When he came back, Eunice said, “Are Creole and my husband at our apartment?”
“Yeah,” he said.
Eunice saw the ox nodding, still half asleep, and she thought it was now or never. She said, “God, I gotta go to the bathroom bad. I’m about to poop my pants.”
“I hope you ain’t too modest,” Jerzy said, “because the door stays open. And make it quick.” Then he unlocked the padlock on her left wrist.
Eunice stood up with a groan, bowed her back and rotated her hips, and walked slowly to the bathroom. On the way, she saw bread and a mayonnaise jar on the kitchen counter. Jerzy stood outside the door, glancing inside while Eunice, actually constipated from stress and fear, gave her own acting performance, grunts and all. Needing an eye-opener, Jerzy shuffled over to his leather jacket on the floor and took a swig from the gin bottle.
When she was finished, she washed her hands, leaving them wet, and returned to the bed. She put her left wrist back into position and kept her right hand down by her hip, the hand with the bar of soap in it, which she slid beneath her wrinkled dress. She held up her left wrist to be chained.
As soon as he clicked the padlock through the same link as Creole had used before, she said, “Call a taxi and get over there. Ring them on the gate phone, and when they let you inside, act like you’re panicked. Say you killed me accidentally and everyone better get outta town. Get Creole out of there somehow and then kill my husband and get that key. Taxi back here and we’ll go together to the storage facility to pick up my husband’s car for the rest of our business.”
“It might jist work,” Jerzy said, looking at his buck knife.
“It will,” she said. “But you better call Creole now and say something to keep them from driving over here. The element of surprise is what’s gonna make it all happen for you.”
“What should I say?” Jerzy asked, and Eunice believed she almost owned him now. She was thirsty and knew he must be parched, given all the booze and drugs he’d ingested.
“Tell Creole to stay there and wait for your call. Say that you might be on the verge of getting the info but that I’m a tough cookie.”
“You got that part right,” he said.
“Okay, Jerzy, you saw Bernie do his acting bits often enough. Let’s see you do it, but first, please get me some water.”
He went to the kitchen and came back with a plastic bottle of water, removed the cap, and handed it to her. When she drank, it seemed to remind him how thirsty he was, and he returned to the kitchen for another. When he did, she poured water on her left hand and wrist.
He returned and retrieved his cell from his jacket and speed-dialed, and then he did just what she was depending on. He turned away and walked to the kitchen to give his performance without an audience. Dewey would have stayed there, relishing an observer, but Jerzy was not an actor, and she knew instinctively he’d want privacy.
She heard him say to his partner, “I need more time. She’s bad, man. Her old man’s a pussy, but she ain’t. Gimme another hour.”
And while he talked, she soaped up her left hand and wrist, moving herself into more of a sitting than reclining position so that he would not see the soap slime running down her bare arm. There was one more movement she was depending on: a bowel movement, a real one this time. His. She needed him in that bathroom. But as she twisted and pulled, her hand was not slippery enough. It wasn’t working!
He came back from the kitchen and said, “Okay, I gotta call a cab, and I’m gonna have to chain you up real good and tape your mouth. Sorry about that.”
“Jerzy,” Eunice said. “I’m about to faint from hunger. Before you go, can I have something to eat? Anything.”
“All we got is some bread and a package of salami.”
“That sounds great,” Eunice said. “Please bring it here.”
Jerzy went to the kitchen and came back with the package of meat he hadn’t opened and the loaf of bread.
“You wouldn’t have anything to put on the bread, would you?” she asked.
“I got a jar of mayo in there,” he said.
“That’s perfect,” Eunice said.
When he came back with the jar of mayonnaise and a plastic butter knife, she’d already torn open the meat package and was making a sandwich. “Would you like one?” she asked.
“Naw, I only get the munchies when I smoke pot,” he said. “When I get the money, I think I’ll switch to blow. I’ll be able to afford first-class booger sugar after you make me rich.”
“Can you open the jar for me?” Eunice asked.
He opened the mayonnaise jar and handed it to her, watching her spread a small dab on the sandwich with the plastic knife.
“Don’t try stabbing me in the throat,” Jerzy said with a revolting leer.
Eunice wished she’d had a cigarette to calm herself, but with as much self-control as she could manage, she said prosaically, “Maybe you need to have a poop too before you leave here, Jerzy. You’re gonna kill a man with a knife. And it won’t be a plastic knife like this one.”
He stared at her fiercely, and she froze, shivers shooting through her. Had she gone too far and made the dolt suspicious? Or was he just contemplating the impending murder, something he’d never done before?
Finally he said, “Yeah, I gotta admit I’m a little nervous about guttin’ your old man, but once I start…”
Jerzy stopped talking and lumbered into the little bathroom, leaving the door open. She heard him unbuckle his belt, and as soon as his bathroom noises began to tell the story, she reached into the mayonnaise jar and scooped out a handful, slathering it on her left hand and wrist. Then she rotated her wrist and pulled, all the time trying to hold the chain in her right hand to keep it from striking the steel bed frame. The mayonnaise oozed down her arm as she twisted her wrist and tugged. And suddenly, her left hand slipped past the linked manacle! She sat upright, and when she heard him grunting, swung her feet to the floor, grabbed her purse, and bolted for the door.
Jerzy saw her flash across the open bathroom door and yelled, “Hey!” Then he leaped to his feet with his jeans down around his boots, and fell forward onto his knees and then onto his face, yelling, “I’ll kill you! Now I’ll kill you! You’re a dead woman!”
But he was yelling into an empty room. Eunice was already halfway down the steps, not knowing what part of L.A. she was in, running barefoot along the sidewalk in Frogtown, absolutely certain that if she let him get close, he’d shoot her dead.
Tristan Hawkins and Dewey Gleason were exhausted from having ransacked the apartment for hours. They had not found a key, nor any evidence of a storage facility, a safe deposit box, or anything else to provide a clue as to where the money could be.
Tristan was slumped in Eunice’s chair in front of one of the computers, and he said, “Maybe we gotta admit the possibility that your old lady put all the money in a bank account. Or maybe more than one account. If she did that, we’re gonna have problems.”
Dewey, who looked to Tristan like a man facing a firing squad, said, “I don’t understand how she could be holding out so long. What could he be doing to her?”
“We’re way down the road past all that,” Tristan said. “We gotta depend on the Polack to make her talk, and that’s the end of it.”
“I wish I had it to do over,” Dewey said with a bleak stare into the abyss.
“Well, you don’t,” Tristan said, “and I’m sick of hearin’ you say that.”
And that was when Tristan’s cell rang, and Dewey said, “Thank God! Maybe she’s talked!”
“Yo,” Tristan said into the phone, and Dewey studied him, seeing the alarm grow on his face as he listened to a long monologue from Jerzy Szarpowicz.
Then Tristan said, “No, don’t come here! Catch a cab to… to the office. Yeah, wait there. We’ll clean out the storage room and take the stuff there in the van.”