“Ira Popowski,” he barked into the receiver, answering on a half ring, clearly expecting someone else.
“That was friendly.” The name, Popowski, sounded powerful. It rang of aggression and brutish intellect, desirable traits in a lawyer. “Ira, this is important.”
He recognized the gravity of my tone. “I thought you were my conference call. What’s up?”
“I’ve been speaking with Sam. By any chance, did you ever draft a will for Charlie?”
“I tried.”
“What do you mean?”
“He always put me off.”
“Shit.”
“There’s always something more important,” Ira explained dispassionately.
“So what happens if he died intestate?”
“The state laws of New York take over, and assets in Charlie’s name go to Sam. It’s relatively straightforward.”
“Except for one thing.”
“Which is?”
“Everything’s tied up in the Kelemen Group. Sam doesn’t know whether they have any other investments. I thought you might.”
Silence. Ira replied in an even, measured tone, “What do you mean, she doesn’t know?”
“Just that. Sam knows about one checking account with six hundred dollars, but that’s it. Charlie handled everything.”
“She called yesterday. She didn’t say anything about that,” he remarked, sounding harried all of a sudden. “Grove, my conference call just started. If Sam needs help, I’m in.”
“One other thing.”
“Quick,” he urged.
“Your firm set up the business. What about the fund itself? Offering documents, prospectuses, the stuff people get when they invest?”
“I pitched for the business,” Ira replied, a wistful tone in his voice.
“Charlie didn’t hire your firm?”
“Said we were too expensive.” Then Ira was gone.
I sat for a moment and grew angry. Not at Ira’s abrupt sign-off. We both struggled with the exigencies of time and the tyranny of deadlines. Our exchanges had always been blunt, with a clipped rhythm unto their own. Two Ivy League graduates unable to complete sentences. Two guys competing over who could hang up first.
It was Charlie who pissed me off. His lack of planning was completely out of character. He had been fastidious, so painfully absorbed with the details of life. Why had he dropped the ball? He left Sam nothing but a stack of trouble.
And Sam. She was smart, perkier than a closet full of alarm clocks. She had grown confident during their marriage. Yet she had avoided the one topic every couple discusses—money. What was that all about?
Not important
.
She needs help.
I dialed Betty Masters. To my dismay, the answering machine picked up. There was no choice but to leave a message. “Grove O’Rourke here. It’s short notice, but I’ll be in New Paltz tomorrow. Are you free for lunch?”
Underneath the two computer monitors on my desk, galaxies away from the charts and all the scrolling headlines, Evelyn and Finn smiled at me from a photo. That brisk fall day had dabbed rosy hues across their coff ee-and-cream skin tones, a gift from Evelyn’s Portuguese ancestors who had landed in New England generations ago. The ocean breeze mussed their hair in a way no artist, not even Crunch, could replicate. Their brown eyes sparkled like exotic jewels. The background of coral beach boulders magnified the warmth of their happy smiles. Every single day of my life now, I longed to return to that afternoon together. Especially on Fridays.
It was almost four P.M. As soon as the market closed, I would leave the hallowed halls of PCS, no loitering, not even for a second with my weekend at the ready. Friday evenings started in Central Park with my cycling club. We rode eyeballs out and hurt at the finish thirty-five miles later.
Afterward, it was takeout from Shun Lee, my favorite Chinese restaurant. Half a dozen spring rolls, a mountain of pork-fried rice, and a whole carton of Szechuan crispy beef. I always scarfed down dinner in front of some cable movie classic. It was a wonderful way to end the week.
It was for shit. I dreaded weekends. I had yet to date anyone and hid from loneliness by cycling, scouring
Barron’s
from cover to cover, or hanging out with Sam and Charlie. One of my antidotes for self-imposed isolation was gone now, and my thoughts turned cynical. There was a new way to fill those empty stretches.
Find Sam’s money. Avoid Charlie’s killer. And think long and hard about what to tell the Monthly Nut.
My discussion with Kurtz had triggered an unintended consequence. He made a request that I had no intention of honoring:
“I’m asking you to back off, Grove.”
That’s trouble.
For all my axioms, top producer this, top producer that, I still recognized one unassailable truth. Kurtz was the boss. It didn’t pay to ignore a direct order. Especially not in public.
Somewhere in a distant cubicle, Casper toiled over his fingernails. Or maybe he had moved on to his toenails. He should have left long ago, but it seemed his clippers were keeping time to my deliberation.
Plink. Plink. Plink.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The next day I tried hard to enjoy the drive to New Paltz. With the top down on my Audi,
The Best of Johnny Cash
blared over the highway noise. There had been a time when I loved to push the speedometer up over ninety, even a hundred miles per hour. Not now. Those days disappeared with an eighteen-wheeler outside New Haven. I traded speed for July sun and “Folsom Prison Blues.”
My thoughts inevitably returned to Charlie Kelemen. Locating hidden investment accounts, I feared, would take forever. Kurtz had only confirmed the obvious and even suggested patience.
“Let it play out.”
Whatever happened to your sense of urgency, Frank?
Charlie’s fund of funds seemed like a more reliable way to recoup money for Sam. The Kelemen Group was out in the open. The auditors would make things simple. And I could speak with Charlie’s investors to gain their input. Today’s visit with Betty, one of the investors, was step one.
My cell phone rang and interrupted Johnny Cash. “Bet you can’t transfer me this time,” a familiar voice observed, a touch triumphant and self-congratulatory.
Mandy Fucking Maris.
“How’d you get my cell number?” I asked, more impressed than annoyed.
“I’m a reporter. It’s what I do,” she explained. “Now why don’t you help the world remember Charlie Kelemen the right way?”
What’s that supposed to mean?
“Mandy,” I finally said, extending my phone far to the left, “you’re breaking up.” At sixty-five miles per hour, the oncoming wind made for great static.
“Stay with me, Grove.”
“What’s that? Mandy? Are you there?” I hung up, miffed by her persistence.
That woman won’t give up.
I felt like pond scum for hanging up on her. But nobody ever declared victory after talking to the press. My last trip to New Paltz had been far less complicated.
“The world just doesn’t make hippies like Abbie Hoffman anymore,” Evelyn remarked wistfully.
We were visiting New Paltz for her cousin’s wedding, glad for the weekend escape ninety minutes north of New York City. One of Evelyn’s English literature friends from Wellesley had described New Paltz as a “classic hippy town stuck interminably in the 1960s.”
Damned English majors. Normal people never used phrases like “stuck interminably.” Evelyn and I half expected to find head shops on every corner, women clomping down the streets in clogs, and gaunt men wearing faded jeans and tie-dye shirts. We looked everywhere for henna tattoos and accoutrements of social discord on loan from another era.
The town disappointed on its advance billing. None of the guys sported ponytails. And head shops? Give me a break. Instead of hookahs and roach clips, the clapboard stores of Main Street housed kitchenware and athletic goods. New Paltz probably hadn’t seen Panama Red and the good shit for twenty years.
Evelyn and I cracked up as we looked for radicals. They were either extinct or had taken refuge in the more rugged parts of the nearby wilderness.
Once we reached this conclusion, our conversation turned to more pressing matters. We speculated on how our lives would change once the baby arrived. Evelyn glowed from the sweet stew of hormones and girl juices marinating Finn. My wife never looked more beautiful, swollen belly and all.
Betty Masters had never been a hippy. She belonged to the rubber-chicken circuit of black-tie philanthropy. She wore conventional white pearls, gallons of Chanel perfume, neutral silk blouses, and trim linen suits in season. Denim was out of the question. She rarely drank but occasionally sipped wine spritzers during visits to New York City. Whenever chatter edged toward contentious topics, Betty steered clear—with one exception.
She despised her ex-husband. She called him “the unctuous, low-life miscreant that abandoned us.” He was “a vile failure of a man . . . a jar of Vaseline with legs.” She insisted his middle name was Shithead. Other divorcées in Charlie’s posse referred to their mistakes as “the ex.” Not Betty. She used his full name, Herb Shithead Masters, every time.
Herb was the classic deadbeat. He vanished after the divorce became final and could have been running a Mexican bordello for all we knew. It was as though there had never been a marriage, except for one thing. They had a son. His name was Fred. He had Down’s syndrome, and his father failed to make even one child support payment. Herb ranked lower on the food chain than organic vermin living inside the assholes of runt maggots eating turds from the bowels of syphilitic billy goats.
Ask me how I really feel.
Betty would have agreed. She seethed with anger, stayed bitter over the way a father had forsaken his son. She loved her boy. She built a careful life, one under the radar, just for Fred.
Outside her Victorian cottage, the house swaddled by steep hills and delicate birch trees, Betty broke from gardening and waved hello. She looked much like Jackie Onassis, the same jet-black hair, sparkling eyes, and recherché bone structure. The two women could have been twins, except that Betty’s face was wider and darker. Her high cheekbones suggested faraway roots.
“How was the drive?” Betty flashed a smile that would have ended hostilities in the Middle East.
“Nothing like a convertible on a beautiful day,” I said, patting the Audi’s hood.
“I hope you used your sunscreen.”
Why do women always say that?
When we kissed hello, our cheeks padding like fluffy pillows, the sweet scent of Chanel nearly smothered my olfactory senses. “Please let me buy you lunch.”
“Don’t be silly,” Betty replied. “We settled all that.”
Betty had insisted on cooking. “I make a mean cheeseburger,” she boasted over the phone after we finally connected. “Best garlic dill pickles north of the Mason-Dixon Line.” It took me all of three seconds to concede.
Now, after the drive, the prospect of a home-cooked meal appealed more than ever. I was tired of eating out. The culinary one-upmanship among New York City’s restaurants had become tedious. I longed to hang out in somebody’s house with a glass of wine and music in the background, no waiters buzzing the aisles for tips. “You sure it’s no bother?” I asked again on her front lawn.
“I’m thrilled for the company. Besides, I want you to meet my boy.” He had just emerged from the front door. “Fred, come say hello to Grove.”
Short and stocky, the kid wore a Yankees hat with the bill pointing far right. He appeared to be in his late teens, and as Fred walked toward us with a slightly pigeon-toed gait I recognized Betty’s features peeking through his flattened nose and upward-slanting eyes. He carried an aluminum bat with his left hand and squeezed a fielder’s glove under his arm.
“Hello,” he said, shaking my hand but looking away with a wan smile. Like me, he found the whole ritual of introduction awkward.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a baseball buried in that glove?” Sports have long been the world’s greatest icebreaker. I had not thrown a baseball in six years, not since breaking my collarbone during a cycling race. But the equipment beckoned like an old friend.
“Softball,” Betty clarified.
“Wanna play?” the boy asked eagerly.
I looked to Betty for her okay. She smiled radiantly. “Throw underhand and be careful,” she warned. “Fred tags the ball every once in a while.”
“Come on, Fred. Let’s see what you got.”
Betty walked inside and called over her shoulder, “I’ll call you boys when lunch is ready.”
I had no idea what to expect. Fred lined up in front of my Audi. The car was not my first choice for a backstop, but our game was slow-pitch.
What’s the harm?
“Okay, tiger. Here comes the heater.”
My first pitch was awful, below the knees and away. Fred swung with a huge, lunging golf shot around his ankles. He missed and observed, “Not a good pitch.” The ball rolled past him and bounced innocuously off the Audi’s rear tire.
The next pitch sailed outside again, but high this time. Once more Fred reached with his bat and missed. “Not a good pitch,” he repeated. The ball thumped against the rear door. No dent.
On the third try I concentrated hard and lobbed the perfect target of opportunity. The pitch floated straight down the middle like an inflatable beach ball, its arc perfect.