Ignoring the sarcasm, Charley kissed her lightly on the cheek, knowing her makeup would still be slightly sticky. She did not return the kiss. At the doorway, she looked back at him. “You’ll call tonight?”
“Sure. And have a good day—Brian might need the money.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.
The only nonstop flight Charley could get a seat on did not arrive in Colorado Springs until a few minutes after eight in the evening. Though the flight took almost three hours, Charley was so lost in thought he later would have almost no memory of it. All those miles across all those endless plains, he squinted out his little window at the still-dazzling sky and thought about his brother and their life together, what different paths they had taken, what totally different men they seemed to have become. And the irony of it was that for the first twelve years or so people were always getting them mixed up, saying they looked so much alike, an assessment neither of them ever agreed with. The truth, Charley figured, was simply that people got their names mixed, not sure which of them was Charley and which was Brian.
The older by nineteen months, Charley was also taller, thinner, and if not smarter, certainly a much better student. Brian, on the other hand, was a much better mischief maker, in fact was pretty much a world-class pain in the ass from infancy on. There just never seemed to be a temptation he could resist, whether it was the playing of an innocent trick on a classmate or creating general havoc at home. And when he was caught, which was most of the time, he would simply fall back on his good looks and warm smile to disarm his victim as well as his guardian at the moment, whether parent or teacher.
By the time he was in high school, though, he put away such childish things and became more seriously delinquent. He never studied, wouldn’t listen to his parents or teachers, and was a constant truant. He drank excessively, smoked marijuana, and became so dedicated to making out that any girl seen with him was assumed to be a slut, when in reality she was probably only in love with him. At the same time, he never quite lost his love of mischief. Leader of the beetle patrol, as he called it, he and two of his friends took upon themselves the task of upending Volkwagen beetles, which were a great favorite of the underpaid teachers of the time. While his cohorts would stand on either side of him, pressing against the roofline of the car, he would take hold underneath the door, and the three would begin to rock the homely little vehicle so violently that finally all it took was a word from Brian—and a sudden surge by all three boys—and one more beetle would tumble helplessly onto its back.
The three were reputed to have struck the spotless yellow VW of Miss Mellinger, head of the English department, on three separate occasions, an overzealousness that resulted in their expulsion from school for two days. It was a punishment that Brian endured in style, however, cruising the school grounds with his friends in someone’s bright red Chrysler convertible, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and waving to the kids inside, as if he were a hero instead of a miscreant.
Nor was the beetle patrol Brian’s only achievement in high school. Looking out the jet’s window, Charley couldn’t help grinning at the memory of his brother pretending to try out for the track team when he was a sophomore, chugging toward the finish line in the mile run with a lit stogie clamped between his teeth and a trail of blue smoke drifting out behind him. Even the coach, old “Second Wind” Sarff, had joined in the laughter that afternoon. And oddly, Sarff was not an exception. Despite the fact that Brian was known to be a problem student and general troublemaker, he always seemed to be well liked by the faculty, probably because his attitude was never surly or hostile. And then there was that winning smile.
Even that couldn’t help him in college, however. Enrolled as a probational student at Illinois State, he found all his courses to be remedial: bonehead math, bonehead English, bonehead science. Terminally bored, he dropped out within a month and enlisted in the marines just as Richard Nixon was being drummed out of office. A year and a half later he came home on crutches, with the back of his right leg a quilt of shrapnel scars that he belittled as spent-metal wounds, barely deep enough to bleed. They were enough, however, to return him to civilian life, staying at home in Flossmoor for all of two months, until he had no more need of crutches. Then he was off again, taking odd jobs here and there—including lumberjack and stevedore, according to his postcards—before he found something more to his liking: the tail end of the counterculture movement, a ragtag army of diehard hippies and acidheads trooping up and down the West Coast, living on handouts, drugs, and sex. Through the rest of the seventies, Charley would receive occasional battered letters from him—from Vancouver and Mazatlan and places in between—usually asking for money, sometimes containing snapshots of him and his friends, beaded, bearded, barefoot, all grinning like idiots.
In time, though, Brian settled down in Hollywood, “doing a little of this and a little of that,” as he said during one of his rare visits home to their parents’ place at Thanksgiving, with Charley and Donna and their little boy Jason there too. Brian had brought a very sexy blonde along with him, a movie starlet so quiet he referred to her as Harpo. Though the girl was obviously in love with him, that was the last they ever heard of her. Then, on a Christmas afternoon six or seven years ago, Brian phoned Charley from Nashville, where he said he was staying with a friend who wanted to say hello. The friend turned out to be the country singing star, Kim Sanders, and she had much more to say than hello.
“I just wanted to tell ya, Charley, I’m sorta in love with your badass brother and one of these days we gonna go and git ourselves hitched, we are. I just love the mean old sumbitch, I really do, and I wanna tell ya I never been happier.” She had laughed then, with the lilting huskiness that probably had much to do with her success as a country music singer. “And just between you, me, and the fencepost, Charley, I gotta admit right now I’m higher than a turkey vulture. Merry Christmas, y’all!”
Brian reclaimed the phone and confirmed what the singer had said, that he was traveling with her on the road and that they would be getting married “one of these days.” He said that he was her “semimanager” now and that if he wasn’t careful, he might have to learn one or two things about the music business.
“She thinks she’s pretty hot stuff, Charley,” he said. “But I can lick her. Most of the time, I can lick her.”
In the background Charley heard the superstar’s whoop of laughter. And in the years that followed, Charley would occasionally come across a newspaper or magazine item about the singer, sometimes about a performance or new song but more often about a narcotics arrest or some nightclub brouhaha. And in the accompanying photographs, Brian was usually there, standing behind her or off to the side.
Then, just four years ago, TV and radio flashed the news that Kim Sanders had died of a drug overdose—while her companion, Brian Poole, dozed beside her.
Thinking of that unhappy night and the rest of Brian’s life, Charley could only shake his head at how greatly it contrasted with his own. All those years, Charley had pretty much just sailed along. A good student and fair athlete in high school, he made the National Honor Society and lettered in basketball and track, running a fairly respectable half mile. In his senior year he was even voted prom king, an honor bestowed on him, he figured, because he was then dating the prettiest, most popular girl in class, herself the inevitable prom queen. At the University of Illinois, he majored in English Lit and minored in world history, both against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to study business administration. And like the nation’s current president, he hated the war, demonstrated vigorously against it, and did his best to dodge the draft. He also smoked pot, though more daringly, actually inhaling the stuff. And he did his share of womanizing too, until a girl named Donna Sunderson showed him the deeper joys of monogamy, including almost endless sex. To lessen his chances of being drafted, they married in their senior year—only months before Brian was wounded and shipped home. And twelve months later t
hey had their first and only child, little Jason.
Through his twenties, Charley worked for his father, selling houses in the posh Flossmoor and Olympia Fields areas. But the real content of his life then, other than his love of Donna and the baby, was the game of tennis. He became so consumed by it that he played every day at the club, often for three and four hours, with the result that by age twenty-four he was one of the best amateurs in the Chicago area. He even briefly entertained the notion of turning pro, until Jimmy Connors came to town one week, visiting friends, and needed local players to practice against. Even though Connors’ serve was supposed to be the weakest part of his game, Charley found it almost impossible to return. Sadly, he accepted the conventional wisdom that he had come to the game a decade too late in life. That, however, turned out to be only a minor disappointment.
Two months later, when he was thirty-one, he suffered the only real blow in his life, when his mother and father were killed in a car-truck accident on the Dan Ryan Expressway. The hole that left in him, in his life and in his heart, had never really filled in, but like most people he simply carried on, running the business as best he could and trying to be a good husband and father and friend. And in time, as Donna proved so much better at selling real estate than he was, he gradually turned the company’s operations over to her and concentrated more on his hobby, buying select old houses and, after redesigning them, rebuilding them with his crew of semiretired carpenters and masons, artisans all, old-timers who could make, among other things, flawless brick arches and curving balustrades.
The area was full of thirty-thousand-dollar houses sitting on two-hundred-thousand-dollar lots. So the opportunities were there. And the profits. And for years he had enjoyed the work, the feeling of actual, tangible accomplishment, not just the making of money. Lately, though, even that had begun to pall for him, just like Saturday morning golf with his old buddies. Instead, he seemed to want to stay in bed mornings, or go for long, solitary walks, or watch some crummy late show on TV, just him and a bottle of Absolut or Scotch.
He accepted it that the root of the problem was his marriage, that he and Donna simply didn’t connect anymore, that day by day they seemed to be turning into perfect strangers. But he preferred not to think about it, since it seemed insoluble, a fact of life as immutable as aging.
In any case, here he was, easygoing if not overly happy Charley Poole, sailor of smooth seas and walker of the worn path, on his way to rescue his little brother, who seemingly had been everywhere and done everything, almost none of it safe and sane. About all Charley could do was smile sadly at the prospect. Fortunately or unfortunately, he had a strong sense of the ridiculous.
While she was still on the phone, Eve Sherman had offered to pick Charley up at the airport, but he had told her that wouldn’t be necessary, knowing that even if he stayed only a few days, he would want his own transportation. So he rented a Ford Thunderbird at the airport and headed north. He had been in Colorado Springs twice before, the first time to attend a realtor’s convention at the Broadmoor Hotel and the second time on vacation with Donna, so he had some knowledge of the city, which sat at the foot of Pike’s Peak at an altitude a good thousand feet higher than Denver.
To the west was the great wall of the front range, to the east a flat wasteland so desiccated all it seemed capable of growing was tumbleweed and housing, mile after mile of crackerbox condos and apartment buildings so drearily the same that Charley elected to take the freeway to Brian’s motel rather than the shorter beltway, Academy Boulevard, which cut through the heart of the wasteland. Normally Charley was not that sensitive about his environment, but in the last few years, as he redesigned more and more homes, he had come to loathe boxy architecture, even to the point of considering it responsible for much of the country’s social ills. Boxes, he believed, were for dead bodies.
So he was not overjoyed to find that Brian’s motel, the Good-land, was itself a box, an oblong two stories with patios and balconies on the side facing the mountains, and a swimming pool, parking lot, and entrances on the other side. It was located just off the interstate, almost as far north as the Air Force Academy, which made Charley wonder why Brian had chosen it, a place so far out of town. Then it occurred to him that the motel was probably one of the closest to Black Forest, where the movie set had been built.
After parking, Charley had just gotten his luggage out of the back seat of the car and was closing the door when he saw the woman up on the second floor, standing at the walkway railing, looking down at him. She was a striking brunette, slim in jeans and a green jersey turtleneck. He was about to look away from her, reluctantly, when she smiled slightly and lifted her hand in a tentative wave. He smiled back at her, then spoke as he drew closer to the building.
“Eve?”
She nodded. “I’m so glad you came, Charley.”
He gestured toward the office. “I’ve got to check in.”
“I’ll come down.” She was already moving along the walkway, toward the stairs.
He waited for her there, outside, still holding his luggage, a suede suit bag and an overnighter. But as she came into view, smiling more warmly now, he almost dropped the bags in his confusion as to whether he should kiss her in greeting or just shake her hand. Fortunately, she solved the problem, taking his hand and turning her cheek up to him, for either a kiss or an air buss, as he called them. He chose the kiss.
“Did you have a good flight?” she asked.
“Yes. Uneventful.”
“I’ve reserved your room,” she said. “Just two doors down from us.”
“Good.”
After he had checked in, she led the way, carrying the overnight bag, graciously insisting on it. In his room, she opened the drapes and the sliding glass door, letting in fresh air and the last of the sunset, a mosaic of reds and purples burning above the ridge of the mountains.
“Great view,” he said.
She smiled. “Yes—great view, lousy everything else. I hope your heater works better than ours.”
“That’s right. It gets pretty cold here at night, doesn’t it?”
“Very cold. Even in June.”
Having hung up his suit bag, he went out onto the balcony. “Before it gets dark, I’ve got to see more of this.”
She followed him out. “Yes, it’s really breathtaking, if you overlook the foreground.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “At night, even a freeway can look okay.”
“Brian said you’re an optimist.”
“You sure he didn’t say a Pollyanna?”
“I’m sure.”
Beyond the freeway, up in the foothills, it was still light enough so Charley could make out the Garden of the Gods, as it was called, steepled rock formations that looked at that hour, and at that distance, like a village of monstrous teepees, a home of the gods. Next to him, Eve was lighting a cigarette.
“How’s he doing?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. All I did was talk on the phone with him this afternoon. We can’t see him until the arraignment tomorrow at ten.” She shook her head in amazement. “Did you know it was on the network news tonight? The bulldozing? CBS, with Bob Shieffer.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. But Brian wasn’t the real news—he was just the crackpot, the villain. The big story’s the movie—the filming being interrupted. And of course ‘Miss Colorado,’ how even in death she’s vulnerable to this particular crackpot.”
Charley shook his head. “Brian must’ve loved that.”
“I don’t know if he even saw it. Unless his lawyer told him.”
“Who’d he get? Someone good, I hope.”
“A public defender, that’s all. Brian says the more expensive the lawyer, the higher his bail will be.”
Though he knew that was nonsense, Charley didn’t quite say so. “I’m not sure he’s right about that. Maybe we can get him someone else in the morning. Some old courthouse hand, a crony of the judge. May
be that’s the way to go.”
Eve smiled ruefully. “I don’t know. Brian says the case is open and shut. He did it. He waited right there to be arrested. There’s no question of his guilt.”
“He’s not going to plead guilty, is he?”
“No, he says he wants his day in court. He wants everyone to know why he did it.”
“Well, that’s something anyway. If he pleads guilty, he goes straight to prison.”
“Yes, he knows that.” Eve’s eyes suddenly filled. Then she shook her head, as if to wake herself up, snap herself out of her unhappiness. “Listen, you must be starved,” she said. “There’s a nice little place across from the parking lot. We could walk there.”
“Well, I am a little hungry,” Charley admitted. “For that matter, I could probably use a martini.”
“Fine. Why don’t you get settled in here, then just come by. We’re two-oh-three, two doors down.”
After she was gone, Charley unpacked a few things and washed up, but he stayed in the clothes he had on, an old herringbone jacket, gray slacks, and an open blue shirt. Idly he found himself speculating as to whether Eve would go as she was or would change into something different: say, a light, short dress. He couldn’t help wondering if her legs were as beautiful as the rest of her.
The restaurant was a cozy place with wagon wheels at the entrance, Remington prints on the walls, and tiny wood tables lit with candles burning in red glass jars. Charley ordered a steak sandwich that proved to be both generous and tasty. Even better, the bartender was not stingy with the Swedish vodka, which was what Charley called a martini: straight Absolut on ice, with an olive. He had two of them before the food came and a Bailey’s coffee afterwards, while Eve made do with a single Scotch and water.
Like him, she had not changed clothes, and he wondered on the walk over to the cafe why he had cared, since her stone-washed jeans amply displayed the excellence of her legs. More to the point, he was embarrassed that such a stupid speculation would even cross his mind, on this particular evening, in the company of his brother’s girlfriend while the brother himself was in jail. But then Charley was never greatly surprised at his capacity for sexual woolgathering. He often thought that on his deathbed, all wired up and gurgling, he would still somehow find the strength to observe and compare the nurses’ buttocks. In this instance, however, he judged he wasn’t entirely at fault, since Eve was in no way just another good-looking woman. He ran across good-looking women all the time. In fact, Charley’s own Donna was one of them. But Eve was different. She was one of those rare perfect physical creatures, like a leopard or eagle, with everything just the way it should have been, from any angle. He imagined that wherever she went, she turned heads and stopped conversations, set men fantasizing about sex and women about murder.
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