The Miser's Dream

by John Gaspard

  Clifford Thomas provided a running commentary for this dream within a dream, during which he kept repeating his bizarre story about dreaming he had somehow repressed a murder. And then, still dreaming, I would wake up and not be entirely certain that the story wasn’t about me. Then I would fall back into the dream within the dream and it would all repeat.

  When I finally woke up for real, I felt more tired than when I had gone to bed. I lay there for a long time, unrested and unnerved, then finally convinced myself the day ahead couldn’t be any weirder than my night had been.

  True to form, the universe took that challenge and met it head on.

  Chapter 13

  “Mr. Marks, welcome to BuyMax. Have you been offered a beverage?”

  Sherry Lisbon asked the question in such a manner that it came out more like a potential accusation against her assistant than a warm, hospitable offer directed toward me. I’ll say this for her, she knew how to establish an immediate tone for a meeting.

  As a corporate magician, I’ve met my share of CEOs and you can set your comic bungling stereotypes aside; the ones I’ve met have been dynamic, magnetic and surprisingly sharp. Their focus may be on the bottom line, but most have known how to carry a conversation and how to win over a room. Some have even been remarkably warm and funny.

  This last was not the case with Sherry Lisbon, the CEO of BuyMax. The snowy and icy view through her large office windows was warmer than the hand which shook mine.

  Her steel blue eyes were colder than the skating rink visible through the window on what must have been a corporate-built manmade pond.

  Her well-coiffed hair was so blonde it might have been white, but that could have been a trick of the light. She wore a tailored skirt and coat combination which was accessorized with a variety of bracelets and rings emblazoned with stones of various colors. Around her neck was a simple gold necklace, which she touched unconsciously after shaking my hand, perhaps reassuring herself I hadn’t lifted it in some well-practiced pickpocket move.

  Of the four possible suspects I had met, Sherry Lisbon was the biggest puzzle and that was clearly by design. Clifford Thomas was a flat-out local celebrity and Randall Glendower was an internet sensation, so research on those two—if I had needed it, which I hadn’t—would be deep and plentiful.

  Chip Cavanaugh’s presence on the internet was less pervasive. The Cavanaugh Bank empire was publicly owned (albeit a huge percentage of the company was still owned by the family), and so finding out about him had been a relative ease. In fact, I had been able to accomplish it with my phone while parked in a visitor spot outside his downtown condo.

  Sherry Lisbon was something else altogether. BuyMax was a privately held company and a little digging on my part demonstrated just how private it was. The company website was designed to sell products of all shapes and sizes and make that process easy; it also seemed designed to tell you as little about the company and its owner as possible.

  Mission accomplished, I had decided that morning, after spending two fruitless hours trying to get a sense of my next and final interview subject.

  “The police warned me of your visit,” she said with a smile but no humor, gesturing to a seat in front of her desk as she returned to the rich leather chair behind it. There was nothing on the desk’s surface, not even a piece of paper, a pen or a phone. Given how barren it was, I wondered for a moment why it needed to be so large. I lowered myself into one of the two chairs facing the desk.

  “Yes, thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” I began, settling into the chair uncomfortably.

  “They gave me the impression the visit was mandatory; however I can’t imagine how such a request could be effectively enforced.”

  Her words were clipped and she sounded angry, but her face revealed no emotion. In her late forties, she had high, strong cheekbones and a long, thin neck. If surgery had been involved to create her look, it was an impressive and invisible job.

  “It can’t be,” I said with my most sincere smile. “Which is why I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.”

  “Mr. Marks, I can tell you what I told them,” she said, getting right down to it. “I certainly knew Tyler James and had done some business with him in the past. Their arrival to question me was the first I had heard of his death.”

  “That must have come as quite a shock,” I suggested. She stared at me as if I had just begun speaking a foreign language, so I blabbered on. “I mean, finding out about his death that way.”

  “We weren’t close in any sense of the word,” she said, throwing a glance at her assistant which spoke volumes. The young lady hightailed it out of the room so quickly that, had this been a cartoon, she would have stirred up a small dust cloud in her wake. “I reacted as I would to the loss of any vendor.”

  “And how is that?”

  She looked at me with the closest thing to an emotion she had revealed thus far, if slight puzzlement qualifies as an emotion. “How is what?”

  “How do you typically react to the loss of a vendor?”

  “You get a new vendor,” she said.

  It wasn’t as if I was being scolded, but it felt darned close. Having not been scolded in, I don’t know, twenty-five years, it took me a moment to recognize the feeling. I didn’t like it any more now than I had when I was a kid.

  She continued to stare at me.

  Somewhere I heard a clock ticking, even though none was visible in the room.

  “What sort of business did you conduct with Mr. James?” I ventured. “Buying or selling?”

  “Exclusively buying,” she said as she spotted a piece of invisible dust on the desk and removed it with great care and unnecessary precision, being it was invisible and all.

  “What sorts of things did you buy?” I continued, feeling like I was coming toward the end of a painful and rather futile game of Twenty Questions.

  “I honestly don’t remember,” she said. “I buy lots of things. That is, in fact, my business.”

  She made the slightest nod to TV monitors on the far wall, which silently projected the live images from studios around the country or around the world. There were a lot of monitors and on each one of them, in a different BuyMax studio, a plethora of products were being presented for sale. All the screens were silent, but the scrolling text on each screen represented a diverse variety of languages, many of which I recognized but none of which I could read.

  I turned back to her. “I thought you were in the business of selling?”

  She shook her head oh so slightly and I thought I recognized the slimmest trace of a smile cross her lips. “I’m in the business of selling in order to provide me with the resources to be in the business of buying. Sometimes I sell the things I buy, often at a significant profit. Sometimes I simply keep what I have purchased.” The change in subject seemed to suddenly energize her. “Tell me, Mr. Marks, do you shop?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Do you, from time to time, visit a department store or perhaps our own Mall of America and move from store to store with no other intention than to discover something to buy? Or peruse the internet with no other goal than to find a treasure you never knew existed but now must own at all costs?” I was about to attempt to form an answer, but she cut me off. “No, you don’t strike me as the type.” She gave me another long look which felt sort of piercing. “No, not the type at all.”

  “What type do you think I am?” I asked, trying to sound confident in the boldness of my question. I doubt it fooled her for a second.

  “You, like so many people—mostly men, but not confined to one gender—are targeted buyers. You need something, you find it, you buy it and then you’re on to something else.”

  “But that’s not how you do it?”

  “No, that’s not my approach. For me, there is nothing more fulfilling than finding an object—a rarity, a one-of-
a-kind item—and swooping in and plucking it away.” She hit the word “plucking” with such force I felt myself jump. Just a little.

  “Does it matter what it is?”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes. Not always.”

  “For you, it’s the swooping. And the plucking.”

  This produced, for the first time, an actual smile. “I suppose you could put it that way.”

  “Is that what you did with Tyler James? Swooped and plucked?” Saying it out loud made it sound vaguely dirty, but if she was offended she kept it to herself.

  She turned toward me. It felt like she was either starting to warm up to the subject or to me. I desperately hoped it was the subject.

  “Tyler and I used to play a little game,” she said. She stared me down, like she was teasing me to ask more.

  “A game?” I worked hard and succeeded in keeping my voice from cracking. “What kind of game?”

  “Sometimes he would find himself in a situation with two bidders, each going after the same object, tooth and nail. Each one outbidding the other. An escalating battle, as it were. If Tyler was feeling like a bad boy—and he often was a bad boy, don’t think for a second he wasn’t—he might get in touch and allow me to enter the fray.”

  “To swoop?” I suggested.

  “Yes, to swoop in at the last second and outbid them all.”

  “And pluck.”

  “Yes.” Again, almost a smile but not quite. “Swoop and pluck.” She basked in the recollection for a long moment.

  “Why?” I asked, breaking the silence. “Was it something you wanted?”

  “Was what something I wanted?”

  “The thing you outbid them on?”

  “I have no idea. I often had no idea what I was bidding on.”

  Now it was my turn to feel like someone was speaking a foreign language. “Then why do it?”

  “I really can’t explain,” she said, her voice dropping to just above a whisper. “But, Mr. Marks, let me share this with you: there are few pleasures on this earth equal to stepping in at the last second and taking something someone else desires. I mean, something they really, really want. An object. A relationship. A person.”

  She turned and looked at me. Her eyes were cold, yet they somehow burned into me. “You should try it sometime. You might be surprised just how pleasurable that can be.”

  Mercifully, our interview concluded moments later and I was quickly and efficiently escorted back out the way I had arrived, through a maze of cubes and TV monitors and white noise.

  Dusk had come and the thermometer in my car put the temperature at a frigid fourteen degrees, but it felt balmy compared to the arctic chill I’d felt in Sherry Lisbon’s office. I had turned back as I exited and I caught her eye. The look she gave me was decidedly predatory but, and I might have been imagining this—and I hope I was—there was a sexual component which was both undeniable and frightening. I tried to convince myself I was imagining it and I think I almost succeeded.

  Once the car started, I immediately switched on the seat warmer and cranked the heater up to full. However, I didn’t start to feel any real warmth until I was nearly home.

  Chapter 14

  The recent snowfall meant parking restrictions were now in place again on Chicago Avenue, with parking allowed on the even side of the street only, to make way for the snowplows. Consequently, I had to park my car way up the hill from our shop, wedging my car into a narrow spot and hoping my tires would be able to get me out of it when the time came.

  The marquee was blazing at the Parkway Theater and people were just entering the lobby for the first show. I looked up at the marquee and was annoyed to see it read: Spellbound For Glory. I had given Tracy easily a half-dozen title possibilities—better ones, in my admittedly biased estimation—and yet she had chosen to program the very first option Quinton had tossed off in what I felt was a casual and slapdash manner.

  Tracy was visible in the lobby and if she hadn’t been in the midst of a conversation with a pair of customers, I might have stepped in and…and what? Told her I was miffed that she took one of Quinton’s suggestions over mine? If I wanted to win some sort of pettiness award that would certainly be the way to do it. I gave the lobby one last look, long enough to see she seemed to have recovered completely from her fall as she conversed in an animated fashion with the couple, their backs to the door.

  I continued down the sidewalk, digging in my pocket for my keys and silently berating myself for my current state of mind. My visit with Sherry Lisbon had put me in a sour mood and I wasn’t feeling particularly upbeat about any of my fellow human beings. Thinking of her led me to thoughts of Chip Cavanaugh and his sad and illicit art collection. And then I thought of Clifford Thomas, who was using alcohol to fight demons of his own, including his jealousy of his ex-wife’s success.

  Of the four alleged suspects I had interviewed—if interview is even the right word—the only one I felt any real connection to was Randall Glendower and his silly movie-and-comic-book-obsessed lifestyle. Unlike the other three, he was the only one who seemed to be getting any real healthy joy out of his wealth, even if it was expressed in a decidedly child-like manner.

  “Are you locked out?”

  A voice pulled me out of my reverie and I turned to see Megan trudging toward me. She was bundled up in a mismatched stocking cap, scarf and mittens, the odd combination creating a pleasing knitted mosaic. I smiled in spite of myself, which triggered a smile from her, and after a moment we stood there beaming at each other, our breath visible in the frigid air.

  “No, just lost in my thoughts. You done for the night?” I asked, gesturing to her store down on the corner.

  “Yes, and not a moment too soon.”

  “Tough day?”

  She nodded. “Tough customers. For all their talk of peace and light and positive energy, some days New Age customers can be a real pain in the ass.”

  “Don’t mince words, Megan. Tell me how you really feel.”

  She continued, either not recognizing my sarcasm or simply not caring. “Here’s a few of the words I’m not going to mince: sanctimonious, self-involved, narrow-minded, narcissistic, clueless and condescending.”

  “Suddenly my day is looking like a bed of roses.”

  “Even a thorny bed of roses would be better than the day I had. But I refuse to take bad karma home with me.” She waved her mittened hands in front of her face, symbolically brushing away the events of the day, then shut her eyes for a moment of either quiet meditation or continued silent cursing. Or both.

  “Peace and light and happiness,” she whispered and when she opened her eyes, all the anger and frustration had apparently lifted and she looked to be her normal, smiling self.

  “That’s better,” she said, and then added suddenly, “I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you too.”

  “If you’re not busy,” she continued, flirtatiously, “would you have any interest in coming over to my place for dinner?”

  “You’re going to make me dinner?”

  “Well, no, obviously you would make it. But you can do it at my place and we can eat it together.”

  “I can’t imagine a better plan,” I said, pocketing my keys and taking her hand. She gave my hand a warm squeeze through her mitten and we turned and began the trek back up the hill toward her duplex.

  As we passed the theater I glanced into the lobby to see that Tracy was still in deep conversation with the same couple. This time she saw me and waved me to stop, crossing quickly to the glass doors.

  “Hey, Eli,” Tracy said, holding open the door with one hand. “I have something for you.”

  I began to move toward the theater and Megan followed, her hand still in mine. We stepped into the lobby together, the glass door swinging shut and giving Megan an unexpected boost into the room.

 
“Some guy stopped by your shop today to drop these off. When he found out the store was closed, he asked if I could pass them along.” She pulled a black canvas bag out from behind the candy counter and crossed to us. Now that I could see her without the distortion of the frosted lobby glass, I noticed she looked worn and tired and about as stressed as Megan had been five minutes before.

  She handed the bag to me and I glanced inside, recognizing the five hardback books of Harry’s I had brought to Clifford Thomas for autographing.

  “Thanks,” I said, looking up. “Thanks for doing that.”

  “Oh, no problem,” she said with what looked like a forced smile. “Are you two on your way somewhere?”

  The answer seemed obvious and I wasn’t really sure how to respond without saying the verbal equivalent of “duh.” But before I could begin to form an answer, we were interrupted by a voice from across the lobby.

  “I’m not done talking to you,” the woman barked as she moved toward us. She was tall with sharp features and not just big hair, but big big hair. Even though she was well covered by a puffy winter jacket and baggy sweatpants, I got the distinct sense that inside those clothes she was way too pale and skinny and sort of mean. Like a low-rent supermodel.

  “Well, I’m done talking to you,” Tracy said, not even bothering to turn and confront the angry woman.

  “Fine,” she snapped. “Just fine. We’ll go up and look at his stuff on our own, don’t need your permission.”

  Tracy still refused to turn around, but she amped up the volume in her response. “First, you do need my permission, and second, it you want to go through Tyler’s effects, you’ll have to take it up with the police or his estate or whatever.”

  The skinny woman froze in her tracks and turned back slowly, providing me with the time to get a look at her companion. He was thinner than she was, but in his case he seemed to come by it naturally.

  He had a hawk nose, a scrawny goatee, and he wore the now standard hipster hat—is it a trilby? A fedora? Whatever it is, it was too small and made his head look overly large.