‘You thought it was mine, so it was.’ She crossed her legs languidly, revealing more thigh.
‘One last time, for Auld Lang Syne?’
‘That’s a lovely way of putting it. There is poetry in you I never knew existed, Wycliff. I’m sure there are many facets of you I never knew, and never will. That’s a pity. But we can never know everything about anyone, can we?’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We never can. And we can’t have sex. Not now, or ever again. That ship left the harbor. It’s gone to sea.’
Her smile was almost endearing. ‘Can’t hurt a girl for trying.’ She pulled her skirt down over her knees.
It was all clear now. ‘You’re the new owner, aren’t you? You’re the sonofabitch who gypped me.’
‘Yes,’ she confessed. There was no shame or remorse in her voice. ‘I am.’
‘Why?’ He stared at her, sitting so calmly across the room from him. There was not a trace of emotion in her face that would indicate that she had just dropped an atomic bomb on his head. ‘For God’s sakes!’ he cried out, ‘why?’
‘Because it should have been mine. The house, the money, everything should have been mine.’
‘If I’m supposed to understand what that means, I don’t.’
‘Of course you don’t. There’s no reason in the world that you could. But it’s true.’ She paused for a moment. ‘You are Billy’s brother. That’s blood.’ She paused again, longer this time. ‘But I am his mother. That’s blood, too, Wycliff. Even closer than yours.’
At least his relationship with Charlotte had not been incestuous, Wycliff thought as his stomach twisted in knots, because she was not his birth mother. They had never had a relationship at all before now, except for the brief time when they had lived under the same roof after Billy was born. Before she picked up stakes and left for parts unknown.
‘I’m going to start at the beginning, so you can truly understand where I’m coming from,’ Charlotte said, shifting in her chair to make herself comfortable. ‘I had to leave that marriage. Your father would have killed me if I had stayed. I was lucky to escape with my body and sanity intact. That bastard beat the daylights out of me, more than once.’
She wasn’t going to get an argument from him on that score. He had been on the receiving end of his father’s wrath countless times himself. Billy, being younger and less able to stand up to their father, had had it even worse.
‘Fair enough,’ Wycliff said, staring at his decades-ago stepmother – now his recent lover – across the room. ‘You were justified in bailing out. Nobody’s saying you were a bad person for doing that. I would have done the same myself, if I had been able to. But what does that have to do with what’s going on with me and you now?’
‘I’m getting to that. It’s my story, I’m going to tell it my way, at my pace.’ She took another sip of wine. ‘I’ve wanted to for a long time, to cleanse my soul.’ She laughed. ‘If I have one. But I was never with the right person to do it.’
‘Until now,’ he responded caustically.
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she corrected him. ‘You’re not the first person I’ve wanted to tell it to. Billy was.’
Their father was her first husband. She was young and naive when she married him, and although she was still young when she left, the innocence had been burned out of her. She got married again, twice. Neither marriage lasted long. ‘I should have learned my lesson the first time,’ she said humorlessly. The circumstances weren’t the same with the other husbands, they didn’t scare her to death. The marriages just hadn’t worked out. ‘I guess I’m not the marrying type,’ she told Wycliff matter-of-factly. By the time she was in her early thirties she had marriage out of her system. She had not had any other children. Billy was the only one. For decades, she had given hardly any thought to the son she had left behind.
‘My family was dirt-poor,’ she said, toying with her glass as if it were a microphone, a prop to help her recite her narrative. ‘I didn’t have much education. That’s why I gravitated towards low-lifes like your father when I was young and didn’t know any better. And because I wasn’t well educated, the only jobs I could get were menial, low paying. I wasn’t going to settle for that.’
She had always been attractive, so she never lacked for male companionship. ‘As I got older, I became more discriminating. No more losers. I chose lovers who were rich and sophisticated. I was like a sponge; I learned how to appear like I was rich and sophisticated, too. I worked hard at that. I earned every dollar those men lavished on me.’
And she was one of those fortunate women whose attractiveness increased as she aged. She was pretty at twenty-five. At forty, she was, to many men, irresistible. (Listening to her, Wycliff could believe that. He was one of them.) But there was a problem. Despite her many charms, she didn’t have money. Real money, fuck-you money. She had proximity to wealth through the men in her life, a tantalizing closeness, but she never had a pile of her own. As usually happens to courtesans – which, bottom line, she was – she was eventually left out in the cold.
The grifting started by accident. She was with one of her beaus at a party being thrown at the home of a wealthy society couple, in San Francisco. It was an older crowd. Having recently turned forty, she was one of the youngest people there (her guy that night was thirty years her senior). Most of the women were drowning in expensive jewelry, earrings, necklaces, rings. ‘I was wearing a lovely pearl necklace and I felt like an absolute pauper.’
They were robbed by a gang wearing stockings over their faces and brandishing big, scary guns. The men were taken into one room, the women to another. Most of the women were hysterical, not only because they were scared shitless, but because their precious bling was being stolen.
‘I wasn’t too concerned about my necklace and ring,’ she continued. ‘They were gifts that could be replaced. What I was scared of was that one of those airheads would do something stupid to panic the robbers. If one gunshot had been fired, it could have been a blood bath.’
Thankfully, that didn’t happen. The thieves were professionals, and no one lost their heads. The entire episode was over and done in less then ten minutes. By the time the host called the police and they arrived, the bad guys had vanished into the night.
Everyone had to be individually interviewed and questioned, a tedious process. By the time she and her escort were allowed to leave, it was after midnight. They weren’t the last to go; several of the guests were still being detained until the detectives could get to them. Before she left, she went into one of the guest bathrooms to splash cold water on her face and freshen up her makeup.
And guess what she found when she opened the step wastebasket to discard her fancy paper guest towel? A Gucci purse. A real one, not a knockoff. Her curiosity compelled her to check the contents, and guess what was inside? Not only makeup, tampons, and lipstick. The bag was stuffed with rings, earrings, a Cartier watch, and an emerald-and-diamond necklace.
‘What must have happened,’ Charlotte explained, ‘was that during the initial confusion, when the men and women were being herded into their respective holding rooms and people were freaked out and hysterical, one of the women managed to sneak away for a moment, strip off her jewelry, and dump the purse there, figuring that she would come back later and retrieve it. Obviously, she was one of the guests who had not had her interview with the police yet.’
When opportunity knocks, open the door. She dumped the contents of the woman’s purse into her own and dropped the other back into the trash. When the owner came to reclaim it, she would assume the thieves had found her hidden stash.
She came out of the bathroom, linked her arm with that of her date, and waltzed him out the door. They went back to his place, where she screwed his aging brains out. Then she returned to her humble apartment and never saw the man again. She was moving on, and seventy-year-old squares didn’t fit into her new plans.
Getting rid of the booty was harder than she had assumed it would be.
She couldn’t lay it off on a pawn shop or jewelry store, they have everything on their hot lists. And she didn’t dare try to sell it through advertising (this was before E-Bay, Craig’s List, other such Internet outlets); she would have exposed herself too much. The police are on the lookout for that. You need to unload that kind of merchandise with a fence. And if you are not in that business, you don’t know one.
But where there’s a strong enough will, there’s a way. One of her former paramours had friends in the know. When she discarded her men she did so on good terms, in case she needed something from them, later. The ex-lover was happy to help her. She was able to sell her ill-gotten goods, and put the money in the bank.
‘And that was how my new life began.’
Sitting across from Charlotte, Wycliff listened to her story with a mixture of appreciation and anger. This woman was some piece of work. Part of him was enraged with her, but another part couldn’t help but admire her, even though she had totally fucked him over.
She was very careful about the jobs she pulled. She never took jewels while in the company of any particular man more than once. She never went back to the same place after she had robbed it. ‘Like the store in Beverly Hills,’ she reminded him, not that he didn’t remember the episode vividly. ‘They will never see me again.’
The theft in Beverly Hills had been an anomaly. She usually didn’t work that close to home. But in casing it, she had learned that it was such a soft touch it was impossible to pass up, particularly since the owner was in cahoots with her.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘that’s all old business. Let’s talk about us.’
Finally, he thought. He leaned forward slightly, fighting to keep his nerves under control.
‘I kept a low profile,’ she said. ‘A few jobs a year, sometimes only one. I made out nicely, but I didn’t get rich. When you’re selling stolen jewelry you make a dime on the dollar. In a good year I might make a couple hundred thousand dollars. In a down year, not as much.’
She held up her empty wine glass. ‘Top me up, please. Just a little. I don’t want to get tipsy.’
He got up and refilled her wine glass, but not his own. The reverse of their usual drinking behavior. Now he was the one who needed to stay sober.
‘You can fake out a lot of things,’ she said. ‘But not time.’ She looked at him across the room, her eyes unwavering. ‘I got old.’
‘You’ve got plenty of tread left on your tires.’
She laughed, a real belly-guffaw. ‘Oh, God! I thought I’d buffed all the abrasions out of you, Wycliff. It’s refreshing that I haven’t.’ She looked around the room. ‘Your brother had exquisite taste. He was a true artist.’
‘Which you never knew,’ he threw back at her. ‘Feng Shui and all that baloney. It was total BS. You and Billy never crossed paths in that condo, or anywhere else.’
‘No,’ Charlotte admitted. ‘We never did. You’ve been there recently, I take it.’
‘This afternoon. The building manager is on the warpath. You stiffed her for fifteen grand, and she’s not happy about it.’
‘She’s the least of my worries,’ Charlotte said, waving her hand dismissively. ‘Certainly none of yours.’
He had to give the devil her due: she was right, and it was good she had reminded him of it. He had to get her back on track before she got lost in her dreams and didn’t finish her story. A tale, he knew with a sick feeling in his gut, of which he was an important part.
‘You got old,’ he repeated back to her.
She winced. ‘That’s rude. But call a spade a spade: I was no longer the desirable companion of men of a certain age, because I was that age myself. Those men want trophies fresh out of the showroom, not last year’s model, certainly not last decade’s. I had to find a new way to make money. And I needed a nest egg, which I had never been able accumulate.’
She took another sip of wine, this time for fortification. ‘And that is when my only child came back into my life.’
She had moved around. California, Nevada, Arizona, places that were warm (‘I hate cold weather’) and where she could meet and ingratiate herself with wealthy people. She never stayed more than a couple of years in any one city, so she wouldn’t wear out her welcome or become too recognizable.
‘But after I hit the age barrier, I had to find a new MO.’
What she hoped would be her chance to finally have her own piece of the rock came about by a fortuitous encounter that was so unexpected that she knew it had to be an omen. ‘I met a woman at a party in Santa Fe who was moving from Los Angeles to Paris for a year, and was looking for someone to sublet her penthouse condominium. As an enticement, she boasted that it had been decorated by a hot young LA designer. She told me his name, which was not that uncommon. But I knew. Immediately.’
Then the other shoe dropped. The young man was dying, the woman told Charlotte. He had incurable AIDS. The last time she had seen him was shortly before he went into the hospital. ‘I was his final client,’ the woman said regretfully.
Charlotte didn’t let on that she had any connection to Billy, but her mind was racing. By coincidence, she told the woman, she was moving to Los Angeles, and the penthouse was exactly what she was looking for. They came to an agreement on the spot. A week later Charlotte flew here, moved into the condo, and that same afternoon, she took a taxi to Cedars-Sinai.
‘Billy didn’t recognize me, of course. He had almost no memory of me at all. How could he? I ran off before he was three years old.’ She laughed. ‘That first time, he thought I was some woman who had wandered into his room by mistake. But I knew it was him the moment I laid eyes on his sweet, suffering face. He was the spitting image of his father. As are you. How that miserable prick brought forth two such beautiful men is one of nature’s stranger miracles.’
You’re a miracle yourself, Wycliff thought bitterly. Of guts and survival.
‘He didn’t believe me when I told him who I was,’ Charlotte continued. ‘He didn’t want to. I couldn’t blame him, I would have felt the same way. He had spent a lifetime erasing me from his mind and he didn’t want to readjust to something so traumatic, especially since he knew he was going to die soon, and already had more than enough trauma in his life.’
She put her empty wine glass down on the table, next to the gun. ‘It wasn’t hard to convince him, though. I talked about things only a mother would know. His favorite bed-time story, his favorite toy. That his favorite meal when he was two was oatmeal with bananas and raisins.’
Oatmeal with bananas and raisins. Wycliff hadn’t thought about that in what seemed like forever. But it was true. For months, the only food Billy would eat, morning, noon, and night, was oatmeal with bananas and raisins.
‘So then what happened?’ he asked her. He couldn’t help himself, he had to find out what had gone down between them.
‘He told me to go fuck myself, in exactly those words. He ordered me to stay away, and never come back.’
That was my baby brother, all right, Wycliff thought fondly. Feisty to the end.
‘I didn’t give up, of course. I’ve spent a lifetime armoring myself. I wasn’t going to dry up and blow away. My own needs were too important.’
‘Getting your hands on his money.’
‘Of course. He had to leave it to someone. Who better than his mother, finally reunited with him after these many years?’
Goddamn, he thought, this woman really does have brass balls. ‘What was his reaction when you brought that up?’ he asked.
‘Give me some credit,’ she said, annoyed by the question. ‘I’m not stupid. I didn’t bring up the subject of money at all. I told him I had always regretted leaving him, and I hoped we could bond together now, before he died. Strictly the love of a mother for her child.’
Wycliff laughed in her face. ‘How did that go over?’
‘Like a lead balloon,’ she admitted candidly. ‘He was not going to have anything to do with me. Period.’ She picked up her glass. �
�I’d like more wine. If you’ll do the honors, please.’
He got the bottle from the kitchen and poured her a healthy portion. ‘You’re not going to join me?’ she chided him. ‘It’s uncouth to drink alone.’
‘I won’t tell on you.’
‘Thank you.’ She took a swallow from her glass. ‘What happened next,’ she said, picking up her narrative. ‘I did some research, online. It’s easy to access anyone’s private data, which is not private at all. You don’t have to be a computer genius to do it, a trained monkey could have done what I did. I discovered that he owned his house outright, which is worth at least a million dollars, and that he had money in his retirement plan.’
‘And you wanted it.’
‘Of course I wanted it. It was my ticket to ride.’ She heaved a heavy sigh. ‘But what I wanted and what I got were entirely different things. What I wanted was what you got, his estate. What I got was the door slammed in my face.’
She continued. ‘The last time I saw him was when we finally talked about money. He brought it up. This was a few days before you came into the picture. I planted myself at his bedside and told him I wasn’t budging until he talked to me, even if I had to bring a sleeping bag and camp out.’
‘So he did talk, finally?’
Her features contorted. ‘He blistered me. There were three people in the world he hated. His father, who was a miserable prick. The bastard was dead now, and he hoped he was rotting in hell. His brother, who had always made his life miserable. And his mother, who abandoned him.’
Now she was the one who was shaking. ‘I couldn’t help myself. I started crying. Forty years of repressed emotion finally boiled over. Billy didn’t cry, though. He was a stone wall. “Get the fuck out,” he said to me. For someone so frail, he was incredibly harsh and powerful. “Get out and never come back. You don’t exist to me.” “Why?” I begged him. “I had to leave that marriage. You know what a monster your father was. You can’t hold my escaping him against me.” And that’s when he really unloaded on me. “I don’t hate you because you left him,” he said. “I hate you because you didn’t take me with you. You abandoned me, and I will never forgive you for that.”’
Turn Left at Doheny--A tough-edged crime novel set in Los Angeles Page 24