Three Twisted Stories Read Free Page A

using this way, but he was smart enough not to ask. He visited the dry cleaner at least once a week now, and while he never saw anyone else in the building, there were always plenty of clothes on the rack. Salmeri had a warehouse over in Colored Town where sixteen black women ironed and washed clothes for him. It was a nice warehouse, not what Charlie had been expecting. The women laughed and listened to the radio. Nobody laughed at Charlie’s dealership. Maybe he should hire some black women.
    “Mr. Lam,” Salmeri said, his code to let Charlie know there was somebody else in the building. Everybody called Charlie by his first name. Nobody called Salmeri by his.
    Charlie jammed his hands into his pants pockets. He was sweating for real now. It was always damp inside the dry cleaner’s, even though no work was done on site. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief. He could hear humming, which annoyed him, then he realized the humming was coming from his own throat.
    That fucking Carpenters cover of the Beatles. He couldn’t get it out of his head.
    “All right.” Salmeri finished filling out a word. He put down his pen. He turned around and pressed a button and the clothes behind him started spinning on the rack. Salmeri played both sides. There were police uniforms alongside the bright green pants and purple silk shirts that the pimps favored.
    Salmeri asked, “You going to the game?”
    Charlie had been hearing this same question all morning. It was code for “Are you for Aaron or are you against him?”
    “Dunno,” Charlie mumbled, his pat answer.
    Salmeri wouldn’t have it. “You think he’ll do it?”
    Charlie shrugged. He was scared of Salmeri. Not Mike Thevis scared, but scarednonetheless. The guy owned several dry cleaners. He ran book on football games. He drove a nice Cadillac and he was Italian, which meant he was mobbed to hell and back.
    Salmeri plucked a suit off the rack. The plastic dry-cleaner bag ruffled as it moved through the air. He showed a row of white teeth under his bushy mustache. “You feel it on the street?” He waited, but Charlie didn’t have an answer for him. “It’s like it was in ’64 when the civil rights bill passed. You could hear one side of the city letting out a long sigh, and the other side screaming out a lo-o-o-ng
‘Mothahfuckahhh!’
 ”
    A toilet flushed in the back. Charlie took this as an excuse not to respond. Salmeri was always trying to pin him down on something. How did Charlie feel now that the city was majority black instead of white? How did he feel now that they had a new black mayor? How did he feel when the white police chief was fired and replaced with an uppity black man from the North?
    Each time, Charlie told him he didn’t feel one way or another. Salmeri couldn’t get it through his thick, greasy head that Charlie Lam cared about politics almost as much as he cared about Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth. He’d sell a car to a black man or a white man, so long as his money was green.
    “Thank you,” a woman’s voice called. Charlie saw her a few moments later. She was a female cop with a pretty face if you were able to look past the uniform, which Charlie was having a hard time doing. His daughter wore pants sometimes, and it took everything he had inside him not to tell her she looked like a whore.
    Salmeri’s smile went up a few watts. “My pleasure, Officer.”
    She looked into the parking lot. “That your car?”
    Charlie waited for Salmeri to give him his suit.
    “Sir?” the broad repeated. “Is that your car?”
    Charlie guessed she was talking to him. He looked at the Buick. The smile came back, tugging at his lips. The bumper was dragging. The back glass was cracked. He had until that moment completely forgotten about the homeless man. Fucking loser. Charlie had been homeless a few years. He was a kid then, barely more than a teenager. What was that guy’s excuse?
    “Sir?” The cop sounded like she was talking to a retarded