Frag Box (6 page)

“A death card, maybe?”

“Yes, that’s it. Thank you. He said somebody had a death card for him. Or he himself had one; I don’t remember which. Does that mean anything to you?”

“The ace of spades,” I said. “Usually from a deck of cards with a military unit insignia on the back. Have you told the police any of this?”

“I have told you, Mr. Jackson. My legal duty is now discharged.”

He gulped down the rest of his food and beer, stood, belched in a most undignified way, and started to leave.

“Stay a second,” I said. “What about Charlie’s body?”

“I’ll play your ridiculous game. What about it?”

“What happens to it? Do I need to make some kind of arrangements?”

“You are the heir, not the next of kin. If you made some kind of arrangements, I’m sure nobody would argue with you. But you don’t have to do anything. I assume they will keep the body for evidence for a while and then do whatever they do with homeless dead people.”

“Which is what?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

He turned to go again, and this time, I let him. He did not look back at me, but he continued to cast hunted looks everywhere else.

I watched him leave, and wondered what, if anything, I should do about him. Even more, I wondered what I should do about Charlie’s body. I hoped they wouldn’t burn it. Then I remembered the will.

I pulled the papers out of my pocket and unfolded them. The first page seemed to be all preamble, with Mildorf’s business address and Charlie’s military service number, which was all he had in the way of ID. There were a lot of wheretofores and inasmuchas-es and
ipso factotums
that finally got us to the second page, where the real meat was. Once you got to it, it took only about half a page more for Charlie to call himself sane and me his heir. His scrawling signature, in real lawyers’ blue ink, took up half of the remaining space, leaving a couple inches at the bottom that had something else written on it.

Printed in block letters, all caps, in pencil, it said simply, “
YOU ARE BEING WATCHED
.” If it was true, it was definitely too bad, because somewhere out there was a box that might just contain thirty thousand dollars. And I rather badly needed twenty-five.

I decided I had hit enough pool balls for one day.

Chapter 7

Fox and Geese

As I stepped out of the door from Lefty’s, I scanned the sidewalk and the parked cars for a tail, but I couldn’t spot one. But then, if it was any good, I wouldn’t, would I? In a standard cougars-and-rabbits operation, there would be at least four shadows, two on each side of the street. Of course there was also the distinct possibility that G. Harold Mildorf was a babbling lunatic, which would also mean that I wouldn’t spot a tail, because there wouldn’t be one. But my gut instinct was that G. Harold was correct. And at some other level, I think I wanted him to be. Maybe I had acquired a will in more ways than one. It was time to engage the enemy.

I paused in front of Lefty’s a bit longer, to let a couple of young black women pass in front of me. One was tiny and fragile-looking and incredibly pretty. From her size alone, I would have said she wasn’t yet a teenager, but she had an air of quiet sorrow and dignity about her that made her look much older. She was pushing a baby stroller. Her friend was bigger, and there was nothing either pretty or quiet about her. She was also pushing a stroller, walking with something between a waddle and a swagger, gesturing wildly, and running her mouth non-stop. Since they were going in my direction, I fell in about ten paces behind them. But I could have heard the big one from a block away.

“So I says to her, ‘What you trippin’ on me about, bitch? Cramped chickenhead like you ain’t got no call to be dissin’ me. Shit, you ain’t even got no call to live.’ An’ she couldn’t think of nothin’ to say to
that
. Humph!”

She looked over at the small woman with a flash of triumph in her eyes. But the other one made no reply of any kind. She simply continued to look down and push her stroller at a slow, deliberate pace.

Getting no reaction, the big one decided to try again, with a slightly amped-up script.

“So I says to her, ‘You better back off, bitch. You think you so phat, but I munna take you…’”

I decided that ten paces hadn’t been nearly far enough. I stopped and took out a cigarette that I didn’t really want and took my time lighting it, as if I couldn’t concentrate on such a complicated task and walk at the same time. The stroller pushers were going awfully slowly, but I was determined to stall around long enough to let them get at least a half a block ahead of me.

That was when I spotted the first one.

Across the street and a little behind me, a tallish, nondescript guy in a dark nylon windbreaker and a mad bomber hat was suddenly taking a great interest in a storefront window. Innocuous enough, except the particular glass he was looking into belonged to a store that had been out of business for some three or four years. Now the place was used to store furniture that had never been taken out of its shipping cartons.

If they were running a classic box, Mr. Windbreaker’s partner would be on my side of the street, maybe a half a block back. I looked back that way and saw a medium-height man in a crumpled raincoat walking away from me. He hadn’t come out of Lefty’s, or I would have noticed him there. And there weren’t any other businesses in that block. Cougar number two. Three and four would be another half a block back.

I stayed where I was and smoked for a while, making no attempt to hide the fact that I was looking at the guy across the street. He kept his back to me, facing the glass, hands in pockets, pretending to be interested in the unremarkable display of boxes and dust. When I turned and headed east, back toward Lefty’s, he seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then he, too, headed east. Ten seconds later, I looked at my watch, put on a phony expression of dismay, and did an abrupt one-eighty, once again heading west.

My man on the other side of the street suddenly had an overwhelming need to make a call on his cell phone. I thought I could pretty well imagine the content.

I think I might have been made.

Then you have been, idiot. Get out of there
.

Of course, it was also possible that I was supposed to make him. They might let me have a glimpse of the scrubs, just so I wouldn’t look too hard for the A-squad. That’s assuming that I was worth a multiple-person surveillance team in the first place. If so, then my stock had gone up dramatically since I became the heir to a phantom estate and a cardboard box in some unknown location, a box that might have also been a frag pot.

I suppose I should have been flattered. I hadn’t been the subject of that kind of interest since my Uncle Fred was being investigated by the feds for some trumped-up RICO charge. I was one of his collectors back then, so I got watched a lot by shadows that were ludicrously easy to spot. Back then, the FBI agents, even when they were working undercover, were strictly required to be clean shaven and wear a coat and tie at all times. But none of them made enough money to buy anything but off-the-rack suits and imitation silk ties. J. C. Penney’s spies. I thought they were adorable.

I dressed better than any of them. In my early twenties, I thought of myself as a young professional, even though the job sometimes required more muscle than polish. I wore tailored wool-blend suits and button-down shirts made of the new permanent-press cotton blends. I preferred the wide ties that were popular then, but I wore narrow pineapple-knits, just to needle the feebes. I knew they weren’t allowed to have them, because Mort Sahl, the comedian, always wore one. J. Edgar Hoover thought Sahl was a communist, and he hated him.

Fred’s numbers and bets always came to him by phone, but the money came to about two dozen collection points around the city, mostly in bars, corner groceries, and laundries. I made the rounds several times a week. Any time I accumulated more than about three hundred dollars, I would feed it into a hidden box that I had welded behind the dash of my ’72 Barracuda. It started its life as the housing for a defroster blower, so even if you stood on your head to get a look back there, it looked as if it belonged. If anybody ever demanded to know why I had $300 cash in my pocket, I would say I was going to buy a car from a friend. If they had been smart, they would have put some pressure on me by threatening to arrest me for failure to register for the draft, which was a federal misdemeanor. They had me there. The draft officially ended in 1973, but you were still legally required to register. But the feebes were never anything resembling smart. When Uncle Fred eventually went away for bookmaking, it was an undercover unit of the Detroit PD that nailed him. They weren’t hampered by cheap suits.

Things were easier back then. Back then, it was a game. Now, my anonymity and maybe even my freedom were starting to feel a bit fragile, and it was not a good feeling at all.

Ahead of me, the so-I-tole-that-bitch monologue was still in full boom, though the extra distance helped a little.

“She so full of shit, I don’t even mess with her. I just slap her right in the face.”

Again, no reaction from the small, sad woman.

“That’s what I do, all right. I slap her right in the face, knock her down, one time. She couldn’t believe
that
shit. And then I says, ‘Listen, bitch…’”

They stopped for a red light at Cedar Street, and I turned and walked south, leaving them behind me. I had no doubt that the loud one would keep retelling her story until Ms. Sad Eyes either became suitably impressed or told her she was full of shit. I was betting on her doing neither, and I wondered how many more times the routine would be replayed and how much more it would escalate. In half a block, it had gone from a story of mere bad-mouthing to one of physical violence. In another few blocks, it could well be up to murder.

Somewhere once I read the number of times we can tell the same lie before we start to believe it ourselves. It was rather shockingly small. Something less than thirty. That probably meant that by this time tomorrow, the motor mouth would seriously believe she had assaulted somebody. That’s if the offending other person even existed.

And maybe that didn’t even matter.

That got me thinking about Charlie. He had decades to tell his stories. By the time I heard them, did they have anything at all to do with reality? Would he even know?

I thought about the day I first met Charlie Victor a little more than four years earlier. He had come into my office to ask about a bail bond, even though he was obviously not under arrest at the time.

Jackson Bail Bonds is the totally unglamorous name on my storefront, picked because “Herman Jackson, Bail Bonds” would have been just as unglamorous, as well as longer. But that’s who I am and what I do. The sign is unilluminated, some would say just like its owner, and painted in a lettering style that the sign company called “Railroad Gothic.” I think I liked the name more than the appearance. It called up images of wizened, colorful hobos with bizarre stories to tell. Under the main sign is a smaller one, in red neon, that says “24 Hour Service,” with a phone number to call when the office is closed. Agnes says that’s my lighthouse beacon, competing with the blue-lit crucifix of the Souls Harbor Mission over in the wino district north of Lowertown, for the traffic of souls lost in the night. That’s what she says, that is, when she isn’t complaining about the fact that the 24/7 service means she has no social life whatsoever. I never did have one, so I don’t worry about it.

Charlie walked in during regular business hours and said, simply, “What’s it cost for a bond?”

“For a friend?”

“No, man, for me.”

“What did you do?” I said.

“When?” He looked behind him, as if there might be a train wreck in the street that he hadn’t noticed, one that he might be blamed for.

“When you did whatever you did that you need a bond for.”

“If I’d already done it, I couldn’t be here now, could I? I mean, I’d be under arrest, wouldn’t I?” He looked at me as if he were talking to a total idiot.

“That would be a problem,” I said, “yes.”

“Well, there you are, then,” he said. “I ain’t done nothing yet. I want to know what it costs first.”

And they say there’s nothing new under the ancient sun.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re contemplating doing some kind of crime, but first you want to know what the bail will be if you get caught?”

“Oh, I’ll get caught, all right. I don’t know how to do much, but I know how to get caught, all to hell. I wouldn’t waste your time, otherwise.”

“Of course not.” And there I was, indeed.

I motioned him to my classic Motel Six lobby chair, even though Agnes shot me a look that clearly said, “Don’t you dare!” She gets a little nervous when we have clients who look as colorful as they really are.

Bonding is a funny business, and in some ways, she has never gotten used to it. Bonding is safe, is the thing to remember. In a system that is full of attitude and even rage, people almost never get mad at the bondsman. It’s a little like being a ringside doctor in a prizefight where lethal weapons are allowed. The fight stops momentarily, you assess the damages and do what you can about them, and then the bell rings and the chaos starts all over again. A lot of the customers don’t even remember you.

I once had a guy in my office, in cuffs and leg irons, who tried to attack the cop who was escorting him. He used his feet and teeth and head, but he mostly just managed to get the living crap beat out of him. But he never made a move of any kind toward me. When it was all over, the cop was kneeling on the guy’s back with a nightstick jammed down on his neck.

“You gonna bond this guy?” he asked.

“That’s a trick question, right? A sobriety test?”

“I got to hear it officially,” said the cop.

“No, I’m not going to bond him. Is that official enough?”

“Perfect.” He jerked the man, who was still officially only a suspect, to his feet and bopped him once more on the ear, just for punctuation. Then he hustled him out, ignoring a sputtering tirade about police brutality.

“You don’t know who you’re fucking with, pig.” The man was screaming, despite split lips and missing teeth. “Someday I’m gonna get out, and I’ll find you and spill your blood and wipe your woman’s face in it. And then I’ll start on her.” Then he turned to me, and in a completely calm voice said, “Sorry about the mess on the carpet, man.”

“Hey, no problem,” I said. He was a suspect, all right. At least, I sure as hell suspected him.

Anyway, Agnes watched the whole scene in appalled silence, and since then, she keeps a .38 revolver in her desk. As far as I know, she has never fired it, and I have never made it an issue.

I managed to look somewhere else as Agnes eased open the drawer where she kept her heat. Then I offered our possible new client a cup of coffee.

He took a look at the carafe on the table in the corner and said, “You got to be kidding.”

“Some people are happy to get it,” I said. I mean, gee, it wasn’t all
that
old.

“Some people are happy to get a shot of radiator juice,” he said, “but that don’t make it bottled in bond. What do I look like, a goddamn bum?”

I looked him over before I replied. He had a wedge-shaped face that was too large for the rest of his body, and he made a lot of sudden, jerky motions with it, like a cat who’s been out on the streets too long and can’t ever relax. It was hard to tell with all the rags he wore, but I thought he must have had a powerful frame and broad shoulders once. Now he had a permanent stoop and one hand that was curled with arthritis, though he still carried himself with a certain stubborn dignity. Ex-military, I decided. Maybe that unit patch on his old fatigue jacket was real, at that. There was something else, too, some quality that made me think that he was down but definitely not out.

“Actually,” I said, “you look more like a hobo.”

“A connoisseur,” he snorted. “I come in to ask about the cost of a bond, and I get a goddamn connoisseur of untouchables. A gourmet of street people.”

“I used to be,” I said, “but it’s harder to tell them apart nowadays.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ll help you out. I used to be a stockbroker, okay? Had friends in high places, money in low ones, and prospects up the wazoo. But I got sick of all that crap, and I dropped out of the system to give all my time to helping the oppressed, legalizing pot, and freeing Tibet.”