by Parnell Hall
A cab came along and she flagged it down and got in. I followed the cab uptown to 48th Street and Broadway, where she got out and paid it off. She went to the corner and stuck out her leg. Within five minutes a man stopped to talk with her.
I followed them up the block to one of those cheap hotels where they rented the same room ten times a night. She and the guy went in. He was out twenty minutes later, and she was out in twenty-five. She headed back to Broadway.
I had the whole setup now, and it was just what I had figured. Without Gutierrez to keep her in drugs, she had to make it on her own, so she was tricking to get enough money to score.
I wondered if she knew anything that could help me. I realized it would have been the easiest thing in the world to make the contact. I had 150 bucks in my pocket I’d saved from the casino. All I had to do was walk up to her and say, “Hi.” I mean, I’m human, for God’s sake, and she sure did have glorious boobs. But, on the other hand, I’d probably catch something. In fact, with my luck, I’d probably catch everything. How would I explain it to my wife? Herpes, syphilis, and crabs, all caught in the line of duty. I’d probably get AIDS too, as a sort of bonus.
I sat in my car and watched Rosa work the street. She was good at it. She had no trouble hooking them, and no trouble getting rid of them either. In the next hour and fifteen minutes she turned three more tricks. That must have been enough, because the last time she came out of the hotel, instead of taking up her position on the corner, she went straight to the pay phone and made a call. I wasn’t anywhere near close enough to hear what she was saying, but I knew she got an answer because I could see her head bobbing up and down and her lips moving. She was on the phone less than a minute. She hung up, walked out onto Broadway, and hailed a cab.
I followed the cab to an address on East 64th Street. It was a townhouse just like all the other buildings on the block, except it was the only one with the upstairs light on. Rosa got out of the cab, went up the steps to the front door, and rang the bell. About thirty seconds later a man opened the door and let her in. The light was poor, and the best I could make out was he was young enough to have dark hair, and he wore a maroon robe.
The door closed behind them. I sat in the car with my lights out, waiting. I had what I wanted now. I figured this guy had to be Rosa’s connection, and therefore Gutierrez’s connection, and therefore the guy the coke had flowed through before the deal went bad. Perhaps he was even Pluto himself. I had the guy’s address and I could check him out at my leisure. But I decided to wait anyway. I didn’t figure Rosa would be long. Just a quick score and out of there. The connection wouldn’t be tempted by her body, great knockers notwithstanding. He’d recognize the uniform, just as I had, and wouldn’t be keen on banging her after coming off an evening of turning tricks. Besides, a big coke and skag connection in an East Side townhouse who was up at 3:00 in the morning would undoubtedly have one or two fifteen-year-old nymphets sitting on his face and plunging his drug-inflamed tool into every orifice. And Rosa, having scored, would be eager to get on home. Despite the fact she had let the cab go, I figured she’d be quick.
She was out in five minutes. She walked briskly to the avenue and caught a cab downtown. I figured she was on her way home, but I tagged along just to make sure. She was. The cab let her out in front of the candy store, and she went straight inside and up the stairs, nodding as she passed to the old lady, who was still sitting on the front steps and who showed no signs of moving. I didn’t know what her story was, but fortunately, as far as I knew, it didn’t concern me, for which I was thankful.
I checked my watch. It was nearly 3:30. I drove back over to Crosby Street and parked a block away from the casino. About a quarter of four the elevator began disgorging loads of tired gamblers. At 4:15 Tony Arroyo came out. As soon as he appeared on the sidewalk, a limo that had been parked in the shadows roared into life and pulled up in front of the door. Tony got in and the car pulled away. I followed more carefully this time. It was one thing to tail a hooker in a taxi. It was something else to follow a guy in a chauffeured limousine, particularly when that guy is probably connected with people who have a habit of cutting people’s cocks off.
If the chauffeur had the faintest idea he was being followed, he didn’t show it. He drove straight uptown and pulled up to a luxury apartment building on East 58th Street, one of those buildings that is so posh it has a circular driveway for cars to pull in to drop off tenants right at the front door. Tony got out and went in and the limo drove off.
I sat and looked at the building for a while. A thought kept nagging at me, and finally I couldn’t resist. I drove to the corner, parked, got out, and went to the pay phone. I dialed information, and asked if they had a Manhattan listing for a Tony Arroyo. Yes, they had a Tony Arroyo on East 58th Street. They even gave me the address. It was the building I had just seen him go into.
It figured. Tony could have had an unlisted number, or the phone company could have refused to confirm the address but, no, it was right there for the asking. Some detective. I stake out a casino at four in the morning, follow the guy home, worrying the whole time about being spotted by his chauffeur, and what do I learn? The same thing I could have got by just picking up the phone and dialing information in the first place.
But that didn’t really matter. And it didn’t really bother me. After all, all the running around I’d been doing wasn’t that important, and it didn’t really accomplish anything. It was just jerking off. It was just me trying to keep busy and pretend I was doing something, to make up for the fact that I had muffed the really big play, the golden opportunity I had had back in the casino when Tony had asked me if I were driving down to Miami. It had been right there, and I had blown it, muffed it, chickened out. Oh, I could justify my decision a lot of ways. If I said I was driving to Miami, I’d have to go through with it. How could I do that? I don’t have the time. I don’t have the money. What could I tell my wife? What could I tell Richard?
But that didn’t really wash. I didn’t have to go to Miami. There would be ways to get out of that. Hell, I didn’t even have to agree to the proposition, assuming that Tony got around to making me one. All I had to do was say “Yes, I’m driving to Miami,” and see what happened next. But I hadn’t done that.
I always knew I had my limitations. I’m not particularly strong, but I’ve always been athletic. In high school I was the high scorer on the basketball team, the shortstop on the baseball team, the first man on the tennis team, and the goalie on the soccer team. But those are all skill sports, sports requiring coordination and finesse, but not great strength. I could never have played football. They’d have eaten me alive. Anything requiring confrontation, aggression, or assertion was just beyond me.
My wife was right, I realized, in her presumed opinion of me. The reason I never made it as a writer, or an actor for that matter, was that I never had the stuff. I never had the courage to get out there and hustle, to confront new situations, to meet new people, to assert myself, to get ahead.
And it wasn’t just fear of failure. It was fear, plain and simple. Just fear. When push came to shove, when the chips were down, I was a bloody fucking coward.
It was a hell of a realization to come to at four-thirty in the morning on a dark, deserted street corner in midtown Manhattan.
9.
I FELT LIKE HELL RIDING the subway downtown the next morning, and it wasn’t just the fact that I’d gotten approximately an hour and a half of sleep. I felt like hell because I was on my way to my office to check my mail and pick up my messages before I headed out to Brooklyn to sign up Mrs. Rabinowitz and her broken leg, when in my heart of hearts what I really wanted to be doing was catching an early morning flight down to Miami to check out what was in Martin Albrect’s safe deposit box. That’s what I should have been doing. That’s what any fucking detective worth his salt would have been doing. But I couldn’t do it. Even if I had the guts to say “fuck it,” to leave Mrs. Rabinowitz in the lurch one mo
re time, to kiss off the day’s work and head South, I simply couldn’t do it. Because, unlike any detective I’ve ever heard about, I didn’t have the money. Even if I went to the cash machine and drew out every penny left in my account, that, added to what I had left from the casino, wouldn’t be enough. I had a Master Charge card, but it had a $1500 limit, and I’d been hovering in the high 1400’s for the last year and a half. If I presented it at the airlines, the computer would register “tilt,” and the nice girl at the airline counter would take out a scissors and cut my card into little pieces right then and there, as she had been trained to do.
What made this even more frustrating was the fact that I was sure I could do it. I was sure it would work. I had Albrect’s key and I had Albrect’s bank I.D. card. True, the card had Albrect’s picture on it and not mine, but that didn’t seem too serious a problem to me.
Half to see if I could do it, and half to torture myself, I stopped at a shop on 42nd Street and had my picture taken in the automatic photo booth. I went into another little shop and asked them if they could make me a photo I.D. They said “sure.” I gave them Albrect’s I.D. and my photo, and ten minutes and five dollars later I was walking out of the place with a bank I.D. absolutely identical to Albrect’s, with the exception of the fact that it had my picture on it.
As I had expected, having the I.D. only made it worse. I was in a hell of a frame of mind when I put my key in the door and unlocked the office.
The mail was already there lying on the floor. It would be bills. Whenever the mail came early, it was always bills. This time there were three of them, and they couldn’t have come at a worse time. What with my casino withdrawal, it was going to be touch and go whether I could cover them.
The first bill was from the Penny Copy Center—$7.80 for Xeroxing a hundred copies of my time sheets, the daily vouchers that I turned in bi-weekly to Richard’s office in order to get paid. Not too bad. The second wasn’t a bill at all, just an appeal from some charity. I threw it in the wastebasket. The last one was the killer. It was the Master Charge bill. Shit! I’d forgotten all about it. The Master Charge bill always came a little bit after all the other monthly bills, and I’d forgotten it hadn’t come yet this month. They only gave you ten days to pay, too. This was going to put a big hole in the account. I sighed and ripped it open.
It wasn’t a bill. It was a letter. Stripped of its delicate phrasing and cheerful terminology, what it actually said was this: because I was fully charged to the limit on my account and had been for some time, because I was a poor schmuck who could never afford to reduce the principal of the debt, but dutifully every month forked over the exorbitant interest charge, because I was in every aspect exactly the sort of sucker these people made their enormous profit from, they were delighted to inform me that they were raising my credit limit from $1500 to $2000.
10.
MY PLANE SET DOWN IN Miami at 12:45. I rented a car at the airport, followed the stream of traffic, and headed for what I presumed was downtown Miami. I’d never been to Miami before, and I had no idea at all what the city was like. I stopped at the first stationery store I came to and bought a Hagstrom map, god love ’em. More than a few times a Hagstrom map had bailed me out when I couldn’t find a client’s address. I checked the address on my bank card, and found I was heading in only slightly the wrong direction. I made a couple of turns, and ten minutes later I was driving by the First National Bank of Miami, big as life.
I looked around for a parking space, but the bank was in a metropolitan area where signs were proclaiming no parking under penalty of death. I cruised around for about ten minutes trying to find a meter. I must have passed a dozen garages and parking lots on the way. I told myself I was doing this to save money. Bullshit, myself answered back. You’re just stalling because you don’t want to go into the bank, just like you’re afraid of any new situation. I had just about sold myself on giving in and entering a garage when I found a parking meter not two blocks from the bank. I pulled in, and put a quarter in the meter. It was a one-hour meter, and I wondered if that would be enough. Asshole, I told myself. If it goes well, you’ll be out in no time. If it doesn’t go well, you’ll be arrested for forgery, extortion, and attempted grand larceny so why are you sweating a parking ticket?
I straightened my tie, took out my briefcase, and walked to the bank.
I couldn’t see very well through the window, just enough to tell that it was big and it was busy, both of which were good. I went inside and found it was a bank, similar to the banks in New York. A long line of people were queueing up and making their way through a labyrinth of ropes as they waited for the tellers, three-quarters of whose windows had signs that said “CLOSED.” To the right of them was a fenced-off area where bank officials of various ages, sexes, and races sat behind desks with name plaques on them. The bank officials were talking on the telephone, talking with each other, eating sandwiches, reading periodicals, and for the most part doing their best to ignore the somewhat shorter line of people waiting to do business with them.
At the far end of the bank was a glass door on which the gold letters, “SAFE DEPOSIT” were emblazoned. I went to the door and looked in. Unfortunately, the blank wall of a small hallway to the left was all I could see. This was too bad. I would have liked some reassurance—for instance, a room with four or five people manning the desk. This was not just paranoia. Albrect must have rented the box within the last couple of months. I had to hope the guy I was about to talk to wouldn’t be the guy who rented it to him, wouldn’t know damn well who Martin Albrect was, and know damn well I wasn’t him.
There was a button on the wall next to the door. I took a deep breath and pressed it. Seconds later, a buzzer sounded. I pulled the door open and went in.
About ten feet down the corridor was a small alcove where a lone, elderly man with bifocals and a stubby cigar sat at a counter.
“Yeah,” he grunted.
I slid the I.D. card and the key across the counter. He slid the key back at once, a gesture that eloquently told me he was dealing with an idiot who didn’t know the system, that he dealt with idiots who didn’t know the system often, and that if people had half the brains they were born with, his job wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass.
He took my card, looked it over, put it in a small machine similar to a Master Card charge machine. He slid a form into the machine, pulled the handle across, and printed the information from the card onto the form. He took the card out of the machine and slid it back to me. He took the form out of the machine, picked up a pen, and made a big “X” on it where I was supposed to sign, just in case, as he suspected, I was a total idiot who couldn’t read the word “Signature.” He turned the form around and slid it over to me.
I had practiced signing the name Martin Albrect all the way down on the plane, and had gotten pretty good at it. It was a little different doing it without bumping along through air pockets, but I managed a pretty good facsimile.
It didn’t matter. I could have written John Doe on the form for all this guy cared. He pressed a button on his desk, and a security guard appeared from a door down the hall. For a second I thought they had me, but the old guy just handed the security guard a key, said “Box 372,” and the guard nodded and started down the hallway with me following.
With our two keys, the guard and I unlocked #372, which proved to be a rectangular box about a foot wide, a foot high, and two feet deep.
The guard brought the box into a private alcove. I followed with my briefcase. I half expected the guard to look at my briefcase and say, “You can’t bring that in here,” but then I remembered this was my safe deposit box and I could damn well put in or take out any goddamn thing I wanted. The guard withdrew and closed the door.
I lifted the lid and looked in. In the box were an envelope and a package. I picked up the envelope first. It was unsealed. I pulled out the contents. It was money. One thousand dollars in crisp, new hundred-dollar bills. I counted it twice, put it bac
k in the envelope, and stuffed the envelope in my jacket pocket.
I took out the package. It consisted of a large manila envelope, folded in half and held with string. It was heavy, weighing, I guessed, about two pounds. I squeezed it, and the contents gave slightly It was somewhat like squeezing a bag of sugar.
I put the package in my briefcase, closed the safe deposit box, opened the door, and summoned the guard. Together, we put the box back and locked it in place.
The old man buzzed me through the door again, and I walked out through the bank. No sirens went off. No police appeared to handcuff me and take me away. I went out the front door and walked the two blocks to my car. I still had 40 minutes on the meter. Well, someone else could have ’em. I got in the car, drove to a Sheraton Motor Lodge, and rented a room.
If the fact that I had no luggage other than a briefcase bothered anybody, it didn’t show. The bellhop escorted me to my room, accepted my dollar tip with the gracelessness of someone who is being paid something for nothing, and withdrew.
The room had two double beds, a color TV a couple of dressers, and a round table with four chairs.
I put my briefcase on the table, sat down, opened it up, and took out the package. I slid the string off, and unfolded the manila envelope, which was both clasped and sealed. I couldn’t be bothered with it. I tore the end off and slid out the contents—a large, heavy-duty, Ziploc plastic bag. I knew the bag well. My father-in-law still sold them. He didn’t manufacture them—the Ziploc bag was a patented item upon which he couldn’t infringe—so it was one of the few bags he still jobbed. He sold a lot of them in his day, but he sold ’em empty. And if I was right about the contents, this one bag was worth more than any goddamned Ziploc bag order he ever filled.