Long White Con: The Biggest Score of His Life (3 page)

Their waiter was just serving the chocolate mousse. He gave Kid and Rita menus. Buxom Rita started rattling off a string of calorie loaded items. Kid gently relieved her of the menu and ordered just a salad for them.

Kid said patiently, “Rita, you’re on a diet. You’ve been gobbling booze and junk all day. Trust Pappy to save what’s left of what you had that hooked me.”

Rita batted her rhinestoned eyelashes seductively like the Vegas chorus pony she once, recently, was. “Please, darlingkins! Let me have a full supper. I promise I won’t eat even a bite all day tomorrow to make up.”

Kid patted the slight protuberance of her alabaster belly gleaming through her see-through tunic. He resolutely crooned, “Sorry, Big Stuff. Your mouth is a dangerous weapon. I can’t let you harm yourself further.”

Janie and Pearl, on giggle road, excused themselves for a trek to the powder room.

Before they were out of view, Kid said, “Dove, your nose is reflecting the candelabra. Go fix it.”

She snatched a jeweled compact from the sable handbag that matched her wrap and studied her elfin face.

She said, “You need an ophthalmologist, Pappy Dear.”

Kid said, “Then cop a heel and pee.”

She muttered an inaudible expletive as she gave him a filthy look and stomped away. Her steepled coiffure glittered like a cache of platinum in the wash of the candelabra glow.

Kid leaned his silver fox head in close to Speedy and Folks. He stage whispered, “Now laddies, there’s no cause for undue alarm, but I received some additional research info on that customer we’re playing for tomorrow. Stilwell drowned a chum about a fluff when he was sixteen. He’s been in the psycho ward of two asylums in the past twenty years. The gent is violence prone! I’ve alerted the High Ass Marvel, Kate and the shills, so Johnny, we’ll have to give him an eggshell play.

“Oh, by the way, Speedy, wire up Victoria Buckmeister’s limo, phone and bedroom. Since Trevor has advised me that his mother is cancerous and rapidly losing her mental powers, I want to be privy
to any radical business decisions she might make. Especially since Trevor believes the old girl has plans to dump him as Buckmeister Major Domo and place his witch of a sister in charge. I want tapes of every word she utters.”

Speedy’s hound dog face slackened with awe. He said, “Kid, you and Trevor angled me into the position of Chief of Security for the Buckmeister castle and bank . . . not the old dame’s nurse. No one else could get the opportunity and time to bug her bedroom.”

Kid patted Speedy’s shoulder. “You’re bright and creative aren’t you, laddie? Find a way and do it within the next forty-eight hours.”

Speedy shrugged and grinned. “Sure, Kid. You know me.”

They glanced at the girls coming back. They assumed normal postures and made small talk. They all stayed to keep Kid and Rita company through their salad.

All the way home, Folks couldn’t think of anything except C.P. Stilwell II, the sizzling mark, and Christina Buckmeister. Pearl’s sloe eyes were bright when he slid into bed beside her. He was strung up on a double rack, he thought.

Pearl knew he had been preoccupied since supper. He didn’t have to be a mental wizard to bet a nickel against a C-note she was toying with the suspicion that he was in a fugue from the highbrow shimmer of the Buckmeister broad. He had hurt his woman with his neurotic space-out, he told himself.

He gave her tender, quickie fore pleasure and fast-paced her to a double orgasm to buy some space and time to think about the ways to tighten up his play for the mark. Pearl didn’t go to sleep as usual after he had done his number.

Her husky voice was laced with hassle. “Say, Love, I’ve got a lightweight critique I’d like to give about the trip we just took. Okay?”

He sighed. “Sure, Pearl Delight, but it was a quickie because your old man has a busy day upcoming. I’d like to be sharp and bushy-tailed.”

He squeezed her close and kissed her with zest. He whispered, “Now sleep well, puppy pussy. Goodnight Sugarface.”

She sat up and said, “Nigger, quickie wasn’t it. You were there and yet away somewhere else at the same time. Your jones, the quality of your erection was low, low Daddy, Dear. Where was Mama’s baby?”

She was a jealous junkie. He knew he’d have to play to turn her around from her relapse. He didn’t answer. He arranged a stricken expression. Then he let his eyes marinate her with pity. She hated that. He put on his pajamas and robe. Her eyes softened. She was chronically ill and she knew it. He’d had a case on Pearl stretching back to Montreal. The case was strongly physical, he decided guiltily. Perhaps her jealousy is forcing me to pity her instead of love her. He was irritated, angry with her for wasting his energy. He needed full energy to play quality con. He turned and made for the doorway.

She said softly, “Johnny, please don’t do your split to Speedy’s pad across the hall routine. I’m all right now. I’m sorry I did my number on you again. Guess I ain’t never gonna kick my you-know-what. Sure, I’ve broken boo-koo promises to stop doubting you . . . myself . . . but I’m trying awful hard, Johnny, awful hard. Don’t hate me, or leave me ’cause I’m sometimes too dumb and crazy to remember how you feel about me. How I feel about you. Guess my crazy shit is hereditary. Poor Mama blew Papa and the wheels off her happy wagon with the same sad crap.”

He said, “You’re in the tall, sweet clover with me always, Sugarface. Me and you, darling, nigger tough and crazy against the world.”

He went back to bed and held her until her incredibly long and lacy lashes shuttered her eyes in infant slumber. He couldn’t sleep. He eased out of bed and soft-shoed to the
chaise longue
on the terrace. Perhaps the lullabies of the southwest Santa Anas would seduce him to sleep. He closed his eyes and listened to the lilting winds. He heard the erotic screech of a nightbird, the bellicose growl of a cougar.

He remembered the humped-back rats that stood on hindlegs, snarling like midget wolves when he was just a little kid back in the
cruel Big Windy . . . the cockroach scouts with E.S.P. . . . the bedbug scouts with Ph.D.’s . . . the piss stink in the kitchen sink pipes, and the decayed blood symbols of mayhem and murder in the hallway . . . the stenches of cancer pus and tubercular spittle that impregnated the very pores of the walls . . . the black kids shooting craps for bottle tops on the stoop . . .

“I’m Johnny O’Brien, lemme play!”

“Go ’way, Peckerwood. Go ’way ’fore we kill you, Trick Baby motherfucker!”

“I ain’t no peckerwood! I swear and cross my heart! I’m a Nigger!”

“
. . . lemme kiss that gorjus little pink prick . . . make you feel so goo-o-o-o-o-ood, darling. Ya round eye gonna wink for some lovin’ . . . c’mon, sweetheart, what ya runnin’ for? . . . I ain’t gonna hurt ya . . . you don’t come back here, I’m gonna kill ya next time I ketch ya . . .”

. . . steamy July night. . . streetcar stop, waiting for Phala . . . my mom. . . .

“. . . what’s a Trick Baby? Am I?”

“. . . no, Johnny Angel . . . I was never a bad woman, a whore . . . married your dad, all legal like . . . worked honest since I was ten . . . ’course he was white . . . your spitting image . . . weak, but he loved us in his own cramped, scared way . . . couldn’t stand up to his family trouble and poisons . . . but he loved us, Johnny, don’t forget that! Honeybee, this world is really two worlds . . . white first and black last. If your dad had been black, then black kids wouldn’t hate you. They’d let you play, ’cause you’d be black like them . . .”

Remembers his mama stopped slaving in white folk’s mansions . . . took a flyer in show biz . . . exotic dancer . . . bucket of blood cabaret, Chicago’s southside . . . hustling his shoeshine box down Drexel Boulevard one night, there was Mama! Imprisoned inside the cracked glass case on the concrete front of the bucket of blood sucker trap . . . rhinestone G-string and the most pitiful smile and sad eyes anybody ever saw. A crooked, monstrous dick, in chalk, below the paper image . . . smashed the glass . . . fists bloodied and hurting . . . he tore his mama’s picture
into confetti . . . Mama drinking herself into madness . . . Mama . . . nuthouse bench . . . wasted, shin bones shiny in the sunshine . . .

“Mama, it’s Johnny, your kid. Mama, please remember me! I’ve missed you so much, Mama!”

Growling in her throat . . . she giggled like a banshee, rolled her belly like a whore . . . grabbed, leering at his crotch . . . whiny, awful voice . . . “Gimme that dick! Cocksucker. Lemme see it, huh? C’mon, lemme suck it, huh?”

Drunk with sorrow, blinded by a billion tears, he had staggered from her sight.

“Mama! Mama, darling!”

He guessed it was the memories that finally pummeled him into ragged sleep. He awakened, still on the
chaise,
with Pearl shaking him. The sun was poking golden fingers into his eyelids.

She said, “You had me worried, Johnny. Are you all right?”

He said, “Sure! I feel great. Let’s have breakfast!”

After wolfing down hotcakes and bacon, he felt slightly better. He leaned back at the table waiting for her to finish. He remembered he was going to be tied up with the mark for at least forty-eight hours. Perhaps longer. He’d have to be like the mark’s Siamese twin after they took him off, until Trevor could move the score, the mark’s money, from his Midwestern bank to the Buckmeister bank.

He said, “Darling, I’ll be away for a couple of days. Maybe several.”

She said, “Oh Hell! There was a movie I wanted to see. Guess I’ll solo it. You just got back yesterday.”

He said, “I’m sorry, but that’s how it goes for a speculator who gets a hot tip on a bargain basement parcel in L.A. Enjoy the flick, baby.”

She gave him an odd look and crinkled her tip-tilted nose. “Johnny, how do you operate, viably in real estate, without a license or an office? You had neither in Canada . . .”

He said, “But Saul did and now has a Nevada brokerage firm.”

She said, as she cleared the table, “But Saul never had an office either. You two are something else!”

She kissed him goodbye and he watched her leave to teach elementary school. Pearl loved kids madly. She was teaching elementary school when he’d started with her in Montreal.

At noon he shaved and showered. He dressed himself impeccably in blue serge Brooks Brothers and ultra fresh linen. He went to the closet and pulled out the two unpacked bags that Stilwell had watched him pack the day before in the downtown suite they had shared for several days. He’d had to take one day away from the worrisome mark for Speedy’s party or brainstorm.

Twenty stories down he spotted Speedy, in purple livery, wiping off the rented limo they’d use for the Stilwell play. He called Trevor Buckmeister at his family’s bank where he was chief executive. He assured him he’d be ready to be picked up.

The Kid called the instant after he cradled the phone. They had a potentially serious problem. The Stilwell tail had casually mentioned to High Ass Marvel that the mark had a crossed eye. Marvel was spooking rapidly.

He examined his rather haggard face in a mirror. He didn’t really feel up to par. But, what the hell, he had no choice except to snort some crystal blow to tango his waltzing energy and leave for his job.

S
peedy dropped him off and rolled away to get some prop papers from the mob’s document expert. Kid, in business suit and face tinted American Indian red, let him into plush high rise diggings.

High Pockets Kate, a wizard pickpocket and talented shill, came in on his heels. Aristocratic-looking Kate was costumed in upper crust, high society attire. She sported eye-popping fake diamonds.

The High Ass Marvel, one of the two American Indians playing the big con, arrived shortly after Kate. He was almost a double for the Indian on the buffalo nickel. Marvel was edgy, all right, when the four of them sat down in Kid’s redwood paneled den. This was the final briefing before Folks picked up C.P. Stilwell II, to lug him to the ghost town set-up for fleecing. Kid’s Japanese houseboy served cocktails.

Kid leaned back, his five grand choppers decapitated the tip off a Corona Corona. He lit it with a platinum table lighter and blew an aromatic poltergeist of smoke that snake-hipped around the filigreed light fixture in the ceiling.

“Laddies and Lady,” he said. “My mild . . . uh, trepidation of last evening about our customer has abated. I feel, excuse the expression, tear-ass ready and fully confident that our ninety grand transaction with Mister Stilwell will conclude without untoward event.”

The Marvel, costumed in the tattered regalia of Aztec Billy, the hapless gold slave, pulled at his classic big nose. “Kid, I, ah, well, I’ve got creepy vibes about the mark. He, ah, well, I’d bet with his funny farm background and all, he brainstorms. And that right eye of his, it’s crossed!”

Kid’s thin lips shaped an indulgent smile. He tented his delicately boned hands beneath his soft, dimpled chin for a long moment studying Marvel.

Folks knew what the Kid was thinking. The role of Aztec Billy was vital, indispensable to the Stilwell play. There wasn’t time to make a viable replacement. Unless Kid could turn Marvel around, he would have to replace Marvel with an untried shill and risk a spotty play for Stilwell.

Kid patted the Marvel’s arm and pitched his satin baritone voice sympathetically. “Sure, laddie. You have a solid reason to feel the way you do about Mister Stilwell’s affliction. A partner of yours met an unfortunate end in Baltimore, wasn’t it? Back in the late thirties, as I am beginning to recall. Sure-Shot Kid, yes now I do feebly recall the grisly affair.”

Marvel cut in, “Sure-Shot and I were lounging around the shed, waiting for the eight-fifteen Super Chief, I think . . . figured we’d cull out, from the lopears arriving, a mark to trim on the smack. We hooked one, loaded and crosseyed! We flipped coins and busted him out. At the tail end of the blow-off, the sucker drew a hand axe from his waistband, poor Shot lying there, his head hanging from a shred of bloody neck! Dying, kicking, jerking and flopping like a butchered dog. Horrible, just horrible! I vowed I’d never play for another crosseyed mark the longest day I lived. Kid, I’m sorry to put you in a cross like this, but I’m leery of that mark!”