Swag

  “You ditched your gun all right?”

  “Leon took care of it.”

  “How come Leon?”

  Stick was sitting forward in his chair, holding a can of beer between his hands. He watched Frank go over to the coffee table to get a cigarette.

  “Weren’t you carrying it?”

  “I carried the doll box,” Frank said. Lighting the cigarette gave him a little time. He walked back to the bar and took a drink of Scotch.

  “Yeah? So you gave him your gun?”

  “We had a little problem.” The whole thing would be in the evening paper—Frank realized that—still, he wanted to tell it the right way, like there was really nothing to it, or Stick was liable to go through the ceiling.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “Billy shot a guy.”

  “Jesus—I told you.”

  “Wait a minute, a witness,” Frank said. “A guy washing the window.”

  “Christ Almighty—”

  “We look up, the guy saw the whole thing, sees Marlys, so Billy had to shoot him.”

  “I told you. Christ, didn’t I tell you? That guy’s going to fuck the whole thing up, not even trying?”

  “Will you wait a minute?” Frank said. “Take it easy, okay? and listen.” He paused to make sure his voice would sound calm. “Billy pulled something else.”

  Stick was staring at him, waiting.

  “He tried—we’re going down the stairs—he tried to grab the box from me. See, he wants the whole thing, probably had it planned all the time and that’s why he was going to settle for five. He shoots a couple times and misses, luckily, Christ, and Leon, he’s got the Python, he shot him and that was it.”

  “You left him there?”

  “He was dead, for Christ sake.”

  Stick shook his head slowly and let his breath out and shook his head again. He said, “Oh, boy—well, how do you like the big leagues?”

  “We still did it,” Frank said. He was being earnest now. “We got the money, five sacks, waiting there in the stockroom.”

  “Hey, Frank, come on—”

  “I’m not shitting you, we got it, it’s there. Everything went according to the book except the thing with Billy Ruiz. Okay, Billy’s out of it, put his five K back in the pot, you never liked the guy, anyway.”

  “Frank, you got two dead men—you want to go back in there for the walkie dolly box?”

  “I look at it this way,” Frank said, getting into it and feeling more at ease, in control. “Whether two guys are dead or not, the money’s sitting there waiting. The two guys don’t change anything—you think Sportree, Leon Woody’s going to say, Yeah, well let’s leave it, then? Bullshit. This is armed robbery, man, and you know what I’m talking about, you go in with a gun and sometimes you have to use it or else you’d carry a fucking water pistol, right? When it’s you or him, buddy, you know who comes first or you’re in the wrong business. Listen, I saw you blow away two guys in that parking lot. You ought to know what I’m talking about better than I do.”

  “It’s different now,” Stick said. “We’re not talking about armed robbery, ten to a quarter, we’re talking about murder, maybe life.”

  “I can’t argue with you,” Frank said, “or quibble about the degree. Yeah, it’s different now. But the odds, the odds are the same. You go in, look around, take your time. You don’t like the feel, you smell something isn’t right, you walk out. Nobody’s going to blame you for being careful. You don’t like it, get out. If it looks okay, pick up the box. Anywhere along the line something doesn’t look right, dump the box, get the fuck out. But remember one thing, my friend, Ernest Stickley, Junior, there’s over a hundred grand in the box and it’s no heavier than you’re carrying the doll in it, a present for your little girl.”

  There was a silence. Stick took a sip of beer. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  “What’s there to think about? Your part, what you said you’d do, hasn’t changed any.”

  “I said I’d think about it.”

  Frank put on an act of being calm, in control. He said, “Take your time. But if you turn chickenshit before day after tomorrow, let me know, okay? I’ll go get it myself.”

  Leon Woody came in while Frank was at Sportree’s, the two of them sitting in the living room upstairs. Frank saw Marlys in the doorway for a moment: she looked in, didn’t nod or say anything and kept going down the hall. Leon Woody said, “How you doing?” and sat down. Frank frowned, looking over at Sportree sitting there in his Afro-Arabian outfit and a big Jamaican smoke held delicately between his fingers.

  “She upset about the man wash the windows,” Sportree said.

  “How upset?”

  Sportree shook his head. “Uh-unh, little girl’s fine.”

  “I can’t keep up with you,” Frank said. “Last week, no, the week before, it was the redheaded girl plays the piano.”

  “Yeah, she still playing, she happy,” Sportree said. “The one I’m worried about is your friend, if he’s got his shit together on this thing.”

  “Well, you say don’t worry about Marlys,” Frank said. “It’s the same thing, you don’t have to worry about Stick. I remind him he said he’d get it and he will, I’m sure of it.”

  “I like a man like that,” Sportree said. “Can take his word. I mean if it’s true.”

  “I don’t know, I’m saying the same thing to him all the time. I’m in the middle of you two guys, I trust both of you, naturally, so I just assume you trust each other.”

  “You like him,” Sportree said, “hey, then I like him. You give me a Stick, I give you a Leon Woody.” He looked over at Leon, who nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “And take away a Billy Ruiz,” Frank was saying. “That was a setup, wasn’t it? You knew he wasn’t coming out.”

  “No, he could’ve made it. It was up to Leon. I told Leon to use his judgment.”

  “But what for? I mean if you don’t trust the guy, what’d you bring him for?”

  “Let me explain something to you,” Sportree said. “See, Billy’s fine for how you use him. Say to him, Billy, here two hundred-dollar bills. You keep one, if you can make that policeman over there eat the other one, tied on your hog. He’d try it, think it was easy money. But see, Billy was very, very dumb. He could go one two three four, no trouble. But something happen he had to go one three seven five, shit, you don’t know what the man was going to do. So I told Leon, Hey, you come to where you got to travel light, then dump the excess baggage, man. See, another thing, if Billy was picked up, you got to hold your breath all the time he in there. They could punch him, he wouldn’t say a word. As I told you, I trust him. But that man, he so fucking dumb they be getting things out of him he don’t even know he telling.”

  “I guess so,” Frank said, “but Christ, killing him like that—I wish we could’ve got rid of him some other way, put him on a plane to San Juan or someplace.”

  “Not easy, is it?” Sportree said, in his Afro-Arabian robe, the Jamaican toke between his fingers, watching the gray smoke curl up. “Sometime we have to make sacrifices.”

  Leon Woody was at the window, watching Frank’s T-bird pull away, making sure. Sportree was smoking. He yelled out, “Hey, baby!”

  Marlys came in behind the three-foot doll box she was carrying, smiling back there, and placed it on the coffee table by Sportree.

  “Little Curly Laurie. You want to know how much she got in her box?”

  “Tell us,” Sportree said.

  “Exactly eighty-seven thousand four hundred and twenty-five.”

  Sportree smiled in his Jamaican smoke. “You have any trouble?”

  “Walked out with it in the bag, Leon’s waiting,” Marlys said. “I didn’t see anybody giving me looks, but I wouldn’t want to do it again.”

  “Divide three into eighty-seven,” Sportree said, “you would.”

  Leon, coming over from the window to sit down, said, “Now this Stick goes in tomorrow, comes out wi
th the box still there, marked. Frank pick him up, they come here all smiling—what do we say then?”

  “We say—they open the box,” Sportree said, “two sacks in there. Two? Open them, checks. Checks? What’s this shit, checks? Where the money sacks? He looks at us, uh? We look at Frank. Hey, Frank? You put the box there the day before yesterday? Frank say yeah, he put it there. He start to look at his friend. His friend start to look at him. One put it there, the other pick it up. But what do they have? Bunch of checks made out to the J. L. and Hudson Company. Somebody begins to say—they looking at each other—Hey, fuck, what is this? What’s going on, man? They don’t know shit what’s going on.”

  “So maybe they go after each other,” Leon Woody said. “One say, You put it there, five sacks in it, or not? The other say, You pick it up, but you don’t come out the store with everything.”

  “That’s the way I like to see it,” Sportree said. “Now after a while, sometime, they going to look at us. We can look back at them, our eyes saying what is this ofay shit going on? Somebody trying to fuck somebody? Or we can look back at them and not say anything. Frank say to me, You wouldn’t be pulling something, would you? Not wanting to come right out and accuse me, you understand? Finally I say to him, Frank, maybe everybody better forget about the whole thing and not think of hurting each other, because if anybody gets hurt, you know who it’s going to be. And none of us can go to the police, can we? Because we all in it. So why don’t we quit talking about it, dig? And you all go home.”

  Leon said, “You think he do it, huh, go home and be good?”

  “Why would a man want to die at his age?” Sportree said.

  Stick got two sets of Michigan plates off cars parked on the roof of the Greyhound bus station and wrapped them in the morning edition of the Free Press that ran two follow-up stories on the Hudson’s robbery.

  There was a graduation-looking photo of a smiling, dark-haired guy, the window washer, and a twenty-year-old shot of Carmen Billy Ruiz in a boxing pose, on the front page, wrapped around the license plates. On page three there was a photo of the window washer’s wife and two small children, and on the sports page a column devoted to Billy Ruiz’s seventeen-and-seventeen record and how he had been Chuck Davey’s sparring partner. Davey, now of the Chuck Davey Insurance Agency, Southfield, recalled that Billy Ruiz liked to eat ice cream—he ate ice cream all the time—but was not much of a puncher.

  The two sets of license plates went in the trunk of the T-bird to be transferred to Stick’s suitcase. He might use them on the way to Florida, he might not, but extra plates were good to have. He’d pick up a car that afternoon sometime.

  He’d decided, finally, to tell Frank his plan and Frank had said, Wait’ll you see your cut and you’re holding it in your hand before you start talking about leaving.

  Stick said don’t worry, he was taking his cut, he wasn’t going up to the toy department for nothing; but this was the end of it. After, he’d go home get his bag and if Frank would drop him off at a shopping center he’d appreciate it.

  Frank said, What about your share in the bank deposit box? Stick said, We can pick it up after, or you give me the same amount out of your cut from the Hudson’s deal and keep all what’s in the bank. That was all right with Frank. He said, All right, if that’s what you want to do. You’ll get down there, play on the beach with your little girl, and I’ll probably see you in about a week. He said, If I’m in Hawaii or Acapulco or someplace, I’ll leave word with the lady, the manager. Frank was in a pretty good mood.

  That was about all that was said between them that morning in the apartment and driving downtown. It didn’t seem like much after being together three months. Frank drove up to the rooftop parking lot over the bus station and waited for him while he got the license plates. Then drove him around to the Woodward Avenue side of Hudson’s and said, “I’ll see you in about fifteen minutes.”

  That was the last they saw of each other for six days.

  Stick took an escalator up as far as he could and then a local elevator to the fourteenth floor. It still took him less than five minutes. He located the stockroom first, in an arcade that connected with another section of the store. He roamed through the toy department then for a few minutes. There were only a few customers around—one guy very intently fooling with some kind of a target game, a young guy in jeans with fairly long blond hair—and hardly any salespeople.

  He watched the stockroom door another couple of minutes. Nobody went in or came out. He said, Okay, let his breath out slowly, walked over, and pushed through the door.

  Frank had said the third aisle over. But he hadn’t said which side. The sectioned metal shelves reached almost to the ceiling and it looked like there were boxes of dolls on both sides, all the way down to the end.

  America’s Little Darling, Baby Angel, Playmate for a Princess, Baby Crissy, Crissy’s Cousin Velvet, Jean Marie, Tender Love . . . Christ, Shirley Temple . . . Rub-a-Dub Dolly, Saucy, Wendy, Cutie Cleaner, Cathy Quick Curl, Peachy and her Puppets, Beautiful Lee Ann the Dancing Doll . . . there, Little Curly Laurie Walker. She wasn’t bad-looking.

  The one he wanted had a little red dot near the bottom of the box. Which wasn’t on any of the ones in front. He had to pull them out one at a time to look at the boxes in the row behind. Then two at a time, Christ.

  It was in the third row, the fifth one. Stick got it up to the front and shoved boxes in to fill the space. He picked it up. Frank was right, it wasn’t heavy at all. He wondered if he should look inside, make sure.

  That was when he glanced to the side.

  It was strange, recognizing the guy in the quick glance and wanting to do something with the box, not knowing the guy, but knowing who he was—even if he did have long hair and jeans on—and knowing, shit, it was way too late.

  “Drop it and put your hands on the shelf, man, right now.”

  The guy had a big gun like Frank’s, some kind of a Mag, the same guy who’d been fooling with the target game.

  Stick didn’t have anything to lose. He said, “What’s going on? What is this, a holdup?”

  “It sure looks like it to me,” the guy said. He had a little leather case open in his other hand, showing a badge.

  Another guy, in a suit, came around the corner from the other side, at the end of the aisle, and that was it.

  Stick said, “I was in here looking—I thought it was the men’s room.”

  “You piss on dolls?” the young guy said. “Man,” and whistled. “Hey, Walter, he says he thought it was the men’s room.”

  The one in the suit was next to him now. He said, “I can see why he’d think that. All the toilets.”

  “No, I mean I was looking for a doll for my little girl. Then I had to go to the men’s room. I came in here, I saw it wasn’t, of course”—Stick was giving the young guy a nice grin he knew already wasn’t going to do him any good—“but then I saw these dolls, see, and started looking at them . . . for my little girl.”

  “You like the one with the red dot on it best?” the young guy said.

  “You can read me my rights if you want,” Stick said, “I’m not saying another word.”

  21

  STICK REMEMBERED A TIME ONCE in Yankton, South Dakota, standing around back of the chutes at a rodeo, watching the contestants drawing the bulls they’d ride.

  He remembered one especially, a skinny guy with his big scooped-brim hat and tight little can, spitting over his hip and saying, “If I cain’t ride ’im, I’ll eat ’im.” He lasted about three and a half seconds on a bull named Candyman and came back through the dust limping and hitting his big curly hat against his chaps.

  The young guy, the cop, reminded him of one of those bull riders or a saddle bronc rider. Long hair, no hips, faded jeans, boots. It was the badge and the foot-long .44 Mag under his left arm that made him something else, a Detroit police officer.

  Frank had said it, you couldn’t tell the cops from the hackers and stalkers anymore.
r />   Stick kept his eyes on the young guy while they were at the First Precinct police headquarters, but didn’t say anything to him or answer any of his questions. Shit no, he was standing mute. He didn’t say anything getting fingerprinted and photographed and the only thing he said at the arraignment was not guilty. They set a bond of five thousand dollars and asked him if he wanted it. He said no. They asked him if he had counsel. He said no. They asked him if he wanted the court to appoint counsel for him. He said no. He’d sit it out and take his chance at the examination. If he didn’t say anything, if he didn’t call anyone for bond money, if he didn’t talk to a lawyer or to the young guy even about the weather, he knew they couldn’t do a thing to him—not for picking up a doll box, even if it did have a red dot on it.

  Stick sat in the Wayne County jail with all the colored guys awaiting trial. He had never seen so many colored guys. He didn’t say much to them and got along all right. The place smelled—God, it smelled—and the food was awful, but he’d been here before. He’d made it.

  It was funny, sitting in jail he remembered the ice machine at the motel in Yankton and the sign on it that said: WE CANNOT PROVIDE ICE FOR COOLERS. He remembered thinking at the time, But how do they know if they don’t try?

  He remembered going into the place next to the motel, walking up to the two girls at the bar, and saying, “Good evening, may I buy you ladies a drink?” One of them said, “You dumb bunny, we work here.” He said, “Oh, then would you bring me a drink?” And she said, “Certainly, sir, what would you like?”

  Sitting in the Wayne County jail. He remembered telling Frank, coming out the last time, they didn’t serve cocktails in there.

  Most of all a Porter Waggoner song kept going through his head, about a hurtin’ behind his left eye and a tiny little bee buzzin’ around in his stomach. Porter was all tore down because of too many good, good buddies and bad, bad gals.