by Parnell Hall
TONY: “Some of Ospina’s friends may be smart as hell.”
PLUTO: “Sure they may. I gotta start him worrying about that, but that’s another story. It doesn’t concern us now. We gotta forget Miami and say, if it came from our end, where’d it come from?”
TONY: “I have no idea.”
TDU: “Me neither, boss.”
PLUTO: “Well, think, damn it. Is there anything that happened lately, anything out of the ordinary?”
I tensed up. I was afraid Tall, Dark, and Ugly’d chime in, “What about the phone being out?” but he said, “Nothing, boss.”
I let out a sigh of relief. Then Tony said something that stood my hair on end.
TONY: “Yeah. There was something, boss. About a week ago. Murphy brought some guy around the casino, some guy from Miami. Said he knew Albrect.”
In the silence that followed my beeper went off and I almost jumped out of my socks.
28.
I SHUT OFF MY BEEPER. Seconds later, I shut off the automatic safety check. I shut off the tape recorder. I knew I had to hear what came next, but not just yet.
Back when I was 25 or 26 and doing summer stock, I remember that after the show one night a bunch of us actors were sitting around drinking and shooting the shit, and one of the guys had a Penthouse magazine that everyone had been reading during rehearsal all day, and we got to talking about some of the more bizarre letters in the Penthouse Forum. One was from a guy who claimed he could perform fellatio on himself, and got off on having people watch him do it. We were laughing and joking about that, and one of the actresses in the company asked if such a thing were possible, and we all laughed and said, “No.” Then one guy laughed and said, “And we all knew the answer,” and we all laughed some more.
That, to the best of my recollection, is the only time in my life I ever consciously considered what it would be like to have my penis in my mouth.
Until now.
I took deep breaths, hyperventilating, trying to keep the nausea from overpowering me. I couldn’t quite do it, but I managed to calm down somewhat. I forced myself to turn the machine back on.
Pluto was saying, “Good thinking. Good thinking, Tony. That’s exactly what I mean. Something like that. Now when did you say this was?”
TONY: “A week or two ago. I don’t remember exactly. Just that Murphy brought him around.”
PLUTO: “Well, was it before or after Albrect was killed?”
TONY: “After.”
PLUTO: “You sure?”
TONY: “Yeah, I’m sure. In fact, it was right after. I remember now. ’Cause I had to play cute with Murphy. You know, ask him if Albrect was coming. And he told me Albrect was dead.”
PLUTO: “You sure about that?”
TONY: “Yeah. I remember now.”
PLUTO: “Then it must have been the next night. I mean, Albrect must have been killed just the night before.”
TONY: “That’s right.”
PLUTO: “And the very next night this guy shows up, says he knows Albrect, says he’s from Miami?”
TONY: “Yeah. That stinks, don’t it?”
PLUTO: “It sure does. What’d the guy look like?”
TONY: “I don’t know. Dark hair. About 30. Six feet. 160 pounds.”
Great. Younger, taller, and thinner. My world is collapsing and they’re trying to flatter me.
PLUTO: “You think Murphy had anything to do with this?”
TONY: “Naw. Murphy’s a civilian. He don’t know shit.”
PLUTO: “He knows too damn much. Look, get him on the phone, find out what he knows about this guy.”
TONY: “O.K. You want me to tell him what it’s all about?”
PLUTO: “Fuck, no. The less he knows the better. Look, tell him we might want to cultivate this guy to take over Albrect’s run. Don’t let him know anything’s wrong. Right? Just tell him you want some info on this guy and ask how you can get in touch with him.”
TONY: “Right.”
There was the sound of footsteps, of Tony walking to the phone. Something was wrong. I mean, aside from the obvious fact that everything had turned to shit, something didn’t make sense. I didn’t know what it was, I just knew that somehow, something I had just heard didn’t fit in with my known facts.
Before I could figure out what it was, the sound of footsteps suddenly stopped and there was silence.
I turned the volume up on the machine. Dead air. There was nothing there.
Suddenly, I realized what had been bothering me. Tony’s phone call to Murphy. It hadn’t happened. It wasn’t on the tape. I’d just listened to the last calls on the tape, and they were incoming calls immediately terminated by TDU. If Tony was about to call Murphy, the call should have been on the tape. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t on the phone tape, and it wasn’t on the room tape. Somehow the tapes had fucked up.
My first thought was that they’d found the bug. That would be my first thought—always think the worst. Then it hit me. The tape hadn’t fucked up. They hadn’t found the bug. For whatever reason—it didn’t really matter why—Tony hadn’t gone straight to Pluto’s that night. He’d gotten there that morning, and not too far ahead of me. The conversation I’d been listening to hadn’t taken place in the early hours of the morning. It had taken place that very day, just as I’d been out there to change the tapes. The phone call wasn’t on either tape, because I’d ripped the tapes out of the machines just before it happened.
Now it made sense that Tony could call Murphy. He couldn’t have called him at home early in the morning and made it seem casual. But he sure as hell could have called him at the office that day. And that’s just what he had done. Only I’d missed the goddamn call because I’d changed the tape just before he made it.
On the heels of that realization came another one. I had to go out there and get the tape and find out what was said. Now that they were on to me, now that they’d gotten a lead to me, now that they were focusing all of their efforts toward finding out who I was, I had to go out there virtually under their noses and get the tapes.
What if they’d found the bugs? What if they’d traced them and found the car? Ironically, there was no way of knowing without having the tapes.
My beeper went off again, and I almost welcomed it. Good. It must be important. It’ll give me something to do. Give me something that’s important enough that I have to do it and can put off, at least for a few hours, having to get those tapes.
I dialed the office.
“Agent Blue,” I said.
“It’s about time,” Kathy snarled. “Don’t you ever answer your beeper?”
“I had to get to a phone.”
“Oh yeah? I’ll bet you’re in your office.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I don’t hear any traffic.”
“Remind me to tape record some and play it back when I’m inside.”
“Never mind that, this is important. It won’t wait.”
“Then you’d better tell me what it is.”
She did. An old man in Queens had just gotten out of the hospital. It had been a medical malpractice case, so taking pictures in the hospital had been out of the question. The doctor in the hospital had been treating the patient’s leg. Gangrene had set in. The old man had lost his foot. The kicker was, that was his good leg. His other leg had already been cut off at the hip.
Richard must have been salivating over this one: I mean, it’s not as if the pictures wouldn’t keep—the guy wouldn’t have any legs tomorrow, either. But Richard was adamant. It had to be done today.
Fine, I thought. Anything, rather than the tapes. I wrote down the address, and pulled out the Hagstrom map.
It was way the hell out in Rosedale, right on the way to Pluto’s house.
29.
ON MY WAY OUT TO Rosedale it began to rain really hard. I don’t know how other detectives handle the rain. I suppose James Bond has an umbrella, but he’s British, he could get away with it. I don’t se
e Mike Hammer carrying one, somehow. I think it’s always sunny when he’s on a case.
I have a problem with rain. I’ve never liked umbrellas or raincoats. I guess it goes back to my childhood, when my mother always wanted me to wear a raincoat or take an umbrella, or both, and I never wanted to because they interfered with my play. I preferred always to sprint madly wherever I wanted to go.
I still do, but with the job, it’s a problem. I started my detective work in February, so there wasn’t any rain to contend with. Then the summer came. I still have no raincoat. Tommie and I got free CitiBank umbrellas by going to Yankee Stadium on umbrella day, so on rainy days I’ll take that, since I have to protect my suit. But I always take it home again, and leave it there. So when a heavy shower starts up in the middle of the day, I’m always unprepared.
I was thinking this as I drove along in my car, and at about Shea Stadium I started giggling uncontrollably. Here I was on my way out to Rosedale in the hope of taking a picture of where someone’s foot used to be, en route to picking up a tape recording that would tell me if a bunch of hoods were taking out a contract on me, and suddenly my biggest problem is that I’m caught in the rain.
I left my jacket and tie in the car, put the New York Post (god love it, the ink doesn’t run like the Times) over my head, and sprinted for the house.
It only took ten rings before they let me in. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything better from a man with no legs, but it was his wife who answered the door, and she had two of ’em.
I’ve taken some pretty gruesome injury pictures in my day: an eyeball hanging in a man’s socket by a few stitches and a prayer; a scar that ran from the cheekbone to the hip; and a penis sliced open in a motorcycle accident and stitched back together again, to name a few, and I’ve become pretty inured to them. But there’s something about an amputee, particularly a double leg amputee, that is disturbing. I mean, they just lie there helpless as you photograph the stumps, and you can’t help feeling sick. And it’s not because the stumps are gory—the wounds have usually completely healed before you get a camera on ’em. It’s just somehow so moving.
Today, I felt nothing. The old man’s plight was pitiful indeed, but I couldn’t focus on it. As his wife pulled the sock covers off his stumps, all I could see was the assignment I had to shoot. I shot it, wished them well, and got the hell out of there.
It was pouring harder now, and suddenly I blessed the rain. Nobody would be out on a day like this. It was perfect.
I sped down to Pluto’s. The rain was still coming down in buckets. I pulled up right behind the rented car, got out, and opened the trunk. The tapes had both been used, though neither was moving. I changed them quickly, got back in my car, and drove off. It was a piece of cake.
My beeper went off on my way back over the Triboro Bridge. I didn’t want to answer it, but if I didn’t, they’d start calling my wife again, and I was running out of excuses for why my beeper wasn’t working.
I came off the bridge and went through the toll booths. I automatically asked for a receipt, as if the damn dollar seventy-five really meant anything to me at that moment.
On the right side of the toll plaza there was a bank of pay phones by the side of the road. I pulled up next to them. The rain had eased down to a slight drizzle. I got out and called the office.
Susan answered, and for once I was glad. I didn’t feel up to dealing with Kathy. She had a new case for me. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to do it anyway. I’d just called to stop them from bugging me. I planned to call the client and stall him off till tomorrow.
But I couldn’t do it. Susan informed me in a cheery voice that drove me to the point of despair that the client had called from work, was now on his way home, and had no phone, and she had therefore made the appointment for me, and I was to be at his place at five.
I told her I was sorry, but I just couldn’t do it. She told me to hang on, and put me on hold. I was debating whether or not to just simply hang up when there was a click on the line, and Richard’s voice exploded in my ear.
“What do you mean you can’t do it?” Richard cried. “Of course you can do it. You have to do it. You went out to Rosedale, didn’t you? You’re on your way back from there, aren’t you? Well, this is right on the way. All you gotta do is swing by and see the guy.”
“I can’t, Richard, I—”
“Yes you can. This is a big case. The guy’s got severed tendons, he may lose the use of his arm. The top of his window fell on him when he went to open it, it’s defective, it smashed on the floor, for Christ’s sake. Be sure you get the pictures before they fix the damn thing.”
“But—”
“Look, I got nobody else who can do it, the guy doesn’t have a phone, so you have to do it. You want this job, you gotta do this job. Stop bellyaching and sign the guy up.”
There was a click and the line went dead.
I was hopelessly torn. The tapes that held my future were right there in the car, and I was desperate to hear them, but if I stood up the client, the repercussions would make my life so complicated, that in my present state of mind, I’d probably never be able to straighten everything out. I felt like a juggler trying to keep seventeen balls going at once. The line of least resistance was to keep the appointment.
It was in Manhattan, which helped. I went over the Third Avenue Bridge and took the FDR downtown.
I parked the car at a meter two blocks away from the address. I must have been really rattled by that time, because the implications of the address “Bowery” never dawned on me till I got there.
The hotel was a flop-house. The entrance was just a narrow stairway up to the second floor. I climbed it, and when I reached the top I felt as if my mind had given way.
I was in a ’40s movie. The desk had a wire-mesh screen around it. The old man behind the desk wore a faded, wide-lapelled suit and a visor. A cigar butt was stuck in his mouth.
The desk was at the top of the stairs, and was in between the hallway and staircase that led to the rooms in the back, and a medium-sized common room at the front.
The common room was what blew my mind. It had a row of old wooden school desks along one wall, the kind that are a chair with a small oval top curving out from the right side, the kind I used to sit in in high school. On the opposite wall was a coffee and hot soup machine, and I knew it! The identical machine had been in the rec room of my old school. When I was twelve years old, I used to stick my hand up through the cup dispenser, and pull out packets of powdered chicken soup.
A half-dozen men were sitting in the school desks. A few others were milling around, walking in and out. One young, black man with no shirt and his pants unbuttoned kept parading around for no discernible reason. But most of the men were old. Old, filthy bums, just like the ones who stopped you in the street. Or passed out in doorways. Or cleaned your windshield against your will, if you stopped at a red light.
On a table by the front window was an old color TV. It had twisted rabbit ears, but the reception was still pretty good, although the color was almost indiscernible. And the men in the room were all watching it. Devoutly. Quietly. Glued to the set. These ragged old men, so help me god, were all watching “The Newlywed Game.”
My client wasn’t home yet, so I sat down at one of the school desks, and watched with them.
The wives had already answered the questions, and now the husbands were trying to match their answers. The question was, “In your neighborhood, does the sun rise in the east or the west?”
One husband, a dumb, goofily handsome type, who had already gotten everything else wrong, said, “The east.” His wife, a young blonde, cried, “No, stupid!” and held up her card which said, “west.”
“It said, in your neighborhood,” she cried in exasperation, and everyone on the show laughed at him.
The bums watched all this without expression or comment. None of them volunteered any theories about the sunrise. They merely watched.
I sat there
as if in a dream. Is this real or just fantasy? Are these bums real? Are the people on TV real? Am I really a detective? Is Pluto real? Or illusion? Is that the fantasy and this the reality?
I really didn’t know.
30.
UNTIL I PLAYED THE TAPES.
I sat in my office, shivering from the rain, or from fear, or probably both, and played the tapes.
They picked up right where the other had left off. Tony called Murphy, fed him the bullshit line Pluto had suggested, and got the name Nathan Armstrong and the phone number of the Whitney Corporation of Miami. Tony called the Whitney Corp. and, strangely enough, was told they had no such employee as Nathan Armstrong.
After that phone call, I switched back from the phone tape to the room tape. I sped past the repeats of the two phone conversations, and got to the part where Tony hung up.
TONY: “No such person.”
PLUTO: “You’re sure?”
TONY: “They’re sure.”
PLUTO: “Any chance Murphy was wrong about the company?”
TONY: “Not at all. He says he sat with the guy and went over the account. The guy knew all about it.”
PLUTO: “You mean the guy learned all about it by stringing Murphy along. This is one slick customer.”
Praise from Pluto was somehow the last thing I needed at the moment.
TONY: “So this is the guy.”
PLUTO: “It’s gotta be. It all fits. It’s the night after Albrect got hit. He knows about Albrect. He shows up at the casino. He gave a phony name, he’s got a phony background. What the fuck else could it be?”
TONY: “So what are we gonna do?”
PLUTO: “I want the fucker, and I want him bad. I want the coke back, but that’s incidental right now. I just want the fucker hit.”
TONY: “Agreed.”
I’d known this was coming, but somehow hearing it made it worse. It was like hearing a judge sentence you to death.
PLUTO: “I want him hit, and I want him hit fast. That’s one thing. There’s another thing.”
