Dead Crazy

by Nancy Pickard

  “Hell, I don’t care what they move in over there,” he claimed with a young man’s air of bravado. “I’m gettin’ the hell out of here, me and Sammie here—” He lifted his right shoulder to indicate the girl behind him. “We’re gettin’ the hell out of this dump. They can move in fuckin’ orangutans”—he pronounced it “tangs”—“for all we care.”

  He was laughing when he shut the door in our faces.

  I stooped to retrieve an unopened piece of third-class mail from the floor of the porch so that I could read the name on it: Mr. Rodney Gardner. I passed it to Derek, who looked at it and then slipped it into the mailbox beside the door.

  “Another charmer,” I said.

  “Fuckin’ charmer,” he corrected me, and we laughed.

  The girl’s face appeared at the cross-paned window in the door. She stared at Derek, ran the tip of her tongue over her full upper lip, smiled lazily, and then disappeared from view.

  “She, however, could steam-heat an entire office building, all by herself,” I observed as we walked off the porch. I smiled at him. “Did your temperature rise, h’mm, Derek?”

  “She’s just a kid,” he said, but he seemed out of breath as we walked back down the front steps. We stopped at the sidewalk. He looked everywhere but at me as he said, “So where the hell’s the opposition? I guess the pig lady’s it, huh? So much for that petition Mrs. Paine was going on about.” And then he tensed, smiled slightly, and touched my arm. I started to turn around, but he said, “Uh-uh, don’t look now. I think the loyal opposition is coming our way in a three-piece suit.”

  I turned, casually, to look.

  A tall, portly man was approaching us—marching, really, both arms swinging. He was wearing brown shoes, a brown suit and matching vest, a tan shirt, and a tie that was striped in shades of, you guessed it, brown.

  “A cigar with legs,” Derek murmured.

  In one of his beefy, swinging hands the man clasped a thick sheaf of white paper.

  “You there,” he called out to us. “Wait up.”

  We waited, up on the grass beside Derek’s car.

  When he reached us, the man planted his brown shoes wide apart as if to break the forward motion of his own stride. Up close, he was the spitting image of the Las Vegas singer Wayne Newton, complete with pompadour. I half expected him to break out in a chorus of “Danke Schön.” He didn’t, however, seem to be in a mood to entertain us.

  “Listen up.” He had a resonant voice that would not have required a microphone to be heard at the rear tables in a cocktail lounge. I realized that some women would find him attractive, but I was not one of them. Maybe it was the tie. He said forcefully, “I ran into George Butts in the alley just now, and George says you’re from some charitable outfit that’s going to finance the recreation hall for those lunatics. I want to tell you people right here and now that you won’t get away with it. We have us a nice family neighborhood here, decent people, safe streets, and we won’t have any loonies comin’ in to rape our wives and murder our children.”

  “In their beds,” Derek murmured, behind me.

  The brown man glared at Derek.

  I had at first guessed him to be in his fifties, probably because of his Las Vegas-businessman appearance, but now I realized he might be considerably younger than that, maybe no more than thirty-five. Clearly, this was a man who had skipped his own generation.

  He was pugnacious in his rebuttal to Derek: “You live on this block? Well, I do, smart guy, that house on the corner.” He pointed to yet another saltbox, painted brown, that was in better repair than most of the others. “And I don’t plan to look out my window and see maniacs pissin’ in the bushes. So you can just take your bleeding-heart money, and you can stuff it down MaryDell Paine’s fat throat, and you can tell her I said so, tell her Perry Yates said so. Her and her crazy brother. Crazy like a lazy fox, that’s what he is. Do you people know there are psychiatrists, top psychiatrists, who say there’s no such thing as schizophrenia? They’re just lazy bums, that’s what they are, living off my taxes, walking my streets, eating in soup kitchens that I pay for, sleeping in flophouses on my tax money.”

  “Yeah,” Derek said in a tight voice, “it’s one hell of a life, all right. It’s the envy of all my friends. Isn’t it the envy of all your friends, Jen?”

  “What’s your business, Mr. Yates?” I inquired.

  “None of yours,” he shot back. “The folks around here, we want that nice apartment built on top of that basement, it’d get rid of an eyesore, be good for real estate values, bring in a good class of people. You get in the way of that sale, and you’ll be in trouble like you won’t believe. I got signatures here.” He waved his sheaf of papers at us. “Hundred of signatures …”

  “Hundreds?” I said.

  I ignored his retort as I opened the door to Derek’s car, got in, and shut it. Derek didn’t follow my lead at first, but stood on the sidewalk, fists clenched, staring at the man. I had a sudden, awful feeling that he was about to take out his emotions on this stranger. But just as I started to roll down my window to distract him, Derek turned and moved off the sidewalk. He strode quickly around to the driver’s side and got in. When I breathed deeply, I realized I had been holding my breath.

  As we drove off, Yates was still waving around his sheaf of papers. Derek glanced in his rearview mirror and said, furiously, “Bastard! They don’t have all the goddamn crazies locked up.”

  This time I didn’t reprove him.

  The first flakes of snow fell on the windshield like a cooling touch on a hot brow.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Derek demanded, as if it were a personal affront.

  “What snow?” I said, lightly. “I don’t see any snow.”

  6

  “It’s only October,” I said. “It’s too early for this.”

  Nevertheless, the flakes were getting bigger and wetter, and falling faster.

  “Damn it!” Derek, still in an impotent, misdirected fury, slammed the palm of his left hand against his steering wheel. “I haven’t checked the goddamned antifreeze in my car.”

  “Or changed the filter on the furnace,” I said.

  He glanced at me. “Changed my damn tires.”

  “Had my winter coats cleaned.”

  He was calming down a little. “Chopped wood.”

  “You really chop your own?”

  “No.” He paused, smiled a little. “But I haven’t found the mates to my gloves.”

  “Put gas in the snowblower.”

  “Hauled down the electric blankets.”

  “Moved to Miami.”

  We laughed a little then, both of us nervously, but still, it was the familiar, rueful, comfortable sound of New England natives facing winter. His anger was dissipating, but it had served the purpose of shooting more life back into him along with the adrenaline. I felt almost at ease with him again.

  He turned his windshield wipers on and then jacked the heater up another notch.

  “It’s almost five o’clock, Derek. Let me off at the office, then you go on home. Tomorrow I’d like you to go back to Tenth Street and interview more of the neighbors. See if you can locate some of those ‘hundreds’ of signatures that Yates claims he has. All right?”

  “I’ll do it tonight,” he said unexpectedly. Derek had never been one to volunteer for extra work. “I’ll probably find móre of them at home.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed. “But I didn’t want to ask. We’ve never paid you enough to justify overtime, and I certainly can’t expect it of you now.”

  He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, almost lightly, “That’s all right. I never worked hard enough to justify you paying me any overtime.”

  We were silent all the rest of the way to the office. When he had stopped his car, and I was about to get out of it, he said, “So what are you going to do now, Jenny?”

  “I’m going to find this Nordic Realty and Development Company,” I told him. “Who are they? Th
at’s what I want to know. Why do I think I’ve heard of them somewhere before? Why this sudden move on Poor Fred?” That was the affectionately contemptuous nickname we natives had long ago dubbed our town. “And why do they have to have that particular basement anyway? I’ll find out who the partner is who’s trying to make the deal. Maybe I can play on his sympathies, Derek, and get him to withdraw his offer.”

  “Just smile at him, Jenny. Once’ll do it.”

  I dropped my gaze, pretending to get a better grasp on my briefcase.

  “I fucked it,” he said, in a dull voice. “I’ve fucked it all up. I’ve got no job. No family. No wife and kids of my own. No reason. No … nothin’. I got a one-bedroom apartment and some friends. That’s it. I’ve fucked it.”

  I wanted to reach across and touch his arm, to squeeze it. But I didn’t. I wish I had. All I did was ask, “Derek, do you want me to tell Faye, or do you want to do it?” Faye Basil was my secretary, a motherly woman who was nearly as fond of Derek, and as forgiving of his faults, as she was of her own sons.

  He shook his head and didn’t look at me. “You do it.”

  “All right,” I said.

  The Nordic Realty and Development Company was so new, it wasn’t even listed in the telephone directory, but a call to Information earned me the telephone number and the address. It was only a few blocks out of my way home, although the detour was made slower because of the snow that was beginning to accumulate on the side streets of town.

  The company was lodged in a small, freestanding building that somehow managed to look like Colorado in the middle of New England, an effect that was heightened by the snow on its shake-shingle roof and on the wooden floor of its homey little front porch. The sign out front was a discreet little thing with orange and blue lettering. “The Nordic,” it said, with a painting of what looked like a Swiss chalet under construction. The artist had topped each letter with a dollop of painted snow. It all looked clean, respectable, modestly successful, quaint, and it gave me an overwhelming urge to yodel.

  I walked into an empty office.

  “Yoo-hoo,” I called out, unable to resist the temptation. “Is anybody home?”

  An arm, clad in plaid wool, emerged from a door that led farther into the building. It waved, then held up its fingers as though to say, “Five minutes.” I gathered, from the red light on a phone in the front office, that the arm’s owner was on the telephone.

  While I waited for him—the arm had been long and muscular-looking, and the fingers decidedly male—I looked through the brochures that were scattered about the reception area. They told me that Nordic’s headquarters were in Gunnison, Colorado, and that the company specialized in the sale and construction of commercial buildings. The four-color brochures featured photos of several of their projects—a small ski lodge in the Rockies, an office building, a warehouse, a town library, a city hall. On the back of the brochures there were photographs of the two partners in the firm. I looked up from their pictures just as the partner in the plaid shirt hung up the phone and walked in on me.

  “Hello, Michael,” I said to him.

  He stopped, put a hand on the desk nearest to him, and stared at me. If he had only walked over to me at that moment, I would have hugged him gladly, kissed his cheek, and we could have told each other how wonderful it was to see each other again. But maybe because of the surprise of the moment, he didn’t move. Michael Laurence, a partner in the firm of Nordic Realty and Development, and the man I’d abandoned in order to fall completely in love with Geof, just stood as if frozen, and the moment passed. Immediately, an awkwardness set in between us. I didn’t seem to know what to do with my hands or feet or mouth. Finally, he took mercy on me, and smiled—the wonderful smile that warmed those brown eyes that used to make my secretary feel like a heroine in a romantic novel. And then he did walk over to me, hold out his hands, take mine, and squeeze them.

  “Hi, Swede,” he said, kissing me lightly. “How’d you find me?”

  “Were you hiding?” I tried for a light tone to match his. “Actually, I didn’t come looking for you, Michael; I came looking for the Nordic company, only to find that you’re it.” But then I gave in to the sheer delight of seeing him again. “Oh, Michael, you look wonderful! You look as if you go skiing every day, and hiking every other day. You look so good to me! How are you? What are you doing back in town?”

  He smiled again. “Well, I wasn’t run out on a rail, Jenny, so I assume I’m allowed to come back to my hometown.” When he saw how that flustered me, he stepped in to save me from embarrassment again. “We’re opening this Port Frederick branch, Swede, at my instigation. I think we can do some good business here, and it’ll give me a chance to get back home more often. See my mom and dad. See my old friends.” Again he flashed that smile that could have melted every glacier west of the Continental Divide, though it had never managed to unthaw my heart, oh, stubborn organ. “By the way, congratulations.” He lifted my ring hand to look at the plain band on it, then looked at me again. “From the way you look, I’d say it suits you.”

  “Thank you,” I mumbled.

  He released my hand and pointed us over toward a couple of chairs. When we were seated, he asked me why I’d come looking for his company. Michael had once been a foundation trustee—the young man among the elders—so I didn’t have to explain that part to him, only that we were interested in purchasing the basement and why.

  “There must be other sites in town, Jenny.”

  “They would be harder to find than you think,” I said. “Can’t you find some other site for your project?”

  “That basement is not the project, Jenny, the whole neighborhood is. We’re going to rehabilitate those properties, starting with that block, starting with that basement. I’ve already done the legwork, Jenny, I’ve already put in an offer, and I’m not inclined to back down at this point.”

  “Not even for the foundation?”

  “Not even for you.”

  “But Michael …”

  He smiled, fractionally. “Where have I heard that before? But Michael, she’d say, just before she demolished my arguments. But Michael, but Michael …”

  “… it’s already snowing, it’s already cold, these people need daytime shelter now. We can’t wait. We need that basement … they need it … more than you do.”

  He stood up, walked over to a front window and stared out for a moment. I waited, hoping he was thinking it over, hoping he was changing his mind. He turned, and said, “You can’t have everything your way, Jenny.”

  I stood up, too, and said as mildly as I could, over the surprise I was feeling, “This isn’t personal, Michael.”

  “I agree, it’s business. But I will make a personal effort to help you locate another site in town, how’s that?”

  I shook my head in a gesture of frustration that brought with it a sense of déjà vu. “You weren’t listening to me, Michael. And when have I said that before? You can find another site, on another block. We want that basement, before somebody freezes to death. Are you willing to let that happen, just so you can make a quicker buck?”

  “You never did fight fair.”

  “It is fair, damn it. It’s also true.”

  He shrugged and glanced out the window again. “You’d better get home to your cop, Jenny. He’ll be worried that you got stuck in the snow.”

  I drew a deep, calming breath. I forced myself to smile and to say as lightly as I could, “I’ll outbid you, Michael. The foundation has deeper pockets than you do. But listen, I’ll send you an invitation to the open house the day the recreation hall opens its doors.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder as I walked past him toward the front door. “They’ll be holding it in my basement, Jenny, the basement of my apartment building.” We traded tight if-looks-could-kill smiles. “Drive carefully, Swede.”

  “Welcome back, Michael.”

  Once outside, I got the front door partway shut against the snow. From the inside, Michael pu
lled the door out of my hands, closing it the rest of the way.

  7

  I slid home on a low burn of anger that took my mind off Derek and that should have melted the ice under my tires and defrosted the car windows. For the past few years I had been remembering Michael fondly—conveniently forgetting how infuriating he could be. He had come home from Colorado tanned, muscled, fit, even better-looking than before, but no more reasonable and fair-minded than he’d ever been. Once, he’d seemed like a saint for pursuing me for many months of date-but-don’t-touch. Inevitably, sainthood had become martyrdom, a less attractive condition. He still carried an air of petulance—at least, around me—that made me want to kick him in the shins. Clearly this was not a case, and never had been, of two people who brought out the best in each other.

  I skidded the Accord into the garage, then I walked—stalked—into our cold, empty house in which a telephone was ringing. I let it ring while I shrugged off my coat, hung it on the coat tree, turned up the thermostat, and kicked off my heels; only then did I reach for it.

  “Mrs. Cain? Jenny?”

  That could only be MaryDell Paine. The wonder of it was that she’d been able to find me in the phone book at all.

  “Hi, MaryDell.” I took a deep breath to cleanse me of my encounter with a former lover. “I’m glad you called. You’ll be pleased to know that Derek and I were both very impressed with the basement. If everything else checks out, we will probably recommend it to the board for purchase. We got the landlord to give us until noon Friday to make an offer.”

  I thought she’d be pleased, even excited, but she didn’t react to my news. It didn’t even seem to be the reason she’d called. Instead, she went off on a nearly incoherent diatribe about the weather and her brother.

  “I found him today, Jenny. I found Kitt, my brother, you know. After I left your office. I’ll admit it to you, I just plain drove around until I found him. After all this time I do know some of the places he hangs around! So I made him get in the car, and I drove him past the church basement, and I said, ‘There, there, would you go there, get a hot meal, if you could?’ And he surprised me, Jenny, he really surprised me, he said he would! Well, I’ll be honest, he said maybe he would, maybe he would if he felt like it. But I was so encouraged by that, really I was, because all the good intentions in the world, you know … but this weather! It’s too soon; we can’t have all this snow and cold so soon! What will he do between now and when we open the recreation—”