Scoring

Valentine, who was on to something big, and Flowers, who could always use some money, had arranged to meet in the back booth at Maury's Bar and Grill to talk business.

Maury's was simply a bar. The only things grilled there were customers who had witnessed a fight over a pool game or something like that; and then the police did the grilling. But Maury had gotten a good deal on a used sign and frequently sold beers to people lured inside by the possibility of a grilled-cheese sandwich.

Although Flowers was the only customer, there was a considerable amount of smoke in the bar. Valentine waved at it as he banged his way toward the booth.

"What the hell is going on in here?" he asked, sliding in opposite Flowers.

"Beats me," Flowers said. "I think this smoke has been in here four or five days, trying to get out."

"What smoke?" Maury said, bringing two beers.

He collected what was due for the beers, plus a 50-cent tip, and stood by the booth with his arms folded. The last time Valentine and Flowers had discussed a little business, people had stopped by the next day asking questions about Valentine's known whereabouts. These people had burr haircuts and large arms and didn't buy drinks. Maury didn't need this kind of nonsense, so he stood by the booth to discourage the type of discussion that would result in more visits of a similar nature. Maury was a fat man with a bald head. He had smiled last in 1978, when his ex-wife married a jockey.

"Your cousins ever catch up with you?" he asked Valentine. "Five, six months ago. The cousins with the arms the size of loaves of bread?"

"Sure did," Valentine said. He had a sip of beer and smiled innocently. He wore a ball cap, a sweat shirt and jeans. He hadn't shaved recently. There were bags under his eyes. Innocent people didn't go around looking like that in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. Innocent people worked. "My cousins were looking to find me because of a will. Some aunt left us a lot of money."

Maury nodded--sure your aunt did.

"So, Valentine, how have you been?" Flowers asked.

"Pretty good," Valentine said. "Pretty good."

And then Maury, of all things, sat down.

"Did I mention the last time you were in, I've found religion?" Maury said.

"Yeah, I believe you did," Valentine told him.

"It's very peaceful."

"I bet." (continued on page 126)Scoring(continued from page 121)

The back booth at Maury's was Valentine's lucky booth. He had done some of his best thinking here. He felt calm and confident in this booth, with the ashtray and the salt shaker arranged just so. This was where, seven months before, he had come up with the idea for making S25,000 selling counterfeit baseball cards to rubes at a big convention at Madison Square Garden.

Valentine didn't want to have to leave that booth. He wanted Maury to leave, instead. So he said, squinting at the smoke, "Somebody has been smoking Merits in here."

Maury frowned.

Flowers cocked his head.

"Somebody has what?" Maury said.

"Been smoking Merits." Valentine sniffed at the smoke. "Merits and Barclay menthols." He smiled. "I had an uncle who used to be in the tobacco business in Kentucky. It runs in the family."

"What runs?" Maury said.

"The ability to tell one kind of tobacco from another. I can tell by one puff what kind of cigarette I'm smoking. Blindfolded."

Flowers blinked rapidly and had a sip of beer.

Maury scratched his chin. "That's the biggest bunch of crap I've heard in ... three weeks." He scooted his chair closer to Valentine. "And I hear a lot of crap in here."

"It's the truth," Valentine said, shrugging.

"But you don't even smoke," Flowers said.

Valentine reached into his front pocket and removed a number of bills. He put two 20s and a ten under his bottle of beer. "One puff. Any cigarette. Blindfolded. Fifty-dollar bet."

"Gambling isn't mentioned in the Bible," Maury said, staring at the money.

"Plus, from your point of view, this wouldn't even be a gamble."

"Right," Maury said to Valentine.

Maury looked at the cigarette machine by the front door. "There are twenty, thirty kinds of cigarettes in there."

"Pick one."

"This is a simple attempt to screw me out of some money, am I right?"

"That's one way to look at it," Valentine said. "The underdog's way."

Maury got up and walked to the cigarette machine. "There's twenty-eight kinds of cigarettes in here."

"I like a challenge," Valentine said.

Maury said he was thinking it over.

"That's a pretty expensive way to buy a little privacy," Flowers said quietly, "giving a man fifty."

"Be quiet and listen," Valentine said.

•

It had begun nearly three months before, when Valentine picked up a fare at Kennedy and delivered him to the Econolux Motel, which was a dump no more than a mile from the airport. "The guy's name was Cleveland and he was from Cleveland; can you beat that?"

"I've taken some guys dressed up as women to Queens; that's about as close as I can come," Flowers said, grinning.

As Valentine had been preparing to leave the Econolux to return to Kennedy to sit in a taxi line three hours long, he noticed a new blue Mercedes parked in front of room four. The Mercedes was so new, it still had its price sticker on the window. "Over at the Econolux, there's a new light bulb or the numbers on the door are straight, you notice. There's a car worth thirty-two thousand sitting out front, it's like getting slapped in the face. It gets your attention. People who drive cars worth a fortune don't stay in dumps that run specials, all you can sleep for twenty-three dollars."

"I never pay much attention to who stays where," Flowers said, waving at some smoke.

"Well, here's the question I asked myself, Flowers. What's a new blue Mercedes-Benz doing parked in front of room four at the Econolux, which is about six feet from a runway?"

Valentine's eyes were wide, and he was very excited, which made Flowers think about going home. Valentine had been this way about the counterfeit-baseball-card idea. Now, there was a night to remember. They had misspelled Red Schoendienst on one of the cards they printed--they left out a vowel or two--and a guy who used to play for the Cardinals chased them down an alley. This former St. Louis Cardinal had thrown a board at Flowers, hitting him on the right shoulder, causing a need for 15 stitches.

Flowers moved his shoulder in a small circle; it still ached.

"Forget that," Valentine said. "It was bad luck, that's all. The basic premise was sound."

Flowers sighed. "Now, where were we?"

"Why is a Mercedes sitting at a dump?"

"Maybe it was stolen."

"It was sitting out front, in broad daylight."

"Some tourist ran out of money."

"No, it had local plates."

"Then I've got no idea."

"Question," Maury called from the cigarette machine.

"What?" Valentine replied.

"Who buys the pack of cigarettes?"

"Me. I buy them."

Maury nodded. "I'm still thinking about it."

Valentine took some note cards and photographs out of a folder and spread them on the table.

"The guy's name is Trafficante," Valentine said. His breathing was shallow. Flowers was afraid he might start hyperventilating. "Salvatore Trafficante."

Valentine touched a couple of photographs of this Salvatore Trafficante walking along a sidewalk, then several more of him with a cheesy motel in the background.

"The guy who owns the Mercedes?"

"Right," Valentine said, mopping perspiration from his brow. "He's at one of the motels out by the airport for the same length of time every Friday. It never varies more than fifteen minutes."

Flowers had some beer and nodded.

"Sometimes he gets there around noon, sometimes around a quarter of one, but the thing to remember is that no matter when he gets there, he's always in one of the motel rooms for seven hours, can you believe that, seven hours?""

"It depends on what he's doing."

"He's doing that," Valentine said, tapping a series of pictures of a woman.

Flowers made a face at this group of photos. "Those are the worst pictures I've ever seen."

"You ever try to take a picture of a moving car out of a moving car? With an Instamatic? While you're driving?"

Valentine explained what was in the bottom corners of these pictures. It was his watch. "With the watch there, you can see Trafficante and the blonde going into the motel room right at noon, and the other one shows them coming out at seven-fifteen. It's hard to focus on something up close and faraway at the same time, Flowers."

The only picture Flowers liked was of a woman's legs. She was wearing a short skirt.

"You're right; it's a hell of a picture. I got that walking by the Mercedes when Trafficante was picking her up. I had the camera in the sleeve of my raincoat. You only see a little of the buckle on my sleeve."

"You ought to send it to the National Geographic," Flowers said.

Valentine stacked the pictures and put them back into an envelope and made certain Flowers was with him so far.

"This guy and this woman go to a (continued on page 197)Scoring(continued from page 126) motel," Flowers said.

"Every Friday. For seven hours." Valentine said that the way he found out who owned the Mercedes was by giving a friend of a friend who worked in the traffic-ticket-paying department the tag number.

Flowers nodded.

Valentine lowered his voice to a whisper. "Now, I don't want you to get upset about the next part. This Trafficante, he's in charge of all the gambling for the metropolitan area. What's great about that is the people who work for Trafficante won't have any trouble putting together a tremendous amount of money in a matter of minutes. With the N.F.L. play-offs starting last week, there's going to be millions sitting around like cheese balls."

Flowers started to get up, thanked Valentine for the beer and told him to give him a ring the next time he wanted to blackmail somebody; but blackmailing the Mafia was not on Flowers' Daily Planner.

"Sit down," Valentine said, grabbing Flowers' arm. "Nobody said anything about blackmail."

"You didn't?"

"No. Do you mind if I go on?"

"I guess not," Flowers said, finishing his beer.

"Hey," Maury called from the end of the bar. He was afraid that Valentine might be able to tell the brand of a cigarette by the sound it made coming out of the machine. "You go in the back when I buy the cigarettes?"

"I'll go out front and stand on my head," Valentine said to Maury, who nodded.

"I was wondering how a hundred sounded to you," Maury said.

"Twice as good as fifty."

"One puff. Blindfolded."

"One half a puff," Valentine said.

Flowers took the pictures of the Mercedes, the seedy motel, Trafficante and the blonde out of the envelope, and he spread them back on the table.

"The blonde is eighteen, nineteen, somewhere in there," Valentine said. "Trafficante is sixty-one."

"I got a house plant eighteen," Flowers said.

"This Trafficante is very sneaky about picking her up. Different places, you know? Say you're following them. You lose them. All you have to do is check the joints by the airport. It's the same, every Friday. I've been watching the last nine Fridays."

Flowers blinked at the woman's legs. "A man gets to be a certain age, he goes out of his mind. A last hurrah--that kind of thing."

Valentine leaned across the table and put his hands on Flowers' shoulders and said, "You guessed it, Flowers. The blonde is not Mrs. Trafficante. Mrs. Trafficante is a fat lady with white hair." Valentine produced another envelope full of photographs. "This is Mrs. Trafficante."

"No blackmail?" Flowers asked.

"No."

"So your point is?"

Valentine made sure Maury couldn't hear. "We kidnap the son of a bitch."

Flowers' jaw dropped and he rose to go. But first he had something important to say, since Valentine was an old friend.

"I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but if you put this much time and energy into driving your cab, hell, you'd make a couple more grand a year."

"Piss on a couple of grand a year," Valentine said menacingly.

"You've got to accept the concept of the work ethic. There's no simple way left to make a fortune overnight. You've got to pay your dues."

"Maybe I better explain myself." Valentine leaned over the table again. "We're not going to kidnap this guy, technically speaking. We're going to pretend to kidnap him while he's shacked up."

"Well, my God," Flowers said, stunned.

"You're on," Maury said.

•

Maury wrapped four bar towels around Valentine's eyes and pointed him toward the back wall while he got a pack of cigarettes out of the machine. He caught the pack before it hit the bottom of the rack.

He took one cigarette out of the pack, showed Flowers the brand and sat down next to Valentine.

"What are we up to?" Valentine asked.

"A C note," Maury said.

Valentine got the rest of his money out of his pocket and tossed it onto the table.

"Let's go for all of it."

"There's two-twenty here," Maury said.

"Listen, Valentine," Flowers said. "There's no need to go out of your mind with this cigarette thing."

Valentine laughed and asked Flowers how much he wanted to lose.

Flowers had $50 in his billfold.

"Have you got a VISA?"

"Well, yeah."

"Let's make it two-twenty each."

"I don't want your money," Flowers told Valentine.

"It's going to work out real good, then," Valentine said.

Maury checked the towels over Valentine's eyes. He then put the cigarette he had selected from the machine between Valentine's lips. Valentine rolled it around.

"He's trying to feel the letters printed on the paper," Maury said to Flowers, who shrugged.

Valentine laughed again, and the cigarette fell onto the table.

Maury put it back into Valentine's mouth and lit it.

Valentine took a puff.

Maury put the cigarette out in the ashtray.

"It's a Claridge," Valentine said.

"Goddamn," Maury said, raking the ashtray off onto the floor, where it broke.

Valentine felt blindly around the table for his winnings and stuffed them into his pocket.

"It's a new brand," Maury said. "I just put the damn things in yesterday."

"You just screwed a friend out of a lot of money," Flowers said.

Valentine laughed some more.

•

Maury brought two more beers at the new price of four dollars a bottle. Flowers sat with his legs crossed, looking at a wall.

After Maury had gone back behind his counter to pout, Valentine said, "It was human nature, that's all. Nobody is going to pick anything popular, like Winstons. They're going to pick the most obscure brand there is. You guess the strangest brand, you win every time."

Flowers said, "Give me my money back."

"I'd really like to," Valentine said. "But there's no way. Hell, I could have actually lost."

Flowers was disgusted and went to the men's room to splash some water on his face and cool off--since he could no longer afford a beer.

With Flowers gone, Valentine frowned over the possibility of Trafficante and his young ladyfriend--her name was Bunny something or other--leaving the motel early. People 61 and 19 certainly didn't have lovers' quarrels, but Valentine was concerned, and justifiably so, that Trafficante might have a heart attack on top of this kid. You would have thought that--as long as they had been doing it--he had built up an immunity to heart attacks, but you never really knew. Valentine didn't want to attempt to get $1,000,000 from Trafficante's people and have Trafficante himself back on the streets, even in a coma, when he was supposed to be kidnaped.

When Flowers returned, calmed by the water he had thrown on himself, Valentine explained the problem about keeping Trafficante out of circulation.

"We ram them," Flowers said immediately.

Valentine jerked his head back as though a bee had flown in front of it.

"We've got somebody across the way watching the motel room, right? They try to leave before we get the money, we ram the hell out of them with a car. We ram the ambulance. We ram anything there is."

Valentine kissed Flowers on the forehead and promised him a $10,000 bonus.

Flowers turned to face Valentine.

"OK, let's take it from the top," Valentine said. "Trafficante and the blonde are in some motel. Somebody watches them from across the way. They try to leave real early, we call it off, do it next Friday. They try to leave during the time we're getting the ransom, we ram them."

Flowers said nothing; he cleared his throat.

"We call Trafficante's people back at his office," Valentine continued, "you know, the people who work for him and love him--the people with the money--the second he's inside the room and say we've got him and want a million-three for his safe release."

Flowers said there was no need to get greedy.

Valentine giggled. "There's some customary bitching and moaning. Some negotiating. They want to talk to him; they don't want to pay good money for a stiff. We say he can't come to the phone because he's tranquilized--tranquilized so we can move him around town. How do you like that?"

"It's fine," Flowers said.

"They say they can't raise the million-three so fast. We say we know better. This and that. We want the money ready in a couple of hours, which gives us an average of five hours to spare. Are you ready for the good part?"

"Is this where I get my two-twenty back?"

"Now, ransom is hard. Do you know the police have stuff they can paint on a dollar bill, some kind of acid, that causes your fingerprints to rot off? They have electronic stuff that can trace a bill twenty-five miles. Do you have any idea when the last time was that somebody got away with ransom?"

Flowers guessed it was shortly after Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., quit the force.

"Exactly," Valentine said. "It was a long time ago."

The secret with ransom was figuring out a way to pick up the money and leave without the other side's seeing you, and the other side would use Dobermans, helicopters, detectives dressed as old ladies--you name it.

"So here's what we do," Valentine said.

"And hang on, you might fall out of your seat and crack your head open on something rusty down there. We tell them to put the million-three loose in hundred-dollar bills in some bag, you know, a big Baggie, like they put garbage in. We tell them to take the loose hundreds in a big Baggie to a car out front of Trafficante's building. We've got somebody in a car out front, too. Their car follows our car. We tell them to open the window and toss the money out loose onto the sidewalk in front of Macy's department store when the person in our car waves. Can you believe that, Flowers? Can you believe a human thought of something like that?"

"Um," Flowers said.

"The money comes out of the window loose--the hundred-dollar bills. There's dozens of people in front of Macy's on a Friday--shoppers. The money flies all over the place. We've got twenty of our people there, waiting, twenty or thirty, acting like regular pedestrians. Only we're ready for the money."

"I see," Flowers said.

"We start grabbing the money. So do some of the real pedestrians, but we've got bags tucked inside our shirts and pants, and we're going to get most of the money. It's us and the pedestrians going for the million-three in front of Macy's department store, can you imagine that? There's no way to tell the kidnapers from the regular people! We can sacrifice three hundred thousand to the pedestrians and still murder them."

"Well," said Flowers. "You ought to be very proud of yourself."

•

A few days later, Flowers called Valentine and respectfully declined from the big deal out in front of Macy's this coming Friday. He had the flu; and when a person got to be 41, he didn't bounce back from a fever the way he did when he was 25.

Valentine again thanked Flowers for the ramming idea. "I'm using Culbertson across from the motel. He's got an old Buick built like a tank, in case we need to crash into anybody. I'll send a few grand over Monday for your help, thinking."

Flowers told him to forget it. "How many people are you using at Macy's?"

"We're going with twenty-five. We'll meet back at my place. I'm giving them ten percent of what they pick up off the sidewalk. A person catches fifty grand, he gets five."

"That's more than fair," Flowers said.

"These are good people?"

"Most of them are aunts and cousins and uncles."

"Good luck."

"Listen, if you're up and around, feel free to drop by Macy's around three or four Friday afternoon, pick yourself up a few thousand, for old times' sake."

"You never know," Flowers told him.

•

Valentine sat on one side of a see-through wall that was probably made of something bulletproof. Flowers sat on the side that was more plush and had chairs made out of fabric, not aluminum.

Valentine was in prison; Flowers was visiting.

Surprisingly enough, Valentine looked OK. There was a glow on his cheeks.

They spoke into telephones on either side of the wall.

"Hey, Valentine," Flowers said.

"Flowers," Valentine said.

"This is just like old times."

"Not hardly," Valentine said, looking at the convicts around him.

"How's prison?"

Valentine raised his eyebrows. "Actually, not as bad as you would think, Flowers. This place is where they store all the white-collar criminals. My roommate is a guy who printed up some phony Green Stamps. We're on the same work detail. We put in those roses out by the front gate."

Flowers nodded.

Valentine nodded.

"I tried to see you right before the trial," Flowers said, "but they said you weren't having any visitors."

Valentine sighed. "I was a little damn depressed."

Flowers asked what the hell had happened; he hadn't read a word about it.

"Well, you know in front of Macy's?"

"Sure," Flowers said.

"Those sneaky bastards in Trafficante's office threw the million-three out the window of their car in two Hefty garbage bags tied up at the top, not in loose hundreds, like they were supposed to, for the love of God."

Flowers winced and whistled.

Valentine shivered and continued. "So the two Hefty bags hit the sidewalk and my people take the hell off, like there's a raid."

Flowers nodded. "You couldn't really blame them, Valentine. Anybody who touched the bags full of money would be saying, 'I'm the kidnaper; come get me.'"

"Yeah," Valentine agreed. "That was about the size of it."

"So what'd you do?"

"Well, Flowers, I picked up the damn things and dragged them to the park. They weighed about eighty pounds each. I sat down on a bench and tried to think of a way to get the hell out of there."

Flowers shook his head and lowered his eyes.

"I thought of one thing that had a chance: Take the money hostage. You know, get some gas and pour it on the bags and ask for a plane at the airport or something like that. But any way you looked at it, it was only a matter of time."

Flowers wiped a tear off his cheek.

"So what happened was the sons of bitches came out of the trees and up through the sewers to get me, Flowers. It was unbelievable. People wandering around the park yanked all sorts of weapons out from under their clothes. It was like an invasion. I was history after about ten seconds."

"I've ... got to go."

Flowers started to hang up.

"Send me some pruning books," Valentine said. "I'm getting pretty good at it."

A guard led him back toward his cell.

Flowers banged on the window and motioned for Valentine to pick up the phone again.

"Valentine," he said, looking around to make sure nobody could overhear them. "I've got some good news. It's going to make your time pass a lot faster. It worked."

Valentine squinted.

"Your idea about pretending to kidnap Trafficante actually worked."

"Goddamn it, Flowers, don't kid around. It's not that great in here. The bed's got lumps."

"We made twenty grand," Flowers said, fully composed again. "Ten apiece."

"What?" Valentine said, blinking at least once a second.

"While you were in front of Macy's, I drove to Mrs. Trafficante's. She's great. I knocked on the door and said, 'Lady, I've got some terrible news for you. Your husband is a worthless piece of garbage. Right now, he's out at some motel with a nineteen-year old, and this has been going on for a long time.' First, she almost cries. Then she wants to kill him. I told her there's a better way. The better way is, we take a lot of Trafficante's money, with her taking the biggest bite."

Valentine's eyes were about to pop out of his head.

"Here's the way it works. Trafficante comes home after shacking up. Mrs. Trafficante says, 'Thank God you're all right, darling!' She says, 'I got a call this afternoon from kidnapers saying they had you and wanted a couple of hundred thousand in ransom or they'd cut you up.' She tells him she went to the bank and got the two hundred thousand and made the ransom payoff!"

"You son of a bitch, Flowers. I'm fighting for my life, surrounded by police dogs, and you're raking in twenty grand from old ladies."

Flowers said that since Valentine had seen fit to cheat him out of two-twenty with that cigarette trick, there was no telling what might happen with the fake-kidnaping profits. "Besides, I really thought you were going to get the million. The way I thought of was a little safer, that's all."

"It's a good thing there's a wall here," Valentine said.

Flowers told Valentine to calm down; this was only the beginning. "Anyway, that's what we did. We drove to the bank. I took the twenty percent, and Mrs. Trafficante took the rest, the one-eighty."

"Unbelievable," Valentine said.

Flowers admitted that he had thought about keeping this to himself. "It's a good thing you look so pitiful."

"I was thinking about trying it with some other guy in front of Macy's again," Valentine said.

Flowers smiled. "Valentine, can you imagine it when Trafficante came home and his wife said, 'Seeing you safe and sound is worth every penny of the two hundred thousand, sweetheart'?"

"I've got to give you that, Flowers," Valentine admitted. "That's funny."

•

Valentine got out after ten months.

The people who ran the prison hated to see him go, because the flowers around the electrically charged fence had never looked better. Valentine had discovered that daisy roots weren't damaged by the occasional electrical jolt, so colorful daisies were all over the place.

They weren't too upset, though. They figured Valentine would be back in time for the spring planting season.

They were wrong.

Flowers picked Valentine up at the front gate one Saturday--in a new Buick Regal, no less--and they went straight from prison to work.

And business was the same as usual at the dumps out around the airport; business was extremely good.

They ate a couple of cheeseburgers while they worked.

"Stop the car, Flowers, there's a new Cadillac parked over by that one," Valentine said, tossing some onions out the window.

"Which one?" Flowers hit the brakes.

"The Anchor Inn. Then you can make a U turn and swing back by the Plaza Court. I think there was a Lincoln Continental parked down toward the end."

"Right," Flowers said, having a French fry. "You get the tag number off that Jaguar over there?"

"Yeah," Valentine said.

Flowers pulled in behind the black Cadillac that was parked in front of room six at The Anchor Inn, a square building with eight rooms over eight rooms.

It was very dark and quiet in room six, as they had expected.

"You know what?" Valentine said, writing the tag number from the black Cadillac into a notebook.

"Surprise me," Flowers said.

"We're probably going to put a lot of motels out of business."

"'You can see Trafficante and the blonde going into the motel at noon and coming out at seven-fifteen.'"

"'Maybe I better explain myself. We're going to pretend to kidnap him while he's shacked up.'"