Kingdom of Fear (39 page)

Then he slapped the man again. “Is that all you want?” he said. “Only a
card?
A stupid little card? A piece of plastic
shit?”

Mr. Henry nodded. “Yes, Judge,” he whispered. “That’s all. Just a stupid little card.”

The Judge laughed and reached into his raincoat, as if to jerk out a gun or at least a huge wallet. “You want a
card,
whoreface? Is that
it?
Is that all you want? You filthy little scumbag! Here it is!”

Mr. Henry cringed and whimpered. Then he reached out to accept the Card, the thing that would set him free . . . The Judge was still grasping around in the lining of his raincoat. “What the fuck?” he muttered. “This thing has
too many pockets!
I
can
feel it, but I can’t find the slit!”

Mr. Henry seemed to believe him, and so did I, for a minute. . . . Why not? He was a Judge with a platinum credit card—a very high roller. You don’t find many Judges, these days, who can handle a full caseload in the morning and run wild like a goat in the afternoon. That is a very hard dollar, and very few can handle it . . . but the Judge was a Special Case.

Suddenly he screamed and fell sideways, ripping and clawing at the lining of his raincoat. “Oh, Jesus!” he wailed. “I’ve lost my wallet! It’s
gone.
I left it out there in the Limo, when we hit the fucking sheep.”

“So what?” I said. “We don’t need it for this. I have
many
plastic cards.”

He smiled and seemed to relax. “How” many? he said. “We might need more than one.”

I woke up in the bathtub—who knows how much later—to the sound of the hookers shrieking next door.
The New York Times
had fallen in and blackened the water. For many hours I tossed and turned like a crack baby in a cold hallway. I heard thumping Rhythm & Blues—serious rock & roll, and I knew that something wild was going on in the Judge’s suites. The smell of amyl nitrate came from under the door. It was no use. It was impossible to sleep through this orgy of ugliness. I was getting worried. I was already a marginally legal person, and now I was stuck with some crazy Judge who had my credit card and owed me $23,000.

I had some whiskey in the car, so I went out into the rain to get some ice. I had to get out. As I walked past the other rooms, I looked in people’s windows and feverishly tried to figure out how to get my credit card back. Then from behind me I heard the sound of a tow-truck winch. The Judge’s white Cadillac was being dragged to the ground. The Judge was whooping it up with the tow-truck driver, slapping him on the back.

“What the hell? It was only property damage,” he laughed.

“Hey, Judge,” I called out. “I never got my card back.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s in my room—come on.”

I was right behind him when he opened the door to his room, and I caught a glimpse of a naked woman dancing. As soon as the door opened, the woman lunged for the Judge’s throat. She pushed him back outside and slammed the door in his face.

“Forget that credit card—we’ll get some cash,” the Judge said. “Let’s go down to the Commercial Hotel. My friends are there and they have
plenty
of money.”

We stopped for a six-pack on the way. The Judge went into a sleazy liquor store that turned out to be a front for kinky marital aids. I offered him money for the beer, but he grabbed my whole wallet.

Ten minutes later, the Judge came out with $400 worth of booze and a bagful of Triple-X-Rated movies. “My buddies will like this stuff,” he said. “And don’t worry about the money, I told you I’m good for it. These guys carry serious cash.”

The marquee above the front door of the Commercial Hotel said:

WELCOME: ADULT FILM PRESIDENTS
STUDEBAKER SOCIETY
FULL ACTION CASINO / KENO IN LOUNGE

“Park right here in front,” said the Judge. “Don’t worry. I’m well known in this place.”

Me too, but I said nothing. I have been well known at the Commercial for many years, from the time when I was doing a lot of driving back and forth between Denver and San Francisco—usually for Business reasons, or for Art, and on this particular weekend I was there to meet quietly with a few old friends and business associates from the Board of Directors of the Adult Film Association of America. I had been, after all, the Night Manager of the famous O’Farrell Theatre, in San Francisco—“Carnegie Hall of Sex in America.”

I was the Guest of Honor, in fact—but I saw no point in confiding these things to the Judge, a total stranger with no Personal Identification, no money, and a very aggressive lifestyle. We were on our way to the Commercial Hotel to borrow money from some of his friends in the Adult Film business.

What the hell? I thought. It’s only Rock & Roll. And he was, after all, a Judge of some kind. . . . Or maybe not. For all I knew, he was a criminal pimp with no fingerprints, or a wealthy black shepherd from Spain. But it hardly mattered. He was good company. (If you had a taste for the edge work—and I did, in those days. And so, I felt, did the Judge.) He had a bent sense of fun, a quick mind, and no Fear of anything.

The front door of the Commercial looked strangely busy at this hour of night in a bad rainstorm, so I veered off and drove slowly around the block in low gear.

“There’s a side entrance on Queer Street,” I said to the Judge, as we hammered into a flood of black water. He seemed agitated, which worried me a bit.

“Calm down,” I said. “We don’t want to make a scene in this place. All we want is money.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know these people. They are friends. Money is nothing. They will be happy to see me.”

We entered the hotel through the Casino entrance. The Judge seemed calm and focused until we rounded the corner and came face
to face with an eleven-foot polar bear standing on its hind legs, ready to pounce. The Judge turned to jelly at the sight of it. “I’ve had enough of this goddamn beast!” he shouted. “It doesn’t belong here. We should blow its head off.”

I took him by the arm. “Calm down, Judge,” I told him. “That’s White King. He’s been dead for thirty-three years.”

The Judge had no use for animals. He composed himself and we swung into the lobby, approaching the desk from behind. I hung back—it was getting late, and the lobby was full of suspicious-looking stragglers from the Adult Film crowd. Private cowboy cops wearing six-shooters in open holsters were standing around. Our entrance did not go unnoticed.

The Judge looked competent, but there was something menacing in the way he swaggered up to the desk clerk and whacked the marble countertop with both hands. The lobby was suddenly filled with tension, and I quickly moved away as the Judge began yelling and pointing at the ceiling.

“Don’t give me that crap,” he barked. “These people are my friends. They’re expecting me. Just ring the goddamn room again.” The desk clerk muttered something about his explicit instructions not to. . . .

Suddenly the Judge reached across the desk for the house phone. “What’s the number?” he snapped. “I’ll ring it myself.” The clerk moved quickly. He shoved the phone out of the Judge’s grasp and simultaneously drew his index finger across his throat. The Judge took one look at the muscle converging on him and changed his stance.

“I want to cash a check,” he said calmly.

“A
check?”
the clerk said. “Sure thing, buster. I’ll cash your goddamned check.” He seized the Judge by his collar and laughed. “Let’s get this bozo out of here. And put him in jail.”

I was moving toward the door, and suddenly the Judge was right behind me. “Let’s go,” he said. We sprinted for the car, but then the Judge stopped in his tracks. He turned and raised his fist in the direction of the hotel. “Fuck you!” he shouted. “I’m the Judge. I’ll be back, and I’ll bust every one of you bastards. The next time you see me coming, you’d better run.”

We jumped into the car and zoomed away into the darkness. The Judge was acting manic. “Never mind those pimps,” he said. “I’ll have
them all on a chain gang in forty-eight hours.” He laughed and slapped me on the back. “Don’t worry, Boss,” he said. “I know where we’re going.” He squinted into the rain and opened a bottle of Royal Salute. “Straight ahead,” he snapped. “Take a right at the next corner. We’ll go see Leach. He owes me twenty-four thousand dollars.”

I slowed down and reached for the whiskey. What the hell, I thought. Some days are weirder than others.

“Leach is my secret weapon,” the Judge said, “but I have to watch him. He could be violent. The cops are always after him. He lives in a balance of terror. But he has a genius for gambling. We win eight out of ten every week.” He nodded solemnly. “That is
four out of five,
Doc. That is Big.
Very
big. That is eighty percent of everything.” He shook his head sadly and reached for the whiskey. “It’s a
horrible
habit. But I can’t give it up. It’s like having a money machine.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “What are you bitching about?”

“I’m
afraid,
Doc. Leach is a
monster,
a criminal hermit who understands nothing in life except point spreads. He should be locked up and castrated.”

“So what?” I said. “Where does he live? We are desperate. We have no cash and no plastic. This freak is our only hope.”

The Judge slumped into himself, and neither one of us spoke for a minute. . . . “Well,” he said finally. “Why not? I can handle almost anything for twenty-four big ones in a brown bag. What the fuck? Let’s
do
it. If the bastard gets ugly, we’ll kill him.”

“Come on, Judge,” I said. “Get a grip on yourself. This is only a gambling debt.”

“Sure,” he replied. “That’s what they
all
say.”

DEAD MEAT IN THE FAST LANE: THE JUDGE
RUNS AMOK . . . DEATH OF A POET, BLOOD
CLOTS IN THE REVENUE STREAM . . . THE
MAN WHO LOVED SEX DOLLS

We pulled into a seedy trailer court behind the stockyards. Leach met us at the door with red eyes and trembling hands, wearing a soiled bathrobe and carrying a half-gallon of Wild Turkey.

“Thank God you’re home,” the Judge said. “I can’t
tell
you what
kind of horrible shit has happened to me tonight. . . . But now the worm has turned. Now that we have
cash,
we will crush them all.”

Leach just stared. Then he took a swig of Wild Turkey. “We are doomed,” he muttered. “I was about to slit my wrists.”

“Nonsense,” the Judge said. “We won Big. I bet the same way you did. You gave me the
numbers.
You even predicted the Raiders would stomp Denver. Hell, it was obvious. The Raiders are unbeatable on Monday night.”

Leach tensed, then he threw his head back and uttered a high-pitched quavering shriek. The Judge seized him. “Get a grip on yourself,” he snapped. “What’s wrong?”

“I went sideways on the bet,” Leach sobbed. “I went to that goddamn sports bar up in Jackpot with some of the guys from the shop. We were all drinking Mescal and screaming, and I lost my head.”

Leach was clearly a bad drinker and a junkie for mass hysteria. “I got drunk and bet on the Broncos,” he moaned, “then I doubled up. We lost everything.”

A terrible silence fell on the room. Leach was weeping helplessly. The Judge seized him by the sash of his greasy leather robe and started jerking him around by the stomach. They ignored me, and I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. . . . It was too ugly.

There was an ashtray on the table in front of the couch. As I reached out for it, I noticed a legal pad of what appeared to be Leach’s poems, scrawled with a red Magic Marker in some kind of primitive verse form. There was one that caught my eye. There was something particularly ugly about it. There was something
repugnant
in the harsh slant of the handwriting. It was about pigs.

I TOLD HIM IT WAS WRONG

—F. X. Leach
Omaha, 1968

A filthy young pig
got tired of his gig
and begged for a transfer
to Texas.
Police ran him down
on the Outskirts of town
and ripped off his Nuts
with a coat hanger.
Everything after that was like
coming home
in a cage on the
back of a train from
New Orleans on a Saturday night
with no money and cancer and
a dead girlfriend.
In the end it was no use
He died on his knees in a barnyard
with all the others watching.
Res Ipsa Loquitur.

“They’re going to kill me,” Leach said. “They’ll be here by midnight. I’m doomed.” He uttered another low cry and reached for the Wild Turkey bottle, which had fallen over and spilled.

“Hang on,” I said. “I’ll get more.”

(Paul Chesley)

On my way to the kitchen I was jolted by the sight of a naked woman slumped awkwardly in the corner with a desperate look on her face, as if she’d been shot. Her eyes bulged and her mouth was wide open and she appeared to be reaching out for me.

I leapt back and heard laughter behind me. My first thought was that Leach, unhinged by his gambling disaster, had finally gone over the line with his wife-beating habit and shot her in the mouth just before we knocked. She appeared to be crying out for help, but there was no voice.