In Love and Law

by Drake Koefoed

  “I’d like to see if you can solve an algebra problem.”

  “I can.”

  “Sight unseen?”

  “Sure.”

  “Here it is.”

  “Read it to me. I’ll see if I can do it in my head.”

  Bob read it.

  “This is a simultaneous equation in two variables. Y is 14. Want me to tell you how to do it?”

  Bob looked in the back of the book at the answer. 14. “Tell me.”

  “Got to get two expressions in the same variable. So divide the first one through by 2/3 Y, and multiply the second one by the square root of two, and you have x= this and that. Set the two expressions equal to each other, multiply through by 7, and subtract Y from both sides, and there it is. Y=14.”

  There was a knock on the door. It was Quint and Poquita. Will introduced everyone. “I thought the seven three was going to bring you.”

  “It did.”

  “I, oh, it’s been plenty of time. Are you here with a truck?”

  “It’s coming. Chrissie got us a travel agent, and the travel agent got everything happening. I just talked to her on the phone and she said she was in the little brick house, and that’s where she was putting us.”

  Will went to the window. “Take the truck around there, go straight at the Med, and it will be on the left. Quint, when you have time, I’d like you to look at the fish ponds, see what we need to do. Poquita, would you do a trick for Bob and Teresa?”

  Quint went outside. Tell an aquarist you have fish ponds, and he wants to see them.

  Poquita saw a deck of cards on the table. “Here, Bob, shuffle these.”

  He did.

  She took them and dealt them to a pile, face up, on the table. She turned them over. “I will tell you which card you are going to find, starting at the top of that deck. The first is the two of diamonds. As you turn each card, I will tell you what the next one is.”

  He turned the two of diamonds.

  “Ten of hearts, jack of clubs, five of spades, nine of hearts, seven of diamonds, three of clubs, nine of clubs. Let’s make it hard. Cut the deck and show me the first card in the stack.”

  It was the seven of spades. “Then the next is the four of clubs, then the ace of diamonds, king of clubs, queen of hearts.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “Memorize the cards.”

  “She memorized a dictionary.”

  “C’mon.”

  “Ask her a word. A real strange one.”

  “Diakensis.”

  “The final stage of the meiotic prophase marked by the contraction of the bivalents. I have no idea what that means. Will probably does.”

  “How long do you remember things for?”

  “I have never tried to remember something and not been able, unless I also forgot that.”

  “Tell Bob my policy on nudity.”

  “Models over 18 can change where they like. Under 18, they must do it by themselves. Over 18, cleavage and the nipples pushing the fabric are all right, but no more than that. Under 18, neither. Models over 18 can pose nude if nothing shows in the pic. Models under 18 may not pose nude, regardless. They will not be permitted to do anything their parents told them not to do.”

  “She is safe with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why so restrictive even on adult models?”

  “Let me give you our career plan for Teresa, if we can pull it off. She does juniors, back to school and that stuff in the Sunday supplements. She gets dressed and made up to look younger, and she does Mother’s day with Marcie. Then she moves into swimwear and dresses and all that. You blink, and she is 18 doing lingerie. She gets a bit part in a movie, a couple of TV commercials. She’s 22, and she gets a supporting role for a hundred. She’s 25, and she gets a lead for five hundred. She’s 27, and she gets a starring role for a million. And someone has nude pix of her they can publish. She can make a movie a year for five years, and each one for twice what she got for the last. Then the nude pix show up. Cruddy, badly shot sleazy junk. Or at best, Marc shot her for Playboy. Beautifully shot erotica. Still, if you were her agent, would you wish she hadn’t done it? I shot Marcie Della’s first paying job when she was 16. She wanted to pose nude, and I told her she would not be doing it. Today, she owns a 737 and a Lear jet”

  “I wouldn’t want Teresa to do it anyway.”

  Marcie came down the stairs in a gown Aurora was probably offering for less than the cost of a semi tractor, and some Phillipa shoes, also reasonably priced.

  Marcie put her arms around Teresa. “I’m sorry I was so rude. I’m under a lot of pressure, and I sometimes act pretty silly.”

  “It’s OK, Marcie.”

  Since she had it on anyway, Will shot her in it. Teresa got a chance to see them at work. She was amazed at how fast they worked. Marcie changed outfits in less time than it takes to waste a dollar at a casino, and then it was “This way. Catch the light from that window. Back a little. Move around some. Shake your hair.”

  Marcie wanted to wear 4112 with the suede boots. Then they decided the grey stockings would be better. She came back out, and they shot that. 4113 was a lost cause, so they just shot it and put it back on the rack. 4114 was cool, and they did it with two different pairs of shoes and then again in the sky blue Marcie liked.

  Bob and Teresa left.

  They shot negligees for a couple hours. Marcie prowled the house like an alley cat. Like? Be nice. She laid on beds, strutted about, sat on couches with innocent looks, and looked over her shoulder with anything but innocent looks. She fussed with her shoes, brushed her hair, and tried on jewelry. She got in and out of outfits faster than a lady who did that professionally. She did every role from the extremely high priced call girl to the little innocent girl who had no idea how good she looked. May was quite busy with hanging things up and all. They hit the wall, and everyone but May went to sleep. Will outlasted the rest for a few minutes, starting an upload to Aurora. He included a little message about Teresa, the digital recording of her agreement to sell the pix, and some technical details.

  * * *

  In the morning, Aurora had sent the highest praise for Will and Marcie’s work, and a contract for Teresa. Will called Bob, and he came with Teresa and her lawyer. He looked at his client’s contract. She would be paid at about the gross national product of Somalia and her education would be on top of that. She could forget about high school, she would not be going back there. She signed. They got on Marcie’s big birdie, and they were in Rome. There, Teresa was lined out with a Jesuit priest, Father James, who would help her out a little with her schooling. Aurora sent a truck to the airport, and she certainly did not need to worry about having nothing to wear. Not that it has much practical application, but women will look at 25 perfectly nice outfits and say they don’t have a thing to wear, but if they look at a thousand, they don’t say that.

  The girls toured Rome, Marcie walking point, Teresa right behind her, followed pretty closely by Will and Chrissie, and a couple of cops. There was also a guy named Bruno who carried a big satchel of catalogs, and said very little to anyone but Will.

  Marcie went to her old routine of visiting every store. She bought something, gave away a catalog, got her picture taken with the owner, or whoever was there, and went on, leaving a business card so they could download their pix from her website. When she hit the old school, she summoned Kitty, who talked with them quietly in his wonderful Italian, and got their addresses to send the posters to. Marcie even learned to write ‘love and kisses’ in Italian, such a student she was. She saw all the cathedrals, and showed them off to Teresa, who knew just a little bit about them from Father James.

  They got a ride now and again from a little bus that had a small bathroom, and the unique property that whenever Marcie and Teresa got in they always came out in different clothes. The cops had one buddy in the bus, a very quiet fellow who didn’t even talk to Will much.

  They visited the Vatican, where Marcie o
pined that ‘God has great taste!’

  They went to some big department stores, and Marcie sometimes had to stand on a ladder to sign her posters. She had special very large markers for this sort of work, and she explained to whomever, that the gold flecks were real gold, which they were.

  She took her little guest everywhere, of course followed by the camera. She stopped occasionally at a bar, and left her little charge in the hands of the cops while she got photographed with well known bartenders and owners. They were marked down to receive posters. She drank so heavily that Will was usually asked to finish the shot she had ordered.

  * * *

  It was time for Mardi Gras, so Marcie had to go to New Orleans. She had her own modestly appointed float, built on a truck chassis. Well, modestly appointed is a relative term, and by Marcie’s standards, well, let’s forget it. Teresa wore a jester’s outfit. She took one side of the float. Marcie took the other in a knit body suit in mixed colors, and black boots with gold buckles. Marcie wrote a big M on the front of a catalog and handed it out, and reached for the next one. Teresa did the same on the other side, handing out a different version of the catalog that had Teresa on the front. The usual aluminum silver dollar sized coins were thrown from the upper deck by a group of court jesters played by, yeah, well, models and other nice looking ladies whose backgrounds were not carefully checked. They were not subject to Will’s rules about the exposure of certain parts, and limited only by the customs of Mardi gras, that rigid set of repressive rules. The coins offered a catalog if you could call or get on the web site.

  When the parade was done, they toured the French Quarter. Marcie bought lots of things she did not need, and gave away lots of catalogs. Teresa tried her French with the Cajuns, who enjoyed it. Will sent a little smile to Marcie, who knew he could speak Parisian French so well that Parisians would think he was one of them. He could no more speak Cajun French than his cats could.

  They ate oysters with Tabasco, crawfish, and a few blue crabs. Will sucked the fat on the crawfish, and people called him ‘coon’, which he obviously liked. The Marcie method was, you came in, said hi, bought something, handed out catalogs, took pictures, and left. Lots of bartenders and patrons got cards with the website on them so they could download pix of them with Marcie. If you were in a restaurant or bar, you would ask if they wanted an autographed Marcie Della poster to put here on the wall. Bar owners put their arms on Marcie, and the poster came in the mail real soon. Local framers, found by the staff, offered usually a 20% discount on framing the posters. Some of them delivered the posters to get the framing work. Marcie had mastered the location deal. She found the spot she wanted to put it in, and measured it, and offered a poster that size. Knowing our Marcie, you can be sure the spots she wanted were not inconspicuous, nor the images excessively modest.

  Marcie’s visit was faster than Katrina’s, and ever so much more pleasant.

  They went to Baton Rouge and Lafayette. Posters were much in demand, now being printed in the bus Marcie had just bought, and had painted in her usual modest pattern. Will could edit pix, print posters, and lay them out on a table for Marcie’s signature and cuddle Chrissie in a nice sleeping berth.

  Poquita and Quint met the bus, and Poquita instantly made everything twice as efficient and practical. Poquita’s ability to communicate was not a problem, but she only knew how to pronounce words from the pronunciation guides. She could read and memorize the dictionary in a day, but she couldn’t talk. Will went to work on that when they got to Spain, by hiring a Spanish secretary. You can get around a lot of places with a pretty, well spoken secretary on point, dressed in the latest Aurora. You can get out if you need to, also, if you have a couple of Spanish feds with you.

  They visited bookstores, where Poquita bought a grammar book at one, and a lot of books on CD at another, where they were very inexpensive. She would listen to a very well spoken reader do Don Quixote, and she would read the text at the same time, and have a fair Spanish accent. She would also be able to recite the entire book word for word in her poor Spanish, for whatever that was worth. Since she had read it in English in high school, she would be able to recite it in English as well.

  They went to an espresso shop, which in Spain, is kind of like a Starbuck’s with much lower prices, better coffee, and people behind the counter who make a decent living, and like their jobs and their customers. Marcie and Teresa circulated, and were shot with everyone in the shop. They went out to the bus and changed, and came back in and did some more of it. Everyone was given the web site address so they could get pix of themselves with Marcie, who was beyond supermodel at this point, and Teresa, who was heading for the Stratosphere herself. Will made a joke about that, and Teresa said something about how much she would like to really go up there. Will conferred with one of his Spanish associates. It was pretty early in Tennessee, but he made the call anyway.

  “Bob? Will. Sorry to call you at such an hour. May Teresa go for a ride in a high performance jet? She’s fine. I just think I need to ask. OK.”

  “Juan, will you ask if we can send her on a two seat fighter up where you can see the stars?”

  “I know we can, Will.”

  He made a short call. “Car on the way. The usual she didn’t see, doesn’t know.”

  Will got Teresa. “Your Dad, and the Spanish Air Force have agreed to let you go somewhere you will forget about, get on an aircraft you have never seen, go somewhere you have never been, and see things you have not seen. Are we on the same page?”

  “This never happened, and it’s gonna be real fun.”

  “But it wasn’t fun, because you were not there, and never saw it, and so on.”

  “Got it. Thank you, Will.”

  Marcie changed outfits in the bus while Teresa got in a car that didn’t exist. Marcie came back in, and got some more good shots. The patrons were really cool. They had all said they didn’t mind the photo shoot, and ignored it, providing an ambiance Will liked. Marcie flirted with the men, confided with the women, and went through a dozen outfits. It was going so well, she did another dozen. Poquita got waivers from everyone, allowing them to be in the catalog or whatever. She gave out business cards so they could get on the web site and get copies of the pix. Will went out and printed pix for everyone, and some posters for the coffee shop. Marcie took them in, and asked what the autographs should say. The shy, proper Spanish people were a little overcome by the brash outgoing American model, but not offended. They accepted pix and catalogs without quite understanding why they were getting them. They read the little insert in Spanish, which showed Marcie on the cover of Vogue and all that. They were quite impressed, and appreciated her paying everyone’s bill.

  A few doors down, a grocery was still open. In they went. Will talked to the man in the office, who turned out to be the owner. What a beautiful store. Could Marcie Della do a quick photo shoot here? They needed some groceries, too, and if he would like, he could have some Marcie Della posters. He could be in them. Show us the wall space.

  Marcie looked at produce in jeans. She shopped at the deli in a little black dress. She stocked the shelves in a denim dress. She examined a fish with the grocer. She went to the canned goods in white linen. She stood in front of the meat counter and had the various cuts described to her while wearing a satin skirt and a fluffy sweater. Cheese was sliced for her while she wore a silk dress and iridescent stockings, pumps by, oh, you guessed it, Phillipa. She looked over dry goods. She examined a mop, an implement that our dear would not know how to use. She changed clothes. She wore a jacket into the frozen food locker, where the jacket was appropriate, if you wear a jacket at minus 10 F.

  They printed posters for the store, and got on the bus to go to their hotel.

  Chapter 16 Touring Germany Musical Theme; That Kind of Thing by J.J. Ames When Will got back to the hotel, he connected the camera with the laptop, and did his usual. Copy to the memory thumb, which would go by mail to his house, and Hank would put it in the safe depos
it box. Copy the pix, raw, to Aurora and the backups. At Aurora, they understood that bad shots would be in the pile. What mattered was that the irreplaceable perfect shot would not be lost. The upload was automatically saved off site a thousand miles away, something that would seem odd, if Will bumped the shutter by accident, and took a picture of the floor, that picture might be kept for 100 or even 1000 years.

  Chrissie was already in bed, so he got in with her. * * * In the morning, the Lear took them to the bus, and they went on with the tour. The itinerary was in the hands of Poquita, who could wake up to the phone, answer questions, add a stop to the list, memorize the travel times and directions, and be asleep again in five minutes. She left slack in it because Marcie tended to want to visit every village they passed. She would sit in the square and be photographed, then run around and buy things from the locals, and give out catalogs. Aurora was putting captions on the pix, saying where they had been taken, and also putting in little pieces about the history of some tiny village Marcie had been in for a half hour. Marcie gave the impression that she loved everyone she met in all those places because she did. Father James worked Teresa very hard, speaking softly so that he almost could not be heard. She learned the history of everywhere they went. She read the classics, learned the basics of a dozen languages, and the life sciences. Will taught her math, physics and chemistry. Chrissie heard him once telling her “I already told you it’s discontinuous at x=7. What’s so hard about that?” A fifteen year old girl being berated for not knowing a function was discontinuous. She seemed to take to it, though. By the time they got to Portugal, she could explain how a nuclear reactor worked, and the fundamentals of steel heat treating. When she explained the drive train of a main battle tank, and the external ballistics of heavy machine guns, it started getting pretty easy to guess where her information was coming from. They went through France, where they were quite popular. They visited designers, photographers, artists, and writers. Marcie told reporters that France was ‘probably the nicest place in the world.’ She was photographed everywhere from villages to Paris. In Paris, she walked around on the street in negligees. The French police were interested, but mainly in getting their pictures taken with Marcie, or perhaps something else, which Marcie did a good deal of. Some pix were shot in police stations, with Marcie in outfits even she would not have worn on the street. She was in custody. She was in a cell. She was kissing cops. She was on the shooting range in a bra and panties, shooting under the direction of a French policeman. The poster printer was using ink by the case. From France, they went to England. Marcie and Teresa were photographed on Tower Bridge, in front of Big Ben, and particularly in the coastal areas, where they could wear their swimsuits. They entertained the nation, as Marcie tends to do. She became very upset when she found that a lot of the Marcie Della stuff was unlicensed. Will hired one of the most prominent of English law firms to sue the pirates. Marcie told the press, “I have worked very hard for what I have, and I share it. I gave half a million dollars to English charities last week. The people who take my name and picture, and sell things they have no right to sell are thieves. They are stealing from the people I try to help. You people who do these things, you will be sorry.” It turned out they were. The law firm got some pretty substantial judgments, took most of the money in fees, but turned a fair amount over to various charities. Marcie took nothing. This was a lesson in Koefoed’s rule of dog kicking. If you plan on going around kicking dogs, learn what a pitbull looks like first. They finished the English tour, and it was time to go to Ireland. They picked up a little guy named Sean. All their stuff went in the seven three.