Clippings

“What’s the fuckin’ diff?” she trilled in her Tweetie Pie voice. “Billy’s a funny boy, a natural scam artist, one of the greats. Who knows for how long this is?”

…

Arriving at the furriers, they looked like an oil sheikh and his moll. Mimi tried on the five figure numbers, waiting for Billy’s lead. At length he said, You like that one? It’s nice. Billy, she whispered, it’s forty thousand, but he was already smooth-talking the assistant: it was Friday afternoon, the banks were closed, would the store take a cheque. “Well, by now they know he’s an oil sheikh, so they say yes, we leave with the coat, and he takes me into another store right around the block, points to the coat, and says, I just bought this for forty thousand dollars, here’s the receipt, will you give me thirty for it, I need the cash, big weekend ahead.” — Mimi and Billy had been kept waiting while the second store rang the first, where all the alarm bells went off in the manager’s brain, and five minutes later the police arrived, arrested Billy for passing a dud cheque, and he and Mimi spent the weekend in jail. On Monday morning the banks opened and it turned out that Billy’s account was in credit to the tune of forty-two thousand one hundred and seventeen dollars, so the cheque had been good all the time. He informed the furriers of his intentions to sue them for two millions dollars in damages, defamation of character, open and shut case, and within forty-eight hours they settled out of court for $250,000 on the nail. “Don’t you love him?” Mimi asked Chamcha. “The boy’s a genius. I mean, this was class.”