The fines imposed for violating this statute ranged from a minimum of $265 to a maximum of $875.
"Yes, sir," Meyer said. "Horn-blowing is against the law. But, Mr. Hurd, no one has the right to take..."
"It's the cabbies and the truck drivers," Hurd said. "They're the worst offenders. All of them in such a desperate hurry to drop off a fare or a precious cargo. Other motorists follow suit, it's contagious, you know. Like a fever. Or a plague. Everyone hitting his horn. You can't imagine the din, Detective Meyer. It's ear-splitting. And this flagrant breaking of the law is carried on within feet of traffic officers waving their hands or policemen sitting in parked patrol cars. Something should be done about it."
"I agree," Meyer said. "But Mr. Hurd..." "I did something about it," Hurd said. Meyer figured it was justifiable homicide.
Priscilla Stetson thought she was keeping
Agnello and Tony Frascati as sex toys. Georgie
and Tony thought they were taking advantage of a beautiful blonde who liked to tie them up blindfold them while she blew them.
It was a good arrangement all around.
Anybody came near her, they would break his head. She was theirs. On the other hand, they were hers. She could call them whenever she needed them, send them home whenever she tired of them. It was an arrangement none of them ever discussed for fear of jinxing it. Like a baseball pitcher with a natural fast-breaking curve. Or a writer with a knack for good dialogue.
At eleven o'clock that Sunday morning, they were!
all having breakfast in bed together when Priscilla mentioned her grandmother.
Georgie and Tony hated eating breakfast in bed."
You got crumbs all over everything, you spilled coffee all over yourself, they hated it. Priscilla was between them, naked, enjoying herself, drinking coffee and eating a cheese Danish. The boys, as she called them,
had each and separately eaten her not twenty minutes ago, and they were waiting now for her to reciprocate in some small way, which she showed no sign of doing just yet. She did this to show the boys who was boss here. On the other hand, they occasionally beat the shit out of her, though they never hurt her hands or her face. Which she sometimes enjoyed, depending on her mood. But not very often.
It was all part of their arrangement.
Like the suite the hotel provided on the nights she played. That was another arrangement. It wasn't the presidential suite, but it went for four-fifty a night, which wasn't litchi nuts. They were in the suite now, which had been named the Richard Moore Suite after the noted Alpine skier who had stayed here back in the days when he was winning gold medals hither and yon, the Richard Moore Suite at the Hotel Powell, Priscilla naked between them, drinking coffee and munching on her cheese Danish, Georgie and Tony wearing nothing but black silk pajama tops and erections, trying not to spill coffee or crumbs on themselves. After breakfast, and after she had taken care of them, if she decided to take care of them, they might do a few lines of coke, who could say? Priscilla had connections. Georgie and Tony liked being kept in this state of heightened anticipation, so to speak. Priscilla liked keeping them there. She might decide to send them home as soon as she finished the second pot of coffee room service had brought up, who could say? Out, boys. I have things to do, Sunday is my day off. Or maybe not. It depended on how she felt ten minutes from now.
"I know she had money," she said out loud.
The boys turned to look at her. Bookends in black silk. The sheet lowered to their waists, Priscilla sitting there naked, breasts exposed. The boys made sly eye contact across her.
"Your grandmother, you mean?" Georgie asked.
Priscilla nodded. "Otherwise, why'd she keep saying I'd be taken care of?."
"How about taking care of this a little?" Tony had glanced down at the sheet.
"She the one lived in the rat hole on Lincoln Street?" Georgie asked.
"Take care of this a little," Tony said, impressed by his earlier witty remark.
"She meant when she died," Priscilla said. "I'd taken care of her when she died."
"How?" Georgie said. "She didn't have a pot to piss in."
"I don't know how. But she said she'd take care of me."
"Take care of this a little," Tony said again.
"Maybe she had a bank account," Priscilla suggested.
"Maybe she left a will," Georgie said.
"Who knows?"
"Maybe she left you millions."
"Who knows?"
Tony was thinking these two had just escalated an old lady's empty pisspot into a fortune. "There are two old people in a nursing home," he said. "The man's ninety-two, the woman's ninety. They start a relationship. What they do, he goes into her room, and gets in bed with her, and they watch television together with his penis in her hand. That's the extent of the relationship. She holds his penis in her hand while they watch television."
"Don't you ever think of anything else?" Priscilla asked.
"No, wait, this is a good one. The woman is passing her girlfriend's room one night she's ninety years
old, too, the girlfriend and lo and behold, what does she see? Her man is in bed with the girlfriend. They're watching television, she's holding his penis in her hand. The woman is outraged. "How can you do this to me?" she wants to know. "Is she prettier than I am? Is she smarter than I am? What has she got that I
haven't got?" The guy answers, "Parkinson's."" "That's sick," Priscilla said, laughing. "But funny," Tony said, laughing with her. "I don't get it," Georgie said. "Parkinson's," Tony explained.
"Yeah, Parkinson's Parkinson's, I still don't get it." "You shake," Priscilla said. "What?"
"When you have Parkinson's."
"She's jacking him off, "Tony explained. "So what was the other one doing?" "Just holding him in her hand."
"I thought she was jacking him off, too."
"No, she was just holding him in her hand," Tony said, and looked across at Priscilla. "Which is little enough to ask," he suggested pointedly.
"I'll bet all that money is still in her apartment," Priscilla said.
At that moment, a knock sounded on the door to the suite.
Jamal knew something the cops didn't know and that was where Yolande had been at what time. She had called him around five-thirty in the morning, told him she was just leaving the Stardust and would be home soon as she caught a cab. He'd asked her what the take
was and she said close to two large, and he told her hurry on home, baby, Carlyle's already here, wait up for you. So from the Stardust to the alley on Sab's and First would've taken five, ten minutes most, which would've put her uptown at twenty to six a quarter to six, depending on how long it took her to find a taxi. Never mind the time in the corner of picture: 07:22:03. All Jamal knew was that had been there almost an hour and a half before that. But who'd been there with her?
Jamal knew the nighttime city.
He knew the people who frequented the night.
He kissed Carlyle goodbye and went out into the glare of a cold winter morning.
He didn't have to go very far.
Richard the First had bought six bottles of Dom Perignon, and he and all the other Richards had already consumed three of them by eleven-ten that morning. Or at least that's what black Richard thought. What he didn't know was that the other three Richards weren't drinking at all, but were instead laughing it up while one or the other of them took a walk to the bathroom, back and forth, emptying glass after glass of champagne behind his back, dumping down the toilet bubbly that had cost $107.99 a fifth. The idea was to get Richard drunk. The idea was to drown him.
What the bellhop delivered to Priscilla's suite was a plain white envelope with her name written on the front of it. She recognized her grandmother's frail