by Parnell Hall
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said. It was a wonderful invitation.
I wasn’t sure what to say next. She seemed quite familiar with that sort of approach, and took the initiative. “You looking to party?”
“Could be,” I said. “How much would it cost?”
“Fifty bucks straight, seventy-five half and half, a hundred around the world.”
“Around the world?”
“Yeah.”
“What countries you visit?”
“France and Greece.”
Hmm. Some itinerary. Book me on a world-wide cruise.
“A hundred bucks?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
What the hell, I thought, I’m not going to let her keep it anyway. “O.K.,” I said. “Take me around the world.”
She hesitated a moment, and I realized I’d done something wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Damn, I should have done more research. Then it hit me. I’d agreed to the price too quickly. I hadn’t tried to bargain her down. The prices she quoted me were only asking prices. She probably rarely got them. The johns who were actually parting with their money were better businessmen than I.
However, the lure of the C-note was too strong for her to ignore. After a moment, she smiled, took my arm, and led me down the street to the hotel where I’d seen her take her other tricks.
In the hotel, for which the word “cheap” had been invented, I discovered the price of the evening’s entertainment had escalated. I had to pay for the room. I registered as John Smith, a clever alias thought of by only half of the establishment’s clientele.
Rosa led me upstairs to a small room furnished only by a bed, a dresser, and a chair.
Rosa locked the door, and turned to me. “First the money,” she said, holding out her hand.
I took out one of Albrect’s hundreds and gave it to her. She inspected it carefully, folded it up, and stuck it in her purse. She put the purse on the bed, straightened up, smiled, put her hands on her hips, and began undulating slowly.
I could have stopped the show there and then, but I figured I should let it go a little further to make sure I had her really hooked good. Besides, I’m only human. I’d been thinking about those tits for days. I contented myself with smiling self-consciously.
Rosa hooked her thumbs under the edge of her pullover and slowly pulled it up over her head. Peace and plenty. Large, firm, protruding breasts, large pink nipples just a half a caress away from being erect. Jesus Christ, remember what you’re there for.
It killed me but I did. As she swayed over to me and began to unbutton my shirt, I reached into my hip pocket and whipped out the pair of handcuffs, another joke present, and with what I hoped would pass for practiced skill, clapped them on her wrists, at the same time beginning the Miranda drone, now a staple of TV cop shows, “You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. If you give up the right to remain silent—”
Rosa gave up the right to remain silent. “Son of a bitch!” she shrieked, twisting away from me with the fury of a trapped tigress. “Fucking asshole son of a bitch! Shit! Fuck! Cunt! I knew you were a cop! Goddamnit to fucking shit hell!”
I was beginning to regret passing up my evening with this girl. It might have been interesting. Hell, I bet she might have even talked dirty in bed.
“Take it easy,” I told her.
“Fuck you, asshole pig!”
I smiled at her. “That’s better.”
She started a furious retort. Stopped. Thought better of it. Changed her tack to pleading and ingratiating. “Come on, man,” she said. “You don’t want to arrest me.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
She stared at me. “What?”
“I don’t want to arrest you.”
“Then what the fuck you doing, man?”
“Let’s you and me have a little talk. If it goes all right, I let you go.”
“You kidding?”
“No.”
“What the hell you want?”
“First of all, I want my hundred dollars back.”
She looked as if I’d just told her there was no Santa Claus. “Oh, shit,” she said. She pouted, swung her head back and forth, and shuffled her feet. Then she turned, fumbled in her purse, and took out the folded hundred. Reluctantly, she held it out toward me, begrudging every inch. I took it and shoved it in my pocket.
“All right,” I said. “Put your shirt on.”
She looked at her shirt on the bed. “I can’t do that with these handcuffs on.”
She was right. She couldn’t. Serendipity.
Still, this was business, and I had to concentrate. I took out my key and unlocked the handcuffs. She rubbed her wrists, which I guess is a reflex action, since the handcuffs hadn’t been tight. Then she got her shirt from the bed and put it on. Easy come, easy go.
“O.K.,” she said. “What do you want?”
“Guillermo Gutierrez.”
Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. She looked as if she’d been slapped.
“What about him?”
“He’s your boyfriend,” I said. It was not a question, and she recognized it as such.
“So what?”
“He’s dead,” I told her.
Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped open. She sank down on the bed. Her hands went to her face.
“Oh, no!” she said.
It was no good. She was acting, and she wasn’t good at all. Her shock at his name had been genuine, but this sucked.
She knew he was dead, and the way I figured it, that could mean only one thing.
“Don’t give me that shit,” I told her. “You know he’s dead. You went up to his place and found him there. You panicked and split. You kept waiting to see what would happen, but nothing happened. Finally, you couldn’t stand it any more. You went back there. The body was gone.”
She was just staring at me. “How do you know this?”
“That’s my job.”
She just kept staring. “You’re not a cop?”
“No.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a private detective,” I told her. “I want the guys who did Gutierrez.”
“Why?”
“Because the guys who hit Gutierrez also hit a friend of mine. I’m gonna find ’em and I’m gonna bring ’em down.”
She believed me. She didn’t know I was an asshole. Hell, she watched television, too. She probably thought I could do it.
“What do you want with me?” she said.
“Alan Donaldson,” I told her.
Again, I was the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
“No,” she moaned.
“Look,” I said. “I know he’s your connection. I don’t think he’s involved in this, at least not directly. I don’t want him. It’s the higher-ups I want. You cooperate with me, I’ll do everything I can to leave him in place.”
“Is that for real?”
“That’s for real. You in?”
“What do you want?”
“Now you’re talking,” I said. “Look, I know what your scene is. You’re gonna turn three or four more tricks until you’ve got enough to score, then you’re gonna call Donaldson. Frankly, I don’t want to wait around that long. So here’s the deal. I’ll give you the money you need to score, you call him and go score now.”
“You shitting me?”
“I’m on the square. How much you need to score?”
She hesitated, and I could see her mind going. “400,” she said.
“Don’t shit me,” I said, “or you go it alone. How much you really need?”
She pouted, shrugged. “Two hundred.”
“For what?”
“An eighth of coke.”
“Nice price, these days,” I told her. I hoped it was.
“Because of Guillermo,” she said. “I pay the same as if I bought quantity.”
“I can see why you’d hate to see Donaldson go down,�
� I said. “All right, you need two hundred to score. How much have you made so far?”
She pouted, looked at me, shifted her eyes. “Fifty,” she said.
“Come again.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “All right, a hundred.”
“That’s what I thought,” I told her. “And I’ll bet it took you more than two tricks to get it. That’s why you took a chance on me. My hundred was all you needed to score.”
She looked at me, said nothing. I took the hundred-dollar bill out of my pocket and held it in front of me. She looked at it, but it had kind of lost its thrill for her. She looked back up at me.
“That’s all you want me to do?” she said. “Just score?”
“No. You gotta find out something for me.”
“What?”
“How low his supply is and when he’s gonna score some more.”
“Shit.”
“That shouldn’t be so hard.”
“You gonna cut off his source?”
“Hey. A guy like him has lots of sources. I can’t protect the whole world.”
“Yeah,” she said, dubiously.
“Look,” I told her. “It’s not like you had room to bargain. You cooperate, he stays in place. You don’t, he goes down. Now let’s go.”
We went. She wasn’t happy, but she went. She made the phone call from the corner. Then we got my car and drove over there. I let her out at the corner.
“I’m gonna drive down the block and turn the corner, and park. You meet me there.”
I gave her the money. She started to get out of the car. I grabbed her arm. “Remember, you don’t show up, he goes down.”
She nodded, got out, and closed the door. I watched her walk down the street toward the townhouse. I pulled out and passed her as she headed up the front steps. I turned the corner, parked, and waited.
She was back in ten minutes.
“Well,” I asked, as she slid into the seat.
She smiled at me. “Piece of cake,” she said. “He’s low. He’s gonna score tomorrow. He promised me he’d be holding by late afternoon.”
I smiled back. “Nice work,” I told her.
I drove her home. I figured I owed her that, and not just for the information. Maybe I’m just a sexist pig, but in my book any pretty girl who smiles at me and shows me her tits deserves a ride home.
20.
I STAKED OUT DONALDSON’S PLACE at nine in the morning. From what Rosa had told me, it was a pretty safe bet he wasn’t going to score until the afternoon, but I wasn’t taking any chances. What if he went somewhere else first?
Of course, I was being stupid. Guys who snort coke all night aren’t usually up at the crack of dawn, and if they are, it’s because they’ve been up all night and are just getting ready to fall into bed. There were no lights in Donaldson’s apartment, no sign of activity of any kind. I had moved my car about ten times, argued with a dozen policemen, and even gotten a forty-dollar ticket from an overzealous meter maid. And still nothing.
What made things worse was, once again, I had gotten no sleep. After dropping Rosa off, I had driven out to East Hampton to pick up the kilo of coke. That wasn’t as easy as it sounds. I have a map that lists the distance places are from New York City, and East Hampton was listed at 106 miles. That’s as the crow flies, and I’m not a crow.
The saving grace was at that time of night there was no traffic and I could make good time, and after I took the East Side Drive to the Midtown Tunnel and got on the L.I.E., I was averaging about sixty, and the miles were flying by.
The tracking unit kicked in somewhere around Islip, and I was mighty glad to hear it. It would have been a real kick in the ass to have driven all the way out there to discover that Red was nowhere to be found and was probably on his way back to Florida at the time. The “beep, beep, beep” from the unit spurred me on, and I pushed down harder on the accelerator.
Not long after that I started getting punchy. I had flashes of paranoia that I shouldn’t be going so fast, I was going to get busted for drug running. Then I realized how stupid that was. I started cracking myself up, paraphrasing the speech Dub Taylor says to Paul Newman and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”: “Morons. I got morons on my team. No one’s gonna bust me on my way out to East Hampton. I got no dope on my way out to East Hampton.”
You had to be there. I got to giggling uncontrollably and stomping down on the accelerator, and if a cop had happened to stop me, drugs or no drugs, they were going to put me away.
I hit East Hampton about four in the morning. It’s a beach town, as the smell of sea air reminded me, and I bet it would have looked great in the daylight, but it was too dark to see, and I was too tired to care. All I cared about was finding Red’s house. Fortunately, I had the tracking unit.
So far I’d only used the unit to track a moving object. This was my first time using it to find a stationary one. It was kind of fun. I’d drive along following the vector, and if I missed a turn or made a wrong turn, the vector would change and I’d have to turn around and backtrack until I got the vector pointing ahead of me again. I kept doing this, and it wasn’t long before I found myself driving down Red’s street with the vector pointing “right this way.”
A couple of blocks down the street the vector veered slightly to the right and pointed straight at a car parked in a shrub-lined driveway about two houses ahead of me. I immediately pulled into the curb and cut my lights.
I took a flashlight out of my glove compartment just in case and got out of the car. I stuck the flashlight in my hip pocket, and crept along the sidewalk up to the edge of the shrubs to check out the house and car.
The car was in the shadows, which was good, but there was a light on in one of the downstairs windows of the house, and I didn’t like that at all. By rights Red should have been sound asleep, and if he wasn’t, what else could it mean except somehow he knew something was up? What if he was watching? What if he was waiting for me? What if he had a dog?
I was a nervous wreck, but I did it. I crept out into the driveway, bent down behind the car, reached under and grabbed—nothing! There was nothing there! I groped my hand around. Jesus Christ, wasn’t this where I put it? I lay down on the ground, stuck my head under the car, groped around with both hands. Nothing! I even risked switching on the flashlight. That clinched it. There was nothing there.
My head was racing. What had happened? Could it have fallen off? No, it couldn’t have fallen off. The coke could, but not the transmitter, because I’d been following the transmitter here. So the transmitter had to be here, but it wasn’t. Impossible. The vector was pointing right at it. It was pointing right at the car and—Jesus Christ! The house! It was pointing at the car and the house, so if it wasn’t on the car it was in the house, and that meant that Red had found it, and found the coke. Red knew that something was up and that’s why there was a light on in the house, because he, and maybe some of his buddies, were there right now waiting for me, and this was a trap, and they must have seen the flashlight, and—
I was back in my car in nothing flat, surprised to get that far and happy to be alive. I gunned the motor and pulled out from the curb.
I don’t know what impelled me to look at the vector as I went by the house. Perhaps I just wanted to see it point to where my would-be killers were.;
But it didn’t. It didn’t swing and point to the house at all. It kept pointing slightly ahead and to the right. But as I passed the next house, the vector swung all the way around and pointed back the other way.
I slammed on my brakes and pulled into the curb. I couldn’t believe it. Wrong car, wrong house! How could I? I hadn’t checked the vector by driving by the house first. I hadn’t checked the license plate on the car. I hadn’t even checked the number on the house. Morons. I got morons on my team.
I got out of the car. I was so angry I slammed the door, screw the noise. I strode back to the house I’d just passed. This one was entirely dark. I walked up to
Red’s car, bent down, and snapped on the flashlight.
There they were, the transmitter and the bag of coke. Two of the suction cups had come loose and were dragging on the. ground, and how Red missed them was beyond me, but the bag was still there. There was a big hole worn in one corner where it had dragged on the ground, but the dope was still in it.
I snapped off the other two suction cups. I was going to take the transmitter too, but thought better of it. Maybe I was just trying to make up for the bonehead plays I’d made so far, but it occurred to me Red might make another run, and it might help to know where he went. Besides, I could always find the transmitter if I wanted to take it off later. At any rate, I left it on the car.
I got back in my car and drove home. I held it well under the speed limit, what with a kilo of coke on board, and it was 7:15 when I double-parked in front of my building.
I went upstairs, where my wife was just waking up, and gave her the impression that I had just now gotten out of bed and gone to double-park the car for the alternate-side parking regulations. I shaved, brushed my teeth, went out, had a cup of coffee and a doughnut, and drove downtown. I left my car in the Municipal lot on 54th and Eighth Avenue, which at eighty-five cents per half-hour is great for short stops and prohibitive for all day, ran down to my office, dropped off the kilo of coke, ran back, got in the car and made it down to Donaldson’s by 9:00—tired, exhausted, angry, feeling like a fool, and knowing damn well he’d never show before noon.
The first sign of life was about 2:30. The blind in an upstairs window went up. By about three a knockout of a teenage girl came out. Another left at 3:15. What was I doing wrong?
About 3:30 a hired car pulled up in front It wasn’t a limousine, but it wasn’t a taxi either. It was car #278 from one of those fleets of hired cars you can call up and order if you move enough coke to be able to afford it.
The driver got out and rang the doorbell, and Donaldson came out. This was the first time I’d gotten a good look at him. He was youngish, say thirty, and of medium height and build. He wasn’t ugly, but he wasn’t handsome enough to rate two teenage girls. Ah, the wonders of coke. He seemed to look none the worse for his evening of wear.
He got in the car and drove off, with me following. We went through the Midtown Tunnel. This driver obviously was paid just to drive.