How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Gillian Roberts

  “Nice goin’,” he said. No small print.

  One small nonpneumatic step for womankind.

  Eighteen

  I LIKE HAVING AN AGENDA, a plan of action, a purpose, even if I’m not at all sure how to implement it. But in this case, snooping around an airfield, even a private and presumably small one, was intimidatingly official. Even in my imagination, the web of regulations choked me. I felt silly saying words as innocent as flight logs, let alone attempting plane-person jargon.

  The entrance to Bader Field was peculiar—tall redbrick pillars that belonged more at the approach to Tara than an airfield, but there they were. Once through them, the oddness continued with an actual field—the kind used for football—to the left of the gateway. The first airport with bleachers I’d ever heard of. I was sure there was a story there, but I certainly couldn’t figure it out.

  Beyond a nondescript building and an equally nondescript firehouse was a turkey-wire fence, and beyond it, finally, rows of small private planes parked on grass, near a runway that looked like a nice suburban street. I watched an elegantly attired middle-aged couple emerge from a red and white plane and stroll to a waiting limousine positioned in front of the firehouse.

  Life was certainly sweet and easy for some.

  I walked into the square, one-story office building, into a deserted front room dominated by a snack machine and an empty glass display counter. Luckily, the vending machine was full, its peanut-butter crackers looking good. I bought a package of them along with a soda. On the wall, a clock told military time. It was now 1326.

  I munched and sipped and cleared my throat, but that didn’t catch the attention of the male voices I heard in a back room.

  I read a framed clipping on the wall and learned that this idiosyncratic little strip was the first place in the world to be called an AIR PORT, right around 1920. I’ve been saving factoids like that for years, in the event I’m someday invited to an actual cocktail party where people exchange bon mots and amusing bits of information.

  Somebody went by the window in a hot-looking long orange coat. I quickly swallowed my peanut-butter cracker, but the man didn’t come in. The plane people debated and laughed in deep male voices in the back room. I read the only remaining print material, which was laminated onto the display case. It was a newspaper photograph of blurry-faced early fliers hanging out here at the World’s First Air Port. They looked to be having a good time. The figures were identified as Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Lindbergh, and Amelia Earhart. “Wow,” I muttered. “Wow,” hoping this wasn’t some archaic forerunner of the Elvis sightings in today’s tabloids.

  Although a small sign told me there was an attendant on duty, nobody appeared. The laughter grew more raucous from the back room. I walked over and knocked on the open door.

  Unreadable maps hung on nearly all the wall space. I looked at the one nearest to me, a map of air routes, climatological areas. Someone had been charting a path on it. A green chalkboard had pink airplane silhouettes in odd formations, with squiggly lines—maneuvers? spy information?—swirling around them. I felt as if I’d walked into the wizard’s studio.

  “Excuse me,” I said, too softly. The three men remained huddled over a desk, intently studying something.

  It was time for drastic action. Time for Ultra-Girl!

  I silently apologized to Gloria Steinem, and walked toward the group in the style of Mackenzie’s bubbly nurse, trying for her I’d-do-anything-to-please ambience. There must be something to it—some invisible rays it emits, amino acid production it stimulates—because without a word, the men slowly straightened up and turned toward me. “Hi!” I said with a Monroe wave, small and slightly incompetent. One man, quite tall and sunburned, wore a bowling shirt with BILL embroidered on its pocket flap. “Hi, Bill?” He smiled back at me. Actually, he looked delighted.

  “I have this, um, business thing to discuss?” Nothing like making every sentence a question to establish yourself as a nonthreat. Or, of course, as a valley girl, but we were in New Jersey, after all.

  “Business?” Bill looked sincerely disappointed. “Probably should talk to Jimmy, here,” he said.

  I would have voted Jimmy least likely to run an airport, unless by virtue of being too heavy to fly under any conditions, he handled the ground-based business by default.

  “What for can I do you today, girlie?” He’d obviously had his head up a helicopter when advice was given about nonsexist behavior and vocabulary. However, I couldn’t play Ultra-Girl and then protest being addressed as same.

  “It’s about, um, my uncle? He died?” I stalled, frantically searching for logical grounds on which to ask for information about flight records. The definition of foolish optimism was my stupid but persistent belief that last minute inspiration will save the day.

  “Sorry to hear that.” Jimmy did not offer grief-counseling. Instead, he looked wistfully down at the document they’d all been studying: Sports Illustrated’s swimwear issue. I had lost him to the ultimate ultra-girls.

  “See, well, he rented a plane from you right before he, um, you know, died?”

  “This isn’t Avis, babe. We don’t rent planes.” He rolled a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.

  So much for my brilliant theory. I felt crushed, and my back, in sympathy, had another, more serious spasm.

  “Maybe he owned his own plane,” Bill offered.

  I hadn’t thought of that. But since nobody had ever mentioned flying in connection with Jesse Reese’s interest or activities, I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Maybe you’d call it chartering, not renting?”

  Jimmy rolled his eyes. I was a trial to him. “We don’t charter, lady. People here own their planes.”

  I’d hit the wall and dead-ended. “Well, but,” I began, hoping my mouth would lead me to a new perspective, because my brain wasn’t. “Could…could he have chartered a plane somewhere else and had it take him here, then pick him up here?”

  “Well yeah, sure,” Jimmy said, as if I should have thought of that obvious, low-level concept before I started talking. “What about it?”

  “Well, he did that, for this past Monday evening? And see, he couldn’t use the second half because, well, like I said. Do you have the record? His name’s—His name was Jesse Reese?”

  “Hey!” Bill said, his eyebrows rising. “Isn’t that—didn’t I say that was the guy? Remember how I told you? On the news? The guy who got offed at the casino? In the bedroom, Jimmy, remember?” Bill spoke now to both of us, Jimmy and me, explaining. “Remember that guy was here from Pomona? Royally pissed because he wound up wasting half the night? Even though the guy—your uncle—had paid in advance. A lot of money, too, all the way to the Bahamas.”

  Gambling heaven. I should have guessed. To Nassau, to Nassau, with Grandma’s money we go. And then, after that, who knew to where?

  “I told you it was the guy on the news,” Bill said. “When I heard the name, I said how many men named Jesse could there be? Couldn’t remember the last name, but aside from Jesse James, who else—”

  “All right, all right! So I was wrong.” Jimmy’s eyes were now tight slits, but even so, I could see them flash with either interest or anger as they viewed me. He put both his hands up, palms out, making himself a breathing brick wall. No passage, no thoroughfare here. “No refunds,” he said. “My condolences and all, but I can save you time and energy goin’ after them. It’s not like a round-trip ticket, it’s a charter. That plane was rented for a certain amount of time, you know what I mean? And a rule’s a rule.”

  I felt obliged to stay in character. “Not even for the gas that nobody used?”

  “Wouldn’t matter if your uncle was only going to Philly, doll. The price was the price. There’s overhead, maintenance, rentals, and there’s rules. You got your troubles and I got mine, and you can go all over the state, find the place where he chartered it—which sounds like it’s Pomona—and for sure, that place’ll have its own troubles.”
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  “Well, then,” I told the philosopher king, “at least make sure he’s credited with his frequent flier miles.” And I was out of there, but not before I heard Bill.

  “Frequent flier miles?” he echoed with mild wonder before Jimmy brusquely shut him up.

  * * *

  Someday I’m buying one of those fake car phones so I won’t feel so conspicuous when I have to say my thoughts out loud, particularly in a convertible on a June day. For the time being, however, I accepted looking like someone with serious problems as I nattered on, alternately arguing and agreeing with myself and my conclusions. Whenever I stopped for a light, I tried to speak more softly, but I nonetheless generated funny looks from people in adjoining lanes.

  The emerging picture still had gaps, but if you fill in enough background, the foreground has nowhere to go but right in front of your eyes. So I muttered my story to the visor, hoping people thought I was talking to a speaker phone, wishing I didn’t care what people thought.

  For years, I told my windshield, at least back to Georgette’s sister, probably before, Jesse Reese had been preying on old people with failing memories and increasing confusion, people who could be manipulated out of their life savings.

  But recently, with particularly bad timing, he found himself squeezed between large gambling debts and the dawning wrath of some of his victims in the geriatric social clubs—all of whom had friends who were potential victims. The very connections that had supported his endeavors and his lifestyle now threatened to strangle him. His methods and practices were within hours of becoming public knowledge through a lawsuit, but he couldn’t repay the old people and get them off his back, because he owed whatever he thought of as disposable cash to the casino. Add this squeeze to the problem of an expensive and enraged wife who had delusions of becoming the next Queen of Seventh Avenue, and a former partner who was determined to sue him to death even if it took forever, and Jesse Reese was in a serious pickle. So he decided to skip.

  I stopped for a light. I loved how logically it all worked out. To a point. But what then? “But,” I said, angry with my own quibbles. “Why does there always have to be a but? Why is there always a very big but?”

  A chubby man in the next lane turned, his mouth a belligerent pout.

  “The conjunction,” I shouted. “Not the noun!” My explanation was lost in his exhaust fumes, but maybe he wasn’t great with parts of speech.

  But. What had happened then?

  “Here’s what I think.” I looked around guiltily, but the pickup now in the next lane blared apocalyptic hip-hop and couldn’t have heard a nuclear explosion, so I talked on. “I think the ungrieving widow figured out that her no-good, cheating hubby was going to split. Maybe his travel kit was missing or the checking account was suddenly gone, or the Pomona pilot called to verify his flight time—but something clued her in and she decided to plug her leaking resources by terminating her husband.”

  Women and Money: The Saga Continues. Georgette lost and slept on the sand; Lala snared Tommy; Lucky’s mother gambled; I taught summer school and Poppy murdered.

  My vote for the tall accomplice was a man in drag, probably Dunstan, if he’d ever show up, although Ray Palford now seemed a potentially good bet.

  Or else the cross-dressing part was last minute inspiration, along with the site. Pure serendipity because Reese’s customary room had been given to Sasha and me. Or else they had always meant to use the room, his favorite room, but not to dress like Sasha. Or else…or else, or else.

  * * *

  When I reported back to Mackenzie, I was given another ego-boosting round of approval. However, my back was now clenched as tight as a fist, and I couldn’t relax enough to gloat. I rubbed it while I was being complimented.

  “By the way,” he said, “I called the precinct here ’bout Poppy and Dunstan and Ray Palford, too. They were real interested, particularly in Poppy. Said they’d talk to her right away. An’ my man says Sasha’s cousin finally arrived. I think a strain of flakiness runs through the whole family.”

  “As long as it’s just a personality defect and doesn’t interfere with legal expertise,” I murmured.

  “I think this means you’re retired, or at least on sabbatical for the rest of the day,” Mackenzie said. “Whyn’t you take care of that back? Doesn’t your hotel have a spa?”

  The thought of a massage shimmered just ahead like a mirage.

  “Everybody’s in place at the moment, so you’re finally on vacation,” Mackenzie said. “At least for an hour or so.”

  * * *

  I made my way across the lobby of the hotel, aiming my feet for the elevator bank.

  “Sweetie pie! We were looking for you!” Lala and Belle advanced on me, talking all the while. “We made a million phone calls,” they said in unison. “Going to cost a fortune!”

  My back went crazy. “Don’t worry about it, but right now, I am on my way up to the health—”

  “Every apartment and church and synagogue and seniors’ complex we could find in the book,” Belle said with obvious pride.

  “Incredible. Could we make a date for later? I have this thing in my back and I—”

  “It’s not really so incredible,” Lala said. “We used a Philadelphia directory.”

  “We called Jesse Reese’s office,” Belle said.

  It was easier to wait than keep protesting. Maybe they’d notice I looked like Quasimodo.

  “I had such a good idea. I made up this whole speech. I’d say I was from the Greater Delaware Valley Seniors’ Coalition—you like that? The GDVSC, I’d say, and then I’d explain. I said we wanted to put a notice in our bulletin about Jesse Reese’s passing since so many of our people—I like that, don’t you—our people—”

  “Belle!”

  “—and we thought it would be nice to mention some of his most recent appearances. So I found out his number and I dialed, but—”

  “His office is closed,” Lala said. “Permanently.”

  Belle sulked. “I was going to say that,” she muttered.

  “We have a few hundred names so far,” Lala said. “People who gave him money. Some of them told us the amount. Twelve thousand, twenty-five, one gave him seventy-five thousand. Adds up.”

  “You’re not kidding. I kept the tallies,” Belle agreed. “I do it for our Thursday night consecutive rummy games. I’m good at it, I don’t know why. It’s kind of a gift.”

  Lala leaned near me. “Five and one-half million dollars we know of already.”

  I didn’t have to pretend to be stunned. I thought their math must be wrong, despite Belle’s expertise.

  “After all,” Belle said. “If two hundred and fifty people give him twelve thousand dollars each—and that is not exactly big money in this world, and most of the people gave him twice that, three times—that’s three million dollars right there. The amount he gave back as dividends—peanuts. Besides, there’s more people—we didn’t even try New Jersey, but I thought you don’t have all the money in the world, do you? Phone bills aren’t cheap, and even with a card, the hotel adds on its—”

  “One woman who answered,” Lala said, “had just come back from the hospital. She told us that while she was sick, and her son was going through her accounts, trying to take care of things, he’d gone to see Jesse Reese twice. Last week and this Monday.”

  “Monday? The day he…”

  Both women nodded. “She said that Reese was very rude. Her son went to the office in Cherry Hill—he had an appointment—but Reese said something had come up, he had to leave. So this man followed him here.”

  I wondered if he was tall, if he knew Poppy.

  “Another man said his son was a stockbroker who tried to transfer funds, to invest some differently. He said that he tried to check out some of the investments and he couldn’t find anything about them. Thinks they were made-up companies. Fakes. He had a word for it, his son did. Something like that movie star, from Casablanca.”

  “Ingrid?”
She shook her head. “Bergman? Humphrey? Bogart? Sam?”

  “That’s it—Bogart.”

  “That’s the name of a company?”

  “No, no, all those investments were Bogarts.”

  I didn’t correct her and say bogus. The image of tough investments with cigarettes hanging off their lips was too appealing.

  “So the son, he got real worried and called his lawyer.”

  “When?” How much pressure was hitting Reese all at once?

  Belle shook her head.

  Lala seemed to stretch, to grow taller. “And my Tommy heard that Miglio’s mother had turned over a nice amount to Reese last year, and about a month ago decided she wanted to surprise her children with a trip for everybody back to Italy, but Jesse Reese didn’t know who he was messing with. Miglio has a very bad temper, particularly when mothers or money are concerned.”

  The woods were suddenly crawling with would-be Reese lawsuits or assassins, or at least serious irritants. No wonder the man was leaving the country. “You’re incredible detectives,” I said. “I salute you. If we could get that list together, I think the police might be interested.”

  “You’re standing funny,” Lala said.

  “Yes. My back. I pulled something yesterday.”

  “So why aren’t you upstairs with the masseuse? Honestly, young people don’t know how to take care of themselves. You act as if there’s no tomorrow. You have to take care of your body. When you’re older, you’ll understand. Go!”

  I went. Next to the spa entrance was a glass-walled room in which Holly Booker led an aerobics class. Actually, it was more of a tutorial, with one apple-shaped and unenthusiastic participant. I have to hand it to Holly. She wasn’t daunted by her class size or by vigorous exercise. She shouted encouragement and popped on and off the step and clapped her hands as if she were guiding the entire world through its paces. And she had been doing so in her glass cage for forty-five minutes already, according to the schedule on the wall.