The Way of All Fish

by Martha Grimes

  “What the hell do you care? She’s the one who has to pay your fees.” This reference was to Cindy Sella. Robson had been talking about their eight-hundred-dollar-per-hour fee. Bryce Reams was not a fan of eight-hundred-dollar-per-hour fees. Neither was he a fan of the complaint against Cindy Sella. He thought the whole thing was a complete cock-up. He did not say this; he merely listened.

  Jackson, wanting to project the image of a caring man, dropped a feather of fish food into the water, and both a blue tang and a discus fish went for it; the discus, a bully, won. The tank had been professionally installed and was professionally maintained. Rarely did Jackson pay any attention to it; it just hung there like a painting on the wall.

  Jackson returned to the table and his panini. Lunch had come from a small place called Gourmet Gourmand and meaning neither, hence a good place for lawyers to get their takeaway food. Gourmet Gourmand was an overrated deli that specialized in sandwiches. But its paninis were quite good. Jackson was eating one made of mozzarella cheese, prosciutto, avocado, and various add-on condiments. Robson Jolt and Barry Weiss were carefully munching chicken salad. Bryce Reams was eating an Eskimo pie.

  The sandwiches and ice cream had been procured by Bunny Fogg. Bunny was the sure-fingered stenographer who made the fifth person at the table; she had no sandwich. Barry Weiss, Jolt’s partner, said nothing but spent a lot of time adjusting the knot in his tie and taking notes in a handsome leather notebook.

  Robson Jolt, a man no one would be tempted to call Robby or Rob, finished his sandwich. He then went on about post-discharged commissions and L. Bass Hess’s alleged right to said commissions.

  “Why would that be the case, Robson, given the concomitant committal of both parties only insofar as the contract states that the Hess Agency would receive commissions on extensions of all agreements going forward?”

  Bunny’s fingers hummed across her pad. She enjoyed taking dictation because she had to listen only to sounds, not meanings. She didn’t ask for words to be repeated, as she knew they wouldn’t make any more sense the second time around. She wrote what she heard, and her ear was a tuning fork.

  “And don’t overlook,” said Robson Jolt, “the claim for promissory estoppel—”

  “Which meets none of the criteria, including unambiguous promises,” Jackson Sprague went on as Bunny whisked her pencil across the page. If the word “estoppel” was a word in the English language, Bunny didn’t know, but she got it down right. These guys could vacuum up words better than any Hoover. She wondered if a bunch of lawyers talking was the source of the expression “bite the dust.”

  Bunny would have loved to tell poor Cindy Sella that she was making a mistake in trying to understand the legal terminology. The words were never meant to be understood, only to intimidate. You could make out good plain words, such as “works” or “agency” or “time,” but they would immediately be set swimming in the torrent of legal babble that would sweep you downstream.

  Bunny played a little piano, and during breaks in the legal exchange—such as the fish feeding—she would devise a musical bar and supply notes for phrases she especially liked, such as “concomitant committal,” and see where the notes led. She drew in five quarter notes, each rising on the measure, then a couple of half notes, and sounded it out in her mind. She smiled. “Fascination.”

  Deftly, she drew a musical bar to the tune of “It was fas-cin-A-tion, I know.”

  Then she penciled in her own version in place of those words:

  “Con-com-it-ant com-MIT-tal, I know . . .”

  It passed the time and kept Bunny from drowning in nonwords.

  Paul had gone into Bobby’s outer office to find Bunny. She wasn’t at her desk, or whatever secretary’s desk it was; he was charmed by the items lined up above the blotter. There was one of those wooden birds with a long beak that kept dipping it into water and went on dipping if you coaxed it with a finger. There was a little ice skater on a pond that moved if wound up with the key at its base. Paul wound it. And there was a ski run (left over from Christmas, perhaps?) down which three tiny skiers sloped, turned, and disappeared.

  When Bunny Fogg walked into the office, he had everything spinning, dipping, and rushing downhill. She moved in a flurry of pens, notebooks, and stenographic pads. Paul immediately went to her rescue before the whole lot slid to the floor. He set the notebooks on the desk, moving the bird to one side. It started dipping again.

  Bunny looked around. “Dolly’s not here?”

  Paul looked around with her. “Apparently not.”

  “Oh. Let me just see if he’s free.” Her hand went toward the intercom.

  “He isn’t. At least he’s not in. Anyway, it’s you I wanted to see. I hope you don’t mind,” he added, seeing Bunny looking at the moving figures. “I was just killing time, waiting for you.”

  “For me?” She looked startled as she sat down in her chair.

  “You don’t work for Bobby full-time as his receptionist, do you?”

  “No, that’s Dolly. I work for whoever needs me at the moment. I’ve just been taking dictation at a meeting of lawyers. In Mr. Sprague’s office.”

  Free-floating. Paul smiled, then recalled that he hadn’t introduced himself. “Oh, I apologize. I’m Paul Giverney.” He held out his hand.

  She said as she shook it, “I know who you are, Mr. Giverney, but I’m happy to formally meet you. I love your books; I’ve read them more than once. What did you want to see me about?”

  Bunny could say a lot in little more than one breath, thought Paul. “Thanks,” he said as he sat down in a chrome and wood chair that looked and felt uninviting. “Well, there’s a project I’m working on.” He added hurriedly in case that sounded suspicious, “It’s a legitimate job, would take not much of your time, and would pay five thousand dollars.”

  Perhaps self-possession was born of having to listen to lawyers talking, for Bunny barely blinked an eye, and her mouth, instead of dropping open, opened just a mite. “What in heaven’s name is it?”

  He leaned back. “Bunny, have you ever read the work of Wilkie Collins? He’s often credited with being the first writer of psychological suspense.”

  While she listened, she thought. Her brow was furrowed beneath that ice-blond hair that Paul couldn’t get over. Today, though, she was wearing blue.

  Bunny said, as her brow cleared, “The Moonstone and all that. Sure.” Mackenzie-Haack had recently brought out a new edition of classics. Besides playing the piano, Bunny also liked to read. It was probably working for a publisher and having all of those books around.

  “It’s the ‘all that’ I’m interested in.” He smiled.

  Bunny smiled. Her white teeth were no drawback.

  40

  That same night, Paul stopped his car at the tall chain-link fence that surrounded Gio’s Auto Salvage. But he didn’t get out, not wanting to be chased and chewed by a bunch of junkyard dogs. He pictured German shepherds, wolfhounds, and maybe a few pit bulls dotted around. That’s what places like Gio’s usually had.

  The gate opened as if by ghostly hands, and Paul drove his rented Chevy in, but warily. He couldn’t recall ever having been in a junkyard and found it an eerie experience, dark and piled high with the carcasses of cars, motorcycles, trucks, and loose parts. There were vertical mounds of tires, narrow and wide, off bikes and eighteen-wheelers; spidery rims off foreign cars; car doors torn off in an accident or a tornado; steering wheels, leather seats.

  The place was huge and ill-lit. On either side of the dirt road were several old streetlamps with metal shades. There were also spotlights along his slow way, though they weren’t switched on.

  Paul loved it; already he was ramping up the engine for a book, the next book after the one he was currently working on.

  Farther along the makeshift dirt road appeared a shack. A figure was silhouetted in the doorway, backlit by a couple of naked bulbs. He waved, so it must be Bub.

  Paul pulled the car over to one side and
braked. At the driver’s-side window, Paul saw one old hound. The dog had its nose and paws pressed against the glass. So much, he supposed, for the myth of the junkyard dog. He got out, gave the dog a few pats, then looked at the shack and the figure there. “Bub!”

  Bub appeared thrilled to death to have Paul right here at his workplace. “Hi. Come on in.”

  It was one room, furnished with a table made from orange crates and a wooden plank; a couple of straight-backed chairs and one chair with fancy carved arms. Its upholstery, a kind of orangey damask, was in shreds, as if the chair had been used to train tigers. One wall had been turned into bookshelves, more wooden planks anchored to the wall holding hundreds of paperbacks.

  Paul felt right at home. “Reminds me of my own office.”

  “Oh, come on, man. You work in a shitty little place like this? You ’avin’ a larf  ?” Bub’s imitation of Ricky Gervaise.

  “Hey, don’t call this shitty; you thereby malign my own writing quarters.” Paul sat down in the ragged upholstered chair; it was oddly comfortable. “We must have a lot in common. I have a chair that’s an offspring of this one, I swear.”

  Registering utter disbelief, Bub said, “Want a beer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Want a glass?” Bub waved his hand along a collection of jelly glasses and mason jars sitting on a shelf above the rust-stained sink.

  “I want the third one over. My mom used to put up peaches in jars like that.”

  Bub looked as if he questioned that Giverney had a “mom” like other people did. He pulled a quart of Budweiser from the tiny fridge and thumbed the cap off. Then he got down two of the jars and poured. Beer foamed over the rims. Paul and Bub tapped jars in a kind of toast and drank. Bub had pulled around one of the wooden chairs.

  “This place,” said Paul, “must be knee-deep in memories. I’ll bet when no one’s around, it wails.”

  “There’s never no one around. It’s either me or Gio or one other part-time guy.” As if working here were a career for Bub and Gio.

  “I think you’ve found the perfect place to write a book, Bub. It’s got it all over a cabin in the woods or a damned chalet in the mountains or something of clay and wattles made.”

  “Yeats,” said Bub. “Innisfree.” He seemed proud to have identified the clay and wattles. He frowned and looked through the door to the pile of windshields that reflected the weak light coming from the streetlamp.

  “Do you know what stuff is out there?” asked Paul.

  “Yeah, some of it. Gio, he knows all of it, every single thing. It all gets logged in, too.”

  “Yeah. Just look at those cars, Bub. The bare bones of Cadillacs and Lincoln Town Cars, the skeletons of Chevys and Fords.”

  “That’s kind of sentimental, Paul.” Bub drank his beer, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “It’s looking at a junkyard as if it’s a metaphor for something.”

  “You think so?” Paul felt deflated. “Maybe I’m just not saying it right.” He got up with his mason jar of beer, nearly gone, and went to stand in the doorway. Black heaps of metal as still as glaciers. “How can you take all this literally?”

  “Because I work here. I see it come in; I see it go out. It ain’t nothing but literal, man. It’s a junkyard.”

  Paul sat down again. “You’ve written a book called Robot Redux, and you’re saying you’re taking all this literally?”

  “You remembered the title?” Bub was clearly flattered.

  “I had the impression your robot got put together from car parts.”

  “But listen. The robot’s not a metaphor.”

  “He—it—isn’t?”

  “Nah. He’s a bot.”

  “Literally.”

  “Researchers and NASA, they put robots together.”

  “Not in junkyards, they don’t.”

  “Look at your Frankenstein’s monster; look at your Dracula.” Bub balanced a small red rubber ball on his fingertips, then jerked it so it rolled toward his elbow. “What I mean is, those two aren’t symbols. They’re real, breathing entities.”

  “Dracula’s not made up of bits and pieces. He’s not a machine.”

  “I didn’t say he was. I just meant, he’s not a symbol. He’s a vampire.”

  Paul wasn’t sure what he was hearing. He said, “That benighted monster of Frankenstein, put together with string and sealing wax—that guy is real, as far as you’re concerned?”

  Bub nodded. “A real monster, yeah. Not a real person.”

  Paul said, “What about the ‘redux’ says—I hate to say ‘suggests’—this is the second time around for the robot? He’s back for further consideration, we could say. Or he’s awakened, we could say.”

  “We could?” Bub was puzzled.

  Paul searched through his mental scrap heap, came up with the obvious. “You got your title from Updike, didn’t you? Your title sounds satirical. Updike’s is Rabbit Redux. We first see Rabbit in Rabbit Run, okay? We see him as a kind of callow teenager. In the next book, the ‘redux,’ we see him grown up, more or less.”

  Bub chewed on the inside of his cheek. “So what you think is I should write the prequel, Robot Run? It’s a thought. Show him as a—”

  “No,” said Paul, as fast as he’d ever said no to anything. “No, it isn’t a thought. Believe me, I didn’t mean that. Any more beer in that bottle?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Bub took the jars and foamed them up again, handed Paul his. “What I was thinking, Paul, was maybe if you—”

  Don’t ask me to read it, please don’t.

  “—if you could maybe get your agent to take a look at it, you know, just to see if he had any ideas about a publisher?”

  Paul grinned. “My agent is the guy that’s messing with Cindy Sella’s mind. And money. My agent’s Bass Hess.”

  Bub put his head in his hands. “Holy shit.”

  Paul couldn’t help but smile as he instructed himself, Do not fall victim to that temptation; do not let Bub be an object of ridicule; do not put Robot Redux on the pyre. But wait. What if he, Paul, were to present this manuscript as one ushering in the new Thomas Pynchon or Haruki Murakami? It would be a treat just to listen to L. Bass sucking up to him with phony comments about the manuscript’s merits, yet at the same time trying to weasel out of sending it on to a publisher as a Hess Agency— Okay, stop it! he ordered himself. Stop fucking around with other people’s lives. That’s what Candy and Karl had said to him after the Ned Isaly business.

  “That psycho is your agent, too?”

  “What? Oh yeah. But he’s my agent only nominally and for a very short while. The thing is, I’m valuable as a source of a big commission. There’ll never be a book contract because I won’t agree to the terms. Also, I’m such a valuable client that I can manipulate him to hell and gone.”

  Bub was chuckling. “I loved the Everglades gig. So what do you want me to do?”

  “Hess has been searching for a partial quarter-panel for his Mustang. A ’64.”

  “Guys are always looking for parts for that car. Sometimes I think Ford must only have made ten of them, the way guys come around begging for this part or that. What the hell is it about that car?”

  Paul shrugged. “It’s a boy toy, a cult car.”

  “Will the whole project go south if I can’t find it?”

  “Not at all. It really makes no difference if you find the actual part, as long as you come up with something. All I want to do is to get Hess to the junkyard. Anyway, Gio would know, wouldn’t he? You said he logs in everything that comes through the gate.”

  “You want me to go at this Hess with a tire iron?” Bub seemed happy at the prospect.

  “I appreciate your fervor, but no. If we just wanted to break his legs or kill him, no problem. No. What we want is his eternal absence from the city of New York.”

  “You’re trying to scare him off?”

  “It’s a bit more complicated, but yes, putting a scare in him is necessary. A friend of mine will be out here tom
orrow to see you. Her name is Bunny Fogg, and she’s a stenographer at Mackenzie-Haack. She’ll need to look around. Tomorrow night, what we’ll want you to do is take care of the lighting. I’m assuming those old streetlamps can be switched on and off from in here.” Paul looked around the shed. “The spots might be a little too bright.”

  “Sure. Panel’s right behind you.”

  Paul turned to look. “Right. That’s what I’ll want you to take care of. Bunny can explain more to you. You’re on duty tomorrow night?”

  “Sure. I’m nine to five A.M.”

  “Hard shift.”

  “Not for me. I get a lot of work done.” Bub stubbed out his cigarette in a little puddle of beer. “So what’s the deal? You’ll come out tomorrow night and bring her?”

  “No. I’ll be bringing Hess, the agent.” Paul smiled.

  “Hey.”

  “The idea is just to throw him off balance. This guy is overcontrolled.”

  “Even after the alligator and the bush on fire?”

  “Oh, he’ll never regain the control he had before, but he’s putting up a fight. He’s in denial. Now, is that your boss’s log here? Can you see if you’ve got the part?”

  “The log’s here.” Bub walked over to one of the shelves where a number of thick dark blue binders were shelved. “It’s not going to be much help.”

  Paul frowned. “Why not?”

  “The logs aren’t made up in categories, which they should be. I mean lists for different types of vehicles and the names of vehicles or the parts applying to those vehicles.” He pulled out one of the binders and handed it to Paul. “It’s not alphabetical, either. He’s keeping records by date: the day such-and-such vehicle or part came in. See here, for instance—2010 January through July.” He turned a page that displayed row after row of entries, neatly written down. “See, it’s not much help. If you want a part for a particular car, like this Hess does, you’d have to get awful lucky finding it.”

  “It’s relatively useless, then, except to flash at the IRS.”