the worm turned when slick Frank Tropper was caught with his forked tongue in the cookie jar. He had become our busiest driver and reported to each assignment augmenting his vested blue suit and bow tie with weird accessories that appeared to have caught on with our customers in Hollywood, where appearance is everything. Tropper’d show up wearing dark motorcycle cop shades and black driving gloves and a black, military-looking cap. He called this his hit man uniform. And, to my annoyance, a couple of the other drivers were now dressing the same way.
Over the last few weeks I’d noticed a number of personal phone messages to Frank—excessive phone messages—from our clients, and I’d brought it to Portia’s attention. Then, with several customers, he had returned the car to the garage very late after the end of a run. Frank always had a ready excuse and Ms. Portia seemed to go along with whatever account he came up with to cover his ass. But I was beginning to smell a problem—the possibility of a drug dealer on my staff.
On this last run Frank had called in to the office at eight p.m. to report the end of the assignment, but it was two hours later and the limo was still not in the garage.
I decided that enough was enough.
The main client in question was currently our biggest cash account: Marv Afferman, a fifty-five-year-old Cheviot Hills millionaire with a knack for keeping a limo on call as many as eighteen hours a day. Afferman was a player and had a swank house at Trancas Beach and liked to shuttle his women back and forth on summer weekends.
Tropper’s hours and the actual in-and-out time for his Afferman gig weren’t jibing. I’d called him in the car on his cell phone. His quick excuse was that Afferman had overpaid him in cash and he’d gone back to return the excess deposit.
When Tropper returned to the garage in Big Red, our maroon stretch, I was waiting in the driveway. Portia, still making excuses for his behavior, followed me outside.
There was Frank decked out in his cop shades and black driving gloves. Before he could do anything to cover his tracks I ordered him out of the car. While he stood by I checked through the limo and found a deck of plastic baggies and three empty gram vials under Frank’s briefcase on the front seat.
He immediately began shucking and jiving, telling me that he’d found the items on the bar console in the back of the car while cleaning it out. I fired the asshole on the spot.
Portia immediately began yammering at me, trying to come to his defense again, but I refused any explanation.
Standing in the driveway she began hissing at me about integrity and personal trust and compassion and that shit. Then she stormed down the street yelling at me for humiliating her in front of an employee and for overriding her judgment. Now I smelled a cover-up and two slimy brown turds.
Frank whined and squirmed and asked for another chance but I’d been in the limo business long enough to recognize that chauffeurs who sell dope to their clients usually continue the practice. I was sure David Koffman would have done the same thing.
That’s when it came out. Tropper chose to take my night dispatcher down with him. It was the jerk’s way of getting even with her for not saving his ass this last time.
According to Frank, Portia’d been showing more than favoritism at Dav-Ko. He said that of course she knew what he was doing, that their friendship and her attraction to him permitted the skinny English girl to administer oral sex once or twice a week along with steering a lot of the cash work at Dav-Ko his way. Bottom line: Portia was a pole smoker and a coconspirator. Nice.
I’d never liked Tropper but the story didn’t sound like a rope-a-dope. It was too damning not to be true.
I made him turn in his cell phone and his credit card and his sets of limo keys, then wordlessly escorted the jerk down the block to where one of his girlfriends was parked and waiting.
“What are you going to do about Portia?” he asked, getting into the new red Mustang convertible.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t think she should run for mayor.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means mind your own fucking business. You’re lucky I don’t have you arrested. Have a nice day, Frank.”
But now I had a choice: I