by Paul Levine
I parked next to an outdoor cafe where men with leathery skin smoked cigars and drank espresso from tiny plastic cups. Next door, three teenagers were making a mess of a transmission, pulled out of a twenty-year-old Chevy propped onto concrete blocks.
I already knew a lot about Compu-Mate. I knew it was the latest way to profit from people’s fears of loneliness. Like-minded consenting adults just a whir and buzz away, courtesy of your personal computer. Talk sweet, talk dirty, titillate your partner, and tickle your fancy until you get a phone number and address. Then cross your fingers, take a deep breath, and wait for the truth. The guy who called himself “Paul Newman look-alike" has the gray hair, all right, but the blue eyes are milky, a paunch hangs over his belt, and he’s three months behind on the alimony. “Buxom blonde looking for fun" means overweight and bleached, a manic-depressive.
I had some background on Max and Roberta Blinderman, president and secretary of Compu-Mate, Inc., a Florida for-profit corporation. Previously, they operated a video dating service that went belly up, and before that, a modeling studio that left a trail of unpaid bills and unfinished portfolios. As far as Cindy’s research showed, Roberta had no criminal record. Max had been a fair-to-middling jockey twenty years ago, once nearly winning the Flamingo Stakes at Hialeah before getting suspended in a horse-doping scheme. Lately he had pleaded guilty to bouncing some checks, was put on probation, and made restitution. Two other penny-ante cases: a mail-fraud case was nolle-prossed, and a buying-receiving charge was dropped when the state couldn’t prove the jewelry was stolen. By local standards, he was clean enough to run for mayor.
The office was no-frills, a Formica counter up front, a green metal desk in back. Next to the desk was a decent-sized, freestanding computer that was probably leased month to month. No waiting room, no sofa, no friendly green plants. A man sat at the desk staring into a video display terminal. A woman stood at the counter licking stamps and pasting them onto envelopes-monthly bills to the customers, I figured.
“I’d like to sign up,” I told the woman behind the counter.
“This ain’t the army,” she said, putting down her envelopes and shoving a form in front of my face.
She was six feet tall and seemed to like it. Her dark eyes were spaced wide and the lashes were long, black as sin, and well tended. The complexion, which had that cocoa-butter, coppery-tanned look with a healthy dose of moisturizers, creams, powders, and blushes, was smoothly sanguine. The black hair was layered and purposely messed, a wild look. Her nose was thin and straight and so perfect it might have cost five grand at a clinic in Bal Harbour. Her body was long and lean with some muscle development in the shoulders and small breasts that were uncaged under a white cotton halter top. The top of a denim skirt was visible below her flat, browned tummy, but her legs were hidden behind the counter.
I licked the end of the pencil like Art Carney playing Ed Norton, made a whirling motion with my right arm, and began filling out the form in block letters.
“Most of our clients just punch us up on their modems and do the paperwork by filling out the form on their computer screen,” she said.
“My modem’s in the shop for an oil change.”
If she thought I was funny, she kept it to herself. She just watched my seersuckered self as I filled in the blanks. I wrote my real name and address, chose “Stick Shift" as my handle, used my old jersey number as a secret password, and pretended to struggle with the rest. When I was done, I handed her the form. She scanned it and scowled.
“This ain’t a dining club,” she said.
“Or the army,” I agreed.
“What’s ‘rare steak and cold beer’ supposed to mean?”
“It asked my preferences,” I said, putting some Iowa corn into my voice.
“Sheesh. Your preferences in bed, Gomer. Are you straight, gay, or bi?”
“Straight as an arrow, slim. Wanna see?”
“In your dreams. Hey, next blank you skipped. You go for French or Greek?”
“No habla nothin’ but English.”
“Oh brother! You got any fetishes? B and D, S and M, water sports?”
“I’m a pretty decent windsurfer,” I admitted.
She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Where you been, the friggin’ North Pole?”
“Maui, Aruba, the Baja,” I told her. “North Pole’s too cold, even with a dry suit.”
“Listen, Ricky Retardo, I ain’t got all day. You don’t fill in the blanks, the computer will spit out your application, so you gotta tell me what you like. Now, Greek, that means bum fucking, get it?”
“Even the poor got a right to get laid,” I said. “It’s in the Constitution.”
She narrowed her dark eyes and gave me a sideways look. “You know what French is, right?”
I didn’t say oui, madame. I just gave her my big, dumb-guy look. It isn’t hard to do.
“Like in the poem,” she said, “‘The French, they are a funny race. They fight with their feet and fuck with their face.’ Get it?”
I scrunched my face into its genius-at-thought mode. “I get part of it.”
“Part of it?”
“I mean, fighting with their feet, I get…”
She turned toward the back where the man was now hunched over the keyboard of the computer. “Max! C’mere.”
A little guy, all wires and gristle in black pants, black knit shirt, and white patent-leather loafers. A tattoo of a snake showed green on a veined, browned forearm. A worm of a mustache wriggled under his nose. He squinted at me through suspicious eyes. All he needed was a switchblade to pick his teeth, and he could have been a small-time grifter in Guys and Dolls.
“Yow, Bobbie,” he answered.
“Whyn’t you help Mister…”
“Lassiter,” I announced proudly.
They traded places. Her high heels clackety-clacked as she legged it toward the back. Sleek, fine legs with a comely curve of the calf undulating with each step. As she slinked by Max he said, “Foot Long’s just about got Naughty Nurse’s panties off.”
She sat down at the desk and peered into the monitor. “Nurse’s been putting out for everybody and their cousin,” she called back.
Max took his time examining my application. I wondered if anyone ever failed the entrance exam. “You can listen in?” I asked.
“Huh?”
I pointed toward the computer where Bobbie sat, her long, lean body bent toward the screen.
“Someone’s gotta be the sys-op,” he said. “Work the panel in case there’s a glitch on-line. We can tap into any talky-talk, just like Southern Bell.”
“You must hear-or read-it all.”
“Yow. Till after while, it puts you to sleep. Like how many ways can they describe it?”
He returned to the form, moving his lips and tracing each line with a finger. “Say, you were just kidding here, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Bobbie don’t have much of a sense of humor. Comes from having a hard life as a kid. You gotta make allowances with a filly like that.” He grinned and showed me two rows of shopping-center dental work. “You’re a straight shooter looking for old-fashioned cooze in the missionary position, yow?”
“Yow,” I answered right back at him.
He gave me a temporary membership card and a book of rules. I gave him a twenty-dollar bill.
“Ever have any trouble with your clients?” I asked.
The word “trouble" made the mustache twitch. “Whaddaya mean?”
“Like any women complain about guys putting the make on ’em, they don’t like what’s being offered?”
His eyes had put up a shield. “No trouble. Woman gets hassled, she can bug out of the call. She invites a guy over or goes out with him, that’s her business. We don’t give no guarantees.”
“You keep records of the calls?”
He sneaked a peek at the wall where his occupational license was taped over a crack. Probably figured me for a city inspector and wondered
when I’d show him my palm.
I pointed back to his main computer. “All the calls stored in there?”
“Hell no! I wouldn’t clog up our hard memory with that shit.”
“How many members you have?”
“Three hundred fifty men. Almost two hundred women. Hey, we’re a member of the BBB.”
“So what’s stored in there?”
“It’s programmed to record how many times members call in and how long they talk. After fifty hours, you gotta renew.”
“So it records who they talk to…”
“That’d be an invasion of privacy,” he said with undue formality.
“But it could be done, if you wanted to know who a client spoke with, say, two nights ago?”
“The calls are coded numerically. It could be-”
“What the hell!” Bobbie Blinderman demanded, towering over Max the Jockey. “Just who the hell are you, buster?” In her bare feet now, she was three inches shorter, but no friendlier. She had silently prowled back to the counter from her position as gatekeeper of erotica and her ebony eyes glared at me.
I gave her a daffy grin. “Just a lonely guy-”
“Get your jollies somewhere else!” she ordered, pointing toward the door.
“With a grand-jury subpoena,” I added, pulling a blue-backed paper out of my back pocket and sliding it across the counter. Max stared at it a moment, then picked it up as if afraid to leave prints. Bobbie looked straight at me with those long-lashed eyes, the sanguine complexion a tone redder.
“Flatfoot faggot,” she hissed.
“ Your preference?” I politely inquired.
REVERSAL
PROLOGUE
The silken sky was endless, the stars infinite, the breeze sweet with a thousand promises. On a night like this, the past is forgotten and the future is forever.
Tony Kingston loved flying at night, the huge aircraft slicing through the tar black sky like some tri-masted sailing vessel on a great adventure. Which is what Kingston thought when feeling poetic, when he let the drone of the three massive engines wash over him, playing their serene song.
Other times, burdened with the reality of a discount air carrier in the era of deregulation, he thought he was flying a bus, an over-crowded, undermaintained, ancient clunker of a bus. Now, as he acknowledged instructions from Miami Center and descended to eleven thousand feet he felt the big jet’s power under his hands. It was still a remarkable beast, four hundred thousand pounds of muscle, one million separate parts in all. Looking as if it shouldn’t be able to get off the ground at all, this huge aircraft was a testament to man’s genius, he thought, just as surely as man was a testament to God’s genius.
Hell, the fuselage of the DC-10 looks like one of those fat Cuban cigars-the Robustos-I bring back from Havana.
Tony Kingston looked through the V-shaped windshield and into the night. To the left was the vast darkness of the Atlantic Ocean. Below and to the right were the twinkling lights of Florida’s Gold Coast, Palm Beach merging with Ft. Lauderdale and farther south, Miami Beach. In less than twenty minutes, they should be pulling up at the gate at MIA. Listening to the soothing white noise of the slipstream, he took the measure of his own life, calculating credits and debits, figuring he was solidly in the plus column.
A former combat pilot, Kingston sometimes missed the action, the camaraderie of the flight squadron. But he overly romanticized it, he knew, and flying a fighter was a young man’s game. What he had now was a career: chief pilot for Atlantica Airlines. The title almost sounded military. So why did the job often leave him wanting more?
Because commercial aviation is to flying what elevator music is to Mozart.
But what had he expected? Surely not the same rush he got from his beloved A-6 Intruder rocketing off the deck of a carrier, a load of HARM missiles slung under its wings.
“Miami Center, this is Atlantica six-four-zero at eleven thousand,” said copilot Jim Ryder into the radio.
“Roger, six-four-zero. Maintain eleven thousand,” came the scratchy reply.
In a few moments, they’d be handed off to Miami Approach Control, which would guide them from the ocean to the airport for landing. With a steady easterly sea breeze, they would make a sweeping loop over the Everglades to the west of the city and come back again, landing into the wind. It was routine. Tony would line them up with the radio signals that indicate the descent profile and the runway center line, then ease the big bird to the ground. Copilot Ryder would keep up the chatter with Approach Control, and Larry Dozier, the flight engineer, would scan the myriad gauges, which assured that hundreds of mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic systems were performing as intended. Within minutes, the passengers would be heading to their hotels or homes or cruise ships.
“Atlantica six-four-zero, expect Harvest Three approach for runway nine left,” Kingston heard in his earphones. On his right, Ryder opened the approach chart.
“Confirm intercept altitude at fifteen hundred feet and decision height two hundred,” Kingston told his copilot.
“Roger that,” Ryder said, consulting the chart. “Final approach fix is Oscar.”
Kingston looked forward to the landing. Even with all the computerized help, it still took a warm body to bring the plane home. For all its drawbacks, being a commercial pilot still beat a suburban commute and a nine-to-five job.
So why did he miss the adrenaline jolts he remembered from the Gulf War? He could still feel the G forces on takeoff from the John F. Kennedy that sunny and windy January day, the heightened heartbeat as he approached the target. One of the “Sunday Punchers,” he dropped a missile down the smokestack of the Iraqi cargo ship Almutanabbi, docked at a Kuwaiti port. The American public watched the whole thing on CNN, including an interview afterward with Kingston on the deck of the carrier. He was unshaven, his dark hair tousled by the wind. Behind him, a navy seaman was painting a hash mark in the shape of a ship on the nose of his fighter. Kingston smiled and spoke comfortably into the camera, his crooked grin and pugnacious chin seeming to symbolize American fortitude.
When he watched the grainy, black-and-white videotape of the bombing, Kingston was riveted by something he couldn’t see from his fighter: two men walking on the products jetty alongside the Almutanabbi. They paused and looked up. So strange. They must have heard the jet or the whistling approach of the missile.
One man said something to the other and shrugged. Then they continued walking. Several seconds later, the blast rocked the freighter, and the two men disappeared in a fiery cloud.
Why hadn’t they dived for cover? Why hadn’t they run?
Now Kingston derived a tranquil satisfaction from flying the fat Robusto filled with tourists. With all the computers and automated gear, he knew he was no longer so much a pilot as an operations director, troubleshooter, and systems manager. But in an emergency, he carried the lives of three hundred people on his strong shoulders. He was good at his job and figured he had finally grown up. He no longer needed the rush of a catapult takeoff from the deck of a carrier. He no longer needed the Top Gun macho swagger, the envious looks from men, the adulation from women. He had been a womanizer, a fault common to combat and commercial pilots alike. Now he had a committed relationship with a wonderful, intelligent woman, and if she was also beautiful and twenty years his junior-so what, some things don’t change.
“Atlantica six-four-zero, good evening,” Miami Approach welcomed. “Turn right heading two-two-zero. Descend and maintain eight thousand.”
Ryder acknowledged the message, and Kingston turned the aircraft toward the west. In a few moments, they were over Miami heading toward the Everglades. Both men listened to conversations between Approach Control and other aircraft. At forty-four, Kingston was older than his first officer but in better physical shape. Jim Ryder had grown a paunch from too much hotel room service. Tony Kingston still had a military bearing and rock hard gut.
“Atlantica six-four-zero, you’re number thirteen for a
pproach.”
“Jeez, we’ll be halfway to Naples before they bring us back,” Ryder said. He turned around in his seat to face the flight engineer. “Hey, Larry, you want to hit South Beach tonight?”
“Sure. Berlin Bar, maybe Bash, finish up at Amnesia,” Larry Doziev said. “How about you, Tony?”
“No thanks. I’ve got to finish my report for the union.”
“That’s what happens when you get married,” Ryder said.
Kingston laughed. “I’m not married. You’re married.”
“Yeah, but you’re acting married ever since you and the mystery woman got together. When you gonna show her off?”
“Maybe she’s married,” Dozier said.
Not yet. But I’m going to change that.
He had never before committed to one woman, always thinking the next one was the fantasy creature who would fulfill all his needs. Now, with the passage of time and more women-flight attendants, models, executives with one-night layovers-in his past than he could remember, he finally had someone whose needs he wanted to fill, a woman he loved more than he loved himself.
Lisa. Lisa Fremont.
The girl from down the hill in Bodega Bay who had traveled so far. He’d known her practically all her life, but he had been blind to the hell she had endured at home. Maybe if he hadn’t been stationed so far away, he could have done something. For starters, he would have thrashed Harry Fremont.