Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

  Shortly after that visit, Grandmother Shaw died in her ninety-ninth year. She had given explicit instructions that she was to be cremated and her ashes intermingled with the ashes of her husband and placed again beneath the feet of the statue of Aphrodite. The funeral was a bleak and sparsely attended affair. It was shortly after the funeral that Jacqueline first started fearing for her life.

  She claimed there were men following her, she claimed to see dark visions in her meditations. When they walked along the city streets she was forever turning around, searching for something. Grimes never spotted anything behind them but he humored her fears. When he asked her what it was that frightened her so, she admitted that she feared one of her brothers was trying to kill her. She said that murder ran in her family, something about her grandfather and her father. She wouldn’t have been surprised if her grandmother died not from an asthma attack but was smothered with a pillow by one of her brothers. The only family members she ever talked about with kindness were her sister and her dear sweet Grammy. Grimes never told her of his brutal conversation with Grandmother Shaw. They would have married immediately but for a delay in Grimes’s divorce proceedings. He offered his wife everything, he didn’t care, because everything he had was nothing compared to all he would have, but still the case dragged on. And still Jacqueline’s fears increased.

  Then, one winter evening, he returned to the apartment from his dental office. She had been at the Haven all morning, meditating, but was supposed to be home when he arrived. He called out to her and heard nothing. He looked in the bedroom, the bathroom, he called her name again. He was looking so intently he almost passed right by her as she hung from the gaudy crystal chandelier in her orange robe, a heavy tasseled rope twisted round her neck. The windows were darkened by thick velvet drapes and the only light in the room came from the chandelier, dappling her with the spectrum of colors sheared free by the crystal. Beneath her thick legs a Chippendale chair lay upon its side. Her feet were bare, her eyes open and seemingly filled with relief. Looking at her hanging there Grimes would almost have imagined her happy, at peace, except for the gray tongue that rested thick and swollen over the pale skin of her chin like a stain. He took one look and knew just how much was gone. He turned right around and took the elevator down and used the doorman’s phone to call the police.

  Along with the police came a man, tall and blond. He obtained a hotel room for Grimes that night at the Four Seasons, an apartment in a modern high-rise on Walnut Street for him the very next day. Without having to do anything, Grimes’s possessions were in the new apartment, along with a brand new set of contemporary furniture. The lease was prepaid for two years. On his new big screen television set was a envelope with twenty thousand dollars in cash. That was the last he saw of Jackie or her family. The last he saw of his hundred million.

  “You’re right,” I told him as we sat side by side at the Irish Pub, across from his new and fully paid luxury apartment at 2020 Walnut. “That’s an absolute tragedy.”

  “So when you talk about almost getting a piddling little share of some crappy little lawsuit,” said Grimes, “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Why’d she kill herself?”

  “Who knows? There was no note. She was always so sad, maybe it just got to be too much. Or maybe her paranoia was justified and someone in that gruesome family of hers killed her. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t that punkette of a sister, either. But it doesn’t make a difference to me, does it?”

  “Guess not. Who was that blond guy who paid you off in the end?”

  “Family banker.”

  I nodded. “You ever been to a place called Tosca’s?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Just asking.”

  “What’s that, a restaurant?”

  “It’s an Italian place up on Wolf Street. Great food is all. I was thinking you can take your wife sometime, make it all up to her.

  “Fat chance, that. I tried to go back but she divorced me anyway. I don’t blame her, really. She’s remarried, some urologist, raking it in even with the HMO’s. He’s got this racket where he sticks his finger up some geezer’s butt, feels around, and pulls out a five-hundred-dollar bill. She says she’s happier than she’s ever been. Tells me the sex is ten times better with the urologist, can you believe that?”

  “It’s the educated finger.”

  “And, you know, I’m glad. She deserves a little happiness. You want to know something else?”

  “Sure.”

  “I sort of liked her. Jackie, I mean. She was a kook, really, and too sad for words, but I liked her. Even with all her money she was an innocent. We would have been all right together. With her, and a hundred million dollars, I think I finally might have been a little happy.”

  He turned back to his drink and swilled the scotch and I watched him, thinking that with a hundred million I might be a little happy too. I took another sip of my beer and started to feel a thin line of nausea unspool in my stomach. And along with the nausea it came upon me again, the same suspicion I had felt before, that somewhere in this unfolding story was my own way into the Reddman fortune. I couldn’t quite figure the route yet, but the sensation this time was clear and thrilling; it was there for me, my road to someone else’s riches, waiting patiently, and all I had to do was discover where the path began and take that first step.

  “What now?” I asked myself and I wasn’t even aware I had said it out loud until Grimes answered my question for me.

  “Now?” he said. “Now I spend the rest of my life sticking fingers in other people’s mouths.”

  10

  I SLIPPED MY MAZDA into a spot on the side street that fronted the brick-faced complex. I snapped on the Club, which was ludicrous, actually, since my car was over ten years old and as desirable to a chop shop as an East German Trabant, but still it was that type of neighborhood. At thirty minutes per quarter I figured three in the meter would be more than enough. I pulled my briefcase out and locked the car and headed up the steps to the Albert Einstein Medical Center.

  In the lobby I walked guiltily past the rows of portraits, dead physicians and rich guys staring sternly down from the walls, and without stopping at the front desk, took my briefcase into the elevator and up to the fifth floor, cardiac care. The hospital smelled of overcooked lima beans and spilled apple juice and I could tell from just one whiff that Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky in Room 5036 was not a happy man.

  “I’m nauseous all the time,” said Jimmy Vigs in a weak, kindly voice as I stepped into the room. He wasn’t talking to me. “I retched this morning already. Should that be happening?”

  “I’ll tell the doctor,” said a nurse in a Hawaiian shirt, stooping down as she emptied his urine sack. “You’re on Atenolol, which sometimes causes nausea.”

  “How am I peeing?”

  “Like a horse.”

  “At least something’s working right.” Jim was a huge round man, wildly heavy, with thick legs and a belly that danced when he laughed, only he wasn’t laughing. His face was shaped like a pear, with big cheeks, a large nose, a thin, fussy little mustache. He lay in bed with his sheet off and his stomach barely covered by his hospital gown. In his arm was an intravenous line and beside his bed was a post on which three plastic bags hung, filling him with fluids and medicines. The blips on the monitor were strangely uneven; his pulse was eighty-six, then eighty-three, then eighty-seven, then ninety. I wondered if Jimmy would book a bet on which pulse rate would show up next and then I figured he already had.

  “Hello, Victor,” he said when he noticed me in the room. His voice had a light New York accent, but none of the New York edge, as if he had moved from Queens to Des Moines a long time ago. “It’s kind of you to visit.”

  “How are you feeling, Jim?”

  “Not so well. Nauseous.” He closed his eyes as if the strain of staying awake was too much for him. “Helen, this is Victor Carl, my lawyer. When a lawyer visits you in the hospital it’s bad news for someone. I
guess we’re going to need some privacy.”

  She smiled at me as she fiddled with his urine. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  “With what he’s charging, this is going to be the most expensive pee in history.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said as she finished emptying the catheter bag, but still smiling. “Just another moment.”

  “She’s been terrific. They’ve all been terrific. They’re treating me like a prince.”

  “When are they cleaning out your arteries?” I asked. For the past few years Jim had worn a nitro patch and kept the medicine by his side all the time, often popping pills like Tic-Tacs when things got tense. He had had a bypass about ten years back, before I met him, but I had never known him to be without pain and finally, when the angina had grown unbearable, he had consented to going under the knife, or under the wire at least, to clear his arteries by drilling through the calcium deposits that were starving his heart.

  “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “By tomorrow evening I’ll be a new man.”

  The nurse fiddled with the drips and took some notations and then left the room, closing the door behind her. As soon as it was closed, Jim said in a voice with the New York edge suddenly returned, “You bring it?”

  “I don’t feel right about this,” I said. “I feel downright queasy.”

  “Let me have it,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Let me have it,” he said.

  I was reaching into my briefcase when an orderly came in with a tray. I snapped the case closed before he could see inside.

  “Here’s your lunch, Mr. Dubinsky,” said the orderly, a big man in a blue jumpsuit. “Just what the dietitian prescribed.”

  “I’m too nauseous to eat, Kelvin,” said Jimmy, weak and kindly again. “But thank you.”

  “You’ll want to eat your lunch, Mr. Dubinsky. Your DCA’s tomorrow morning, so you won’t be getting dinner.”

  “I’ll try. Maybe a carrot stick. Thank you, Kelvin.”

  “That’s right, you try, Mr. Dubinsky. You try real hard.”

  When the orderly left, Jimmy ordered me to close the door and then said, “Let me have it.”

  I stepped over to the tray the orderly had just brought and lifted the cover. Carrot sticks and celery and sliced radishes. Two pieces of romaine lettuce. An apple. A plastic glass of grape juice. An orange slice for garnish. “Looks tasty.”

  “Let me have it,” he said.

  “I don’t feel right about this,” I said as I again opened my briefcase and pulled out the bag. White Castle. A grease mark shaped like a rabbit on the bottom and inside four cheese sliders and two boxes of fries.

  He looked inside. “Only four? I usually buy a sack of ten.”

  “You need a note from your cardiologist to get ten.”

  He took one of the hamburgers and, while still lying flat on his back, popped it into his mouth as easy as a mint. He breathed deeply through his nose as he chewed and smiled the smile of the righteous.

  “What about your nausea?”

  “Too many damn carrots,” he said in between sliders. “Carotene poisoning. That’s why rabbits puke all the time.”

  “I’ve never seen a rabbit puke.”

  “You’ve never looked.”

  While he was shoving the third hamburger into his mouth, keeping all the while a careful eye on the door, the phone rang. He nodded with his head to the phone and I answered it. “What’s Atlanta?” asked the whispery voice on the phone.

  I relayed the question to Jimmy and he stopped swallowing long enough to say, “Six and eight over Houston.”

  “Six and eight over Houston,” I said into the phone.

  “This is Rocketman,” said the voice. “Thirty units on Houston.”

  I told Jim and he nodded. “Tell him it’s down,” said Jimmy Vigs and I did.

  “That’s the problem with this business,” said Jim. “It never stops. I’m scheduled for surgery tomorrow and they’re still calling. I need a vacation. Want a fry?”

  “No thank you.”

  “Good,” he said as he stuck a fistful in his mouth. “They’re not crisp enough anyway, you need to get them right out of the fryer.” He stuck in another fistful.

  “You know, Victor,” he said when he was finished with everything and the bag and empty boxes were safely back in my briefcase and the only remnant of his surreptitious meal was the stink of grease that hung over the room like a sallow cloud of ill health, “that was the first decent bite I’ve had since I was admitted. Starting tomorrow I’m going to change everything, I swear. I’m going to Slim-Fast my way to skinny, I swear. But I just needed a final taste before the drought. You’re a pal.”

  “I felt like I was giving you poison.”

  “Aw hell, they’re scraping everything out tomorrow anyway, what’s the harm? But you’re a real pal. I owe you.”

  “So then do me a favor,” I said, “and tell me about one of your clients, a fellow named Edward Shaw.”

  Jimmy sat still for a while, as if he hadn’t heard me, but then his wide cheeks widened and underneath his tiny mustache a smile grew. “What do you want to know from Eddie Shaw for?”

  “I just want to know.”

  “Lawyer-client?”

  “Lawyer-client.”

  “Well, buddy, you know what Eddie Shaw is? The worst gambler in God’s good earth.”

  “Not very astute, I guess.”

  “That’s not what I tell him. He’s the smartest, most informed, most knowledgeable I ever booked is what I tell him. And he’s such an uppity little son-of-a-bitch he believes every word of it. But between you and me, and only between you and me, he is the absolute biggest mark I’ve ever seen. It’s uncanny. He’s such a degenerate he couldn’t lose more money if he was trying. He’s the only guy in the world who when he bets a game, the line changes in his favor, he’s that bad. He bets a horse, it’s sure to come in so late the jockey’s wearing pajamas. I could retire on that guy, go to Brazil, lie on the beach all day and eat fried plantains, suck down coladas, never worry about a thing, just bake in the sun and book his losers.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Well, you know how it is sometimes. Collection can be a problem.”

  “Isn’t he good for it?” I asked, wondering how much Jimmy knew about the family.

  Jimmy let out an explosion of breath. “You know Reddman Pickles? Well this loser’s a Reddman, and there aren’t too many, either. The guy’s worth as much as some small countries, let me tell you, but it’s all tied up in some sort of a trust. He lays the bets based on his net worth but he can only pay up based on his income, which is less than you would figure with a guy like that. When his old man dies, then he can buy the moon, but until then he only gets a share of a percentage of what the trust throws out in income.”

  “Ever have any real trouble getting him to pay?”

  Jimmy shifted in bed a bit and the line on his monitor flat-lined for a moment, his pulse number dropping to zilch, before the line snapped back into rhythm and the pulse registered ninety-three, ninety-six, ninety, eighty-eight. “What’s up, Victor? Why so much interest in Shaw?”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “Lawyers don’t just ask.”

  “I heard that he got pretty far behind and you started getting tough, a little too tough.”

  He turned his head away from me. “Yeah, well it’s a tough business.”

  “How much did he owe?”

  “Aw, you know me, Victor, I wouldn’t hurt a pussy cat.”

  “How much?”

  “Lawyer-client, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Over half a mil. Normally I cut it off before it gets that high, just cut them off and work out a payment plan, but he has so much money coming and he loses so regularly, I just couldn’t bear some other book taking my money. I let it get too high, and I was willing to be patient, with the interest I was charging it was going to be my retirement when his old man died. Bu
t January a year back I took more action than I should have on the game and laid off too much to the wrong guys. The refs don’t call the interference on Sanders, and it was clear, so clear, but they don’t call it and I’m way short. Next thing I know those bastards started squeezing. I was in hock to them, Shaw was in hock to me, so I had to apply some pressure. It was just business is all, Victor, nothing…”

  The phone interrupted him. I picked it up. “What’s the spread on the Knicks tomorrow night?” said a voice.

  “Hello, Al?” I said into the phone, rapping the handset as if the connection was bad. “Al? Are you there, Al? I think the tap shorted out the wires. Al? Al? Can you get on that, Al?”

  “Aw cut it out,” said Jimmy, reaching for the phone.

  “I don’t understand it,” I said. “He hung up.”

  “You’re killing me here.”

  “You said you needed a vacation. Tell me what you did about Shaw.”

  “I went to Calvi.”

  “Calvi, huh?” I said. “I heard he’s gone to Florida. Any idea why the sudden visit South?”

  “I don’t know, maybe the boss got sick of the smell of those damned cigars.”

  “I wouldn’t blame him for that.”

  “I also heard some rumors about him getting impatient with his share, stuff I never believed. But I got sources say that Earl Dante was behind the rumors and his ouster.”

  “Dante’s rising fast.”

  “Dante is a scary man, Victor, and that is all I want to say about that.”

  Just then the door opened and a thin young man in a black leather coat and a black fedora stepped into the room. On some guys the leather coat and the hat would have made them look hard, like Rocky, but not this guy, with his long face and beak nose and wide child-taunted ears. He wore thick round glasses and between his pursed lips I could see a set of crumbling teeth. When he saw me he stopped and stared.

  “Hey, Victor,” said Jimmy, “you know Anton Schmidt here?”

  I shook my head.

  “Next to you, Victor, he’s the smartest guy I know.”