Slice

“Who the fuck knows?” Lee said. He looked over at his pudgy partner and shrugged.

“What a handjob.'

“They'll watch you the rest of your fucking life, man.” Eichord told him. All for twelve fucking thousand. “This just keeps getting worse and worse.” And he didn't know anything. He hadn't even seen the tip of the shitberg. “Jeezus, Chink—I mean, seriously, you're a logical person. You knew there was no fuckin’ way you could get clear with the money in that sort of a controlled circumstance. You knew it would mess up your job. They'd be suspicious of you forever. It might even get you thrown off the force not to mention into prison. Why in the flaming FUCK did you do it?'

“Everybody else gets THEIR slice of the American Pie, papa-san. I looked down there and saw that fucking money, and that was MY slice. Hey, I'll tell you the truth I only wish it had been MORE. I wish it wasn't twelve I wish it was a hundred twelve. And as far as them watching me the rest of my life, fuck ‘em. And I'll tell you something else, Jack. You know something: if I had it to do over, I'd do it AGAIN!'

“Dana,” Eichord said, looking into the bloodshot eyes in the rearview mirror, “what the hell are we gonna DO with this maniac?'

“Fucked if I know. What do I look like f'r Chrissakes, a'—he couldn't think of the name “halfway house” and he trailed off sleepily—'a goddamn whaddyacallit?'

“Yeah,” his partner said to him reflexively, “for once you got it right, hippo hips. You look like a goddamn whaddyacallit.'

They rode in silence and finally Eichord muttered, “Well, at least there's one thing to be thankful for: it's still a secret. Only seventeen people know about it.'

“That's a lotta yak shit. Nobody's knows but you, me, the human blimp, and'—he narrowed his eyes and intoned in his best Sessue Hayakawa—'Admiral Yamamoto. Nobody else knows that on the dawn of December twenty-first, my men and I will attack Pearl Bailey.'

But Eichord wasn't going for it. He said in a serious, soft voice, “Jeezus, man. I just can't come to grips with it. You FUCKING GOT TO COUGH IT UP, BUD. Get it? You gotta give it back. Either Dana can get it back to ‘em, I can get it back to ‘em someway, or whatever, but get rid of that damn stolen money.'

“Don't talk nonsense, Amellican G.I.'

“One, it's the right thing to do. Two, it'll show you are a honest person who just fucked up for a second, came to your senses, and decided to play it straight. VERY important, mano, when they descend upon your silly butt with the warrants and the hoo-hah. Gon’ be too late then. Get the money back now while you still got a shot.'

“You spleek suplisingly good Engrish for a total roon-a-tic. But your thinking is unsound.” Still with the put-on voice.

“Yeah.” Wonderful. His best friend was going to prison. He couldn't get it up half the time for worrying. And down at the office he had twenty-nine fucking dossiers from the task force. Missing persons all having vanished in the same sixty-mile radius during the past six or eight months. Sometimes life was just a bowl of cherry pits.

MOUNT VERNON

Howard Kresse, Kresse and Co., Inc., Kresse Enterprises, Inc., Kresse Entertainment, Inc., Hokress/Amalgamated Industries, Inc., Midwest Investment Partners, Ltd., Kresse Art Museum, and a young man purporting to be his son despite the name “Richard Cross” on his credit cards had to drive in all the way from Kresse's exclusive country club on the other side of Mount Vernon, just so—as he eloquently put it—his hotshot kid could put a night deposit in some shiksa's sperm depository. “Turbulent” was the most genteel word that could accurately be applied to their father-and-son nonrelationship.

Richard had gone through a period where he had even started calling his father “Howard,” but his mother had been so hurt he'd returned to “Dad.” It was a small hypocrisy to pay for a loving mother. In fact, this inquisition of the day was all for his mom's benefit, and for his fiancee's, to see if he could lay a foundation on which to build a new relationship. Sharon was a traditionalist who insisted they have all the family ties and niceties of holiday gatherings and all the rest of it. So far it had been a mitigated disaster.

Richard could never understand what made his father tick. He seemed enamored of money, but when his son took over the famous Marsh-Endicott Agency in Chicago, and he became the official guru of record to one of the biggest accounts in local print advertising, he'd thought that would have turned the tide. But no. It only managed to widen the gap between them. Richard could NEVER please his father in a thousand years. Finally, he'd learned to accept it. The unfairness of it rankled, but he'd please his favorite ladies and bite his tongue until he could shake loose of his carping father.

“You really turn onto this shit or you just doin’ this to bug me,” the father asked his kid rhetorically.

“I don't TURN ON to it. Dad, gimme a break here, will ya?” The kid was twenty-eight years old and making a hundred and fifty thousand a year running one of the biggest agencies in regional advertising.

“You still play the rock-'n'-roll on the radio, look at this hair down to your ass, live like a MENSCH for a change. Be a man, what d'ya—seventeen years old with pimples? Act like a grown-up person.'

“Lighten up. Riding with me was your idea.'

“Mother said make an effort. She blackmails me. Make an effort with the boy. So I make an effort, I cram myself in this kiddybopper car the hotshot drives to go put a few hard earned dollars into the bank, we can't go down in the daytime like normal people, we got to drive down and in the darkness yet. And I'm crammed in the front with my son the hotshot here, I can't feel my legs they're numb already, I'm getting such a migraine from this music noise here you gotta play.'

“So what did you want to talk about? Come on.” He reached over and killed the tape deck. “I know you're pissed about somethin'.'

“No. Why would I be pissed? My wife is going to Europe by herself. I'm stuck here working my ass off. I gotta kid don't care enough about his old man to bring the girl he's goin’ to marry over even if she is a shi—uh, even if we don't know her from nothing. Why would this be a possible irritation?'

Howard Kresse was a business genius. He was responsible for developing some of the biggest shopping malls in the Midwest back in the early 1950s, a pioneer from the dawn of urban renewal. He'd been in on the first teams to steamroller the old ma-and-pa stores for the vast parking lots and huge shopping centers of the new American merchant's dreamworld. Howard Kresse was a dream salesman. He dreamt of big bosomy blond women, shiny limos with wet bars and telephones, leveraged buy-outs, and sprawling shopping centers. And not in that order.

“You know why I haven't brought her with me. Why would you want me to subject my fiancee to this sort of abuse? I know how you'd behave.” The kid was Dick Cross, he couldn't even be Dick Kresse, like a man, he had to have a “professional name” like this was Dachau in the 1940s, he couldn't be a Jew in public. What a disappointment this kid had turned out to be. He and his father had not loved each other for many years. They were a kind of family accident that kept looking for a place to happen.

By the late 50s Howard Kresse had filed Chapter 11 twice and made his first seven figures and lost it twice and was on his way to a third when he got into such a swindle he couldn't even believe it was happening. It was called West Hills and a giant conglom wanted him to put it all together for them and it was to be on land HE owned through a dummy corporation and such a license to steal he couldn't believe his luck. BIG bucks, we're talking. And the dough went into smart stocks like Dr. Land's clever camera thing, and he became very rich.

So when Dick that little shit decided to go to some no-prick, goyim school nobody'd ever heard of, and come back with a half-assed major in COMPARATIVE FUCKING LIT that you couldn't get a decent fucking teacher's job with much less anything in business—it was enough to make a father sick. Then, this disappointment goes to work for Lawrence Cain's agency, another little hotshot can't own to being a Jew, and he teaches the kid to dress like some faggot preppie and talk like a hippie, and before you know it, his son is gone and somebody named Richard