The next thing she said was, “You always perspire a little, don’t you?”
“Not always,” Stick said. “Sometimes I do, I don’t know why. It doesn’t have anything to do with, you know, the enjoyment of it.”
“I wondered.”
Then neither of them said anything for a little while, lying next to each other in the darkness, touching but not holding. The light from the hall reached the bed, and if he turned his head he could see their outline, in shadow, on the wall close by. He liked her. He liked the way she moved, skinny little thing. She was funny. And she was smarter than she sounded. She sounded goofy, but it was just that she let it come out and didn’t try to act or be someone else. He liked her a lot.
Arlene said, “I wondered, it made me think of it, something else.”
“What?”
“If you were sweating that time—in the bar.”
“What bar?”
“In Hazel Park.”
“I don’t remember any bar—” He stopped.
“The one a couple of blocks from the Hazel Park track.”
Stick sat up. He knocked a glass off the night table getting the light on. She was looking up at him, eyes wide open, her hands clutching the sheet to her tightly.
“Oh God, I shouldn’t have said anything, should I?”
“Wait a minute, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Some bar I was supposed to’ve been at? You thought you saw me?”
“I saw you,” Arlene said. “You and Frank, you took the money from him, I thought, God, they’re cops. And then you locked us in the room.”
“You were at the bar?”
“I had on this scarf, over my hair? You looked right at me once, I thought sure, I thought, Oh God, but I guess you were busy, you looked right at me but didn’t see me. I didn’t know whether to say anything or not. Then in the room”—Arlene started to smile and she giggled—“it was really funny, everybody was opening bottles and drinking and the woman was trying to stop them. She kept hitting the poor guy—”
“Who were you with?”
“Just my friend.”
“Arlene,” Stick said, as gently as he could, “did you tell him you knew us?”
The telephone rang in the living room.
She frowned. “Who’s that? I know he’s out of town.” She was up, climbing over him—
“Arlene—let it ring.”
—running naked out of the room.
“Arlene—”
He listened and heard her saying, “Really? But isn’t it kinda late? . . . No, but it’s pretty short notice.”
She’d been in the bar, seen the whole thing, and admitted it to him. Christ Almighty.
“No, no, I didn’t mean that. Hon, you know I’d love to come. . . . Yeah, okay. . . . God, I’ll have to move. . . . Okay, ’bye.”
Arlene came back in the room, hurrying, not looking at Stick.
“I’m going to Chicago. Calls up practically in the middle of the night—gets the big urge, I have to come. He’s sending the company plane over.”
“Arlene,” Stick said, “hold still a minute, okay?” He watched her come out of the closet with a suitcase and clothes over her arm.
“He’s at the APAA convention. God, I didn’t know it was the APAA. Who’s he had in the booth? Some girl, must be from Chicago. But what would she wear?”
“Arlene, did you tell him about me and Frank, that you knew us?”
She looked at him briefly. “You got to get out of here, I’m being picked up. Why didn’t he take me when he went? The prick. No, I shouldn’t say that, he’s been very nice to me.”
“I’ll drive you,” Stick said. “We can talk in the car.”
She was in the closet again, getting a green pantsuit and the shiny silver costume. “One of his hot-rodders is on the way over. God, the way they drive. He doesn’t believe anybody should get to the airport more than ten minutes early. It means they don’t have anything to do.”
“Arlene, did you tell him our names?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Say yes or no, will you?”
“No, of course not.”
He felt a little relief, just a little. It was funny, in a way, watching her run around the room naked, taking things out of the dresser and throwing them in the suitcase.
“Did you tell anybody else?”
She was out of the room again.
“Like the police!”
He heard the bathroom door close and lock and the water turned on. Stick put on his pants and shoes. He couldn’t believe it. Carrying his shirt he went into the hall and stood close to the bathroom door.
“Arlene?”
“Hon, I can’t talk now, I’m doing my eyes.”
“You didn’t tell anybody else?”
“God, I almost forgot. Look in the front closet, see if there’s something hanging there, from the cleaner’s.”
Stick hesitated, then went into the living room, putting his shirt on.
The front doorbell rang.
Almost immediately the bathroom door opened.
“Get in the bedroom.”
Her eyes, vividly lined and framed in silver-green, were wide open. She ran in and put on the green pantsuit before running back out to open the door. Stick waited.
He heard her say, “Larry, hi, you’re a doll.” She laughed at something Larry said. “No, no, get in the car, I’ll be right out.”
Arlene came into the bedroom with a dry cleaner’s plastic bag, finished packing in less than half a minute, and picked up the suitcase.
“Arlene—”
“I’ll talk to you when I get back,” Arlene said and rolled her eyes at him. “God.”
The front door closed and there was silence. Stick made himself a drink, Canadian Club, because her friend didn’t have bourbon. He drank it and smoked a cigarette and went back to Arlene’s bed for the night.
18
“I PUT A STACK OF plastic glasses on the bar,” Frank said, “they use the good ones, have to go and find them so they can put their cigarettes out in the glasses—plastic ones’re sitting right there.”
Stick passed him, going out to the kitchen with a couple of ashtrays.
“I’m surprised you got anything in there at all,” Frank said and picked up a glass. “Look at the cigarette butts. Potato chips all over, ground in the carpet, drinks spilled—like they’re raised in a fucking barn.”
Stick came out of the kitchen. He felt like moving, doing something, and kept picturing Arlene running around naked, packing the suitcase.
“Next morning always looks depressing,” Stick said. “Especially with the sun out.” He could remember hangovers in the Florida sun. He went through the open doors to the balcony and began gathering empty beer cans. “Nobody’s down at the pool yet.”
“And they aren’t at church,” Frank said. “Where you suppose all the partygoers are?”
“Throwing up,” Stick said. “Hugging their toilets.”
“You get the guy out of your bed all right?”
“He opened his eyes, didn’t know where he was.”
“You didn’t come back, uh?”
“This morning,” Stick said, “about half-past seven.” He didn’t want to mention Arlene just yet—Arlene seeing them in the bar—so he said, “I noticed you weren’t home.”
“You want to know where I was?”
“With the nurse,” Stick said. “I figured you were both about due.”
He came in and dropped beer cans into an open grocery bag on the floor. “She any good?”
“The quiet ones,” Frank said. He was resting, taking a break with a beer and a cigarette. “You know what they say about the quiet ones.”
“I know what they say,” Stick said, “I just don’t know as it’s true.”
“Take my word, buddy.”
“You promise to marry her?”
“We’re engaged,” Frank said. “I notice you went out, you must’ve made some arrangements.?
??
Stick brought in more beer cans from the balcony. He didn’t say anything. He let Frank believe whatever he wanted.
“Well, let’s see,” Frank said. “Karen was with the talker. Jackie was smashed. If you got her kitty outfit off, you might as well’ve put her jammy-jams on, she was through for the evening, and I can’t see you doing a number on some broad’s out practically cold, at least I hope you wouldn’t. Arlene was already gone when we got back—was it Arlene?”
“You got another cigarette?”
“Last one. Look on my dresser. It must’ve been Karen, then. She got rid of the talker and you met her at her place.”
Stick went into his bedroom; he might as well get his own. He was thinking maybe he should wait until Arlene got back and talk to her again. He didn’t know what she really thought about it. Say she didn’t tell her friend who they were, fine; but what did she think about it, seeing two guys she knew holding up a bar? She was nutty. It was hard to imagine what she might think. She might even think it was cute.
He could hear Frank in the living room.
“How you like doing it by the numbers? Now the other. Do the thing with the boobs. That Karen—she’s too much. Now the one where we stand on our heads.”
Stick got a pack of cigarettes from his dresser.
Tell him, he was thinking. You got to tell him sometime.
He opened the pack going out to the front room.
“She too much?”
“I wasn’t with Karen,” Stick said. “Arlene.”
Frank raised his eyebrows, a little surprised. “Arlene—yeah? Not much there but I can see it could be very active, a good workout. Right?”
“She’s a nice girl,” Stick said.
“Almost all of them are,” Frank said. “But is she any good?”
“What’re you asking me something like that for?”
“You just asked me the same thing, for Christ sake.”
“Okay, let’s drop it,” Stick said, “get the place cleaned up.”
“You hear that? Honest to God,” Frank said, “the way you think. You don’t sound like a broad, but—I don’t know—it’s like you think like one, with a broad’s mentality. I don’t mean that as an insult—”
“You don’t, uh?”
“No, it’s just you’ve got a different way of looking at things.”
“Wait’ll I get a beer,” Stick said. “We can sit down and argue for a change.”
“We’re supposed to be at Sportree’s, four o’clock,” Frank said.
That stopped it. Stick looked at Frank sitting there with his beer, Frank staring at him, waiting, sort of a little challenge in his expression.
Stick thought, Well, screw him. And then he thought, No, why fight about it?
He said, “What’s that, the cocktail hour? Drinks are half price?”
“He’s arranged a meeting, a special presentation,” Frank said, “I think you’re going to be quite interested in.”
“Shop at Hudson’s and be happy,” Stick said. “Am I warm?”
“That’s all you are,” Frank said. “Shop at Hudson’s and make enough to be happy for a year is the way it goes. It’s all worked out. He’s going to show you how we knock down the biggest department store in town and find happiness. Show you how it’s no more trouble than a supermarket.”
“Nothing to it, huh?”
“Not if you know what you’re doing.”
Stick said to himself, I’m not going to get pissed off. I’m not going to get in a dumb argument. I’m not going to say anything, no, nothing at all about Arlene.
He said to Frank, “Okay, let’s go, then.”
“One more thing,” Frank said. “They’re all going to be black. At least I think they are. Now, it’s okay to call a Negro a Negro. Like with Jewish girls, they know what they are. But don’t refer to them as niggers, okay?”
Fuck you, Stick said to himself. He said to Frank, “I’ll try not to.”
19
THEY WERE IN SPORTREE’S APARTMENT, upstairs over the bar, and Frank was telling them how Stick had shot the two muggers in the Northland parking lot.
Stick was uncomfortable, he didn’t like it at all. Three colored guys and a colored girl listening to Frank describe how he’d killed two other colored guys, not telling it the way it actually happened but making him sound like a gunman: The two guys come up and try and take the bag, my partner here doesn’t say a word, fuck no, pulls out his piece, .38 Chief’s Special, and blows the two guys away.
Blows them away—Christ, he shot one of them in the back.
Sportree would nod as he listened and sometimes smile, but you couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Or sometimes what any of them were thinking. There was Sportree in some kind of funny loose open shirt and trading beads. Marlys cool in a bare midriff, showing a dark little navel. And the two guys Sportree had brought in for the job.
Leon Woody, with a beard and moustache, looked like an Arab. He sat quietly, with one leg crossed over the other. He’d smile a little with a gentle gaze that held as long as he wanted it to. Leon Woody reminded Stick of Sportree. There was something African, mysterious, about them. Nothing was going to hurry or surprise them.
The other one, Carmen Billy Ruiz, was Puerto Rican. His eyelids were heavy with scar tissue and his mouth looked puffy and sore drawing on his Jamaican tailor-made. A long time ago he had been a welterweight with a seventeen-and-seventeen record, then a sparring partner for Chico Vejar, then for Chuck Davey after Davey whipped Vejar. In 1955, in Detroit, he shot and killed a store clerk during a holdup and spent the next seventeen years in Jackson. (Carmen Billy Ruiz said diez-y-siete was a bad fucking number; don’t mention it in front of him.) He resented the fact Stick had killed two men and said through a smoke cloud, while Frank was telling the story, “What is this shit? He put away a couple of kids.” Leon Woody and Sportree looked at each other—Stick noticed this—and Leon Woody said, “Billy, be nice and let the man finish. Then you can tell how many you put away.”
Stick was glad, God, he was glad he wasn’t going to have any part of this. They could say anything they wanted. He’d listen and nod and seem to go along, and when they were through, that was it. He didn’t know these guys or owe them a thing. Be nice, like the man said, and play along.
He nodded yes, he’d have another bourbon, yes please, when Marlys picked up his glass. Marlys was doing the drinks and constructing big Jamaican cigarettes with four pieces of paper each for Billy Ruiz and anybody who wanted one. The redheaded black girl who played the piano wasn’t around. Unless she was in the bedroom. Or Sportree could’ve gotten rid of her for the meeting.
There wasn’t any doubt Sportree was in charge. He sat on the couch with Marlys next to him, looking over his shoulder, and sheets of drawing paper on the coffee table that showed the floor plan of several different sections of Hudson’s downtown store—including the administrative offices, with dotted lines leading to exits—and a plan of the exterior with adjacent streets indicated.
“We start with the outside,” Sportree said and looked at Stick. “You—you here on Farmer Street on the back side of the building, in the bar, right here. You see the Brink’s truck turn in the alley that run through the building. You know what I’m saying?”
“I know the alley you mean,” Stick said. “It’s like a tunnel.”
“That’s right,” Sportree said. “They come in off Farmer, alley bends in there, they pick up the load and come out on the south side the building. Before that, soon as you see it coming, you make the call.”
“What’s the number?”
“You get the number when I’m through.”
Sportree looked at Frank. “You by the telephone outside the men’s room, north end of the toy department, fourteenth floor. You been there to see it?”
Frank nodded.
Sportree’s gaze moved to Leon Woody. “You watching Frank. You got the doll box, huh, in the Hudson bag.”
“Little Curly
Laurie Walker’s box,” Leon Woody said.
Sportree began to smile and shook his head. “Come on, shit—Curly Laurie Walker. That her name?”
“Little redhead girl, three foot tall, she do everything but bleed,” Leon Woody said. “Billy try to jump her. I give her to my little girl so she be safe.”
“What was that?” Billy Ruiz said. “What’d you say?”
Marlys was laughing and slapped her leg. “I can see him doing it, stoned on his herb.”
Billy Ruiz was frowning, puzzled. “See what?”
“Man, let’s pay attention,” Sportree said. “Okay? You got one minute. Bang on the door the men’s room, Billy comes out in his uniform.” He looked at Ruiz. “We get that tomorrow, bus driver suit, I know where we can get one. With the holster it be good enough, get you in the office. Okay, so the three of you take the stairs, here, by the exit sign. You go up to the office floor.”
“How long’s it take them, the Brink’s guys?” Frank asked.
“About five minutes,” Sportree said. “It varies.”
Marlys looked up from the drawings. “You know the man down at the door, he’s like a porter? He calls up the office when they come, then we know to expect them in a few minutes. He doesn’t call and some dudes walk in with uniforms on, we know they not from Brink’s.”
“So we get to the office just before the Brink’s guys,” Frank said, “giving us, say, four minutes.”
“Say three,” Sportree said, “to get in and get out. They see Billy in the bus driver suit and the gun, they open the door. You two go in behind him, put the people on the floor, take the sacks, put them in the doll box, and get the fuck out, down the stairs to the toy department. You go in the stockroom and put the box on the shelf where all the curly what’s-her-name little jive-ass doll boxes are, in the back. The box is already marked.” He looked at Leon Woody. “You been in there?”
“Yesterday.”
“And they still got enough little curly-ass doll boxes?”
“Whole shelf full. I put it there and see Billy get out of his bus suit.”