Ask for Me Tomorrow

Two

The wind had come up during the night, a Santa Ana that brought with it sand and dust from the desert on the other side of the mountain. By midmorning the city was stalled as if by a blizzard. People huddled in doorways shielding their faces with scarves and handkerchiefs. Cars were abandoned in parking lots, and here and there news racks had overturned and broken and their contents were blowing down the street, rising and falling like battered white birds.

Smedler’s office was in a narrow three-story building in the center of the city a block from the courthouse. The lesser members of the firm shared the two bottom floors. Smedler, who owned the building, kept the third floor for himself. After an earthquake a few years ago he’d remodeled it so that the only inside access to his office was by a grille-fronted elevator. The arrangement gave Smedler a great deal of privacy and power, since the circuit breaker that controlled the electric current was beside his desk. If an overwrought or otherwise undesirable client was on the way up, Smedler could, by the mere thrust of a handle, cut off the electricity and allow the client time to acquire new insights on the situation while trapped between floors.

Gilly knew nothing about the circuit breaker but she had a morbid fear of elevators, which seemed to her like little prisons going up and down. Instead she used the outside entrance, a very steep narrow staircase installed as a fire escape to appease the building-code inspector. The door at the top was locked and Gilly had to wait for Smedler’s secretary, Charity Nelson, to open it.

Charity made much the same use of the bolt as Smedler did of the current breaker. “Who’s there?”

“Mrs. Decker.”

“Who?”

“Decker. Decker.”

“What do you want?”

“I have an appointment with Mr. Smedler at eleven o’clock.”

“Why didn’t you use the elevator?”

“I don’t like elevators.”

“Well, I don’t like taxes but I pay them.”

Charity unlocked the door. She was a short wiry woman past sixty with thick grey eyebrows so lively compared to the rest of her face that they seemed controlled by some outside force. She wore a pumpkin-colored wig, not for the purpose of fooling anyone — she frequently removed it if her scalp itched or if the weather turned warm or if she was especially busy — but because orange was her favorite color. She had been with Smedler for thirty years through five marriages, two of her own, three of his.

“Really, Mrs. Decker, I wish you’d use the elevator like everyone else. It would save me getting up from my desk, walking all the way across the room to unlock the door and then walking all the way back to my desk.”

“Sorry I inconvenienced you.”

“It’s such a lovely little elevator and it would save you all that huffing and puffing. I bet you’re a heavy smoker, aren’t you?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Just out of shape, eh? You should try jogging.”

“Karate appeals to me more at the moment,” Gilly said.

She wondered why so many employees these days acted as though they worked for the government and were not obliged to show respect to anyone. Charity’s general attitude indicated that she was in the pay of the IRS, CIA and FBI and possibly God, in addition to Smedler, Downs, Castleberg, MacFee and Powell.

“Smedler’s waiting for you in his office.” Charity pressed a buzzer. “And Aragon will be up in a few minutes.”

“Who’s Aragon?”

“He’s your boy. You did specify a bilingual. N’est-ce pas?”

“N’est-ce pas. In a private, personal call to Mr. Smedler.”

“All of Smedler’s calls go through me. I am his confidential secretary.”

“You’re also a smart-ass. N’est-ce pas?”

Charity’s bushy eyebrows scurried up into her wig and hid for a moment under the orange curls like startled mice. When they reappeared they looked smaller, as if stunted by the experience. “Crude.”

“Effective, though.”

“We’ll see.”

Gilly went into Smedler’s office. He rose from behind his desk and came to greet her, a tall handsome man in his late fifties. He had known Gilly for thirteen years, since the day she married B. J. Lockwood. An old school chum of B. J.’s, Smedler had been an usher at both of his weddings. He could barely recall the first — to a socialite named Ethel — but he often thought of the second with a considerable degree of amazement. Gilly wasn’t young or especially pretty, but on that day, in her long white lace gown and veil, she’d looked radiant. She was madly in love. B. J. was short and fat and freckled and nobody had ever taken him seriously before. Yet there was Gilly, well over thirty and certainly old enough to know better, iridescing like a hummingbird whenever she looked at him. Smedler decided later that her appearance was, had to be, simply a matter of make-up, a dash of pink here, a silver gleam there, French drops to intensify the blue of her eyes. (He was frequently heard to remark during the next dozen years that it was not politics which made strange bedfellows, it was marriage.)

Except for an occasional business meeting or football game, Smedler saw very little of Gilly and B. J. after the marriage. The divorce eight years ago had been handled by an out-of-town firm, and the only inside story on it had come to Smedler from Charity: B. J. had run away with a young girl. Gilly was rumored to have taken the divorce very hard, though not all the effects were on the bad side. B. J., evidently suffering from guilt as well as his usual poor business judgment, had been very generous in dividing the community property.

“Sit down, my dear, sit down. Here, you’ll be more comfortable in the striped chair.”

He told her she looked lovely (false), that her beige silk and linen suit was very chic (true) and that he was happy to see her (a little of both).

He was, in fact, more puzzled than either happy or unhappy. Her phone call the day before had provided few details: she wanted to hire a young man who could speak Spanish and was trustworthy, to do a job for her, probably in Mexico. Why probably? Smedler wondered. And what kind of job? She had no business interests south of the border or even outside the country, except for a small money-hungry gold mine in northern Canada. But he had been a lawyer too long to go directly to the point.

“And how is Mr. Decker?”

“The same.”

“There is still no hope?”

“Well, my housekeeper prayed for him last night at church. That’s something, I suppose, when you’re as hard up for hope as I am.”

It had been three months or so since Smedler had seen her and she had aged considerably in such a short time. The results weren’t all negative, though. There seemed to be a new strength in her face and more assurance in her manner. She’d also lost quite a lot of weight. Smedler had always admired her sense of style — no matter what costume she wore, it was difficult to imagine it suiting anyone else — and the weight loss emphasized her individuality.

“About your call yesterday,” Smedler said. “It was rather enigmatic.”

“It was meant to be, in case anyone was listening in on my phone or yours.”

“Don’t worry about mine. I have no secrets from Charity.”

“I have.”

“She’s very discreet.”

“As my housekeeper would say, discretion is in the eye of the beholder.”

“Yes. Well.”

“Tell me about the young man.”

“His name’s Aragon. Tom Aragon. He’s twenty-five, bright, personable, speaks Spanish like a native, graduated from law school last spring. I find him a bit pedantic, though that could be simply his manner with me, since I’m the boss. Technically, anyway.”

“How much do I pay him?”

“That depends entirely on what you want him to do. We estimate the time of a recent graduate to be worth so much an hour.”

“Paying by the hour would be too complicated in this case. I’ll need his total services for — well, two or three weeks, perhaps longer. What’s Aragon’s monthly salary?”

“I don’t know for sure. Let’s call Charity and—”

“No. Negative no.”

“I think you may be doing Charity an injustice.”

“More likely I’m doing her a justice,” Gilly said. “Suppose I pay your office the amount of his salary plus a commission for the use of his services. Then I’ll make separate financial arrangements with Aragon. They’ll be strictly between him and me.”

“Why all the secrecy, my dear?”

“If I told you anything further, you’d try and talk me out of it.”

“Perhaps not. Give me a chance.”

“No.”

They stared at each other for a minute in silence, not hostile, but not friendly either. Then Smedler, sighing, got up and walked over to the main window. Clouds were parading across the sky like a procession of spaceships. On the earthbound street below, traffic remained sparse and sluggish. Smedler didn’t look either up or down. This is a damn stubborn woman. Okay, I can be a damn stubborn man.

“You were B. J.’s friend,” Gilly said. “But you always had a pretty low opinion of him. You treated him like a nice jolly little fellow without a brain in his head.”

“Now what in hell — I mean, what brought that on? What’s it got to do with anything? Even if it were true, which it isn’t—”

“Oh, it’s true. You made it quite obvious and it hurt. I guess it hurt me worse than it did B. J. because he never had any more faith in himself and his ability than you did. I did. I was full of faith.”

“Dammit, Gilly. Get to the point.”

“It’s simple. If I told you what I want Aragon to do, you’d just call me a fool.”

“Try me.”

“No.”

“Negative no?”

She didn’t answer.

“By God,” Smedler said. “I need a drink.”

Tom Aragon closed the iron-grilled elevator door behind him and approached Charity’s desk. He was a tall thin young man with horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a look of continual surprise. He’d come to Smedler’s firm straight out of law school, so most of the time he was in fact surprised. The jobs assigned to him so far didn’t often involve the third floor or the woman who ran it. There was a rumor, though, that she had a sense of humor if it could be found and excavated.

She must have heard the elevator door clank open and shut, but Charity didn’t look up from the papers on her desk or indicate in any way that she was aware of someone else in the room.

“Hey,” Aragon said. “Remember me?”

She raised her head. “Ah so. The new boy from the bottom of the bottom floor. Rather cute. Well, don’t try any of the cutes on me. What do you want?”

“The boss said you’d clue me in.”

“On the world in general or did you have something specific in mind?”

“This Mrs. Decker, what’s she like?”

“You’d better not ask my opinion. She just called me a smart-ass. What do you think of that?”

“I think that’s a leading question which in a court of law I wouldn’t be required to answer.”

“This isn’t a court of law. It’s a nice cozy little office with only two people in it, and one of them just asked a question and the other is going to answer.”

“Very well. Mrs. Decker could be right. You and I haven’t been acquainted long enough for me to judge.”

Charity pushed aside her wig and scratched the lobe of her left ear in a contemplative way. “The junior members of this firm, especially the junior juniors, are usually careful to show me some respect, even a little hard homage around Christmas.”

“Christmas is a long way off. Maybe I’ll work up to it by then.”

“I hope so.”

“Now back to Mrs. Decker.”

“Gilda. Gilda Grace Lockwood Decker. Lockwood was her first husband, a funny little man, looked like a drunken cherub even when he was cold sober. She married him for his money, of course, though Smedler doesn’t think so. Smedler’s an incurable romantic, considering the business he’s in and the number of marriages he’s had. Anyway, Lockwood’s long gone... Gilly did a lot of traveling after her divorce and there was talk of various affairs in different parts of the world. Nothing really serious until she met this guy Marco Decker in Paris. Then it was clang clang, wedding bells again. She wired Smedler to send her money in care of American Express for her trousseau. Some trousseau. She must have bought half the nightgowns and perfume in France. I guess it was too much for poor old Decker. He had a stroke while they were honeymooning at Saint-Tropez. So there was Gilly, stuck with a paralyzed bridegroom in the midst of all those lovely naked young Frenchmen.”

“Why were the Frenchmen naked?”

“My dear boy, it was Saint-Tropez. That’s why people visit there, to see other people naked.”

“It seems like a long way to go to see somebody naked.”

“Well, of course only the ‘in’ people go to Saint-Tropez. The ‘out’ people like you and me, we just take off our clothes and stand in front of a mirror... Well, that’s the sad story of Gilly. She brought Decker home, installed a lot of expensive equipment so she could keep him there and hired a male nurse to help look after him. Et cetera.”

“What’s included in the et cetera?”

“You can bet your life she’s not wasting all those Paris nightgowns. Any more questions?”

“One,” Aragon said.

“Okay, shoot.”

“What joker gave you the name Charity?”