“Did it have a plate this time?’ said Alex.
“Don’t know,” said Wooly. “I couldn’t see.”
“Same driver? Ski mask?”
“I was too busy ducking for my life. I couldn’t see.”
“So you have nothing new to add? Even less than last time? You see my frustration.”
“Your frustration? I’m getting shot at in front of my own domicile. I’m soiling my butt on my own front fucking lawn. How much of this fucking guff do I have to put up with?”
“Wooly,” said Genevieve, refilling Alex’s glass from her pitcher, “do you have any idea how loud you’re screaming?”
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. No more outta me. Pattern of patience, right here. I won’t say another fucking thing.”
“Have you looked for the car?” said Genevieve. “The Fusion?”
“Twenty-four hours,” said Alex, “we’ve had our eyes out for it. I hope you understand, this isn’t necessarily a big town, but there are plenty of places to hide.”
“So you have no idea who owns it?”
“To be honest, we don’t have much to go on.”
“Cause you’re fucking useless!” said Wooly. “You and those two dancing dingleberries out there, you couldn’t find the car if it ran you the fuck over!”
While Wooly’s lament went on, I turned to Nickie. “By the way, I appreciate the take-down before.”
“Did I hurt you?”
“Considering you saved my life, I’m willing to let it go.” I clinked her glass. “Thank you.”
“Not a problem. I guess you’re worth having around.”
“Compliment?”
“Possibly.”
Now Wooly was working up a new line of thought. “I know what it is. I know. It goes back years ago, doesn’t it? What I told you about the Pope. You’ve never taken me seriously since.”
Alex went into his deepest squint of the day. “What can I tell you, Wooly. There’s no statute of limitations on insanity.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 3
BRAIN SPLATTER
>>FRIDAY JUNE 15 (6 days to go)
>>SATURDAY JUNE 16 (5 days to go)
FRIDAY JUNE 15, 4:45 p.m.
MONEY IN THE BANK
Wooly kept downplaying my interest in Monte Slater, but he hadn’t managed to squelch it. Not with the lawsuit, with Georgiana Copely’s visit, hanging in the air. Georgiana goes to the Trident office, an hour later somebody’s slinging bullets at Wooly’s big head? I thought talking to Monte was worth a shot.
And my curiosity only trended upward when I got to the fifth floor of the Hidden Lake Executive Center. I saw two guys walking out of Trident Manufacturing, and I saw them quickly slam the door shut behind them when they saw me approach.
I said I was looking for Monte Slater, who turned out to be the wreck on my right. A doughy, roundish, disconnected man, flabby and winded. He looked like a defeated dumpling.
The other guy was Gary Bogash, one of the Trident partners—a Chamber of Commerce-type huckster with bronzed cheeks and spiked blond hair, wearing a suit of tiny yet exquisitely loud black and white checks. Something about him reminded me of photos in those creepy old nudist magazines, where the genitals were always airbrushed into smooth, sexless flesh.
What did I want with Monte?
I was doing a story on Wooly Cornell.
They both stiffened right up.
“Crack pipe,” said Monte, “here I come.”
“We’re in litigation with Wooly Cornell,” said Bogash. “We can’t talk about the swiney bastard.”
“It’s off the record.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Wait,” said Monte, “what the fuck. Off the record? I’ll tell you something about Wooly. He doesn’t understand. HE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND.” He slapped his palm with the back of his other hand as he said this. Slapped it hard. “Him, everybody else—nobody understands!”
“Understands what?”
“The pressure. They can’t pressure me like this, the sons of bitches. They shouldn’t be pressuring anything on me.”
Monte was rattled, coming part—torn up something bad.
“Getting what you want?” said Bogash.
“I’m only asking for one reason,” I said. “Looks like somebody’s trying to shoot him.”
“Are you serious?” said Monte.
“I am.”
“Then why’re you talking to me?”
“Wooly’s got lots of enemies,” said Bogash. “He’s going for like the world’s enemy record. Money in the bank, it’s one of them.”
“I had nothing to do with it,” said Monte. “Nothing…at…all.”
That took three slaps on his palm. What did Wooly say about him? He takes his anger out on himself.
“What about Georgiana Copely?” I said. “What was she doing here?”
Bogash looked at Monte, lot of curiosity in his face.
“Look,” said Monte, “there are always obligations. That’s what we’re talking about. There are always obligations that have to get paid.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Anything I can do?” I said.
“What can you do?” said Monte. “What can anybody do in a situation like this?”
“What situation?”
Bogash grabbed Monte’s arm and pulled him past me. “We’re done.” He pressed for an elevator.
“I’m in no shape to talk today,” Monte admitted. “Try me tomorrow.”
“Saturday? You’ll be here?”
“Maybe we can talk then.”
Bogash jammed on the elevator button.
“All I got to say,” said Monte, “I didn’t come all the way over here just to get all the way over there. I didn’t. I…just…didn’t.”
Slap, slap, slap.
Ding. They stepped inside the elevator.
“You know Wooly’s problem?” said Bogash. “LSD is not a good breakfast.”
And down they went.
>>>>>>
FRIDAY JUNE 15, 7:00 p.m.
PLUM CHERRY
Genevieve invited me to stay for dinner. Her chicken tetrazzini was fantastic. The mood around the table, however, wasn’t quite as satisfying. Wooly was pissed to high hell by the day’s shooting, by Alex Tarkashian’s rude words. Genevieve, Nickie and I listened while he ranted about the sheer amount of nutjobbery he’d been subjected to. And when Genevieve pointed out that, even though someone had tried to kill him, it didn’t take, he flew off the roof. It would’ve been nice, he said, if she’d shed at least one tear after the ordeal. She said she had shed a tear—several of them, in fact. He said he hadn’t noticed a one. Then you weren’t looking, she said, because they were big, big tears. Didn’t matter, he said, his days were numbered. Time was only moving in one direction.
And speaking of time, he thought I was wasting mine on Monte Slater. All I was doing was jig-jagging around, in his humble opinion. The whole question of Monte, as he put it, was as interesting as porn after you’ve shot your wad.
More cheese sauce?
No, the true bane of his existence, he said, was Georgiana Copely. She’s like a horrible human being—I think I might’ve mentioned this.
Monte, on the other hand, his only sin was being deadly broke. And having no regard for testing. Speaking of which, he was going to take me on a tour of Material Witness tomorrow. It’ll be fun. I’m fun to be with.
But not tonight. He couldn’t maintain his manic flow. Conversation ebbed, trickled to a chit-chat stream and lapped into silence. Toward the end of the meal, all that was left was the clinking of knives and forks on the plates.
Wooly said he was tired, drained by the day’s travails. He was even going to skip dessert, a startling announcement in itself. He was going to turn in early—he really needed to pack some zzzs away.
>>>>>>
Nickie and I helped Genevieve clean up. She said she knew her husband’s sanity could
wear dangerously thin at times—just the way he is. The first time someone shot at him, she said, he came home and fixated on eggs. Decided they had too many eggs in the house. He took them all out, boiled them up and made a gigantic bowl of egg salad. Then he forced everyone who walked in the door to eat egg salad sandwiches. That included Genevieve, people from the factory who came to see if he was all right, Alex Tarkashian when he came to interview him again. Of course that wasn’t enough so he took the bowl to work and insisted all his employees have an egg salad sandwich.
“I think every person is like a drug,” said Genevieve. “We all come with side effects. You always have to ask yourself, if I’m going to be with this person, if I’m going to take this drug, can I handle the side effects?”
>>>>>>
When Genevieve went to bed, Nickie and I stayed at the kitchen table. We did a lot of talking—how to survive Wooly World, how to get by working in agencies, how you’re always asking can I find a place here for myself? We talked about cases we’d worked, people we might’ve known.
Something seemed to happen to her face as the night went on. It seemed to slowly unfold to me, like a flower coming to bloom. I paid more and more attention to the dark honey color of her skin, her chocolate eyes, her white teeth. Even the scars came to seem natural, as if any woman wouldn’t want them there.
Of course, I tend to think highly of any woman who saves my life.
At one point she was in the mood for something sweet. She missed having dessert. A jar of homemade plum cherry jam was sitting on a shelf in the refrigerator. She brought it to the table with a spoon, began eating it out of the jar. It’s delicious, she said. Try some.
I took a big heaping spoonful and managed to get half of it in my mouth. The other half fell plop on the table.
“Such a mess you’re making,” she said.
“I’ll get a sponge.”
“Hold on.”
She scooped the jam up with her fingers and smeared it on my face. On my right cheek, the same place her scars were. I just sat there, totally what-the-hell surprised. She went hysterical with laughter.
Now what? I wiped the plum cherry off me and drew a line with it around her lips. She didn’t resist. Then I leaned in my chair, looked into her eyes and licked the jam off her mouth.
She took a fresh fingerful from the jar and rubbed it on my throat. I lifted her out of her chair and onto my lap, felt her tongue flicking along my neck and sliding up to my lips. I touched her tongue with mine, pushed it deep back in her mouth. I could taste her, smell her.
She rolled her T-shirt up. I undid her bra, circled her breasts with jam and licked it off. She closed her eyes. I rubbed another circle of jam across her stomach. She took my hand and brought it lower, showing me where she wanted more.
>>>>>>
I woke up in silver heaven. The whole bedroom was filled with lustrous argent light. The blinds were still open. Moonlight was streaming into the room where she stayed in the house.
She was moving next to me. Me waking up was nudging her out of sleep. She opened her eyes and smiled. I touched her face, stroked her cheek. The moonlight threw small shadows off her scars, off the blade traces in her flesh.
“Can I ask a question?” I said.
“I guess.”
“What happened to your cheek?”
She pulled away from me, pressed to the edge of the bed.
“Don’t ask,” she said. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t hurt. She was just final. “Don’t ever ask.”
>>>>>>
SATURDAY JUNE 16, 9:30 A.M.
EATING LIGHT
Wooly didn’t seem to mind finding me with Nickie in his house. “You two seem to be getting along. Good for you. The most action we have in bed is fighting over the covers.” Genevieve also seemed pleased, though she was more concerned with the herbs she had growing out back. They were swarming with caterpillars this morning and she didn’t know why.
After Wooly’s hearty breakfast we set out in his Lexus loaner, Nickie directing him on a different way to work. Beautiful sunlit day, peaceful and calm. You could smell summer coming.
Testing fabrics, Wooly was saying, “is all about time. How’s that for ironic? But that’s what the business is about. How do things change over the course of time, how do things fall apart, decay. I got some of the biggest manufacturers in the world coming to me and saying, what’s gonna happen to my product over the course of time?”
Material Witness Labs consisted of two Quonset huts sitting side by side with a connecting tunnel between them. Slice a humungous aluminum can in two, lay the halves face down next to each other and you’ve got the setup.
The parking lot was only a third full with weekend shift cars. Nickie and I were on full alert, ready for anything that looked or sounded suspicious. Wooly pulled into his space and got out.
“Stay close to the cars,” Nickie said. “Don’t walk out in the open.”
He complied, but he wasn’t showing a lot of caution. Wooly moved at a good clip, arms swinging in front of him like a man doing the breast stroke.
“I started right outta high school, like I told you. Fort Lee, then Seventh Avenue. That’s how I learned the trade. After a while, though, working for somebody else, you got as much chance for advancement as a heterosexual priest. So I took out a loan and moved back here.”
The main entrance was nothing special—a pair of gray double doors with an intercom buzzer and a security card swipe pad. As we approached, Wooly suddenly cocked his big butt in the air and attacked the swipe pad with a full-ass body slam. The magnetic card in his pocket unlocked the doors.
“Those were some years,” he said, “doing 18, 19-hour days trying to build this thing up.”
We went through the doors into a toneless, no-frills hallway. No frills, no lobby, no reception—the place evidently didn’t get many visitors.
“I had a staff of two, total, and I was doing all the work myself. The measurements, I mean—taking the measurements. I had to do every one of them by myself.”
He almost sounded a little nostalgic about it.
A door just ahead of us opened and a young, tired, dark-skinned man carrying three clipboards under his arm came out. He looked at Wooly with dull surprise. “You’re here today?”
“Little while. I’m giving these people a looksee.” Wooly turned to us. “This is my manager, Farooq. He’s one of the reasons I don’t have to come in all the time anymore. I tell him what to do, he tells everybody else.”
Farooq shook our hands.
“What’s it like,” I said, “working for Wooly?”
“We have a deep bond between us,” said Farooq. “It’s called my salary.”
We caught up with Wooly as he was taking a corner. He strolled to a table piled with tinted goggles. “You’ll need these,” he said. We each put a pair on and went through the next door.
It was like walking into the center of the sun. Rows of 6,500-watt Xenon arc lights were blazing down on at least 100 samples of fabric stretched over metal frames. Goggled workers waded through the sea of light, nodding at Wooly when he came near but quickly looking away, trying to avoid him.
“This is one phase of the testing,” he said. “Ten days under these things, 24/7, it’s equal to 30 years of normal light exposure. Best in the business, very efficient, no question. But let me ask you, you’re looking at it, you’re looking around. You see any problems? You see any spillage, any light leaking outside?”
Squinting in the light, I couldn’t see any windows. “No.”
“Of course not. Remember those F.L.A.C. people, all that shit about fatal light? It was shit. This isn’t fatal light. It’s good light.”
One of the workers was carrying a sample past him, heading for the door.
“Paulita,” he said, “how’re you feeling?”
“Fine.”
“Light bothering you at all?”
“No, Mr. Cornell.”
“See?”
She
left, we kept walking through the room.
Wooly made a sound like he was blowing through his nose. “Those F.L.A.C. people, they were working overtime at the crap factory. What we’re doing here, this is for a good purpose. This is so, you buy a nice piece of material for your sofa, it’s not gonna fall apart on you in 12 fucking months. Here, like this.”
He stopped in front of a baking sample.
“This has been here a day already. You see anything?”
“Not really.”
“Right, cause at this stage, it’s almost impossible to eyeball. That’s why we do color analysis.”
We left the light room, deposited the goggles and went down the hall to another door. Paulita was inside with a few other workers, running samples through a giant digital-crazy contraption.
“This does it all,” said Wooly. “Are the tones turning? Are the highlights fading? Are there any kinds of prognostic signs? It’s Swiss, it’ll show you anything on a microscopic level. Paulita, how much did I pay for this?”
“Four hundred and ten.”
“That’s right, $410,000. And whatever it sees, it automatically records the data in the main server. “
He sighed and shook his head, then turned and went back in the hall. “That’s what I used to have to do by myself, the old days. I’d take all the numbers down by hand and put them in the computer myself. Not no more.”
The corridor was narrowing. We must’ve been crossing over to the other Quonset hut.
“How bad were Monte Slater’s results?” I said.
“Terrible. One of the worst I’ve ever seen. Stuff flunked just about every indicator.”
He popped a door open. The machinery inside was brushing mitts back and forth over a fabric sample.
“This tests for durability, simulates hand rubs. Thirty thousand rubs without showing wear, for instance, is a very good mark. Monte’s crapped out at 4,000.”
The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Page 5