I got back to the office around 3 to find Trish in a rampaging tizzy. Her desk was a litter of undecipherable messages, unfiled folders, unopened mail, an uneaten sandwich, and an untouched cup of coffee. Her hair was uncombed, her clothes unkempt, and her temper unkept. She held the phone under her chin and was burrowing through the mess looking for a pen and something to write on. “Okay, got it!” she shouted, writing a message down on a paper napkin and slamming the phone down. The ink blotted into an oval blob.
She looked up and saw me. “Jesus, what a day you picked not to come to the office!”
“Anybody call?”
“Anybody? Everybody! The Pope, the Queen, Lee Duc Tho, the Messiah, they all called. I haven’t had a bite to eat and I couldn’t get to the post office and if I don’t pee this second there’s gonna be an accident.”
I brushed a wisp of hair out of her eyes. “All right, all right, calm down. Just tell me, did Vreel or the commissioner call?”
“No. They’re the only ones who didn’t call.”
“Okay, go pee.”
“It may be too late,” she said, scattering paper until she found the powder-room key.
She dashed out and I shuffled the papers around, separating telephone memo slips from the rest and examining them as they surfaced. There were a lot of them, mostly urgent ones from clients. I set them aside. They could wait. When a client calls you urgently, it means he needs an advance.
Three messages aroused my curiosity, all from nonclients. One was from Sondra Sadler, another from my best friend Roy Lescade, the New York Post sportswriter, and third was from my pal up in Harlem, Tatum Farmer. All were marked Urgent, and the one from Lescade said, typically, “Call me back or you die!”
I loved Roy better than a brother. He was a good old boy from Brownsville, Tex. He’d played for Texas A&M, linebacker; and every year for three years whenever the Aggies played the Longhorns we’d beat each other’s asses off. He was drafted by the Chicago Bears, but was essentially lazy and failed to make the cut. His daddy wanted him to run the ranch but Roy loved sports too much—and besides he’d discovered a hidden talent for writing. So he set out to be a sports reporter. He’d become one of the best, for my money, and one of the few I liked to read because he was honest. He boasts he makes up only 10 percent of what he writes, which is an incredible display of integrity.
He also cares, not just about sports and athletes but about people. He’s always going after the human-interest side of a story, and it was one such story, about a former Dallas Cowboy who’d dropped out of football after an injury and almost destroyed himself with drink, that led to the rescue of the author of this account. It was Roy who got me a job in the front office of the Cowboys, and Roy who suggested I had a good feel for the agency business. Shit, it was even Roy who suggested I ought to write down some of the things that have happened to me and try to get them published. So you can see how much I owe Roy Lescade.
I called him first, and slipped easily into my cowboy bag.
“You leave this message for me, you old turd?”
“Dave! Hiya, buddy!”
“What’s up?”
“I wanted to tell you the one about the Polack who’s making love to his girl friend?”
“The Polack who’s making love to his girl friend,” I repeated, searching my mind. “No, I don’t think I heard that one.”
“Well,” Roy said, chuckling, “she says to him, ‘Kiss me where it smells.’”
“Yeah?”
“So he drove her to Gary, Ind.” He broke into an explosive hissing giggle.
“Good one, Roy. What’d you call about?”
“Oh, I thought you might help me puzzle out a weird thing that’s going on. You know I been taking out Commissioner Lauritzen’s secretary, Connie?” Roy ended most sentences with a question mark.
“Sure I know. You took her away from me, remember, buddy-fucker?”
“Bullshit! You said you were through with her. Anyway, I was talking to her last night—uh, to tell the truth, I was bailing her ass off—and she told me there was some big kind of hassle concerning Richie?”
“No trouble, Roy,” I extemporized, silently cursing both of them. “A hitch came up, that’s all. We were dickering over some small print and the parties got a little sore at each other; it don’t amount to nothing more’n that.” I waited to see if Roy would buy it. If I knew him, he wouldn’t.
“Didn’t sound that way to me, but Connie refused to tell me anything more. I called Richie at his hotel? Got his sister, the one you were talking to at the party? Pretty little thing, she is.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said he’s ‘in seclusion.’ Dave, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“He’s got to bone up for his final exams, that’s all. Too many damn reporters hounding him, if you get what I mean.”
“That’s what she said, he’s studying. And what Vreel said, too.”
“You’ve spoken to Vreel?”
“Uh huh.”
“Busy little reporter, ain’t you?”
“Got to earn those Yankee dollars, buddy. I also had an interesting conversation with Tommy Brent?”
“Tommy Brent?” I frowned. Tommy was the owner of the St. Louis Gateways of the ABA.
“Yeah, he was bitching about being hit up for an extra assessment for Richie Sadler?”
“But Roy, all the owners...”
“This is a second assessment. Now, can I come over?”
“I don’t really have the time, Roy. Ever since Richie Sadler I been busier’n a sow with four tits and eight piglets.”
“That’s what I call a buddy.” He sighed. “All right, I guess I’ll just have to print my speculations.”
“What kind of speculations?”
“Oh, that the deal is about to fall through, maybe?”
That was what I’d hoped Roy would say, not because I wanted that printed but because it indicated he was still in the dark as to what the problem was with Richie. The best thing to do was to string him along.
“You sure are one smart sumbitch,” I said, trying to sound a little awestruck.
“Aw shit, Dave, it’s just that I’ve seen so many contracts tore up in my time, I can hear one ripping five miles away.”
I played him like a hooked fish. “Tell you what, Roy, you git your syph-ridden ass up here in half an hour, I’ll give you the poop—on the condition you don’t release it till I say go. Fair?”
“Fair.”
“And don’t breathe a word to nobody, hear?”
“Shucks, and I was just about to call Dick Young at the News.”
My next call was to the St. Regis Hotel. I asked for the Sadler suite and got Sondra.
“Any news?” she asked. She sounded terribly tired and strained.
“Not yet.”
“Nothing yet,” she repeated to her parents.
“What about you?” I asked. “You called, said it was urgent.”
She hung fire so long I thought we’d been cut off. “Well, yes.”
Something suddenly occurred to me. “Are you free to talk, Sondra?”
“Not really,” she said in a level voice.
“Are you all right?”
“Oh sure,” she singsonged.
“Are you free to come and go?” My heart was pumping hard. I wondered if someone was holding a gun to her head.
“Of course.”
“All right. Meet me at my apartment at 7. We’ll have dinner and talk.” I gave her the address.
“That’ll be fine.”
I hung up and scratched my head. Someone in the room with Sondra had inhibited her from speaking freely, yet she was free to come and go and didn’t seem overly uptight. Maybe she wanted to tell me something she didn’t want her parents to hear. I hearkened back to what had happened yesterday when I’d asked them if they could think of anything else that might be helpful. Sondra and her father had exchanged a funny look. I hadn’t thought anything of it then, but now I wondered if there was some skeleton in the family closet that was rattling the doorknob. I speculated on what it might be, but found my speculations drifting to another possible outcome of dinner with Sondra at my apartment. Had Trish not returned, grinning the grin of one who has found a blissful relief, it’s hard to say where my fantasies would have carried me.
Trish began cleaning up her desk but I didn’t want her around when Roy came by. Roy could charm the birds out of the trees. He’d already jollied enough out of Connie, Commissioner Lauritzen’s gal Friday, to jeopardize the secrecy of our situation. I felt Trish was made of sterner stuff than Connie, but I wasn’t about to put this hypothesis to the test. I pressed two dollars into her hand for a taxi and sent her home. She looked at the deuce and said, “Wow, boss. Ever since you took on Richie Sadler the money has been flowing like—silk.”
“If you think that’s small, wait till you see your severance pay,” I said holding the door open for her.
While I waited for Roy, I called Tatum Farmer. Tatum called me regularly with tips about interesting ballplayers coming up in Harlem, but this was the first time he’d said it was something urgent. I thought maybe he simply had an urgently interesting ballplayer coming up, but as soon as I heard his voice I knew something was seriously wrong.
“Dave? Aw, thanks for calling me back, Dave,” he said as if I’d just rescued him from the gallows. His voice was nasal and mournful and seemed to be fogged from crying.
“Jesus, what is it, Tatum?”
“Oh it’s bad, Dave. Bad, bad, bad.”
“Tell me, for Christ’s sake.”
“Timmie Lee, the kid we played with the other day?”
“Yeah?”
“They got him, Dave. They beat him up somethin’ terrible.” He started snuffling and I waited nervously. “They broke him up so bad he’ll never play basketball again. Fuck, the hospital says he may never even regain consciousness.”
“Who did it, Tatum? Who’s ‘They’?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I can guess.”
“Slakey?”
“That’s who I think.”
I lowered myself into my chair. “Tell me just what happened.”
I drummed the desk while he blew his nose and lit a cigarette. “You saw him that day, how he had his arm around Timmie and all that shit?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he been sweet-talkin’ Timmie the last couple of weeks, I mean, rushin’ him hard, you understand? Tryin’ to get him to sign an agreement, like an exclusive contract?”
“Why, those are worthless, Tatum. For one thing, the kid’s only a minor.”
“The kid don’t know that, and Slakey wouldn’t care anyway. Once he’s got a kid signed up, he’s got him locked.”
“Is that what happened?”
“Yes. Last week Timmie told me he was gonna ‘sign up’ with Slakey as soon as he could come up with the ‘consideration’ of five hundred bucks Slakey required. I think Timmie was thinking of hitting me up for that five, but I set him straight fast enough. I tried to talk him out of it. I tried to make him go see you and talk it over with you, but you know, some of these kids don’t trust The Man, you understand. Well, two days later he calls me and says, ‘Hey, Tatum, do you think Slakey’s jivin’ me?’ I says, ‘What do you mean, boy?’ He says, ‘Well, I come up with five bills Tuesday and today Slakey calls me and says I owe him another two hundred and fifty.’ I says, ‘What for?’ He says, ‘On account of Slakey says he talked to John Wooden of UCLA.’”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “What does one thing have to do with another?”
“Don’t you see?” Tatum said, sniffing. “John Wooden is the most famous coach in the country. Even the dumbest kid in Harlem knows who he is. What Slakey was saying was, for getting through to Wooden, he deserved kind of like a bonus.”
“What did you tell Timmie?”
“I told Timmie, ‘Boy, you been fucked over for fair. Get out of this before he owns you.’ And you know what Timmie says? Timmie says, ‘I think you may be right, Tatum.’ And that’s the last thing he said to me.”
“Last night he told his mother he was gonna have a talk with Slakey. He never come back. This morning some kids found him on some rubble in a lot on 133rd Street. They’d taken a pipe to his arms and legs and for good measure stomped on his head. Aw, Dave, he was a good boy...”
Tatum’s voice cracked again and he began sobbing. I felt sympathetic tears filling my eyes and I sat quietly in my darkening office waiting for Tatum to get control. Finally he said, “Dave?” His voice had an ominous quality.
“Yes?”
“I’m going after him.”
“You’re gonna do no such thing, Tatum.”
“I’m gonna kill that motherfucker.” He was frighteningly calm and I knew he meant it.
“Listen to me, Tatum. You take this upon yourself, many things can happen, all of them bad.”
“What am I supposed to do, stand by and watch him rip these kids off and beat them into vegetables? There’s a beautiful boy layin’ in Harlem Hospital tonight who ain’t gonna be good for playin’ jacks let alone basketball, if he comes out at all. Ain’t no way I’m gonna sit for that!”
“There’s a better way.”
“Don’t hit me with any ‘Work Within The System’ jive. That may work downtown but up here it don’t buy a thimbleful of shit. They sent a couple of detectives around. The detectives said, ‘The kid must have been dealing dope,’ and went back to the precinct. I’m telling you true, Dave, I’m gonna go after that motherfucker and I’m gonna lace his face with my kitchen knife.”
“Come on, Tatum. I know you know the difference between right and wrong, and what you’re talking about is wrong, uptown or down. I know what kind of pain you’re in, but you take action blindly and you’re gonna end up in a gutter or a prison cell or a wooden box and you won’t have made the world a better place by the thickness of one hair.”
Tatum breathed heavily into the phone for a minute, negotiating in his grief-stricken mind between vengeance and common sense. Finally he said, “You got a better plan?”
“I think I can come up with one.”
“Like what?”
At that moment the door opened and the hulking, rain coated figure of Roy Lescade tramped in. “I got someone in my office now, Tatum. Give me till tomorrow. I want to speak to some people. Will you do that?”
“Till tomorrow, all right. But you better come up with something good, because I’m gonna take that motherfucker off.”
I hung up and swung around in my chair. Roy was standing in the anteroom poking his head into my darkened office like a suspicious bear. His was a massive presence that threw a huge shadow across the carpet. Roy was an inch shorter than me, but he had the shoulders and chest of a buffalo. Had he wanted to work at it, Roy could have been one of the greatest defensive football players of all time; I think he could have been an even better linebacker than Dick Butkus. But he just didn’t have that desire.
“That you, lardass?” I said.
“What you doin’ in the dark, Dave?”
“Playin’ with myself.”
He ambled in and walked straight to my liquor cabinet. “Seems kind of silly considering that piece of poon you keep for a secretary. Where is she? I’m workin’ on that, you know.”
“I know. I lock her up when you come over.”
He helped himself to a bourbon and reached behind a bookshelf where he knew I kept my branch water, something I save for drinkers with civilized palates. He made me one without asking if I wanted it, and we quaffed in silence for a couple of minutes before getting down to serious conversation.
“Now then, Thunder Bolt, what is going on with Richie Sadler?”
“Well,” I said, digging in for a good bluff, “like you guessed, the negotiations came apart at the last minute. Not fatally, you understand. Let’s just say the contracts are on the runway but I can’t quite get ‘em into the sky.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Richie is asking for a loan.”
“A loan? How much?”
“Yea much.”
He polished off his drink and lumbered to the cabinet for a refill. “Must be an awful lot, Dave. He’s got people running around like wild ponies trapped in a box canyon.”
“Seven digits, not counting the two on the other side of the decimal point.”
“What for?”
“He wants to build a sporting-goods store,” I said, congratulating myself on my inventiveness. “You know, something he can count on for income when he retires.”
“Retires! He ain’t even started yet!”
“Oh, you know how these kids think nowadays.”
He shook his head and nattered like a horse. “Sporting-goods store.”
“That’s right.”
“Where is he?”
“I told you, in seclusion, and that’s the truth. He’s got to hit the books for exams or he won’t get his diploma, and won’t that be embarrassing?”
“Can’t I at least...?”
“Interview him? No. But as soon as this thing gets cleared up, I’ll give you the exclusive, I give you my word as a white man.” I raised my hand in a solemn vow.
He looked unhappy, but accepting. Then he suddenly cried, “Hey, you ain’t a white man, you sumbitch!” He threw an ice cube at me. “You’re part black!”
“And you better remember it, honky.”
We refilled, or more properly re-refilled, clowned a little, and reminisced about growing up in Texas. Roy spun a long and probably apocryphal yarn about his first sex experience, with Paloma, his Mexican nanny. “She was a handsome widow that was always being eyed by the hands,” Roy said, “and they would have caught her too, except my daddy had warned them he’d cut the pecker off the first man that touched her. Actually, daddy was saving her for himself. Anyway, one day, we were walking near the corral, Paloma and me, when I saw something I’d never seen before. My daddy was feeding the cock of this inexperienced stallion into a mare’s pussy. I’d seen plenty of animals mating, you understand, but this was new to me. Well, I felt myself getting hard and Paloma noticed the bulge in my trousers.
“Suddenly my daddy spied us and chased us away; he thought I was too young to be witnessing this business. So Paloma and I went back to the ranch house. Ain’t nobody there. Paloma says, ‘You want play horse?’ I says sure. So she undoes my pants and takes out my whang and lifts her skirts and does like my father did with the stallion. Then she showed me another way, and a couple of others. That gal had one big repertory, I’ll tell you. We played horse every chance we got until daddy, on account of Paloma was indifferent to his advances, got suspicious that some hand was banging her regular. One day I was riding high on Paloma when guess who busts into my room? Well, he gives me a whipping so bad I still got stripes on my ass. And Paloma? He drug her out to the corral, screaming, ‘You like to play horse, I’ll give you a real stallion to hump!’ It was too dark for me to see proper, but the sound of her screams—I still dream about them. Never saw her after that.”
I listened to Roy’s tale with attention divided by concern. Richie was uppermost, but the sound of Tatum’s sobs still echoed in my head. In a way the problem of heading off Tatum was even more pressing than Richie, because if I didn’t do something about it tonight, he was going to do something about Slakey tomorrow. I had to stop him.
Suddenly I looked at Roy and realized he might hold the answer. “Hey Roy, how would you like to cover a real story?”
He tilted his head. “You don’t call Richie Sadler’s contract a real story?”
“Hell,” I sneered, “Anybody can write that big headline shit. I’m talking about a human interest story, the kind you do so well.”
He looked askance at me. “You wouldn’t be trying to divert my attention from the Sadler story, would you?”
“With all we been through together, you still distrust me?” I said indignantly.
“With all we been through together, you should thank your stars I’m talking to you at all. What’s this human interest story?”
I began relating the story of Timmie Lee and Warnell Slakey, and the deeper I went into it, the more attentive and sober he became. When I came to the beating he held his breath and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. His eyes took on a distant cast as if he were framing the story in some larger context in his mind. When I finished he swallowed hard.
“Well?” I said. “What do you think?”
He sighed. “I got to admit, it’s a heckuva story, Dave.” He asked me a few questions, then reflected quietly. “Funny thing, but in my mind there’s some sort of link-up between the Timmie Lee story and Richie Sadler’s, as if... as if Timmie’s is the other side of the coin. The coin...” He closed his eyes and visualized it. “The coin is ambition and greed and folly. It’s the common currency of the privileged white kid from Midwest suburbia and the disadvantaged black from the deep ghetto of Harlem. Here’s a white kid with a three million-dollar contract that ain’t good enough for him. And here’s a black kid who’d be happy to have 1 percent of that and will go to any lengths to get it. Ambition and greed and folly. Christ!”
I looked away from Roy, ashamed of myself for having misled him about Richie, yet strangely touched anyway, as if Roy’s interpretation, with only a few adjustments, might be true. Because for every Richie who accepted life’s bounty with humility and gratitude, there were a dozen vain, arrogant athletes who believed nobody could ever pay them what they were worth. I knew: I represented some of them.
“How would you like to help me put Warnell Slakey out of business?” I said to Roy.
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”
“Okay. Call me tomorrow. I’ll have my strategy thunk about by then.”
“I’d like to visit Timmie Lee tonight.”
“You got it.” I phoned Tatum Farmer and let Roy speak to him. They arranged to meet at Harlem Hospital.
Roy left quickly, leaving me sitting in the shadows, depressed about the human condition and filled with a longing for sleep or some other kind of oblivion that would remove me from the vileness I’d seen the last few days. I looked at the bottle of bourbon on the liquor cabinet. There was more than enough to narcotize myself for 10 or 12 hours. It was my first strong temptation in a decade. Then I remembered I had a date with Sondra Sadler at 7. I looked at my watch. It was 7.
The mere thought of her, oddly, chased the bogeys out of my brain. I put the bourbon back in the liquor cabinet, locked up the office, and hurried out of the darkened building.
I hailed a cab. It was still light out and the evening was still warm. We headed up Third Avenue. It was swarming with carefree couples reveling in the simple splendor of a perfect spring evening in New York. My driver, a long-haired kid, stopped for a light and we watched a thousand pleasure-seekers bustle past us heading for Bloomingdale’s and Alexander’s and Yellowfingers and Daly’s and the movie theaters that line Third Avenue between 57th and 60th Streets. The cabby looked over his shoulder at me and said, “You know what?”
“What?”
“Life can be real nice.”
“Gee, I’d have expected something more profound from a guy like you.”
“There’s nothing profounder,” he said.
I thought of Sondra and my pulse quickened. “Maybe you’re right about that.”