Frag Box (5 page)

A really persistent researcher might conclude that between Manley and St. Paul are just too many blank pages to be believed. Awkward, but hardly damning. And even with the research capacity of the federal government, it would be awfully hard for somebody to find a link back to Detroit and a bonding agency abandoned when its principal was implicated in a murder (innocent, I swear) and an insurance fraud (that’s another matter altogether.)

Hard, but not impossible. And somebody who knew exactly what to look for might even find a cold case file in Detroit that points to an even colder case file in Toronto that actually contains my fingerprints, the only place on earth that does, other than St. Paul.

The links are all very convoluted, their discovery highly unlikely. And that’s good, because bringing them to light could very well spell the end of life as I know it. Against that eventuality, I keep an escape kit in a locker at the Amtrak depot, plus extra cash in two locations out state. If I ever have to use them, I can never, ever come back.

And if I am too slow in making that decision, I will lose the chance forever. I’m not ashamed to say that scares the hell out of me.

Agnes is the only person who knows anything about any of this, apart from my Uncle Fred, the career bookie who is currently doing hard time in the Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and can be trusted to be at least as discreet as any other con. Even Agnes doesn’t know all the particulars, though she does know that she may someday have to do a rearguard stalling action while I make myself nonexistent. She gets all teary when we talk about it, so I seldom do.

“What about that other thing, Herman? Are we holding anything for Charlie Victor?”

“Nothing that they would really care about.”

“Then what’s the big deal? Let’s give them his files and wave goodbye as they leave.”

“It’s a matter of principle, Ag. Never give bullies what they want.”

“Even when they have the authority to demand it?”

“Especially then.”

Chapter 6

Massé and Fugue

Athletes like to talk about muscle memory. You make the perfect free throw or the ace tennis serve or the flawless triple axel, the theory goes, and you should immediately do twenty or a hundred more. Then when crunch time comes, even if your mind has degenerated into a useless collage of past disasters, your body remembers how to make the moves.

That’s what they say.

I had no idea what I was going to do about my cash flow problems or the pinstriped mobster or the feds whom I had deliberately pissed off or the flames I had seen from Railroad Island or even about Charlie Victor’s cigar box, which I had told nobody about, not even Agnes. So I decided to work on the problem that I at least knew how to approach. If the athletes are right, that is.

I left the office and headed back to Lefty’s, to practice the pool shot that sooner or later I would have to perform for Wilkie, or else give him his twenty bucks as a forfeit. I can do things like take unscheduled time off, because I own the business. Hard working, sweet-hearted Agnes can’t, because she doesn’t. Life is not fair.

I gave Lefty back his .38 and got an arched eyebrow and a pointed look at his watch in return. Then I got a large mug of beer, a bowl of salted-in-the-shell peanuts, and a rack of balls, and I rented a table that was as far from Lefty’s perch at the bar as I could get. I told him I wanted to be left alone to practice. What I really meant was that I didn’t want him noticing me practicing a shot that is famous for turning a cue ball into a deadly airborne missile and also for ripping up the felt on the table. In fact, a lot of pool halls have signs on the wall prohibiting massé shots.

“What are you practicing?”

“Three-cushion banks.”

“Wow. Tough stuff.”

He didn’t know the half of it.

I left the rack with eleven balls in it on a windowsill, putting only the cue ball, the eight, and three striped balls on the table. I picked the shortest cue stick I could find and chalked the tip until there was a little cloud of blue dust floating around it. Then I swallowed a slug of beer, put an unshelled peanut in my mouth so I could suck on the salt, and began.

I started out with a simple draw shot, hitting the cue ball below center and giving it enough backspin to go straight away from me, then change its mind and come straight back. It didn’t work very well. The amount of backspin I was able to give the ball was different every time. I pulled an emery board out of my pocket, turned my back to Lefty to hide what I was doing, and proceeded to rough up the cue tip. After that and some more chalk, it worked a lot better. I got in the habit of chalking after every shot, which everybody knows you should always do anyway and nobody ever does.

I did a dozen more draw shots, progressively increasing the angle of the cue stick with the horizontal. As it approached dead vertical, I could get the ball to come back beyond the place where it had started. Sometimes it skipped and bounced a little along the way and sometimes it wobbled a bit, but mostly it worked.

This was pretty exciting stuff. I wondered if they knew about it at MIT or Cal Tech.

It was also pretty trivial, compared to what I had come here to try. I took another slug of beer, shelled and ate a bunch of nuts just to stall a little longer, and finally got down to hitting the ball off-center in two directions at once.

That’s kind of a slippery concept, and it doesn’t do to think about it too much. But not thinking about it wasn’t working worth sour owl shit, either. I could get the ball to go away to the right and come back to the left or vice-versa, but there was no way I could get it to go away
a little
to the left and come back even more to the left.

I decided it was all a matter of point of view, and I tried the shot with the cue in the same place but with me facing a different way. That was a little better.

Finally, I set up all five balls in their original locations, closed my eyes for a moment, and meditated on the mystical state of being Minnesota Fats and a Zen archery master, all at once. Then I tried the massé shot exactly fifty times. I almost made it twice. The odds were getting better, though I seriously doubted if my muscles had learned a thing yet. I decided it was time for another beer.

As I was heading back to the bar with my empty mug, I was met by a short, pasty-faced blimp in a rumpled three-piece sharkskin suit and a striped dress shirt with a pin collar. He also had a hat that I don’t know how to describe. A real independent thinker. I hadn’t seen pin collars since the mid-nineties, or sharkskin since never mind when. And I had never seen a hat like that, though I thought it might have been what was once described as a pork pie.

“I was told I might find Herman Jackson here. Would that be you?”

“That would be me, yes.”
And I was told a fat guy in a suit and a hat went down in the gulch last night. Would that be you?
“And you are?”

“G. Harold Mildorf, Attorney at Law. My card.” He pulled a business card out of his vest pocket, showed it to me, and then put it back, just as the Persons in Black had done with their plastic ID cards.

“You have a client who needs a bond, Mr. Mildorf?”

“You mean a bail bond? Certainly not. I don’t practice criminal law. In fact, I try not to even practice civil law with people who might possibly be criminals. Is there someplace private where we could talk?” He looked at the cane-backed spectator chairs around the perimeter of the hall as if they might be about to attack him, his bushy eyebrows nearly meeting as he formed them into a frown.

“Lefty’s in the morning is about as private as anything you’re liable to find. Pick up a stick and pretend you’re shooting pool, and I guarantee you nobody will pay the slightest attention to us.” Not that there was anybody else around anyway.

He obviously didn’t like the idea, but he took a cue stick off a rack on the wall and walked back to the table. I suddenly became aware of the empty beer mug in my hand.

“I was just going to get myself another beer. Would you like anything?”

“Do they have food?”

“They have the usual bar food. Fried stuff, microwave pizza, that sort of thing. The burgers are pretty good.”

“I’ll have two burgers and fries and a large beer.”

“The beer, I’ll get you. The other stuff, I’ll order, and Lefty will bring it over when it’s ready.”

“Lefty. So there really is such a person. How fearsomely droll.”

“You’re holding the cue stick by the wrong end, by the way.” I left him to ponder the subtle geometry of tapered wood and went back to the bar, where I ordered his little snack.

“On your tab?” said Lefty.

“No way. I don’t even know this guy.”

“Oh yeah? Well, he knows you. He was watching you shoot pool last night.”

“Really?”

“Almost the whole time. Came in after you’d already started, asked me to point you out. Another beer?”

“I suddenly lost my taste for the light buzz. Give me a new mug of beer for my spectator friend and a cup of coffee for me.”

“Is that on your tab or not?”

“The drinks, yes. For everything else, G. Harry there is on his own.”

“Got it. I’ll collect cash when I bring the stuff.”

“Can’t say I blame you.”

We were talking about a lawyer, after all.

I went back over in the corner and found G. Harold Mildorf pushing the eight ball around the table with his stick, scowling at it in intense concentration.

“I don’t believe you’ve stumbled onto your secret vocation, Mr. Mildorf. There’s nobody here to impress, so why don’t we just sit down and wait for your food?”

“Really? I thought I was doing rather well.”

“Trust me, you don’t want to enter any high stakes tournaments.” I gestured to a couple of chairs over by the windows, and we ambled over that way and sat down. I found a small round table that was only slightly wobbly and pulled it over in front of us.

“I don’t really have any papers to lay out,” he said.

“How very un-lawyerlike. But you do have about four and a half pounds of food on the way.”

“Oh, yes. Well then, a table by all means.”

“While we’re waiting for it, why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”

He looked around the entire place, working his mouth in odd ways and squinting, as if some silent spy might have snuck in while we were looking at chairs. Then he leaned over close to me and said in a low, conspiratorial tone, “Charles Victor.”

“He’s dead.” I think I upset him by speaking in a normal voice. He deepened his already monumental scowl.

“The body on the sidewalk?”

I nodded.

“I feared as much. The whole point of my being here, in fact. You see, I am the executor of his estate.”

Good thing I wasn’t sipping my coffee at the moment, because I would have definitely choked on it.

“Estate? Charlie had an estate?”

“But of course.”

“Get the hell out of here.”

“Excuse me? My food hasn’t arrived yet.”

“It’s an expression, Mr. Mildorf. It means ‘I can’t believe what you’re saying.’”

“Oh, I see. Get out of the hell, yes, um… Let me assure you, I am entirely in earnest. He had an estate, and you, Mr. Jackson, are his sole heir. I am empowered to give you this.” From an inside jacket pocket, he produced two or three pieces of paper that had been folded into business-envelope size. As he handed them over, he again scanned the room in all directions.

“A copy of his will,” he said. “Only two pages, and not terribly eloquent. But it definitely names you as his one and only beneficiary. He even mentions his father, someplace up in the northern part of the state, so there can be no question of him merely forgetting that he had one. He mentions him, curses him, and excludes him. All very legal. You get everything, as you can see.”

I stuffed the papers in the inside pocket of my suit coat without looking at them.

“Besides his cardboard box and some occasional walking-around money, what does ‘everything’ consist of, exactly?”

“Ah yes, well, therein lies the problem. I don’t honestly know, you see. Not exactly how much, and not where it is, either. I know he had something, because he paid my fee in cash and didn’t quibble about the amount. And he claimed to have something he called a frag box, which he said contained thirty thousand dollars, but I never saw it. Aren’t you going to read the will?”

“What’s the point? Aren’t we exactly where we would have been if you had never talked to me?”

“We most certainly are not. I have now delivered the will, as I am legally charged to do. That is not a trivial thing, you know. Don’t you at least want look at it?” He pointed with an index finger, looking as if he really wanted to pull the papers back out of my pocket.

“Later, maybe. Tell me about this frag box thing.”

“You realize, of course, that if you weren’t his sole heir, I wouldn’t be able to discuss it with you at all.”

“But you just said that I am.”

“And so you are, sir. Do you know what a frag
pot
is, by the way?”

“I know what it was in Vietnam. Charlie told me.”

“Enlighten me, if you would.”

“Basically, it was a pile of money to pay for an assassination. Usually it was kept in an extra helmet, which is where the name ‘pot’ came in, but it could have been kept anywhere. When some troop had an officer who was really despised, they would start the collection. And every time the guy pissed somebody off again, a little more cash would get thrown in. When the pile was finally big enough to be worth risking a prison sentence, somebody would waste the officer in question and collect the reward. The preferred method of killing was with a grenade or a mine, which would leave no fingerprints or ballistic evidence.”

“Aha. A fragmentary weapon, and hence the word ‘frag,’” said Mildorf, nodding.

“I believe the word you want is ‘fragmentation.’”

“Just so. Mr. Victor assumed I already knew all that, which made him a little hard to follow at times. Tell me, do you think this practice actually did happen?”

“Some people say it was really quite common, especially toward the end of the war, when the morale was all in the toilet.”

“Well, then, maybe the box is believable, too, who knows? Mr. Victor claimed to have a box in which he was accumulating money to buy a political assassination.”

“Really? Did he say who the target was?”

“He did not. And since it involved a criminal activity, I didn’t ask.”

“But whomever it was for, now the money is all mine.”

“Exactly so.”

“But only if I can find it.”

“Correct again. I think there were supposed to be some instructions to you in the box, as well. As his executor, it would be up to me to enforce them. But since I cannot ethically enforce an illegal behest, and since I don’t have the box anyway, I think it’s safe to say all that is moot. Unless, of course, you already have the box?”

He took a large drink of his beer, which immediately reappeared as sweat on his forehead and cheeks. He took a tissue out of a back pocket and mopped at his brow. But through it all, he kept his eyes on me. If he was looking for a “tell,” I disappointed him utterly. Then his hamburgers arrived, he paid Lefty, and nothing else could compete for his attention for a while.

“I don’t suppose you have any idea why Charlie didn’t tell me all this himself?”

With his mouth full of hamburger and onions, he nodded absently, then looked around and held both hands up with greasy fingers spread. I handed him a napkin, and he wiped first his hands and then his mouth before he spoke.

“Thank you. He might have wanted to, but he was trying to stay out of sight, as it were. When he came to see me, he snuck in the back way, through the fire escape stairs.”

“That’s not like him.”

“If you say so, I believe you. But when I met him he was definitely running scared.”

“Do you know of what?”

“I think he knew he was about to be murdered.”

“Did he say that?”

“In a roundabout way. He found it ironic. He said, as I recall, ‘After all these years, somebody is keeping a frag pot on me.’ And then he used one of those colorful expressions I can never seem to remember. Something about a card.”