Lucky Leonardo

by Jonathan D. Canter

  “…securities laws.”

  “Besides, I don’t think he’ll do it, so if anything the stock won’t go down, it’ll…”

  “I’m sorry,” Remington said. “I forgot he sold the options, and that you don’t own any stock.”

  “I don’t own any stock.”

  “So I say sit tight. You’re safe. Your children are safe. I’ll talk to Mr. Drunkmiller as soon as he’s available and see if he has any other ideas.”

  “Great.” She hung up.

  “So?” her mother asked.

  “So?” she replied. “These men are clowns.”

  For a couple of years she’d been nurturing a rainy day account at Charles Schwab—in her maiden name, jointly with her mother, 1099s sent to her mother—depositing whatever nickels, dimes, twenty dollar bills and expense reimbursement checks she could rescue from absent-minded Eugene’s pockets. Trusting her instincts about his need to fail, his destiny to fail, and without bothering to ask technical questions about trends, volume, news or whatever, she bought three hundred shares of DeltaTek stock from this account at about the same time Eugene hit the glass wall running, and felt very good about it. She did. He was unconscious, and couldn’t feel a thing.

  Marge Blitz sent out an investigator to talk with Susan’s mother, who was the buyer of record, who wasn’t prepared with an alibi and started talking ragtime, that she was drinking heavily, constantly, always drinking and couldn’t remember a thing. The investigator let her walk the plank until there was nothing under her feet but air, and smirked when she panicked and changed her story to implicate her daughter.

  In turn Susan, with the benefit of advance notice and Drunkmiller’s lawyerly manipulation of the facts, argued that she bought the stock because of insider marital information not insider corporate information. “I knew my husband was a loser,” she said under oath. “That’s no crime.”

  “I tend to agree with her,” Marge Blitz told Kurt Knight over drinks in her office at the end of the day.

  Chapter 27

  Helen, Chrissie’s co-worker at Starbucks, had secrets, including that she was greenly jealous of Chrissie’s good fortune in hooking Dr. Lenny, and curious as to how he treated her in their private times. At ten o’clock on the night Chrissie and Dr. Lenny were startled by the ring of the telephone and the scary news from Barbara about Harvey, Helen was restless and pacing her small studio apartment in her flannel pajamas and floppy slippers, not ready to call it a night.

  She moved from her refrigerator to her television seat to her unmade bed to the mirror above the bathroom sink to watch her pimple grow, sometimes in under a minute, longer if she paused at one of the stations, like if she worked on the pimple, or caught a scene from the movie, or plopped herself on top of her turmoiled bedsheets and stroked her hair, but she could not obtain respite from the neediness, from the queer feeling of heat rising in her body. “This,” she said, “is how the werewolf feels when he catches sight of the full moon, and the fur spreads on his hands and up his arms. I think I need a night out.”

  She knew how Chrissie reacted to sounds in the night, because she coaxed the story out of Chrissie’s lips little by little between lattes and cappuccinos, joking it up, urging her to embroider and expand and touch the spot one more time, and because on nights when there was no choice Helen watched it happen in real time from the dark side of the glass.

  ———

  Phantoms should be spared the indignity of public transportation, Helen observed as the street car rattled along the outbound track, and she stood as far away from her late-night fellow travelers, an old man and a fat lady seated near the front, as space would permit. She was wearing her action clothes, her black cat-woman costume, which she concealed for the public part of her commute beneath a hooded cloak which she stowed in her pouch when she stepped back into the night.

  She assumed the position against the bare-branched apple tree in the middle of Dr. Lenny’s backyard, pushing back against the trunk with her legs spread and her hands free, with a clear view into the room. There was a modicum of satisfaction just being there, breathing the cold night air and observing the familiar room, like the ancient shepherd, the one who with his sheep asleep and endless time on his hands, identified the constellations, not the one who cried wolf. Mythic and mystic, and dangerous since she entered without a ticket. No plausible deniability here.

  She strummed the first familiar notes of her sonata. Pleased with herself. Pleased by her music. Anything more would be gravy.

  And on this special night, like when a new planet shoots across the shepherd’s sky, Helen found herself drenched in gravy. A light went on in the room. Chrissie entered, and opened the window, and freely disrobed. Dr. Lenny appeared, disappeared, appeared again, amorously circling the naked Chrissie, who had a rounder and fuller chest than one might have expected from such a slender girl, and a brazen face in lieu of her daily innocence. Then the heavens parted and the gravy poured down, as Chrissie spread herself against the glass, pink and lush as a whore, her eyes wide open and staring into the darkness—staring directly at invisible Helen dressed as cat woman—while Dr. Lenny pumped his heart out from behind.

  When it was over Helen slumped down to the base of the tree, ass to cold ground, drained and ashamed and satisfied, and watched Chrissie and Dr. Lenny collect themselves and make their way to bed. The light went off. There was silence, or silence from the room, as Helen started to think she was hearing things in the air above her, like a mouse scratching in the attic, sporadic, indistinct, irritating, unlikely to be the wind on this still night. At first she didn’t want to give it attention, like it was an alarm clock going off in the middle of a deep and absorbing dream, but as it continued to intrude and was after a few more minutes undeniably a thing in the air above her head she leapt to the insane possibility of Roger LaFlamme, Chrissie’s high-school love and the father of Chrissie’s nighttime demons. “Roger?” Helen asked softly into the air.

  Then the telephone rang inside the room, Barbara’s call about Harvey. The ring reverberated into the surrounding darkness, and caused unbalance in the apple tree because branches started to shake, and snap and crack, followed by a percussion of thumps and bumps directly above Helen’s head, each closer and louder like the sky was falling. She had only enough time to shield herself with her arms as a body dropped out of the tree and landed with a thud on the cold ground next to her. Before she could breathe, scream, or figure out what had just happened the body bounced to life and bolted madly out of the yard.

  Next morning at Starbucks a weary Chrissie told a weary Helen about Harvey’s disappearance and the grim fears that were in the air. The news froze Helen. “Harvey used to live at Dr. Lenny’s house?” she asked.

  “Yuh.”

  “He’s like thirteen years old?”

  “Yuh.”

  Helen thought she had news about Harvey—that he was alive and running as of midnight last night—but to give it up would require an explanation she was not prepared to provide. “Oh my God,” she said.

  Chapter 28

  Brockleman was no naïf. He understood that wins and losses are rarely based exclusively on merit, that tactics, pressure, timing, cunning, bluff, guts, muscle, a big bankroll, and other manly arts often make the difference. He understood that fairness, like any object of desire, is in the eye of the beholder. He understood that dogs eat dogs, and had eaten a few himself. But he was still so shocked when Marge Blitz confronted him in Janet’s kitchen with accusations of illicit trading that he spit up pepperoni pizza all over Selma Floyd’s affidavit.

  Marge had given Selma the blue plate special, with extra sauce, stopping her in the street on her lunch break with a posse of trench coats who flashed badges and waved tape recorders and whisked her off to a sequestered room where she was denied telephone access, and accompanied to the toilet, and threatened with the maximum sentence allowed by law unl
ess she confessed during her next breath. “Sign this affidavit, Selma,” Marge urged, “and you’re free to leave, no strings attached.”

  Selma read the affidavit. It said that she directly or indirectly caused to be purchased shares of stock in DeltaTek Corporation on the basis of knowledge and information which was not available to the trading public for the direct or indirect benefit of William T. Brockleman, her boss and the person to whom she reported in her place of employment, said Brockleman being an attorney at law in active representation of said DeltaTek at said time and privy to certain knowledge and information not available to the trading public and which said he by telephonic transmission caused to be delivered to said her for the purpose of effectuating said purchase, intending thereby to profit therefrom and to aid and abet said her to so profit therefrom, like a greedy pig; and on and on with the backing and filling, sliding and gliding, dancing and prancing with words that circled around and around until they felt faint and needed a glass of water and a cold compress before they could finish their sentence, and further providing, despite the obvious circumstances to the contrary, that she was signing as her free act and deed without coercion, duress, or a gun to her head, hand held, legally licensed, or otherwise, and that she knowingly, intentionally, and happily to a point past delirious waived the right, if any, now or in the hereafter, to be represented by counsel in connection with signing this fair and true testament, so help me God.

  They placed a pen in Selma’s hand, and moved her hand to the front of the dotted line, and with steady unrelenting pressure urged her to do the right thing and get on with the rest of her life. “But,” she said, “Mr. Brockleman didn’t know.”

  “What?” they replied. “Are you saying you knew and he didn’t?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know or you don’t know if he knew you knew?

  “I…”

  “Or you don’t know if you knew he knew you knew?”

  “No, I knew.”

  “You knew?”

  “I knew he didn’t know.”

  “If you knew he didn’t know then you knew.”

  “How do you know I knew?”

  “We know.”

  “I want to speak to a lawyer.”

  “We’re lawyers.”

  Selma had worked with Brockleman for more than five years. He treated her fairly, decently, as a person, as a friend more or less, gave her nice holiday gifts, joked with her, took her out to lunch during National Secretary’s Week, didn’t often blame her for his own fuck-ups, didn’t often hover over her work station, and when he did hover he didn’t brush against her chest, or touch her hair, or fart in her face, or speak to her like she was dumb.

  She liked him. She liked him a lot. So that even if the affidavit confessing his guilt were true, which it wasn’t, it would be horribly disloyal for her to sign.

  What happened was that last winter she met a cute rock of a guy from Dallas on a singles cruise to Cancun who told her over drinks and laughs that he would pay for useful stock information, and it would be fun and risk-free, like sex with him if she should have an interest. Which she didn’t at first, because he seemed too full of himself for her refined taste, but under the influence of nonstop calypso and rum and an enormous moon she changed and/or lost her mind. Back on dry land she emailed him a couple of times with information that crossed her desk, and considered it a pretty successful relationship. He sent her roses. They planned to re-cruise.

  Marge, using the woman’s intuition which she kept hidden at the back of her spice rack, sweetened the pot by saying that if Selma signed, they’d go easy on the boy from Dallas as well. “But we have to know right now,” she said. Like she was selling used cars on commission and desperate for the sale. Like she was playing good cop/bad cop by talking out of both sides of her mouth.

  Even still, Selma could not believe what she did after she did it. Neither could Brockleman, who sprayed her affidavit with a burst of pepperoni pizza, and roared the roar of the falsely accused, vowing to fight this calumny to his dying breath. Which didn’t give him much time. About half an hour.

  Chapter 29

  Helen, like Selma, was getting gored by the horns of a moral dilemma, which thrust deeper into her private parts with her every wiggle. Oh God, you’re killing me. The decent thing, she knew, would be to tell Dr. Lenny that his boy was alive and falling out of a tree and running through the back yard last night. It would give him comfort. It might give him clues. It was information she had to share. But once she opened her mouth she would have to keep it open until she said how and why she knew what she knew, like: “A funny coincidence, Dr. Lenny. I was out for a walk in the middle of the night in my cat-woman costume, and happened to be walking through your backyard…”

  As if.

  She dwelled on the prospect of lurid exposure. She imagined a picture of herself as daytime Starbucks girl, grinding her beans, smiling sweetly with her glasses a little askew and a strand of dark hair loose from its bun falling down to her chin, on the front page opposite a picture of her as night stalker, the outsider who haunts the village when the moon is full, the deviant consumed by sexual yearning without a name, although maybe the sex part could be massaged, like maybe she could hire a spin person on her Starbucks salary, like if she still had a job. Like the first time Mr. Donovan discovered her masturbating in his chair, in his classroom after school, and she didn’t hear him coming until he was right there, and like he saw her.

  Oh, man.

  For the equivalent of a week of breaks she stood in the alley behind her Starbucks smoking butt after butt and weighing her choice. She gave a grim-as-death eyeball to each and every fellow employee who came out to ask, “You all right?”

  From the alley she could see a slice of the parking lot. Out of the blue she saw the red Corvette slide into a space. She rushed it, and swung open the passenger side door and was sitting inside before Dr. Lenny, haggard beyond anything she expected, turned off the engine.

  “Helen, no jokes, my son is missing.”

  “I know. I know something…”

  “What?”

  “Can you promise me you’ll never repeat what I’m about to say, so help you God?”

  “What? What do you know?”

  “I need the promise. Just give me the promise.”

  “Promise.”

  “Your son, I saw him last night, in the middle of the night…”

  “Where?”

  “In your backyard.”

  “Huh?”

  “In your backyard. He fell out of the tree in the middle, almost on top of me, after you and Chrissie had sex, but he seemed to be OK. He got up and ran away…”

  Leonardo’s cell phone rang. He grabbed for it.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Uncle Lenny? Its Joan.”

  “Who?”

  “Joan. Your niece.”

  “Oh, Joan. Joan, I’m…I got…You know that Harvey is missing?”

  “Uncle Lenny, I know where he is.”

  “What? Is he OK?”

  “Um, he’s um, stressed out, but like he’s not bleeding or anything.”

  “Joan, where is he?”

  “Uncle Lenny, I made promises to him. Like I promised him I wouldn’t call you, and he trusts me, but like I just heard my mom say he’s missing and this is a big deal, and so I wanted to tell you he’s, um, OK, and he’s been here with me since yesterday afternoon…”

  “Where are you?”

  “You can’t tell my parents anything. Anything. Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “We’re in my house, in my room. He’s asleep.”

  After Leonardo disconnected he exhaled a long and deep sigh of relief, and almost smiled. “Helen,” he said, “it might not have been Harvey who fell on you out of the tree in my backyard last nigh
t.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  Chapter 30

  Harvey brought his own.

  He brought a fifth of Bacardi rum from the liquor cabinet in Carl’s house. Joan told him that sometimes people pour liquor from the bottle into a to-go jar, and top off what’s left in the bottle with tap water, and return the bottle to the shelf, but that seemed like a lot of difficult and unnecessary work. It wasn’t like he was a babysitter taking liquor every week, or a live-in daughter. This was one time only, and Carl’s parents had lots of liquor bottles, including another unopened fifth of Bacardi.

  And it was so much nicer to bring the whole bottle.

  Harvey had been refining his plan since last Thanksgiving when his father and Uncle Hal fell asleep in front of the television, and Aunt Gayle and Cousin Ellen went out for a walk, and he paid a visit to Joan in her basement bedroom. The door was closed. He knocked.

  “Who is it?”

  “Harvey.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  Harvey was thirteen years old, three years younger than Joan, but they’d always been pals, from when Harvey was a baby and Joan would play with him, and feed him, and make funny faces which calmed him down. Joan’s mother laughingly suggested that Joan looked happier with Harvey than with kids her own age, until the thought crossed her mind that Joan was happier with Harvey, which is when she started telling Joan to stop spoiling the baby and start acting more grown up, like Ellen, who was perfect, and didn’t want much to do with either Joan or Harvey.

  As far as Harvey was concerned, Joan was the only bright spot, at least until Uncle Hal starting talking football to him, during years of dark and dreary family get-togethers, especially when his mother got into screaming matches with Aunt Gayle, which turned into screaming matches with his father, which lasted for days. When the others, including perfect Ellen, were busy doing grown-up things, Harvey and Joan nestled together to watch cartoons, and play cards and joke around, like an older sister and younger brother without the daily grind of competition for love and bathroom time.