Airtight Willie & Me (14 page)

Red stared stupidly at him, slack-jawed, a portrait of guilt as he flogged his brain for the logical words to explain why he lied. He tensed, and decided to bomb Frog's jaw with his foot. Red leaped to his feet and blurred a slippered foot toward Frog's head at the instant he saw the chambers of the revolver start to roll. His dead foot grazed Frog's head as he crashed to the floor with a leaking red hole in the center of his forehead.

Frog rose from his chair and pumped two bullets into the back of Red's head. He stared down at Red, the smoking pistol in his hand. He stripped off Red's flannel robe and wrapped it around Red's bloody head. Then he dragged the corpse into his bedroom closet. He sat on the side of the bed and thought about the problem of the body and what to do about Satin when she returned.

•  •  •

Satin arrived at Pony's house ten minutes after he left for Lula's ice cream and the celebration champagne. Satin stood patiently outside the front door listening to the metallic clatter as Lula unbolted and unbarred the thick oak door. She stepped into the house and helped Lula refortify the door.

Near Forty-seventh and Calumet Avenue, Jelly Drop stepped from his bathtub. He talced his blubber and slipped into fresh white silk pajamas. He scooped up a new porn mag from a living-room table. He went to the bedroom and propped himself on satin pillows in his king-size bed. He opened the mag and grinned salaciously as he started to enjoy the erotic contents. He reached a hand into a tall candy crock on the nightstand beside him. Dramatic pain creased his face as he peered into the empty crock. He swung his tree stump legs off the bed and turned the crock upside down on his palm. He licked his palm clean of the sugar crystals.

He sighed as he slipped on his overcoat over his pajamas. He put on shoes and socks and went to a drugstore around the corner on Forty-Seventh Street. He pressed his face against the door to attract the attention of clerks and cashier hustling to go home.

A porter came to the door and threw his hands in the air. “We closed, man!” he hollered before he broomed away.

Jelly Drop turned disconsolately away. He waddled to his car parked in front of his apartment building. He unlocked the car, got in, and pulled away for a sure shot source of jelly drops. Fresh! He sped down Martin Luther King Drive to Sixty-first Street. He turned and pulled up to park in front of a drugstore. Open! He got out and started across the sidewalk.

The corner of his eye snared a figure with a unique equine stride walk from a parked tan Mercury Marquis across the sidewalk into a liquor store in the middle of the block. Jelly Drop forgot his candy dope. He scuttled to the liquor store window and peered in at Pony standing at the rear of a long line of last-minute customers. Jelly Drop told himself, “He's the size, the height. It's him!” He scrambled to a drugstore phone to call Red.

Frog picked up the phone in the den on the second ring. He listened to Jelly Drop's excited report. Frog said, “Take that Marquis's registration card off the steering post. Don't try to memorize his address! Don't try to tail him. You might wake him up. Call me to give me his address as soon as you get the card. Don't mention this to anybody!” Frog hung up. He went to dress for the street.

Jelly Drop went to Pony's unlocked car and shakily got the registration card. He went back to the drugstore phone to dial Frog and read off Pony's address. Frog loaded his revolver, locked his bedroom door, and went to his Buick in the garage. He drove down the driveway to the boulevard. Frog was too excited to detect Silas Hilson pull out behind him, tail him to Pony's block. Frog parked near the corner a half block from Pony's house.

Silas parked a half block away in the next block. Pony's Marquis
and Satin's El Dorado were parked in front of the Jones's house. Silas eased out to the street. He walked to a public phone in the middle of the block where he was parked and called Mel.

Inside the house, Pony and Satin giggled in a haze of dust as they slit the heavy gauge plastic-wrapped kilos of “H” with razor blades and flushed the powder down the toilet. After the last of it was flushed, they lay nude on the bed and sipped champagne. Their eyes were hooded with the narcosis of the inhalation of the “H” dust. They kissed and fell asleep with their lips and bodies locked together.

Two hours later, Frog left his Buick. Gun in fist he went to the rear of the Jones's house. A killer Doberman snarled and lunged from the shadows. He blew a hole in its head in midair with his silenced gun. He dropped his gun into his overcoat pocket. He made a hole in a basement window over the latch. He dropped into the basement. Silas, with MI6 rifle, hid in the shrubbery in the front of the house. Mel and Jeff went to the rear of the house and waited in the shadows, with guns drawn.

Frog ascended stairs to the locked door to the kitchen. He opened a pocketknife, struck a match. He shimmied the spring lock open with the knife blade. He drew his revolver. He stepped into the dark kitchen and went through it into the dimly lit hall. He stopped at the sound of Lula's snoring at the end of the hall. He moved to Pony's open bedroom door. He stepped inside and stared down at the intoxicated lovers locked together, with the valise of cash gaped open beside them. He held the gun an inch from Pony's temple and pulled the trigger. Pony jerked spastically. Pony's movement and the air-from-a-punctured-tire sound of the gun awakened Satin. She stared gigantic eyes up at Frog over his gun in her face.

Frog grinned and whispered, “High and mighty ho! I couldn't fuck you one way, so I'll fuck you the sweetest way there is.” He pulled the trigger and stared at the sudden hole between her glazed open eyes.

Frog turned to search the room for the dope. He noticed the pile
of plastic in the bathroom wastebasket. He stooped and saw the inside of the toilet rimmed with “H,” the floor dusty with it. He fastened the valise, put it under his arm, and went to the side of Lula's bed. She stirred and stared sightlessly up at him.

“Malique, is that you?” she asked in a sleepy voice.

Frog's finger was tight on the trigger. He waved the gun before her eyes. Then he turned and went to the barred front door. He frowned at the heavily fortified door, turned, and went to the back door. He unbolted it, opened it, and peered into the shadow-haunted backyard. He stepped into the night.

The sound of Mel's and Jeff's barraging silenced pistols were like a dozen tires popping as the bullets cavorted and slammed Frog against the side of the house. He fell lifelessly to the frozen earth.

Malicious winds off Lake Michigan scattered and sailed the spill of bills from the unlatched valise.

I
n 1938, Jay Henderson sat suspect in a klieg of Texas sun, a disheveled rodeo cowboy Apollo. Big green money lay like bouquets of wilted blossoms in front of him and at center table. He felt threatened in the breathy silence beneath a gimlet battery of bloodshot eyes. His insides queased in the rancid odors of nicotine, the emotion stink of his opponent. He felt suffocated by the sour whiskey gusts from the four busted-out hard-faces leaning in with sullen flabbergast to detect a cheat angle, or even a rational explanation of how their perennial sucker had wiped them out.

Atom-deep fatigue stained Jay's eye sockets like blue shadow makeup. But his violet eyes shone with frantic vivacity behind sunglasses as they scanned the brute face of his surviving opponent: Sol “Wildman” Starkey, rodeo star and high stakes stud poker player—and peerless hard loser.

Starkey grunted and hunched his buffalo shoulders. He pushed his tap-out pile of green into the pot. He rapped his knuckles against the table. “C'mon now, Cutie Face, call that two thou raise or pass,” Starkey drawled. “Call! 'Cause I ain't got no disrespect for that ten high club flush you maybe got.”

He took a hit from a whiskey bottle, then lit a trademark cigar to
signal his win of the first substantial pot in almost fifty hours. The gallery leaned in closer on their chairs.

Jay stared at Starkey's apparent jack high diamond flush hand on the tabletop. He shifted his eyes to zero in on the center of Starkey's freckled forehead. In his crucial bet situation he heard, as he had for two days, whirring high voltage electrical sounds inside his skull. Then like from an echo chamber, the infallible read-out tip-off voice of his budding super-sensitized schizophrenia boomed: “Starkey's bluffing!”

Starkey ribbed, “C'mon, boy, don't just sit there eyeballing me like a possum in a tree. Play poker!”

Jay smiled as he scooped up his winning hand and shuffled it into the deck. He knew that Starkey considered himself undressed without a pistol. And worse, he remembered Starkey's penchant to use his pistol to reverse a tap-out. Yes, he told himself, unarmed as he was, it would be hazardous to his health and winnings to tap-out Starkey along with the others.

Starkey grinned extravagantly as he flipped over the black spade jack in the hole that paired the diamond jack. He pulled the pot in. He hee-hawed and winked at the gallery. “Don't you know, friends, it feels good, real good, to sock a stiff one on him?”

The gallery chuckled.

Starkey scowled as he watched Jay scoop up his bundle of green and stand. “Look here, boy, it ain't sporting to quit now. We gonna play a few more hands to give me some kinda justice,” Starkey said as his hand fiddled at the butt of his pistol in his waistband.

One of the gallery piped up, “Yeah, give the man a shot to get even.”

Jay shook his head as he peeled off two hundred in walking money for the four losers. He scooted fifty-buck portions to them on the tabletop. Then he stripped his yellow bandana from his throat and tied his winnings into it. His knees quivered as he walked toward Starkey's front door.

Starkey followed him and shoved his palm against the door as he opened it. “Boy, you clipped me for ten grand and the others for at least another five. I'm gonna call you in a coupla days for another go-round. You coming, ain't you?”

Jay shrugged, “Sure, why not? Nobody living can beat me playing poker. Not any more!”

Starkey removed his hand from the door. Jay stepped into the Sunday sunshine. He stood on the porch, a blinking, booted portrait of woe slumped in his wrinkled pastel-blue cowboy suit. Wisps of lank golden hair scaggled the edges of his tan ten-gallon hat as he went down the walk and got into his spanking-new 1938 white Caddie parked at the curb. He cruised away through the bustling Houston streets to the northside and Ila, his teenage inamorata.

As he parked on the tree-shaded street, an electrical fire issued smoke from beneath the hood and deadened the engine. He leapt from the car and put out the flames with a fire extinguisher from the trunk. He cursed as he slammed down the hood.

He heard a Glen Miller band recording blasting from his pink stucco bungalow accompanied by the bedlam of a Saturday night party still in riotous progress. He moved up the walkway determined to evict the familiar mob of freaked out sluts and studs.

“I'm only twenty-seven, and I feel like my own grandpa,” he lamented. “You're an idiot, a star sucker to hold on to Ila,” he told himself. “She's poison, a tramp. Throw her out!” But, he remembered a pathetic vision of himself humiliated, groveling when he was forced to find her, apologize, and beg her back. Once he begged, literally, on his knees as she marinated him with her sewer-mouth abuse. “I hate her, but I can't do without her,” he told himself bitterly as he rammed his key in the lock and twisted himself into the shambled living room.

Remnants of his filet steaks lay on cigarette-butted plates stacked on the beer can-littered coffee table. High heels, panties, jeans, and condoms were strewn on the carpet. Dead soldiers of
scotch and bourbon glittered from the wastebasket. A half-dozen nude teenaged couples, pretzeled on the couch, chairs, and floor, chattered and laughed raucously. They raised eyebrows, and then ignored him as he moved past them through a smog of hash smoke toward his bedroom.

He halted slit-eyed in the hallway and knotted his fists at the appearance of a strange, brawny, teenage jock prancing from his bedroom toward him with a con grin on his foxy face.

“Whew! Man, I'm glad you showed. I'm Freddie. You must be Jay, Ila's old man. I been helping your old lady with the party and stuff. You know, I been making like a bouncer keeping everybody from tearing your joint down and bad asses from crashing in.” Lipstick smeared Freddie as he stuck out his palm.

As Jay limply slapped his palm, he noticed the lipstick indictment on his face was Passionate Scarlet. Ila's. The jock's fly gaped open, smudged red. This bastard's fly is flying her flag too, he thought. She had to French him to brand him there.

“I can't find words to thank you, Freddie, for everything,” he said with a hideous smile.

Freddie gave him a fist in the arm. He gave Freddie a return shot, hard, as he went past him. Jay continued down the hall to the bedroom door. He pushed it half open.

Transfixed like a voyeur stranger, he peered through the door crack at Ila nude. She was squatting in the center of the gold-quilted bed flogging her five-inch cone of jet pubic bush with a silver brush. His weapon tingled as he gazed at her incredibly fat-lipped snare, its shocking pink gate aflash. Her hair, Betty Grable-styled, framed her pixie face like an indigo halo. “Why does she have to be so luscious and so lowlife?” he groaned mutely.

Bite and suck bruises lividly pocked her pulse-sprinting curves from epic chest to sculpted inner thighs. She has to be the most irresistible orphan that was ever born, and the most corrupt, he thought. Somehow I have to find the balls to let her go before she
compels me to do something I don't ever want to do again, he told himself as he punched his door wide open with his fist.

Her grey eyes, beclouded with dope, zoomed in wide on him, rosebud lips slung loose in alarm for the instant before she recovered her sloe-eyed cool. He moved to sit on the side of the bed. She recoiled in mock disdain. He studied her with an expression of treacherous bemusement on his stubbled face as he waited for the witty overlay of her offensive defense of her tramphood.