Let There Be Linda

by Rich Leder

  “He sued us before and won, Mike,” Stan said. “Almost ruined us. You were here. You saw it happen. We barely survived.”

  “I think your survival is the unfinished business,” Mike said.

  “You can’t do that,” Ira said, pointing a muscular finger in a threatening way.

  “What happened to hard work, accuracy, honesty, and proficiency? You were here fifteen years. What happened to loyalty?” Stan said, standing as if he meant to emotionally stop Mike from hiring Bogatz to sue them.

  “You can’t do that,” Ira said, red in the face, rising beside his partner as if he meant to physically stop Mike from hiring Bogatz to sue them.

  Throughout his days at Wasserman and Waddell, Mike had been intimidated by Stan and Ira or, rather, had allowed himself to be intimidated. But sitting here in the conference room, he knew those days were gone forever—he had survived the zombie, re-killed his own mother, and seen the dead brought back to life. There was no one who could bully him now. If a week can change a man’s nature, Mike thought, then I am minnow reborn as shark, roadkill reborn as big rig, accountant reborn as extortionist.

  “Lifting weights doesn’t make you smart, Ira. It makes you slow,” Mike said. “Now sit down. You’re five-six, not six-five. You look ridiculous with those muscles.”

  Ira blinked with confusion. No one had spoken to him like that in, well, ever. He looked at Stan, they communicated without words, as they had done since sleep away camp, and they both took their seats.

  Mike slid a folded piece of paper across the conference table and said, “That’s my settlement number, bank routing number, and checking account number. I would have been a partner for twenty years. Lost income opportunity is where my number comes from, in case you were wondering. You’ll hear from Bogatz at nine a.m. tomorrow if the money’s not wired into my account by the close of business today. Written under my number is his number. You can tell the difference between them by the extra zero at the end of his number.”

  Ira looked like he was going to explode; he was crimson, muscles bulging. “You have nothing, you fat piece of shit,” he said. “No proof, no case.”

  “For most of the week, you’d have been right about that,” Mike said. “I had a lot on my mind, and I’d forgotten about recording the meeting where you were supposed to make me a partner.”

  “You recorded the meeting?” Stan said, swallowing his voice.

  “On my iPhone,” Mike said. “My wife was so excited about the partnership thing, you know, after fifteen years, the big raise, the profit participation, the benefit package, and I was going to play her the moment it happened. I thought it would help us rekindle our marriage. Anyway, all the stuff about you pointing Judd Martin’s anger and aggression in my direction instead of the firm’s and you lying to the lawyers and to the banks and attaching the word embezzlement to my name, I think in court they call that stuff the truth. Bogatz has the recording. You probably know that. And Ira, I’m not going to be fat forever, but you, you’re going to be a dick the rest of your life.”

  As he left the office, Mike thought, Numbers are my nature, and if a week can change a man’s nature, then my Numbers of Life have become my Numbers of Ruin have become my Numbers of Chaos have become my Numbers of Vengeance.

  While Mike was meeting with Stan and Ira, George Edwards called and left a voicemail saying he had, uh, happened upon Linda’s corpse in the hearse parked beneath the portico and could Mike come by to, uh, arrange anew his mother’s end-of-life affairs.

  Mike drove to the Mission Hills mortuary, and the men had stood in the display center, looking at Linda’s original casket.

  “Hotel in a box,” Mike said, thinking of the pervert clown.

  “Pardon me?” George said.

  “Soft rounded edges, matte maple finish, Rosetan interior…all that’s missing is room service,” Mike said. “I trust you’ll make her look as pretty as her casket.”

  “Her appearance changed dramatically over the weekend,” George had said, his voice conveying concern. “At this point, all I can do is my best.”

  On the one hand, Mike had always liked George Edwards and wasn’t intending to squeeze the mortician for money—George had not misplaced his mother; Mike had stolen her. On the other hand, Mike had had the sense from the beginning that George wanted to be squeezed, had more or less asked Mike to squeeze him, had given Mike his permission for some squeezing, had made Mike feel that squeezing would somehow help George assuage his mortician guilt. For that reason, Mike was happy to gently oblige.

  “Maybe you should show her to me so I can see exactly what happened to her after she went missing from your mortuary,” Mike said. “You make it sound like she reappeared as the Bride of Frankenstein. Is that what you’re saying? My mother’s a monster? I’m asking because at this point my insurance company is chomping at the bit for me to file a claim, which I haven’t done yet and don’t really want to do on account of my being your friend for fifteen years. We were friends, George. Weren’t we?”

  Mike left the mortuary with a cost-free funeral, with the thirty-three-hundred-dollar Rosetan casket compliments of the house, and with the mortician’s assurances that Linda would look lovely at her service and burial on Friday. George had been relieved and grateful to offer Mike this arrangement, and Mike had been pleased for him.

  From Mission Hills, Mike had driven to his bank and then to Mrs. Alemi’s office and then to Bob Cutting’s office and then to Target and then to Best Buy and then home, where he’d inflated the Hello Kitty lounger he’d bought at Target, plugged in the Bose he’d bought at Best Buy, and floated in his pool while listening to loud music.

  After a while, Danny had come out of the garage and jumped in the pool. The brothers swam around and tossed a tennis ball back and forth and didn’t say a word until Mike said, “Now what do we do?”

  “Now we regroup,” Danny said. “We find jobs. We pull ourselves together. We run the next race. Families do that all the time.”

  “I meant what do we do right now?” Mike said. “Do we order a pizza, rent a movie? What do we do right now?”

  They had both smiled, recalling that same conversation in reverse after Linda had died the first time. In the hospital, their words been laced with enduring enmity. In Mike’s pool, with the temperature stuck on one twelve, after all they had been through, including saving each other’s lives on Sunday, the words had become less pointed, said with humor and not hatred, meant to bust balls not hurt feelings. It was the tone of voice they’d used everyday when they were boys in the small yellow house, when they were simply brothers, before they grew into estranged adulthood.

  They had played catch in the pool for a minute more and then Mike had said, “Call the clown. Tell him to bring his truck. I need you to move out before nine o’clock.”

  “Mike, come on,” Danny had said, “I have nowhere to go.”

  “Yes, you do. I made a deal with Mrs. Alemi. You’re going to live in the yellow house. It’s a two-year lease with an option to buy. I paid the first six months. I put the lease in your name, Dan. It’s your house.”

  Danny had stood still in the water, holding the tennis ball in his hand. Finally, he’d said, “Two questions. First, why would you do that for me?”

  “Because you’re my brother. I mean you’re an incredible asshole, and I know, I know, I am too, but no matter what, you’re my brother. That’s why. Of course, you’re a bigger asshole than I am.”

  “Not even on my bad days.”

  “You only have bad days.”

  They’d laughed and tossed the ball back and forth across the pool and Mike had said, “What’s the second question?”

  “Where did you get the money?”

  “I found Greenburg’s seventy-five grand.”

  “You what?”

  “Greenburg’s money was in the zombie’s trailer.”

  “Greenburg’s money?”

  “In a bag on the floor of the Airstream, where he tortured
me. He stashed it in Mrs. Alemi’s storage unit. I found it when I went to get Mom’s funeral suit after we killed her in the yellow house and put her back in the hearse.”

  Mike took a moment to marvel at that sentence. One week ago, saying those words would have been inconceivable without his voice quivering, his knees shaking, his palms sweating, his heart pounding. Now, he’d heard his own voice and thought he sounded like Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad, a show he had never really believed but was now about to live.

  “What was it doing there, the money I mean?” Danny said.

  “My guess is Shuler was hiding it in the Airstream, and Martin went rogue,” Mike said.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Shuler or Martin?”

  “Shuler.”

  “He’s a crazy fucking cop.”

  Danny nodded. They both knew Shuler was the craziest fucking LA cop in film, television, or real life. The brothers threw the tennis ball back and forth for a bit, and then Danny had said, “Where’s the money now?”

  “There are three envelopes on the Tiki bar in the garage,” Mike had said, “one for me, one for you, one for Jenny. There’s seventy-five hundred dollars cash in each one. The rest I spent on the yellow house so you could have a house that wasn’t my house. You can live in the master bedroom, put your talent agency in the second bedroom, and put our business in the third bedroom.”

  “Our business?”

  “Miller, Miller, and Stone. Equal partners—a third, a third, a third. I run the business. You run sales and marketing. Jenny breathes on dead things.”

  “She may not like that deal.”

  “She doesn’t have a choice. She’s needs us as much as we need her.”

  “I owed her all of Greenburg’s money, including our commissions.”

  “She used her share to buy in as a partner. You can give her the money and pitch her the deal. And you can tell her there’s no ménage. I don’t fuck my partners—literally or figuratively.”

  “I do. Literally, not figuratively.”

  “I know. It’s okay. I can’t change a racehorse into a farm horse. Took me forty years to figure that out. But every thoroughbred needs a jockey. I’m your jockey, Dan. That’s the angle. If we’re going to make money, you run as fast as you fucking can, but I’m the jockey.”

  “I like this angle, Mike. It’s a good angle. It’s an angle with potential.”

  And then Danny moved to the side of the pool and pulled himself up and out of the water.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Call the clown.”

  Mike got out of the pool too. He put on his jogging shorts and running shoes and did two laps around the block in the brutal heat. Then he took his clippers and buzzed his head so his hair was spikey and shaved everything on his face but his new goatee and took a shower and put on his Tommy Bahama blue shirt (Marcy’s favorite) and white board shorts.

  And then it was five minutes to midnight in New Jersey.

  WELCOME TO THE ERA OF INFAMY

  Marcy was way across the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains and the Mississippi River, three time zones removed from the San Fernando Valley, where Mike contemplated his iMac, and her face appeared, and they said hello, and they talked about the weather. In Paramus, she said, the air was thick and sticky, like walking through maple syrup. In Los Angeles, he said, the air was on fire, like breathing burning coal.

  She looked wonderful (even on his computer screen), and Mike told her that. “You look muy beautiful today, Meess Marceeah,” he said, imitating the Mexican maître d’ who’d greeted her with those very words spoken in that very voice every morning on their Acapulco honeymoon. She smiled when Mike said it and might even have blushed a bit, though it was hard to tell from so far away.

  She said she liked Mike’s new style, the short spikey hair and goatee. He could tell by the look on her face that she was surprised at how hip and handsome he’d become since she’d been in New Jersey. It had been a long time since he’d seen that shine in her eyes, since he had surprised her this way—or any way.

  And yet he could also tell she was not planning to come home. His new style by itself would not be enough to convince her to return to the Valley. He had opened the door, but he would need more than spikey hair and a goatee to bring her back through it.

  They talked about the girls. Marcy said Bethany had liked Paramus High School, but Julia had reservations about the middle school she would be attending.

  The old Mike would have choked up during this discussion. The old Mike would have been blubbering about how much he missed them and needed them and loved them.

  The new Mike felt all those feelings for sure but had anticipated this part of the conversation and was waiting for the right moment to react. And his reaction would not involve weeping, which was not part of the new Mike’s repertoire. The new me holds his cards close to the vest, Mike thought. The old me didn’t own a vest.

  They talked about Marcy’s parents, Dianna and Jim. Marcy said her mother was pushing her to cut the cord, come home, and move on. Mike knew that by cut the cord Dianna meant file for divorce, by come home she meant move permanently to Paramus, and by move on she meant get busy with the pediatrician.

  Dianna walked into the room at that moment, in her bathrobe, hair in curlers, without makeup and stood behind Marcy so that Mike could see her and she could see him.

  “It’s very late in Paramus, Mike,” Dianna said, filling her voice with impatience, disgust, indignation, and condescension. “It’s after midnight.”

  Much like Stan and Ira, Dianna had intimidated Mike throughout his courtship and marriage to Marcy. Also like Stan and Ira, Mike’s days of being browbeaten by her were over and done.

  “Dawn of a new day, Dianna,” Mike said. “Welcome to the Era of Infamy.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Dianna said.

  “Fasten your seatbelts,” Mike said. “It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dianna said, flustered by the confidence in the new Mike’s tone of voice.

  “Turns out, that’s never been my fault,” Mike said, waving good-bye and giving her the finger. “Good night, Dianna. I’m going to win back my wife now.”

  Dianna made a shocked and discomforted face and looked to Marcy for support, but Marcy was smiling and didn’t glance up at her mother, and so Dianna glared at Mike and left the room. Mike wished he could have done it in person, but doing it through FaceTime was better than he thought it would be.

  “You can’t win me back,” Marcy said.

  “I have to,” Mike said. “I need you in my life.”

  “Your life is unsettled. It’s not safe for me or the girls.”

  “The zombie is dead.”

  “What?”

  “The zombie is dead.”

  “The zombie is dead?”

  “The coast is clear.”

  Marcy nodded, and Mike had the feeling the nod was involuntary, as if she was unconsciously checking the stalker off her list of reasons not to fly home.

  “You don’t have a job,” she said.

  “I’m the new chief financial officer for El Caballero Country Club,” he said.

  “What?”

  “They offered me Mom’s job, but because of my qualifications, they gave me a bigger title, more responsibility, and more money.”

  “As much as Stan and Ira paid you?”

  “No. But Wasserman and Waddell gave me a severance check.”

  “They did? How much?”

  “Five hundred thousand.”

  Her eyes shot wide open. “Jesus, Mike,” she said.

  “I paid off the credit cards, knocked down some of the mortgage, and bought a bunch of tax-free revenue bonds. We’ll have about the same income with fewer financial obligations. Our books are balanced. All systems go. Mom’s funeral is Friday. Pack the girls and come home.”

  Marcy swallowed hard. He could see her struggling. Sh
e had been in the all-consuming pull of her parents’ presence for too long.

  “Is it the pediatrician?” Mike said.

  “No, I don’t know…” she said, and she looked away.

  And so it all came down to the future in three, two, now-or-never.

  “What do I have to do to prove my love, Marcy?”

  “Mike, don’t make me—”

  “What do I have to do to prove how committed I am to you, to the girls, to our family?”

  “It’s hard for me to—”

  “Do I have to burn an ‘M’ into my chest?”

  “Mike, please—”

  “Do I have to burn the letter ‘M’ for Marcy into my chest so that you’ll know for the rest of time how deep and true my love is?

  “Mike—”

  He sat back from the desk so she could see him from the waist up.

  “Is that what I have to do to win you back, burn the letter ‘M’ into my chest?”

  “Please—”

  “Because if that’s what I have to do, then that’s what I’ll do.”

  And he ripped his Tommy Bahama shirt wide open with both hands so the buttons flew everywhere around the room, and the “M” that Judd Martin had branded into his chest glowed a sultry red.

  “Oh,” Marcy said in a voice that purred with shock and sex and lust and love. “Oh, Mike.”

  It had been a long time since he’d pushed them, but the new Mike remembered where the buttons were. Some I’ll push now, he said to himself. Some I’ll push later.

  For my fabulous, beloved children, David, Eric, and Kate, who are everything to me and who, when they were young and living at home, were the whirlwind embodiment of a roller coaster caper.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Great thanks to two of my heroes, creative artists who have entertained me, educated me, guided me, and encouraged me over the years, geniuses who, in one way or another, inspired the bloody irreverence that became this book. Monty Python, who have made me laugh since 1969 (holy crap, that’s a long time to make someone laugh, don’t you think?), and Quentin Tarantino, a brilliant filmmaker whose orchestrally violent and hilarious movies leave me awestruck.