McNally's Gamble

by Lawrence Sanders

  I finished working on my journal, sipped a marc and smoked a final cig while I listened to a tape of Tony Bennett singing “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” Then I went to bed. But my dream wasn’t broken. It involved the Rockettes, me, and thirty-six hula hoops.

  The following morning was peculiar. I seemed to be functioning in a daze, even more disoriented than usual. It couldn’t have been the weather, which was crisp and bracing. But I was unable to focus on anything; every time I tried, my concentration just fuzzed away. I finally decided my condition was due to the confusing telephone conversation with Natalie Westmore. I had been a Laplander trying to converse with a Bantu.

  My anomie began to fade during my drive to the McNally Building. A container of black coffee and two glazed doughnuts from the company cafeteria helped. I had breakfasted at home but my stomach still seemed as vacant as my brain. The caffeine and a jolt of nicotine removed most of the cobwebs remaining and I convinced myself I would live to play the kazoo again.

  Having nothing better to do before my lunch with Nettie and Walter Westmore, I found a pad of scratch paper and began to compile my Christmas list. The holiday loomed and I hadn’t even begun shopping or mailed out a single card.

  I started with my parents, of course, followed by Ursi and Jamie Olson. That took care of the McNally household except for Hobo. I decided he deserved a new rawhide bone at least. Then came Connie Garcia, Binky Watrous and his Bridget, the four Pettibones at the Pelican Club, Mrs. Trelawney (my father’s secretary), Sgt. Al Rogoff, gossip columnist Lolly Spindrift, Herman Pincus (my barber), Wang Lo (stockbroker), Dr. Gussie Pearlberg, and a long roster of friends and coworkers.

  Finished, I gazed in horrified amazement at the number of gifts I’d be required to purchase. I knew the wizened state of my checking account and wondered if I could possibly obtain a home equity loan on Hobo’s doghouse. I remembered my nonchalant prevarications to Frederick Clemens concerning jumbo CD’s and $200,000 to invest. It was a moment for hollow laughter but I was saved from that hackneyed response when my phone rang.

  The caller was Sydney Smythe and I knew immediately what he was going to ask. The challenge to my talent for improv was enough to dissipate the remnants of my morning’s attack of mindlessness.

  “I was wondering, dear boy,” he said, “if you’ve had an opportunity to examine the ‘surprise’ in the Fabergé Imperial Easter egg you mentioned.”

  “I have indeed,” I said, slipping on my Ananias cap. “The most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen. It’s a teeny-tiny model of the 1907 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. No more than an inch and a half long and fashioned of sterling silver. Crystal windshield and headlights. Real leather upholstery. It really is an amazing work of artistic craftsmanship. The wheels actually turn.”

  I heard his sharp intake of breath and then there was silence for a beat or two. Finally he exclaimed, “What a marvelous find! But understandable. I’m sure such distinguished cars were owned by royalty in 1917 St. Petersburg. I must look it up in my library. If I find any references to the Rolls-Royce model I’ll certainly let you know. It might help establish the provenance and market value of your deceased client’s egg.”

  “I would appreciate that,” I told him. “Thank you so much for all your trouble, Mr. Smythe.”

  “No trouble at all, dear boy,” he sang out gaily. “I shall enjoy the search.”

  After we disconnected I wondered again about his continuing interest in my imaginary Fabergé Imperial egg. But then a greater wonder—awe at my own inventiveness—took over and I questioned how I had come up with the creation of a model car “surprise.” I finally decided it had its origin in my inspection of Frederick Clemens’s Bentley, my puzzlement at his choice and why he hadn’t selected a Rolls-Royce with more pizzazz.

  But I put all my musings into a mental deep six, doubting if I would ever hear more on the subject from Sydney Smythe. It was true I had sent him off on wild-goose research of an object that didn’t exist, but he had assured me he would enjoy the pursuit, so I was able to endure a feeling of guilt. I’m good at that.

  As a further assuagement I added his name to my Christmas gift list. Then, realizing it was time to go shopping for luncheon pizza and beer, I also added Natalie Westmore’s name. The list was beginning to resemble a telephone directory and I dreamed of sending each of my donees a chaste card saying a contribution in their name had been made to some worthwhile charity—such as the Society for the Prevention of Drinking Brandy Stingers. Would that scam work? I didn’t think so. Christmas is a time for giving till it hurts—right? How true, how true.

  CHAPTER 14

  MOTHER HAD DESCRIBED Walter Westmore as being nerdish, a science wonk whose most fervid dreams probably involved algorithms known only to him and the ghost of Pascal. I found a totally different man and I could only conclude a year in Africa searching for old bones had wrought the transformation.

  He was stalwartly built and on the afternoon we met he was wearing a neatly pressed khaki safari suit and looked physically capable of wrestling a black rhinoceros to a draw. The short-sleeved jacket revealed muscular arms with a pelt of fine golden hair noticeable because he was suntanned to almost a mahogany shade.

  His handclasp was strong without being crushing and his voice had a nice timbre. He said he was happy to meet me. “Nettie has told me a lot about you, Archy.”

  “Don’t believe a word of it,” I advised him, and we all laughed.

  I was glad to see Natalie had acquired a new steel cot, much sturdier than the one we had demolished. Walter and I sat on that while we worked on the pepperoni pizza and cold six-pack of Heinekens I had brought. Nettie perched on the high stool at the drawing table. She was wearing short shorts which looked as if they had been hacked from a pair of denim jeans with a dull razor. And she nibbled a paste she told me was minced mushrooms and eggplant moistened with extra-virgin olive oil. This mire was spread on cracked wheat wafers and looked loathsome. Never did pepperoni pizza taste more delectable.

  “In what part of Africa did you work?” I asked Walter.

  “Mostly in Kenya near Lake Turkana, although I spent a month in Tanzania. But Kenya offered the best possibilities.”

  “What were you looking for?”

  He answered carefully. “Bones, teeth, or any other evidence of early hominids. My specialty is bipedalism. I assume you know what that is.”

  “Oh sure,” I said. “Being able to jump into the air on two feet and click your heels together.”

  He smiled. His teeth were white tile against his sunburned face. “Something like that. There is a continuing controversy about when it began. And where. Millions of years’ difference in the estimates. Guesses actually.”

  He spoke elliptically, as if he thought I had little interest in bipedalism. How right he was. But I was curious about when Homo sapiens learned to stomp on grapes with both feet, which eventually resulted in 1982 Lafite-Rothschild.

  “Fascinating,” I said. “And old bones help determine the date we stopped walking on our knuckles?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “If sufficient fragments are found to reconstruct a skeleton, even partially.”

  “Walter can’t go back,” Natalie said bluntly. “He had a one-year grant and it’s over.”

  He shrugged. “Grant money is tight right now. The universities are cutting back and so are the foundations.”

  “Mother could finance you,” she said angrily. “But no, she’s just interested in buying a Fabergé egg.”

  He shrugged again. “It’s her money. She can do with it what she pleases.”

  He tried to express insouciance and failed miserably. There was no mistaking the bitterness in his voice.

  “It’s not fair!” Nettie burst out.

  They both looked at me as if expecting an instant solution of the problem of getting Walter back to Africa to continue his search for ancient bones or perhaps a rack of stained bicuspids.

  “It’s important to you, is it?” was
the best I could do.

  He nodded and gave me a sheepish grin. “It starts out as a scientific investigation. Then it becomes an obsession. For all of us. Something like prospecting for gold I suppose. The lure never dies. It’s all accident and chance, of course. But sometimes it does happen.”

  “Talk to mother again,” his sister commanded. “She won’t listen to me.”

  He shook his head. “I asked her once and she turned me down. I won’t beg. I think I better start looking for a teaching job somewhere—or maybe I can get into a research lab.”

  “Oh God!” Nettie cried out. “There goes your life.”

  He stood up to kiss her cheek and give her a sweet smile. Then he resumed his seat on the cot. “It’s not that bad, dear,” he said evenly. “We all have to make compromises. Don’t you agree, Archy?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “And occasionally the compromise turns out more happily than we anticipated.”

  I don’t think either of them believed me. Why should they? I didn’t believe it myself.

  “Let’s talk about something more cheerful,” Walter said. “Mother is having a cocktail party on Friday. Around five o’clock. Of course you’re invited, Archy. Can you make it?”

  “Delighted.”

  “Good,” he said. “Bring anyone you like. Most of the guests will be mother’s friends.”

  “And Helen’s,” Natalie said darkly.

  He made no response to that but rose and rubbed his fingers through his sun-streaked brown hair cut en brosse. “How do you like the crew cut?” he asked me. “I usually wear it long but barbers were few and far between in the Kenyan outback so I settled for a brush cut. Helen says it makes me look like a fugitive from a chain gang.”

  “She would,” Nettie said scornfully. “Well, I like it.”

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I have to finish unpacking and make a start on my report. It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Archy, and I’ll see you again on Friday.”

  I stood briefly to shake his proffered hand. He gave sis another cheek kiss and then he left. I looked at the two unopened cans of Heineken.

  “I don’t suppose you drink beer,” I said to Natalie.

  “No, I do not.”

  “It’s made of grain, you know. No animal fat.”

  “I still won’t drink it. Take it home.”

  “I should have given them to Walter to aid his labors.”

  “Do you like him?” she challenged.

  “Very much. But he does seem unhappy.”

  “Worse,” she said. “It’s despair. Because he can’t get back to Africa and do what he loves most.”

  “He’s a big boy,” I told her. “I’m sure he knows how to endure disappointment.”

  She slid off the stool and began pacing back and forth, hugging her elbows. “It makes me so furious!” she cried. “Just furious. Mother could easily finance one or two years in Africa. It doesn’t cost that much. But all she can think about is that stupid egg. I could kill her!”

  If I had thought her last declaration was a brief and temporary explosion of anger I would have made cooing noises and attempted to soothe her. But there was such vitriol in her tone she was obviously expressing a deep, long-standing passion. I didn’t know how to respond to her rage.

  “You don’t mean that,” I said feebly.

  She paused in her pacing to face me and glare. “I do mean it. Every word of it. Walter lets mother and Helen walk all over him. Not because he’s weak but because he thinks it’s unimportant compared to his work.”

  “His obsession,” I suggested.

  “Yes, his obsession,” she agreed. “And meanwhile they’re destroying him. Well, I won’t let it happen. If he won’t do anything about it, I will.”

  “Do what?” I asked, fearful of what she might answer.

  But “Something” was all she said.

  I realized I was uncomfortable in her presence as if she might be suffering a petit mal and I was ignorant of how to aid her. So I was somewhat relieved when she said, “I don’t want to make love this afternoon, Archy.”

  “All right,” I said equably.

  “I’m too upset,” she explained. “You can see how things are, can’t you?”

  I couldn’t, of course. I had only the haziest notion of how things were in the Westmore ménage. But I nodded and she accepted that. She plopped down alongside me on the cot and put a bare and slender arm around my neck. I kissed her wrist.

  “You’re a yum-yum devil,” she said.

  For some reason I recalled the classic line from The Ten Commandments, spoken by Anne Baxter to Charlton Heston: “Oh, Moses, you adorable fool!”

  “Tell me a story,” Nettie enjoined. “Take my mind off my problems.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What kind of story?”

  “A true one but a funny one.”

  I thought a moment. Then: “Well, here’s one you may find mildly amusing. I work for my father’s legal firm and not too long ago...”

  I told her about the Franklin kidnapping and how the Boston bubbleheads had been nabbed simply because their intended victim had a phone equipped with Caller ID. Natalie didn’t laugh uproariously but she smiled and tightened the arm about my neck.

  “The boy wasn’t hurt?” she asked.

  “Nope. He was fine.”

  “And what happened to the kidnappers?”

  “Durance Vile, I hope.”

  “What do you do at your father’s firm, Archy?”

  “This and that,” I said casually. “I’m a sort of paralegal. I don’t have a law degree.”

  She accepted it with no further questions about my occupation, for which I was thankful. She withdrew her arm and took up her perch on the high stool again. My recital of the attempted Franklin kidnapping had enlivened her for a few moments but now she seemed to have slipped back into her broody mode, planning, no doubt, how to slaughter her mother, discombobulate her sister-in-law, and finance her brother’s African explorations. Then, her self-imposed tasks successfully completed, she would take me to cot in celebration.

  I thought it time to depart and she made no effort to persuade me to linger. She did insist I take the two remaining cans of Heineken with me and I finally acquiesced, hoping they were still cool enough to be drinkable. I also received a light kiss before I left.

  “See you on Friday?” she asked. “At the cocktail party.”

  “I’ll be there,” I promised.

  She gave me a lidded glance but said nothing more.

  I drove home reflecting I had learned a great deal about the Westmores that afternoon but nothing directly concerning my Discreet Inquiry into Mr. F. Clemens. But isn’t there a folk saying to the effect that the longest way round is the shortest way home? There is no such bromide? Strange; I could have sworn there was.

  Even stranger was the character of Natalie Westmore. What a contradiction she was! At our first meeting I had been initially aware of her apparent apathy and indifference. Then came the Paroxysm of the Collapsing Cot during which she displayed a physical passion I had not suspected. And more recently she had revealed an emotional intensity scary to such an easygoing, laid-back chap as your ’umble ’ero.

  A windless calm’ outside and raging squalls within—that was the only conclusion I could arrive at, and wondered if my gamble on an intimate relationship might be a losing proposition. Women and men who present a serene persona to the world but who carry repressed storms within can prove extremely dangerous when finally thunder rumbles and lightning flashes. And I abhor violence. Except for the Three Stooges, of course.

  CHAPTER 15

  WHEN I PULLED INTO the graveled turnaround at the rear of the McNally manse I saw Jamie Olson sitting on the step leading to the back door. Hobo was lying beside him. The pooch was on his spine, all four paws in the air, and Jamie was slowly scratching his belly. Lucky dog. No one ever did that for me.

  Hobo was alerted by my arrival. He raised his head, saw me, scrambled upright an
d came dashing. I gave him the customary ear tweak and assured him he was the handsomest hound in dogdom. I retrieved the two beers and went over to join Jamie on the step. I gave him one of the cans.

  “Not cold,” I warned. “But I think it’s still cool enough to drink.”

  “Thankee,” he said.

  We popped the tabs, sipped, sat placidly in the waning sunlight and watched Hobo chase a fluttering moth. Jamie filled his old briar from an oilskin pouch and I lighted a cigarette to protect myself. I think Jamie smokes shredded tar paper.

  When he had the pipe alight he said, “Al Canfield,” and lapsed into silence. I waited for what seemed like minutes. No one has ever accused Jamie of being mouthy. “Had a brew with him and some others,” he finally added, pausing midspeech to quaff his beer and puff his pipe.

  I reckoned the “others” he referred to were all staff employees of Palm Beach richniks, which meant the gathering was probably a gossipfest.

  “Hear anything?” I asked. “From Al. About the Westmores.”

  “Got a boyfriend. Canfield says.”

  “Who’s got a boyfriend?”

  “Mrs. Westmore.”

  “Jamie,” I protested, “she’s as old as my mother. I can’t see her fooling around.”

  “Not her. T’other one.”

  “Mrs. Helen Westmore, the daughter-in-law?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did the houseman say who he was—the boyfriend?”

  “Nope. Don’t know.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s possible. She’s a flashy woman and her husband was away for a year. But he’s back now.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I heard amusement in that interjection, a cynical recognition of the ways of the world.

  “You mean that even with hubby at home she’s continuing her affair?”

  “Al says.”

  I did not pursue the subject further. Natalie had hinted at her sister-in-law’s misbehavior and now a servant had confirmed her suspicion. I believed it. I had met Helen Westmore only once, briefly, but she had impressed me as a woman likely to consider chastity an absurdity.