The Road To Ruin

2

SINCE THE TIME, a couple years ago, when Anne Marie Carpinaw’s husband, Howard, decided to walk out on her in the middle of a vacation trip to New York City from their home in Lancaster, Kansas, and while drowning not her sorrows but her befuddlement in the hotel bar she had met and taken up with Andrew Octavian Kelp, life had become odder and more interesting than it had ever been with Howard or in Lancaster (or in D.C., for that matter, where she’d also partly grown up while her daddy the congressman was still alive), which meant things were usually pleasant and went a long way toward making life worthwhile. But now and again, in the orbit of Andy Kelp, life became a little too interesting, and this was one of those moments right now.

The guy in the living room wasn’t menacing, exactly, but he wasn’t explainable either, and that’s what had Anne Marie upset. The doorbell had rung, and when she’d opened the apartment door there he was, short, aged maybe fifty, bandy-legged and skinny-armed but with a big barrelly torso, like a cartoon spider. He was balding, with very pale skin that had maybe never seen the sun, plus watery blue sunny-side-up eyes and a kind of blunt fatalistic manner, as though he would be hard either to surprise or please. There was something in his manner that reminded her of John Dortmunder, except that John almost never got mad, but you could imagine with no trouble at all this guy getting mad.

At the moment, he was cheerful, brisk, and indifferent to her. “Hi,” he said, with a smile, when she opened the door to him. “Andy in?”

“Not at the moment. I’m—”

“I’ll wait,” the guy said, and slithered in past her.

“But—”

It was too late; he was across the threshold. With an empty smile over his shoulder at Anne Marie he said, “I’ll just sit in the living room here, wait’ll he comes back.”

“But—” Helplessly, she watched the guy look at the available furniture and go directly to the chair she thought of as hers. “I don’t know you,” she said.

Settling into Anne Marie’s chair, the guy said, “I’m a friend of Andy’s.” He smiled at the living room: “Very nice. The woman’s touch, huh?”

“Is he expecting you?”

“Not for maybe twenty years,” he said, and laughed. “Don’t mind me,” he advised her. “You go on what you’re doing.”

“I’m not sure when Andy’s coming back.”

“I got nothing but time,” he said, and suddenly looked bitter, as though he’d reminded himself of something unpleasant. Something that might make him mad.

“Well…” She thought, maybe she should placate him somehow. Even though he wasn’t at all threatening, he did look as though he might get mad, even if not at her. The truth was, he barely seemed to notice she was there. She was, she knew, an attractive person, but he gave no indication at all that he’d remarked it. Which was also unsettling.

So, not wanting to, but feeling she should, she said, “Do you want a cup of coffee? Glass of water?”

“No, I’m fine,” he said, and pulled a Daily News out of his jacket pocket, all folded in on itself like origami. Unfolding it, he said, “I’ll just sit here, read my paper, wait for Andy.”

So that’s when she left him there, went to the kitchen, and called John and May’s place, because Andy had told her he wanted to see John today, so maybe he was still there. She got May, and Andy was still there, “but I don’t need to talk to him,” Anne Marie said. “Just tell him what the situation is here.”

May said, “What is the situation there?”

So Anne Marie told her, and May said, “Ooh. I wouldn’t like that.”

“Neither do I.”

“I’ll send Andy home right now.”

Which meant Anne Marie spent the next fifteen minutes in the kitchen, a place where she normally didn’t spend a whole lot of her time. It was very small, to begin with, and what could you do in there except cook and eat?

What she did do, for the next quarter hour, was fret. Was this man a friend of Andy’s? Was it Andy he was potentially mad at? Had she inadvertently permitted all kinds of trouble into the house? It was so hard, sometimes, to know what to do in Andy’s world.

Finally, she heard the apartment door open, so she hurried out to the living room to be present for whatever happened next, because, of course, she was partly responsible for whatever happened next. As she entered the living room, suddenly breathless though it was a mere half-dozen steps from one room to the other, she saw that Andy was here, that John had come along with him and was closing the apartment door, and that the stranger was getting to his feet, doing origami again with his newspaper. And he was smiling.

And so was Andy! It was with great relief that Anne Marie saw that smile, and heard Andy say, “Chester! Whadda you doing out?”

“Believe it or not,” Chester said, “I been out almost four years.”

“Well, I’ll be.” Andy seemed genuinely happy to see this strange man, which Anne Marie knew shouldn’t surprise her, though it still did. Shaking hands with Chester, he said, “You met Anne Marie?”

“I didn’t wanna push myself forward,” Chester said, and turned to offer a smile and a nod and a “How are ya?”

“Anne Marie Carpinaw,” Andy introduced, “Chester Fallon.”

“Hello,” she said, thinking, You didn’t want to push yourself forward? You walked right into the house!

On the other hand, it was now clear Chester Fallon was not a threat or a problem, but a friend of some sort. And once he was Chester, somehow, he became much less threatening.

Meantime, Andy was saying, “I don’t think you know John,” and made the introductions, and Anne Marie noticed that John was very neutral toward Chester, like herself, shaking Chester’s hand, looking him straight in the eye, and contenting himself with a “Harya.”

“Not so good,” Chester told him, and said to Andy, “I take it Anne Marie’s with you, and John’s one of us guys.”

“You wanna tell a story?” Andy asked him. “In confidence? Be confident. Siddown. Everybody wanna beer? I’ll get them.”

So Andy left, and the other three sat, and Anne Marie said to Chester, “I wish you’d told me.”

Chester looked surprised. “Told you what? I’m a friend of Andy’s, I said that.”

“But there was no … conversation.”

“Well, Anne Marie, if I can call you Anne Marie—”

“Of course.”

“I didn’t know you, did I? It could be you’re the lady of the house, it could be you’re a bill collector, process server. No offense, I seen cops look like you.”

“Not enough of them,” John said.

“Very true,” Chester told him. “John, is it? You’re right when you’re right. Most cops, what they look like, they look like what you would look like if, your whole life, you never ate anything but Big Macs.”

Andy came back then to distribute beer, take his own seat, and say, “Chester, I haven’t seen you in years. More.”

“You know I went up,” Chester said.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Andy assured him.

“Of course it wasn’t my fault,” Chester said, “but I was still doing large time.” Including John and Anne Marie in his explanation, he said, “I’m the driver, it can’t be my fault, unless I turn around and drive back to the bank. The thing is, I started in life as a stunt driver.”

Anne Marie, surprised, said, “Really?”

“You may have seen the one,” Chester said, “where the guy’s escaping in the car, they’re after him, the street becomes an alleyway, too narrow for the car, he angles sharp right, bumps the right wheels up on the curb, spins sharp left, the car’s up on two left wheels, he goes down the alley at a diagonal, drops onto four wheels where it widens out again, ta-ran-ta-rah.”

“Wow,” Anne Marie said.

“That was me,” Chester told her. “We gotta do it in one take or otherwise I’m gonna cream the car against some very stone buildings. I liked that life.”

John said, “Was it you in the rest of the picture?”

“Nah,” Chester said, “that was some movie star. They even had to bring in somebody else to do his swimming. Anyway, the problem was, that career dried up. They don’t need the guys like me now, they got computers to do the stunts.” He shrugged, but looked disgusted. “People wanna look at a cartoon, a car on a diagonal down the alley, nobody at the wheel, nobody’s life at stake, what I say, it isn’t the pictures got worse, it’s the audience. But don’t let me get off on that, that’s a pet grievance, or it would be, except now I got a new pet grievance.” Turning to Andy, he said, “And frankly, that’s why I’m here.”

“I was wondering,” Andy admitted. “You say you’ve been out four years, but I haven’t heard anything about you, so I don’t think you’re driving any more.”

“Not away from banks,” Chester said. “See, it isn’t that I reformed, it’s that driving in heists wasn’t my first career choice to begin with. Movies, and some television, your circus in the slow periods, industrial films, I was making out okay. But then, when the computer muscles me outa there, how else am I gonna maintain my standard of living?”

“So,” Andy said, “you didn’t go back to it when you got out, because you got something else?”

“I did minimum time,” Chester told him. “Kept my nose clean, all positive reports, got parole in one, with a placement bureau that actually did some placing for once. There was this rich guy, Monroe Hall—”

“I’ve heard that name,” Andy said, and Anne Marie felt that she too had heard it, but couldn’t think where.

“It’s been in the news of late,” Chester said, and sounded disgusted again. “Let me get there.”

“Take your time,” Andy agreed.

“Monroe Hall,” Chester said, “owns one of the major antique car collections in the world, out in his estate in Pennsylvania. Probably two million dollars on wheels, he keeps them in climate-controlled barns, he does exhibits sometimes, these are his babies. But himself he’s not a great driver, so he hires a guy, like a chauffeur, to drive the cars, make sure they stay in condition. You just let a car sit around, the gasoline gums up, everything goes to hell. So around the time I’m getting out, Hall’s previous chauffeur, that he’s had almost as long as the cars, dies of natural causes and he needs a new guy. I’ve got one fall, I’ve paid my debt to society, I’ve got this movie background, it’s exciting to Hall in every possible way. Movies, jail, bank robbery, you name it. So the placement bureau puts me together with Hall, I’m hired, I relocate the family out to Pennsylvania.”

Andy said, “Family?”

Surprised, Chester said, “You didn’t know that? Well, I guess I kept that part away from the part you knew. Yeah, I got a wife and three kids, grown now, well, in their twenties, but outa the house. So the wife and me, we relocate, and I’ve got all these cars to play with, and I’m an employee of SomniTech.”

“Wait a minute,” Andy said. “I’ve heard of that.”

“Sure you have,” Chester agreed. “It’s one of your huge corporations, they’re in oil, they’re in manufacturing, they’re in communications, they’re all over the place. It’s what they call horizontal diversification, which to me sounds like a whorehouse that caters to all tastes, but if that’s how they want to call it, fine. Anyway, Monroe Hall is one of the major executives there. And everything in his life is paid for by SomniTech. My paychecks are SomniTech. I get health insurance and a retirement plan, it’s all SomniTech. The upkeep on the cars, paid for by SomniTech. His pool maintenance is a business expense, goes through SomniTech, his kids’ dentist bills.”

“Something went wrong,” Andy said. “I’ve read about this thing.”

“What he was doing,” Chester said, “charging everything off to the company, turns out he wasn’t supposed to do that.”

“Cheating the IRS,” Andy suggested.

“Well, that, too,” Chester said. “But the main thing was, he was stealing from the company. That’s shareholders’ money, that’s supposed to be profit, dividends, they just sucked it all out, him and like four other executives at the top of the heap.”

Anne Marie said, “I remember that! Wasn’t he the white-haired man, testified in front of Congress?”

“Anne Marie,” Andy said, “every white-haired man in America that owns a suit has testified in front of Congress.”

“But you’re right,” Chester assured her. “Monroe Hall was one of the people testified in those business ethics hearings.”

Andy said, “So what happens? This Hall guy gets your old cell?”

“Not a chance,” Chester told him. “You can’t touch these guys, every one of them is surrounded by a moat filled with man-eating lawyers. He’s still fat and happy there in Pennsylvania. But here’s the thing of it,” he said, and Anne Marie saw that now he was getting angry. “The deal he cuts,” Chester explained, “he has to make restitution, partial restitution, and the reason it’s partial, he’s gotta plead poverty now, so he can’t be a guy now that his hobby is million-dollar antique cars, so he gives it—here comes a charitable tax deduction, by the way—he gives it to a foundation. And guess who the foundation is. I mean, if you lift up the rock.”

Andy said, “How does this affect you?”

“The foundation takes over maintenance on the collection,” Chester said, “with some federal education money, and the foundation can’t hire an ex-con.”

Andy said, “You’re out of a job.”

“I’m out of everything. My job is gone, my medical insurance through SomniTech is gone, my retirement is gone, everything’s gone. I asked him, on account of my faithful service, find a spot for me somewhere, all of sudden I’m not allowed on the property, nobody wants to talk to me on the phone.”

“Jeez,” Andy said.

Chester shook his head. “My first career is still dead, my second career still contains certain risks, and I don’t feel like getting a job at a car service in Manhattan, to be the guy out at the airport holding up the sign: Pembroke.”

Andy said, “You have a different idea.”

“I do.”

“And you think it includes me,” Andy said.

“I hope it includes you.”

John said, “What is it you want to steal?”

“His fucking cars,” Chester said, and nodded at Anne Marie. “Excuse the French.”