Going Nowhere Fast (18 page)

"You sure you want to do this?" Big Joe asked me.

I shook my head. "No. But we're going to do it anyway."

He nodded his head and we started walking.

We were moving past a big silver, four-door Oldsmobile when someone working under the hood said, "Pardon me. You wouldn't happen to have a set of jumper cables on you, would you?"

Joe saw the woman first; he was closest to the car. She was a moderately attractive brunette in a perfectly tailored gray business suit, with long legs and a ready smile. There was a light hint of rouge on her cheeks and the mere suggestion of blue eye-shadow on her eyelids. If I had kept my eyes on her face, I would have never thought twice about her, but her legs caught my attention and wouldn't let go. By the time I figured out where I had seen them before, it was too late: Joe was already standing beside her, ever the Good Samaritan, scanning the Olds' engine compartment for the source of her trouble.

"Joe, get away from there," I said, trying to be calm about it.

He turned toward me, confused by the order, until she made him aware of the gun in her hand by firmly poking him in the ribs with its nose.

"Anybody makes a sound, you all die," she said. "Anybody makes any sudden moves, same result. Do we understand each other?"

"Who—" Joe started to ask.

"No questions. No pregnant pauses. Just blind obedience, starting now. What do you say?" She poked Joe in the ribs with the gun again, hard. Bad Dog looked like he was about to speak, but I cut him a glance that instantly removed the thought from his mind. Satisfied that she had won our full cooperation, the brunette said, "All right. Back to your truck, everybody.
Slowly
."

And that's what we did. We went back to our truck.

Slowly.

*     *     *     *

"I knew you'd come back," Danny Gottifucci said.

If the photos Geoffry Bettis had taken of him were any indication, he hadn't been particularly handsome as a man, but as a woman he was really a looker. He knew how to dress, how to style a mean wig, and of course, as I've mentioned before, he had the kind of legs most chorus girls would die for. From a distance, you'd never know his secret; up close, you'd almost have to already have your suspicions about him to catch on. He looked that good.

"Our friend Alex Medavoy tried to tell me that he'd scared you off, that you were gone for good and would no longer pose a problem, but I told him he was crazy. I've been watching you, Mrs. Loudermilk, and you're a real bloodhound. Once you get the scent of something, you don't let go, do you?" He laughed.

We were sitting in the cab of our Ford pickup; I was doing the driving and he was watching me do it. We were alone. Big Joe and Bad Dog were behind us inside Lucille, where they'd been told to stay put, keep quiet, and leave the trailer's windows alone if they ever wanted to see me alive again. We'd been on the road now for well over a half hour, once again heading south along Interstate 17, and had heard not a peep yet out of either Joe or Dog. Given Gottifucci's threat, I didn't expect that we ever would.

"You were the one watching me at Hopi House," I said, suddenly able to picture him, in drag, emerging from the curio shop amid a group of five other people.

Gonifucci nodded. "It's like I've been saying. You're the curious type," he said, no longer finding it necessary to feminize his voice. "I recognized that about you right away. That's why I've been so good about keeping an eye on you. There's no telling what a snoop like you will do, given the chance to screw up somebody else's business."

"How did you know we'd turn up at the sheriff's station?"

"I didn't. But it seemed like a safe bet. Where else were you gonna go?"

I was having a hard time remembering to keep my eyes on the road, and not on the gun in his hand. "Are you Philly Gee?" I asked.

"Some people call me that. Yeah." He didn't seem to enjoy having to admit it.

"But you're not from Philly. You're supposed to be from Baltimore."

"What? What does that have to do—" I had opened my mouth to explain, when he started laughing again, catching on. "Oh. I get it," he said. "Philadelphia. You think Filly's short for Philadelphia."

"Isn't it?"

"I'm afraid not. The name's F-I-L-L-Y, Mrs. L. Filly. Like the horse, not the city."

"
Filly?
"

"That's right. Filly. A female horse. A sleazebag by the name of Sammy Slowhand gave me that name. The bookie. He thought it was cute, said he gave it to me on account of how much I always loved to play the ponies, but I knew better. Somehow, he'd found out about my—my
hobby
, shall we say?—and thought giving me that nickname might earn him a few laughs around the track." He shrugged and smiled. "He never got the laughs, but he did get a nice funeral. You should've seen all the beautiful flowers."

"You killed him?"

Gottifucci nodded.

"Just like you killed Geoffry Bettis."

"More or less. Sammy was actually taken out by some friends of mine. Bettis, I did myself."

"Why?"

"Come on, Mrs. Loudermilk. You know why. Because the little puke was trying to blackmail me, that's why. I'd gone into the store where he worked one day and bought some shoes from the son of a bitch, and he recognized me. Can you believe it? The son of a bitch recognized me!"

"He saw your foot," I said.

"Yeah. My foot. You know about that, huh?" As he had been doing every few minutes or so, he glanced at the side-view mirror on his side of the truck, making sure Big Joe and Bad Dog were behaving themselves inside Lucille. "Well, what can I tell you? I made a mistake. Leaving the house and going into town to shop for shoes was stupid enough, but letting some wise guy salesman like Bettis actually)it me was downright moronic. I was wearing stockings, sure, but he could see the outline of my toes right through 'em. Anybody could have." He sighed and then smiled again. "But you know how it is. When a girl needs shoes, she needs shoes."

The look on my face must have asked my next question for me, because he said, ''I'm a cross-dresser, Mrs. Loudermilk. Not a transvestite. That means I'm really only in it for the clothes." He cracked up at his own joke. "At least, that's what my shrink used to tell me. The hack. I only bother with the wig and the makeup when I have to go out." His eyes drifted over to the highway ahead of us and he said, "Okay. Let's be very careful here, Mrs. L. We wouldn't want to do anything foolish, would we?"

The northbound Arizona state trooper cruised right by us, and I did nothing to stop him.

"Good girl," Gottifucci said, eyeing the side-view mirror outside his window again. "Now, if your son and your husband are as smart as you are…" He waited before going on. I peered into the mirror on my side and watched with him as the state trooper's taillights vanished over the horizon, having never slowed for a minute.

"Wonderful," Gottifucci said, blowing a strand of brown hair from in front of his eyes. "Now. As I was saying. This little…
problem
of mine. You'd never know it to see me now, I suppose, but the truth is, it's not that big a deal, really. That is, I hardly ever feel the need to dress up like this. Two or three times a year, that's the most I've ever really done it. That's why I was always able to keep it a secret. Other than that stupid nickname Sammy Slowhand gave me, there was never a word of talk about me being a cross-dresser from anybody, in or out of the family. Not a word.

"Still, even getting your rocks off only two or three lousy times a year can be difficult to pull off when the goddamn Feds are watching you like a hawk, keeping you on a leash like a fucking dog or something. They didn't care about my needs, all they cared about was keeping me alive. They pretended to understand, sure, but they really didn't. It was all a big joke to them, just like it was to Sammy."

He was getting angry, and that worried me. "The FBI didn't provide you with… what you needed?" I asked awkwardly, hoping to sound sympathetic.

"You mean clothes? Oh, sure they did. I got lots of clothes. Blouses and skirts, dresses and panty hose, bras, panties, nightgowns, and slips—the works. And shoes. Plenty of shoes."

"Then what—"

"What was the problem? Think about it for a minute, Mrs. Loudermilk. You're a woman. It'll come to you."

I didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about, until I put myself in his place and asked myself how it would feel to have others buying my clothes for me, sight unseen.

"They didn't bring you anything you wanted to wear," I said.

"Exactly! You hit the nail right on the head," Gottifucci said. "What a man—or a woman—chooses to wear on his or her body is a very personal thing, Mrs. Loudermilk. You know that. What's acceptable to one individual may be unacceptable to another. The things the Feds were buying me were nice, sure, but they weren't me. And if they weren't
me
"—he shrugged—"they didn't make me feel good. And let's face it—the whole point of getting dressed is to feel good, isn't it?"

I would have agreed with him, except that our conversation and the images that were beginning to form in my head were starting to make me nauseous.

"So you see, it was only natural that I'd be tempted from time to time to go out and do my own shopping. Right? It was like an itch I had to scratch. Only I should've been more careful about it. I can see that now, of course. I should've just gone into that store, picked out a pair of shoes that appealed to me, and bought a pair my size. Period. No trying 'em on, no strolling before the mirror, just hand over the money, take the box, and get the hell out of there. That's what I should've done."

"But you didn't."

"No. I didn't. I made a careless play instead, and let a two-bit loser like Bettis get his hooks into me, but good. I open my mail one day, and I find these photographs he's taken of me at the house. He says he knows who I am, and why I'm in Flagstaff. He says if two hundred thousand dollars isn't in his hands within three days, the people who've been looking for me are gonna get a phone call. Along with some pictures of their own.

"Right away, I know who it is trying to fleece me—the timing of this shit appearing in my mailbox and my trip into town is too coincidental, right? So what do you think I do to get this jerk off my back? Go back down to that shoe store and finish him myself? No. That's what I should've done, but that's not what I did. What I did instead, like an idiot, was ask Agent Medavoy to handle it. And naturally, being the worthless, spineless,
brain
less Fed that he is, he botched the job completely.
Completely
.

"He has his boys try and take Bettis out, and they miss. They
miss
. Medavoy says they were all set to blow him away in a phony liquor store robbery when a local cop breaks it up. But don't worry, Danny, he says, we'll try again. Only they never got the chance, because Bettis doesn't believe in coincidence any more than I do. He comes out of that liquor store smelling a rat, and immediately goes into a little hiding of his own. That's when I decided to disappear too."

He glanced at the road ahead, then went on. "The way I looked at it, if that was the best Agent Medavoy and his merry men could do to protect me, I was better off on my own. So I packed up and took off on 'em, to see if I could find Bettis myself."

"Then the FBI was looking for both of you," I said.

Gottifucci grinned. "Yeah. Bettis they eventually found, as you know. But me?" He shook his head. "They're still beating the bushes for me, I'm afraid." He looked out the window at the side-view mirror again. "Hell, those dimwits couldn't find water if they fell out of a boat. You take the way they were looking for Bettis, for example. They staked out his house and the shoe store where he worked, and that was it. They just sat there and waited for him to show up. They followed his wife around, yeah—any fool would've known to do that—but they never put a tail on anybody else. And you wanna know why that was a mistake? Because when a man's in trouble, Mrs. Loudermilk, he doesn't always look to his wife for help first. He goes to his
friends
. Somebody he can trust, who'll do whatever he needs done without asking a million and one questions first. You see what I'm saying?

"That's why, while the Feds were tailing the wife, I was tailing the other salesman at the shoe store. Bettis's co-worker."

"Bob," I said.

"Yeah. Bob. How'd you know that?" He waved me off before I could answer. "Never mind. I forgot, you're the curious type. Sooner or later, people like you know everything, right?

"Anyway, I followed this Bob around for two days, and bingo, it paid off. He goes out for lunch on the second day and leads me right to Bettis. The two of 'em meet in a supermarket parking lot out on the east side of town and he gives Bettis a couple of dollars and sends him on his way. Bettis never even got out of the car—he just took the money and drove off. I go to follow him, and the heap I'm driving stalls out. Right there in the parking lot, a brand—new Caddy, it goes fifteen feet and dies, just like that, as Bettis gets away. Last goddamn Cadillac
I'll
ever lift in a pinch, I can promise you that. Anyway—"

"Where are we going?" I asked him abruptly, tired of driving blind to what, in all probability, was going to be my own funeral.

"When we get there, I'll tell you," Gottifucci said, irritated. "Now, do you wanna hear this story, or not?"

"I want to know where we're going."

"I don't know where we're going, yet. An appropriate place to pull over, that's all I can tell you, all right?"

"Appropriate for what?"

Gottifucci hesitated for a moment, then set his jaw and answered the question. "Appropriate for the accident you're gonna have," he said. "Are you happy now?"

I bit my tongue and just nodded at him.

"All right then. Where the hell was I?"

"The Cadillac broke down on you," I said, sorry we had ever gotten off the subject in the first place.

"Oh yeah. The Caddy. So Bettis gets away, right? And from the looks of it, he's gone for good. Only way I can think of to find out where he's gone is to ask his buddy the shoe salesman. Bob. I know his name's Bob because I heard Bettis call him that that first day in the store. I let him get back to work, and then I give him a call, tell him I'm with the FBI and that we know he just saw Bettis. 'Tell us where your friend Geoffry went when he left you a few minutes ago, and we might decide not to arrest you,' I say. Very polite, very cordial. 'The Grand Canyon,' he says, without so much as a moment's hesitation. 'He went to the Grand Canyon.'