Libra (36 page)

Parmenter said, “I’m here,” and waited for Everett to ask the first question on the list.

“What do we know about schedule?”

“It looks like mid-November.”

“That gives us time. I’m anxious to hear what Mackey is doing.”

“He knows we’ve got Miami. I haven’t told him when.”

“Tell him right away.”

“I can’t find him,” Parmenter said.

A pause on the other end.

“Is he reassigned?”

“I did some very delicate checking. He’s not at the Farm or anywhere else he might logically be. There is no trace. It’s beginning to look like he just submerged for a time.”

“It’s a reassignment,” Everett said.

“I looked into it, Win. I was extremely goddamn thorough. He is not in a cover situation. He is supposed to be training JOTs and he isn’t.”

“Does it mean he’s out? We can’t operate without Mackey.”

“He’s setting up. That’s all. He’ll get in touch.”

“He can’t just walk away.” ,

“He’ll get in touch. You know the man is solid.”

“I’ve had a foreboding,” Everett said.

“He’s setting up. I’ll get in my car one morning and find him sitting there. He wants this to happen as much as we do.”

“I’ve had a feeling these past weeks that something isn’t right.”

“Everything is right. The city, the time, the preparations. The man is absolutely solid.”

“I believe in the power of premonitions.”

Larry put down the phone. Downstairs he found Beryl at the table with the newspaper, her coffee and a pair of scissors. Pages were spread over the wineglasses and dinner plates.

He’d stopped commenting on this oddness of hers. She said the news clippings she sent to friends were a perfectly reasonable way to correspond. There were a thousand things to clip and they all said something about the way she felt. He watched her read and cut. She wore half-glasses and worked the scissors grimly. She believed these were personal forms of expression. She believed no message she could send a friend was more intimate and telling than a story in the paper about a violent act, a crazed man, a bombed Negro home, a Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire. Because these are the things that tell us how we live.

 

 

Baby LeGrand stood at the end of the runway, knees bent, hands locked behind her neck, the drummer going boom to the jolt of her pelvis, and she scanned the club meantime, making out shapes beneath the tinted lights, whole lives that she could diagram in seconds, oh sailors and college boys, just the usual, plus a waitress taking setups to the hard drinkers, a kid in a skimpy outfit that makes her titties bulge. She ran a sash between her legs and waved it slow-motion through the baby spot. She eyed the table of off-duty cops drinking their cut-rate beer. She saw the odd-job boy taking Polaroids of the customers which Jack will present as gifts. These are men in suit and tie, on business in the city, and men who come with dates to do the twist between sets. Brenda knows the twist crowd. She likes the younger cops if they are blue-eyed. She knows the smallest tomato stain on the narrowest tie because the only food is pizza from up the street, which somebody sticks in the warmer. Meantime the drummer’s picking up the beat and a sailor says go go go. She drags the sash through the smoke and dust, scans the bar for the lowlife types that Jack drags in off the street, sad sacks and drifters he feels sorry for. And there is the gambling element or whatever they are, the vending-machine and Sicilian element, men of sharp practices, standing frozen at the back of the club. It’s the whole Carousel in a five-second glimpse, plus the tourists from Topeka. They are saying go go go. They are crying for a garment. They want the piece of silk that passed between her legs. They are here to bathe in the flesh of the sleepwalking girl, the girl who wakes up naked in a throbbing crowd. This is how it always seems to Baby L. She is having a private fit in the middle of the night, like she is demonized, and wakes up naked in a different dream, where strange men are clutching at her body. Does anybody here know the stupid truth? She wants to be a real-estate agent who drives people around in a station wagon that is painted like wood. An award-winning realtor in a fern-green suit. But she is humping a spotlight in front of a crowd, flinging sweat from her belly and thighs, and the tassels on her pasties are swishing to the beat.

She did her trademark twirl of the breasts, one breast spinning clockwise, the other counter, and quickly disappeared.

Then she showered and wrapped herself in a towel and sat in the dressing room, smoking. This was the time when a cigarette was the purest pleasure known.

Lynette was in street clothes sitting at the next mirror. She had her head in a copy of Look.

“If I had the slightest sense,” Brenda told her, “I’d get what I’m owed and just scram. I have a seven-year old and a four-year old and I am half the time too tired to say hello.”

Lynette turned a page. She said, “I will tell you this Bobby Kennedy is right up my alley. Bobby is the one who could make me crazy. He has got this little hard gleam. Ten minutes with Bobby, I am out of my head.”

“He doesn’t do a thing for me.”

“He could drive me into wah wah land.”

“Where is that, Lynette?”

“He has got this little meanness in the eye but he doesn’t really know it like?”

“I think he knows it,” Brenda said. “Give me his brother any day. Jack would be better in bed. I like a lover with some shoulder to him. I stay away from these rabbity types.”

“Bobby’s an athalete.”

“The President is mature to handle a woman like us. Not that I’m ready to settle down with the man.”

“You need one of those bouffant hairdos like Jackie.”

“I need more than that.”

“You got the knockers, Brenda.”

“Tit tit tit. This is my Achilles heel you’re pointing out. Too much talent up front. It means a bunch of trouble.”

“What’s he do anyway, the Attorney General?”

“Are you kidding? He’s the top cop.”

“Top cop or top cock?”

“Same difference,” Brenda said.

There was some kind of commotion out front. They could hear a few voices and a glass or bottle breaking. Lynette turned a page.

“Do you believe what they say about tell a person exactly when you were born, to the hour and the minute, and they can figure out everything about you?”

“I smell a fish, to quote a maxim,” Brenda said.

The disturbance, whatever it was, grew louder. You feel these things in the walls. Brenda put on her robe and went to the end of the hall and looked out. Between the bar and the entranceway there was a flurry of bodies and arms, maybe four guys including Jack who were physically propelling a man who looked like he combed his hair with firecrackers. It now developed that Jack wanted to throw the man down the stairs. The others were trying to prevent this as extreme. Brenda waited until the odd-job boy lost his place in the moving knot of people and came off to the side, shaking a hand that may have been bitten.

“What is it?” Brenda said.

“This guy like grab-assed one of the waitresses. You know, felt her going by.”

“Do we kill people for this?”

“You know Jack when it comes to abusing the girls. He about Hipped sky-high.”

Jack wrestled the man away from the others and the two of them went quick-walking down the narrow stairs, actually out of control, banging off the handrail, almost pitching forward to the street.

The bar crowd went after, hurrying down single-file and loud. Brenda took a deep drag on the cigarette and went back to finish her talk.

Out on the street Jack knocked the guy down. He went after him with his feet, kicking in a fastidious way as if trying to shake dog matter off his shoe. The guy skittered away and ran down the street, breaking through a line of people in front of the club next door, where an amateur strip night was going on. Jack went after him, followed by five or six others from the Carousel. The man was much faster but turned halfway down the block and was ready to fight. It made no sense to anyone and only got Jack madder. Jack charged into him swinging. The sheer bulk and force of the attack knocked the guy down. Jack kicked at him twice and the guy grabbed Jack’s ankle and twisted him down to the pavement in slow motion. Then he started crawling toward a parking sign. Jack was on his knees and grabbed the guy’s leg to keep him from reaching the signpost. Someone from the bar crowd tried to break Jack’s grip, speaking soothingly to Jack. The guy kept struggling toward the sign. This was the clear meaning of what was going on. If he could only reach the sign. Two men from the bar crowd broke the fighters apart but Jack got in two kicks at the guy’s ribs. The guy stood up, eyes averted. His pants were somehow unbuckled. Jack punched him hard in the head over the shoulders of the men between them and the guy walked out in the middle of the street and stood there, making the cars go around him. He fixed his clothes. He stood out there in traffic. He would not look at the men on the sidewalk, their chests pumping from the run and scuffle.

Jack went back down the street. When he reached the line of people outside the other club, he started shaking hands and giving out cards with the Carousel name and hours. Then he got into his white Olds and drove off to clear his head.

Jack’s car was a movable slum. His dogs had chewed up the seat covers and mats. They’d eaten the stuffing inside the rear seat, exposing the springs. There were paw marks on the windows. There were eight empty liquor cartons tilted and wedged across the rear seat. He had jars of diet food rolling across the floor when he stopped or turned. He had a couple of hundred dollars on top of the dashboard, folded in butcher wrap stained with lamb-chop blood. There were extra Preludins in the glove compartment plus a bathing cap, a number of unpaid tickets, a number of address books, some loose condoms, a set of brass knuckles and a TV Guide.

He tuned in KLIF, looking for a disc jockey called the Weird Beard. He needed a familiar voice to calm him down.

He drove around downtown Dallas. It happens a few times where I have to pummel one of these guys who causes trouble in the club. Once they get you cowered to that extent, you are physically doomed. He felt his jacket for the 38, which was tucked into a Merchants State Bank moneybag along with three thousand dollars in recent receipts tightly rolled in pink rubber bands.

It was the talk with Jack Karlinsky that probably got him inflamed with the guy who put his hand on what’s-her-name. He had to get the money. He had no other source. There were debts and harassments in every direction. Even with forty thousand dollars in his hands tomorrow, the problems were not solved. He had to get the business built up. He had this union thing with the girls. He had an extortionist of long standing on the West Coast who’d already turned down his request for a loan and now Karlinsky was leaning the same way.

So the jacket is mohair. You should have bought two. One to shit on; one to cover it up.

He had a deal going where you put a token in a machine and it washes your car. His brother Sam sold one of his two washaterias and was looking with interest at this machine. It would never happen but it could. He’d tried different things with different brothers, from selling salt and pepper shakers to nice-looking busts of FDR. He sold costume jewelry, sewing machine attachments and cures for arthritis from Chicago to San Francisco.

Thirty years with a fishbone in her throat.

Weird Beard said, “I know what you think. You think I’m making it up. I’m not making it up. If it gets from me to you, it’s true. We are for real, kids. And this is the question I want to leave with you tonight. Who is for real and who is sent to take notes? You’re out there in the depths of the night, listening in secret, and the reason you’re listening in secret is because you don’t know who to trust except me. We’re the only ones who aren’t them. This narrow little radio band is a route to the troot. I’m not making it up. There are only two things in the world. Things that are true. And things that are truer than true. We need this little private alley where we can meet. Because this is Big D, which stands for Don’t be Dissimilar. Am I coming in all right? Is my signal clear? We’re the sneaky little secret they’re trying to uncover. Do you think I’m making it up? I’m not making it up. Weird Beard says, Eat your cereal with a fork. Do your homework in the dark. And trust your radio before you trust your mother.”

Jack had no idea what the guy was saying. He squeezed a Preludin down his throat. It takes away your procrastination about what you want to do next.

He drove to the Ritz Delicatessen and parked outside. He opened the trunk and threw in the moneybag with the gun and heavy cash so he wouldn’t forget to do it later. The trunk was a little overflowing with barbells, weights, a summer suit, a can of paint, a roll of toilet paper, dog toys and dog biscuits, a holster for his gun, a golf shoe with a dollar bill in it and about a hundred glossies of Randi Ryder that he’d brought back from New Orleans. You might as well call it my life because it’s not any neater at home.

He walked into the Ritz and ordered everything with extra mustard and extra mayonnaise, a dozen sandwiches. Roast beef, corned beef, sliced turkey, tongue, dill pickles, cole slaw, relish, potato salad, black-cheny soda, ginger ale, etc. He told the man to give these sandwiches special handling because they were going to police headquarters.

He got back in the car. These cops of ours deserve the best because they put their lives on the line every time they walk out the door. This is a homicidal town. Barn. He had to remember to go back to the club later to get his dachshund Sheba and clear the register and grab his hat. He didn’t like being without his hat because the balding head is here for all to see. He took scalp treatments that he felt were doing some good although he doubted it.

He drove to the Police and Courts Building, feeling a sharp sting in his left knee and hiking up his pants leg as he drove. A nice ripe gash. A street fight takes up your attention to the point where you don’t know you’re bleeding for an hour. He drove with his left pants leg raised above the knee. No responsible party would finance him because he gave away drinks to nobodies and brought in people and dogs off the street. He got out of the car, lowered his pants leg and went into the old part of the building, walking between the tall columns.