Rumpelstiltskin

4

I called Jim Sherman at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning.

Jim was one of the two owners of the Greenery, a tall, rather muscular man in his late thirties, whose hair had gone prematurely white when he was only twenty-two. Blue-eyed and tanned to a rich burnished bronze, he worked very hard at creating the image of a dissipated beach boy, even though he owned a million-dollar restaurant and three spacious condominium apartments out on Whisper Key — renting, I’d been told, for a cool two thousand each for every month in season. His partner, Brad Atherton, was somewhat older than he, forty-five or — six, I guessed, with dark hair getting a bit thin on top, and eyes as startlingly blue as Jim’s. He was shorter than Jim, though, less flamboyant in style and dress, and somewhat soft-spoken, a combination of characteristics that perhaps accounted for the rumor that he and Jim were sharing a homosexual relationship, with Brad the passive or “female” partner. I had no evidence that either of them were what popular opinion held them to be, and frankly I didn’t care what their sexual persuasions were. When Anita Bryant began quoting the Bible as source material for her vicious crusade against homosexuals, I stopped drinking the orange juice she was advertising on television. I knew Jim wouldn’t be at the restaurant that early in the morning, so I called him at his home on exclusive Flamingo Key.

“Hullo?” he mumbled, and I knew at once that I’d awakened him.

“Jim,” I said, “this is Matthew Hope. I’m sorry to be calling so early in the morning.”

“No, no, not at all,” he said, but I visualized him peering bleary-eyed at a bedside clock.

“I’m sure you heard about Vicky Miller...”

“Awful,” he said. “Terrible shock. Police were at the restaurant last night, asking questions. God, such a lovely girl.”

“Yes,” I said. “Jim, the reason I’m calling, I know you must have made some sort of contract with Vicky...”

“For the singing engagement, do you mean?”

“Yes. There was a contract, wasn’t there?”

“Do you need it for some reason?”

“No, no. I was simply wondering who might have represented her. Was there an attorney who handled it for her?”

“Yes, there was.”

“Who, can you tell me?”

“Some firm downtown with a dozen names. Let me think a minute. Jackson, Harris, does that sound right? Jackson, Harris, Something, Something and...”

“Would it be Blackstone, Harris?”

“Blackstone, Harris, right.”

“Blackstone, Harris, Gerstein, Garfield and Pollock?”

“That’s the whole crowd,” Jim said.

“Would you know who Vicky’s attorney there might have been?”

“I’m sorry, no. This was a simple thing, Matthew. I handed Vicky the contracts, asked her to have her people look them over, and she brought them back to me signed two days later.” He paused. He was wide awake now. “Who do you think did this, Matthew?”

“I don’t know.”

“Beat her to death, huh?”

“Yes.”

“The son of a bitch,” Jim said.

“Yes. Jim,” I said, “thanks for the information, I want to get moving on it.”

“Glad to be of help,” he said, and hung up.

I called Honest Abe Pollock, with whom I’d had a conversation only yesterday concerning my client who was trying to buy a liquor store. The first thing Abe said was, “Have a heart, Matthew. It takes a little while to figure what a whole inventory cost.”

“I’m calling about something else,” I said.

“Thank God,” he said. “Make it an easy one, it’s still too early in the morning.”

“Victoria Miller,” I said. “The woman who was killed Sunday night.”

“What about her?”

“I understand your firm looked over the contract she made with the Greenery. For her singing engagement there.”

“That’s news to me,” Abe said.

“Can you find out who did it for her?”

“You know how many lawyers we have here, Matthew?”

“How many?”

“I don’t even know myself,” Abe said. “A lot, believe me. More than a lot. When do you have to know?”

“Now.”

“When you say now, do you mean now now, or do you mean ten minutes from now, or do you mean tomorrow morning now? Define your terms, Matthew.”

“I’d like to talk to whoever was her attorney, Abe. If you can help me locate him...”

“What’s so important about a singing contract?”

“That’s not the important thing.”

“Then what is?”

“Whether or not she left a will.”

“You want me to look for a will, too? Have a heart, Matthew.”

“Just find out who represented her up there, and I’ll go bother him, okay?”

“Just a second,” Abe said. “I’m putting you on hold, I’m not hanging up.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I waited.

Cynthia came in with a cup of coffee for me. She was wearing dark blue tight-fitting slacks, high-heeled blue pumps, and a pastel blue blouse. I looked at her in surprise; she rarely wore slacks to the office, preferring instead skirts that showed to good advantage her long, eternally tanned legs. She caught my look.

“What?” she said.

“I’m surprised is all.”

“No good?”

“Very nice,” I said.

“Then what?”

“You usually wear skirts.”

“For a change,” she said, and shrugged. “Is there a rule?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. Frank says I look terrific.”

“Ah, but Frank is not a leg man.”

“Chacun son goût,” she said. “Do you know you’re holding a telephone in your hand?”

“I’m waiting for Abe Pollock.”

“He always takes forever,” she said. “We’re out of real cream, I put Dari-Rich in it.”

“Fine, thank you, Cyn.”

“De nada,” she said, and breezed out of the office.

I kept waiting. When Abe finally came back onto the line, he said, “Matthew, this is going to take a while. There’s a big meeting going on up here, another one of our usual multimillion-dollar deals...”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“... and I can’t get hold of anybody. Are you going to be in the neighborhood any time later?”

“I have a closing at Tricity in about twenty minutes.”

“Good, that’s right next door. Can you stop in here after you’re done? I’ll know who was handling this by then, and you can talk to him directly.”

“It may not be till twelve, twelve-thirty, Abe.”

“I’ll be gone, I have an early lunch. But I’ll leave word for you, and I’ll ask him to wait till you get here, okay?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“No problem. On this other thing, give us till the end of the week sometime. Just between you, me, and the lamppost, my client can’t add two and two, it’s going to take him forever to go through those books and dig out the wholesale prices on all that booze. Will Friday be okay?”

“Fine, Abe.”

“I would say ‘Have a nice day,’ ” Abe said, “but I think it’s going to rain.”

In Calusa, during the rainy season, you can usually expect a thunderstorm along about three or four every afternoon, at which time the humidity and the heat have combined to leave the suffering citizenry virtually limp. The rain, when it comes, mercilessly assaults the sidewalks and the streets, but only for an hour or so. During that short while, the torrential downpour brings at least a semblance of relief. But once the rain stops, you’d never know it had been there at all. Oh, yes, the gutters are running with swift-flowing muddy water, and there are huge brown puddles everywhere, and here and there a truly flooded street — but the heat and the humidity follow as closely behind the brief storm as does a rapist his victim. Within minutes you are sweating again. That is during the rainy season. January was not supposed to be the rainy season. We were not supposed to get rain in January. As Abe had predicted, though, it began raining very hard along about noon, just as I was leaving the closing at Tricity, and I was soaking wet after the short run from the bank to the front door of Blackstone, Harris, Gerstein, Garfield and Pollock.

Most law offices with tongue-twisting firm names will allow their switchboard people to answer with a curt “Law offices,” or an even briefer “Legal,” but not the firm of Blackstone, Harris, Gerstein, Garfield and Pollock. As I stepped liquidly into the huge carpeted reception area beyond the massive oaken entrance doors, the blonde behind the desk across the room was chirpily reciting into her telephone mouthpiece, “Blackstone, Harris, Gerstein, Garfield and Pollock, good morning.” Making my way soddenly across the room, shaking water from my hair and the sleeves of an expensive jacket I was certain was about to shrink to my daughter’s size, I heard the receptionist saying apologetically, “No, it isn’t a very good morning, is it, sir?” She listened again. “Well, that’s right, sir,” she said, “it isn’t even morning anymore, is it, it’s already afternoon.” I was standing at her desk now. She looked at me, rolled her eyes heavenward, and then said into the mouthpiece, “And not a very good one at that, no, sir, whom did you wish to speak to, sir?” She nodded, said, “One moment, please,” and then plugged in one of her rubber snakes. “May I help you, sir?” she asked me.

“Abe Pollock said he would leave a message for me. I’m Attorney Hope.”

I don’t know why lawyers announce themselves that way to other lawyers or to people who work for law firms, but we do. I guess it is a sort of secret password that tells the other guy it isn’t a truck driver or a bill collector or a garbage man calling on the phone or in person — this is a lawyer, an exalted “attorney” like himself. Anyway, it’s what we do. At my local bank I’m Mr. Hope. In the law offices of Blackstone, Harris, Gerstein, Garfield and Pollock, I was Attorney Hope.

“Yes, sir,” the receptionist said. “I have it right here,” She handed me a memo slip with Abe Pollock’s name printed on the top of it. In his scrawling hand, he had written:

“Would you let Attorney O’Brien know I’m here, please?” I said to the receptionist. “I’m expected.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and plugged into her switchboard. She waited a moment, and then said, “Attorney Hope to see you.” She nodded, said, “Right away,” and then said to me, “You can go right in, sir, it’s through that door and the third office on your left.”

“Thank you,” I said.

As I went through the door leading to the inner offices, her switchboard lit up again, and I heard her saying, once again, “Blackstone, Harris, Gerstein, Garfield and Pollock, good afternoon.” I was beginning to feel like a member of the firm: at least I had passed the first test, memorizing the name. I found the third office on the left and peeked in. A woman in her late twenties, I guessed, was sitting behind a secretary’s desk in a little anteroom beyond which was a closed, walnut-paneled door. She was searching for something in the top drawer of the desk, her head bent, but she heard me the moment I approached, and looked up at once.

“Oh, hi,” she said.

Her hair was the color of fall leaves, a reddish-brown that evoked for me suddenly and inexplicably the seasonal changes I missed so much here in Calusa. Her eyes were predictably green, the only imaginable color to complement that russet hair, the green of a lush tropical glade, summer in her eyes and autumn in her hair, springtime in the clean fresh look of her generous mouth, no lipstick on it — where was winter to make her complete? A spate of freckles spilled from her high cheekbones onto her fox-faced nose. A pair of oversized eyeglasses were perched on top of her head like skylights on a rusting roof. She squinted at me for a moment and then pulled the glasses down over her magnificent eyes and smiled radiantly — and my heart stopped. I knew at once that I would ask her to go to Brazil with me as soon as my business with O’Brien was finished, or perhaps the Galápagos, or Alaska or Hawaii or Russia or the moon, perhaps even before my business with O’Brien was concluded, perhaps right this minute, right here and now before I even saw O’Brien.

“You’re Mr. Hope,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. I was staring at her shamelessly. “Mr. O’Brien’s expecting me.”

She stared back at me. Behind her glasses, those hypnotic green eyes blinked. She said nothing. Neither did she reach for an intercom switch or a telephone receiver. She just sat there behind her desk, staring at me. I thought perhaps she hadn’t heard me. I thought, Just my luck, I meet the most beautiful woman in the world and she has a hearing problem, I will have to shout, “I love you,” in her good ear, whichever one that happens to be.

“Mr. O’Brien’s expecting me,” I said again, a little louder this time.

“I’m Dale O’Brien,” she said.

I looked at her. She could have been a Dale O’Brien, I supposed. Her hair and her eyes were the hair and the eyes of a Dale O’Brien, or certainly some kind of an O’Brien. Not to mention the freckles. There had once been a Dale Carnegie, of course, and he’d been a man, and there was at present a Dale Robertson, who was also a man albeit an actor, but there was also a Dale Evans, who was a woman married to Roy Rogers, whose horse’s name was Trigger. At the moment I felt like Trigger’s backside.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Abe didn’t tell me.”

“Don’t apologize,” she said, “it fools almost everyone. I’m a male chauvinist trap. So’s my friend Dana. She’s a surgeon at Ben Taub General in Houston. Dr. Dana Canfield, right? So everyone automatically thinks of Dana Andrews, who’s a man, but does anyone think of Dana Wynter, who’s a woman? Being any kind of professional only compounds the felony. How can I help you, Mr. Hope? Come on inside, I was out here looking for some paper clips.”

She rose from behind the desk in one swift motion, gracefully unfolding what had to be at least five feet nine inches of big-boned, well-padded femininity, long russet hair cascading to her shoulders, green eyes bright and amused and intelligent behind the oversized glasses, good breasts swelling the lapels of her brown suit jacket. She stepped around the desk. The matching skirt to the suit, slit on the left side to just above her knee, revealed a beautifully proportioned leg that tapered gently to a narrow ankle in a tan high-heeled pump.

I could not take my eyes off her. I felt like a schoolboy.

“Well, do come in, Mr. Hope,” she said, and laughed a small embarrassed laugh. Her cheeks, I noticed, were beginning to flush beneath their faint dusting of freckles.

Her office was simply furnished. A large cluttered desk with a leather swivel chair behind it, two similarly upholstered chairs angled in front of it, bookcases lining three of the walls. The framed diplomas on the wall told me she’d got her B.A. from the University of California and her law degree from Harvard. There were two certificates of admission to the bar: one for the State of California, the other for Florida. She went behind her desk, sat in the swivel chair, tented her hands like a proper attorney, and said, “You want to know about Vicky’s contract.”

“Is that what Abe told you?”

“He caught me on the fly. Isn’t that it?”

“I really want to know if she’d drawn a will before her death. Is it Miss or Mrs.?”

“Pardon?” she said.

“Your marital status.”

“It’s Ms.,” she said pointedly and with a smile, “but I’m not married, no.”

“Will you have dinner with me tonight?” I asked.

“Pardon?” she said again.

“Dinner,” I said. “Tonight. With me. Attorney Hope.”

“Well, yes,” she said, sounding very surprised.

“Phew,” I said.

There are very few so-called intimate restaurants in Calusa; in fact, many of the eateries here serve their dishes on bare Formica-topped tables, and the napkins are more often than not of the paper variety. Billy Banjo’s was a notable exception to the rule. Situated on Calusa Bay, behind the luxurious Trident Tower Hotel on Route 41, the plant itself was a long, low, elegantly modern, wood-and-glass structure that hugged the shoreline and afforded a splendid view of Flamingo, Lucy’s, and Stone Crab keys across the water. Not quite on the same cuisinary level as the Greenery, it compensated instead with damask tablecloths and napkins, highly polished silver, and stemware that glistened in the warm glow of tapered candles.

Dale had told me in her office that afternoon that she, at least, had not drawn a will for Vicky, and that if one existed she was unaware of it. We both suspected that if any Calusa attorney had prepared such an instrument for her, the Probate Court would be hearing about it soon enough. There was really no further business to discuss; we both understood we were together now for a purely social evening. Dale, in fact, was dressed somewhat resplendently for the occasion, wearing a green, sarong-wrapped skirt with a matching top piped in red at the sleeves and tied at the waist with a rolled red scarf. Her russet hair was swept up tidily on top of her head, and her green eyes behind their oversized glasses echoed the deeper green of her outfit. She was wearing small diamond earrings as well and a diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand.

The ring caused me several moments of panic until she explained it had been her mother’s engagement ring, and she saw no reason why she shouldn’t wear it. I suggested she might wear it to better advantage on her right hand, although even this might — in our primitive symbolistic culture — signal either a broken engagement or a temporary hiatus in a long-standing relationship. She confessed then that wearing it on the telltale finger of her left hand was a gesture not entirely without malice aforethought. Had she possessed the necessary courage, in fact, she’d have worn her mother’s inherited wedding band as well — both rings combined might have served even more formidably to keep the wolves away from her pantry door. She explained, in more detail than I might have hoped for, how waitresses wearing wedding bands had discovered that their tips were lower than those whose fingers were not so adorned. Similarly, she herself had learned in the six years since she’d begun practicing law, first in California and next in Florida, that the engagement ring — albeit her mother’s — immediately announced to any male client that she was “spoken for,” and put matters on a simple businesslike basis from the word go.

“What about males who aren’t clients?” I asked.

“I take off the ring,” she said simply.

“But you’re wearing it tonight,” I said.

“Only because it matches the earrings,” she said, and smiled in what I thought was an encouraging manner.

Since my divorce I had discovered that many women — in an attempt to impress or to inspire trust or even simply to keep a conversation going — would inundate me with intimate trivia about their various tastes and prejudices. I had listened to women telling me what their favorite colors were, which movies they had adored or despised, which television shows they watched on a regular basis, which perfume they wore, whether they preferred to paint their toenails or leave them au naturel, and on and on ad infinitum. Not so with Dale O’Brien.

She was, I began to suspect, a more reticent sort of person, perfectly content to tell me where she’d gone to college (University of California in Santa Cruz, which I’d already learned from one of the framed diplomas in her office), and then law school (Harvard, again already learned from the other framed diploma), and where and when she’d begun practicing law (back in San Francisco in 1974, at a starting salary of $22,000), and how long she’d been practicing here in Florida (it would be four years in June), but unwilling to reveal very much about her personal self as opposed to her professional self. In the beginning I might have been a client seeking advice on a legal matter, eliciting credentials in passing. Well, wait a moment. She did tell me she was thirty-one years old; I had guessed wrong in assuming she was still in her late twenties. She also told me that she owned the house I’d picked her up at earlier, a pristine Mediterranean gem on Whisper Key, which had — coincidentally — been designed by our client Charlie Hoggs. But more and more I suspected that Dale O’Brien was the sort of woman who would reserve any exchange of confidences for when she was securely tucked into a man’s bed, and then only after they had made love (a consummation devoutly to be wished), at which time the flood of intimacies would pour forth as from a burst dam.

I kept waiting for an opportunity to probe a bit more deeply. It did not come until she mentioned, casually, that she shared her house with a cat named Sassafras, who—

“I used to have a cat who loved listening to music,” I said at once.

“Oh? What kind of music?”

“Jazz mostly. Miles Davis. Oscar Peterson. He used to stretch out on the living room floor, exactly midway between the two speakers. His ears used to twitch in time with the beat. The Modern Jazz Quartet, he loved the Modern Jazz Quartet.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died just about when my marriage did. I sometimes think of him as a metaphor for the divorce.”

She hesitated, as though debating whether or not she was willing to move the conversation on to this more intimate level. Her eyes met mine. “Was it very painful for you?” she asked.

“Someone once told me that divorce is a kind of killing. I think it may very well be.” I shook my head. “I sometimes feel I’ve done my daughter a great disservice. It might’ve been easier to have stayed married, kept the family together at any cost.”

“No,” Dale said.

“People do make arrangements,” I said.

“Was there someone else involved?”

“Yes.”

“On whose part? Your wife’s or yours?”

“Mine.”

“What happened?”

“She’s divorced now, too.”

“Do you ever see her?”

“No. She lives in Tampa.”

“Tampa’s not that far away.”

“I don’t think it would matter if she lived right around the corner.”

We were silent for several moments. Again she seemed weighing whether she should switch the conversation back to safer ground. At last she said, “Was your marriage failing otherwise?”

“If you’re seeing someone outside your marriage, then I would say it’s failing, yes.”

“Okay,” she said, and smiled. “End of direct examination.”

She spooned sugar into her cup. She seemed preoccupied with stirring it into her coffee. Her head bent, she said, “I was almost as good as married myself, once upon a time.”

“When was that?”

“When I first began practicing. In San Francisco. I lived with an artist out there.” She lifted her head; her eyes met mine again. “He used to paint these cutesy-poo pictures of animals with big eyes and lolling little tongues. I thought they were marvelous. I left him the minute I realized they were crap.”

“When was that?”

“Four years ago, on the fifteenth of May. That’s when I moved out. I came to Florida the following month.”

“And you still remember the date, huh?”

“Oh, sure. Biggest decision I ever had to make in my life. I mean, I’d been living with him for two years, that’s a long time. And I loved him, you know. I suppose I loved him. Until...”

She shrugged.

“Until you found out you didn’t like his paintings.”

“No, that came after I found out I didn’t love him. I can remember the exact moment, isn’t that strange? We were in Los Angeles one day, walking in MacArthur Park, it was a Sunday, and I mentioned how much I loved the lyric in that song, the one about MacArthur Park, the lyric about someone having left a cake out in the rain, you know the lyric. And he said he’d never understood what the hell that song was all about. I looked at him. He was walking along with his hands in his pockets, he was a great big shambling bear of a man, with a beard, and he wore these little Benjamin Franklin eyeglasses, and he was looking down at his feet as we walked through the park — it was one of those miserably smoggy Los Angeles days — and he had just told me he had never understood a song that for me had only summed up a whole generation! I didn’t say anything. We just kept walking through the park, and when we got back to the apartment we sat around smoking dope, and then he wanted to make love, and for the first time in my life I told somebody I had a headache, I told this man I’d been living with for two years, this man I thought I adored, that I had a headache and could we wait until later, please? I moved out two weeks after that.”

“You didn’t just...”

“No, no, I didn’t leave a note tacked to the bathroom door or Scotch-taped to the refrigerator, nothing like that. We talked about it, a week after our walk in the park, talked about it like mature, sensible adults, while inside my heart was breaking because I didn’t love him anymore. I think I was more hurt than he was. We talked about it all night long that night, and then we did make love, we finally made love for the first time since that day in MacArthur Park when all the cool green icing melted down, and even the lovemaking wasn’t any good anymore. He gave me one of his paintings when I moved out. I still have it someplace. I never look at it.”

“So,” I said, “here we are.”

“Alone at last,” she said, and smiled.

We lingered over coffee and a sinfully rich concoction called Chocolate Coconut Supreme; it was a little after ten when I paid the check and walked Dale out toward where I’d parked the Ghia. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still overcast with threatening clouds, and the temperature had dropped drastically. In Calusa, whenever you mentioned how cold it was, or how rainy it was, or how suffocatingly hot it was; whenever, in short, you mentioned how absolutely shitty the weather could be here at times, the natives (and this included all those transplanted migrants from the north) would invariably say, “Ah, yes, but think how bad it is anyplace else.” Anyplace else apparently included such idyllic spots as Barbados or the Virgin Islands or Antigua or Acapulco. Why the snowbirds bothered coming to Calusa at all was something I would never be able to fathom. When it gets cold in a warm climate (and please remember that Calusa is only on the northernmost fringes of the subtropics) it can seem colder than four below in Utica, New York. It felt that cold right this minute.

Dale took my arm and moved in close to me. We both ducked our heads against the wind and braved our way across the parking lot. Inside the car I turned on the heater — the first time I’d done so since last February. I also turned on the radio, twisting the dial till I found the station I was looking for, a program originating in Manakawa and promising “Music for Us.”

The music was completely wasted on at least one of us.

At Dale’s front door, she thanked me for a lovely evening, and then offered her hand in farewell. I told her I’d call her again soon, if that was all right with her (“Yes, please do, Matthew”) and then I walked through the raging wind to my car. As I crossed the Timucuan Bridge and headed for the mainland, Artie Shaw’s “Stardust” flooded the automobile.

I found it small solace.