Highbinders (2 page)

I counted it and put the money into my wallet. “It’s all there.”

He nodded. “Sign here, please.”

While I signed the form he said, “I must say,I expected you to be a size bigger.”

I handed him back his pen. “Why?”

“From the way my men were talking when I came on duty, they claimed to have collared themselves an American karate expert. Constable Wilson especially—limping around he was with a bad foot to prove it.”

“I don’t know any karate,” I said. “I just thought I was being mugged.”

“At six o’clock in the evening and the sun not down?” Sergeant Matthews made his brown eyebrows form two skeptical arcs.

“I’d forgotten where I was when they grabbed me.”

“Your home’s New York, isn’t it, sir?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t suppose they wait until dark there. Muggers, I mean.”

“Daylight or dark, it’s all pretty much the same to them.”

“Must be an interesting place.”

“Terribly,” I said. “What’re you charging me with, drunk and disorderly?”

“Just drunk, sir.”

I tapped my wallet with a finger. “Have I got enough in here to cover it?”

“That’ll be up to the magistrate, sir.”

“Can’t I just post bond and forget about it? Forfeit it, I mean.”

Sergeant Matthews shook his head. He seemed a little sorry about the entire thing. “Afraid not, sir,” he said, handing me an official-looking form. “This is your summons to appear at the Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court at nine this morning.”

I sighed, took the summons, folded it, and put it away in a pocket. “What if I don’t show?”

All traces of sympathy vanished. “Then a warrant will be issued for your arrest.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. “Can I go now?”

“Certainly, sir.” Sergeant Matthews looked at the clock on the wall. “You should be able to get back to your hotel, take a nap, tidy up, get a good breakfast in you, and be in court with plenty of time.”

I stood up. “Well, thanks for everything, Sergeant.”

“Not at all, sir.”

“Where’s the best place to catch a taxi?”

“Out to the street, then right to the next corner. Should be one along directly.”

I nodded a good-bye of sorts, went through the entrance of the stationhouse, and out into what seemed to be a kind of alley or mews. I walked to the street without looking back, turned right, and headed for the corner. About halfway there, I spotted a dustbin, unpinned my carnation, and dropped it in. It had served its purpose. Somebody had recognized me all right.

O
NLY TWO DAYS PRIOR
to spending that night in a London jail cell, Julia Child and I had been pounding hell out of a couple of boned chicken breasts when Myron Greene, my lawyer, the new millionaire, knocked on the door of my “deluxe” efficiency on the ninth floor of the Adelphi on East Forty-sixth. There was an ivory-colored doorbell that Myron Greene could have pressed, but he knew better because it didn’t work, and hadn’t worked in three years. The Adelphi Apartment-Hotel was that kind of a place.

I put my stainless-steel mallet down on the ancient butcher block that I had recently acquired from a seventy-two-year-old Brooklyn butcher who had said to hell with it and gone out of business the day that prime porterhouse hit $4.25 a pound. I nodded as Julia Child dipped the pounded chicken breasts, first into the nutmeg-seasoned flour, and then into the lightly beaten egg yolk. “I got it, Julia,” I said, switched off the television set, and went to the door.

Myron Greene stood there for a moment, eyeing me with the same faint disapproval that he probably eyed all grown men who answer their doors at four in the afternoon dressed only in terry-cloth bathrobe and denim apron.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Not bad; how are you?”

He came in and looked around the way that he always did, as though expecting to find a badly mismanaged seraglio. While he looked, I took the opportunity to examine what a bright New York attorney, who had just become a millionaire at thirty-eight, might wear on a nice warm May day.

If he had been born about a century and a half earlier, Myron Greene probably would have been a disciple of Beau Brummell, a slightly plump disciple perhaps, but nevertheless a devoted one. As it was, he contented himself with dressing about six months behind the latest cry which, on that particular May afternoon, happened to be a half-hearted revival of the zoot suits of the wartime forties.

Myron Greene was wearing a modified version of one, a powder blue number with a jacket that draped almost to his knees. High-waisted britches went halfway up his chest and were held there by two-inch-wide midnight blue suspenders. His brown, graying hair, still modishly long, glistened with what I suspected of being a pound or two of Vaseline.

“My, you’re pretty,” I said.

“Like it?” he said in a half-serious, half-hopeful tone.

“What happened to the key chain?” I said. “You know, those three- or four-foot-long jobs that they used to wear?”

Myron Greene glanced down. “I thought it might be just a bit much.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Well, congratulations anyhow.”

“On what?”

“On the Centennial Group. I heard that it hit one twenty-one at two o’clock yesterday afternoon so that makes you a millionaire, if you exercised your options which, knowing you, you sure as hell did.”

Myron Greene shrugged at my news about the stock of the conglomerate that he had helped put together nearly six months ago. “It’s all on paper,” he said.

“Well, it must be fun to tot up the figures anyway.”

He shrugged again, his eyes still wandering around the apartment. “That’s new,” he said, indicating the butcher block that stood before the Pullman kitchen.

“Actually, it’s a hundred and nineteen years old.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Brooklyn.”

“How much?”

“Fifty bucks—and another fifty to get it hauled up here.”

“It’s still a good investment.”

“Jesus, Myron, I didn’t buy it as an investment.”

“Maybe you should’ve.”

“Let’s have a drink first.”

“First before what?”

“Before the bad news that dragged you out of your office at four o’clock on the afternoon that you became a millionaire.”

Myron Greene looked at his watch. “I’m thirty-eight.”

“Is that what your watch says?”

Myron Greene sighed and sat down in one of the chairs around the hexagonal poker table. “If it had happened when I was twenty-eight, it might have meant something. I don’t know what though.”

“Here,” I said, setting a Scotch and water down in front of him. “It’s got the meaning of life in it.”

Myron Greene took a swallow of the drink and then looked slowly around the room. “At least you’ve lived,” he said.

It was really the reason that I was Myron Greene’s client. He was convinced that I led a spicy existence peopled with long-legged blondes, likeable adventurers, and fairly honest crooks and thieves, all of whom had hearts of gold. I was, in Myron Greene’s eyes, a tear-around with an enviable life-style designed almost exclusively for fun and frolic, but highlighted here and there with the occasional thrill of mild danger.

In reality, I was turning into a recluse who spent too much time alone in museums, galleries, motion pictures, and at any parade that happened to come along. I also drank too much in bars in the company of minor thieves, con men, prospering cops, failed gamblers, fast-buck hustlers, and others of their ilk such as out-of-work actors and free-lance writers.

In my spare time, of which there was virtually no end, I stayed home, stared at the walls, looked at too much television, and read too much Dickens and Camus. On most Saturdays I got to see my eight-year-old son whose mother had married a man who, unlike Myron Greene, had made his first million at twenty-three. He was thirty-five now and apparently well on the way to his first billion.

My son was never really quite sure what it was that I did for a living. “You mean you get things back for people, Dad?”

“That’s right.”

“You mean if somebody lost something, like a whole lot of money, you’d help them find it?”

“No, I help people get things back that they’ve had stolen from them. It’s never money.”

“What things?”

“Well, jewelry, for instance. Or personal papers. Or valuable art such as paintings and pictures and things. Sometimes, even people.”

“You mean people get stolen?”

“Sometimes.”

“And you go find them and then arrest the crooks?”

“No, I go and buy the people or the things back.”

He had to think about that for a moment. “And the people who have things stolen, they pay you to go buy them back from the crooks, huh?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes the crooks pay me.”

“How much?” he said. I could see that his stepfather was teaching him a thing or two.

“Ten percent,” I said. “Suppose you had something stolen.”

“My bicycle.”

“All right, your bicycle. And suppose whoever stole it was willing to sell it back to you for ten dollars.”

“It’s worth more than that. A lot more.”

“I know. So the crooks would say that if you’d use me to bring the money to them, they’d let you have the bike back for ten dollars.”

He had to think about that, too. “I guess so,” he said finally. “But how do I know that they wouldn’t just take the ten dollars and keep my bike?” He was also growing up a true New Yorker.

“Because I wouldn’t let them. No bike, no money.”

“And how much would you charge me?”

“I wouldn’t charge you anything. But if it were somebody else, some boy I didn’t know, I’d charge him a dollar.”

“And he’d have to pay that?”

“Either he or the crook who stole the bike.”

“Huh,” my son said. “That’s a funny business.”

“You’re right.”

“What do you call it? I mean, what do you call what you do?”

“I’m a go-between,” I said, feeling a little foolish.

He shook his head slowly.“I never heard of that before.”

“There’re not too many of us around.”

“Mama always says you’re a writer.”

“Not anymore.”

“She says you used to work on a newspaper.”

“That was a long time ago. The paper went out of business.”

“When?”

“About the time you were born.”

“Did you write about football?”

“No, I wrote a column.”

“About what?”

“People.”

“What kind of people?”

“All kinds. I wrote about crooks a lot.”

“And who else?”

“Oh, funny people. People who do funny things for a living.”

“Like you do now?”

“Uh-huh. Like I do now.”

“Do you do this every day?” he said. “I mean do you go buy things back every day for people who’ve had them stolen from them?”

“Not every day.”

“When do you do it?”

“Oh, about once or twice a year. Sometimes three times.”

“Do you make a lot of money?”

“No. Not a lot.”

“Do you make as much as Jack?” Jack was his new father.

“Nobody makes as much as Jack.”

“Do you make as much as Uncle Myron?”

“Not quite.”

“I bet you make as much as Eddie.”

This time I had to think. Eddie was the bell captain at the Adelphi, and a special pal of my son’s. Eddie was not only a bell captain, he was also a slum landlord, the owner of a taxicab fleet consisting of two cabs, a minor bookmaker, and—when pressed—a reliable procurer. “Well, Eddie might make just a little more than I do.”

“Are you poor, Dad?”

“You’ll have to ask your uncle Myron about that,” I said.

“You’re broke, you know,” Myron Greene said after taking another swallow of his drink.

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “It’s about time.”

“Well, you’re not really broke. You’ve got a few thousand left.”

When he wasn’t putting conglomerates together, or finding fairly legal ways for his enormously rich clients to become even richer, Myron Greene gave some attention to my affairs, such as they were. He saw to it that my bills were paid; touted me on stocks that I never bought (invariably to my regret); kept me even, or just a little ahead, with the Internal Revenue Service, and insisted that I squirrel some away each year in a Keogh plan for my golden retirement years which, as far as I could tell, had already arrived.

And it was to Myron Greene that the rich and their insurance companies came when they wanted to ransom something that had been stolen from them, usually something which they were rather fond of, or at least accustomed to having around—a diamond necklace, a Klee, or perhaps a nine-year-old daughter.

Or sometimes it was the thieves themselves who made the initial contact with Myron Greene. He liked to talk to them. In fact, he liked to talk to them so much that they sometimes couldn’t get him off the phone and I later had to explain that among other things, Myron Greene would like to have been a flashy criminal lawyer, if there had been any real money in it.

So it was through Myron Greene that the go-between assignments came to me, usually two, sometimes three a year, and for his services he got ten percent of my ten percent and whatever pleasure it was that he found in skirting the world of the thief.

Now as he sat at my poker table brooding about having become a millionaire ten years too late for it to mean anything, I said, “Well, there must be some alternative to welfare.”

Myron Greene sighed, “You’re getting up there, too, you know.”

“I’m six months older than you are.”

“Middle-aged,” he said.

“I don’t feel middle-aged, but then I get a lot of rest.”

“You have real talent,” he said. “Have you ever thought of putting it to work again?”

“You mean a steady job?”

Myron Greene nodded.

“I dreamt about it last Friday, I think it was, but before it got really bad, I woke up.”

Myron Greene sighed again. “Well, I got a call earlier this afternoon. Long distance.”

“From where?”

“London,” he said. “London, England.”

“I thought that that’s where London was.”

“It involves a goodly sum.”