by M. M. Mayle
“No . . . hell no. If anything I’m even more in awe of you than I was at the start. Knowing what I know now makes you even more intimidating.”
“Excellent! Then there’s a damn good chance I might feel the same when you’re finally able to tell me what life has forced you to overcome.”
“Bleedin’ Jesus you are good! You’ve got me, then . . . oh, have you got me,” he says and lifts his glass to her.
“I thought so, although I can’t imagine why my opinion of you should matter so much. You do intend to bare all for the reading public, don’t you?”
“I do. And I will. Promise. Again, I’m asking you to trust me.”
“And again I have to say very well, with all that implies.”
She softens the statement with a half-smile and gestures at the abundance of food. “Have more salad and please finish the shrimp. I brought enough for Bemus, that’s why there’s extra. Oh, and I’m forgetting dessert.” She brings out a tray of chocolate-dipped biscotti and a flask of hot coffee from the depths of the hamper.
He eats more than usual. Besides being fabulously good, the food keeps his mouth full when it wants to go fuckwit on him and his hands busy when they want to go rogue. Then, with eating at an end, he’s grateful for the business of clearing the lunch things away and repacking the ice chest and hamper. After that, he has just a cup of coffee to deal with and the growing worry about how to manage the trip back to Manhattan.
Maybe he could ask to drive the obviously brand-new Range Rover on the pretext he might be in the market for one, but that would leave him with the problem of what to say when she finds out he already owns two similar models. Maybe he could offer to drive as the gentlemanly thing to do, but that carries the risk of chivalry coming across as chauvinism. And, under any guise, there is always the chance his desire could be read as a need to reestablish his dominion over any animal that might step into the road.
“Colin . . . hello . . . where are you?”
“Sorry. I was thinking how a hammock would feel good right about now.”
“Next time I’ll remember to bring one.”
“You no doubt will, but next time’s on me. Have dinner with me tonight. No hammock, just dinner . . . please?”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“Serves me right for asking on such short notice. Tomorrow, then, does that work?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“We are getting together tomorrow, though?”
“Yes, only not for dinner. I can give you the agreed-to four hours during the day, but it will have to be at my office. At the moment I can’t think of another venue like this that won’t be crowded on a Saturday. Shall we?” She nods in the direction of the car park and they leave the way they arrived, with her carrying the hamper and him the ice chest. Along with the ice chest he’s carrying more misgivings than he’s felt in a decade.
If she’s experiencing any interior debate about who should drive, she’s not letting it show. Once the picnic things are stored in the back, she gets behind the wheel, and he buckles into the passenger seat.
“I think we’ve made a clean getaway. I’ll be very surprised if I read in tomorrow’s papers that rock star and mouthpiece companion were savaged by squirrels during an al fresco bacchanal.” She further disables him with infectious laughter as they drive out of the park.
TWENTY-SIX
Midafternoon, April 3, 1987
Hoop is amazed to see by the clock at the North Bergen bus station that it’s only three-something in the afternoon when he gets back from New York. Taking into account all that went on while he was across the river, he feels like it should be a lot later than that—like he wouldn’t have been surprised if it was night when the bus came out of the tunnel.
After unlocking the Jimmy and checking that nothing’s been tampered with, he’s strongly tempted to call it a day. Enough has happened already, enough for two days. Besides, when he looks for the town of Glen Abbey on his New Jersey state map he can’t find it anywhere—another good reason to call it quits for now.
The dingy high-rise motel holds a lot of appeal. So does having a look at what’s inside the canvas bags or maybe doing nothing for a change.
Not a chance. While there’s still enough daylight left for another survey, he’d be a jackassed-fool to slack off.
He tosses the useless map aside and with the canvas bags stowed on the front seat beside him, drives away from the park-and-ride lot in the direction of the motel. Although he’s already thinking of New Jersey as home ground, the only stretch of this turf he’s familiar with is the one he’s on now, Route 3, where he’s passing by the exit for the motel and heading back the way he came when instinct steered him off the interstate yesterday.
He sees golf links and a cemetery he saw before; he crosses under a major highway that he recalls and right after that he comes to a join he recognizes as the one with Route 46. He’s not far along Route 46 when something makes him notice a sign for Holbrook Road and all the places it leads to. The names of these places flash by in his side vision—Montclair, Lawndale, Upper Montclair, Glen Abbey, Cedar Grove—and it’s more miracle than instinct that makes Glen Abbey catch his eye.
Using a maneuver practiced in Los Angeles, Hoop guns it across two lanes of traffic and exits onto Holbrook Road with no plan in mind other than finding the town where the lawyerwoman’s said to live.
Unsure which town he’s in at the moment, he pulls into a supermarket parking lot after a mile or so of wandering and heads for the rear of the store. At a spot near the loading docks he partially conceals the Jimmy behind a lineup of dumpsters and estimates ten minutes to go by before he feels fit enough to take action. Although this isn’t the first time he’s had luck bordering on the miraculous, he’s still not used to it. Luck, like happiness, can’t be trusted.
As a calmative he decides to see what, besides dirty pictures of Audrey, he looted from Gibby Lester’s safe. He digs into one of the canvas bags and comes up with three worn ledgers held together with a wide rubber band. Nothing stands out on the pages of the one ledger he opens and leafs through; all he sees is a blur of people names, product names, and long strings of numbers. Business records. Monkey business records. Not the kind you show to the tax man. They can be chucked into the nearest dumpster for all the good they’ll do him. Same with the other seized items. By outward appearances they won’t do him any good either.
He’s betting the two pasteboard shoeboxes sealed with duct tape are stuffed with more records of shady-type business dealings. Same with the rectangular package done up with heavy plastic covering and wide bands of reinforced tape. All three need a blade to open, saying he wants to go to the bother. And if he does, he’ll have to use the big knife locked away in the tool chest; he hasn’t carried a pocketknife since grammar school.
After he gives in and goes to the bother, he finds the first shoebox full of more money than he’s ever seen in one place. It’s packed in so tight he’ll have to use the blade to pry any of it out. The second shoebox holds more of the same. But when he puts the knife to the third package, the plastic-wrapped one, something tells him this one’s not filled with money. It’s not as hard as the shoeboxes and it can be squeezed without being squishy.
Like he’s seen done a million times on TV and in the movies, he puts just the tip of the knife into the package, and just like on TV and in the movies, a puff of whitish powder comes out. Unlike on TV or in the movies, he’s not willing to taste it and if he did, he still wouldn’t know for sure what it was. The one thing he does know for sure is that he got a lot more than bargained for when he cleaned out Gibby Lester’s safe, and this may not be a good thing.
What to do with it presses on him harder than any other question he’s had to ask himself in a day of questions. In a week of questions. He can’t keep it in the car; he’s already taking chances by riding around with the paint bucket and the things taken from Cliff Grant in plain sight. Now if he’s stopped
for even the smallest traffic violation, there’s small chance these new possessions wouldn’t be sniffed out. The easy answer is to pitch it all into a dumpster—ditch everything but the bucket—and be satisfied with the leads provided by the newspapers and Cliff Grant.
What would a garbage picker do if he happened onto hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars packed into a couple of pasteboard boxes and maybe two full pounds of an unlawful substance packed tight into a heavy plastic covering? What would anybody do? Go to the police? No chance. So if Hoop does decide to toss the stuff, that’s one less thing to worry about.
Setting all his worries aside for the time being, he drives to the front of the store and parks there as though the Jimmy didn’t contain the equal of three or four bombs.
Inside the supermarket, he sees right off that the place is too rich for his blood. The displays are fancier than those at the Farmers Market in Los Angeles and the atmosphere is a lot less welcoming. If he weren’t getting desperate for something to eat, he wouldn’t put himself through the bother of again showing himself as an outsider ignorant of local ways.
At the section offering carryout foods, he reads a menu that includes things like grilled vegetable Napoleon, lasagna rollantini, and risotto primavera. He sees things inside a cold case that look like pizza and ordinary sandwiches; because they’re called something else, he keeps moving.
At the checkout counter, when he pays for a two-liter bottle of Coke, a jar of peanut butter, a package of saltines, and a sealed stack of bologna slices, it dawns on him that given the stash of money in the car, he could afford to buy all the fancied-up food he wants and throw it away if he didn’t like it.
This realization doesn’t keep him from counting his change and checking the total on the cash register receipt; those habits will hang on no matter how much money he’s lucked into. He’s ready to crumple the receipt and throw it away when he sees the store address printed at the top; he’s in Abbot’s Food Bazaar on Holbrook Road in Upper Montclair, for what it’s worth—and it’s worth a lot just to know the town of Glen Abbey has to be somewhere close by.
In the store vestibule, he helps himself to an assortment of giveaway renter’s and buyer’s guides, a sometime habit that’s been known to furnish emergency toilet paper as well as free reading material. What he’d really like to come across is a rack of phone books and local maps.
After he stows everything in the truck, he spots a drive-up payphone on the other side of the lot, and even from here he can tell there’s no directory attached. For the next several minutes he goes along Holbrook Road at a crawl, holding up traffic more than once and failing to spot either another outdoor payphone or a business that wouldn’t be apt to bar someone like him at the door, unlike the places in New York that begged him to come through their doors.
The stores here call themselves things like boutiques and emporiums, and the beauty shops are called salons; a liquor store is a purveyor of libations, and the bakery next door is a boulangerie, whatever that means. There are no lunch counters or diners, just bistros, trattorias, and delicatessens. Even the banks and drugstores have fancified names, and the one library he passes looks as though you’d have to be a member and be wearing a necktie to get a foot in the door.
Right about the time he’s as worn out on the hifalutin environment as he was the sleazy surroundings on 42nd Street, things start looking different. The buildings are more spread out, and the business names call a spade a spade. The combination hardware store and garden center he comes to doesn’t pretend to be anything else, although “Edelweiss” is not the name he would choose for either kind of business.
Hoop pulls into the parking area and drives around back. Before it’s even determined that he won’t stand out much here, he sees the regulation phone booth next to the back door of the hardware store and a parking space right beside it.
The phone is in working order and there’s a directory in the slot underneath. The directory includes listings for the township of Glen Abbey. Among those are three with the family name of Chandler. He can’t deny this is luck, and he can’t pretend the continued run of luck is not making him more nervous by the minute. There is no listing for a Laurel Chandler, however, so maybe by having to work for that information he can lessen the feeling he’s getting something for nothing.
The first Chandler listing is for a Norman and Helen. Not one to play games on the telephone, Hoop will only call this number if he comes up empty on the other two. Somehow he doesn’t think Elliot’s new girlfriend lives with her parents. From her newspaper pictures she looks too grownup for that, and didn’t one of the stories say she’s come into some money? Don’t the parents have to be dead before you can inherit? Enough reason right there to reject the Norman and Helen Chandler listing.
The next one is for Benjamin Chandler and that could go either way. Benjamin could be the husband of Laurel Chandler because a husband’s not likely to stop Colin Elliot from taking what he wants. Hoop calls that number and an answering machine comes on after three rings. The female voice doesn’t say a name; it just says the number called. Hoop hangs up and after a little while calls the number again, and again the voice sounds like he imagines a lawyerwoman would talk—firm and sure, like she’d knock you silly if you argued with her. Although his mind’s pretty much made up, he dials the third Chandler listing—just in case. This one goes by the initial “W” and a recorded message tells him the number’s no longer in service.
He’s readying to tear the Chandler page from the directory and quick changes his mind when he sees someone looking his way. Besides, the address, 13 Old Quarry Court, is not so hard to remember that he needs it in print and the phone number is of no further interest now that he’s all but sure it’s given away Laurel Chandler’s home place. The problem remaining is how to get to Old Quarry Court.
Because every other car in this parking lot was not built in Germany, and every other person moving around between stacks of fertilizer and mulch is not wearing clothes with alligators or horseback riders embroidered on them, he feels encouraged to go inside and ask for directions.
He’s hardly taken a step when a guy wearing a shirt embroidered with a white flower and lettering that reads “Edelweiss Landscaping Service” stops him. This guy assumes he’s looking for a job as a temporary yard worker and directs him to the trailer office of the garden center where applications are being taken. Before Hoop makes a move in any direction, he’s informed there are still openings on crews that service the townships of Lawndale and Glen Abbey and that decides the direction he takes.
Inside the trailer the first thing he sees is a big plasticized roll-down wall map showing all the boroughs and townships that make up the service area for the Edelweiss outfit. Then he sees that he’d better take an application form from the fat woman stuffed behind a small desk in one corner, or he won’t have any reason to go on studying the wall map. At a table in another corner, he fills out the form with false information all the while glancing up at the wall map and memorizing as much as he can cram into his already overloaded head. When there’s nothing else to be filled in and he’s sure he can find 13 Old Quarry Court by more than one route, he gets out fast before the application taker discovers he’s given no local address or phone number where he can be reached.
He drives to Old Quarry Court in no time at all—in a shake of a lamb’s tail, as the old storytelling uncle would say. He finds out right off why it’s called a court and not a street, and that number 13 is at the center of the dead end. It’s not the best house if bigger means better, but it does have the most space around it and more lawn and nice trees than the other houses. He doesn’t stop directly in front; he picks a spot farther along on the curve where he does dare to stop because that’s where the Edelweiss Landscaping people have parked their trucks and flatbed trailers. There are even a few noncommercial vehicles, older cars resembling his own that probably belong to temporary workers of the type he’s pretending to be.
F
or a while he just sits there letting this, that, and everything else sink in like he did after he found what was needed in the newspapers. Only he’s not thinking of coincidence now. Now he’s thinking about the luck of it. Luck is all he can think of, and that kind of scares him because luck is only what you make of it. You have to know what to do with luck when it lands on you or it’s wasted. Luck has to be earned, so maybe by biding his time for all those many months, and driving all the way across the country and back again, and being willing to do whatever is necessary to even the score with Colin Elliot and purify Audrey Shantz’s memory, he’s deserving of this luck. That has to be it.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Late afternoon, April 3, 1987
Leaving Glen Abbey was easier than finding it. And same as with the return from the big city, the trip back to North Bergen didn’t take as long as he thought it would.
Now, after wheeling his belongings from parking lot to motel lobby to elevator to room, Hoop pats himself on the back for a day well spent—for taking care of another of Audrey’s defilers without an eyeblink of hesitation, for sticking with the search for the lawyerwoman’s home place till it was found.
In a repeat from the night before, he dumps everything on the bed, including the contents of the two canvas bags he’s still not sure he shouldn’t get rid of. He pries some of the money from one of the shoeboxes causing the rest to burst out and spill onto the floor. Just for the fun of it, he counts it as he picks up the dropped bills and reaches twenty thousand dollars before he’s even half done. He’s counted beyond fifty thousand by the time he’s retrieved everything from the floor, and there’s still a goodly amount scattered on the bed plus whatever’s still packed inside the other shoebox.
