by Parnell Hall
Wendy/Janet answered the phone.
“Rosenberg and Stone.”
“Hi. It’s Stanley.”
“Stanley. Where are you? I must have beeped you five times.”
“I got tied up,” I said. I didn’t want to tell Wendy/Janet I’d been put on a jury. She might figure that was a reason to stop giving me work. “You got a case?”
“I got nothing for tonight, thank god, ’cause you wouldn’t have made it. But I got one for tomorrow morning.”
Under the circumstances, things couldn’t have been better. It had been a long, hard day, and I didn’t feel like going out on a case now, even if she’d had one. I took down the information, and told her once more not to get excited if I was slow answering the beeper, that I’d be sure to call in.
I hung up and walked down the corridor to the elevator. There were a bunch of people waiting, what with it being rush hour and all. I was preoccupied with my thoughts, and I didn’t really notice anybody until a voice behind me said, “Hi.”
I turned around.
It was Blondie.
10.
“I DON’T THINK I caught your name.”
I was glad she said that. I hadn’t caught hers, and I’m shy about asking.
“Stanley Hastings. And yours? “
“Sherry Fontaine.”
“Oh?”
She smiled. “You sound as if you don’t believe me.”
“No, it’s just. . . Is that your real name, or your stage name?”
“Stage name? Oh, the script. No, it’s my real name. I didn’t have to change it.”
The elevator arrived and we stepped in. So did a bunch of other people. And the elevator had been crowded to begin with. I found myself rather close to Sherry Fontaine, whom I was even more convinced was not wearing a bra.
Carrying on a conversation in the midst of a lot of other people makes me uncomfortable, but it didn’t seem to bother her.
“Well,” she said, “pretty dull case, huh?”
I frowned. We’d been instructed not to talk about the case. But surely that meant the specifics of the case. Whether it was dull or not didn’t really count.
“Dull is the operative word,” I said.
The elevator stopped on three and more people tried to pile in.
“Any closer and you’ll have to marry me,” Sherry said.
I grimaced. “I’m already married.”
She smiled. “That’s your loss.”
It was not the type of conversation I wanted to have in an elevator. People around us were picking up on it and grinning at us. I felt in serious danger of blushing, which wouldn’t have done at all.
My beeper picked that moment to go off. I’d forgotten to put it back on silent after I’d checked it in the men’s room. In the crowded elevator it sounded like an air raid siren. I fumbled under my jacket to shut it off.
“What the hell was that?” Sherry said.
I didn’t want to say. With my luck, there was a court officer somewhere in the crush who would grab me and impound the damn thing. “My beeper,” I said out of the side of my mouth. “I gotta call my office.”
“Why are you talking like a gangster?”
The elevator arrived at the ground floor and people piled out. I crossed the lobby, found a pay phone, and called the office, hoping like hell it wasn’t a case for tonight. As I said, I just wasn’t up to it.
It wasn’t. It was for tomorrow night in Harlem if I wanted to take it, which I sure as hell did. Despite being on a jury and getting out at five, I needed the money.
For once I was lucky. The client had a phone. So even though the appointment was made for five, if I didn’t get out of court till five, I could always call the client and just say I was gonna be late. Piece of cake.
I hung up the phone and turned around to find Sherry Fontaine standing there. I must say that surprised me.
“So?” she said.
I put my notebook and pen back in my jacket pocket. “I got a case in Harlem.”
“Oh? For tonight?”
“No. Tomorrow night. After court.”
She nodded. “So where you heading?”
“Home.”
“Where you live?”
“Upper West Side.”
“Me too. Wanna catch the subway?”
“I got a car.”
“You got a car?”
It was only natural to offer her a ride. She turned out to live on West End Avenue in the eighties and I go right by there.
We went out and walked down to the parking lot.
And discovered I’d gotten a ticket. Shit. Of course I had. I’d fed ten quarters into the meter at two o’clock, just before I’d returned from lunch, but at four o’clock when the meter ran out I’d been sitting in court. And wouldn’t you know it, the meter maid came around.
I pulled it off the windshield to inspect the damage. Overtime parking. Thirty-five bucks. Which more than knocked out this morning’s signup, making the day a total washout.
I unlocked the car, hopped in and switched off the code alarm. I reached over and unlocked the passenger door, and Sherry Fontaine got in. I fired up the ancient Toyota, pulled out of the lot, and began fighting my way through rush hour traffic.
While I drove, we made small talk. Sherry had a pleasant voice along with everything else. It was cultured and refined, with an occasional hint of southern drawl. I figured that to be an affectation, part of her theatrical image.
Sherry said, “So you’re a private detective?”
“Yeah.”
“You do trip-and-falls and stuff like that?”
“You heard that? I thought you weren’t listening.”
“I was working on my lines, but I heard what you were saying.”
“You got a show?”
She grimaced. “I got a showcase. No money, but it’s a chance to be seen.”
I knew about that from my days as an actor. Showcases were no pay, hard work, and despite the premise, usually nobody important ever came to see them. Nonetheless, there were always hundreds of actors willing to kill to get in one.
“So when do rehearsals start?”
“We’re rehearsing now. I gotta go home, change and get over there.”
“They rehearse at night?”
“Yeah. You take a showcase, everyone in it’s doing it for free, they got other jobs.”
“I know. I used to be an actor.”
“Oh yeah? Why’d you quit?”
“No work. I couldn’t make a living.”
“Yeah? Tell me about it.”
“You get work?”
“Now and then. In between I waitress.”
“Right.”
“Oh? You wait tables too?”
“No, I never did. I’ve done a lot of other job-jobs. My detective work is a job-job.”
“Oh? You still try to act?”
“No, now I try to write.”
“Any luck?”
“About as much as with acting.”
“Yeah.” She looked at me. “You shouldn’t have given it up. You’re not a bad-looking guy. I bet you could still get work.”
Let me say right here that I’m a happily married man, I don’t cheat on my wife and I had no sexual designs on Sherry Fontaine. It just isn’t in my nature, and wouldn’t be, even without the threat of AIDS. But despite that, I’m human. And I couldn’t help responding to and being pleased by the fact that this very good-looking young woman seemed to find me attractive. I mean, she’d waited for me, sought me out, inveigled a ride, and now she was coming on to me. And while I had no intention of acting on it, it was doing wonderful things for my ego. This very desirable woman was interested.
“So,” she said, “your detective work is a job-job?”
“Yeah.”
“You do it full-time?”
“More or less. I get cases through a law office. When there’s work, they beep me. Like in the elevator. I do as many cases as I can. Sometimes it’s an eight-
hour day. Sometimes it’s more. Some days are slow and it’s less. I try to fill those days with photo assignments left over from other jobs. But the point is, it’s flexible. I make my own hours so I can do other things.”
“Like writing?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded. “I see. So anyway, your detective work—you do a lot of trip-and-falls, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“My girlfriend, Velma—back in Cincinnati—she had a case like that. Maybe ten years ago. She got hit by a car. Hit-and-run. Never got the driver. But she went to an attorney, and it turns out you can sue anyway.”
“Right, it’s a no-fault claim.”
“That’s right. No-fault. The attorney tells her they don’t have to catch the driver, they can still sue.
“Only thing was, she wasn’t really hurt. Just a few scrapes and bruises. But it turns out she had broken her leg in a skiing accident two years before.”
My eyes widened. “You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not,” she said. “Isn’t it great? The attorney got a hold of the X-rays of her broken leg, filed a no-fault claim, and she wound up getting thirty thousand dollars.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah. Isn’t that clever?”
“Clever isn’t the word for it.”
“Hey look, it’s just an insurance company and they got millions.”
“Yeah, sure, but—”
“But what? I think it’s really clever. And everyone always bilks insurance companies. I mean, hey, the lawyer you work for—I bet he does stuff like that.”
“No, he doesn’t,” I said.
That was a half-truth. I mean, I’m sure Richard Rosenberg bilks insurance companies out of millions, but not with phony X-rays.
“Yeah, but he could,” she said. “And he wouldn’t even have to know.”
“What?”
“Look,” she said. “I broke my arm a few years back, and I never did anything about it. Suing, I mean. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. There wasn’t any liability. But I have the X-rays, and—”
“Forget it,” I said. “Richard wouldn’t touch it.”
“Yeah, but like I said, he’d wouldn’t have to know. You investigate for him, right? So you just sign me up as a client, fill out all the papers. Treat it as a trip-and-fall. Find some great crack in the sidewalk, take pictures of that. I give you the X-rays, you turn it in with the rest of the case, and who’s to know?”
“It wouldn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“They’re old X-rays.”
“So what?”
“There are tests that can determine that.”
“Who’s gonna test them?”
“The defense attorney might.”
“So? So, you dupe the negatives. Then they’re new negatives.”
I shook my head. “You don’t understand.”
“What’s to understand?”
“Look, when I sign up a client, I fill out a fact sheet. The fact sheet asks, ‘Was there a police report? Did an ambulance come?”’
“And if not, there’s no case?”
“Not necessarily, but—”
“But what? So the police weren’t called. So there wasn’t an ambulance.”
“With a broken arm, you have to go to a hospital.”
“I could have gone to a private doctor.”
“Then they’d want the doctor’s name and his records.”
“Oh.”
I was getting angry. Not at her, I was getting angry at myself. I was angry because I wasn’t saying, “No, I won’t do it.” What she was proposing was illegal and wrong and something I wouldn’t do. But I wasn’t saying that. I wasn’t refusing to do it. Instead I was explaining why it wouldn’t work. And the only reason I could be doing that was because I didn’t want this beautiful woman to think I was a straight arrow stick in the mud.
Which was ridiculous. Because, as I said, I had no sexual designs on her. She was someone I just met, someone who couldn’t matter in my life one whit, and yet here I was fumphering around not saying what I really felt, just because I didn’t want to fall in her estimation, fail in her eyes, seem unhip, uncool, or whatever the hell her generation would use to refer to the socially unacceptable.
Generation. Maybe that was it. Or at least partly it.
Maybe I didn’t want to be an old fogy.
At any rate, at least the bit about the doctor’s records slowed her down. She pursed her lips, pouted a bit, lapsed into silence.
I fought my way crosstown, got on the West Side Highway.
After a bit she said, “I have friend who’s a doctor. Maybe I’ll talk to him.”
I said nothing, hoping she’d drop the subject.
She did. Once we got on the West Side Highway traffic got really jammed up and now we weren’t moving. “Christ,” she said. “This is awful.”
“Yeah.”
“If this doesn’t clear up, I’m gonna be late for rehearsal.”
“It’ll clear up, but it’s always slow.”
“Damn. If it’s like this, I should have taken the subway.”
Maybe it was just that she had already gotten me in a bad mood. But now I felt on the defensive. Like she was blaming me for making her late to rehearsal. Like it was my fault for offering her a ride.
I said nothing, looked straight ahead.
As if she read my mind she laughed and said, “Hey, don’t look so pouty. It’s not your fault. I’m not blaming you.”
“Un huh.”
“And I’d much rather ride in a car than the stinking subway. Say, you driving down tomorrow too?”
“Well, not directly. I got a job in Harlem first.”
“Harlem?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you’re driving down?”
“Right.”
“It’s right on the way. You have to go right by me to get downtown. Could you pick me up?”
“It’s a close thing getting there on time.”
“Hey, I got to be there same time you do. Just tell me when you’re going by, I’ll be standing out on the street. I hate the subway.”
I could have just said no. But it’s hard to refuse a ride to someone when you’re going their way. And should I really turn her down just because she made me uncomfortable about wanting to pull an insurance scam?
And if I had, would that have been the real reason? Or would it have just been that she made me uncomfortable by being an attractive woman.
Damn.
At any rate, I said I would.
Traffic thinned out, and we began to move up the West Side Highway. Things relaxed somewhat, and Sherry got expansive and started talking about her acting career. It turned out it was no great shakes, in fact not much more successful than mine.
She’d done some summer stock, some regional theatre, but virtually no work in New York outside of extra work in movies. Which was why the showcase was important. Why she had her feelers out all the time.
She had an agent, which was more than I’d ever done, and he was starting to get her things. Not work, but auditions. Auditions were important even if you didn’t get the work because you learned from them, you got better from them and, hey, maybe one day one of them would pan out.
The conversation was basically a monologue, during which I occasionally muttered brief noncommittal words of encouragement. Though frankly, the whole audition syndrome was a familiar and depressing one.
There was a pause and I glanced over. She wasn’t looking at me, she was looking out the front window at the traffic, but she wasn’t really seeing it. There was a look in her eye, and I recognized it. It was the same look she’d had just before she started in on the insurance scam pitch. I wondered if I was imagining it.
I wasn’t.
She said, “Yeah, auditions are real important. You know, my agent got one set up for tomorrow afternoon, but I can’t do it, ’cause I’m on a jury. If they hadn’t put me on a jury, I’d planned on
going and then just reporting late. I’m sure that would have worked. They’d just give me a slap on the wrist. But now I’m on this case.”
“Yeah. Too bad,” I said.
“Yeah, but I was thinking. . .”
“What?”
“You’re a real private detective. Work for a law office. Couldn’t the lawyer there call over to the court, say something big came up, he needed you in the afternoon? I mean, he might even know the other lawyers. Surely there’s some sort of thing as professional courtesy, right? So you get excused for the afternoon so they can’t have court, so they knock off at lunchtime.”
Jesus Christ.
Revelation, déjà vu, blast from the past, flashback, what have you.
I have to apologize for being a sexist pig again, but this is something that women just won’t quite understand, but men will get right away. So pardon me, but this is really just for the guys.
Remember when you were back in high school, there was always some girl who, on the one hand you knew you were never gonna get into her pants, but on the other hand you just couldn’t keep away from? And never mind getting into her pants—you were never even gonna get her bra unhooked, and you knew that, but you stuck around anyway.
Worse than that, she always wanted to do things you didn’t want to do. Things you knew you shouldn’t do. But you did them anyway. Like you’d be talking to her, and suddenly you’d realize, hey, we gotta get to class, and you’d tell her that, and she’d just laugh and put you down and tell you not to worry. And you’d know you ought to leave her and go to class, but somehow you just couldn’t do that. So you’d stay, and it would get closer and closer to class time, and you’d get more and more anxious, but she simply wouldn’t be hurried. By the time you did get her ass in gear, it would be too late, you’d only be halfway down the hill to the class house when you’d hear the bell ring. And even then she couldn’t be hurried, she’d just smile and keep on talking.
And then you would leave her. You’d say, “Come on!” to which she would not respond, and you’d turn and sprint off down the hill with your books, run full-tilt to the class house, and come bursting in the door panting and out of breath, just in time to interrupt the teacher, who had just begun his lecture.
And the killer was, while he was bawling you out for disturbing the class, and sending you to Friday night detention study hall for coming late, she would calmly walk in the door and sit down at her desk, and the teacher wouldn’t even notice.