I'll Let You Go

by Bruce Wagner

  He became another poorly groomed, badly dressed coverboy of the money rags—Fortune, Portfolio, Tycoon—though one especially beloved, for it was Dodd’s spectacular feat to have made the greatest amount of dollars in the shortest amount of time in the pecuniary history of man. This centerfold anomaly, comely string of ciphers beneath silky spreadsheets, was responsible for the birth of Forbes’s infamous MPH graph, where IPO booty is half-whimsically measured in “millions per hour.” Like geeky campfire tales, bizarre analogies and goosebumpy stats abounded: such as how the man’s annual take matched the incomes of a hundred thousand blue-collar workers combined—or how it wasn’t even worth his time to stoop to pick up a $20,000 bill, if there were such a thing, because he’d make more than that in the seconds wasted by the effort.

  When Dodd met his wife (Joyce Gilligan was his father’s “second” secretary, a sad sack resigned to spinsterhood) he was still working for Trotter Waste Systems. To get out from under, he invested $13 million in the fledgling start-up of a once high-flying industry, which the reader has by now surely inferred. He renamed the company Quincunx, at the suggestion of his sister—the golden calf could have been called ePiss or iShit for all anyone cared—and within three years he was Dodd Trotter the Eighteenth and we’ll leave it at that. Once, details of the acquisition of vast personal fortune were revelatory, offering insight and inspiration; those times are no more.

  Now he walks through a building, earbud wire slacking to a phone hidden in his pocket. He does not have the fashion sense of his dad; balding since he was thirty, he shaves his own head, usually missing meadowy patches of hair at the base of the skull. He is in the mood to buy an empty shell of a structure, another in the strange series his daughter Lucy already avouched. Today, his real estate consultant has steered him to a Beaux Arts husk: the Higgins Building at 2nd and Main.

  What was it about vacant buildings that captivated him? He shared the idiosyncrasy with his father—both engaged in epic searches, one seeking new edifices for the dead, the other dead edifices once for the living. For Dodd, it had begun with a magazine article about an abandoned nineteenth-century asylum in Connecticut. He’d bought it sight unseen, then moved on to rusted refineries, desecrated churches, ghostly downtown movie palaces—all of which he determinedly refused to develop. Consortiums built private prisons in hopes of landing government contracts; when that didn’t happen, the bankrupted jails still stood. Dodd had already snapped up three such institutions and had no other plans but to let them sit.

  He obeyed Joyce’s command to see a specialist, who immediately prescribed Prozac for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, 100 mg, once a day; BuSpar, also for OCD, 15 mg, twice a day; Seroquel (an anti-psychotic he took for sleep), 100 mg, once at night; Tegretol (mania), 200 mg, three times a day; Neurontin (mania), 300 mg, twice in the morning, once at noon, twice at night; and Lamictal, for “rapid cycling” between poles of mania and depression, one tablet, twice a day. He cheated with Prozac, adding 100 mg in the afternoons. The specialist said Prozac tended to “elate” a manic.

  “I’ll get you archive photos,” said the consultant, shuffling through lobby debris. “Everything’s from the thirties,” he said. “It was all marble—before the scavengers got to it … make a great loft building.” He pointed to the ceiling. “All this was copper conduit. Brass doorknobs everywhere, engraved with HB. Clarence Darrow used to rent a whole floor.”

  “Hello?”

  “Clarence Darrow used to have offices—”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “I’m not disturbing you, Doddy?”

  “Not at all,” he said, continuing his walkabout. Realizing that Mr. Trotter was taking a call, the consultant moved away to give him privacy. Dodd pushed the earbud further in as he spoke into thin air. “Just looking at property.”

  “What else is new?” said Bluey, sardonically.

  “How are you feeling?”

  He knew she was calling to discuss the day’s obits.

  “Well, Winter told me a marvelous joke.”

  “Is Winter doing stand-up now?”

  “Don’t you be silly,” she laughed. “Would you like to hear, Doddy?”

  “I would. Yes, I would, Mother, very much.”

  The consultant cautioned him to take care as Dodd poked around at the base of the stairs. A solitary pigeon watched their lazy progress.

  “We were going over my album and Winter suddenly says, ‘God was sobbing on a cloud.’ Well, her delivery was so natural, Doddy, that I had no idea what she was saying. I said, ‘Winter, what on earth are you talking about?’ ‘God was sobbing on a cloud,’ she said, cool as can be, ‘when an angel floated up and said, “What’s the matter? Why are you crying?” And God says, “I’m in love with an atheist—but she doesn’t even know I exist!” ’ Isn’t that marvelous, Doddy?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “I thought it a delightful thing. And Winter—well, I never knew her to tell a joke. And she doesn’t know where she heard it, but it must be Thurber or Wilde. It does sound like Wilde, doesn’t it, Doddy?”

  “It’s very witty.”

  “Oh, Doddy, did you read about the poor little girl killed in Brentwood?”

  A fifteen-year-old who went to school in the Palisades had been struck by a car in a Montana Avenue crosswalk; Lucy had already told him, but he didn’t let on.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “The father saw her get hit—how awful! How could you ever get over seeing something like that? An old man, who shouldn’t have been driving. Ninety-four years old! They showed the shrine on the news. That’s what they do now, the friends and neighbors tape letters and flowers to telephone poles until they rot away. Do you remember the Deutschmans?”

  “Howard and Lillian.”

  “Well, Howard just dropped dead—at a hundred and three! At St. John’s. Born in St. Petersburg. Did you know he played bridge? The article says he was an expert, even wrote a couple books. Now that, to me, is marvelous … the things you find out, Doddy, after they’re gone! Howard was a great friend of Sybil Brand—there’s a jail you could probably have for a song! It’s closed now, did you know? Where do they put all the prisoners, that’s what I wonder about. What do they do with them? You know, your father and I used to see the Deutschmans all the time at the Hilton, for the benefits. In the grand ballroom—oh, that was long before Merv moved in. Long before. Howard had a degenerative hip. And you’d better believe Lillian’s still cutting a rug, at ninety-one! Who did the Deutschmans know? The Bloomingdales, the Darts, the Jorgensens—now, there’s another one! Earle just died, at a hundred and one. Didn’t I read you that? Do you know what the paper said, Doddy? That he was working out with a personal trainer three times a week and playing tennis before he died. At a hundred and one! It said that Earle Jorgensen spent three days on a schooner watching San Francisco burn after the earthquake—in 1906! Now, that’s old. Did you know Marion—Earle’s wife—did you know that Marion’s son is Donald Bren? He’s got almost as much money as you do, Doddy. Land in Orange County: the Irvine Ranch. And of course Howard and Lillian knew the Annenbergs—everyone knew the Annenbergs. The Deutschmans were very much a part of the Sunnylands Christmas crowd. Walter always called Sunny ‘Mother’—ugh! Don’t you ever call Joyce that, Doddy, don’t you ever!”

  She went on like that while he made his way to the sidewalk. The consultant followed and they climbed into the Arnage.

  His mother was on to another obituary, and he let her talk all the way to Beverly Hills. It was comforting to hear her chattily cogent, because of late there had been some reason to worry. A few days after the release from Cedars, Winter had found her standing in the hall in frozen repose. Startled, Bluey pretended she was trying to recall where she misplaced a book, but it was clear to Winter that the old woman was literally lost. Dodd phoned their dear friend Dr. Kindman, who suggested she be evaluated for Aricept; the billionaire had seen the Alzheimer’s drug promoted in National Geographic, next to an a
d for a pill that was supposed to help your dog remember better when he began having trouble responding to his name. He thought that odd.

  He eased his mother off the phone as they neared Beverly Vista, the grade school he had attended as a boy.

  Back in the sixties, the Trotters lived on Bellagio Road (they always seemed to live on a road), just outside the eligibility zone of the Beverly Hills school system. Louis could have sent his kids to Buckley or Oakwood or Westlake—could have sent them anywhere—but wanted them in public school instead. So he bought a house on Roxbury, south of Wilshire, and Winter stayed there with the children during the week. Dodd and Trinnie could walk to grade school; that way, when they graduated, they could walk to high school too, even closer but in the other direction. His father liked the unpretentious small-town feel of that. Hadn’t Beverly High’s “trapdoor” swimming pool been famously filmed in It’s a Wonderful Life?

  His alma mater had turned to him for help. BV had been badly damaged in the Northridge quake; since then, the lovely orange-brick California Romanesque revivalist-style buildings were entirely fenced-in, with students housed in “temporary” school-yard bungalows. The district wanted to demolish the school and build state-of-the-art facilities, but there was opposition, both nostalgic and fiscal.

  The Board of Education came up with an Environmental Impact Report that provided four suggestions. The first was to do nothing—they called it the No Project Alternative, meaning the bungalows would remain. The second was the Auditorium Rehabilitation with New Construction Alternative; the third, a Partial Historic Rehabilitation with New Construction Alternative; and last, a Historic Rehabilitation Alternative—restoration of the school as in its heyday. The fight was between the PTA, who wanted to tear the thing down, and the preservationists, who reminded that all schools in the precious Beverly Hills system were official historic landmarks. The feud had lasted years.

  Marcie Millard, former treasurer of their eighth-grade class and now honorary president of the PTA, had charmingly approached Dodd at a scleroderma fund-raiser. She looked the same as he had always pictured her, hair upswept and old-fashioned, as it had been in the school production of The Music Man. She made sure to refer to such shared touchstones—long-ago plays, outings, cultural ephemera—when they spoke, yet Dodd had the perverse sense she didn’t really remember him, and had found out by chance (or the Internet) that he was an alumnus. Sometimes her words and manner seemed too scripted and eager, but maybe that was just her way. Marcie’s kids were now at BV and she expressed her disgust and contempt for “the scandal of district politics” that had caused the near seven-year delay in renovations. The children, she said, were the ones who suffered. She wanted to know if Dodd would be interested in funding a new campus, ballsily suggesting the school might even bear his name as a result of his largesse.

  So there he was again, walking through another shell, this time retracing smaller steps taken more than thirty years before. The group—Marcie and her carefully selected PTA brethren: architect, dentist, restaurateur—wore hardhats and missionary smiles, as if the mere presence of Dodd Trotter, their Dodd Trotter, class of ’71, completed—sanctified—the dream team. Their billion-dollar angel.

  Passing through the condemned halls spooked him. He went to the rest room, and Marcie called after, “Not sure the equipment’s working too well in there!” He stood on the spidery-fissured diamond-patterned tiles and peered through the wire-cage windows. The architect came in, trying a faucet, which erupted in a rusty geyser. When the water cleared, he washed his hands and reminisced about a field trip they’d taken to Paradise Cove. Dodd said he’d never been to Paradise Cove and the architect had to admit he’d confused him with Tim Gaspard, a brainy boy who played the harp.

  Before he left, Marcie made a final plea. She hoped, she said, they could create an environment as creative and technologically sophisticated as the campus at Four Winds, where Dodd’s children were enrolled. Oh, she’s good, he thought.

  The consultant waited in the car while Dodd took a slow walk around the school’s circumference, ringed by stucco’d condominiums and duplexes in the French Normandy or Spanish Colonial style, their attractive leaded-glass bay windows presiding over tiny lawns like great dark open mouths. His attention turned to the playground. The prefab bungalows were hideous; how bizarre that parents had tolerated them all these years. A bell rang and children poured out. He was startled how a generation had changed the complexion of the student body from garden-variety Jew to Benetton: Korean, Latino and Persian.

  They all looked happy enough.

  Earlier, had Mr. Trotter looked back through the Bentley’s smoky rear window as it pulled away from the historic Higgins Building—had he had cause to look back—he might have seen a fiftyish detective in a serge suit rounding the corner. The gentleman had a homeless man in tow, or rather was towed by the homeless man; they’d just come from the St. George, where only yesterday the badly decomposed body of a woman had been found in bed, strangled by her own sheets.

  The wily Sherpa was none other than Someone-Help-Me, who, rebuffed the night before, had discarded the spoiled custom-made sign that had provided his name. It was Will’m’s misfortune the beggar had chosen that very night to camp in an alcove across from the venerably decrepit Higgins “plant.” Awakened by a caroming warble of sirens from black-and-whites, he had poked his head from the cardboard; it was then that he saw an alley child in the light of the street lamp, and heard an unmistakable shout calling her back to darkness. A large, charcoaly figure appeared and lifted the girl to his back, covering her with a greatcoat before galloping off.

  The vagrant and the detective walked from alley to sidewalk, scrutinizing the crime scene.

  “Did the girl seem to be in any distress?”

  “That time of night … little girl that age. I’d be distressed. Not in bed with her toys all safe. I would be—”

  He rasped his words, interposing repulsively guttural clicks, grunts and snickers.

  “Was she fighting? Did he force her—”

  “—wouldn’t be playing no kinda game that time of night.”

  “But he shouted at her,” said the detective, mildly exasperated.

  “A command—and you better listen. ‘Come ’ere, girlie!’ All ‘Englified,’ too, like he Michael Caine! Shit, that one’s a bear.”

  “You saw her face.”

  “Not too well. But I’d know her. Yep, I’d know her!”

  “And the man?”

  “I didn’t so much seen him but heard him.”

  “Then how could you identify?”

  “That one hard to miss! Big as a house—I know that one. Chased after him awhile, too. Couldn’t keep up, me with my leg … Never thought he go that way, not with kids. Them who fuck kids is pure shit.”

  “Which way did he run?”

  “Down Broadway. I didn’t go no further. He was movin’ and groovin’—the girl on ’im like a papoose!”

  “Now, you know this man?”

  “Name Will’m but some call ’im Topsy.”

  “And you know where to find him?”

  “Give me heehaw and I’ll know, know what ahm sayin’?”

  One-legged Fitz passed by and Half Dead nipped the informer’s ankle, drawing blood.

  “Mother fuck you, spunion! Old crackhead bitch!” He lowered a fist down on the dog’s spine and the thing trundled off. “I’ll kill that mutated peesuhshit!” He pounded the air with a gnarly fist. “Kill you too, Half Man!”

  Fitz skedaddled as the dog dodged a bike messenger, who threw them an oath.

  Someone-Help-Me rubbed his bitten ankle as he cane-lurched after the laughing detective on the short walk back to the St. George.

  †For the careful—or skittish—reader, we can assure that a fortune of Dodd Trotter’s magnitude, shepherded by a man of his skill and temperament, was destined to remain one of the great fortunes of our time. If that same reader needs more assurance, suffice it to say, the pr
escient CEO had invested heavily not only in real estate but in energy, the “go-go” field of the new millennium.

  CHAPTER 14

  Little Search Engines That Could

  Lucy Trotter had a mission. She would help her cousin, the boy who was first—next to Edward, of course—in heart and in blood. She would do this large and amazing thing for him and be Author in the process. She had finally solved the Mystery of the Blue Maze—or was at least well on her way, for the riddle now had a designation: Marcus Weiner, long-lost father extraordinaire. She had pried the surname off a reluctant Winter, then backed away from further interrogations. Vanity would not let her take the easy route.

  So, she Yahoo!’d and Google’d, fidgeted and stressed; there were a million pages to sift through on the Web. She back-slashed, skidded and WWW’d her way from Net Detective 2000 to The Skip Tracing and Locating Missing Persons Resource Center, The Hollywood Network’s Missing Persons CyberCenter, How to Find Anyone Anywhere, Tracing Missing Heirs, Missing Persons Throughout the World, and TrackStar Inc.—America’s Missing Person Locator (an Infotel Company). Each site offered Certified Missing Persons Investigator courses and on-/off-line seminars in locating specialized detectives (the latter would have been a cheat). Lucy staved off tears of anxiety, frustration and boredom—YOU ARE VISITOR 193,784—mailing in subscriptions to PI and Pursuit magazines and Professional Repossessor once she got her seventh wind.

  The free sites were filled with suggestions on how to track down the vanished through genealogy, local 411, voter registration, birth and civil records, criminal and military, real estate and alumni, news archives, former husbands, former wives, licensing bureaus, hospitals, et alia.

  There were Netherlands databases and comprehensive national White Pages and what seemed to be an infinity of pathetic, once-poignant notices from those looking for loved ones stretching all the way back to the birth of the Net—how could she possibly sort through it? She enlisted her phlegmatic brother to root out Social Security numbers on Lexis-Nexis while she, with halfhearted incompetence, tackled property deeds. It felt hopeless.