Improbable Fortunes

by Jeffrey Price

  “No kidding,” she said, slightly impressed.

  Mrs. Mallomar ate all of her sandwich and drank her milkshake, then watched Buster carefully unwrap a candy bar as he gazed out at the mountains.

  “What’s that?”

  “Lone Cone Mountain,” Buster replied.

  “No, what’s that in your hand?”

  “It’s a Payday.”

  “Well, that’s appropriate.”

  “Beg yor pardon, ma’am?”

  “Meeting my husband has certainly been a payday for you.”

  Buster just looked at her and sadly rewrapped the candy bar, losing his appetite for it. When she saw the look on Buster’s face she immediately regretted saying what she’d said.“I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t resist hitting a nice, fat meatball thrown down the middle of the plate.”

  “That’s okay,” he said quietly.

  “Do you have another…Payday?”

  “Sorry, ah don’t.”

  Buster took the candy bar and handed it over to her. Most people would have politely turned down an offer to eat another man’s candy bar, but not Mrs. Mallomar.

  “My husband made me into this.”

  That was all she said for the rest of the day. Mrs. Mallomar’s inflamed coccyx forced a premature retreat to the ranch.

  Once ensconced back at home, she watched from a double cushioned deck chair as Buster unsaddled the horses in the corral. A profound sense of loss swept over her, for this would have been a wonderful moment for a vodka and tonic or a Tom Collins. Or, for that matter, a spicy Bloody Mary with a couple stalks of fresh celery planted in a glass dusted with seasoned salt. Or a nice, cold Chenin Blanc. Christ, she’d even take an Old Milwaukee right now. Did they still make that beer? If she hadn’t already gotten off to such a lousy start with Buster, she could have yelled out, “Hey, Clem, what do you say we drive into town and I’ll buy you a beer?” But the yokel was under her husband’s thumb so there was no use trying that one. Frustrated and angry with herself, she picked up her cell phone and speed dialed her operatives in New York.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Tradecraft

  Mallomar was picked up at Avjet and taken straight to a late night conference in Manhattan with his lawyers. He used three separate firms, so no one knew the complete profile of his holdings, his business methods, or his personal life. The downside was Mallomar’s legal triangulation created jealousy and suspicion. For example, the decision as to which firm would host this meeting took five days of haggling. It was only when they received a call from Mallomar informing them that he was “wheels down” that they quickly decided to have the meeting on neutral ground at the Sherry Netherlands. They rented a suite, brought in some vintage wine, and passed around Cuban cigars.

  “Marvin, everybody in this room knows the insider trading allegation is absurd.” This was coming from his friend, Sidney of Glasker, O’Reilly, Ng, and Erlichmann.

  “I’m sure it will be resolved in two seconds tomorrow when you meet with the SEC.”

  “Have you been thinking about what I should tell them?”

  “You simply say that your decision to sell drlivingstonipresume.com was based upon a unique trading method that you’ve been using throughout your entire trading career.”

  “I sold drlivingston at the time I did to raise capital for another idea.”

  “And what was that?”

  He lit a cigar and took a sip of whiskey. Mallomar had always been a man of mystery when it came to business, and everyone at the table leaned in expectantly to hear the secrets of the organism.

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “But…we’re your lawyers.”

  “Sorry.”

  Mallomar saw the looks on their faces and took a large swallow of whiskey. “So, obviously, I have to come up with something else, right?”

  “What’s so wrong with just telling the truth?” a young attorney’s assistant seated against the wall was bold enough to ask.

  Mallomar smiled.

  “What’s his name?” Mallomar inquired of his boss and not him.

  “Jeremy Greenberg.”

  “He’s fired.”

  Jeremy looked to his boss, who remained silent. He swallowed, closed his attaché case and left the room without saying another word. Mallomar addressed the crowd.

  “Gentlemen, here’s what we know so far. One: everyone in this room is on an exorbitant retainer. Two: I’m not going to jail. Three: you better fucking think of something!”

  Outside the Sherry Netherlands, the callow Jeremy Greenberg was waiting in line for a cab. Under the hotel’s marquee lights, he looked like a wax version of himself—as if he were about to faint.

  “Hey, Greenberg…”

  Greenberg turned in shock to see Mallomar. He held out a business card for him.

  “This is the number for Albert Kohner of Kohner, Walsh and Anastasia. I called him on my way down the elevator. I told him you’re a bright kid and to hire you. You start tomorrow.” Before the dumbfounded Greenberg could say anything, Mallomar held up his hand to hail his car and walked out into the street.

  His driver wheeled the car to the front curb. It was a bullet-proofed, black Mercedes S65 AMG that was capable of doing over a 205 mph. Mallomar climbed into the back seat and collected himself for a moment as a pulse of adrenaline coursed through his veins. When he was wired like this, there were only two things, besides medication, that could cool him off: food and/or sex.

  “Where to, Mr. M?”

  “Let’s go to Brooklyn and grab something.”

  The driver turned the car into traffic and headed downtown for the Brooklyn Bridge. On the way there, Mallomar made him stop several times, first at a hot dog stand, then for a gyro truck, and once again for a taco. He could see the driver in the rear view mirror watching him eat.

  “Why don’t you get something?” Mallomar said.

  “I’ll eat after I drop you off.”

  “Get a taco for the ride. I’m in no hurry.”

  The second the driver got out of the car, Mallomar lunged over the seat to grab his cell phone—which he could see resting in the console. Quickly, he clicked menu>recent calls>received. Up came Dana’s private phone number under the code name, WRANGLER. This was just what Mallomar had suspected. Dana had been paying his driver to spy on him. He could have fired him on the spot, but didn’t. It was better to know what was going on and then tailor the information that got back to Colorado. Mallomar returned the phone to its original position just before he got back in the car.

  “Should I call Peter Luger’s and tell them you’re comin’?”

  “Naw, I changed my mind. I feel like fish. Let’s go to Lure.”

  The driver called in the reservation and made sure they knew who Mallomar was. He looked up in the rear view mirror to tell Mallomar that he was booked, but Mallomar was on his phone using exasperated gesticulations—indicating it must be a business call he was on. Mallomar knew that he was being watched, and of course, was not on a business call at all. A few minutes later he was delivered to the front door of the restaurant.

  “I got you a private booth in the back, Mr. M.”

  “I’ll call you when I’m finished.” The driver watched Mallomar go inside and was promptly yelled at by a cop to keep moving. The moment Mallomar saw his driver pull away, he came right back out the door and crossed the street to the Mercer Hotel. There, a room was already waiting for him. He took the key from the front desk with greased efficiency and went upstairs where dinner from Nobu had been cabbed over from Hudson Street—along with two young Asian girls. One of them had been instructed to wear a USC cheerleader’s outfit, the other, UCLA. Mallomar, a City College boy himself, had always taken a keen interest in the California schools’ rivalry. When he had finished his order of sea urchin tempura, squid pasta,
and chi ra shi, he slipped back across the street and called his driver. They stopped at Rice to Riches on Spring Street for some chocolate hazelnut rice pudding and then drove home—Mrs. Mallomar none the wiser.

  Mrs. Mallomar called the driver the next day while he waited for Mr. M outside the Securities and Exchange Commission. From a small spiral notebook, he recited the boring details of Mallomar’s previous night. The driver’s per diem for this kind of work was a thousand dollars. The next call she made was to the doorman of their Fifth Avenue apartment building. The doorman received a $2,500 bounty for any information regarding her husband’s misbehavior with guests who looked like hookers. She had the same arrangement with a young female maitre’d at Balthazar where Mallomar was known to have dinner on the way back from the financial district. But Mrs. Mallomar’s most important contact in New York was his long-suffering secretary. Mrs. Mallomar had “turned” her many years ago by planting in the secretary’s mind the nagging fear that Mallomar could not be relied upon to provide her pension or medical care. Mrs. Mallomar offered her a form of “Co-Pay” in return for clandestine HUMINT. Satisfied from her morning briefing that her husband was too busy trying to save his ass than getting any, she shut down WRANGLER INTEL for the day and decided to take her first sober look around her husband’s dream house.

  Mallomar, no slouch in the black arts of surveillance himself, had the best security firm in DC make the house “video and audio ready” before it was sheet-rocked. Cameras were integrated into the lighting fixtures in every room, every hallway, the exterior of the house and the outbuildings. Mallomar had his own secret website, and from anywhere in the country—anywhere in the world for that matter—he could, in real time, peer into his house from the privacy of his own laptop. That was exactly what he did the previous night when he came home with his rice pudding. The cameras, positioned on the house’s exterior, showed another beautiful Colorado sunset with high cumulus nimbus clouds moving slowly west to east. Mrs. Mallomar was in her room reading the label of, what looked to be, a bottle of furniture polish. Loyal Buster was sleeping on a bed roll on the living room floor. Mallomar switched to a porno site for a few minutes, then called it a night.

  The first stop on Mrs. Mallomar’s tour of the house was the six-car garage where she hit the first clinker note. The phone box contained eight separate telephone lines. There was a dedicated circuit to the home security system. But it was neither of these that raised her eyebrows as much as did the unlabeled line that was connected to its own auxiliary power source. This could only mean one thing. Off she went to hunt for the video cameras which she was now sure her husband had installed to surveille her. Half an hour later, she was able to locate thirty-five in the interior of the house. To the lens of each, she applied a thin coat of clear nail polish. The thought of her husband spending half his day yelling himself red-in-the-face at his security company, didn’t quite bring a smile to Mrs. Mallomar’s face, but it did help take her mind off having a drink for the moment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Short Reining

  The water in the newly completed Big Dog reservoir was cold enough to be used as anesthesia, but Buster waded in, nonetheless. Why he didn’t bathe in the house was anyone’s guess, but pride and not wanting Mrs. Mallomar to know her insults were getting to him, had something to do with it. Within seconds of entering the water, he had lost sensation in his feet and knees. He splashed a little water under his arms and lathered the antibacterial soap that Mallomar used Lady Macbeth-like several times a day to rid himself of filth accumulated under his fingernails. Armpits done, he looked down to his testicles quickly ascending, as if having the good sense of their own to retreat to the warmth and safety of his body cavity. This was the general area—if one were to take everything Mrs. Mallomar said to heart—that needed the most prioritizing. Buster got to work quickly, for although it was only six in the morning, Mrs. Mallomar was a wild card and could not be trusted to sleep late, or do anything for that matter, in a predictable way. Buster held his breath and lowered himself to his neck and scrubbed furiously.

  Mrs. Mallomar did not sleep well during the night. Without her prescription sleeping aids, she felt as if she were lashed to a tossing and turning bed of self-loathing and regret. Why was she trying to kill herself? That’s exactly what Marvin probably wanted her to do. She needed to take a step back and think this through. Her attempt at a unilateral withdrawal from the battlefield only highlighted her real problem. Lack of self-esteem had “flamed out” her starboard engine and put her in this steep dive. To pull out, she needed a plan—something her husband had obviously implemented for himself. He had brought her out here in the middle of nowhere and cut her off from drugs and alcohol. This, he hoped, would cause her to wig out in a very public way. She had to vitiate his gambit. Unfortunately, she had already dug herself a pretty deep public relations hole by alienating the hired hand, attempting suicide, and exposing the inner workings of the House of Mallomar to a doctor that she had never before laid eyes upon. All of this could be used against her in divorce proceedings. Therefore, things needed, as they say at Langley, to be “cleaned up.” Tomorrow would be the first day of her charm offensive starting with the foreman.

  Buster figured the two or three minutes he’d spent washing his testicles and cleaning his rectum was good enough. He found that if he kept moving slightly he could escape the filth and scum that was floating to the surface and wanting to buddy back up with him. A rubdown with crumbled sagebrush and he would be ready for the opera. Now as Buster began to wade out of the water, something caught his eye. It was the yardstick that he’d installed alongside the levee to measure the reservoir’s water level. To his surprise, it was down slightly. How could that be? It had rained a good inch and a half the night before. Could the reservoir be leaking? Suddenly he was struck with uncontrollable shivers and needed to do the rest of his thinking on dry land. He scrambled up the bank to where Stinker was waiting patiently and dried off with a kitchen towel. Just as he was removing his clean clothes from his saddlebag, he heard a splash behind him. Odd, the reservoir had not yet been stocked with fish. He scanned the shoreline for telltale splash rings. Nothing. The surface was smooth. Then, as he turned back to his horse, he heard another splash. Buster spun around just in time to see the tail of the culprit dive back under the water. It was a muskrat. Muskrats are diminutive versions of beavers and, while they are cute and playful to watch, they’re a reservoir’s worst enemy. They dig their homes in levees. They start above the water line and go down—creating a honeycomb of tunnels that eventually flood, causing the integrity of the structure to be jeopardized. Buster hurried around the other side of the horse to his rifle scabbard. A one-hundred-yard shot was not out of the question with his 30-40 Krag. Still naked, he tried to stop shivering while he slid back the bolt to chamber a round. Almost imperceptibly, a little black nose broke the surface. He put the bead slightly under the water line and led it a couple of inches as the critter swam on its back. Slowly, he squeezed the trigger.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  The muskrat quickly dove back beneath the surface. Buster stood up, forgetting that he had no clothes on. It was Mrs. Mallomar, wearing jeans and one of her husband’s cowboy shirts.

  “Ma’am, I…”

  “Jesus Christ,” she said covering her mouth in shock. Having already learned that most people were not like the Svendergards, Buster quickly scrambled around to the other side of Stinker and quickly threw on his jeans.

  “Ma’am, lemme ’splain to you about these here muskrats…”

  “You don’t have to explain anything. There will be no killing on this ranch!”

  “But with all due respect, ma’am…” Buster was hopping on one leg trying to get his boot on a wet, numb foot.

  “Did you hear what I fucking said? I don’t want you fucking shooting anything around here!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” This, of cour
se, was not how Mrs. Mallomar had wanted things to go today. She softened her tone.

  “I don’t mean to be a…it’s just that…” Now her eyes welled with tears. “Isn’t there enough fucking cruelty in this world without you going off and shooting little animals for the hell of it?”

  “Ah wern’t doin’ it for the hell of it, ma’am, ah…”

  “Look, I don’t care to talk about it anymore. If you need to shoot something, shoot a tin can or that moldy piece of cheese in the refrigerator.”

  “Tin cans don’t tunnel under…” She glowered at him again. “Yes, ma’am, whatever you say.”

  “You weren’t bathing in there were you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  A horrible thought occurred to her.

  “Is that the water we drink at the house?”

  “No ma’am. Is jes fer irrgayshun.” That relaxed her a little.

  “Why didn’t you use the shower in the maid’s quarters?”

  “Ah cain’t fit inside it, ma’am.”

  “You can use the guest room facilities if you like.” It killed her to say that, but she was struggling to come up with something that would slightly humanize her.

  “Much obliged, ma’am, but ah’d druther not make a mess.”

  “It’s a ranch,” she said with a winning smile. “Aren’t we supposed to make a mess?” She wanted to add “…you dumbfuck,” but didn’t. “Let me ask you something, Clem. When my husband’s at the ranch, what does he actually do here?” Buster wasn’t quite sure what she was referring to, hopefully not Mr. Mallomar’s assignations with Mary Boyle.

  “Lil’ of this…lil’ a that,” he said noncommittally.

  “Well, I want to do a lil’ of everything he does.”

  “Sure yor up to it, ma’am?”

  “Just give me something to do. I’ll let you be the judge of whether I’m up to it, or not,” she said with a defiance that was almost laughable considering her pitiful physical condition.