by Otto Penzler
“You just got here. Don’t be disrespectful. Sit down.”
“No, look, I gotta be somewhere. I’m late to pick up my kid,” she pleaded.
“Sit down, bitch.” Orlando’s voice was so cold that it made her scalp crawl. And before Lisa could move of her own accord, Muscle shoved her into a chair, which she was almost glad of, since her knees were starting to buckle anyway.
“Come on, leave her out of this,” Bruce said half-heartedly.
“What the fuck. You brought her here. You think this gonna go easier for you ’cause you bring some bitch along, you don’t know me,” Orlando said, radiating danger.
“Hey, wait a minute. Where do you get off being mad at me? I got you the name you wanted. I’m risking fucking witness tampering charges, even a murder conspiracy charge, for Chris sakes. You owe me fifty grand, and I expect to be paid.”
“Yeah, well, unfortunately, that ain’t in the cards right now. I got a few problems with your performance.”
“So, fine, tell me. I’m all ears, Orlando. Word of mouth is my stock in trade. I never like to disappoint a client.” Bruce’s voice dripped sarcasm. He seemed completely unafraid, which dumbfounded Lisa.
Orlando sprang to his feet and got right up in Bruce’s face.
“Don’t fucking tell me that! We show up to get him, and they all waitin’ on us. Explain that to me. The Gomez brothers and their whole crew. I’m lucky to be standing up here breathing right now. You playing both sides, Bruce. You set me up!”
Lisa was shaking uncontrollably, but Bruce was unbowed, staring right back at Orlando.
“Don’t look at me! I told you before, you got another rat besides Gomez. My guy in Counter-Narcotics says they’re looking at doing a wire on you, and they got a real confidential snitch. That can’t be Gomez, because everybody and his brother already knows Gomez is snitching. If you wanna blame the messenger because you refuse to take care of business, Orlando, you’re gonna be doing twenty-five to life, not me.”
The two men stood eye to eye as everybody else in the room held their collective breath.
“Well? Am I right?” Bruce demanded.
The moment stretched into an eternity. Finally, Orlando’s body relaxed, and he asked, “So? Who is it, then?”
Lisa breathed again.
“I don’t know,” Bruce said. “I told ya, they’re playing it real close to the vest. My guy can’t get shit on it. I have a couple of other sources I can try to hit up…”
“Okay, so do that, then,” Orlando said.
“Why the fuck should I? Not only are you holding out on me with the money, but you go and pull a stunt like this. Calling me here to intimidate me. What kind of bullshit is that, Orlando? What kind of trust is that between a lawyer and his client?”
“Come on, son, I was just playing with you.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t appreciate it. Who else left on Queens Boulevard is gonna do what I do for you? Huh? Tell me that.”
“Nobody. Since Del Pietro got got, Bruce Goldman is the man.”
“Fucking right, I am.”
“No hard feelings, awright, son? Have a drink and let’s work this shit out. Alvin, get my man Bruce here a drink, and his lady friend, too.”
After that, Lisa started doing tequila shots, lots of them, until her hands stopped shaking and she forgot how scared she’d been. Pizzas were brought in, and eventually someone passed a joint around, a really powerful joint. Somebody else had some Ecstasy. The afternoon ebbed into a delicious, drugged-out haze. Hours seemed to pass, but it might’ve been minutes, she couldn’t be sure and didn’t really care. She went outside for a while. The heat of the sun pressed down on her so hard that she was pinned to the chair. She let the unreal emerald green of the oval vibrate on her eyes like a tuning fork and giggled uncontrollably when the blast of trumpets announced a race. At one point, White Track Suit came outside and they made out slowly until Bruce emerged to pull him off her.
“Hey, come on, Alvin, I brought her. Christ, I didn’t even do her yet,” Bruce said.
They all laughed. Nobody was mad. Lisa’s bones were like mush, her face was numb and she felt very pleased with herself that Bruce seemed jealous. He sent one of the guys to buy her a two-dollar ticket for Hell’s Bells in the fifth, and when it hit, a forty-to-one long shot, she was so high that she tore the ticket up and threw it in the air just for a laugh.
After a while, Bruce said he had to get to some school thing in Great Neck for one of his kids. He told Lisa he’d drop her back at the diner. As they were leaving, the guys all hugged her like brothers, telling her to come back real soon.
The valet brought the Porsche around. The tan leather seats were almost cool to the touch. Life seemed fat and joyous.
“I got about fifteen minutes,” Bruce said, looking at the Rolex.
“Okay. I know a spot. Back behind those horse trailers we passed when we came in.”
Later, lisa would ask herself what she’d been thinking. But part of her was just thinking she felt like blowing this guy. Really.
“So, admit it,” she said as they drove. “You brought me there like an insurance policy. You thought Orlando was gonna kill you.” And she started giggling again.
“No way.”
“Liar. You are such a liar, Bruce,” she said, and punched him on the arm.
“Whoa, watch the jacket.”
“You definitely thought that. Jesus, /thought that. Walking in, I thought we were dead meat.”
“No, seriously. You wanna know why I brought you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Because I looked at you and I said, this girl has an unbelievable body and an incredible mouth. And I bet she gives amazing head.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, swear to God, that’s exactly what I thought when I first saw you.”
“Aww. You are so nice.”
“It had nothing to do with Orlando. He doesn’t scare me, anyway. I figured I’d pick up my money, then you and me would get a room and we’d kill a few hours, have some fun.”
He pulled the Porsche around behind the horse trailers and turned off the engine.
“In fact,” Bruce continued, turning to face her as he reached for his zipper, “my only regret is, we hung out at the track so long that we don’t have much time right now.”
“What? Fifteen minutes. That’s plenty.”
“Yeah?”
“You were right. I am good. You won’t last long.”
Lisa got to her knees, half on and half off the leather seat, and took him in her mouth. Bruce gripped her by her hair and moved her head up and down, slowly at first, then faster, in time to the thrust of his hips. He braced himself against the car door, breathing hard.
“Oh, yeah, that’s good. Just like that,” he said, moaning.
With the position she was in, Lisa couldn’t see anything, so when Bruce’s body jerked suddenly, for a second she thought he was starting to come. But then she realized he was shoving her off him, reaching frantically for one of the guns he’d taken back before they left the skybox.
“Shit!” Bruce yelled, looking at something over her shoulder.
“He’s got a gun!” Lisa shouted, diving for the floor, and she wasn’t exactly sure which guy she was trying to warn.
She saw a flash from behind her, heard a blast and covered her head, screaming.
“Fuck!” Manny said, and Lisa looked up to see Bruce slumped against the driver’s side door, dark blood rapidly soaking his white shirt front.
“Manny, you killed him. Shit! Why’d you do that?”
“What the fuck was I supposed to do? He had a gun! Quick, get his wallet before someone comes.”
“I don’t want to touch him. He’s all bloody.” And his eyes were staring weird, creeping her out.
“Just get his wallet before I fucking killjoy! Stupid bitch. I knew this was a bad idea.”
She reached for Bruce’s pants pocket, shrinking back in momentary horror as her hand
touched hot, viscous blood. It was practically pumping out of him now.
“Is his fly open? Were you really blowing him?” Manny demanded.
“You took too long. I got in an awkward situation.”
“You slut. You fucking slut.”
“Just calm down, okay? We got worse problems than that.”
Lisa’s mind was suddenly very clear. She steeled herself and reached back into Bruce’s pants pocket, pulling out a solid-gold money clip shaped like a dollar sign and stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. Then she swiftly stripped the Rolex from Bruce’s wrist and handed both over to Manny.
“Wow, this is like the biggest payday we ever had,” Manny said, staring down at them, looking mollified.
Lisa put Bruce’s dick back inside his pants and zipped up his fly. He’d gone limp at some point, but she wondered if an autopsy would show that he’d had a hard-on right before he died.
“Help me sit him up and get the seat belt on,” she commanded.
“Why?”
“Just do it. I’ll explain later.”
Manny came around to the driver’s side, and they quickly arranged Bruce to make it appear that he’d been driving. Then they got the hell out of there.
For a few days afterward, Lisa bought the newspapers. Everything played out just like she hoped. The cops had it as drug related, with the victim’s wallet and watch taken to make it look like a robbery. There was no mention of any girl, or sex, or anything that would make her think the cops were looking for her. Bruce Goldman had been under investigation for acting as “house counsel” to a couple of rival narcotics organizations. It was speculated that he’d gotten caught in the middle of a drug war. The police were following up some leads, but they had no particular suspects at the moment. From the tone of the articles, in fact, it sounded like they weren’t looking that hard. It sounded, even, like they figured Bruce Goldman had pretty much gotten what he deserved.
After a while, Lisa thought that, too, and she stopped buying the papers—except to check if the ponies were running. Not that she was necessarily looking for another mark. You couldn’t keep robbing and expect never to get caught. Or could you? After all, long shots do come in sometimes. Lisa knew that for a fact.
MEADOWLANDS
Joyce Carol Oates
Bring your driver’s license, sweetheart. You’re driving.”
Fritzi’s new car? He was letting her drive?
Smiling his easy smile. Reaching over to squeeze her arm in that way of his, which sent a sensation like a mild electric shock through Katie’s body. Even as Katie warned herself, Don’t fall for it. You’ll be hurt.
Fritzi Czechi was known for his upscale but tasteful cars. This new-model steely-silver BMW with the mulberry leather interior and teakwood dash, he’d purchased only two weeks before, he was asking Katie Flanders to drive to the Meadow-lands racetrack, handing over the keys to her as if they were husband and wife, not a man and a woman in an undefined if romantic relationship. Katie stared at the keys quivering on the palm of her hand. Don’t! Don’t fall for it.
“Look, Fritzi: Why exactly am I driving, and not you? I missed the reason.”
“Because I need to concentrate, sweetheart.”
This was so. On the way to Meadowlands, while Katie, always a careful driver, drove the elegant new car at exactly the Turnpike speed limit, Fritzi studied what appeared to be racing forms, frowning, making notations with a stubby pencil. After a while he shifted in his seat to stare out the passenger’s window, frowning as if painful-size thoughts were working their way through his brain, and Katie glanced over at him wondering, what was Fritzi thinking? (Probably not of what had happened between them the night before, as Katie was. A warm dreamy erotic memory intensified by the smell of the new-car interior.) Fritzi was part-owner of one of the horses scheduled to race this Friday evening at Meadowlands, a three-year-old stallion named Morning Star who was returning to serious racing after being sidelined for months with a hairline fracture of his right front knee. Katie understood that Fritzi was worried about his horse, but also Fritzi was a gambler, which meant he dealt in odds, in numerals, and probably he had a mathematical mind and could “see” figures in his head in a way Katie could only imagine, it was so alien to her way of perceiving the world. Once, when she’d asked Fritzi how much one of his horses had cost, Fritzi had told her, “A racehorse is beyond computation, sweetheart,” which had been a mysterious answer yet made sense.
It was a way of telling Katie Flanders, too, that Fritzi’s private professional life was beyond her comprehension.
So Katie drove, and liked it that Fritzi so trusted her with his car, which wasn’t like Fritzi Czechi in fact, or any man she’d ever known, asking or allowing a woman to drive his car while he sat in the passenger’s seat staring out the window. Katie wondered if maybe Fritzi was in one of his moods: captured by the look of the mottled, marbled early-evening sky like the usual sky over northern New Jersey, clouds like chunks of dirty concrete shot with veins of acid-yellow and sulfur-red. This Jersey sky they’d been seeing all their lives, Katie thought. Familiar as a ceiling of some room you could die in.
The last time Fritzi had taken Katie to Meadowlands to see one of his horses race had been a year ago, or more. That year had passed slowly! Fritzi’s horse then was Pink Lady, a four-year-old who hadn’t won her race but hadn’t lost badly, in Katie’s opinion. Pink Lady had galloped so hard, Katie’s heart had gone out to the shuddering mare, whipped by her scowling little jockey but unable to overtake the lead horses who’d seemed to pull away from the rest immediately out of the gate as if by magic. Pink Lady had come in third, out of nine. That wasn’t bad, was it? Katie had seemed to plead with Fritzi, who’d said little about the race, or about Pink Lady, and he hadn’t encouraged Katie’s encouragement, still less her emotions. Always Katie would remember A racehorse is beyond computation and understand it as a rebuke.
A gentle rebuke, though. Not like somebody telling you to shut up and mind your own business, you don’t know shit.
Fritzi Czechi was one of those men in Katie’s life—Katie didn’t want to think how many there were, and that some of them knew one another from Jersey City High where they’d all gone—who’d been in and out of her life since the early 1970s. Now it was 1988 and they were fully grown, no longer high school kids, yet when you looked closely at them, as at yourself in a mirror, frankly, unsparingly, you saw that they were still kids trying to figure what the hell it was all about, and what they were missing out on, they were beginning to realize they’d never get.
Except Fritzi Czechi. But for his broken-up marriages, Fritzi hadn’t done badly. He exuded a certain glamour. He dressed in style. He was a fair-skinned, lean, ropy-muscled man of about five feet nine, not tall, carrying himself with a certain confidence, at least when people were likely to be watching. Fritzi had strangely luminous stone-colored eyes, fair hair thinning at the crown he wore slightly long so that it curled behind his ears; he had a habit of stroking his hair, the back of his head, a medallion ring gleaming on the third finger of his right hand. (Katie recalled Fritzi had once worn a wedding band. But no longer.) Fritzi was a good-looking man, if no longer as good-looking as he’d been six or seven years before when his smiling picture had been printed in Jersey papers as the part-owner of a Thoroughbred that had won $500,000 in the Belmont Stakes. (Katie had saved these clippings. She hadn’t been going out with Fritzi at that time, Fritzi had been married then. If he’d been seeing other women, which probably he had been, Katie Flanders wasn’t one of these women.)
As well as horses, Fritzi was known to have invested in a number of restaurants, clubs, and bowling alleys in Jersey, though he rarely spoke of his business life; it was part of Fritzi’s glamour that he was so reticent, so elusive you might say, keeping his private life to himself, so if you were Katie Flanders you’d have to hear from other sources that things were going well for Fritzi, or not so well. “Investments,” horses, marriages. (Three marriages
. Children, both boys, from the first, long-ago marriage when Fritzi had thought he’d wanted to be a New Jersey state trooper like his oldest brother. So far as Katie knew, Fritzi was separated from his third wife, not yet legally divorced. But it was only an assumption. She couldn’t ask.) Definitely it was part of Fritzi Czechi’s glamour that he did unpredictable things like giving money to bankrupt Jersey City High for new uniforms for both the boys’ and the girls’ varsity basketball teams, or he’d send boxes of expensive chocolate candies to the mothers of certain of his old friends for their birthdays, or hospitalizations, or a dozen red roses to a woman friend like Katie Flanders he was sorry about not having seen in a while, as a token of his “esteem.” Fritzi was known to pick up tabs in restaurants and clubs, and he was known to lend money to friends, if they were old friends, without asking for interest, and often without much hope of getting the money back.
He’d “lent” money to Katie, too. When there’d been a medical crisis in her family. When she’d tried to return it he’d told her, “Someday, sweetheart, you can bail me out. We’ll wait.”
Katie was a secretary at Drummond Tools, Ltd., in Hackensack. One of those temporary jobs, she’d thought, until she got married, started having babies. But just to be a secretary these days you had to know computers, and computers are always being upgraded, which is scary as hell when you’re on the downside of thirty and not getting any younger or smarter while the new girls being hired look like junior high kids. The thought chilled Katie. She reached out to touch Fritzi’s arm, needing to touch him, and liking the fact that it was Katie Flanders’s privilege to touch Fritzi Czechi in this casual intimate way since they were more than lovers, they were old friends. “This BMW, Fritzi, is very nice.”
Fritzi said, “Well, good.”
He wasn’t listening. He’d put away his racing forms and was staring now at his watch, which he wore turned inward, the flat oval disc of digital numbers against his pulse. As if, with Fritzi Czechi, even the exact time was a secret.
