The Stingray Shuffle Page 16

  He braced the butt of the shotgun on the floor and placed the other end in his mouth. He kicked off his right sandal and stuck his big toe in the trigger guard.

  He pressed down with his toe.

  Nothing.

  He pressed again. Still nothing. The damn thing wouldn’t budge. He took the barrel out of his mouth and looked down. The safety was still on. He reached for it but the gun was too long, and he couldn’t get to it with his toe still in the trigger. He tried to pull the toe out, but it had swollen and was stuck.

  Jethro sulked on the end of the bed, hanging his head pitifully, his big toe turning purple. He grabbed the bottle of Dickel again. “Exquisite,” he sighed. “Even in suicide I have become a buffoon.”

  The motel room door crashed open. Five tropical shirts stood in the doorway.

  “Where’s our briefcase!”

  Jethro screamed. He jumped up and ran for the bathroom.

  “Get him!” yelled Ivan.

  It was difficult for Jethro to run, dragging the shotgun. The sixteen-gauge swung out and hit the bottom of the dresser, knocking off the safety.

  Jethro took another step for the bathroom.

  Bang.

  Another step.

  Bang.

  Jethro hobbled as fast as he could, the shotgun firing with each step, spraying a tight pattern of lead pellets at everything within six inches of the floor.

  The homicide detective was conducting follow-up interviews at the driving range. His beeper went off.

  The detective parked behind the Orbit Motel and trotted quickly toward an upstairs room but slowed when he noticed five sets of bloody footprints coming down the steps.

  A paramedic was inside, trying to get Jethro’s toe out of the shotgun with Vaseline.

  “Ah, yes, you drive the ambulance,” said Jethro. “Like the courageous young men of the Parisian countryside during the Great War…”

  “Jethro, straighten your leg out some more,” said the paramedic. “I can’t get leverage.”

  “Did you check to see if it was still loaded?” asked the detective.

  “Of course.”

  Bang.

  “Jethro?…Jethro?…”

  The detective pulled out his notebook. “This is going in your file.”

  20

  Spider came back to the Sapphire Room after storming out that night. He always came back.

  Preston promised not to do the one-armed gag anymore. He always lied.

  The Sapphire Room was the Devil’s Island of lounge acts. The gang wanted out. They all had the same agent, and they complained every chance. On a Saturday night in September, they got the phone call. Their agent had come through with an ambitious schedule of engagements cutting clear across the country from the desert southwest to the northeast industrial corridor. The itinerary came over the fax at the Gold Dust Motel.

  “These places look worse than the Sapphire Room!” said Spider. They called their agent.

  He advised patience. This was résumé-building time. They needed to get some polish from the road, put together recommendations and audition tapes. And if all went well…the agent told them what he had in mind next.

  “Shit,” said Preston. “What are we waiting for?”

  They hit the highway in Spider’s brown DeVille with bad suspension, pulling a U-Haul, dragging the trailer chain and making sparks. It was tight quarters. Spider, Andy, Saul, Preston, Frankie and Bad Company, shoulder to shoulder in blue tuxedos. They were surprised to discover they actually liked the road. It got in their blood: the gas stations and the greasy spoons and the greasier motels with The Paper Strip of Total Confidence across the toilet seat. They worked the circuit of small hotel bars in second-shelf cities bypassed by the big acts. No interstate travel. Just two lanes across America. The big, open sky and rolling plateaus and tumbleweeds across Arizona and New Mexico, putting in a lot of car time. Preston kept them going with hypnosis stories.

  “There was this guy in Switzerland back in the eighteen hundreds who used to hypnotize his wife into becoming completely rigid. And he would set up two chairs and lay her on her back, head on one chair, feet on the other, nothing underneath…”

  “I’ve seen that one,” said Andy.

  “It gets better,” said Preston. “This guy put concrete blocks on her stomach and invited people from the audience to smash them with sledgehammers.”

  “I know what’s coming,” said Spider. “She came out of the trance at the crucial moment?”

  “Worse,” said Preston. “One of the volunteers from the audience—he misses the block completely. Kills her.”

  “That’s fucked up,” said Spider, lighting a cigarette.

  “Still a fun story,” said Preston.

  More miles. Texaco road maps, flat tires, bad coffee, farts. But things were looking up, moods improving. They were seeing their country. And they were getting better. Acts began to sharpen during the night-in-night-out lounge march east, Tempe, Tucson, Tombstone. “Any cliff dwellers in the audience tonight? I got a joke for you…” Albuquerque, Carlsbad, Roswell, Lubbock, Abilene, the landscape slowly transforming, cattle ranches and oil derricks replacing the mesas and buttes and UFO people. San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, the Alamo Room, the Lone Star Supper Club, the downtown Galveston Skate-O-Rama, which they would be discussing with their agent.

  “Here’s a good one,” said Preston. “This is what got me interested in hypnosis in the first place, and it’s definitely true, completely documented. All the scholars know the details. In the late 1800s, another hypnotist in Europe had regularly been hypnotizing an assistant for stage demonstrations. He usually instructed her mind to leave her body and enter another hypnotized subject, in order to cure ailments. Then she’d leave that person’s body and take the ailment with her.”

  “Did it work?”

  “The medical part is hocus-pocus, but the power of suggestion is very real. One night, the guy got sloppy or something and instead of telling her mind to leave her body, he told her soul to leave.”

  “What happened?”

  “Heart attack. Died.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “We only find it amazing because we’re cynical Americans. We’ve never really accepted hypnosis over here,” said Preston. “The French know all about this.”

  “The French?”

  “If it can be used for sex, the French are all over it. A hundred years ago, stage hypnotists were screwing everything that moved in Paris. It got out of control. Everybody knew what was going on. The subject dominated French publishing. De Maupassant wrote about it. So did Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers. Then, in 1894, the same year that assistant got killed onstage, George du Maurier kicked the door wide open with his international best-selling novel Trilby, featuring the cowardly-cruel villain Svengali, who exploits his subjects.”

  “A hypnotist who exploits his subject?” said Spider. “What a shock.”

  Onward, turning north, heavier coats, autumn leaves changing. Knoxville, Lexington, Akron, Wilkes-Barre, Schenectady. The regional accents and politics morphing, but not the clubs, which even had the same names, repeating over and over in a neon Möbius strip: the Flamingo, the Satin Club, the Stardust Room, the Horseshoe Lounge, Fast Eddie’s, the Sands, the Surf, the Algiers, the Copa, the Aladdin, the Riviera, the Flamingo…These were the good times, barnstorming Vegas Nation, laughter again filling their lives, even if it was at someone’s expense from another hypnosis prank. None of them would admit it, but they genuinely began enjoying hanging out together, encouraging each other, going to movies at old Main Street theaters. They went to see Saving Private Ryan in Bridgeport and Preston said asparagus, and Frankie Chan went up to the screen and made shadow puppets during the beach landing, and they all got chased down the street.

  With such a heavy schedule, it was bound to happen. Casualties. In Poughkeepsie, they lost Saul Horowitz and his vaudeville tribute to va
ricose veins, replacing him with Dee Dee Lowenstein “as Carmen Miranda.” Then, in the Tango Room in Scranton, Bad Company was served a footlocker of lawsuits for trademark infringement.

  But they were professionals now, no looking back, pressing forward, toward the final prize. The odometer turned over. Spider dialed their agent in New York. “When do we get the replacement musical act for Bad Company?…But they were our anchor on the marquee…. You said to be patient last time….”

  The DeVille pulled into their Thursday-night engagement.

  Dee Dee Lowenstein finished her Carmen Miranda set. She returned to the corner booth in the restaurant and set her fruit hat on the table.

  Spider lit her cigarette. “How’d it go?”

  She exhaled. “Fuckin’ morgue.”

  Frankie reached for her hat. “Can I have a banana?”

  “No, you can’t have a banana! What are you, fuckin’ simple?”

  “But you got a whole bunch.”

  She pointed at his hand. “Move it or lose it!”

  A stranger approached the table wearing a tuxedo and carrying a small musical case. He took a piece of paper from his pocket and read something.

  “Can we help you?” asked Andy.

  “I’m supposed to meet some people. I’m not sure I have the right place.” He reread the piece of paper.

  Andy reached. “Let me see that.”

  Spider finished his juggling set and came back to the table.

  “How’d it go?”

  “Fuckin’ granite. Gimme a cigarette.”

  Andy handed the paper back to the new guy. “Yep, you’re in the right place. What’s your name?”

  “Bob. Bob Kowolski.”

  Andy motioned back and forth. “Bob—the gang…. The gang—Bob.”

  “What’s your act, Bob?”

  Bob told them.

  Frankie lit a cigarette. “Better than nothing.”

  The emcee came up to the table and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “What’s going on here? We got an empty stage.”

  Spider pointed at the new guy. “Looks like you’re up, Bob. Cherry-poppin’ time. Break a leg.”

  Bob hurried off with his musical case.

  Spider chain-lit a Viceroy. “I didn’t think it was possible, but Bob may just make us long for the days of Bad Company.”

  Bob climbed onstage and pulled a stool up to the microphone.

  The emcee motioned for a soft spotlight. “Ladies and gentlemen, Caesars Palace of Hoboken is proud to present Steppenwolf!”

  Bob leaned to the microphone. “Get your motor runnin’!…” He began playing the pan flute.

  A cell phone rang in the corner booth. Spider answered. He mostly listened. He hung up.

  “Who was it?” asked Preston.

  “Our agent.”

  “Jesus, Spider, you’re white as a sheet!”

  “That was the call we’ve been waiting for our entire lives.”

  “What call?”

  “We’ve made it. No more playing dumps like this. We’re going right to the very top.”

  “You don’t mean…”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  21

  “They’re in a pink Cadillac, for Chrissake!” Ivan yelled into his cell phone. “How hard can it be to find?…Shut up! That was rhetorical!…Look, here’s what you’re going to do. Tell all your hookers and pimps on US 1 to keep their eyes open for a pink Eldorado. They’re out there twenty-four hours anyway. If the Caddy ends up anywhere on US 1 from West Palm to Miami, at least a dozen of your people will see it…. What do you mean, how do I know they’ll end up on US 1? They’re scumbags!”

  A metal clanging sound.

  Eyelids fluttered in morning sunlight.

  Clang, clang.

  Lenny sat up in the rigid motel bed and looked around.

  Serge was at the sink, shaving, singing Estefan, “…I live for lov-in’ you. Ooooooo, la, la, la—la, la, la, la…”

  Lenny rubbed his eyes and went over to the window. He pulled back a burlap curtain. Cars raced by on US 1, past a big sign out front, SAHARA MOTEL. Someone had thrown a brick through the camel. He looked across the bent fence at the source of the clanging, the body shop next door.

  “Where are we?”

  “Riviera Beach,” said Serge. “My hometown.”

  Clang, clang.

  “This motel is on the skid,” said Lenny.

  “I know. Isn’t it great?” Serge pointed at a wall. “And they still have the original cheesy beach painting from the sixties.” Serge grabbed one side of the frame and began pulling.

  “You’re stealing the painting?”

  “Yes, this is The Thomas Crown Affair,” said Serge. “Why do they have to bolt these things to the wall?”

  Lenny came over and tugged from the other side, and the painting came down along with two drywall anchors and a tiny cloud of plaster dust. Serge reached in his shaving kit and pulled out a travel squeeze bottle and began squirting red liquid on the bedsheets.

  “What’s that?” asked Lenny.

  “Chicken blood.” Serge squirted the pillowcases and splattered the wall.

  “It looks like someone got hacked up in here.”

  “Exactly,” said Serge. “Takes their mind off the missing painting. Works every time.” He stuck the bottle back in his shaving kit. “C’mon, we have to check out.”

  “I think I need a shower,” said Lenny. “I can smell myself.”

  “No time,” said Serge. “We have to get to the hideout.”

  “The what?”

  “The hideout. We need to lay low until the heat is off.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re on US 1 and this is a very distinctive car. The network of hookers and other human cockroaches has no doubt already been alerted to be on the lookout.”

  “So that’s why you covered it with that thing.”

  Serge tucked the painting under an arm and picked up the silver briefcase. “Let’s rock.”

  They went around behind the motel. Lenny pulled the beige tarp off the Cadillac, and they got in.

  Serge made a quick left onto North Thirty-seventh Street and pulled up to the curb in front of a small clapboard house, number 28.

  “Is this the hideout?”

  “I wish!” said Serge, snapping pictures without getting out of the car. He lowered the camera to change the f-stop. “No, this is Burt Reynolds’s childhood home. His dad was police chief here, and the family used to have a restaurant on Blue Heron Boulevard by the old drawbridge.”

  Lenny fired up the morning fat one. “Why are you so into Burt, anyway?”

  “Because we’re homeboys. I grew up on Thirty-fifth Street, two blocks over.”

  “Far out.”

  “Think of it,” said Serge. “Just two streets. Do you have any idea what that means?”

  Lenny shook his head.

  Serge held his thumb and index finger an inch apart. “It means I was this close to being in Boogie Nights.”

  A hooker approached the car. “Hey, sugar.”

  Serge pointed at the house. “What time’s the next tour?”

  “The what?”

  He snapped a couple more quick pictures and looked around the yard, then back at the hooker. “Where’s the historic marker? They’ve put one up, haven’t they? Don’t tell me someone stole it!…Yeah, that has to be it. There’s no way they’d let Burt’s place go unmarked…” He raised the camera again. Click, click.

  “Wait,” said the hooker, slowly backing away from the convertible. “This is the pink Cadillac. This is the car!” She quickly pulled a cell phone from her leopard purse.

  “We’ve been made!” said Serge, starting up the car. “To the hideout!”

  22

  Well after midnight on the island of Palm Beach. The streets were empty; the people with five-hundred-dollar sweaters tied around their necks had all gone home. Waiters mopped and turned chairs upside down on the tables at Ta-boo, a
popular piano bar on Worth Avenue.

  It had been quiet outside, but now the windows shook, and the help looked up to see a purple Jeep Wrangler fly by with a pulsating stereo producing the kind of sound used by surgical instruments to pulverize gallstones. The Jeep continued west, past the showroom windows, Cartier, Tiffany, Gucci, Saks, ten-thousand-dollar purses, framed autographs of Sigmund Freud and Woodrow Wilson, handcrafted figurines depicting the Boer War. Past Via De Mario, Via Roma, Via Parigi, Renato’s and the Everglades Club. Across Hibiscus Avenue, weaving erratically over the yellow center line. But the car was local, and the attention of the police was directed elsewhere, outward, defending the social perimeter from the unwashed mainland people.

  The Jeep rounded the corner at South Lake and turned up a winding slab driveway to a private waterfront residence inspired by the Acropolis. The Jeep’s doors opened; two men in loafers got out. Cameron and Brandon, home for semester break from the Ivy League. They had started vacation as a group of four frat brothers, but the other two had been beaten to pâté in a Miami Beach traffic misunderstanding and were respectively undergoing orthodontic surgery and groin reconstruction.

  “Don’t forget the beer.”

  “Whoops.”

  They were fairly good-sized boys, 215 pounds each at the start of the year, now 240 with the anabolics—stars of the sculling team and Greek intramural touch football. Everything was going their way. They had just made it home without a DUI, and that called for a celebration. Time to get out the speedboat.

  According to the manufacturer’s literature, the thirty-three-foot Donzi Daytona can reach speeds of a hundred miles an hour, but it was only going sixty when it ran over the pelicans in the darkness under the Royal Palm Bridge and spread a wide wake across the Intracoastal Waterway.

  “Do you think we’re going too fast?” Brandon yelled over the wind and spray.

  “What?” yelled Cameron. “Go faster?”

  He pushed the throttle forward and headed for the next bridge, Flagler Memorial. The draw spans were up and a yacht was coming the other way.