"Freshen that up for you, Mr. Cassidy?" Ramon Delgado asked. Ramon was a handsome Mexican, short and muscular, about ten years older than Wheeler. He had witnessed many of Wheeler's spear-fishing tournaments from his penalty box behind the bar.
"Might as well keep the barley farmers in business," Wheeler said as a new shot was poured into his glass.
"John Haverston was in here this morning," Ramon said, his voice sort of ending in a question. John Haverston was on the membership disciplinary committee, which had been deliberating for almost a week on whether or not to give Wheeler the boot. "He was looking for you," Ramon continued. "I said you was out playing golf."
"I think we're about to have a W. C. C. execution," Wheeler mused. "I'll be beaten to death by old lawyers with putters."
"I don't know, sir. I think they just gonna tell you you gotta be more discreet. . . ."
Ramon polished the bar, trying to find a way to put difficult thoughts into words. Wheeler always thought it must be strange for Ramon to deal drinks to bums like him all day. Ramon, who had come across the border in the back of an empty, stinking gasoline truck, who had worked in the lettuce fields in central California to support his family until he got a job through his cousin on the maintenance crew at Westridge Country Club. Ramon, who learned near-perfect English and worked like a peon, and who now found himself behind the bar listening to millionaires' sons bitch about their lives.
"See, I think if a woman member is married but she don't respect the sanctity of her marriage vows and decides to take liberties in the bedroom, this is not totally the gentleman's fault . . . because, sir, this was not a good marriage, I think, to begin with."
"That's got nice Latin spin on it, Ramon, but I don't think this bunch of pooh-bahs is gonna see it your way."
He knocked back the drink in one swallow as the phone on the bar rang and Ramon moved down to answer it. Wheeler could hear him say, "He's right here, sir."
Ramon brought the phone over to him. It sort of bothered Wheeler that most people now knew they could find him at the W. C. C. bar any afternoon, but it didn't bother him enough to do anything about it. Still, it was discouraging, as if he'd dropped another notch on the social ratchet wheel. He put the phone to his ear.
It was Jimmy, a willowy, overtly homosexual blond man who was his mother's secretary.
"You must get here immediately," he lisped.
"Why? What is it ... is Mother okay?"
"As if that matters one whit to you. . . ."
"Come on, Jimmy, cut the shit. What's up?"
"I'm not going to say. It's not my job to say. Better she tells, but you just better get your little white ass over here, Wheeler," and Jimmy hung up.
He thought it was also noteworthy that his mother's secretary felt he could sass Wheeler out. On the other hand, Jimmy was an expert on men's asses, so maybe it was just a nice compliment. With that amusing thought still rattling in his liquor-soaked head, he got up off the bar stool, dropped a twenty for Ramon, and left.
The Cassidy mansion was in Beverly Hills, on Wingate at the end of the cul-de-sac. It was a choice seven-acre spread, the house sitting in Colonial splendor on the top of a rolling hill of bright green, freshly mowed summer rye. He parked his new red XK8 Jag convertible out front and walked into the house, his hands in his pockets, linen pant cuffs flapping over polished Spanish leather loafers, feeling like a road-company Gatsby.
He had never lived in the house. His father had bought it just after Wheeler got thrown out of Special Forces. Wheeler had decided to live in sexual splendor with two topless dancers who worked the summer shows at the Trop in Vegas and were now wintering in Los Angeles, trying to open a health food restaurant. Why does everybody in L. A. want to open a restaurant?
Jimmy was standing by the banister with his hands on his hips, feet in fifth position, glowering savagely. "You're going to have to help her. You're the only one she has left," he said. "She's going to need a lot more than a half-drunken bum."
"I really wish you'd just tell me what the hell is happening, Jimmy."
The young man chose to say nothing, but moved to the side and pointed to his mother's room upstairs. Wheeler climbed the long circular staircase to the upstairs hall. He could hear his mother crying. When he entered the bedroom, his mother looked up from the chaise longue by the front window.
It happened again, as it had for all the years he had known her. He was momentarily startled by her incredible beauty. She was sixty-five but looked forty, and it wasn't Beverly Hills plastic surgeons who had performed the miracle. He knew he had received his looks from her gene pool, but there was something about Katherine Cassidy, something so beautiful and restrained and elegant, that she always required a moment of reappraisal. As if his memory wasn't strong enough to carry her perfection. She turned to him.
"Prescott, Prescott... is dead," she said, and her hand wandered up to her mouth and covered her lips, almost as if she was afraid the evil sentence would return.
"What?" Wheeler said, his mind in full gallop. "Dead? How?" Three one-word sentences. Mr. Bullshit comes up dry.
"How could this happen?" his mother wailed.
"Mom, who told you? Are you sure?"
"The police. They came by two hours ago. We didn't know where to find you."
"I was at the club," he said, instantly regretting the remark. "Did he ... ? Was it. . . ?"
"Heart attack," his mother whispered. "They found him in his office, at his desk, when they came to work this morning." And then she started to cry again.
It was such a mournful wail that Wheeler rushed to her and put an arm around her, trying desperately to comfort her. He felt the racking sobs. Her muscles quivered with the sickening effort.
"Mother, mother, I'm here," he said, as if that made any fucking difference. "I'm here," he whispered, and she reached down and squeezed his hand. The squeeze sort of said it all. It was the way you'd squeeze a child's hand when you want him to be quiet.
"What can I do? How can I help?" he asked, his mind still racing. Somehow, just like that--in a heartbeat--Pres wasn't part of the race anymore. He'd been scratched on a coronary technicality. Wheeler's world had shifted again. Prescott Cassidy had checked off the planet.
"Why? Why Prescott . . . ?" Kay said.
And immediately, Wheeler knew that the full sentence went: Why Prescott and not Wheeler? After all, Wheeler was the foul-up. The country club lush who was only trying to screw other people's wives. Wheeler was just taking up bar space while Prescott was taking up political causes. Wheeler was a much better candidate for a medical crack-up--he'd been processing ninety-proof Scotch through his kidneys and liver faster than a mid-sized distillery. Why Prescott and not Wheeler? Goddamn good question.
"The office has been calling," Kay finally said. "They're frantic. I don't know what to tell them."
"What office?" Wheeler said, dumbly.
"His office. Nobody knows what to do. Can you go see if you can help?" she asked, not looking at him, her eyes out the window as if maybe Pres was out there winning another race, about to come in and surprise them with a new gold trophy.
"Mom, what do I know about Pres's law office? What do I..." He stopped, speechless, because she looked at him with such a pained expression of anger and regret he felt dismembered by it.
"Okay, I'll go. I'll go over there."
So, with very little else to say, that's exactly what he did.
What he found made absolutely no sense at all.
Chapter 4.
Madhouse
Wheeler's thoughts about Pres were complicated. So complicated that he suspected they would never become totally clear to him. First there was love; Wheeler had really loved his younger brother, loved him unconditionally, loved him for who he was and what he had become. While Wheeler was getting drunk, Pres was getting rich and famous, and you had to admire that, because it was what Dad had wanted for both of them and Pres had taken the chance, stepped up and hit the ball. Wheeler h
ad chosen his own path, which, lately, was winding in tighter and tighter circles around the nineteenth hole at the Westridge Country Club. Still . . . still, there was that early training, those fatherly lectures delivered to Wheeler earnestly and without deviation; lectures that had somehow managed to find a spot and fester malignantly in the back of his head. Now he could hear his father's warnings. "Wheeler, you're wasting valuable time. Your life is about nothing."
Pres had become the things they had both been told to be, and Wheeler truly admired Pres for taking the more difficult road.
Okay. So that said, there was also the other side of it. There was Pres, the fucking prince; Pres, the family kiss-ass; Pres, who, with his immense success, had made Wheeler's failure even deeper and more important. And for this, Wheeler had started hating his younger brother. Now his little brother was dead. Pres's heart had blown up like an old Studebaker engine. Wheeler was finally back out in front. He was alive and Pres wasn't. So who's better off now, buddy?
Wheeler's thoughts were a jumbled mixture of sadness and guilt. Then his mind flashed back to a drunken conversation he'd had one afternoon, a year ago, at the W. C. C. bar. He'd been looking into the rum-dimmed eyes of Stockton C. Tanquary IV, known around the club as "Tank." Alcohol had ravaged Tank, and tuned his Harvard-educated engine down to a dieseling, coughing idle. His complexion looked like a blueberry pie that had exploded in the oven.
"Fucking Suzanne Peiser . . . 'member Suzy?" Tank was referring to a younger member's athletic wife. "Fuckin' brain cancer. Deader'n dog shit in less than a year^" he slurred, wheezing musty breath over the rim of his tub glass at Wheeler, who nodded, not sure what to make of the abrupt statement. "Yep, she's right there with the Colonel," Tank continued. "The Spudster is one dead military son of a bitch. Fucker's doing close-order drill with Jesus now."
"Right," Wheeler had said, wishing he didn't have to smell Tank's alcohol-rotted breath. Colonel Warren "Spud" Westwater had had a fatal traffic accident coming home from his horse farm in Santa Barbara. His wife, Sissy, had also been killed in the crash.
"An' how 'bout Kip Lunsford? How 'bout that? Huh? The fuckin' guy died in the shower. Can you believe it? Thirty-nine years old, head of his own trucking company, and that bozo slips goin' for the soap, hits his fuckin' head on the tile ledge, and . . . kaboom! Adios, motherfucker."
Even in his dumbed-down stupor, as Wheeler looked at the ghost of his own future, he had known what Tank was saying: "I might be a drunk, I might look like two hundred and thirty pounds of yellow shit in a bag, but dammit, I'm better off than all these other world-beating assholes who are now gazing up at their own coffin lids."
The traffic was light on Beverly Glen, but Wheeler was so lost in thought he almost hit a pedestrian who was crossing the street at Wilshire. He was on his way to Century City, where Prescott's law firm was housed in two floors of antique-furnished splendor. Those ornate offices had always managed to give Wheeler the finger every time he dropped by to get his estate check, which his mother thought should be delivered each month by his reliable younger brother. So, fuck you, Pres! Who the hell is winning the race now?! Wheeler wanted to cry for his dead brother, but the tears wouldn't come. So he drove stone-faced, all the way down Santa Monica Boulevard to the Avenue of the Stars, and down the underground garage ramp of Prescott's building to visiting parking. Although he couldn't cry, he was broken-hearted because he would never be able to see his brother again or root for him or be proud of what he'd accomplished.
Like he'd said, his thoughts about Pres were complicated.
The office was a madhouse. Phones were ringing; there was an air of funereal reverence amidst confused, frenzied activity.
"Angie didn't come in this morning," the pretty redhead said, looking at Wheeler, trying not to flirt. She correctly reasoned this would be a bad morning for it, even though she found Wheeler terribly attractive. "We met last time you were here. I'm Georgette, I was in Legal Research then," she said. "I'm so sorry. We're all . . . we're so ... I just don't know how to say it. Prescott was a wonderful . . . just a wonderful person."
"Yeah, he was," Wheeler said softly and looked around at the chorus of faces watching him, all of them wondering how he would surf the crest of this wave. He showed nothing.
"It's been crazy," she said. "Clients have been calling. I'm just temping up here, but somebody apparently broke into your brother's house last night and set off the alarm. And now Angie didn't come to work and she's the only one who knows where everything in his office is. . . ."
"Somebody broke into Pres's house?" Wheeler said, concerned. He knew that Pres's wife, Liz, and his son, Hollis, were in Connecticut at Liz's parents' house for Hollis's winter vacation. Pres had been planning to go there on Tuesday. Now they were flying back, or at least that was what Jimmy had said as Wheeler left for Century City.
"The police called. We gave them a key. They shut the alarm off. I tried to find Angie. She's got her machine on and she's not picking up."
Wheeler remembered the last time he had seen his brother's secretary. Angie Wong had breezed by him on her way out of the country club a week before.
"Is his Rolodex in the office?" Wheeler asked. His mind was still whirling and skipping beats, nibbling at stray thoughts but locking on nothing. She shrugged, then nodded, and he moved into his brother's huge corner suite filled with certificated Chippendale furniture.
Chip and Dale--aren't they cartoon mice?
Wheeler started to look through the Rolodex for the number of the alarm company so he could contact them to see if a window or door had been broken. It was then that he noticed the first strange thing ... all of the little cards were out of order, as if somebody had removed them and stuck them back in without looking. None were under their correct alphabetical listing. Pres would never do that. Pres was over-organized; even his closets were color-keyed.
"These are out of order," he said, looking at the hundreds of cards, thinking it would take forever to find the alarm company in this jumbled mess.
"Well . . . uh, he . . . that's strange." She couldn't explain it, but theny she was just a temp, transferred up from--what was it?--
Legal Research. He sat down and went through the cards, finally finding the alarm company in with the Q's, where there was almost everything but a name starting with Q.
He handed it to Georgette and asked her to call the company and make sure the house was secure. While she went out to call, Wheeler sat in his brother's high-back swivel chair and looked out the window toward the ocean.
The offices were on the twenty-fifth and -sixth floors and the view was spectacular. This particular L. A. afternoon was better than most. A light Santa Ana wind had cleared the basin of smog, blowing it out to sea, giving Catalina Island a good dose of twentieth-century reality. He felt strange sitting in his brother's chair, where Pres had died. He'd never sat there before. He didn't belong in this chair ... or did he?
The next thing that happened was downright spooky. Pres had died at his desk, working late . . . and his car was still in the garage. It had been, for some reason, parked across two spaces. Orderly, compulsive Prescott would never do that.
Who's pulling this shit?
The building's parking garage had been asking that it be moved. Nobody had the key. Georgette came back in and told him that the police had not reset the alarm, but the house was secure. He nodded and went down to move Pres's car.
It took no time for Wheeler to get Pres's classic brown Mercedes sedan open. He popped the chrome strip off the door with his penknife, reached in through the hole under the strip, and pushed the lock up. He hot-wired the car by reaching under the dash, disconnecting, then touching the ignition wires together. The engine coughed and purred to life. Prank car theft was another of Wheeler's deft social accomplishments.
"Stop," Prescott said, his voice clear and commanding in the car interior. Wheeler's heart jumped up into his throat. He spun around, looked in the back seat . . . empty! What the fuck?<
br />
"New paragraph, Angie," his brother's voice continued. It was coming from the speaker system. The radio in the dash had a digital readout on the LED screen that now said "Tape." Wheeler's heart slowed. It was just a dictation recording:
"All our contacts at I. N. S. will remain intact, and John will continue to process the account on your end. However, I must caution our friend in Hong Kong against continuing to increase the flow in all three divisions. At this level of activity, he will surely have political trouble at the highest level of the U. S. government. Stop. New paragraph, Angie. Lastly, I regret to inform you that, as of this date, I will no longer be able to continue to participate. Stop. I have been making all of the above arguments to the White Fan here, but have basically been ignored. I have no other choice but to withdraw from the equation. New paragraph, Angie. I wish you well and hope all is successful, and that everything we worked for will eventually happen in mid-V8. Please make no further contact as my decision is final. Sign that with the usual closing, Angie, and get it off immediately. Then erase this tape and shred the file."
The tape was over.
Silence.
His brother's voice had shaken him deeply. He wanted to get the fuck out of there.
Riding the Snake (1998) Page 4