The Switch

Chapter 10

ORDELL HAD SAID, "For sure, he's a creepy guy. Lives here by hisself; nobody bothers him, wants to come near him. Can you think of a better place?" No, Louis couldn't. But he wished they were some place else.

Richard was standing in the doorway to the hall, looking into the living room at them. He said, "You want me to take the first watch?"

"Yeah, you take the first watch, Richard," Ordell said. "Hey, Richard--" He pulled the Frankenstein Monster mask out of the shopping bag on the floor by his chair and threw it over. "Put that on, man, you go in there. Or she comes out to go to the toilet." He said to Louis, when Richard left, "I believe it's a good place. Can you think of a better one?"

"I told you, it's fine," Louis said. "What would he go in the room for?"

"It's his house," Ordell said.

"He doesn't have anything to say to her. What would he go in there for?"

"I mean if he happen to be face to face with her," Ordell said. "That's all I meant. I'm not saying for him to go in there and do anything he wants. That what you thinking about?"

"We don't have any reason to hurt her," Louis said, backing off a little.

Ordell seemed to grin--Louis wasn't sure-- looking over at Louis sitting on the couch with the parts of the newspaper spread out next to him. "No, we don't have to hurt her none. She gonna be up there by herself prob'ly a few days. Maybe she get bored, want a little something to do. You see Richard making it with her?"

"I'd like to see his wife," Louis said. "I can't see Richard making it if he paid for it. No, what I'm saying, we get her upset--we got enough to handle without her going whacko on us. You don't know what a person, they get upset's liable to do. You keep the person reasonably scared, yeah, but you keep the person quiet, man, easy to manage."

"You don't want nothing to happen to the lady," Ordell said.

"Why should I? Do you? She's pretty cool about it so far, you know? You want to make problems we don't have?"

"I haven't said nothing. Man, I'm with you," Ordell said. "We're in this deal partners, man. Richard works for us. He does what we tell him."

Louis was going to say, Yeah, but just before you said, It's his house. Like he can do whatever he wants. But he didn't say it. He kept quiet now, deciding to wait and see. Whatever you were into, it didn't always work the way it was supposed to or the way the other guy said it would. You could have an understanding, thinking you both saw it exactly the same, and later on the other guy would say, "What're you talking about? I didn't say that. When did I say that?" Ordell said how it was going to work, what each of them, including Richard, was supposed to do; okay, he'd take Ordell's word for it. Otherwise he'd be worrying about things that might never happen. The way to play it, just don't be surprised if the other guy did something that wasn't in the agreement, because it wasn't a written contract or the kind of agreement you could point to and take the other guy to court and sue his ass over. You had to get along. It was good when two of the guys were close and there was a third guy they trusted but didn't give a shit about; it strengthened the closeness and lessened the chance of the two close guys fucking each other over; though it wasn't a guarantee. You did not want to be alone in something like this, naturally, it was too fucking scary. But if it meant saving your own ass-- as Ordell had said, "If there's somebody standing between me and forty years in Jackson--" And Louis had said, "I know. It's not a choice."

That morning, Monday, Ordell had called his friend Cedric Walker in Freeport, Grand Bahama, and gave him Richard's phone number. Mr. Walker had called back collect: yes, the man had arrived on the early flight from Fort Lauderdale. He'd see what he could find out.

In the late afternoon, Mr. Walker called again. Yes, the man was on the island. No, a boy wasn't with him, he came alone. He hadn't gone to the bank, but Lisabeth Cooper was watching for him if he did. The man was at Fairway Manor where he had an apartment and always stayed and looked to be entertaining his lady friend who lived over in Lucaya. Ordell said what lady friend? He sat listening to Mr. Walker on the phone while Louis went out to the kitchen for a couple more bottles of O'Keefe Lager.

When Louis came back in, Ordell had hung up but was still sitting in the straight chair by the telephone table fooling with his beard. Louis handed him a bottle on his way to the couch. The end of the couch by the lamp with the cellophane-covered shade and the Little Bo-Peep base looked like it was going to be Louis' seat. It was the first place he had sat down in Richard's living room and, for some reason, he kept going back to it, looking at the lamp sometimes when they weren't talking and wondering what the Nazi was doing with Little Bo-Peep. There was something wrong with the guy. His wife or his mother probably had bought the lamp or won it across the street at the State Fair, throwing balls at wooden milk bottles, but there was still something wrong with the guy.

Ordell moved over to one of the deep maroon chairs, still thinking.

Louis said, "You gonna tell me or keep it to yourself?"

"The man's there," Ordell said, "staying at this apartment he's got on a golf course."

"Yeah, what else?"

"He got a lady with him. See, I knew he like the ladies, but I didn't know it was this same lady he's been seeing all the time when he goes there. I thought he had all kinds of ladies. Mr. Walker say no, it's the same one, good-looking young woman name Melody ... Mel something ... Melanie. That's it, he say Melanie. Young foxy-looking chick; Mr. Walker say she lays by the swimming pool without her top on, these gentlemen come chipping onto number seventeen, that's right by the place, like the front yard. Man, they looking over there at Melanie, waiting for her to turn over, they lucky to five-putt the hole."

"That's an interesting story," Louis said. "What's the rest?"

"She don't work that Mr. Walker knows of," Ordell said. "But Lisabeth Cooper say she got four thousand seven hundred and two dollars in the Providence Bank and Trust."

"Say she's been saving her money," Louis said. "Say shit. She spends it in the casino, but she's always got some in the bank."

"I don't see the problem," Louis said. "So the man's got something on the side."

"I don't say it's a problem," Ordell said. "But I like to know all the shit that's going on. I don't like surprises, man. I like to know, what's he doing there? What's she doing? Who is she? You understand what I'm saying?"

"Why don't you call him and ask him?" Louis said. He studied the clean, streamlined O'Keefe label. He liked the old one better. The new one gave him the feeling the beer was weak, watery. He said, "Why don't we call him? I'm serious. Get it done."

"Ask him about the foxy chick?" Ordell didn't see it yet.

"No, I mean tell him the deal. Why do you have to wait till he gets back?"

He could see Ordell hadn't thought about it, the possibility. Maybe there were some other things he hadn't thought about.

Ordell said, "I don't have his number."

Now he was stalling, giving himself time to think.

"Call information. Or get it from Mr. Walker," Louis said. "The man's right there. All he's got to do is go to the bank."

Ordell was frowning, thinking hard. "See, he comes home, he finds out she ain't there. He knows something's happened to her."

"He calls home tonight," Louis said. "No, hey-- we let her talk to him on the phone. 'Honey, these men--I've been kidnapped--'" Louis stopped, realizing something. It was the first time he had said the word or had even thought the word and heard it in his mind. Kidnap. Christ, they had kidnapped a woman. It wasn't simple extortion, leaning on the man, prying money out of somebody who was making it illegally and cheating the government, they had kidnapped the man's wife. Ordell hadn't used the word either. Talking it over it was always about the man, how they were going to jive the man into giving them a million dollars. Pay off Richard, pay off a few people in the Bahamas, they'd split, say, $960,000. You believe it? $480,000 apiece and the man couldn't say anything about it, couldn't call the police, couldn't do anything. See, always the man. The man thinking he was so smart. They were gonna skin the man. And to make him jump right now and not get in a long conversation and give him time to lie or confuse them or move the money someplace else, they'd tell the man he'd never see his wife again unless he did what he was told. Nothing about kidnapping.

"Say call him, let his wife tell him," Ordell said, thinking about it. "He makes the transfer tomorrow. I call the bank, see the money was deposited--"

"We drop the lady home--" Louis said.

Ordell's gaze came alive and flicked at Louis. "With the police waiting."

"Okay, we put her on a bus."

"The police still waiting, wanting to know who put the man in the closet. Man with about fifteen stitches in his head."

"What she gonna tell them," Louis said, "she was kidnapped?" Christ, he said it again. "She doesn't know anything, because if she gets her husband involved they start asking him questions-- all that money, huh?--dig into his business, his books. Before she knows it he's in Lewisburg, man, conspiring to defraud the United States government."

"Hey, it's interesting," Ordell said. "You know it? He's down there with the foxy chick his wife don't know nothing about. His wife's up here sitting on Richard's mother's bed, he thinks she's home making cookies. Yeah, it's interesting."

The Sony TV Frank had won and kept in the bedroom was now in this room. It sat on the vanity that had round corners and was made of lacquered blond wood, the back of the set reflecting in three panels of mirrors. She thought of Frank and his golf trophy. Because the vanity reminded her of the 1930s and the Empire State Building.

Mickey remembered snapshots of her mother taken in the '30s ... her mother and her mother's two younger sisters, her grandmother ... looking at the album every summer in the house at Gratiot Beach, the home on Lake Huron they called "the cottage" where there had been a vanity like this one in her grandmother's room. She remembered the sachet odor from that time, looking at her grandmother's "things," linens and silks (what were they, scarves, tablecloths?) folded in tissue paper and stored in a fat leather trunk, a treasure chest in an upstairs room where a pair of dormer windows looked out past a sweep of lawn to the beach and the lake that was like an ocean.

The dormer windows in this room were covered with a sheet of plywood, nailed tight to the frame with headless nails. In case she might try to rip the board off with her fingernails and jump out the window. Mickey had no idea where she was: within a half hour of Birmingham or Bloomfield Village, but in which direction? In a small, two-story house, blind behind the plywood to what might be a familiar view outside. Though she doubted it.

The little ruffle-shade lamp--the only light in the room except for a fixture in the ceiling--could be her grandmother's, but not the chenille bedspread with the peacock design in blue, purple and red. There was a print on the wall of a blond Christ Child, a scrubbed, well-behaved looking boy. The Sony, she noticed, was plugged in. They were considerate--a white man and a black man and a third one who had body odor, God, who stunk. Someone else recently had had b. O. A lot of people did. Why didn't they smell themselves? She'd have it too if they kept her in here very long. It was warm in the room. She had a nearly flat package of cigarettes, a lighter. Knock if she had to pee and put her mask on. It would be something to do. She wondered if they'd talk to her. Maybe they had the wrong person. Who was being kidnapped these days? People in Italy who had money. And the kidnappers got away with it. What was the last one here, in this country? A girl in a box underground who breathed through a tube. No, a more recent one. A woman tied to a tree in the woods, found after a couple of days. Both of them found alive, she was quite sure, and the kidnappers arrested.

Why would anybody--if you were going to kidnap somebody, why not pick ... she'd never had her picture in the paper. Oh God, yes she did. But they couldn't have seen it and then planned it so fast. They must've seen Frank's name. Frank A. Dawson Homes, Grandview Estates. But even then, what did they cost? Grandview Estates wasn't money. What about the really wealthy people in Detroit? Somebody must've made a mistake.

God, kidnapped--

She couldn't believe it. She'd turn on the 6 o'clock news and there it would be. Friend of family describes wife's ... mother's abduction. Friend of family.

Prominent industrialist trying to fool around with and get in the pants of friend's wife describes daylight abduction. Husband away on business not immediately notified.

When would they get in touch with him?

Local and county police have begun a thorough investigation ...

The one who came to the door had smelled of perspiration. The policeman in the two-tone blue uniform, in the unmarked car. The same one, here.

It was planned. Of course it was planned. They had been watching her, waiting for the right time. And Marshall, the big jerk, had strolled in and gotten whacked on the head.

It was 10 to 5. The earliest news was on Channel 4 at 5:30. She was dying to hear how the friend of the family would explain what he was doing in the house between 12:30 and 1 o'clock in the afternoon.

"I just happened to be driving by and saw something suspicious," said Marshall Taylor, president of Taylor Industries, five-handicap golfer and country club lover.

Mickey sat down on the bed. A little self-analysis. How did she feel about all this?

Surprisingly, she felt fine. She felt--what else? Excited. More than that. Afraid? Yes, she was afraid. But she wasn't scared to death or petrified. Just the opposite, she felt alive. She was excited but calm. She had time to take what was happening to her and study it. She could perch up there wherever she perched and look at the whole scene, calmly watch what was going on and direct herself if she wanted to--yes, exactly--and give herself lines and use them. Say what she wanted. She didn't have to worry about a nice mom image. No points for nice moms here. She could be herself.

That was interesting. Mickey looked over at the triple mirror, at her reflection in the large center panel. She said, "Who are you?" She studied herself and said, "If you don't know, you're gonna find out, aren't you?"

She liked the feeling, being excited and calm at the same time.