Mortal Bonds

by Michael Sears

  “Doug, I’m sorry. I really had nothing to do with this. Let me help.”

  But he wasn’t there. He had already hung up on me.

  • • •

  EVERETT WAS AGAIN standing guard over Virgil’s inner sanctum when I called.

  “Virgil will be in meetings all day. I will pass on any information you have.”

  “What I have are questions, Everett. I just got a very strange phone call from Doug Randolph. Someone threatened him—rather, someone threatened his wife.”

  “Who threatened him?”

  “That’s one of my questions.”

  “As I understand things, Randolph has a lot to answer for. He defrauded a lot of people. I would not be surprised if one or more of them retaliated.”

  “They used my name,” I said.

  Everett didn’t respond.

  “Did you get that, Everett?”

  “I will pass that on to Virgil. Is there anything else?”

  I promised myself that someday I would grant myself the luxury of venting a bucketful of frustration on Everett. Not today. “I spoke to Mrs. Welk. She swears there’s nothing there.”

  “Welk? I’m taking notes.”

  “The clerk?” Was he playing games? “The old man’s clerk. You said she ‘sat at his feet,’ if I remember correctly. Well, she just got out of prison, and I spoke to her. I don’t know that she was innocent, but I really don’t think she knows anything that would help us.”

  “Any other messages?”

  I had never trusted Everett, and so far I had heard nothing to make me change my mind.

  “Yes. I need to speak to Virgil.”

  He sighed impatiently. “He’ll just tell you to talk to me.”

  “Then he’ll have to tell me that himself.”

  | 18 |

  The next morning, Randolph’s call still had me looking over my shoulder as I hurried out of the Ansonia lobby and headed for Central Park. I was seeing those goons everywhere—grabbing a hot dog at Gray’s Papaya, using the ATM at Citibank, waiting to get served at the Red Velvet Bakery. There had been no call from Virgil.

  Skeli was waiting at the Imagine plaque in Central Park, surrounded by a gaggle of middle-aged Chinese tourists, all vying for, and boldly nudging one another out of, position for a photo op. The women were the worst—all elbows and shoulders—while yelling orders to one another, the men, and anyone passing by who might be blocking a shot.

  Skeli was watching and smiling as though it was a madhouse comedy being put on for her benefit alone. She was wearing a light paisley-print dress that I had not seen before and was carrying a plaid blanket and a brown paper bag. I held back and enjoyed a moment of just looking at her. As my Pop would have said, “She was easy on the eyes.”

  “Come here,” she said. “You look like some weird stalker staring at me like that.”

  “I’m enjoying the view. New dress?”

  She laughed—one of her big, openmouthed guffaws. “No. God, you are such a guy. You’ve seen me in this about a thousand times.”

  “You look nice,” I managed.

  She shook her head and took my arm. “Here. You carry this.” She handed me the blanket. “Now repeat after me. Sisters look nice. Co-workers look nice. Maybe mothers look nice, I don’t know. But girlfriends look great.”

  She had me smiling. “Got it. I will try to remember it. I appreciate all this remedial work you’ve been doing with me. I’m sure it will all pay off someday.”

  “Do you know the real tragedy of marriage?” We began to walk away from the Lennon memorial and up toward the Lake. “A woman gets married thinking her man will change, and, of course, he doesn’t. And the man gets married thinking his woman will never change, and, of course, she does.”

  “We’re not going to talk about our exes, am I right?”

  “Right. So, how is the psycho?”

  I would rather have talked about prostate cancer.

  She had led me up to the Bow Bridge. “Where are you taking me?” I said, looking ahead to the wooded area known as the Ramble—the perfect place for an ambush. I could imagine Randolph’s goons hiding in the brush.

  “Just up here. I want you to see something.” She stepped off the manicured trail and into the woods. “Come on, I’ll watch out for you. And I do want to hear. How is whatshername?”

  I remembered my father once dispensing advice to one of the regulars at his bar—a man who had managed to stay unmarried while dating the same two women for more than twenty years. “Never talk to one woman about another woman. The deck is stacked against you. You’ve got three ways to get it wrong for every chance of getting it right. The best thing you can do is fold. But, if you absolutely have to, and there’s no other way out, say something nice. It may not keep you out of trouble, but you’ll feel better about it afterwards.”

  So the question that I had to face was: Could I get away with not talking about Angie?

  “Look, you’re acting like I’m going to bite your head off,” Skeli said, while stretching out her stride and forging up the slight hill. “If you don’t want to talk about her, then don’t.”

  So that answered that question. I composed a response that would skirt all the truly aggravating bits.

  “Evangeline Oubre is and always will be a handful. But she is trying hard not to be a royal pain in the ass right now. I may not be giving her enough credit. Or maybe my expectations are just so dreadfully low that she only seems halfway human.”

  “Uh-huh.” With two soft grunts—not even syllables—Skeli managed to communicate a full rant on the subject.

  “And she is sober,” I manfully continued in the face of her complete disdain. “Forty-something days. Even while she’s up here, she’s been making a meeting every day. She wants me to come to Lafayette to see her get her ninety-day chip.”

  “Uh-huh.” She repeated the whole thing, all over again.

  “Stop. I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I have no interest in her romantically. She is here making amends.”

  Skeli gave me a skeptical look. “And how’s that going?”

  I applauded myself for conveying so much distanced reason. Maybe I really was free of her. “We are doing our best to get along for the sake of the Kid—and that’s all. Okay?”

  “So will you go to Lafayette?”

  “No. If I’m going to make the Kid travel, it will be to come see you on the road somewhere.”

  She turned off the main path and headed up a narrow trail into the woods.

  “You know where you’re going?” I asked, trying to pierce through the leafy curtains around us. Whole platoons of armed thugs could have been hiding steps away from us.

  Skeli stopped. “Are you all right? You seem awful skittish taking a walk in the woods—I mean, for a guy who survived cell block D or whatever.”

  I debated telling her about the phone call from Randolph the day before. As I stood there with Skeli under a cloudless sky in the quiet of the park, Randolph and his panic, fear, and threat were fading quickly, leaving a feeling of mild unease. I could shake it off.

  “I’ll be okay. Lead on.”

  I followed her up a winding stone pathway to a small clearing with a tiny pond and a great view of the Lake below. Around us was a dense wall of sprawling, big-leafed shrubs. The pond fed a tiny, inch-deep stream that led back down the hill. We were in the center of Manhattan, and could have been in the depths of some primeval forest. It was a warm, sunny day in June and the park was filled with people—and it felt like we were all alone. Miles from anyone or anything.

  “Is that rhododendron?” I asked, rolling out the blanket.

  She looked around. “No. Mountain laurel.”

  I nodded. “What’s the difference?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’ll tell you when you need to know.�
��

  She knelt on the blanket and patted it with her hand for me to join her. “This is what I wanted you to see.” She bent forward with her face a foot above the water and looked down. “See. There they are.”

  I looked as well. At first all I saw were rocks and sand and iced-tea-colored water.

  “I’m looking,” I said.

  “Look harder.”

  I tried looking harder.

  “There. See? One just moved.”

  What was she seeing?

  “Uh. No.”

  “Really? Look again.”

  I tried even harder. And I saw them.

  “What the hell? They look like tiny lobster.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Exactly. They’re crayfish.”

  Crayfish lived in the Mississippi River, and when they were served up in heaping mounds on beer trays they were called crawfish. I had eaten a beer tray’s worth one night in Lafayette. Angie had not taken one bite. She was prepping for a shoot, which meant that she was living on cocaine, tissues, and vodka. The coke kept her going and the tissues filled her up. As for the vodka—at least she was getting some caloric intake.

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “Crawfish don’t live this far north.”

  “They’re crayfish,” she said, leaving no room for further discussion.

  “They call them bugs down South.”

  She blew air through pursed lips in mock desperation. “You are such a pain sometimes. Here I bring you to see this wonderful freak of nature—this amazing miniature lobster, living wild in Central Park, right smack-dab in the middle of the greatest city on earth—and what do I get from you? ‘Bugs.’ Why do I bother?”

  “Think I’ll ever change?”

  “Well, I’m planning on it.” She opened the brown bag. “Virginia ham, Vermont cheddar on sourdough. An all-American. That or the veggie wrap.”

  “Veggie wrap?”

  “Well, it’s really grilled eggplant and buffalo mozzarella on semolina with a schmear of pesto, but if I think of it as a veggie wrap, I can ignore the calories.”

  “Half and half?”

  “You’d let me have half your ham sandwich?” she said.

  “I thought you were going to take the ham. I could hear you salivating as you described it.”

  We ate in silence. Food was practically a sacred rite with Skeli. Both sandwiches were mere memories when she spoke again.

  “It’s my last day in town. We have to be on the bus by six. If we leave late, they don’t have to pay us the meal allowance. Goddamn cheapskate producers. It never changes.”

  My heart stopped. I knew it was coming, but I’d managed to place that very important piece of information in the mental file cabinet, labeled TO BE OPENED ONLY WHEN YOU NEED TO GET DEPRESSED. I’d been too busy to take the time to get depressed.

  “So, I was thinking we might have this picnic,” she continued. “A special picnic.”

  “We’ll visit,” I said. “The Kid and me. We’ll visit.”

  She gave a sad single nod. “You have to promise me—you will never come here with anyone else.”

  I smiled. “Promise.”

  “Because I will know if you do,” she said.

  “How will you know?”

  “Because I will look in your eyes and I will know.”

  I believed her. “I promise. Does this also mean you’ll move in with me when you get back to New York?” I asked.

  “You just want a live-in babysitter, maid, and call girl all in one.”

  “Well, there’s that. But I like you, and that’s important, too.”

  We lay down, her head resting on my shoulder.

  “I was scared. The other day. Your ex scares me.”

  I brushed the hair from her face and kissed her temple. “I know. She scares everyone.”

  She propped herself up on one elbow and looked into my eyes. “Then how the hell did you two ever get together?”

  I shrugged. “When I think about it, it’s like I don’t recognize myself. That guy didn’t know who he was or why he was here.”

  She put her head back on my shoulder. “And now?”

  “I’m here for the Kid. As soon as I saw that, everything became very simple.”

  “So you did change. Didn’t she?”

  I gave it some thought. “I don’t know. I don’t think I knew her very well when we were married. And I don’t know that I know her any better now. I have a ton of very good reasons for hating her guts, only I find that I don’t.” I ran my hand down her back, gently massaging and prodding. “Can we not talk about my ex anymore?”

  Skeli pulled the other half of the blanket over us and patted my chest with her palm. “You’re a good dad.”

  “I wasn’t. I was terrible. Not a monster, just not there. I’m working at it now. Getting better.”

  I felt warm under the blanket.

  “Are you cold?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then?” I made to move the blanket back.

  Her hand slid down to my belt buckle. “You might want to leave it where it is.”

  My throat tightened up. She lifted her face to me and we kissed—a long, probing kiss. Her hand found my zipper.

  “Remember,” she said as her head disappeared under the blanket. “You promised.”

  “I’ll remember,” I managed to croak.

  | 19 |

  Skeli and I said our farewells on the sidewalk across from the Museum of Natural History. I bought her a soft pretzel and told her it was a forget-me-not. We both laughed, avoiding any tears. Then I put her in a cab and walked home, taking the longest, most winding route I could, killing time until I was sure Angie would have left the Kid with Heather and gone out with her mother.

  In the past, a walk through the neighborhood, taking stock of the changes as businesses moved in or out, sold out or cashed out, took me out of my head. Mapping the changes in skyline is for tourists—save for the empty scar of the Twin Towers. You were a local, a member, almost family, when you could carry on a conversation at the dry cleaners that began, “Hey, did you see the shoe store going in where the Korean market used to be?”

  But appreciation had given way to depression after my favorite bar—on the same corner for more than sixty years—had been forced to move uptown to make way for a bank, which turned into the Blossom Nail and Wax Lounge when the bank went under halfway through renovation. Now I saw only the holes. The stores no longer there. The Royale Pastry Shop, the All State Café. I felt old. Not forty-five-old, Methuselah-old.

  I stopped in front of the kosher butcher on Seventy-second Street and stared in at the late Thursday afternoon bustle, as shoppers who wanted to avoid the Sabbath crush on Friday stocked up for the weekend. Skeli loved their barbecued breast of veal. I wondered if they’d deliver to Washington.

  Then I saw the man’s reflection in the window before me. He was behind me, across Seventy-second, squinting into the sun, standing still in the middle of the sidewalk, creating a small eddy in the pedestrian traffic flow, and watching me. I didn’t turn around.

  He was big, too big to be an effective tail—he stood out. And he wasn’t dressed for it. He had on a distinctive, if not quite unique, hat—a broad-brimmed Australian outback hat. Otherwise, he wore a rumpled gray suit, a wrinkled white shirt, and a dark tie, three decades too wide. I couldn’t see his face under the hat, but I knew he was staring at me. I felt him.

  I turned to my right and walked quickly down the block, then stopped abruptly and made a U-turn and headed back to the butcher’s. The guy in the hat almost fell over himself. He had been hustling to follow me and had been caught flat-footed when I turned. He ducked behind an illegally parked delivery van. He couldn’t be one of the goons who had terrified Doug Randolph’s wife—he was big enough, but he seemed clumsy and stiff. Oaf
ish rather than thuggish. I stopped and stared, waiting him out. A full minute passed before he dashed out, striding off, making a point of looking everywhere but at me. I lost sight of him as he approached Broadway.

  My cell phone rang.

  Unknown Caller.

  “Stafford,” I answered.

  “Jason? Fred Krebs.”

  “Spud!”

  He sighed. “Fred. Please. I’m going to Yale Law School in two months. I don’t want to be Spud anymore.”

  “Sorry. I was just thinking about how nothing remains the same, and you call to say you don’t want to be Spud anymore.”

  “Spud doesn’t argue cases before the Supreme Court.”

  “Is that your dream these days?”

  “So, what are you doing?”

  “Out for a walk. I just scared off some guy who was following me. Crocodile Dundee in a cheap suit.”

  “Weird.”

  “Even for the Upper West Side,” I agreed.

  “How’s your son?”

  I had learned that most people, no matter how kind their intentions, did not want the long answer. “He’s good. How’s those files? Come up with anything?”

  He gave a short laugh. “You got your money’s worth out of me this time around.”

  “But you found something. Otherwise you wouldn’t have called.”

  “Aaaa-yup.”

  “Let’s hear it.” I started walking toward the Ansonia.

  “Okay. First, there’s not three billion dollars missing. I see why they think so, but they’re wrong—whether it’s on purpose or not, I can’t say. The trades and money movements don’t always match, and if you add up all the anomalies you get a great big number.”

  “Like three bil?”

  “Three bil, eighty-seven mil, two hundred twenty thousand, and then whatever.”

  “So?”

  “But this guy moved money just to move it. No economic purpose. It’s all camouflage.”

  “All of it?”

  He paused. “No. There are two areas where money is not where it should be. The first is money that was being washed through this Hurricane Relief Fund, into and out of various Von Becker investment funds. It comes to just under a bil—nine hundred and change.”