Long White Con: The Biggest Score of His Life (10 page)

Folks returned his wink. “I’m certain that we will find something, Marvin.” Folks, imitating Bates, darted a furtive eye toward Mrs.
Bates. He lowered his voice. “Something well-rounded and orgasmic in Silicone Gulch.”

They laughed. Folks turned to leave and Bates banged a ham-hock hand against Folks’ shoulder.

Bates said, “Lance, my boy, you’re my kind of gentleman!”

They warmly shook hands. Folks left the office and went to the elevator athrob with satisfaction that the Bates cut-in had come off so sweetly.

Bates, shark undercover Treasury Department agent, went to his phone to call his immediate superior with the news that the Vicksburg Kid’s con mob had gobbled their meticulously prepared bait and that the government’s investigation of Federal Bank Act violations by the Buckmeister Bank was proceeding as planned.

N
ext day, beneath a cloudy Sunday sky, the mob had set up the ghost town in a remote, hidden ravine ten miles from the city. They had earlier performed a dress rehearsal for the upcoming Bates play at the mansion-museum set-up. Now they were concluding rehearsals with Folks in the key role of Aztec Billy. Speedy filled in as Bates, the mark.

One of the trooper grifters from the Stilwell play was closely observing Folks’ performance as Billy to prep himself to play it for Bates. The other fake trooper from the Stilwell play had taken Folks’ Lance Wellington role.

The Kid, earlier that morning, had bailed out High Ass Marvel from jail. The charges were disorderly conduct and aggravated assault on police officers stemming from a drunken brawl late Saturday night in a fashionable downtown bar. Something to do with Marvel’s unrequited heat for a barfly sexpot and her ex-pug bird dog.

Kid had berated Marvel with master works of profanity for his drinking and cavalier attitude toward the Kid’s iron-clad rule that his players keep a low public profile. High Ass, in Apache pique, had caught the first thing smoking out of the city.

At twilight the mob completed the final bidding segment of the
rehearsal in the stable. One of the troopers would stay as a watchman until the Bates play.

There was a flash of lightning and rain fell heavily. Folks thought of his promised rendezvous with Christina at her mountain lodge. He grinned as he decided to keep the date costumed as ragamuffin Aztec Billy. He thought, I’ll shock and tantalize the jaded witch!

Folks and Speedy got in Trevor’s Continental, and the others got into their cars and went down the ghost town’s muddy street for the highway.

Pearl pulled her Mercury from the cover of a stand of trees on a rise overlooking the ghost town. She drove down the hill and continued her all-day tailing as Folks drove his Eldorado down the highway through thick curtains of rain to keep his tryst with Christina.

Pearl was caught at a stoplight near the obscure dirt turn-off road leading to Christina’s lodge. She drove frantically up and down the highway, her eyes vainly searched motel and restaurant parking lots on both sides of the highway for Folks’ Eldorado. Finally, she parked in a McDonald’s lot at the intersection where she had lost him. She sipped coffee in her car with a tight face as she grimly hawkeyed the rain-fogged highway traffic moving in both directions through bellowing thunder and dazzling spears of lightning.

Folks and Christina sat cozily in the luxurious lodge on a couch before a warming, incandescent log in the fireplace that grenaded sparks. They snorted sparkling rows of cocaine with a mother-of-pearl horn. In the vermillion flare of the flames Christina’s curves gleamed through a black organza peignoir. Robert Goulet’s
Couldn’t We?
pulsed softly from a console.

Christina’s eyes were oddly electric, sweeping Folks’ battered boots, his tattered combination ancient Indian and southwest cowboy garb as he leaned snorting cocaine off the coffee table. A fake Cortez era helmet was jammed down over his shoulder-length platinum wig to his ears. His red-tinted face was creased and ruined with artificial age. His front teeth were blacked out with tar.

Rain stomped a raucous flamenco on the slate roof as she leaned and nibbled at his earlobe. She whispered, “Aztec Billy, you’re adorable!”

He sat back. She sucked his nipple through a hole in his shirt. Then, she swooped her head and teethed his fly open, gnawing at his pubic hair. In return he daggered a fingernail down her spine making her shiver and squeal.

In the earthy dialect of Billy, he said, “You boil my pot and I’m gonna give your poontang a black eye!”

They laughed and she snorted up a row of crystal dust. Folks got a quality erection as he brutally pinched her buttocks and gazed at her classic profile, translucent in kleigs of lightning. She trembled as she gazed luminous, enormous eyes into his. His slab of weapon escaped his fly into the firelight.

She caressed it and whispered, “Billy, your womb duster is heroic. And how your eyes turn me on. Up! Up! High! To randy heaven. Your eyes are like swatches of Saint Tropez sky in summer. Gorgeous Johnny and fantasy. One!”

He tried to remember that broad who had said something like that before about his eyes but couldn’t.

She purred on, “I’d love to share a secret with you, Billy. You’re a living link up with fantasy and dreams I’ve had since a little girl. There is this grotesque, but utterly exciting old roue. Shrinks tell me he was the symbol of my repressed desire to copulate with Father. Billy, you don’t think I’m a freak?”

He shook his head.

She said, “Then make love to me like that cruel old roue. Maim me with your dong! Ball me until I beg you for mercy. But don’t give me any.” She giggled. “Will you promise to keep it a secret from Johnny?”

He said, “I will if you will.”

They laughed. She slipped out of her wrapper, then removed his boots. He, wearing the wig and helmet, stripped nude. His
blood-bloated organ lobbed a fearsome shadow across her flame-tinted torso as he lifted her into his arms. He arranged her bottom meat, with the casual precision of a butcher, on a pillow placed on a crotch high table block with her back jammed against the wall.

He shaped a cruel smile as he watched his reflection in a wall mirror trap her legs across the ridges of his shoulders. Then he lacerated her swollen Bing cherry nipples, lips and tongue with his bared teeth. She squawked ecstatically as she bucked in the trap. He gripped his weapon and twirled the snout violently against her clit until her vulva frothed with lubricity. Tidal waves of rapture rocked him to perversely imagine himself, like Hitler’s Rommel, juggernaut into the enemy, blitz her thicketed enclave pit with tanklike, powerful reams of his steely armament.

She trembled the air with howls of joy and pain. Dispassionately, he counted ten orgasmic spasms of her entrails as his weapon concussed her pit with a tally of five hundred bludgeon strokes. She sighed and went ragdoll limp. He stared down at her corrupt child’s face in repose, sweat shiny in the flickering firelight.

His unconquered slab of vengeance made a kissy sound withdrawing. He had no need or desire for anti-climactic physical ejaculation. He had achieved climax, an orgasm in his soul. He carried her to the couch, then went to the bathroom and brought an icy towel for her face. She stirred and opened her eyes, smiled and seized him in her arms, pulling him down between her thighs. They gazed into each other’s eyes.

She said, “Aztec Billy, I love you.”

He frowned skepticism. “Darling, don’t lead my poor heart to slaughter. Don’t you mean you love our loving?”

Hurt ridged her brows for an instant. Her golden mane swirled about her shoulders as she shook her head vigorously. “Please believe me. I mean I’m certain I loved you from the instant I saw you.”

“Aztec Billy loves you, darling!” He stripped off the Cortez helmet and wig. “Christina, Johnny O’Brien loves you too.” He shaped
his heartbreaking smile. “Is it possible that you can love both of us? Billy and me?”

She laughed. “I love you both equally and madly.”

He slipped off, from his pinky, the heirloom Unhappy Virgin ring. Taking her hand, he said, “Could it be a mistake to dream the sweetest dream I could ever dream?”

She raised her ring finger with an outcry of joy as he slid on the ring. They kissed torridly.

She said, “I’m so happy I want to shout from steeples! I’ve landed in a bed of orchids with the man I love.”

He was intoxicated as heady victory shot thrilly lances through his being. Then he sobered, remembering his Pearl problem adangle. He simply needed time, he thought, to angle a solution.

He said, “Please, angel face, don’t shout it until after Saul and I have concluded a business deal with a mar . . . uh, client. A Mister Bates this month. The announcement of our engagement would magnetize local newspaper reporters and photographers. I am associated with Bates as Lance Wellington, and we could save him confusion by keeping our secret until after he’s gone home to the east coast. Do you understand, darling?”

“Of course you’re right. I couldn’t stand a misadventure now.” Then she frowned. “Johnny, promise me that you’ll retire from the rotten confidence game after we marry.”

“I promise.”

They lay in the fire-lit shadows for a long while before they showered and dressed. They clung together for a final kiss before they went to their cars, a perfect meld of sadist and masochist in the pungent murk.

Folks drove down the stygian mountain darkness toward the highway followed by Christina’s Excalibur. He glanced through the windshield at the obese full moon as it suddenly smashed through a wall of clouds. He thought, you wonderful, mystical old broad, you’re in the family way with a billion golden dreams. Then he thought about Pearl prophetically. And maybe nightmares.

Pearl, in the fallen dark on the McDonald’s parking lot, saw Folks go past her in the Eldorado. She keyed on the Mercury’s motor, started to back out to go down the driveway to the highway to follow. Then she stiffened to see Christina pull to a stop at the red light scant yards from her at the intersection. She hurtled the Mercury over the sidewalk onto the highway broadside across the front of the Excalibur. Curious motorists gaped as she leapt from the Mercury and sprinted to the driver’s side of Christina’s car. Pearl jerked open the door and glared hatred into Christina’s face, which was frozen in shock.

Pearl said in an ominous whisper as she brandished an angry index finger under Christina’s nose like a stiletto, “Leave my man alone, bitch! You hear me, cunt?”

Christina nodded furiously.

Pearl hissed, “I’ll stomp a mud hole in your ass if you ever speak to Johnny O’Brien again. You hear me, bitch?”

Christina frantically nodded again.

Pearl leaned her face almost touching Christina’s. “I’d bet you’re a stone racist dog. I hope so. You’ll get a shock down the line. I wish!”

Pearl slammed the door shut and went to her machine. She got in and straightened it up, then she screeched it away down the highway.

Stricken, Christina sat motionless through the horn blasts of angry motorists behind her for several light changes before she drove down the highway like an automaton.

F
olks went into Speedy’s apartment to change his clothes. He and Speedy sat on a sofa in the den and sipped a succession of whiskies and sodas as they grooved to Ray Charles records. Folks went to the bar near a window to get refills and glanced down at the street. He saw Pearl loading suitcases into the Mercury trunk.

He said, “Speedy! Look at this!”

Speedy came to the window, looked down and said laconically, “She’s hitting the wind, pally.”

Folks galloped from the apartment to the elevators, savagely punched at a down button. He pounded his fist into his palm as he waited, then stepped into the elevator and rode down, sprang from it and raced to the street. Pearl’s car had disappeared. He got into his car and desperately tried to spot her for an hour and a half.

He drove back and went to his apartment with Speedy and found Pearl’s note on the bed. He sat down heavily on the side of it. Her tears had run the ink.

He read: “
Dear Johnny, sorry to do it this way. I lost my temper and I’m so ashamed. I thought I’d be nigger crazy and strong enough to tough it with you, until things worked out for us. Be happy with your new love, Johnny. I’m chicken, I just can’t compete with my competition. She’s a wipe out, Johnny. And after all, she’s got the edge I guess, since you
both have white skins in common. I tried to make you happy. You know that. But, like you always said, “Somebody is got to lose when somebody wins.” Don’t forget to take your vitamins every day. Good-bye, Pearl.”

The jangle of the phone beside him on the nightstand startled him. He picked it up and said, “Hello.”

He heard Kid’s cold voice crackle. “Stay at home, Johnny. Trevor and I will be right over.”

Fifteen minutes later Folks opened the door to Trevor and Kid. They walked into the living room and sat down with long faces.

Folks leaned forward in his chair and asked, “Something important pop up? Trouble, Pappy?”

Kid growled. “Just some nit shit trouble cunt freak, lopear! Christina was threatened on the highway by Pearl. She’s distraught, in a rage and she’s frozen the fix. We can’t play for Bates! And our set-up is blown with a wave of your sucker ding dong!”

Trevor said, “Johnny, I just can’t understand how a fellow with your intelligence would let his girl tail him with so much at stake.”

“Shut up, Trevor! I was stupid all right! Look Pappy, give me a chance to clear my skull. I’ll come up with an angle to square the fix.”

“You have to square up Christina, Johnny. Mother has put her in charge officially. Christina vowed to me that she’s through with you. I know her well and I’m afraid you don’t have a prayer to change her mind about anything.”

“I can change her mind if I can talk to her. Trevor, arrange a meeting at the bank this week for Pappy with her. I’ll show up.”

Kid said, “Pipe dreams won’t get it, laddie. She’s too raw for that. Besides, what makes you think she’ll see me?”