Airtight Willie & Me (23 page)

Tut finger-stroked his chin. “Was she out of your sight up there?”

“Hell, yes, for an hour or so while she prowled several caves until she found the one where she said she and her husband had made love in almost fifty years ago. I had driven the last six hundred mile-leg of our trip into California, so I took a nap in the car. I was too pooped to have a flaming desire to see a cave where a dead dude had humped her before I was born. But, what's the diff? Like I told you, Tut, she brought that briefcase into the suite.”

They shook hands to bind their deal, then he walked her to the penthouse private elevator. She pecked his cheek before stepping into the elevator, and he turned away with his face aglow with easy, big, fast-buck excitement.

At seven forty-five that evening, Lela placed the receipt for the dummy briefcase in the hotel safe faceup on a dresser top before she and Cassandra left for the movie. At eight fifteen, Tut and Skeeter used the dupe key to enter the target suite. They searched the suite, Lela's bags, even Cassandra's, and even beneath Lela's and Cassandra's clothes hanging in the walk-in closet. Every aperture of the suite was checked out with a flashlight.

After an hour and a half of reach-and-stoop sweaty labor, mostly Tut's, Tut panted, “Skeeter, that briefcase ain't in this suite.”

Skeeter looked at pimp Tut dripping sweat and struggled mightily to keep a straight face as he said, “Naw, man, ain't no way it's here. Guess, like you said, if it ain't here, it's gotta be stashed somewhere underneath the old broad's ride.”

Tut heaved a sigh. “Yeah, we'll check out the ride in the parking lot this morning. Let's get the fuck outta here for a blow of frost and a bath. I don't see how square chumps can hump eight hours a day on a gig.”

Skeeter said, “Let's mop this sweat off our faces before we hit the hallway,” moving toward a box of tissues on a dresser top next to the briefcase receipt.

An eight by ten framed likeness of Lela in her old crone disguise stared myopically through heavy bifocals at Skeeter from the dresser top.

“Well, I'll be John Wayne's bastard brother!” Skeeter exclaimed as he picked up the receipt, passing it to Tut with con flabbergast twisting his awful face.

“Personal papers, her grey ass. That old bitch is leery of Cassandra! She sneaked that bread into that fucking hotel safe!” Tut exclaimed as he carefully returned it to its original spot on the dresser top.

Skeeter drawled, “Well, player, guess you gonna have to hit the old bitch with your game to cop that bread. Right?”

Tut glared at Lela's picture, “Yeah, it's gonna thrill the piss outta me to play a bitch older than bedbugs.”

Skeeter perversely gave him a jarring fist in the shoulder, goading, “Cheer up, player! Maybe you won't have to suck her pussy to take off the sting,” as they eased out of the suite.

At midnight, Cassandra called Tut to whisper that she had discovered the receipt for the briefcase atop Maggie's lingerie when she mistakenly opened Maggie's dresser drawer instead of her own while dressing for the trip to the movie. She explained to Tut that she had placed the receipt on the dresser top just before leaving the suite with the hope that he would spot it before he made an unnecessary search for the briefcase. Before she hung up she told Tut she sneaked the receipt back into Maggie's drawer when they returned from the movie.

At nine in the morning, she called Tut to report that Maggie had reclaimed the briefcase after hearing a TV news report of how bandits in Seattle had invaded a hotel and cleaned out the guests' valuables from the vault after forcing the manager to open it at gunpoint.

Then, at ten thirty, she breathlessly called Tut to report that she
was calling from a hardware store where freaked-out Maggie had sent her to purchase a strongbox, shovel, and heavy-gauge plastic.

Immediately after the call, Tut turned to Skeeter seated beside him on the living-room sofa. “This is it, Skeeter! Cannon-ass it down to that hardware store down the block and cop a shovel!”

Ten minutes later, Tut and Skeeter, blue-jeaned and booted, sat in the hotel parking lot in Tut's gold Rolls. Fifteen minutes later they watched Cassandra carrying a bulky package and a shovel with its scoop wrapped in brown paper, and stooped Lela, clutching a briefcase, enter her scarlet Mercedes. Chauffeur Skeeter tailed the Mercedes when Cassandra drove from the parking lot into sparse traffic.

Later, inside the Mercedes as Cassandra drove into the mountainous Big Bear area, Lela broke a long silence. “This used to be our favorite vacation spot when Marc was alive. It's beautiful, isn't it, Cass?”

“Very, Lela. Well, we are almost there where we . . .” Cassandra said as she glanced at the reflection of the Rolls in the rearview mirror, a half mile behind as she turned the Mercedes off the deserted highway to ascend a very steep mountain toward its heavily forested pinnacle.

“Yes, Cass, and now that we are only minutes away from doing it, I'm not thrilled a bit. In fact, in a way, I wish that fate had never put us in this position. I almost wish we didn't have to do it!” Then she heaved a heavy sigh and said bitterly, “But then, I remember my baby in that casket . . . and I know for her and the safety of other young women that monster must die!”

Minutes later inside the Rolls, several hundred yards from the mountaintop, Skeeter said, “They've stopped up there!”

Tut answered, “Yeah, to bury that bread. I was wrong about the old broad being leery of that young bitch.”

Skeeter said, “The old lady must really have her nose wide open for Cassandra to take her along to deep-six a load of bread like that . . . unless the old broad is senile.”

Before Skeeter could say it, Tut said, “Drive the ride into cover.
We'll have to hike it from here to eyeball the spot where they bury that bread.”

Skeeter slowed the car as it approached a crooked sign that read Picnic Area. He pulled the Rolls, as Tut instructed, off the road onto a narrow dirt road. Driving through a thick stand of trees to a mossy clearing containing several oaken tables for picnickers, Skeeter U-turned the Rolls to face the main road visible a hundred yards away. They got out and moved through heavy brush toward the summit of the mountain, halting and staring at the gaping mouth of a cave fifty yards away.

A half hour later they peered through heavy brush at Lela and Cassandra leaving the cave empty-handed except for the shovel. A cabin sat a hundred yards above the cave.

That must be the cabin where the old broad honeymooned, Tut told himself. They watched as Cassandra pulled the Mercedes away down the road toward the flatlands.

“Let's go!” Tut exclaimed as he turned and led Skeeter back toward the Rolls.

As they reached the picnic clearing, Lela and Cassandra, armed with the shovel, stepped from the cover of thick brush at the clearing perimeter, several yards behind Tut. He whirled and recoiled in shock from Lela's mint image of Toni stripped of gray wig and heavy bifocals, leveling an automatic at his chest. At the same instant, Skeeter pulled a length of iron pipe from his boot.

“Yes, you dirty cocksucker, I'm Toni's mama!” Lela intoned with a hideous face as Tut turned to flee.

Skeeter smashed the pipe against the side of his head, and as Tut stumbled past Cassandra toward the brush, she chopped a long, deep gash into his throat with a violent swing of the shovel. Tut collapsed on his knees. As Lela went to stand over him she fired several rapid shots into the back of his head and Tut fell dead on his back.

The trio dragged him to the Rolls, put his corpse on the front seat. Then they got in with Skeeter behind the wheel, and he drove
to park the Rolls and set the emergency brake near the inclined edge of a thousand foot cliff near the parked Mercedes. After they got out, Skeeter retrieved a five-gallon can of gasoline from the trunk of the Mercedes, saturating Tut's body and the Rolls's interior with the gasoline. He leaned in, released the emergency brake, and scampered away from the car.

As the death car rolled toward the abyss, Lela fired into the gas tank. The Rolls exploded in a ball of fire as it tumbled off the cliff. Then the trio hurried to the Mercedes, and Lela sprinted it away down the mountain toward the flatlands.

At that instant, bathrobed Marcus flipped breakfast pancakes in the Leseur kitchen, then sat down at the breakfast nook table to wolf down the flapjacks. Finished, he was about to rise when he froze, seeing Pat in a pink bikini moving through the unusually hot and humid sun-dazzled air toward the open kitchen door.

“Hey, baby, I just copped some dynamite smoke!” she said as she entered the kitchen. She slid her pulse-hammering curves against him at the table, extracting a fat joint from the satiny lair of her wipe-out breasts.

“Pat, you ain't got no business here,” he said raggedly as she tongued his ear and darted her hand beneath his robe to finger-stroke his obese womb sweeper quickening to the perpendicular despite his sincere promise to Lela to cut Pat loose.

“I ain't gonna stay, baby. I just wanted to share this bad shit with you,” she crooned as she lit the bomber with a lighter from her awesome valley of rut.

She drew deeply, with slumberous eyes, before she placed the angel dust brain-bomber between his lips. Then he drew on it deeply, and they passed the joint between them until it roached.

“Whew!” he blew as he stripped off his robe.

“Ain't it some bad shit, baby? It's spiked with angel dust,” she slurred as she dropped her head to his naked lap, massaging her cheek against his crotch thicket.

“Don't know . . . This shit has got me on fire!” he gasped as he savagely jerked her head up by her hair to stare malevolently into her eyes.

“Baby, please don't look at me like that!” she bleated as she tore at his hand to free her hair.

He saw her face transpose hideously. Then he stood and lifted her by her hair to her feet as she shrieked in pain and raked bloody rills down his face with her fingernails. He hoisted her over his head and hurled her against the wall where she lay stunned in a sitting position, moaning.

He galloped nude from the kitchen through the house and out the front door into the quiet street, gabbling like a Holy Roller possessed by the Holy Ghost and the Divine Fire. He bowled over an elderly black man who had known him since birth when the man tried to block his way on the sidewalk in front of the Leseur house. Marcus raced to the crowded street of a business district a block away where he stopped to seize a parking meter. He bent it backward and forward to loosen it at its base before he wrenched it from its foundation.

Pedestrians screamed and scattered in his wake like sheep before a panther as he shattered shop windows with the parking meter for two blocks before a police car blocked his way at an intersection. He clubbed the cruiser windshield to smithereens before the pair of cops leaped to the street and leveled pistols on him.

“Put your hands over your head!” one of them commanded as they leveled their guns on him from behind the cruiser.

Marcus charged them with a snarl, and they emptied their guns into his head and chest. Lela's “I'll cash in my chips if anything happened to him . . .” child fell riddled, encrimsoned into the street. Dead.

S
he lay beside me in the late March night, naked and crying bitterly into her pillow. The bellow of a giant truck barreling down State Street in Chicago's far Southside almost drowned out her voice as she sobbed, “What's wrong with me, Otis? Why is it so hard for you to make love to me? Am I too fat? Do you love someone else? Yes, I guess that's it. And that's why you haven't married me. This is 1968. We've been sleeping together for a whole year. I wasn't brought up like that. Let's get married. Please make me Mrs. Tilson. I hope you're not stalling because I married twice before.”

I just lay there squeezing the limp flesh between my sweaty thighs and feeling desperate helplessness and panic.

I danced my fingertips down her spine and whispered tenderly into her ear, “Dorcas, there's no one else. I think I've loved you since we were very young. I just have to stop drinking so much. Maybe we'll get married soon. Now, let's try it again.”

She turned over slowly and lay on her back in a blue patch of moonlight. Her enormous black eyes were luminous in the strong ebony face. Desperately I set my imagination free and gazed at her tits, jerking like monstrous male organs in climax.

I felt an electric spark quicken my limpness. Frantically I closed my eyes and gnawed and sucked at the heaving humps. Her outcries of joyful pain pumped rigid readiness into me.

She pinched it. She moaned and held herself open.

She screamed, “Please! Please, fuck me before it falls again.”

I lunged into her and seized her thighs to hold them back. But as I touched her fat softness I felt myself collapsing inside her.

I was terrified. So I thought about Mike and the crazy excitement I had felt long ago when I pressed my face against his hard hairy belly. Then in the magic of imagination, instead of Dorcas it was the beautiful heartbreaker Mike that I smashed into.

Later, I lay and watched Dorcas sleeping. Except for added weight and faint stress lines etched into the satin skin, she looked the same as she had on that enchanted spring day when I first met her twenty years before.

What a chump I had been then to dream that the daughter of a big shot mortician could really be mine.

Mama had warned me then, “Sweet Pea, a slum fellow like you don't have a chance with a girl like that. Her father will see to it. If anyone despises poor niggers more than white folks, it's high class niggers like him.”

Mama had been right. He had helped to marry her off and broken my heart. The prejudiced bastard was dead now.

By sheer chance I had run into Dorcas a week after his death. She was a trained mortician, but she was lonely and needed help.