Money for Nothing (16 page)

"Hi," Josh said. "You free?"

"Well, I'm reasonable," she said. "Hop in."

They did, and Robbie said, "We'd like Sandy Drive off Sands Point Road the other side of Manorhaven. Not Sandy Road or Sandy Lane." So why had Josh made all those notes?

"Sandy Drive, I know exactly where you mean." There was no meter in the cab. "That's seven dollars," she said.

Josh bet it wasn't seven dollars, not really, not for a local, but Robbie said, "Fine," and the woman started the Chrysler engine, which coughed a lot.

As they drove through town, stopping at a red light, the woman said, "What you boys doin' up there?"

Josh was trying to think of some story to make up, but Robbie said, "We're going up to Mrs. Rheingold's place."

Interested, the woman looked at them in her rearview mirror, then drove forward through the green light, saying, "Really? They hirin' again up there? Been quite a while. Got all those foreigners up there."

Robbie said, "You know the place, do you?"

"Oh, that's just the saddest story," she said.

Robbie slid forward to rest his forearms on the front seatback, near her large head with all the fuzzy gray hair. "Really?" he said. "I
love
sad stories. Tell."

"Well, old Mrs. Rheingold," the cabby said, "she must be ninety, maybe even more. She was one of the Caissens, old-time family around here, you know. Early settlers. Daughtered out."

"That's tough," Robbie said.

"She was the last. Miriam? Something like that. Her mom and dad both died in the 1917 flu epidemic, when she was just a little girl. She was brought up, in the big estate there, by some old aunts and people, kept dying off."

"Wow," Robbie said.

"They saw to it she had her schooling, though," the cabby assured them. "Bryn Mawr and all that. Then she met
him
."

Robbie said, "I
thought
it was gonna be like that."

"Just like that," the cabby said. "Jock Rheingold. A Dartmouth man, but it seemed as though it might be all right."

"Oh oh," Robbie said.

"Well, they got married," the cabby said, "just around the time the last of her aunts expired, leaving her the absolute last Caissen, and not even a Caissen anymore but a Rheingold."

"Daughtered out," Robbie said, and Josh suspected Robbie had repeated that because he'd just now figured out what it meant.

"But that wasn't the worst," the cabby said. "There were rumors about Jock Rheingold from the beginning—"

"But she was in love," Robbie said.

"You know it. He claimed he was a bond salesman down in New York, but there were rumors about dealings in New Jersey, whispers that bonds weren't where he made his living at all."

"He wasn't a" — Robbie was twitching all over in his excitement — "wasn't a
bootlegger
, was he?"

"No no, nothing like that," the cabby said, and Josh knew he and Robbie had both leaped ahead to a Gatsby finish. But it was to be something else.

"Well, then what?" Robbie asked her.

"A developer," she said. "Over there in Jersey, he was putting up all those little houses you see, all look alike, one right after the other, no idea
who
lives in those places."

"Exactly," Robbie said.

"Well, he wasn't doing it around
here
," she said, "you could say that much for him. But others were. You see what we're driving through."

Josh said, "I think the town planners call it 'mixed use.'"

"Very mixed, you ask me," the cabby said. "Anyway, when the truth came out, it just broke Miriam Caissen's heart, or Mrs. Rheingold, as she knew she had to be known the rest of her life. How could she hold her head up ever again in the community she was born into, sharing her bed with a developer? A fellow bringing in who knows who, everybody cheek by jowl, no discrimination at all."

"Exactly," Robbie said.

"She had no choice, really," the cabby said. "She had to divorce him."

"Absolutely," Robbie said.

"But he brought in some very slick lawyers from New York," she said, "or maybe even from New Jersey."

"Wow," Robbie said.

"At the end of the day," the cabby said, turning left onto Sandy Drive, "Jock Rheingold wound up with a
huge
settlement."

"The cad," Robbie said.

"That's right," the cabby agreed. "She got to keep the big house, and the antiques, and most of the cash, but he got half the property." Pointing off to the right, she said, "You see what he did with it."

Boxy Cape Cod houses in pastels marched away in rows to the right, on a squared-off grid of blacktop, like a minimum security prison. The development was old, and had not aged well. Over the years, people had put additions onto the original tiny boxes on their tiny lots, filling the eye with planned uniformity overlaid by unplanned clutter.

Robbie said, "
He
did that?" He sounded awed.

"That was all Caissen land," the cabby said, "the part she lost to him in the divorce. And that's what he did with it. For revenge, some say."

"Wow," Robbie said.

Pointing again, the cabby said, "And that's her wall."

A gray stone wall that had to be twelve feet high marched along beside the final row of little houses. Robbie said, "
She
did that?"

"So she'd never have to see the desecration of her land," the cabby explained. "And became a hermit for the rest of her life. Still up in there, ninety-something years old."

"Wow," Robbie said. "What happened to
him
?"

"Died in prison," she said.

"No!"

"Yes. Went to prison for bribing congressmen, all about some more development over in Jersey. Got stuck with one of those homemade knives they make in prisons. Shivs, they call them."

"That's what I've heard," Robbie said.

"Here's where you're headed," the cabby said, and pulled to a stop at a tall iron gate flanked by tall brick gateposts, just where that high stone wall stopped at Sandy Drive.

"What a story," Robbie told her.

The cabby shook her head. "Wealth," she said. "Greed. Property. I'm glad
I'm
not rich. That'll be seven dollars."

STANDING IN FRONT OF THE closed gate, with the cabby's story fresh in their minds, it was easy for them to see the history of the place in the layout. These high square brick gateposts, topped by gray stone balls, were surely the original entrance markers to the Caissen estate, which would have stretched from left to right, west to east, from Sandy Drive north to Long Island Sound. Originally, the gate itself would have been much less imposing, with possibly even a gatehouse, and a simple stone wall along the road.

Once Miriam Caissen had been unlucky in love, however, and the court, using the same Solomon precedent they always do, had split the baby in half, everything to the right of the gateposts had been lost to the estate and turned into that warren of the working class. The original stone wall along the road, which was the obviously older workmanship up to about three feet, had been heightened to seven feet and topped with broken glass embedded into concrete, while the monster wall along the dividing line had been made tall enough to keep out not only interlopers but the very view itself.

The only place to see inside the estate property was through the iron bars of the gate, where a neat crushed-stone road led at an oblique angle to the left, inward through very messy underbrush and crowded-together small pine trees and scrubby bushes and interweaving vines. It all looked neglected and overgrown, and no building could be seen back in there, nor any other sign of human occupancy except the road itself.

"Let's see what's down at the other corner," Josh said, so they started to walk along beside the glass-topped stone wall, which was, as the fellow at Mailboxes-R-Us had described, pockmarked with hostile signs: Keep Out. No Trespassing. Private Property.

They walked quite a while next to all this disapprobation, and then abruptly the stone wall made a right turn and streamed away north, over a gentle slope. Beyond it, along the road, was suddenly a much gentler fence, three strings of black wire stretched above a low and crumbling old stone wall. "The neighbor," Josh said.

"The land Mrs. Caissen never did own," Robbie said.

They walked a while beside this new fence, seeing beyond it neat parkland, specimen trees, ornamental statuary and curving blacktop paths, but no people. Then they did see someone; or actually two people. Both were middle-aged white men, seated side by side on a golf cart puttering along one of the blacktop paths at a point where it briefly angled closer to the road in order to meander around a spreading beach plum. The men were in almost identical business attire of dark suit, white shirt, dark blue figured necktie, and black oxfords. They would have looked perfectly normal, except that they were seated side by side on that traveling settee, and that both wore Day-Glo orange baseball caps with Day-Glo green
CC
emblazoned on the front.

Josh and Robbie stopped to take in this apparition, just at the moment when the two men noticed them in return. Simultaneously, they offered big smiles and big round waves; the same wave, synchronized, like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, scootering through Wonderland. Josh and Robbie waved back — what else would you do? — and then the blacktop curved the men away, and off they went, out of sight among the varied plantings.

Josh said, "What the heck was
that
?"

"Something new under the sun," Robbie suggested. "Let's go see."

They continued to walk, and as they went they saw a few other golf carts, all at a greater distance, all with their complement of two business-suited orange-topped white men aboard. Then, even farther back, they saw a group of maybe a dozen such men, strolling along in animated conversation.

And here was the entrance, a broad white concrete sculpture, ten feet high, of hands with their fingertips meeting, in the symbol of making a steeple. Between the spread-apart palms was the entrance drive, and way back in there was what looked very like the plantation from
Gone With the Wind
. An elaborate billboard on posts beside the entrance, featuring the make-a-steeple hands in all four corners, read, in large green letters on a white background,
CHRISTIAN CAPITALISM
, and in smaller green letters beneath, "A Retreat
To
, Not
From
."

A bright orange bar was down across the entrance, between the hands, with a guardshack containing a brown-uniformed guard just inside it to the left. The guard, air-conditioned within his glass booth, was reading a magazine, and didn't look up as they neared, since he was programmed to respond only to automobiles.

So, from east to west, this side of Sandy Drive consisted first of Revenge Estates, then the remaining half of Mrs. Rheingold's property, then these beanied capitalists in their parkland. What an odd pair of neighbors Mrs. Rheingold was tucked between; if an estate, even half an estate, can be tucked.

Robbie grabbed Josh's forearm: "We go back."

"You've got an idea?"

"We just do it," Robbie said.

As they walked, returning toward the more imposing wall that surrounded the Rheingold property, they saw more of the traveling pairs of orange-topped men and another group of the strollers. "Something like a monastery," Josh suggested.

"I bet it's tax deductible," Robbie said. "And the thing is, except for the hats, we could just go in there and mingle."

"Are we going in there?"

"I think so. Let's check out the security."

Josh didn't see any security to speak of, just the three iron wires above the old stone wall, but he walked along with Robbie, and when they got to the juncture of the two properties, where Rheingold's wall undulated north, Robbie bent to study the post holding the wires. Josh watched the sparse traffic on Sandy Drive — mostly service-related, he noticed, plumbers and furniture store vans and diaper services — and then Robbie said, "Ah hah. I thought so."

Josh looked at him. "You thought what?"

"Where there are capitalists," Robbie told him, "even Christian capitalists, there will be paranoia." Pointing at the post, he said, "Electric eye; see it?"

Josh bent and did, the steady small amber light beam at just about five feet above the ground. "That wouldn't be easy to step over," he said.

"Under," Robbie told him. "There's room between the beam and the top of the stone."

Josh looked out at the road; no delivery trucks, no repairmen. "Try it," he said. "I'll watch your back."

"You don't have to get melodramatic about it," Robbie told him, as though
he
didn't.

Pretending patience, Josh said, "What I meant was, I'll watch to see if the light shows up on your back."

"Oh, sorry." Robbie grinned. "Good idea. I'll do the same for you." And he dropped to his knees like a penitent, to crawl through.

Neither of them broke the beam.

THE MEANDERING BLACKTOP PATHS where the golf carts roamed didn't extend to this extreme end of the Christian capitalists' land, so they were alone as they walked beside Mrs. Rheingold's wall, which remained too tall to look over, but with continuing glints of broken glass along the top. After a minute, Robbie said, "You know, the law is, private property owners can't block a beach, so this wall has to stop before it gets there."

"If there's a beach," Josh said.

"Well, a waterline," Robbie said. "The point is, the wall has to stop before it reaches the water, so then we can just walk around the end of it. What do you think of that?"

"I think it sounds too easy," Josh said.

"Me, too," Robbie said, and stopped. "I just have to see in there. Give me a boost, will you?"

"You can't go over, not with that glass."

"Not over, just up. So I can see inside."

"Fine."

So Josh stooped and made a stirrup of his cupped hands. Robbie put a foot in the stirrup, a bracing hand on Josh's shoulder, and Josh straightened, lifting Robbie high enough to rest his forearms carefully on the top of the wall and look at Mrs. Rheingold's hermitage.