Gagliano,Anthony - Straits of Fortune.wps (5 page)

The boldness in her eye was not sexual in cast or in inten- sity of expression, just appraising and self-assured. The sex was there, though, lounging in the background like a black cat on a Persian rug. You know what I mean. It was blended in, natural, nothing artificial, no need to force it. We sat down, and Cal got called out of the office for a moment. There was the usual awkward silence that hangs in the air like an invisible pi� waiting to be broken. I let it hang. No sense saying anything stupid until it was absolutely necessary. Besides, if you're quiet, you can feel people. I caught a lot of people that way when I was a cop. "Cal said you used to be a police officer," she said. "Yeah, in New York." I was a little pissed at Cal for having told her about the cop thing. I understood why he did it, though, especially with the wealthy, the famous, or the nervous. People figured that it made me that much less likely to haul off a Hummer or talk to a tabloid. Maybe they were right, but I didn't think so. Either you're honest or you're not. I wasn't a thief, and I knew how to keep my mouth shut, but I hadn't learned that at the academy. My father had beaten it into my head with his shoe and other sundry objects. Plus, I read the right comic books. "I'm looking for someone to train my father," she said. "You'd have to come to the house. It's quite nice there, really. Would that be a problem?" I was glad she was talking to me mainly, because it gave me an excuse to look at her without being impolite. She had the glossy black hair of a Chinese, but she looked mixed, maybe Eurasian. Everything about her seemed to come from someplace else. "Mind if I ask you a question?" I said. "Not at all." "That's almost a British accent you have, but not com- pletely." 38

"I went to school in England when I was little. I guess I haven't lost it yet--the accent I mean. Well, what do you think?" "About what?" "Training my father. What did you think I meant?" Cal had come back into the office, and I was conscious of him sitting back in his swivel chair watching us. I laughed. "I thought you were asking me about your accent. I mean, what I thought about it." "Well?" "Keep it. It's nice." She smiled. "Thank you." "Let's stick to business, okay, kids?" Cal said mercifully. "I'm trying to make a living here." "Where does he live?" I asked. "Your father, I mean. We have to tack on a bit for the travel time." "Not a problem. He's out on Sunset Beach." She studied me to see what effect the address was going to have on me. I wasn't surprised. She had the look of money without being obvious about it. Everything top-shelf but inconspicuous-- Cartier watch, small diamonds. Was it old money? I didn't think so. It didn't have that musty, old-book smell to it. "Sunset Beach? Sure, I've been there," I said. "Except they always make me leave when it gets dark." She looked at me for a long moment, as though I'd said something strange or more revealing than I had intended. Then she laughed. "I think my father will like you." "Really, why so?" "You're in disguise. You have secrets. He likes that. People look at you, but they don't see you. But my father will see you. And I see you." "I see you, too." She looked around. "I guess smoking in here is out of the question." 39

"I don't think Cal would like that. He smokes his cigars outside." She studied me for a moment. "I've seen you before," she said. "Do you go to the clubs?" "I did when I worked at one." "Which one?" she asked. "I've been to all of them." I told her. "Let me guess: You were a bouncer. Don't take it person- ally, but you're the type they'd stand by the door." "Really?" I said. "I thought of it more as public relations. The darker side, of course." "You see?" Vivian said triumphantly. "I told you, an- other disguise," she said. "Tell me, who are you really, Jack Vaughn?" I decided to give her a serious answer. "I don't know," I said truthfully. "I really have no idea." "Jesus Christ," Cal said. "All this talking is killing me." He sprang out of his chair and stalked out of the office. I was glad to see him go. Something in my tone must have convinced her that I was telling the truth. We stared at one another for a moment. I sensed a certain hunger in both of us to keep up the conver- sation. She was the kind of person you could really talk to. "I know what you mean," she said, looking around the room. "Sometimes I think that perhaps I've traveled too much. After a while everything seems foreign." She looked at me earnestly as though to see what I would make of her statement. "I think I know what you mean," I said. "Yes, I think you do." Then Cal had come back. I know the three of us talked, but I don't know if I made any sense that day. She wanted someone she could trust to come out to the house and train her dad, a Colonel Patterson. It didn't matter, though. I would 40

have buried dead mules in her backyard with a tablespoon if she had asked me to. We had known each other for a thou- sand years. It was just a question of getting reacquainted. No need to rush. When she had gone, Cal frowned at me for long moment. He twirled a pencil around in his gnarled fingers and shook his head. "What the hell was that all about?" he asked in that gruff voice of his. "What? You heard her," I said. "I'm going to train her father." "It's not what I heard, shithead; it's what I saw." "I don't know what you're talking about." "My ass you don't. You two really hit it off. I about ex- pected her panties to fly off when she stood up." "You're crazy," I told him. "I've been crazy, and I'm going to stay crazy, too, but there was something pretty jazzy going on between you two." He looked more worried than pleased when he said it. "You know what they say about business and pleasure." "You're telling me I should stay away from her? You don't have to tell me that, Cal. And you're forgetting one thing: I am a certified personal trainer. That has to mean something in this crazy world." "It means shit. Look, wise guy, I didn't say you had to stay away from her, not necessarily, but you've got to play it right. And sometimes that means not playing it at all. Can you grasp the subtle fucking mystery of what I'm telling you? Sometimes you just got to grin and bear it. You got to stand like Cary Grant with his hands in his pockets. You're smart. You know what I'm saying. Don't give me that certi- fied bullshit." "I know what you mean. I've got to stand like Cary Grant." "Is that right? Say that when she's sitting by the swimming 41

pool, wise-ass; when it's hot and you're thinking, What the hell? When she's asking you to put the suntan lotion on her back. What are you going to say then, Charlie Chan? What? `Cal, I fucked up. Her father's on his way over here with a flamethrower. Save me, Cal.' " I laughed. "What the hell movie did you get that from?" "No movie, real life. I been in this business for fifty years. Right after the war. I was real cute then, muscles and every- thing. Not out of a bottle like Raul. He's on the juice again, by the way. You know how many women have tried to kill me? Go ahead, guess." "All right," I said. "Ten." "Actually, it was nine. Then I got old and retired from being stupid. You're still on active duty in that department. I'm thinking of making a comeback, though. I can still get a boner you can hang a mink coat on. Hah! I bet you never heard that one before!"

I had an apartment that year near the beach up in Surfside, not far from the old movie theater that some friends of mine had leased and converted into a gym. I trained a few of my clients there. I had moved up there after the northerly migration created by the hurricane back in '98 had driven up the rent prices down on South Beach to the point where I had to either buy a condo or spend the rest of my days resigned to the task of helping send my landlord's kids to Harvard. In the end I moved north. The boom hadn't reached as far as Surfside, and the rents there were still reasonable. The place I lived in was a twin- level apartment building on Byron Avenue, called the Lan- caster Arms. The neon sign out front didn't work, and the blue-and-white building looked faded against the relentless- ness of the sun. An octogenarian named Sternfeld owned and managed the place, and he was nearly as surly as Cal. 42

He liked to stand on the stoop of his building behind his walker like an old admiral at the prow of his ship, and he had the crazy, wispy, white hair of a conductor in search of a symphony. The day I came by to see the apartment, Sternfeld looked me over with the expression of a man attempting to calculate just how much trouble you were going to be to him. He was delighted when I told him I had a job, as though I'd accom- plished something remarkable. He was even happier when I told him I was single, without even so much as a goldfish for company. In the end he promised to chop a hundred dol- lars off the rent if I would walk with him three evenings a week. So for four hundred a month, I got a one-bedroom apart- ment with two entrances, and if you left both doors open on a hot day, a nice breeze would blow through. You had to be careful when you did that, however. The neighborhood was not all that safe and secure. One day I came out of the shower and caught a sun-fried crackhead with a glass eye trying to download my laptop out the back door. The lesson there was that while the rents were reasonable, the people around you might not be, and after that I was more vigilant. A quiet man who minds his own business and who doesn't own a stereo with too large a set of speakers will, in general, get along with his neighbors, and so I did. On my left was a family from Ecuador. They had a twenty-year-old son whom the police came for one night because he had decided that parking people's cars wasn't quite as profitable as selling them. His parents knew I had been a cop, and so they asked me to counsel him. I did what I could. After that he decided to raise pit bulls for the dogfights over in Hialeah, but the police hadn't liked that idea very much either, and so now he was back in community college, trying to find another way into the economy. 43

Billy Shuster lived in the studio on my right. He was a transvestite who worked as a postman by day. It sounds cli- ch� but he really did like show tunes, particularly Ethel Merman's rendition of "There's No Business Like Show Business," which for some reason he never played all the way through to the end. It was very anticlimactic in an an- noying way. It got so that I could even predict to the second when he would lift the stylus only to set it down at the begin- ning again. Sometimes, when Billy left his door open, I'd see him standing at the ironing board in his bra and panties, ironing the clothes he was going to wear that night, his sand-colored Twiggy wig perched on the end of the board like a depressed cat. Billy told me once that he liked me because I brought stability to the building. In his own way, so did he. He had been a tenant there for fifteen years. Sometimes, on cooler evenings, he and Sternfeld played chess on a little tiled table they'd set up in the shade on the small patio behind the hedges. It didn't seem to matter much to Sternfeld whether Billy was dressed like a man or a woman, though he didn't curse nearly as much when Billy was in drag. He just didn't like the fact that his partner usually won their matches. Later that afternoon, when I pulled up in front of the apartment, Vivian's red Porsche was parked at the curb, just past the spray of purple bougainvillea that was overwhelm- ing the hedges in front of the building. Sternfeld was sitting in a lawn chair under the eaves, his aluminum walker off to one side. He shielded his eyes from the sun as I came up the three steps that led to the first landing. I looked down the walkway at the closed door of my apartment. "Where is she?" I asked. "I'll give you two guesses," Sternfeld said. "And it's not my place." "You let her in?" 44

"She had the key, asshole." "You're right. I forgot about that." "You told me she was history," Sternfeld said. "She is." "Well, I guess history just got reincarnated." "We'll see about that." "When are we going back to the Rascal House?" Stern- feld asked. "I'm overdue for a corned beef on rye." "Soon," I said. "That's what you said last week." When I opened the door, Vivian was sitting at the small table in the alcove next to the kitchen. She stood up and walked into my arms, and I held her to me. She was trem- bling with fear and relief, as though in great distress she had arrived at a place of possible deliverance, and I knew that I had been waiting a long time for exactly this moment, when every absence and betrayal would be canceled out by a simple embrace--at least temporarily. I took her chin in my hand and turned her head. There were tears in her dark eyes. Despite myself, I was glad to see her. "You cut your hair," I said. "I hate it," she said petulantly. "They took too much off." "No," I said. "It looks good." I asked her if she wanted anything to drink, then went to the fridge and brought out two Diet Cokes and poured hers into a clean glass. When I came back, she was smoking a Marlboro. I went into the kitchen again and found a lid from an empty jar of mayonnaise and set it down in front of her to use as an ashtray. "I thought you quit those," I said. "I started again this morning." "A killing will do that to you." Her face lost its tan, and for a second she reminded me 45

of one of those scared, desperate people you see sitting in a holding room at the police station who are at the beginning of a new kind of trouble. Her dark eyes quivered, then stared straight through me. "It seems like a nightmare," she said. "It is a nightmare. What are you going to do?" "I don't know. My father said you were out to see him this morning." "He asked me to get rid of your boyfriend's boat, but I had to turn him down." "I know." "Then why are you here?" "I'm not sure. I suppose it's because you're my friend." "It's strange you picked today to remember that. I haven't seen you in more than a year." "You didn't want to see me." "Why do you think I want to see you now?" "Should I leave?" "So you shot Matson. I guess things didn't work out be- tween you two." Mentioning Matson's name had summoned up all the bit- terness I had felt toward both of them. I watched her impas- sively, as though her weeping were an accompaniment to the dark, righteous mood I was sealed so tightly into. But it was no fun being in command of a shit situation. Her cigarette burned down, and the ash tipped backward onto the scarred surface of the table. I picked it up and snubbed it out, flicked the butt over her head and into the sink. "Do you have a tissue?" she asked. "No. You should have called ahead." "You're not going to help me, are you?" "I'll help you call the police. I'll even go down there with you, but that's about all I can do." Vivian looked at me as though she were searching for 46