Fallen Idols

by J. F. Freedman

  “Rachi, where are you?” a woman's voice called from inside.

  Tom snuffed his cigarette, flicked the butt over the edge, and stood up, lowering the dog to the floor. He started back inside. The dog followed, as if he'd been trained to heel at Tom's feet.

  “Out here,” Tom called.

  The dog's owner was wearing a short black cocktail dress, half-zipped up the back. Her legs were bare, her shoes were off, her hair was mussed. She jumped, hearing Tom.

  “I didn't know there was anyone else here,” she said as he came inside. She sounded put-off.

  Tom extended his hand. “I'm Tom Gaines, Will's brother. I camp out here. I just got off work.”

  The woman bent down to the dog, who was barking and jumping up and down in excitement. “Were you a good boy?” she asked in an irritating, high-pitched baby-voice. She looked around the floor, worried that he had pissed or dumped. “Sometimes he gets a nervous bladder when he's in strange surroundings,” she said defensively.

  “He was fine,” Tom assured her. “Not a drop.”

  “Good,” she said, relieved.

  “Hey.” Will came into the living room, tucking his shirt into his pants. He, too, was shoeless. “You're home early, aren't you?”

  “It was a slow night. I closed up early,” Tom explained.

  Will nodded. If he was put out by Tom's coming in while he was having a romantic interlude, he didn't show it. “This is Lindsay Weiss,” he said, putting a casual proprietary arm around the woman's waist. “We went to see Mother Courage at the Goodman. It was a good production. You ought to go.”

  Tom nodded. He felt like an intruder. “Maybe I will, I'm going to have a shower,” he said, by way of taking his leave.

  “I'm going to walk Lindsay home. I'll be back in a little bit.” Will held the woman's coat out to her, as if saying “it's time to go now.”

  “I have to get my shoes,” she said, holding up a freshly pedicured bare foot. Looking peevish, she darted down the hall and into Will's bedroom.

  “Sorry about busting in on you,” Tom apologized.

  Will waved a dismissive hand. “No big deal. I forgot to tell her I had a roommate.”

  The woman returned from the bedroom. She had pulled on a pair of sheer dark pantyhose and was wearing high-heeled pumps. “I'm ready,” she announced curtly to Will, as she snapped the dog's leash to his collar.

  Will slipped on his old high school letter jacket that was hanging on the hall coat tree. “I won't be long,” he said to Tom, winking behind his date's back.

  “Adiós, dog,” Tom called. “See you around the neighborhood.”

  They were sprawled out on the living room couches, listening to Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks. The vegetal, perfumy aroma from the joint they were passing back and forth wafted in the air.

  “You working tomorrow?” Will asked Tom.

  “No, I'm off. You got something you want to do?”

  Will shook his head no. “I wish, but I'm buried in work. I need to find some time to start looking into mom's and dad's finances, see if they had any money stuck away we don't know about.” He frowned. “I've got to figure out how to, if I can. I wish I had some kind of lead, somebody who was involved with them we don't know about.” He toked on the joint Tom passed him, handed it back. “The money they were pulling out of their house, and mom's insurance policy. What did they do with it?” he asked rhetorically.

  “In dad's new house?”

  “Why would he have gone through that song-and-dance about the refinance, then?” Will came back. “That's the fishiest part of this whole deal to me. Where is that money? What did they do with it?”

  “Isn't there some database you can access?” Tom asked. He was a babe in the woods when it came to high, or even low, finance. “You're on the inside.”

  Will smiled ruefully. “Hell, no. Money's the most liquid commodity in the world. Dad could have it squirreled away in a savings account, or buried under his mattress.” He took one last hit from the joint. “You want any more of this?”

  “No, I'm high enough.”

  Will wet his thumb and forefinger and snuffed the joint. “I'm bushed. See you mañana.“

  Will was long gone by the time Tom woke up. He went for a run along the lake, showered, dressed, made a pot of coffce, read the paper. His normal morning routine.

  He was feeling restless. He had an entire day off and nothing to do with it. He had been going to movies in the afternoon, cut-price matinees. There wasn't anything showing this week that he already hadn't seen, except for the crap he wouldn't waste his money on.

  He was out of the loop—that was what was really begging him. Clancy had hooked into Walt's retirement package and their parents’ insurance policies. Will was going to try to use his insider knowledge of the financial markets to find out where the rest of the money had gone. No where did that leave him? Nowhere. Once again, he was the odd man out. He had more free time than his brothers, but he wasn't involved.

  He needed to be included in the hunt, for his own peace of mind as well as for whatever factual information he might uncover, particularly since he didn't know, specifically, what he was looking for. Earlier this morning while out on his daily run, he had reflected on what Will had said last night—that he didn't know where to look for the missing money, because there was no one he knew who could help them.

  Through the glass wall that separated the reception area from the main therapy room, Tom could see his brother. Clancy was with a client, a middle-aged woman whose left leg, from hip to ankle, was in a soft cast. She was lying on the floor, on her back. Clancy was bending her other leg back and forth. The woman was in discomfort—Tom could see the unhappy expression on her face. Clancy leaned toward her and said something. The woman nodded, gritted her teeth, and pushed against him with her good leg.

  Clancy, having helped his client to her feet, caught his brother's eye and smiled. He waved Tom in. Tom walked into the workout room as Clancy assisted the woman to the door.

  “Hey,” Clancy said, low-fiving Tom, “what brings you down here? You want to work out? You can use one of the treadmills upstairs. The weight room's not full right now, either.”

  “I ran this morning, thanks.”

  Clancy gave his brother a love-tap on his shoulders. “You're getting to be a real stud, man. But you need to do weight training, too. Any time you want to come down here, just do it. Keep a set of workout clothes in a locker. I don't have to be here.”

  “Thanks, I will.” Tom looked around. “You're doing great here.”

  “We're doing okay,” Clancy acknowledged modestly. “One thing you can count on in this world—people are always going to get hurt. So … what's up?”

  “I was thinking of driving up to Madison today.”

  “Oh, yeah? What for?”

  “Dad put his and mom's stuff in storage, didn't he? All their furniture, mementos? And our stuff, our old things, baseball mitts, class albums. Didn't he store it all somewhere?”

  Clancy nodded. “He rented a unit in one of those commercial places out by the airport. Was there something specific you're looking for?”

  “Nothing special, just some of my old things,” Tom said. “You forget about that stuff, it gets lost forever.”

  “I know. Callie and I have been meaning to go up there and go through it ourselves, make a rough catalogue. There's things of mom's she'd like, and there are dozens of photo albums. Dad didn't take much with him. I guess you noticed that when you were out in L.A.”

  “He wanted to leave it all behind,” Tom said. “He did a good job,” he added caustically.

  “Let's not go there today.”

  “No, I don't want to, either. Is there somebody up there who can let me in?”

  “There's a guard there to let you in the gate, but they don't have keys to the individual units. Only the owner of the facility and the renter have keys to the units, to protect against theft.”

  Tom was disheartened, and angry.
“I hate thinking about asking dad for the key.”

  “I know how you feel,” Clancy sympathized. “I'd hate to ask him, too. But you don't have to, ‘cause I have one.”

  “How'd you do that?” Tom asked.

  Clancy grinned. “I faked dad out into giving me a duplicate. I told him in case it had to be gotten into fast, like a fire or some other calamity. He went for it. It's right here in my office. Hold on, I'll get it for you.”

  MADISON

  It was like an oven inside the fifteen-by-twenty-five-foot cinder block storage unit. A thin layer of dust like the residue of a sandstorm hovered in the stagnant air. Tom stood outside for a few minutes until some of the hot air had drifted out the open doorway, then he went in and started looking around.

  The space was piled high with furniture and taped-up Bekins storage boxes. The contents had been hastily thrown in, without organization—boxes were perched precariously on top of old pieces of furniture, large, heavy pieces lay askew on lighter, smaller ones. Framed pictures and large mirrors had been stacked against the side walls, without any protective covering.

  This could take days, Tom thought pessimistically, as he surveyed the mess. To compound his problem, none of the boxes were labeled as to their contents. Taking a deep breath, he cleared a space on the hard concrete floor, wrestled a large box down from on top of the pile, and pried the packing tape off.

  Three hours later, he had gone through less than half the boxes. He was sweating buckets, and his clothes were filthy with greasy dust and dirt. Although he hadn't found anything having to do with his parents’ finances, he had come across several items that had stopped him cold when he saw them; almost brought him, in some instances, to tears.

  His parents’ wedding pictures. Photos of Clancy's birth, his own, Will's. (They had all been home births, the boys delivered by Walt with assistance from a midwife.) The baseball glove Clancy had passed down to him when he was six and signed up for his first T-ball team, which he, in turn, had handed on to Will. Pictures taken of his parents’ twenty-fifth-anniversary party, seven years ago. Jocelyn had recently turned forty-five. The first tendrils of gray were showing in his mother's blond hair. She was still a beautiful woman, but she was no longer the young woman he remembered from his childhood.

  Why am I doing this, he thought? This hurts. What also hurt was that his father had left all these treasures in this dump, discarded. It was as if the family's past was meaningless. All these things, the pictures, the elementary and high school diplomas, the sheet music from their childhood recitals, Clancy on trumpet, him on cello, Will on alto sax, the swimming and tennis medals, hundreds of pieces of priceless memorabilia—consigned not to the junk heap of history, but worse, to a storage vault that might not be visited for decades, as long as Walt (or his estate) paid the annual storage fee. Over time, the pictures would fade until the likenesses were barely distinguishable, the medals and trophies would turn green with tarnish. His mother's dresses, including her wedding dress, wrapped in tissue, were already coming apart at the seams.

  Why didn't his father want any of this? Especially his mother's things, her rings, her necklaces, other pieces of jewelry. Her special coffee cup, that Clancy had made her in sixth-grade ceramics class. Was Walt afraid that Emma, his new young lover, would be angry at him for keeping them?

  Emma. She came into his consciousness more than he wanted her to, but he couldn't help thinking about her. Not a good thing to covet your father's woman. There was something heavily Oedipal there, even if she wasn't his wife and was your age rather than his.

  He didn't need to go into that, not now. He had a ton of work to do. He methodically dug into the boxes again.

  Tom looked at his watch. It was almost five. He'd been here all afternoon. The facility closed at six; he could stay less than an hour. Whatever he was looking for, he hadn't found it. He was going to have to stop searching soon, because he wanted to take a few boxes with him, his mother's personal stuff, items belonging to him and his brothers. They shouldn't be relegated to a concrete box in a dingy commercial mall, he thought, as he put them aside.

  A battered couch had been buried under piles of loose junk. He wrestled it to the side and discovered a couple of legal-sized accordion folders that had been hidden under it. Sitting on the couch, he opened the first one.

  His mother's passport was on top of the pile. It had been issued in 1992, when she was in her early forties. She was laughing into the camera, as if something off stage had amused her.

  A feeling of sorrow engulfed him. Ah, mom, he thought. I really miss you. He put the passport in his pocket. That was coming home with him.

  There were a few manila envelopes inside the folder. He opened one up and took out a sheaf of papers. The top page bore the letterhead of a stock brokerage firm in Milwaukee. The letter was addressed to his mother, regarding information she had inquired about. Leafing through the pages, he saw what appeared to be an assortment of stock transactions, some of them for five figures. Much of it was high-tech stuff—Cisco Systems, Intel, Qualcomm, among others. He put everything back into the folder, picked up the second one, opened it.

  The documents in this folder had been jammed in hastily, a rush job. He dug one out. It was a manifest from his parents’ final trip to La Chimenea, including a list of the student volunteers who had been there, along with their addresses and phone numbers. He glanced over the names. None of them rang a bell.

  Putting that aside, he fished out a thick, legal-sized envelope that was also from a Milwaukee firm. Inside, he found a set of policies from an insurance company. He scanned them quickly.

  “Jesus Christ,” he whispered to himself. “What in God's name is this?”

  It was getting dark. The facility was closing in ten minutes. He carried a few boxes of memorabilia out to his car — the precious things he didn't want to leave behind — along with the two accordion files. Then he turned off the lights, locked the unit, and hightailed it back to Chicago.

  CHICAGO

  Ahard rain had been falling since before dawn. Will awakened in darkness as it pelted down on his windows and the small balcony outside his living room. Although he normally had his morning coffee and whatever else for breakfast at his office—fruit, a container of yogurt, once in a while a croissant or scone—this morning, because it was still too early to go in, he brewed up a pot of coffee and drank it sitting by the windows, watching the rain as it came down in sideways sheets, washing the remaining leaves off the trees, forming small rivers in the gutters along the sides of the street. No one was outside braving the elements. Even though Tom was in the other bedroom, sleeping, he felt alone.

  He had been up late last night, looking over the documents Tom had brought back from the storage unit. Clancy had joined them. It had been a somber time. By the time Clancy went home, after midnight, they were more upset than they had been before, which was saying a lot. On the face of things, the documents, particularly those relating to stocks, were very upsetting. Morethan upsetting—they were potentially terrifying. He'd find out more this morning, when he got to the office and started checking them out.

  The gist of what he'd read was that his parents had been heavily involved in buying and selling stocks for several years, starting in the mid-1990s. It looked to him, going through these papers, that they might have even been day-trading on their own. The broker they had used would know. That would be his first call this morning. He was swamped with his own work, but he was going to get into this right away.

  This was why they had been refinancing their house; that was obvious to him. He knew people who had done that, mortgaged everything to get in on the stock boom. Friends of his in college had done it, their parents had done it. It was like those commercials for Ameritrade that had run a few years ago with the punk-looking kid who squawked like a chicken, egging on his girlfriend's square father to get in on the gold rush.

  Some of the people he knew who had jumped on the bandwagon had made fortunes. Ot
hers—most of them—had risen with the tide, and then had crashed on the rocks when the tech boom collapsed. You didn't see commercials like those Ameritrade ones anymore, or read about all the instant dot.com millionaires, most of whom were broke now. Will didn't know if his parents had had the foresight to cash in their chips and leave the table, or if, like most people who had never owned stocks until the urge to make easy money became irresistible, they had kept on gambling long after their luck had turned.

  Maybe they had gotten out okay. His father had recently bought a very expensive house, and from what Tom and Clancy had told him, was living large in other ways as well. Maybe the money his parents had made went into that. He hoped so. But if that had been the case, why hadn't his father said so, instead of lying about getting a special deal on the mortgage? He would have thought Walt would be crowing about making out in the market, when so many others had fallen on their asses.

  If their broker was cooperative, he'd know in a few hours. He didn't know the man, but someone in his office would, or would know someone who did. Assuming he was able to talk to the broker, he could have the information he was looking for by lunchtime.

  Even with milk and sugar, the coffee was rancid in his mouth. He dumped what was left in his cup down the drain and went to shower and get ready for the day. He wasn't looking forward to it.

  It wasn't yet seven-thirty, but every broker was at his desk, almost all of them on the telephone. They did it all day long. You got in early and you went home late. That's why it was a young person's game. At twenty-six, Will had the stamina to do it. He didn't know if he would at thirty-six, or older. By then he'd be a partner, and wouldn't have to.