Pit Bull Peter Geller 03 - Pit and the Pendulum

PIT AND THE PENDULUM
    When the phone rang, I rolled over with a groan and reached for it. Who could possibly be calling me? I didn’t have any friends left, and all my bills were paid up, thanks to last month’s trip to Atlantic City’s casinos.
    “’Lo?” I mumbled into the receiver. My head pounded something awful.
    “Pit?” asked a man’s voice.
    I blinked. Nobody had called me that in years. “Who is this?”
    “Pit! Thank God I reached you — I need your help.”
    “Huh.” I managed to sit up in bed. The room swayed; I felt sick and dizzy. “What? Help? Who is this?”
    “God, Pit, it’s three o’clock! Aren’t you awake?”
    “What? Three o’clock?” With my free hand, I rubbed at crusty-feeling eyes. It didn’t help. I felt old and tired and all fogged up inside … thirty years old and ready to die. “Call me in the daytime!”
    The voice on the phone chuckled. It sounded forced.
    “Come on, Pit,” the man said urgently. “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon . Wake up. You’re the sharpest guy I know. I need your help!”
    Slowly I tried to think it through. Only frat brothers had ever called me Pit. Short for Pit-Bull — because I never let go. So that meant we had gone to college together, a lifetime or so ago. At most in any given year, our fraternity had thirty-two members. Times four … a lively selection of suspects.
    “Pit? You still there?”
    I frowned. A decade had deepened his voice, but it sounded familiar. Like a gear clicking into place, my brain started working and the name came to me: David Hunt. Tall, blond, and good-looking in a Calvin Klein-model sort of way, mostly skilled in partying and racket ball, but good enough academically to get his MBA without any special assistance from me. That was the only reason they let me into old Alpha Kappa Alpha, after all, to help the jocks and old-money frat boys keep up their GPAs. Sometimes I had resented it, being there to be used, but mostly I didn’t care, since the perks were great. I got into all the parties. I had my share of dates and fun and beer, and I still graduated top at the top of our class. So what if I did a lot of tutoring and ghost-writing?
    David had been … fifty-third? Yes, that was right. Fifty-third in our graduating class. More than respectable for a party-boy from Alpha Kappa Alpha.
    “What is it, Davy?” I said. The haze was lifting now. “And I go by Peter these days.”
    “Peter. Right. Come see me — I need your help. I’ll make it worth your while.”
    I yawned again. “Where are you?”
    “The Mackin Chase Hotel. I’ll be in the lobby. Twenty minutes okay?”
    “Make it an hour.”
    “If I have to. But hurry.” A frantic note crept into his voice. “My future depends on it.” He hung up.
    Since he sounded desperate, I debated skipping a shower. But one look in the mirror and a sniff at my armpits changed my mind: I could live with bloodshot eyes and mussed-up hair, but popular society frowned on people who smelled like I did right now.
    Heaving my legs over the side of the bed, I found a bottle of aspirin on the night table and dry-swallowed four tablets. My right foot bumped against a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor, and briefly I debated a wake-up shot. No, not now; I had an appointment to keep. Instead, I screwed the cap back on.
    I spent the next fifteen minutes showering, shaving, and cleaning myself up for polite society. A gulp of half-flat Pepsi and a cold slice of pizza from the refrigerator made a very late breakfast. Then I found a shirt that wasn’t too rumpled and put it on with jeans and comfortable old loafers. Finished, I grabbed a cane from the umbrella stand by the door, left my little one-bedroom Northwood apartment, and limped out to the Frankford El station.
    A train came almost immediately, luckily. It was mostly empty, so I flopped down in the corner — not the handicapped seat by the door, which I hate — and from there I proceeded to study the gum, scuff marks, and unidentifiable stains on the floor, trying not to look out the window at passing brick factories and endless lines of row-houses. Details tended to overwhelm me these days; that was partly what led to my nervous breakdown and retirement from a twenty-hours-a-day job at a Wall Street investment firm four years before. Now I kept to myself, tried not to leave my apartment when I didn’t have to, and drank to blunt the pain and keep the edge off my always-racing