Fast Friends

by Susan Dunlap

  She swallowed hard and forced herself to go on. “At a certain point in their drinking cycles they were clever and very funny if you weren’t the topic. This day, sober, it was like walking with third-rate actors who hadn’t read the script. They got lines out, but their timing was off, the inflection wrong, and it was so clear how much of an effort it was.”

  “Sounds like it was easier when they were drinking.”

  “Yeah. Much. These days were torture. But anyway, we came to the jewelry store, Pope’s Jewelers. Mom stopped and began to move her head back and forth as if she were really window-shopping. Dad had the easier job of standing behind her husband-like waiting for her to spot one or two items they could spin words around before we moved on. So Mom’s looking and suddenly she stops, doesn’t say anything. She’s staring at a gold pendant. The design just seemed free-flow to me, but she said, ‘Don’t you see the sports car? Well, not that car so much as the wind in your hair and the open road ahead.’ Dad moved in closer and slid his arm around her shoulder and started talking about a trip they took in a convertible right after they were married. I still couldn’t see any resemblance to anything in the pendant, but I could see them as they had once been when they were young and fun, and the road rolled out in front of them, before it was all uphill.”

  Liza reached for her coffee, but the old couple in the matching blue jackets across the rooms co-opted her attention.

  “No!” The woman’s voice was not loud, but her wiry tone sliced the silence. The syllable was firm, complete, like the final word of a movie before the screen went black. No panic, no fear. The man grumbled something undecipherable. She didn’t respond. He grumbled again, then pushed himself up and stomped across the room and out. The woman picked up her cup and drained, it.

  Liza eyed the woman, noting her face weathered like red rock in the desert, and the desperately hard clench of her jaw. Her eyes were closed now. What would this abandoned woman do, a woman so old—in her sixties, at least? Could she even live alone?

  “And then?” Ellen prompted.

  It took Liza a moment to realize Ellen hadn’t even noticed the old couple, and another moment to force herself back into the memory she so much wanted to avoid. “And then the three of us moved on down the boulevard, pausing before other store windows, but after that one burst of real enthusiasm everything we said sounded stale. The next day the sobriety fling failed, and things were worse than ever, and Thanksgiving was coming up, which meant a Hell day with my grandmother.

  “What I did made no sense; I knew that even then. But Mom’s birthday was right before Thanksgiving and I got the idea the pendant would be a talisman to make her better and then she’d be a talisman for Dad, and, well, you get the picture. It wasn’t like me, dreaming up fantasies like that.”

  “The last clutch of childhood, maybe?”

  “Maybe.” Liza couldn’t stop to consider that. She had to race ahead before she lost her courage. “Anyway, I caught the bus and went down to the store and made a point of speaking to the owner, because I knew if you want to deal you talk to the owner. I asked him if I could pay it off on time, or work in the store, or what I could do. The pendant cost eight hundred dollars. He said we could work something out and I should come back after closing the next night.”

  Ellen was offering tiny nods; her face was flushed.

  “Ellen, this isn’t the kind of story you need to be hearing now. Maybe I—”

  “No, go on.”

  “It turns out Jeweler Pope was hot for teenage girls. Seems he was known to the cops, but he was also a wealthy businessman, so you can imagine whose side they were on.”

  “But you didn’t know that?”

  Liza could tell for Ellen that was the natural assumption. Why didn’t she just go with Ellen’s presumption of naïveté? “I had no idea he was a pedophile, but I did assume there would be some price to pay; I mean he did want me after hours.” She swallowed hard; her throat caught. This was the part she couldn’t imagine Ellen accepting. “I just didn’t figure it would be a blow…oral sex. I didn’t figure he’d get me on my knees. Or that the surveillance camera would be on, snapping pictures of his prick, my mouth and the tattoo between my breasts.” She grabbed her coffee and drank. Only when she put the cup down could she bring herself to check Ellen’s reaction.

  Ellen had gone pale, but not as pale as she’d have expected. In fact Ellen’s face was scrunched as if she was considering the logistics. “I thought,” she said, “there was a robbery.”

  Liza nodded.

  “Did he say he’d give you the pendant, and then call the police on you? Or did you—”

  “Just snatch it while his pants were down? Not quite. Maybe I would have, I don’t know. The whole scene was overwhelming and surreal. I didn’t know it, but my father had followed me. The shades on the door and windows were down. Suddenly he was banging on the door, and then when Pope didn’t answer, he grabbed a newspaper machine and broke the glass. The alarm went off. Pope was shouting, my father was shouting. The pendant was on the counter. I grabbed it and we ran. The cops caught me two blocks away.”

  “Just you?” Ellen demanded. “What about your father?”

  “I ran. He didn’t get caught.”

  “Ever? What kind of man was he?”

  “Don’t!” It was as if her whole fourteen years with him were wrapped in that one protective word. Ellen understood enough to back off.

  Ellen reached for her water glass, drank and drank again. Liza picked up her burger. Her hands were quivering and the lettuce and tomato slices shook loose and ketchup splattered the plate.

  Ellen set her glass down in front of her but kept hold of it with both hands. “Liza, I’m so sorry. God, what a wretched childhood you had. I never knew—obviously.” She was shaking her head. Her voice was soft, awkward, but full of concern. “Still Liza, bad as that was, it was years ago and it has nothing to do with your husband being murdered now. It doesn’t change anything. Your husband is dead and you have to call the police.”

  Liza felt as if her entrails had been yanked out and thrown back at her before she could get her guard back in place. But it snapped into place now and she was ready to “put it on them” like she’d learned in Juvie. She took a moment to get her fear and anger under control, then said, “Ellen, your boyfriend was talking to Jay for ages in Portland. The two of them looked real serious. What did your boyfriend say about it?”

  She spotted Ellen’s discomfort before her first word was complete. “Nothing. He wouldn’t talk about it.” Ellen lifted the water glass she’d never let go of and sipped. She set it down with a thump. “I called him from San Francisco and he told me to get out quick.”

  “Get out? Why?”

  “I don’t know, I—”

  “Well, how about asking him now, Ellen? Jay is dead, but he’s alive.” Liza pulled her wallet out of her purse and shook out the coins. “Here, you won’t even have to call collect.”

  Liza downed the rest of her water, almost the full glass, as she watched Ellen make her way past the restaurant counter to the phone. Beyond it, the blue-jacketed woman was still sitting in her booth, alone now, fingering her empty cup. Liza kept her head down as she turned back but she could still see shocks of short thick gray hair, “the dust of death” they called it in L.A. Death of love and chance and hope and…

  Stop it! You should live long enough to have her problems. What about Jay? It’d been one thing to defend him, but she couldn’t go on defending him from herself. She had to face…whatever. Ellen had a good point about his business. A little two-step outside the law wouldn’t have fazed Jay. It would, in fact, have added spice. Like the games.

  But a little two-step didn’t get you murdered.

  Twenty

  HARRY COOPER DROPPED THE door key twice before he managed to slide it into the lock. The street was dark now. The trees were winter-bare but the street light stood behind a huge spruce and illuminated only a few feet of lawn on the far side
. This section of Kansas City boasted hilly streets of pleasant wood-and-stone bungalows. No sidewalks, no late nights. He mowed his lawn on Saturdays. He had expected Ellen to move in with him. Then the house would have been perfect. When she agreed to come east with him from Portland he had been overjoyed. He just assumed…And even when she said she wasn’t ready to live together, he did figure that she would rent a house in the neighborhood. It was such a nice area, with all the amenities, and there was no way property values wouldn’t rise. It never occurred to him she would choose an apartment she had no stake in, in an impersonal area like the Plaza, when she could reasonably afford a house. She was younger, of course, nearly twenty years younger, but she was so mature, so sensible, so steady.

  He opened the door and, from habit, left the light off for a minute, picturing Ellen hurrying to the door, arms outstretched, her eyebrows lifted in question, willing him to come up with a story from the day’s annals of railroad freight to connect the two of them in amusement, to remind her that he was more than just a bureaucrat.

  Usually he lingered in that daydream and reluctantly snapped it shut with the flick of the light, but tonight he didn’t bother with the light at all. The thought of dinner flashed, but although he hadn’t eaten since lunch, it was just a thought, no visceral pang, and easy to dismiss. He made a sharp right onto the stairs, and headed for the bedroom. Usually his fantasy ended with Ellen in bed, but tonight he was glad there would be no one lying between him and sleep.

  God, he wanted to sleep. He had never taken a sleeping pill in his life but tonight he’d wash down a double dose with a double shot of whiskey, if he had either in the house.

  Twenty-four hours ago life had been good. He’d been happy as a tramp in a mattress car. Sure there were people who thought railroad freight forwarding was as exciting as sanding your porch. But they missed the point. Freight routing was always a subtle game. K.C. to Chicago—via St. Louis to add cars and time and income, or send the shipment straight through on the northern route? Which way won the cost efficiency game? And now with the great railway merger there were alternate routes all over. A man could devote a whole day to deciding the cost-efficiency ratio of all the available routes from Chicago to Long Beach. The possibilities filled him with awe. It was like going from black and white to color, from two to three dimensions, from celibacy to sex. He couldn’t stop talking about it. He knew ninety, no ninety-eight per cent of the world thought he was bonkers. He’d heard guys, even his friends at the station, mocking him as if he were the twit in a British comedy. They missed the elegance of the system. With all the new possibilities they were overwhelmed. Their goal was to route freight rotely, cost and time be damned.

  But for him it was like being sent up from the minor leagues to pitch the pennant game for the Royals. He was having the time of his life.

  Until today.

  He knew something was terribly wrong but just why, or how it would affect him, to that he didn’t have a clue.

  He was not a man given to intuition or any of that mushy California stuff, but when he met Jay Silvestri at Ellen’s college alumni party, his stomach had gone cold. He’d actually glanced around for the men’s room in case he had to lurch to it. Then the moment had passed and he’d felt ridiculous and profoundly inhospitable to this overdressed visitor from out of state who was doing nothing but being polite, in a sort of over-the-top way. But what do you expect from Los Angeles? It would have been unreasonable for him to expect Jay Silvestri to do more than he already was: making an effort to understand the subtleties of freight routing. That was more than he could say for seventy per cent of his colleagues at the Portland yard. He could still see Silvestri putting down his wine glass, milking his smooth chin in thought. Silvestri had picked up the very point that excited him—all the options presented by the merger. He spotted the game. And then he could see all the moves.

  Silvestri’s mind moved so quickly it awed him, and it scared him. And, he had to admit, here, alone, to himself, the intensity of it all seduced him. Never in his twenty-seven years with the railroads had anyone been so intrigued by it. Silvestri was like a little kid, a whiz kid.

  At the end of the event, when Silvestri had introduced his wife, a blonde stunner every other guy in the room had been eyeing, he resented the intrusion. He hadn’t realized that he’d snubbed the woman until Ellen chided him in the car: “Liza’s not used to men ignoring her like that,” she’d said. “It’s probably never happened in her whole life.”

  He could tell Ellen was just mouthing the rebuke. She was amused, and she was looking at him a little differently, as if he was something less drab than she’d thought. Well, he wasn’t about to tell her the truth, that he found a beautiful blonde less exciting than moving freight through Pocatello.

  “Why would I care about her when I have you?” The words would have sounded corny on Jay Silvestri’s lips.

  “Why would I care about her when I have you?” He had never had the nerve to ask what went through Ellen’s mind in the eternity before she leaned over and kissed him. Whatever, he was sure it was that remark that reassured her she’d made the right decision about Kansas City, about him.

  So he had a lot to thank Silvestri for. The angel from the city of angels, he’d thought with a smile as the moving van rolled east. He figured he’d see Silvestri one more time—at his and Ellen’s wedding.

  It had been a shock to get Silvestri’s call, and a bigger shock to find Silvestri, the big L.A. venture capitalist, needed to ship a container of memorabilia from movie lots—he wouldn’t be specific—very hush-hush the whole business—to a collector in Richland, Washington.

  “I can’t be moving hot goods on the rail, Jay.” He’d been upfront about it; it wasn’t the first time he’d gotten this type of request.

  “It’s perfectly legal.”

  What else would he say? This was Silvestri’s novice attempt at this conversation. Harry Cooper, Head of Freight Forwarding, was the reigning expert. “You have bills of sale I can show the police?”

  “Oh yeah,” Jay said without pause. “Oh, hey, you’re thinking ‘hot’ as in stolen.” He’d laughed. “The stuffs only hot to the other collector who thought he had an inside route to it. I need to get it to my guy before this other collector knows anyone’s thinking about it. To you, Harry, this is freight. To wannabe collectors with viewing rooms in their basements, inviting a guy to watch a screening of The Philadelphia Story from the passenger seat of C. K. Dexter Haven’s convertible is worth millions. I’m not charging millions, but I’m not running low either. And I’m sure not asking you for a cut rate. I’m calling you, Harry, because I knew you’d enjoy this, and because you’re the best router in the business. I need this container to be in Richland, Washington, a week from Monday. And to travel as soybeans.”

  “Originating in L.A.?”

  Jay saw the problem. “Okay, send it through San Francisco and call it sourdough starter.”

  That was last week. And now Jay Silvestri was dead. Shot down in a way that would make good viewing from C. K. Dexter Haven’s car. It was all so Hollywood.

  Admit it, he said to himself. Silvestri snowed you. This shipment was only the beginning, Silvestri had said. He was getting more and more orders for memorabilia, particularly from the Silent era. Stuff was going for a fortune and he figured it’d account for more than half of his business soon. He needed a freight router he could trust. “Memorabilia is irreplaceable, Cooper. I can’t take the chance of it getting shunted off in Laredo and sitting on a siding till the cloth disintegrates. I’ve got to have a guy who knows the system and knows its faults. I need the best, and Cooper, you are it. I can’t believe my good fortune!”

  Harry had pictured his own agency, the trips to L.A. to confer with Silvestri, trips for him and Ellen.

  He was an ordinary man with one chance for her to see him as more. He should have known, but he wanted it, wanted her so much.

  Sweat coated Harry Cooper’s body. His shirt clung t
o his chest and back and his skin was hot against the icy cotton.

  Ellen! Was she still with Silvestri’s wife? God, that was the last place to be. He had waited for her to call from her new hotel, waited hours, till his shirt was damp as a dish-towel. She said she’d call and Ellen was invariably reliable. Finally without thought he’d grabbed the phone, and dialed Ellen’s hotel. He prided himself on never raising his voice, but when the twerp at the Rosewood Hotel tried to tell him Ellen had checked out, he’d screamed so loud his secretary came running. Then he had to get off the phone and calm her.

  Wait till this pothead is off and there’s someone responsible on duty, he’d told himself. Go home, call from there.

  In the bedroom now he walked to the phone. The message light was blinking. Relief flushed him. Everything would be all right; she wouldn’t be shot or bombed because of Jay Silvestri and his skittish wife. Ellen had called him back. Maybe she’d called from the airport. Maybe she was already on her way home. He pressed play.

  “Cooper, you don’t know me. I am an associate of your associate in Los Angeles, the one who just bought it. He had a shipment for me and now he is dead. My shipment is on its way to Richland. Silvestri was supposed to tell me exactly when it will arrive. He did not give me that information before he died. All he gave me was your phone number. What the hell is going on, Cooper? When will my shipment arrive? Listen, I will call you back at seven a.m. your time and you damn well better have an answer.” The voice was youngish, male, no discernible accent. And no sense whatever that he was kidding.