by John Decure
“I don’t know if you can marry someone if you lack capacity,” I said.
“Even if it’s valid, the marriage doesn’t entitle her to Rudy’s assets,” Dale said.
“She’s not worried about legal entitlement,” I said. “All she needs is the authority to get at his property, and that will be that.”
“You won’t let that happen, though,” Dale told Mr. Dobbs, but the manager just shrugged.
“I’ll forestall any access or withdrawals as long as I can, but if she produces legal authority, I’m not sure there’s much I can do.”
Dale and I stared at each other. I guessed that he, too, knew that this little saga was going to end very badly unless we could show the marriage was invalid.
“Just buy us a little time,” Dale told the manager.
Dobbs’s eyes darted between us. “I’ll try.”
“Rudy,” I said, “do you know that lady who just left, Angelina?”
“Sure do,” he said, the ball cap still riding way too low. “She’s
… she’s my friend.” Not exactly the answer I was hoping for.
“She’s very pretty too,” Dale said. “Is she nice to you?”
“Yeah.” Rudy smiled, his teeth small and gray, but his sun-spotted face tightened like withered fruit and his blue eyes began to blink hard. It was as if he was fighting something inside but didn’t know what it was or when it would strike next.
“What’s the matter?” Dale asked in a gentle voice. I remembered what a marvelous questioner he was—that is, had been—back when he had a career.
“Who, me? Oh … sometimes she gets mad.”
“Like when?” I asked.
“Oh … I dunno.” His eyes slipped into a fog.
“When, Rudy?” I said. “Tell us.”
“Oh, you know? … Well, it was last night. They were going out. Again.” As if he was offended.
“You wanted to go too?” Dale said.
“Yes, I wanted to go too. I don’t want to be alone every night, watching the tube. Jeopardy was already over.”
“What did she do to you when she got mad?” Dale said.
Rudy smiled. “Alex Tre-bek!” he said the way Johnny Morton does when he kicks off the show. Then he looked at Dobbs. “I like watching Jeopardy. Literary liftoffs for four hundred, Alex. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
I couldn’t tell if this was part of his dementia or he was throwing up a wall against an unpleasant memory. “What is A Tale of Two Cities,” I said.
“Correct! Select again.”
“All right,” I said. “Right after a word from these sponsors.” Rudy’s gaze was affixed to the maroon carpet, still shutting us out. “Why don’t you tell us what happened last night?” I suggested a moment later.
His lower lip was jittery, and I noticed one of his white tennis shoes had come untied. I bent over to tie it. When I looked up, he was staring at me with something approaching anger.
“They locked the door when they left. I couldn’t open it! I … got hungry.” His voice trailed off in a whimper.
“They do that a lot?” Dale said. “Lock the door on you when they go?”
“You gotta know, it’s for your own good, daddy-o,” Rudy said, mimicking Angie’s street accent.
“What about last night?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Last night? That room got dark last night! No windows. No TV! I have three suits …” Suddenly he was shaking a little through the shoulders. “But I haven’t worn them in ages. Out with the old, in with the new, daddy-o.”
Dale put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re okay now, pal.”
No one spoke. Rudy broke the spell with, “Potent potables for two hundred, Alex!”
Dale took me aside and asked for my assessment. “Sounds like they stuck him in a closet,” I said.
“This British novelist created the protagonist who prefers his martinis ‘shaken, not stirred,’” Rudy asked me.
“Who is Ian Fleming.”
“Correct! He created the dashing James Bond. Select again.”
It was like Rudy had memorized a sizable tract of TV trivia and was escaping back into it at will.
“They came in yesterday morning,” Mr. Dobbs told us. “She had a key to his safe-deposit box. Left with stocks, some cash and jewels, I think. Cleaned it out.”
Dale nearly came out of his chair. “What? That’s terrible. Why didn’t you stop her?”
“I couldn’t, not legally. I hadn’t seen Mr. Kirkmeyer in eight, nine months at least. His current condition … was a bit of a surprise to us.”
“This is recent?” I asked.
“Very. I sensed something right away yesterday. When she asked for access to Rudy’s portfolio I tried to chat with him, as I always will with longtime customers. I noticed the change immediately.”
“Apparently not soon enough,” Dale said.
“No, I did hold her off,” Dobbs said, his tone defensive. “Only Mr. Kirkmeyer himself can access his portfolio, and I made that clear. She tried to feed him directives to pass on to me, but I put a stop to it.”
“But if she has power of attorney, she won’t need Rudy,” I said.
Dobbs’s upper lip twitched, and he dabbed a few tiny beads of sweat from it with a handkerchief he pulled from his pants pocket. “That’s right, but that’s not all. She showed me that certificate to prove the marriage was legal. Says he married her of his own free will.”
“Rudy,” I said. “I want to ask you an important question.”
“Select a category.”
“We’ll be right back with Final Jeopardy after these messages. Rudy, are you married?”
“Oh yes, I am,” he said without hesitation. Dale slumped with disappointment at that answer.
But I wasn’t convinced. “What is your wife’s name?” I asked. “Tell us that.”
Rudy gave it some thought. “Thirty-nine years of bliss.”
“Thirty-nine years, you were married that long?” I said.
He rubbed his wrinkled chin, grating the gray stubble. “I think so? … I think that I would like to go home now.”
“Jesus,” Dale said. The poor old man was fading in and out on us like a searchlight in fog.
“Rudy,” I said, “who can we talk to that’s a friend, a really good friend, or a relative of yours?”
Rudy smiled at Dale. “Are you my friend?”
Dale smiled. “Yeah, buddy.” He seemed touched by the old guy’s sincerity.
“He’s got a daughter in Seattle,” Dobbs said. “I called her yesterday. Haven’t heard back.” He saw the look on my face and picked up the phone. “But I think I’ll try her again.”
Her name was Kimberly Kirkmeyer-Munson, and this time she was in. Dobbs filled her in on what was happening—the confidential marriage, the emptied safe-deposit box, her father’s present “difficulty,” the assistance Dale and I had provided of late. Then he put her on with Dale. I wasn’t up for another round of imaginary Jeopardy with Rudy while we waited, so I tried talking about his daughter, but Rudy clammed up, acting put out. I figured he must be tired out from all the running around and backed off. Then Dale hung up the phone and stood over it without speaking, as if he was deciding whether what he’d heard was good or bad. I asked him what was up.
“Nice lady,” he said. “Pretty upset about what’s happening. Says she had no idea.”
“She coming down?” I said.
He frowned. “Not right away. Next week.”
Shit. “That won’t do,” I said. “He can’t take care of himself like this.” I picked up the phone to call her back and asked Dobbs for the number.
“She can’t get here any sooner, J.,” Dale said.
I replaced the receiver. “Yeah, well, we can’t let those three get hold of him.”
“She asked me to look after him,” Dale said. “Just until she can get here.”
“What do you have in mind?”
He shrugged. “Don’t
know yet. Take him home. Or we could put him up. His daughter has money, said she’d pay our expenses.”
“I can’t take him in,” I said. “My fiancée and her brother just moved in with me temporarily this morning. I don’t have room.”
Which was true. My house sits on a small beach lot and is pretty modest in the square-footage department. Three bedrooms, one for me, the others for Carmen and Albert, or so the plan had been as of this morning. Though Carmen and I have been together a few years, she didn’t want Albert, who is in his late twenties and mentally handicapped, to recognize that we were sleeping together yet. Carmen is his big sister, his only sibling and primary caretaker for the last ten years or so, and he’s attached to her in a major way. They’d both been out of sorts since January, when their mother’s doctor recommended that she be put in a nursing home for full-time care following surgery to remove a brain tumor. The surgeon got the tumor, but the operation left their mother weak and without speech, probably six months from the end of her life.
The nursing home would cost a lot, and Carmen wasn’t going to be able to make it for long on her social worker’s salary. I’d suggested they look into selling their mother’s house, and though Carmen hated the idea, she’d reluctantly agreed. The title search was a shocker: the house was in the name of Carmen’s father, a sour, violent, beaten-down old dog she hadn’t laid eyes on in something like twenty years. He was still living in East L.A., as far as she knew, but he was a dedicated boozer and might be dead by now. The drinking had started a long time ago, when Albert was tiny and not developing normally and Carmen’s dad began pitying himself on an operatic scale. His apparent excuse was that he couldn’t accept the fact that his only son was retarded, and the family name would die off. He felt that God had spited him.
The beatings had started when Albert was about six, just a slap on the hand or buttocks at first for an ill-timed cry or a wet bed. The slaps turned to spanks, and slowly, the fingers closed into a fist, with a gangly preteen Carmen intervening for all she was worth because her mother wouldn’t take a stand. Eventually the old man lost his job at the Firestone tire factory, started drinking full-time out in front of the neighborhood bodega, and quit coming home at night. Carmen was pleased about that development, though her mother remained loyal and refused to toss out his possessions.
The title search I’d so helpfully suggested had been like taking a crowbar to a fucking Pandora’s box. There had been no divorce. Carmen’s parents had a common-law marriage, which meant there was no official record of their union. Carmen’s mother had made every house payment for twelve years until the mortgage was paid off, but the deed was nowhere in her records. For now, at least, the house was in the name of Ricardo Manriquez. This fact creeped Carmen so badly that she could no longer drift off to sleep under the same roof—“his roof!”—that had sheltered her for every one of her thirty years. Legally, he could blow back in at any time, and every time the doorbell rang, his daughter fairly jumped.
A couple nights ago I’d tried to breathe some hope into the situation by explaining to Carmen a little about the research I was doing on community property law in California. The look she leveled on me was enough to make me swallow my helpful little breath on the spot. Another time, I said timidly.
“You okay, J.?” Dale Bleeker’s tone was beseeching. I must have looked pretty glazed, because Mr. Dobbs was handing me an ice water.
“I’m fine.”
I chugged the cup of water, picturing the look on my fiancée’s face when I told her I was taking an incompetent old man in for a few days, greatly complicating what should have been an easydoes-it period of adjustment for Carmen and Albert. Carmen is an accommodating woman, so she would tolerate the disruption; yet I knew what she would think of me, without her even voicing it.
There you go again, J., trying to do too much. Taking care of others to the exclusion of yourself—and your own.
I remembered the beer-can collection in Dale’s Regal. What did I know? Maybe the guy truly did recycle. Yeah, right, what I knew was that I was stroking myself with the recycling excuse. I’d seen too many lawyers like Dale Bleeker to believe that convenient little story.
But I had nothing to lose by trying Dale.
“Think you can watch him full-time until she gets here?” I asked him.
“I don’t see why not. Ms. Kirkmeyer-Munson basically hired me to look after him.”
Mr. Dobbs nodded, studying something in Dale’s expression. “She told you what’s at stake, didn’t she?” Dobbs asked him. Dale just swallowed. Dobbs cracked a thin smile. “I would certainly hope you know.”
I asked Dobbs what he meant. He took up a fancy gold quill from a slanted holder on his desk, scratched something on a slip of paper, and handed it to me. Some nice-looking numbers, trailed by a whole lot of zeros. “Whoa,” I said. “Are you sure?”
“That’s what careful planning and several decades of compounding interest can do,” Dobbs said.
Dale opened the door to Dobbs’s office and peered toward the bank entrance. “The guard’s still out there, but I don’t see the others,” he said over his shoulder.
I asked Dobbs if the place had a rear exit. He said it did but that it was rigged to an alarm. He got on the phone again, got a code from an off-site security outfit, and wrote it down. Then he regarded his client with a campaigner’s smile that made me begin to see Mr. Dobbs in a less than flattering light.
“We’ll continue to take good care of you, Mr. Kirkmeyer, yes we will.”
“Heartwarming,” I muttered to Dale.
Dobbs turned his nose up at my remark. “I hope you know what you’re doing.” It was as close as he could come to saying Don’t blow this for my bank without actually saying as much.
“You just hold off the wife for a few days,” I told the manager.
“What if I can’t?”
“Be creative. We’ll do our part.”
“I certainly hope so.”
Rudy just stood off to the side, eyeing a British line drawing of horses and a barn that hung a little sideways on the far wall. Poor guy. Nobody really gave a shit about him, at least not first in order of priority.
We slipped out of the manager’s office and into an employee break room in the back with a single metal door that looked formidable. Near the doorknob was a keypad with illuminated red numbers. Dobbs checked his slip of paper and began tapping in a code. “Just a minute,” he told us without looking up. “Haven’t done this since the last fire drill.”
I noticed that my hands were shaking. I suppose I was anticipating violence again. Dale just stood there like a statue, his face a whiter shade of pale. Anticipating God knows what, I supposed. But he caught my eye and nodded affirmatively. I’d seen that look once before, a long time ago in a county courtroom, sitting soreassed in a jury-box chair as Deputy District Attorney Dale Bleeker wrapped up his closing argument against the jewel-thief baby-sitter, Thelma Ruffo. I remembered the vibe I had gotten when the confident prosecutor gave me that nod, as if he were saying, Hey, whatever the outcome, there’s a job to be done and we’re in this together. And it made me believe in myself, which, at the time, was something.
Still is.
I nodded back at my probationer.
Rudy’s soft-focus gaze had an observant quality I hadn’t noticed until now, and I could be wrong, but I thought I saw him wink at me. Suddenly, he didn’t seem so out of it after all, and I wondered if he was even sizing me up for what I was worth. Hell, that would be tit for tat, since everyone else had done the same to the old boy repeatedly this afternoon. Behind him, the bank manager persisted with his tapping and fiddling until a red light popped off and a green light popped on atop the keypad on the door, followed by a persistent beeping tone.
“Got it!”
“Players, get ready for Final Jeopardy,” Rudy said, his smile so blank that I instinctively reached out to take his hand. Dale’s breath was on my collar, he was so close behind.
Then Mr. Dobbs sighed like he knew what awaited us out there, gave a sharp all-or-nothing yank, and wrenched open the door.
Four
Bobby Silver, Rudy’s kid wife, Angie, and the sore-armed boyfriend hadn’t anticipated our back-door exit, for the alley was empty. We hustled Rudy to Dale’s Buick, explaining that we were taking him to meet his daughter, which was a sizable stretch, since she was out of state at the moment. But Rudy didn’t protest; my guess was that he’d become used to being shuffled about without apparent reason. He stopped flat when we arrived at the Buick, as if some obscure chord of memory had been struck without notice and was resonating within. I looked at Dale and he at me, and I knew that the unspoken question between us was the same: Is the fogbank lifting? And if it is, shouldn’t we ask Rudy the question on both our minds: Is the little spitfire Angie really your wife?
The moment seemed to crawl to a halt. I suppose I was expecting something of true portent to issue forth from those rather thin, cracked lips of his, such was his poise as he stood there, the blue eyes blaring now, the smallish mouth twitching on the brink of a revelation, like an oyster harvested by the low tide and slowly splitting in the afternoon sun, offering a peek at a pearl whose beauty had, until now, lain hidden at the bottom of the sea. I was waiting for him to utter a word like “Rosebud,” maybe, to offer us the key to a riddle beyond our grasp, a thoughtful rumination on the nature of growing old or time passages. But that’s not how it went.
“Eighty-one Regal,” Rudy said. “Four-door, vinyl top, walnut interior, power seats, cruise control, straight eight.” Apparently, the Bonnie and Clyde bird-shit-spatter special didn’t rate a mention. He winked at Dale. “A very smooth ride.”
Dale beamed. “Quite right. This baby just needs a little attention.” He ran a finger across the roof; I had to suppress a grin when it came up sooty black.
“Still got the owner’s manual?” Rudy asked. I nodded at Dale as if to say, Christ, this guy is sounding pretty good.