Folks said, “Captain, if you up your share, it’s gonna bruise the score.”
He smiled. “Bruise the score, or kick it back to Stilwell! I want fifteen percent!”
Folks said, “But Captain, I’m not qualified to make a decision like that.”
He leaned back and said, “Wonder, you’re much too modest. You’re qualified to know that a con store is like a house of wax. It can’t survive strong heat without a strong fix!”
Folks said, “But Captain, Mr. Stilwell has blown off his heavy steam.”
The captain leaned his massive frame toward Folks with his eyes flickering green flame. He half whispered, “Don’t play the con for me, Wonder. I knew what happened at the airport five minutes after it blew. Even the Vicksburg Kid couldn’t blow that mark off. That mark is hot enough to fry this administration! Face it! I could demand fifty percent of the score and deserve it. I’m the only one qualified now who can blow him off.”
Folks said, “Well Captain, I don’t have your five percent puff up. Sure, you’re worth it, Captain Ellis, but I’ll have to expose the Kid to your logic.”
The phone rang. Captain Ellis picked up and said, “Yes . . . yes . . .”
He stared up at Folks as he listened. He said, “Yes, Officer Tate! Go on . . .”
He leaned back in his chair, reached into his baroque humidor and extracted an imported Panatella. He said, “Wonder, light my cigar.”
Folks smiled as he went around the desk and flicked his lighter flame to Ellis’ cigar tip as he listened on the phone with a “rapist laid the virgin” look.
Folks said, “Captain, we’re lucky to have a stand-up friend like you.”
He frowned him silent. Ellis said, “All right! Give me ten minutes, Officer Tate, before you bring Stilwell in.”
He hung up and said, “Mr. Stilwell has indicated a determination to beef past me, should I fail to satisfy his lust for justice. This is bad! I can only see a kickback of the score to Stilwell, or indictments, unless I blow-off that mark. I want twenty percent of the score.”
Folks said, “Captain, you’re great! Just priceless! So, you got your twenty percent! Captain, no disrespect, but may I be excused before you wind up with the long end of the score?”
The captain blew a mote of cigar ash off the sleeve of his five C-note suit. His five carat ring shot light like a swarm of fireflies. He chuckled, “You’re a charmer, Utah Wonder. I like you.”
Folks said, “I’m fond of you too, Captain. Any chance I get the exclusive right to light all of your cigars?”
He said evenly, “I’ll expect you here before noon tomorrow.”
Folks nodded and smiled as he left the office for the street. He stood in the neon thicket looking for a cab, whistled at one that was in hire. A pastel fox, in a pink Excalibur, flushed from the thicket. Christina Buckmeister pulled to the curb in front of him. She waggled a long, tapered finger his way.
She swung the Excalibur door open, his side. Her eyes were slumberous, beclouded with vulva steam and he got in. She threw her head back and laughed with joy. He saw her nostrils were frosted with crystal blow dust. She sucked his bottom lip.
He thought, what the hell. Why not punish this come freak with my ten inch whip?
Behind them, on the sidewalk, one of Captain Ellis’ bunco detectives stared at them with a surprised and thoughtful look on his corrugated face. He went into Captain Ellis’ office, reported the scene he’d witnessed and left the office.
Captain Ellis went through a familiar routine. He swiveled his chair to remove a folder fat with Canadian dossiers and mug shots from a file case behind his desk bearing the caption Vicksburg Kid And Associates. Captain Ellis put it into his desk drawer and locked it. He turned back to the file-case and extracted folders and mug shots of deceased and imprisoned con men. He placed them on the desk before him.
Officer Tate escorted Stilwell into the office. The captain slipped on his commiserating blow-off-the-mark mask as Officer Tate deposited Stilwell into a chair at the side of the desk. The captain smiled and leaned to give Stilwell’s hand an energetic shake reserved for transient V.I.P.’s and city hall nabobs. The captain lit a cigar as Stilwell started his fruitless search of the mug shots.
PETTICOAT PIT
Christina lit a stick of gangster for them. Folks studied her perfect profile, her breeze-flogged hair streamed like golden bunting as she hustled the Excalibur through the moil of cars and people to the outskirts of the city. He marveled at her sorcerous resemblance, under the soft glow of the night sky, to Camille Costain, the alabaster Chicago witch with the kinky sexual hang-ups with rain and the psychic maim as keys to the penultimate sexual gratification. He remembered again how Camille had tortured him, driven him to near madness before she dumped him.
Christina said, “How about a bit of this lovely night’s ambience before I drop you off, wherever?”
Folks shrugged, “Why not?”
She smiled, inserted Robert Goulet’s Couldn’t We? into a dashboard tape deck and sang along throatily.
Folks decided to postpone Christina’s direct physical punishment through a brutal womb sweep with his weapon. He’d titillate her, ignite a bonfire of passion in her loins, get his revenge on her for the Costain pain. He’d leave her strung up on a steamy rack of desire and frustration. He’d punish Christina, the heiress, for the crimes of her robber baron fore-bearers, for her death-stained fortune. The fortune amassed from the misery of coal mine’s black lungers, he’d read so much about to support his fake background as Utah Wonder, star con roper up from the coal pits.
He’d punish her for the hopelessness and starvation in black ghettos, for his dead black mother. For all the blacks ever imprisoned in holds of slave ships. He’d punish her for being spoiled, pampered, aggressive, beautiful and rich. But most of all for the pain her prototype, Camille Costain, had inflicted upon him. He shaped a cruel smile as she tooled the Excalibur into an access road at the foot of a mountain.
Suddenly she pulled the car onto the road shoulder. She dramatically keyed off the engine, turned and faced him with an enigmatic smile.
He suspected she was about to give him some sort of crotch test to reverse their positions. He blandly looked about the moon-swept, but rather bleak terrain in the loom of the stygian mountain.
He mockingly said, “Miss Buckmeister, this is an interesting spot that you’ve discovered. A macabre ambience.”
She glanced toward the mountain and said huskily, “Johnny, I didn’t want to stop here. I did because I’m afraid of you, Johnny.” She fingered the lacy hem of her slip as she averted her eyes. “I wanted us to go to my lodge at the top of the mountain, but you . . . ah, well, lie for a living. I hate lies! I’ve never before felt for any man quite as I do about you. I’m terrified at the risk that you, the consummate reflex liar, have lost the capacity for truth in every instance. I pressured Trevor to tell me all about you, how you, a child of fourteen, went into the Utah mines to support your mother and younger brothers and sisters. That is your redeeming aspect to me. Otherwise I should not be here with you. The question is whether your horrid life left you bitter and hostile toward people like me.”
He slipped on a wounded mask and stared ahead. “There is no reason to fear me. But I don’t plan to take a polygraph test to convince you of that, Miss Buckmeister.”
She was unsmiling, phosphorescent in her diaphanous white silk dress. She gazed at his sculpted Errol Flynn profile. She was motionless, like a pastel mannequin in the star-lit window of night.
He decided that he could better frustrate her, maim her, get the hook sunk deeply into her psyche up there in her web. He thought, this assassin needs to con me that she’s afraid like Camille did before she slaughtered me. He shaped his heartbreaking little boy smile and took her into his arms. They deep-tongued.
He disengaged and whispered, “Christina, please don’t be afraid. I could never lie to you, darling. You can risk the mountain top.”
He tried
vainly to remember the novelist who had propounded the theory that all black men had been driven insane in the throes of the fake great nightmare, American Dream. Was he insane?
She put the car in motion and catapulted the sleek machine up the mountain through caverns of lush spicy forests to its top. She parked before the stately redwood lodge, gleaming richly on the moon-engorged pinnacle. The shimmering neon below was strung about the city’s frame like ropes of rainbow pearls.
She slid from the car, stood like a quizzical Botticelli nymph, to see him look blandly at her, make no effort to follow her lead. She laughed, “Johnny, I can’t believe that you want me to carry you past the threshold.”
He smiled, “Come back here to me, darling. Let’s enjoy the view a bit.”
With transient pout, she got in, wiggled herself snugly against him, her cheek against his chest. She goosebumped him with her nails across the blue silk at his kneecap. His fingertip caressed the passion pit beneath her earlobe to stoke her crotch fire as they gazed down at the extravaganza of city lights.
He thought about the walk-up tenement hovels and the zillion meals missed in the Chicago black ghetto. The senseless cuttings and shootings behind the psychotic invisible walls of the ghetto. He remembered how the icy winds had slashed him blue with cold through his threadbare garments going to school and his lunches of fatback and turnip greens sandwiches.
He remembered the arrest of the gaunt old man on a street corner, his black face deformed before his pauper audience with revolutionary passion as he shouted, “The rich should be compelled, at gun point, to share their riches with the starving wretched masses. We blacks must force all white offspring of their slavemaster fathers to pay us reparations for the sweat and agony of our slave mothers and fathers.”
Reparations! The concept burst like a thunderbolt inside his head. He was electrified at the realization that he held the palpitating heiress to the Buckmeister millions in his arms. He thought, I must play her for the ultimate stakes. Of course, he told himself, my real, noble purpose must be to lock up this gold-plated bitch. Marry her! Then find the method to use the most of her fortune for reparations, the rest for my personal future and security, before I dump her.
He trembled with excitement at the birth of his master plan for her. He thought about Pearl and the certain complications. He’d structure that aspect later, he decided. In the blinding brilliance of his master plan he wondered if Pearl was indeed indispensable. He thought, I must first discover what Christina is to the bone.
Christina said, “Are you chilled? I felt you shiver, Johnny.”
He said, “No, I’m comfortable.”
He remembered the Vicksburg Kid had told him about how Christina’s late grifter father had built the foundation for the Buckmeister empire in Germany from stock and bond flim flams. And before that the hoary money machine swindle. He’d sound her out, play her, convince her and fleece her as he would any other mark. Poetic justice for the daughter of a con man.
He said, “Tell me about your aristocratic self.”
She chewed her bottom lip. “Johnny, until Victoria, my mother, became ill, my life in my memory has always been a cliché, poor little rich girl existence, dangling on a dominating, possessive maternal string. With Victoria’s guidance I accepted the challenge of managing the family’s business affairs. My new responsibilities have given me at least the chance to escape vegetation and the means to hold at bay the drooling cabal of alleged men who hounded me around the clock. But now I’m suffering from emotional dehydration. Johnny, I need a man I want. I want to be happy, to be fulfilled. I’m an executive by necessity. But, I’m first a woman. Oh Johnny, I’m so lonely!”
He said, “I’m lonely, too.”
She said, “Is that why you and that black woman had dinner together the other night?”
He said, “Not exactly. She’s just a friend. I’m able to advise her on certain business problems thanks to a degree in business administration. I know her family.”
Christina sighed, “I’m relieved to hear that, Johnny.”
He said, “Why?”
She said, “Because Latins and blacks are notorious for low boiling points, especially when their romantic links are snarled by white women. I’m strongly attracted to you Johnny, but I wouldn’t be thrilled at the prospect of mayhem or worse as a result of whatever territoriality I might enjoy with you. To say nothing of the scandal! Johnny, do you have any serious affair going?”
He decided to swing the gate wide. “Why, no. I like it that way. Please don’t plan to get me into trouble.”
She laughed, “You can’t be unaware that I already have.”
They lit cigarettes.
She said, “Where do you live, Johnny?”
He said, “On the west side. I share an apartment with Speedy, your chief of security, and his girl.”
She said, “When should I call you to catch you in an emergency? Such as I just have to hear the sound of your voice.”
He knew that Speedy’s girl, Janie, was in L.A. for a couple of weeks. And Speedy seldom left for the Buckmeister place until four P.M. He said, “Before four on weekdays.”
She said, “Fine, I have the number.” She stroked her fingertips across his inner thigh, “Let’s go inside. I’ll buy you a drink.”
His cue, he thought, to prat her out, block her away from the erotic payoff in the sure shot tradition of the con. The cinch way to hype up her passion and desire for him, to lower the odds in his favor for his total conquest of her.
He glanced at his watch, kissed her and said, “I’m afraid I’m very late for that business appointment I was on my way to keep when you picked me up. Darling, I’m so sorry we can’t explore our . . . uh, intimate possibilities in the unhurried way I think we should. Let’s make a date to meet on this spot.”
She moved beneath the wheel, started the car and said peevishly, “All right, Johnny. When?”
He enjoyed an interior smirk as he thought about the way Camille Costain had pratted him out to wildly palpitate him with the yen to sex her. “Johnny, let me miss you until I’m bursting inside,” she purred. “Let’s wait until we can make love to the music of a rainstorm.”
Folks said, “Christina, let’s rush here to meet the very next time it rains, at its first fall. Think of the sweet mystique of it, darling, lying in soft shadows wrapped in the heady drama of a rainstorm, even salutes of thunder, with a light show of lightning.”
She kissed him hungrily and exclaimed, “It’s a dynamite idea, Johnny!” She turned the car around and as she drove down the road, she said, “I’ll miss you . . . where should I drop you?”
He answered, “The Marriott.”
They were practically silent all the way downtown. He kissed her, got out in front of the hotel, paused at the driver’s side.
She said, “Goodnight Johnny. I hope it you-know-what’s soon, otherwise I’ll have to hire a squadron of aircraft to seed the clouds!”
He smiled. “Goodnight, Angel Face. Between us we’ll pull down a lulu of a rainstorm soon!”
He went into the hotel lobby and watched her gun the Excalibur away into the neon thickets. He purchased a dozen red roses from the hotel’s florist. Then he went to the street and got into a cab for home. And Pearl.
Pearl was in the bathroom when he walked into his apartment. He got into lounging clothes and propped himself in bed to read the newspaper. It struck him that Pearl’s rich contralto voice was not accompanying the lyrics of running water as she washed stockings and underthings as usual. A moment later, he looked up from the paper and smiled when she opened the door and stepped into the bedroom in her panties.
He held out his arms and said, “Hi, sweetheart. How about some hot bubbling sugar?”
Pearl came to the bed with something concealed in her hand. She bypassed his upturned lips and pecked him on the forehead.
He said, “You got a cold, baby?”
She shook her head and sat on the side of the bed facin
g him. Her glaring brown eyes in the smear of cold cream on her tar black face gave the effect of an angry Mau Mau maiden. She retreated her wrist as he reached to touch it.
He said, “Tough day at school today, huh?”
She said, “No, tough time when I found your stash of dope on the floor beneath the facebowl in the bathroom.” She opened her hand and thrust a small cellophane package on her palm into his face.
He stared at it, realized that the Scotch tape had given way and exposed his passion for cocaine. He said, “Hon, don’t be uptight. That isn’t dope. I mean, it isn’t H. A joker laid it on me to try. It’s coke, sugar face . . . a harmless recreational high.”
He reached to take the quarter ounce of precious dust. She ripped open the package and dumped the powder into a pitcher of water on a nightstand beside the bed. He groaned, “Oh, you square-ass broad! You just blew several C-notes!”
She said, “Ah ha! You lied! Junkie, you bought that dope! I’m not so square that I don’t know dope that expensive isn’t passed out as freebie samples. Who are you really, Johnny? What are you? I want to know! Now!”
He said, “I’m Johnny O’Brien, real estate speculator. I’m willing to forget your vandalism with that coke if you can get yourself together and forget.”
She said, with heat, “I can’t accept that, and the rest of the mysterious shit about you. I mean it, Johnny! I can’t live like this. I must have answers to questions that have made me miserable since I left Canada with you.”
Folks’ blue eyes were radiant with aggravation. He said, “All right, sweet stuff, take an enema. Fire away!”
She said, “For an opener, what do you and Saul Borenstein really do for a living?”
He looked at her, a portrait of doubt and suspicion with her legs crossed, elbow propped on her thigh with her chin resting in her palm, glaring at him. For the hundredth time since he’d known her he flirted with telling her the truth. It was her fault that forced my lies, he told himself. Rather, her strait-laced black middle class brainwashed dogma about honesty and hard, legitimate labor as the only acceptable means to realize the so-called American Dream.