Red pulled up in front of the multistoried hotel and handed the car keys to a doorman dressed like a caballero.
He took a deep breath and knocked on the suite door. He was conscious of dampness in his armpits.
The door was opened quickly, chain still on, by a husky man in a flowered shirt. Red noticed a gun bulge at the man's waist.
"I have an appointment with Tony Dio," Red said.
The man unlatched the chain and ushered him over plush, thick carpet to a small balcony. On the balcony, without a word, the man began to frisk him. Ignoring this, Red sat down at the balcony table. He faced the ocean.
"Hey, I'm not finished patting you down, pal."
"Where's Tony?"
"You ain't going to see him until I see if you are wired up, pal."
"Tell Tony he can search me himself if he thinks I'm a snitch. Keep your goddamn hands off me." Red stared at the ocean.
Tony Dio, in a tennis outfit and smoked glasses, walked onto the balcony and flicked his cigar ashes over the rail. He looked as if he had been gaining weight for the past five years-King Farouk in tennis shorts. He did not shake hands.
The man in the flowered shirt walked back inside.
Dio turned and looked down at Red.
"Don't let him bother you. He does that to everybody. You know how things are these days." He stuck the cigar in his mouth.
"All I need is another couple of months," Red said. "I have a project planned and I just need a little time. I'm trying to get back on my feet. You know that."
Dio puffed and blew smoke into the breeze. He did not look at Red.
"Red, in the old days, when we were just little guys, there was no quibbling about a few bucks here or there. It's different now. It's all points, you know, percentages. Everything is points and deadlines."
The veins on Red's neck stood out. He clenched his fists.
"I just did a nickel in Terminal Island. I'm fifty-four years old. This is it for me. This is my last shot. I've got a big project planned. When it comes through I'll be able to pay you off with interest for the whole five years. You know I'm good for the twenty-five grand."
Dio turned to him and took the cigar from his mouth. "I know you are good for it. That's why I let the debt ride while you were in the joint… Now you are out. I placed my bet on the 'come line.'" He stared.
Red felt sweat begin to run from his armpits to his waist.
"I wasn't born yesterday," he said. "All I'm asking is more time. I guarantee that…”
"How much did you bring with you today?" Dio interrupted.
"Eight grand." Red laid the envelope on the table.
"Take your time with the rest," Dio said. He gazed at the ocean again. "Take another ten days."
Red stood up, "How about thirty days? I mean, there's always last-minute problems… "
"Thanks for stopping by, Red," Dio said.
As Red walked through the living room to the door the man in the flowered shirt stood behind a portable bar, watching. Red wondered if he would be the one to get the contract if he couldn't come up with the money.
In the hallway, waiting for the elevator, Red recognized the falling-away feeling, with its concomitant fire in the intestinal tract. He had made notes about the feeling in his cell and had reread them often. The name falling-away feeling was coined by him because "falling away" was the opposite of things "going one's way," that is, goals being reached, predictions of success coming true…big scores.
Red's notes had reflected that the feeling usually, but not always, was present shortly before a disaster, when things started to get out of control. A sucker screams about his money and calls the cops; shortly thereafter handcuffs bite the wrists. Even psychiatrists, actual doctors of the mind, could not predict human behavior one hundred percent of the time.
The falling-away feeling was a signal calling for careful planning to find the way out. And Red knew that there was, in every bad situation, a way out. Patience was required. And occasionally (he remembered specifically writing this with an exclamation point in a margin) brute force. In other words, "God helps those who help themselves."
The elevator doors opened soundlessly for Red Diamond. He stepped in and they closed. "The primary objective is to reduce risk," he said out loud.
Ronnie Boyce removed the fancy pink package from the attaché case and placed it in the rental locker. After glancing at the passengers in the bus terminal, he closed the locker quickly, removed the key, and pushed it into the pocket of his leather jacket.
On the way from Red's, he had bought birthday paper and wrapped the sawed-off shotgun. Red had told him it was the best precaution against a general inspection of such lockers. He said they usually wouldn't go to the trouble of opening a gift-wrapped package. Happy birthday, mother fuckers, he thought.
Before meeting Red, he would never have gone to such trouble. Now such precautions were a source of pride. "No bull can prove a murder case without the murder weapon," Red often said.
It was dusk when Ronnie drove toward the Sea Horse Motel. He left the Santa Monica Freeway and headed south on Lincoln Boulevard and smelled salt air. The smell reminded him of Carol's beach apartment six years ago. He pictured her walking around the apartment naked, tits jiggling, talking a hundred miles an hour. He thought of the arrow tattoo.
At a traffic light, a woman in tennis shorts crossed the street in snappy fashion. Her legs were long, like Carol's. Although he remembered Carol's body, he wasn't sure he would remember her face. He had not seen her since the trial, six years ago. She had sat in the dock like a penguin and testified against him. For the first months in stir he had dreamed of escaping just to kill her, but those thoughts had faded into others. Walking the yard was a mind bender.
He knew it had been his fault. After all, he chose to live with her and let her in on the bank jobs. What the hell did he expect her to do? Carol would never ride a beef for a man. She was a loner. She was one of the few broads who had her own reputation. Carol was the Queen of Plastic. She could have written books on how to make two grand a day from a hot American Express card.
He swung into the lot in front of a row of aqua-colored motel rooms and parked. He checked the note in his wallet. Sea Horse, room eleven. She had been easy to locate through the grapevine.
He walked to room eleven and knocked loudly. There was no answer. After looking around, he removed the screwdriver from his pocket, jimmied the lock, opened the door, and stepped into the darkened room. Women's clothes lay on the bed; a brassiere hung on a chair. Closing the door, he moved a chair to a corner of the room and sat on it.
He removed the switch-blade knife from his pocket, flicked it open, and cleaned his nails. The motel room was fairly clean, but small, cell-like. A print of an ocean scene hung over the bed. The room reminded him of the Burbank apartment where he had played as a child. Walls thin as paper. His mother had liked the apartment because it was near the studios, where she had worked on and off as a waitress. He remembered the cheap furniture and the hundreds of tiny bottles and jars on her dressing table, the Screen Romance magazines in the kitchen drawer, the enormous photo of Alan Ladd on the living-room wall, the smell of cold cream.
He had spent the first night away from the apartment in Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall. The next day, good old Mom had come to pick him up, carting along a whiskey-breath boyfriend. They dropped him off at the apartment after she scolded him for breaking into a car. She hadn't even taken the trouble to find out that he had broken into a house, not a car.
He had received a telegram about her death when he was in Chino serving three years for some gas-station stickups. After learning the news, he had finished his handball game.
He heard a key enter the lock and he stood up quietly with the knife in his hand.
She did not see him as she closed the door and walked to the dressing table. She turned on the table lamp; her back was to him but she saw him in the mirror and gave a sharp cry. Her hands flew to her mouth and
she spun around. They faced each other across the messy bed.
"Ronnie! Oh! Please don't kill me. The Feds made me testify. I didn't want to. They tricked me. Oh, God. NO!" Her knees and thighs were held stiffly together.
He noticed the crow's-feet and the extremely short bleached hair. Her voice was the same, deep, almost hoarse. She wore jeans and a silk blouse.
"I guess you know that I woulda never got convicted if you wouldn't have testified." He held the knife loosely in his right hand.
"I just got out a month ago myself…What…are you going to do? What are you going to do to me?"
"I was going to choke you to death. Or maybe just cut off your tongue."
Her fists clenched. After a moment of silence she began speaking, her voice shrill, staccato. "I want you to do it," she babbled, "I want you to kill me right now. I want to get it over with. I deserve it for being a snitch. You were my baby and I snitched. I wanted to write you and tell you what happened but I knew you wouldn't understand…"
"Carol, don't try to con me. You're not talking to some bank turkey to set up a phony account. You're talking to Ronnie Boyce. And I'll tell you right off I'm six years smarter than I ever was. I'm together this time: one-hundred-fucking-percent together."
She fell silent as he spoke, but glanced toward the door.
"Don't look at the door, woman. You ain't going nowhere." Ronnie sat down nonchalantly on the chair. It seemed that they had been staring at each other for hours.
"I heard you ended up in Corona three years ago. I guess you didn't have anybody to snitch off on that case."
With a moan, Carol sat down on the edge of the bed, hands over her eyes and forehead.
"You were all I thought about the whole thirty months," she sobbed, looking up, then covering her eyes again quickly.
Ronnie was quiet for what must have been ten minutes. "Don't get the idea that you've conned me, Carol," he said at last. "Nobody does that to me. If I came here to ice you, that's just what I would have done."
She looked up.
"I just want to make it up to you," she said softly. Her chest was heaving, thrusting, under the silk blouse. Her eyes were piercing.
Ronnie did not answer immediately. Perhaps without admitting it, he had known all along he wanted her back. In prison, his mind had allowed her many fates. Now that he really was finally out, the choice was either to snuff her because of what she had done or to let her live and have things like they were.
He put the blade of the knife back in the handle and tossed it across the bed into her lap. She looked up, startled.
"I'll make it up to you. Everything will be okay again," she said.
"The only way you could make it up to me would be to go down on it nonstop for six goddamn years." His voice was sad.
She smiled cautiously, stood up, and stripped quickly, efficiently, jabbering away as if nothing had happened, as if the six years had been six days.
No reason to kill her now, he thought, it wouldn't prove anything.
Naked, she walked around the bed and faced him. He stared at the tattooed arrow on the thigh pointing upward toward the hair. Christ, in how many prison dreams had he seen the tattoo? Once, he had drawn the arrow on a photo in Playboy.
"I ain't never going to go back," he said.
Quickly, she dropped to her knees in front of him. "Everything's going to be okay again. Come here now, let me see…" said Carol, reaching for him. He grasped the sides of her head.
SIX
The federal prison was located on the south end of Terminal Island, the gun tower being positioned next to sea rocks. The prison itself was separated from the steam-belching canneries on the island by various perimeters of chain-link topped with barbed wire. The canneries and dead seaweed along the rocks gave the whole place the smell of rotten eggs.
In the prison's parking lot, Charles Carr locked his gun and handcuffs in the trunk of the government sedan and headed for the two-story administration building. The drab brownstone structure accented a steel door with reinforced hinges. It was the only way in and out.
Inside the building he displayed his badge, signed the visitor's register, and filled out two useless forms.
In an interview room, he reviewed Freddie Roth's lengthy prison file, concentrating on the latest stretch.
Carr remembered his first meeting with Freddie Roth. The door of the print shop had gone down. Freddie was back-pedaling past the press with greenish hands in the air. "Okay. You got me. You got me."
Inside the print shop Carr had holstered his gun and bantered with Freddie for over an hour about where he had hidden the plates. "On my mother's grave," chanted Freddie, "I destroyed 'em. Go ahead and look! Be my guest. You won't find any plates. I burned 'em with a blowtorch and dumped 'em in the ocean. So help me God!"
And there was the blank look on Roth's face when the plates were pulled out of the floor safe-not a smile or a frown, just a business-as-usual, do-my-time, see-you-when-I-get-out-again expression.
The interview room was neat. Two chairs, a table, a tiny aluminum-foil ashtray. The walls were freshly painted light green. The paint odor combined with a hangover caused Carr to feel slightly light-headed. He wished he had eaten breakfast.
He stopped turning the pages of Roth's prison file and looked up. The khaki — uniformed guard stepped in the door carrying a steaming mug of coffee. Carr noticed tattoos on his giant arms, a full head of thick hair combed backward with grease.
"You Carr? Treasury?"
Carr nodded. "I'm waiting for Roth to be brought down from D wing…Frederick Roth."
After another loud slurp, which caused Carr to stifle a gag, the guard leaned forward for coffee-breath emphasis. "Before you talk to him, there's something you may want to know. He's been in my office begging for a gate pass for the past month. The pass would allow him to be assigned to the work detail in the minimum — security wing. I was going to approve the pass until I found out about his old lady."
"His old lady?" Carr looked puzzled.
"She wrote him a Dear John last month. We read all the letters coming in. The bleeding hearts haven't taken that away from us yet. Seems she moved in with a colored gentleman since poor old Freddie's been in barbwire city. Freddie tried to smuggle a letter out to her." The guard dug into his shirt pocket. "Here's a copy of it."
Carr read the letter as the guard lapped at the mug.
The last line of the letter read, "I'll be getting out of here sooner than you think, bitch. Then you and your nigger are going to die."
"The reason he's pushing for a gate pass is that the minimum-security wing gives him access to the highway. It's the easiest way to escape. You can rest assured the last thing he will ever get is a gate pass." The guard smiled wryly.
With the knock on the door, Carr handed the letter back, and the guard quickly stuffed it in his pants pocket. The guard stood up and motioned Roth to the table, stepped outside, and closed the door. Carr heard the snap of the lock.
A gaunt Freddie Roth sat down and gushed insincere greetings about how pleased he was to see the "old fox." Roth's bald head and his face appeared yellow, cadaverous, just as Carr remembered them. His glasses were much thicker.
"This place is a little different from my pad in Malibu years ago, eh? Remember?" Roth motioned to the green walls as if introducing a choir. "It is really good to see yez. Really, I'm very serious about it. It really is good to see yez." He spoke as if he were selling a vacuum cleaner.
"Got a date yet, Freddie?"
"I was supposed to have a date by now, but they turned over my house during a lockdown and found some seed, so they held up my date. The grass wasn't even mine…What do you want to talk to me about?" He pushed his glasses back on his nose.
"Some of your old twenties have been showing up recently," Carr said.
Roth leaned forward, interested, elbows on knees. The glasses slipped again.
"Which old twenties?"
"The ones you printed just before t
his stretch."
Roth rubbed a hand across the desert of his scalp. "Yes, the plate had a bad key in the Treasury seal." He shook his head. "I should have burned the whole friggin' batch instead of putting them out on the street. I'm almost embarrassed to say they were my work."
"Santa Anita and Hollywood Park didn't think they were so bad," Carr said.
Roth beamed. "The casinos in Las Vegas put out a notice on them, too, as a matter of fact. I had a friend there who checked for me…I was peddling them for thirty points on the dollar. Six bucks apiece. And even with that price, my phone was ringing off the hook."
"Who has the rest of the notes, Freddie?" Carr's tone was fatherly.
Roth held out his hands. "Wait a minute! Did you come here to lay a goddamn case on me while I'm in the joint? What the hell do I know about who has a few twenties that I printed three years ago? How do I know what's happening on the street right now? I'm in a cage, man. I…"
"Thanks, Freddie," Carr interrupted. "You can go now. Sorry to bother you."
Roth's yellow jaw dropped. "What?"
"I said you can go back to D wing. I don't have any more questions," Carr said. Through the years Carr had learned that Roth had to be kept on the track.
Roth slid his chair back to stand up. He stopped.
"What if I was to remember something about a stash on the outside. What's in it for me?" He sat down again.
"What do you want to be in it for you?" Carr said.
Roth put his hands in his lap. "It's like this. I'm on the list to get a gate pass to minimum security so I can work outside on the grass. I'm sick and I need some sun and fresh air-vitamin C. You know how it is…If you could talk to the captain and move my name up on the gate-pass list, I think I might be able to remember something about the twenties. Get the picture?"
"I get the picture," Carr said. "I'll go see the guard captain and see what I can do."
Carr stood up and knocked on the door. A guard unlocked and opened it. He stepped out into the shiny corridor and walked toward the prison-staff coffee room. As he walked he noticed the yellow that was building up along the baseboards. Unnecessary waxing, like the cheap labor of an army headquarters company.
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