Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  Traffic began moving again, and thinned out abruptly after he crossed the bridge to the mainland. At the Crestwood Nursing Home he found an empty slot in the herringbone parking area and went in and up the stairs to be certain Carolyn was all right. She was clean and fresh and napping, so he went down to the offices and let himself into Oscar Castor’s private office with the key Oscar had given him.

  There was nothing of great interest in the “in” basket containing items for his attention. One note from Castor, clipped to inventory sheets, was gratifying. It said, “Gus, I couldn’t really believe this could happen. But you were right. Incoming shipments of supplies are consistently short count or short weight by ten to fifteen percent. It has been double checked. That would be ten to twelve thousand a year down the drain. I’m putting in claim forms for the current shipments, but there’s no way to recover what was lost before last month.”

  Gus sighed. In forty or fifty more years he might turn Oscar Castor into an administrator. The man was a fussbudget who consistently fussed about the wrong things. He would diddle around with ten minutes of low-pay overtime, trying to save a dime here and a dime there, while dollars ran out of the stockroom door.

  He studied the bids which had come in on interior painting. They were grotesque. Probably the way to go was see if the Palm County Retirement Home had any old men painters in there who needed therapy. Get Maintenance to do the ladder work, and the old men could paint the low places. Make them feel useful and needed.

  Suddenly he laughed out loud at himself. Just like I’m making myself feel useful and needed around here. Old fart. Old hoss getting restless in the barn.

  He scrawled a few notes to Castor and knew he’d have a chance on Monday to go over them with the man. Castor had been very edgy and reluctant at first, until Gus had saved the man a few dollars on his budget. That was the big problem. Work inside the budget and still provide better care and attention.

  He went back up to Carolyn’s room. She looked at him, and the good side of her face lifted in her half smile, and she made the gluey sound of her welcome to him and tried to tell him something about the television. He looked at it and saw that the picture was rolling. He adjusted the vertical hold and it made her happy. It was a Japanese movie. People in pajamas were sucking air between their teeth and swinging two-handed swords.

  He sat beside her and watched the movie and held her left hand. When he had been with her a half hour or so, she drifted into sleep again. It was strange to him to look at her sleeping and see her familiar face, the face of the wife of the long marriage, and know that the Carrie he loved and who loved him was no longer inside that familiar skull. This was a simpler and more primitive organism. It was aware of heat, cold, hunger, discomfort. It could think only on those terms, communicate only on those terms. He had attempted many ways of trying to communicate with her on some more complicated level, codes and slates and objects, but had not been able to arouse any stir of interest. So accept this stranger, and this obligation.

  A very old woman maneuvered her wheelchair into her room. Seventy pounds of wrinkles and blemishes, some tufts of thin white hair and two small bright blue eyes. She wore a stained pink robe and carried a Raggedy Ann doll on her lap.

  “Sleeping her life away,” the old woman said.

  “How are you doing, Mrs. Dibble?”

  “I’m just great. You should be calling me Ruthie like everybody.”

  “Ruthie, then.”

  “Mr. Groder finally had a visitor this morning.”

  “Great!”

  “It was a lawyer with a paper his granddaughter-in-law wanted for him to sign.”

  “You wouldn’t know who steals personal things from the patients, would you?”

  “Sure I would.”

  “Who, Ruthie?”

  “That would be telling.”

  “Aw, come on, Ruthie.”

  She wheeled closer, lowered her voice. “Don’t you dare tell anybody I told you. It’s the members of the poor woman’s fambly.”

  “Huh?”

  “They’re all fighting each other about who gets what, you know what I mean, so what they do, they come prowling and sneaking in here and they take stuff to make sure it’s theirs instead of it going to somebody else. I seen them get the silver bowls and the little enamel boxes my daddy brought back from China and the jade dragon and all those gold watches. That’s what it is, all right. Her fambly. Don’t you tell.”

  “Okay. I won’t tell.”

  She laughed a very small silvery laugh, startlingly like a child’s laughter. “I fooled my fambly,” she said. “They were all waiting on me to pass away. Waiting and waiting, and now every friggin’ one of them is in the ground. Joke’s on them, you bet.” She backed the chair into the doorway and said sadly, “Sleeping her life away. Rudy, damn your soul, don’t you tell anybody I told you the secret. ’Bye now, Rudy.”

  He got up and turned the dial until he found a golf match. Carolyn slept on. He adjusted the sound until it was barely audible to him, and sat back and once again took her hand.

  The lithe young men in their bright clothing struck the ball high and far, the camera following it against the blue sky, watching it come down and bounce and roll onto the green carpet. “… and now, here on the par-five sixteenth, he has closed the gap to just two strokes, and he has a chance to catch Nicklaus …”

  The hand of the sleeping woman squeezed his hand twice. He wondered what images moved through the empty rooms of her mind.

  “… if he can hold second place through tomorrow’s play here, he will pick up the second-place check for twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars. Al, what do you have on the fifteenth now?” “Jimmy, we’ve got Super-Mex studying a very difficult punch shot he’ll have to make from the far right rough and under the limbs of one of those big old trees, and put it on the green, or he stands a good chance of losing a stroke to par right here.…”

  He looked at her and wondered how it would be if she woke up and smiled and said, “Hi, honey. How long have I been asleep anyway?”

  At three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, August tenth, tropical storm Ella was centered approximately at 12 degrees north, 41 degrees west, still holding course and speed, with winds approaching fifty knots. This put the storm roughly eleven hundred miles east-southeast of Barbados, or fifty-five hours away, and twenty-four hundred miles southeast of Miami, or five days away, assuming, of course, that it did not slow down or alter direction.

  Warnings were sent out to all weather stations and all ships in those areas. All incoming reports were given most careful analysis at the National Hurricane Center at Miami. Long-range forecasts were made of probable high-pressure and low-pressure profiles in the path of the storm in order to estimate how any ridges or wind patterns might alter the storm track.

  Toward nightfall the skies darkened over Puerto Rico and the first heavy patches of rain began to move across the islands. Throughout the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the West Indies and the Bahamas, the small boats of summertime were heading for harbor.

  32

  ON SUNDAY AFTER CHURCH Benjamin Wannover went back to the Palm County Courthouse and was let in the back door by one of the security people, and climbed the rear stairs to the borrowed office on the third floor.

  Mr. H. D. C. Franklin, the young assistant U.S. Attorney from Washington, was there with Wise from Tampa and Howe from Atlanta, sitting at the long oak table strewn with documents, talking in low voices.

  Franklin said, “Hello, Mr. Wannover. Have a seat. You’ll want to wait for your attorney, I believe, your Mr. Sender.”

  “Sinder. With an ‘i.’ Yeah, I’d rather wait.” Benjie smiled sadly and shook his head. “All this makes me feel pretty shitty, you guys can understand that.”

  “Sure,” said Wise.

  “And there are things I’d rather see you going after.”

  “What does that mean?” Howe asked belligerently.

  “Like this, for example. We h
ad trouble on a good-sized apartment in Azure Breeze. That’s a Marliss Corporation condo, out on the beach side from Golden Sands. What happened was these people, this old couple, they had two hundred thousand in time deposits, bringing in like thirteen thousand a year. They had been reading the ads in the paper about how these east coast outfits would pay fourteen percent and put up good first mortgages on land as security. The couple didn’t have Social Security, retirement, nothing. So twenty-eight thousand looked very damned good, and when the time deposits matured they shifted them over, and they got two quarterly payments and then zip. Those merciless bastards over in Hallandale were putting fifty cents’ worth of land behind every fifty dollars they borrowed, and using the old Ponzi system of paying the old suckers with money from new suckers. There’s a good half dozen of those outfits operating over there, stealing money from old folks directly. Shouldn’t you guys be working on that kind of thing first?”

  “We’ll get around to it in due time,” H. D. C. Franklin said. “The state has to move first on that one.”

  “That couple is indigent. Totally broke.”

  Franklin looked at his watch. “Is Sender likely to be much later than this?”

  “Sinder. Morris Sinder. He should be here.”

  Franklin was dark and handsome, with high coloring. Rosy cheeks, red lips, and blue beard shadow. A lock of dark hair curled across his forehead. He picked up a sheaf of papers and leaned back and began to scan each sheet quickly, laying it face down as he finished.

  Sinder came hurrying in. “Sorry. The damned bridge was stuck again. Hope I haven’t—”

  “Let’s get started,” Wise said.

  Sinder sat down beside Benjie, saying, “I want to point out to you that my client is really not in trouble so serious that you can—”

  “And I will point out to you again, Mr. Sender, that I can read these statutes and compare the law with the information we piled up before Mr. Wannover chose to cooperate, and I can assure you that we had every chance of tucking his ass into jail for five years and taking fifteen to twenty thousand dollars out of his pocket in fines, to say nothing of the expense of his defense in court. Now let’s get to it again.” He punched the forward and record keys of the tape recorder. “Mr. Wannover, have you had a chance to study the expenses incurred by the Marliss Corporation over the past six years?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you been able to identify those payments supposedly made to County Commissioner Denniver, Justin Denniver?”

  “Pretty close, sir. I wouldn’t say I’m a hundred percent accurate. I would say—”

  “Wait for the question,” Morris Sinder said. He was a very tall man with a shaved head and a youthful face.

  “We’re not in front of a jury,” Wise said.

  “I want him to be in practice in case you people put him in front of a jury.”

  “Do you have a total amount and total number of payments?”

  “Eight payments totaling thirty-eight thousand.”

  “Does that include the payment of May last?”

  “Yes, sir. It includes the ten thousand dollars in May.”

  “What special treatment did Mr. Liss expect to receive for this money?”

  “The usual thing. We put up four condos on Fiddler Key and one on Seagrape. If you crossed every i and dotted every t, you’d never get anything built. So what we were after was favorable consideration on zoning requirements, permits, setbacks, buffer strips, number of parking slots per apartment and so on. The payment was bigger for Harbour Pointe because it was going to be the biggest project we’d done, and we had to get into some no-no areas, like land clearing and dredge and fill. Let me interject, this isn’t exactly a one-way street, you know. Those guys aren’t dummies that sit on that commission. If they decide to get hungry there can be a lot of roadblocks in your way. It is cheaper to pay off in front so that things will run smoothly, and that’s what we did.”

  “Who knew about this system?”

  “Marty, of course. And me and Lew Traff and Cole Kimber. And probably Dru Bryne, Marty’s secretary. And on the other end of it, Justin Denniver, and his wife, Molly. I wouldn’t know if they told anybody. But the impression I get was that Denniver paid off two of the other commissioners. Oh, and Billy Scherbel knew. He’s assistant to the county manager.”

  “And the county manager?” H. D. C. Franklin asked.

  “Tod Moran? No. He doesn’t know anything about what’s going on.”

  “How was the money transferred?”

  “A check would be made out and Lew would go downstairs to the bank and cash it, and then he would take the cash out to Denniver’s house and give it to his wife. I asked him once. He said she always put it in a safe in a closet wall, a barrel job. The house is in a very private spot. Lots of plantings. A car parked there, you can’t see it from the street. It’s been a good safe way to do it.”

  “You seem to be on the verge of telling us something else about the arrangement.”

  “No, sir. That’s all.”

  “Now would you identify these Xerox copies, please?”

  “Uh … sure. These are copies of my account at Stone and Brewster, of my monthly statements for … the past six months.”

  “Is this your only account with a brokerage firm?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There are some transactions here showing that you went short on Equity Mortgage Management Shares in May. You covered at various times and covered the last two hundred shares in June. Would you accept the figure of $13,126.88 as your total short-term profit on EMMS?”

  “That sounds just about right. I report every source of—”

  “Some of the short sale was consummated a few days before the first agreement between Mr. Grome and the Letra Corporation was signed. But you shorted more shares after you had knowledge of the deal Grome made with Liss, for the loan and the kickback and the imminent failure and default on Tropic Towers. That constitutes inside knowledge.”

  “Are you asking a question?” Sinder asked.

  “I want to say something,” Benjie said. “You can ask Steve Millard. When I placed the first order, I told him to keep on trying to short more. Until I said whoa.”

  “Do you know a floor broker named Dean Hart?”

  “I think so. But some other house, isn’t he?”

  “Lannon Daniel and Company. Did you know that Miss Bryne has a margin account there?”

  “No, I didn’t know that!”

  “Did you know she was shorting EMMS at the same time you were?”

  “No shit! You’re kidding.”

  “Now let’s go back to ground we’ve covered before, if you don’t mind. Let’s go back to the conversations you had with Martin Liss when Lew Traff was present, regarding his report of his conversations with Sherman Grome, and what Grome had promised him.”

  “Repetitive?” Sinder asked.

  “We have some blanks which still need filling,” H. D. C. Franklin said. He turned the machine off. “We’ll take a short break here while I reorganize my notes.”

  Benjie Wannover said, “I feel so rotten about all this.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have started cutting corners,” said Wise.

  Wannover stared steadily at him for a moment. “Don’t give me all this moral rectitude shit, Wise. I don’t need to hear it from somebody squatting up to his belly button in the public trough.”

  “Hey now!” Franklin said. “Hey there.”

  “Just keep that jerk off me,” Benjie said, pointing toward Wise with his thumb. “Sure, I fudged some records. I put my thumb on the scales sometimes. I did as I was told because if I didn’t, I would be out on the street. If that jerk had my job and my ten kids he would have been twice as far into—”

  Franklin said quickly, “I want to remind everyone that we are here to take a deposition from Mr. Wannover, not to pass judgment on his actions. Understood?”

  Wise nodded gloomily, lit a cigarette and went over to s
tand and stare out of the window down at the parking lot.

  “Has Mr. Grome been located?” Sinder asked.

  “Not yet. We’ll find him.”

  “His decisions seem … irrational,” Sinder said.

  Howe, from Atlanta, laughed. “Very very crazy even? What if Sherm decided a year ago, based on the evidence, that he had made a bad move, taking the job as head of that real estate investment trust, and no matter how hard he tried to rescue it, it was still going to go down the drain and he was going to look terrible. So what he did with Mr. Liss, and with a lot of other suckers, was use them to buy time. And he used the time to carefully cash every chip he could put his hands on. If the auditors can ever untangle all those records, we might find eight or ten million missing. He could have been cashing the chips and at the same time building an identity in some nice place, like maybe São Paulo, with the money in a nice number account in Brussels. Sherm may be very very strange, but he isn’t dumb. All the guys like Liss will serve time. And Grome will be by some pool with some great broad, smiling and smiling and smiling.”

  “Serve time?” Sinder asked politely.

  “The best shot is for tax evasion, for taking a million-dollar payoff for taking over Tropic Towers and setting it up as a capital gain. It was straight income. He was cheating the IRS out of a quarter mil,” Howe said.

  “Tax evasion before he even files?” Wannover asked blankly.

  “He runs his personal taxes on a fiscal year ending June thirty. He filed.”

  “Oh, shit, I forgot that,” Benjie said.

  “Gentlemen!” said H. D. C. Franklin, snapping his head to toss the black curl back from his forehead. “Shall we continue.”