Bleeding Edge (18 page)

“Off,” Vip mutters, “would be nice sometime.”

The camera stays on Vip till he turns to face it, resentful, reluctant. “Not too happy tonight, are we, Willy?” inquires a voice from behind it.

“You noticed.”

“You have the look of a man things are closing in on.”

Vip shifts his eyes away and nods, miserable. Maxine wonders why she ever quit smoking. The voice, something about the voice is familiar. Somehow she’s heard it on television, or something close to it. Not a specific person, but a
type
of voice, maybe a regional accent . . .

Where could this tape have come from? Somebody who wants Maxine to know about Vip’s household arrangements, some invisible Mrs. Grundy with a strong disapproval of threesomes? Or somebody closer, say more of a principal in the matter, maybe even a party to Vip’s skimming activities. One of those Disgruntled Employees again? What would Professor Lavoof say beyond his trademark, “There has to be a world off the books”?

Same old sad template here—by now there’s an unfriendly clock on
Vip’s affairs, maybe he’s already kiting checks, wife and kids as usual totally without clue. Does it ever end well? Ain’t like it’s jewel thieves or other charming scoundrels, there’s nothing and nobody these fraudfeasors won’t betray, the margin of safety goes on dwindling, one day they’re overcome by remorse and either run away from their lives or commit terminal stupidity.

“Slow-Onset Post-CFE Syndrome, girl. Can’t you allow for at least one or two honest people here and there?”

“Sure. Someplace. Not on my daily beat, however, thanks all the same.”

“Pretty cynical.”

“How about ‘professional’? Go ahead, wallow in hippie thoughts if you want, meantime Vip is floating out to sea and nobody’s told Search and Rescue about it.”

Maxine rewinds, ejects, and, returning to realworld television programming, begins idly to channel-surf. A form of meditating. Presently she has thumbed her way into what seems to be a group-therapy session on one of the public-access channels.

“So—Typhphani, tell us your fantasy.”

“My fantasy is, I meet this guy, and we walk on the beach, and then we fuck?”

After a while, “And . . .”

“Maybe I see him again?”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah. That’s my fantasy.”

“Yes Djennyphrr, you had your hand up? What’s
your
fantasy?”

“Being on top when we fuck? Like, usually he’s on top? My fantasy is, is I’m on top for a change?”

One by one, the women in this group describe their “fantasies.” Vibrators, massage oil, and PVC outfits are mentioned. It doesn’t take long. Maxine’s reaction is, is she’s appalled. This is fantasy? Feeuhnt-uh-see? Her sisters in Romance Deficiency Disorder, this is the best they
can come up with for what they think they need? Schlepping through her bedtime routine, she takes a good look in the bathroom mirror. “Aaaahh!”

It is not hair or skin condition tonight so much as the Knicks second-color road jersey she’s wearing. With
SPREWELL
8 on the back. Not even a gift from Horst or the boys, no, she actually went down to the Garden, stood in a line, and bought it for herself, paying retail, for a perfectly good reason, of course, having been in the habit of going to bed with nothing on, falling asleep reading
Vogue
or
Bazaar
, and waking up stuck to the magazine. There is also her mostly unavowed fascination with Latrelle Sprewell and his history of coach assault, on the principle that Homer strangling Bart we expect, but when Bart strangles Homer . . .

“Obviously,” she remarks now to her reflection, “you are doing much, much better than those public-access losers. So . . . Makseenne! what’s your fantasy?”

Um, bubble bath? Candles, champagne?

“Ah-ah? forgot that stroll by the river? all right if I just step over to the toilet here, do some vomiting?”

•   •   •

SHAWN NEXT MORNING
is tons of help.

“There’s this . . . client. Well, not really. Somebody I’m worried about. He’s in twenty kinds of trouble, his situation is dangerous, and he won’t let it go.” She does a recap on Vip. “It’s depressing the way I keep running into the same scenario time and again, every chance these clowns get to choose, they always bet on their body, never on their spirit.”

“No mystery, quite common in fact . . .” He pauses, Maxine waits, but that seems to be it.

“Thanks, Shawn. I don’t know what my obligations are here. It used to be I didn’t care, whatever they got coming, they deserve. But lately . . .”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t like what’s going to happen, but I’d feel bad ratting this guy
out to the cops too. Which is what led me to wonder could I just pick your brain a little. Was all.”

“I know what you do for a living, Maxine, I know it’s all ethical trip- wires, and I don’t like to put in. Do I. OK. Listen anyway.” Shawn tells her the Buddhist Parable of the Burning Coal. “Dude is holding this burning-hot coal in his hand, obviously suffering a lot of pain. Somebody comes by—‘Whoa, excuse me, isn’t that a burning-hot coal in your hand, there?’

“‘Ooh, ooh, ow, man, yes and like, like it really hurts, you know?’

“‘I can see that. But if it’s making you suffer, why do you keep holding on to it?’

“‘Well, duh-uhh? ’cause I need to, don’t I—aahhrrgghh!’

“‘You’re . . . into pain? you’re a nutcase? what is it? Why not just let it go?’

“‘OK, check it out—can’t you see how beautiful it is? lookit, the way it glows? like, the different colors? and aahhrrhh, shit . . .’

“‘But carrying it around in your hand like this, it’s giving you third-degree burns, man, couldn’t you like set it down someplace and just look at it?’

“‘Somebody might take it.’

“So forth.”

“So,” Maxine asks, “what happens? He lets go of it?”

Shawn gives her a nice long stare and with Buddhist precision, shrugs. “He lets go of it, and he doesn’t let go of it.”

“Uh, huh, I must’ve said something wrong.”

“Hey. Maybe
I
said something wrong. Your assignment for next time is to find out which of us, and what.”

Yet another one of these shadowy calls. She should get on to Axel and tell him Vip’s a frequent visitor to the South Fork, then pass on the card-number fragments she was able to copy down off the videotape. But not so fast here, she cautions herself, let’s just see . . .

She runs the tape again, especially the dialogue between Vip and
whoever’s behind the camera, whose voice is maddeningly just there at the edge of her memory . . .

Ha! It’s a Canadian accent. Of course. On the Lifetime Movie Channel, you hear little but. In fact, it’s Québéquois. Could that mean . . .

She gets on to Felix Boïngueaux’s cellular. He’s still in town chasing VC money. “Heard anything from Vip Epperdew?”

“Don’t expect to.”

“You have his phone number?”

“Got a few of them. Home, beeper, they all ring forever and never pick up.”

“Mind sharing them?”

“Not at all. If you get lucky, ask him where our check is, eh?”

It’s close. It’s close enough. If it was Felix behind the camera, Felix who sent her the tape, then this is either what social workers like to call a cry for help from Vip or, more likely, seeing it’s Felix, some elaborate setup. As to how this shuffles together with Felix being down here allegedly looking for investors—back burner, it’ll keep, disingenuous li’l schmuck.

One of the phone prefixes is up in Westchester, no answer, not even a machine, but there’s also a Long Island number, which she looks up in her crisscross at the office, already queasy with a suspicion, and sure enough, it’s in the flip side of the Hamptons, all but certainly the amateur-porn set Shae and Bruno live in, where Vip has been making excuses to slide away to, to pay his dues to the other version of his life. The number brings an electronic squawk and a robot to tell Maxine sorry, this number is no longer in service. But there’s something strange in its tone, as if incompletely robotized, that conveys inside knowledge, not to mention You Poor Idiot. A paranoid halo thickens around Maxine’s head, if not a nimbus of certainty. Ordinarily there wouldn’t be money enough in circulation to get her inside bomb-throwing distance of the east end of Long Island, but she finds herself now dropping the Tomcat in her bag, adding an extra clip, sliding into working jeans and a
beach-town-appropriate T-shirt, and next thing she’s down on 77th renting a beige Camry. Gets on the Henry Hudson Parkway, hassles the Cross Bronx over to the Throgs Neck Bridge, the line of city towers to her right crystalline today, sentinel, onto the LIE. Cranks down the windows and tilts the seat back to cruising format and proceeds on eastward.

S
ince the mid-nineties when WYNY switched formats overnight from country to classic disco, decent driving music in these parts has been in short supply, but someplace a little past Dix Hills she picks up another country station, maybe from Connecticut, and presently on comes Slade May Goodnight with her early-career chartbuster, “Middletown New York.”

I would send you, a sing-in cowgirl,

With her hat, and gui-tar band,

Just to let you know, I’m out here,

Anytime you need a hand—

But you’d start

Thinkin, about that ol’ cowgirl,

And where she’ll be after the show,

Same hopeless

story again,

same old sorrowful end, for-

-get-it, darlin, I already know—

And don’t, tell, me,

How,

To eat, my heart out,

thanks, I, don’t,

need no—knife, and fork,

list-nin to

trains . . . whistle through

The nights without you,

Down in Middletown, New York.

[After a pedal-steel break that has always reached in and found Maxine’s heart]

Sittin here, with a longneck bottle,

watchin car-

toons, in the after-school sun,

while the shadows stretch out like a story

about things that we never got done . . .

Never got a-

round, to groundin that Airstream,

and, so, we

kept, gettin shocks off the walls,

un-til we

neither could say, which particular day,

We weren’t feelin nothin, at all.

So don’t tell me

How, to eat, my heart out . . .

So forth. By which point Maxine is singing along in a pretty focused way, with the wind blowing tears back into her ears, and she’s getting looks from drivers in adjoining lanes.

She hits Exit 70 about midday, and since Marvin’s videotape wasn’t that attentive to what Jodi Della Femina might call shortcuts, Maxine has to go intuitive with this, leaving Route 27 after a while and driving for about as long as she recalls it taking on the tape, till she notices a tavern
called Junior’s Ooh-La-Lounge with lunch-hour pickups and motorcycles out front.

She goes in, sits at the bar, gets a doubtful salad and a PBR longneck and a glass. The jukebox is playing music Maxine’s unlikely ever to hear string arrangements of in any lunch venue in Manhattan. Presently the guy three stools down introduces himself as Randy and observes, “Well, the shoulder bag has a sway to it suggestive of small arms, but I don’t smell cop somehow, and you’re not a dealer, so what does that leave, I wonder.” He could be described as roly-poly, though Maxine’s antennas put him among that subset of the roly-poly who also carry weapons, maybe not on his person but certainly someplace handy. He has a neglected beard and wears a red ball cap with some Meat Loaf reference on it, out the back of which hangs a graying ponytail.

“Hey, maybe I
am
a cop. Working undercover.”

“Nah, cops have ’at special somethin you get to recognize, least if you’ve been bounced around much.”

“Guess I’ve only been dribbled up and down the back court a little. Am I supposed to apologize?”

“Only if you’re here to get somebody in trouble. Who you lookin for?”

Okay. How about— “Shae and Bruno?”

“Oh, them, hey, you can get them in as much trouble’s you want. Everybody around here’s collected their share of karma, but those two . . . what in ’ee hell would you want with them?”

“It’s this friend of theirs.”

“Hope you don’t mean Westchester Willy? Built kinda low to the ground, partial to that Belgian beer?”

“Maybe. Would you happen to know how to get to Shae and Bruno’s place?”

“Oh, so . . . you’re the insurance adjuster, right?”

“How’s that?”

“The fire.”

“I’m only a bookkeeper from this guy’s office. He hasn’t showed up for a while. What fire?”

“Place burned down a couple weeks ago. Big story on the news, emergency response from all over, flames lightin up the sky, you could see it from the LIE.”

“How about—”

“Charred remains? No, nothin like that.”

“Traces of accelerant?”

“Sure you’re not one of these them crime-lab babes, like on TV.”

“Now you’re sweet-talking me.”

“That was gonna be later. But if you—”

“Randy, if I wasn’t so wired into office mode right now?”

A general pause. Colleagues in on breaks from work struggling not to laugh too loud. Everybody here knows Randy, pretty soon there is a schadenfreudefest in progress about who’s having the worst time of it. Since last year when the tech boom collapsed, most homeowners out here who took hits in the market have been defaulting on contracts right and left. Only occasionally can you still find echoes of the nineties’ golden age of home improvement and the name that keeps coming up, not to Maxine’s surprise, is Gabriel Ice.

“His checks are still clearing,” Maxine supposes. Randy laughs merrily, the way roly-poly folks do. “When he writes them.” Renovating the bathrooms, Randy has found himself being stiffed invoice after invoice. “I owe all over the place now, four-figure showerheads as big as pizzas, marble for the bathtubs special-ordered from Carrara, Italy, custom glaziers for gold-streaked mirror glass.” Everybody in the room chimes in with a story like this. As if at some point having had a fateful encounter with tabloid figure Donald Trump’s cost accountants, Ice is now applying the guiding principle of the moneyed everywhere—pay the major contractors, blow off the small ones.

Ice has few fans in these parts—to be expected, Maxine supposes, but it’s a shock to find opinion in the room unanimous that he also likely had a hand in torching Bruno and Shae’s place.

“What’s the connection?” Maxine squinting. “I always took him for more of a Hamptons person.”

“Cheatin side of town, as the Eagles like to say, Hamptons ain’t doin that for him, he needs to get away from the lights and the limos, out to some old fallindown house like Bruno and Shae’s where a man can kick out the jambs.”

“They think it’s who they used to be,” opines a young woman in painter’s overalls, no bra, Chinese tats all up and down her bare arms, “nerds with fantasies. They want to go back to that, revisit.”

“Oh, Bethesda, you’re such a pussy, that’s cuttin ol’ Gabe way too much slack. Just like with everythin else, he’s lookin to get laid on the cheap’s all it is.”

“But why,” Maxine in her best insurance-adjuster voice, “burn the place down?”

“They had a reputation there for getting into odd behavior and whatever. Maybe Ice was bein blackmailed.”

Maxine does a quick sweep of the faces in range but doesn’t see anybody who thinks they know for sure.

“Real-estate karma,” somebody suggests. “A crib as out of scale as Ice’s would mean a lot of smaller houses somehow have to be destroyed, part of maintaining the overall balance.”

“That’s a lot of arson counts, Eddie,” sez Randy.

“So . . . it’s a sizable spread,” Maxi pretends to ask, “the Ice home?”

“We call it Fuckingham Palace. Like to have a look at the place? I was headin out that way.”

Trying to sound like a groupie, “Can’t resist a stately home. But would they even let me in the gate?”

Randy produces a chain with an ID tag. “Gate’s automatic, li’l transponder here, always carry an extra.”

Bethesda clarifies. “Tradition around here, these big houses are great places to bring a date if your idea of romance is gettin rudely interrupted right in the middle.”

“
Penthouse Forum
did that whole special issue,” Randy footnotes.

“Here, let’s just go detail you a little.” They repair to the ladies’ toilet, where Bethesda brings out a teasing brush and an eight-ounce can of Final Net and reaches for Maxine’s hair. “Got to lose this scrunchy thing, right now you’re lookin too much like these Bobby Van’s people.”

When Maxine emerges from the facility, “Mercy,” Randy swoons, “thought it was Shania Twain.” Hey, Maxine’ll take that.

Minutes later Randy’s wheeling out of the lot in an F-350 with a contractor’s rack on it, Maxine close behind wondering how good of a plan this is and growing more doubtful as Junior’s is replaced in the mirror by dismal residential streets gone tattered and chuckholed, full of small old rentals and dead-ending against chain-linked parking lots.

They make a brief stop to look at the site of Shae, Bruno, and Vip’s old playhouse. It’s a total loss. Green summer growth is vaporing back over the ashes. “Think it was an accident? Torched deliberately?”

“Can’t speak for your pal Willy, but Shae and Bruno are not the most advanced of spirits, in fact pretty dumb fucks when you come to it, so maybe somebody did somethin stupid lightin up. Could’ve happened that way.”

Maxine goes fishing in her bag for a digital camera to get a few shots of the scene. Randy peering in over her shoulder spots the Beretta. “Oh, my. That’s a 3032? What kind of load?”

“Sixty-grain hollowpoint, how about yourself?”

“Partial to Hydroshocks. Bersa nine-millimeter?”

“Awesome.”

“And . . . you’re not really a bookkeeper in an office.”

“Well, sort of. The cape is at the cleaner’s today, and I forgot to bring along the spandex outfit, so you’re missing the full effect. You can take your hand off my ass, however.”

“My goodness, was I really—”

Which, compared to her usual social day, passes for a class act.

They continue out to the Montauk Point Lighthouse. Everybody is supposed to love Montauk for avoiding everything that’s wrong with the Hamptons. Maxine came out here as a kid once or twice, climbed to the
top of the lighthouse, stayed at Gurney’s, ate a lot of seafood, fell asleep to the pulse of the ocean, what wasn’t to like? But now as they decelerate down the last stretch of Route 27, she can only feel the narrowing of options—it’s all converging here, all Long Island, the defense factories, the homicidal traffic, the history of Republican sin forever unremitted, the relentless suburbanizing, miles of mowed yards, contractor hardpan, beaverboard and asphalt shingling, treeless acres, all concentrating, all collapsing, into this terminal toehold before the long Atlantic wilderness.

They park in the visitors’ lot at the lighthouse. Tourists and their kids all over the place, Maxine’s innocent past. “Let’s wait here for a minute, there’s video surveillance. Leave your car in the lot, we’ll pretend it’s a romantic rendezvous, drive away together in my rig. Less suspicion from Ice’s security that way.”

Makes sense to Maxine, though this could still be some elaborate horse’s-ass nooner he thinks he’s pulling here. They drive out of the lot again, follow the loop around to Old Montauk Highway, presently hook a right inland on Coast Artillery Road.

Gabriel Ice’s ill-gotten summer retreat proves to be a modest ten-bedroom what realtors like to call “postmodern” house with circle and pieces of circle in the windows and framing, open plan, filled with that strange lateral oceanic light that brought artists out here when the South Fork was still real. Obligatory Har-Tru tennis court, gunite pool which though technically “Olympic” size seems scaled more to rowing events than swimming, with a cabana that would qualify as a family residence in many up-Island towns Maxine can think of, Syosset, for example. Over the tops of the trees rises a giant old-time radar antenna from the days of anti-Soviet nuclear terror, soon to be a state-park tourist attraction.

Ice’s place is swarming with contractors, everything smells like joint compound and sawdust. Randy picks up a paper container of coffee, a sack of grout, and a preoccupied expression, and pretends he’s there about some bathroom question. Maxine pretends to tag along.

How could there be secrets here? Drive-through kitchen,
state-of-the-art projection room, everything out in the open, no passages inside the walls, no hidden doors, all still too new. What could lie behind a front like this, when it’s front all the way through?

That’s till they get down to the wine cellar, which seems to’ve been Randy’s destination all along.

“Randy. You’re not going to—”

“I figure what I don’t drink I can go on that eBay thing and turn for some bucks, start getting some of my money back here.”

Randy picks up a bottle of white Bordeaux, shakes his head at the label, puts it back. “Dumb son of a bitch got stuck with a rackful of ’91. A little justice, I guess, not even my wife would drink this shit. Wait, what’s this? OK maybe I could cook with this.” He moves on to reds, muttering and blowing dust off and stealing till his cargo pockets and Maxine’s tote bag are full. “Gonna go stash these in the rig. Anything we missed?”

“I’ll have another look around, meet you back outside in a minute.”

“Just keep an eye out for rent-a-cops, they’re not always in uniform.”

It isn’t vintage year or appellation that’s caught her eye, but a shadowy, almost invisible door over in one corner, with a keypad next to it.

Soon as Randy’s out the door, she pulls out her Filofax, which these days has evolved into an expensive folder full of loose pieces of paper, and in the dim light goes looking for a list of hashslingrz passwords Eric has found down in his Deep Web inquiries and Reg has passed along. She recalls some of them being flagged as key codes. Sure enough, only a couple-three fingerdances later, an electric motor whines and a bolt slams open.