by M. M. Mayle
The client accepts the offer of her pen and a supply of blank pages pulled from her notebook for the petitioners who don’t have their own. He personalizes each autograph, assures a pair of late-arriving chaperones no real harm’s been done when they apologize for letting things get out of hand and sheepishly request autographs for themselves. He’s gracious and tolerant of everything but the cacophony of questions tossed at him. These, no matter how innocuous, he ignores as though never posed. Something else for her to take away from this scene.
Escaping the scene becomes the priority as the one crowd withdraws, allowing Laurel to realize another crowd has assembled, attracted by the excitement generated by the first gathering. She also realizes Bemus has disappeared. Concern becomes worry until he reappears with three museum guards in tow. Together, they form a phalanx behind which she and the client are whisked out of the Sackler Wing and ultimately out of the museum.
Somewhere along the way, the client has put a protective arm around her that she peels away when they reach the parking garage, noticing that he does indeed have large hands.
NINETEEN
Late afternoon, April 2, 1987
By pure stick-to-itiveness and personal sacrifice, Hoople Jakeway ends the cross-country drive in something less than the seventy-two hours he allotted himself. This earns him a stay at a chain motel in North Bergen, New Jersey, where a real bed and a hot meal will go some way toward making up for the cat naps, soda pop, and snack food that kept him going for the duration.
He doesn’t jump out of the truck right off. His head thinks he’s still in wheeled motion like it did when he made a pee stop in Western Pennsylvania on the stretch that ought to be part of Ohio for being so flat and featureless. And it happened again at a gas stop at the good end of Pennsylvania, at the place they call the Delaware Water Gap, where the view of the heights added to his dizziness and it was easy to imagine his Lenni-Lenape brothers up there defending the pass-through. Here it won’t do to appear feeble-footed. When he does get out of the truck, he circles it a couple of times to make sure he won’t stagger when he goes in to register.
After check-in’s complete with cash on the barrelhead, he’s faced with the job of bringing in his odd assortment of belongings without drawing extra notice. He looks for an employees’ entrance, an out-of-the-way-type door like the one he slipped through at the fancy hotel in Los Angeles. This is no fancy hotel, though, and by the look of things in general, this is no fancy neighborhood.
With that in mind, he brings everything in through the front on a beat-up luggage cart found in the lobby. If he looks like a garbage collector making a delivery instead of a pickup, no one notices.
The seventh-floor room is fancy compared to what he’s used to, but it smells like the kitchen of the abandoned homestead in Michigan. No, it smells like the unaired back room of Kings Tavern in Bimmerman—of spilled drinks, spittoons, and overflowing ashtrays.
The one window overlooks the parking lot of a truck-rental place and a busy road beyond, and he could be looking through amber-tinted glazing or some weird kind of science fiction-type smog because the glass is filmed with a heavy coating of nicotine that sticks to his fingers when he touches it. Still, he grimaces, this place is better than the back end of a Jimmy or chancing it in the open where they’d pick him up for vagrancy.
He unloads the luggage cart and shoves it out into the hall before test-flopping on the bed, releasing smells he’d just as soon not guess at. Despite the grime and bad smells there’s no regret about the decision to stop here because it wasn’t a thought-out plan that made the choice, it was instinct and gut feeling.
While homing in on New York City on I-80, something other than a map told him to veer off the interstate before he got to the George Washington Bridge and too many opportunities to take a wrong road and wind up in Connecticut. He was drawn to Route 46 and a sign indicating alternate routes to the city as if the truck was the planchette on a Ouija board. The unseen force then guided him onto Route 3, where he got his first sight of New York City and the idea he might not want to jump in right away like some showoff tourist plunging into ice-cold Lake Superior without tempering himself first.
The one thing he forgot to look for when drawn to this location was a convenience store. His food supply is down to a half-stack of saltines and a few scrapings in the bottom of a peanut butter jar. Replenishing is not an emergency, though. Not yet. Didn’t he already promise himself a hot meal after going without for so long?
The clock radio by the bed shows the time as quarter to five—too late for lunch and too soon for dinner, but the card next to the device says the onsite restaurant serves a full menu all day long.
Downstairs, the Salisbury steak platter they serve him barely qualifies as a hot meal, and the black coffee he asked for ahead of the meal is still sitting beside the brewer where the sulky waitress left it to go do something else, like pick her teeth. When he reminds her about the coffee, she takes her time bringing it, then sets it down hard so that some spills over into the saucer. He mops up the spill with a paper napkin, tastes the coffee and of course it’s cold.
Nice and polite-like, he asks for a fresh cup and the waitress pours the cold coffee that he’s drunk from back into the brewer jug and refills his cup from the same jug—as though he would drink it now.
He resigns himself to laying out money for the string of insults, knowing he’ll probably suffer worse before he’s learned how to get along in this foreign land.
Upstairs in the grimy room, Hoop could be forgiven if he hit the sack before the sun’s gone all the way down. And he would stretch out on the bed, clothes and all, if the stuff brought from Cliff Grant’s place wasn’t telling him sleep’s not apt to come till he’s had a look at it and figured out what it’s good for, if anything.
He hefts the first bag his hand comes to and empties it on the bed. Folders fall out higgledy-piggledy. Some fall open, releasing yellowed newspaper clippings and tattered pages torn from magazines. Shuffling through these samples is like suffering through a long drawn-out flashback because he’s seen this material before, in one supermarket publication or another, at one time or another. They all bear on Colin Elliot and, if you know to read between the lines and look beyond the picture outlines, they all show how his wicked rock star ways brought about the ruination of Audrey Shantz. Only she’s not called that; she’s called by the fancified name of Aurora.
Without reading the fine print he knows each item will credit Cliff Grant as photojournalist—another fancified name. And without looking at any of them overlong, he knows they’re only useful to him as red-flag reminders of the score he’s come to settle.
The second bag contains more of the same, along with an extra-thick folder bulging with whole sections of those papers they call tabloids. These all have the kind of headlines that make you buy the paper then leave you feeling shortchanged when you find out it was a come-on. He’s seen most of these as well, harking back to a time when he didn’t know better than to get sucked in by headlines like the one he’s looking at now.
BRITISH ROCKER FATHERS CHILD WITH THREE WOMEN
Only a jackassed-fool wouldn’t know that the three women will be identified on an inside page as the kid’s mother, grandmother, and babysitter.
He refills the second bag and casts it aside. Nothing there to keep him fired up because the bulk of it’s untrue, and wishing won’t make it true because he’s already tried.
With a knife to his throat, he might laugh at trash like that and even allow that Colin Elliot has received some abominable bad treatment by the press. But isn’t that the cost for making yourself famous? And shouldn’t you have to pay for dragging others into your shameful limelight?
Hoop goes into the bathroom for a drink of water. The faucet won’t turn off all the way. The dripping might bother him if it weren’t for the louder sound of the toilet running.
Bone-weary and still too stirred up to sleep, he digs into the third bag and brings
out the kind of stuff that will keep him fired up—pictures and reports that make Audrey look bad, drag her name through the mud, and blame her instead of the rock star for her fall from grace.
He sits down on the floor to go through these items piece by piece. A lot of the reports are from overseas—written in foreign language—and a lot of the pictures look like they’ve been monkeyed with. He doesn’t have to search far to find support for that guess. Halfway through the pile he comes across a paste job for sure. The figure shown with Audrey doesn’t match in size or any other way and you’d have to be the worst kind of jackassed- fool to believe they were ever really together.
The same instinct that warned him away from the George Washington Bridge now tells him to either go slow or pay no mind to the next thick folder he comes to. He chooses slow and takes his time lifting the cover to reveal a stack of 8x10 copies of the dirty pictures he saw hanging from Cliff Grant’s wire clothesline earlier in the week. He shudders and looks away the same as when he first glimpsed these shots of the former Audrey Shantz showing her private parts.
He scrambles up off the floor, searches everywhere for matches. He’ll get rid of the filthy pictures the same way he destroyed the ones clipped to Grant’s clothesline.
He finds a half-used book of matches on the windowsill, moves to make a bonfire of the offending material, and stays his hand at the last minute. He’d be a lot dumber than a jackassed-fool to risk burning down a multistory motel in order to clean up Audrey’s reputation.
That last thought, about her reputation, makes him realize he ought to have another look at the shiny photographs. Maybe she wasn’t forced to pose for those pictures. Maybe they were created by scissors and paste pot instead of her rock star husband’s wicked wish to flaunt her.
He can’t do it right away; he has to work into it. When he is able to gather up the pictures and stare at each pose under the bare bulb of a lamp stripped of its shade, he’s unable to see anything that says Audrey’s head had been attached to someone else’s body. And he’s unable to decide right away if this is good news or bad news. In the end, he decides it doesn’t matter because, either way, Audrey is not to blame. That’s all he’s out to prove.
He isolates the filthy pictures from the other stuff he’s looked at, removes the last item from the bag—the rotary file he’s been saving like it was dessert—and lets weariness drop him fully clothed onto the littered bed.
TWENTY
Late Afternoon, April 2, 1987
Two hours after the escape from the Temple of Dendur—as she will forever think of the exit from the museum—Laurel vacates a small conference room in the Trust Department of Clark, Sebastian & Associates. No one would have thought to look for her there, and had she been discovered, she could always have said she was trying this floor on for size like some Goldilocks of the legal world.
With today’s notes now expanded to the extent they can be, she returns to her own floor hoping to avoid Amanda, who should have gone home by now, and anyone else who might want to know what was accomplished during the first full session with the celebrity client.
No such luck. The door to her office is wide open and Amanda is at her desk when Laurel approaches.
“Oh, here she is now,” Amanda says into the phone as Laurel attempts to bypass her.
“Who is it?” Laurel mouths.
“Your boyfriend. He’s called three times,” Amanda responds with her hand over the mouthpiece and a twinkle in her eye.
“Ryan Walker? I don’t remember giving him this number.”
“It’s Colin Elliot.”
“I see.”
“You want to take it here or in your office?”
Laurel heads for the inner office, closes the door behind her and snatches up the phone without bothering to sit down. “Mr. Elliot?” she says and receives an immediate reprimand for not calling him by his first name. “Very well . . . Colin, was there something else? Some question about tomorrow?”
“No,” he says, “I just wanted to make sure you knew how to get hold of me if the need arises.” He recites the number for his hotel, his suite number, and the pseudonym he uses should she be challenged by the switchboard—all of it information he’s given her twice before.
“You can ring me anytime, day or night,” he goes on. “I’m available for spider and mouse captures, plumbing emergencies, mechanical failures, pizza delivery, middle- of-the-night gab fests, card games, board games, badminton, croquet—”
“Thank you, that’s good to know. Will that be all, then?”
He says it is without sounding in the least discouraged by her impatience.
The minute the light blinks off on the phone console, Amanda bursts in without knocking. “What did he want? What made him call so many times? Are you having dinner with him? Making a night of it?”
Laurel motions her to come in and sit, then stands over her as she would a naughty child. “I told David, and I’m telling you—I have taken on an assignment, not an assignation. I am neither Colin Elliot’s latest squeeze nor his catch of the day. Is that clear?”
“Yes, but I think you meant to say ‘chick du jour’ or else you’re talking about fish,” Amanda says. “And who came up with ‘latest squeeze’? That sounds like tabloid-speak.”
“Mr. Elliot’s bodyguard warned me I could be viewed as such.”
“There, you see? Another believer.”
“I don’t see that at all, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
Laurel does want to talk about it. She wants to have the gab fest the client just suggested to her; she wants to giggle and compare notes as she used to hear her little sister do with high school friends; she wants to drink too much and confess those things that only surface in the middle of the night. She cold-bloodedly eyes Amanda as a potential drinking buddy and confessor and rejects the idea out of hand. That would be too much like misbehaving with a colleague at an office Christmas party and expecting the working relationship to be unchanged the next morning.
“If you’re not in a hurry to leave, I’d like to hear how lunch went with Nate Isaacs.” Laurel goes for the compromise.
“That’s the other reason I’ve been waiting around. I’m dying to tell you—I think it’s critical that I tell you.”
“Why, did something go wrong?”
“Not really . . . well, almost. We met nearby, at the Sea Grill, and sat by the windows. He was very nice, he didn’t condescend even one bit and for a while I did feel like I was his date.”
“Then what happened?”
“He started talking about his background and relating little things that have happened to him along the way and I could tell right off he was trying to set up some kind of chain reaction.”
“What do you mean?”
“Okay, if I tell you about the time I went to a fraternity dance with the love of my life, was unprepared when he dipped me and fell flat on my rear end, chances are you’re gonna counter with a similar experience, either to make me feel better or to top me.”
“I see. That’s what you feel Nate Isaacs was trying to do?”
“Yes, enlist me as both fellow sufferer and amiable competitor.”
“Well said, Amanda, but how could you tell?”
“All his little anecdotes had to do with work relationships.”
“It’s been quite the day for anecdotes.” Laurel sighs. “Sorry, you were saying?”
“He told an amusing story about how trust was established with his first executive assistant and my logical response would have been to produce something about how you and I got together and what our level of trust is and I didn’t, of course, so then he tried a couple different variations on the same theme and I gave him some boilerplate about knowing which side my bread is buttered on. After that he told a story I felt was designed to draw me out on the subject of loyalty and I hit him with a standard speech about allegiance being a two-way street and he thought that was way more astute and clever than it really was and even
patted my hand in a congratulatory way like I had passed a test or something. So then my guard was way up when the subject of Rayce Vaughn entered the conversation and I really began to see what was going on.”
“Rayce Vaughn—isn’t he the rock star David just signed to manage?”
“Yeah, and I think Nate Isaacs may have had an interest in managing him, too. He asked a few general questions about how David and Rayce happened to get together and if you—and me by association—were involved in the courtship period.”
“Courtship? He used the word ‘courtship’?”
“He did. In the context of wooing clients.”
“Wooing clients? What are you talking about? Who’s wooing whom?” “It took Nate Isaacs to make me see what David could be up to.” “What, for heaven’s sake?”
“David most likely wants to take over as Colin Elliot’s manager and he’s using you to lure Colin away from Nate Isaacs.”
“That is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard! What did you have for lunch? Peyote? Jesus Christ, Amanda. . . .”
“Wait, it makes perfect sense. David knows Colin’s contract with Nate is up for renewal—even I know that’s one of the reasons Colin is in New York—and David knows Colin is poised to become one of the greatest comebacks in contemporary music history and, on top of that, has a sensational story to tell. Plus, who didn’t notice when Colin pretty much blew off his manager in that weird meeting the other day? For someone like David, just starting out in artist management, could there be a greater asset to acquire than Colin Elliot? Could there be an easier way to grab a certified connoisseur of babe flesh than by putting you, his drop-dead gorgeous semi-unattached former protégé on the case?”
“Slow down a minute.” Laurel scowls. “You honestly believe this? More important, does Nate Isaacs believe this?”
“I’d say so if he’s pretty much convinced me to believe it.”