The Way of All Fish: A Novel (20 page)

“Seems to me it should be illegal to import them. And that peppermint angelfish? What the fuck—excuse my French,” said Karl. “You’re saying there’s only two of those little fellas in captivity, and the U.S. government says go ahead and plunder them?”

Lena reached the small coffeepot across the cocktail table and refilled their cups. “The question yet to be answered is what story I tell these attorneys in order to gain access to what they have on Cindy Sella. They know the documents are out there and that the wrong people picked them up. Your testimony would be that Mr. Hess handed the papers to you, assuming you were Wally Hale and Rod Reeves.”

“It doesn’t prove Wally and Rod are in league with Hess. Or vice versa.”

“Wait. The secretary. The two of them had an appointment with Hess.”

“Yeah, but so what? They were Cindy’s attorneys until a few days ago. So they could say they were there to discuss a settlement.”

“All right. What exactly do you need?” said Arthur.

“Anything. A letter, a memo from the lawyers to the agent or vice versa, that shows they were, uh, collaborating.”

“There’s nothing in the papers you got that suggests they were working for Hess?”

“No cover letter, nothing. Not even a letterhead of Snelling and Botox,” said Karl.

“Borax,” said Candy.

“Tell me. Why would such information in the hands of these lawyers be a threat to Cindy Sella if they were allegedly her lawyers?”

“Get her to do what they wanted, maybe to hand over the commission to Hess, or all this stuff gets aired.”

Karl said, “It doesn’t make much difference what was in the papers. Just that Wally and Rod and Bass were in collusion. These lawyers were working for both the plaintiff and the defendant.”

“You lie and I’ll swear to it. Ain’t nothing shows where that information was headed. So those papers we got don’t prove collusion.”

There was a silence.

“Blackmail,” said Lena as if the word were always right on the tip of her tongue, waiting to be spoken. She lifted the Lalique lighter and was about to ignite it when three hands thrust themselves toward her with struck matches. “Thank you, gentlemen.” Her exhalation was like breath blowing out candles. She repeated it: “Blackmail.” It was as if the
word were wedded to stars in the dark, merely waiting to illuminate their minds. “That’s what we want. What do we have that these lawyers want?”

“Nothing,” said Candy.

“What could we have that they would want? Think.”

They settled down with their cigarettes to cloud-think. It was Karl’s eye that first fell on the glossy photo of the peppermint angelfish. He picked it up, looked at it, and said, “They got a fish tank.” A slightly abstruse comment, but Karl continued, “You know they wouldn’t have the papers on it. I mean, if they had one of these.” He floated the photo past them and looked at Candy. Karl said while Candy shook his head, “Candy’s got a fish looks just like this.”

“You’re crazy. Oscar don’t look like that.”

“He does. He’s striped. Red and white.”

“Stripes? You said yourself it was squiggles. No.” He had quickly come out of his cigarette trance, clear-eyed, clear-minded. “No way. No fucking way.”

“Oh, come on, C. Nothing bad’s going to happen to him. It’d only be for a few hours.” He turned to Lena. “Candy’s fish, I saw a picture of one, can’t remember the name. The stripes are kind of zigzag, but—”

Lena intervened. “It could be an angelfish. Or a discus fish. They’re carnivores, though. Discus fish. What do you feed it?”

Sullenly, Candy shrugged. “Fish food.”

“You should check on that.” Lena paused. “Hm. Perhaps something as elaborate as blackmail won’t be needed. All we need is for them to be absent long enough to get at their files.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“They’ve never seen Arthur, have they?” She looked at him.

Arthur shook his head. “No.”

Lena thought for a bit longer. “Anyone else you could get?”

“How about Blaze Pascal?” said Karl.

Lena looked slightly astonished. “Blaise Pascal is a philosopher.”

“Not this one.” Karl chortled. “She’s a PI.”

“A woman, then?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“For this particular job, I believe you’d want another man,” said Lena. “The woman might be useful later.”

“Danny Zito?” said Candy.

“He’s in WITSEC,” said Arthur.

“Ha! Makes no difference to Danny, the way he hangs around galleries and bookstores. Loves to sign copies of his book.”

“Good. Two people would be better than one, I think.”

“For what?” said Karl.

She told them. Everyone laughed but Candy.

“Just look at him; Oscar don’t know what fate has up its sleeve.” Candy tapped a little food onto the water’s surface.

Karl looked up from
Publishers Weekly
. “If that fish is a carnivore, like Lena said, you should be grilling a steak.” He snapped the magazine. Trouble with magazines, they didn’t snap like newspapers.

Candy reflected on that. “Those other fish in Frankie’s tank, they were ones Oscar knew, right? He was used to them.”

Karl’s tone was understandably edgy. “They were not frat brothers. They were not all members of the Sigma Chi chapter of the Clownfish Café. Trust me.” He paused. “Who are you calling?”

Candy had the cell phone in hand and was tapping in numbers. “The Clownfish. Check with Frankie. What say we go over there for dinner?”

Karl actually liked the Clownfish. He wasn’t sure why. The food was only average. It must be, he thought, what people liked to call ambience. Karl didn’t like words such as “ambience”; he thought they were mirages. But the Clownfish Cafe was like being underwater. The fish were soothing, he had to admit.

He worked a lot of impatience into his tone when he answered, “Yeah. Well. Okay, I guess. But I’m not going to sit around while you confer with Frankie all night long.”

“Nah. He can just maybe give me a few pointers.” Candy snapped his cell shut. “I’ll bet Frankie thinks Oscar looks nothin’ like a peppermint whatever.”

“Peppermint
angelfish,
” said Karl, snapping
Publishers Weekly
as best he could.

N
ever one to put off the unpleasant errand, Clive had packed and departed for Miami the day after his call from Paul Giverney.

Again, never one to avoid the unpleasant, he had tossed the manuscript he’d barely looked at into his bag. It was titled
How (Very) Happy We (Never) Were
.

Titles had become not titles but undigested notes or shreds of conversation. He tried to recall what long title it was that had started this trend, because that’s what had done it: bestseller with a talky title had spawned titles such as this one by Shirley Murphy. Pardon me, thought Clive, Shir-
lee
Mur-
phee
.

Shirlee’s title (with its parenthetical stuffing) was as dreadful as the punning titles that seemed to turn up on slews of mystery series, such as knitting,
A Bitch in Time
; cooking, as in
Another Man’s Poisson
; and handymen and woodcutters, as in
The Axman Cometh
. He could not imagine how anyone who believed in writing could jump on the boat and start trawling through the water for anything at all they could net.

Clive cast his eye over the page, Page One. He leafed through and found that, yes, each page was a spelled-out number. Page Two, Page Sixteen. All in some hideously medieval typeface about as easy to read as an income tax form. Could Shirlee Murphee possibly believe that this lent some artificial gravitas to her work? Written-out words, top-right-hand corner.

One could tell with such manuscripts, just from a look at the format and the font, the litter of exclamation points and troughs of italics, the way in which all of the technical stuff had been handled—one could tell such a book as straightaway bad.

Why was he sitting here with this book, leaning out into the aisle, watching the molasses-slow movement of the drinks cart that seemed to be stalled by an extremely loud passenger, either free of or bound for an A.A. meeting?

The only reason Clive was giving time to
How (Very) Happy
was Tom Kidd. Of all the senior editors at Mackenzie-Haack, this turd had landed somehow on the desk of the legendary Tom Kidd. As Clive remembered it, there had been some sort of family relationship involved, and Tom had agreed to “have a look.” So Clive was doing this as a personal favor because he wanted Tom Kidd in his debt. The story began for some reason with a character spouting Shakespeare, the bit in
Hamlet
where Hamlet is instructing the players on how to perform. Shirlee’s opening made no sense; it was another story that began in the middle of something, which would have been all right had Shirlee been Shakespeare. Clive flipped through the manuscript and found more people spouting Shakespeare or perhaps he should say respouting. “Get thee to Barneys New York” and “The rest is almost silence.” Clive hung parentheses around “almost,” feeling that was more in keeping with Ms. Murphee’s style.

He stuffed the manuscript in his carry-on and settled back to think about the onerous task before him. He would have to spend the night at a motel smelling of air freshener and with a couple of cans of Raid under the sink. They were all pretty much alike, but he had chosen the Sawgrass, which advertised “Free Wi-Fi!!!” “Full Kitchen!!!” “ ’Glades at Your Doorstep!!!” He decided, as the cart pulled to a stop beside him and he ordered (“vodka rocks”) (and
there,
Shirlee, is the correct use of the parenthetical), that Shirlee Murphee was writing copy for the Sawgrass Motel; that was her day job. He veritably snatched the drink from the flight attendant’s hand and downed nearly half of it at once.

The ’Glades at your door. Anyone would want to open his door and find an alligator, a crocodile, a selection of invasive snakes (boa? python?), and one of the all-but-extinct Florida panthers left. Well, he guessed he preferred the Everglades at his door rather than a Shirlee Murphee manuscript lying there.

He was sipping the second half of his drink when he decided the plane was losing altitude, by way of either landing or crashing. He didn’t
care as long as the cart had time to come his way again and as long as Shirlee Murphee’s manuscript was incinerated.

The only car the rental agency had available was an SUV that drank up gas as fast as Clive had downed his vodka. A full tank of gas dropped to under half not far from Everglades City. He stopped at a wreck of a gas station, fascinating because it looked straight out of the forties, where the gas was a few cents cheaper than the others’. It had to be, or nobody would have stopped there except Clive, who liked the thirties and forties.

The station had two pumps, neither equipped with a credit card mechanism.
Pump gas, Pay inside
was the instruction. Clive thought that amazingly trusting for South Florida, but he went ahead and pulled out the pump. He topped up the tank as he looked through the dirt-speckled window of an office where a seated figure hunched over his account books, or whatever he appeared to be reading.

He replaced the pump and walked inside. The man he had seen through the flyblown window was at a desk, peering at pictures—snapshots or photos, it looked like—with a magnifying glass. He didn’t look up. A small sign on the counter said
Donny Lugz, prop.
Leaning against the wall behind him was a rifle, a Winchester or a Remington; Clive didn’t know the difference. There were racks of chips and pretzels on the counter and, in the glass case beneath, candy bars lined up in boxes: Mars, Milky Way, Almond Joy, Hershey. It was strange to Clive how these had lasted for decades in their same old clothes, while everything else—people, cars, soft drinks, refrigerators—had donned new ones.

Clive assumed that the man scouring his pictures was Donny Lugz. He cleared his throat to get attention.

“Yeah.” It appeared to be a response to the picture, not to his customer. Then the man slapped the desk, explaining, “Got the bugger right here!” Donny (if this were he), more sturdy than stout, wore a canvas cap beneath which gray curls sprouted around the edge.