Funny Money

4 Gerry

Valentine awoke the next morning at seven, the sunlight streaming into his motel room. Wrapping himself in a blanket, he went and cracked a window, then sat in a chair listening to the waves pound the shore while remembering how he and Doyle had often ended their shifts by walking the beach. Sometimes, they kicked off their shoes and stuck their feet in the water, two flatfoots cooling off. The memory was made vivid by the lingering taste of yesterday’s cigarette, and he cursed himself for smoking it.

For breakfast, he ate the remains of last night’s Chinese take-out. Out of nostalgia, he’d picked a cheesy motel off Pacific Avenue to stay in. The Drake. Efficiencies, rooms by the day, week, or month; HBO and Showtime; no dogs. What more could a man want?

The banging on his door was loud and frantic. Taking the Glock off the night table, he slipped it into the pocket of his overcoat hanging in the closet. Then he went to the door with the blanket hanging from his shoulders.

Through the peephole he spied his son, his hair peppered with silvery flakes of snow. Physically, they had a lot in common, but that was where the similarities ended. He went and hid in the john. The banging continued.

“Come on, Pop,” his son bellowed through the door. “I saw you looking at me.”

“Who’s me?”

“Gerry.”

“Gerry who?”

“Gerry your fucking son, the apple of your eye, the product of your loins.”

Valentine opened the door. Gerry smiled, stuck his hand out. He was dressed in a somber three-piece suit and a tie. He’d lost the annoying little earring and shaved away the stubble he called a beard.

“The funeral was yesterday,” Valentine informed him.

Gerry had cried all the way from New York, or so he said. Doyle had been like an uncle to him, Guy and Sean like brothers, Liddy his surrogate mom. He made it sound like he’d spent every weekend at their house, and not with the dope-smoking lowlifes Valentine remembered so vividly.

“So how’d you find out where I was?” Valentine asked over pancakes at the IHOP down the street.

His son made a face, his mouth dripping maple syrup.

“I’m just curious, that’s all,” Valentine said.

Gerry kept eating, the look becoming a frown. The restaurant was deserted, the snow keeping everyone home. In the kitchen a radio was playing Sinatra, New Jersey’s favorite son.

Valentine said, “You want me to figure it out by myself?”

“Go ahead.”

“Mabel told you. Now, I didn’t give her my number, but I did call her, and since she has caller ID, she must have scribbled the number down. You called, and she gave you the number. Bingo.”

“Why you making a federal case out of it,” his son said belligerently.

“You could have called my cell phone.”

“I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“I hate surprises.”

“Even when it’s me?”

Especially when it’s you, he almost said. “If I’d known you cared so much about Doyle, I’d have called you. But unless my memory’s fading, the last time Sean came over to the house, you bloodied his nose.”

“I still wanted to pay my respects,” his son said. “Hey, you going to eat your bacon?”

Valentine glanced at the grisly strips on his plate. During his last checkup, the doctor had heard a swishing in his neck and determined his carotid artery was getting clogged. Someday, he would need to have it scoped, which sounded like no big deal, except two percent of patients had a stroke on the operating table and never came back.

“Why, you still hungry?”

Gerry frowned again. Valentine could never get him to admit anything, not even what day of the week it was.

“No,” his son said.

“Then why do you want my bacon?”

“I just don’t want it to go to waste, that’s all.”

“You still sending money to those starving kids in Africa?”

“Aw, Pop, for the love of Christ...”

Their waitress slapped the check down, then gave Valentine the hairy eyeball. She’d been lingering by the cash register eavesdropping. No doubt she’d figured out the bloodlines, and was now painting Valentine out to be a jerk for playing rough with his son.

Valentine removed his wallet. “Can you break a hundred? It’s the smallest I’ve got.”

“Hey, Harold,” she yelled into the kitchen, “can you break a C-note for Donald Trump?”

A bullet-headed man stuck his head through the swinging kitchen doors, said, “Nuh-uh,” and disappeared.

Valentine laid his Visa card atop the check.

“We don’t take credit cards,” she said.

He slid the check toward his son. “Cover this, okay?”

Gerry dug his wallet out. It was made of snakeskin and looked like something Crocodile Dundee might have owned. He dug around in the billfold, then said, “No.”

“You don’t have ten bucks?”

“No,” he said again.

“Where’s your money?”

Meeting his father’s gaze, he said, “I lost it, Pop.”

Gerry owned a bar in Brooklyn, did a brisk business running a bookmaking operation in the back. He always carried a fat bankroll. Better than a ten-inch prick, he’d told his father, who’d slept with two women his entire life.

“How much?” Valentine asked.

“Fifty grand.”

Their waitress had dropped all pretense and was hanging on every word. Her name badge said Dottie.

“Dottie, how about a little privacy?”

She ignored him. “Did you really lose fifty grand, kid?”

Gerry lowered his head shamefully. Valentine slapped a hundred onto the check.

“I’ll come by later for the change,” he told her.

Snow had hooded the cars, and they walked to the corner of Jefferson and stopped at the light. A half-block away, the surf pounded the desolate shoreline.

“Okay,” Valentine said. “Let’s hear it.”

Gerry stared straight ahead as he spoke. “Last Saturday, I get a call from a guy named Rico Blanco — you don’t want to know what he does for a living — and he invites me over to a club called the Spanish Fly in lower Manhattan. I’ve known Rico since high school, so I say, what’s the harm?”

“Isn’t that club in Alphabet town where all the drug deals go down?”

“Alphabet town got cleaned up,” his son said. “Studio apartments go for two grand a month, bathroom down the hall. Anyway, I meet Rico at the Fly. There’s a bartender named Sid. He starts serving us drinks. Then this gambler comes in named Frankie Bones. Frankie is all flash and cash. I’ve heard Frankie is a made guy, but he’s always seemed okay to me, you know what I’m saying?”

“Look at me,” Valentine said.

Gerry turned sideways and looked into his father’s eyes.

“Get to the goddamned point, I’m freezing my nuts off.”

“I am,” his son insisted. “Sid turns on the TV. Next thing you know, we’re watching football, Boston College playing East Bumfuck. BC is winning and Frankie starts hollering. Seems he got tossed out of BC for selling dope, nothing major, just nickel bags to guys in his frat house, only the cops got wind—”

“Get on with it!” his father roared.

“Right. So Frankie starts betting on East Bumfuck—”

“And you started betting on BC.”

“How could I not bet on them? It was like watching a scrimmage.”

“And you started winning,” Valentine said. “Let me guess. By halftime, you were up ten grand.”

Gerry’s expression turned sullen. All his life, his old man had been a mind reader, knowing exactly where and how he’d screwed up. “Twenty,” he said.

“You took a drunk for twenty grand? Shame on you.”

“Pop, cut it out.”

Valentine bit his lip. He was trying to be civilized about this and let Gerry present his case, but it was hard. He loved his boy more than anything in the world, but it did not change who his son was.

“So what happened?”

“Start of the fourth quarter, East Bumfuck’s quarterback gets knocked out. The coach sends in some red shirt. Frankie pulls out this monster wad and throws it on the bar. He says, ‘Seventy grand says BC is going down.’ Then he goes to the john. I ask Rico and Sid what they think—”

“And they told you to do it,” Valentine said. He could no longer feel his toes and decided to finish his son’s tale before he got frostbite. “So you bet the farm against a loud-mouth drunk on a game that was a sure thing. But then a crazy thing happened. The red shirt starts throwing the ball like Dan Marino. He runs BC’s defense up and down the field. One touchdown, two touchdowns, three, then four. Of course, your buddies are feeling terrible. And when the game’s over and BC loses, well, they’re downright miserable that you’ve lost all your money. Weren’t they?”

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“It was a setup, Gerry. The game was a tape. It’s the oldest hustle in the world. Didn’t you see The Sting?”

The clouds had opened up like a busted feather pillow. Snowflakes stuck to everything they touched, the two men turning white before each other’s eyes.

“So what happened?” his father asked.

“I wrote Rico a marker,” Gerry said. “Rico sold the marker to these hoods named the Mollo brothers. They tracked me down to Yolanda’s apartment. They slapped me around, then Big Tony made a move on Yolanda. I’m sorry, Pop, but I caved in.”

“Meaning what?”

“I gave the Mollos the bar.”

Gerry had borrowed fifty grand to buy the bar, plus gotten Valentine to put the place in his name, his own history with the law a major deterrent in gaining a liquor license. On paper, the bar was Valentine’s, even though he’d visited the joint only once.

“How the hell did you give them something you don’t own?”

“They think I own it, Pop.”

Valentine thought about his clogged artery, wondering if the pressure building inside him might send a piece of plaque to his brain. “What do you want me to do?”

“I know this is going to sound stupid...”

“Try me.”

“Lend me another fifty grand so I can buy the bar back.”

“What?”

“Come on, you’ve got the money. What’s the point of sitting on it? You’re just going to give it to me eventually.”

“I am?”

“Sure. Have you ever seen a Brinks truck at a funeral?”

Valentine’s jaw tightened. His son had come here to put the squeeze on him. He placed his hands on Gerry’s chest, and gave him a shove.

Gerry slid backward on the slick sidewalk. Then he took off at a dead run. Crossing the street, he entered a wooded park.

“Come back here.”

Puffing hard, Valentine entered the park and followed Gerry’s footprints until they disappeared beside a brick wall. Did his son think he was born yesterday? Standing on tiptoes, he peeked over the wall. Gerry sat in a frozen flower bed, cell phone in hand.

“Will you listen to me? My father said no. That’s right. N O. Well, you’re just going to have to move.”

It was Yolanda, Gerry’s third-year med-school girlfriend whom Valentine hadn’t met but had a low opinion of anyway.

“Hey, stupid...”

Seeing his old man climbing over the wall, Gerry started to run, his butt caked with brown dirt and leaves.

“Come back here!”

“I’ll figure out something,” Gerry told Yolanda, fleeing through the woods toward a frozen pond.

“I said come back here!”

Kneeling, Valentine packed a snowball between his gloveless hands, then hurled it with all his might. He’d always had a strong arm, and the snowball arced gracefully in the air, then returned to earth and hit the back of his son’s head. Gerry fell like he’d been shot.

An invisible knife pierced Valentine’s heart. Years ago, Lois had made him promise never to fight with his son when he was in a bad mood. “You’ll hurt him,” she’d warned.

He ran through the forest in a panic. What if he’d scrambled Gerry’s brains, turned the worm into a vegetable, could he live with that? No, no, of course not. He loved him; that had never changed. Coming to the forest’s end, his eyes fell on the spot where his son had fallen.

Gerry was gone.