She lifted his glass and wiped underneath. “Marge was my old man’s first wife.”
“Oh. I take it she moved on,” Abbie said.
Bev looked sidelong down the bar to Sherri Larimer, and when Abbie followed her glance, Sherri cracked an evil grin and said, “Oh, yeah. She moved on.”
This first time Abbie visited Marge’s, though, Bev was frying something or other in the back and only came out to introduce herself brusquely to the Pittsburghers and give a deferential nod to Larimer. They were served by a thin man in a tank top that exposed a Styx tattoo on his shoulder. There were a few midday drunks smoking cigarettes and watching soaps on the tiny TV on a shelf above the chips and pretzels. Sherri and Billy, her older son, were at a picnic table in the back. She was smoking her slims.
This was before Sherri became county commissioner, although she was already rumored to be the money behind Ron Cavignac, the then-sitting commissioner whom she’d eventually replace. The Larimers had some real estate holdings—rentals, mostly—in Fayette, Washington, and Greene counties, as well as their land down in West Virginia. Sherri lived in a great gaudy mansion on a hill above the village of Smock. Her husband, an amiable and stupid man from an amiable and stupid Brownsville family, was nominally in charge of the family’s most openly profitable business: combination miniature golf courses and shooting ranges, the Hole-in-Gun chain, of which there were three in Fayette County, one in Greene, and one down in West Virginia just outside of Morgantown. There were rumors that the Larimers also funneled most of the meth, heroin, and coke into the tri-county area. Harrow thought these were only rumors, perpetuated by the Larimers themselves as a prop to their reputation as hard-assed local kingmakers. Veronica thought it was entirely possible that they were drug dealers and used their properties to launder the ill-gotten cash.
Veronica had told Abbie to keep quiet. “These people are suspicious,” she said, “and they require a delicate touch.” So, of course, the first thing he did after introductions all around was to gesture grandly at the bar and tell Sherri that he loved her conference room.
Veronica looked at Harrow, and Harrow looked at Veronica, and they both waited for Sherri to explode or instruct Billy to threaten everyone with a pistol or some such Larimeresque stunt, but she laughed and shook Abbie’s hand and said, “Shit. I like this one!” She pumped his hand again. “The new guy.”
“Well, thanks,” said Abbie. “I hope it’s the beginning of a fruitful relationship.”
“Fruitful,” repeated Bill. He giggled, then narrowed his eyes.
“Shut up, boy,” said Sherri. “Why are you so goddamn obsessed with homos? It means productive. Profitable.” She studied Abbie for a moment. “Nice suit,” she said at last.
“You ever read the Wall Street Journal?” Abbie asked.
“Abbie,” said Phil.
Sherri tapped her finger twice on the table, in a sign that Harrow and Veronica had learned to interpret as something like a threat.
“On occasion,” said Sherri. “The truth is that I ain’t real big on what you might call the Wall-Street mentality. I prefer to make my money the tangible way, if you know what I mean.”
“Surely,” said Abbie. “I’m an architect by trade. Perhaps we have that in common. The tangible. I only brought it up, because if you ever read the Journal, you’ll notice that from time to time, there are these ads for Hong Kong tailors who come to New York, and you can go and pay, oh, five thousand bucks, and he’ll make you five suits, ten shirts, and two hard-boiled eggs. Well, I always thought it was a joke, but then one day, my wife said to me, ‘Abbie Mayer, you need some new suits,’ and pointed out one of these ads. And I said, ‘Sarah, that’s got to be a scam.’ I’m a native of the New York Babylon, so I assume everything is a scam. And she said, ‘No. My father used to go to these guys.’ And her father, let me tell you, had some very nice suits. So I went downtown to where this little guy from Hong Kong had set up shop, and sure enough, he made me the nicest suits I ever had.”
“I like a man in a suit.” Sherri eyed Harrow, who was in his typical golf shirt and khakis.
“What?” Harrow said.
“Phil and Veronica here once tried to screw me in a deal, but Ray-Ray pulled a knife on their suit, and he crapped in his pants.”
“That’s not quite fair,” Veronica protested. “You made good money.”
“Not quite fair,” said Larimer. “Not quite. But yinz originally came down there with some suppositions about my sort of people.”
“Well,” said Abbie, “that’s why I’m here.” He gestured to his sister, on his left, and to Harrow, on his right. “I am,” he said, “the people person.”
“Can we get down to it?” asked Veronica. “I don’t mean to be the bitch who always talks business, but I’m going to be that bitch.”
“Let’s,” said Sherri. “What do yinz drink?”
Veronica and Harrow stuck with ginger ale. Abbie asked for a Sambuca. “Really, Abbie?” said Veronica. She indicated with her eyes that this was not that type of bar.
Abbie in turn grinned at Sherri. “I deduce,” he said, “from her name and bearing that Sherri here’s got some Italian in her, from way back, and I bet there’s some Sambuca in this bar.”
“Take this one to Vegas,” Sherri told Veronica. She gestured toward the back bar. “Now, like the lady said. Let’s get down to it. Phil here told me the general outlines on the phone. Okay. I’m game, in theory. But I don’t see how the hell anyone here makes money building a damn highway, except Phil, of course. Even Phil. Shit, you’ll have to underbid cost to get the low bid anyway.”
“We’re not going to build the highway,” said Veronica.
“Well, not the whole highway,” Harrow added.
“We’re more interested in the idea of the highway,” Abbie said. “The concept.”
“The concept.” Larimer appeared amused. Two shots of clear Sambuca appeared between her and Abbie. She lifted hers, he lifted his, she tossed hers back, he tossed his back. “Did you ever actually build a highway, Phil?”
“Ramps and interchanges.”
“Oh, I see,” Larimer said. She nodded and tapped another cigarette out of her pack.
“Do you?” Abbie cocked his head.
“Shit, Mr. New York, I wasn’t born at night. So what, you got another Wal-Mart up your sleeve?”
“Better,” Veronica told her. “Subdivisions.”
“Bedroom communities,” Harrow added.
Larimer considered it. “I follow. Sure.”
“I don’t get it,” said Billy.
Sherri slapped the table. The drinks rattled. “Do you need to get it, boy? Will you go play darts? Here.” She pulled a wallet out of her purse and a few bills from the wallet. “Take the car down the road and get me some of that fudge at the fudge store.”
“Aw, ma.”
“Get me some goddamn fudge, boy, or I’ll bust your eggs. And scramble them.”
“Yes ma’am.” He skulked out, but not without turning once in the bright doorway and projecting an angry look back into the room.
“That boy.” Larimer shook her head and found a cigarette. “Any of yinz got kids?”
“Three boys,” said Harrow.
“I know about your kids, Phil. I’m talking to these two.”
Veronica shook her head. Abbie said, “Not yet.”
“You want mine? I got two and another one on the way. Though I ain’t showing yet. If there’s any eggs I oughta bust, it’s my goddamn old man’s. Anyway, where were we?”
“In order to build the thing,” Veronica said, “you’ve got to assemble the land. The right-of-way. And then you’ve got to figure out your exits and on-ramps, where you’re going to connect to the local roads. The majority of this thing is going to pass through Fayette County. I mean, we’ve looked at the topographic maps, and there are only so many routes the thing can take. We figure probably sixty percent of the overall mileage will be down here. So we’ve got two issues.
One issue is we’ve got to get a better sense of the route, and that’s really why we get involved in bidding, but also, that’s a big piece of construction, and we need someone with your . . . connections in the local power structure as well. And issue two is we need to quietly and quickly acquire the acreage we’ll need down the road, so to speak.”
“To build the fuckers.”
“Yes,” Veronica agreed, “to build the fuckers.”
Sherri Larimer took a long drag. “That ain’t bad,” she said. “That ain’t bad. Although you ain’t the only ones to think of it, that’s for sure.”
“No,” Veronica agreed, “probably not, which is why time is of the essence.”
“Well sure,” Sherri nodded. “But at the same time, you don’t want to rush in. It’d be too obvious to anyone else trying to buy up the same property.”
“Who else would be buying the same property?” Harrow asked.
“It’s hypothetical,” Sherri said. “You familiar with the term?”
Harrow grumbled.
Larimer said, “The other thing—issue three, you might say, Miss Lawyer—is that you can’t just go buying all that land around a brand-new, hell, not-built highway if you’re also proposing to build it. There’s gonna be rules against that.”
“Oh, that’s where I come in,” Abbie said. Veronica noted a change in his manner; she’d assumed he’d view the whole thing with a prissy moral reluctance, although, needing the money, he’d come around. Instead, he was warming up to a role as some kind of brassy, hilarious gangster. He was probably trying to impress Larimer, but she knew how easily Abbie could fall into a good role. He said, “I’m the patsy.” He grinned. “The real question,” he added, “is whether or not you think you can wrangle the prized information out of one or other of your charming local officials, and whether or not you can assist in convincing the Farmer Browns and Miner Smiths around here to sell cheap and sell fast and keep their traps shut when they do.”
She tapped her finger once, twice on the table. “Surely I can,” she said. “Why, I’m a major benefactor, I think you’d say, around these parts.”
“This is some good Sambuca, by the way,” Abbie said. Another had arrived, and he was sipping it. “The black bottle, if I’m not wrong.”
“You’re not wrong.” She took his glass and sipped from the opposite side of the rim. “I always did have a taste for licorice.” She sighed. “Keeps ya regular.”
• • •
They’d ended the meeting with Harrow suggesting that Sherri let it percolate for a few weeks, and then, on a weird, cold day in November when freezing rain and an early snow entombed the trees and their unfallen leaves in grotesque, translucent cocoons, Sherri called Veronica in the morning and said they had better come down to Uniontown to finish their chat. They met Larimer at the old Mt. Vernon Inn, a sagging motor-court lodge whose shrink-wrapped and mostly unoccupied rooms remained open only to justify the existence of the inn’s actual and profitable business, which was its large and raucous bar. It was all later torn down to make room for a Walgreens; all the good places, Abbie would tell you, were sacrificed to uniformity. Abbie thought it would be funny to spend the night there, but Sherri Larimer told him it wasn’t for people like him, and she ordered him to book rooms at the Holiday Inn out past the mall instead. Harrow, who’d come up separately, said he’d just drive back to Morgantown. “You might be drunk,” Veronica told him.
“I’ll certainly be drunk. What’s that got to do with it?”
Larimer had insisted that they meet at nine on a Friday night. The bar was packed with men on a rough approach to fifty and a few equally rough, if generally younger, women, who were all angled to gaze mournfully at the drunks walking too carefully past the unattended hostess desk and around the round tables between the front door and their sweating drinks. The whole place smelled of an ashtray left out in the rain. There was a band playing on a riser at the far end of the room. They mostly played Little Feat covers. Larimer bought drinks and insisted they listen to a set. Harrow rolled his eyes and spent the next thirty minutes watching a muted baseball game on a tiny TV over the bar and stuffing stale pretzel rods into his mouth. The screen was so fuzzed with static that one of the drunks beside him leaned over and mumbled through his cigarette, “Hey, buddy, is this TV fucked up, or am I fucked up?”
“TV looks fine to me,” Harrow told him.
“Christ,” the man muttered.
Abbie grinned and chuckled and sang along with the band and occasionally tapped Larimer with a collegial elbow at some song lyric that they both found funny. “What’s their name?” he yelled.
“Who?” Larimer shouted back. She drank Seven and Seven and smoked slims.
“What’s the band called?”
“Alimony.”
Abbie’s smile grew. “Where’d they come up with that?”
Larimer chuckled and tapped ash onto the floor. “Where do you think?” she bellowed.
Veronica spent the half hour wondering why she’d ever given up the practice of ordinary law if the price of prosperity was this constant mucking about in the poorest places in America. Like all of the Mayers, she was essentially a snob; unlike them, she admitted it. She’d done very well in this business, keeping her partnerships and exposure limited, using other people’s money to buy and build things from which she profited, and well. Unlike her former law firm—or any law firm—there weren’t any old men in her way. Yes, she still had to conduct a lot of her business through conduits like Phil Harrow, this male-drag-at-a-distance necessitated by the same sexist systems that would have delayed and stymied her rise in the grotesque fraternity of the practice of law, but at least here this self-diminishment was purely instrumental, albeit still unjust in its necessity.
Her partner, Edith, argued this point with her. She thought these male proxies were absurd for someone of Veronica’s intelligence and accomplishment. Veronica pointed out that Edith had worked for Harrow, and Edith would just give a thin smile and say, “But I’m not you.” Veronica occasionally worried that they’d fallen into an insupportable, gender-normative relationship in which she fulfilled the typically male role in the household with Edith as the supportive wife, but wasn’t that inevitable? For all she wanted to be innocent of the wrongheadedness around her, wasn’t she ultimately tainted by it no matter what she did? Didn’t everyone fulfill, even in their small rebellions, the very inequities that they’d rebelled against?
After the set was over, Larimer led them through a service door and into a storage area stacked with folding tables and chairs. The band had hauled down a couple of tables and turned the place into a makeshift green room, but three of them skedaddled back to the bar when Larimer came in, all but the frontman, a fat guy with a shiny head and a vaguely professorial air derived mainly from the patches on the elbows of his jacket. He was smoking a joint. “Hey Sherri,” he said. “I was just hittin’ this nag champa. I’ll be going.”
“No, Bob. You stick around.”
Bob flicked the joint nervously and sent an appealing glance toward Veronica, Abbie, and Harrow.
“Don’t look at them, Bobby. Look at me.”
“Sorry, Sherri. I didn’t mean anything.”
Veronica noted that unlike Larimer, unlike most of the people she’d encountered in Uniontown, this fat stoner spoke a perfectly uninflected American English.
“I’m sure you didn’t think you did, but I seen you looking. Don’t worry, you can go on smoking that weed.”
“You mind? I mean, this looks serious.” He glanced around again, caught himself, and dipped his head to look at the floor.
“I don’t mind. I insist.”
“Thanks.” He hit the joint. “All that smoke out there really gets to me.”
Veronica raised and lowered her foot and said, “Not to be the lawyer of the group, but maybe we ought to find somewhere more private.” She indicated Bob with a tilt of her head. Like a lot of lawyers, Veronica believed only provisionally i
n the law, but she had a rigorous, almost religious reverence for the forms of confidentiality. “If you don’t mind, of course, Sherri.”
“Nah,” said Larimer, and she swung her leg over the back of a chair and sat, folding her arms across its back. “Mr. Krupp is my main man. He’s got his finger on the pulse.”
“What pulse is that?” asked Veronica.
“The pulse of Uniontown.”
“Not much of a pulse,” said Harrow.
“Phil, shut the fuck up. Bob,” Larimer ordered, “tell them what you told me.”
“Ah, man, Sherri. Look, I just was a little short on the child support, and I—”
“No, Jerry goddamn Garcia. Not about the loan. We’ll talk about that later. Tell them about the road.”
“Well.” He took a fortifying hit. “Okay. I was drinking the other night over at the Titlow Tavern. We had a gig. And I heard Marv Edison tell Patrick Dell that he heard from Jerry Rittenhauer that Mantini Construction was going to be hiring for a big PennDOT job in the next year or so and was looking for local guys to do general labor.”
Veronica rolled her eyes. “Who are these people?” Of all the things she found difficult and distasteful in Fayette County, the endless parade of names from the mouths of people who assumed you already knew who they were was what annoyed her the most. It was impossible to keep them straight. Edith, who’d grown up in tiny Point Marion, told her that she ought to learn to ignore it entirely. But Veronica had an attorney’s mind, and it demanded tags and attributions.
The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates Page 17