Trust (26 page)

“Good training for business,” she said.

“Speaking of which,” he said, as the waiter delivered her Dubonnet. The waiter studied her again, and she dismissed him with raised eyebrows. The busboy delivered a claim check for Simmons’s coat.

“I have it right here,” she said. She patted the small Bonwit’s bag.

Simmons smiled. To the waiter he said, “Pernod and water, I think, please.” He returned his gaze to meet hers. He patted the left breast of his suit coat. “As good as your word,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, “it’s nothing, really. You know what a fan I’ve always been of early-morning drives in the winter to New Hampshire. So very stimulating. Up while it’s still dark and off into the country for some lovely conversation at a quiet little jail with a lovely bunch of guys. It’s really very nice.”

“But you didn’t encounter any problems,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “if you mean: After I saw the problem and tried to deal with it, and didn’t, and then figured out a way to deal with it and solve it, that I didn’t have a problem—right, I didn’t have a problem. But before: ‘I didn’t have a problem’? Well, you could say I had a problem.”

“It was the brother, then?” he said.

“I couldn’t move him from square one,” she said. “I don’t know why that was. I mean, I’ve never met the guy, and I was really startled, I talked to him on the phone, that he sounded just as stupid as Earl always said he was. Which took me by surprise because most of what Earl told you wasn’t worth a damn. Maybe that’s his secret, Earl’s. Maybe he tells just enough truth so you don’t always know he’s lying. But I was still a little unprepared for the way this guy reacted. I mean, he’s known Earl all his life, and anyone who’s gone through that, who’s known the guy at all, has got to be about as totally fed up with him as anyone could get. And here I am, I come along, another one of Earl’s
suckers that believed him, and depended, and now look what I have got, and all I’m really asking this guy is to do what, well, what I would certainly want to do, if I’d’ve been Earl’s brother. ‘Just call him up, don’t have to go there, and tell him you’re finished with him. That is all you have to do. So if he wants to get out then he has to deal with me.’ And he wouldn’t do it. He didn’t say he wouldn’t do it, and he didn’t say he would. He just kept on, oh, I don’t know, sort of kept on mumbling. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘No, I’m not sure.’ ‘Well, I’m making up my mind.’ ‘No, I haven’t decided yet.’ Very frustrating. Because as long as Earl thought that there still might be another human being he could get a fresh ace from, he was not about to do what I said.” She snickered. “I got the definite impression Earl and I are not best friends anymore.”

The waiter brought the Pernod in a small carafe and a glass of water. Simmons poured the contents of the carafe into the glass, turning the water milky, stirred it once, and sipped it. He nodded. “So how’d you break the logjam?” he said.

“Wasn’t easy,” she said. “I know you thought, I thought you must think, every time I called and said: ‘I haven’t got it yet, but I will, a day or so,’ after a few of those calls you must’ve started thinking: ‘Well, she can’t get it done.’ And I was afraid you’d find another way, someone else to do it.”

“I considered it,” he said. “As a matter of fact I had my people call some other people who do hush-hush private work. Mostly industrial. And they ran a background on Earl and came up with some interesting stuff I could have used.”

“Really,” she said. “I mean, I don’t doubt the bastard’s
had a really full career, but my impression was that, well, he never really got involved with anyone with clout. I mean, like someone who could get things done that’re really hard to do, and wouldn’t want it to get out he was involved with Earl.”

“Reasonable supposition,” he said. “Just not, as it turns out, a fully accurate one. You knew about his prison record, naturally, I guess?”

“Uh huh,” she said. “If you’ve ever known someone that’s done some heavy time, well, it seems like it does something to them that lasts after they get out. A few days in the sun and some decent food and stuff, and a couple good rolls in the hay and they lose that pasty look. But what’s inside their head stays pasty, like their minds’ve been bleached. I had a brother that went bad, and he did a couple hitches in a couple county jails. Houses of correction. He was not corrected but he certainly did change. They’re like, they get like really hungry dogs with bones. Nobody’s really bothering with them, or wants the goddamned bone, but every time they get a bone, by God they act like that. Like someone’s going to march right up and take it away from them. Earl was like that. He had this thing about his beer. I don’t even like beer. If I have a beer today it’ll probably be my last one until a year from now, and it’ll be my first one since about a year ago. But Earl, when he was living with me? Fanatic about his beer. Always hadda have two six-packs cold in the icebox. He drank one, part of the other, he got home tonight, tomorrow when he came home he’d have another case. And I figured out why that was. I don’t think that Earl, you know, ever liked beer all that much. But when he was
in prison he couldn’t get a beer, and now he’s out he still worries they might shut him off again.”

“Yes,” Simmons said. “Well, another thing that happens to them, they usually get in prison, is a prison record. One that follows them. A little trail of paper that goes everywhere they roam, just like Mary’s little lamb.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Well,” Simmons said, “I found it interesting, or I should say, Larry Badger did, that when he ran Earl through his files and probably someone else’s, he didn’t find Earl’s name among those having prison records. Not at first, that is. Someone with a fair amount of heavy pull did something, so that unless you’re really wired in, Earl looks white as snow. Of course that kind of trick can backfire pretty badly—as soon as you use the right password and you find out he has got one, you know not only that he did time but that he knew some guy who looks clean well enough to wipe it out.”

“Blackmail,” she said.

“Could be,” Simmons said. “Except for the fact that he did such a clumsy job on me—hard to believe anyone who’d pulled it off before, and got his record scrubbed, could’ve learned so little about shaking down a man. More likely, I think: family. Some family connection. Someone that Earl’s father knew, or maybe this dumb brother. Collected on a favor from a friend of one of theirs. Earl probably takes the credit, brags it shows how smart he is, how well he’s connected. But chances are it wasn’t that, since it worked so well. Things that work well, this is my guess, don’t have Earl’s prints on them. If it’s petty, and it’s stupid, and it doesn’t work, well then, if Earl takes the credit, I’d
accept his claim. But anything sub rosa that worked out and worked out well, if Earl got some benefit I’d say he was innocent of any real work that produced it.”

“But I didn’t pursue it,” Simmons said. “I held it in reserve. There really wasn’t any hurry to my interest in this. No urgency, I mean. As long as Earl was safely locked up he could not do much to me. And as events had proven, even when Earl’s on the loose, he still can’t do much to me. He isn’t good enough. There just wasn’t any major gain foreseeable from making trouble for some obliging friend of family who’d done the shit a favor once because he liked Earl’s father. Or his brother, or his mother, or the family dog. Things got nasty? Might be different. But until they did? Sit tight. Rely on Penny’s loyalty. I had confidence in you.”

“Oh, Allen,” she said, “you’re such a gentleman.”

“I know it,” he said. “It’s my one claim to fame. May I see the merchandise?”

“Certainly,” she said. She picked up the Bonwit’s bag and handed it across the table to him. He looked inside at the end of the shoe box. “Bostonian?” he said. “Twelve double D?”

“He was a basketball player,” she said. “Big men have big feet.”

“And?” he said. “Do we now have the missing link, the one thing that explains his otherwise perplexing powers of attraction for fine ladies of good taste?”

“No,” she said, “we don’t. That part’s like socks, especially in what I sell. One size fits all. I hooked up with Earl because he fascinated me. I used to know a guy who kept pirhanas in a tank. At the oddest times—he was a real baseball lunatic who’d call me up and have me over, and then forget the reason if there
was a big game on and it went extra innings. But he’d get up with the bases loaded, two outs, and the score tied, and feed raw hamburger to his fish. He liked to see them eat. Didn’t matter to me—time’s what I sell. The price is the same, clothes on or clothes off. But I really liked that nut. He was different. He had imagination.

“And Earl,” she said. “Well, he’s got weaknesses. But see I grew up on a place that was a working farm before we got it. Outside Portland there. It wasn’t a working farm after we got it because nobody in my family really liked to work. At farming or anything else. So the place got pretty run-down. But it was still, you know, fairly big, and we had these dogs. I got used to having dogs around. Real nothing-special dogs. Just dogs. The ones that stayed outside all the time? They stayed outside all the time. The ones that lived in the house? They lived in the house all the time. They all did the same kinds of things. The ones that lived outdoors, they shit outdoors, and the ones that lived inside shit inside. They were nice, friendly dogs. Always coming up to you, scratch their ears and play with them, and that’s sort of what Earl’s like. Except he lets himself in and he lets himself out, and he knows how to feed himself, but you got him around, and it’s sort of homey, you know? You know he really likes you. He might go off someplace and not come back a few days, but generally he does come back. And if someone, you know, attacks you, well, you can say: ‘Sic ’em, Earl.’ And I think he probably would. Growl, at least. Earl would at least growl. And that was the real reason, I guess. I liked him and he kept me entertained.

“See, what I do,” she said, “I keep
men
entertained.
I entertained you. I see a man, he whips it out, I spread, he pays me money. He has a good time, I do a job. Nobody entertains me. But I see Earl, he drives me nuts, he’s got all these big ideas? I know half of them’re off the wall, and the rest he’ll never finish, but he’s thinking about
me.
Not about Penny’s crotch; about Penny. We did it, sure, but sex with Earl was an afterthought. With Earl I could relax. So work is work, and play is play. I kept Earl around for fun.”

“Some fun,” Simmons said.

“Well, it was,” she said. “Don’t kid yourself, Allen. I’m the only one in my family that ever amounted to anything. I’m the only one with any money. And they know how I got it, what I did to become something. And they don’t like it. They pretend that they don’t like it because I’m disgracing them, but I know very well that it’s because they’re just plain jealous. My two sisters. If they looked like I do and they had my balls, which they don’t, and they don’t, they would do the same thing in a flash. My brothers did the best they could, but they kept getting caught. My father hasn’t drawn a sober breath in all the years I’ve known him, and if you saw my mother you would say: ‘Mammy Yokum.’ All that’s missing is the pipe. I’m telling you, Allen, it’s Dogpatch. And I’m out of it, and I’m damned glad of it, and they hate my guts for that. Which they admit, they hate me, but they say it’s something else.

“Earl was sort of like going home for me, you know? I know I can’t do that anymore, and I’d never want to stay there, even if I could. But you need, I need, at least, some kind of base where I can go and just be
there, you know? Comfortable. And Earl was comfortable.”

“Huh,” Simmons said. He took the box out of the bag and dropped the bag on the floor. He removed the cover from the box and selected one of the envelopes at random. It contained negatives. He riffled through them, noted the dates on the front, and put them back in the box. He took out another envelope. It contained pictures. He sorted through them. He held one up. “Coming back from Saint Croix?” he said.

“I think so,” she said. “That was that white angora jumpsuit that I had. That I liked so much. That I spilled the wine on when we got the turbulence when we flew to Honolulu. Never got it out. ‘Red wine and tattoos,’ the lady at the cleaners said. ‘Nothing we can do.’ ”

“Umm,” he said. He put the pictures back in the envelope and put it in the box. He put the cover back on the box and dropped it into the bag on the floor. He sat back. “I can assume that they’re all there?” he said. “Without going through them all now?”

“Not as long as what you’ve got in that pocket’s still in that pocket,” she said. “Until what you’ve got in that pocket moves into my pocket, you can assume I went through that box, and as far’s I know, all the pictures that he took, and the negatives, were in it. And that some of the negatives, now, aren’t.”

“And where might they be?” he said.

“I hired them a limo,” she said. “They’re having a glass of wine and driving around the block until I give them the signal. Then they’ll fly right out of that car, and jump right in the window, and land right in your
lap. And they will never go see Phyllis, or let her see them.”

“And we used to be such friends,” he said. “We had such good times.”

“Right, Allen,” she said. “Was that my job description, in payroll accounts? ‘Friend, for good times’? Gimme the money, old friend.”

He took a number-ten manila envelope from his right inside pocket and placed it on the table. She picked it up and opened it. There were fifteen strapped packets of hundred-dollar bills in it. “You’re short,” she said, “ten short. Earl said twenty-five.”

He laughed. “Well, we both know Earl lies,” he said. “But this time, for once, he chose to tell the truth. It was twenty-five for Earl. That day. He turned it down. You called me and asked me if the deal was still open. I said it was, I did not say it was still twenty-five.”

“Okay,” she said, putting the envelope in her shoulder bag. “I guess you got me there. But now I’ve got you. Here. As Jesus said to Saint Michael: ‘We gonna fuck around, man? Or are we gonna play golf?’ ”

“I don’t follow you,” he said.