Felony Juggler, page 14
“What has that got to do with you?”
“He didn’t trust her, but he trusted me. He had some money, a lot of cash. I don’t know how he got it, but he definitely wasn’t a street performer. He wanted to make sure that if his gold-digging talking head divorced him, he’d at least have some cash she couldn’t get to. He needed it somewhere safe that wasn’t in his name. So he asked me to get a safe deposit box for him in my name.”
“It’s called ‘safe deposit box’ mostly in England, over here it’s more commonly called a ‘safety deposit box.’”
“Really? I never knew that. I always wondered which was right.”
“Well, they’re both right and if you’re ever writing it, stick a hyphen in.”
“Why would I ever write about safety-deposit boxes?”
“You never know—get on with your story.”
I kind of felt I was telling a little of the truth. My real problems were also related to a safety-deposit box, so there was some truth there. “Yeah, so many years ago, before I met you. Before I moved to Hibbing. Before Ronnie was married, I was hitchhiking around. I knew Ronnie lived in Ohio, so I stopped to visit, for a place to crash. We talked all night. He said he didn’t trust his fianceé.”
“That’s weird.”
“Yeah, really weird—I trust you, and you aren’t even my fiancée.”
“We can talk about that another time. Go on.”
“He didn’t trust her, so he gave me a big box of money and shit, and had me open an account at his bank and get a safety-deposit box for him. All under my name. That way if she divorced him, he’d have his bug-out bag of money that she couldn’t get to.”
“That’s really shady.”
“Really shady. But what the fuck did I care? At the time he was a friend, though that didn’t last long. We lost touch over the years. I’m a totally different person since I met you.” See? I was almost telling the truth. “I forgot all about Ronnie, and his sleazebag money in my safety-deposit box. I don’t know how he tracked me down, but when I came back from the RenFest on Sunday night he was at our house. He looked awful. He was fucked up on drugs or something. He did that thing that drunks do, where he hugged me and said he loved me. I hate that. He said we had to talk. I said I needed to sleep and so did he, so we slept at the house, that’s who slept in the guest bed—Ronnie. I got a nosebleed. The next morning he said he wanted to go out to breakfast and talk.”
“If you were going out to breakfast, why did you eat my fruit-on-the-bottom blueberry yogurt? That’s my Tuesday treat.”
I can talk: “I ate that before bed. I was starving. I didn’t eat much at the RenFest rock party. You know that yogurt stuff isn’t good for you anyway, it’s just pudding with more sugar and fruit at the bottom, and I felt I needed the treat more than you at that moment. Greater good.”
“Why didn’t you leave a note?”
“We were just going to breakfast. I thought I’d be back before you got home, but then he went into the men’s room at the diner and came out really fucked up. I guess he did drugs in there. He was talking about hating all bitches and that cunt who was leaving him.”
“You know I don’t like those words outside of fucking.”
“Right, I was quoting. So, he said she had left him and emptied out their bank account. She threw him out of the house, and everything was tied up in proceedings. He wanted that safe-deposit-box money. Wait, it’s ‘safety-deposit,’ right? And we were going to drive to the bank right then. I had forgotten it was in Ohio. It was awful. He was high, so I insisted on driving his car. And he kept smoking. Smoking in a car with the windows up. It was awful. I smell like … cigarette smoke … I was trying for something clever, but nothing came.”
“Wait, did you take my Bruce cassette?”
I thought I was better at lying than this. “Maybe Ronnie took it. We had one in his car, I thought it was his. Everyone has The River.”
“I don’t anymore. I also don’t have blueberry fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt.”
“Right. It’s really just pudding. So, we drove his car to Ohio.”
“And you didn’t call? Didn’t you know I’d be worried sick?”
“I tried once or twice but it was terrible. He was screaming the whole way, and I was kind of afraid to leave him alone. Like he’d take off in the car and leave me stranded. Which he finally did, just now, in Ohio. We got to the bank, and he gave me the key that he’d hidden. It was probably hidden in his prison wallet.”
“What? Prison wallet?”
“That means up his ass—I was trying to be all tough-guy.”
“Don’t.”
“Okay, sorry. So, he gave me the key and I went in and showed my ID and got the safety-deposit box. I took out the whole shoebox and brought it to him.”
“Why didn’t you just give him the money and call me?”
She had a point. “It wasn’t that simple. He opened the box in the car, and it was a shit-ton of cash. Big bills, like drug money, or thief money or something. Hundred-dollar bills and lots of them. And there were some drugs in there too, and then all these Polaroids of his wife. Really nasty stuff.”
“Like we take?”
“Exactly, but not happy ones.”
“The sexiest ones aren’t happy.”
“I know, but these were just creepy. I like creepy, but you know, I didn’t like these. Turns out she’s now a real newscaster and he wanted us to bring the pictures to the TV station and the newspaper to fuck her over. He wanted to spread her pictures all over.”
“What an asshole. Are you that kind of asshole? Do I need to burn all our Polaroids before you hate me and bring them to the library board?”
“NO! I love those pictures. Like I said, these weren’t happy ones. Ours are dirtier but loving in their way, even the ones with strangers. When his Polaroids of her and whoever came out of the shoebox, it got bad. It was so bad I was looking at naked pictures of his wife getting fucked and not enjoying it.”
“That’s really bad.”
“I didn’t want him to use those pictures against her. I didn’t want that. Because if people start doing that a lot, then other people will stop taking Polaroids. I had to stop him for the greater good. I didn’t want to be associated with him. There were also drugs in the safety-deposit box, and he took like all of them at once.”
“Like old drugs? Like what?”
“I don’t know, they didn’t have labels or expiration dates on them.”
“Unlike my yogurt.” She was taking this pretty well. I think she was buying it, in her way. What a weird fucking librarian. I loved her even more because she was buying my lie. She wasn’t a gullible person, but she loved me. And it was a good story.
“I didn’t want to be associated with a criminal. I didn’t want to end up a felony murderer or something.” Throwing in some more truth.
“Why would you be a murderer?”
Oops. “I don’t know, I just wanted to get away from him, but I also didn’t want him using those pictures to hurt her and our culture of sexual trust. I tried to sober him up. I tried to bide time. I told him to just use the money. I didn’t feel too bad about him not letting her get her hands on that. I had proof he had it before he married her because I was the one who put it in the safety-deposit box. He took over driving the car and we were heading to the TV station to leave off the pictures. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t throw them out the window because he could go back and pick them up, or someone could find them and recognize the teeth, tits, and hair. I didn’t want her to have her career ruined.”
“When was this?”
“Today. This evening. He was going to leave them off at the desk for her boss. He was smoking like a freak. I told him I had to piss. His cigarette lighter, a Zippo …” Fuck, people who are lying always give too many details. Fuck, I sucked. “… was between the seats. We stopped at a gas station with the restrooms outside and he went in to get jerky and beer.” More truth. “The instant he walked away from the car, I grabbed the pictures and the lighter. I went to the men’s room and lit them on fire. It’s hard to light Polaroids on fire, but I did, and I flushed them down the toilet.”
“My hero. Well, some teeth-tits-and-hair broadcaster’s hero.”
“He figured out what I’d done, and he went fucking nuts. He came at me and hit me. I ran into the gas station and told the guy to call the police. Ronnie threw some jerky at me, swore a lot, and took off.”
“Jesus.”
“The guy hung up on the police. I asked to use his phone to call you because the pay phone wasn’t working there. He said no and told me to get the fuck out. I walked across the overpass to McDonald’s and called you.” I ended with the truth.
“He hit you? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, he hit me in the face a few times. I didn’t like it but I’m fine.”
“Did you put ice on it?”
“No, I’m already freezing my ass off.”
“How are you going to get home?”
Oh boy, she believed me enough to want me to come home. I’m a white guy who can talk. This was the first time I had ever lied to her … except the lies I had to tell about what had happened to me, where I’d been, and who I was. I needed to tell this lie too—it wasn’t even another lie, it was the same lie.
CHAPTER 23
Marion had believed me, but she didn’t want to come get me in Milan, Ohio. Can’t blame her. I had to get home on my own. I knew the bus station would take credit cards, yet first I had to get to the bus station. I called directory assistance for taxi companies, and called a few, but none of them took credit cards. This was a long time ago. There was only one limo service that took plastic. The limos were for proms, weddings, funerals, and serious stuff like that. They could get a guy to me with a stretch limo in ninety minutes, probably the owner’s idiot son-in-law who he would wake up. It was nutty expensive, but I’ve exaggerated the price in my head over the years, so I don’t remember the real number. It was worth it; I would be traveling to the bus station in style. The idiot son-in-law wore a suit and a hat, opened the door for me, and drove me to the Greyhound. There must have been a better plan, but I couldn’t think of it then; I still haven’t thought of it. I had no cash.
From one thirty to three a.m. outside a McDonald’s in Ohio, waiting for a tired idiot in a hat, is a magic time. I was still cold. Not shivering, but the kind of cold that seeps in and stays. Romania cold. I was too cold to think but I was still curious. I reached into my bag and pulled out dead Jerry’s notebook. It was a little spiral pad like the ones Bob Dylan used for the lyrics to Blood on the Tracks. I opened it up.
Years later I went to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. There was a fancy case with the lyrics to “No Future” by the Sex Pistols, which would become “God Save the Queen.” They were written in Johnny Rotten’s hand. “Oh God save history / God save your mad parade.” The words Johnny Rotten would spit out with venom just a few years before I was freezing at the Ohio McDonald’s. The song that had been in my head ever since Jerry paused The River to steal gas and jerky: “No future / No future / No future for you.” Those dismal words that were somehow uplifting. Years later I read them in a carefully lit glass case in Cleveland, very neat cursive. Not neat for a person, but way too neat for Johnny Rotten.
As I sat freezing at the McDonald’s, waiting for a sleepy asshole in a hat, singing to myself, “No future for you,” I opened the cheap little notebook, and I was struck by the handwriting. Jerry, a killer, the man who was going to kill me—his handwriting, was small, precise, and gentle. There was no emotion. It was the handwriting of a kind accountant.
I don’t know what I expected. I guess I expected “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy” over and over. Or “FUCK KILL FUCK KILL,” or at least “No future for you.” But it was none of that. It was just the facts.
Starting about halfway through was all the information that I had never had about our heist. There was Bee’s name, his real name, his full name. And a date under it. I guess the date when Jerry found him. Then a list of five other people who I had never met—the rest of the crew. Nicknames and then real names. The names of all the girlfriends, wives, and children. Descriptions, addresses, phone numbers. Jerry had divided it carefully. There were a few blank pages left after each name for additional information. In each person’s section there were the dollar amounts and lists of jewelry and passports and insurance papers—the stuff they got from the few boxes that they’d successfully robbed, or I guess we’d successfully robbed. Everything that was stolen and how it had been split up. No names were crossed out. But after most of names there was a clean efficient little “X.” I guess it was smaller than that, I shouldn’t capitalize, it was an “x.” Then after the name of the guy I supposedly met with came me—there was my dead name. I hadn’t seen the name “Poe Legette” in years and there it was in clear cursive. It was underlined once.
On Poe’s second page, there was Tracy’s full name, with an “x.” There were my two would-be comedy partners, “x,” “x.” Fuck me. There was the dollar amount I was supposed to have gotten, my share. Not worth it even if I had gotten it. He had written “pearls,” “diamond earrings,” and then “DK’s notebook,” and he’d carefully underlined “notebook” twice. Reading that, I was the most scared I’d been since the robbery. When Jerry wrote this, he was sure I had the notebook.
“Six foot seven. Dark short hair. Thirty pounds overweight. Blue eyes. Loud damaged voice. Street juggler. Knives. Blindfold. Funny.” There was a list of other jugglers and street performers. Lots of dead ends he’d gone down. Lines from my street show: “I bothered to learn it, you’re going to watch it,” “Final trick not juggling trick,” “Turn executioner’s hood into change purse,” “Apple eating,” “Apple sputum,” “Let’s run over get good seats.” And then it was laid out: “Mick ‘Tiny’ Jackson, Minnesota Renaissance Festival, Shakopee, Minnesota. Pick up Bee Thursday morning.”
There I was. He’d found me, and then he took Bee with him to Minnesota to confirm. The next page was worse: “Marion Lane. Hibbing library. 48 Silver Street. 218-772-0852. Five foot one. Dark hair. Big tits.” Terrifying. Marion had big tits all right, and that was her address, that was our address, but that wasn’t her phone number, that wasn’t our phone number. The area code was right, but it wasn’t our number. And there was no “x” by either of our names. Did we win? Were we okay? Had he photocopied this notebook and sent it to someone? Had he called it in? Had he told DK he was off to get Tiny and Marion? Did anyone else have our information?
Back at the gas station, Ohio’s finest would figure out who Jerry was from his fingerprints. He was certainly in the system. They would notify his next of kin and then DK would know he was dead. Someone would get the Trans Am, and someone would check it out to find any information that was there. I don’t think they would find any trace of me in there, because I had wiped it down with a shirt like I’d seen on TV.
DK really wanted that fucking criminal notebook. Did he want it enough to send another Jerry on the mission to find me and fuck up Marion? Someone would be coming for us. If Jerry had shown his work, they would be coming soon. If he hadn’t told anyone anything, they would be coming eventually. We had a year or a week.
I wasn’t going to disappear again. I was happy as Tiny; I wasn’t going to be anyone else. My secular cycle of reincarnation had been actualized. Tiny was my nirvana.
The best defense is a good offense. Let’s go. No future for you, DK.
CHAPTER 24
What did I have going for me? I could talk, and I had Jerry’s notebook. Those were the tools I had to take down a crime boss. The notebook wasn’t just about our heist. The front half of the pad was other stuff. Jerry didn’t start a new notebook for each new job. There were names and numbers. The inside cover of the notebook had four numbers with no name at the top. Every other one was labeled. The area codes were all Philly, except one, 609—that was Trenton and South Jersey, near Philly. The first three phone numbers were neatly crossed out. Were these DK’s phone numbers as they changed? A guy like DK, whoever the fuck he was, would change his numbers often and Jerry wouldn’t put in the boss’s name.
Our phone number was wrong. That was weird. Our phone number wasn’t 218-772-0852 like Jerry had written, it was 218-437-4173. I don’t even think 772 was an exchange for Hibbing. It had to be in code. I had a whole bus ride from Ohio to Hibbing to work on it; I actually had rides on several different buses. I had to keep getting off the bus and transferring. I guess if the bus were going from where I was to where I wanted to go directly, it wouldn’t be a bus, it would be a car. So I thought on buses and I thought in bus stations, but you got it right away, didn’t you? You just glanced and it jumped right out at you. “Really? That simple?” If that’s what you’re saying, maybe you’re saying it out loud as you read this book and I hope you’re in public and you look like an idiot. It took me about an hour to crack it. To decode our number, I took Jerry’s number and added seven to the first number after the area code, and then six to the next digit, and then five, four, three, two, and finally one. You figured that out right away? Just looking at it? Bullshit. Good for you. If he used the same code for all the numbers, I had the phone number in Philly that Jerry reported to. I had DK’s phone number.
Now why was the safety-deposit notebook that I didn’t have so valuable? It couldn’t be time sensitive, or he wouldn’t have been keeping it in a safety-deposit box. I watched as much jive-ass crime movies as the next guy, so I figured it’s got to be numbers of Swiss bank accounts. Or Hong Kong bank accounts, or Freedonia bank accounts—someplace offshore and shady. I bet you, Mx. Smarty-Pants, you knew the instant the MacGuffin notebook from a criminal in a safety-deposit box turned up in my story that it had to be offshore bank accounts for laundering money. Good for you. DK thought I had the notebook, the key to all his ill-gotten gains. For a bad guy like DK, the code to all your money is worth fucking up a lot of jugglers for.
