Condominium (26 page)

“Stall around. I don’t know where they stand legally on this. But that doesn’t make much difference. I’ve seen it happen too many times. These agencies, they’ve got all the muscle. You do like they say, or they get Justice to hit you with an indictment. Then you are under a cloud for eighteen months and maybe it is dropped or maybe it goes to trial. Either way, you are fucked. If it goes to trial and you come out innocent, you are twenty to forty thousand poorer because of the cost of defending yourself, and people say you hired an expensive lawyer and got yourself off. Hell, there is no middle ground between a public defender and an expensive lawyer. There is no bargain-price defense.”

“Can we fake some backup for that fifteen thousand?”

“Sometimes, Lew, you really surprise me, you turn so stupid. I told you, these are pros. The way we play it, we just can’t remember. We run a busy shop. We’re shorthanded. Somebody should have made a memo. We deal with a lot of cash from time to time. We’ve plain forgotten. If something comes up that reminds us, we’ll let them know right away.”

“What do they suspect?”

“My guess is they suspect it is okay. They know how these things work. A little money has to be passed under the table, or nobody would ever get anything started or built or finished. They just like to have it look plausible, instead of half-ass careless. They
seem to be more interested right now in the price Letra paid Marty for that fourteen acres. That’s why I wanted a chance to talk to you. I had an old feasibility study stapled to my work sheets on the Harbour Pointe project. In that study I put down the land cost at $1,480,000, with $1,252,000 going to the Silverthorn estate, and $228,000 going to Marty personally for his option, which he held for twenty months before he sold it to Letra. It comes to $105,700 an acre. Yet on our books it shows $1,228,000 to Marty for his option, and $1,252,000 to the estate for the land, or $177,000 an acre. Barber and Grosscup got that same figure from Atlanta, from whoever looked at the EMMS books.

“Anyway, Grosscup comes to me and says it looks like a sudden change, a million more in May than it seemed to be worth in March, and I told him land prices tended to move quickly, especially waterfront. He’s got a funny smile. He smiled and said that they certainly did move quickly, and lately they seemed to be mostly moving down. I pointed out that the land had moved for more than that an acre in this area, and when you have a fourteen-acre tract, it is so hard usually to put a waterfront piece together that size, it ups the price. Then I went and got those two letters that came in from those two big outfits on the East Coast, to Marty personally, offering just about the same. He looked at the letters and smiled his funny smile and said, ‘This one is under investigation by the SEC for fraudulent sale of unregistered securities, and this other one is within a couple of weeks of filing in bankruptcy. Very interesting, Mr. Wannover. Very very interesting.’ And he walked out of my office, back to that little conference room they’re working in.”

“I saw those offers. They look legitimate. They look good. And I would bet that there’s no good way to prove that Sherman Grome asked those people to make those offers. It would be tough to take
it to court, even to tax court, to try to deny him long-term capital gain status to that one million dollars.”

“You take the extra million loaded onto Harbour Pointe and you take the debt service Grome stuck us with, and there isn’t any way at all to make it work out, Lew. No way.”

“Can that be proven?”

“I think so.”

“Then, Benjie, maybe we all get named as part of a conspiracy to defraud. You and me, Grome and Marty, God only knows who else.”

“Especially if they subpoena brokerage account records.”

“You know, you could have gone all afternoon without saying that.”

“Did you make out?”

“Not too bad. I shorted fifteen hundred shares at an average eighteen bucks a share. It went down to five two weeks ago and when it started to move up, I covered and got out. After commissions it was eleven dollars a share net. Ordinary income, of course. I made about sixteen thousand five.”

“It’s down to three and five eighths on yesterday’s close.”

“You still in?”

“I got out of some. But I’m still short on four hundred shares. Monday I cover. Lew, look. We’re in kind of a funny position. We’ve known each other long enough and well enough, we know better than to trust each other too much.”

“Right.”

“I think things are going to move along pretty fast. I think they are going to close down Sherman Grome and put in a receiver, and I think they’ll put in somebody with good footwork, and he’ll come down here and cut Harbour Pointe off right now and pull back that eight million sitting in certificates of deposit in the
Athens Bank and Trust. That is going to leave Letra with our equity in Stalbo’s Tropic Towers and the fourteen acres behind Golden Sands and about eleven cents in cash, against … call it five and a half million owed. So Letra goes bankrupt, and Harbour Pointe is dead. Don’t ask me how I happen to know, but I do know that Marty has been putting money into Swiss francs. And the other day I walked in on Irish and she was reading brochures on the Greek islands. What would Marty hang around for? What would he need offices and staff for? He’s got Frank West and Sully running the two money machines here, with the money flowing into the Services Management Group in Miami and coming back to him as dividends. We are going to be unemployed, Lew.”

“How soon?”

“One month. Two. Right after Grome comes tumbling down.”

“What’s with him?”

“I think Sherm is plain old-fashioned nuts. In the pictures he looks like a kid. But he has to be close to fifty. Dietitians, face lifts, sunlamps, a gym in the office. I saw a thing about him in
Forbes
a year ago, saying he wanted to buy his own studio and make some movies about his life and star in them himself. He is nuts, but he has been in a line of work where it is very difficult to tell crazy guys from sane guys.”

“Until too late.”

“Everybody used to think Howard Hughes was nuts. Two billion dollars’ worth of crazy. But Sherm is crazy in a different way. I don’t think he really believes anything could ever go wrong. I’ve never met him, of course. I could be way off.”

The rain was easing. “Benjie … I keep wondering if there is any way we could get some nice … terminal bonuses out of Marty.”

“Like how much?”

“Like you and I split half of that extra mil he got.”

“Like we mousetrap him somehow?”

“Something like that. You know, though, he always hints about the hard-nose people in Miami. What is it he calls them?”

“The firemen. They come and put out fires for you.”

“Is he kidding?”

“I don’t know. That outfit, that Services Management Group, it stands to reason they’d have troubleshooters. In construction there are always people trying to make trouble.”

“Did he ever use them for anything?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been with him nine years, a couple years longer than you, Lew. People have tried to make trouble and they’ve had bad luck. They have had bad falls and they have fallen asleep smoking in bed, and they have gotten cramps and drowned.”

“Oh.”

“It could be coincidence, but I don’t want to run any test. Do you?”

“I don’t think so. It’s funny. I’ve used those people as a threat when somebody got out of line, but I never believed. Not until now. I’m not even sure I believe it all the way now.”

“Maybe Marty just has natural luck.”

“I don’t want to test it. Oh, God damn it all, Benjie, what am I going to do?”

“You are a single guy with a law degree. You asking a guy with ten kids what you should do? Let’s talk again about all this. I got to go now. You hear anything, let me know. I’ll do the same.” He rolled the side window down and held his hand out. “It’s almost stopped.” He got out and leaned back down to the window. “Maybe we can pick up some scraps while the big dogs fight, old buddy. Cheer up.” In another minute he had backed the station wagon out and driven away.

Lew Traff drove back to his apartment, parked in back and hurried through the rain. His head ached. He poured a glass of milk and sat and sipped it, easing the dull pain of the ulcer.

Inventory time again. Stocks worth not quite twenty thousand, or one ninth of what they’d cost in the go-go days. The money from the short sale of EMMS had gone to clean up two of the three demand notes at the bank and pay off the compromise settlement with the IRS. But that gain was ordinary income and the tax would be heavy.

And if the three thousand a month from Marliss stops coming in? Who needs Lewis Traff, specialist in real estate options, transfers, deeds, titles, metes and bounds? The times had suddenly rendered him obsolete.

His back teeth on the upper right side ached. He put his thumb tip back there and gently wiggled the molars. They seemed to be quite loose. He looked across the living room at the digital clock atop the television set. He closed his left eye and then his right eye. When he had his right eye closed the orange numerals of the clock were misty and blurred. He could sharpen them by squinting. The goddam teeth and eyes and ulcer and constipation and the goddam premature ventricular beats waking him up in the middle of the night, scared and sweaty.

If only Adele would get married. Without the alimony payments maybe he could get a little bit ahead. Enough to have breathing space.

Maybe the Jerry Stalbo solution wasn’t all bad. It had really made Marty jumpy, the way Stalbo had done it. From the way the police had reconstructed it, Jerry had siphoned a two-quart milk container of gasoline out of his about-to-be repossessed Continental, gone up to the penthouse, stripped, put on his silk pajamas,
stood on his rear wall, drenched himself, lit himself, and jumped flaring and screaming down through the soft black night, landing with sodden bursting impact upon the curbing of an auxiliary parking area. Dru said that when Marty heard how it happened, he had barely made it to his executive washroom. They had been close at one time, years ago, she said, back when they had both been married to their first wives, back when they had both been building small homes in an orange grove they had purchased jointly.

Marty had said to Lew, “It wasn’t me, you know. Nobody forced him to build that big pile of crap and paint it brown and yellow to match. He had to be a big man. Live in the suite. Have a lot of broads. He thinks he could stay in the suite forever? If it wasn’t us trying to move him out, it would have been somebody else. He was a bankrupt. Besides, he was nuts. Absolutely. I swear it. You should have seen how he was the last time I saw him, like he’d shrunk down to half his size. And he kept crying. My God, he used to have a laugh, that man, you could hear him a block away. In a restaurant, everybody would jump, like a lion was roaring.”

Lew stretched out on his couch, wadding a pillow behind his neck. The hiss of the air conditioning shut out all sounds of the world, of rain and wet tires and music in the other apartments.

The Stalbo solution did not have to be in the Stalbo manner. The thought of burning made his flesh crawl. A nice glass of warm milk to wash down a handful of sleeping pills, and then crawl, yawning, into the downy bed and fade off into sleep, smiling, thinking of all the grasping bastards who would have to stop taking chunks of his hide and flesh. Disappear down the rat hole of dark sweet sleep.

He reached back beyond his head and picked up the phone and
placed it on his chest. Margo’s phone did not answer. Nor did Ruthie’s. He hesitated, then looked up the Denniver number and exhaled his tensions when Molly answered.

“Hey!” she said with obvious delight. “This is a coincidence. I phoned you a couple times. Noon, I think. And one thirty.”

“I was playing out at Gator Hole and we got rained out after nine. Whyn’t you come on over here, honey. I’ve got some good wine cooled and—”

“Now you
know
I won’t come there, Lew, not ever. You’ve asked me often enough. What would people think if anybody sees me going in or out of your place? I wouldn’t want to start up any idle gossip about you and me. Besides, we promised it wouldn’t happen again ever.”

“I’m sorry. It was just an idea. Where’s Justin?”

“He’s staying over at that meeting at Kansas City. He left here a day early and he’s not anxious to get back, and it isn’t hard to figure out why, the way every fool in the county has been badgering him about the land-clearing on the Silverthorn property. What I called you about, my tennis tournament got called off, and I wondered if you’d like to come over here and have a nice swim.”

“In the rain?”

“It’s nice, Lew. It really is. The rain really comes down through the screen. Anyway, I want to prove to us that we can behave for once. Okay?”

“Okay, honey. Why not?”

JULIAN HIGBEE FOUND
the service cart parked in the hall outside 4-B, and he went in and found Leanella in the kitchen, washing up. She was a six-foot black girl in a brief white uniform. Her skin tones were gold and ivory, and her hairdo was an enormous carrot-colored natural. She wore sandals with high cork soles. With the additions she was almost seven feet tall.

She beamed at him, eye to eye. Her little radio was on the countertop, turned so high the rock was hissing and frying. She was moving her shapely hips to the beat. Her belt was pulled tight around the slenderness of waist.

He turned the radio down to a whisper.

“They left?”

“What do you think, man? They sure God did. When the rent got raised, they took off like they were saying they would.”

“How much longer’ll you be here?”

“Nuther hour.”

“I’ll go down and get the owner’s list. You can help me with the inventory.”

“No way, Mr. Julian.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Get you Coreen. That woman
likes
counting up stuff and marking them off. It drives me weird. What I’m paid for is cleaning. No counting.”

“See much damage?”

“Maybe more than usual. These Sappers spilt and dropped.”