Airtight Willie & Me (12 page)

He half-whispered, “I will, Chippie Slickstuff. Second-Story Jack swears he spotted you lollygagging around your store around midnight last night. A pure-in-heart bottom bitch don't slip back in town and detour her man's lonely bed overnight.”

Contempt curled her frothy lips as she rinsed her mouth and spit into the face bowl. “Hah! I wish I had a tape to play that square-ass lonely bed crack from Razzle Red to all the jive mack men that think your swipe is frozen numb. Razzle Red, the coldest ass kicker in town. Hah! Red, you're a clown if you'll buy anything a junkie burglar tells you about your woman. Maybe you should cut me loose.”

His jaw muscles writhed. He sprayed spittle. “Uh-huh! You got yourself some splitting power, you got that shop I set you up in. Now you're ready to hit the wind, to set me up as a chump laughingstock. Right? Ha!”

She stared up at him, aquiver with the struggle to be cool. “You're wrong, Red. I don't plan to hit the wind unless you can't trust me. And, Red, please call me Etta or Satin, okay?”

He put his giant palms on the face bowl and leaned his flat yellow brute face into hers. “I couldn't get you all night at your sister's house. Why?”

She jerked her head to flounce her hair in irritation. “DA, the phone was off the hook. The calls after the funeral drove us up the wall. Can you believe, understand that, Red? Now get out of my ass, okay? I gotta headache.”

He said, “How's Mimi?”

She stared in outraged awe. “None of your damned business, Red! She'd be with me if you cared.” She stepped into the shower and flipped on a torrent. She lathered herself. Red's face was hideous with suspicion and rage as he glared at her soapy curves through the frosted shower door. His maximal erection tented his trousers as he peered over the shower door.

He shouted above the thunder of the water, “Ho, you got some stud's stink on you? You fucking around I'm gonna send that sucker to the morgue when I get hip to who he is. Then guess what I'm gonna do for you?”

She hollered, “Braid steel coat hangers and beat me bloody like you did when you copped me.”

He screamed above the water roar, “I'm gonna have your shop torched and put you back to humping in the street where you belong.”

She shouted, “Don't shuck me, Nigger. The torch I believe. But you won't share this mojo pussy, Red. And you know I'm hip. I'm the only one you can trust to deliver your dope after Smiley burned you for that bundle of bread last month. If you torch my joint, I'll cut you loose, Red.”

Red busted a cobweb into the shower door with his fist. “Bitch, you ain't no precious necessity to a player. A star!”

Out of control with hatred, she shrilled, “Trick! The stupid hoes
you claim are just a front for your star dope-dealing ass. Now, kick my ass. Nigger, I don't want to sell your dope! Fire me, player!”

Red stomped into the bedroom and started to undress. She finished showering and stepped out. She cut murderous eyes at Red on the bed, snorting cocaine and stroking his organ. She slammed the bathroom door, saturated a sanitary pad with mercurochrome. She belted it on around her hips to turn off Red's humping yen and ravenous tongue. She slipped into her gown.

A realization hit her. She was playing her hand stupidly with Red, waking him up with her bared hatred. She ripped off the sanitary belt and slipped off the gown. She must endure Red one more time. She relaxed her tight face in the mirror, made it bland, then sultry. After that, she opened the door and stepped sensuously into the plush pit to put Red back to temporary sleep until she could arrange his permanent slumber.

That same evening, three brothers from New York drove in and checked themselves and Red's expected kilos of “H” into a top-floor suite in a high-rise hotel. The hotel was on the extreme Southside, at the end of Red's block on the other side of the boulevard. Corpulent Mel “Ox” Hilson, the eldest, sat in the flashy suite on the living-room couch in red satin pajamas with the phone receiver to his ear. His thin, hard-faced brothers, in pink-striped dressing gowns, flanked him on the couch as they watched and listened intently.

“No, I tell you I can't deliver those shirts tonight. My sewing machine broke down. Yeah, maybe some time tomorrow. Talk to you, Red.”

Mel's tar-black face was angry as he slammed down the receiver. He drummed fingertips on the coffee table before him. He lit a cigar and grunted, “That asshole has a new partner that demands to be with the transaction.”

The unspoken question sparked the room like electricity as the brothers stared at one another: Is Red's new partner a narc or an informer?

Mel said, “Silas, get to the window with your binoculars. See if he is alone when he leaves the contact phone in the drugstore at the other end of the block.”

Silas got the spyglasses off the coffee table and went to the window.

Jeff, the youngest brother, said, “I don't like it, Mel.”

Silas returned from the window and said, “He was alone. Mel, does Red know where we're stopping?”

“Hell, no!” Mel said as he dialed the phone. “Has he ever?”

Mel said, “How ya doing, Eli? Yeah, I'm in town, gonna hoist a few with you before I leave. Listen, you ever hear of a Jake ‘Frog' Stone? Fine! Give me a full rundown on him.” Mel frowned, clucked, shook his head for five minutes before he said, “Eli, thanks. I love ya,” and hung up with a dour face. Mel sighed. “Red's partner is an ex-burglary squad detective at Eleventh Street, Central Headquarters.”

His brothers chorused, “Let's get back to the Apple.”

Mel slashed a double-jointed arm through the air. “Don't panic, girls. True, since he's an ex-cop, Frog is gotta be a card-carrying snake. He got bounced off the force six years ago. He caught a five-year bit in Joliet for fencing jewelry and furs he ripped off from junkie burglars. He went to bat for wasting three of 'em, but he beat those raps.”

The frozen fireworks on his giant fingers exploded dazzling light as Mel poured himself a glass of champagne. He sipped and leaned his bulk back on the couch. He grinned at his brothers. “Now, students, listen while I give you a lesson in business economics. We lugged a ticket to the joint from the Apple because the top bread in the East was fifty grand for the kilos. There's a dope panic in Chicago. So Red and his snake partner are ‘coming' in their drawers to buy at a hundred grand.”

Mel put a cigar in his mouth and nodded toward a lighter at
the end of the table. Silas picked it up, leaned in, and flicked flame to the end of the cigar. Mel blew a blue gust of smoke toward the crystal chandelier and patted his processed gray hair.

He said, “Only a moron would lug those sizzling kilos back to the Apple to a fifty-grand market. I want you both to rent a couple of Fords or Chevys. I want Red and Frog tailed every one of their waking hours until we turn our deal. I want Red's meet spot cased before we show. I'll know where when I call him at the drugstore phone at ten in the morning.

“Well, get the hell out of here and cop those cars. Don't carry your pieces until we deal.”

The brothers went into one of the bedrooms to dress. Mel went to the window to zero in with the powerful binoculars on Red's estate across the way. He said to himself, “Red's main bitch is a superfox.”

Satin, resplendent in a sable-trimmed pink leather walking suit with matching boots, strolled through the front gate to the boulevard. She moved under the horny scrutiny of Mel the “Ox.” Minutes earlier, Red had loaded his gaggle of whores into his Continental and left to take them to their all-night humping gigs. Mel watched her cross the boulevard and enter the drugstore. Satin went to a public phone to call Pony. She arranged to meet him on an El train platform within the hour to give him the duplicate key to Red's meet motel room on the southern outskirts of the city.

As she left the store a creative thrill shot through her: the plan to eliminate Red! She caught a cab at a stand in front of the drugstore under Mel's leering view. A quarter-hour later she paid a fare at an El station window on Fifty-eighth Street and walked up the stairway to the crowded southbound platform. Pony stood at the end of the platform, looking down on the wind-whipped street at pedestrians slogging through dirty, mushy snow. She walked to his side and looked down on the street, awash in neon.

She banged his hip with hers. “I've missed you. I love you,” she whispered.

“Me you, too, Lover Doll,” he said.

She slipped the dupe key into the pocket of his tan cashmere overcoat and said, “I'll call you in the morning and let you know the approximate time Red and Frog will leave to make their deal. I could almost kiss Frog.”

He frowned and took his eyes from the street and stared at the side of her face. “You could what?” he growled.

She hip-banged him again and smiled wickedly. “Easy ‘Ice Cream Cone.' Frog has transmitter bugs on all the phones at home. He's got a fresh lock on his bedroom door. So, he's gotta have his receiving and recording gizmos behind that door.”

She paused to light cigarettes for them. “Pony, Frog's bugs gives us the way to put Red where the devil can hug him, and dogs can't bite him, as Mama used to say. Listen carefully, darling; call Red at home at one
A.M
. I'll pack my nicer things in the car trunk and split before you call. Baby, hang up after you say, ‘Red, I've got bad news. I'm not splitting the motel score with you. I'm calling you from out-of-town. You were a dirty nigger, Red, to burn me like you did last year when we took those Dagos in Cicero. Dixie hipped me, Red, the week before his ho wasted him.' ”

The Jackson Park El train pulled in to stop at the platform. They risked a kiss.

Pony said, “Damn! You're a smart broad to be so pretty.”

Satin turned and dashed into the train. She blew a kiss as it pulled away to the far Southside.

Next day at twilight, Pony drove a stolen blue Pontiac in search of a highway motel sign several miles past the city limits. Ironically, he passed the two Hilson brothers on their way back to the city after casing the motel.

He spotted the sign and pulled off the highway through a thick stand of trees into the snow-choked driveway. Ten blood-red stucco units huddled, battered in a trench of snow like slaughtered soldiers dead in the hush as requiem snow blossoms fell. A Cyclops bulb
winked above a blistered metal sign: OTTO'S AND GRETA'S BERLIN MOTEL. Below it, a pasteboard For Sale sign.

He parked near the office and got out with an overnight bag. His black leather jacket and cap shone under the bald eye of the sign as he went into the dimly lit office and punched a bell on the scabrous counter. He heard an ancient throat expectorate phlegm and the sound of weary feet drag toward him from a burlap-curtained rear room. An old white man in a tattered plaid robe with a matching tasseled nightcap perched on his grizzled head entered the office. He yawned sleepily.

“Welcome to the Berlin Motel, mister. Five a day, twenty by the week,” he said with a heavy German accent.

Pony said, “Just overnight.”

Otto smiled toothlessly as he shoved the registration pad toward Pony, blank except for Red's entry as Frank Smith, registered in room ten.

As Pony signed Leo Franklin, he said, “A friend said number nine is nice. Could business be slow enough so I got a choice?”

Otto said, “It's terrible. I'm selling. This place could be a mint again, dolled up.” He sighed, “I'd dress her up pretty again if I had my Greta and a thimble of youth left.” He looked at the signature, took a key from a rack, and shoved it across the counter. “Number nine you got, Mister Franklin.” he said as he inked in “nine” beside Pony's pseudonym.

Pony slid a five spot across the counter, picked up his key, and went to the Pontiac. He drove it to the end of the building and sat for several minutes watching the office door. Then he took his blanket-wrapped machine gun and bag into his room, flipped the light on, and placed them under the brass bed. He went and keyed himself into adjoining number ten. He flipped on a dim nightlight and examined the large one room and bath. He decided he'd get the drop on them from the closet, in a group or however they showed.

He started to leave, turned back, and went to a tall rectangular
electric heater in the wall that he thought was in the same position as his room's heater. He peered around the edges of the heater and smiled as he spotted a pinpoint of light from his room. He used a pocketknife to loosen the screws that anchored the heater's light metal housing to the wall. Then he wrenched it gently from the top. It fell loose into his hands. He pressed it and the screws back against the wall, flipped off the nightlight, left, and locked the door.

He got into the Pontiac and drove it behind an abandoned service station a hundred yards down the highway. He walked back to the motel and went behind the office building and cut the telephone line. He went into his room and locked it. He felt a draft and went into the bathroom to swing a large hinged window shut. He repeated the loosening process on his wall heater, then he pulled it off and leaned it against the gaping hole in the wall.

He glanced at his wristwatch, then pulled the suitcase from beneath the bed and took from it five sets of opened handcuffs, a coil of baling wire, five strips of double cloth sewn together with rubber balls inserted into the hollow to the middle and wire clippers. He hung the articles on key hooks affixed to his belt. After that, he blackened his room, lit a cigarette, and pulled up a chair to the window. He slit a tiny hole in the drawn drapes. For an hour and a half he smoked and peered radiant eyes through it at the access road leading to the motel.

He leaped to his feet when he saw the headlamps of Red's Continental flare on the access road to the motel. He took the machine gun to the hole in the wall and stooped in the darkness to peer through a tiny crack between the loosened heater and the wall on the other side. He heard the Continental purr into the parking lot in front of number ten and saw the headlights bomb the interior for a moment before they extinguished. Then he heard the rasp of a key.