Frenzy

'Yes, sir, Mr. Cohen, one moment please,' the woman said, missing the man's joke.

A few seconds later a laughing voice came on the line: 'Jake Rozitsky.'

'Hello, Mr. Rozitsky. You don't know me and my name won't be important to you, but I have some information that you're going to find very valuable with respect to a criminal case you're going to be involved in within a couple of weeks.'

'Who am I talking with, please?'

'Oh, just think of me as a friend of the court. Listen, I don't want money. I just want justice. And I happen to be in a position to tell you something about a certain person that will be of great help to you in the upcoming situation.'

'If you're talking about the hearing, I really can't discuss something like this over the phone and I —'

'Cut the bullshit,' the voice said quietly. 'I'm a friend. All you have to do is listen and judge for yourself. I don't trust this line of yours at all, for starters, and if you have half a brain you'll know what I'm talking about. If you want to hear the information I have for you, no strings attached, go downstairs to the pay telephone in your lobby. Do you know the phone I'm talking about?'

'Yeah, but that —'

'This is important. I don't have time to bullshit with you, I'm phoning that pay telephone in three minutes. If you're there to answer it, fine. If the doorman or somebody answers it, I hang up and you won't hear from me again. If I get a busy I'll dial it again in three minutes, but that's it. You've got three minutes to get downstairs.' The line clicked dead before the lawyer had a chance to argue about it.

'He told his secretary he'd be back in a few minutes,' the cop said to Eichord, 'and that was the last thing he ever said to anybody as far as we know.

'There was about a half a pound of plastique under the pay phone. It went off approximately three minutes following this last call. Blew him right in half, took out the front windows, glass fucking everywhere, killed an innocent man —'

'Adios, Jake.' another cop said.

Eichord thought about the line in Shakespeare's Henry VI. The one about 'Kill all the lawyers.' He rewound the tape back a little ways, listening to the cool, well-modulated, soft tones say, 'Tell him it's Roy Cohn.' It was a distinctive voice. The man speaking barely above a whisper, enunciating with the greatest precision, accentless and bland like an announcer but without the professional smoothness, each syllable distinct from the next. Overprecise. Confident.

'You don't know me and my name won't be important to you,' the soft voice said, pronouncing each vowel so precisely.

Jack Eichord reached over and rewound it back again and tried to imagine the man's mouth as it formed the o sounds, 'You don't know me and my name won't be important to you —'

'Wrong,' said Eichord to the tape.

'Hey, I can tell ya one thing about that voice for sure.'

'Yeah?' They looked at the cop who had spoken.

'Jackie Nails it ain't.'

The thing about Rita was. Yes, you dirty old man. That WAS the thing about her. And there were other things he liked too. He liked her. He liked — hell, he LOVED the idea of liking a woman. One woman. He was nuts about liking.

It was good to be, as the previous generation had put it, 'of an age.' He guessed they were of an age, okay. It was an interesting age, too. No doubt about it. Even with the anxieties and the doldrums and the infrequent paranoia, there was that wonderful feeling of being comfortable in your skin that so rarely is gifted on the young. They have other things going for them, sure. But he wouldn't trade places.

Take Rita, and he certainly would. Every chance he got, thanks. She had that class you can't acquire by any shortcut. Money will definitely not buy it. It's more than style, or flair, or good breeding. It's class. Even in her wildest, hottest moments of abandon, he thought her touchingly decorous.

He knew he could talk to her of Casablanca, Sibelius' Valse Triste, Dostoyevski and Diaghilev and Della Street and Vivian Delia Chiesa, and she might know and remember. He could whisper to her of Madame de Beauvoir and Ted de Corsia and Vaughn de Leath and Demosthenes and she'd not lose her marbles. But would she remember Les Damon and Les Tremayne, Brad Runyon and Margot Lane, Olan Soule and Omar the Mystic, Jack Packard and Michael Axford, George W. Trendle and Phillips H. Lord? Would she recall the pussycat on Kilimanjaro, Moxie and Chox,

Chickory-Chick, Stan Getz' Stella? Stella Dallas? Or only Dallas . . . ? He knew, and the flood of knowing engulfed the hard consonants in a stream-of-consciousness distant sharing.

She was his salvation, first of all. The one thing that could elevate him out of the dour, drab, sordid milieu that held him in its more or less permanent grip. Rita could take him out of there in an eye blink. Just the thought of being with her, that long, flashy, red mane of silky-soft hair that framed her pale and angelic beauty, the look of her striding across a room on those killer legs of hers, it was enough to turn him completely around in a New York second. The lady made him crazy. What a fox. He especially liked her mouth and told her so as they moved forward in the moderately long line waiting to see Asphalt Jungle.

'You've got some mouth on you,' he whispered to her, 'you know that?'

'Yes. A lot of people I know say I've got a real mouth on me.'

'Well, that too. But even that turns me on.'

'Laundry lists turn you on, Binaca breath, so what else is new?'

'Waiting in lines doesn't turn me on. But I'll do anything to see Marilyn again. You two had something in common, ya know?'

'Oh, sure. I want to list all the things that Marilyn Monroe and I have in common. I'll list them in alphabetical order, okay? We're both women. She spoke English and I speak English. When she was still alive her body temperature was about ninety-eight point six and by coincidence so is mine. Well, that's pretty much the end of the list. We do have a world in common, don't we?'

'I could work on the body-temperature part if you've got a minute.'

'You want me to call a cop, mister?'

'The worst thing about being close to you is that you don't get to look at you from a distance. I wish you could be with me and across the street at the same time, so I could watch you walk. If I could see you walking down the street right now on those lovely, long legs of yours . . . . ' His black eyes were sparkling at her and he was speaking very softly in her ear.

'Well, kindly try to NOT jump on my bones here in the line. Dad is retired, and I'm not at all certain we can count on Winston bailing us out if we were arrested,' she whispered, 'for creating a public spectacle. After all, this is St. Louis, almost the Bible Belt.'

'Is that right?' he whispered back, hotly.

'Also,' she said, the tip of her tongue touching his ear for emphasis as she whispered, 'if you keep nuzzling me like this we may not get to watch The Asphalt Jungle again, which you've probably only seen roughly twenty-seven times. I don't think I could stand something like this on my conscience.'

'If you really don't want to see Marilyn and the gang we can bop on over to East St. Louis right now. There's a little neighborhood art house showing Dick Powell in Cry Danger.'

'Oh, my God! Really? Can this be true?' He nodded affirmatively. 'Be still, my beating heart. This is too exciting. And who is the leading lady in that one, Lillian Gish? No. Don't tell me. Just say this much. Is it a talkie?'

'Yes. Of course. It's the ultimate trailer-court movie. Seedy and sleazy just the way you like 'em.'

'Good.' She shook her red mane as if in pain at the thought. 'Do we know each other well enough I could ask one small favor?'

'You got it, shweetheart,' Bogie said. 'Just whishtle.'

'After we've been together for a few more months — you know, when we really start to know each other — there's something I'd like to ask you to do for me. It's kind of wild and crazy. And perhaps it isn't something you'd want to do on your own, it's so kinky. But please, keep an open mind about this. Sometime — if I'm good — could we go see a NEW movie? You know, one that's in color? With living actors?'