“Vaguely,” Taylor said. “I heard of it somewhere....”
“Well, it’s
the
club to belong to. Every spring they pick only the top ten senior men.” Wendy looked closely at Taylor. “Once in Spur, lots of doors open—not just at the University, but downtown too. All over the world. My father was president of Spur back in 1939. The governor was a member then. Senator Thompson and Harrison H. Harrison.” She looked at Taylor’s blank face. He smiled. She did not and he detected pity in the look and in her voice. “Well, they’re being tapped tonight at the Tower at midnight.” Wendy smiled. “I’m not supposed to know, but Lem can’t keep anything from me.”
“Tonight, huh?” Taylor said.
“Tonight.”
“And your fiancé will be there? What’s his full name?”
“Lem Carleton III. Everybody calls him Three. His daddy, Lem Carleton, Jr., is regents chairman. Lem Three is president of the IFC.”
“The IFC?” Taylor saw no reason to reveal his peculiar relationship with Lem junior. Lem Three was a better subject. “IFC?”
“The Interfraternity Council,” Wendy explained. “Don’t you know
anything?”
“You think it helped ol’ Lem getting into Spur because his daddy is the regents chairman?”
“Maybe in the short run.” Wendy was irritated by Taylor’s question. “But they’re the ten top men, and being one of them means guaranteed success in the long run.”
“You talk like everybody
gets
a long run. Some people have very short runs. The ten top onions,” Taylor said, laughing, “on a short run.”
Wendy gave in and they both laughed hard. The wind blew caliche dust clouds around them and the spring sun baked them. They felt good and strong, almost content. “Are you the kind of person who forgives but never forgets? Or forgets but never forgives?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” She reached up and touched the red welt between Taylor’s eyes. “How did you get that scar?” Gently she stroked the violet slash between his eyes. Her touch enfeebled him.
“The corn picker got me.”
“The corn picker?”
“Actually it was a Grapette bottle.” Taylor’s voice quivered. “It’s a long story.” His insides shivered and he leaned against the billboard for support.
“The kind of person who forgives but never forgets?” She repeated his question. “Or the kind who forgets but never forgives?”
She didn’t answer.
Taylor drove south from the Armadillo Ranch and Gift Shop. Buffy and Simon were in the backseat. Wendy sat fragilely against the door. Taylor constantly kept her in his peripheral vision and studied her movements. He watched how at times she surreptitiously studied him.
The sky was cobalt blue. Herds of fluffy cumulus clouds were skidded by the hard spring winds, covering and uncovering the sun. The plains rolled endlessly in all directions. It was a long drive to the city. Simon and Buffy fell asleep. Simon snored.
“I wonder if she knows he snores?”
“Does it matter now?” Wendy stifled a yawn. She held the back of her delicate hand against her full lips, her slim fingers curled out. The tendons stood out from her long slender neck, accentuating its length and the long sweep from her erect shoulders to her slightly pointed chin.
“I think everything matters now. It’s live scrimmage for the rest of their natural lives.” Taylor quickly shnigged himself out of his tan jacket as Wendy began to drop off to sleep. “Here, use this as a pillow.”
“No. No. I’m okay,” she said, yawning and stretching. Catlike.
Taylor’s eyes were dry and sore. He folded his jacket and handed it to her. She held it against her chest, stared straight ahead vacantly, then placed the jacket across Taylor’s thigh, lay her head down, pulling her legs up on the seat, pushing her stockinged feet against the door. She was instantly asleep. She looked even smaller curled up next to Taylor. The weight of her pressing on his leg was pleasant.
Taylor turned off the main road and followed the Trinity Bottom riverbreaks, where in the 1860’s Sam Bass and his Denton Mare hid from the railroad law. Finally betrayed and gut shot from ambush in Round Rock, Sam took two days to die. One hundred years later they still had a week-long celebration of the bushwhacking, complete with rodeo and barbeque.
Been dead over a century and still good for business
, Taylor thought.
Another notch on the Sun Belt.
The Pontiac rolled south from Oklahoma with Simon D’Hanis and his new wife, Buffy, in the backseat and Cyrus Chandler’s daughter, Wendy, curled up with her head on Taylor’s jacket, the jacket on his thigh. Taylor wanted to stroke the fine-boned face, but he kept his big hand on the wheel. Add a Pi Phi to the load he was carrying now and it was almost certain disaster. The catastrophic.
But Taylor did decide to take one extra chance that warm spring afternoon of his senior year at the University. The big quarterback decided to take an onion to the Tower at midnight.
The ten top onions were expected. He had to take a look and see.
A.D. K
OSTER WAS
leaving the apartment when the Cobianco brothers drove their black Lincoln into the parking lot.
“Hey, little buddy.” It was Don Cobianco, at forty-four the oldest and biggest of the three brothers. His six-foot-four-inch, two-hundred-fifty-pound bulk was stretched out on the black leather backseat behind the driver, twenty-eight-year-old Johnny, his baby brother. Johnny was about six foot two, two hundred twenty. Roger was on the passenger side and was somewhere in between Johnny and Don in size and age.
The Lincoln full of Cobianco brothers cut A.D. off from his car.
“We want to talk to you, little buddy,” Don continued. His electric window hummed down and out of sight. Johnny’s window was already open.
A.D. thought a moment about running but dismissed that as unbecoming and most likely unsuccessful. Like the Comanche, the Cobianco brothers loved a man on the run. They were keen on the smell of blood.
A.D. walked slowly up to the car.
Sitting in the backseat, Don Cobianco ran his index finger back and forth across his thick dark eyebrow while keeping his thumb on his stubbly cheek, effectively hiding his face.
All the brothers had the same facial features. Thick, dark hair curling all over huge square heads; heavy beards with constant five-o’clock shadows; small, black, deepset eyes flashing dark under heavy brows, aborted Roman noses, fist-flattened and scarred. The bulbous, fleshy dimpled chins were especially sinister. Full red lips. Capped very large teeth. Hard, mean men in ill-fitting polyester leisure suits.
The Cobianco brothers had started out as Teamsters, then had moved in on the building trades and small real estate developers around the University. They carried the book for the city and ran most of the prostitution and drugs. From union trouble on down to shylock deadbeats, the Cobianco brothers handled it. A.D. Koster fit in there somewhere; now he was about to learn exactly where.
Next to Don sat Tiny Walton, a Cobianco “associate” who did their wet work, most recently a nineteen-year-old coed hooker that an ambitious US attorney had been squeezing against the brothers.
The US attorney had subpoenaed her in front of a grand jury, immunized her and taken away her Fifth Amendment rights. The coed prostitute had to either testify or go to jail for contempt. The judge gave the pretty young girl the weekend to think it over.
Tiny arrived that Sunday, cut her up in the bathtub of her efficiency apartment and used the trash compactor to reduce the teen-age carnage to a neat, square plastic-lined brown paper bag. Tiny left her in the dumpster behind the apartment house. The trash collector picked her up promptly at six the next morning.
The US attorney said she had fled and issued a warrant for her arrest. Two months later he was appointed a federal judge and completely dismissed her from his mind. A busy man, he had politicians to protect.
The coed prostitute was never missed, and Tiny Walton didn’t have to use his alibi. The killing was a favorite of Tiny’s, and he often recounted to the brothers how he had explained to the hooker what was planned and how she had reacted.
A.D. Koster’s confrontation with the Cobianco brothers that morning in his apartment parking lot was “about various financial obligations assumed on Mr. Roster’s part that were not forthcoming as promised.” That was how Don put it, and it sounded very sinister coming from inside a black limo full of thugs.
“Listen, I know the rent is late,” A.D. started saying, “but you got to remember the two guys I live with ain’t the most dependable sons-a-bitches in town. They’re jocks, for Chrissakes! You can’t image what it’s like to get money out of them, but I’ll get on it.” A.D., hunched up like he was cold, was shifting from foot to foot with his hands jammed in his pockets. Don held up his hand for A.D. to stop talking.
“You owe us money on baseball, you cocksucker,” Johnny, the youngest, snapped and accidentally spit on himself.
“I’ll get that money too.” A.D. leaned over and helped Johnny brush his own saliva off his coat. Johnny knocked his hands away. Tiny smiled at both of them.
“What we heard, A.D.,” Don said, “was that you lost all your money, plus another grand you don’t have, playing cards all night with fraternity boys. Isn’t that what you guys heard?” Don asked his brothers. They both nodded.
“Well, that’s all bullshit!” A.D. started shuffling again. The three Cobianco brothers watched and smiled. “I didn’t lose the money in no card game. It’s those two turkeys I live with; they just won’t come up with the money.”
“Do you think we should speak with them?” Don said quietly. “Maybe we can impress on those boys the necessity of honoring commitments. We are doing business here. They can’t be exempted just because they are big football stars. Maybe our associate, Mr. Walton, should talk with them.”
Tiny’s smile was unchanged. He looked at his manicured hands. Big, thick fingers and knuckles, the perfect fist.
“No! Wait!” A.D. stepped back; he again considered flight. “They aren’t here. But I’ll get them today for sure and make them pay up.”
“That’s fine, A.D.,” Don smiled. “I know I can count on you for the baseball money too. I wonder how that story about you having a thousand dollars in IOUs over at the Deke house ever got started?”
“The price of fame, I guess,” A.D. said. “People like to make up stories about you and include themselves. You know how it is.” He tried to smile.
“No, we don’t know how it is,” Don said. “We’re just three flat-nose Italian guys who had to work downtown for their money. We don’t know about Park City or the University, the big time or fame or being a big celebrity. Do we, guys?”
The two other Cobianco brothers shook their square heads.
Tiny was studying his heavy gold, twelve-carat diamond pinkie ring. The setting was in the shape of a gold horseshoe. He had taken it off a bookie who disappeared down a Fort Worth well in 1968.
“We’re so stupid, we believed the fraternity boys’ story about your IOUs,” Don said. The eyes stayed on A.D., who kept his head down and shuffled from sneaker to sneaker. Don Cobianco’s voice rolled and filled with anger.
“We were so dumb, me and my two brothers, that we let those fraternity boys sell us those IOUs. That’s how stupid we are. I don’t mind the money,” Don Cobianco said, “but I can’t stand to look that stupid. You know what I mean, A.D.? Like letting some fast nigger beat you in front of eighty-five thousand people. You got to intimidate him. Right on the next play. Show whose field it is, you know? When somebody makes us look that stupid, they are gonna get intimidated. You understand that, don’t you. A.D.?”
“Ah. Yeah. I understand that.” A.D. shuffled and shivered like he was cold.
“I didn’t hear what you said, A.D.,” Don said loudly. “Did you guys hear him?”
The brothers in the front seat shook their heads again.
“What did you say?” Don leaned forward, gripping the window frame with his thick fingers. The huge knuckles were white from the tension in the grip.
“I said I understand,” A.D. said slightly louder. He kept his eyes on his blue sneakers.
Tiny smiled at his huge horseshoe ring.
“Now we got to go make those fraternity boys understand. Let’s go, Johnny.” The window started up and the Lincoln roared out of the parking lot.
A.D. Koster never moved from the lot. It took the Lincoln one and one-half minutes to circle the block and pull back into the parking lot of the apartment building.
Johnny wheeled up alongside A.D. and rolled down Don’s window. Don stayed back in the seat and said, “You want to get in and talk about it?” The voice was soft and disembodied.
A.D. nodded his head, but did not move.
“Better help him, Johnny.”
Johnny Cobianco got out from behind the wheel and pulled at A.D.’s arm. A.D. Koster peeled free from the pavement and stepped woodenly into the big black car.
Johnny closed the rear door and got back behind the steering wheel.
“We got some jobs for you to do, A.D.,” Don said.
“What kinds of jobs?” A.D. found his voice. “How long will they take?”
“All kinds, A.D., and they’ll take a long time. A long time.”
Taylor Rusk steered into the parking lot two hours after A.D. Koster had ridden out in the back of the Cobianco brothers’ Lincoln.
A.D. had not returned.
Taylor stopped the car; everyone began to come awake.
“This is where I get out,” Taylor said. Wendy Chandler lifted her head from the pillow of his jacket. She leaned over against the passenger door and kept her eyes closed.
“Bye,” she said softly, her face finely wrinkled and red from sleep.
Buffy stretched out in the backseat. Simon slipped behind the wheel and Taylor clapped him on the shoulder.
“You and Buffy can live with us if you want. We pay three-quarters of the goddam rent anyway.”
“Thanks, we may do that for a while,” Simon said. “But first I’m dropping Wendy back at the Pi Phi house. Then Buffy and I are going straight to the Longhorn Motel and get some
sleep
.” Simon turned his head to check traffic, then drove away.