Uncorked

by Lois Greiman

  “I know,” I said. And I really did. From what I had seen, Thea Altove, long-legged beauty that she was, adored her half brother. It was one of the many things I resented about her. Her long-legged beauty being the first.

  “Honey Bear…” I could hear his political advisor’s voice in the background. It had gone from angry to silky in less than sixty seconds. I envied that speed. When I’m mad I stay mad for approximately…well…there seems to be no statute of limitations on my anger. “I am tired.”

  He covered the phone with his hand, but it was pretty ineffective.

  “… just be a minute. Why don’t you—”

  “And I am hot.” Her voice might have been a little louder than it needed to be to be heard by the senator. But just about loud enough to be heard by me.

  “Turn up the air, then, and I shall…” He stopped. I wasn’t sure if I imagined it or if I really could hear silk sliding against well-moisturized skin, but I was sure about his raspy intake of breath.

  I rolled my eyes and waited for some of his blood to flow back up to his brain cells.

  “Christina,” he said after a few sparse droplets had, apparently, rejuvenated his cranium. “I’m afraid I must run.”

  “Someone tried to kill me,” I said, and noticed with some satisfaction that the end of the phone went absolutely silent. Apparently murder attempts got his attention irregardless how much well-moisturized skin his political advisor had exposed.

  “Dear God, no,” he whispered. “Not again.”

  “Again.” My voice was miraculously steady. In fact, my hands were hardly shaking at all.

  “And you think my daughter is somehow implicated.”

  “The possibility has crossed my mind.”

  “Because you were involved in her father’s death.”

  “Not technically,” I said, reminding him with my tone that he, in fact, was her father. I wondered vaguely if it was difficult for him to justify his chronic womanizing when his current conquests made his daughter look like an aged spinster by numerical comparison.

  “I hope you do not think less of me since learning of her existence, Christina.”

  I would have liked to have said that there was no way I could think less of him. I mean, he was a sleazy old narcissist with visions of grandeur, the kind of father that made my own rather dubious sire look like something out of a Rockwell painting. But the truth was, Senator Rivera was a difficult man to dislike. I’m sure it had nothing to do with his sexy voice, his still-toned body, or his mountains of money.

  “I would just like to cross her off the list,” I said.

  He was silent for a moment longer, then, “Thea is currently visiting relatives in Mexico.”

  “That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have hired someone to kill me.” I mean, it wasn’t as if I thought she had attacked me herself. I’m no wilting flower, but whoever had been waiting for me in my backseat had had a penis and the musculature to go along with it.

  “Christina, think on it,” he said. “Why would she bear you ill will?”

  I stared blankly at my window for a second, then, “Because I caused the death of the man she thought of as her father for the first twenty years of her life?” Which left her with a father who dated woman barely out of the womb, I thought, but I didn’t say that out loud.

  “Theodore was disturbed. She is fully aware that his death was not of your doing.”

  “You can’t be sure of that, Senator. Many people feel the need to place guilt where it is not necessarily due. She may very well be one of those—”

  “She blames me, Christina,” he said. I sat utterly silent. “Me and me alone.”

  “Really?” I didn’t want to say it, but I was incredibly relieved. I mean, it’s really nice to pass the blame around sometimes. “What makes you think that?”

  There was a lengthy pause, then, “She accused me of being a…how did she say it?” He drew a deep breath. “A pathetic old man who defies his age by sleeping with…”

  He hissed a breath. I heard a giggle in the near background and then murmured voices.

  “Senator?” I said cautiously.

  “I really must go, Christina,” he said. “I have important matters to discuss with my advisors.”

  “I just…” I paused. “There’s more than one advisor?”

  “Of course,” he said. “A presidential hopeful must garner as much advice as he can. It will take a great deal of dedication and stamina—” Another sharp inhalation, but he rallied. “To become the chosen one. It is a heavy burden, but one that I would gladly bear if I could but put this great nation back on track to emotional health and fiscal well-being. Indeed, I do not look forward to the hardships ahead, but as an American I feel it is my duty to—”

  “Senator…” I had heard enough.

  “Yes, Christina?”

  “Be sure to wear a condom to your meetings.”

  Chapter 17

  I’m not crazy. Crazy is when you paint yourself orange and go around thinking you’re a kumquat. I hardly ever paint myself orange.

  —Dagwood Dean Daly

  “Hey, Miss Chris.” Apparently Dagwood Dean Daly, better known as D to the underbelly of Chicago, Illinois, had caller ID. He answered on the first ring. It was 9:52 L.A. time, which meant it was almost noon by Midwestern standards. “You ready to sleep with me yet?”

  “I’m not very tired,” I said, but it was a lie. My conversation with the senator the previous night had worn me out. Apparently the thought of orgies is exhausting to a person who rarely even has onesies.

  “Well, we wouldn’t have to sleep,” he said, then spoke to someone nearby. “Uh huh. I’ll be with you in a minute, Sandy.

  “Not till later, anyway,” he added to me.

  “And I have to get to work.”

  “Hmm.” He sounded like he was debating hard. “Hey, I know. I could come to your office. I mean, you’re a therapist, right? What’s more therapeutic than sex?”

  “Sex can as easily cause severe emotional damage as…” I began, then realized a little belatedly that I may have gotten off on the wrong foot…again. I took a deep breath. “I need your help.”

  “With sexual tension?”

  “With remaining alive.”

  I could almost hear him nod. “One of your fucktard brothers being threatened again?

  “Just put it there, Sandy. Thanks,” he said.

  Doesn’t anyone just carry on one conversation at a time anymore?

  “No. It’s me this time,” I said, and almost laughed at the improbability of it all.

  “Someone’s trying to kill you?”

  “Hard to believe, isn't it?” I tried to sound amused. I was not.

  “In the city of angels?”

  “I think the demons have a pretty good grip on things.”

  “Tell me,” he said, and I launched into the tale. When it came right down to it, there wasn’t all that much to tell. Still, I felt even more exhausted by the time I was done.

  “And this all happened while you were in the car wash.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a momentary silence. “Genius,” he said.

  I scowled. “I didn’t really tell you so you could admire his methods.”

  “You’re sure it was a man?”

  “He had a penis.” It wasn’t until that moment that I remembered D’s propensity for hiring women with abilities like Hercules and bodies like Wonder Woman. “Even your employees don’t have penises.” I paused a second, thinking. “Do they?”

  “I’m not sure. Just a minute.

  “Sandy, do any of the girls have penises?”

  I heard a murmur in the background.

  “Uh huh. Alright. Thanks. Hey, why don’t you take the rest of the day off.” Another murmur. “I’ll be fine,” he said, and in a moment he was back on the phone.

  “Sandy said they don’t, to the best of her knowledge. So…other than the opportunity to talk about penises, why call me, Miss Chris?” />
  “I was hoping you could help me figure out who might be wanting me dead.”

  “Well…” He sounded thoughtful. “We know he has a penis, so that narrows it down to fifty percent of the population.”

  “I was hoping for more.”

  “I suppose that’s the price I pay for being a giant in the collection business.” D didn’t like the term gangster. “My uncle, Leslie, told me to be a cobbler. I guess I sort of followed his advice.”

  “Really?” I’d once traveled to his office to repay a debt one of my aforementioned fucktard brother owed. It was a high-rise unit on Chicago’s illustrious Gold Coast. There hadn’t been a single shoe jack in sight.

  “I make cement boots,” he said, and felt free to laugh at his own joke. It’s probably one of the many advantages of being a gangster/collection engineer. “Who do you think might have been visiting you in the car wash?”

  I took a deep breath. “Originally, I thought it was a police officer. But his alibi was pretty solid.”

  “What’s his name?” D was not shy about his love for causing trouble for the police force…any police force.

  “Joel Coggins.”

  “I’ll check into it. Anybody else?”

  “There’s a man named Jackson Andrews who—”

  “Jackson Andrews the drug designer? I thought he was in prison.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Huh, my intel must be slow.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up too much; he just got out a few days ago.”

  “I wasn’t planning on beating myself,” he said.

  “Oh.” I cleared my throat.

  He laughed. “Listen, Chris, Andrews is a pretty clever guy, and he makes me look all warm and fuzzy. Tell me you’re not involved with him.”

  I cut my eyes toward the window. They were tearing up a little. “I wish I could.”

  “All right.” He drew a heavy breath. “Tell me about it.”

  So I told him the whole sordid story about Andrews and drugs and mixed-up jackets that had led to Laney’s kidnapping a few months earlier.

  When I was finished, there was a long silence, followed by, “You’re not making this up?”

  “My imagination’s not that…creepy.”

  He laughed. “So you think Andrews is out of jail now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want him back in?”

  I sighed. “So much.”

  “Okay, but it’d be easier to just kill him.”

  I paused for a moment, taking that opportunity to worry at my lower lip. “But wouldn’t that be morally wrong?”

  He was silent for a second. “Maybe you need someone else on your Friends and Family plan to answer that one, honey.”

  I scowled, came to a quick decision and spoke before I changed my mind. “I don’t want him dead, D. I just want to know if it was him…you know…in the car wash.”

  “And then you want him dead, right.”

  “No,” I said, but I knew it was a lie even before the words left my lips.

  At 10:30 I had shellacked my hair into a back-combed do to keep it off my neck, dragged on the coolest clothes I could find that wouldn’t get me arrested, and left for work. The 5 was more like an automotive battle ground than an interstate, but forty-seven minutes later I arrived at L.A. Counseling, where I tried to look chill and chic. My orange-popsicle sheath, however, seemed determined to stick to the back of my legs no matter how high we cranked up the AC, and it was hard to focus on Mr. Wilson’s water-balloon fetish when my own problems seemed so much more immediate.

  By the time my last client rolled out the door, I was ready to tear out my well-coifed hair.

  “You okay?” Shirley asked. “You look kind of…” She gave me an analytical eye. “…like one of them TV evangelists.”

  “Big-haired?” I asked.

  “Crazy,” she said.

  I had given her the short version of my latest trauma earlier in the week. It wasn’t much more fun than the long version. “Yeah, I’m all right. Just a little…” I peeked out the door into the parking lot. It was almost dark. Sometimes I work late on Mondays and Fridays. Mondays because some of my clients have just spent the weekend with their families. Fridays because some of them are just about to. “Nervous.”

  “You look about ready to fly. It’s time you go home and lay on the couch in front of a fan.”

  “I agree.”

  “Then that’s what you’re going to do, right?”

  I slung the strap of my purse over my shoulder. It was a Coach knock-off. Twenty-seven ninety-nine brand new. “It sounds like a great plan.”

  She stuck out her jaw. She’s got a good, firm jaw. The rest of her was good too, but not necessarily firm. “So that’s what you’re going to do, right?” she asked again.

  I considered lying, but I wasn’t brave enough. “Right after I meet with a friend.”

  “What friend?”

  More hedging didn’t seem prudent.

  “Micky,” I said, and turned toward the door.

  “Micky Goldenstone?” Her voice suggested trouble might be brewing. Shirley had given birth to, and subsequently survived the teenage years of, seven kids. I figured she could, therefore, shoot death rays out of her eyeballs if she wanted to, but I defended myself as best I could.

  “He’s not a client anymore,” I said. But I had been his therapist when he’d shot Jackson Andrews, subsequently tying me to that unsavory character for all time.

  “That doesn’t mean the board of psychology isn’t going to fry your skinny behind if they find out you’re fraternizing with him.”

  “I’m not fraternizing with him.”

  “He’s got connections to all manner of hell,” she said.

  “I’m not fraternizing with him,” I repeated, and put my hand on the door latch.

  “Ms. McMullen!” she barked.

  I turned like a spanked cadet… and froze. She was pointing a handgun directly at my left eyeball. I felt the blood rush to my extremities.

  “Take this with you,” she said.

  I managed to pull a little air into my lungs. “What?”

  “The Glock,” she said, letting it droop in her fingers before handing it over. “Dion gave it to me a couple months ago.”

  “Is it…” I swallowed, not even sure how to frame a question. “Where did Dion get it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I figure it’s better off with you than where it’s been.

  ”

  Chapter 18

  Kids…you spend a couple years teaching them to walk and talk, then spend the rest of your life wishing they’d just sit their butts down and shut the hell up.

  —Shirley Templeton, mother of many

  Micky Goldenstone was a beautiful man with a beautiful soul and a not-so-beautiful past. He was waiting for me in a booth at the Grill and Chill when I slid in beside him.

  “How you doing?” he asked. He had a beer the size of a water cooler in front of him. It looked fantastic in all its amber glory. Unfortunately, I’ve actually sampled beer and know it tastes like cat pee; I have brothers who were always graciously willing to introduce me to the taste of the urine of several species.

  “I’m doing well,” I said, and thought I must be doing okay because he hadn’t shrunk away when he saw my face and I’d only applied half a quart of concealer, followed by a bushel basket of foundation. I’ll admit, I wanted to unload on him, but hard as it is to believe, Micky’s issues are generally more serious than my own. And because I had once been his therapist, I felt it was my moral obligation to be professional. Well, that and the fact that the board of psychology would fricassee me and serve me with Hollandaise sauce if they found one more infraction on my record. “How are you?”

  He gave me a jaundiced glance over the edge of his mug. “You know how some people say parenthood is hell?”

  I did, in fact. My own parents had generally looked as if they needed a shot of whisky and an exorcist. But
I’m quite sure that had nothing to do with me. Remember the brothers of urinary fame? “Yeah?”

  “Turns out they lied.” He took a deep quaff from the cooler in front of him. “It’s worse.”

  I laughed. “Jamel giving you a little trouble?” Jamel was the son he’d only realized he had after the boy’s mother had died of an overdose. A shitstorm of problems had followed in the wake of her death. A shitstorm which I had foolishly galloped into.

  He gave me the evil eye over the top of his mug. “A little trouble I could handle. Hell, I’d welcome a little trouble. But the boy questions everything I say. Challenges every order, has a smart remark for every possible situation.”

  “Have you tried tying him to the banister and reading him Bible verses yet?”

  He stared at me a second, then chuckled and put his beer down. “Who would have thought Grams’s methods were the only ones that actually work?”

  I’d met his grandmother on more than one occasion. She was a hundred and eighty if she was a day and she’d still scared the bejeezus out of me. “How’s she doing?” I asked.

  He was watching me with those gorgeous devilish eyes, dark skin shining beneath the overhead lights. “Better than you.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, but at that moment our waitress appeared. I ignored her horrified expression as best I could, ordered a glass of water with a lemon twist, accepted a menu, and stared at the choices, hoping to look nonchalant, but I could feel Micky watching me.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” I tried a shrug, casual as hell, but to tell the truth, even that caused pain to radiate from my cheek to my neck and lower. “The lasagna looks good. But I’ve heard the chef’s salad is excellent, too, and I can’t ever decide between making my stomach happy and keeping my heart pumping for another—”

  “Doc,” he said, “is this about Andrews?”

  I didn’t answer right away. Hell, I didn’t have an answer.

  “I heard he was out of jail,” he said. "Truth is, a cop the size of a fucking minivan showed up at my door to question me about my whereabouts that night."