Mink Eyes

by Dan Flanigan

  “Sorry, Boss, but that computer and me and that little fascist fuckhead Jarvis and me can’t live together. And that’s sad because I don’t get to see Sara much anymore. You taken a run at her yet?”

  “And to think that you are the product of a Catholic education. Is nothing sacred to you?”

  “Can’t say that there is. Not since Father Murphy stroked my ass that day in grade school.”

  “Good luck at the lake,” O’Keefe said.

  “I already got lucky. I ain’t nothin’ but lucky.”

  WALKING OUT OF the coffee shop, O’Keefe heard George say, “Fabulous, Boss. They’re fabulous” loud enough so that everyone in the coffee shop could hear it. It was George who had long ago been the one to reveal to his gaping-mouthed friend Peter O’Keefe the “facts of life,” satanically initiating the astonished and appalled ten-year-old O’Keefe into the dismal world of sluts and hard-ons, sperm and cunts, rubbers, and the dreaded “clap.” O’Keefe still remembered it vividly. He thought maybe it had been the first thing in the world to break his heart. George had concluded his filthy narrative with a flourish: “So, you thought that little dick of yours was just to piss with, huh, Pete?”

  George was still trying hard never to grow up, and O’Keefe wished him well. He mildly envied George his easygoing attitude toward life and its pains and pleasures, his way of taking life as it came, his way of not making a big deal about anything.

  Since it was Saturday, O’Keefe was able to park the van directly in front of the hotel. He sat in the back of the van in a

  swivel seat and watched the front of the building through a custom-designed, one-way window that he had specially installed in the side of the van. The van also contained sophisticated, audio-visual snooping equipment, a portable toilet for emergencies only, a very narrow, built-in couch-bed, a hot plate, and a small refrigerator. An electronically-controlled panel in an interior wall concealed the guns he had lied to Kelly about. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his mobile phone light up. He picked it up before it rang.

  “O’Keefe,” he answered.

  “Having fun?” It was Sara.

  “I was about to slash my wrists. I forgot how boring this really is.”

  “Harrigan wants you to call him right away.”

  “Is he pissed?”

  “He’s always pissed. Or acts like it anyway. He’s got some new business for you.”

  “What did I tell you just a couple of hours ago?”

  “No new business for a month.”

  “Right. But it’s Harrigan. Never say no to Harrigan.”

  “Why?”

  “Later. Got to move on.” O’Keefe clicked the phone off and then on again and dialed Harrigan’s number, still watching the front of the hotel. Julia, the receptionist, answered on the second ring. If she let it ring more than twice, Harrigan would not be pleased.

  “Harrigan, Fremont, and Love.”

  “May I speak to the King of Spades in the Department of Frauds?”

  “Hi, Pete.” There would be a smile on her face at the other end of the line. “He’s waiting to take your call.”

  Shit, here we go, he said to himself as she transferred the call to Harrigan’s office. Harrigan would be sitting at his huge desk and looking out at the far horizon beyond the city thrusting up below him. He had the best corner office in the tallest building in town, one of those glass boxes that were so ugly on the outside but so satisfying for the guy on the inside looking out. The floor-to-ceiling windows sustained you with sunlight and gave you a dangerous illusion of command over the city beneath you. Harrigan would be sitting in there like the King of the Hill his very self. His mind would be working furiously as always, clawing and chewing at the raw information, breaking it down, sorting it, spitting out the irrelevant, putting the seemingly inexplicable things aside, back into the nether reaches of his consciousness, only to let them come forward later on when they would make more sense. Harrigan called it “puzzling.” According to Harrigan, a good lawyer was just a puzzle solver. And a great lawyer? Well, he was the guy who invented the puzzles for the good lawyers to try to solve.

  Julia’s voice on the intercom told Harrigan that O’Keefe was returning his call. Harrigan hit a button, engaging the speakerphone on the left-hand corner of his desk.

  “Harrigan,” he answered.

  “King of Spades, this is the Ace of Trump, and I’m after your ass.”

  But Harrigan was all business today. “Can you get down here right now?”

  “I’m sitting in front of the Excelsior Hotel waiting for our boy Preston to come out.”

  “I can’t believe you haven’t nabbed him yet. This weekend. It’s got to be this weekend. Because, on Monday, he gets on his big bird and flies away. And then who knows when or if we’ll get another chance? But right now I need you here.”

  “I’m trying to figure out how I’m gonna be two places at once.”

  “Where’s all those deadbeats on your payroll? Where’s George?”

  “I’d say that right now George has his hands full. Literally.”

  “Old George. Why didn’t we turn out like him? He’s got the world by the balls, and he’s smart enough not to squeeze. I can still see him in the class spelling bees. He never once got past the first word they asked him. Remember when he missed the word ‘apple’?”

  Harrigan and O’Keefe both started laughing.

  “He goes ‘A P P’ . . . and then he stops and thinks his ass off for a minute . . . and then he spits it out: ‘E L’! Dumbest fuck in Sister Bridget’s whole fourth-grade class. But life-wise, Pete, he’s got us beat all to hell.”

  “He’s Polish. We’re Irish. What else can I say?”

  “Send Sara down there to watch for Preston.”

  “Come on! She doesn’t need this stuff.”

  “What are you, a male chauvinist? Give her a chance. She might like it. Since your boys can’t seem to get the job done, maybe we ought to give the girl a chance.”

  Harrigan’s voice ebbed and flowed, dimmed and then grew louder. O’Keefe knew what Harrigan was doing because he had seen him do it so often. He was pacing around his office, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, looking out the window into the distance as he listened, turning back to shout at the speaker box when it was his turn to say something. The sound of his voice rose and fell depending on whether he moved closer to or farther from the speaker phone. The speaker caused an echo effect, so it sounded like Harrigan was walking around talking in a box.

  “Thirty minutes,” he said. “There are two gentlemen in my conference room, waiting only for you. You’ll like this one. It’s different.”

  “What is it?”

  “You ever heard of a mink farm? Or maybe it’s a mink ranch? No, this is a tacky little deal, so we’ll call it a farm.”

  “‘Mink farm?”

  “Thirty minutes. And the role you play today is the ‘United States Marine.’ ‘A Few Good Men,’ ‘Semper Fi, Do Or Die,’ ‘Death Before Dishonor’ and all that stuff. These gentlemen are patriots, and good Christians to boot. And whatever you do, keep a straight face.”

  CHAPTER 4

  ON HIS WAY to Harrigan’s office O’Keefe worried about Sara. If Preston came out of the hotel, she would have no idea what to do. He had told her to call him at Harrigan’s office if Preston appeared and that he would give her instructions then. Well, he would eventually need to placate her with some street work, and now was as good a time as any to start, especially since she was chafing to do it. She wouldn’t to be happy much longer just being his Girl Friday.

  He would have to train her. That would bring them more intimately together as they sat in the van on stakeouts. That could get complicated. If he let it. If she let it. Of course, there would be no complications at all if he could just continue to mentally muscle through those times when she stood next to him and leaned down beside him, her left arm across the back of his chair as she reached down to point out something on the building p
lans that lay on the desk in front of them. Or if he would just look away when she crossed her legs. Or if he would avert his eyes instead of watch her as she studied something in front of her, her dark hair falling against the soft skin of her cheek.

  SOMETHING IN HIS stomach wanted to snap as the rocketing elevator stopped abruptly and deposited him on the top floor of the tallest office building in the city in the middle of Mike Harrigan’s waiting room. Harrigan leased the entire floor. He did not yet need all that space, but he did not mind if people thought he did. Besides, he would need all the space quite soon anyway, and the space on the floor below as well, on which he had taken an option exercisable in five years.

  “You act big, and you’ll be big,” Harrigan had told him. “You act like the best, and people will perceive you as the best. You say you’re an expert, and you will be an expert, so you can live up to what you say you are. The kind of clients I want aren’t gonna hire some guy who works out of a scruffy, little shithole because he’s trying to go easy on the expenses. It’s dumber than shit maybe, but that’s the way the world is.”

  There were enough light colors in the waiting room to keep it from depressing you, but it was the dark colors, the mahogany paneling, and deep blue-black carpet that gave the room its power. Power was what the room and Harrigan’s whole setup was all about. Philosophizing as always, Harrigan had put it this way in one of their many late-night drunken talks: “The purpose of all this elegance is to induce awe in the beholder. The purpose is to intimidate. To intimidate my lawyer opponent who comes here to take a deposition. To intimidate my clients too for that matter. Most people think too superficially to figure it out. They think we just do all this shit to show off how much money we make. But that’s not it at all. It’s not money talking here. Except to the extent money means power. The nation-state in its infinite wisdom has given us lawyers the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom being the awesome, massed, crushing power of the state. All we have to do is file a piece of paper to unleash all the might and majesty of the law, with its tribunals and its penalties, its decrees and its dungeons. Listen to the language of the law, even the civil law. Summons, executions, replevins, garnishments, sequestrations, subpoenas.

  Subpoena means ‘under pain.’ Under pain. The language of the law is the language of force, the language of power. We make the rules, and if you don’t follow them, whatever they are, you’re just fucked, that’s what you are. We will break you into pieces just as easily as I can take that five-hundred-dollar vase over there and smash it on the floor.”

  O’Keefe paced slowly around the waiting room while Julia, who looked like she had been designed to go with the room, finished taking telephone instructions from one of the lawyers. Here the supplicants before the throne of justice waited to be ushered into the inner sanctum. One of the walls of the waiting room was a window wall. O’Keefe stood there looking down on the city. From up here the city seemed empty of people, a dead object, for contemplation only. From up here you could not see the winos and the bag ladies, you could not smell the exhaust fumes that belched out of the back ends of the buses, you did not almost wheeze and break out in a clammy film of sweat as you walked through the fetid air in the humid summertime. Up here in the wintertime you did not get knocked damn near backward by the biting wind that whooshed down the canyon-like streets and razored right through you.

  He heard Julia flirting with the lawyer on the telephone. Was he sleeping with her? How many of them were sleeping with her? Certainly most of them wanted to. His heart, always ready to offer itself in silent pity, went out to her. She was like so many of the girls in the offices all over the city, hoping one of these hotshots she worked for would dump his wife and marry her, hoping to trade one kind of bondage for another, more opulent one. Her heart had probably been broken too often. But then, she wouldn’t care a bit about some wife who had been betrayed because of her. He did not really know whether to dislike her, pity her, or try to take her to bed himself. She hung up the phone, smiled, and told him to go on back to the conference room.

  The conference room was another of Harrigan’s shrines to power. Harrigan sat with two men at an eighteen-foot-long conference table. The table was black and glossy. You could see your reflection in it. Harrigan and the two men sat in walnut chairs upholstered in a soothing, gray fabric, silently waiting, staring out the window. Harrigan stood up when he saw O’Keefe, and his guests followed his lead.

  “Gentlemen, this is Peter O’Keefe. Mr. O’Keefe, this is Mr. Anderson, and this is Mr. Lufkin.”

  Anderson and Lufkin, each in his fifties, looked like church elders. Each wore an inexpensive, light-colored suit, a white shirt, and a tie that blended so thoroughly with the suit and shirt you could hardly tell it was there. Each had a small U.S. flag pinned to the lapel of his suit coat. Anderson, small and stolid looking, resembled someone O’Keefe knew or had seen before—Henry Kissinger, O’Keefe would realize later, with less forehead and less nose. Lufkin was jowly, a substantial piece of beef well marbled with fat. He had a full head of coarse, dark hair. He looked like a cross between a football linebacker and a small black bear.

  The two men examined O’Keefe as if he were an amoeba under a microscope. It seemed like no one was going to say anything. The excruciatingly awkward pause was presided over, it seemed to O’Keefe, by Mr. Anderson. But Harrigan, as usual, got quickly down to business. He poured cups of coffee for everyone and sat down. The others sat down when he did.

  “Gentlemen,” he said to Anderson and Lufkin, “since Mr. O’Keefe’s time and my own are expensive, and I know you’re concerned about that, let me try to save as much of that expensive time as possible by summarizing the situation.”

  The two men nodded gravely. Harrigan had hit them where they lived, in their wallets, and they were appreciative. Today was a blue day for Harrigan—navy-blue suitcoat, pants, and socks, navy-blue Italian-made loafers, a creamy, light-blue, custom-made, French-cuffed shirt, cufflinks of dark-blue lapis trimmed with gold, and a tie made of blue silk with a touch of crimson in the pattern that caused the tie to stand out distinctively from all the rest of the blue. Even his watch had a blue lapis face. The only thing not blue was his wedding ring, a simple band of brushed gold. He was a man of only average height, but his clothes always made him look taller and thinner than he was. He had light brown hair, thick but straight, longer than a lawyer’s hair was supposed to be. It covered the tops of his ears and touched the top of his shirt collar in back—a hint of rebellion, a genuflection back to the ’60s. His nose was a bit too sharp. He had a hard face and soft eyes.

  “Mr. O’Keefe,” said Harrigan, “these gentlemen are members of the board of directors of Prosperity Farms, Inc., which is in the business of operating a mink farm down in the lakes area. They breed minks. Investors put up their money and buy a pair of minks. Sometimes they buy lots of pairs of minks. How much is it that you gentlemen personally have invested in this operation?”

  “One hundred forty thousand dollars,” Anderson mumbled, as if ashamed.

  “One hundred thousand dollars,” said Lufkin sadly.

  “Now these two gentlemen,” Harrigan continued, “have a lot more money in this deal than most of the other investors, but there’s probably two hundred more out there with anything from five hundred to twenty-five thousand bucks in this thing. And the idea is exquisitely simple. You just put these minks into cages together and let them do what minks do best.”

  Harrigan smiled at Anderson and Lufkin, who force-smiled back at him without amusement.

  “And pretty soon,” Harrigan continued, “you’ve got little minks running all over the place. And when they grow up, you take some of those minks and skin them.”

  “Pelt them,” interrupted Anderson. “Pelting is what it’s called.”

  “You pelt some of them,” Harrigan went on, with a sardonic glance at O’Keefe, “and you sell the fur. So you’ve already got some of your money back, and, yet, you’ve still got minks, more
minks than you started out with, and they just keep on doing what minks do best. And, of course, the company generously permits you to reinvest your earnings from the pelting to buy more minks for your account.”

  Harrigan stopped to light a cigarette. Anderson and Lufkin looked at him as if he had just made a lewd proposition to their daughters. Harrigan blew some smoke their way and went on with the story. To Harrigan the clients were not really there anymore. They had told him their stories, and now he had their stories down cold. They had become their stories. That was Harrigan’s way. People were just stories to Harrigan.

  “And although these gentlemen are directors of the company, they don’t really know much about what goes on, because this whole show is actually run by one guy, a Mr. Lenny Parker. Well, everything goes along just fine for a couple of years. Everybody’s getting paid these fabulous returns on their investments, when, all of a sudden, the checks stop coming. When they call down there to the farm, Mr. Parker is always out, and his secretary doesn’t know beans from mink droppings. And then, all of a sudden, yesterday, the secretary calls Mr. Lufkin here and says she hasn’t seen Mr. Lenny Parker for almost a month. Mr. Lenny Parker seems to have just taken off or something. And the hell of it is they’re running out of mink food, and there’s no money in the bank to buy any more.”

  “They’ll starve to death in no time at all,” said Anderson.

  “And, of course, that’s a disaster,” said Harrigan. “Because then the minks can’t do what minks do best, and all those people’s money is gone forever. So these gentlemen have retained me to do whatever I can for them legally. But the real problem is more up your alley, Mr. O’Keefe, and that problem is this. Where’s the money? And, of course, there’s the very related question of where is Mr. Lenny Parker? I explained to these gentlemen that you’re quite expensive but that you’re the best in the business, at least here locally, and even more important, you’re the fastest in the business, so you’ll get maximum results for the money these gentlemen invest in you. And accordingly, these gentlemen may wish to employ you, Mr. O’Keefe.”