Tempting Fate

Twenty

The temperature had dropped to a tolerable one hundred degrees when John arrived back in Tucson.

His apartment, shut up for two weeks, was sweltering and smelled bad. His ungodly spider had taken over his bathroom. His living area was scattered with the pages of a manuscript he knew now he’d never finish. The historians could have the last word on Ulysses Pembroke’s life.

John would write his memoirs of growing up as the only child of his lunatic, famous, impossible mother and father.

His trip to Saratoga had cleaned him out. There was a letter from the IRS in his mailbox. He needed money, fast.

Looking at the squalid conditions of his life, he wondered why he hadn’t taken his father-in-law’s offer to return to Chandler Hotels. The job would have meant moving back to New York. He’d be closer to Dani and Mattie. His daughter certainly could use all the moral support she could get. After giving her mother a proper burial next to Claire Chandler in the family plot, Dani had rolled up her sleeves and tackled the problems endemic to the kind of publicity she, the Pembroke and Pembroke Springs had received in the past days. On top of having her mother’s body turn up after twenty-five years on her property and a murderer in the family, it turned out Roger Stone had hated her guts and floated rumors of her impending self-destruction. Apparently he’d been terrified Eugene would succeed in bringing Dani back into the fold, make her head of Chandler Hotels. Roger had never felt secure; he could never really be a Chandler himself.

John thought it’d be nice to be close to his mother and daughter.

Dani hadn’t asked him to stick around, but she’d kissed him at the airport, slipped him a couple hundred bucks and told him she loved him-she who’d never been open about such feelings. That was enough. More than he deserved, for certain.

And he’d already told Eugene no. Even now he couldn’t explain why.

He turned up the air conditioners as high as they’d go, opened a Dos Equis and cleaned out his refrigerator. Then he got down on his hands and knees and gathered up the scattered fragments of his manuscript.

Opening another beer, he sank into his lumpy couch and opened up an old photo album. Right there on the front page was his favorite picture, of the five of them together: Nick, Mattie, Lilli, Dani, himself. They looked happy.

They’d been happy.

He was still staring at the picture when someone pounded on his front door. “Yeah, coming.”

A troop of neighborhood kids trailed into his apartment. They carried fresh tortillas, pots of beans, a big salad and a dozen eggs, all from their mothers, who’d heard he was back in town and were worried he didn’t have any food.

He was thanking them profusely when he sensed the foreign presence at his feet. Standing rock-still, he looked down. There was the hairy little bastard. A few of these let loose on the streets of New York City, he thought, and every smarmy New York cockroach would head for the Hudson River. For a change, he had on shoes. If he moved fast and stomped hard, death would be quick and sure, if not neat.

The spider scampered toward the toilet. John let him go.

The kids howled with laughter. “Hey, Johnny,” one impertinent urchin said, “we sure missed you.”

He grinned. “I missed you, too, kid.”