Her e-mail had three attachments, all bad. I was being accused of bid package tampering and pandering to favored bidders. Two memos, written by GUESS WHO, said I had unnecessarily complicated the bid request packages, thereby jacking the price and insuring my own handpicked bidder won the contract. Dale the Dork had stopped just short of accusing me of receiving kickbacks, but the implications were clear.
Attachment number three was a copy of an old letter on Baxter Brothers corporate letterhead stationery summarizing their never-proven suspicions that I was disloyal to Baxter in my dealings with Superior Oil, the client in Japan. Presumably this little tidbit was presented to my Seattle client as further proof of my nefarious nature.
I forwarded the blasphemous documents to the Trob, then called Jan.
“I’ve already heard,” she said. “Bad news travels fast. My boss is talking to lawyers as we speak.”
“And?”
“Nothing yet, but other than being a big pain in the ass, he thinks we’re dealing with a nuisance thing. The fact that you and I are friends is beside the point. We bid it fair and square, we got the purchase order and shipped the goods. It’s the goods that are being questioned by your now-ex-client; you know, whether all the equipment you spec’d out was necessary. The boss is writing a rebuttal letter as we speak. Defending your honor, I might add.”
“Tell him thanks, but I’m a big girl. I’ll handle it.”
“What are you gonna do, Hetta?”
“I’m going to Seattle and whup up on Dale.”
Jan giggled. “Now that’s mature and businesslike.”
“Okay, maybe not, but it sure would make me feel better. I don’t know yet what to do, but I’ll be damned if I’ll take this besmirchment lying down.”
“Atta girl. You going to get a lawyer?”
“I’m going to call Allison. She’s meaner’n a rattlesnake with a tummy ache.”
“You go, girl. See you tonight?”
“Yep. Hot tub huddle, comin’ up.”
24
Allison Cuthbert, all five feet one of her, dangled dainty feet in the tub while her almond-shaped eyes scanned steaming copies of documents. A product of Houston’s fifth ward and the daughter of a black, second generation welfare mom, Ms. Cuthbert came up hard, as we say back home. A prosecutor with political ambitions, she possesses the body of a gymnast, the beauty of a model, the professional scrappiness of an alley cat, and a politician’s savvy. My kind of lawyer.
Zeroing in on the Baxter Brothers missive hinting I was not what they’d call a “team player,” she asked what that was all about.
I sighed and told her. “It’s about change orders, Allison. Used to be, when the engineering and construction industry was in its heyday, contracts were let on a cost-plus basis. In other words, whatever it cost to complete, plus a set percentage over that. The Alaska Pipeline killed cost-plus forever. Murdered the goose and the egg. After the pipeline thing, the industry had to start bidding hard money. Actually estimating what a job was going to cost and, in theory, sticking to it. What a concept.”
“Sounds reasonable to me,” Allison said. “Like getting an estimate for car repairs.”
“Right. If a mechanic finds an additional problem with your car, he calls you for authorization to do the extra work. In our business we have something similar. It’s called a change order. I call it a ticket to ride. I’ve been on projects where the change orders numbered in the thousands. The client expects change orders, budgets for them, and usually approves reasonable charges without much comment. It was those old dreaded change orders, however, that got me in trouble with the Baxter boys.”
“Hetta, I’ve never heard the whole story,” Jan said. “I don’t understand. How could you get in trouble? The change orders all originated in Baxter’s home office in San Francisco, right?”
“Right. But over in Tokyo I discovered some of the specification changes precipitating massive change orders were unnecessary, and I naively tipped off Nippon Oil, the client’s client. Needless to say, I was about as popular as dandruff back home. If it hadn’t been for the Trob, they’d’a boiled me in oil. He stepped in, pulled off some miracle, and I didn’t even get fired. Put on the back burner, for sure, but not fired.”
Allison took a sip of wine. “The Trob? What, or who, in the hell is that?”
I told her about Fidel Wontrobski, then spent a better part of an hour telling Trob tales.
“Sounds like a great guy,” Allison said. “Refreshing, to say the least.”
“Oh, he’s different all right. And like I said, he really saved my ass after the Tokyo debacle.”
Allison slid back into the tub. “Boy, those two years in Tokyo weren’t exactly a pinnacle of happiness for you, were they? Not only the work thing, but Hudson, the jilter. No wonder you were so stressed out when you got back.”
I almost told Allison and Jan about Hudson’s fingerprints the OPD had ID’d, but decided against it. No use getting Jan all het up. She hets good. I glugged wine, and then quipped, “Oh, it wasn’t so bad,” I flashed my finger, “I ended up with a ruby.”
My friends laughed, for they both knew I’d bought the ruby for myself. One of Hudson’s twenty-four karat lies was he was going to buy me a two carat ruby engagement ring. He’d hinted he had friends in low places who could get rare, perfect Burmese stones with murky provenances. After Hudson took a powder, I was feeling sorry for myself one day and, on a whim, bought my own ruby ring.
“Back to our present problem, Hetta,” Allison said, “I wonder how that Dale guy in Seattle got a copy of this letter from the Baxter files? Not that it matters, I guess.” She took a sip of wine, smiled sweetly, and added, “Oh, what the hell. Let’s sue the bastards.”
“I don’t really want to, but I do want my good name restored,” I said in all sincerity, which prompted raucous hoots. “My professional good name,” I corrected.
“Of course you do,” Allison said, all lawyerly and properly indignant on my part. “And I was joking, sort of. Litigation will take time, be messy and probably do you more harm than good. But,” she added, and in the dim light I swear I detected a ghostly fin sprout between her shoulders, “perhaps if I were—on my letterhead, of course—to request a copy of the alleged,” she shook the papers, “documents, it might get someone’s attention. They don’t have to know that I’m not in private practice.”
She was just warming up. “I’ll also let them know I’m holding that insulting recompense check they want you to endorse and cash. That way they’ll know they ain’t playing with kids, here. Their legal counsel will call and I’ll suggest a very discreet investigation of the entire affair before they make any decisions that might prompt legal action. Trust me, they’ll be pissin’ their pants to return those calls of yours. Which, of course, you will refuse to take until I say so. Tell them to talk to their lawyer.”
“You, my friend, are a genius.”
“No, but I am a respectable lawyer and … ”
She was cut off as both Jan and I shrieked, “Oxymoron.”
25
While the slow wheels of injustice rolled along with Allison at the helm, I suddenly had a great deal of time on my hands.
I busied myself by submitting proposals for new projects. Allison let me take an occasional call from Seattle, answer a few questions, and fax requested documents. Mostly, however, I waited. I hate waiting.
Normally, time on my hands precipitates a windfall profit for sleazy bars, ice cream parlors, Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door, and RJ, but in my newly impoverished mode, RJ was the sole benefactor. And the timing was ironically good, for my best buddy was failing. Fast.
As he deteriorated, our daily routine revolved around twenty-four hour drug doses of painkillers, mood elevators, and tranquilizers. And then there were RJ’s pills.
The only thing RJ would eat was Ben and Jerry’s and Craigosaurus’s mint biscuits. He even turned up his nose at prime rib. I buried megavitamins in his ice cream and hoped h
e wouldn’t spit them out. He could flat ferret out a vitamin pill.
For a dog who required constant attention, RJ had drawn a bum paw. He had a nurse who abhorred sickness.
The stairs became too tricky for him, so after he took a couple of heart wrenching tumbles, I carried him both ways. And it was getting easier to lift him, for as he dwindled on an ice cream diet, I ballooned.
With a little help, he could still go outside to do his business, but it was becoming a trial for both of us. More often than not, RJ would lift his back leg and fall over on his nose. Had it not been so tragic, it would have been comical.
Unless Jan could fill in for me, I rarely left the house, afraid to leave RJ alone unless he was in a drugged slumber. Even then, in case he got up and lost his bearings, I locked him in the kitchen—oh, the guilt!—where I’d moved his daybed into a sunny corner.
When I was home, RJ wanted to be where I was. All the time. If I left the living room to get a drink of water, he tried to follow and would end up hurting his leg. So I carried him, from room to room, all day long. I got to the point where I waited until the last possible minute, or until his drugs kicked in, to go to the bathroom. We were both exhausted, both hurting.
But I was the human. I knew what was going on. RJ would sometimes gaze at me in pain and question, his big brown eyes asking, “Why do I hurt? Why can’t you make it stop?”
And I could.
But the decision was beyond me.
Dr. Craig, bless his heart, made it for me.
* * *
I carefully carried RJ down the stairs that last morning, placed him gently on his warmed electric blanket on the couch and covered him with a throw. His tail thumped weakly as I kissed him on the nose. The knockout pill I’d given him earlier had kicked in and he soon drifted into a drugged doggy dream world where, judging from his movements and noises, he was still a pup chasing an elusive postal employee. I made a note to get some of those pills for myself.
Jan brought in coffee and we sat quietly, each lost in our own grief, until Dr. Craig let himself in the front door.
“Is he asleep?” Craig asked.
I started to say yes, but the sound of Craig’s voice roused RJ enough for a tail thump. Craig sat down on the couch with RJ between us, gave him an ear scratch, and my dog went back to sleep.
“Rough night?” Craig asked.
“No, he slept real good for a change.”
“I meant you, Hetta.”
I nodded numbly. “Pretty bad.”
Jan burst into tears and headed out the back door.
“Are you ready, Hetta?” Craig asked. At the sound of his voice, RJ stirred again and licked his vet’s hand. Tears sprang into Craig’s eyes. “Do you want to leave?”
“No.”
“Okay.” He quickly tied off RJ’s back leg with a length of surgical tubing, slipped a preloaded syringe from his pocket, removed the casing, and inserted the needle into a large vein in RJ’s leg.
RJ sighed, and it was over for him. His humans, however, were left with a big empty space he had filled in our lives.
26
“Hetta, go home,” Jan demanded. “But first take a shower, wash your hair, and put on something besides that crappy old kimono. You look like hell.”
I poured myself another glass of wine.
“I mean it, Hetta Coffey. You can’t stay here anymore. I’m evicting you. You’ve got to clean up your raggedy assed act and put it on the road. What have you been doing all day, watching TV?”
“Naw. Too many dog food commercials. What Madison Avenue genius thought up using dogs to sell cars, I ask you? Or toilet paper? Do you have any idea how many ads have dogs in them these days?”
“No. I don’t. I do not sit around counting canine commercials. I have a life. You need to get one, too. And frankly my dear, your roots are showing.”
“I have no roots,” I whined. “No dog, no job, no money, and my house is being sold out from under me in three weeks. I’ll be homeless. Living out of a shopping cart. And double frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. I don’t want to see my house ever again. It’s too empty and lonely.”
Jan planted her hands on her hips and glared at me with disgust. “Well, you have to,” she spat. “I’ve endured almost a month of your . . . despair. I miss RJ, too. I grieve for him. But he’s dead and you’re not. Although right now I’m tempted to kill you myself. I’ve had all I can stands, I can’t stands no more. One of us has to move, and it’s you.”
“Gee, what did I do? Why are you so mad at me?”
“Don’t play dumb and pitiful with me, Hetta Coffey. Today was a nightmare, a nightmare I tell you.”
I gave her a two thumbs down. Not since the ‘40’s British flicks has anyone successfully employed a line like, “A nightmare, a nightmare I tell you.”
Unfazed by my unsolicited critique, she continued to rail. “I couldn’t get a damned thing done at the office today. Would you like to venture a guess as to why?”
I shook my head and took a gulp of wine.
“Because, Sorrypants, I was fielding your crap. I understand why you had your phone calls forwarded from your house to my apartment, but why, in God’s name, did you then call forward everything to my office today? All I’ve done all day is take messages for you, and I couldn’t even call you because I got myself!”
“Ain’t modern technology a wonderful thing? I didn’t want to talk to anyone,” I whimpered.
“Dammit, you are going to.”
Jan reached into her briefcase and waved a handful of pink WHILE YOU WERE OUT SCREWING AROUND sheets. “The neighbors called. You didn’t pay your gardener, he quit, and the yard looks like hell.” She threw the message in my lap.
Crushing it into a ball, I launched it across the room, through a basketball hoop hanging on the bathroom door. Nothing but air. “Let the new owners worry about it.”
“I think not. Your real estate agent called. If you don’t get over there and make the place presentable, the new owners are going to send in some professionals and charge it to your escrow account.”
“Let them eat weeds.”
“Your mother called. She wants you to come home.”
“I don’t have the energy.”
“We’ll go together.”
“I’m busy.”
“She said she’d fry okra.”
“When do we leave?”
Jan smiled. “That’s more like it. Now, for cryin’ out loud, take a shower and pull yourself together.” She snatched the wine bottle from me and threw a clean towel in my face. I reluctantly climbed out of bed and started for the bathroom. Then I remembered something.
“Oh, Jan, you got flowers today. They’re in the kitchen.”
“Who’re they from?”
“I didn’t look at the card.”
“Boy, now you’re really scaring me. You, Miss Nosy Britches, didn’t look at the card?”
I shrugged. I have to admit, I’m slipping. I’ve been known to steam open “Occupant” mail. And the demise of the telephone party line? I considered that a great tragedy.
Jan tromped to the kitchen to check out her flowers. I heard tissue paper rattling, then water running. When I stepped out of the bathroom all scrubbed up, she handed me a vase of daisies and roses. “Actually, these are for you.”
“Really? Flowers for me? Maybe someone thinks I died.”
Jan handed me the card. I was nonplussed, for the flowers were from Bob “Jenks” Jenkins. “Did you put him up to sending me flowers? Posies for the pitiful, something like that?”
“No, I did not.”
“Fancy that,” was all I could say. Maybe, just maybe, that Bob person wasn’t so bad after all. Gosh, since he sent me flowers, maybe I’d even call him Jenks. I’d call tomorrow, thank him. Suddenly I felt better. I was clean, I had the possibility of a new friend and a trip to Texas. My horizon lightened, slightly lifting a month of heavy sorrow from my heart.
I put down the flowers,
picked up Jan’s hair dryer and tried to fluff up an overdue clip. Examining my roots, I saw that Jan was right and that my spirits weren’t all that needed lightening. A call to René le Exorbitant was definitely in order. Then I’d go back to the house and get things in order there. As I dialed my overpriced hair guru, I caught Jan smiling.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Bullcrap. What’s so humorous?”
“Nothing. I’m glad to see you doing something.”
Just Add Water (Hetta Coffey Mystery Series (Book 1)) Page 14
