Chump Change (5 page)

“Help ya?” the guy behind the desk asked.

I smiled and slid the photo his way. “You know this guy?”

He pretended the picture wasn’t there. Just kept looking at me.

“You want a room?”

“I want to know if you’ve ever seen this guy.”

The bruiser pushed himself up out of the chair and began shuffling in my direction. I tapped the photo. “What about it?” I asked the clerk.

“We got a real discerning clientele,” Wifebeater said with a gap-toothed grin. “Real touchy about their privacy, you know.”

“I’m not a cop,” I said.

“You sure look like a cop.”

I turned toward the voice. The bouncer came bellying right up to me. Close enough to smell the onions on his breath. “You probably oughta get the fuck outta here,” he said.

“When I’m done,” I replied.

That seemed to amuse him. He showed me an acre of yellow teeth. “Believe me, asshole, you’re done,” he assured me, and reached out to clamp a big hand on my shoulder. It never arrived.

I put everything I had behind a short, straight right to the middle of his solar plexus. He whooped out a great rush of air, staggered backwards two steps, and dropped onto the filthy carpet, barking for breath, trying to force air into his spasming lungs. I’ve been on the other end. It’s not a pleasant experience.

I turned back to the desk clerk. He had his right hand under the counter.

“I wouldn’t,” I cautioned.

Took him all of a second to decide I was right. Behind me, the big guy was rolling back and forth on the floor, making noises like a broken bilge pump. Wifebeater threw a disgusted glance at his disabled musclehead, then looked down at the photo and nodded. I watched as he fingered his way through an old-fashioned card file, extracted one, and slid it across the desk to me.

“You’re sure,” I pushed.
“
Cause if this turns out to be bullshit, you’re going to be seeing me again.”

He nodded so hard the toupee slipped. He pushed it back into place.

“Last Tuesday and Wednesday nights,” he said. “Paid cash.”

I pocketed the card. Dropped the key on the counter. “That yours?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Nice doing business with you,” I lied, as I turned and headed for the street.

With lowlifes like those two, you never know, so I kept an eye on my back as I dodged traffic across Jackson Street. Satisfied my wake was clear, I leaned against a store window and gazed down at the card in my hand. Scrawled on the card was a name. Gordon Stanley. Two nights. Twelve bucks a night, plus tax.

Somewhere in my mind, a rocket rose in the night sky. “Gordon Stanley,” I whispered to myself. “Who in hell is Gor—” And then the rocket exploded, filling the darkness with brilliant streams of multicolored light. I pulled the photo from my pocket. My eyes crawled over it like ants at a picnic.

“Gordy,” I whispered. “Holy shit. It’s Gordy.”

Rachel kept running her palm over the photograph, rubbing the shiny surface as if her hands could somehow smooth the deep lines etched in his face.

“What happened to him?” she whispered.

“I think we both know what happened to him.”

Her eyes were going damp. “But . . . I mean, like, there was nothing we could . . .” She stopped. Looked up at me again. “You think we should have . . . ?”

I didn’t say anything. We were wandering into one of those moral minefields, where people are forced to recognize that the veneer of civilization is purely illusionary. A set of undefined agreements, the vagueness of which allows us to blame an unjust God, or bad luck, or anyone or anything but ourselves for the ofttimes predictable misfortunes of others. I remembered a line from a song. Said that people don’t do what they believe in, they just do what’s most convenient, and then repent. Break out the scourges.

Year and a half back. A glorious spring. The kind of weather you only get every six or seven years here in the Pacific Northwest. Temperature twenty degrees above the norm. Seventy-five in April. Rachel and I camped out at the Landry manse for the first time, all touches and looks, soaking naked in the spa, mooning over one another, lost in the heady fumes of carnal expectation.

As the days kept getting warmer, it was like some homing signal was being broadcast to the houses lining the north edge of the bay. One by one, residents and renters alike began to emerge from their winter hibernation, shielding their sleepy eyes from the fiery glint on the water, rummaging for charcoal briquettes in the garage.

That’s when the party started. I don’t recall who first invited everybody over for a barbecue and a few drinks, but that’s how it began. T-bones and tequila on the terrace. Then somebody decided to return the favor. Then somebody else made crab cakes for everybody, until damn near every night somebody or other was having some kind of shindig, and a whole collection of disparate souls who normally kept to themselves were suddenly thrown together.

We were a week into the rolling party scene when Gordy first showed up.

He’d rented the house next door to the Morrisons’, and came wandering into the light of the bonfire one night, tentatively, like the new kid in town.

He seemed harmless enough. A big doughy guy, with a smile and a story. Seems he’d won the Washington state lottery a few months back. Lived all of his life over in some minuscule town on the other side of the state. Way out there in wheat country. About fifteen seconds after receiving his first disbursement check, Gordy decided it was time to flee the fescue and check out life in the big city.

Rather than throw himself directly into the belly of the beast and rent an apartment in downtown Seattle, he’d wisely decided to spend a couple of months making day trips into the city, from the other side of the Sound. He’d figured the somewhat slower pace of peninsula life would help ease him more gracefully into full-scale urban chaos. Probably turned out to be the worst decision of his life.

If I had to choose a word for Gord, I guess it would be
sweet
. A big corn-fed mama’s boy bachelor with a smile on his face and a dimple in his chin. A bit of an oaf, I suppose, but a genuinely nice guy. Not necessarily the sharpest tool in the shed, but not, by any means, stupid either. Always showed up with a couple of bottles of wine. Always stayed around to help clean up when the party was over. First one to volunteer when a store run was needed. Generous, but careful with his money. The kind of guy you’d enjoy having for a neighbor. Within a week or so, Gord had become an integral part of the perpetual party.

And then . . . then she showed up. I’d like to think that, had I not been quite so distracted by the gravitational throes of lust, I might have been the one to take him aside and warn him that maybe he was getting in a bit over his head here. That maybe this particular pretty package would be better left unopened. But who knows? Maybe that’s just my usual dose of self-serving tripe.

She showed up one night just about at dark. As Jill Crowley was putting the flame to the barbecue, Missy Allen came stumbling into the scene, panting like a terrier, her blouse ripped nearly in two and her face streaked with tears. Talk about an entrance.

Needless to say, everybody dropped what they were doing and rushed to her aid.

Blankets were found, brandy was poured. We waited with bated ear.

Punctuated with bouts of sobbing, the story eventually emerged. She told us she was Canadian, from the suburbs of Windsor, Ontario, where she’d spent the last nine years nursing a dying mother. After Mom passed, and the bank took the house, finding herself without prospects, she’d accepted a job offer from a family friend. An older man from the U.S. she’d always thought of as an uncle. Some sort of an au pair position, looking after the guy’s adolescent children, taking care of the house, a small salary and a roof, that sort of thing. They’d flown back to the States on a private jet, and settled into a somewhat stilted version of domestic bliss. Briefly, anyway.

Turned out a maid wasn’t what this guy really wanted. What he wanted was into Missy Allen’s knickers. At first, it was just an occasional misplaced hand, a tweak here, a fondle there. Destitute in a foreign country, Missy pretended not to notice. Two weeks into Missy’s domestic tenure, however, the children were sent to visit their birth mother in New York, and the situation promptly went to hell in a handbasket. Touchy-feely quickly evolved into a series of perverse sexual demands so repulsive and shameful she couldn’t bring herself to describe them in any real detail.

Things had come to a head earlier today, when he’d quite literally tried to tear the clothes from her body. Terrified, she’d fled the house. Ran through the woods for what she thought was hours, until she’d stumbled upon our little gathering. She didn’t know where in the U.S. she was. No papers. No passport. No nothing.

She wouldn’t reveal the scoundrel’s name, either. A matter of pride, she said. If the folks back home should ever find out what had happened to her . . . well, that was something she just couldn’t live with.

In twos and threes we wandered off and talked it over while she sipped brandy and huddled under a blanket by the fire. Calling the cops was discussed, of course; we were, after all, a pretty solidly upper-middle-class bunch. That’s when Gordy piped up, which was, now that I think about it, really out of character for him. Gordy was a listener, not a talker. Maybe we should wait on the cops thing, he said. He had plenty of room. He was knocking around a six-bedroom house all by himself. Let’s give the lady a good night’s sleep and then see what it is
she
wants to do.

We should have known something was amiss when neither of them showed up at the following night’s gathering. By the time anybody saw Gordy again, he was so distended by lust, his big feet looked as if they were floating above the grass.

In less than a week, she owned him, lock, stock, and lottery. That’s when people began to say what they later claimed they’d been thinking all along. This wasn’t right. This poor guy was a deer in the headlights. Maybe somebody should have a word with Gordy. Everybody had an opinion. Bob with the ski boat was still pushing for the cops. Rachel was in favor of the man-to-man approach. Me? I’ve never been much on telling other adults what to do. I mean, I’ll stop you if you’re about to step in front of a bus, but otherwise you’re pretty much on your own, as far as I’m concerned.

Interestingly, it was the women who first had doubts. Right off, Tina Bandon said she thought the story was crap. Even Rachel, who is much disinclined to render her professional opinion outside the office, said there was something just a bit
off
about the woman, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. All of which was odd, when you think about it, because, I mean, here was a wronged woman, fallen victim to the paternal penis oppressors, a situation where womanly solidarity should have reared its coiffured head, but where only distrust seemed to fester.

Me? I mean . . . I don’t kid myself . . . who could blame the guy? Missy Allen was a very hot package, indeed. When I look at it now, there was more of an art to that packaging than I’d noticed at the time. You had to get past the baggy clothes and the wan smile to notice how incredibly put together she was. She made you work at it. All fresh-scrubbed girl-next-door with a truckload of serious woman equipment. The allure was lost on nobody.

Gordy never had a chance.

That Thursday night, Gordy pulled his rental Escalade as close to the beach as he was able and walked down to the nightly fire. Missy stayed in the car. Gordy announced that he and Missy and the lottery money were leaving. Heading up to Canada to get her paperwork straightened out and then . . . pregnant pause . . . they were gonna get married. A considerably longer silence dogged him on his way back to the car.

It’s like when people tell you they’re getting a divorce. You don’t know whether to say you’re sorry to hear about it, or pound them on the back with heartfelt glee. Sorta depends on the circumstances, doesn’t it?

I’d thought of him a few times since then. Wondered how things had worked out. But I’d never laid eyes on Gordy again, until the night before last, when he died with my name spilling out of his mouth.

Rachel smoothed the photograph for about the fiftieth time.

“I wonder what happened to all that money?” she asked.

“Now, that’s the question, isn’t it?” I replied.