I dropped Sondra off at the St. Regis and parked my car in a nearby garage. Then I walked over to 666 Fifth Avenue, where the commissioner had scheduled a meeting to brief his task force on Project Big Silver Birch, or whatever you wish to call it.
When I walked into the commissioner’s office I got my big surprise of the day. There were Mickey MacGuire, Dennis Whittie, Arnie Fried, Red Lipsett, Monty Babbidge, Bo Bowen—10 or 12 retired basketball stars who had faded into obscurity so fast you’d have thought they’d been dropped collectively into the sea. “Je-sus, it’s Old-Timers Day!” I whooped, shaking their hands. “I thought you guys had all gone on to the big postgame show in the sky.”
The commissioner smiled. “This is what I call my shadow government, Dave. We keep them on retainer for special, discreet assignments.”
“Only half of us is shadows,” said Monty Babbidge. “The rest is honkies.”
We reminisced for a few minutes until Stanley Vreel arrived, looking pale and tense. Then the commissioner called for order. “The purpose of this meeting is to devise a strategy for tomorrow’s operation,” he said. “Dave Bolt has just returned from the area where the money is to be dropped, and he’ll brief you on the layout.”
I stood and looked bleakly at the commissioner. “Well sir, after I tell you what happened today, you may want to call the whole thing off.”
He bit his lip. “What happened?”
“I was followed, that’s what.”
“By whom?”
“I didn’t see him, but I think we can assume it was one of the kidnappers.” I told them about the car that had followed me. “Unless I miss my guess, Mr. Vreel should be getting a call saying the deal is off. They know I’ve been scouting the location. They’d have to be pretty dumb not to know why.”
The commissioner lowered himself wearily into his big chair and looked around the room with lifeless eyes. “Any bright ideas?”
Vreel waved his cigar. “Aren’t we jumping to conclusions?” He looked at me. “Bolt, you say you pulled off Route 22 and this green car behind you pulled off too. Then you continued on to Macedonia, but you have no idea whether that green car was still tailing you. Then you’re in the woods and you hear a car pull up near the campsite. You look through the deep woods and you think you see a green car. The car takes off before you can get a good look at it or even see for sure what color it is. Now, I’ll admit that looks suspicious, but for all we know the whole thing was a coincidence. So I think that unless we hear from the kidnappers, we ought to go through with our plan.”
The ensuing comments indicated general concurrence with Vreel’s view, and I had to admit it made sense. Up to a point. I said, “Mr. Vreel has made a good case that perhaps I misconstrued the whole thing. It may be that I’m just extra jumpy these days.”
I asked everybody to gather around the map I’d marked off and we assigned stakeout spots to each man. Then Bo Bowen, the electronics expert, demonstrated this transponder gadget, a little black box designed to pick up impulses transmitted by a bleeper concealed with the money. He opened a carton and distributed one to each man, showing us how to set it at the proper frequency. Then we went into the strategy part, and hashed out every contingency until we were as well rehearsed as the cast of a Broadway musical. The commissioner then broke out the booze. I went into Connie’s office and made photocopies of the map.
When I returned, Dennis Whittie took me by the elbow. Dennis, a wiry tall black dude, had been a ferocious backcourt scrapper for the Virginia Squires until he dislocated his hip in a collision with Al Fields of the New York Nets in a playoff game a couple of years ago. The last I’d heard, Dennis was working in a clothing store in Miami. “Aren’t you curious about Mr. and Mrs. Sadler?” he said.
“Christ, I forgot all about them! Did you follow them?”
“I followed him, Lipsett followed her. You want a rundown?”
“Is it interesting?”
“Depends on what you mean by interesting.”
He took out a note pad and read from it. “At 11:15 AM Mrs. Sadler appeared in the lobby of the St. Regis and Red followed her out. Her first stop was Bonwit Teller, Fifth Avenue and 56th Street. She went to the Lingerie department and bought a blue nylon peignoir. Then she went to Bergdorf Goodman, Fifth Avenue and—”
“Okay, okay. Is that all she did, go to department stores?”
“She went to the Russian Tea Room for lunch and had blinis. Afterward she went to the powder room and made wee wee.”
“Red saw her making wee wee?” I said with a straight face.
For a second Dennis thought I was serious, then he laughed. “Anyway, that’s all she did, shop.”
“Well, there’s nothing criminal about that.”
“If my wife spent money the way that lady did, I’d call it criminal,” Dennis remarked.
“You followed Davis Sadler?”
“Yeah, and that’s what I’d call interesting. He came down around noon and had lunch in the hotel. Then he split, walking east to Lexington Avenue. He went past 58th, walked to 59th, then doubled back past 58th, like he was scouting something out. He kept looking behind him, too. Finally, he took another crack at 58th, but this time he turned up it.”
“Where’d he go?”
Dennis gave a kind of congested chuckle. “Into a rap parlor.”
“A what?”
“A rap parlor. They’ve taken the place of massage parlors. The cops busted massage parlors like crazy about six months ago, after Mayor Beame’s wife got indignant. So everybody cooled it for a few weeks, then reopened as rap parlors. Now instead of going in for a massage, you go in for a rap. You pick out a chick, go into a private room with her, get undressed, and talk.”
“Just talk?”
He shrugged. “The girls are good talkers. After a few minutes of rap the customers want to go to bed with them. It would appear that while his wife’s out shopping, Davis Sadler’s out wenching.”
I turned this revelation over in my mind. “It sounds like the logical thing a visiting fireman from the Midwest would do, especially if he’s married to a woman like the one Sadler is married to. Except that I’m not sure Sadler is the kind of man to cheat on his wife.”
“You mean there’s another kind of man?” Dennis said.
“True. But do you think a man would go alley-catting around at a time like this, when his son...?”
Dennis pondered. “Life goes on, Dave. Whatever a man’s troubles, he still got to dip his wick.”
“You’re probably right,” I said, but a doubt lingered. I’d started to walk away when a very wild notion came into my head. “Hey, Dennis?”
“Yo?”
“Suppose Sadler doesn’t go to this rap parlor to get laid.”
“You think he actually goes there to rap?” He issued that strangulated chuckle again. “He’d be the first man in history.”
“No, I was thinking maybe he’s got Richie there.”
“You’re out of your gourd.”
“Probably, but—you got any plans this evening?”
Dennis backed away, gesticulating wildly. “No, but my wife does. She has this plan not to cut my balls off with a carving knife as long as I remain faithful to her.”
“Aw, Dennis, come on, you don’t have to actually do anything. We’ll just have a look around and maybe—well, rap with the chicks a little, that’s all.”
He shook his head and glowered at me. Then a subtle smile spread across his face. “Mmm—it is in the line of duty, after all.”
“Right on.”
The meeting broke up and Dennis and I walked out into a hazy spring night that glowed purple in the glare of the city’s lights. Occasionally the sky crackled blue with heat lightning, but it didn’t feel like rain. I remembered the morning’s downpour but it seemed like month ago, and I suddenly felt incredibly tired. I also realized I hadn’t eaten for about 12 hours.
“Do you mind if we stop for a quick bite?” I said.
“There’ll be plenty to eat where we’re going,” Dennis smirked.
“Yeah, but I meant food.”
We stopped at a stand-up pizza joint on Lexington. I had two squares of Sicilian and a grape drink. “You know how I think we ought to work this?” I said between munches.
“Mff?” Dennis had a slice of the regular with sausage and peppers jammed into his cheek.
“I think we ought to say we’re cops.”
“Mff,” Dennis shrugged, which I took to be agreement.
I felt a little less light-headed as we walked up Lexington to 58th Street and turned left. About halfway up the block, next to a movie theater, was a doorway with a hand-printed sign advertising the “Communal Encounter Rap Parlor.” We squeezed through a long line of kids waiting to see a new Truffaut movie, and some of them snickered as we entered the doorway.
We trudged up the stairs, following the arrows. We passed a pink-faced traveling-salesman type on the way down, who slid past us with averted eyes, and came to a landing with a bright red door that was partially open. We entered a small, garishly decorated anteroom with rust-colored walls hung with challis-patterned velvet. The ceiling was draped in brown satin. The sofa, unoccupied, was upholstered in brown plush, and the floor was covered with a soft ocher carpet with a phony Persian design.
Facing us was a white desk of simple stamped plastic. The girl behind it was anything but plastic, however. She was a willowy, walnut-colored chick whose furry natural constituted the bulk of her attire. The rest was a satin bikini filled with big breasts and wide hips. Her smile flashed promises all over the place.
“Hi,” she said, “I’m Melanie. Can I help you?”
Gazing at the nubs of her nipples outlined against the flimsy fabric of her bikini top, it was hard to remember what we there for, but I assumed a stern face, flashed my wallet, and said, “I’m Mr. Bolt and this is Mr. Whittie. FBI.”
I was counting on her not looking at the wallet, since the card I was flashing was my season pass to the Jet’s games. She didn’t even glance at it, but twisted her lips and said, “I’ll get the manager.”
She went into a curtained room behind her and emerged a minute later with an extremely wide gent wearing a Hawaiian shirt, a chestful of amulets and sharks’ teeth and ivory hands with various fingers extended—and a scowl. His hair was plastered back in a kind of duck’s-ass pompadour. He looked like he should have been a Steak-’n’-Shake carhop twenty years ago.
“What’s this shit?” he growled. The friendly sort.
“It’s like the lady told you,” I said.
He looked us over. We were big enough, clean-cut enough, and looked dumb enough to be federal agents. “My dues are paid up,” he said, which I took to be a reference to the local police.
“This is federal business,” I said.
“Meaning what?”
“I said it was federal business, porky, not your business.’’
He smiled a sordid little smile. “Look, boys, if it’s just a little nooky you want, we do that all the time for our friends down at New York’s Finest.”
“We might take you up on that, pal, but right now we’ll be satisfied with a look around.”
“Help yourselves. Just don’t go busting into the rooms. I mean, at least wait till the customers are through.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Dennis said.
Porky inflated his chest and stepped in our path. “You got a warrant?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Dennis, show him the warrant.”
Dennis brought his knee up and caught the poor bastard in the cubes. I’d never heard a guy’s nuts crack before but so help me, that’s the sound they made. Porky made this pathetic braying sound as he sank to his knees. Dennis looked at me and shrugged apologetically, then dragged Porky, still trumpeting like a ruptured bull elephant, into his office, yanked the phone out of the wall and tied him up with the phone cord.
I looked at him admiringly. “Christ, where’d you learn that?”
“Mostly playing against the Kentucky Colonels,” he said. “Never could get to the playoffs any other way.”
Nub-nippled Melanie was standing against the wall with her fist in her mouth, and several hennaed female heads were poking through a gap in a curtain to our right. “What’s this, a bust?” one of them chirped.
I walked over to her and poked her in the tit. “No, this is a bust, sugar. How much do you charge to rap?”
She was a frizzy-haired broad, plump and blotchy-skinned and distinctly not my type. She looked at Melanie, then back at me. “Twenty-five dollars for 15 minutes. You want to rap longer, it’s another twenty-five for every quarter-hour or part thereof.”
“Is there a mileage charge, too, sister?” Dennis asked Melanie.
The fear started to drain from Melanie’s face and she looked Dennis over as a potential rapper. “It depends on how far you want to go. You want to ride around the world, you can’t get out of here for less than a yard.”
“Look,” I said, reaching for my billfold, “we’re looking for someone. Let us stick our heads in the doors and we’ll pay you for your trouble.”
“And if I don’t?” Melanie said resigned to the inevitable.
“Then we’ll huff and we’ll puff,” I said. I laid a hundred dollars on her palm and gestured to Dennis to do the same.
“Come with me,” she said. The girls crowding around the curtain backed away and retreated into a kind of parlor. They were all scantily clad and most of them were awful, ranging from plucked chicken types to over inflated pool-float replicas.
“I seen better in Amarillo, and that’s a vile town,” I said to, Dennis.
“You see who you’re looking for?” Melanie asked.
“We’re not looking for a woman,” I said.
She squinted at me. “We don’t run that kind of place.”
“Just show us the rooms,” I said.
We passed through a door at the back of the parlor and stepped into a narrow corridor lined with corrugated vinyl doors with latches on them. We paused at the first door. I’ve done a few weird things in my life, but this came close to copping the giant-sized fruit cake. We listened and heard low muttering sounds. I took a deep breath, shrugged, flipped the latch and looked in.
It was a windowless room, maybe 8 by 10, painted canary yellow and lit by a dim floor lamp in one corner. It had a tiny alcove with a toilet and sink. The air was pungent with the cloying aroma of grass, plus a smell nowhere as agreeable.
Against the far wall there was a bed occupied by a young naked couple sitting facing each other in the lotus position. Their hair was equally long and their chests equally flat, and for a moment it was hard to say which was male and which female. It didn’t matter, except academically. What did matter was that neither was Richie Sadler. “Oops!” I said, backing out. “Sorry, kids. Thought this was my room.” They looked at me through bleary eyes.
I slid the door closed and glared at Melanie. “What the hell kind of rap parlor is this, anyway? Those people were rapping.”
She smiled. “Maybe you’ll have better luck in here.” She gestured at the next door.
It sounded that way. A baritone voice was grunting something that came out, “Yumm, yumm, yumm.” Melanie drew the door back herself, and if we’d been perverts we’d sure have been in luck. In the darkness it was almost impossible to sort out what we were looking at, for there seemed to be arms where the legs should have been, and vice versa. Then I realized we were looking at what the Elizabethans called The Beast With Two Backs. It also had two heads, one at each end.
Melanie boldly switched on the light and two figures disengaged with one mighty frightened leap. The man, a pink little shrimp, was definitely not Richie. The girl, a flabby number with pendulous boobs, hissed, “Get out of here, you cocksuckers.”
We apologized and retreated in confusion. Then I got sore and whipped open the corrugated door again. “Listen, sweetheart, you’re not really one to call somebody else a cocksucker.”
Dennis yanked me back and hauled me down to the next room. “Your turn,” I told him.
He wrinkled his face. “If Krafft-Ebing could see me now,” he sighed, sliding the door open. I looked over his shoulder and for a second I thought we’d struck pay dirt. A long, sandy-haired youth was astride a redhead, the prettiest gal I’d seen so far in this chamber of horrors. In the frail light, her lover could have been Richie. His head darted around and he stopped in mid-stroke. It wasn’t Richie.
The girl looked at him. “What’s the matter?”
“There’s someone here.” She stared at us. “You cops?”
“Uh uh,” Dennis said. “Just walked into the wrong room. Don’t mind us, folks.”
She shrugged. “Stick around and watch if you want to.” She gazed up at her john. “Finish me,” she sighed, squirming beneath him.
He looked uncomfortably in our direction. “I’ve never done it in front of anybody.”
“Forget about them. Just fuck me.” She grabbed his ass and pulled him down hard on top of her. For a few moments he was torn between private pleasure and public exposure, but the girl reached around and tickled his balls and helped him make up his mind. Soon he was banging away at her like a lumberman who’s just had his tot of rum. He was hung with one fine big rammer, and though they say hookers aren’t supposed to feel anything, her heavy panting sounded pretty authentic to me. Dennis began to back out, but I edged him back into the room. “I’m really enjoying this,” I whispered.
It lasted another minute or so, his long strokes quickening and the couple’s sighs and murmurs and grunts and groans rising in volume until it sounded like Marshall, Paige, Larsen and Eller working out on the blocking sleds. To tell the truth, though I’ve done as much balling as the next dude, I’d never watched anyone else that close up, except in fraternity skin flicks. I was amazed, for instance, that anyone with a tool that long could work it so damned fast. He finally came with a long wolf-like howl, and if she was faking her orgasm, she should soon replace Helen Hayes as First Lady of the Theater. Her body virtually lifted all two hundred pounds of this cat off the bed, her eyes rolled, her breasts heaved and her tongue rolled around her lips. She said things to him that I haven’t heard since boot camp, and after another frantic minute or two of post-coital wriggling, he collapsed heavily on top of her.
She turned to us, panting in flute-like wheezes. “How was that, boys?”
“If he has a hook shot, sign him,” Dennis said as we backed out and slid the door shut.
I won’t detail the rest of our tour. Suffice it to say it was your standard rap-parlor survey, a lot of people running through the basic 15-minute rap and a few taking overtime with some interesting variations. The long and short of it was that Richie was not there, and Richie’s father apparently went there for the very best of reasons—to get fucked and sucked like any other red-blooded butter-and-egg man.
All that bearing witness had instilled a strong desire in Dennis and me to try the merchandise ourselves. Dennis asked Melanie herself, who by this time had warmed considerably to his cool line of jive and went willingly to room No. 3 for a roll in the kip with him. I didn’t see anybody who really turned me on, but I finally settled for a doe-eyed teen-ager who hadn’t quite yet acquired the hard gloss of a mature hooker, though in all other respects she was thoroughly professional. She was also an excellent judge, telling me I was the very best she’d ever gone to bed with, oh yes indeed.