Condominium (18 page)

Marty looked at Lew Traff. “Is that insider information?”

“Who is inside? Nothing is on paper. But if you’re going to do it, you ought to take the position in it before you become a borrower.”

“Benjie, can your pal in Miami handle that size?”

“Whyn’t I ask him how much he could swing and get back to you with a figure?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Sure. I think if I want to come in for some, or Lew does, it’s better we make our own arrangement elsewhere. It would be smaller and not so hard to arrange.”

“Good thinking.”

“That’s what you’re supposed to be paying us for.”

After Traff and Wannover had left, he sat in silent thought for ten minutes and then punched out his home phone number on his private line. The maid answered and said that Miz Liss was in her baff. Martin said that he was certain his wife was the cleanest woman in Palm County and would she please take the phone in to her. The woman giggled and said yessa.

“Marty? I’ve been expecting you any minute! You should
be
here, darling.”

“That’s why I called. You go ahead, will you? And I’ll join you there later on.”

“How much later on? I hate taking two cars.”

“As soon as I get a few more details cleaned up, I’ll shower and change and go right to the party from here. I’ve got lots of good news to tell you.”

“Just don’t be too damned late. And if this is one of those times when you never
do
show up, I swear, I’ll …”

“See you there, honey. ’Bye.”

Drusilla Bryne brought in two checks for his signature. She adjusted the thermostat, warming the large office to a temperature more comfortable for her. She sat naked on the black Naugahyde of his big judge’s chair. The round red sun was sitting on the rim of the gray sea, filling the office with furnace light when she straddled his lap, facing him, her long legs threaded through the opening of the padded arms of the big chair. The sun was gone when they had finished, the room full of shadows. When she stirred to leave him, he held her close and stroked her long back, silk-smooth and moist with her exertions. Her dark hair tickled his cheek and temple. He kissed the side of her throat and inhaled the scent of her. She was beginning to feel uncomfortably heavy. He stirred and she lifted away from him with easy agility.

“You go ahead first,” she said. “You’re late enough already.”

“Francie won’t be lonely. She always makes friends.”

“And you’re always suspicious of the poor woman, now, aren’t you?”

“With cause, Irish. With good cause.” He went off and took his shower. He shaved while she showered. She had laid out fresh clothing for him, suitable for an informal cocktail party. He was ready to leave when she finished her shower. He kissed her and patted her wet behind and told her to be sure to check the lock when she left.

When she was dry she put her office clothes back on, brushed
her hair, fixed her mouth and went in and turned on the office lights and sat in Mr. Liss’s chair and dialed a local number.

When he answered she said, “Dean? Dean, darlin’, this is Dru here, who else? That nice little bit of money that you’ve been keeping at work for me there in the Tampa Electric stock, tomorrow I should like you to take me out of it and go short on Equity Mortgage Management Shares. Pardon? Oh, for as much as the sale will afford me. That’s a dear fellow. Forgive me for phoning you at home, love, but I might not have the chance in the morning. Give my best to your lovely Clara. What? Ah, don’t you remember our rules? No questions and no explanations. Yes, of course I have been lucky on these little things, and as I told you before, it does not matter to me at all if you decide to do as I do. Right. Good night, darlin’.”

THE HEAVYSET WOMAN
was having her hair done at Connie Lee’s House of Hair by one of the older operators. The customer had long since been classified as BTLT (big talk, little tip) and thus did not have any steady operator but was assigned by Connie Lee, who out of a sense of fairness and good employee relations did not give Mrs. Cleveland too many times to the same girl.

“All your life,” Mrs. Cleveland was saying, “you think about retirement and what it will be like, but it sure isn’t anything like I imagined. The first few months at Golden Sands were kind of fun, getting the apartment fixed up the way we want it. Of course we brought too much stuff down. You pay a fortune to have some slobby men smelling of beer throw your furniture around, but when it gets down here in the tropics, it doesn’t look the way it did in Warren, Ohio. The light is brighter, or something. It looks all shabby and tacky. We sold a lot of it. I don’t really know why I say sold, because we practically gave it away. When the man made that
offer, I actually broke down and cried. But Jack said we better take it, so we took it. The new things were very costly, and they’re not made as well as the old things were, but I must say they look a lot nicer in the apartment.

“The thing that is driving me out of my skull is having Jack around every living minute of the day. I am even coming here and getting my hair done oftener than I should because it is the only way I can get away from him, and even now I’m not really away from him because he is right out there roaming around in the parking lot, or roaming around in the drugstore or the hardware store, or he is sitting in the Buick rattling his fingernails on the horn ring. The thing about my husband, everybody knew him up in Warren. It isn’t really a very big place. Jack had the lumberyard his father started way back, and the building supply business. He was in the Rotary and the Kiwanis and the VFW. He was on the board of directors of Ohio Federal Savings and Loan, and he was chairman of the Community Chest a lot of times. And he was on the hospital committee. And he was on the house committee at the country club. He’d walk down the street, and about half the people he met would know him by name and he’d know their names. He isn’t used to people not knowing who he is.

“But it’s more than that, I think. He had a lot of things going all the time. He had to keep track of an awful lot of things going on all the time, and make decisions and so on. It was the way he lived for years and years and years, and all of a sudden there isn’t enough going on to use up all that energy, so he is just about to drive me crazy. I could do the grocery shopping for the two of us in certainly no more than twenty minutes, but he comes along every time, and it takes an hour and a half, because he has one of those little electronic adding machines with the batteries, and he has to read the number of ounces on a package and get the price per
ounce and compare with three or four other kinds and pick out the one that’s the best value. He makes lists and charts and so on. He keeps putting things in the shopping cart and taking them out until I don’t know where I am and I get so confused I get all shaky, I really do. He’s got another thing about the Buick that is driving me crazy too. He keeps track of every single mile, and he keeps getting the tank filled to the top every time we go by a gas station, so that he can figure out how many miles we are getting to a gallon. Two weeks ago he had the tires blown up to thirty-five pounds of air, and he says they will last longer and we are getting better mileage than before, but you can feel every little crack in the pavement and the car goes
bang-bang-bang
, hard enough to jar the fillings out of your teeth. He’s started keeping a chart on the temperature and the cost of the electric too. And if I touch the thermostat, he flies into a rage, yelling and cursing. I wish he could get some kind of a hobby. He doesn’t like fishing very much. He never cared for boats. And you know how it is with shelling. If a shell washes up anywhere on the beach there are five old ladies ready to pounce on it and run home with it.

“At first Jack was willing to wear resort clothes, you know, bright pretty shirts and walking shorts and so on, but I think he’s decided that somehow he’ll get treated with more respect if he wears a suit and tie. Over a month ago we were over in downtown Athens because he was looking for a kind of clock thermostat you can set so that—oh, I don’t know what it does, but it is supposed to save money, and he said to the clerk that he used to have a building supply business and the clerk gave him a fisheye look for about three seconds and then said, ‘So?’ He needs to feel that he accounts for something in the world. He needs to be Jack Cleveland that people would go to when they had personal problems because they wanted his advice. He feels like he is absolutely nothing down
here, and so he just fusses and fusses about everything under the sun. Now he is grumping around because when they were looking for people to be directors and officers of the Golden Sands Condominium Association, Jack said he was retired and he’d had enough of that stuff to last him forever, and now we understand the directors are going to make us all pay a lot more money every month, and more money to catch up on some kind of a deficit. Jack looked up the Florida law and it says that the administration of any condominium cannot have a meeting and decide anything unless they post a notice of the time and place of that meeting in some place where the owners will see it at least forty-eight hours before the meeting, so he is going to declare that the new assessment is not valid and nobody has to pay it until they do it right. Maybe if he makes enough fuss they will make him a director, and then he can spread himself out a little bit and drive a lot of other people crazy along with me.”

Harlin Barker stood by the counter in the manager’s office waiting for Mrs. Higbee to notice him and come over. She was engaged in inaudible animated conversation with a tall dark-haired sturdy young woman who looked familiar to Barker. After a few moments he remembered where he had seen her. She had been on duty in the emergency room at the Athens Memorial Hospital when he had taken Connie Mae in at two in the morning a month ago with her coronary. He could remember everything so vividly from that night that he was able to close his eyes and visualize her in uniform and even read once again the gold and white name tag on her blouse. Roberta Fish, R.N. She had been very swift, competent and reassuring. He was tempted to interrupt, but there was an intensity about the muted conversation which made him
reluctant. Mrs. Higbee’s eyes seemed to be glistening with tears. With an almost awkward abruptness the two young women embraced, and then the nurse left swiftly, head down, never glancing toward him. He had hoped for a chance to prove he remembered her.

Mrs. Higbee blew her nose and came over to the counter. He could see that she was trying to remember who he was.

“I’m Harlin Barker. Four-G.”

“Oh sure, Mr. Barker. Can I help you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Connie Mae, my wife, had a heart attack a month ago and …”

“How is she doing?”

“Well, she’ll have to take it easy for quite a long time. It was a massive coronary occlusion. She’s doing real well, considering. The problem is that I’ve got to get some help for her. I was talking to Dr. Keebler yesterday. He says I can bring her home next week, if she continues to improve the way she has. But she’ll have to stay in bed for two weeks or maybe three, and then she can be up half days for the next month. There was quite a lot of … damage. I was wondering if you could suggest how I should go about finding somebody to come in and, you know, do housework and cook and sort of look after her. We’re new down here, and I don’t even know how much I’d have to pay to get a person like that.”

“What would the hours be?”

“I think if she came in about ten o’clock in the morning six days a week and left … oh, about six?”

“Well, Mr. Barker, I’d say you could figure on about thirty dollars a day, say about two hundred a week to get someone experienced in that kind of thing.”

“My God! That much?”

She shrugged. “That’s the way it is.”

“Excuse me. I just recently heard how high our monthly charges are going. And even with the Medicare there are a lot of things that aren’t covered. You know how it is.”

“Mr. Barker, I didn’t say you could even find a person at that money.”

“How should I go about it?”

“Well, you can try Florida State Employment, and you can put an ad in the paper.”

“Do you know anyone?”

She peered over his left shoulder for so many seconds he had to turn and see if there was anyone behind him. Her small ripe mouth was sucked tight, and there were frown lines between her eyebrows. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Look, Mr. Barker, this is none of my business, okay? A lot of people in this building are having it rough on account of the prices of everything going up. I think maybe you could work out something with one of the women in the building.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know the Twiggs? They’re on four too. Four-E.”

“Do you think she …?”

“I don’t think anything. You lay this on Mrs. Twigg she could maybe hit you in the mouth. I don’t know.”

“I know them to say hello to. That’s about all. We didn’t have a lot of chance to get very well acquainted here before Connie Mae … got sick. And since then I’ve been spending a lot of time at—”

“You don’t know where the idea came from. Okay? How you should handle it, start talking about how the fee is doubling. My God, everybody in the building is willing to talk about that.”

“Okay. I’ll try that. And … thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“By the way, wasn’t that a nurse who just left? Her name is Fish?”

“Yes.”

“She was in the emergency room when I had to take my wife there.”

“So?” She looked at him without expression.

“I just happened to recognize her. That’s all.”

“Excuse me. I’ve got things to do. You try what I said.”

Harlin Barker wandered out of the office, looked at his watch, sighed, wandered out toward the tennis courts. He was a smallish man, pyramidal, with a long narrow head, sloping shoulders, wide hips and thick, muscular, hairless legs. He wore brown shorts and a pale tan cowboy shirt with pearl buttons, snaps and elaborate stitching. His fringe of gray hair reached from ear to ear, around the back of his head. His habitual expression was one of mild puzzlement, and people tended to speak loudly when dealing with him, though his hearing was perfect. He had spent forty years in municipal civil service in Buffalo, New York, moving slowly up from payroll clerk to his final slot as assistant to the city executive.