Eve's Men (3 page)

Through his twenties, Charley worked for his father, selling houses in the posh Flossmoor and Olympia Fields areas. But the real content of his life then, other than his love of Donna and the baby, was the game of tennis. He became so consumed by it that he played every day at the club, often for three and four hours, with the result that by age twenty-four he was one of the best amateurs in the Chicago area. He even briefly entertained the notion of turning pro, until Jimmy Connors came to town one week, visiting friends, and needed local players to practice against. Even though Connors’ serve was supposed to be the weakest part of his game, Charley found it almost impossible to return. Sadly, he accepted the conventional wisdom that he had come to the game a decade too late in life. That, however, turned out to be only a minor disappointment.

Two months later, when he was thirty-one, he suffered the only real blow in his life, when his mother and father were killed in a car-truck accident on the Dan Ryan Expressway. The hole that left in him, in his life and in his heart, had never really filled in, but like most people he simply carried on, running the business as best he could and trying to be a good husband and father and friend. And in time, as Donna proved so much better at selling real estate than he was, he gradually turned the company’s operations over to her and concentrated more on his hobby, buying select old houses and, after redesigning them, rebuilding them with his crew of semiretired carpenters and masons, artisans all, old-timers who could make, among other things, flawless brick arches and curving balustrades.

The area was full of thirty-thousand-dollar houses sitting on two-hundred-thousand-dollar lots. So the opportunities were there. And the profits. And for years he had enjoyed the work, the feeling of actual, tangible accomplishment, not just the making of money. Lately, though, even that had begun to pall for him, just like Saturday morning golf with his old buddies. Instead, he seemed to want to stay in bed mornings, or go for long, solitary walks, or watch some crummy late show on TV, just him and a bottle of Absolut or Scotch.

He accepted it that the root of the problem was his marriage, that he and Donna simply didn’t connect anymore, that day by day they seemed to be turning into perfect strangers. But he preferred not to think about it, since it seemed insoluble, a fact of life as immutable as aging.

In any case, here he was, easygoing if not overly happy Charley Poole, sailor of smooth seas and walker of the worn path, on his way to rescue his little brother, who seemingly had been everywhere and done everything, almost none of it safe and sane. About all Charley could do was smile sadly at the prospect. Fortunately or unfortunately, he had a strong sense of the ridiculous.

While she was still on the phone, Eve Sherman had offered to pick Charley up at the airport, but he had told her that wouldn’t be necessary, knowing that even if he stayed only a few days, he would want his own transportation. So he rented a Ford Thunderbird at the airport and headed north. He had been in Colorado Springs twice before, the first time to attend a realtor’s convention at the Broadmoor Hotel and the second time on vacation with Donna, so he had some knowledge of the city, which sat at the foot of Pike’s Peak at an altitude a good thousand feet higher than Denver.

To the west was the great wall of the front range, to the east a flat wasteland so desiccated all it seemed capable of growing was tumbleweed and housing, mile after mile of crackerbox condos and apartment buildings so drearily the same that Charley elected to take the freeway to Brian’s motel rather than the shorter beltway, Academy Boulevard, which cut through the heart of the wasteland. Normally Charley was not that sensitive about his environment, but in the last few years, as he redesigned more and more homes, he had come to loathe boxy architecture, even to the point of considering it responsible for much of the country’s social ills. Boxes, he believed, were for dead bodies.

So he was not overjoyed to find that Brian’s motel, the Good-land, was itself a box, an oblong two stories with patios and balconies on the side facing the mountains, and a swimming pool, parking lot, and entrances on the other side. It was located just off the interstate, almost as far north as the Air Force Academy, which made Charley wonder why Brian had chosen it, a place so far out of town. Then it occurred to him that the motel was probably one of the closest to Black Forest, where the movie set had been built.

After parking, Charley had just gotten his luggage out of the back seat of the car and was closing the door when he saw the woman up on the second floor, standing at the walkway railing, looking down at him. She was a striking brunette, slim in jeans and a green jersey turtleneck. He was about to look away from her, reluctantly, when she smiled slightly and lifted her hand in a tentative wave. He smiled back at her, then spoke as he drew closer to the building.

“Eve?”

She nodded. “I’m so glad you came, Charley.”

He gestured toward the office. “I’ve got to check in.”

“I’ll come down.” She was already moving along the walkway, toward the stairs.

He waited for her there, outside, still holding his luggage, a suede suit bag and an overnighter. But as she came into view, smiling more warmly now, he almost dropped the bags in his confusion as to whether he should kiss her in greeting or just shake her hand. Fortunately, she solved the problem, taking his hand and turning her cheek up to him, for either a kiss or an air buss, as he called them. He chose the kiss.

“Did you have a good flight?” she asked.

“Yes. Uneventful.”

“I’ve reserved your room,” she said. “Just two doors down from us.”

“Good.”

After he had checked in, she led the way, carrying the overnight bag, graciously insisting on it. In his room, she opened the drapes and the sliding glass door, letting in fresh air and the last of the sunset, a mosaic of reds and purples burning above the ridge of the mountains.

“Great view,” he said.

She smiled. “Yes—great view, lousy everything else. I hope your heater works better than ours.”

“That’s right. It gets pretty cold here at night, doesn’t it?”

“
Very
cold. Even in June.”

Having hung up his suit bag, he went out onto the balcony. “Before it gets dark, I’ve got to see more of this.”

She followed him out. “Yes, it’s really breathtaking, if you overlook the foreground.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “At night, even a freeway can look okay.”

“Brian said you’re an optimist.”

“You sure he didn’t say a Pollyanna?”

“I’m sure.”

Beyond the freeway, up in the foothills, it was still light enough so Charley could make out the Garden of the Gods, as it was called, steepled rock formations that looked at that hour, and at that distance, like a village of monstrous teepees, a home of the gods. Next to him, Eve was lighting a cigarette.

“How’s he doing?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. All I did was talk on the phone with him this afternoon. We can’t see him until the arraignment tomorrow at ten.” She shook her head in amazement. “Did you know it was on the network news tonight? The bulldozing? CBS, with Bob Shieffer.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. But Brian wasn’t the real news—he was just the crackpot, the villain. The big story’s the movie—the filming being interrupted. And of course ‘Miss Colorado,’ how even in death she’s vulnerable to this particular crackpot.”

Charley shook his head. “Brian must’ve loved that.”

“I don’t know if he even saw it. Unless his lawyer told him.”

“Who’d he get? Someone good, I hope.”

“A public defender, that’s all. Brian says the more expensive the lawyer, the higher his bail will be.”

Though he knew that was nonsense, Charley didn’t quite say so. “I’m not sure he’s right about that. Maybe we can get him someone else in the morning. Some old courthouse hand, a crony of the judge. Maybe that’s the way to go.”

Eve smiled ruefully. “I don’t know. Brian says the case is open and shut. He did it. He waited right there to be arrested. There’s no question of his guilt.”

“He’s not going to plead guilty, is he?”

“No, he says he wants his day in court. He wants everyone to know
why
he did it.”

“Well, that’s something anyway. If he pleads guilty, he goes straight to prison.”

“Yes, he knows that.” Eve’s eyes suddenly filled. Then she shook her head, as if to wake herself up, snap herself out of her unhappiness. “Listen, you must be starved,” she said. “There’s a nice little place across from the parking lot. We could walk there.”

“Well, I am a little hungry,” Charley admitted. “For that matter, I could probably use a martini.”

“Fine. Why don’t you get settled in here, then just come by. We’re two-oh-three, two doors down.”

After she was gone, Charley unpacked a few things and washed up, but he stayed in the clothes he had on, an old herringbone jacket, gray slacks, and an open blue shirt. Idly he found himself speculating as to whether Eve would go as she was or would change into something different: say, a light, short dress. He couldn’t help wondering if her legs were as beautiful as the rest of her.

The restaurant was a cozy place with wagon wheels at the entrance, Remington prints on the walls, and tiny wood tables lit with candles burning in red glass jars. Charley ordered a steak sandwich that proved to be both generous and tasty. Even better, the bartender was not stingy with the Swedish vodka, which was what Charley called a martini: straight Absolut on ice, with an olive. He had two of them before the food came and a Bailey’s coffee afterwards, while Eve made do with a single Scotch and water.

Like him, she had not changed clothes, and he wondered on the walk over to the cafe why he had cared, since her stone-washed jeans amply displayed the excellence of her legs. More to the point, he was embarrassed that such a stupid speculation would even cross his mind, on this particular evening, in the company of his brother’s girlfriend while the brother himself was in jail. But then Charley was never greatly surprised at his capacity for sexual woolgathering. He often thought that on his deathbed, all wired up and gurgling, he would still somehow find the strength to observe and compare the nurses’ buttocks. In this instance, however, he judged he wasn’t entirely at fault, since Eve was in no way just another good-looking woman. He ran across good-looking women all the time. In fact, Charley’s own Donna was one of them. But Eve was different. She was one of those rare
perfect
physical creatures, like a leopard or eagle, with everything just the way it should have been, from any angle. He imagined that wherever she went, she turned heads and stopped conversations, set men fantasizing about sex and women about murder.

Even now, as she finished telling him about the bulldozing and went on to other things, Charley caught himself paying as much attention to her eyes and mouth as to her words. Still, he learned that Eve was indeed an actress, a failed one. Jewish on her father’s side, Irish on her mother’s, she had been raised in comfort in Santa Barbara, where her father was a prosperous tax attorney. After studying theater arts at UCLA for a couple of years, she married a lawyer colleague of her father’s, divorced him a year later, and seriously set about becoming an actress. Getting nowhere in New York and London, she returned to Los Angeles, got a new agent, and landed a few parts in various cable TV movies.

“And other real dreck,” she said. “Bikini and beach stuff. Even a cavewoman epic. My fanny’s been on screen more than my face.”

“That’s a shame,” Charley said, adding, “I think.”

Eve gave him a wry look. “Well, it was. At least for my so-called career, it was.”

“Well, I suppose you have to do movies like that in the beginning.”

“Maybe so. But I just couldn’t hack it—the cattle calls and the humiliation. In the end, I wound up pretty much like Brian. Maybe the business didn’t want me, but the stars did.”

Charley made no response to that, waiting for Eve to elaborate. But she apparently preferred to leave the matter as it was, which made him wonder why she had brought it up in the first place. There were many things Charley wanted to ask about Brian, particularly his long-standing problem with drugs, as well as the state of his finances, considering that his bail was likely to be substantial. But Charley didn’t want Eve to feel that he was pumping her, so he sat back and let her continue to take the conversation where she would. As he expected, she never strayed far from Brian. Regarding his use of drugs, Eve claimed that he no longer used them at all except for alcohol and tobacco. And even with these, she said he tried to minimize their harmful effects by strenuously working out. In Venice he ran the beach and swam in the ocean; here he swam in the motel pool for thirty and forty minutes at a time.

He was in great physical shape, she said. Unfortunately she could not say the same about his attitude, his outlook on life.

“More and more, he just seems to do things with no thought to their consequences. And I guess the making of
Miss Colorado
was simply the last straw. I mean, here’s his onetime lover, this has-been star and longtime drug addict, and they’re going to portray her as a helpless victim in the clutches of a cruel, drug pushing boyfriend.”