by Michael Ryan
Also quite jolly was Sheed’s then informing me that his tab so far was approximately $6,000, not including xeroxing. Add that to the Unwedding Dinner, and being abducted by the Cheerios people was starting to look good. At least I could live on cereal.
Unless the situation changed, Sheed said, he and I would not need to meet again. I should feel free to call him if I had any problems or concerns. He said the private investigators who worked for him would be contacting me when they had further information. They’d certainly tell me who owned the house Angela Chase took me to. I said I’d like to be told if and when Angela Chase got out of Mexico alive and, if she did, where she was. He said he’d try to find that out for me. And with that I said good-bye and shook his little hand.
I felt like I had been picked up by the tornado in Kansas and deposited in the land of Oz. All the reactions I had suppressed to focus on understanding what Sheed was telling me now swirled around me and left me standing outside his office door in Munchkin land dressed in Dorothy’s pigtails and powder-blue pinafore. I had completely forgotten about Tori. On the way to the elevator, I glided past her desk like a zombie.
“Robert?” she said to my back.
“Oh, hi,” I said, turning around, and recalling her name with difficulty. “Tori.”
“How’d it go?”
“Good. I guess.”
“I’m not allowed to talk to the clients about their cases. But people don’t see lawyers like Mr. Sheed unless they’ve got a good reason. I just hope everything’s okay. You’re in good hands with him. He’s tough but honest.”
I nodded. And smiled (I think).
“He’s so busy, though. Call me if you need to get through to him,” she went on. “That’s one way I can help.”
I said thanks.
“Oh, don’t thank me. It’s selfish.”
She waited for my response, but I just didn’t have it in me. She would have thought I had an electroshock treatment instead of legal counsel, except that she must be used to seeing people come out of Sheed’s office looking lobotomized.
“You have the office number here. This is my home number.” She wrote it on the back of one of Sheed’s business cards and handed it to me.
I looked at it dumbly. She had used red ink. Underneath the number, she had printed “Tori” with two hearts: a big one for the o and a tiny one for the dot over the i.
WHEN I handed my stub to the parking attendant, he looked at me as if I really had just landed from Kansas dressed in pigtails and a powder-blue pinafore. I had forgotten to get my valet parking ticket validated, which for an Angelino is like a Muslim forgetting Ramadan. I don’t believe he had ever seen an unvalidated parking stub before.
“Twenty-five dollars, señor,” he said. “You want to go back inside for the stamp?”
That didn’t appeal to me. I handed him the money. He muttered a sentence to himself in Spanish that had the word gordo in it. I assumed he was speaking metaphorically, either about my fat wallet or my fat head or both. When he came back with the car, and held the door for me, I gave him five dollars just so he wouldn’t feel undertipped by the big spender. Then I had to go back into the building anyway, because I had forgotten to sign out and pick up my driver’s license and I had also forgotten to leave my HBO contract with Sheed for one of his entertainment specialists to review. Bucket’s lawyers had surely reviewed it as they always did, but now I didn’t trust Bucket either. Maybe I shouldn’t trust anybody, I thought. Ever.
10.
I didn’t want to go home. I couldn’t deal with Krista right now or with Renate dealing with Krista. Lunch with Don was set for noon. My gym stuff was at home, so a therapeutically mind-numbing killer workout was not an option. There was always Starbucks, but sipping a latte with my fellow Californians did not suit my state of mind—if you can call being spun in a cyclotron a state of mind. Sitting calmly in the middle was someone named Angela Chase, smiling at me with that lush lopsided ironic grin of hers.
When I stopped the car, I found myself at Madge’s. That’s how it happened. I didn’t know I was going there. She was leaning on the counter with her half-lens reading glasses on her nose paging through a soap opera magazine. The waiting room smelled like incense instead of the usual Essence of Dog.
“Back already, Robert,” she observed. “Where’s Sparky?”
“At home,” I said. “It’s just me that needs boarding.”
“What’s up?”
“This is going to sound odd, but do you mind if I sit here for a while? I’ve got something to read and I need a place to do it.”
“Make yourself at home. There’s a pot of green tea under the cozy. The girls went home already, if you can call a massage parlor home. They had a ceremony for Mitchie here this morning. I guess we had a ceremony. I was part of it too. To tell you the truth, it was heartbreaking. The girls got some lotus-flower petals somewhere and some incense. It was all sort of Buddhist, I guess. What would I know? I got dunked in a river in Midgeville, Georgia, washed in the blood of the lamb and all that shit. They had a photo of Mitchie too. They gave it to me as a present.”
She handed it across the counter. It was no bigger than a matchbook cover, not the kind of print you get in the US. A ten-year-old in a school uniform smiled happily at me.
“You’re good to those girls,” I said.
“I’ve been there myself. There were some mean guys in Midgeville. Pickups with shotgun racks. You’ve heard the joke about why a Southern town’s population always stays the same? Every time a baby’s born, a man leaves. Not Midgeville. Motto there was ‘Keep the women barefoot and pregnant so they can’t outrun you.’ But you came here for some privacy. There’s your chair,” she said, nodding to a legless overstuffed chair in the far corner, fluffy with dog hair.
When I sat down my butt hit the floor. There wasn’t any stuffing in the legless overstuffed chair. I opened the folder on my lap and flipped through it: downloaded photographs and newspaper stories; credit reports on Angela and Michael, listing their five most recent addresses; even their college transcripts. Michael got a B in bowling at the University of Miami. Angela went to UCLA. She was a freshman my last year there before I dropped out of the PhD program in English (now I recognized the place her graduation picture was taken—the quad in front of the Humanities Building). There were 40,000 students at UCLA so it wasn’t surprising that I never met her. Or had I? That was a bizarre idea. But unless she had a total body transplant, I certainly would remember if I had.
Even more bizarre was to read these things about her. I had made love to this person, I had been inside her most intimate being. Or so I had thought. The person I had spent the most remarkable day of my life with didn’t exist. There was no Sabine. She wasn’t dead: she had never existed, except as a figment of my imagination, a holographic erotic fantasy she played into. She had been what she knew I wanted her to be, and not even what I personally—Robert Wilder—wanted her to be but what she knew some generic male led around by his dick wanted her to be. Whoever this Angela Chase actually was, I wasn’t going to like her—this rip-off queen, this scam artist.
But I did like her, of course: I liked her too much. Just looking at these pieces of paper filled me with longing. This was the summary of her identity provided to Sheed by Advantage Private Investigators:
ANGELA CHASE (aka “Sabine”) was born November 14, 1967, in Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles to Rev. John Chase and Margaret Chase of Malibu. Rev. Chase was at the time the pastor of Our Lady of Malibu Episcopal Church. Margaret Chase was active in worldwide Episcopal charities especially those concerning children’s welfare. She was also a soprano in various choirs, a painter of watercolors exhibited locally, and an organizer of monthly book discussion clubs. Angela was the second of their two children. Her brother, Michael, was born in 1962.
Angela Chase attended elementary school at Miss Waterstone’s, a private girls’ school in Malibu. Upon graduation at the age of thirteen, she was sent to the Mo
nt Fleur Academy in Lucerne, Switzerland. She returned to Malibu for the summers.
In March 1985, Rev. John Chase committed suicide in gruesome fashion in the backyard of his home. He put a 12-gauge shotgun in his mouth and pushed the trigger with his toe. He apparently slipped as he did so, because the first shot did not kill him. The sound woke his wife, who came out the back door just as he had crawled to the gun and managed to put it into his mouth again. Mrs. Chase witnessed the second shot, which killed him (c.f. Los Angeles Times, file item #16).
Angela Chase returned to Malibu to be with her mother. She was two months short of completing her course of study at Mont Fleur, and was never awarded a diploma. Michael Chase did not return to Malibu for his father’s funeral. He was then a broker of foreign currency futures for Dean Witter Reynolds in Miami, specializing in the Mexican peso. He had attended the University of Miami from 1979–1985, and during this period was arrested four times for lewd conduct, once for drunk driving, and three times for possession of narcotics (seven acquittals, one misdemeanor conviction). He was incarcerated for short periods of time in city and county jails. He had no contact with his family during this time, and apparently financed the purchase of two nightclubs and a South Beach restaurant by dealing drugs to fraternities and sororities. He was well-known to the Miami police (dossier included: item #5). He was indicted by a grand jury in a bribery scandal involving the South Beach police department during his last year of college, but cooperated with the prosecution and was never brought to trial.
Margaret Chase was periodically hospitalized for depression after her husband’s suicide, from March to November 1985. Angela stayed with her mother at their home in Malibu during this time. On November 14, 1985 (Angela’s eighteenth birthday), Margaret Chase committed suicide in exactly the same fashion that her husband did, with the same shotgun. Angela was awakened just as her mother had been, and ran to the backyard just as her mother had. Her mother, however, was already dead. Unlike Rev. John Chase, the first self-administered shotgun blast killed Margaret Chase. The story was widely covered by the news media (item #12).
Michael Chase did return to Malibu for his mother’s funeral. He continued his brokerage career in Los Angeles. Michael and Angela shared an apartment in Brentwood from November 1985 until September 1990. There is no police record for Michael Chase during these years. Angela Chase enrolled at UCLA in September 1986 and graduated summa cum laude in June 1990. In September 1990 she was admitted to the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, the school for Europe’s political and diplomatic elite. Michael Chase was hired as vice president for international marketing by General Mills and moved to Mexico City. The house in Malibu they now owned jointly was maintained as a lease property by Coldwell Realty from November 1985 until it was sold one week ago for $3.2 million. Part of the profit from this sale was delivered to Angela Chase at the Bank of America branch at Second and Colorado in Santa Monica. This unusual procedure was authorized by T. Jefferson St. John, President of B of A (item #33).
Angela Chase completed her graduate studies in Paris in eighteen months. Except for the purchase of plane tickets to various capitals in the Middle East (items #44 through #48), there is no record of her whereabouts from March 1992 until June 1996 (two weeks ago), when she returned to California to arrange the sale of her parents’ home to pay her brother’s ransom.
Michael Chase resided in Mexico City since leaving Brentwood in September 1990. He was an investment partner in various enterprises with government officials associated with drug and arms smuggling, and has been the subject of investigations both by Mexican panels of inquiry and the CIA (item #17). He has never been indicted. His illegal activities, if any, are unknown. He is a homosexual, and is reputed to frequent the Zona Rosa district. On three occasions, he has undergone inpatient hospitalization in Costa Rica and the United States for cocaine addiction, most recently at the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Springs. His lifestyle made him an excellent candidate for abduction. His whereabouts are unknown.
The whereabouts of Angela Chase are also unknown.
WHEN I looked up I saw a woman sitting in the pink plastic chair across from me. It was the woman from the beach Sparky had rubbed rotted black marine jelly on, the woman who watered her flowers with Evian.
“Dropping off your dog?” she asked.
“Um, no,” I answered.
“Well, you’re not picking him up. I saw you with him this morning.”
Was that this morning? “He’s at home,” I said.
“So what are you doing here?” she asked, as if it were her constitutional right to know.
“I’m reading.”
“You’re reading,” she said. “He’s reading. At a kennel,” she said to the rack of old magazines on the wall. “I love this town.”
“Do you mind if I ask you something?” I said, irked at being interrupted. “Why are you so unhappy?”
My mouth ahead of my brain again.
She looked at me angrily. “You doing a survey?”
“Kind of. It’s a subject that interests me professionally.”
“You a shrink or a priest? Or an undisguised sadist?”
“Comedian,” I said.
“An undisguised sadist, in other words. Probably with a high dose of masochism too.”
“Guess it depends on how you do comedy,” I muttered.
“The answer to your question is none of your business, Mr. Funnybones. But I’m going to tell you anyway. I moved down here from Santa Cruz six months ago, because I got married. I just found out my new husband spent the weekend with another woman. How did I find out? The kennel lady called because Asshole forgot to leave the dog’s meds. Asshole told me he was going duck hunting this weekend. Duck hunting! I love that. The outfit, the gun, the decoys, even his stupid duck call. Big masquerade. Loaded his hunting dog into his car then dropped it off here. Where do you men get off screwing around on your wives? Don’t you have any integrity? Don’t you love anybody but yourselves?”
“I guess all men don’t do it,” I said, certainly not referring to myself.
“Show me one,” she said.
Madge walked through the swinging door from the kennel with a springer spaniel on a leash. It saw me first, since my face was at its eye level, due to my seat in the unstuffed legless overstuffed chair. It came right over and tried to lick my mouth. I blocked it with my forearms, so it licked those. I must have smelled like the woman’s husband: the infidelity scent.
“Over there, over there,” I said to it, pointing to the woman. Madge handed her the leash, and she handed Madge a credit card. She didn’t say another word to me. As she was leaving, I said, “See you around the neighborhood.”
“Not for long,” she answered. “Have a nice life.”
“Unusual dog for that kind of woman,” Madge said to me after she left. “They don’t go together at all.”
“It’s her husband’s,” I said from my chair.
Madge raised her eyebrows as if to ask how I knew that. I still was sitting there with Angela’s folder on my lap, which had been playing like a tape loop in my mind during my soon-to-be-ex-neighbor’s rant. Madge saw I was preoccupied and went back to her soap opera magazine. There was only one more page in the folder: the xerox of the California driver’s license that Sheed had already shown me. I looked at the photo more closely. Angela looked startled and scared. Or was this a combination of the DMV flashbulb and my imagination? It wasn’t an expression of hers I had seen before. Maybe she had acted the part of Sabine so well I had seen nothing of Angela Chase. Here was this real person somewhere in the world with her own problems and agony—including the agony of losing both parents and now possibly her brother. No wonder she treated me like a function (as Charles put it): the rescue-my-brother function. Didn’t I treat her the same way? The escape-from-Doris function? I didn’t give her much reason to think I might be interested in anything else.
Yet here she was: Angela Chase. According to the State of Californ
ia, an official real human being. We had served each other’s functions very well. Was that the end of it? What about the note she wrote to me, saying she’d never forget me, the lovely gentle sexy (underlined three times) man? What about that nutty business of being together in the next life? Was that part of the act?
Staci and Laci came flying through the swinging door from the kennel. Madge’s twins. Blonde twelve-year-olds with pierced noses and Def Leppard T-shirts, twin hormonal fireworks displays.
“Madonna and Michael Jackson are having a baby!” Staci shouted. Or maybe it was Laci.
“Together?” Madge asked.
“No!” Laci (or Staci) said, punching her sister in the shoulder. “They’re having separate babies, but at the same time.”
“At the exact same time?” Madge asked.
“Nooo, mom. God,” they said. But they knew she was kidding them.
“Maybe they’ll share the same hospital room,” Madge said.
“Nooo. They’re both rich! They’ll each have private rooms. They can buy a whole hospital. We decided we’re never going to have babies. We’re never getting married because guys suck.”
“That is exciting news. You’ve met, Robert, girls? What do you say?”
“Hi, Robert,” they said in unison. “Mom, can we have some money? Can we go down to the Promenade?” The Third Street Promenade was the downtown Santa Monica mall. Lots of homeless people, street performers, psychotic outpatients, drug pushers, and teenagers sucking it all into their teenage brains.
“I’m going to take off, Madge,” I said. “Thanks for the reading chair.”
“No trouble, Robert,” she said. It was advice, not a statement. She had two good reasons for avoiding trouble, and one was at each elbow as she dug into her purse.
11.
Just a normal morning. It wasn’t yet noon and I had watched an insane young woman smash her thumb in my car door so she could study my response; I had spent $6,000 to find out that a) I had not driven the getaway car for b) a bank robbery that wasn’t a bank robbery by c) a woman who wasn’t who she was; I had been given a phone number by a third young woman for whom I felt nothing but unregenerate lust; and I had been ranted at by a complete stranger (also female) about male infidelity. Not to mention Madge’s problems and Mitchie’s suicide. That was just about plenty of bad day for one bad day. I had just slept seventeen hours but I needed more sleep—say, a week under the covers, with the door locked, the shades drawn, the phone turned off, and a nice slow morphine drip.
