Slice

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 fiancée'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 fiancée 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 Cross is making a living in advertising, which, he had to admit, the kid had made a few dollars at. But what a disappointment to Howard that the boy didn't come in with him.

Then the kid winds up running Marsh-Endicott and rubbing the old man's nose in it that he's a big success, you call this a big success running around in a little car with legroom like a fucking Nazi wagon, hair down to your ass, you call this wonderful? And now he's marrying some shiksa named Sharon Souther he never heard of, God only knows from their family what does the father do—a fucking poet, for all he knows—and never mind where the Kresse and Company, Inc., money is all going to end up someday. It's a heartache. But Mother makes him promise so they're spending the day together and they play golf and dinner at the club so he can't even get to the bank, and now this aggravation.

And some big guard is coming up to the window and the kid rolls it down and the guy is saying something about the night deposit being temporarily closed and all the old man can see is a cap and a badge of some kind and there's the loud bang and Dick is slumping over my God something shot him OH GOD DON'T NOOOOOOOO THE EXPLOSION AND BLINDING FIRE AND THE SMACK OF THE TINY LEAD NEEDLE THE BULLET EMBEDDING ITSELF IN HIS NECK AND OH MY GOD WHY ARE YOU KILLING US LIKE THIS? And the guard leans in and shoots the man on the passenger side again but still it doesn't kill him. As he shoots the car starts moving as Dick Kresse/Richard Cross slides down and to his right and into the man beside him and his foot is off the brake and the car's idling engine is tuned up so high that it surges forward slightly as the huge man tries to wrench the door open but it is locked and the car keeps going until it hits a concrete abutment and it stops and the man has charged after it on strong, tree-trunk legs and he smashes the window and pulls the driver out of the way, taking the checks and cash in the zippered envelope between them, pocketing the checks, which he'll destroy later. He will not try to dispose of these bodies, and he senses the older man is still alive and he puts the long-barreled .22 to the ear of the one on the passenger side and fires another round killing him.

Chaingang takes the two wallets containing, respectively, $68 and $170, and then he finds two hundreds tucked inside a “hidden” compartment in the wallet with the $68 in it, and he doesn't stop to count it all but in less than three minutes he's made about $6,300 and change. More than satisfactory, he thinks, quickly obliterating the prints on the envelope and door handle, and moving toward the car parked nearby, wiping off the empty billfolds and pitching them in the street as he walks. He will not endanger himself further here but soon he must satisfy his hunger for bloody essence of human. He craves a fresh heart.

Even the girl's would do, he thinks, letting himself toy with the idea in his twisted mind as he drives back to her, although he knows he needs her if only for the time being. Soon, however, he will slice open this albatross.