The Cutie Read Free Page A

try growing your own in this country. That means that Ed has a close tie-in with a couple of boys in Europe. He’s the distributor for them just the way Billy-Billy is a distributor for Ed. Every once in a while, a representative from one of these European boys comes over and looks around a little, not saying much of anything, just to see how things are doing. If he should happen to decide that things aren’t doing as well as they might, there would very likely be a shuffling of authority, and Ed would no longer be my boss. And, since a new broom sweeps clean, Ed and I would probably go together.
    And into all this comes Billy-Billy, who did something non-dangerous behind the lines during World War Two and who probably worked black market a bit. He wasn’t a snowbird then. He met somebody, did the guy a favor or two, and it turns out that that somebody became very big after the war, and still remembered Billy-Billy. Which complicates things when standard operating procedure calls for Billy-Billy to have an accident.
    “Get going, Clay,” Ed told me. “Call me when you come back, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”
    “Yeah, Ed,” I said. “Sure.”
    He hung up, and I sat there holding the phone for a minute. “I’ll be double-damned,” I said.
    “What’s the matter?” Ella asked me.
    I looked at her, then at the silent phone, and then back at her again. I put the phone back in its cradle, and said, “I’ve got to go to New Goddam England.”
    “Now?”
    “I’ll be a royal son of a bitch,” I said.
    “Now, Clay?”
    “He’s got friends. That two-bit, unwashed, flea-ridden, dime-a-dozen punk has friends.” I got to my feet and glared at the phone. “Why?” I wanted to know. “Why should a lousy punk like that have friends? Why should I have to go all the way up to New England because that good-for-nothing bum has friends?”
    I might have kept on that way for quite a while, but the doorbell rang again, cutting me off. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Another one.”
    I stormed on through the apartment, and met Billy-Billy coming the other way. We met in the hall between the dining room and the bedroom. He looked more terrified than ever. “Cops!” he whispered. “It muh-must be cops! Wuh-where can I hide?”
    “You stay the hell out of the bedroom,” I told him. I looked around. The bathroom was to the left, the combination den and hi-fi room to the right. “Go on in there,” I told him, motioning at the den. “Come on, hurry.”
    He hurried, and I followed him in. Along one wall I have a waist-high bench, where the turntable, tape recorder, pre-amp and amplifier are all lined up. I use the space beneath this bench for storage, and I have sliding doors across in front of the storage space. I shoved one of the doors aside now, and prodded some junk back into a corner. “Crawl in there,” I told him. “And stay there until I come looking for you.”
    “Thu-thanks, Clay,” he said, and crawled into the space I’d made for him. He went head-first, and I had to work hard to resist the impulse to boot that bony butt of his a good one. But I was afraid I might dropkick him into some expensive equipment, so I just waited until he was all the way inside, and then I slid the door shut in front of him.
    My second visitor, whoever he was, was a lot more patient than Billy-Billy. He didn’t ring for the second time until I was on my way out of the den. I called out, “Hold it a second!” and hurried through to the living room.
    This time, I was more careful. I looked through the peephole to see who it was outside there, and I saw Billy-Billy had been right. There were three cops out there, one of whom I knew, a plainclothesman named Grimes, who worked out of a precinct on the Upper East Side. The other two, both of them strangers to me, were also in plainclothes, and they looked a lot like Grimes. Heavy, dour, stern faces. Baggy plain-pipe-rack suits. Broad shoulders and no waists.