Thompson gave Lucinda a peck on the top of her head and paused at the back door to towel off her feet. She led me into the kitchen, where she relieved me of the Von’s sack and set it on the counter.
“Milk. God bless you for that. Lucinda’s got to have milk with her cereal and there wasn’t a drop of it in this house. Bitty boxes of cereal; that’s sweet; there’ll be something she’ll like in there. Grapefruit and bananas, good. Bacon! And bread! Wonder enriched white bread! Thank you, God! I mean, you too, Jay.”
“No, no, give God the credit. I’m just his humble instrument.”
“Would you believe there wasn’t more than three or four bites of solid food in this entire kitchen?”
“Yes, I would.” I’d been kind of counting on it.
“Unless you’re really into nuts, strange fruit, and brown bread. Lucinda! Come on in here and get yourself some cereal, honey. Mommy’s gonna fry up some bacon and make a little toast.”
Taking one of the bananas for myself, I parked on a stool at the counter-island and watched Thompson get to work. I made sure that Lucinda had trudged back out onto the porch with her cereal, and that the door had closed smoothly behind her. Even then, I waited until Thompson had eight slices of bacon sizzling on a stove-top griddle before I spoke.
“Can I ask you a question, Hurricane?”
“Shoot.”
“Do you have any acting or modeling work that will tie you up for the next couple of weeks, or are you up for a gig?”
She looked at me like a Vegas pit boss might look at a tourist who’d doubled down on face-six three hands in a row and won all three.
“Depends on the gig.”
“Legal and you get to keep your clothes on. But it would involve some travel.”
“How much would this legal, fully-clothed, traveling job pay?”
Tricky question. I could get her twenty-five hundred a week without breathing hard. But if I said that she’d assume it was drug smuggling which, if I had her sized up right, would be a deal-killer.
“Depends. Say, eight-hundred a week. Plus room and board—and we’re talking nice rooms and nice boards.”
Now she looked at me like I was a cat who’d missed the litter box. She flipped bacon, popped toast, put in more toast, and started spreading margarine on the toast she’d popped.
“What do you do for a living, Tall Dude?”
“I work for an insurance company.” I started to pull out one of my cards.
“Skip it. I didn’t ask you who you worked for. I want to know what you do.”
“Well, it’s like this. Insurance companies make bets with lots and lots of people that certain things won’t happen. If they win ninety-eight percent of those bets, they pay off the other two percent and make a lot of money. What I do is, I go into situations where it looks like my company might lose one of those bets, and I try to get them from the two percent column into the ninety-eight percent column.”
“Oh. Okay. I get that I wouldn’t be hooking or showing off my birthday suit. What would you want me to do for two weeks for—oh, just for fun, let’s say for a thousand a week?”
Before I could get a word out, Trowbridge’s pitch-perfect baritone voice echoed resonantly through the kitchen.
“He wants you to be my jail coach.”
Chapter Eight
Trowbridge was wearing a black-and-white silk robe that came down to just above his knees. One of the almost-twins, still wearing what she’d had on last night, came into the kitchen right behind him. Working her way around his body, she pulled an industrial-sized blender out from the wall next to the refrigerator.
“Jail coach?” Thompson shot me a look.
“Something like that,” I said.
“Yep,” Trowbridge said.
“I forgot where you keep the celery,” the almost-twin said.
“So.” Trowbridge put his hands in the pockets of his robe and gave Thompson the kind of attention the cop had given me. “Let’s say you were my ‘jail coach.’ I already know not to bend over in the shower. What else could you teach me?”
“I guess I’d have to think about that.”
Hmm. Trowbridge had decided that we were going to do a little improv, which isn’t the first thing you think of when someone says ‘Simi Valley.’ Thompson would need some help. I turned toward Trowbridge.
“How about this? First full day in the zoo. You’re in the dayroom with your new neighbor, Hurricane Thompson here. Go.”
“Okay.” With a shrug, Trowbridge sauntered over to Thompson. “So, Hurricane, is it? So, Hurricane: what are you in for?”
“No.” Thompson wagged an index finger back and forth in front of her face, like a very shapely windshield wiper. “No, no, no. You do not ask anyone on the inside what they’re doing time for.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. Just don’t do it. It’s a fresh meat move, and fresh meat is something you do not want to seem like—especially if you are.”
“And you know that…how?”
“Not from reading it in a script. Mama has been a guest of the county.”
Thompson put four strips of bacon and two slices of toast on a plate. Trowbridge glanced at the blender, where something that looked vaguely like a pea-green smoothie was shaping up. Thompson held the plate out to him.
“Uh, no, thanks.”
Trowbridge said this about the way you’d say it if someone offered you toxic sludge. Thompson handed the plate to me.
“Would you mind taking this out to Lucinda? Oh, and remind her to say her grace, in case she forgot?”
Lucinda had not forgotten to say grace. By the time I got back Thompson was jail-coaching Trowbridge with both barrels.
“Here’s the deal. I can tell you the do’s and don’ts in five minutes and you won’t have to pay me a penny. Don’t accept anything anyone offers you, whether it’s a joint or a library book or something in between. Don’t tell the guards you have a big, scary lawyer who can sue them. Don’t snitch on anyone, including the bruiser who puts your face into the wall. Don’t take the bait when someone starts jawing at you. Don’t fight unless there’s absolutely nothing else you can do. If you do have to fight, do it like your life depends on it, ’cause ain’t no director gonna yell, ‘Cut!’ Don’t promise anyone a job on the outside. He’ll know it’s bullshit. If a guard starts playin’ with your head, just swallow hard and take it. Don’t say a word, don’t shift your eyes, don’t move a muscle. Just take it. Find something in the vending machines that you can stand to eat. Mind your own business, do your own time.”
“Okay.” Trowbridge did a little exhale take that I vaguely remembered from two movies ago. “Got it. So now I’m ready?”
Thompson now offered me a plate with four slices of bacon and two pieces of toast. I started nibbling the part of the toast that hadn’t touched the bacon. Strolling over to Trowbridge, Thompson looked at him with a kind of brutal pity.
“Mr. Trowbridge, from everything I can see, you are a really decent person. Letting Lucinda and me stay here last night—that was just real nice. But there’s one thing you definitely need to know if you’re gonna spend more than twenty minutes in jail. Something way past those dos and don’ts I just rattled off.”
“Tell me.” Trowbridge spread his arms and flashed his million-dollar smile.
“There’s somethin’ about you that makes people just wanna kick the livin’ shit outta you. That’s your problem, right there. Every time you walk ten feet across the exercise yard two or three guys are gonna have this sudden urge to whip your ass just for the exercise.”
“Oh.” Trowbridge didn’t spread his arms. The smile he attempted wouldn’t have brought ten cents at a junior high slumber party.
“Now, that’s what I think Tall Dude here wants
me to work on with you if I take on what you call this jail coach gig. I’m not for sure I can do anything about it, but if you wanted me to give ’er a try that’s what I’d zero in on.”
Thompson glanced over at me. Her eyes said, “Am I hot or what?” I gave her the eyebrow equivalent of a thumbs-up. She noticed the untouched pigs’ bellies on my plate.
“You don’t like bacon?”
“Not kosher. I looked it up.”
“Oh my Lord!” She blushed tomato red and her hands went to her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“No way you could have known. I left my prayer shawl back at the hotel.”
Thompson suddenly turned back to Trowbridge. She looked like the basic concept for the next generation of smart phones had just popped into her brain.
“Say, I just got an idea! A place we could start.”
“All ears.”
“How about if you go to the studio sometime today, look up that kid you sucker-punched, and say you’re sorry? No photo-ops, no publicity, no press release, no posse, just by your lonesome. Don’t give him any money, don’t promise to make it up to him. Just say, ‘Look, I was way out of line. No excuse for it. My bad. It’s on me. I’m really sorry.’ Do you think you could handle that?”
That had to be the world’s easiest question, right? I mean, you’ve got to at least say you could handle a decent apology.
Trowbridge didn’t say this. For a good five seconds he didn’t say anything. Then he said, “I’ve gotta call Saul.”
I had to call someone too. I speed dialed Proxy as I walked out onto the back porch. My one-minute recap ended with, “So it seemed like a good time to call you.”
“It sounds like ten minutes ago would have been a good time to call me.”
“I had a fluid situation on my hands.”
“Let me get this straight.” She had that little pant to her voice that you sometimes get when you talk on a mobile phone while you’re doing complicated driving. “We’re about to lay a thousand bucks a week on a high school dropout porn actress who’s an alumna of the Harris County Jail so she can play Doctor Phil with pretty boy—am I clear on the concept?”
“Just for the upcoming tour. As soon as that’s over, I’ll have a Rhodes Scholar who’s done time in some classy federal penitentiary replace Thompson.”
“If you’re joking, Davidovich, I’m pissed off—and if you’re not I’m scared.”
An hour later we were two fingers from a deal. Proxy had somehow managed to jack Thompson’s stipend up to twelve-hundred a week—negotiating isn’t her strong suit—but that was still chump-change on Planet Trans/Oxana. Trowbridge said he was okay with apologizing to the kid he’d punched out. Levitt had signed on. Thompson was on board. Then Proxy almost blew it.
“And we’ll be happy to arrange twenty-four/seven child care for Lucinda while you’re gone.”
“Uh-uh.” Thompson shook her head gravely as something close to shock washed over her face. “Luci comes along with mama.”
Lucinda nodded vigorously, jumping into her mother’s lap. She clutched the doll like it was a seat on the last life-boat leaving the Titanic. Proxy looked at me. I nodded. What could possibly go wrong?
Chapter Nine
By 9:45 Monday morning we had been in the air for an hour, and we’d made up enough time to be only forty minutes behind schedule. We had a cozy little group: Trowbridge, Thompson, Lucinda, and yours truly; a flack from Levitt’s office named Jeff Wells and a go-fer for him; Jennifer Seawright, a studio flunky, and her go-fer; a guy who knew how to replace toner and ink-cartridges and make computers behave; another guy who looked to me like he could mop the floor up with a gunnery sergeant and who was Trowbridge’s personal trainer; a person whose gender I had to guess at but who carried a massive make-up satchel with him or her at all times; and a couple of short-necked knuckle-draggers.
No Proxy. She was back in Hartford, telling the suits not to worry about the Trowbridge policy—or something like that. Proxy has three rules: (1) Don’t lie; (2) Back up the people who are working with you; (3) if Rule (1) conflicts with Rule (2), Rule (2) wins. So I wasn’t worried about her.
First stop would be Nashville. That’s right: not one of the East Coast biggies, not Atlanta, not even Miami. Nashville.
“Nashville is the single best per capita market for westerns east of the Mississippi.” This from Wells, who had decided that he and I should be good buddies. “No one knows why. Maybe just because the entire city lives on hat-acts.”
I shrugged. I was concentrating on figuring out which members of our merry band had illicit pharmaceuticals stashed in their Travel Pros. Also, I couldn’t get Rachel out of my head. No question about it, the chick is a drama magnet. Always has been. But things got way weirder after my return from Iraq. Had she cheated on me and then gotten fucked up guilt-tripping herself over it? Don’t know. Something huge had gone down, though, and I had no idea what it was. Wells interpreted my indifference as ignorance and explained his comment.
“A ‘hat-act’ is a country-western singing group? Because they all wear cowboy hats?”
“He knows what a ‘hat-act’ is.” Trowbridge beamed down at us.
“I do now.”
“Look, Jay, could you maybe join me for a few minutes while I do a little cardio?”
“Sure thing.” I stood up and stretched, then threw Wells a bone. “Interesting dope about Nashville.”
I followed Trowbridge to the rear of the main cabin, where the exercise stuff waited. He had on a plain white tee and blue shorts, with a regular white towel around his neck. He climbed onto the stationary bike, fussed with the settings, and started pumping away with the effortless steadiness of a guy who really does keep himself fit. He nodded toward pairs of twenty-pound and fifty-pound weights locked into the weight bench near the bulkhead.
“You ever do free weights?”
“Twice a week.” I found a seat that I could swivel toward the middle of the plane so that I could look at Trowbridge while I kept my legs at full length.
“Katrina says you were an MP in Iraq.”
“Guilty.”
“You sign up after nine-eleven?”
“Nope. Joined the Connecticut National Guard for help with college tuition. I figured basic training would be a breeze after basketball practice, and then I’d just have a month of summer camp and an occasional natural disaster. Nine-eleven came as an unpleasant surprise to Bush and me.”
“You got called up?”
“Yep. Ended up doing the college thing in bits and pieces.”
Trowbridge pedaled away, leaning forward with an intense expression as he glanced at what must have been pretty good numbers on the screen between the handlebars, seeming to glow from the fine sheen of sweat he’d already worked up. Cord-like muscles pulsed rhythmically in the thigh and calf that I could see.
“Saul had a workup done on you.”
“That doesn’t come as a complete surprise.”
“It says your real name is Davidson.”
“My parents’ name is Davidson. I changed it back to the original family version when I turned eighteen.” My look was supposed to tell him that I wasn’t exactly fascinated by me. Didn’t work.
“Why did you do that?”
“So mom and dad wouldn’t feel disgraced if I ever got caught humping underage girls.”
That worked. Trowbridge’s mouth formed a little O as his head snapped in my direction.
“You’re talking about Kathy and Cathy, right?”
“We were never actually introduced.”
“You know how old they are?”
“My guess is they should get grounded for smoking.”
“Twenty-three. That fifteen-year-old Lolita deal is their thing. Their look.”
“The
ir art.”
“Well, let’s not get excited.” Trowbridge threw me the patented grin.
“Well, they sure fooled me.”
Trowbridge leaned into the bike and did a good three minutes of serious pumping. Not quite Tour de France stuff, but he had his legs moving. Then he dialed it back closer to normal and returned his attention to me.
“You don’t think much of me, do you?”
I thought about that for a second. I’ve learned the hard way to cut people some slack. There have been times when I didn’t think much of myself. Bad things don’t just happen in war. They also happen in peace.
“You know what? I won’t say that. You don’t exactly get a gold star for punching out a kid who couldn’t defend himself. On the other hand, you were drunk. On the other hand, knowing that you do stuff like that when you get drunk is a good reason not to get drunk.”
“I told Dex I was sorry. I tracked him down and did the apology thing, like Katrina said.”
“I’m glad you did that. Strikes me as the right thing to do.”
“And I came to get you myself just now, instead of sending someone for you.”
“Another Katrina suggestion?”
“Yeah.” The whirr of the well-oiled pedal gears picked up again, heading back toward something just short of a whine. “It seems lame, hearing myself say that just now. As if it’s something special to act like a regular human being. Like I’m in some kind of twelve-step jerk-rehab program.”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re a jerk. To someone on the outside looking in, it seems like you’ve had everything handed to you, without having to work for it. People hate that. They see the great bod, but they don’t see the three-hour workouts that keep it great.”
“What can I do about that?”
“Beats me.” I pushed my shoulders into the back of my seat. “Probably nothing. I thought I was going to go through college on rebounds and lay-ups and then find a job somewhere as a civil engineer if I couldn’t get into coaching. Didn’t work out that way. So what? There are five billion people in the world who’d love to have my problems.”
Jail Coach Page 4
