“Never mind, Mr. Sessions,” one man said, “we’ll take over. I’m Ben Wilkins, U.S. Customs. We know who you are.”
The other man said, “Harold Page, BCI. Thanks for your help.”
I leaned against the Pontiac and took several deep breaths as the agent named Page put handcuffs on Red Cap, the man I had hit. To Charlie he said, “You’re under arrest, too.”
“Yes, sir,” Charlie said in a weak voice. He looked confused. Until now I had been just a nosy old man who worked in the shelter. Then all at once I had neutralized a muscle man and plainclothes cops were calling me by name.
Wilkins was talking on a cell phone. “We’ve got the car and a couple of errand boys. Come on in and pick us up. And hurry up; it’s cold out here.”
He offered me a thermos of coffee, and I took it gratefully. “We had a state highway crew cut up that tree first thing this morning, and we staked out the car. The chief said give it a day and then tow the damn car to the impound lot in Malone. But I thought somebody would show up sooner or later.” He shivered. “I’m glad it was sooner.”
As casually as I could, I asked Page, “So I was right about the car?”
He nodded. “We knew this meet was going down, and we were going to crash the party. We picked up the car at Champlain and followed it here, but the storm screwed everything up.”
“What’s in it?” I asked. It had to be something important to have two agencies working on it. I knew narcotics generally move from south to north and that payment comes back through Canada into the States. “Money?” I guessed.
“We don’t know for sure until we take the car apart, but if our contact gave us the straight dope, there’s a hundred thousand dollars in counterfeit hundreds in there. The new hundreds.”
Two cars showed up on the highway, and several men got out. I gave one the keys to the truck, and he moved it out of the way. They put Charlie in one car, Red Cap in another. Agent Wilkins drove me back to town.
I asked him about the two young people, Elaine and Charlie.
“The girl was just window dressing. Charlie? If he doesn’t have a record, they’ll probably let him go. Nobody should be that dumb.”
The great storm was over. There had been countless instances of neighbor helping neighbor, of kindnesses by strangers, of the vitality of small communities. Medium security prisons had opened their gates to give shelter to storm refugees and sent inmates out on cleanup details. A caravan of forty cars and trucks from Plattsburgh drove over icy roads to deliver cords of firewood to two beleaguered towns in Quebec.
It was Saturday and Father Joe and I were watching Jerry and some others load the last of the cots on a truck to be returned to storage. We were closing the shelter, and we were anxious to get home and assess the storm damage.
I explained the Florida situation to Father Joe and said I was in a bit of a hurry. He took the hint.
“I’ll be glad to return the letters for you,” he said. “Will the police be able to prosecute this man for trying to cheat people that way?”
“They’ll try. He’s been convicted of intent to defraud before. You might caution Mrs. Allen and the others to be very careful of requests for money that come in the mail,” I said. “There are ways to check them out.”
“I will, Hank.”
I handed him the letters I’d been holding. Father Joe put them in his pocket and looked at me with a little grin. “I guess you saved me some money, too, Hank.”
He took an envelope out of a pocket and showed me the address. It was the familiar Reverend Daniel Fisher in Orlando.
“This can be our little secret, all right?”
“Sure thing, Father Joe.”
“Take care of that leg.”
I went home. It had been a terrible storm, but as I saw it, things could be worse.
A Narrow Squeak
by Lawrence Doorley
All tales have a beginning (“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”; “Call me Ishmael”; “It was a dark and stormy night”). This tale — a tale of murder gone awry — may be said to have its beginning on a lovely summer morning in 1942 in Hillsdale, the county seat of Ashford County in the Appalachian foothills of southwestern Pennsylvania.
Six-month-old Elizabeth Watson, a chubby blonde darling, was having a wonderful time playing with her toys in her playpen in the back yard when a wee intruder appeared. Just out of the nest, exploring the great big world for the very first time, a meadow mouse (M. Pennsylvanicus) hopped into the playpen squeaking baby mouse noises.
Oh, oh, oh, a new toy and it makes funny noises, thought Elizabeth happily. She grabbed it, squeezed it tightly in her baby fist. The squeaks became shrill squeals as the frightened mouse fought to free itself from the clutches of this monster. It made it. It ran up the baby’s arm, leaped onto her blonde head, began digging frantically.
Elizabeth screamed. Her mother, who had been keeping a watchful eye on her from the back porch swing, flew down the steps, ran to the playpen, swatted the mouse so hard that it landed twenty feet away. Squeaking pathetically, it ran for home, a lesson learned; it’s a dangerous world out there.
The mouse hadn’t broken the skin, but it left a permanent scar. That terrifying experience marked Elizabeth for life. She was petrified of mice, an incurable musophobe, haunted by musophobia, one of over two hundred phobias (fears) listed in psychiatric dictionaries. Others are ailurophobia (fear of cats; Bunny Ainsworth — she who was once plain Elizabeth Watson — loves cats; they catch mice), and phasmophobia (fear of ghosts).
Bunny is not alone. There are thousands of women and who knows how many men who, given the choice, would take a cackling ghost in the attic to a squeaking mouse in the bedroom. It is unlikely that anyone has ever died of musophobia or phasmophobia. Let us hope not; there are already enough goofy ways to die. And Elizabeth “Bunny” Watson Ainsworth didn’t die of her phobia. But it was close, a narrow squeak.
The tale moves to a casino in Las Vegas, the date September seventh, 1993. Lady Luck, a fickle creature who had fallen under the spell of that charming scoundrel Tony Gregory, abruptly deserted him for another scoundrel, and by the time Tony realized that his luck had run out, the casino had two hundred twenty thousand dollars’ worth of his markers (casino I.O.U.’s).
Back in the primitive 1930’s when all gambling was illegal — and sinful — when the riffest of the riffraff controlled it, a Tony Gregory would have been in serious trouble. Oh, he would have been given a couple of weeks to pay up “or else.” A standard “or else” involved concrete shoes and the nearest body of water.
My, how the world has changed. Gambling flourishes, is legal in forty-eight states (the two sanctimonious holdouts are Utah and Hawaii), is enveloped in a halo of respectability. States have their own lotteries; casinos are managed by MBA’s from prestigious universities and are highly regarded by mutual funds, but like their illegitimate forebears, they are in business to make money. When you lose — especially if you are a premium player like Tony Gregory (premium players number thousands, wager a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand dollars per visit) — you are expected to pay up. In Tony’s case the casino was “lenient”; he was given a year, charged a modest eight point seventy-five percent interest.
But if by September seventh, 1994, the markers were still unpaid, the casino would reluctantly institute legal proceedings to collect — reluctantly because the gaming industry does not like to admit that now and then a player loses. Being sued would devastate Tony. His name would be posted in casinos not only in Las Vegas but in Atlantic City, London, Monte Carlo, everywhere. Losing his good name, publicly branded a welsher, his markers not worth the paper they were written on, was unthinkable.