Golden Orange (2 page)

“The judge will be made aware of all that, Winnie,” the lawyer said, writing:
Life's turbulent waters. Trim the sails.

All the time he was talking to Winnie, Chip Simon was toying with a crystal paperweight that was the latest hot toy among Gold Coast executives. It was a Testarossa, a car coveted by Newport Beach yuppies. Nobody
ever
called it a Ferrari. If you didn't know what a Testarossa was …

“I think it's partly a midlife crisis,” Winnie said. “I turned forty a couple weeks ago. I got a midlife crisis so real you could put a coat a paint on it. Wait'll it happens to you in ten years.”

“Eleven.”

“Eleven. Or maybe it was the divorce. I always tried to do the decent thing with that man-eater.”

“How well I remember her during the hearing for spousal support,” Chip Simon said cheerfully.

“I could never decide which one a her twins was more horrible,” Winnie said. “They were both clones of their mother. When I met her second ex-husband one time I asked him which twin was meaner and he said to me, ‘Win, it's a jump ball.' Still I
adopted
those monsters! The judge should be told what a decent guy I really am. Legally adopting her brats!”

“Some people might say that such a rash decision is proof of your …”

“I'm
not
an alcoholic! I jist shouldn't drink rum!”

“… drinking problem, I was going to say.”

“It was the Christmas season and I couldn't stop thinking about how she savaged me with the child support for my
adopted
kids. How she even took away my sailboat. I earned that sailboat with my insurance payoff when I got hurt.”

“Yes, it's very sad,” the lawyer agreed, running over a bent paper clip, a make-believe pedestrian, with the Testarossa.

“I'd still be a cop today,” Winnie said, “if I hadn't hurt my back chasing a boat burglar all over that yacht club. Getting knocked down the companionway of some millionaire's seventy-five-footer that never leaves the dock except to get hauled out for inspection every year or so. Jist a place for him and his cronies and bimbos to get drunk on. Might as well be set in concrete right there in front a the club for all the good it does. Kind of guys that put shoe trees in their Top-Siders. And here I am, unemployed with a bad back and that barracuda chewing up my balls and pirating my sailboat and leaving me beached and broke. The only person in town that watches a TV without a remote control. I shoulda bought a copy of
Soldier of Fortune
and hired me somebody like Ollie North to snuff that man-eater. So why don't you tell
that
to the judge, Chip?”

“I'll tell him everything positive that's relevant, Winnie,” Chip Simon said, smoothing back his fresh haircut, causing Winnie to observe that ever since Michael Douglas made that
Wall Street
movie, every yuppie in The Golden Orange had his hair Dippity-do'ed. And Chip wore silk suspenders decorated with little water-skiers.

“And I'll certainly point out that a pensioned, fifteen-year veteran of the Newport Beach Police Department is not just some
ordinary
unemployed beach rat,” Chip added.

“They're treating this like piracy, for chrissake! It was nothing more than joyriding, is all!”

“Except that the joyriding took place not in a car but on a ferryboat, Winnie. Not on a public highway, but in the bay of Newport. In the midst of the Christmas boat parade when the harbor was alive with boats and twinkling lights. And the smell of hot rum filled the air and filled the defendant's belly. That's what my learned opponent, the assistant district attorney, will say.”

“So nobody's gonna care that I actually did my best to continue on active police duty with a herniated disk I got when a boatyard burglar coldcocked me with a length of anchor chain knocking me down into the galley of a booze cruiser they shoulda hauled out for bottom paint and it wouldn't of been there in the first place!”

Writing once again, Chip said, “Judge Singleton is impressed with a good clean job history, Winnie. Give me yours
before
the police work.”

“Lifeguard, U.S. marine, street cop. That's it,” said Winnie. “Three jobs in my whole life. None of which am I now young enough or fit enough to perform.”

“The judge will be impressed, I hope, by the fact that you're voluntarily attending A.A. meetings,” the lawyer said.

“Because a
your
insistence. I'm not one a
them
.”

“Tell me, how many meetings have you attended since the ferryboat incident?”

“Four, I think,” Winnie lied. “Altogether. More or less.”

Chip Simon wrote:
Has attended at least four meetings a week for past three months. At same time he looks for work.
Then the lawyer wrote in caps: BAD BACK PREVENTS EMPLOYMENT.

“Before Tammy's ambulance-chasing shyster crucified me with the spousal support and shanghaied my sailboat I had hopes of hiring on as a fishing boat skipper,” Winnie reminded him. “Put
that
down.”

“I suggest we forget that divorce,” Chip said.

“Maybe if she hadn't been born in the Debbie Reynolds era she wouldn't be such a pitiless crocodile. I never met a broad yet named Tammy wasn't a nut cracker.”

“It would help if you could get a job,
any
job.”

“We're going to court next Monday, Chip.”

“Any job or even a prospect of a job. I can't paint a complete portrait of Winston Farlowe without the materials. And I can't introduce irrelevant information. By the way, did you know that lots of American baby boomers like you are named Winston? For Churchill, of course.”

“What the hell's relevant about that, Chip?”

“Just an interesting aside.”

“Is it
relevant
that I thought Tammy and me were happily married when in fact she was in the process of silkworming our
Loveboat
cruise and leaving me dead in the water?”

The lawyer didn't answer but wrote:
Ship of Fools.

“Is it
relevant
that she dumped me for the owner of a dental clinic who started out exploring her root canal and just kept moving south?”

“Very little about your failed marriage is relevant. Now tell me, Win, have you reached the stage of drinking wherein you're cold sober until a given drink? You know, the tenth, fifteenth or twenty-fifth, whatever? You know, when you never know
which
drink will turn off the torment and shut down the stress factor and give you alcoholic bliss?”

At that moment, Winnie Farlowe knew that he
hated
his lawyer, Chip Simon. So while Chip gave his writing hand a rest to rev up the Testarossa, Winnie said, “If nothing I can say is relevant and if the judge decides to fire a broadside, what would he give me? Realistically? Me. An ex-cop. A person with a clean record. Only mistake I made was drinking rum!”

“Judge Singleton despises drunk drivers and, by inference, will hate a drunk ferry pilot even more. I wouldn't be shocked if he gave you three months in the county jail.” Chip was still revving the Testarossa.

Just like that. Three months.

Winnie nearly had his first midday visitation from the winged scavengers who ate his guts. Three months! The Orange County Jail! One of the most overcrowded lockups in California! A jail so jammed with the scum of the coast, not to mention inland Orange County, that the sheriff had actually been instructed by a U.S. District Court judge not to incarcerate more prisoners in the dangerously overcrowded facility. Three months!

“I can't do three months in jail, Chip!” Winnie said. “I can't do three
days
!”

The lawyer propped up a paper clip again, shook his head sadly, ran it down with his Testarossa and said, “Yes, life truly
is
unfair, isn't it.”

Then Winnie watched as Chip aimed the Testarossa at the pathetic kneeling wire man and squashed it flat.

Reliving that meeting with Chip Simon brought forth a dive-bombing attack from one of the winged scavengers. Fear plummeted straight for his guts. Winnie cried out and bolted upright in bed. The huge turkey buzzard retreated and grinned like a gargoyle, a coil of Winnie's large intestine dangling and dancing from that horrible leering rictus.

2

The Ghetto

T
ess Binder secretly hated the ocean because she feared infinity. Of course, the water in Newport Harbor is usually placid, particularly in the summer, but it
is
seawater, even though at night the harbor sometimes reminded her of lily pads and frogs. The water never reassured her, not like the water of Lake Arrowhead where she'd summered as a girl.

Tess liked to pretend that it didn't chase the moon and tide, this normally placid water outside her home on Linda Isle, but it certainly did impose definite limits in her life: north to Dover Shores in upper Newport Bay, so-called because of the white cliffs, then south to the Balboa peninsula, west to Balboa Coves, and east … She didn't like to think of east. East was the harbor jetty and beyond. There
her
water turned into the vast bleak ocean. Infinity.

It wasn't only infinity that frightened Tess Binder. Since her latest divorce she had discovered that she was afraid of crowds, sagging triceps, AIDS, herpes, being single, trying to survive on her last $50,000.

Tess Binder was forty-three years old, and had been searching with growing despair for another husband, one who would
not
insist on a prenuptial agreement. But there were very few of those around The Golden Orange these days.

Tess opened the balcony door of the master bedroom and put on her round tortoiseshell
serious
glasses to look west toward Bayshores. But she didn't have a main channel view. She was forced to face Pacific Coast Highway and to endure traffic noise. Once, at a party on Spyglass Hill, she heard her side of the island called “the ghetto” by a Linda Isle neighbor on the other side.

She had made the mistake of starting the day by going grocery shopping in the market she'd used during her short marriage to Ralph Cunningham: one of those where white eggplant, apple pears, elephant garlic, and Maui onions are individually wrapped in little nets. And the long-stemmed strawberries are so big that only eight of them fit in a basket, and Pepino melons go for nearly ten dollars a pound, ditto for Holland purple bell peppers. She
did
note that soft-shell crab was on sale at thirty bucks. And white truffles were being “offered” at sixteen hundred dollars a kilo. In short, a week's shopping could overdraw a plumber's Visa card.

Just shopping there made it impossible
not
to think of her present state of affairs. She was surrounded in the store by people she knew casually, people who could still afford to buy anything they wanted. She saw the
parvenue
wife of a Costa Mesa car dealer, buying slabs of abalone like it was lunch meat, at forty dollars per pound. That was when a panic attack struck Tess Binder, the first since Ralph Cunningham left her. She had to get
out
of that place in a hurry. She had to go to the beach.

When she reached her five-year-old Mercedes (the one Ralph Cunningham let his office help use to run errands), she discovered with amazement that she was holding an empty banana skin! She'd been compulsively eating a banana while she was in the store and hadn't even realized it. When she got in the car she almost wept. Tess Binder wasn't just an abandoned woman. She was a goddamn thief.

The Easter season had brought with it Santa Ana winds from the desert. It was 85 degrees Fahrenheit on the sand at her club, and the club's hot mommas were white-hot on that Saturday afternoon. There was a tanker load of Bain de Soleil sliding over a thousand square yards of winter-white, health-club–firm, middleaged female flesh on the tiny beach.

Some of the women chose to wear the dated string-bikinis instead of the newer French-cut. This by way of proclaiming that there were no irreparable stretch marks. No hip scars from liposuction, at least none you could notice. Most of the hot mommas were no younger than Cher and no older than Jane Fonda. Many could rival either when it came to body sculpting. It was astonishing what the Nautilus, the knife, and single-minded dedication had accomplished in The Golden Orange.

Tess Binder arrived on the beach that afternoon wearing tinted prescription glasses with white plastic frames. She nodded to the other hot mommas, acknowledged a few panther smiles and found a suitable place on the sand away from the others but close enough not to
seem
aloof. She sensed whispering, actually heard a few giggles, and imagined she heard a few clucks of sympathy. Which were about as genuine as those heard when Vilma Draper, former queen of the hot mommas, had experienced silicone-curdle and sued Dr. Max Jenner (Max the Knife), a swashbuckling surgeon whose work was on carnal display in the club lounge one afternoon a week, when the price of booze was reduced and free food was offered.