Book Read Free

Proportionate Response

Page 6

by Dave Buschi


  Lip’s DIY work could leave a bit to be desired at times. He might have been a genius with certain things, but that certainly didn’t hold true when it came to the man’s handyman abilities. Man splurged on hardware and software for computers, but hated to spend a dime on anything else. He’d bought six gallons of “oops” paint at the local Lowe’s. Saved a bundle. Doing the painting himself saved him even more. Thing was, it wasn’t exterior grade paint. It was interior latex. Hadn’t been four months and already it was starting to peel off the house.

  Lip’s standard M.O. Don’t pay anyone for something you can fuck up yourself. Even tried to do his own maintenance on his properties. Marks pitied those poor tenants. Lip had once asked him if a leaking hot water heater could be fixed with some plumber’s tape.

  Marks pulled an ice tray out of the freezer. It was one of those old-style aluminum ones with a handle, where you pulled a lever to pop the cubes. He found a Ziploc bag under the sink and filled it up.

  His elbow and forearm was starting to smart from where he’d hit that guy. It would be bruised come tomorrow. Body was willing, but it didn’t take licks like it used to. He was lucky a bruise was all he’d gotten. He kept forgetting he wasn’t Superman anymore.

  Sportscreme, Ben Gay, Aspercreme. He needed to buy stock in those companies the way he went through that stuff. That and aspirin. He popped the stuff like candy.

  Second reason for visiting the kitchen. Marks opened one of the upper cabinets. Mrs. Lipkin kept a jumbo-sized bottle on the lower shelf. He pilfered three of the pills and chased them down with a slurp from the sink. Moments later, bag of ice on his arm, he rejoined the others in the drawing room.

  “So what are we looking at now?” Marks said.

  “Do you have to ask?” Lip said. He was slouched in a floral wing-back chair with a look of defeat.

  Marion flashed a quick smirk from the couch.

  “Gotcha,” Marks said.

  Marion’s look said it all. Baby pictures.

  Marion was being a good sport. This was probably like some surreal form of therapy for her after what had just happened and what might have happened to her husband. She picked up the picture of the three of them again and gave it another look.

  Marks, Lip and Johnny Two-cakes. The three friggin’ stooges. Meat, Babel and Mr. Happy. Their other nicknames. Could never have too many of ‘em.

  Meat for Marks. Babel—as in Tower of Babel—for Lip. And Mr. Happy for dour-face Johnny Two-cakes.

  “Were you in the CIA?” Marion asked.

  The question hung in the air.

  Mrs. Lipkin looked up after a moment. She picked up the tray that was on the coffee table. “I’m going to get us some more tea,” she said with a minced smile. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  16

  LIP’S mom walked into the other room. She was her son’s number one fan, but as Marks well knew, she chose to have her own idea of what Lip actually did. Marks took a seat across from Marion. Lip pulled out of his slouch.

  “Johnny Two-cakes told you nothing?” Lip said.

  “That name,” Marion said. “Johnny Two-cakes? I’ve never heard John say that before. Did he like being called that?”

  Marks sighed. “I’m beginning to understand why we weren’t invited to the wedding.”

  Marion’s forehead bunched. “You both knew John well?”

  “Depends,” Marks said. “Was a time I’d say yes.”

  “You should probably tell us what you do know,” Lip said.

  Marion had taken her flats off and had tucked her legs beneath her. She was an attractive woman, Marks realized. Not in an overt way, but in an understated sense. She wasn’t trying to hide her age; no Botox, no dying of the hair, just letting the years show. For good and bad. Mostly it was good. She looked womanly in her jeans. He had a rueful thought, thinking of Johnny Two-cakes. Man had been a bachelor for a long time and finally had found the one. He thought of that letter and what it said. Like a swan song.

  Marion crossed her arms. She looked scared. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Why don’t you start from the beginning,” Marks said. “Tell us about things before you got that letter. Anything that might help shed light on why those guys visited us back there.”

  She nodded resolutely. “Okay… I’ll try.”

  They picked up the conversation they’d started to have with her at the Starbucks. Marion began tentatively. Lip and Marks let her talk. They only asked questions when she seemed to need prompting.

  She began when she first met John.

  IT was in Costa Rica, at a resort—one of those fancy ones that catered to Americans and Europeans. She’d gone there with some girlfriends. It was on a whim. So unlike herself to do that. “I was with two of my good friends. All three of us were dealing with certain things; one was getting over a divorce, another was separated, and I was still dealing with the loss of my husband. About a year before I’d lost him to cancer. That had been a horrible time…he was sick for so long.”

  She mentioned how she’d been a caregiver. How for years she never thought of herself. It was all about her husband; trying to make him comfortable.

  It had been almost a year to that day. She was just starting to come out—really see the world again. Have color in her life. She faltered for a moment, but picked up. “Anyway… I won’t go into my own sad past, the trip just sort of happened. We all needed it.”

  That was three and a half years ago, but she remembered it clearly, like it was yesterday. The day she met John. It was early in the trip, on the third day. Her girlfriends were still sleeping. She met him in one of the hotel’s restaurants at the breakfast bar. They bumped into each other in line and she accidentally spilled her juice on him. After an apology on her part, they started talking. They ended up sharing a table.

  He was very shy, which was disarming. “I liked his company. We just started talking. He was doing some work for the resort. I later found out more about him. How he lived nearby and owned his own company. He’d been there for a little over two years. It’s not like he was chatty. Particularly not on what I call our first date, eating cereal and having juice.

  “We bumped into each other the next day—I think he stayed on to see me again. I was flattered… and intrigued. He was so intelligent. The most brilliant and unusual man I’d ever met. He told me about some Pre-Columbian history that was pertinent to Costa Rica, as we drank our coffee. He seemed to have been everywhere. And knew so many obscure facts and interesting stories.”

  Marks eyed his partner. Lip was doing a good job restraining from dropping any of his usual wisecracks.

  “He took me and my girlfriends on a tour later that day. After that, he and I spent some time together… just us.”

  At the end of the trip, her friends had gone back. She—surprising even herself with her decision—had decided to stay for a little longer. “It was a crazy decision, I realize now. I wasn’t looking to meet anyone, but that’s exactly what happened.”

  That ‘little longer’ decision stretched out to become a lot longer. Only days later she accepted John’s invitation to stay at his place. Guestroom first… and then… “I’m not that type of girl. Or at least I didn’t think I was. Looking back on it I guess there were a whole list of possible reasons why I acted so impulsively. Whatever it was, it felt right. It was like we were meant to find each other.”

  She paused, as if uncertain where to go with her story.

  “Can you tell us about his company?” Lip said.

  “Sure. It was a security company. They specialized in protecting computer systems, or something like that—very technical and I couldn’t tell you exactly what they did, but they worked with all the casinos down there and all the other companies that were into gambling.”

  “The online ones?” Lip said.

  “Yes those, and others.”

  Both Marks and Lip were familiar with the various outfits that operated in Costa R
ica. The place was a haven for casinos and the online gambling industry. Several hundred entities were located there—mostly US companies, doing what they could do there that couldn’t be done in the states. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 had started an exodus with far-reaching implications. It was boom time for certain areas in South America. Many of those countries, like Costa Rica, had made it very attractive for US companies to set up shop. Their infrastructure, lax regulations, and telecommunication systems, which they’d drastically improved over the years, were all custom designed to attract and service that industry.

  “His company did very well from what I could gather,” Marion said. “But towards the end some things started to happen.”

  Marion didn’t have all the details. “As you probably know, John wasn’t one to share things of a personal nature. Sometimes I wonder if I knew him at all.” She laughed when she said that—a nervous laugh—and began to fidget with some lace fringe on a pillow.

  “This seems so ironic, saying this now. Anyway… the one time I’d asked him about what he did before in his career, he’d told me he’d worked as an analyst for the US government. Bureaucratic stuff, is what he said. Completely boring and uninteresting.”

  She shrugged and gave another nervous laugh. “Of course, I believed him. Why wouldn’t I? That’s all he ever told me. He was very adept at steering conversations away from himself.”

  She looked up and made eye contact with Marks. Her eyes were intelligent, searching. There was some steel in them too. “Somehow I doubt boring and uninteresting would be the best way to describe John’s past, but I bought it. Call me naïve, I guess… or I could think of a few other words that come to mind, like blind or stupid.”

  “I wouldn’t be hard on yourself,” Marks said.

  “I don’t know, right now I’ve a lot of conflicting thoughts. I don’t know what to make of this.” She fingered the hobo bag full of money lying next to her. “What is this? Did he steal this?”

  Lip leaned forward. “I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. Johnny—John wasn’t that type of guy. It sounds like you two really fell for each other.”

  Marion smiled thinly. “I thought so. Me? I’d fallen in love.”

  Marion seemed to lose some of her steam and her eyes gazed faraway again. “We got married less than six months after we met. It was impulsive. I’m using that word again, but it’s fitting. It was in a small chapel. Just us, a priest, and a few witnesses.”

  “Anyone from the states?” Lip said.

  “No, isn’t that crazy? I called my girlfriends to tell them afterwards. They still haven’t forgiven me.”

  “What about family?” Marks said.

  Marion shook her head. “I’m not really on speaking terms with my mother. My dad passed away years ago. It’s only my brother and me, and we’re not really close. I never had kids—I wanted them, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

  She went quiet, as if collecting herself.

  “Being with John was wonderful. We were together for almost three and a half years. Three of those married. During that time I only went back home to Dallas once to take care of some things. When I think back on it, I felt like I was living someone else’s life. Does that make any sense? When I was down there, it was just paradise.”

  She described where they’d lived. It sounded like a resort in itself. John had had acreage, sea views, a large estate, and almost a dozen servants.

  “We had a three-star chef that cooked all our meals. I know this sounds awful and I can’t imagine what you’re thinking of me. But I’ll admit, for a simple girl like me, it all just blew me away.”

  She went quiet again.

  “What happened with John’s company?” Marks said, leading her back.

  Marion took a sip from a glass of water that had been on a coaster. She set the glass down and wiped the condensation from her hand. “Yes, that’s probably what this is all about. I guess it was about a month before we left for good when I first noticed that something was wrong.”

  17

  MARION’S face was pensive.

  “Maybe that’s the wrong word—wrong—but it’s the best one I can think of to describe the change that I noticed in John. It was almost immediate. He was always so thoughtful and caring. But then…

  “John’s work. Something happened to it. He started working crazy hours. When I asked him if anything was wrong, he’d get short with me. One time he actually shouted at me and banged his fist into a wall before locking himself back in his office.”

  Marks didn’t reply. The crow’s feet around his eyes set a little deeper. It took a lot to elicit that type of reaction from Johnny Two-cakes. Even with all of Lip’s antics, and the crazy shit they’d seen, he’d only seen the man really lose his cool once. A memory popped in his head briefly. Fuckin’ munchkins.

  “He holed himself in his office for two days,” Marion said. “I don’t think he slept for forty-eight hours.”

  “And you don’t know why?” Marks said.

  Marion shook her head. “Less than a month later we left Costa Rica.”

  “And moved here?” Lip said.

  She nodded. “John actually had kept a home here, unbeknownst to me. There was a caretaker watching over his place, all those years. I don’t know why—I mean it was a very nice home, but still.”

  “Shit I know why,” Lip said. “Market sucks.”

  Marion was done. They asked a few more questions, but it revealed nothing new. Johnny Two-cakes had left two weeks ago. He hadn’t said where he was going, just that it was overseas and that he’d be back in twelve days. She hadn’t liked that—the secrecy part—but John had said it was for the best. He was supposed to have come back two days ago. But he didn’t. Instead she got his letter. She was in the dark… pretty much about everything. She untucked her legs and put her flats back on.

  “You know you didn’t answer me,” Marion said, standing up. “Were the three of you in the CIA?”

  Lip shook his head. “No.”

  She looked at each of them. Woman deserved better than a no.

  “But you called it right,” Marks said. “Johnny Two-cakes was certainly not uninteresting.”

  Marion nodded, wistfully, and excused herself to go to the ladies room. As she left the room, Marks thought of the memory that had popped in his head.

  Fuckin’ munchkins.

  The phrase ‘truth was stranger than fiction’ applied in spades. Some of the shit they’d seen would have read like a bad B-movie script—the kind when they made the movie it went directly to DVD.

  No one would believe it if you told ‘em, and a movie would just make it look ridiculous. Cast would be all unknowns, of course. Even Hollywood rejects wouldn’t want to touch it. There’d be some beefcake, half his age and better looking, playing himself and for Lip they’d find some Jack Black clone.

  It had been in Burma. The three of them, Lip, Johnny Two-cakes and Marks were doing a job, whose objective had changed on them three times. It was a total unmitigated disaster. Worse than their usual and that was saying something. Everything that could go wrong, did. They went from doing a package grab in China to running for their lives in a bug-infested jungle.

  Bottom line… they’d gotten split up. Johnny Two-cakes was on the horn communicating with them—waiting for them at the rendezvous point.

  Things had become so ridiculous—that truth stranger than fiction stuff—that Lip couldn’t hold it together—man was having a bad case of the insane man giggles. They were in a tight spot being pursued by one hundred children.

  “Fuckin’ munchkins,” Lip had said over and over, every time they thought they’d lost ‘em.

  The Kachin Independence Army was notorious for recruiting child soldiers, even little girls. Wasn’t funny, but hell, he was laughing himself. Those eight to eleven year olds were armed with AK-47s. It didn’t look good. Not one bit. They were going to die pissing in their pants. Least Lip was. Marks quickly stopped seeing the humo
r. One of the few hard and fast rules he lived by, he didn’t kill kids. No way, no how. Wasn’t the best time to be principled. That little rule was going to cost him his life.

  Lip went from being the Joker to sober, all in a heartbeat. Partner wasn’t keen on killing kids either. It was choice time.

  “How do you want to go out?” Marks had said.

  Lip was onboard. Both of them were coming to terms with it. That’s when Johnny Two-cakes showed up. Fuckin’ Batman.

  Man had commandeered a damn helicopter. Guy couldn’t fly worth a shit. But he’d jerked that joystick like a champ. Munchkins with AK-47s blasting away. The three of them in a flying fishbowl going over a damn thousand-foot cliff. Talk about cutting it close, and Johnny Two-cakes was cool as could be. Till he lost it, probably sinking in. He’d gone on a five minute bitch tirade calling them idiots.

  After the vent, which would have put any Gunny to shame, Lip had deadpanned, “Whaddayaknow, Johnny Two-cakes likes us.”

  Man had saved their lives and it wasn’t the first time. But it was the first time the man had lost his shit. Mr. Happy. Dour-face Johnny Two-cakes. Marks cracked a rueful smile.

  “DO you believe her?” Lip said once Marion left the room.

  Marks caught a familiar scent. Mrs. Lipkin, judging by the smells coming from the kitchen, was making chocolate chip cookies.

  “It came out real,” Marks said. “Either that or she’s a fantastic liar.”

  He keyed in on some things she’d said. He thought about the Fed Ex envelope and the letter with instructions. He pictured Johnny Two-cakes’s garage full of newspapers, all arranged on shelves according to their dates. That was a little strange… those dates. He placed it.

 

‹ Prev