Prudence Couldn't Swim (21 page)

Half an hour later when he left Cephas gave Tarisai $800 to buy a “few things” for his daughter.

It would be almost a year before Cephas would see his daughter again. By that time Tarisai had a new job and had moved out of Dorcas's apartment to her own place. Her life goals had changed as well. She was solidly on the road to becoming an avenue girl.

Y
ou couldn't call George Tsiropoulos Oakland's premier lawyer. He alternated between flashes of brilliance and alcoholic binges. But he was affordable and wouldn't sell me out for another client with deeper pockets. I'd used George before. He saved me from ten years in the Feds back in the day. He stood his ground and got the prosecutor down to thirty months. He was no dump truck.

I hadn't seen George in a while and time hadn't served him well. His once slightly pudgy body had matured into full-fledged obesity. He labored to breathe and multiplying chins were putting serious pressure on the top button of his shirt.

His office furniture was in a similar state. The nicks at the corner of his veneer desk were starting to shred and the fabric on his client armchair had dwindled down to a few threads. Probably wouldn't even qualify for the Goodwill show room.

“We have to wait for discovery before we know what they have on you,” he said. “Right now the DA's talking five years, one year for each count of trafficking. I could probably get him down to two or three if you want to deal.”

“I need to know what they have,” I said. “There's something fishy. What are these five counts all about?” I explained the complications with Jeffcoat. I left out the details about Olga, just said that Red Eye grabbed him and threatened him with an iron.

“What planet are you guys living on? You're lucky not to be looking at kidnapping,” he said. “This isn't the Oakland of the 1970s anymore. There's a new sheriff in town.”

“I still don't like it,” I said. “See what you can find out.”

Tsiropoulos phoned the next day.

“You know an Olga something?” he asked. “Russian sounding name, like that tennis player, the big blonde.”

“Yeah.”

“She rolled on you.”

“What'd she tell them?”

“Don't know yet. She got caught in an immigration raid. Some strip club. I'll keep pushing for more info. I've got a friend in the DA's office.”

I told him I had a few more things to explain, things that wouldn't go down well on the phone.

He got the point. That afternoon I unloaded all the all the gory details about our night with Olga and Jeffcoat at Jimmy the Geek's. George wasn't happy.

“How can I defend you if you don't give me all the facts?” he asked. “Jesus, you think I'm going to snitch?”

I spent five minutes massaging his ego, assuring him that I trusted him completely, that omitting the information about Olga was just another one of our “random bad decisions.”

“Red Eye and me, bad decisions are us.”

Tsiropoulos didn't crack a smile but he was simpatico. He could always find a way to forgive. Fuckups like me and Red Eye made his life interesting.

“It doesn't look good,” he said. He was right. If Olga told them about our session with Jeffcoat, it was curtains. She'd be a witness to a kidnapping. With her and Jeffcoat on the stand, we'd be toast. She'd probably even wear a discretion-inspired outfit in the witness box.

I was still gambling that Jeffcoat wouldn't want to pursue it but the balance was shifting. He had the option of moving from adulterer to kidnap victim. We could only hope that the Peter Margolis card could hold him at bay. But something else about this was smelling rotten. When I showed up at Jeffcoat's office with the lottery story, I got a strange visit from Carter and partner the next day. Now this. Too much coincidence.

I phoned Red Eye on his cell. For once he picked up. He told me he'd be staying with a friend for a while. I didn't ask who.

“Olga rolled on me,” I said. “If she spills her guts, you might want to think about that vacation in Brazil or Belize.” I avoided spelling out the
whole list of countries that didn't extradite to the United States over the phone. Red Eye would get the idea.

I told him we had to meet. He said he wasn't sure he could fit it in.

“I'm trying to get in the zone,” he said. “The Greeley is this afternoon.” Amidst all this, Red Eye was worrying about a hot dog-eating contest. Of course, this wasn't just any old hot dog-eating contest. This was the Greeley. He'd been thinking about it ever since last year when he suffered a “reversal,” as they call them at the forty-dog mark, and lost his title. He was hungry for revenge.

“You might be sitting in some county jail somewhere by then,” I said, “if we don't get this straightened out.”

He caved in and we agreed to meet later at what we still called DeFremery Park. They'd renamed it after Bobby Hutton, some Black Panther kid who got killed by the police in the 1960s. Oakland just couldn't leave well enough alone.

Once the word “kidnap,” stopped bouncing around my head like a beach ball in the wind, I looked more closely at the facts. If they had me for a kidnap, they wouldn't have granted bail, at least not for anything less than a million. Also, they'd have been looking for Red Eye, pressuring me to tell them where he was. And they would have torn my place apart.

Olga probably just told them I got her the drivers' license. But there was one thing about snitches—once they started telling, they usually ended up revealing the whole story, adding a few embellishments for good measure. They might protect their mother or child, maybe even a lifelong friend, but forgers and financial backers for small scale shopping sprees were definitely expendable. Olga had entered a complicated game. A good cop would have that sixth sense to know when she was holding back. They'd keep pressuring her. If she had to tell each and every detail to avoid that flight back to Belarus, she'd let it all hang out in less time than it took her to get Jeffcoat's dick hard. But maybe that wasn't the game here at all. If Jeffcoat was working with the cops, this was just a plan to get us out of the way. Still, if that was the game, how was Jeffcoat dumb enough to think we wouldn't rat on him about Peter Margolis? I needed to talk to Red Eye.

DeFremery Park, or Bobby Hutton Park or whatever you want to
call it, was a bad choice. I'd played baseball there but that was thirty years earlier. It had been reincarnated as a drug-dealing haven. Red Eye and I would also probably be the only white faces there, not an ideal way to conduct a secret meeting.

As it turned out, I was wrong about being the only white faces. The place was crawling with undercover cops of all colors, sizes, and shapes. They must have been expecting a big bust.

Red Eye looked agitated.

“I was trying to focus today,” he said, “to visualize that fiftieth dog going down the hatch.” He was wearing his Greeley contest T-shirt from the year before. The drawing on the front showed a huge set of teeth devouring a frightened hot dog. Drops of ketchup, mustard, and pieces of relish flew in every direction.

“I wouldn't have bothered you if it wasn't important,” I said trying to keep my cool. I didn't understand how he could be thinking of stuffing hot dogs down his gullet with a nice little trip to the pen on the table but that was Red Eye.

“It's not rocket science to figure out where this will end up” he said.

“And they probably don't have hot dog-eating contests in Belize,” I said.

“Maybe it's time to make amends with Jeffcoat,” he said.

“What should we do, send flowers and a sympathy card? Tell him our thoughts are with him in his hour of grief. All we've done is kidnap him, terrorize him with a steam iron, and vow to send some tapes of him banging Prudence to his wife. Oh yes, and accuse him of murder and threaten to tear down his business with our little list of names.”

“Don't trip,” said Red Eye.

“One of us better trip” I said. “A kidnap charge can get you the lethal injection.” The seriousness of the matter wasn't registering. He was staring off into space.

“And I thought this was going to be my year,” he said.

“Your year?”

“Yeah, that fat Irishman who won last year's Greeley got stomach cancer. He's out of the running. He was a hell of an eater.”

“Have you thought about leaving the country?” I asked. “How does Brazil sound? Beautiful beaches, even more beautiful women.”

“Won't help, homeboy. If they want you these days, they go and get you. The law doesn't matter anymore. Besides, I don't speak Spanish.”

“Portuguese.”

“Whatever. Still a foreign language. I only speekee dee English,” he said, “and you know what?”

“What?”

“I've never been on a plane. Don't even like going up ladders. Does Greyhound go to Brazil?”

I wished weeping was my style. This was a perfect moment for uncontrolled sobs. Instead, we stood there for a long time behind a couple of trees in the park that were supposed to provide shade for the swings and the jungle gyms. What a waste. The swings were broken, and the jungle gym looked like someone had ripped out parts for scrap metal, probably to make shanks and machetes. A kid would be safer walking on a bed of nails than playing on that thing. Anyway, the only child in sight was a toddler holding his mother's hand while she paced in a circle in front of the park waiting for her connection. She was so out of it, she didn't even notice the dozen or so undercover cops trying to blend in. But then who was I to talk? I'd chosen this park and hadn't run away when I saw all the heat.

I kept talking about options. Red Eye's fear of flying dissipated a little when I told him they spoke English in Belize. But my efforts to convince him to leave didn't really seem to be making headway. He was Raider Nation to the core. He'd never live anywhere else. Couldn't really. His runs for me to Mexico were the only time he'd ever been out of California.

As I pondered Red Eye's boundaries, I examined my own. Brazil, Portuguese or Spanish, didn't look too bad when I set it next to fifteen years in the penitentiary. Half the guys in the pen spoke languages I didn't understand anyway. And all that talk about federal pens being like resorts was as exaggerated as the length of the salmon that got away. Any prison is hell for me. I didn't want to go back, would probably rather shoot myself in the head than end up doing life.

I told Red Eye I was thinking about making a fake passport for myself, just in case. He looked a little surprised, like I might leave him behind. If I did, he'd have to ride the whole beef. I couldn't do that. I
offered to make him a passport as well, but he wasn't biting. Oakland held a magical mystery for him. He couldn't cut it loose.

When two cars stopped in front of the park and the white guys inside in the one-way sunglasses started looking our way, it was time to leave.

To my surprise, they didn't follow us. I guess they just wanted us out of their turf. We were happy to oblige. Neither me or Red Eye were going to Brazil, Belize, or anyplace else. I was as tied to Kenny Stabler, Al Davis, and Jack London Square as Red Eye. I just wasn't as quick to recognize it. Red Eye and I were bound together. We'd just have to find a smarter way than lottery schemes and steam irons to find out who killed Prudence. But for the moment our biggest problem was keeping our asses out of prison.

A
bout ten blocks from Bobby Hutton Park, we picked up a tail. An unmarked car followed us for six more blocks before we shook him at a red light. I jumped on the freeway and headed south for San Jose. Paranoia was setting in and it wasn't even nighttime. The Eagles' “Take It Easy” didn't calm my waters. I tried Tower of Power, the greatest group in my city's history. Even their best album,
Back to Oakland,
couldn't ease the stress.

I phoned Tsiropoulos on the cell and asked him if he had any news about warrants for me or Red Eye. Probably a stupid thing to ask over the phone. He didn't know anything. By the time that Tower of Power album finished we were on the outskirts of San Jose and had run through every option from catching the next flight to Guadalajara at the San Jose Airport to renting a car and driving to Oklahoma to lay low for a few weeks.

Then we started tripping on the cell phone. We both knew a mobile could be a tracking device. I'd heard that taking the battery out removed the tracking capacity but I never believed technological rumors. Red Eye had heard the same theory so he encouraged me to throw the phone away for “safekeeping.” I pulled into an AM/PM and told him to toss it in the dumpster out back. He followed my instructions after he set it on the pavement and stomped on it about twenty times with his boot. It's good to have thorough partners.

After the demise of the phone, we felt much better. An extra large coffee and a chili dog bolstered our spirits and sent us back toward Oakland. The Greeley might be Red Eye's last act as a free man but at least I'd try to get him his chance to bring home the gold. I had to hurry. I kept it at 85 all the way, darting from lane to lane like a runaway
rabbit. When the traffic slowed me down, I slid along the shoulder and prayed no cops were looking. With a replay of
Back to Oakland
to inspire, I couldn't lose. Like Red Eye always said, “When in doubt, put it to the floor.”

We pulled into the parking lot of the Oakland Coliseum with ten minutes to spare. A distant blue banner with the same logo as Red Eye's T-shirt gave us all the directions we needed.

“I shouldn't have eaten that chili dog,” he said. “It could make the difference between the gold and the silver.”

“Don't trip. You got it in the bag.”

This was my first Greeley, and the crowd was impressive, about five hundred hysterical gluttony lovers and several teams of TV cameras. The fans were a cross section of WWE supporters, Ultimate Fighting aficionados, and the normal inhabitants of the Black Hole. Not a highly sophisticated Oakland hills gathering where a barely audible burp could draw glances of derision. A solitary black security guard policed the crowd. The Raiders could have used him on their offensive line.