by Peter Rabe
At that moment of great pain, Abbie walked in.
Sid saw him first and did his smile.
“Hi. Abbie, you finished with the books? A mess, I betcha. Can I help you with something?”
“I’m doing fine, more or less,” said Abbie who never lied. “Did you take delivery yet?”
“What’s that?”
“He took delivery,” said Schlosser who sounded strong in kind of a worrisome way. “He’s shipping it out to the buyer right now.”
“Oh that,” said Sidney and shrugged, but Schlosser wasn’t finished.
“And he won’t pay me.”
“Pay what?” Sidney started yelling. “This guy’s the foreman and knows from nothing!”
But that tone had no effect on Abbie. He waited for silence and then he said, “There’s a contract,” he said. “I haven’t found it, but there’s always a payment schedule of some sort, and certainly one that starts before resale takes place. You must have the copies.”
“I’m supposed to know what you’re talking?”
“According to these notations,” and Abbie flicked a finger against the folder under his arm, “you and Marve signed on the same day that Marve had his heart attack and died right here. So that probably means you got all the copies of the contract you were signing. I need at least one of those copies, Sid, if I’m ever going to close this estate.”
Sid leaned his bony elbows on the top of the blotter and smiled his lizard smile. His jacket went off like a neon sign when he moved, but now it had stopped blinking and looked just ugly.
“You see a contract around here?” is all he said.
There was a little silence, little but heavy. And now Abbie was catching on. His brain was turning legal and going very fast, I could tell that much, but he didn’t move because there was nothing for him to do.
Sid smiled. For me, everything was turning black. Outside, one of the Coogan flatbeds was rolling by. And then the door opened and Ruthy walked in.
“Found you!” and she sounded relieved. “I got some news for you,” she said to Abbie.
“Good. Please hold that a minute,” and then Abbie looked back at Sid.
Sidney stopped smiling, not because nobody was introducing him to Ruthy, but because Abbie had changed to the kind of tone which you don’t answer with a smile.
“Listen to this with a legal perspective for a moment,” he said to Ruthy, and then he turned back to Sid. “I have notes and jotted calculations here,” he tapped the folder again, “which amounts to strong, circumstantial evidence that Marve and Sid here had signed an agreement involving delivery of goods and of payment in money. Now, delivery has been made,” and he pointed at the work at the end of Line One, “but money has not been paid. Meanwhile, Minsk here claims that there is no such agreement.”
“He’s lying,” said Schlosser.
“Allow me,” said Ruthy and gave a proper set to her glasses. “Mister Minsk, is it?”
“Call me Sid.” He smiled at Ruthy and folded his arms. “You a lawyer, Miss?”
“It’s Miz. Miz Ruth Golding. No. I’m a third year student.”
“Oh, how nice, Miz Third Year Student.”
“I want to address what is so far conjecture on Abbie’s part. Do you say, Mister Minsk, that there is no contract?”
“What contract?” and he put his hands right on top of the blotter.
Ruthy looked at Abbie.
“That makes it difficult to proceed.”
If I hadn’t died already, this would have been the time to do it.
They talked, all of them separately, all of them at the same time, none of it going anywhere, except Sid’s way.
I could see the contract, I could see Sidney’s lousy hands on the blotter, I could see by the clock that it was ten to nine. And the steel was getting loaded, the second flatbed going out of the yard right now.
“Under the circumstances,” Ruthy was saying, “you’d really have to go the lengthier route of a court order, based on the evidence which cumulatively — ”
I couldn’t listen. Desperation was all.
So I did it.
She was still talking when I moved around and got behind Sid at the desk. She was looking at Abbie, so I had to wait. Then she turned to say something reasonable to Sidney, something about contracts misplaced, perhaps, rather than non-existent. And then she stopped talking because her jaw would not move. And her eyes got bigger than saucers.
“Good — God!”
“Ruthy?” which was Abbie, very concerned.
“It’s the fat, the fat uncle!” Then she shut her eyes and shook her head and made a dog kind of sound in her throat. A deep breath and she opened her eyes again.
“Ruthy, if you’re looking at something….”
“Still there! I’m telling you it’s that dead uncle of yours….”
“Mister Minsk,” said Abbie, “I assure you there is no cause for alarm….”
“Shut up, Abbie!” with a very strong voice now, “and he’s damn well there — Damn well pointing! He is damn well trying to say something with that finger pointing!”
“Mister Minsk,” Abbie again. “What are you doing?”
“I tell you what he’s doing,” yelled Ruthy. “He’s scrabbling at the blotter where your uncle is pointing, so help me I’m not making this up, will you look at that!” and she lunged across the desk, frightening poor Sidney.
And now the contracts were out, plain to see. The rest was routine.
I then took care to get out of the way, not wanting to be a distraction. I hung back and was watching how Sidney shriveled and suffered the rewards of his rotten ways.
He did not take any of this with good humor, with good manners or anything like that, but he did have to take it, oh dear me, did he have to take it.
“We’ll forget about making charges for attempted fraud and so forth,” said Abbie, “but you damn well pay up now, and I mean it.”
“I didn’t know about the three thousand to my foreman,” this was Sid whining away while he wrote a check for the money that went to my friend, dear Schlosser.
“One phone call to your customer who is now getting load number three coming his way,” with a wave of the hand at the window, “and your legal culpability is going to be extreme,” said dear Abbie.
“I didn’t know …”
“The hell you didn’t. Here it says: One hundred and ninety seven thousand dollars on delivery. See?”
“Oh. What that means….”
“It means make out your check to Palaver Salvage. That way it goes straight into the estate.”
“And you’ll forget about the rest of it?”
Sidney wrote and Abbie waited and then he said, “Thank you, Mister Minsk.”
Now the silence was light and soft and had a smile in it. For the first time in my life — in a manner of speaking — I knew fulfillment. I did not know that it could feel any better than this.
“Now that you’ve got that settled,” said Ruthy, “do you want to hear the news?”
“Sure,” said Abbie. “But if it doesn’t concern Sid maybe we should leave him with his thoughts at this very moment and you tell me after we leave.”
“It concerns Mister Minsk.”
She opened her attaché case and took out some notes.
“The name Mac, which you asked about, belongs to a man called Mackey. According to notations in the Odds file, he’s the one who collected forty two thousand dollars from Marve. And he’s the one who used to work for Tri-State, which is why Tri-State is in the indictment.”
“And what’s that got to do with our devastated Mister Minsk here?”
“I’ll make a complicated story short,” said Ruthy, and now she looked at Sidney. “Mackey forged auction receipts, for carbon steel from army ordnance to go as government surplus. What it means, Mister Minsk, those loads which are leaving out there in the direction of your buyer, that steel is stolen property.”
Sid got up from his chair, eye
s wide, seeing nothing.
“Mister Minsk, are you alright?”
A question! Was Mister Minsk, my Sidney, alright?
After having to pay Schlosser, would everything be alright with mine Sidney? After having to pay for a shipment he owned, how’s that for a businessman called Sidney? And after he paid for that, he finds out he doesn’t own the merchandise, how would that be for mine Sidney?
I can tell you this, he turned a very bad color.
He then weaved back and forth for a while, in the middle of my wonderful moment, and then, I don’t know how to say this, it wasn’t so wonderful anymore. Did I lose interest? Did I get distracted?
Anyway, I know that Sidney made a gasp and fell down on the floor. It was nine o’clock.
At the hospital, what do they know, the doctors, they couldn’t believe their eyes. A man with a heart attack should have nothing wrong with his heart?
Schlosser had come along to the hospital. When they didn’t know why to hold me any longer, he brought me my clothes.
When he gave me my jacket, I couldn’t believe such a thing could be mine, it was that ugly. Then Schlosser gave me the chains.
“You’re looking better already,” he said, “after such an ordeal. I’ll drive you back now.”
I thought, what a decent person, this Schlosser, to watch out like he did and to take me home. I held out the gold chains.
“Take ‘em, Schlosser. They’re yours.”
He held them in his hand and looked like he’d been hit in the head with a hammer, a big one.
“I don’t believe this,” he said. “Thanks, Sidney. You’re nice.”
Nice, he said. What do I know from nice?
THE END
This edition published by
Prologue Books
an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
57 Littlefield Street
Avon, MA 02322
www.prologuebooks.com
Copyright © 2011 by Christopher Nielsen
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4008-X
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4008-0
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