Airtight Willie & Me (22 page)

Jenkins's self-coronation occurred in the mega-explosion of media hype, in the big-buck huckstering of replicas of the ancient Egyptian boy king, of ersatz gold reproductions of statuary and artifacts looted from his centuries-endusted tomb by archaeologists under the guise of their grave-burgling science.

Street Pharaoh Tut halted his pacing of the terrace to stare across
a midnight ocean of Hollywood neon at a pair of distant police helicopters attacking the bleak enclave of Watts with spy lasers of fiery light. He shaped a triumphant smile in the throes of cerebral masturbation. He ecstatically mulls the no-price odds that he, a mulatto trick baby spewed out on the toilet floor of a Watts bucket of blood saloon from the womb of his white whore mother, would survive to become a superstar player, Rex of Hollywood's Kingdom of Vice.

Suddenly his rapture clabbered. He remembered his drug case on the court calendar impending that could depose him to a prison cell. He reminded himself that from a hundred gees, his bankroll had shrunk to a paltry two grand. And that his weekly nut for stable logistics and his own support and hedonistic fulfillment was close to five grand.

His chest inflated with tension again. He paced once more, with his recently gem-burdened, now mouthpiece-denuded, hands jammed into his gold silk-brocaded robe pockets. For the thousandth time he cursed the Hillside Strangler and the heat his murders had generated in Hollywood. The glut of strangler task force cops on the streets, and the special hooker task force of undercover and uniformed cops walking and riding had compelled him to ship all but one of his ten-girl stable to bordellos in several states. The thought that madams skimmed fifty percent off each of his girls' earnings roiled his entrails with irritation.

He sat down on a gold satin chaise beside an aquarium stocked with butcher piranha fish for a blow of coke. He snorted dust from his diamond-encrusted spoon strung on a gold chain around his neck. Then he took a hamster from a cage beside the tank and grinned as he watched the butcher fish churn the water to bloody froth as they slashed and tore the rodent to pieces and devoured it.

He saw the reflection of Skeeter, his chauffeur and long-term flunky, in a mirrored panel of the tank coming toward him. He had a worried expression on his once-handsome, lye-scarred face, inflicted by one of his girls ten years before when he was the Big
Apple's top player. Suspecting the reason for Skeeter's approach, Tut stiffened and glared at Skeeter's reflection as he reached him.

“Say, man, I got bad news. Joy is sick. Like I told you, she needs a doctor, bad! She's got terrible pains in her side. She's pouring sweat.” Skeeter toyed with the lapels of his blue Petrocelli sharkskin suit.

“Put that ho on her flight to Nevada, nigger. I promised Kate the bitch would be there on time. I ain't gonna let that fulla-shit-bitch foul my word. 'Sides, ain't no ho nineteen with her asshole pointing to the clay can be too sick to work in my game book,” Tut growled as he evil-eyed his man's reflection in the tank mirror.

Skeeter shrugged. “The ho is going to collapse at Kate's the first trick she turns if she don't on the plane. She's too sick to dress. But, it's your ho, my man,” he said as he
turned and walked away.

“Dress that ho, Skeeter, and ship the bitch!” Tut shouted to his back.

Skeeter halted at the entrance to the sunken living room, then turned in slow motion fury to stand glaring at Tut's reflected face. The jaws of his monster face quivered anger and empathy for Joy, whom he secretly adored.

“Cocksucker! I'm going to ice you one of these days!” Skeeter screamed to himself. “All right,” he managed to say blandly as he turned and disappeared into the living room.

After several blows of cocaine, twenty minutes later, Tut left the terrace. He traveled across the dazzling expanse of the lavender and gold-motifed living room toward a line of bedrooms, passing Skeeter's half-open bedroom door on his way to Joy's room.

“Hey, man,” he heard Skeeter say behind him.

He went back to face him in the hall outside his room. “Yeah, what is it?” Tut said irritably.

“Save yourself a trip to Joy's room. She'll never make the plane to Kate's.”

“What!?” Tut exclaimed.

“Your ho is dead, man,” Skeeter said in a shaky whisper as he turned away into his bedroom with fists knotted and trembling at his sides.

Tut hurried down the hall to Joy's open door and recoiled aghast, staring at the perfectly formed wee chocolate doll lying nude on her back with an odious green slime oozing from between her legs. Tut retched as he galloped back to Skeeter's open door.

“What happened to the ho, nigger?” he shouted.

“Her appendix busted. My mama went that way,” Skeeter whispered as he sat on the side of his bed and wrung his hands.

“Nigger, you gotta take that dead bitch outta here and dump her!” Tut ordered.

“We could've saved her . . . if you hadda let me take her to a doctor like I begged you. I ain't gonna dump her in no alley like Toni. I'll get in the wind!”

Tut sneered. “Nigger, you ain't gonna split heaven for a dead ho. You copping two bills a week and freebie skag to shoot. Plus all the freebie cunt you can eat. And who but me would plan to spring for ten grand in the near future to make you pretty again? Nigger, dump the ho!”

“Please don't make me do that! She's dead legit. Ain't no need to dump her. I'll call in a city ambulance for a bad sick girl and let 'em find her dead. Won't be no hassle for you that way.” Skeeter pleaded with his eyes locked on the carpet, certain that he would tip off his raging hatred if he looked at Tut.

“Sucker, I ain't investing no bread to bury no dead ho. Dump that stiff!” Tut hollered.

“I'll spring to bury her. I'll tell 'em she's my kid,” Skeeter said as he picked up the phone receiver from a bedside table.

“Chump, that's mellow with me,” Tut answered as he turned away.

Skeeter dialed, tears bursting as he fixed a homicidal stare on Tut's back as he stepped into the hall and pranced away.

Two weeks later, Lela, with Cassandra, stomped her Mercedes stallions toward L.A. to kill Tut for Toni's death after his lawyer had
beaten his drug rap on the technicality of “illegal search and seizure.” They had successfully contended that there was no reasonable legal justification for the squadron of cops to search Tut's machine after a petty traffic violation.

Eight hours later, Lela, disguised as a wrinkled, silver-haired senior citizen, sat in her two bills a day presidential suite in Tut's hotel. She had plotted in meticulous detail Tut's death with Skeeter and Cassandra. Moments later, the pair left Lela to set the death plot in motion.

Skeeter went to the penthouse, dropping down beside Tut seated on a sofa in the living room about to dial a phone. “Man, that call can wait!” he exclaimed with grifter excitement illuminating his ruined face.

“What happened?” Tut asked apprehensively as he replaced the receiver.

“Let's get out of here!” Skeeter said as he rose, darting a glance at a maid dusting furniture in a corner of the room.

Skeeter led him to the den, shutting the door. They dropped on a sofa.

“Remember Toni's roomie downstairs on the fifth floor?” Skeeter asked with bucked maroon eyes.

“Yeah, what about that square-ass zero bitch?” Tut said with a scornful hitch of his lavender silk-robed shoulders.

“You're playing her cheap, man. She ain't so square. I just rapped with her in the lobby. She begged me to connect her with some smooth, handsome player to take off a two hundred grand score from an old black broad in the presidential suite downstairs! I sure wish I didn't have this fucked-up face.”

“You sure the bitch wasn't stoned?” Tut said as his grey eyes sparkled interest.

“Naw, man, she was sober as the born-again dude in D.C. Look, man, if you ain't interested, I'll cut New York Willie into the action and cop ten percent of the sting.”

“Get on the horn and get that young bitch up here so I can quiz her.”

Tut lifted the phone off an end table and put it in Skeeter's lap. He dialed the switchboard to ring Cassandra, now sharing Lela's suite. Within three minutes, Skeeter let her into the penthouse and escorted her into the den to sit beside Tut on the sofa, snorting coke up his straight, full-nostriled duplicate dead Pharaoh's nose. Skeeter started to sit down on the sofa, but he left the room when Tut glowered at him.

“Long time no see, pretty songbird. How you been?” Tut said as he brushed her cheek with his copy-sculpted, sensual-lipped Tutankhamun mouth.

“Like bad luck, in again, out again, Finnegan, gigging in boondocks clubs for a lousy bill or two and all the garbage I could eat.”

Tut crooned, “Shit, ain't no reason for a boss fox like you to take punishment like that for slave change. I could pick up the phone and cop you a gig that would pay off two grand a week minimum if we could get an understanding.”

Cassandra smiled. “Like I told you, Tut, when we first met, I just don't have what it takes to be a hooker.”

At that instant, Lela walked out of the hotel manager's office with a receipt memoed briefcase, full of personal papers. The locked case left for the hotel safe was stuffed with newspapers.

In the penthouse, Tut leaned into Cassandra's face with his big, liquid, almond-shaped orbs wide in fake puzzlement. “Girl, why you so fucking square in this rich, fast, cold world where every motherfucker in it that's copping a big, easy, fast buck and silky living, ain't?”

She smiled ruefully, con lies. “You're mistaken about my squareness. I heisted a bank once with a dude I was hung up on, did a trey in the joint. I'll get down tough and caper if the payoff is in a class like the old lady with the long bread I told Skeeter about. Want me to give you a rundown on her?”

He slit-eyed her. “Yeah, Miss Willie Sutton, after you run down
why you egged me, the greatest player on the planet, to hit on Skeeter to connect you with a player to take off Grandma what's-her-name?”

“Tut, I thought you were still salty with me because I got in the wind that night you hit on me to be your girl at your party. Okay?”

He nodded, “Go on, girl, run her down.”

“Tut, the mark's name is Maggie Owens. She tipped me a ‘C' note in a club to sing ‘Embraceable You.' She went ape when I did. I was her houseguest until the end of my gig. I told her I was an orphan to hook her. Damn! She was uptight, all alone. She put her house up for sale and drove me to L.A. I can't get rid of her!

“She's the widow of a dude who was chief accountant for a big insurance company in Columbus, Ohio, before a stroke suddenly killed him. Then the company discovered that he had embezzled more than two hundred grand that they never recovered. She has it! I saw it! She'll be a cinch to take off it—”

Tut waved a hand through the air to interrupt her. “Whoa, Nellie! How long you know her?”

Cassandra thoughtfully chewed her bottom lip. “Oh, a couple months, give or take a day or two. Why?”

He shook his head. “Look, baby, you could be the most charming, adorable bitch there ever was. You could be so motherfucking sweet you shit Chanel Number Five turds. But, wouldn't no broad or stud young or old flash two hundred grand in stolen penitentiary bread and tip you to the rest of that private scam on no two-month foundation. She could be uptight as a saint in hell for a pal and she wouldn't tip to you. You gotta be fulla shit!”

She smiled indulgently. “I didn't say she tipped me to anything, Tut. I found out about her husband from newspaper clippings I found shaking down her house while she was at church. I saw the bread the night before we split for Columbus. I saw her, just before dawn from my bedroom window, digging in the yard of a vacant house next door. I peeped on her through the keyhole of her bedroom door when she took the bread from a plastic-wrapped
strongbox and put it into a briefcase. Now, do you still think I'm bullshitting?”

He grinned sheepishly. “Naw, girl, Maggie could be a bird nest of gold on the clay, lying in the tall, sweet clover. Where is the bread now?”

She shook her head. “I don't know. That's why I need a player to play the bread out of her, wherever it is.”

He slugged his knee with his fist. “Why don't you know where it is? Playing it out of her could take months. She ain't that kind of mark with all that bread in a briefcase.”

She stared stupidly at him with mouth agape for a long bit before she mumbled, “It beats me where that bread is. I've been living in her suite since we got here four days ago. She hasn't been out of my sight except when I or she showered or used the john, and once when she went to the hotel beauty shop, empty-handed. I had dupes of her car trunk keys, and also of our suite key made at that key shop on the corner, which I guess was unnecessary, while she was in the beauty shop. That took less than ten minutes. I searched the suite immediately and the car trunk later in the morning while she was asleep.” She fluttered her hands helplessly. “Tut, what do you think?”

He patted her knee. “You overlooked it in that big suite. She probably stashed it behind a loose ventilator cover . . . unless she stashed it somewhere in the undercarriage of her ride along the way to the coast while you were asleep. How long did you get to search the suite?”

“Not a helluva long time because she only got a hair trim.”

“Well, you musta overlooked the stash. Give me the dupe to the suite and Skeeter and I will fine-tooth it while you lug her out to a restaurant or a show tonight. If we don't score in the suite, I'll have Skeeter crawl under her ride and search the undercarriage.”

She obdurately shook her head. “No way, Tut. No unless we split fifty-fifty.”

He shaped a cunning grin. “Sure, clever baby, that's cool.”

She dug into her cleavage and handed him the dupe suite key. “I'll
take her to see
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
at eight. Okay?” she said as she stood. “Oh, I forgot a stop we made in the Big Bear area. For sentimental reasons, she wanted to see a cabin her husband once owned that she honeymooned in a zillion years ago.”