by Frank Sibila
These speculations would have been stymied completely had they recognized that she was not repressing sobs, as her tremors seemed to indicate, but giggles.
The thing was this:
Her husband, if present, would have happily testified to three of the qualities that made her such a formidable opponent. She was a light sleeper and a morning person and one of those lucky people constitutionally immune to jet lag.
Unlike Frank, who had rolled out of their rumpled bed two hours after her, if not addled, then at least not quite at the top of his game, Monica felt refreshed, exhilarated, bright-eyed, and ready to rumble.
That hadn’t been her plan, really. She’d tumbled into bed with Frank for the exact same reason she’d said she was doing it: because it was late at night and it was there and because it wouldn’t change anything and because it would be fun and because Frank was attractive and because Keith had long since fed their wedding vows into the shredder. For what it’s worth, she’d enjoyed herself quite a bit and was able to separate her willingness to entertain the idea of a sequel with her mission to cause Frank serious trouble first. So it hadn’t been, even remotely, strategy on her part. Not consciously, at least. That would have been just plain cold.
But if it turned out that way, que será será.
Monica had been sitting here, following every detail of the conversation between Yorick and Felicia, since shortly after they’d taken their seats. She’d derived the nature of the business relationship between them and listened with steadily increasing glee as Frank, arriving late with just enough of his natural cunning pounded out of him (she really amazed herself sometimes, as that was more than even she’d expected), completely failed to reach the same understanding. When Felicia reciprocated with a misunderstanding of her very own, it was for Monica like the heavens had disgorged a shower of gold coins, except without all the cranial bruising.
Really. You couldn’t blame her for not resisting the temptation to giggle.
She couldn’t wait for Frank to fly back to New York. This was gonna set entirely new records for fun….
SEVEN
FOR A WHILE, the other shoe hovered high above him, waiting for the proper moment to drop.
He could feel it there. That was the crazy thing. He had no reason to believe that anything had gone wrong, no reason to expect an annihilating death blow from above. But the air itself felt heavy, exactly as he would have expected it to feel were it being compressed to a nigh-liquid density by an epic weight poised to flatten him. More than once in the next couple of hours of relative drudgery, he found himself looking up, half expecting to see that terrible weight bearing down on him and not knowing why. More than once he tried to tell himself that he was being silly, and more than once he found himself thinking of Monica in terms that seesawed between erotic reverie and soul-shriveling terror.
Where was she?
He packed his things and got Yorick and himself checked out of the hotel. He insisted on bypassing the concierge, who could have facilitated the car rental for them, for fear of being too visible in an environment where Monica Custer was known to be lurking. As a result, they took the moving walkway to the Luxor, then a cab to the Hilton and then the monorail back to the MGM, before stopping in at the Wynn and dealing with the concierge there, a route that delighted Yorick and made Felicia’s eyes very wide and round. When they stopped off at the car rental place, Yorick slowed them down an additional half hour by insisting on upgrading to a snappy red convertible, providing an explanation that began with James Dean, continued with the old TV show Route 66, and spent a dangerous amount of time hovering around the world according to Bruce Springsteen. Surrendering to that whim proved the fastest route to seeing Yorick into a car so Frank could take Felicia aside and say, “Listen, when I said take your time, I meant take your time. I don’t want George reaching New York until I have a chance to straighten this out.”
Felicia winked, “I get it, boss. You want me to pad the per diem.”
Frank frowned, because that wasn’t what he was saying at all. “No, I mean take your time. Drive carefully. Take breaks.”
“I got it,” Felicia said, winking again.
“Look, I’m not sure you get this. Don’t take a slow boat to China. Get him there. But don’t break any land speed records, if you get me.”
“Got it,” said Felicia, this time without winking, but nevertheless expressing a wink by sheer attitude.
Frank sighed. “I guess I’ll just have to check in and make sure you don’t overdo it.”
Yorick and Felicia disappeared into the distance, if not in a cloud of dust, then at least in a flurry of bad omens. Frank didn’t know why he was having such a bad feeling about this. The escape did seem to be going well, after all. But the knot of tension in his belly was already the size of a doorknob and growing larger every instant. Sighing, thinking hard about opportunities in street sanitation and fast food preparation, he rolled his overnighter to the nearest quiet alcove and checked in with Destinii.
When she answered, the explosions, screams of agony, and cries of eternal vengeance in the background indicated an early start to Max’s long day of workplace video gaming. “Hey, boss! How’s life in the land of the four-dollar breakfast steak?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he mourned. “I haven’t eaten.”
A bad thing to say to Destinii, who was always worried about everybody’s blood sugar levels. “Why, then, eat something, stupid.”
“I know, I know. I will.”
“What distinguishes a breakfast steak, anyway? Where do they get it from, a cow that got up earlier in the morning?”
“Again,” he said, “I wouldn’t know.”
“Have you been to the Liberace Museum?”
Something must have gone wrong with the connection; for a moment there he honestly believed she’d asked him about a Liberace museum. “Say what?”
“The Liberace Museum,” she repeated.
He was lost. “I didn’t even know there was a Liberace museum.”
“For a while there, it was rumored to be the only museum in Vegas. There’s also supposed to be a replica of the Simpsons’ house, but I hear they painted it a different color and you can’t tell.”
He gave the bridge of his nose a fresh massage. “I’m not sure I have time for this, Destinii. Have you been able to locate Keith Custer?”
“He seems to be taking some unscheduled time off. His secretary says that his mother’s having one of her regular episodes.”
“Episodes,” Frank repeated.
“From what I’ve been able to determine, the poor thing seems to suffer from a bizarre medical condition timed to facilitate three-day weekends and attendance at major sporting events. The symptoms are just as inconsistent and sometimes so exotic that they can only be explained by catastrophic system-wide organ failure or infection by alien symbiotes. Over the past few years, Custer’s had to leave work any number of times, often on a moment’s notice, to fly her to specialists in the Caymans and the United States Virgin Islands. They must hospitalize her outside for some reason, since Keith often comes back with a tan.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Her doctors sure know what they’re doing, though. So far, by his secretary’s count, that resilient old lady’s bounced back from two burials and a cremation.”
“You’ve got to bless her. Most old people, being cremated would definitely throw them off their stride.” Frank shook his head with something very much like wonder. “It’s no wonder the guy hired us. He wouldn’t be able to lie consistently even if he wallpapered everybody in his life with sticky notes. What about Mrs. Yorick? Have you found her?”
“Nope. Wouldn’t you know it? She’s also taken the day off. I guess everybody’s concerned about Custer’s poor grandma.”
Frank said, “She must bake absolutely stellar cookies.”
“
Like my grandma.”
That invisible shoe, hovering in the stratosphere high above him, seemed to double in both size and weight. When a cloud passed in front of the sun, temporarily draping him in shadow, he almost cowered, for fear of imminent stompage. He shook his head and resumed, “I’m going to need to know where they are by the time I get back to New York. What else is up?”
“Umm. Let’s see. I reached my showgirl contact, told her to call you at the Excalibur regarding a party you needed transported to New York.”
“Done.”
“Really? Gee, that was fast. I didn’t reach her till early this morning.”
Butterflies hatched in Frank’s stomach but didn’t do much more than twitch their wings experimentally. Not connecting that to his inner intimations of doom, instead mistaking it for the first symptoms of hunger, Frank said, “What else?”
“Few things. Got a call for Mrs. Weisbrodt. She needs some cover for a long weekend in the Poconos three weekends from now. Max is printing up the taxi receipts and canceled train tickets even as we speak. Shut up, you. Sorry, Max is being an anal pore again. Where am I? Oh, yeah. Wade Brown says he needs some coverage for a romantic dinner on the seventeenth, and I told him we’re on it. Got a strange call from a fella named Archibald Leach. He says he isn’t cheating on his wife, has nothing he needs covering up, and isn’t planning to misbehave in any way. With that in mind, he still wants some false documentation easy enough for her to see through that he can act suspiciously about, because it provides him with a great excuse to confess, weep about how sorry he is, and, in his words, ‘get some great makeup sex.’”
Frank winced. “I’m not sure we want to touch that one.”
“Why not?” Destinii wanted to know. “We help plenty of husbands pretend that they’re not cheating. Why not help this guy pretend that he is?”
“Because he’s putting an awful lot of faith in his wife’s willingness to forgive, and I wouldn’t want to get sued if she turned out to be one of those types with a pair of scissors and a talent for penile kirigami.” Frank shuddered. “Save the message for me; I’ll take a look at it when I get home. What else?”
Destinii hesitated, a rarity for her. “Just one last thing. A somewhat suspicious e-mail query from a Mr. Oliver Norvell in Chicago. He says that he and his friend Arthur Jefferson want to attend a convention in Hawaii without their wives finding out. However, the telephone number he provided gets a disconnected signal. I’m wondering whether I should expend any more effort trying to track him down, or whether it’s another prank.”
Frank smiled. “I think you’ll find it’s a prank, Destinii.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Arthur Jefferson is the birth name of the comedian, Stan Laurel. That would make ‘Oliver Norvell’ Oliver Norvell Hardy. Laurel and Hardy. Get it? In their movie Sons of the Desert, they make up a cockamamie story to get away from their wives so they can attend a convention in Hawaii. In short, it’s exactly the kind of thing we would have been hired to facilitate, except that in the movie, it doesn’t end at all well.”
“Wow,” Destinii said. “My boss knows Stan Laurel’s birth name.”
“Yeah. That’s why I pay me the big bucks….”
The butterflies were still twitching their wings as Frank made his way to the airport, grabbed himself a small bite to eat, and boarded the next flight to New York. They continued to flutter even as somebody took the seat next to him, and he whirled, ready with the insouciant quip that would have given him the tactical advantage had his neighbor in the row turned out to be Monica Custer, as he half expected, and not a goggle-eyed redhead who couldn’t have been mistaken for her at a thousand paces. Monica’s failure to keep up with him in this instance both relieved and disappointed him: the relief emerging from confirmation that he could leave her behind if he really needed to, and the disappointment, he found, from the very same thing. He was pretty damned sure this wasn’t love, but more the grand respect any villain feels for his greatest nemesis … and what that said about him—that he immediately cast himself as villain to her hero instead of the other way around—disturbed him so much that he fell into a blue funk that distracted him until well after the drinks service.
He slept a little, unable to escape Monica even there. She was naked except for a Superman cape, and she was poised opposite him in the bed, giving him the grin of a cat who found him more delicious than milk. And she said, “You know what, Frank? Your problem? You’re a romantic working for people who wouldn’t know romance if it was stapled to their foreheads.”
His dream self could only plead guilty. “I know, I know.”
“You know what’s worse?”
“No,” his dream self said. “What’s worse?”
“You don’t have even the slightest clue when you’re being driven over a cliff….”
Then the butterflies started to flutter, developed razor-sharp steel wings, and flapped hard, working their way out of him in various straight lines. The biggest and worst of them landed on the top of his nose, revealing another manifestation of Monica’s face as it waggled antennae at him and said, “Seriously, fella. You need a new line of work….”
He woke up yelling, “Annnnnhhhhh!” to find himself still on the plane and the woman with the goggly eyes demonstrating their capacity for protrusion as she stared at him from a distance of about twelve inches. She was not alone, either. The people in the seat in front of him had also turned around to investigate, and the people across the aisle had all swiveled their faces toward his. Evidently he’d been making noises for a while, maybe even speaking coherent sentences.
The woman next to him said, “Why are you calling my name?”
He blinked. “Your name?”
“You kept saying it. ‘Monica, Monica. Don’t hurt me, Monica.’ Like that.”
“I did?”
“Yes. Damned creepy, if you ask me.”
“And your name’s Monica?” he asked, stomach already sinking with the certainty that he already knew the answer.
“Yes,” said the Wrong Monica.
He shook his head, not sorry to see the last remnants of his daymare dissipate like so much vapor. “Sorry,” he said. “Different Monica.”
But she was not mollified, and she continued to stare at him, her gaze boring holes all the way to the back of his skull. “Are you a stalker?”
“What?”
“Is that it?” she demanded, her voice rising. “Are you stalking me?”
“No,” he said, with absolute mortification. “Honestly. It’s just coincidence.”
“Do you expect me to believe that?”
“Please,” he said, not knowing what else to do. “I’m having problems with a woman named Monica and had no idea of knowing, especially while asleep, that it’s your name, too. I apologize.”
She glared at him for several additional seconds, then sniffed and muttered, “You should allow for coincidence,” before turning to her copy of The Da Vinci Code.
The butterflies in his stomach went insane again. For a moment he thought that this was like one of those vile horror movies in which the protagonist wakes up in the middle of a nightmare only to have something even more horrible happen that forces him to wake up again to the realization that he’s just had another nightmare on top of the first. He would not have been surprised to have the butterflies turn to steel a second time and emerge in a swarm to attack the other passengers, but the drone of the engine, the coughing of an infant somewhere in the seats in front of him, the press of the armrest against his side, and the tense posture of the Wrong Monica furiously flipping pages at a rate probably faster than she could read all combined to testify to the truth of the moment, if not its significance.
Allow for coincidence.
He found himself reaching for the Sky phone set into the back of the seat in front of him, inputting his
credit card number, and calling the office.
Destinii answered again, the aarggghs and explosions in the background no less formidable in volume. “Hey, boss. Don’t tell me you’ve landed already.”
“No,” he said. “I’m using the Sky phone.”
“Oh, boss.” She mourned. “Tell me you’re not one of those people who call from the plane just for the pleasure of saying you’re calling from the plane.”
“I’m not, and I’m not. Listen. A couple of hours ago you told me that you got in touch with your friend the showgirl and told her to meet me at the Excalibur. What time was this?”
“About a quarter to nine.”
His head started to hurt. “And when I met the two of them in the breakfast buffet place around ten o’clock, the woman told me that George had already given her the information and sent her home to pack. So she supposedly made it from her home, wherever that is, to the Excalibur, made contact with George, went home to pack, and came back, all in an hour and a half. Isn’t that cutting it awfully close, Destinii?”
When she spoke again, it was with considerable wariness. “Uh. Yeah. I’d say so. ’Specially since Bernadette commutes to work on bicycle.”
“Bernadette?”
“Yes.”
“That’s her name?”
“Yes.”
“Bernadette.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the name of the friend you sent.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me that’s her real name and she uses another onstage.”
