“Six rooms now,” Rita said. “That’s all. Mimi, Jerry, Wilma, Dusty and Sheldon all have their own rooms. Sheryl is staying in the extra bedroom in Mrs. Blatnick’s suite and Richie has been sleeping on the sofa.”
“He’s working,” Steve said. “How come he can’t afford his own room?” A breeze swept in through the open window, bringing a faint scent of sand and muck. A framed poster from the opening of one of Uncle Max’s other centers banged against the wall.
Rita shook her head. “You don’t know how expensive the rooms are at that hotel. It’s just a shame he should have to sleep on a sofa like that when you have all that room at your apartment.”
“No,” Steve said firmly. “I’m not sharing my apartment with Richie Fenstersheib. He’s a jerk and I don’t like him. You made me get him a job and I’ve been sorry ever since.”
“Now, really, Steven. What has Richie done to you lately? I see him out on the site and I’m very proud of him. He seems to be doing very well.”
Steve admitted that Richie hadn’t caused much trouble since the union dispute. “I don’t care. I’m not letting him stay with me.” He reached forward and rearranged the construction dictionary and the volumes of specifications that sat at the edge of his desk.
“He’d share the rent with you,” Rita said. “And it would just be for a few months, until this job is finished. You do have that extra bedroom.”
“I don’t know.” Steve kept toying with the books, and his resistance was weakening. His salary didn’t go as far in Florida as he’d expected it to, and it’d be nice to get some help on the rent. “I’ll think about it.”
“You know, I think he’s a little in awe of you,” Rita said, leaning close to Steve, as if she was transmitting confidential information. “You’re very successful and important around here, and he’s just a carpenter. Just a journeyman carpenter.”
“Enough,” Steve said. “I told you I’ll think about it. Now tell me what’s new with the wedding.”
“Mimi and Jerry have decided to have it at the Neuschwanstein Palace, but they’re waiting until Sunday, the fourth of March, to give people a chance to answer the invitations. And they’re having a special dress made for Sheryl that’s supposed to cover up her stomach.”
“The wedding of the year,” Steve said dryly.
“Not a word, Steven,” Rita said, shaking her finger. ”You want to go out and find yourself a Jewish lady lawyer, then we’ll see what you have to say.”
Steve had the feeling that as long as he hung around with the Blatnicks and on construction sites, he wasn’t likely to meet that nice Jewish lady lawyer for some time. “Maybe I won’t say anything to the Blatnicks. But nothing is going to stop me from telling you and Daddy what I think.”
“That’s fine,” Rita said. “Your father forgets everything you tell him within five minutes. And I know how to keep my mouth shut.”
“Which reminds me. In the middle of that meeting you said I’d never told you about how you had to put a lay-in tile ceiling in the front six feet of the store. Let me see that package I gave you. I’ll show you where it says.”
Rita handed the package over to Steve and they sat down to go over the plans again. Steve forgot all about the lizard and the pending suit from the Florida Club. It was almost like old times in the kitchen back in Pennsylvania. The only things that were missing were the girl scout cookies and Harold sleeping in the next room.
23 – Dolores
On Friday afternoon, Steve ran into Richie in the main atrium just after lunch. “Hey, cuz. Your mom said you might let me stay with you,” Richie said. “Am I in?”
Steve looked at his cousin. There were years of family parties between them, shared memories of growing up. Richie wasn’t the cousin Steve would have chosen, but he was still family. He remembered how good it had been to hang out with Dan, how that history between them mattered. Maybe he could have the same thing with Richie. “Yeah. You can move in. But just til the project is over, OK?”
“OK. You can pick me up tomorrow at the hotel. Not too early, though. I need my beauty sleep.”
“More than you know,” Steve said, as Richie walked off.
The next morning Steve drove to the Neuschwanstein Palace, but Richie wasn’t in the suite. Steve walked around the pool for a few minutes, looking for him. Though it was hot, there weren’t many people out. Sheryl was lying on a lounge chair working on her tan, and he said hello.
The grounds around the pool were scattered with directional arrows telling how many miles it was to Buenos Aires, Munich and Berchtesgarten. At the entrance to the beach, a bored blond guy with a great tan sold suntan lotion from a scale model of an Alpine chalet. Steve walked under the waterfall at the edge of the pool and into the bar, a dark, wet-smelling place called the Lagoon Saloon where he saw his cousin slumped in a corner. “Hey, Richie,” he said, nudging him.
“Hey, Stevie,” Richie said, a little sleepily. He held out his palm and Steve slapped it. “How’s it hanging?”
In a gesture he’d picked up on the site, Steve scratched his crotch elaborately and said, “A little to the left today.”
Richie smirked. “Hey, you got some cash? I know where we can score some primo dope.”
Steve shook his head. Whenever he saw the Blatnicks, he felt he had immersed himself in a sort of never-never land. With the Blatnicks’ luck, Richie’s connection would turn out to be an undercover cop. At least once Sheryl married Morty there’d be a lawyer in the family.
Steve had a beer, though it was only ten o’clock, and bought one for Richie. His eyes got accustomed to the dimness, and he liked the quiet reggae beat in the background, but he knew he had better places to be on a Saturday morning than hanging around the bar at the Neuschwanstein Palace. “You gonna be ready to go soon?” he asked.
Richie shook his head. “Grandma’s on the warpath,” he said. “One minute she wants me out of the suite, out of the hotel. The next minute she says I’m deserting her in her old age, after all she’s done for me. I’m just lying low in here until my mom tells me the coast is clear.”
They talked for a few minutes and Steve drained his beer. “Well, I’ve got my suit on under my shorts,” he said. “As long as we’re going to hang around I’m going to go into the pool.”
Richie gave him the thumbs up. “Swim a few laps for me. I’ll get back to you.”
Richie ordered another beer but Steve got out of the bar before he could be expected to pay for it. He walked down to the pool, dropped his shorts, shoes and shirt next to Sheryl, and dove in.
He felt like he was wasting the little free time he had. There was a murder mystery he was reading on the table next to his bed; he had just gotten to the part where the killer was ready to strike again. He was interested in getting some new shirts, and Brad had mentioned a place that he said had nice merchandise. And then there was the option of just kicking back in his own living room with a beer and a game on TV.
He backstroked up and down the pool a few times and then stood up in about five feet of water and splashed Sheryl lightly. She sat up and glared at him, and he noticed that her bathing suit accentuated the growing roundness of her belly.
“Hey, stop that,” Sheryl said.
Steve was bored and wanted some fun. “Why don’t you come in the water? It’ll be good exercise for you.”
Sheryl lay back on the chair. “I washed my hair this morning. No way am I getting chlorine in it.”
A very pretty young woman with coal-black hair walked up. “Excuse me, you’re blocking the sun,” Sheryl said.
“You’re Sheryl Fenstersheib, aren’t you?” the woman asked, speaking with a slight Latin accent.
Sheryl sat up and looked at her. “Yeah. What kind of difference does it make to your life?”
“It makes a big difference if you steal my boyfriend.”
“Morty is your boyfriend?”
The woman smiled. “Yes. He calls me Darling Dolores.”
Steve groan
ed. Any day could turn into another episode of the Blatnick soap opera, with strange women making trouble. He lifted himself up out of the pool, shook off, and stood next to Sheryl’s chair. “What a wild and crazy guy he is, that Morty,” he said.
Dolores continued, “And I’m not going to let some stupid rich bitch steal Morty away from me.”
Sheryl stood up, though it took her a little doing. “Who are you calling a rich bitch?”
Dolores smiled. “It’s true! Morty said you were too stupid to know when people were talking about you.”
“That’s a lie,” Sheryl said. “Morty never said anything like that about me.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know the things he says about you! He comes to me when he can’t take any more of you and your stupid family.”
Steve stepped forward. “I think you’d better leave.”
Dolores turned to him. “Which one are you? The pot-head brother or the stuck-up cousin?”
Steve smiled. In a flash he imagined Morty describing the Blatnicks to this girl. “I see Morty has a kind word for everybody.”
Sheryl turned to Steve and frowned. “I don’t need your help, Stevie. I can dealing with trash like this.”
“Who are you calling trash, you knocked-up piece of garbage?” Dolores asked. “I hate you and your whole stupid family.”
“Watch what you say about my family,” Steve said, surprising himself.
“This is a free country,” Dolores said. “I can say what I please.”
“Yeah, well, we have a saying here, in this free country. Go jump in the lake. Or the swimming pool.” All it took was the flat of his hand pressed into Dolores’ left shoulder, and she went backwards into the pool.
“That takes care of her,” he said. He stood over the pool smiling as Dolores surfaced, taking big gulps of air and shaking the water from her long dark hair.
“Why’d you do that, Stevie?” Sheryl whined. “You always mess everything up.”
Dolores stalked up the steps at the shallow end. She had her shoes in her hands and her black and white polka-dot dress clung to her figure. She was braless and dripping strands of that arresting coal-black hair hung to her shoulders. She reminded Steve of Sophia Loren in a late-night movie he had seen once on television. If Morty really was dating her, he could see why.
Dolores stopped at the top of the steps and shook her fist at Steve and Sheryl. “You’ll see! I won’t forget this! I won’t give up Morty so easy. I’m going to come to your wedding and tell everyone in your stupid family about me and my Morty and then we’ll see if you still want to marry him!” She turned and stalked off.
Steve and Sheryl lay down on adjacent lounge chairs to dry off and think about what Dolores had said. Sheryl was pouting and Steve thought she might cry.
“You don’t know she’s telling the truth,” Steve said. “She could be some old girlfriend with a grudge. Maybe he ditched her for you.”
Sheryl looked up. Her eyes were wet. “You think so?”
Steve nodded. “But we ought to check her out.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t know that woman. You don’t know what she could do. She could mess up your wedding.”
“So what do we do?”
They agreed to tell Dusty, who they found sitting out on the beach under an umbrella, a gin and tonic in his hand and bright blue zinc oxide smeared across his nose. “So what do you think we should do, ice this chick?” Dusty asked, after they had described Dolores and the encounter at the pool.
Steve’s mouth dropped open. “You’re not serious!”
Dusty elbowed Sheryl and laughed. “I knew he’d fall for it,” he said. “You gotta lighten up, Steve.”
Dusty took a long, thoughtful sip of his gin and tonic, and then looked up. “Seems to me we’ve gotta talk to her,” he said. “Find out if she’s been dating Morty, if she wants to try to bust up the wedding. Maybe we can buy her off.”
Sheryl shrugged. “Maybe we should just let her have Morty.”
Steve stared at her, sure she was just putting up a front.
Dusty turned to her. “Sheryl, sweetheart, you’re pregnant with the man’s child. You’re getting married in a couple of weeks. You call it off now you’re gonna break your mother’s heart.”
“Didn’t ya ever hear of transplants?”
Dusty stood up. “All right. Did you get her number?”
“Nope,” Sheryl said.
“Address?” Dusty asked. “Last name?”
Sheryl pointed at Steve. “Wonder boy pushed her into the pool, remember? It wasn’t a good time to pull out my address book.”
“So call Morty. I’ll bet he knows how to reach her.”
Sheryl shook her head. “I don’t want to call Morty.”
“Steve, call Morty,” Dusty said.
Steve got up. “There’s a pay phone by the bar.”
Sheryl stood up, holding her back. “All right, I’ll call him. God, you guys are a pain in the neck sometimes.”
Sheryl started walking up the beach. “Where you going?” Dusty asked.
“To my room, if you don’t mind. I am about to get married to the guy. I can at least talk to him in private. And boy, he’s gonna get a piece of my mind.”
“Just remember, no fudging,” Dusty said. “If you don’t come through I’m gonna sic Steve on him.”
“What am I, a dog?” Steve said.
Dusty rolled a piece of paper into a ball and tossed it across the sand. “Yeah. Fetch.”
An hour later, they were in Dusty’s Cadillac convertible, driving south on Collins Avenue. Steve and Sheryl were squeezed into the front seat with Dusty driving. Sheryl hadn’t actually spoken to Morty; she had tricked the receptionist at his office into giving her Dolores’ address. Steve was impressed.
“You know, Richie is still at the bar at the hotel,” Steve said. “I was supposed to help him move to my apartment today. What if he goes looking for me? Are you sure this is okay? Maybe we should have told Aunt Mimi and Uncle Jerry after all.”
“Don’t be such a wooss,” Dusty said. “We’re just going down to talk to this Dolores. See what she knows.”
They pulled up in front of an old Art Deco apartment building on South Miami Beach. It had once been painted a pastel shade of yellow, but that had faded to be no color at all. There were no balconies on the building; instead there were little rims of plaster stuck over the windows as partial shade from the hot Florida sun. Steve had read in a guidebook that they were called eyebrows, and he thought of every window in the building as an eye, watching them, ready to call the police at any minute. “This is it?” He didn’t want to get out of the car.
This is the address,” Dusty said. “All right, everybody out. And Steve, try to keep from pushing the girl into any pools, bathtubs, sinks, anything like that.”
Steve got out and stretched. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
They walked up to the front door and rang a bell. Dolores stuck her head out of a window on the second floor.
“Who is it?” she asked. She looked down. “Oh, it’s you. I don’t have anything to say to you.”
Dusty pulled his wallet out of his pocket and held it up for Dolores to see. “See this, sweetheart?” he asked. “What’s inside it has some talking to do to you. But it don’t talk outdoors. You gonna let us in?”
Dolores pulled back into the window and a moment later the door buzzed. Dusty opened it and they all walked in.
Dolores lived in a messy, funky studio apartment overlooking Collins Avenue. It was small and bright, furnished with fifties wire mesh chairs and a leopard-skin rug. Once inside, Steve and Sheryl sat on chairs, Dusty lay back on the bed, and Dolores leaned against the windowsill.
“I can’t just walk away from Morty Fleischmann like that,” Dolores said, snapping her fingers. “We have a baby I have to look out for.”
“You never said you had a baby,” Sheryl said.
Dolores turned to her. “You never gave me a chance
.”
“Did you have an orgasm with him?”
Dolores laughed. “Orgasm? Honey, that’s all I have with Morty. Why do you think I don’t want to let him go? His good looks?”
Steve looked around the room. “Where’s this baby of yours now?” he asked.
“He’s in day care,” Dolores said. “Usually I work in the afternoons, but today I have off. I’m a beautician.”
Sheryl sat up. “I need a good place to get my hair done before the wedding.”
Dolores pulled a card off the table and handed it to Sheryl. “Here, I’ll give you my card. We can fix up that dye job for you.”
Dusty stood up and started to walk around. “You realize this puts a new spin on the ball, Dolores,” he said. “We’re gonna have to think this one over.”
“Just don’t think too hard,” Dolores said. “This wedding you’re planning, it’s what, a month away?”
“Yeah, a month.” Dusty walked to the door and stopped with his hand on the knob. “We’ll be in touch.”
Steve was lost in thought as they walked out of the building. He knew Dolores was bad news, a cheap floozy who was out to milk the Blatnicks for everything she could get. But he liked her. She was gorgeous, for starters, and then there was her attitude, something about the way she dressed, the way she stood, the way she had decorated her apartment.
As they walked toward the car, Sheryl was still wondering out loud. “I can’t believe she has orgasms with him.”
“Maybe you can ask her advice when she’s doing your hair,” Steve said. “Honestly, Sheryl, are you going to trust that girl to do your hair for your wedding? To her old boyfriend? She’s liable to dye you blue.”
“You’re supposed to have something blue for a wedding, stupid,” Sheryl said. “And something old and new and borrowed and dirty.”
“Dirty?” Steve said. “I never heard that one before.”
As Sheryl got into the car, she said, “See, you don’t know everything, Mr. I’m So Smart It Hurts.”
By the time they got back, Richie had made up with his grandmother and postponed moving out. Morty was hanging out with him in the suite.
Invasion of the Blatnicks Page 21
