MIAMI ICED

by Susan Sussman

  “Bitsy says your family vacationed at the Nippersink Lodge every summer,” says May.

  “Yes, we did,” I say.

  “And you were thirteen when you met your husband there?”

  “He rammed his rowboat into my rowboat.”

  “So romantic,” says Bitsy.

  “We hated you, you know,” says May. “Our boys were so hot for you big city girls.” She wiggles her toes which are painted a screaming scarlet. “I’m a small town girl born and bred. Moved here with my late husband in the nineties. I guess at some point I’m either going to have to move back home or begin thinking of myself as a Floridian.”

  “Who says we can’t hold duel citizenship?” asks Bitsy. “Florida has its perks, but there’s something different about a mid-westerner.”

  “Yeah.” May hoists her glass in a toast. “We’re more gullible than most.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of resourceful,” says Bitsy. “Tenacious.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’ve been thinking about Wendel.”

  “Why bother?”

  “Point taken. Howsomeever –” My sister pauses, closes one eye, “how-someever? Does that sound right to you?”

  “Close enough,” I say.

  “Howsomeever,” Bitsy continues, “it’s been my recent unfortunate experience that a person who cheats in one area of life is, like as not, cheating in others. My ex-husband, to name a few.”

  “Interesting,” says May. A small dot of light dances across the ceiling. “Fairy light,” she squeals.

  We jump up like three schoolgirls, running to the windows to track the light to its outside source. “There!” shouts Bitsy, pointing to sun glinting off a yacht docked at the Intracoastal pool. A uniformed crewman ties up while another man jumps onto the dock and lets himself into our pool area. “Why are yachts always white?” asks May. “Why not puce. Or fuchsia.”

  “An off-color like puce might hurt resale,” says Bitsy-the-Practical.

  “White paint hides imperfections,” I say, thinking I’ve seen that yacht.

  I pick up the small binoculars Michael kept on the sill. He bought them to look at yachts and cruise ships and horses running at Gulfstream, but they likely did equal duty checking out the thonged South Americans sunning at our pool. I adjust the focus. The crewman is wearing taupe and white. This is the same yacht I saw pick up Caprice the other day. Does she have a date to go sailing? That can’t be. If her mother hadn’t fainted, she’d still be at court. More likely, the owner of this boat also lives in this building.

  I focus the binoculars on the man crossing the pool deck toward my condo. Fortyish, fit, black hair combed back ending in curls at the nape. Dressed in elegant casual, he’s the type usually cast in movies as the Italian lover. Bitsy takes the binoculars, takes a quick look, then passes them to May.

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen him around here,” I say.

  “Him I’d remember,” says Bitsy.

  “He’s definitely not one of ours,” says May, “more’s the pity. Don’t you just wonder where some people get their money?”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking about Wendel,” says Bitsy.

  “His money?”

  We settle back on our relative sofas and retrieve our drinks.

  “Did you even notice how Wendel talks about money all the time?” asks Bitsy. “The yacht he used to have. His home in the Hamptons, a Manhattan brownstone, an apartment in Paris. He goes on and on about his rich friends and their money and what they own. When I liked him, I found it enchanting. Now that I don’t like him, I find it boorish. In my experience, the people with serious money – and I met Chicago’s wealthiest in my charity work – talk about anything and everything except their money. The richest woman I ever met, and that’s going some, carried a shopping bag full of her old shoes to the shoemaker every spring to be resoled and reheeled.”

  I think of Maria Galdino’s fine leather purse, worn on the edges, its seams restitched, leather cream worked into the aging skin. Could she be rich? Could she have the money to buy things the way her sister had, but chose not to? No. Her husband borrowed a hundred-thousand dollars from her brother-in-law and couldn’t pay it back. Or, maybe he could, but didn’t want to.

  “Are you suggesting,” asks May, “that Wendel might not be rich.”

  “He’s just walkin’ the walk and talkin’ the talk,” says Bitsy. “A phony baloney start to end.”

  May squints, trying to drive coherent thoughts through the Vodka fog. “Can’t be,” she says. “Wendel showed me photos of his homes.”

  “They could have been anyone’s homes,” says Bitsy.

  “He has a photo of him standing next to his yacht that was destroyed in the hurricane.” We both give her a look. “Oh,” she says.

  “That should have been my first clue,” says Bitsy. “All his talk about his yacht. That’s why I invited him to go out on Laura’s boat. But, when we got to the marina, Wendel said the place reminded him of his days sailing the charming harbors of the French Riviera. He said – and he made it sound like some great adventure – he said ‘Why don’t we picnic right here?’ I thought he was being romantic. Now I think he doesn’t have the first idea how to sail a boat.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” I say.

  “We Midwesterners are too trusting,” says May. “Maybe that’s because it’s hard to run a scam in a place like Genoa City. Everyone knows everyone, their family, their school, their church, the kind of mischief they got into in eighth grade. Roots there run as deep as oaks.”

  “Here, they’re shallow as palms,” says Bitsy. “All we really know about someone is what they tell us. In these condos, almost everyone is from someplace else. You can be whoever you say you are. Which brings me back to Wendel. He is the Chairman of the complex’s Finance Committee.”

  “You think he’s stealing from the condos?” asks May.

  “I think it’s worth investigating.”

  “And how,” says May, “do you plan to go about this?”

  “What Bitsy isn’t telling you,” I say, adding cubes to my drink, “because my sister doesn’t like to brag, is that for years she served as treasurer of various humongous charitable organizations.”

  “I did keep impeccable records,” agrees Bitsy, “balanced hundreds of thousands sometimes millions of dollars to the penny. And I started back in prehistoric times, when records were kept by hand. Not that I don’t love computers. I looovvvvee computers. I can do cartwheels on an excel spreadsheet, spin numbers six-ways-to-Sunday.

  “When my husband told me he was leaving me –” Bitsy pauses, takes a swig of vodka. It’s not like her to talk to strangers about what happened. She must really trust May. “The shock--” she says, trying again. She takes another swig. “It took a while. But once I could step back and see Sheldon for who he was, I wondered where he got the money to pay for his affair. It certainly wasn’t out of the pittance he gave me to manage our household. Luckily, he had no inkling what I was capable of. I’m sure he thought my job as Treasurer of organizations like the Jewish Community Center of Chicago meant I collected coffee cake money for Maj games.”

  She picks the lime out of her drink, rips the meat from the rind with her teeth and chews it slowly. My mouth puckers. “Luckily, his attorney advised him not to move out of our home until the divorce was final. At night, when Sheldon left to schtoop his skank, I went into his laptop and did some serious forensic accounting, made copies of everything he owned before he could hide it from my divorce attorney.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I say. We do. “But, can we get access to the condo records?”

  “Florida law gives condo residents the right to see the financial information,” says May. “We just need to present a written request.”

  “May’s a real estate agent,” explains Bitsy.

  “Everyone in Florida’s a real estate agent,” says May, “which explains our high rate of unemployment.”


  Bitsy brings in her laptop and, together, we compose the letter.

  Later, I’ll call Stacey and tell my daughter I’m not selling the boat just yet. Mr. Sam Parker Boat Buyer was a lie and I doubt I’ll see a real buyer before next season, if then. Maybe the kids can fly down in November, take a little trip to the Bahamas or the Keys. It would be the baby’s first cruise. The baby. My heart leaps. My baby is going to have a baby.

  -What will he call me? Grandma? Bubby? Laura? Nani?

  -How can he call me anything if he doesn’t know who I am?

  I’ll ask Ethan to figure the details so I can fly to Chicago on a regular basis, make sure the baby knows me, knows my name, whatever it turns out to be.

  27

  “Did you…see the…obituaries this morning?” asks Bitsy, back from speed-walking with May. The Bobbsey Twins meet in the lobby at six then speed-walk four miles along the Hollywood Boardwalk before the sun boils the air. Her face is flushed and sweaty and she’s sucking air like a beached carp.

  I’m two cups of coffee into my morning paper. “I never read the obits,” I say.

  She shoots me The Look. “How can you not read them?”

  “Why would I? I don’t know anyone down here.”

  “That’s hardly the point.” She pours a tall orange juice. I’m waiting to hear what is the point as she chugs the juice, then says, “I thought you might know the man. He’s a harbormaster.”

  Quincy? I rip through the sections, my heart jerking crazily, “Where is it?” looking for news of the one person down here Michael and I considered ‘friend’.

  “Honestly.” Bitsy plucks the Home section from the mess and opens to the obits. A formal photo accompanies the long article covering half the page. I almost don’t recognize the harbormaster in his Navy Whites. Not Quincy. It’s Deke Hawkins. My nose stuffs up and a couple of renegade tears splat on the article.

  “You knew him?” asks Bitsy.

  “Yes. He runs…ran the Tradewinds Marina up in Palm Beach. Nice man.”

  “Was he sick?”

  “He had a bad heart.” I hope to God my Scotch didn’t speed his trip to heaven.

  -He said his doctor okayed drinking in moderation.

  -Sure, let an alcoholic define ‘moderation.’

  “He was a good looking man,” says Bitsy, slicing a sesame bagel in half.

  “This photo was taken about twenty years and forty pounds ago. You think they’d use something more recent.”

  “Why?” She digs two fingers around each half of the bagel, eviscerating the innards, leaving the skin, “Why shouldn’t people see what a handsome young man he was? I’ve already picked out my obituary photo. It’s that one from Jeffrey’s wedding.”

  I know exactly the photo she means, captured under the chuppah at a moment of transcendent joy as her son stomped the wedding glass. At that instant, Bitsy looked more movie star than mother-of-the-groom. That was fifteen years ago. “What if you live to be a hundred?” I ask. “Won’t you want a more recent photo so people can recognize you?”

  “It’s my life,” she says, “and it will be my death.” She pops the scooped bagel into the toaster and turns the dial to CHAR. “Why shouldn’t I get to decide how I want to be remembered? I’ve already sent the photo to the cemetery to have it etched on my stone.”

  “You’re grossing me out.”

  She gasps. “Oh!”

  “What?”

  “The cemetery plots. We split them in the divorce. I need to sell mine, find someplace else.”

  “Calm down. There’s no rush.”

  “How do you know? What if I die tomorrow?” We air-spit the backs of our fingers – poo poo poo – to ward off the evil eye. “I will not spend my eternity next to that man, and God knows he’s too cheap to pay for moving his plot.”

  She disappears into the recesses of her room to fine-tune her arrangements for eternity. I sip my coffee and read about Deke’s life. He was fifty-four – way too young to die -- married thirty years. Three grown children, seven grandchildren. This is a lovely long article, the kind usually reserved for celebrities. The fact that it’s in a paper this far south of Palm Beach tells me someone pulled some strings. I’d like to think it was those wealthy yacht owners at the Tradewinds Marina – high-powered socialites, politicos and celebrities – by way of paying homage to this gentle man who took such good care of them.

  Deke’s funeral is scheduled for three-o’clock this afternoon in Palm Beach. I wonder if Quincy knows. I call the marina. “I heard,” says Quincy.

  “Are you going?”

  “I am. You?”

  “I’d like to,” I say, wavering. I remember Michael’s funeral, the great comfort I felt being surrounded by people who loved him. It would be nice to do that for Deke’s family. But I also feel pulled to go to court today. If Mrs. Galdino is well enough to testify, I want to give moral support to Caprice, perhaps sit next to her as her mother takes the stand to finish her testimony. “I have something important I need to do in Ft. Lauderdale,” I say.

  “No problem. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

  A thin stream of smoke rises from the toaster. I glance up at the smoke alarm. Bitsy has taped a shower cap over it. All quiet on the Western Front. The kitchen fills with the aroma of burning bread. The bread pops up two seconds short of flames. “Bagel’s ready,” I call.

  Caprice is not in her usual courtroom seat. I find Farley sitting among strangers in the second row and slide in next to him. “Where is everybody?” I ask.

  “I hear Nikki got a callback for a TV commercial. I haven’t seen Lucille.” We spread ourselves out, hogging extra space to save room for her. Farley’s resting his hands on a cane with an intricately carved silver duck’s head. “Are you all right?” I ask.

  “Bum hip,” he says. “Weather gets it sometimes.”

  Court is called to order and Judge Kossoff motions the attorneys up to the bench. In the row in front of us, Zeke works on a chalk sketch of the Lucas children, a dark study of the brother and sister. Their hangdog expressions bear only the faintest shadows of the supercilious punks I saw my first day in court. It’s as if they’ve been punctured, the life-force leaking out of them. Is this because Parker still hasn’t tracked down their parent’s missing millions? Are they worried that if Uncle Galdino is convicted of murdering their mother and locked away for life, the window of opportunity to find where he hid the money will slam shut forever?

  The attorneys’ confab with Judge Kossoff turns animated. Farley leans toward me, whispers, “The scuttlebutt is Galdino’s wife is too sick to come back to the stand.”

  “She just fainted,” I say, telling him about my trip to the hospital to return her purse.

  Farley shakes his head. “Has to be more than that. Galdino’s daughter hasn’t missed one day of this trial. Not one single day. The only reason I can think she’s not here supporting her father is that her mother is seriously sick.”

  “I didn’t get that feeling.”

  “Could be they found something wrong with her after you left. That happens, tests come in, things show up.” His eyes go watery and I sense he’s talking about more than Maria Galdino. “It must be rough on the kid,” he says, “her being an only child, needing to be two places at one time, no one sharing the load. I feel for her.”

  We strain to hear sotto voce scraps of legal wrangling between the defense and prosecution but the judge has turned his microphone to one side and flicked on the ‘white noise’ switch. Those of us seated below the salt devolve into quiet conversations. “What happens if Mrs. Galdino doesn’t come back to finish testifying?” I ask.

  “I doubt it matters,” says Farley. “She was pretty well finished. It wouldn’t help either side to look like they’re beating up on a broken old woman.”

  “She’s actually not that old,” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  “I just happened to see her I.D. She’s in her fifties.”

  “I
guess all the shit going on in that woman’s life would age anybody pretty fast.”

  The attorneys step away from the bench. Judge Kosseff flicks off the white noise and turns toward the jury.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “the Prosecution and Defense have finished presenting their cases. They have asked to meet with me to discuss my final instructions to the jury before they begin closing arguments. This might take quite some time, so, rather than keep you waiting, this Court will recess until tomorrow morning at which time we will begin closing arguments.” He bangs his gavel and before I can process that this day is over before it began, he’s up and out of the room.

  Two guards move swiftly to Galdino’s chair. He pushes up, turning toward the gallery to where his daughter should be, has been, every day. Something shifts in his face. I try to read his look – disappointment, defeat, concern? Did he not know Caprice wouldn’t be in court today? Does he know his wife is sick? He looks around, catches me staring. Black eyes, evil, a force hard enough to knock me back. I look away as the guards lead him off. Farley pushes up on his cane. “You’ll want to get here early tomorrow. It’s going to be a zoo.”

  “Should I call Lucille,” I ask, “tell her what’s going on?”

  He hesitates. “We buffs mostly see each other in court, don’t usually call.” His eyes seem more watery than usual. “But, it might be nice, take her mind off her health. Do you have her number?”

  “Not with me.”

  He opens a worn leather wallet bulging with scraps of odd-sized papers. “It’s different if you make the call,” he says, thumbing through the scraps, “you being a woman and all…” My daughter, who occasionally raises a strident voice for equality, would likely say something here. But Stacey didn’t grow up with men of Farley’s generation who compartmentalize jobs according to gender. Back in my youth, ‘Making social calls’ would be found under ‘Women’s Jobs’ in the segregated Help Wanted ads.

  “Ah, here,” he says, ripping off a corner of his Racing Form and copying a number in perfect Palmer penmanship.

  I find a pay phone on the first floor. Lucille’s machine picks up. I wonder if she’s on her way to court. I hope not. “Court’s adjourned until tomorrow,” I tell the machine. “They’ll begin closing arguments. Oh, and I returned Mrs. Galdino’s purse to her at the hospital yesterday. I think she passed out from some diuretics she took to try to lose weight. I thought she’d be okay but she and her daughter weren’t in court today and Farley thinks maybe her fainting was something more serious.” I’m babbling into her machine. “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”