Book of Nathan (3 page)

“Why?”

“There’s a guy named Maurice Tyson who lives at the Gateway.
He understands every word Zeus says and that’s something no one else can do.
So, I need him on board.”

“Who’s the third?” Doug asked.

I tried not to pause because it was a dead giveaway to my
discomfort. But I just couldn’t stop myself. “Uh . . . Doc Waters.”

“Mother of God!”

“Doc’s old news,” I said. “The mob can’t even remember his
name.”

“Doc Waters ripped apart the Philadelphia Mafia, for
chrissakes. The mob doesn’t forgive and forget. If the man sticks his nose out
the door, it’s all over. Putting him on a Boeing 757 is sheer insanity.”

Point well taken. The New York–Jersey–Philly corridor was
loaded with organized crime bosses who had a reputation for long memories. A
few years back, Doc Waters kicked the mob where it hurt, which meant
retaliation was likely to pay Doc a call. Even so, Doc was an irreplaceable
part of my game plan.

“Doc’s cousin is chief of corrections for Orange County.
Bottom line—he’s my foot in the jailhouse door.”

“Or a foot in the grave.”

“Not negotiable. He’s part of the deal.”

“You know you’re asking for the moon, right? But let’s say I
work a miracle and muster up three tickets and a place to stay. It’ll cost
you.”

I braced myself. Just because Doug made his livelihood
working with charities didn’t mean he was charitable. Want him to scratch
yours? Be prepared to scratch his.

“You know the name Manny Maglio?”

“The king of strip clubs?”

“Manny likes us to call them gentleman’s clubs. He’s in the
entertainment industry.”

Most red-blooded men living in Central Jersey knew about
Maglio’s Venus de Milo Club in South River. He also had a couple of other nudie
operations—one in Queens and the other near Camden.

“So, here’s the trade,” Doug continued. “Manny’s a big-time
contributor to United Way.”

I gagged on my decaf.

Doug’s hands went palms up and did a bad JFK imitation. “Ask
not where the money comes from, but what it can do for others.”

“Do Manny a favor and he forks over a fat donation?” I
guessed.
 

“Something like that. He’s got this niece, Twyla. She’s in
what you might call show business.”

“Show business?”

“Yeah, show
business
with an erotic twist. She works for one of Maglio’s competitors. For spite,
according to Manny.”

“Nothing like a little lap dancing to really piss off your
relatives.”

“Seems that Manny promised he’d take care of his niece just
days before her dad met with an untimely accident.”

“I bet accidents are a big problem for the Maglio family.”

“Twyla blamed Manny for not doing enough to protect her dad.
So now she’s taking it out on her uncle.”

“Or taking it off.”

Doug gave me a stop sign. “Here’s where you come in. Manny
wants his niece to go legit—to get a decent job. He’s got connections at
Universal Studios in Orlando, and he’s set her up for an interview. Maglio will
do whatever it takes to get Twyla away from the Northeast with all its
temptations and bad influences.”

“Uh,-oh,” I whispered. There was a freight train heading my
way.

“She doesn’t know that her uncle is working behind the
scenes to give her a change of venue. And she can’t find out. The lady thinks a
cousin of some guy she met at her club set her up with Universal. She also
thinks Universal is so hot to recruit her they’re sending someone to escort her
to Orlando.”
 

I cut Doug off. “Hold it. You had this all figured out,
didn’t you? You knew
I
was going to hit you up for a trip to Florida.”

“One trip,” said Doug. “One trip is what I expected.”

“Even so, you knew what I was going to lay on the table.”

“Of course,” Doug chuckled. “I know you. Like I said, when
one of your boys falls on his nose, you’re there in a flash. It’s in your DNA.”

Doug was right. It was all about genetics, and if I had a
weird empathy for anyone at the bottom of society’s pig pile, then blame Anne.
Or maybe even my parents. My old man was a lawyer who went to bat for every
scumbag who couldn’t afford a dream-team defense. At age eighteen, I had been
so indoctrinated with criminal law, I could have passed the New Jersey bar. My
mother battled injustice in other ways—mainly by helping poor people find a hot
meal, warm blanket, or sometimes a place to get an abortion. When I graduated
from Penn State, the expectations were that I would carve out some kind of
human-service career. Instead, I fell into a big-salaried ad agency job, which
prompted my parents to predict that in time I would find out what was really
important. Naturally, they were right.

“Let me make sure I have this straight,” I said. “You want
me to bring this woman to Orlando. And that’s it.”

“That’s it. She thinks the studio’s picking up her expenses
for the trip. You get her to Orlando, she walks into the HR office at Universal,
and the rest is automatic.”

I knew there had to be more. “Why does the niece need hand
holding? Why not give her a ticket to Orlando and let her go solo?”

“She’s a lot like your Gateway folk,” Doug explained. “Her
cerebral cortex has a few—kinks.”

“In other words, without a chaperone, you’re not sure she’d
ever make it to Universal Studios.”

“I think she’d make it to Orlando. But she could be easily
led in a different direction, from what I’ve been told.”

“Which means that somewhere between the airport and
Universal, she might decide to further her dancing career,” I guessed.

“Something like that.”

I took a deep breath. “All right. I’ll do it.”

“Good.” Doug’s smile was too wide.

“So when do I meet Twyla Maglio?”

Doug coughed. “Actually it’s Twyla Tharp.”

Couldn’t be
,
I thought. “Twyla Tharp is a big-time choreographer.” I was no dance expert,
but Tharp is a hard name to forget, especially when it belongs to a woman who
owns a Tony Award and a couple of Emmys.

“Yeah, well Manny’s niece has the same handle but different
credentials. She changed names when she was twenty-one, probably a smart move
since it gets people past their first impression.”
 

Would it matter what
a woman called herself if she were wearing pasties and a g-string?
But I didn’t press the point. “What kind of first impression are we talking
about?”

“Twyla’s a little on the tawdry side. Manny’s niece, I
mean—not the Twyla who does Broadway.”

“Yeah, I’m getting the picture.” It was an IMAX image. I
began to back away. “I don’t know about this.”

Doug reached across the table and gave me a tap on my arm.
“Relax. Friends don’t let friends drive over a cliff. Trust me—this is no big
deal.”

Friends? In a sense, this was true. There was an odd but
authentic connection between Douglas Kool, Jr., son of a Manhattan real estate
magnate, and Richard Bullock, the offspring of a South Jersey couple who
thought Karl Marx was just a click short of being a genius.

“A no big deal in your world could be a show stopper in
mine.”

“Here’s what you need to keep in mind,” noted Doug. “My
world is about people with a ton of money; yours is about derelicts and bums.
Occasionally, our two worlds intersect and good things happen.” Doug pushed the
rest of his cannoli through his smile.

The two-worlds-colliding theory was a stretch, but there was
no debating that Doug was all about affluence. He had been nanny-raised in his
father’s Park Avenue penthouse and shipped off to a high-grade boarding school
when he was nine. The right connections and a seven-figure donation got him
into Yale. It took another hefty gift to get Doug out of the university with a
bachelor’s degree. Shortly after graduation, life threw my pal a curve ball.
Daddy died and left an estate a tad shy of forty million. Doug’s mother, a battery
of lawyers, and a couple of mistresses consumed 90 percent of the money,
leaving Doug with just under five million. In Manhattan’s upper echelons,
chickenfeed. Hence, Doug had to find the right kind of socially acceptable job
to beef up his net worth.

“You know, you’re right,” I said after mulling over Doug’s
statement. “I do hang around with misfits and rejects. But at least I know who
I’m dealing with.”

“And I don’t?”

“You’ve told me a dozen times that New York is a haven for
phonies and pretenders, most of whom can’t afford a pot to piss in.”
 

“Exactly!” Doug laughed. “Which is why H&G pays me the
big bucks to sort out the fakes and tap the real thing.”

Sorting and tapping is exactly how the United Way used
Harris & Gilbarton’s golden boy. He spent most of his billable hours luring
the richest of the rich into the organization’s upper echelon of
philanthropists. His track record was astounding.

“Let me rephrase what I said a minute ago,” Doug said. “I
raise the capital and people like you use it to change the world.”

“More like, try
to
change it.”

“Whatever.”

Yup. That pretty much summed it up. While Doug was milking
the moneyed set, I was on the front line flailing away at a menu of social
inequities.

“Think I ended up holding the wrong end of the stick, don’t
you?” I asked.

“Hey, you made your bed. There are a lot of roads that’ll
take you out of New Brunswick.”

“I’m happy doing what I’m doing.”

Doug feigned surprise at the comment. Like I hadn’t given
him this line a dozen times before. He checked his watch.

“Super. Wish I had time to hear more about how happiness
means running a men’s shelter, but I have a train to catch. Let’s review—” It
was classic Kool. Every conversation ended with a recap. “If I come through
with tickets and rooms for you and your two boys, Twyla tags along. You take a
day to do your business with Zeukanintroph—”

“Zeusenoerdorf.”

“Whatever you say. Day two is all about taking care of
business with Twyla. Third day, you take a morning flight back to Newark. Sound
like a plan?”

I nodded. Anything for Zeus.
 

“Three days and two nights in America’s playground. I’m
handing you a sweet deal, Bullet. Just make sure Twyla gets to Universal on
time.”

I paid the Panico’s bill and walked Doug a few blocks to the
city’s ancient train station. We rode the escalator to the platform and waited
for the Trenton local. It pulled in fifteen minutes late, which had to irk the
hell out of the ever-punctual Doug Kool. But he seldom showed his irritation.
That’s the way it usually was with my friend. No matter what might be stirring
on the inside, there was rarely a mess on the outside. Except once in a while,
life finds a way to mar the veneer of even someone as composed as Doug. On this
particular day, fate had attached a long piece of Panico’s rigatoni on the back
of his Versace pants.

“I’ll call you,” he promised, disappearing into the car. I
waved and caught a glimpse of the pasta. I took it as a sign. The deal that had
been hatched minutes before was likely to turn sticky for everyone involved.

Chapter 2

If
you travel Florida’s Interstate 4—the blacktopped, clogged-up, east-west
highway that slashes across the Sunshine State’s midsection—you might catch a
glimpse of the Orange County Jail. But most drivers who pass I-4’s exit 79 are
oblivious to the walled-in gulag that is partially hidden by an IHOP and a Days
Inn.
 

Of all the strange visitors who have walked into the prison
over the years, few could possibly match the weird conga line that barged
through the main entrance on a cloudy September afternoon. At point was Twyla
Tharp, Manny Maglio’s niece. During the Newark-to-Orlando flight, I tried
coming up with the right words to describe her. Saucy. Salacious. Sin-sational.
They all worked. She had shoulder-length blonde hair that partially hid a pair
of oversized triple-hoop earrings. Her gold-plated rope-link bracelet and
matching necklace looked more JCPenney than Cartier. Not that it mattered. It
wasn’t the bling that attracted attention—it was the short skirt and tight, décolleté
top that did the job. Twyla stood five six in four-inch spikes and had a
well-toned body that I guessed was going on thirty. A master of the tease, she
had a raw sexiness that was as powerful as her perfume. And although she would
never be invited to a Mensa meeting, I discovered early on that Manny’s niece
was as street smart as they come.