Safe House (33 page)

“You could jet,” I told him.

“I was gonna do that, what’d you take Lothar off the count for? I ain’t that stupid. I know what you was talking about. Lothar was the ace, right? Now I’m the top card. The only one that cocksucker Pryce’s got. I thought we was gonna play this to win.”

“I should have asked you about the next meeting.”

“I’m going in there,” he said. “And if that little motherfucker Porkpie dimes us out, I’ll take the weight. For everything. I did that guy in the alley, I did Lothar, what’s the difference? Life is life.”

“I thought you said you weren’t going back.”

“If it was just me, I wouldn’t,” Hercules said. “But if it goes bad, the only way I can take the heat offa everyone is to stand up, right? So I’ll do it.”

“If that happens, I’ll get you out,” I promised him. “Not through the courts, over the wall. It’ll take some time but—”

“I’ll have the time, brother,” the big man said, down but determined. “Now I gotta go say goodbye to Vyra.”

“
D
id I do something to make you angry?” Crystal Beth asked meekly. Lying on her stomach, her body picking up bronze highlights from the candle’s flame.

“Why’d you ask me that?”

“Because you . . . hurt me. When we made love. You were so . . . rough. Storming in here. Holding me down. Pinned down. I felt like I was in a steel vise. I couldn’t move. And you didn’t . . . wait for me. You just—”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Not to me, anyway.”

“I said I was sorry, Crystal Beth. I . . . got something on my mind.”

“Pryce?”

“Pryce is a dead man,” I snapped at her.

She gasped.

“I mean, if he doesn’t come through, he’s dead,” I said quickly. “It’s really tense now, little girl. I shouldn’t have . . . done what I did. To you, I mean. I’m sorry. If there’s any way I can make it up to you, I’ll—”

“We could try it again,” she said softly, a little smile playing around her full lips. “From the top.”

“
W
here are you going?” she asked later.

“Out.”

“Why can’t you just stay here for the night?”

I could have told her I had to get back to take care of Pansy, but it would have been a lie. I have it all set up so Pansy can get food for herself when I’m gone. Not the food she loves—just dry dog food—but if she got hungry enough, she’d eat it. And a fresh water supply too. With the plastic garbage bags I’d laid out for her, she was good for a nice long time, although it wouldn’t smell too great when I got back. And if I didn’t come back, Max knew what to do—there was always room for one more mutt in the Mole’s junkyard. I told Crystal Beth the truth. “I need a TV set. And you don’t have one.”

“Yes we do,” she said. “Right downstairs. The one you had for Hercules. It’s still in the basement. It’s just a little portable, not cable or anything. But we could plug it in and—”

“Go get it,” I told her.

I
t was the lead story on the eleven o’clock news. The male anchor read the copy as the camera panned over footage of a lower-middle-class house surrounded by yellow
POLICE
tape, using that ponderous tone they all go to when they think there’s a chance anyone will mistake them for real journalists.

A Queens man long sought by the authorities for violation of a court Order of Protection has taken his own life after a shoot-out with police. Lawrence Bretton, age thirty-six, an unemployed printer, apparently invaded the home of his estranged wife and infant son, unaware that she had been living at another location.

The camera switched to Lothar’s mug shot, probably from when he was first arrested for domestic violence.

Bretton was armed with a nine-millimeter automatic pistol and several clips of ammunition. He also had a pair of handcuffs and a roll of duct tape with him, leading to speculation that he planned some sort of kidnapping or torture. According to police sources, Bretton had threatened his wife with death on numerous occasions and was considered extremely violent.

The camera switched to a copy of the Order of Protection, with Lothar’s true name in the caption.

When ordered to surrender, Bretton fired upon police at the scene and attempted to barricade himself in the house. Reinforcements were called in as well as the Hostage Negotiating Team, but a brief telephone conversation ended with a shot from inside the home. Ironically, Bretton was wearing a bulletproof vest, but he took his own life with a single shot to the head rather than surrender. Details of this astounding case, so emblematic of the domestic violence which has infected this city for so long, are still coming in. Stay tuned to this channel for . . .

“Oh my God,” Crystal Beth said quietly. “That’s him, isn’t it?”

“That’s him all right. But it’s not over.”

“It is for Marla,” she said. “And the baby.”

T
here was more at eleven-thirty. A beautifully woven web of lies, with such a heavy marbling of truth that digesting the whole meal wouldn’t be a problem for any media-watcher. They threw in a whole lot of lovely professional details . . . including an excerpt from one of the wiretapped calls Lothar had made to Marla. Even with the profanities bleeped out, it was explicit enough to make the hairs on your forearm stand up.

I watched the show with Crystal Beth sitting next to me. Knowing Pryce could get it done now, knowing he had the juice.

And wondering who he really was.

The phone didn’t ring all night long.

I
n the morning, I went back to my office. Exchanged a half-pound of boiled ham and a plump custard cream puff for the present Pansy had left for me to clean up.

The joint where I’d gotten the ham also sold cooked stuff—mostly chicken and beef, spinning on a rotisserie. I had bought a nice-looking hunk of medium-well steak, planning to split it with Pansy, but it was as tough as a Philadelphia middleweight, so she got all of that too.

I settled for some toasted stale bread and a bottle of ginseng-laced soda, wishing I hadn’t duked the cream puff on her so quickly.

Soon as I was done eating, I tried Mama’s. Drew a blank.

I remembered I’d never gotten Porkpie’s address from Pryce. And realized it didn’t matter anymore.

T
he day crawled. I went out to get the newspapers. More of the same. Except for the hostage team at the scene, it wasn’t that big a story in New York. Man abuses woman. Woman—finally—leaves man. Man swears if she won’t have him she won’t have anyone. Court issues Order of Protection. Man beats the crap out of her. Back to court. Man is given low bail, if he qualifies . . . which means: woman not hospitalized or media not paying attention. Another Order of Protection issued, this time with a pompous warning that impresses only the autoerotic judge. Sooner or later, woman is found dead, with that useless piece of paper in her purse. Man nearby, dead by his own hand. Happens all the time. Only this time, the intended victim had flown the coop before the fox broke in.

If the papers had gotten hold of the Nazi angle, it would have been front-page for days. But not a word of that slipped out. The usual round of neighborhood interviews, ranging from “I can’t believe it” to “I knew he’d do it.” Pious editorials about “junk justice” and the need to get tough on domestic violence. Somebody who didn’t want to be identified said it was a terrible thing all right, but he could understand a man being driven crazy by not being allowed to see his own child.

And the usual always-good-for-a-quote collection of exhibitionistic “experts”—every TV producer worth his sleazy job has a Rolodex full of them.

The papers ran a bunch of teasers like: “The whereabouts of Bretton’s wife and son are unknown,” but nobody took the bait, even when one of the slime-tabloids offered a hundred grand “reward” for “the whole story.” And without a victim the media could wring their hands over, the whole story would be as dead as Lothar in a couple of days.

I
slapped a fresh battery pack into the cellular and hit the streets, looking for the Prof. Left word in a few places for him to call Mama’s.

I rang Vyra from a pay phone down the street from the hotel. She was in.

When I walked in the door to her suite, she was barefoot, wearing a big white fluffy bathrobe, her face scrubbed clean but bloodless and haggard. “Have you—?” she asked.

I shook my head no, sat down in one of the plush chairs, placing the life-line cellular carefully on the arm. She sat on the couch across from me, hugging herself inside the robe. “I’m scared,” she said.

“Me too,” I told her. “But all we can do is wait for word now.”

“Did you have to make him . . . do that?”

“Do what?” I asked her.

“I don’t
know,
” she almost wailed. “He wouldn’t tell me. But I know it was very dangerous. I begged him not to, but he just . . .”

“It all had to be done,” I told her. “All of us, whatever we did.”

“He said . . . he said you were all doing it for him.”

“And . . . ?”

“And I know better, don’t I?” she said, eyes snapping at my face. “It’s not for him. Not
just
for him, anyway.”

“So?”

“So I’m one of them, aren’t I? I’m one of the people he’s . . . doing it for. Me. If anything happens, I’m responsible too.”

“What was the choice?”

“For the . . . for the network, for Crystal, I don’t know. For the women, I don’t know. For me, I know. The rest of them, it was to protect their . . . lives, or their children. Or something important. Me, it was to protect my spoiled little ass. My . . . money.”

“And now you feel guilty?”

“You’re a miserable person to talk to me like that,” she said bitterly.

“I’m not downing you, Vyra. It’s way too late for petty bullshit like that. Herk said I misjudged you. Maybe I did. I never got to know you, and—”

“—now you never will,” she finished for me.

“No, I never will,” I agreed. “And if that’s my loss, I’ll have to carry it.”

“I never got to know you either.”

“That was no loss,” I promised her.

“Oh God, I wish he’d call,” she said softly.

V
yra finally agreed to go take a nap after I swore I’d wake her as soon as her phone rang. But it was my cellular that buzzed first.

“Have your lawyer go to the Southern District tomorrow, first call. Tell him to go to the fourth floor and just wait. Tell him to wear a carnation in his lapel.”

“What color?”

“This time of year? He’ll be the only one wearing a flower, don’t worry. Tell him to just wait. Somebody will come and get him.”

“And make the deal?”

“Yes.”

“You sure there’s anybody to make a deal for?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. And hung up.

T
he buzzing of the cell phone had woken Vyra, and now she wouldn’t go back to sleep.

“He’s so different,” she said. “I never met a man . . . I never met anyone like him.”

“Yeah, Herk’s one of a kind, all right.”

“You don’t understand a word of what I’m saying, do you?” she said sadly. “He told me about his life. His whole life. From when he was a little boy. You never told me anything like that. I’ve known you for years . . . and you’re a stranger to me. And he
asked
me about my life too. You never did that. Burke,” she giggled, “you know what he said?”

“How would I—”

“He asked me about growing up. What it was like for me. I told him I was a JAP. You know what he said? He said: ‘I thought you was a Jew.’ Can you believe it?”

“From Herk? Sure.”

“You don’t get it,” she said, peat-moss eyes alive in her made-up face. “Okay, he didn’t know what ‘JAP’ means. So what? Where he was raised, he’d never heard the term. But the thing is, it didn’t make any difference to him. It’s me he likes. Not my money. Not just my . . . tits,” she said, flicking her hand against her breasts like she was dismissing them.

When she started to cry, I told her a shower might make her feel better. Naturally, she argued, but I made the same promise I had when she took her nap, and she finally went along.

When the hotel phone rang, I hit the bathroom on the first ring. I pulled the shower curtain away, held my fist to my ear like it was a telephone. Vyra leaped out of the shower covered in suds, hair wet, a loofah in one hand. She ran to the phone, snatched it up.

“Hello.”

She held the phone slightly away from her ear so I could listen, but I didn’t move . . . just in case.

“Ah, you
promised,
honey,” she cooed into the receiver. Then she listened for a minute before she said: “All right, baby. Whatever you say. You’re the boss. I’ll wait for you, okay?”

Whatever he said in return was real short. Vyra whispered, “I love you, Hercules,” and hung up.

Then she started to cry, hands over her face. I stepped to her, gently held her shoulders, standing at arm’s length to keep her breasts off my chest. “What?” I asked her.

“He’s all right. He’s all right,” she sobbed.

“So why are you crying?”

“Because I’m
happy,
you moron!”

“What did he say?”

Vyra walked over to the bed and sat down, oblivious to the instant puddle she created.

“He said he couldn’t keep our date. For tonight. He told me I was his bitch, and he’d come when he could. And to shut up and do what he told me,” she said, a sunburst smile turning her little face lovely like I’d never seen it in all the years I’d known her.

I
went down to my own room in the hotel and called Davidson, gave him the word.

“Wear a
carnation?
” he squawked. “Jesus, are these guys for real?”

“Oh yeah,” I told him. “No question.”

“Then consider it done,” he said. “Give me a call tomorrow night. Anytime after six.”

“
Y
ou heard from the Prof?” I asked Mama.

“Right here,” she said. “You come now, okay?”

“I’m rolling,” I told her.

I
t wasn’t just the Prof at the restaurant. Clarence was there too. And Max. And Michelle.