Long White Con: The Biggest Score of His Life (20 page)

Speedy said, “Come on, Upshaw, I’ll drop you at your hotel before I take these gentlemen to the southside.”

Upshaw glared homicide at Tango. “Carl, I ain’t riding with this jive-ass nigger. I’m afraid I’ll tear his fucking head off and get in trouble with Mister Hoffman! I’ll get a cab.”

Speedy laughed. “Relax, old buddy. Meet Tango and Precious Jimmy, our friends. They’re with us to set up Junior for a big buck killing.”

Upshaw’s eyes popped wide in complete flabbergast. “Well, I’ll be a sonuvabitch!” he exclaimed. “Damn! Brother Tango, you had me fooled.”

Upshaw darted a glance toward Folks in the office before he pumped Tango and Precious’ hands. They left the building for the parking lot behind the gym.

Speedy drove the Outer Drive to the southside where, minutes later, he, Upshaw and Precious followed euphoric Tango into his house to rehearse the rigged fight.

Back in the Loop, Folks had taken a cab to his hotel suite immediately after Speedy left the gym with the group. Folks and Kid sat in the living room sipping Jack Daniels on the rocks.

Kid said, “Laddie, I think I’ll pack and get a flight tonight back to Rita . . . unless you think you’ll need me.” He drained his glass and stood.

Folks went behind the plexiglass bar to refill his glass. “Pappy, you know how much I appreciate your bringing Tear Off and coming in to help. We won’t need you now except to make that phone call tomorrow to the meet suite at two-thirty
P.M.
as Mister Dolan. The mark won’t know if it’s local or from Tibet. Pappy, I’ll send your ten percent end of the score plus expenses to your hotel in the Apple tomorrow night before we split Chicago.”

Folks came from behind the bar, put his arm around Kid’s shoulder as he walked him to the door.

Kid said, “Laddie, it’s been a pleasure to play with you again. I’m
angling to fix Rochester for us, so jingle me at the Sherry Netherlands at least once a week.”

They embraced warmly before Kid stepped into the hallway. Folks stood at the open door watching his friend until he disappeared into his suite down the hall.

Folks heard the beat of a drum. Glass in hand, he went to a patio chair and watched a young guy on a hotel patio across the way, practicing on an incredibly shiny, heavily chromed drum. He gazed transfixed, listening to the drum beat as he tried masochistically to snare the infant memories and trauma visions of the past. He felt a ball of tension inflate inside his chest. He fled the patio, went into the bedroom, then shut the door to blot out and forget the sound of the drum across the way.

For some strange reason, he couldn’t forget the sound of that drum. He wondered why. He tried to turn his mind from it but it was no use. Then he closed his eyes, surrendered and let his mind grope back through the past. Perhaps it could make some kind of connection there.

Then the painful reason why the sound of that drum was so insistent came in a blinding burst of chrome! On the screen behind his closed eyes he saw once again that glittery, elusive drum . . .

He saw the featureless image of the blond giant striding through the hazy doorway. He felt again the transient, joyful fear in the pit of his stomach when the shadow had hurled him into the air. He’d catch him and squeeze his cheek against his. At his feet would be the drum.

He heard Phala’s, his mother’s, cries of happiness as she rushed into the visitor’s arms. Then he’d heard her soft, sobbing moans behind her bedroom door.

He saw himself so lonely, amusing himself making faces in the gleaming trim of the drum. He felt a familiar aching boulder of tension roll and tumble inside his chest when he saw himself waking up the next morning. He rushed frantically through the apartment but
he couldn’t find it anywhere! The drum! That mute, shiny drum was gone again.

Phala tried to blink back her tears. He got in her lap and they bawled together because the drum was gone. One day the drum did come and never came again.

The pictures were becoming more vivid. Spinning on the reel of memory, back to Kansas City, Missouri. It was, perhaps, like the total recall that a dying man might experience.

Shortly after the drum left for the last time, Phala’s loneliness and heartbreak became real to him. There were blond white men, many of them, in drunken succession. But no drum. They brought bottles, and far into the night he’d lie awake listening to Phala’s wild, sad laughter.

He was a little past three years of age, when his terrible crying seizures started. He’d cry until he threw up. Sometimes Phala would hear him above the clamor of the drunken revelry. She’d come to him in the darkness. He’d be holding his testicles. She’d turn on the light and look. His testicles would be swollen to big sore lumps from his bitter crying.

What a strange thing, he thought, I don’t ever remember calling my mother anything except P.G. to her face. The G was for Grisby, her maiden name. She hadn’t liked it. She’d begged him to call her mama. She’d threatened, and even tried to bribe him. Finally she gave up.

He remembered her account of how, in 1926, she became a waitress-hostess. She was eighteen years old, had a magnificent body and an Eurasian appearance. Silky clouds of jet hair floated to her twenty inch waist. She’d found it easy to get work in the wooly Roaring Twenties nightspot in Kansas City, Missouri.

Later, in his teens, she told him how she had run away from her home in the country outside of New Orleans. She’d left her father and mother, one sister and four brothers.

Folks remembered his mother told him how she got work as a
waitress in a Rampart Street gumbo house. His father and several other white musicians came there one early morning from Bourbon Street. His father was half drunk but he was stricken foolish at the wondrous sight of Phala. He was stone drunk that same week when he actually married his ravishing fourteen-year-old mother.

His father had drummed for three bands by the time he was three. Somehow, despite his drinking, he managed to keep food in their mouths and a roof over their heads. He came to see them only when his band was playing near Kansas City. And when he came, it was usually for only overnight. Then he didn’t come at all.

Phala had told him later he had fallen in love with a wealthy white girl and was living common-law with her in the east. But Phala had loved him too much to get a divorce. She always hoped he’d come back to them. He never did!

“Peckerwood cunt, weakling deserter!” Folks said as he left the bedroom.

He went to the bar and poured whiskey into a water glass to the brim and dumped it down his gullet.

Balmy late summer night had fallen when Speedy and Upshaw went to Speedy’s hotel suite after a soul food dinner at Tango’s house. Dinner had followed exhaustive rehearsal of several ways for Upshaw to lose the rigged fight, which was not to occur.

Upshaw sat in the living room sipping a cool drink, relaxing from the rigors of the rehearsal with Samson. Speedy finished packing his bags in the bedroom. He shoved them into the closet to be scooped up next afternoon after Tango was separated from the hundred grand he was hopping wild to wager on a cinch thing.

Speedy went to the bathroom and pulled out the mirrored cabinet from the wall over the face-bowl. He took his and Folks’ bankrolls from the stash, then he extracted twelve grand, in large bills, from his bundle. Chewing his lip thoughtfully, he peeled off two thousand. He shoved the ten grand into his shirt pocket, packed the two grand with the bankrolls into a money belt and strapped it
around his waist next to his skin. Then he replaced the cabinet and left the bathroom.

He was going behind the bar in the living room when he heard two light knocks on the door. He looked at Upshaw and dipped his head toward the bedroom. Upshaw went into the bedroom and shut the door.

Speedy put his eye to a peep hole and opened the door to elderly Jake, the bell captain, creased and vivid in his puce monkey suit. Jake went past him as he shut and chained the door. The old man up-ended a brown paper sack and dumped a pile of counterfeit fifties and C-notes on the coffee tabletop. Speedy stared down at the phony fortune.

Jake said, “There’s a hundred and twenty grand there at ten cents on the buck like I told you. Wanta count it?”

Speedy grinned ruefully. “Jake, I trust your count . . . but, all I could raise is ten grand. Hope you’ll split the boodle and still let me cop a hundred grand at ten cents on the buck.” Speedy riffled the ten grand.

Jake studied Speedy’s poker face with narrowed grifter eyes for a long moment.

Jake shrugged. “Nigger, it looks like you done had a double lucky night since this old scuffler ain’t about to stick his ass out copping two grand, wholesale, for twenty gees of sizzling ‘queer.’ And I sure ain’t gonna take it in them streets to pass. ’Course, I’m hip I ain’t pulling your coat to nothing you ain’t already figured out!”

Speedy slapped the wad of bills into Jake’s extended palm. “I owe you two grand, Jake. Now, count it fair and you’ll find it there.”

Jake said, “Nigger, the bargain you got, it better be right and there,” as he shoved the wad into his brown paper bag.

Jake moved to the door as Speedy unchained and opened it. Then Speedy extended his hand. Jake stared at it for a mini instant before he shook Speedy’s hand with minimal enthusiasm and went down the hall. Speedy shut the door and Upshaw stepped back into the
living room, sat on the sofa watching Speedy stuff the “queer” into a briefcase.

Upshaw said, “I heard Grandpa beefing.”

Speedy grinned as he shut the case. “Yeah, he had rocks in his jaw. He’d piss his pants in joy if he knew how close he came to making me a gift of this ‘queer’.”

Upshaw laughed. “He’d have a stroke, you mean. I wonder why you didn’t break his heart.”

Speedy shrugged. “He’s Folks connected.”

Upshaw hee-hawed. “Don’t drop that lug on me, friend. You know Folks wouldn’t turn a blond hair if you ripped off any outside grifter, even if it was his old lady!”

Speedy frowned irritation. “I couldn’t be sure that Jake wasn’t an exception with Folks. They go back together since he was a punk carny shill.”

Upshaw needled, “Come off the shuck. Jake is old and black and you got a sucker soft spot for a mark like that. Always have had in the twelve years I’ve known you. Right?”

“Right! So you would have taken off Jake. Now, let’s get the hell out of here, cold-blooded Tear Off Thomas!”

They stopped off in the ghetto at an auto body-upholstery shop recommended by Precious. In a half hour, the left bottom of the limo’s rear seat had a foot and half long section cut out. The aperture from carpet level was concealed by the intact flap of leather upholstery. The next stop was to purchase two identical thick leather valises, with locks and keys, at a Loop luggage shop.

They drove several blocks to a luxury hotel where Folks had rented the Presidential Suite especially to receive Tango and the score the next day. Folks led them through the gem-cut chandeliered entrance hall into the posh gold-leafed living room, sunken and fabulous with richly gleaming furniture and cream-hued brocaded walls and drapes of cobalt blue, shot through with antique gold. They sat down on the blue satin sofa.

Folks lifted a bottle of 1928 Chateau Margaux from a wheeled cart and filled their glasses. He said, “Here’s to the score!” They toasted and drank.

Folks said, “I’m going to order dinner for you guys,” as he finger picked and nibbled morsels from the remains of baby quail on the coffee table.

Speedy said, “No, thanks. We let Tango stuff us with garbage soul food.”

Folks asked, “We’re all set up for the play tomorrow, I take it?”

“All set. The limo back seat is gizmoed, and I copped Jake’s hundred and twenty grand in ‘queer’ and the valises. Tango is creaming his drawers for action. Tonight Upshaw and me will load the dummy valise with paper from the phone book, cut the proper size with the weight of two hundred grand. I’ll plant it in the limo switch-nest!”

Upshaw yawned wearily. “I hope we don’t make up that boodle tonight, Speedy. I need rest.”

Folks stood and stretched, sweeping his arm through the air. “Well, this pad’s all yours, pallies. Just sign your name Frederick Dockweider, 111, for food and drink. I’ll be back around noon.”

Speedy’s face was pained as he glanced at his watch. “Partner, it’s just ten-fifteen. Don’t split with Upshaw sneaking into the land of nod,” pointing to Upshaw as his chin dropped to his chest. He snored, fast asleep. “Stay for a couple of hands of gin, two bits a pop.”

Folks shook his head as he turned and moved toward the entrance hall. “I got Barbara McNair’s double waiting in my bed for a rematch,” he said over his shoulder.

Speedy followed him through the entrance hall to the door. “Folks, I got our bankrolls from the stash,” he said as he started to unbutton his shirt.

“Leave my bread in your kip until tomorrow,” and he opened the door.

“You lucky jockey! A broad that looks like McNair, huh? Where did you cop?”

Folks smiled. “In the lounge at my hotel, couple of hours ago.”

Speedy wrung his hands. “Christ, I’m horny for some Big Windy pussy. If I had a nice face and the right paint job, I could slip in that lounge downstairs and con the pants off one of those muckety-muck silk broads laying at the bar.”

Folks smiled sadly. Cruel angles of light and shadow deformed his face hideously old and tortured.

“Wade, a white paint job over your blackness could drive you mad. Believe a friend.” Folks stepped into the hall and walked away.

Next day, in mid-afternoon, Tango, Samson and the con players were assembled in Folks’ Presidential Suite. Upshaw and Samson glared ferociously at each other as per the script. They all sat on the living room sofa and in chairs, silently scrutinizing Speedy, standing, as he counted and stacked Tango’s hundred grand wager, in large crisp bills, into the brand new valise on the coffee table.

“A hundred thousand. Correct, gentlemen?” Speedy said.

Tango and Folks nodded.

Speedy started to count Folks’ bundle of nearly perfect phony money. Tango scooted to the edge of the sofa and leaned his eyes close to the coffee table as Speedy audibly counted out Folks’ stakes. Speedy packed the bundle into the valise, locked it and tossed the key in his palm.