefer Fort Worth. I used to live here.”
“The fact that you moved shows more sense than wanting to bet on Tom Case.”
“What about Case by a knockout somewhere in the first seven rounds? What would that get me?”
He looked at the daughter. This time she raised three fingers on her left hand.
“And Case by a knockout in the first five?”
She deliberated, then raised a fourth finger. I decided not to push it any farther. I wrote my name in his book and showed him my driver’s license, holding my thumb over the Jodie address just as I had when I’d bet on the Pirates at Faith Financial almost three years ago. Then I passed over my cash, which was about a quarter of all my remaining liquidity, and tucked the receipt into my wallet. Two thousand would be enough to pay down some more of Sadie’s expenses and carry me for my remaining time in Texas. Plus, I wanted to gouge this Frati no more than I’d wanted to gouge Chaz Frati, even though he had set Bill Turcotte on me.
“I’ll be back the day after the dance,” I said. “Have my money ready.”
The daughter laughed and lit a cigarette. “Ain’t that what the chorus girl said to the archbishop?”
“Is your name Marjorie, by any chance?” I asked.
She froze with the cigarette in front of her and smoke trickling from between her lips. “How’dja know?” She saw my expression and laughed. “Actually, it’s Wanda, sport. I hope you bet better than you guess names.”
Heading back to my car, I hoped the same thing.
CHAPTER 25
1
I stayed with Sadie on the morning of August fifth until they put her on a gurney and rolled her down to the operating room. There Dr. Ellerton was waiting for her, along with enough other docs to field a basketball team. Her eyes were shiny with preop dope.
“Wish me luck.”
I bent and kissed her. “All the luck in the world.”
It was three hours before she was wheeled back to her room—same room, same picture on the wall, same horrible squatting commode—fast asleep and snoring, the left side of her face covered in a fresh bandage. Rhonda McGinley, the nurse with the fullback shoulders, let me stay with her until she came around a little, which was a big infraction of the rules. Visiting hours are more stringent in the Land of Ago. Unless the head nurse has taken a shine to you, that is.
“How are you?” I asked, taking Sadie’s hand.
“Sore. And sleepy.”
“Go back to sleep then, honey.”
“Maybe next time …” Her words trailed off in a furry hzzzzz sound. Her eyes closed, but she forced them open with an effort. “… will be better. In your place.”
Then she was gone, and I had something to think about.
When I went back to the nurses’ station, Rhonda told me that Dr. Ellerton was waiting for me downstairs in the cafeteria.
“We’ll keep her tonight and probably tomorrow, too,” he said. “The last thing we want is for any sort of infection to develop.” (I thought of this later, of course—one of those things that’s funny, but not very.)
“How did it go?”
“As well as can be expected, but the damage Clayton inflicted was very serious. Pending her recovery, I’m going to schedule her second go-round for November or December.” He lit a cigarette, chuffed out smoke, and said: “This is a helluva surgical team, and we’re going to do everything we can … but there are limits.”
“Yes. I know.” I was pretty sure I knew something else, as well: there were going to be no more surgeries. Here, at least. The next time Sadie went under the knife, it wouldn’t be a knife at all. It would be a laser.
In my place.
2
Small economies always come back and bite you in the ass. I’d had the phone taken out of my Neely Street apartment in order to save eight or ten dollars a month, and now I wanted it. But there was a U-Tote-M four blocks away with a phone booth next to the Coke cooler. I had de Mohrenschildt’s number on a scrap of paper. I dropped a dime and dialed.
“De Mohrenschildt residence, how may I help you?” Not Jeanne’s voice. A maid, probably—where did the de Mohrenschildt bucks come from?
“I’d like to speak to George, please.”
“I’m afraid he’s at the office, sir.”
I grabbed a pen from my breast pocket. “Can you give me that number?”
“Yes, sir. CHapel 5-6323.”
“Thanks.” I wrote it on the back of my hand.
“May I say who called, if you don’t reach him, sir?”
I hung up. That chill was enveloping me again. I welcomed it. If I’d ever needed cold clarity, it was now.
I dropped another dime and this time got a secretary who told me I’d reached the Centrex Corporation. I told her I wanted to speak to Mr. de Mohrenschildt. She, of course, wanted to know why.
“Tell him it’s about Jean-Claude Duvalier and Lee Oswald. Tell him it’s to his advantage.”
“Your name, sir?”
Puddentane wouldn’t do here. “John Lennon.”
“Please hold, Mr. Lennon, I’ll see if he’s available.”
There was no canned music, which on the whole seemed an improvement. I leaned against the wall of the hot booth and stared at the sign reading IF YOU SMOKE, PLEASE TURN ON FAN. I didn’t smoke, but turned the fan on, anyway. It didn’t help much.
There was a click in my ear loud enough to make me wince, and the secretary said, “You’re connected, Mr. D.”
“Hello?” That jovial booming actor’s voice. “Hello? Mr. Lennon?”
“Hello. Is this line secure?”
“What do you … ? Of course it is. Just a minute. Let me shut the door.”
There was a pause, then he was back. “What’s this about?”
“Haiti, my friend. And oil leases.”
“What’s this about Monsieur Duvalier and that guy Oswald?” There was no worry in his voice, just cheerful curiosity.
“Oh, you know them both much better than that,” I said. “Go ahead and call them Baby Doc and Lee, why don’t you?”
“I’m awfully busy today, Mr. Lennon. If you don’t tell me what this is about, I’m afraid I’ll have to—”
“Baby Doc can approve the oil leases in Haiti you’ve been wanting for the last five years. You know this; he’s his father’s righthand man, he runs the tonton macoute, and he’s next in line for the big chair. He likes you, and we like you—”
De Mohrenschildt began to sound less like an actor and more like a real guy. “When you say we, do you mean—”
“We all like you, de Mohrenschildt, but we’re worried about your association with Oswald.”
“Jesus, I hardly know the guy! I haven’t seen him in six or eight months!”
“You saw him on Easter Sunday. You brought his little girl a stuffed rabbit.”
A very long pause. Then: “All right, I guess I did. I forgot about that.”
“Did you forget about someone taking a shot at Edwin Walker?”
“What has that got to do with me? Or my business?” His puzzled outrage was almost impossible to disbelieve. Key word: almost.
“Come on, now,” I said. “You accused Oswald of doing it.”
“I was joking, goddammit!”
I gave him two beats, then said, “Do you know what company I work for, de Mohrenschildt? I’ll give you a hint—it’s not Standard Oil.”
There was silence on the line while de Mohrenschildt ran through the bullshit I’d spouted so far. Except it wasn’t bullshit, not entirely. I’d known about the stuffed rabbit, and I’d known about the how-did-you-miss crack he’d made after his wife spotted the rifle. The conclusion was pretty clear. My company was The Company, and the only question in de Mohrenschildt’s mind right now—I hoped—was how much more of his no doubt interesting life we’d bugged.
“This is a misunderstanding, Mr. Lennon.”
“I hope for your sake that it is, because it looks to us like you might have primed him to take the shot. Going on and on about what a racist Walker is, and how he’s going to be the next American Hitler.”
“That’s totally untrue!”
I ignored this. “But it’s not our chief worry. Our chief worry is that you may have accompanied Mr. Oswald on his errand last April tenth.”
“Ach, mein Gott! That’s insane!”
“If you can prove that—and if you promise to stay away from the unstable Mr. Oswald in the future—”
“He’s in New Orleans, for God’s sake!”
“Shut up,” I said. “We know where he is and what he’s doing. Handing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. If he doesn’t stop soon, he’ll wind up in jail.” Indeed he would, and in less than a week. His uncle Dutz—the one associated with Carlos Marcello—would go his bail. “He’ll be back in Dallas soon enough, but you won’t see him. Your little game is over.”
“I tell you I never—”
“Those leases can still be yours, but not unless you can prove you weren’t with Oswald on April tenth. Can you do that?”
“I … let me think.” There was a long pause. “Yes. Yes, I think I can.”
“Then let’s meet.”
“When?”
“Tonight. Nine o’clock. I have people to answer to, and they’d be very unhappy with me if I gave you time to build an alibi.”
“Come to the house. I’ll send Jeanne out to a movie with her girlfriends.”
“I have another place in mind. And you won’t need directions to find it.” I told him what I had in mind.
“Why there?” He sounded honestly puzzled.
“Just come. And if you don’t want the Duvaliers père and fils very angry at you, my friend, come alone.”
I hung up.
3
I was back at the hospital at six on the dot, and visited with Sadie for half an hour. Her head was clear again, and she claimed her pain wasn’t too bad. At six-thirty I kissed her good cheek and told her I had to go.
“Your business?” she asked. “Your real business?”
“Yes.”
“No one gets hurt unless it’s absolutely necessary. Right?”
I nodded. “And never by mistake.”
“Be careful.”
“Like walking on eggs.”
She tried to smile. It turned into a wince as the freshly flayed left side of her face pulled against itself. Her eyes looked over my shoulder. I turned to see Deke and Ellie in the doorway. They had dressed in their best, Deke in a summer-weight suit, string tie, and town cowboy hat, Ellie in a pink silk dress.
“We can wait, if you want us to,” Ellie said.
“No, come on in. I was just leaving. But don’t stay long, she’s tired.”
I kissed Sadie twice—dry lips and moist forehead. Then I drove back to West Neely Street, where I spread out the items I’d bought at the costume and novelty shop. I worked slowly and carefully in front of the bathroom mirror, referring often to the directions and wishing Sadie were here to help me.
I wasn’t worried that de Mohrenschildt would take a look at me and say haven’t I seen you before; what I wanted to make sure of was that he wouldn’t recognize “John Lennon” later on. Depending on how believable he was, I might have to come back on him. If so, I’d want to take him by surprise.
I glued on the mustache first. It was a bushy one, making me look like an outlaw in a John Ford western. Next came the makeup, which I used on my face and hands to give myself a rancher’s tan. There were horn-rimmed specs with plain glass lenses. I had briefly considered dying my hair, but that would have created a parallel with John Clayton that I couldn’t have faced. Instead I yanked on a San Antonio Bullets baseball cap. When I was finished, I hardly recognized myself in the mirror.
“Nobody gets hurt unless it absolutely has to happen,” I told the stranger in the mirror. “And never by mistake. Have we got that straight?”
The stranger nodded, but the eyes behind the fake glasses were cool.
The last thing I did before leaving was to take my revolver from the closet shelf and shove it in my pocket.
4
I got to the deserted parking lot at the end of Mercedes Street twenty minutes early, but de Mohrenschildt was already there, his gaudy Cadillac butted up against the brick backside of the Montgomery Ward warehouse. That meant he was anxious. Excellent.
I looked around, almost expecting to see the jump-rope girls, but of course they were in for the night—possibly sleeping and dreaming of Charlie Chaplin touring France, just to watch the ladies dance.
I parked near de Mohrenschildt’s yacht, rolled down my window, stuck out my left hand, and curled the index finger in a beckoning gesture. For a moment de Mohrenschildt sat where he was, as if unsure. Then he got out. The bigtime strut wasn’t in evidence. He looked frightened and furtive. That was also excellent. In one hand he held a file folder. From the flat look of it, there wasn’t much inside. I hoped it wasn’t just a prop. If it was, we were going to dance, and it wouldn’t be the Lindy Hop.
He opened the door, leaned in, and said, “Look, you’re not going to shoot me or anything, are you?”
“Nope,” I said, hoping I sounded bored. “If I was from the FBI you might have to worry about that, but I’m not and you know I’m not. You’ve done business with us before.” I hoped to God Al’s notes were right about that.
“Is this car bugged? Are you?”
“If you’re careful about what you say, you won’t have anything to worry about, will you? Now get in.”
He got in and shut the door. “About those leases—”
“You can discuss those another time, with other people. Oil isn’t my specialty. My specialty is dealing with people who behave indiscreetly, and your relationship with Oswald has been very indiscreet.”
“I was curious, that’s all. Here’s a man who manages to defect to Russia, then redefect to the United States. He’s a semi-educated hillbilly, but he’s surprisingly
crafty. Also …” He cleared his throat. “I have a friend who wants to fuck his wife.”
“We know about that,” I said, thinking of Bouhe—just another George in a seemingly endless parade of them. How happy I would be to escape the echo chamber of the past. “My sole interest is making sure you had nothing to do with that botched Walker hit.”
“Look at this. I took it from my wife’s scrapbook.”
He opened the folder, removed the single page of newsprint it contained, and passed it over. I turned on the Chevy’s domelight, hoping my tan wouldn’t look like the makeup it was. On the other hand, who cared? It would strike de Mohrenschildt as just one more bit of cloak-and-dagger spookery.
The sheet was from the April 12 Morning News. I knew the feature; AROUND TOWN was probably read a lot more closely by most Dallas-ites than the world and national news. There were lots of names in boldface type and lots of pix showing men and women in evening dress. De Mohrenschildt had used red ink to circle a squib halfway down. In the accompanying photo, George and Jeanne were unmistakable. He was in a tux and flashing a grin that seemed to show as many teeth as there are keys on a piano. Jeanne was displaying an amazing amount of cleavage, which the third person at the table appeared to be inspecting closely. All three held up champagne glasses.
“This is Friday’s paper,” I said. “The Walker shooting was on Wednesday.”
“These Around Town items are always two days old. Because they’re about nightlife, dig? Besides … don’t just look at the picture, read it, man. It’s right there in black and white!”
I checked, but I knew he was telling the truth as soon as I saw the other man’s name in the newspaper’s hotcha-hotcha boldface type. The harmonic echo was as loud as a guitar amp set on reverb.
Local oil rajah George de Mohrenschildt and wife Jeanne lifted a glass (or maybe it was a dozen!) at the Carousel Club on Wednesday night, celebrating the scrump-tiddly-uptious lady’s birthday. How old? The lovebirds weren’t telling, but to us she doesn’t look a day over twenty-three (skidoo!). They were hosted by the Carousel’s jovial panjandrum Jack Ruby, who sent over a bottle o’ bubbly and then joined them for a toast. Happy birthday, Jeanne, and long may you wave!
“The champagne was rotgut and I had a hangover until three the next afternoon, but it was worth it if you’re satisfied.”