TWELVE
Ma’s objections to his job aside, my cousin Brad is one of my favorite people in the world.
This was not always so, because Brad was a nasty kid. At family get-togethers I built houses of Lincoln Logs with him, a forced partnership in which I did the laying of lapped walls and carefully imbricated green cardboard-shake roofs while Braddy laid my creations to scrap with gleefully malicious swats. I hated him for that and dreaded the major Jewish holidays up until my teens, when the roles reversed: I became the brat surf-punk shoplifting teenager, and Brad started turning into a regular guy—as is the curious case with a lot of juvenile bullies, even some of the most vicious, the kind who build elaborate little wooden guillotines out of ice cream sticks to chop earthworms in half, or who ally themselves with other nasties to pin down the class wimp and masturbate him at recess.
A few years ago, Brad was still “trying to find himself.” as his mother, my recently-passed Aunt Doreen, rationalized it to clucking family. He was volunteering hours acting at a small repertory house in Venice under the stage name Daniel Woodlawn, crashing in a loft above the theater—an unconverted warehouse, really—with six other actors and actresses, waiting tables at a coffeehouse called the Busted Snaredrum (“It’s Unbeatable!”) and using his primary teaching credential to do a little substitute teaching at a local public school. The combined income from these jobs couldn’t keep his ringworn Datsun in Pennzoil.
At length exasperated with his self-imposed rich-kid squalor, and convinced that he didn’t have the clawing, screw-the-competition drive or the physical stamina or the reliable coke connections necessary to be a success in Hollywood, Brad succumbed to his father’s pressure and joined the family business: Global Casualty, a small firm and probably shady even by insurance industry standards, catering mainly to clients who, due to a surfeit of drunk driving convictions, could no longer qualify for coverage with the larger and more reputable companies.
My Uncle Ed, Global’s founder and a man of rigid traditional values, said his son had to work himself up in the business, “just like any schnook off the street.” so Brad now finds himself on a rung maybe a little higher than halfway up the corporate ladder, a Global policy salesman who has to follow up on an occasionally questionable claim, like the time a client, shitfaced drunk and speeding in the rain, spun out and plowed into a disabled Camaro on the shoulder of the southbound Ventura freeway, then compounded this inanity by submitting a claim in which she accused the Camaro’s driver of backing into her. Brad investigated. She lost.
Finally settling on a career niche seems to have made Brad genuinely satisfied with himself, probably the main reason why he’s become such a pleasant, easygoing companion. He now has a wife, Margy (pronounce the “g” hard), a darkly chic but not overly narcissistic Vassar graduate, raised Catholic, who baby-talks under social pressure of family gatherings but who has down-home common sense and is extremely supportive of Brad. Brad also has two Great Danes and a newish split-level in the valley, a little kidney-shaped pool and a Ping-Pong table, and a new Sony TV with which he pursues his second passion (after Margy): watching sports and murder mysteries. Brad’s recall of sports trivia is total, and he can remember the characters and recite the story lines of all the major crime shows, going back as far as “77 Sunset Strip” in the early sixties, with an attention to intricacies of plot rivaling that of the pickiest Restoration drama professor.
It embarrasses Brad to tell people, especially his self-righteous theatrical crowd, that he’s happy—that Daniel Woodlawn is once again Bradford Lesnick, with a tract house and a color tubie and a lifetime no-cut contract to play the indemnity game. But he is happy. He appreciates the money (his first act as a man of swelling financial substance was to trade in his Datsun for a new root-beer brown BMW sport sedan) and admits he enjoys the personal contact that comes with the territory: “… being up there on stage performing for a bunch of faceless people always made me nervous, but I like talking one-on-one with clients. Maybe I should have gone into psychology.” Further, he’s surprised himself and thrilled his parents (who always thought him hopelessly thickheaded in areas they considered practical: pre-med biology, engineering-track calculus and physics, legal-prep political science) by becoming a bit of a computer nerd. At the office he has learned how to code into the most far-flung modem-accessible data banks, with a facility that would inspire envy in a CIA operative with years of experience spying electronically on innocent citizens. Brad loves his new digital toy. With it, he can access (often illegally, I imagine; I’d as soon not know) Department of Motor Vehicles records, bank credit ratings, state and federal tax returns, police and FBI rap sheets, news services, aviation weather reports, a gourmet cooks’ recipe service, and a personable but nearly unbeatable backgammon program on a mainframe somewhere in Kansas.
I subscribe to the motto that if it relaxes you, do it; if it relaxes you and pays well, make a career of it. So, even if I could never stomach insurance work—neither the tedious keypunching nor the hours of filling in all those morbid little boxes on carbon-paper forms nor the hyper-pushy Sta-Prest image the job conjures—I approve of Brad’s work, for Brad. Besides, still wobbly from the episode on the offramp, I desperately needed his investigative expertise. Something I had done or was doing—hanging around the star-crossed Ernst? wooing Lissa ardently? digging up skeletons in George Eliot’s closet? annoying some hypersensitive psycho by hawking too loudly when an unseen cloud of ragweed pollen stimulated my postnasal drip?—was clearly putting me in harm’s way. I needed answers, fast, before someone else tried to do me in. The same day on which I demolished my BSA and nearly myself, I made an urgent call to Brad.
Dispensing with our usual talk of the Dodgers’ pennant chances, I filled him in on all that had happened. I related details of the inheritance, the theft and assault, my new friendship with Ernst and Lissa, and the recent near-calamity on the freeway.
“Jesus.” he shouted, “they shot at you. They tried to run you off the road. You have to tell the police.”
“You really think they’re more likely to take this complaint seriously than my last one? Lissa nearly got raped, I got my balls mashed, and the police rushed off like they were late for their next bribe payment. If I report this one, they’ll probably bust me and throw me in jail for driving my motorcycle with a faulty muffler.”
“Suit yourself . But an El Camino’s a deadly weapon, and the police don’t take assault with a deadly weapon lightly.”
“Tell that to my balls.”
“I’d rather not address your balls directly, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Suit yourself.” I mimicked. “But the suspensory’s still killing me, and I haven’t heard word one from headquarters. I’m going to follow up on this one myself. And you’re going to help.”
I asked Bradford if he had the inclination to do a little computer-assisted “background research” on all this. Brad positively jumped at the prospect of unraveling a mystery instead of just watching it on TV. “Inclination? Sometimes I have computer dreams. Weird, huh? Real vivid, too, like they’re real. About, you know, plugging into a bank account with unlimited funds or tracking down a killer the police haven’t been able to find, and I end up rich or famous or both …”
I cut short his effusion. “Calm yourself, Braddy, this probably won’t be real exciting. What we’re dealing with here is a blind antiquarian and a research assistant from Nebraska. Not the stuff your high-tech wet dreams are made of.”
“Maybe, but the El Camino, the plates, the shotgun … we might turn up something really good. Anyway, it’s worth a try. How soon do you need it?”
“Soon.” I told him. “I have a feeling I’m going to keep having ‘accidents’ until I can figure out what’s going on.”
THIRTEEN
Brad buys two sets of season tickets to the Dodgers every year, good seats, halfway down the third-base line and not too high up in the second deck. He gives most of
the tickets to his insurance clients as gifts, having found they enjoy baseball more than the Global Casualty logo-embossed polyethylene pitcher-and-glass sets he passed out at Christmas during his first couple of years with the business. But he always saves the prima games, like the Astros, for himself and his wife, or himself and his former Lincoln-Log partner.
We parked outside the stadium—an old trick of Brad’s; saves money and beats the crowds leaving the game—on a hill not far from Ernst’s house, in fact. I had a pang of tragic yearning, knowing Lissa was nearby, but I displaced it with the compelling image of a foot-long kosher Dodger-dog, heavy on the chili and relish. We took the elevator to our level, stood in line, and bought our dogs, drinks, and nacho chips covered with a drippy yellow “cheese food” that looked like bathroom tub caulking and had no taste. But the junkier the food the better at baseball games. It contributes to the ambiance of guffawing, bearded blue-collar joy and stupidity, of beer spilled sloppily from whopping waxed-paper cups and nylon mesh Caterpillar Tractor caps. We found our seats and ate. I got ketchup on my Harley T-shirt. I fit right in.
It was a day reminiscent of the immobilizing, sticky Julys I spent in New York visiting the grandparents during my childhood. The northern edge of a tropical storm had spun itself over the L. A. basin in a thick, pale gray quilt of cloud, which trapped and concentrated the heat and humidity and pollution. By the time Enos Cabell rolled a little groundout to Russell to end the Astros’ first inning, our shirts were soaked with grimy sweat. We took them off. Around the stadium all the patrons, or at least the menfolk, were doing the same thing, sweating and stripping. There was no breeze. The place smelled funky, like an elevator filled with militant soap-resisters.
Removing his Izod alligator shirt revealed a wide white bandage wrapped tight around Brad’s upper torso. I contemplated it for a moment and then commented, “I’m the guy who fell off his bike. What happened to you?”
He said, “Oh, softball last weekend. It was the last game of the season, city ‘B’ league, you know. One away, bottom of the ninth, we were up by two runs, and they had the bases loaded. I was playing third, and the batter hit a shot right up the third-base line, and …”
“Always the star …”
“Yeah, right. I dived for it, a real Graig Nettles-type circus play, and I caught the ball, too, but I came down on top of my glove and ball, and I got knocked out. They said I was only unconscious about a half a minute, and I felt OK enough to finish up the game, but the next day it was like I couldn’t breathe, and I knew something was wrong.”
“That’s always a giveaway something might be wrong, when you can’t breathe.”
“The doctor said I had bruised ribs, nothing cracked, and he taped them up. Happens all the time, he said.”
“It’s real attractive. You look like you’re up for the lead in ‘The Mummy’s Curse.’”
“Yeah, I know. It doesn’t hurt much anymore. Most of the time I forget I have it on.”
“Big mistake. You should be milking this for all the sympathy you can.”
“Good idea. Could you get me another Coke? My ribs hurt.”
“Get it yourself.” I said.
Houston up in the fifth, Sutton working on a one-hit shutout, Cruz hit a long fly ball that turned Reggie Smith around, but he made an over-the-shoulder catch at the warning track and the crowd went wild. We ate the last of the nachos, schvitzed like pigs, and, small talk spent, I brought us around to the crucial topic. “So did you find anything out about my … situation?”
Brad spoke slowly at first, with a worrisome solemnity. “I was afraid you were going to get to that. I found out quite a bit, actually, and you’re not going to like it very much.”
I tried to lighten his tone of pending calamity: “Spare me the suspense, Woodlawn. Did I ever tell you ‘Woodlawn’ sounds more like a cemetery than an actor?”
“Probably. I’ve heard every lame joke you know at least ten times. You repeat yourself a lot.”
“That’s what she said last night.” I said, aping the obnoxious commentary of macho dudes in YMCA locker rooms.
“You’re dreamin’, Harmie. The way I hear it, last time you were with a woman you got your peepee whacked by Aunt Fay.” That’s what he called my mother, because she’s his aunt. “Have you ever thought about moving out and settling down …”
“Like you. Suburbia, one-point-eight kids, picket fence, Toyota in the driveway …”
“Datsun.”
“I know.”
“You could do worse.”
“I suppose. It’s just that I’m a husk of my former self since the Brenny business, plus I’ve got this fucking dissertation hanging over my head all the time. Right now settling down seems like a remote possibility.” I paused. The DiamondVision scoreboard was flashing an unrecognizable digitized image of the Astro who was currently at bat. The San Bernardino foothills lay beyond, an unevenly ripped chaparral-gray horizon under red-brown monoxide haze. “Extremely remote.” I repeated emphatically, “like one of those trees you can barely make out on Mount Baldy, you know what I mean?”
“All I know is if you wait much longer it might dry up and fall off. Use it or lose it, like they say.”
“Oh, super advice, Brad. I’ll take out an ad in the Freege tomorrow. ‘Single white Wop-Kike, divorced, twenty-eight, seeks bitchin babe for ingenious experiments in nuclear family fusion. Send photo, ferns only.’ I ought to get tons of letters.”
“You couldn’t do any worse than you’re doing now.”
“I appreciate your concern for my psychosexual well-being, Brad, but to tell you the truth, right now I’m more worried about just living through the end of the week. Could you just tell me whatever you found out.”
He began, “Well, I couldn’t find any special meaning for JQGENUS or GENUS or ENUS or … Anyway, I checked a lot of combinations against telephone records of individuals, groups. Nothing. But the El Camino is registered to a guy—wait, I brought all this stuff with me …” He unzipped his brown daypack, dug into it and brought out a small, vinyl-covered ring binder, which he opened. As he flipped through its contents, he continued, “By the way, you’ll be relieved to hear that the accident report said neither guy in the El Camino was hurt bad. The truck was totaled, a few other cars got some dings, but it landed upright, on its wheels, and the guys walked away. They got taken in for carrying a concealed firearm and suspicion of drunk driving. Your would-be murderers are out now. On the streets. Maybe if you had filed a police report …”
“I don’t want to hear about it, OK? Ever since that time they hauled me in and worked me over, the police make me nervous.”26
“Here.” He stopped his paging. “The El Camino’s registered to a Robert Sweeney, who it turns out has a record as long as your arm—no, longer, ’cause you’re a runt. Nasty stuff, too, armed robbery, assault, that sort of thing. In case you’re interested, he has also gone by the aliases Bobby Sweet, Dick Sweeney, and Sid Dickey …”
“Did you get anything on him?”
“Sure. I can tell you how many parking tickets he had in 1959 if you want.”
“Anything a little more relevant?”
“This Sweeney reported yearly earnings of over fifty grand the last few years, and—here’s the cool connection—he works for one Laurence Sterne, as his gardener.”
“Sterne! The guy who had Ernst blinded?”
“The same. Sweeney works for him. His gardener. I’d call fifty grand pretty good bucks for picking weeds, wouldn’t you? The accident report said Sweeney was the passenger in your El Camino.”
My steel-trap sleuth’s mind was already snapping at inductions: “Sterne ran off with Ernst’s wife something like thirty years ago, and now he’s sending thugs to rough me up. What possible reason …”
“Wait, there’s more, and this is the part you’re not going to like.”
I waited.
“I couldn’t find any record of a Lissa Sturm
in L. A. or in California, or in any midwestern state, for that matter, until …”
The former Dame David Woodlawn couldn’t resist the dramatic pause here, and an imaginary audience hushed in expectation of a shocking revelation, “… until I made the connection: Sterne’s old tax returns, real old ones, listed a daughter as a dependent: Lisa Sterne, around twenty-two years old. Her most recent address is also Sterne’s.”
I started gasping, foaming.
Brad concluded, “From the few descriptions I could get of this Lisa Sterne—driver’s license stuff, mostly—she sounds an awful lot like the Lissa Sturm you described to me. It adds up to this, old cuz: You may be in love with the stepdaughter of a guy who’s trying to kill you, and she’s working for her real father under a fake identity. Way to go, Harmon.”
Top of the ninth, Cruz got all of a Sutton slider this time and sent a towering homer into the right field pavilion with men on first and third.
The Dodgers lost by a run.
FOURTEEN
I have days, usually after troubled and sleepless nights, when I can’t wear my contacts—when I need the world to have softer edges, a uniform field of diffuse color on which my imagination can paint its own soothing detail in ferny greens and pastel blues. This day was one of those. Never mind that I see double and bump into things, upsetting the old, wrought-iron art-deco lamp my parents bought shortly after they were married, and bruising my hip on the sharp corner of the dining table. Small surcharge indeed for a world that appears balanced and hospitable.
Lissa lied. Whatever else she might be up to—whether spying on Ernst, plagiarizing her real father’s scholarly discoveries, conspiring with her stepfather and his henchmen to steal my inheritance (and staging a damned convincing near-rape in the bargain) and dispose of me—all this was less than a grain in balance against her simple absolute betrayal of my trust. Boring midwestern upbringing, she said; get to know each other better, she cooed; too protective of poor blind Ernst, she protested! I was bumping around blind, bulimic with anger at the treacherous bitch, even more furious with my own pathetically predictable weak self for doing it again. You can get away with stupid mistakes, like my marriage, when you’re young, because you still have a reserve of regenerative energy with which to put back together your shattered nervous core, like a lizard sprouting a new tail. But when you’re older and the reserves are shot, you need to be more cautious; with Lissa I had jumped in even more recklessly than I had done with Brenny.27 But at least this time the inevitable withering truth came sooner, before I had played out the sordid script one more time. I could let Lissa go now, and I would do it in coolest private-I style, with a glacial passive-aggressivity: just walk in, take my books and stuff, a chill-breezy “See ya” and leave under some preposterous pretext, like, “I have to work on my dissertation.”
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