Fahrenheit 1600 (Victor Kozol) (12 page)

Chapter 24

Success in a Business

It is now three months since the first
package
arrived in Vic’s garage. He has now had three more rendezvous with Vinnie, all
as uneventful as the first. With each success and an additional $10,000 into
his coffers, Vic is finally a success at a venture. He is careful to not
deposit the cash in any of his accounts. He keeps this money literally under
his mattress and takes out what he needs to make up payments when he is short
in financing the funeral business. Yes, his other business is still a loser,
but he can easily now make up the shortfall from his newfound “stash.” And it
gets better; the extra $40,000 of found money is tax free, which is the reason
Vic can’t deposit any of this directly into his checking or savings accounts.
Only if the IRS were doing a formal audit of Vic’s books, would the injections
of cash from another source be brought to light.

Given the small size of Vic’s funeral business, an
IRS audit is not likely. In fact the little money losing funeral home is a
perfect dodge to ‘launder’ the money. Vic is doing in Duryea on a small scale
what the mob is doing all across the country on a far larger scale; using
legitimate businesses to hide money made in illegal activities. If anything
were to go wrong, it would have to happen with the illegal operation of the
crematory, and Vic swears to himself this won’t happen. With three months in,
Vic doesn’t even think about a possible snag with these operations. He only has
to be around when another call comes in.

It was now time to live a bit. After spending the
last several months scraping by from hand to mouth, Vic has a pent up appetite
to finally enjoy some of the things he could only dream of before he met Sam.
While not rich, Vic has what every American dreams of, excess spendable cash,
literally walking around money.

First, Vic takes his eight-year-old minivan with
over 100,000 miles on the clock down to the local Chevy dealer. Without ever
realizing, he is beginning to look more like a mob member, he purchases a brand
new triple black Chevy Suburban with all of the bells and whistles. The truck
has a sticker price on the north side of $40,000, but Vic simply puts $10,000
down and finances the rest.
Don’t want to show all your new money at one
time.
Sitting in his aromatic leather captain’s chair driver’s seat, Vic is
for the first time ‘king of the road’.

He now uses his new wheels to take him to the
Wilkes-Barre mall and Nugents furniture store. Here he picks out, with the help
of a shapely sales assistant, $15,000 worth of cool modern furniture for his
man cave. The stuffy looking apartment sparsely furnished with his grandmother’s
leftovers is to be a thing of the past. Next to the furniture store is
Tomorrow’s Man, a men’s clothier, and another $3,000 for a completely new
wardrobe. Finally Vic will look the part of a small town, thirty-year-old
capitalist. Vic reflects as he leaves the clothing store with bags of stuff,
that this is fun.

“Now I know what I have been missing all this long
time in the financial wilderness.”

It’s funny, but for most people, the stigma of where
the money came from soon disappears when one is out enjoying it. Vic is
certainly no exception. In one short week, Vic has spent nearly $60,000. But,
now with good credit, having paid off his overdue credit cards, he has a whole
new outlook on things. Gone are the days when clerks would swipe his credit
card and give him that sickening look when the purchase comes back
rejected.
No, life is good, and Vic is going to do what he has to do to keep it that way.

To compliment his living large, Vic, no longer
depressed and broke, begins to frequent the local hot spots where the yuppies
his age hang out. He can now easily leave tiny Duryea, and appear in Scranton
or Wilkes-Barre for his weekends. Vic has regained some of the attitude and
momentum he once had in his college days. Vic could order a $50.00 meal, and
then stay to dance and party the night away. Combing his hair looking in the
mirror, not a bad looking guy, he muses. He’s in the pink with proper attire,
correct wheels, and the right attitude, combined with being a good spender by
buying drinks and leaving good tips at the clubs and bars.

Vic can finally attract the “hot” chicks. He started
to hook up with the local girls who frequented these places. He reacquired his
taste for dancing and was becoming quite popular with the “in” crowd. After some
brief flings with some good looking
women,
Vic begins to realize these
relationships always seemed to melt away when they found out what he did for a
living. It seems most women aren’t thrilled with dating a funeral director,
even if he was a
cool
dude. He had to start lying that he was into the
computer industry, but that had its limits, and basically Vic was not able to
settle in with any one favored lady. He took all this in stride for a while,
but he really longed for a
soul mate
to have a permanent relationship
with.

Chapter 25

Karen

When Vic was doing the bar scene in Scranton, one
of the bars he stopped at was Basil’s. A downtown club on the first floor of a
large office building, the modern interior was minimalist almost to being
austere. However, Basil’s offered a happy hour that went from 4 to 7 p.m.,
longer than the other Scranton places. On weekends, it also brought in some of
the better local bands. Here is where Victor first noticed Karen Schmidt. Karen
was one of the more conservatively attired girls in the place; she did not
dress especially seductively. But her well-coordinated outfits did show off her
curves very well. Besides not being flashy, she hung in the background, not
hiding, but not aggressively looking for attention. Vic guessed she was about
five foot six, and weighed perhaps one twenty. All of the weight well
proportioned. She had a pleasant looking face, not a Hollywood starlet, but
better than average. Vic would give her a solid eight.

After a couple of weeks of seeing Karen talk to some
of the guys and even do a couple of dances, he ascertained she was not hooked
up with any one person. On the fourth visit to Basil’s, Vic decides “it’s now
or never.” He will make his move and if she blows him off, well nothing
ventured.

Victor was pleased when Karen was not reticent to
talk with him and accept a drink from him. She even accompanied him to the
dance floor and was pretty agile with that not too shabby body of hers. Vic was
impressed. He left it at that, but made it a point to be back the next Friday;
there was something about Karen that wasn’t there with the other girls he got
close to. Vic wanted to get to know this reserved pretty lady better. After
more pleasantries the next week, Vic went for broke.

“Karen, I would like to take you to dinner.”

“Okay Vic, where and when?”

“Tomorrow night we will go to Romano’s, one of the
better Italian restaurants in Old Forge. By the way where do I find you?”

“I live up near the hospital in the Valley View
Apartments. Here, I’ll write it down for you.”

“Tomorrow then, I’ll pick you up at six.”

Vic was elated, he’d now get a chance to learn more
about Karen while having a great meal; life is good.

At dinner the next night Vic learned that Karen is
from Wyoming, Pennsylvania, hell right around the corner, and she also
graduated Wilkes University with a BA in nursing. She worked at CMC Hospital,
the largest in Scranton as an intensive care nurse. This thought Vic was great,
nurses are usually unafraid of the dead because in their hospital training they
are marched down to pathology at some point and made to witness an autopsy.
That is not for the faint of heart, but hospitals want their nurses used to all
aspects of the human body.

After divulging that he ran a funeral home in Duryea
none of the usual bad vibes came back from Karen. In fact she seemed genuinely
interested and wanted to hear more about Vic’s career. At twenty-eight, she was
two years younger than Vic, but very mature and a good conversationalist.
Victor couldn’t believe his luck at finding this near-perfect girl; but there
was more than luck at play.

What Vic didn’t know was that Karen had been
somewhat reticent about meeting other guys, due to an unpleasant experience in
her recent past. It seems Karen was dating a doctor at the hospital. Unbeknown
to Karen the doctor had a wife back in Philadelphia. All of this came to a head
when the little woman came up one Saturday night from the City of Brotherly
Love to see why her husband seemed to not want to come home on weekends.

Acting on a tip from a jealous intern at the
hospital, Karen and Emily (Mrs. Edward Smallwood) met up in a restaurant in
downtown Scranton. This was highly embarrassing to Dr. Smallwood who had one
too many women sitting at his table. Karen was mortified, said goodbye, and
left that scene forever.

Thus, Karen was free when Vic, through good timing,
was observing her. Of course, Vic wanted to get serious immediately, but Karen,
coming off of a bad experience was reserved about being intimate with Vic. She
wanted to know more about him and feel secure, before she let her emotions get
irretrievably involved.

After four weeks, the romance was proceeding like a
high school puppy love affair. Vic was hot to engage in any kind of sex he can
get, usually settling for kissing and petting in the living room of either his
or Karen’s apartment.

Karen insisted that she would not sleep with Vic,
but was feeling herself getting closer to Vic and actually longing for more.
She wanted to be sure, so even though the last time she confided in her mother
about a boyfriend it turned out horribly embarrassing for Karen; she needed to
know more about Vic.

“Mom, I am dating this funeral director, Victor
Kozol. He’s a really nice guy from Duryea, but I really don’t know much about
him, how can I be sure he is who he claims to be?”

“I have a co-worker at the pharmacy where I work who
is from Duryea, what if I ask her if she knows anything about Victor?”

“Okay mom, I know it sounds hokey, but I can’t get
myself emotionally involved for a second time only to find out the other person
is an imposter or deeply flawed.”

In just one day, Mary Schmidt, Karen’s mother is on
the phone with her daughter.

“Well Jane my friend doesn’t know him or his parents
who are retired and living in Florida, the rest of his story checks out though.
He runs the family funeral home and has never been married. In fact, he only in
the last month has been seen in the company of a good looking girlfriend around
town.”

Karen was ecstatic; she knew that she is that girl.
She has in the past couple of weeks been eating out and hanging around Duryea
with Vic.

“Oh and Karen, why don’t you ask this Victor of
yours to come over for a good home cooked meal some Sunday.”

“Okay mom, I will see how he reacts to that, and
thanks for the help with the ‘find out’ committee.”

In another month, Vic and Karen have spent some
nights together both at his place and hers, and they are more enamored with
each other than ever. Vic loved the idea of not being lonely, and was happy to
shuttle between his place and Scranton. He was actually in love for the first
time in his life.

But, as he reflected on the good parts of this new
relationship, Victor began to have his own reservations about his future
relationship with Karen.

For the first time in months, the other and much
darker side of his life started to encroach into his consciousness. There were
two elephants in the closet that Victor did not want Karen or anyone else to
find out about. One was his funeral business was nearly non-existent; which if
and when Karen figured out she might start to wonder, where did Vic get all of
the money he had to keep his lifestyle up? This would lead to the much darker
secret in Vic’s life, his association with underworld characters from New York.

Since Victor never had to associate with them
publicly in Duryea, they were separated by one hundred miles of space. This
made it much easier to cover for a lifestyle that was anything but normal. But,
would the width of the State of New Jersey, forever keep Victor safe from being
discovered, especially by Karen?