He stood up as she turned, looking at her watch.
“I think we talked right through fried-egg time,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m really starving. What we’re down to is peanut-butter-sandwiches time.”
They went to the kitchen. He leaned against the counter and sipped a tall glass of milk as she assembled the two thick sandwiches.
“I bet I made forty-five thousand of these before the kids went off to school,” she said.
“What are they going to do this summer?”
“God knows. I think Midge wants to work at Disney World again if they’ll take her. Brud is looking for something that’ll grow meat and muscle.” She gave him his sandwich and said, “Do you ever think about getting married again, Lew?”
“If I can find a lady as smart as you I’ll get married and run for governor.”
“You always keep saying I’m so smart. Mostly all I’m good at is games. And what … we do. I mean what we used to do. We swore off. Right?”
He toasted the thought with a lift of his milk glass. “Absolutely right. Never again.”
“Lew? You know the money from my mother’s estate, that I put into certificates of deposit? Remember, over a year ago it was, I told you if Marty went ahead with Harbour Pointe, I wanted a predevelopment price on a real nice one?”
“I remember.”
“Well, if anybody counted me in, you better tell them to count me out.”
“You’re probably on some kind of list of people to be contacted, but no obligation was set up. Just say no thanks.”
“Would you buy one yourself?”
“No thanks.”
“That’s what I thought.”
It was time to go. He wiped away the crumbs with a paper napkin and kissed her on the temple. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, honey.”
“I guess I’m glad you did. Look, some hot day when you want a swim, you call me up, hear?”
Her face was earnest, her round green eyes without guile. “I’ll just do that,” he said. “Thanks, Molly girl.”
He backed out and drove around the circle and west on Bayview Terrace to the stop sign at the corner of Beach Drive. In his rear vision mirror he saw Molly Denniver right behind him in the Lincoln, wearing her big mirrored shades. He waved and she honked and they turned in opposite directions on Beach Drive.
• • •
When Lew Traff stepped off the elevator at the twelfth floor, the receptionist told him that Mr. Wannover, the Marliss accountant, wanted him to come to his office as soon as he got in.
Benjie Wannover was behind his desk, going over large work sheets, his fingers dancing across the keys of his big desk-top electronic calculator. Benjie was about fifty. He looked to be in the final stages of some wasting disease, gray, frail and transparent. In actuality he had ten children and a very contented wife. He ate like a timber wolf, played scratch golf and had never been sick a day in his life.
Benjie nodded Lew Traff into a chair, finished his calculations, tore the tape off, leaned back and studied the figures, then crumpled the tape and missed the wastebasket with it.
“I had Cole Kimber in here, funning me,” Benjie said. “He priced out the architect’s working drawings for Harbour Pointe twenty months ago, and he just priced them out again. Make a guess.”
“Hummm. Up twenty percent?”
“Twenty-one. Very damned good for a horseback guess. Okay. Take total costs and translate that into per-square-foot costs of the hundred and sixty-eight apartments. Total costs work out to $37.80 per square foot, and at an average 2,265 square feet per apartment, you’ve got $14,383,656. So I worked it backwards. We’ll have to see three million net before taxes. That means an average sale price of $103,474 per apartment. Call it from $85,000 to $125,000.”
Lew whistled. “Rich for the neighborhood. Gulf frontage, yes. But the Silverthorn tract is on the bay.”
“I know. I know. With the eleven-mil line of credit, we’ll have to take in three and a half million in advance payments on the units before completion.”
Lew said, “I think we ought to cut back. Different materials. Smaller units. Cut out one pool. Shrink the marina.”
“That’s what you think. And that’s what I think. But do you know what he says? He says we won’t compromise. He says we’ll go first class. And that decision could send the whole group right down the tube.”
“He’s got an instinct. He’s a winner.”
“So far. We had some other winners around Athens. And they’re in bankruptcy Chapter Eleven.”
“You are a pessimist, Benjie.”
“Me? I’m a very cheery guy. All I’ve got here is the figures. And they look terrible. Anyway, your problem is with Cole Kimber. He says the only way he’ll touch it is on straight cost plus. No upset price. He says that shortages could kill him, and he isn’t going to try to outguess them. He says he can make a nice little living with a shrunken crew, making repairs on the stuff he’s put up over the last ten years, and there’s no need for him to take a fat risk. So you have to draft a contract he’ll sign that won’t send Marty up the walls.”
“Maybe some kind of sliding scale on cost plus, the longer the delay the lower the percentage. I’ll talk to Cole first, then take a formula to Marty.”
“Sure. Oh, and he said to tell you to set up a closing on the Silverthorn tract. One million two hundred and fifty-two thousand. That’ll be the first draw on the established line downstairs. You should take the note down when you get a date for the closing, and make a transfer into Marliss Special Account, then you and Marty will both sign the check to the Silverthorn Trust.”
Lew Traff went down the corridor to his own office. His secretary was out sick. He punched an outside line and phoned Cole Kimber. They said he was expected back a little after four. He left his number. He got out the Silverthorn file, but he could not keep his mind on the clauses of the option agreement. He closed his eyes and leaned back into one of his favorite fantasies, the one about the nuns and the haystack. But it wouldn’t come off. Their squeals and gigglings were on mylar tape. The straw was dynel. Up under the habits, the smooth young bodies were plastic, warmed with clever wires. It was trite, boring and mechanical, like a play which started as a hit but now, after two years, was about to fold.
He had hoped to avoid getting into the inventory. But he slid into it, helplessly. It happened too often lately. A portfolio of—hah!—stocks worth twenty-one thousand, and they had cost him a hundred and eighty. Maybe they’d come back. Before the century changed. Working off three notes at the bank. Working off a compromise settlement with the IRS. Forty thousand a year from Marty, plus maybe another forty in little side things that opened up on account of working with Marty. Where in Christ’s name did it all go? Taxes, and alimony to that pig, Adele. And eating out. And drinking out. And three fairly steady women: Margo, who was elegant and expensive and sexy and quarrelsome, and Ruthie, who was a lot handier, cheaper, rounder and more loving, and Molly Denniver, the water girl. And a rented apartment. And an ulcer, small. And some root-canal work needed. And an eye exam. And new glasses. Nothing at all in the whole wide world seemed worth a shit, but oh, God, the thought of losing it turned his belly to ice. Weird Martin Liss was going to blow the whole thing. He could feel it. Right down the tube. Marty and everybody close to him. Where the hell could he go? Could anybody use a shrewd-stupid shyster name of Lew Traff? Not after the disaster that was called Harbour Pointe.
He worked his way back to the nuns, snuggling into their haystack world, accepting the fact it was all plastic. Hell, anything was better than the inventory.
8
ROBERTA FISH, R.N., and her husband, Gilbert, a young administrator with the Palm County public school system, had rented Apartment 2-C for one year from a Mr. Horuck of Cincinnati, beginning February first when Mr. Horuck despaired of finding a seasonal tenant for a high weekly rent. Mr. Horuck was due to retire in three years and had been persuaded to buy an apartment at Golden Sands on
the theory it could carry itself.
Bobbie Fish worked the 11 P.M. to 7 A.M. shift at Athens Memorial, on emergency-room duty. She was twenty-nine, five foot ten, a big-boned woman who tried, usually without success, to keep her weight under one fifty-five. She had glossy cropped black hair, deep blue eyes and black brows which met over the bridge of her nose, giving her a look of wearing a small perpetual scowl. She had pale flawless skin, endless energies and a full classic figure. With less jaw she could have been beautiful.
She got home in time to have coffee with Gil while he had his breakfast. She was asleep by eight thirty and slept until three thirty when the bedside phone awakened her. Julian Higbee said, “You alone?”
“Yes.”
“Be right there.” He hung up before she could ask him to give her a few minutes to get organized. The phone had hauled her up out of nightmare depths. Nightmare seemed ever more frequent. People did such damned awful things to themselves and to each other. They were brought in during the long stained hours of the night, ripped and bloodied, smashed and slashed, charred and scalded, making monkey sounds and crow sounds and kitten sounds. Lately when she heard the rapid oncoming weep-weep-weep of the siren, racing toward the hospital, there was no quickening of mind and reflex, no challenge to save someone from dirty death. A sick weariness instead, a resignation, a distaste. They would all die anyway, soon enough. So wheel in your burden of agony and let Doctor Tucker and Nurse Fish dab away, exercising small skills and traditional remedies. “You and I,” Tucker said, his odd thin mouth with its little doll-teeth shaped into the imitation of a smile, “you and I, Bobbie baby, we get the absolute worst, the ones who won’t make it up to the O.R. unless we do our magic act first. The penalty of excellence, eh? Goddammit, nurse, find me a vein somewhere! How does that foot look?”
She yawned and stretched, knuckled her scratchy eyes, put on her blue robe and trudged to the door. She opened it and looked through the crack until she saw Julian approaching rapidly. She let it swing wide and turned and walked away. He thumped the door shut, caught up with her, stopped her with both arms around her middle, worked the shoulder of her robe aside with his blunt bristled chin and kissed the top of her shoulder.
He turned her around and looked at her. “Hey, you all right?”
“Fan-damn-tastic.”
“What’s wrong with you, Bobbie, huh?”
“I was sound asleep when the phone rang. I think it would be very nice, very touching, if you sometime said you’d be along in fifteen minutes, so maybe I could pee and brush my teeth.”
“So go ahead, for God’s sake. You’re in a bad mood, huh?”
She looked at him, at the auburn hair carefully arranged and sprayed to cover the evidence of the receding hairline, at the heavy, dull, sensual features. He was such a towering hunk of solid meat and bone, of sun-crisped hair on massive arms and legs, he made her feel fragile and feminine. When she came out of the bathroom he had stripped down and lay supine on her unmade bed, thick fingers laced behind his head, afternoon sunlight filling the room. She saw that he was becoming tumescent in anticipation of her, the brute weapon lolling across his thigh, inching upward to each beat of his muscular heart.
She put her robe on the chair and got in with him. He folded her close and small in his big arms and said, “I thought you wasn’t going to phone down there anymore like yesterday, Bobs.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I had a couple of drinks and then I thought, Well, why not?”
“You shouldn’t get on the sauce so much.”
“I guess not. But what difference?”
“You’ve got a really great body, you know? A woman goes on the sauce, she goes down the road pretty fast. Look at Peggy Brasser.”
“I’ve got a long way to go before that.”
“Calling the office, you can get me jammed up, you know? When Lorrie says your name, she’s got that funny way of doing it already, like it hurts her mouth. She don’t play by any rules. She could go to your school-teacher husband and tell him about us.”
“She wouldn’t!”
“Hey. Lay down again. It’s no sweat. She won’t if you stop calling down there all the time.”
“Oh, great,” she said. “I’m just supposed to keep my mouth shut. What I am, I’m just available ass. Anytime you’ve got a minute or two in between renting an apartment or fixing somebody’s john, you can trot up to Two-C and get fixed up. Bam, bam, thank you ma’am.”
“Oh, shut up, Bobbie. Jesus! If you didn’t want it too, there wouldn’t have been a first time, right?”
“I was drinking.”
“I didn’t notice it slowed you down any. Then or since.”
“You’re a way of taking my mind off things, like drinks are.”
“What things?”
“I don’t want to talk anymore. Okay?”
“But that’s …”
“Shut up, Julian.”
For long minutes after she heard the discreet closing of the door as Julian let himself out, she could feel the fast bumping of her heart, slowing as her breath slowed. This time, as had happened several times recently, she had thought to remain a bystander, to help him along with apparent enthusiasm, but actually feel very little. Sometimes it had worked, but more often it did not. He seemed to have a strange knack of lasting just a little bit too long, and once she felt it beginning to happen, no matter how faint and far away, there was no stopping place for her. She felt that if she could learn the knack of deadness, learn in the midst of sweaty and energetic copulation to think of other things and to feel nothing at all, then she could start to be rid of him.
She showered, dressed, made the bed and fixed coffee. Each time she crossed the small kitchen she was aware of the hidden bottle under the sink, behind the two rolls of paper towels. Finally, she squatted and took it out. Without looking at it, she unscrewed the top, poured an unmeasured, unwatched amount into a water glass and drank it down. The tepid vodka bounced back up into her throat. She leaned against the sink and coughed shallowly, mouth wide, shuddered, swallowed several times. She put the bottle away and rinsed the glass. She looked out the window at the tropic jungle between the parking area and the bay. Fingers of heat felt their way through the narrow places of her body. Heat and softness, blurring the edges, melting the hard spaces.
“Nothing is wrong with me,” she said aloud.
It had been on account of the Avery kid. Hell, you are supposed to be on the lookout for things like that. The leg was definitely broken and there were a lot of bruises, but the bruises were all the same age and color, and X-ray found no old healed breaks. And after all, a fall down a flight of stairs will cause a lot of damage. A very silent little girl. It could talk but wouldn’t talk about the fall. That should have tipped her off. Nervous little big-eyed mother. You hesitate, wonder, and finally decide to leave it alone. The kid goes home. Two months later it is back. With a broken finger, arm, shoulder, pelvis and skull, with internal bleeding and with pressure building inside the skull. A dying blonde named Anne. Come home then and start having a couple of off-duty drinks daytimes, and one day get big Julian up to fix the leaking faucet and start kidding around, and all of a sudden as you are beginning to get annoyed and beginning to get ready to turn him off, he has you perched on the edge of the bathroom countertop next to Gil’s toothbrush and towel and aftershave, and he has somehow slid that big purply thing up into you, and he is grunting and thudding away, and you are clinging to him and sobbing and gobbling with shock, fright, guilt, consternation and shame.
“Nothing is wrong with me,” she said again, knowing that some terrible thing she could not define was happening and had been happening for a long time, starting well before the Avery child was brought in, long before the affair with Julian Higbee began or the drinking began. It made her think of the summer days of her Florida childhood in Tangerine, where her father owned small groves. A storm could climb the sky behind you while the sun shone brightly all around you. And before the day bega
n to darken, before you could hear the thunder, there would be a change you could not define. Perhaps it was the way the wind turned the leaves or moved the grasses. These are the little winds plowing across my heart, she thought. A blond child and Smirnoff and Julian. The sad little winds have names. The storm is so close behind me now that if I looked straight up, I could probably see the leading edge of it. Soon I will hear the rumble of the thunder.
“I am all right,” she said, and the tears ran down her face, tickling the pale fuzz at the corner of her mouth.
She sat on the kitchen stool and folded her arms on the countertop and laid her cheek against the cool Formica in the circle of her arms. She shut her teeth so tightly her ears rang and then she whispered, “Whatever is becoming of me now?”
When Julian Higbee sauntered into the office, elaborately casual, Vic York stood up from where he had been half sitting on the corner of Lorraine’s desk, one leg dangling, and said, in his raspy, rusty high-pitched voice, “Well, here he is finally at last. Mister Julian Higbee himself. Kid, I was about to give up and come back tomorrow, maybe first making an appointment through your beautiful little wife and better half and helpmate here.”
“Hi, Vic,” Julian said. He looked at Lorrie. She was pale and her eyes looked wide and frightened. He felt a chill in the pit of his stomach. “What you want, Vic?”
“Hey, I found a place where we can have a little talk, you and me. Come on, kid.”
Lorrie got up quickly when they left, and closed and locked the office door behind her. She hurried after them as they went across the basement parking area, between the support columns, to one of the service rooms. She got there just as Vic closed the door behind them. She tried the latch. Vic had apparently bolted it on the inside.
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