“I don't think a hundred thousand dollars is squat,” she rebutted. “I wish we had a hundred thousand in the bank.”
“It's squat when you should've pulled four hundred out. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Why were they refinancing the place?”
“I'm sure there's a logical explanation.” Callie paused. “You aren't going to dig deeper into this, are you?”
He gave her a sad-sack half-shrug.
“So a promise to me means nothing.”
“Come on, it's not like that.”
“It isn't? How is it, then? What are the rules for justifying breaking a promise, Clancy? Like, when's it okay to?” She was steaming. “Does this go both ways? Boy, great marriage we're having here tonight.”
“Look, honey, I don't want to fight about this.” He had messed up, and he didn't like that she was busting him for it, although she was well within her rights to do so.
“Then you shouldn't have done it.”
He didn't answer her.
“So now what?” she demanded. “When's the other shoe going to drop? How many shoes?”
“I—”
“Screw it,” she snapped, cutting him off. “You want to go off on some cockamamie wild-goose chase, be my guest. Just don't tell me you're doing it. When ignorance is bliss … I want to be ignorant, of everything. Leave me out of the loop.” She paused. “What about Will and Tom? Did you tell them?”
He shook his head.
“You going to?”
“Probably.”
She shook her head, more in sadness than in anger. “You guys are cruising for a bruising,” she warned him. “You'd better be damned careful about asking questions you might not want answers to.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Tom said. “Which doesn't surprise me, although it does make me more nervous and pissed-off about dad than I already was.”
He was on the phone with Clancy; his older brother had called him. “You talk to Will about this yet?” he asked.
“No, I called you first.”
It was nine o'clock, the following morning. A warm, balmy day, almost tropical in feeling, the beginning of Indian summer, Clancy's favorite time of the year. He was in his office at the fitness center, on a short break between appointments. Between the disconcerting news from the real estate agent and Callie's bitching at him, he had hardly gotten any sleep.
He looked outside the glass partition of his office to the large therapy room. The place was abuzz with activity. You're up to your neck running two businesses, he thought, and now this? What he was finding out about his parents was giving him an ulcerous pain in his stomach. He figured Tom and Will had the same nauseated feelings in their guts, too.
This latest development was going to make things even worse.
“What do you think this draining of funds from the family treasury is about?” Tom asked.
“How should I know?” Clancy responded. “We've already discussed how it's none of our business what they did with their money. I don't give a damn about that.” His trying to understand and then explain his parents’ erratic behavior was becoming more difficult and aggravating.
“Bullshit.”
Busted. “You're right. I do care. But it's not my affair.”
“Or mine,” Tom replied testily.
“Mine, ours, it's the same deal.” Jesus, it was so easy to hurt Tom's feelings. “The thing that bothers me is that it's so out of character. This is becoming like a wooden Russian doll. You keep opening one up and finding more inside.”
Tom was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Even if it is none of our business, don't you want to know where the money was going? What they were using it for? I never noticed any big changes in their life-style.”
“Who knows? The real estate broker speculated they were putting it into investments.”
“Walt and Jocelyn Gaines?” Tom's voice was laden with skepticism. “I can't picture that. They were wild and crazy kids in their life-style, but where money was involved they were buttoned-down reactionaries. I never told anybody this, but a few years ago I hit them up for a loan. Not much, a couple grand. I didn't know if my fellowship was going to be renewed, and I thought I might have to go out into the cruel world and get an actual job.”
He laughed; to Clancy it sounded like he was mocking himself. That would be vintage Tom.
“They sympathized with me—you know how mom was, the greatest shoulder in the world to cry on—but they flat turned me down. Said they couldn't afford it, all their money was going into their retirement fund, which they implied was ultraconservative. Going out on a limb in the stock market would not be how they would have invested.”
“The more I learn about them, the less I know,” Clancy sighed. “Knew,” he corrected himself.
“There's an easy way to find out.”
“How?”
“Ask dad.”
Clancy moaned. “That's a great idea. Why didn't I think of that? Hey, dad, I found out that great sucking sound we've been hearing was you and mom pulling money out of your house. What were you using it for, your drug habit?”
“A bit on the direct side, I think,” his brother replied. “There are subtler ways. You could tell him you're thinking of investing and ask his advice. Or ask him who his broker is. See how he reacts.”
“I can tell you his reaction: A, I'm nuts, and B, I'm prying. He's not stupid, he'd see right through that.”
“Fine, then,” Tom snapped. “So what do you want to do? You called me.”
“I don't know what I want to do,” Clancy confessed.
“We're going around in circles.”
“Like a whirlpool.”
Tom was silent.
“What do you think?” Clancy asked.
“I'm glad you asked that question, Clancy, because I've been thinking about it myself,” Tom answered. “For openers, we'd better know what really is going on with dad before we start jumping to negative conclusions, which is what we've been doing—me the worst, I've been the quickest to jump on him. The point I'm making is, people do all kinds of crazy, irrational stuff, whether it's bailing out of a secure job, moving to Disneyland, taking up with a young tomato, whatever. Maybe it's time for us to stop reading sinister motives into everything dad's done and is doing.”
“Well said,” Clancy agreed. “Speaking of young tomatoes, wait'll you meet this new one. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. And she is one tasty pudding.”
“So you've said. Sounds like she worked her wiles on you, married man,” Tom teased.
Clancy remembered the almost animalistic sexuality Emma Rawlings had emitted. “Callie's all the woman I'm ever going to want.” Which was true. “But this one is pretty hot and tasty.”
“I oughta go to L.A. and check her out myself,” Tom suggested. “If she's that hot she might burn poor old dad to a cinder. I might need to help him put out the fire.”
Tom was joking, but the banter, particularly the sexual undertone, had a hard edge to it. The competitiveness between them, not only among the brothers but also between father and sons, was intense. Walt had always pushed his boys to do better, achieve more, to try to come up to his exacting standards. School, Little League, the quality of the girls they were dating, anything. When they succeeded, he was generous with his praise. When they didn't, which by his high standards was a lot of the time, he let I hem know it, in no uncertain terms. He was loving, but he was formidable. Even now, as grown men, there was a spark of fear of Walt that still smoldered in all of them.
Tom had taken more than his share of their father's disapprobation. He had always been the son who tried the hardest and disappointed the most. One of the main reasons, Clancy was sure, why Tom had stayed cocooned in his graduate studies without producing his thesis or making any real progress toward finishing his doctorate. As long as there was nothing to criticize, he was safe.
Clancy knew that Tom's choosing to go into academic life, albeit in a different discipline from Walt
's, had been worrisome to their mother, who zealously defended her offspring. She knew that Tom's choice of vocation was a two-sided coin: heads you please and win approval, tails you self-immolate. He had his father's sharp mind but not his tough hide.
Clancy agreed with his mother, but he would never tell Tom how he felt. It wouldn't be taken in the spirit in which it was given. Clancy was the older brother. He was always going to be the older brother.
“At some point you'll meet her,” he said, referring to Tom's statement about checking Emma out. “It's inevitable.”
“I'm not counting on being offered an invitation,” Tom answered. “Look, Clancy. I'm sorry to hear this about the mortgage thing. It's one more piece of a puzzle I have no clue how to solve, and neither do you. If you think we should check up on what mom and dad were up to with that money, I'd go along with it. Grudgingly. But I'm into wanting him back as dad, the hell with his money and what he and mom were doing with it. We lost one of our parents, Clancy. My desire is to not lose both.”
Sound advice, Clancy thought, after they said their goodbyes. It was going to be hard to take, but he knew he should. Callie wanted him to, and now Tom, the most aggressively upset about the changes in their father, was voicing the same sentiment.
For the remainder of the morning he worked nonstop, one client after the other. An assistant brought him a turkey sub for lunch, which he wolfed down at his desk. He put in a fast call to Callie, and they made plans to go out to dinner at a French country-style bistro she'd read a good review about. Maybe a movie after, if they had the energy. He was going to relax, let Pete handle business, and let the cares of the world go by, at least for tonight.
His telephone buzzed. He picked it up.
“Your brother, line six,” the receptionist informed him.
“Thanks.”
So Tom couldn't sit on this after all. He wiped mayonnaise off his mouth and punched up the blinking line. “Hey, Tom, what's up now?”
“It's Will, Clancy.”
“Oh. Hi. How's it going?”
“Not good. We have another dad problem.”
Bad news travels at mach speed, Clancy thought morosely. “You talked to Tom?”
“Tom?” Will asked, confused. “Not for a couple of days. Why?”
He hadn't? Then what was this?
“Tom and I had a conversation about stuff having to do with dad,” Clancy explained. “I assumed he'd called you to fill you in. I was going to, but I've been overwhelmed here “
“What about?”
“You tell me your news first, then I'll tell you mine.”
“Okay. How dad bought his new house? Taking over the bank payments?”
“Yeah?”
“He didn't.”
Clancy sucked air.
“Clancy? You still there?”
“Yes, I'm here.” He looked out the glass partition to the therapy room, where his next client, a woman with frozen shoulder syndrome, was taking off her sweats. He caught her eye and gave her an “in a minute” signal. She nodded and started doing stretches.
“How do you know that?” he asked.
“I got to thinking about what you'd told us last Sunday, how dad had been able to take over the payments on the existing mortgage,” Will said. “An inside deal? That sounded strange to me, a bank not wanting to make money. That's why they're in business. Our firm doesn't do that stuff directly, but we're tied in to most of the major lending institutions around the country, so I called up a guy who knows the mortgage business in California. He said that what dad told you doesn't work that way. It can't, it's against the law.”
“Are you sure?” Clancy didn't want to believe this, not on top of what he'd found out last night. “If dad's friend Emma had an in, couldn't they have finagled a deal?”
“No,” Will answered unambiguously. “Transfer of title is public record. A transaction like that would be a red flag to the state and L.A. County government, because they make money when houses are bought and sold. The property taxes go up, there are expensive fees. It can be a significant amount if it's a substantial sale. Which this was.”
“How significant?”
“I'll tell you in a minute. You're gonna shit. Let me first clarify how it works in a foreclosure sale when there are no heirs to the property, which was the situation here,” Will began explaining. “A broker is assigned by the court overseeing the foreclosure. The broker is obligated to sell the property to the highest bidder. That's how it happens, through a bidding process. Usually there's a floor to the bids, so it can't go way below fair market value. When that happens they take it off the market and put it back on later. You with me so far?”
“Yes.”
“The broker assigned to that house determined a fair asking price was two point two million. At that price, there were no bids. Which was okay, they start ten, fifteen percent high, in case they find a buyer who has to have it find is willing to pay for it. This one sat on the market for live months. So then they dropped the price to one-nine, with a floor of one-seven. At that point, it became a decent deal. They got three bids. All below asking, but close enough. The bids were a million seven on the nose, a million seven-fifty, and a million eight.”
“You know all this for a fact?” Clancy asked. His head was spinning.
“Got the numbers right here in front of me. It's all in the public records, anybody can check them out. You just have to know where to find them.”
Which I didn't, Clancy thought, annoyed at Walt for lying, annoyed at himself for having bought his story at fine value, when he should have known better. That's why he was here, working with disabled people, and Will was on his way to becoming a millionaire.
He could at least figure the rest of it out. “Dad offered the million eight.”
“Give the man a giant panda. Yes, Walt Gaines was the high bidder. That's in dollars, not pesos or lira. Cash, no contingencies. Which meant he had to check the property out first, satisfy himself it was structurally okay and that there weren't any hidden liens or other legal action against it, and then he had to have his financing in place. It's like going to a car auction, if you're not ready to write the check, it goes to the next highest bidder and you are shit out of luck.”
Another shoe hit the deck with a crash. “Dad had almost two million dollars in hand,” he said, almost numbly.
“He had to. Those were the conditions.”
Neither spoke for a moment. Finally, Clancy broke the silence. “This is incredible. Inconceivable.”
“Mind-boggling, to use one of dad's ancient phrases.”
“When did you find out about this?”
“Just now. I called you as soon as I had the pieces put together. I've been checking into it since Monday, when I got back here. It's only been a couple days since we talked about this.”
“I know.”
“What I've been trying to figure out is, where in the world would he get that kind of money? I've got to tell you, Clancy, I really freaked out when I got this information.”
“I'm sure,” Clancy said. At least he wasn't in on this alone now.
“What you and Tom talked about,” Will pressed. “Is it connected to this?”
Clancy's muscles were knotted from tension. He stood up and stretched.
“Yes, it is, but I don't want to talk about it over the phone. We're going to have to get together again. This whole situation with dad is becoming too heavy a load to ignore.”
Clancy didn't tell Callie that he and his brothers were going to meet up again to discuss the dad problem. For one thing, they hadn't decided when they could. They were all busy, especially him and Will, they couldn't drop everything on a moment's notice. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, in Chicago again, they had mutually decided, as it was the most convenient location.
That Clancy was going to keep the meeting a secret from Callie was wrong. He knew that, but he had to. She would hit the roof if she knew what they were planning, and Clancy didn't want her p
issed off at him more than she already was.
Tonight, she was in a good mood. She had splurged on a girlie day—she'd bought a new dress, got her hair cut, had manicure and a pedicure. The restaurant she'd selected was a tiny patch of the Loire Valley plunked down in Wicker Park. It felt authentic, because it was so squarely old-fashioned—the young waitresses wore heels and real stockings and spoke in heavy French accents, and the hostess, a Simone Signoret look-alike, could have stepped out of a 50s black and white movie on AMC.
Callie squished her bread in the garlicky escargot butter. “This is so decadent!” she gushed as she bit into it. Clancy, eating his onion soup, nodded in agreement. His wife was happy, and that was all he needed tonight.
“Listen, honey,” she said. “About last night.”
“Forget it,” he came back quickly. “I was out of line. I made you a promise, and I broke it.”
And I'm going to break it again, he thought dolefully.
He had decided—sadly, because she was his wife and his closest confidant—to take Callie at her word: to not tell her anything else about what he and his brothers were doing or thinking regarding Walt. He hated lying to his wife but was less painful than any other choice he could think of.
“No.” she said. “Listen.”
“I was” he insisted, “wrong.”
“I know, but listen.” She reached across the table and took his hand. “I can't tell you not to be worried about your father. He's your father. That's selfish of me, and how could you not worry anyway, if you think there's cause to?”
“Thank you.” What a woman, he thought. How lucky a guy you are, which you sometimes forget to remember.
“I just wanted you to know that.”
“Thanks.”
The waitress cleared their appetizers and set down their entrées, salmon Wellington for her, coq au vin for him. She poured their wine, the house red.
Callie tasted it. “This isn't bad. So about your father … what are you guys going to do?”
“I don't know. Hopefully, nothing.”
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