by Paul Levine
So don't start romanticizing this one. This was weird from day one. First she stiff-arms and belittles you. Then drops you in the soup with a bunch of sicko killers and gets angry when you fight your way out. Next she shows up under the sheets, then boom, she's furious. She cuddles again, sharing bed and board until she finds someone else. Who was it? A psychiatrist at one of her speeches. Or a beachboy type, Mel Gibson with a deep tan.
Okay, grow up already. She left. Accept it for what it was. "'Sweet love were slain,'" old Tennyson wrote. A meaningless joining of bodies, a sharing of mutual heat, a momentary exchange of breaths. Nothing more.
The ex-coroner and the ex-jockey hadn't come back, so I limped up the stairs to the mezzanine, the left foot still swollen and angry at me. There were cries of joy and anguish from the grandstand, and by the time I got to the bar, the TV monitor was showing the replay, number two, thundering down the stretch, five lengths ahead, Bellasario leaning forward, talking horse talk, I imagined, in Radar Vector's ears. He paid $25.80, $9.80, and $5.20.
I ordered a draft beer and was joined by two elderly men in polo shirts, golf slacks, and sneakers. A second TV was tuned to the Yankees-Red Sox game and it was clear these guys didn't come to drink. One had a hundred bucks on the Yankees at six-to-five.
Five minutes later, Charlie Riggs and Max Blinderman pulled up, laughing, slapping each other on the back, counting their money. Literally counting it, unfolding greenbacks as they walked.
"Jake, buy you a beer?" Charlie thundered.
I didn't say no.
"Never played a perfecta before," Charlie announced. He dropped two fifties on the bar and stuffed one in the pocket of the old geezer who was polishing glasses. "But couldn't resist pairing Radar Vector with Internal Medicine. How could I lose?"
How, indeed?
"Paid ninety-eight dollars on a two-dollar bet."
"Great, you can buy dinner," I said.
"He can buy more than that," Max said. "He bet a hundred bucks. Say, doc, you're not doing anything tomorrow, we'll have breakfast, study the charts."
"Tomorrow?" Charlie raised an eyebrow.
"Don't worry. I'll be at the lab by eleven, they can stick me, and we'll make the one o'clock post."
"Done," Charlie said.
The bartender drew a pitcher of beer for the coroner and the lawyer, then delivered a Preakness-rye and vermouth with a dash of Benedictine-for the jockey.
Max sipped his drink and looked at me, his smile gone. "Hey, shyster, that English-bred filly of yours came by the other day to sign up. What's the matter, she want to graze in other pastures?"
"Thanks for the news bulletin, Max," I said. "Give Bobbie my best."
He showed me a shit-eating grin. "Yow, I'll do better than that. I'll give her my best."
I laughed. Not at him. At us. A couple of immature punks in the school yard insulting each other's prowess with the opposite sex.
"Whaddaya laughing at, shyster?"
"Just wondering. When Bobbie comes sniffing around, should I tell her to skedaddle, go home to Max? Or should I give her a run around the track?"
I don't know why I said that. Stupid and vicious. That wasn't the man Granny Lassiter raised. There was no need to respond in kind to his ridicule. Charlie would tell me later how disappointed he was in me. Max told me something else. He came next to my bar stool and stood, maybe on tiptoes, pressing his face close to mine. His breath smelled of tobacco and whiskey.
"Look, shyster, you try anything with Bobbie, I make you a gelding quicker'n you can say Eddie Arcaro."
"Eddie Arcaro," I said.
Oh boy, aren't you big and tough, taunting someone who makes Michael J. Fox look like Rambo. Little guys always want to fight you, to prove something to themselves. If you take them up on it, throw them from here to second base, you're a bully. Get whupped, you're a wimp. Jockeys prove something to themselves squiring six-foot-tall models and driving block-long Lincolns. Don't ask me what or why. Maybe Pam Maxson knows. I'll ask her. Maybe get the promised therapy at the same time.
"Nobody fucks with Bobbie," Max Blinderman snarled, turning on his heel and disappearing into the grandstand.
CHAPTER 35
Sublimations
I had the top down and the pedal to the metal climbing our Miami mountain, the great looping causeway from the mainland to Key Biscayne. The causeway soars skyward to let the sailboats pass underneath, and it gives you a copter's view of the city, sun-sparkled and gleaming. Cruise ships and condos, beaches and sports cars. It is the cinematographer's vision of the tropical paradise. Phony as a bar girl's smile.
The Olds roared over the crest, eastward toward the morning sun, and I eased off the gas, cruising past the marina and the Marine Stadium, past the entrance to Virginia Key, and on through Crandon Park into the small downtown of Key Biscayne. The Key is turned inside out. Surrounded by water, the condos and hotels on the east open onto the sea. The houses on the west open onto the bay. In northern climes, houses have front porches. You can walk the block and salute your neighbors. Here, we're all out back at the beach or pool. The fronts are deserted, out of the action.
I tried the house phone at the hotel. No answer in her room. At least the operator didn't give me the non disturbate message. I tried the lobby. No luck. The pool deck had its usual collection of buttocks in bikinis, the South American Tonga, alongside heavyset men weighted with gold. But no English lady from the Cotswolds. I stepped onto the beach, my black wingtips sinking into the sand. I don't know what's worse, being underdressed for your surroundings or overdressed. It is impossible to wear a shirt and tie on the beach and not feel both foolish about yourself and resentful of those properly unattired.
I checked the grill at the chickee hut, not thirty yards from the surf. Bare backs, the smell of coconut oil, icy red strawberry daiquiris, and the sizzle of burning burgers. But no Pam Maxson.
I tried the front desk, where a slim young man with a slim young mustache smiled at me and chirped g'morning. For a moment I thought I was two hundred twenty miles up yonder in the land of the mouse. The plastic tag on his brown blazer said "Carlos." I allowed as how it was a fine morning indeed and asked him for Dr. Maxson's room number. Still smiling under his whiskery lip, Carlos told me he couldn't do that but the operator would be oh-so-happy to dial the room she might fall off her ergonomic, three-hundred-sixty-degree swivel chair. So I flashed him my laminated, semiofficial badge, which was starting to show wear around the edges, and Carlos punched some buttons on his computer and gave me a suite number, twelfth floor, ocean side. I headed for the elevator and he looked after me. Smiling.
There was silence after the first knock on the double doors. And the second.
After the third she asked who it was.
When I told her, she cracked the door, chain still affixed, and asked what I wanted.
Beaches without footprints, I told her. Eternal happiness, too. But I'd settle for fresh-squeezed juice, eggs over lightly, and a basket of toast with three or four of those little jelly jars.
She unchained and let me in. We faced each other awkwardly in a sitting room tastefully done in muted tropical colors. A sliding glass door led to a balcony with a floor-to-ceiling view of the Atlantic. She wore an ankle-length floral satin robe and no makeup. The sculpted cheekbones still showed their granite planes. Her green eyes were still spiked with flint. Her auburn hair was pulled straight back and tied in a ponytail.
I was too late for breakfast. The room-service cart was there, covered with a white tablecloth and decorated by a vase with fresh-cut lavender flowers. An empty cereal bowl sat on one side of the table and the remains of a western omelet on the other. Two chairs, two place settings, one big pot with two coffee cups. My inductive reasoning told me that Pamela Maxson had not dined alone. I was getting so good at this I decided to ask Nick Fox for a raise.
"Kiss me quick before I die," I said.
"What in heaven's-"
"The flowers on your table. I don't
know the real name, but as kids, that's what we called them, kiss me quick-"
"Before I die." She picked up one of the flowers, a white eye in the center circled by a lush lavender. "How quaint."
"The color doesn't last. Even on the shrub, it'll fade to pale lilac and then a ghostly white in just a few days."
"Gather ye rosebuds," she said, twirling the stem in her hand.
"Something like that. Flowers, people, we're all a-dying, aren't we?"
She didn't answer. I thought I heard the water running in the bathroom, but it might have been the next suite down the hall.
"Coffee?" she asked.
I nodded and she poured into a used cup. The coffee was still hot.
"Business or social call?" she asked.
"I was wondering how you were doing."
"Fine."
"Think you'll stay here long?"
"No."
"You need anything?"
"No."
Reluctant witnesses either blather incessantly about irrelevancies or one-word you to death. I drank somebody else's coffee and stared through the glass door at a tanker three miles offshore, heading south. I wanted to put all the little fishes on the reefs on red alert.
"Pam…"
"Yes?"
"I thought we could talk about-"
A sound from inside the bedroom stopped me. Maybe a dresser drawer closing. I watched the door.
"Oh, Jake. Just come out and ask. There's no reason to be so sensitive about it. I'm surely not."
"All right. I'll ask. Why? Who? What's going on?"
The bedroom door opened and out walked Bobbie Blinderman.
She was dressed in a hot-orange, body-molding leather mini held up by two straps. The shoes were matching orange with stiletto heels. She puckered her orange glossy lips and blew me a kiss. "'Morning, Lassiter."
I wished it had been Mel Gibson.
"Jake, don't look so surprised. My goodness, you're actually turning pale, isn't he, Bobbie?"
"As a ghost," she said.
"Jake, I'm helping Bobbie with some of her problems. She's-"
"Great, who's helping with yours?"
"Oh Jake, don't."
"Is the little boy angry?" Bobbie jeered. "Somebody steal his candy bar?"
"Jake, bisexuality is quite normal, really. Some of the greatest figures in history were bisexual. Socrates, for example."
"Elton John," Bobbie added.
"Oscar Wilde," Pam said.
"David Bowie," Bobbie countered.
This went on for a while, like a vaudeville routine.
Pam said, "Henry III."
And Bobbie said, "Janis Joplin."
Pam said, "Colette."
And Bobbie said, "Bessie Smith."
"Okay," I said. "I get the point."
Pam said, "All of us are born bisexual and have those tendencies until puberty. The heterosexual merely sublimates his homosexual cravings in friendship and other social engagements with the same sex. Some don't sublimate it."
"I understand," I muttered.
"So why are you so…threatened?"
Bobbie sat down on the sofa and crossed her legs, hiking the leather dress toward her hips. What was it she told me that day in the courthouse? That I really didn't know her at all, and the less I knew the better.
"Hey, I don't care if people are homosexual, bisexual, or if they like inflatable dolls or rubber duckies," I said. "It just gets personal when somebody I'm involved with, somebody I thought I was involved with, turns out differently than I had supposed."
"Would you be as upset if I left for a man?"
"I don't know, maybe not."
"Why?"
I was getting tired of her analyzing me. "While we're talking about why, tell me why you're the way you are."
"Do you really want to know or do you need reinforcement that your manhood isn't diminished by my choices?"
"No. I want to know. I came here today because I missed you, couldn't understand why you left. So now I know part of it, the tip-of-the-iceberg part…"
"I suppose I could tell you about the positive and negative Oedipus complex. For a girl it's very complex. To become heterosexual, she has to transfer her love from her mother to her father, then must repress that love and transfer it to other men while still identifying with the mother. If the girl has incomplete identification with her own sex, she combines characteristics of both sexes. If she cannot resolve the positive Oedipal complex, if she cannot transfer her love for her father to other men, she will become homosexual or bisexual." Pam studied me to see if I was following the lecture. I just looked out the window and watched the tanker steam south, black puffs belching from its smokestacks.
"You get an A-plus for clinical psychology," I said, "but I want to know about you. Your childhood, your parents. What made you what you are?"
"What I am!"
"Wow," Bobbie breathed. She squirmed on the sofa and turned toward Pam. "He thinks you're a thing, an it, a lesbianic creature from outer space."
"You two are having fun with this, aren't you? Baiting me."
Pam stood and walked toward the balcony. The tanker was gone.
"Jake, it doesn't greatly concern me what you think of me, though I should like to enlighten you. A hundred years ago, Dr. Krafft-Ebing declared that heterosexual cunnilingus was a perversion of fetishists."
"He probably didn't like oysters, either," I said.
"My point is that attitudes change. In ancient Greece-"
"I don't care about ancient Greece. I really don't. But I care about you, or I wouldn't have come here."
"Good. I care about Bobbie. And there is no reason we cannot all care about each other."
"Before we start caring too much," Bobbie said, hoisting herself up on long legs, "I gotta go to work."
"Me too," I said. "Too much enlightenment before breakfast gives me a headache."
"Your sarcasm is readily apparent," Pam said.
I shrugged. The two ladies said ta-ta and their lips brushed, Pam giving Bobbie a little squeeze on her burnt-orange behind.
I examined the tops of my shoes as Bobbie Blinderman and I shared an elevator. A middle-aged man with a fresh sunburn, an aloha shirt, and a conventioneer's tag identifying him as a risk-loss specialist from Omaha stopped talking to his wife and stared at my six-foot-tall orange lollipop. Bobbie showed her hundred-watt smile, and then turned to me. "I'm gonna be sore for a week, you big moose." My risk-loss friend snickered and slapped me on the back when the doors opened at the lobby.
It took the valet ten minutes to coax the Olds out of the stable. If you drive a Rolls or a Jag convertible or if you arrive by limo, they leave your machine out front in the shade of the palms. Impress the tourists, justify the room rates. If it's a convertible older than the valet, they often put it on a concrete deck in the broiling sun where the salt spray can speckle it.
A sleepy-eyed teenager in a red vest was opening Bobbie's door as I got in on the driver's side. I had my right foot inside and my left foot on the ground when I saw the blur.
The blur hit the side of the door and slammed it into my shin. The pain shot through me and I fell backward into the car, my leg still pinned by the door to the frame. The blur opened the door a few inches and slammed it back again, smashing me harder. It felt like a sledgehammer had crushed me.
Then my leg stopped hurting but only because my head ached. Something hit me above the eye. A fist.
A left fist that did it again. Not much of a punch, but I couldn't move. My leg was on fire, still pinned in the car. Red flashes streaked across my brain. Then a flurry of punches bounced off my forehead and chin. Quick combinations, pop, pop, popping off my skull. I felt two hands reach for my neck, and I heard Bobbie screaming. Somewhere on the edge of my peripheral vision I had the impression of people staring. Parking attendants, tourists, a crowd frozen by the sight.
I pivoted with the leg inside the car, got both hands on the door, and shoved. It tossed him backwa
rd into the driveway, and he stumbled but didn't fall. I struggled out of the car, one-legging it toward him.
He glared at me, dark eyes blazing with hate. "Nobody fucks with Bobbie," Max Blinderman declared.
CHAPTER 36
The Message
The Harman and Fox receptionist didn't bat an eye. She just wished me a pleasant afternoon and tapped a glowing button on the phone with the tip of her polished nail. A law clerk stopped in the corridor, started to ask, thought better of it, and ducked into the copying room. My partners were either at a late lunch or an early golf game, so I was unmolested all the way back to my two-window, bayfront office where Cindy sat in her cubicle, pretending to type.
"Holy shit! Did you get the license number?"
I lifted my standard-issue, rubber-tipped aluminum cane and said, "It's not as bad as it looks."
"It looks like you stuck your leg in a manhole and your head in a beehive."
True. I could barely walk, little welts were popping out of my forehead, and my right eye was swollen shut. Max's jabs had left more marks than pain. The leg wasn't broken, but not for lack of trying, and the foot still hurt from where Carruthers danced on it. I stretched out the leg and eased into my high-backed chair.
"Musta been a mean hombre," Cindy said, fishing.
I didn't bite.
"I mean, he musta been one big nut crusher."
"Right. Runs about a hundred twenty, including his saddle."
"C'mon. Probably a whole gang of thugs with chains and clubs."
"Cindy, it was a tough morning. Bring me the mail and the messages and any work you may have inadvertently done, then leave me alone."
"Okay, okay, I been working. The usual pleadings to sign. Motions to continue, motions to defer, motions to forget. Nothing in the mail to interest you except a trial lawyers' convention in Aruba."