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  Harsh and partially true. Granted—Anne had a lot to do with why I first took the job in New Brunswick. I needed to get out of Manhattan, which had become a constant reminder of how much I had lost when cancer killed my wife. I had planned to spend a year or two working with the homeless and then jump back into the business world. That didn’t happen. Not solely because of Anne, but because I also became infected with the same convictions that had defined my wife’s life until her final day at Sloan-Kettering.

  “Speaking of keeping the lights on,” I tried moving the conversation in another direction. “Paying the bills would be a lot easier if guys like you could arm-twist the upper crust into using their tax-deductible donations to help the sick, poor, and homeless instead of buying privilege and status.”

  “Don’t start,” Doug implored.

  I couldn’t help myself. It was an old ballad I loved to sing. “You know as well as I do that for every ten-cent donation made to the Gateway, ten dollars goes to some high-end nonprofit that promises to put a contributor in good company or good seats.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Doug groaned. “So get back to why I’m parked here in Central Jersey. What exactly do you want?”

  “A free ride,” I answered. “To and from Orlando. Plus room and board.”

  “What’s the point? To spend five minutes with a man who’s absolutely, positively guilty! You’re in denial, for chrissakes. Two guys saw your man do the deed.”

  “They didn’t actually see what happened. The two college kids who showed up on the scene got there a few minutes after Kurios was attacked.”

  Doug looked at me in disbelief. “Bullet, what they saw was your guy holding a homemade cross soaked with blood. And they saw Kurios on the street with his skull in pieces. Jesus! What more do you want?”

  “To hear Zeus tell me what happened.”

  Doug leaned back. “You need to give this thing a rest.”

  “I can’t do that—at least not yet.”

  “You do remember who your man, Zeus, exterminated, right?” Doug asked. “Benjamin Kurios. The prince of evangelists.”

  I didn’t need to be reminded of the obvious. The media had been profiling Kurios since the day he died.

  “Kurios wasn’t just another Joel Osteen, Jim Bakker, or Benny Hinn,” said Doug. “He was better than Billy Graham, for God sakes. People followed him like lemmings.”

  One of those lemmings was Miklos Zeusenoerdorf, who was infatuated with Kurios. He rarely missed a televised sermon and had a complete collection of the evangelist’s books on tape. Twice, Zeus saw Kurios live at stadium-sized revival rallies, one at Madison Square Garden and another at the Meadowlands. It was a chance to see Kurios perform for a third time that had taken Zeus to Orlando.

  I paused to give my coffee a counterclockwise swirl. Doug and I both looked at my cup like it was trying to tell us something. “Zeus is as gentle as they come.”

  “If I remember right, you also told me he’s nuts.”

  “I said retarded.”

  “He’s retarded and crazy.”

  “Even if you’re right, he’s not a crack-your-head-open kind of crazy.”

  Doug wasn’t buying it. In fact, it seemed the entire country wasn’t swallowing it except for me—and a few of the misfits who took up space at the Gateway.

  “Here’s another fact that may have slipped your mind,” Doug said. “The man did a stretch in Rahway.”

  “Simple theft. He got caught loading a few TVs into a van. It wasn’t like he was locked up for murder.”

  “So stealing televisions isn’t a clue your guy has certain antisocial tendencies?”

  “A couple of lowlifes paid him to do a half hour of heavy lifting. The cops show up, the bad boys disappear, and Zeus is left holding a forty-six-inch plasma.”

  “And you actually believe that’s what happened.”

  That’s exactly what I believe. “Zeus has, well, he’s a man with the mind of a child. If someone tells him to shove a TV into the back of a van, that’s what he does. If he gets caught, there’s no way he can talk himself out of it.”

  “And if somebody tells him to whack one of the most magnetic characters to ever set foot on the planet, does he do that too?”

  This all was going nowhere. It was time to close the deal—or at least try to. “Let’s get back to what I want. Three round-trips to Orlando and three rooms somewhere in the city.”

  “Three?”

  “Three.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a guy named Maurice Tyson who lives at the Gateway. He understands every word Zeus says and that’s something no one else can do. So, I need him on board.”

  “Who’s the third?” Doug asked.

  I tried not to pause because it was a dead giveaway to my discomfort. But I just couldn’t stop myself. “Uh . . . Doc Waters.”

  “Mother of God!”

  “Doc’s old news,” I said. “The mob can’t even remember his name.”

  “Doc Waters ripped apart the Philadelphia Mafia, for chrissakes. The mob doesn’t forgive and forget. If the man sticks his nose out the door, it’s all over. Putting him on a Boeing 757 is sheer insanity.”

  Point well taken. The New York–Jersey–Philly corridor was loaded with organized crime bosses who had a reputation for long memories. A few years back, Doc Waters kicked the mob where it hurt, which meant retaliation was likely to pay Doc a call. Even so, Doc was an irreplaceable part of my game plan.

  “Doc’s cousin is chief of corrections for Orange County. Bottom line—he’s my foot in the jailhouse door.”

  “Or a foot in the grave.”

  “Not negotiable. He’s part of the deal.”

  “You know you’re asking for the moon, right? But let’s say I work a miracle and muster up three tickets and a place to stay. It’ll cost you.”

  I braced myself. Just because Doug made his livelihood working with charities didn’t mean he was charitable. Want him to scratch yours? Be prepared to scratch his.

  “You know the name Manny Maglio?”

  “The king of strip clubs?”

  “Manny likes us to call them gentleman’s clubs. He’s in the entertainment industry.”

  Most red-blooded men living in Central Jersey knew about Maglio’s Venus de Milo Club in South River. He also had a couple of other nudie operations—one in Queens and the other near Camden.

  “So, here’s the trade,” Doug continued. “Manny’s a big-time contributor to United Way.”

  I gagged on my decaf.

  Doug’s hands went palms up and did a bad JFK imitation. “Ask not where the money comes from, but what it can do for others.”

  “Do Manny a favor and he forks over a fat donation?” I guessed.

  “Something like that. He’s got this niece, Twyla. She’s in what you might call show business.”

  “Show business?”

  “Yeah, show business with an erotic twist. She works for one of Maglio’s competitors. For spite, according to Manny.”

  “Nothing like a little lap dancing to really piss off your relatives.”

  “Seems that Manny promised he’d take care of his niece just days before her dad met with an untimely accident.”

  “I bet accidents are a big problem for the Maglio family.”

  “Twyla blamed Manny for not doing enough to protect her dad. So now she’s taking it out on her uncle.”

  “Or taking it off.”

  Doug gave me a stop sign. “Here’s where you come in. Manny wants his niece to go legit—to get a decent job. He’s got connections at Universal Studios in Orlando, and he’s set her up for an interview. Maglio will do whatever it takes to get Twyla away from the Northeast with all its temptations and bad influences.”

  “Uh,-oh,” I whispered. There was a freight train heading my way.

  “She doesn’t know that her uncle is working behind the scenes to give her a change of venue. And she can’t find out. The lady thinks a cousin of some guy she met at
her club set her up with Universal. She also thinks Universal is so hot to recruit her they’re sending someone to escort her to Orlando.”

  I cut Doug off. “Hold it. You had this all figured out, didn’t you? You knew I was going to hit you up for a trip to Florida.”

  “One trip,” said Doug. “One trip is what I expected.”

  “Even so, you knew what I was going to lay on the table.”

  “Of course,” Doug chuckled. “I know you. Like I said, when one of your boys falls on his nose, you’re there in a flash. It’s in your DNA.”

  Doug was right. It was all about genetics, and if I had a weird empathy for anyone at the bottom of society’s pig pile, then blame Anne. Or maybe even my parents. My old man was a lawyer who went to bat for every scumbag who couldn’t afford a dream-team defense. At age eighteen, I had been so indoctrinated with criminal law, I could have passed the New Jersey bar. My mother battled injustice in other ways—mainly by helping poor people find a hot meal, warm blanket, or sometimes a place to get an abortion. When I graduated from Penn State, the expectations were that I would carve out some kind of human-service career. Instead, I fell into a big-salaried ad agency job, which prompted my parents to predict that in time I would find out what was really important. Naturally, they were right.

  “Let me make sure I have this straight,” I said. “You want me to bring this woman to Orlando. And that’s it.”

  “That’s it. She thinks the studio’s picking up her expenses for the trip. You get her to Orlando, she walks into the HR office at Universal, and the rest is automatic.”

  I knew there had to be more. “Why does the niece need hand holding? Why not give her a ticket to Orlando and let her go solo?”

  “She’s a lot like your Gateway folk,” Doug explained. “Her cerebral cortex has a few—kinks.”

  “In other words, without a chaperone, you’re not sure she’d ever make it to Universal Studios.”

  “I think she’d make it to Orlando. But she could be easily led in a different direction, from what I’ve been told.”

  “Which means that somewhere between the airport and Universal, she might decide to further her dancing career,” I guessed.

  “Something like that.”

  I took a deep breath. “All right. I’ll do it.”

  “Good.” Doug’s smile was too wide.

  “So when do I meet Twyla Maglio?”

  Doug coughed. “Actually it’s Twyla Tharp.”

  Couldn’t be, I thought. “Twyla Tharp is a big-time choreographer.” I was no dance expert, but Tharp is a hard name to forget, especially when it belongs to a woman who owns a Tony Award and a couple of Emmys.

  “Yeah, well Manny’s niece has the same handle but different credentials. She changed names when she was twenty-one, probably a smart move since it gets people past their first impression.”

  Would it matter what a woman called herself if she were wearing pasties and a g-string? But I didn’t press the point. “What kind of first impression are we talking about?”

  “Twyla’s a little on the tawdry side. Manny’s niece, I mean—not the Twyla who does Broadway.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting the picture.” It was an IMAX image. I began to back away. “I don’t know about this.”

  Doug reached across the table and gave me a tap on my arm. “Relax. Friends don’t let friends drive over a cliff. Trust me—this is no big deal.”

  Friends? In a sense, this was true. There was an odd but authentic connection between Douglas Kool, Jr., son of a Manhattan real estate magnate, and Richard Bullock, the offspring of a South Jersey couple who thought Karl Marx was just a click short of being a genius.

  “A no big deal in your world could be a show stopper in mine.”

  “Here’s what you need to keep in mind,” noted Doug. “My world is about people with a ton of money; yours is about derelicts and bums. Occasionally, our two worlds intersect and good things happen.” Doug pushed the rest of his cannoli through his smile.

  The two-worlds-colliding theory was a stretch, but there was no debating that Doug was all about affluence. He had been nanny-raised in his father’s Park Avenue penthouse and shipped off to a high-grade boarding school when he was nine. The right connections and a seven-figure donation got him into Yale. It took another hefty gift to get Doug out of the university with a bachelor’s degree. Shortly after graduation, life threw my pal a curve ball. Daddy died and left an estate a tad shy of forty million. Doug’s mother, a battery of lawyers, and a couple of mistresses consumed 90 percent of the money, leaving Doug with just under five million. In Manhattan’s upper echelons, chickenfeed. Hence, Doug had to find the right kind of socially acceptable job to beef up his net worth.

  “You know, you’re right,” I said after mulling over Doug’s statement. “I do hang around with misfits and rejects. But at least I know who I’m dealing with.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “You’ve told me a dozen times that New York is a haven for phonies and pretenders, most of whom can’t afford a pot to piss in.”

  “Exactly!” Doug laughed. “Which is why H&G pays me the big bucks to sort out the fakes and tap the real thing.”

  Sorting and tapping is exactly how the United Way used Harris & Gilbarton’s golden boy. He spent most of his billable hours luring the richest of the rich into the organization’s upper echelon of philanthropists. His track record was astounding.

  “Let me rephrase what I said a minute ago,” Doug said. “I raise the capital and people like you use it to change the world.”

  “More like, try to change it.”

  “Whatever.”

  Yup. That pretty much summed it up. While Doug was milking the moneyed set, I was on the front line flailing away at a menu of social inequities.

  “Think I ended up holding the wrong end of the stick, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Hey, you made your bed. There are a lot of roads that’ll take you out of New Brunswick.”

  “I’m happy doing what I’m doing.”

  Doug feigned surprise at the comment. Like I hadn’t given him this line a dozen times before. He checked his watch.

  “Super. Wish I had time to hear more about how happiness means running a men’s shelter, but I have a train to catch. Let’s review—” It was classic Kool. Every conversation ended with a recap. “If I come through with tickets and rooms for you and your two boys, Twyla tags along. You take a day to do your business with Zeukanintroph—”

  “Zeusenoerdorf.”

  “Whatever you say. Day two is all about taking care of business with Twyla. Third day, you take a morning flight back to Newark. Sound like a plan?”

  I nodded. Anything for Zeus.

  “Three days and two nights in America’s playground. I’m handing you a sweet deal, Bullet. Just make sure Twyla gets to Universal on time.”

  I paid the Panico’s bill and walked Doug a few blocks to the city’s ancient train station. We rode the escalator to the platform and waited for the Trenton local. It pulled in fifteen minutes late, which had to irk the hell out of the ever-punctual Doug Kool. But he seldom showed his irritation. That’s the way it usually was with my friend. No matter what might be stirring on the inside, there was rarely a mess on the outside. Except once in a while, life finds a way to mar the veneer of even someone as composed as Doug. On this particular day, fate had attached a long piece of Panico’s rigatoni on the back of his Versace pants.

  “I’ll call you,” he promised, disappearing into the car. I waved and caught a glimpse of the pasta. I took it as a sign. The deal that had been hatched minutes before was likely to turn sticky for everyone involved.

  Chapter 2

  If you travel Florida’s Interstate 4—the blacktopped, clogged-up, east-west highway that slashes across the Sunshine State’s midsection—you might catch a glimpse of the Orange County Jail. But most drivers who pass I-4’s exit 79 are oblivious to the walled-in gulag that is partially hidden by an IHOP and a Days
Inn.

  Of all the strange visitors who have walked into the prison over the years, few could possibly match the weird conga line that barged through the main entrance on a cloudy September afternoon. At point was Twyla Tharp, Manny Maglio’s niece. During the Newark-to-Orlando flight, I tried coming up with the right words to describe her. Saucy. Salacious. Sin-sational. They all worked. She had shoulder-length blonde hair that partially hid a pair of oversized triple-hoop earrings. Her gold-plated rope-link bracelet and matching necklace looked more JCPenney than Cartier. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t the bling that attracted attention—it was the short skirt and tight, décolleté top that did the job. Twyla stood five six in four-inch spikes and had a well-toned body that I guessed was going on thirty. A master of the tease, she had a raw sexiness that was as powerful as her perfume. And although she would never be invited to a Mensa meeting, I discovered early on that Manny’s niece was as street smart as they come.

  Behind Twyla was a dark wisp of a man named Maurice Tyson, followed by Doc Waters, an unkempt codger with a wild mop of white hair. I was the rear guard until we fully penetrated the visitation hall, where I moved to the front of the line.

  “Need your I.D.s.” The guard at the registration desk spoke without ever lifting his eyes from the sports section of the Orlando Sentinel.

  “I’m Rick Bullock. We have an eleven o’clock to see—”

  “You got nothin’ until you show me your I.D.”

  I pulled out my driver’s license while Doc and Maurice miraculously found their New Jersey nondriver photo identification cards. The guard gave me what I took to be a semilook of approval, but when it came to Waters and Tyson, he turned suspicious. I could understand why.

  Maurice Tyson is as unsightly looking as he is skinny. Born thirty-nine years ago, he never had much going for him other than doling out street drugs for pocket change. Finding a legitimate job isn’t easy when you haven’t rebraided your dreadlocks for months and are so emaciated you disappear when turned sideways. Although Maurice wasn’t what one would call a highly educated man—he and the New Brunswick school system went their separate ways when Tyson finished eighth grade—he had a unique ability to understand Zeus. To me, Miklos Zeusenoerdorf’s bizarre muttering was Greek. To Tyson, it was E. B. White.