Trust (24 page)

“So,” Simmons said, “I told her that, and I said: ‘Look, there’s something going on here that either he’s not telling me, or you’re not. And I want to know what it is. What’re you leaving out?’ And she assured me there was nothing. And this horrible thought struck me, blackmail was involved, and I asked her if there was anything, any kind of evidence, that he had of our
relationship. That he could show, or threaten to show, to somebody else. And she said: ‘No.’ And that she was going to call his brother and see what was going on.

“She did that this afternoon,” Simmons said. “Apparently it was a waste of time. She reached his brother up in Vermont and got nothing out of him. ‘He’s just as stupid as Earl always said he was,’ she said, this is when she talked to me. ‘I almost can’t believe it. They haven’t heard from him. They don’t know where he is. And they don’t really care.’ And I said: ‘Look, Penny,’—this was just a hunch—I said: ‘Look, Penny, you’re keeping something back from me. I can hear it in your voice. I believe you don’t know where he is. But I don’t believe you have absolutely no idea of what he’s up to. Is there anything, did he take anything you know about that could link the two of us?’ And that’s when I found out about the photographs.”

He laughed. “On the one hand,” he said, “I feel like a sap. Here’s this goniff thief snapping pictures of us every time we take a trip, and here I am, man of the world, and I never even noticed him. All those times I shooed those goddamned nightclub photographers away from our tables in San Juan, out in Nevada, wherever, and all the time this piece of human shit’s been pointing a lens right down my throat.

“ ‘And you knew it,’ I said to her. ‘You knew very well what he was doing. You didn’t tell me. You not only didn’t tell me, you probably helped him. Let him know where he could spot us.’ Who the hell pays any attention to people taking pictures in an airport? Long-lost relative comes home. Kid comes back from college. Happy couple going off on their honeymoon. There’s always some idiot grinning into space while his moronic
relatives fire flashbulbs in his face. I mean, who the hell’d want a picture of a middle-aged man and a woman getting off a plane, or going into a hotel?” He grimaced. “A two-bit crook with a long-range plan, that’s who,” he said.

“And then you heard from him,” Roth said.

“Late this afternoon,” Simmons said. “Right after she called to tell me about talking to his family. First there was an envelope by messenger service. He must’ve been somewhere around the building, where he could see the messenger come to deliver it. Probably in the lobby. Took a gamble that whoever took the elevator to my floor, and looked like a messenger, carrying my envelope, was the guy he’d hired. The phone rang about three minutes after I opened the envelope. One picture of me and Penny. Some airport or another—most likely Kennedy. She’s leaning on me and taking her shoe off.” He sighed. “We certainly made a handsome couple.”

“And he wanted money,” Roth said.

Simmons laughed. “He didn’t open with that,” he said. “He worked his way up to it. He hated to bother me at the office. He hoped I understood the only reason he was doing it was because he was desperate. He said Penny didn’t know where he was which of course is what Penny’d told me, and that she didn’t know what he was doing. Or’d been doing, for that matter, for the better part of a year and a half. I cut him off. ‘Earl,’ I said, ‘I’m a busy man. Let’s just dispense with the bullshit you gave your boss, and the bullshit you also gave Penny. I know about the pictures. What do you want?’

“Well,” Simmons said, “that sort of threw him off
stride for maybe a second or so. Lost his place in his script. But he recovered pretty well. ‘Mister Simmons,’ he said, ‘the next time I call you, I figure I won’t be able to talk very long, because you’ll have something on your line.’ ”

“Not entirely stupid, then,” Roth said.

“Right on the money, in fact,” Simmons said. “If he’d taken thirty minutes instead of three to call me after that envelope arrived, our security people would’ve had a tracer on that line and the cops on alert to grab him. ‘This is true,’ I said.

“ ‘So,’ he said, ‘I got to tell you what my situation is.’ And he started this long, involved fantasy about how the only reason he’s doing this to me is because he got in too deep with the bookies and the loan sharks, and they’re going to have him killed, if he doesn’t pay up. I asked him how he managed this, to get himself in such a mess. Very contrite. ‘Gambling, Mister Simmons. I’ve always been, well, I guess what I am is a degenerate gambler. It’s like a sickness with me.’ And I asked him how much, and he said: ‘Well, a million dollars.’ ”

“Fellow thinks big,” Roth said.

“Too big,” Simmons said. “I laughed in his face. Well, if you can do that over the phone. I said: ‘Come on, Earl, be serious, willya? A million bucks? What do you think I am, the federal government or something? That I can just
lose, misplace
, a million dollars, and no one’ll ever notice? My wife, or maybe the auditors here, or the guy who does my taxes—you think they wouldn’t see it and say: “Ahh, Mister Simmons, hate to bother you, you know, but do you have any idea where this million dollars went?” What am I going to
say? “Gee, honey,” if this is my wife that asks, “I really can’t imagine. Must’ve left it in my other suit, before it went to the cleaners.” Come on now. Be realistic. Tell me something I can at least pretend to believe.’

“He swears again it’s true. ‘Bullshit,’ I say. ‘I never heard of a bookie or a shy that’d lend a guy in your class, or let him get in debt, a million U.S. dollars. If you told me five, or maybe ten, maybe ten thousand dollars, that I would believe. But you in hock for a full mill? Couldn’t happen in this world.’

“He backtracked some. ‘Okay, okay, it’s more like half that. But I aslso got to get myself lost, and I got this opportunity in southern California, to go in partners with this guy I know that’s building shopping centers. So I need a fresh start. A stake is all I need.’

“ ‘Earl,” I said, ‘really, now. I like a good laugh as much as the next guy, but this is ridiculous. Now let’s see if we can trim this thing down to manageable size here, get so we understand each other, and maybe just eliminate a lot of frustration and delay for both of us, all right?

“ ‘You want money and you think I’ve got it. Conceded. I haven’t got anywhere near as much as you obviously think, but it’s more than you’ve got, and I’ve been in that position myself. Not as extreme, maybe, but in my time I’ve found myself a lot times in a situation where I had to get my hands on some money, and the only way I could do it was by yanking it away from somebody else that had more. So this is fun for you, I know.

“ ‘The thing of it is, you’ve got to be, like I said, realistic. There’s no point in my giving you a sum of money that’s so big explaining where it went, and what for,
’ll put me in a position just as awkward as the one that I’d’ve been in if I didn’t give you one thin dime and just said: “Go fuck yourself.” Which is what I’d like to do, of course, but I’m willing to be reasonable, and that’s what I’m telling you, see? We both have to be reasonable here.

“ ‘If you send those pictures to my wife, she’ll throw me out. Again. You hearing me, Earl? You soaking all this in? She will throw me out
again.
We’ve had our little differences in the past about my choice of companions, and I’ve spent my share of nights living in hotels alone. It’s inconvenient, and the word always gets out on the street, and people that I’d ordinarily never try it figure I’m distracted and start getting cute with me. So I have to mash their fingers, and that’s a damned nuisance, and while I’m doing it I’m not making any money.

“ ‘You still with me, pal? You can cause me some trouble, granted. But not a million bucks’ worth. Not half a million bucks’ worth. Not a quarter of a million bucks, or a hundred thousand bucks, or even fifty grand. Don’t get yourself confused about what you are, Earl. You’re not a scorpion that can kill me. You’re not a German Shephered that can tear off my right leg, and you’re not even a bedbug that can cover me with welts while I’m unprepared and sleeping. What you are is a mosquito. If I’m not quick enough to swat you, you can make me itch. You nip me once—this the once—the chances are I won’t be quick enough. You hang around for refills, seconds, thirds, a buffet, the chances are, I will get quick, and I will swat you good. So I’m making you a counteroffer, and if you’re smart, you’ll take it. We still on the same song?’

“ ‘I’m warning you, Mister Simmons,’ he says. ‘You may think this is funny, but I can tell you that it’s not.’

“ ‘No problem there, Earl baby,’ I say, ‘this ain’t laughter that you hear, and these aren’t jokes I’m telling you. You put all of the pictures, and all of the negatives, in a box or something, and you leave that box in a baggage locker someplace. Keep the key on you. Train station, airport, the bus station on Saint James Street. Don’t matter shit to me. I’ll meet you in the nearest coffee shop. I will have two keys. The first key will be to a locker in the same place. In it you’ll find an envelope with ten big ones in fifties. You give me your locker key. I give you my first. I’ll go to your locker and get the damned box out. If it’s got in it all the stuff you’re saying that you’ve got—no fair keeping something back—you get the second key I’ve got, to my second locker. And in it is another pack of fifties—fifteen large. That’s twenty-five I’m offering and I’m not going up. I’m your only buyer, Earl, your only customer. Twenty-five to go away, tomorrow afternoon.’

“ ‘Shit,’ he says, ‘you must think I’m an asshole.’

“ ‘As a matter of fact, I do, ‘but the world is full of assholes, as I learned long ago, and sometimes I do something dumb and have to deal with one. Well, I admit it: I did that. And you lucked out and caught me at it. Okay, spilt milk. So I pay up. Get it over with. Forget it. On to the next thing. But once. Once is all I pay. Tomorrow. Twenty-five thousand. Take it or leave it.’

“ ‘Fuck you,’ he says.

“ ‘Sleep on it, pal,’ I say to him. ‘Give me a call in the morning.’ And that was my fun for the day.”

“Umm,” Roth said. “Off the top of my head, I
doubt that he’ll take it. You made the same mistake he did. He started too high, and you started too high.”

“Too high?” Simmons said. “I would’ve thought you’d say: ‘Too low.’ ”

“Oh,” Roth said, “you had the right idea. I’m not saying that. But you’re misjudging him and his situation much the same as he is yours. He thinks you’ve got a raja’s purse; you know very well you don’t. But when he says he’s broke, you think his broker’s pushing him for ten grand more in margin and his cash flow’s been off lately. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. If you’re willing to give him twenty-five K to get rid of him, and you call him a mosquito, the mosquito gets the idea he must be a goddamned vampire and you’re really scared of him. That is big dough to this punk, and if you think it’s chicken feed you really must be rich.”

“Ahh,” Simmons said. “So tomorrow when he calls me, he’ll still be demanding more.”

“That’s my guess,” Roth said.

“So what do I do?” Simmons said. “Call the FBI?”

“How eager you are to testify, first to a grand jury, then in court?” Roth said. Simmons scowled. “That’s what I figured,” Roth said. “Well, that’s the only way you get J. Edgar’s men to help you. They’re not like the gallant firemen that come and rescue you down ladders, and then don’t expect a thing from you except you buy ten tickets every year to the Firemen’s Ball. They go out and grab a bad guy that is causing you trouble, they really want—insist, in fact—that you make sure he stays grabbed.”

“I know some guys,” Simmons said “Well, I know some guys that claim they know, some other guys I
don’t. That ocassionally do things for guys like me. I could feel them out. See if that’s all talk.”

“It isn’t,” Roth said. “You put out feelers for them, you will find it’s not all talk, and find out real fast. But later on you’ll find out there’s a price for what they do. A price much higher, I would guess, than what this bozo wants, and one that you’ll have to pay. Pussy’s still against the law, unless you marry it, but nobody enforces that law. Accessory before the fact of some fatal event, well, that’s a different matter. That is one you can’t laugh off, and if you don’t pay up large money, you’ll have cops, not patient Phyllis, waiting for explanations.”

“I think I’d better sleep on this tonight too,” Simmons said.

“I’d recommend that,” Roth said. “I’d put that trace on, too.”

Shortly after 10:30 in the morning of the last Wednesday in November, Earl Beale used a telephone booth outside the train station in Gloucester to call Allen Simmons on his private line at his offices in Boston. Earl had awakened in his bed at the Harbor Cove Motel an hour before to a double dose of audible bad news; rain thrummed steadily on the metal casing of the window-unit air conditioner and blood pounded in his head through vessels that had tightly constricted as he slept and his body burned up the booze he’d had the night before. At first he had trouble remembering whether he had spent the night alone, and was about to search for his wallet. Then he recalled that the spike-heeled woman from the dim pink neon barroom, shockingly late-fortied in the unforgiving glare of the sodium streetlamps, had passed out still leaning on his arm six blocks away. Gradually he remembered easing her down slowly, allowing her to fold herself into a fetus crouching on the soapstone step before a doorway, and that led him to the explanation for the abrasions on his right hand—he had used it to fend off the
brick-walled buildings that encroached on his unsteady walk back to the motel.

Getting those things sorted out he had recognized that no coffee ever made would supply what he needed. He had pulled on his clothes and raincoat and gone out into the rain, finding a bar where fishermen whose teeth were missing lamented through gray stubble and accents from ports near Lisbon the North Atlantic weather, engine trouble, absent fish, cranky Coast Guardsmen, and torn nets, they drank PM rye whiskey with beer chasers for their lunches during breakfast and commuting hours for people who worked on land, and they showed tolerant contempt for the shiftless drunk he was. He drank three shots of Mr. Boston rum and put the fire out with glasses of ginger ale.