by Burton Hersh
“Looks like second-degree breaking and entering,” Sonny said. “What do the bedrooms look like?” We trudged through, checking out the master bedroom suite and Mother’s combination gallery and sitting room. “Whoever did this never got this far,” Sonny said. “I do this kind of entry a lot. Line of duty.”
Sonny checked the night-table drawer. “Usually burglars start in the bedrooms. Heirloom jewelry, cash stashed under the handkerchiefs. They want a quick payoff in case they get interrupted. Even without that -- I would see the footprints.”
“How? On polished tile?”
“You track enough, it’s almost like a shadow. On anything – a grain field where a buck went through, hairs under a leaf--” Sonny steepled his long, muscular fingers. “You have to start with, what was he after? Then work back. You’d have to think the forensic guys will pick up on something. Maybe even a shred of DNA their little vacuums catch, skin. Might have scraped off while he was dragging on that pinch-bar.”
“I think,” I said, “I had better wait before we get the authorities involved.” I had a premonition, an ugly one. “My father will definitely want to be in on this. He’s getting back over the weekend.”
“Don’t want to let the trail cool, ever” Sonny advised.
Max had been looking on, saturnine, brow rumpled. “This gentleman is definitely correct,” he said suddenly. “Why your pa want to come home to this? You ain’t got to worry about no problems with him. He gonna be overjoyed you get this foolishness under control.”
“Still, we’re going to wait.” I was surprising myself. “Leave everything the way it is. Let’s see whether he can figure it out.”
* * *
I let Dad know about the break-in while he was still at Heathrow. I offered to pick the place up but, as I anticipated, he preferred to look around for himself. The trick was going to be to protect Mother – stretches on the airplane tended to leave her very stiff, her usual regimen of corticosteroids and diuretics wasn’t really enough. But she loved Europe – their friends in Europe – and bore up cheerfully. Cheerfully, but drained. Dad wouldn’t have confided in her about any prowler. It would have affronted her to think their privacy could be so violated.
We got together for lunch on the esplanade of pavers beneath a huge blue umbrella outside one of those up-market restaurants on Beach Drive across from the museum. The sailboat harborage vis-a-vis was visible between the stupendous – prehistoric -- banyan trees that dominated the park, profoundly sculpted and exploding tendrils and alive just then with squirmy little children, black and white, hanging upside-down and shrugging their way along the lower boughs.
“This place is definitely looking up,” Dad opened. “We’re starting to have Avenues. Like Paris.”
Our wine arrived; I asked for a bleu-cheese cheeseburger and Dad wanted the smoked salmon plate. Dad seemed a little fatigued still from his trip, almost pasty and noticeably popeyed. “Are you OK?” I asked him after we clinked glasses.
“Riding airplanes is death. Then there’s the ordeal of following your mother all over Mayfair, from gallery to gallery, while she tries to hunt down the perfect additions to her collection. What she’s after, obviously, is pornography. Except refined pornography, and only by geniuses. She’s still secretly enchanted with sex. Which bucks me up, long-term.”
“You two are hopeless.”
“We’re degenerates. Probably Hitler was right. In the New Order men should die young in wars and women should pull plows. No energy for hanky-panky.”
“How did the research go?”
“Mostly a waste of time. The editor the publisher planted on my neck agonizes day and night over cockamamie legal issues. She wants at least three verifying documents for every reference to Keynes’ homosexuality, for example. The fact is, Keynes was a perennial mama’s boy and a polished charmer who liked to boast in his diaries about his conquests. He seems to have tangled assholes with just about every male cutie from Duncan Grant to Lytton Strachey. Old news, except to my editor. I tracked down source notes behind a piece in The Economist that authenticates every single smear on the old boy’s bedsheets.
“The best thing that happened was that I ran into a don in Cambridge who agreed to critique in advance my chapter on probability theory. That stuff gets abstruse. For me, at least.”
We drank more wine. “We’ll have to deal with the break-in,” Dad acknowledged after a long swallow. “Max really had the jitters. I calmed him down and went all over the place myself.”
“We think your discount-house alarm system scared the guy off.”
“I beg your pardon. I got that thing at Radio Shack. Top of the line.” Dad smacked his lips. “Who would this ‘we’ be? Max told me you had somebody with you.”
“That was the kid brother of that Indian woman I told you about. He’s in the military. He was a lot of help. Sonny.”
“That’s his name, Sonny?”
“It’s actually Buffalo Hump, but when he signs like that it invalidates his credit card.”
“I see.” Dad let his eyes roll into his head. “And you were where when all this transpired? He found the mayhem the guy left early in the morning, Max says.”
“I was…with Linda. Our tenant.”
“Hmmm. One night stand? You know that sort of thing is fraught with peril. Tenants tend to rat you out to the rental authorities.”
“You’re missing the point. The thing was largely spiritual. Closer to transcendental meditation. Out-of-body.”
“Well, my diagnosis is, either you’re starting to grow up or you’re losing your marbles.”
“Both, I hope. I never felt better.”
Our entrees arrived.
Dad’s salmon had been scrolled into a cone on a leaf of lettuce. He unscrolled a couple of inches onto a crisp of toast daubed up with cream cheese and chives after brushing the capers aside. Dad didn’t like capers.
“Sonny has some police experience,” I said while Dad chewed. “He thought the whole thing wasn’t particularly professional.”
“The break-in? Probably not.” Dad patted the crumbs off his lip with his napkin. “I have a feeling the bastard got what he was after.”
“Which was?”
“Legal papers. Whoever broke into the files cleaned out all my copies of everything that pertained to any kind of financial arrangements. Wills. Trusts going back a couple of generations in your mother’s family. Our mortgage here. That inch-thick packet of documents Prescott Wallaye came up with when we got tangled up with Ricky’s mishpokhe in Miami.” Dad raised his thick, grizzled eyebrows.
Wallaye, a shrewd, laid-back deal specialist, did our corporation’s legal work in Florida. “You think it might have something to do with that?” I asked.
“It could have. Nobody was after finesse, maybe they were sending a message.”
“And that would be?”
“Leave well enough alone.” Dad took a swig of the house white. “Maybe somebody got wind of the fact that we just might renege on our participation in those collateralized bonds and turned out not to be too crazy about the idea.” Dad was examining me, closely.
“OK,” I said finally. “Carol had Wendy and Rick and me over last Tuesday for bratwurst and the hedge fund business came up. I think I indicated that we might have to – you know – sort of reconsider.”
“Sometimes you’re a lox.” Dad said, and grinned. “Too much integrity. You keep this up, they’re likely to drum you out of the legal profession.” Dad took a little more salmon. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said.
“You’re not wrong. One thing Sonny picked up on was the fact that whoever broke in was big and powerful and had a bum left leg.”
Dad nodded. “Rick, is what you’re thinking?”
“It makes a certain amount of sense. He knows his way around the place.”
“Except that – Jesus – he’s in our family now. We have to consider Wendy. They might be depending on that as cheap insurance. It’s an edifying picture – E
nrique in some lockup and Wendy dropping by in those short short shorts of hers on visitors’ day.”
“That could be calculated too,” I said. “Incitement to riot.” I’d taken maybe one bite out of my cheeseburger, but now I had no appetite. “What I don’t understand is what would be the point of the exercise? Other people would have copies of all those papers. Wallaye, certainly.”
“Probably it was largely a gesture,” Dad said. “A shot across the bow.”
8
Dad paid the bill and asked me to get over to Wallaye’s office ASAP and ask for double printouts of everything his firm had prepared for us since we’d showed up in town. I had a brief due later in the week, and I needed the rest of the afternoon to work on the discovery. Tomorrow would be soon enough to drop by Wallaye’s building. I went back to the office and plowed through background details until after five. I’d left it with Linda Meadows that I would pick her up for dinner at Muldavey Court around 5:30.
This was to constitute, I suppose, our second date. I was at a loss for protocol. What is the appropriate follow-up to a hallucinogenic orgy? Bare tit? What could we pick things up by? I remember standing there holding a bottle of good vermouth in a paper bag and my knees starting to tremble the moment Penelope greeted me with that low, resonant yip. I waited for the door to open.
Linda was wearing a dress, colored medallions on cotton. It was mildly décollete. A necklace strung with what turned out to be very large elk’s teeth lay along her prominent collarbone.
“All dressed up,” I said, and regretted that immediately. We sat down.
“I didn’t think you would call or anything.”
“How could I not call? The woman who saved me from terminal depression?” My untrustworthy sinuses were kicking up, and I needed to blow my nose.
“I thought, you know, that was too much for you the other night. First too much beer, and after that the vision quest….”
“The peyote. I loved it. Also, I hated it, but wasn’t I supposed to? What I keep remembering is you. Straddling me like that.”
Linda’s canted black eyes, examining me, seemed to be waiting for some signal. She tossed her mane. “Maybe it’s me can’t handle it. Why are you sniffing like that?”
“Pollens. Dust. Nothing unusual.”
She crossed over to her bedside table and felt for a small bottle and opened it and came back. She shook the bottle a few times and handed it to me.
“What’s this for?”
“Powdered sneezeweed. My mother is a puhakut, an eagle doctor. Medicine woman. Take a few breaths of this and you will be OK.”
I sniffed. There was a mild stinging; slowly my sinuses cleared. “What can’t you deal with?” I said.
“You. You’re my first white. I want you, but how do I come out? Afterward?”
“What did you have in mind? A treaty?” Penelope had started to lick my ankle.
“I don’t know nothing about treaties. Except – we keep signing treaties, and look how it is now.”
“It could be worse. Sonny seems to be doing all right.”
“Sonny is going to die pretty soon fighting the white man’s wars.”
“You’re pretty sure of that?”
“His ghost comes and tells me that sometimes in the night.”
“Heavy,” I said. “I need to use the john.”
Inside the john I flicked the switch and the dusty little dome light over the medicine cabinet came on and half-a-dozen cockroaches skittered to escape. I took a little while. Pissing can be quite a project through a semi-hard-on. Once I had done what I could I turned the light off and rejoined Linda.
“Pretty nasty in there, right?” Linda wanted to know immediately.
“It definitely needs renovation. Scored wallboard around the shower stall. Invites mildew. Blame the landlord.”
“You saw the cucarachas?”
“Palmetto Bugs? They’re Florida’s state mascot.”
Linda bent to kiss me, very lightly, on the lips.
“What happened to what’s-her-name? The lizard. Your best friend. She seems to be falling down on the job.”
“Isabella-Yearns-For-Water? She decided it was time to move on. One afternoon she sat there looking at Penelope, and Penelope looks at Isabella, and Isabella pledges her soul.”
“I’m not sure—
“Penelope ate Isabella,” Linda said. “It was her nature.”
I withdrew the vermouth from the paper bag and proposed a toast to Isabella’s sacrifice. Linda produced a pair of tumblers and some tiny cubes of ice from a tray in her little refrigerator and we worked on the vermouth for a while. Neither of us had much to say. After a few minutes Linda stood up and pulled closed the curtain on the window that looked out on the landing. Then she sat down and smiled at me and poured herself another vermouth.
After a few moments more I said: “What do you think.”
“What I think? I think what you think. Un poco loco, both of us. You tease me like a boy. Shy, always so shy. When does the fucking start?”
Our clothes dropped off of us, although Linda retained the necklace. Her body in open daylight had an old-fashioned impact I had never quite experienced before. The weight – the gravity – of her unencumbered breasts with their big, expanding aureoles and her massive pubic triangle concentrated for me exactly what Mother’s wildest picture selections were about. Woman! It had become fashionable among the girls I dated to shave the pubis, the easier for the fingers of their dates halfway into a movie to navigate toward the more responsive corners. Linda had remained untouched, her wooly black sporran initially concealing, then more and more exposing glimpses of an extraordinary fullness, swollen fold inside fold for me to explore and enrich. Stretched out alongside each other on the futon we groped and fondled, stroked, kissed deeply and licked each other’s ears.
Her thighs opened and I was about to enter her when I heard her whispering something. “The best thing is,” she was whispering, “ to travel as wide as we can stand it first underneath the buffalo robe.” I stopped. “Even Penelope can tell how you are somebody who understands a woman’s needs….”
Penelope was chewing lightly on my big toe. “You want me – I’d better take the scenic route—“
I doubled back down and fell to as requested. I remembered the yeasts, but now there was a sweetness, a sharp whiff of the ammonias of birth to oil her slippery stiffening bud, her swollen labia the taste of which was starting to befuddle me.
Man and boy I had experienced my share of head. This was an exotic dimension. Her rough dimpled tongue continually worked its way around my frenulum, she understood just when and how to modulate the suction to keep me on the ecstatic edge of climax without quite pulling me over. When she had had enough she let me know and shrugged back and I rolled up and lost myself in liquescence as she began to buck into orgasm; this stampeded us both to where she intended to finish all along. We both collapsed slowly after an agonizing last volley. Penelope was after my backside; I could barely catch my breath.
“Injun good time,” Linda breathed, and kissed my nose. “You like?”
“I definitely like”
“Why do you frown?”
“I just hope neither of us got Penelope pregnant.”
That night we ate the duck special at The Brasserie on Central. I stayed over. Sonny, Linda confided, was bivouacked now with a buddy from the 113 Cavalry in Clearwater.
* * *
The futon was small; around three we bumped each other awake and slipped into another groggy round. I woke up again a few minutes after seven and Linda made coffee and it was well after eight before I got a shower and dressed and descended the plank staircase to my BMW. I was pretty sure Wallaye’s office was open by then. It was no more than six or eight blocks away, just north of Central.
I heard the racket before I could see the offices. Squad cars were lined up halfway around the block, several with their sirens wailing. The building itself was on a corner, a low, solid-lookin
g structure of white painted, deeply pointed brick that might have been the overseer’s residence on an anti-bellum plantation. There was a sweeping veranda on both the street sides with high double-hung windows, a number of which had been blown out. Black smoke was billowing out everywhere.
I parked as close as the cops would let me and joined the mob outside. Prescott Wallaye -- a tall, youthful-seeming man in his early fifties with a big debonair crest of graying hair and a lot of the misleading Southern politesse that made you wonder much of the time whether he quite caught the gist – Wallaye stood there exchanging pleasantries with a couple of the local police and a thick-set fellow in a brimmed hat. I hailed Wallaye, who introduced me as a client of his firm to the man in the hat. He was Special Agent in Charge Vincent Hardagon from the Tampa field office of the FBI.
“What happened?” I asked Special Agent Hardagon. We were exchanging cards.
“Hahd tellin’, not knowin,” Hardagon said. He was obviously from the badlands of Greater Boston. “It ain’t malicious mischief, you can bet your ass on that. I’m just droppin’ by until the goonsquad from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms shows up to dust for prints,” He forced an Irish grin, a rictus of exceedingly thin lips around teeth so white they looked artificial.
“Somebody set a fire?”
“Somebody blew a safe.”
“We had this enormous antique document safe we kept our duplicates in,” Prescott Wallaye said. I remembered the safe; a vast beige crackle-finished Victorian relic on iron casters with pocked-chromium rod handles hanging down beside the tumbler. It had presided over the bullpen in which Wallaye’s perky assistants in their tropical frocks labored desk by desk at their outdated computers. The rest I could already feel in my gut.
“They took everything?” I asked.
“There wasn’t a hellova lot left to take, Bud,” Hardagon said. “A lot of the safe wound up in the can. Quite a detonation. Our own explosives guy has come and went. Some kind of limpet mine or something, he thinks. Prick knew his business. One of those shaped charges.”