The Shark-Infested Custard

by Charles Willeford

  Part 4

  Larry “Fuzz-O” Dolman

  Any man who is willing to accept responsibility is always

  loaded down with more and more of it, because there aren’t

  that many men around who will accept responsibility.

  32

  It was a stormy March night, but Hank and I, after talking about it on the telephone that afternoon, decided to go ahead with Don’s birthday party. Besides, it was more than just a birthday party for Don; it was a celebration for me, as well. Don, after sitting around in Eddie’s apartment for a month doing nothing, except for watching TV all day and drinking Pagan Pink Ripple wine, had finally snapped out of his lethargic depression and had gone out and found a job selling Encyclopedias Americana. And I, because of Merita, had taken possession of the apartment above Hank, the one Don was supposed to get, and all of my furniture had been shipped up to me from Miami.

  I liked the apartment, and so did Merita. Eddie, who enjoyed having Don live with him, or said he didn’t mind at any rate, had told us—Hank and I—that Don wasn’t ready to live alone yet, so I had taken the vacant apartment two weeks before Don’s new birthday. My furniture was installed, with everything the way I wanted it, so the party was a combination housewarming and birthday celebration.

  I was above Hank, and Eddie and Don were across the hall from me. There was an inside stairwell, and Hank’s apartment was directly below mine. There were a fireman and his wife living across from Hank, in 3624 1/2, a middle-aged Polack who was planning to buy a house with a yard in a few months. When the fireman moved out, we had already made arrangements with the real estate agent for Don to get his apartment, and the four of us would then have the quadriplex to ourselves.

  Meanwhile, everything was working out well. The fireman, Mr. Sinkiewicz, was on duty at the fire station for one full twenty-four hour day out of every three, and on the two days he had off he worked at a Philips 66 gas station. His wife, Anna, cleaned Hank’s and Eddie’s apartment one day a week, and I had Merita to keep mine spotless. Merita had polished my harpsichord, and it was more beautiful now than I had remembered it. She had used a full can of New Gloss wax on the harpsichord.

  When Don had arrived in Schiller Park, Eddie and Hank had been concerned all out of proportion to the problem he presented. Without consulting me they had talked to Don at length, trying to persuade him to go back to Miami. Their arguments were rational enough, based, as they were, on practicality, but they either did not understand or take into account Don’s emotional commitment. They worried about all of that silverware Don had appropriated, and they were also afraid that Clara would report the Mark IV Continental as stolen. She had the legal tide, not Don, and they were afraid that Don would go to jail, both for stealing the silverware and for stealing his own car. This was a possibility, of course, but there were ways to get around it. If Don went back to Miami, time was also on his side, because Don’s bosses were far away in England, and it was possible for Don to absent himself from Miami for two, three, or even five weeks without his company even finding out that he still wasn’t in his office. He mailed them two reports a month as a general rule, but even if they didn’t get a report for a few weeks, he could always say that he had mailed it and that it was lost by the Post Office. So Don could go back to Clara easily enough, and keep his well-paying job without his company knowing that he had spent a fortnight’s vacation in Chicago.

  Don listened to them patiently, but he told them that he was not going back, ever. They heard him, but the tone of his voice was so despairing they didn’t believe him. He had left Clara once before and had gone back to her, so they felt that a precedent had been set.

  When Don had failed consistently to respond to “reason,” they asked me to talk to him. Eddie and Hank had listened to themselves, but I listened to Don. Don was not going back, ever, and he meant exactly what he said. What they took for despair in his statement, “I’m not going back to Clara, ever,” was resignation—not despair.

  “Okay, Don,” I said, “if you aren’t going back, what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know yet, Fuzz-O, but I’ll have some dough after I sell the silverware, and I can decide later. Right now, I don’t want to think about it, and I don’t even feel like going out to hustle the silverware.”

  “What about child support? If you send Clara money, you’ll be traced, you know.”

  “I’m not sending Clara shit.”

  “Then you’ll have to change your name and disappear. Either that, or we can ship the silverware back to Miami, which’ll clear you of that charge, and you can mail in a letter of resignation to your company.”

  “I can’t do that, Larry, I’ll need the money.”

  “All right, then,” I told him, “I’ll take care of it for you—the whole business, and you can start all over again here in Chicago with a new name.”

  “You can fix all this for me?”

  “Sure. Pick a name, and I’ll get it for you.”

  “I don’t care about the name,” he said. “A kid can’t pick his name when he’s born, so if you’re going to handle the whole business for me, I don’t give a shit about the name either.”

  I used the resources of National Security to get Don a new identity—”Donald Lane.” If he didn’t get into any major troubles with the law, the new identity would hold up for all ordinary and practical purposes. I got him a Social Security card with a new number, a driver’s license, a birth certificate, and a transcript from the University of Chicago in the name of Donald Lane with forty-eight college credits. In time, I told him, if he joined a few clubs and had some calling cards printed, no one would ever question his identity unless he got into trouble. Insofar as a work record was concerned, he would have to come up with a list of previous employments on his own, jobs that couldn’t be checked out very well—like farm laborer, counterman, and so on.

  “That will more or less disqualify me for any decent position,” he said.

  “Not exactly. That’s the new dropout lifestyle these days, and if you want to—you’ve got forty-eight credits already—you can always go back to the University of Chicago and work on your degree.”

  “Is this a genuine transcript?”

  “Of course.”

  “What happened to the real Donald Lane?”

  “He dropped out of college five years ago. I don’t know what happened to him. You’ll also notice that the Don Lane on the birth certificate is two years younger than the Don Lane on the transcript, but you’ll have to work out these discrepancies and make up your own phony biography and memorize it. I can’t do everything for you.”

  “I know that, Larry. I didn’t think you could do this much.”

  I didn’t do very well on the car and the silverware, but I didn’t want Don to go around the city trying to sell the sets one at a time and risk getting caught with hot silverware. So I checked our N.S. files again, and sold the Mark IV and the silverware to a fence in Peoria, Illinois, for a total of $7,400. If Don was disappointed in the sum, he didn’t say so. He took the cash and opened an account in the name of Don Lane at the Schiller Park Bank and Trust Company, and he established credit at the Sunset Drugstore and Karl’s Liquor Store in the shopping plaza four blocks away from our quadriplex.

  Hank Norton, of course, as was to be expected, had two long distance calls, one from Nita Peralta, and one from Clara Luchessi. Both of these women were charged emotionally on the wire, Hank told us, but Hank was able to convince them that he had neither seen nor heard from Don in several weeks. He also promised to telephone them immediately if he did get a letter or call from Don.

  There were no more calls from Miami.

  In summary, all of this sounds simple enough, but it wasn’t. Getting a new identity for Don was complicated and time-consuming, and during this period I had a few problems of my own. I had two chipped knuckles on my left hand, and my hand and part of my wrist was still in a cast. These knuckles hurt constantly. The company doct
or told me that they might hurt (“give me some discomfort”) for a year or more, and that they would easily break again if I banged my fist into anything hard. To minimize the pain, I carried my left wrist in a black silk sling, and I tried, without much success, not to move my fingers. Every time I moved my fingers, the grating pain in the knuckles grew sharper. But at least I was alive.

  Frank Devlin, one of the security guard supervisors, had called me at the Stevens Hotel and told me that one of his watchmen was drunk and waving his pistol around. The watchman was stationed at an all-night park-and-lock on the North Side. There had been a good many car break-ins in the huge parking lot, and the male cashier in the one-man lighted box by the exit had been held up twice in one week before the stingy owner had called N.S. and hired a night watchman.

  Our security watchmen wear powder-blue uniforms with black Sam Browne belts and .25 caliber pistols. Usually it is safeguard enough just to have one of these uniformed men walking around to discourage car prowlers and stick-up men.

  They are all lousy shots, with only four days of security training before they are sent out on jobs like this one. In 1973 we decided to arm them with .25 caliber pistols, instead of .38s they used to carry, so they wouldn’t be so likely to kill someone. I would have preferred to arm them with .22s myself, but a warning shot with a .22 sounds like a pop gun, so we settled on the .25 caliber pistol as an uneasy compromise. At least half of the men I employ for these uniformed security jobs are hired against my better judgment, but I’m like the Dutch kid plugging the dike with ten fingers instead of one, and I have to hire the kind of men I can get. And the kind of men you can get for $2.20 an hour to work twelve-hour shifts—in many cases, but not all, thank God—are often the kind who could and do make more money panhandling, stealing milk bottles, or bagging groceries than they get from National Security. I screen out the worst ones, but to fill the thinning ranks every week I have to take on a good many borderlines. Luckily, I lose the worst of the borderlines during the four days of training.

  Every Monday morning we start a new four-day course. The recruits get lessons in courtesy, some basic city and county law, do’s and don’ts, and weapons training. We show them how to use a riot gun, although they don’t get to fire one. But we do give them dry and wet run firing with the .25 caliber pistols in the basement range of the N.S. Building. On the fifth morning, Friday, they are issued uniforms and pistols. Tom Brady, the Chicago Director of N.S., gives them a pep talk.

  We start every Monday with from 25 to 30 new men, and by Friday, when we issue the uniforms, we are fortunate if we have 15 of them left. During the week, they melt away. N.S. has learned to save money by issuing the uniforms on the fifth day instead of on the first, as the agency did formerly. (The men who didn’t show up again took their uniforms with them, of course.) Also, on Thursday night, the new men are given their pay for the first four days—even though their work was merely training, and easy training at that—but that first small paycheck means that at least four or five of them will not show up the next morning for graduation.

  At any rate, the survivors, now in uniform, come back to me, and I send them out on jobs. Two months later, after being out on all-weather jobs, there are only one or two men left who started out originally with a group of 25 in a four-day training session. It’s a headache to me, trying to recruit and keep manpower, but I can’t blame these men for quitting. For good men, intelligent men, the work is too boring after a week or so, and it is cold out there in the open spaces and lonely in the warehouses. But the work they do is light enough. Visibility is the main idea, and the biggest problem they have is in staying awake and walking around. But if, on the job at night, a man gets too bored, or too cold, he simply walks away and goes home. When this happens, the man’s supervisor has to find out that the man has gone before the company who hired us does, and replace the watchman with another man or take the position himself until the end of the shift.

  Good supervisors are the key to running a smooth operation, and the supervisors I hire are never borderline cases. I check these supervisors out closely, and fortunately there are still a lot of American males who will work for less money if they are given a uniform to wear and the rank of “Lieutenant.” If many of my supervisors are ex-servicemen who would have had a hard time making sergeant in the Army, I still have a lot of retired NCOs with a good retirement pay already who are willing to work as supervisors because they can wear a powder blue uniform with red stripes on the legs and gold lieutenant’s bars on the shoulders.

  Frank Devlin was a good man, an ex-first sergeant of Infantry, so when he called I told him, “You don’t need me, Frank. Fire the sonofabitch, and replace him.”

  “Not in this guy’s case,” Frank said. “I’m in uniform, and I’ve chewed him out twice this week already. He’s drunk, and he’s got a loaded pistol. If he spots me in my uniform, he is liable to start shooting.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll come down. Where’re you calling from?”

  Frank had phoned from an all night café two blocks from the parking lot. I put on my full-length leather coat, rode the elevator down, and took a cab. When I reached the café I went inside and Frank and I discussed strategy.

  “I caught him drinking the other night,” Frank said, shrugging, “and I should’ve fired him then. But it was cold, and he only had a half-pint on him, so I let it go.”

  “Did you take the half-pint away from him?”

  “Yeah. I did that. And I got word today that he was bitching about it to the other men. Personally, Mr. Dolman, I don’t think either one of us should take a chance. We should get a couple of cops to pick him up.”

  “If we did, we’d both be on the mat with Tom Brady in the morning. Every time one of our uniformed men is picked up by the fuzz, it’s another black mark against the agency. Don’t forget that our N.S. watchmen have eaten up a hellova lot of security jobs that off-duty policemen used to get. We can handle it. You can take off your uniform hat and wear my leather coat. Then he won’t know it’s you in uniform. I’ll go into the lot straight on, and you circle around behind. While I wander around, pretending to look for my car, you come up behind him. I’ll grab him from the front, and you can sap him behind the ear. Have you got your sap?”

  Frank nodded.

  “Okay. Where’s the cashier?”

  Frank grinned. “He was here, in the café—he called me from here. But after I talked to him, and told him I’d call you, he went home.”

  “That’s good. Let’s go.”

  The plan was simple, and it should have worked out all right, but the watchman, instead of having his pistol in his holster, had it concealed in his right hand. His arm was hanging down and I didn’t notice it. When I jumped for him, he stepped back clumsily and raised his arm with the pistol. In mid-jump, I swung my left hand and arm in a backhand. My knuckles hit the pistol hard, cracking, knocking it out of his hand. I heard it skittering across the wet asphalt of the lot but I didn’t see it because everything went red, then blue, and then black in flat wavering sheets of color like a Mark Rothko painting. I must have passed out, or fainted, momentarily, but only for a second or a fraction of a second, because when I opened my eyes again I was on my knees. The drunk watchman was out cold, sapped from behind by Frank Devlin. Because of my injured hand I wasn’t much help to Frank, but we got the watchman into Frank’s car and drove down to the N.S. Building. I told Frank to get the man out of his uniform—he had awakened by then, and was sobering up as well—into his civilian clothes, and to dump him over on State Street some place. Still hugging my smashed hand, I went back to my room at the Stevens, which was only a block’s walk from the N.S. Building.

  I soaked my hand in hot water, ate a couple of aspirins, and drank four ounces of whiskey. It didn’t do any good. The swelling was getting worse, and so was the pain. At two a.m. I called the hotel doctor. He taped my hand, and gave me a shot. I took a few more slugs of bourbon, and fell asleep at four a.m.

&nb
sp; The next day, after x-rays, which showed the chipped bones on the first two knuckles, and following the cast-setting, Dr. Haas, our agency doctor, asked me how many hours a day I worked.

  “Twelve, fourteen, why?”

  Dr. Haas pointed to the cast. “This,” he said, “shouldn’t have happened. As Director of Personnel, you’ve got a responsible job. Going out with Lieutenant Devlin last night was like a colonel playing P.F.C. By playing games, and taking on everything, you’re doing yourself and National Security a disservice. It isn’t your place to—”

  “Look, Dr. Haas, don’t tell me how to do my job. Somebody had to help Devlin, and he had to call me because there was no one else to call.”

  “In that case—” Dr. Haas grinned “—appoint Frank Devlin as the night supervisor, and then your other security supervisors can call him when they get into similar jams, and he’ll have to handle it. You can stay in bed at night, and get your sleep for the next day’s work. No man can work for twelve and fourteen hours a day without making mistakes through being overtired. And last night, you made one hellova mistake. You could’ve been shot and killed. And Devlin, if you had been shot, would have, in all probability, beaten that drunken watchman to death with his sap. And that, Mr. Dolman, would’ve resulted in much worse publicity for the agency than calling a couple of cops in a patrol car to pick up the watchman.”

  Dr. Haas was right. He ordered me to take two days off before going back to the office, and I lay on my bed at the Stevens thinking about my life, the job, and the way things were going.

  A man who is willing to accept responsibility is always loaded down with more and more of it, because there aren’t that many men around who will accept responsibility.

  The agency kept two hotel rooms at the Stevens at all times. These rooms were reserved for visitors, directors from the field who were visiting Chicago headquarters for a few days, and for clandestine meetings with clients who, for one reason or another, did not want to come to the N.S. Building for conferences. There were more of the latter than one would suppose—husbands or wives who wanted spouse surveillance, for example; and also, we could meet privately with our ops who were engaged in industrial espionage and discuss their reports in these rooms.