Mink Eyes

by Dan Flanigan

  Kelly’s brow furrowed, and she said, “Mom thinks you drink too much.”

  He said nothing, as if he had not heard her.

  “Do you?” She looked up at him in great earnest.

  “Probably,” he said sadly, but then he smiled that mocking smile, and his eyebrows turned up like the Devil’s. “But at least I don’t take drugs anymore.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  They arrived at O’Keefe’s building. Kelly eagerly rushed to open the door that led from the sidewalk to an interior stairway. There were offices on the second floor above the street-level shops. They climbed the stairs, and she skipped ahead of him down the hallway to a set of walnut-paneled double doors. On the wall next to the doors a brass sign with black etching said, “Peter O’Keefe.” The double doors opened onto a small reception room. An oriental carpet covered the parquet-wood floor. The walls were painted a darker gray. The furniture was modern but comfortable, upholstered in gray and black. Sara, already at work, typed intensely on the word processor.

  “Sara!”

  Kelly ran to Sara’s desk.

  “Hey, Kelly!”

  “Seven-thirty on Saturday morning,” he said. “You trying to make me look bad or what?”

  “I promised you the workup on that fire case for Global Insurance by Monday, remember? And Jarvis’s report on the drug-testing program is on your desk.”

  Kelly asked if she could play on the big computer.

  “Fire it up,” he said. She hustled through a door that led to a hallway off the reception room.

  “Remember,” he said as Kelly left the room, “if she asks, I never carry a gun.”

  Sara moved her fingers across her mouth as if zipping it up. Her nails were painted with clear polish. Her lips were soft and full. She was in her early thirties, but she wore no makeup and did not need to wear any. You would not call her beautiful, or maybe not even pretty, but you would be attracted to her all the same.

  “Is everybody in place? Have you checked?”

  She swiveled around to face the computer screen and clicked the buttons on the keyboard. A list appeared on the screen. The list itemized each assignment, the person assigned, the place, the time. The list was two pages long. Only a few months ago, it had been less than one page. Success, he thought, visually presented.

  “Everybody’s in place but Carter,” she said. “He called in sick.”

  “Saturday morning. Hungover again. As predictable as death. What’s he supposed to be doing?”

  “He’s supposed to relieve George on the Damon Preston watch at nine o’clock.”

  “We haven’t got Preston yet?”

  “No. And Harrigan’s getting pissed about it too. He called about it yesterday.”

  “I don’t blame him. We’re supposed to be such hotshots, but we can’t even deliver a little piece of paper to a big-time deadbeat. We’re getting too big. Don’t let me take any more business.”

  She smiled, because she had heard this many times before.

  “I’m not kidding this time. No kidding. No new business for a month.”

  She gestured around the room. “How are you gonna pay for all this then?”

  He grimaced. You had to keep the pipeline full all the time. You were afraid to turn anything down because if you turned anything down, the pipeline might not stay full, so you took more than you and your people had time to do, and then you hired more people and you leased more space and bought more equipment and furniture. The pipeline got bigger, and then you had to keep that big God-damned pipeline really full all the time. So you were afraid to turn anything down . . . and on and on . . .

  “Can George stay with Preston?”

  “George has had a weekend at the lake scheduled for a month. He says if you screw this one up for him, you can find yourself another gumshoe.”

  “If George had a dollar for every time he’s threatened to quit, he could have retired by now.”

  “How about letting me do it?

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Don’t you think I can handle it?”

  She was deadly serious. He knew what she was thinking: “Why won’t you let me do it? It’s because I’m a woman, isn’t it?” This was a very dangerous moment indeed, for both of them.

  “I thought you were working on that fire case,” he said. This worked. This satisfied her. At least it appeared that way. He had slipped out of the net.

  “George gets off at nine?”

  “Nine.”

  “One more time for Carter. One more time, he’s done. Make a note. Remind me I said that.”

  He turned abruptly and marched into his office with that quickened pace and those long strides that meant he was angry. She knew he would not do anything about Carter until he had worked himself slowly up into a rage, then he would lose his temper, and Carter would be gone. He was a lousy boss when it came to personnel relations. He avoided confrontations with his employees. He tried to lead by example rather than instruction, which just did not work for most people. His employees either met his expectations according to their own devices or they were gone one day all of a sudden, with a craw full of bile and no severance pay. But for people like Sara, he was a prize of a boss. He let her do whatever she was capable of doing—within certain bounds. He had not let her go out on the street yet. That was some sort of residual protective paternalism or whatever it was that still trapped even men of goodwill like him in what they called “male chauvinism.” He told her once that he would not be able to forgive himself if something terrible happened to her.

  O’KEEFE’S OFFICE WAS carpeted in a deep dark gray. A black parson’s table with a high-gloss finish served as his desk. His desk chair was upholstered in black leather and trimmed with mahogany. The chair perched on a thin slab of parquet. A comfortable-looking black couch sat in front of a big picture window that let the sunlight in and afforded him an excellent view of the street. More than once Sara had come to work in the morning and found him sprawled out on that couch because he had worked too long or been too drunk the night before to stagger home from the bar downstairs.

  His desk was fairly clean. To his surprise he had become more neat and orderly as he had grown older. Behind his regular desk was a stand-up desk littered with fire-investigation reports. Over the years he had become an expert in fire cases, but the work no longer interested him, and he was slowly turning it over to Sara, who was picking it up very well. A rueful thought—he was becoming an executive, moving from the doing of work to the supervising of it, from the real to the abstract.

  A built-in mahogany bookcase covered one wall. The books on the shelf included many of the classics, ancient and modern. People who did not know him well refused to believe that he had actually read any of these books. He poured a cup of coffee from the pot that Sara had made and placed it on a warming plate on the credenza. He rummaged through a pile of laser discs, chose one, and inserted it into his disc player. The precise, cool opening of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 filled the room. The sound system had cost him too much but was worth it.

  He sat down at his desk and read Joe Jarvis’s memo on the proposed drug-testing program. Jarvis’s tone was urgent. The country perceived itself to be in crisis. Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign wasn’t cutting it. As always, the crisis would soon pass, making way for a new one. If they failed to move now, it would soon be too late. Jarvis had understated the projected expenses and overstated the projected revenues, but even so, the program would be a money-maker. Employee drug testing would be lucrative and would have the added benefit of giving the firm entree into the big corporations that might hire them for other work as well. There was every reason to do it, but O’Keefe had kept holding back. The word “totalitarian” kept intruding itself into his mind though he knew he was overdramatizing. Another assault on the right to privacy. He didn’t like being part of that. But then, wasn’t he just kidding himself? His success was composed of a series of successful assaults on people�
��s privacy.

  Yet this drug testing seemed different somehow. Urine samples, chemistry, technology. There was nothing in it of the kind of work O’Keefe liked, the lone searcher in solitary quest, using his craft and art to expose the shabby secrets of white-collar cheaters. This Jarvis thing was just chemistry versus the workingman’s piss.

  He wondered whether Jarvis would quit if he failed to approve the drug-testing program. Such a threat lurked between the lines of Jarvis’s memo. Jarvis had been a frustrated plainclothes cop when O’Keefe had found him, a bright, energetic, and thoroughly ruthless man chafing at the restraints that the law and the bureaucracy imposed upon him. O’Keefe had swallowed hard and paid Jarvis the money he asked for, but Jarvis had been an excellent buy. Suddenly O’Keefe had a communication link with the higher echelons of the police force. Jarvis conferred on O’Keefe’s whole operation a new aura of legitimacy. Before Jarvis, O’Keefe was thought of as, at best, a lucky amateur. After Jarvis, the agency was considered highly professional, and a steady stream of referrals began to flow from the police department itself.

  It would not be very long before Jarvis figured out that he could take his show on the road and start his own agency. To keep him, O’Keefe would have to give him a piece of the action. Harrigan would draw up a generous contract. The first few paragraphs of the contract would graciously bestow on Jarvis more money, more power, but, toward the end of the document, there would be a clause preventing Jarvis from competing against O’Keefe for a period of three years after leaving O’Keefe’s employment. Jarvis might negotiate a bit, but it would end up no less than a two-year noncompete. The carrot—pay the man so much money that it would be a serious gamble for him to go out on his own and risk his lifestyle. The stick—if he goes out on his own, he’s on ice for two years. If he tries to compete with you during that two-year period, the massed power of the state will intervene at your beck and call to restrain him, enjoin him, and seize every nickel he makes.

  Another thought full of rue. There he was, drinking his coffee and listening to Bach while he devised ways to manacle Jarvis in economic chains. Little lines, external manifestations of his inner shame, formed under and around his eyes. But business was business. Meanwhile, he would have to keep Jarvis, tinhorn dictator that he was, smug little know-it-all that he was, from running off the rest of the employees. George was already fed up with Jarvis, and Sara was not far behind George.

  So it was a problem to keep Jarvis and a problem to let him go. But you had to keep the pipeline full. O’Keefe wrote “Go for it” on Jarvis’s memo and called Sara to tell her to schedule an appointment with the banker on Monday. He would have to borrow more to get the drug-testing program going.

  Kelly came in and turned up her nose at the music.

  “How about Madonna?” she said.

  “We listened to that all night last night.”

  Bored, she plopped onto the couch and slumped down in it, her whole body a pout.

  “Sara says you might be taking me home early?”

  “Yeah, I have to. I’m sorry. Somebody didn’t show up today, and I have to take his place.”

  “Will it be dangerous?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “Why can’t I go with you?”

  “Because you’d be bored worse even than you are right now just sitting in the van all day waiting for a man to come out of a hotel.”

  “We were supposed to go to the movies tonight.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be finished in time. If I am, I’ll come and pick you up.”

  She did not cry. She hardly ever cried anymore. She just got up from the couch and said, “I’m gonna go talk to Sara,” and left him alone with his guilt.

  He picked up the telephone and dialed his former wife’s number.

  “Somebody didn’t show up, and I’m the only one who can fill in. I’ll have to bring her home.”

  “What’s new? Nothing ever changes with you. What if I have something to do?”

  “Do you?”

  “No, but what if I did?”

  “If I get done early enough, I’ll come by and take her out tonight.”

  “No. I don’t want her mooning around all day waiting for you and then have you not show up.”

  Years of disappointment and perceived betrayal envenomed her voice.

  “I’m on my way,” he said and abruptly hung up the phone.

  They hardly talked in the van on the way home, her disappointment in him too much for both of them. If it had been a year ago, this would have been time for her to beg him to come back home to live. Now she just sat there in a sullen stupor, looking out the window. He wanted to be angry, but his pity for her overcame his anger. Tears welled up behind his eyes.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She hesitated for a moment and then said, “I love you too, Dad,” and kept looking out the window at nothing in particular.

  CHAPTER 3

  GEORGE NOVAK SAT reading a detective novel in a coffee shop across the street from the Excelsior Hotel. This reading on duty was a bad habit he had picked up from his boss, Peter O’Keefe. O’Keefe seemed to be able to read his damn book and still be able to sense everything that was going on around him. George had a harder time. Once or twice he had become so absorbed in the novel he was reading that the subject had flown the coop, walked out of the building right in front of George, who had not even noticed. Just now O’Keefe had pulled up in his van, gotten out, and started walking toward the coffee shop before George had even seen him. Shit, maybe Preston had checked out, hailed a taxi, and blithely rolled away while George was slavering over the scene where the detective finally got to hit the sack with his beautiful client.

  “You ought to read poetry,” O’Keefe had told him. “Not that hard-on stuff you read. Read something that won’t absorb your limited mind so much.”

  “Poetry! Poetry, my ass!” he had replied.

  This reading was an addiction, he thought, like drinking coffee or smoking cigarettes. He vowed once again never to read on duty.

  George had not seen O’Keefe for many days. A rush of bubbling, warm affection surged up from his heart to his shoulders and through his neck to his head. They had known each other since kindergarten. They had been altar boys together, solemn and efficient as they glided about the altar in their starched white surplices and shiny black cassocks, performing the ancient ritual of Holy Mass. George was grateful to O’Keefe for rescuing him from that eternally cruising patrol car and the boneheaded partner and the belligerent, puking drunks and the domestic brawls, to say nothing of the spit-and-polish military bullshit that uniformed officers had to endure. But he was less and less grateful as time went on. It had been great working with O’Keefe until O’Keefe had started buying computers, until he had hired that insufferable little prick Jarvis.

  Surely—George was quite sure of it—all of that made the O’Keefe George had known nearly all his life pretty miserable as well. Although O’Keefe was his boss, George envied nothing O’Keefe had except his van and his good looks. O’Keefe and their old grade-school pal Harrigan (and Harrigan was even worse than O’Keefe) had always suffered from the same disease—too much brain power for their own good. Just too damn serious. Christ, as kids they had wanted to be priests. Every month they had changed their minds about what priestly order they intended to join. One week it would be some outfit doing missionary work with the heathen Chinese; the next week it would be that monastery down South where those dumb sonuvabitches spent their whole lives scrubbing floors and not talking to each other. And then that deal of theirs about being modern knights in search of the Holy Grail, whatever that was.

  George scrambled to hide the detective novel only after O’Keefe had already come into the coffee shop and was looking straight at him. As was usual with O’Keefe, there were no niceties. He got right down to business.

  “Why can’t we get this guy, George?”

  “Well, ‘Hello’ to you too, and shit if I know. I
t’s like the sonuvabitch was blessed or something. I was one step behind him all last night. For a while he was at a bar down the street here. Gigi’s. You know Gigi’s, don’t you?” he asked, winking as he did.

  “Yeah,” George continued. “Where all the slightly higher-class hookers go who haven’t scored by midnight. For what it’s worth, Preston liked the lady bartender’s action. Fabulous tits.”

  “I get the picture, George.”

  “In short, Pete, this Preston is a tit man all the way. Smooth old fucker too. But the lady bartender told me she took a rain check on his ball game, and he went away. I got here just after he’d gone inside the hotel here. And guess what he went in with? A hooker on each arm, according to the night bellman. I repeat, Peter—each arm. You understand French? A may-nage for Christ’s sake. You ever done a may-nage? Ever been the meat in the sandwich, boy? Indescribably delicious.”

  George pointed to the dirty pavement outside the coffee shop. “So, while I’m standing out there all night feeding quarters to the winos and waiting for this pissant coffee shop to open up, he’s up there sandwiched between those two hookers. Who says crime don’t pay?”

  “Who’re you taking to the lake?”

  “Guess.”

  O’Keefe shook his head “no.”

  “Some kind of detective you are, O’Keefe. Why, the lady bartender, of course. So save your breath, Boss. Nothing can deter me from that, not even the fun of following this old goat-fucker around.”

  George hesitated for a moment before he continued. Sometimes you had to watch what you said to O’Keefe.

  “You’re about due for some time on the street anyway. You can forget what it’s all about back there in the office, playing executive with that dipshit Jarvis.”

  “Somebody’s got to sign your paychecks, George.”

  George snorted his contempt through his nose.

  “You ought to come see us sometime, George. People think you don’t work there anymore. What’s this that I have to mail you your paycheck? You won’t even come in for your paycheck now?”