Free 1975 - Night of the Juggler by William P. McGivern Page B

Harlem night was blue with a smog reflecting brilliant neon lights in dancing patterns, and in the cruising green Cadillac, Samantha’s mood was as blue as the night itself, a mix of emotions that turned her thoughts toward her childhood and her drunken giant of a father, rotting with syphilis, his own eyes turned inward in bitter recollections of old angers, dead illusions.
    Samantha’s father used to say to her, “The game ain’t worth the shame, honey. You win, you just shippin’ some tired shit. Lose, you turn it around. You the tired shit gettin’ whipped.”
    It was Gypsy Tonnelli who was darkening her thoughts, she knew, because the only reason Tonnelli would call her was that he needed help, but helping Whitey was the thing that gave Samantha those migraines. . . .
    Manolo Ramos dressed hastily in his most provocative gear, a pale-gray silk shirt open to his navel, a short white fur jacket, stacked blue leather boots, and midnight-blue suede pants that fitted his rounded buttocks like a second layer of skin. He patted a sweet cologne on his cheeks and hair, which he had already teased into a halo of brown curls. Flashing a brilliant professional smile at himself in the mirror above his hand sink, Manolo let himself from his room and ran down dirty, uncarpeted stairs to catch the crosstown bus to Central Park.
    Six hundred ninety dollars, he was thinking. Shit, I’m a bargain. . . .
    At eleven thirteen P.M. on the fourteenth of October, engine and ladder companies were dispatched to a fire in a shabby tenement west of Ninth Avenue in the middle Fifties of the borough of Manhattan. Firemen contained the blaze that was smoldering in a mattress in the first-floor bedroom and that had been started by an elderly wino who had fallen asleep smoking a twisted stogie.
    The hissing of water under compression, the sound of shouted orders, the thud of firemen’s boots, had alerted and terrified a nursing alley cat nesting in the basement of the tenement with four lively kittens. The big tabby bitch, in panic, began evacuating her young, carrying them in her teeth with a soft but firm grip on the backs of their necks, running with them through an open window to the safety of an unoccupied garage in another area of the block. She made three such trips, but when she returned for her fourth and last kitten, she couldn’t find it. She circled restlessly, whining in distress and anxiety, but receiving no answer at all to her plaintive, demanding calls, she leaped a last time through the open window and ran off into the darkness.
    The lobby of the Plaza Hotel at Fifty-ninth Street near Fifth Avenue was in brilliant contrast with the slum district where firemen had doused the flames in a mattress and chewed the ass out of a dumb Puerto Rican wino who had fallen asleep smoking a cheap black stogie—and where in the dim brain of a nursing tabby gleamed the distant, receding memory of some part of her forever lost.
    Crescent Holloway was making a harried, distracted entrance into the lobby of the Plaza, blinking with jet-lag weariness and irritation at the exploding flashlights of a phalanx of news photographers. In Miss Holloway’s van and wake streamed protective and supportive members of her personal entourage, forces beefed up by baggage-laden bellhops, a brace of assistant managers, and several executives from National Films, whose firm had become a financial phenomenon among the majors by distributing back-to-back smash hits displaying the explosive sexual pyrotechnics of Miss Holloway, who had become known in the trade papers as the Stacked House Kid.
    Directly behind Crescent Holloway, who was shielding her eyes in a pretty gesture against the exploding flashbulbs, stood her personal makeup man, Simon Sachs; her press agent, Nate Sokol; and her bulking and belligerent-looking black maid, Honey Hopper.
    Directly in front of Crescent—the sturdy prow of this harmlessly beleaguered sex boat—stood Rudi Zahn, her lover, her