He said, “Beautiful, nothing will happen to me. But I been worrying about Red and Frog hunting us down. Shouldn’t I . . . ?”
She shook her head. “They don’t trust each other. Frog is paranoid; he trusts nobody. It shouldn’t be hard to come up with a plan to make Frog eliminate Red for us. You know how I hate Red, but it’s better for us that Frog hits him. We’ll worry about Frog later.”
He said, “I’ll pass up the smack when I take ’em off.”
She said, “Oh no, you don’t. Take it so we can put it out of circulation.”
He groaned. “A hundred gees worth of smack down the crapper.”
They laughed and kissed good-bye. He watched her pull away and disappear behind a lazy curtain of snowflakes. Twenty minutes later, she turned into the driveway through the open steel gates of Red’s high-walled estate on the extreme Southside. She pressed the button on the Genie garage door opener as she drove down the long driveway into the four-car garage. When she shut off the motor, she noticed Frog’s Buick, and saw that Red’s Continental was missing. She stepped from the car to the driveway and pressed a button beside the garage door. It swung shut.
She glanced up at the five-bedroom apartment atop the garage where Red’s stable of five whores lived. She walked to the back door of the two-story white brick mansion that was cleaned and maintained by Red’s whores. She let herself into the service porch, then through the door into the gleaming spacious kitchen. She went through the lavish Chippendale dining room to the spiral staircase leading to the master bedroom.
She reached the second-floor landing, paused outside Frog’s room at what she thought was the sound of her own voice. It was her voice, she realized, as she heard tinny segments of a telephone conversation she had with her shop’s perfume supplier two days before. She hastened away to examine her phone, then heard Frog’s door open behind her.
She halted, turned, and said frostily, “Good morning, Frog.”
A frown hedge rowed his brow for an instant before he said, “Hi, Miss Fine. Didn’t expect you until tonight,” as he walked toward her looking like a huge black, wet frog with his protrusive eyes glittery in his blunt face, shining greasily.
She said, “Frog, the plans of mice and et cetera . . .”
He walked to her and towered over her with his heavy lips pulled back in a gold-toothed smile. “My sympathy for your mother’s passing.”
She said, “Thank you, Frog,” as she turned away.
He grabbed her wrist. She faced him with narrowed eyes staring down at his grip on her arm. He leaned into her face with his ugly face twisted with grotesque ardor. His squeaky voice quavered. “I missed you, L’il Fox, more than Red, you can bet. Give me a break, huh? I can keep a secret.”
He dropped his mouth toward hers. She jerked her face out of range and twisted her wrist from his grasp as she backed down the hallway.
He pursued and pleaded, “Gimme a break! I don’t want something for nothing.” He snatched a roll of “C” notes from his pocket. They littered the hallway when he threw them at her retreating feet.
She backed into her bedroom, slammed, and locked the door. Frog muttered obscenities as he got on his hands and knees to retrieve the “C” notes from the carpet. Satin hung her coat on the doorknob over the keyhole. She used a nail file to unscrew the base of the telephone. Just as she had suspected, she saw a tiny concealed transmitter bug. She replaced the screws and nervously chain-smoked at the window overlooking the backyard.
She wondered if Frog’s bug was in two weeks ago; that day, the only time, she had called Pony from the house in months. And only then because she had a bad cold and didn’t go into the shop for a whole day. She tried to remember the texture and text of the call. Just light chitchat she thought.
She watched Frog, in coveralls, open the garage door. He lifted the hood of his antique ’38 Buick Limited, then opened a toolbox and tinkered under the hood. She left the room to check out the phones in the adjoining guest rooms. Bugged. She stopped at Frog’s door, twisted the doorknob. Locked. She checked out the three phones downstairs. Bugged.
She returned to the bedroom window. She saw Red’s Continental pull into the garage. He got out with his stable of wilted young whores that he had picked up off the street and from second-rate hotels in the Loop. He pecked their cheeks in turn as they went up the stairs to their pad over the garage.
Satin went into the bedroom. She stripped nude and examined her haggard face in the bathroom mirror. She heard him enter the bedroom, saw his muscular image come to stand in the doorway behind her.
He grinned crookedly as he said, “Damn, girl, you look tore down, like you been turning a slew of two-buck Spic berry pickers.”
Her face was stony as she looked into his hooded green eyes in the mirror. His processed red mop glinted in the light.
“My mama had a funeral, Red. I gotta be uptight if I’m human.”
He stepped in close and rubbed his crotch against her buttocks. “Aw! C’mon now, baby, with that shuck. We got in common we hate our old ladies. Right?”
She moved to brush her teeth at the side of the washbasin. “Wrong, Red! I just hated Mama’s strictness, fool that I was, but I loved Mama. She didn’t dump me in an alley as yours did when I was born. She wanted me, took care of me, Ora, and my pa dying of cancer. She was a saint, Red. An old church doxie cracked I was cursed for killing Mama. But she was mistaken.”
She cringed away from his hands reaching for her shoulder. He laughed. “They say a trick killed my old lady. But shit, you’re in serious trouble, sugar, for sure, wasting a saint.”
Her dark eyes were killer panther orbs as she indicted him. “You mean you’re in trouble, bad trouble, Red. You’re the louse that pulled me away to break her heart with your con air castles. You murdered my sweet saint, Red! Don’t you want to change the subject?”
He half-whispered, “I will, Chippie Slickstuff. Second-Story Jack swears he spotted you lollygagging around your store around midnight last night. A pure-in-heart bottom bitch don’t slip back in town and detour her man’s lonely bed overnight.”
Contempt curled her frothy lips as she rinsed her mouth and spit into the face bowl. “Hah! I wish I had a tape to play that square-ass lonely bed crack from Razzle Red to all the jive mack men that think your swipe is frozen numb. Razzle Red, the coldest ass kicker in town. Hah! Red, you’re a clown if you’ll buy anything a junkie burglar tells you about your woman. Maybe you should cut me loose.”
His jaw muscles writhed. He sprayed spittle. “Uh-huh! You got yourself some splitting power, you got that shop I set you up in. Now you’re ready to hit the wind, to set me up as a chump laughingstock. Right? Ha!”
She stared up at him, aquiver with the struggle to be cool. “You’re wrong, Red. I don’t plan to hit the wind unless you can’t trust me. And, Red, please call me Etta or Satin, okay?”
He put his giant palms on the face bowl and leaned his flat yellow brute face into hers. “I couldn’t get you all night at your sister’s house. Why?”
She jerked her head to flounce her hair in irritation. “DA, the phone was off the hook. The calls after the funeral drove us up the wall. Can you believe, understand that, Red? Now get out of my ass, okay? I gotta headache.”
He said, “How’s Mimi?”
She stared in outraged awe. “None of your damned business, Red! She’d be with me if you cared.” She stepped into the shower and flipped on a torrent. She lathered herself. Red’s face was hideous with suspicion and rage as he glared at her soapy curves through the frosted shower door. His maximal erection tented his trousers as he peered over the shower door.
He shouted above the thunder of the water, “Ho, you got some stud’s stink on you? You fucking around I’m gonna send that sucker to the morgue when I get hip to who he is. Then guess what I’m gonna do for you?”
She hollered, “Braid steel coat hangers and beat me bloody like you did when you copped me.”
He screamed above t
he water roar, “I’m gonna have your shop torched and put you back to humping in the street where you belong.”
She shouted, “Don’t shuck me, Nigger. The torch I believe. But you won’t share this mojo pussy, Red. And you know I’m hip. I’m the only one you can trust to deliver your dope after Smiley burned you for that bundle of bread last month. If you torch my joint, I’ll cut you loose, Red.”
Red busted a cobweb into the shower door with his fist. “Bitch, you ain’t no precious necessity to a player. A star!”
Out of control with hatred, she shrilled, “Trick! The stupid hoes you claim are just a front for your star dope-dealing ass. Now, kick my ass. Nigger, I don’t want to sell your dope! Fire me, player!”
Red stomped into the bedroom and started to undress. She finished showering and stepped out. She cut murderous eyes at Red on the bed, snorting cocaine and stroking his organ. She slammed the bathroom door, saturated a sanitary pad with mercurochrome. She belted it on around her hips to turn off Red’s humping yen and ravenous tongue. She slipped into her gown.
A realization hit her. She was playing her hand stupidly with Red, waking him up with her bared hatred. She ripped off the sanitary belt and slipped off the gown. She must endure Red one more time. She relaxed her tight face in the mirror, made it bland, then sultry. After that, she opened the door and stepped sensuously into the plush pit to put Red back to temporary sleep until she could arrange his permanent slumber.
That same evening, three brothers from New York drove in and checked themselves and Red’s expected kilos of “H” into a top-floor suite in a high-rise hotel. The hotel was on the extreme Southside, at the end of Red’s block on the other side of the boulevard. Corpulent Mel “Ox” Hilson, the eldest, sat in the flashy suite on the living-room couch in red satin pajamas with the phone receiver to his ear. His thin, hard-faced brothers, in pink-striped dressing gowns, flanked him on the couch as they watched and listened intently.
“No, I tell you I can’t deliver those shirts tonight. My sewing machine broke down. Yeah, maybe some time tomorrow. Talk to you, Red.”
Mel’s tar-black face was angry as he slammed down the receiver. He drummed fingertips on the coffee table before him. He lit a cigar and grunted, “That asshole has a new partner that demands to be with the transaction.”
The unspoken question sparked the room like electricity as the brothers stared at one another: Is Red’s new partner a narc or an informer?
Mel said, “Silas, get to the window with your binoculars. See if he is alone when he leaves the contact phone in the drugstore at the other end of the block.”
Silas got the spyglasses off the coffee table and went to the window.
Jeff, the youngest brother, said, “I don’t like it, Mel.”
Silas returned from the window and said, “He was alone. Mel, does Red know where we’re stopping?”
“Hell, no!” Mel said as he dialed the phone. “Has he ever?”
Mel said, “How ya doing, Eli? Yeah, I’m in town, gonna hoist a few with you before I leave. Listen, you ever hear of a Jake ‘Frog’ Stone? Fine! Give me a full rundown on him.” Mel frowned, clucked, shook his head for five minutes before he said, “Eli, thanks. I love ya,” and hung up with a dour face. Mel sighed. “Red’s partner is an ex-burglary squad detective at Eleventh Street, Central Headquarters.”
His brothers chorused, “Let’s get back to the Apple.”
Mel slashed a double-jointed arm through the air. “Don’t panic, girls. True, since he’s an ex-cop, Frog is gotta be a card-carrying snake. He got bounced off the force six years ago. He caught a five-year bit in Joliet for fencing jewelry and furs he ripped off from junkie burglars. He went to bat for wasting three of ’em, but he beat those raps.”
The frozen fireworks on his giant fingers exploded dazzling light as Mel poured himself a glass of champagne. He sipped and leaned his bulk back on the couch. He grinned at his brothers. “Now, students, listen while I give you a lesson in business economics. We lugged a ticket to the joint from the Apple because the top bread in the East was fifty grand for the kilos. There’s a dope panic in Chicago. So Red and his snake partner are ‘coming’ in their drawers to buy at a hundred grand.”
Mel put a cigar in his mouth and nodded toward a lighter at the end of the table. Silas picked it up, leaned in, and flicked flame to the end of the cigar. Mel blew a blue gust of smoke toward the crystal chandelier and patted his processed gray hair.
He said, “Only a moron would lug those sizzling kilos back to the Apple to a fifty-grand market. I want you both to rent a couple of Fords or Chevys. I want Red and Frog tailed every one of their waking hours until we turn our deal. I want Red’s meet spot cased before we show. I’ll know where when I call him at the drugstore phone at ten in the morning.
“Well, get the hell out of here and cop those cars. Don’t carry your pieces until we deal.”
The brothers went into one of the bedrooms to dress. Mel went to the window to zero in with the powerful binoculars on Red’s estate across the way. He said to himself, “Red’s main bitch is a superfox.”
Satin, resplendent in a sable-trimmed pink leather walking suit with matching boots, strolled through the front gate to the boulevard. She moved under the horny scrutiny of Mel the “Ox.” Minutes earlier, Red had loaded his gaggle of whores into his Continental and left to take them to their all-night humping gigs. Mel watched her cross the boulevard and enter the drugstore. Satin went to a public phone to call Pony. She arranged to meet him on an El train platform within the hour to give him the duplicate key to Red’s meet motel room on the southern outskirts of the city.
As she left the store a creative thrill shot through her: the plan to eliminate Red! She caught a cab at a stand in front of the drugstore under Mel’s leering view. A quarter-hour later she paid a fare at an El station window on Fifty-eighth Street and walked up the stairway to the crowded southbound platform. Pony stood at the end of the platform, looking down on the wind-whipped street at pedestrians slogging through dirty, mushy snow. She walked to his side and looked down on the street, awash in neon.
She banged his hip with hers. “I’ve missed you. I love you,” she whispered.
“Me you, too, Lover Doll,” he said.
She slipped the dupe key into the pocket of his tan cashmere overcoat and said, “I’ll call you in the morning and let you know the approximate time Red and Frog will leave to make their deal. I could almost kiss Frog.”
He frowned and took his eyes from the street and stared at the side of her face. “You could what?” he growled.
She hip-banged him again and smiled wickedly. “Easy ‘Ice Cream Cone.’ Frog has transmitter bugs on all the phones at home. He’s got a fresh lock on his bedroom door. So, he’s gotta have his receiving and recording gizmos behind that door.”
She paused to light cigarettes for them. “Pony, Frog’s bugs gives us the way to put Red where the devil can hug him, and dogs can’t bite him, as Mama used to say. Listen carefully, darling; call Red at home at one A.M. I’ll pack my nicer things in the car trunk and split before you call. Baby, hang up after you say, ‘Red, I’ve got bad news. I’m not splitting the motel score with you. I’m calling you from out-of-town. You were a dirty nigger, Red, to burn me like you did last year when we took those Dagos in Cicero. Dixie hipped me, Red, the week before his ho wasted him.’ ”
The Jackson Park El train pulled in to stop at the platform. They risked a kiss.
Pony said, “Damn! You’re a smart broad to be so pretty.”
Satin turned and dashed into the train. She blew a kiss as it pulled away to the far Southside.
Next day at twilight, Pony drove a stolen blue Pontiac in search of a highway motel sign several miles past the city limits. Ironically, he passed the two Hilson brothers on their way back to the city after casing the motel.
He spotted the sign and pulled off the highway through a thick stand of trees into the snow-choked driveway. Ten blood-red stucco uni
ts huddled, battered in a trench of snow like slaughtered soldiers dead in the hush as requiem snow blossoms fell. A Cyclops bulb winked above a blistered metal sign: OTTO’S AND GRETA’S BERLIN MOTEL. Below it, a pasteboard For Sale sign.
He parked near the office and got out with an overnight bag. His black leather jacket and cap shone under the bald eye of the sign as he went into the dimly lit office and punched a bell on the scabrous counter. He heard an ancient throat expectorate phlegm and the sound of weary feet drag toward him from a burlap-curtained rear room. An old white man in a tattered plaid robe with a matching tasseled nightcap perched on his grizzled head entered the office. He yawned sleepily.
“Welcome to the Berlin Motel, mister. Five a day, twenty by the week,” he said with a heavy German accent.
Pony said, “Just overnight.”
Otto smiled toothlessly as he shoved the registration pad toward Pony, blank except for Red’s entry as Frank Smith, registered in room ten.
As Pony signed Leo Franklin, he said, “A friend said number nine is nice. Could business be slow enough so I got a choice?”
Otto said, “It’s terrible. I’m selling. This place could be a mint again, dolled up.” He sighed, “I’d dress her up pretty again if I had my Greta and a thimble of youth left.” He looked at the signature, took a key from a rack, and shoved it across the counter. “Number nine you got, Mister Franklin.” he said as he inked in “nine” beside Pony’s pseudonym.
Pony slid a five spot across the counter, picked up his key, and went to the Pontiac. He drove it to the end of the building and sat for several minutes watching the office door. Then he took his blanket-wrapped machine gun and bag into his room, flipped the light on, and placed them under the brass bed. He went and keyed himself into adjoining number ten. He flipped on a dim nightlight and examined the large one room and bath. He decided he’d get the drop on them from the closet, in a group or however they showed.
He started to leave, turned back, and went to a tall rectangular electric heater in the wall that he thought was in the same position as his room’s heater. He peered around the edges of the heater and smiled as he spotted a pinpoint of light from his room. He used a pocketknife to loosen the screws that anchored the heater’s light metal housing to the wall. Then he wrenched it gently from the top. It fell loose into his hands. He pressed it and the screws back against the wall, flipped off the nightlight, left, and locked the door.