Played! Page 4

  Chapter Eleven

  It’s almost noon.

  We’re in the men’s room at the SharpShooters Club, just down the hall from the Safari Dining Room.

  Marble sinks, polished brass fixtures, neat stacks of cotton hand towels, and a sumptuous row of porcelain urinals fit for the gods. An elegant room. Exactly what you would expect to find in the most exclusive gun club in St. Louis, founded in 1904 to coincide with the World’s Fair and the Olympics, both held in St. Louis that year. Over the decades its guests—many displayed in framed photographs in the lobby—have included two Presidents, several CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and various other celebrities from the worlds of Hollywood (that one on the far right is Clint Eastwood), music (yep, that’s Ted Nugent), and sports (including several Cardinals but no longer O.J. Simpson, whose photo came down a few months before the jury verdict).

  And thus we are in one of the last men’s rooms in St. Louis where you would expect to find Jimmy Torrado. He combs his thick black hair in the large mirror over the marble sinks, trying to maintain his cool. He runs his finger under his collar and then straightens his tie, checking his reflection. He isn’t used to wearing a coat and tie, but you do what you gotta do. Trailed the son of a bitch for three days, trying to figure out how to get close enough to do it, to get past his driver and his secretary and the rest of the damn entourage. And then it hit him, like one of those bulbs clicking on in a cartoon: serve the asshole in the crapper.

  Jimmy leans forward and stares at himself in the mirror. There is a little blackhead on the bridge of his nose. Yes, sir, he says to himself as he pinches it out between his thumbnail and fingernail, you got to get up pretty early in the a.m. to get the drop on Jimmy Torrado. Fucking aye, baby.

  He hears a rustle of newspaper from one of the toilet stalls. Then the sound of toilet paper unrolling.

  Jimmy Torrado takes the documents out of his blue plastic briefcase and waits. The toilet flushes, the stall door opens. A silver-haired guy steps out, a St. Louis Business Journal folded under his arm. He moves past Jimmy toward one of the sinks like Jimmy wasn’t even fucking there.

  Yep, that’s him.

  Jimmy waits until the guy starts washing his hands. Big green gems on his cuff links, manicured fingernails, gold Rolex watch. Guy is loaded, no question.

  “You Leonard Pitt?”

  The silver-haired guy turns his head toward him as he lathers his hands. Doesn’t say a thing. Just stares at Jimmy with those cold blue eyes. Sub-zero eyes. Rinses the suds off his hands, reaches for a towel, taking his own sweet goddamn time, drying his hands like he has all fucking day, Jimmy just standing there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  Still drying his hands, the guy looks at Jimmy, sizing him up.

  In a raspy voice, he says, “What do you want?”

  Making it sound like more of a demand than a question.

  Jimmy Torrado takes a step toward him and holds out the court papers. “Mr. Leonard Pitt, you are hereby served with the summons and complaint in this here lawsuit. You’re also served with a motion for preliminary injunction and, uh, some of these other court papers.”

  Pitt doesn’t take them. Doesn’t even glance at them. Just stares at Jimmy Torrado, who is starting to feel like a total douchebag standing there with the papers in his outstretched hand and this arrogant bastard still drying his fucking hands and giving him a look like Jimmy’s some kind of retard.

  “You gonna take ’em or what?”

  After a moment, Pitt’s lips curl into a smile. An arrogant smile. He turns away and drops the towel into the hamper.

  He turns back toward Jimmy. “Leave the papers by the sink, greaseball, and get the fuck out of here.”

  Torrado slaps the papers down on the sink and grabs his plastic briefcase. He opens the door, pauses, and looks back.

  “You’ve just been served, asshole!”

  After Torrado leaves, Leonard Pitt glances down at the stack of papers. The top page is the summons in Mid-Continent Casualty Assurance Co. v. Leonard M. Pitt. He lifts the document. Below it is the complaint. He skims through it, expressionless. Below that is the motion for a preliminary injunction and the supporting memorandum of law. Pitt leafs slowly through the motion, stopping at the final page:

  Wherefore, this honorable Court should enter a preliminary injunction freezing all liquid assets of defendant Pitt by enjoining and prohibiting defendant and any banks, savings and loan associations, or other financial institutions with whom defendant Pitt or his firm maintains any accounts from removing, withdrawing, or otherwise transferring any money out of any such accounts.

  He rereads that final paragraph. After a moment, he looks up at his reflection in the mirror, his frown fading.

  There is a hint of a smile as he turns away.

  Chapter Twelve

  At twelve-ten the following afternoon, Hal pulls his car into the alley behind the Pitt house, steps through a gap in the bushes, and bounds up to the back door. He is carrying the duct tape in one hand. He raps on the door. Cherry opens it.

  Hal’s grin fades. “What happened?”

  Cherry is wearing dark glasses. Her face is grim. “I’m getting out of this house for good.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Come on in.”

  She closes the door after him, walks over to the fridge, and opens it.

  “Have a beer,” she says, pointing to the bottles on the top shelf. “I’ve already had three.”

  Hal reaches in, takes one, and steps back with a confused look.

  “Okay,” he says, and twists off the beer cap.

  Cherry says, “We had a fight.”

  “About what?”

  “I told him I wanted a divorce.”

  She walks toward the living room, pausing to look back at him. “Take a look.”

  Hal follows her, stopping at the doorway to the living room.

  “Holy crap.”

  The room is a mess: furniture overturned, a piece of pottery in shards on the carpet, the fireplace screen jammed in the fireplace.

  Hal turns to her. “What happened?”

  “He went nuts.”

  “Your husband did all this?”

  “And this.”

  She removes her sunglasses. She has a black eye.

  “And this.” She opens the top buttons of her shirt to reveal scratches on her chest.

  “That bastard. I’ll kill him.”

  “No you won’t. He’s a dangerous man, Hal. The people who work for him are even worse.”

  “Then let’s call the police.”

  “Forget the police, Hal. I just want to get out of here. And never come back.”

  He reaches tenderly for her face. She flinches.

  “Come with me,” he says. “You can stay at my apartment.”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t want to get you involved, honey.”

  “I am involved. I want to be involved. You need someone to protect you.”

  She reaches for his hand, her eyes watering. “Dear sweet Hal. You don’t know what he’s like.”

  “Screw him. It’s you I care about.”

  “Not your apartment. It has to be somewhere he’d never look. Somewhere I can disappear for a while.”

  “Wherever it is, I’ll take you there.”

  She smiles at him. “You shouldn’t get involved, sweetheart. It’s my problem.”

  “It’s our problem, Cherry. Pack an overnight bag and let’s get out of here.”

  She gives him a tender kiss. “My protector.”

  “Damn straight, girl.”

  ***

  Hal is on his cell phone when Cherry comes back downstairs to the kitchen

  “It’s probably a virus,” he says into the phone. “One of those twenty-four-hour things. I’m going to go home
and get some sleep. See if I can shake it. I’m off tomorrow and Thursday. Hopefully, I’ll be feeling better on Friday, okay? Thanks.”

  Cherry has an overnight bag. Hal finishes his beer and sets it on the counter.

  He gives her an encouraging smile. “Ready?”

  She nods.

  “My car’s in the alley.”

  She follows him out.

  Hal opens the car door for her. Just as Cherry starts to get in, she stops.

  “Damn,” she says.

  “What?”

  “I forgot something. I’ll be right back.

  “Can I help?”

  “No. Start the car. This’ll take two minutes.

  Cherry reenters the kitchen, puts her overnight bag on the counter, and unzips it. She removes the surgical gloves, slips them on, and pulls out a manila envelope and the duct tape. She reaches over and picks up Hal’s beer bottle out of the trash. She carries the envelope, duct tape, and beer bottle into the living room. She places the bottle on the fireplace mantle. Then she removes the ransom note from the envelope, tears off a piece of duct tape, and tapes the note to the mantle. Then she picks up the fireplace poker, walks over to the gun case, and shatters the glass. She selects a handgun, opens a drawer, removes a handful of bullets, and puts the gun and the bullets into the manila envelope. She pauses to survey the room and then heads back to the kitchen, opens the cabinet beneath the sink, pulls the empty beer bottle out from behind the dishwasher detergent boxes, and sets it on the kitchen counter. Then she removes her surgical gloves, unzips her overnight bag, shoves them inside, zips the bag shut, and heads to the alley. She tosses her overnight bag in the backseat of Hal’s car and gets in on the passenger side.

  “All set?” he asks.

  She nods. “All set.”

  “You say this motel is out by the airport?” he asks.

  “It’s a real dive. I’ve seen it on the way to the airport. Leonard will never think to look there.”

  Hal grins and shrugs. “Then off we go.”

  Hal guns the engine, shifts into Drive, and screeches out of the alley. His radio is on, the volume high.

  He doesn’t notice the late-model black Mustang parked down the street from Pitt’s house, and certainly doesn’t hear that engine start up.

  Hal turns right at the corner and heads toward the highway. A moment later, the Mustang turns right at the corner and heads toward the highway.

  ***

  Thirty minutes later, we are inside the dingy front office of the Sleepy Time Motel. A jet screams by overhead in its final descent into Lambert Airport, momentarily drowning out the tinny sounds of Gilligan’s Island coming from the portable TV visible in the back room behind the counter.

  “Sixty, eighty—”

  The elderly female day manager watches as Hal counts out twenty-dollar bills. She is dressed in a faded flowered housecoat. A lit cigarette dangles from the corner of her mouth. Easily in her seventies, she has jet black hair and a lacquered hairdo that could survive a direct hit from a cruise missile.

  “—one-hundred, one-twenty, one-forty, one-sixty. There.” Hal looks up and smiles. “Four nights, right?”

  The day manager peers around Hal toward the parking lot. “Where’s your wife.”

  “She’s a little shy. Never stayed in a motel before. She’s still in the car”

  “Don’t expect no one to clean your room. The maid quit. You want fresh towels or sheets, you bring the dirty ones down here and trade ’em for clean ones. Got that?”

  “Sure do. Sounds good to me.”

  Twenty minutes later, Hal is sitting on the bed in Room 205. The bathroom door is closed.

  “What?” Cherry calls from the bathroom.

  “I said it seems a little depressing in here.”

  The bathroom door opens and Cherry emerges. She has on a man’s dress shirt and black pumps. She walks over to the easy chair and leans against it, her backside toward Hal. Slowly moving her hips back and forth, she gradually lifts the tail of the shirt. She has nothing on underneath.

  Looking back at Hal, she whispers, “Fuck me.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  We are high above Tenth Street, inside the chambers of the Honorable Roy L. Stubbs, United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Missouri.

  The room is imposing. Fit for a pharaoh, adequate for a federal judge. Tall ceilings, dark paneling, a huge picture window with a panoramic view of downtown St. Louis—of Busch Stadium, of the Old Courthouse framed by the Gateway Arch, of the Mississippi River. In front of that window sits a massive walnut desk. Behind that desk is a high-backed leather chair that’s more throne than seat. And on that throne sits the Honorable Roy L. Stubbs, beads of sweat forming on his forehead.

  His Honor leans to his right and releases another fart.

  Fiber shock. Has to be. Christ Almighty, I’m going into fiber shock.

  In the middle of the room, dominating the foreground, is a burled walnut conference table encircled by eight leather chairs. On one wall are floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with bound law books. On another are portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, along with a framed St. Louis University Law School diploma and a plaque displaying a bronzed Missouri State Highway Patrol badge. On the desk, a standup family portrait of a plump blond woman and three blond daughters, all wearing glasses. Hanging from a brass coatrack in the corner: a black robe and a bright orange-and-black plaid sports jacket.

  His Honor lifts his haunches and releases another fart.

  Married to a fiber zealot, for God’s sake.

  Yesterday morning Bernice had placed a homemade bran muffin next to his coffee mug. Had the heft of a waterlogged softball, the flavor of drywall. The Muffin from the Black Lagoon.

  His Honor’s stomach rumbles. Gas pressure builds again in his colon.

  This morning she’d kissed him on the forehead and placed a bowl before him. He’d stared down at what looked like a pile of hamster turds.

  “What in God’s name are these?” he’d finally asked.

  “Bran buds, Father. Packed with yummy fiber.”

  They’d tasted even worse than they looked, a moist blend of sawdust and industrial sand. His Honor had forced down half a bowl, all the while imagining what would happen if the president of Kellogg’s ever found himself in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Roy L. Stubbs.

  His Honor shakes his head. Who’d have thought that the cute blonde he’d pulled over for speeding thirty-seven years ago on I-55 just south of Festus would become, in the thirty-third year of their marriage, a born-again believer in the divine grace of an ample bowel movement? After three peaceful decades of Wonder Bread, Uncle Ben’s, and Rice Krispies. Go figure.

  Another wince, another fart.

  Then again, he concedes, he isn’t exactly the trim highway trooper anymore. When they were newlyweds she called him her John Wayne, although even then it was a reach for a guy five-foot-nine. It is far more of a reach now. Over the past thirty years he’s added ten inches to his waistline, lost most of his hair, and padded those square jaws with a set of jowls. Last weekend at Home Depot, while selecting a new belt for the sander, he thought he’d spotted former Cubs manager Don Zimmer across the aisle—only to realize with a start that he was looking at his own reflection.

  His Honor pulls a handkerchief from his back pocket and wipes the sweat off his forehead.

  Definitely fiber shock.

  There is a rap at the door.

  “Christ,” he mumbles, squeezing his butt cheeks together.

  “It’s open.”

  Into chambers lumbers His Honor’s enormous docket clerk, Rahsan Abdullah Ahmed (né Lamar Williams). Six-feet-six-inches tall, two hundred eighty pounds, big as an ox, black as coal, and—on first impression—dumb as dirt. First impressions can be misleadin
g.

  “Good morning, Rahsan.”

  “Mornin’, Yo’ Honor.”

  Their first months together had been tough ones for Judge Stubbs. He enjoyed the pomp and circumstance of the district court, right down to the traditional Oyez, Oyez, Oyez to open court each morning. Thus he used to cringe when Rahsan banged the gavel three times and announced to the crowded courtroom, with a hearty Oh-yeah, Oh-yeah, Oh-yeah, de United States Distick Coat is now in session!

  But that was then. Although Rahsan would never dub voice-overs for Darth Vader, it hadn’t taken Judge Stubbs long to recognize his docket clerk’s true value. He’d had law clerks, of course—those kids with degrees from snooty law schools. Even though they had all the street-smarts of a St. Louis Country Club dowager, those damn kids could research like there was no tomorrow, and that’s important to former Highway Trooper Roy L. Stubbs. He isn’t looking to blaze new paths in the law, especially after what the Eighth Circuit did to him last year in the Arnold Bros. appeal. Judge Eastman wrote the opinion for the panel. Made him sound like some yahoo who’d slipped his electronic cuffs, the pompous bastard. So these days he turns to his law clerks for the law. But when His Honor needs something more important than legal research, he has Rahsan. His law clerks occasionally let him down; they can’t always find a precedent. But his docket clerk, God bless him, never lets him down.

  “What do we have this morning?” Judge Stubbs asks.

  Rahsan shakes his head with weary patience and tugs on his goatee. “Oh, jes’ the usual tattletales and crybabies.”

  He hands Judge Stubbs the stack of motions that have been set for hearing that morning. His Honor checks his wristwatch and sighs. He could close his eyes and picture them: grim squadrons of lawyers armed with briefcases marching toward the Eagleton Courthouse, leaning forward with determination. Soon they’d be converging on the elevators below for their ascent to the courtrooms of Judge Stubbs and his fellow judges of the Eastern District of Missouri.

  Morning motion call.

  Judge Stubbs leafs through the all-too-familiar pile of papers, the distaste evident on his face. Motion to Compel Production of Documents. Motion for Extension of Time to File Reply Memorandum. Motion for Sanctions. Motion for Continuance. Motion to Compel Answers to Interrogatories. Motion for Sanctions. Motion for Leave to File Sur-Reply. Motion for Extension of Time to File Amended Complaint. Motion for Leave to File Brief in Excess of Twenty Pages. Motion for Continuance. Motion for Sanctions.