Golden Orange (8 page)

The 44 Regular fit Winnie okay, but he wasn't used to baggy trousers and big shoulders, and when he stopped at Spoon's Landing for a pick-me-up, Spoon looked him over. “That just-took-it-outta-the-washer-with-the-sleeves-rolled-up look of today ain't it, Winnie.”

“Think it's too much?” Winnie buttoned the jacket, then unbuttoned it. “Maybe the green paisley tie don't go with the winter white?”

“Too yuppie-ish,” Spoon said. “You're no yuppie.”

Guppy Stover, who'd begun drinking brain tumors at nine
A.M
., was already surly. “Duppie,” she said. “You're definitely
downwardly
urban. Goddamn duppie.”

Winnie said to Spoon, “I heard they're lookin for a boat salesman over at that broker by Mariner's Mile. I think I could probably sell those big stinkpots, right?”

“Jist turn on them oh-so-sincere peepers and you could sell the Rushdie memoirs to one a the ayatollahs,” Spoon droned.

Which caused Guppy to say, “That guy Rushdie oughtta move to Orange County. Our Eye-ranians couldn't leave the discos long enough to kill anybody.”

Winnie finished his drink and left, but hadn't been gone five minutes from Spoon's when the saloonkeeper took the phone call from Tess Binder.

He seemed to like Winnie and somehow that made it
more
depressing. Winnie walked along the row of motor yachts in the broker's boat slips, trying to be interested in what the guy was telling him about an Ocean fifty-three-foot sports fisher. And an Egg Harbor 46 that he'd just sold. And there were two Vikings in his inventory, one fifty-seven-footer having a custom wet bar that cost $20,000. He told Winnie about a 111-foot steel-hulled oceangoer built to Lloyds specs that he'd been offered for two million, and a seventy-four-foot Stephens Flybridge for a million and a half. But it was only when he'd spot a sloop or a ketch that Winnie would get a spark of interest. A Nordic 44 knocked him for a loop, and he fell in love with a Hinckley 52.

“I'd be better at selling sailboats,” he offered. “I'm a sailor.”

“
Lot
more money in powerboats,” the broker said. “Outsell sails five to one in this store. You sell one of the big babies, you made your year.”

“Yeah,” Winnie said without enthusiasm. “Gotta be hard to move em though.”

“Be surprised. Good year, we got no problem moving them, even the hundred-footers. This year hasn't been too good. People don't know which way George Bush is gonna go. Don't know if we're in for inflation or recession or more good times. Boat business'll be tender till Bush figures out who he is.”

Bush wasn't the only one with an identity crisis, Winnie Farlowe thought, studying the boat slips bulging with rapidly depreciating booze cruisers. Imagining himself trying to convince a Gold Coast millionaire that his life was incomplete without one of those greenback gobblers blocking the view from his waterfront home. As Winnie left, the broker told him he was one of the “finalists” for the job, and would be called within a week, one way or the other.

By the time Winnie parked in front of Spoon's Landing, Guppy Stover had a whiskey glow and was telling some poor guy who merely said “How ya doing?” about the son of a bitch who dumped her on Waikiki and wrecked her entire life.

“Got a phone call,” Spoon said to Winnie. His sweat-stained yellow shirt was unbuttoned all the way down the front on this hot day, exposing a wet pink hairy belly.

“Who, my lawyer?”

“Your squeeze,” Spoon said.

“What squeeze?”

The saloonkeeper removed his navy cap to scratch his bald head. Then he did something really ugly. He smiled. “Come on, Winnie, tell old Spoon all about it!”

“
What
squeeze?”

“The one I seen you talkin to the other night. That two-legged tuna that looked like she was cruisin the Bermuda Triangle till she laid eyes on you.
That
one!”

“Tess Binder? You serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“Called me here?”

“Asked me if you was gonna be in today. I said the day you don't come in we'd put your picture on a milk carton.”

“She coming in?”

“Wants you to meet her over at her club. Six o'clock. Think you can make it?”

“Can I
make
it?”

Winnie was so happy he bought a drink for Guppy, one for Spoon, and another for himself. Winnie was so happy he spent thirty bucks in the next two hours, and when Carlos Tuna shambled in, he looked at all the grins and said, “Why's everybody so happy? They puttin
Roller Derby
in prime time?”

By the time six o'clock arrived, Winnie was half fried. He'd meant to limit the drinks, but he was nervous. Tess Binder made him that way, and when he was nervous he drank a bit more than he should. Just as he did when he was depressed. Or scared. Or lonely. Or on a night with a full moon, half-moon or no moon. Especially when he got to missing police work.

Well, there was
some
truth to the accusation that he had a drinking problem, but he sensed a change was about to occur. Tess Binder was part of it. A woman like her showing such interest in him, well, if he could get some kind of employment, a job he was proud of, the way he was proud of being a policeman … Okay, maybe not that kind of pride. He didn't expect to ever have
that
kind of professional pride again. That thing he felt during the fifteen years he was a cop, the thing about being a professional.

He thought of these things while driving to her club. He forgot them when he got in the parking lot and gave the VW convertible to the kid parking a Lamborghini. Then he saw a Testarossa that looked like the one his lawyer, Chip Simon, used to run down a pathetic kneeling paper clip, the way life had run down Winston Farlowe until he no longer knew who or what he was. Winnie staggered a bit when he got out of the VW and the valet parker had to grab his arm. Winnie mumbled something about weak ankles, but the kid's knowing look said, sure, just like the
rest
of the dipsomaniacs around this joint.

There was live music in the bar, a three-piece band with a female vocalist. And the place wasn't as dark as Spoon's Landing, which meant it wasn't as dark as Dracula's bunk, but it was dark enough to camouflage nips and tucks and bad sutures and lumpy implants and curdled silicone.

Winnie walked all the way around the rectangular midroom bar but couldn't find her in the teeming crowd. He started looking at the people the way a cop does, noticing that a lot of the women had skin so taut they were frog eyed, with that look of perpetual astonishment. The older guys had their share of cosmetic surgery too, the kind that softens and smoothes the eyes. But instead of looking like young men they end up looking like old women. Old guys with old women's eyes were a common sight even in Spoon's Landing. What
wasn't
common was the sight of a black face anywhere in The Golden Orange. The census always claimed there were a few, but nobody ever saw one. It was said that former baseball slugger Reggie Jackson lived around here but it was widely believed that by now he'd turned white.

Winnie elbowed a space for himself at the bar next to a guy who was doing well just to hang on. The guy was very tall, wore an auburn toupee, and was swaying like a palm tree in big wind. He looked pretty old up close, and you could weave a dock line from his gray wiry nose hair.

“Better adjust the horizontal hold, partner,” Winnie said when the guy lurched into him.

“I know you?”

Winnie thought it was the worst rug he'd even seen, especially on a rich guy. “I'm new around here,” he said.

Winnie was delighted when the guy waved to one of the harried bartenders and yelled, “Give my friend a …”

“Polish vodka. On the rocks.”

“Double?”

“Why not?”

When Winnie's drink arrived, the drunk in the funny red rug said, “You won't like it here. Superficial. Everybody's superficial.”

“Well, superficiality's only skin deep,” Winnie said, standing on tiptoes, unable to spot her among the murky mob of drinkers.

“Look at the lizards slithering in,” the guy said disgustedly. “Here to ferret out some lonely old broad before she gets Alzheimer's so bad her lawyer has to slam a lid on the money box. This is the night of the lizard. Drinks're cheap. Grab-a-granny night, we call it.” Then the tall drunk took a closer look at Winnie, swayed to starboard, and said, “Wait a minute.
You
a lizard? Naw, you don't look like one.”

Winnie caught him in midstagger and said, “You filed a flight plan?”

“
Another
drink for my friend!” the guy said to the bartender, who nodded and took an order for thirteen drinks from a perspiring waitress as the roar of the crowd increased in direct relation to the decibel level of the band playing in the other room.

“Anyway,” Winnie's sponsor continued, “you're new, so you can hook your wagon to a star. Or your bumper hitch to a hearse. Some old broad with lips like wet clay and a house done in graveyard marble.”

“I'm sorta always hooking my wagon to a wagon, is my problem,” Winnie said.

Then the drunk pointed to a booth full of hot mommas on the upper level. They were sleek and slim and expensive, like Tess Binder. Women her age. Even across the room Winnie could see they were all looking for something.

“Stay away from
them
,” the guy said.

“Who they waiting for?”

“Not guys like you. F.F.H. rich, not just seven-one-four rich.”

“Excuse me?”

“I tell you, stay away from
those
broads! None of them ever had an orgasm unless it happened on shop-till-you-drop day at South Coast Plaza. If local paramedics have to learn lifesaving liposuction it's because of
them.
Conversation? They could trivialize trivia.”

While Winnie Farlowe was watching
them
, Tess Binder strolled into the jammed barroom, walked directly toward
them
, kissed one of them on the cheek and sat down at their table.

“Do you know
that
one?” Winnie asked the tall drunk.

The guy swayed again, looked over the heads of the crowd at Tess Binder and said, “No, but they're interchangeable. Choosing between any two of them's like choosing between Iran and Iraq.”

Two minutes later Winnie was standing at the booth full of hot mommas. Corky Peebles, in a torso-hugging cotton turtleneck, took a sniff but passed. She knew poverty when she smelled it.

“Win!” Tess said, beaming up at him. “Sit. Have a drink.” Then she turned to the other hot mommas and said, “Everyone, this is Win Farlowe.”

Winnie caught a few names, and sat down to hear the end of Rita Fisher's tale of
tragic
divorce, which everyone knew to mean she'd not been able to get Graham Fisher to abrogate the prenuptial agreement.

“... so there I was wandering around Crystal Court,” Rita explained. “Alone. I mean,
really
alone in a crowd. My house on Lido? Gone. Even my birthday present? My five-sixty SL? Gone! Stolen by that barrel of guts! That heartless, three-hundred-pound monster. Him, he's still decimating herds of beef. Me, I'm living on tarragon sprigs!”

Tess said, “You should've put mad money aside every chance you got. Next time, get a secret safety deposit box.”

Rita sighed. “That doesn't work for me. Mad money's harder to keep boxed up than Elvis Presley.”

A few of the women clucked and murmured sympathetically, but Winnie noticed that none of them stopped eyeing the new prospects who passed through the packed lounge in an endless flow.

“I told you, you should never've married that greedy swine!” said the ever-sensitive Corky Peebles. “People like him, and Castro and Qaddafi, and Ted Kennedy, and …” She'd just run out of famous people she hated. “They should all be put in a country where they only have a Sears store to shop in! They should have to live with mall withdrawal forever!”

It was clearly the worst fate that Corky Peebles could wish on another human being.

“After a while the need to shop sort of goes in remission,” Tess consoled. Then she turned to Winnie and said, “Shall we go to dinner?”

As Winnie and Tess pushed through the crowd and got to the door, the drunk in the red rug was boozier yet. He was sharing the door table with a dog-eyed hot momma so thin you could pick her up like a beer mug, by her collar bones. He was saying to her: “Grow old along with me! The best is
yet
to be! That's Robert Browning.”

The skinny momma, her silicone bursting out of a creamy pink silk blouse, had just eyeballed better pickings in the form of a rollicking up-and-coming mortgage banker. She jumped up and said, “Mister Browning was correct
only
if you have a personal trainer, a good cosmetic surgeon and a great portfolio. Bye-bye, darling.”

The disgusted drunk spotted Winnie leaving with Tess Binder and cried out, “Don't think
yours
is any different! They're so predictable! An organ grinder shows you more variety! Their natural inclination is toward spike heels with ankle straps and fishnet stockings! Don't be fooled, my friend! Hookers!
All
of them!”