19 Purchase Street (43 page)

To divert and calm her, Gainer asked: “How did your day go?”

“I read, explored the garden and waited. You must have left very early. Your toothbrush was dry.”

A cue for the Millicent foolishness. Gainer let it slip by. “You were bored, huh?”

“At least I didn't get the mopes or the monies,” she said. “I usually do when I'm lonely and alone like that.”

“But never when you're with me.”

“Never,” she fibbed. “You know, love, the Hine thing is an all-around answer if you want to see it like that.”

“Yeah.”

“We get to live and we get—”

“You get to live no matter what,” he said.

“Don't be so sure of that.”

“I have to be.”

“You're my lifeline,” she said.

“I thought Rodger was.”

“He just gives transfusions.”

“That you require.”

“Less and less. But you, love, you're essential. Without you I'd be broke under any circumstances.”

“Everything you say is true.”

“I love you.”

“Especially that.”

She ate the eggplant as though it was as bland as a New England boiled vegetable dinner. Didn't even need to extinguish it with water. “You did say thirty million?” she asked.

“That would be my take-home pay.”

“Nice, long figure, thirty million.”

“Enough?”

“We could invest it,” she said brightly.

“What in?”

“Us. We'll live on the interest and never touch the principal.”

He loved that sweet play on words, so much that he allowed her to stroke another forkful of her hot stuff into his mouth.

“You know what's best about us?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Including that, naturally.”

“What?”

“We get better,” she said. “We keep getting better even when there doesn't seem to be any possibility for improvement.”

“True.”

“I want to admit something I've never admitted to any man—although, perhaps I've come close a couple of times. Anyway, when I'm not with you I'm terribly deficient, inside and out. I don't function well. My arms feel heavy, my head gets short-circuited and I'm awfully unfilled. I mean by that worse than ordinary empty.”

“I think a lot about filling you.”

“It's sexual. Oh God yes, it's sexual, but not only. My eyes need to be filled with you, and my ears and my lungs and hands. It's a dreadful admission, isn't it?”

“No, not at all.”

“It imposes on you and reveals me. I'd keep it to myself if I could.”

“What if I feel the same?”

“I believe I could handle it.” She lowered her eyes, they clouded. “I was remembering something a man once said to me. I don't recall him particularly but what he said must have impressed me because it stuck. He was trying to seduce me in a cold roundabout way, wanting to use me like a whore and have me like a whore use him, hoping, you know, for that sort of mutual irresponsibility. Come to think of it, that approach was tried often in one form or another by several others. Have you ever come on like that with anyone?”

“No,” Gainer fibbed.

“Anyway, this man said romantic love was never fair, not the equitable thing it was made out to be. Rather, it was like a surgical operation with one person making incisions while the other cried for anesthesia.”

“Believe that?”

“It used to get proved to me a lot.”

“Not this time. I need the hell out of you, Leslie.”

“Dependency …”

“I honestly, straight out, lay it on the line need—”

“… dependency takes courage.”

“When I was on that carry for Darrow and out of touch, it wasn't just that I was concerned about you or that I missed you. For sure it wasn't ordinary missing. I felt that it was unfair that I should have to give any of my time to anyone other than you.”

“How do you feel now?”

“Grateful.”

He got up and went around to her, oblivious to the place, the other people there. He tilted her face up and brought his own down to kiss her. A long, light kiss. The Szechuan pepper on her lips made his own burn.

“Let's go find Hine and tell him he's on,” she said.

“Too soon.”

“What's soon have to do with it?”

“First we need some insurance.”

J
IMMY
Chapin.

Gainer spent all the next morning and half the afternoon trying to locate him. Called the last number he had on him and even a back-up special number but got no answer. Went by Chapin's apartment on East Forty-ninth, buzzed for five minutes before giving that up.

There were other likely places.

The sublevel, swimming pool whorehouse on West Forty-second where Jimmy had a favorite working girl.

An early bar on Eighth Avenue. Six people there but only the bartender capable of rational speech.

“Jimmy Chapin been around?”

The usual reply to that would have been, “Who's Jimmy Chapin?” Gainer was known so he got a wary, “What's up?”

“Business, no beef,” Gainer assured him.

“Haven't seen him in a week. Try his brother, Vinny, why don't you?”

“Where?”

“Down around Canal probably. Otherwise I don't know.”

Gainer was sure his chances of running into Vinny on Canal Street were slim, but he went downtown and stood on one of the prime jewelry corners for an hour. Recognized several sleepless fences looping around, getting swag priced. But no Vinny.

By then it was noon. Gainer recalled that Jimmy often had lunch on Third Avenue, between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth, a blue-fronted place called Elmer's. He went there, stood at the end of the bar with a draught Heineken. Down the way was Rocky Graziano, as good-natured as ever, knowing everyone. And, more restrained, Jake LaMotta. There were fight people and people who admired fight people. There were also racing people. No Phippses or Whitneys, but some takers and players and a few jockey-sized older guys who got information now and then.

Gainer helped himself to four toothpicked meatballs and three fried chicken wings from the free lunch hot trays. A waiter came with a fresh batch of meatballs. He was a waiter Gainer had overtipped at least three times in the past. A good one to ask.

“At the track, I think,” the waiter said. “Last night when he was in I heard him mention something about going to the track.”

Belmont racetrack was an hour's drive out, and a mention overheard by a waiter wasn't much to go on. Gainer almost decided to hang around places and let Chapin eventually come to him, if not today, tomorrow. He wished he had when he got into a traffic tie-up in the Midtown Tunnel behind a truck with a killer exhaust.

He arrived at Belmont and got parked just as the fifth race went off. Heard from outside the roar of the crowd, the loud urge of it abruptly changing into a sort of mumbling moan the moment the horses crossed the finish line and losers became the majority. Gainer bought his way into the clubhouse, let the escalator take him up to the unique atmosphere of tickets underfoot like worthless printed money, and greed and desperation almost deoxygenating the air.

He crossed over to the thick pipe railing that kept the common weekday player from the private boxes. The bright blue uniformed ushers stationed at entry points made sure.

Gainer scanned the boxes for Chapin. It was where he'd be if he was there. On his third scan Gainer caught on the back of a head that might be the man. A half-turn of that head revealed it was him. Six boxes down and off to the left, almost in line with the finish line.

Gainer borrowed a pen from a player to jot a note on the back of a discarded ticket. He put a ten dollar bill in an usher's hand and then the note, and moments later Chapin was standing, turning around, gesturing to him to come down to the box. The usher returned and stepped aside for him as though there had never been a doubt.

“Take any seat,” Chapin told Gainer.

The box accommodated six on two tiers. It was the box of a well-known trainer kept for his new or faraway owners. Most weekdays it was unoccupied, as were many of the other boxes.

Chapin was with his brother, Vinny. They both had small, very expensive binoculars suspended from around their necks. From Vinny's sources, Gainer assumed.

“Got something going?” Chapin asked Gainer. He knew Gainer seldom, if ever, bet on a horse unless it was a special occasion, such as a ten-length lock.

“Something important,” Gainer told him.

“What race?”

“Be a joke if it was the sixth,” Vinny put in.

“It has nothing to do with a horse,” Gainer said.

“Then keep it for later,” Chapin said, a bit curt. “Right now I've got everything to do with a horse.”

Chapin appeared relaxed enough unless one knew him as well as Gainer did. Gainer noticed the little giveaways. The tip on the cigarette Chapin was smoking was oval from extra lip pressure, and he didn't smoke it down short as usual, dropped it, overdid grinding it out. Normally he would have just made one stab at it with his heel. Also, his ears were florid.

Chapin was forty. He physically resembled the one-time, late mayor of New York, James Walker. Had that sort of small-boned build and Irish durability. He didn't look to be strong but it was said around that once at Jimmy Weston's he had, on a thousand dollar bet, lifted by its leg a chair containing a hundred and fifty pound hooker ten inches off the floor using only his left hand—and he was right-handed. Gainer hadn't seen it but he believed it. Actually, it was one of Chapin's lesser exploits. He enjoyed being talked about, doing the unexpected. “There are those who make news and those who merely read it,” he'd said to Gainer one night when they were out running together.

Chapin was indeed a character.

By choice.

He'd earned a B.S.E.E. degree at Cal Tech and done graduate work at MIT. All the leading electronic firms had wanted him, recruited hard, and the two that he'd worked for had put him right in the middle of their most sophisticated projects. A lot of Chapin's subminiature circuitry creations had landed on the moon.

He could have stayed straight. He was offered everything this side of the chairman's virgin granddaughter to stay. But it was too narrow for him, too predictable. So he took his vacation with pay and never went back. On his own he found opportunities that were far more entertaining. When they weren't offered, he devised them.

Such as his scramble with the Federal First of Miami.

He opened an account under an assumed name at that bank, put in just two hundred dollars. Under another assumed name he got a job with an electronic servicing firm. Among its clients, he knew, was Federal First. For three months Chapin was a model employee, dependable, good at what he did and quiet. Before long, on a routine service call, he got his head and hands in the complicated electronic bowels of Federal First. He located the information chip that applied to his account, replaced it with another, identical except for one infinitesimal difference.

From that day on, each withdrawal Chapin made from his account registered as a deposit. In ten days he moved out two hundred thousand.

Federal First never knew who hit them.

It was doing such things as that that Chapin got the most kick out of. Devising ways of outsmarting the systems, especially the ones that were smug.

Ordinary electronic surveillance work was like child's play for Chapin. His reputation was that he could merely be in a room and sense whether or not it was bugged. The best wire man ever.

The Mob's wire man, it was said.

The Justice Department questioned him. Was it true he'd come up with a remote beaming device for listening in on a conversation? If so, it would make all bugs obsolete.

He told them he was working on it.

Then came their bottom line question. Would he come over, work for them?

He told them calmly, sincerely, just as if he had said, “Yes, I will,” told them, “Go fuck yourselves.”

Not long after that, Chapin did time.

Ten months of a three-year sentence in Danbury for an illegal wire tap.

No sooner had he gotten out on parole than he was picked up on another tap charge. However, this time he was innocent. Those involved were trying to give him up as part of their bargain. Their depositions hinged on one particular Wednesday night. It just so happened on that Wednesday night Chapin had been with Gainer. They had gone to the Garden to see the Knicks beat the spread but not, of course, the Celtics, and after the game up to Nanni's for fettuccine. Gainer enjoyed the evening. It was just after midnight when he dropped Chapin off at the East Seventy-fifth Street address where he had a sight-unseen prearrangement with a new young working girl.

As it turned out the girl was younger than just young and also had a couple of arrests for possessing controlled substances. A statement from her would only make matters worse for Chapin.

It was up to Gainer. Chapin's attorney took a walk with Gainer, told him what was needed. Gainer stretched his statement five hours. Swore that from Nanni's Restaurant he and Chapin had gone to his apartment, played backgammon until five or so. Yes, he'd been with Chapin for ten straight hours.

So Chapin owed Gainer at least three years of his life. A heavy debt but they both carried it lightly.

Now, there they were in a box at Belmont, watching the horses for the sixth race come out onto the track. Chapin handed his copy of the
Daily Racing Form
to Gainer. “What do you think of the number one horse?”

Gainer looked it over.

The number one horse's name was Snapshot. A four-year-old chestnut gelding with some Hail to Reason blood in him. According to his last twelve times out he was the sort of horse that some people thought ought to be good. Several of the better trainers had tried him. He could win at the thirty-five thousand claiming level but when stepped up into the allowance class Snapshot seemed to enjoy having the other horses in front of him. All the races his chart showed had been sprints of six and seven furlongs. Today he was in steep and long, going against better, pure allowance horses over a mile and a sixteenth. Evidently his current trainer was just trying something different, hoping for a positive response.