The Suspense Is Killing Me Read online

  JC was, in the opinion of many, one of the era’s greatest figures. Or he wasn’t. What possible difference could it make? I don’t know. But I wrote the book, took the reader back through the finale of rock’s first great age. Tony Fleming got his money’s worth.

  While I was writing back in New York, Sally Feinman did another story, this one for the Sunday Times Magazine, about my search for the truth. It made a wonderful promo for my book, which Tony Fleming entitled Rocking Death: The Tangier Days of JC Tripper. The book sold something over a hundred thousand copies in hardcover; the paperback rights brought $700,000 and escalators at auction; and MagnaFilms bought the film rights for $450,000. They also paid Sally Feinman $100,000 for the rights to her two stories, just to cover all the bases and because I told them that my deal hinged on the deal with her. There was a small JC Tripper industry all of a sudden.

  And MagnaDisc released his recordings with very snazzy matching artwork in all three formats. As JCs sole heir, I was cleaning up on that front, too. Fried Psychos and Defective Wiring, the first two albums released in CD form, hit the top of the charts. Big money, my friends. And there were thirteen more albums on the way. Recycling, the wave of the future.

  Of course, as Somerset Maugham observed, it wasn’t all cakes and ale. Let me give you a for instance. Time’s critic reviewed my book in a couple of brief, dismissive paragraphs and trained his Bofors gun on your hmbl servt. He called me “a pathetic remnant of a drugged-out, sex-obsessed subculture without which an entire generation might have stood some slight chance of developing into conscientious, responsible adults.” That sounded to me as if he’d been paying attention and pretty much got my drift. I was a pathetic twerp feeding off the iconic remains of my brother, etcetera, etcetera. Well, our generation made an inviting target, didn’t it? Who were the survivors? A bunch of gray-bearded ex-hippies who hadn’t quite noticed the parade passing them by. And the rest had been pretty well absorbed into the vast body politic, occasionally squeezing into tie-dyed jeans and shirts and remembering the old days. When you get right down to it, however, I’m not altogether sure a bunch of snot-nosed, post-adolescent, ethically stunted Masters of the Universe, practitioners of corporate raiding and leveraged buyouts and hawkers of junk bonds—greedy little shits who’d sell their grandmothers to make another month’s nut on the condo and the BMW—I can’t really see how they represent some big step upward on the evolutionary ladder. But don’t get me going on all that. Who cares, right? I haven’t got anything original to say about it. Viewed in the proper glare, whose generation can withstand careful scrutiny? We’re all only befuddled travelers on the Circle Line, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, going round and round and round.

  So, back to the day it began.

  What happened is that I met this woman, Heidi Dillinger. One of the oldest and most devoutly adhered-to rules in the history of movie-making is what was dubbed a very long time ago “the cute meet.” Well, Heidi and I should have been in a movie because we definitely met cute. It didn’t last but it was cute.

  I left my place about noon with nothing more important on my mind than hitting Dunhill and J & R for cigars, Scribner’s for some book browsing—checking on the supply of my book, which was still selling nine months after publication, testament to old JC, and then maybe a call at Paul Stuart for a gander at the new duds. I could make all that last until mid-afternoon, at which time I’d set off on the shady side of Fifth Avenue for an hour or so of strolling, fetching up at Sally’s loft in SoHo. Cocktails in her sun room, maybe some dinner at an irritating joint called Raoul’s where we’d probably be the only people in the room not gabbling on in French. People thought Raoul’s was still the center of the Eurotrash chow line, but in fact most of them had already begun oiling their way up toward Indochine across the street from Joe Papp’s place. As it turned out, Sally and I never made it to Raoul’s for dinner, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. Nothing turned out the way it was supposed to, not from the time I ran into Mellow Yellow on Fifth Avenue near the entrance to Number 666, beside the B. Dalton Bookstore.

  Mellow Yellow was a nimble young fellow of the black persuasion, about six and a half feet high by four feet wide, weighing in at roughly 350, and the operative word would be “roughly.” He habitually wore a yellow T-shirt with MELLOW YELLOW printed in black across his pecs, which looked like sacks of wet cement. He and five of his colleagues operated a three-card monte game on Fifth, Sixth, and down on Forty-second between Sixth and Broadway. He was in his own way a tourist attraction, like the Statue of Liberty, only larger. He had an agreement with the cops on the beat, who only rousted him once a day per location. So Mellow and his merry band were raking in $2500 a day. When I stopped to watch the show he was just getting into it, sucking the tourists in with his patter, with his extraordinary manual dexterity. It was a show, and the price for the wary was right. I figured Mellow may have been the only man in America who was being paid exactly what he was worth, to the penny.

  I once knew a man in Zurich who said that the simplest cons were best and the simplest cons were those based on nothing but elementary psychology and pure skill. The con man could attain a level of skill that enabled him to bet on himself with nearly absolute certainty. The rest of it was knowing how to sucker the rubes into insisting that you take their money. Mellow had a benign faith in himself and, since he never lost, I assumed he’d found an inner peace that others could only envy.

  Watching him work was a little like watching Art Tatum play the piano. Those big black fingers moved with a kind of effortless Zen concentration, as if they were operating out of a genetic muscle-memory inherited from practitioners on the Mississippi riverboats in the years preceding the Civil War. He used two spades and one diamond drawn from a pinochle deck. He shuffled the three cards back and forth, using a fluid cross-handed motion. Each card was bent in exactly the same way as the others, except that for the moment the diamond carried an extra crease at the corner, making it easily identifiable by even the slowest students. Only a blind man could fail to see it, which is, of course, the point.

  Mellow was playing to a crowd of twenty or thirty passersby, several of whom actually worked for him. It was hot and he’d set up just inside the shade of the arcade. Some days he’d have had somebody dispensing free lemonade; he was a hell of a businessman, a Donald Trump of the street. Same street, after all. Fifth Avenue.

  I’d been watching for five or ten minutes when I noticed the woman who’d come to stand beside me. She was tall and was craning her neck to get a good view. She wasn’t paying the slightest attention to me, so I gave her a practiced once-over. Five-nine or ten; short, close-cropped blond hair revealing tiny, perfectly shaped ears and a long, slender neck, with the hair cut to a geometric point on the nape. Her face was oval with a faint roundness at the cheekbones, pale eyebrows, a short, straight nose, a flat forehead, unusually pale tan eyes, a wide mouth with thin, precise lips and a bemused, quirky smile. She was wearing a navy-blue summer dress, sleeveless with white piping, a necklace of white balls that looked like wood and emphasized her tan. Blue-and-white spectator pumps. Bracelet matching the necklace. She carried a two-tone brown-and-black briefcase I recognized as a Madler, about $1200. She was clearly all business, no nods to current fashion; a paragon of efficiency who, I’d have guessed, had forgotten what it was like to have a personal life or an emotional attachment to another human being. She was very pretty, but in that first summing-up I saw no particular allure in her looks. Everything about her said I dare you, just try something, make my day … Everything about her was a gauntlet flung down, a challenge. Maybe if she had a weakness, it was gambling. She was a born victim for a guy like Mellow. One look and he’d be licking his lips: she was money in the bank. She thought she was the smartest kid in the class, the smartest thing since Hattie Carnegie’s hat.

  Mellow’s game was progressing by the script.

  Three sticks working with Mellow picked the wrong card three successive times whe
n it was perfectly obvious to everyone in the crowd where the diamond was. The sticks were of Tony Award caliber. One guy, a white yuppie in a three-piece suit, about twenty-five, a Vuitton briefcase under his arm, looked as if he were lunching at Prunelle or “21” before heading back down to Wall Street. Another guy was the classic rube tourist—terry-cloth polo shirt, snappy plaid Bermudas, black socks and thong sandals. The female stick was Hispanic: a bright-eyed, intelligent face, cotton blouse, designer jeans from Fourteenth Street sprayed on, bright red toenails in medium heels, a big leather shoulder bag. Among them they lost a couple hundred bucks in five minutes, while the rest of the crowd felt superior and groaned each time they picked the wrong card. Finally Mellow rapped out some patter about taking candy from babies and allowed someone else into the game. Now the con began in earnest, the shuffling faster and smoother, the cards fluttering to the surface of the upturned cardboard box. There was the telltale crease in the red diamond.

  Forty bucks on the table.

  But the red diamond was a spade.

  Eighty bucks on the table.

  But the red diamond had become the other spade.

  That was the problem. Nothing was what it seemed.

  The woman standing beside me chuckled, turned to me, shaking that fine small head. Not a hair out of place. “These people are morons.” Her voice was deep and throaty.

  “Well, Mellow is a considerable artist. A genius in his own way.”

  “You’re cheapening the language,” she said.

  “It’s an unimportant art, but an art nonetheless.”

  “You’re a romantic. He’s a creep who is proficient at a creepy job. Anybody with half a brain could clean him out.” She was impatient with the stupidity of it all.

  “I have an entire brain,” I said, “the full complement of brain. And I wouldn’t have a chance with Mellow here.” I flashed my timeworn boyish grin. “And neither, let me add, would you.”

  She caught my eye with those odd pale tan numbers of hers, a quizzical expression on her face. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’ll tell you what I would bet on. I’ll bet you lunch you can’t beat him once.”

  She looked at her gold Rolex, then back up at me. “You look familiar. Are you a well-known loser about town?”

  I shrugged. “It’ll cost you lunch to find out.”

  She checked her watch again, then fished a couple of twenties from the green alligator Filofax. She pushed her way to the front of the crowd and waved the bills in front of Mellow, who grinned broadly, lots of gold bridgework showing. The shuffling began, the cards dropped. She cocked her head, calmly watching his hands, a tiny smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. There was a faint patina of perspiration on her upper lip. Now that was alluring.

  The cards dropped. Instantaneously, almost as if she weren’t looking at them, had lost interest in them, she pointed at one of them. Just the hint of surprise registered on Mellow’s massive face.

  He turned it over. The diamond.

  “Let’s do it again,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to think you were letting me win. I’d love to see how mellow you really are, Mellow. I’m a test, the person you prayed you’d never meet.”

  He grinned and she won a second time, then a third, collected the money, and stuffed it into the Filofax. Mellow just stared at her impassively, neither angry nor beaten, just relieved to see the last of her. In the end I’m sure it was good for business. Everybody standing around Mellow figured they could do it if this hot-shit broad could do it, but of course they couldn’t.

  She looked at her watch again.

  “There ought to be a law against me,” she said. “It’s your treat. A fool and his money … and you have no excuse. Mellow didn’t know I was going to whip his fat black ass but you, my friend, did.”

  “I did?”

  “Well, I told you I would. And I never lie.”

  “Gambling interests me,” she said. “In all its forms.” She sipped at a tall glass of iced tea. The yellow table umbrellas flapped overhead. There were flowers everywhere, water splashing beneath the golden sculpture of Prometheus overlooking the outdoor cafe at Rock Center. Music tinkled from loudspeakers. Hundreds of tourists leaned on the railings staring down into the sea of yellow canvas, a field of dandelions. “For instance, today’s the hundredth-and-something anniversary of Wild Bill Hickok’s death. He was playing poker in Deadwood, South Dakota, fella shot him in the back. He was holding two pairs, aces and eights. That’s why they call it the Dead Man’s Hand.” She smiled at me but her eyes were still remote and cool and appraising. “You look like a man whose hope blooms eternal. You’ll always try to fill an inside straight and you’ll be lucky if you pull it off five times in your life.”

  “How did you do that to Mellow?”

  “I know the con. Obviously it’s not really gambling. Mellow isn’t supposed to run any risk of losing. It’s not sport, it’s Mellow’s business. When I engage in a game of chance I try to remove the element of chance. Like Mellow. It’s a business investment. I hate losing. I mean, what’s the point?”

  “So how’d you beat Mellow?”

  “It’s the right hand. He can drop the top card or the bottom card. When he’s setting you up he works the top card out first, then the bottom. The two cards in his right hand, the diamond and one of the spades, get dropped bottom-to-top when he’s setting it up, then he goes top-to-bottom when it’s for money—”

  “But what about the crease in the diamond?” I said innocently. She seemed to know what she was talking about.

  “Oh, Mellow was good enough at his job. He uncreased the diamond and creased a spade, no way you could see him do it. But when he dropped the cards, one thing you knew for sure—the diamond wouldn’t have a crease.” She let the tip of her tongue slowly circle her lips. “Look, people get excited, they want to win, they forget to give the dealer credit for skill and brains. I never get excited and I never underestimate.”

  It was hot. We ordered lunch and I shifted around in my sweaty linen suit that was wrinkling just the way it was supposed to, about eighty-five bucks per wrinkle. Lavender-striped shirt, a big floppy lime-green bow tie, a lavender silk pocket square, chocolate-brown reverse calf wing tips. And all of it felt wet. She was, of course, supernaturally cool and dry, perfect. That drove me crazy.

  “What’s your name?” I said, cutting to the chase.

  “Dillinger.” That smile, a little one, a tease.

  “The blood of the late Public Enemy Number One flows in your veins?”

  “Quite possibly. I have made my pilgrimage to Greencastle, Indiana.”

  “Oh, good!”

  “That’s the jail John Dillinger broke out of with a gun he carved from a bar of soap and blackened with shoe polish. I like that in a man.”

  “What?”

  “Audacity. Fuck the odds.”

  “But you always stack the odds in your favor.”

  “I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about men. Audacity in a man is good. Brains don’t much matter. I’ve got the brains. My first name is Heidi. You have one, too, right?”

  “Lee Tripper.”

  “Ahhh,” she said softly. “Tripper. You do look familiar, don’t you—I read your book about that brother of yours. What an asshole! I can see his face in you. Is he really dead?” She shook her head, laughing. “No, scratch that. You must get that all the time. So you’re a professional brother and—”

  “Tactless, Miss Dillinger. You wound me.”

  “Oh, buck up. You’re made of sterner stuff than that. Mustn’t crumble in the face of little Heidi’s chitchat.”

  “What is it a person like you does?”

  She daintily chewed a forkful of chicken salad and dabbed at her mouth with the napkin. “I’m an adjunct to the writing business, actually. A wholly owned subsidiary specializing in research.”

  “Owned by whom?”

  “ABC. No, not that ABC. Mine is the Allan Bechtol Corporation.” />
  Everything she said seemed to get my attention. Allan Bechtol was one of the world’s best-selling novelists—unreadable in my view, but he didn’t notice that I no longer bought his books. He was a highly reclusive writer of gigantic thrillers that might just as well have been sold by the pound. Each book contained a great deal of information, so when you finished reading one of the damn things—while the plot may have made no sense—you sort of felt like you’d learned something. He’d written one about the world of computer hackers and viruses, and that literary weekly People ran a piece telling how the book had dramatically goosed the sales of some new personal computer. He’d written another one set in a national park, dealing with the search for a Russian mole who had taken refuge among diseased killer bears. That one had really worn your polish off after 750 pages. And the country had gone nuts about bears. Research was what set his books apart. Heidi Dillinger’s contribution. It was reported in the press that Bechtol’s advance for a novel was approaching five million dollars.

  “You must be very well compensated,” I said. “Without the fruits of your labors, he’d have to pay people to read that crap.”

  “I do all right, but of course you see the truth of things. So I’m not doing as well as I should be. My owning him would be a better arrangement. I’m nothing if not candid.”

  “Behind Bechtol’s back, however.”

  She laughed at me. “You think I haven’t told him the same thing? Don’t kid yourself. Of course you’re a romantic. Kidding yourself is your style.”

  “Did you just spring full-grown from Bechtol’s brow, or did you do something before Bechtol?”

  “Well, he didn’t invent me. I was a yup computer whiz after Cal Tech and suddenly I realized I was surrounded by major nerds and I was only making a couple hundred thousand a year. My analyst at the time told me I was a ‘people person.’ Two things happened. I realized I could not tell my innermost thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams to a woman who let the words ‘people person’ escape her lips. And I saw that in a way she was right. Computers were not my life and I didn’t mind dealing with people … if they bathed regularly and so on. So I quit the computer business, quit my analyst, got an angle on Bechtol and blindsided him with my brains and—relatively speaking—my looks. Four years ago. I’m thirty-one.” She looked at her watch again. “Look, I really have to run. Have you enjoyed our little talk, Mr. Tripper?”