Killer Move

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Is this from you?”

“What?”

“This.” I turned from the counter toward the kitchen table, where Steph was swiftly eating breakfast while absorbing local nonnews from the small flat-screen in the corner. She put her head on one side, causing still-wet hair to slide across her face. When she clocked the jacket of the book I was holding she gave a snort.

“That would be a supersized no.” She laughed. “With a side of ‘Dream on, my friend.’ ”

I looked back at the book, which I’d found propped outside our front door, in corrugated packaging, when I got back from the gym. It was large and heavy and apparently retailed for eighty bucks. It was published by a European house I recognized as purveyors of lavish coffee-table tomes, and featured a retrospective of the work of a photographer I’d never heard of.

A quick flick through confirmed that, as the cover implied, said snapper was all about honoring the timeless beauty of the female form, in fetishized states of undress. An immaculate airline stewardess bending over a meal cart, skirt hitched up to reveal tattered, cheap underwear. A secretary dutifully typing at an old Underwood, unaware of how very close her besuited boss—seen only from the waist down, complete with self-evident bulge—was standing behind her. A female doctor, adrift in a lamp-lit ward in the dead of the night—the patients asleep in their beds—wearing only high heels, garters, stockings, and a stethoscope, gazing with apparent melancholy at a clipboard she held in one hand.

“Really?”

“Really,” she said.

“This isn’t some guy who’s going to have an exposition here or something?”

“Exhibition, not exposition, dear,” Steph said around a mouthful of high-spec granola. “And no. Sarasota has come a long way, but it ain’t New York. Or even Tallahassee. The art-porn market still falls outside what local folks will countenance in a public gallery.”

I frowned down at the Amazon delivery note. “Well, that’s weird.”

“Does it say it’s a gift?”

“No. It was bought on my account.”

“Hon,” Steph said, “it’s okay.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you ordered this, I don’t mind.”

I stared at her. “Why would I even open the package in front of you if I had something to hide?”

She shrugged. “You’re cruising around the site, see the book, accidentally click BUY IT NOW instead of ADD TO BASKET. Forget all about it and then bang, here it is. And in front of the wife. Whoops. No biggie.”

I spoke slowly. “I did not order this book.”

“So send it back,” she said, grabbing her car keys. “I got to go, hon. Big day of prep for the Maxwinn Saunders powwow tomorrow.”

“Steph, listen. I didn’t buy this.”

“I believe you,” she said with a wink, and then she was gone.

First thing I did when I got to work was to e-mail Amazon, briskly requesting the procedure for returning a book sent in error. I’d already checked the shipping notification e-mail I’d received the day before. Paying more attention when it came in wouldn’t have achieved much—by then the book had already been on its way. It was Steph’s response that was nettling me most. It wasn’t as if the book was hard-core. Two seconds with a search engine would have flooded my screen with pictures that would have made Henrik Myerson (creator of the images in the book stowed in the trunk of my car) blanch. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that the book’s arrival had made me look like the kind of person who wanted to own this kind of thing. I have dedicated a lot of time and effort to assuming control of my personal brand. I’m not going to stand for random misinformation muddying the waters.

That was the first point, anyhow. The second was a broader one. I grew up in Pennsylvania. My mother’s sister lived in South Carolina, and from time to time the family would migrate down to spend a week. Aunt Lynn was a recovering hippie and big on producing her own food. This included a series of impressive chili plants that grew along a fence in the backyard. The fruits of these were fascinating to me. There’s something so ripe and eye-catching about a chili when it’s ready to pick, a plumpness that bellows “eat me” to the untrained eye. My parents had firmly instructed me not to do any such thing, and I was in general a well-behaved kid.

Imagine their surprise, therefore, at coming out into the yard one afternoon to discover that the eight-year-old child they’d left peaceably playing was now in paroxysms of agony, unable even to come indoors, apparently caused by having eaten one of these chilies.

They were comforting, and supportive, and fed me ice cream to dull the burn, all the time managing to refrain from saying they’d told me so. I said I hadn’t eaten a chili, and they didn’t explicitly call me on it, but smiled when they thought I wasn’t looking. But the thing is . . .

I hadn’t eaten a damned chili.

All I’d done—and this hadn’t been explicitly disallowed, and children need explicit instruction because they are not good at expanding from the specific to the general—was to reach up and touch one of the swollen, bright red chilies. I’d marveled at how hard it was, how powerful and fecund, then turned my back on the forbidden fruit and got on with something else. I’d evidently also accidentally brushed those same fingers across my lips, however, bringing the freakish power of a Scotch Bonnet to bear upon skin that still thought of American mustard as wantonly aggressive.

The pain eventually subsided. What did not fade was the sense of injustice—the injustice wrought by someone being kind and forgiving over a sin that had not been committed. Steph shrugging off the book’s arrival this morning felt the same way—and the worst of it was that there was no way back. I could go home at the end of the day clutching proof that I’d returned the book, and she could interpret this as me going out of my way to maintain the pretense of not having ordered it in the first place. Even if she eventually believed me, the instant in which she’d thought otherwise remained alive in time.

I was still fulminating over this when there was a ping to indicate I’d received an e-mail. It was the Amazon help desk, with guidelines for returning a book if you had ordered it in error.

Suddenly I was even more angry. I hadn’t ordered it in error. Their computer had fucked up. I knew the response I’d just received was itself computer generated, and that made it worse: a computer telling a human how to unscrew an error made by another computer, making me a pawn in some ludicrous glitch-generated scenario I hadn’t asked for in the first place.

I scribbled a note for Karren’s desk—saying I was headed out to a meeting, and in the process also demonstrating I’d been at work before her—and stomped out to drive to the post office at Ocean View Mall.

After I’d mailed the package back I felt better. I took a twenty-minute time-out with an iced Americano before driving back to work, taking myself through some positivity exercises. It didn’t take long to work out that what had really bugged me was the feeling of loss of control. I’d quickly regained it, and so—big deal. By the time I was done with the coffee I’d gotten to the point where I was emboldened to drop an SMS message to Steph, reiterating that I hadn’t ordered the book but saying that if it had given her any ideas, then I was all ears and would be at her disposal tonight.

Two minutes later an SMS came back, saying she’d bear the offer in mind, with a winking smiley and a kiss.

Job done. Steph could think what she liked about whether I’d ordered the book. So long as it turned to my advantage, what did I care?

On the way back across the lot to my car I noticed a dapper figure walking along in front of the drugstore. He was listening to someone on his cell phone. I slowed, gave him time to end the call, and then took a side step to put me in the man’s field of view.

“Morning, Mr. Grant.”

Peter Grant, owner-CEO of Shore Realty, frowned. “There’s no meeting up here today, is there?”

“No,” I said, thinking on my feet. “Just met with a potential client. I’m heading back to the office now.”

He nodded, evidently glad to have cleared the mystery up. He was dressed in an understated but wildly expensive suit, and his silver hair seemed to have been spun from the finest thread. He looked distracted, however, slowly replacing his phone in his jacket.

“So . . . how are things down there, Bill? I see the figures, of course, but it’s been a while since we’ve had a chance to catch up man-to-man. Too long.”

I wasn’t sure if Grant had ever taken the time to “catch up” with me. “Quiet,” I allowed. “But we’re working at it. Putting our ears to the ground, keeping the clients happy. If they’re on our side, it’s all win.”

“Very true,” he said, and for a moment seemed to look directly at me, as if seeing me in a particular light. “That’s a positive attitude. It will serve you well.”

“Only way to beat the world, sir.”

“Absolutely. Okay, well—don’t let me keep you, Bill. Keep up the good work. And good luck.”

“Good to talk to you, sir.”

“You too, Bill,” he said, as he turned to head back into the building. “You too.”

As I climbed back into the car I was feeling a lot more chipper. Spurred by my off-the-cuff excuse to Grant, it even occurred to me to wonder if my straight-to-the-nukes reaction to the photo book was down to lingering annoyance at the blowout of the night before. I pulled up to the highway, hesitated, then turned right instead of left, to head up the road to David Warner’s house.

He wasn’t there, and a call to Melania’s number dead-ended in voice mail. I didn’t leave a message. I took out one of my cards instead, and jammed it in a crack in the buzzer mechanism—after jotting the words “Call me when you’re ready to do business” on the back.

Now feeling two hundred percent better, I drove back to The Breakers.

When I got out of my car I had a sighting of the resort’s rarest fauna—Marie Thompson. She was talking to Big Walter, dressed in an immaculate white trouser suit, the perfect outfit to showcase an evident dedication to the maxim that you can never be too rich or too thin. As had been the case on most occasions I’d seen her, she was giving someone a hard time. Word was that Marie was from old Sarasota money. It was evident from her body language toward Walter (one of the very blackest black guys I’ve ever met) that she had yet to receive instruction on modern modes of interacting with people of color.

After a final jab of the finger to underscore whatever dread point she was making, she turned on her heel and stalked into the main building.

Walter watched her go, then turned to look at me. I shrugged. He shrugged back. That made me feel cool.

As I reached for the handle on the door to the Shore office, I heard someone guffawing inside. I knew who it would be. Janine had a very distinctive laugh, one of those plain-girl cackles—bubbly, raucous, and strange. It’s the kind of laugh that grown-ups who find themselves unable to compliment a child on her looks may favorably comment on instead, causing the girl to carry what is in reality rather an annoying sound into her adult life.

Sure enough, I walked into the office to find Janine at her desk, hand in front of her mouth, grinning inanely at something on her screen. Buoyed by recent successes, I decided to play nice.

“S’up?” I said.

She giggled, as if we’d been caught in some collusion. “It’s kinda bad,” she said. “But I like it.”

“What is?”

“You know. What you sent.”

I bent to look over her shoulder. An e-mail from me was open on her computer screen, with a joke. It was a mildly funny joke, assuming you were prepared to overlook the fact that it was markedly off-color and somewhat racist, too.

The only thing was that I hadn’t sent it.

Not to her, or any of the other people on the list.