It slammed into the fire door with the crash of metal on metal, the sound so close it stung.
Harry stumbled and it came again, not as hard, not as much time for a backswing, but it caught him across the shoulder and sent him to the asphalt, where he felt the gravel dig into his palms, and he saw the shapes now in the greenish light. Two of them with one baseball bat and it swung again, chopping down at him, and he thought of Juan Marichal whacking away at Johnny Roseboro’s head with a Louisville Slugger, but this bat was aluminum, and the kid swinging it was no major leaguer. One of the skinny punks from out front. Harry rolled on his side and the bat pinged when it hit the asphalt near his head.
It doesn’t hurt much to get kicked in the stomach by a sneaker on the foot of a 130-pound punk. That’s what Harry thought as the second kid started stomping him. The one with the bat bent over, scooped up the backpack and tossed it to his buddy, all in one motion. Good field, no hit, but goddamn it, the crowbar was in there and he could use it now. Then, as Harry rolled over, his hand touched the round shape of the Kel-Lite which had fallen from the pack and his fingers closed over it, and like the caveman with a piece of bone, he swung at his enemy, a good swing for a guy on his knees and it caught the leadoff batter square on the kneecap and there was a satisfying crack and a high-pitched scream.
The kid dropped the bat and hopped away on one foot. The other one, the kickless shit, kept the backpack, snatched the bat, and ran after him. Harry dusted himself off and inspected the damage — a tear in his camouflage pants, a searing pain in his left shoulder, and a most beautiftd dent in the Kel-Lite.
Violet Belfrey listened to the phone ring a dozen times. No answer. Where the hell was he? Sitting in jail spilling his guts? No, the bird brain couldn’t get arrested if he tried. Lost maybe? Or did he lock himself in the theater somehow?
Everything should be perfect. Sam Kazdoy was sleeping the sleep of the contented, and she had a twenty-four-carat alibi. At the precise time of the heist — if Harry didn’t fuck it up — she was on her knees between the old man’s legs. Christ, it took so long, she nearly got lockjaw.
The old man lived in a penthouse apartment in Bal Harbour, a hundred blocks north of South Beach. The windows looked straight over the Atlantic and the view at night was overwhelming blackness. No stars or moon tonight and from the balcony that jutted over the beach, the world was painted with tar.
Violet sat on the balcony so she could use the cordless phone with no chance of waking the old man. Not that he was about to stir. Probably sleep till, whadatheycallit, Hahnoocha, the Jew Christmas. She had dialed her apartment every ten minutes since two o’clock. Harry was supposed to be there, a flock of eagles in the bag. An ocean breeze sent the old man’s brass chimes pinging into each other in a discordant cacophony. In another two hours, some pink would show over the Atlantic. Where the hell was he?
“Hullo.”
“Harry! What happened?” She lowered her voice. “Didja get ‘em?”
“Nothin’ to get, Vi. He musta moved them to a safe-deposit box, just little slips of paper in the bottom drawer. All I got to show for the night is a shoulder that hurts like hell, had to beat the shit out of two greasers who — “
“Little what?” Violet asked.
“Huh?”
“In the bottom drawer…”
“Garbage!” he said, spitting it out. “A million little slips of paper.”
“All the same size?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“With lots of little writin’ on ‘em?”
“Yeah.”
“You brought ‘em home, right?” Violet asked, her voice pleading, hoping, praying.
Silence.
She knew it. He would find a way to fuck it up and he did. “Harry!”
“No, Vi baby, I left them there. They looked like garbage,” he said defensively.
“Them’s the kew-pons, dickbrain!” Violet shouted through the phone, forgetting about the old man sleeping on the other side of the glass door. “Them’s what you turn in to git the money. He musta clipped a bunch of them in advance.” Violet heard a rush of air into the phone, as if Harry had taken a shot to the gut.
Silence again. Violet waited, thinking, staying calm, trying to use her new knowledge of high finance to assess the situation.
“I didn’t know,” Harry whined. “You told me to look for eagles, for packages that fold up like a road map.”
Harry sounded as if he might cry. He had let the birds slip through his fingers. Now he was out of control.
“Calm down, Hany. Just drag your ass back there and get them kew-pons.”
“Can’t, Vi. The fire door’s locked now. And I lost the crowbar. I can’t get back in.” Harry was in no mood to try again, to maybe run into the punks or six of their cousins.
“Goddamn it, Harry, you fucked it up, now you fix it. Once the old man sees there’s been a break-in, he’ll move ‘em quicker than shit through a goose. The key’s in my jewelry box in the bedroom. Just walk the fuck in the front door like you owned the place.”
It was easier the second time, just as Violet said it would be. No backpack this time; Harry carried a large plastic garbage bag that he stuffed with little slips of paper. Back at the apartment Harry built a mountain on the kitchen table. A dozen coupons floated to the floor. Let ‘em go, walking-around money.
In his excitement Harry didn’t notice what was missing from his jacket pocket, didn’t even remember picking it up in the first place, so much had happened that night. But in the alley behind the theater, on the gravel-covered blacktop, amid flattened popcorn boxes and the unidentifiable flotsam of a city’s byways, was the unsmiling, red-eyed, Polaroid face of Violet Belfrey, arms squeezing breasts together, bottom arched skyward.
The sun was on its way up, sizzling in the Atlantic. The clouds were silver turning pink. The wind had died as it clocked around to the south, and the brass chimes on Sam Kazdoy’s balcony hung straight and still. Violet, sleepless and puffy-eyed, dialed her own number.
Harry let it ring six times. Let her think about it. Bitch came down too hard on me tonight. Been bustin’ my chops. I’m the one had his dick on the chopping block. Twice. Coulda gotten killed by those friggin’ greasers. Would have, except one swung a bat like a rusty gate and the other kicked with spaghetti legs.
Awright.
Enough.
Now I’m calling the shots. He picked up the phone but was silent.
“Harry. Harry. Answer me. You got ‘em?” “The eagles have landed,” Harry Marlin said firmly, sounding very much like a man who had the world by the balls.
CHAPTER 7
Doctor Charles W. Riggs used a stubby thumb to push his lopsided glasses up the bridge of his nose, cleared his throat, scratched his bushy beard, and said, “Diethylstilbestrol.”
The court reporter squeezed her eyes shut and tried to take it down phonetically on her Stenograph. Winston P. Hopkins HI, two years off the Andover-Princeton-Yale express, studied the 173 questions he had prepared in longhand on his yellow pad. His first solo deposition.
“Dethel still…” Hopkins muttered.
Jake Lassiter sat at the end of the polished teak conference table. His job was to watch Winston Hopkins depose the plaintiff’s expert witness and fill out a scorecard on his performance. Law firm bureaucracy.
The plaintiff’s lawyer, Stuart Zeman, leaned back and dozed. Manicured and immaculately groomed, he wore a fifteen-hundred-dollar suit of beige silk. The wages of representing the widowed and crippled. His client, a beefy Air Force sergeant with a brush cut and tiny ears, tugged at the choking collar on his dress-blue shirt and loosened the regulation knot in his solid black tie. They were gathered in the thirty-second-floor deposition room at Harman amp; Fox, a hallowed, dark place where many thousands of hours have been billed at enormous rates.