Fool's Flight (Digger) (16 page)

"Hello, you little darlings," Digger said cheerily. It was always nice to start the day by doing good.

He rang the doorbell a long time before Mrs. Donnelly answered. She was wearing a robe and yesterday’s makeup.

She looked at him hard for a moment as if trying to place him.

"Julian Burroughs," he said. "Just in the neighborhood, thought I’d stop by with coffee."

He held the bag forward. She looked at it with distaste, before nodding and opening the screen door to let him inside.

"There aren’t any eggs in the house," she said. "I can make toast."

"Not on my account," Digger said. "I never eat breakfast."

"Fine. We’ll just have coffee. She poured the coffee from the containers into two stoneware mugs and put them on the table in the kitchen. Digger noticed that his read Trini. Hers read Steve.

"If you’re here to talk about my suing, forget it," she said. She put a lot of sugar and cream in her coffee. Digger waved it off. He drank his black.

"How come?"

"I thought about it," she said, "and it just didn’t seem like it would be worth the bother. It’s a shame, but I guess my husband had the right to make insurance out to anybody he wanted."

"Unless he was coerced into doing it," Digger said.

"You think that happened?"

"I don’t know. I was talking to Mrs…. what’s her name?"

"Wardell."

"Yeah, Wardell. Thank you. And she said they didn’t know anything about the insurance but I don’t know if I believe them. I’ve talked to my home office and they’ll do what I tell them. I think I may tell them not to pay anything. Sue, stall, or something."

"Sue about what?"

"Who knows? Fraud or something. We’ll see." He noticed that she was touching his hand again as he spoke. He extricated his hand, got up and went to the counter where he poured some of the coffee remaining in the containers into his cup.

When he walked back to the table, he put his hand on Mrs. Donnelly’s shoulder, his thumb touching her bare neck. She squirmed her head back a little, pressing against his hand.

"That feels good in the morning," she said.

"Feels good all the time," Digger said.

"You know what I think?" she asked.

"No, what?"

"What I think is that you should just tell your company to pay off and let it go at that. I talked to Randy yesterday. He stopped by just to say hello and see how I was. He said the accident was just one of those things."

"That all he said?"

"Ah, he just wanted to chitchat. Talk about Steve. How good he’d been. How healthy, yap yap yap. How sorry he was." She squirmed again against his hand. "Let your company pay."

"I’d like to, little girl. But that’s not the way I work. I’ve got my standards."

She stood up and faced him. She put her arms around his waist and he lifted them draping them over his shoulders.

"Can I convince you?" She moved her face forward to be kissed and Digger kissed her. Her tongue darted into his mouth and she pressed her body against his.

"You know, my son was right. We is gonna fuck," she said softly.

Digger thought of the tape recorder whirring smoothly against his back. Taking it off was such a pain in the ass.

"Tonight," he said. "Let’s try for tonight. Maybe we can get dinner and then…"

"And then what?"

"We’ll see what happens," Digger said. "I’ll call."

He held her closely so that she would not put her arms around his waist, kissed her again, then backed away from her.

"I’ll call," he said. "Let’s see if we can connect."

"I hope so," she said.

She walked him to the door, her hand in his. She tilted her head up again to be kissed one more time. Digger leaned forward to her.

"When you talked to Mrs. Wardell," Digger said, "did she say when the insurance might pay off?"

"No. She…" Mrs. Donnelly caught herself but it was too late. The warm glow on her face turned to ice. She glared at Digger who shrugged: "Just doing my job, ma’am," he said.

"Get out of here."

"I guess this means dinner is off?"

"Get out of here."

Digger met Koko in a small oceanside restaurant on the ground floor of one of the giant condominium towers that fouled the Lauderdale skyline. When he arrived, she was attacking a sink-sized bowl of seafood salad.

She gulped a hurried swallow and said, "What have you been doing while I’ve been working my little tits off?"

"Taking advantage of some poor lady with a drinking problem," Digger said.

"Don’t tell me about it."

"All right, I will. After I talked to Mrs. Wardell and told her that the pilot’s wife might sue about the insurance, she called the wife. And the wife backed off. Now, she’s only doing that for money, but why should Wardell care if she sues or not? And Randy Batchelor, who doesn’t like her, he went to visit Mrs. Donnelly. He was pumping but I don’t know for what. I’ve let her know that old Benevolent and Saintly might sue about the policies anyway."

"Why’d you say that? The company wouldn’t do that."

"I know. I just did it to stir the pot."

"And put yourself in it," she said.

Digger nodded. "Sometimes it’s what you’ve got to do."

He finished his drink and signaled for another.

"Digger, why don’t you stop drinking?"

"Because I’m an alcoholic."

"Alcoholics stop drinking all the time. Did you ever think of quitting?"

"I thought of it once. Just the thought gave me the shakes and I hid out in a saloon until it passed."

"This isn’t funny. You’re going to kill yourself."

"Christ, I hope so."

He looked at her and saw a twinge of hurt in her eyes and he felt himself a shit for having put that there.

"You need a hobby," she said. "Something to replace drinking."

"I was working on it. I thought making love to you might fill the bill but that avenue is closed to me. Unlike you, saloons are always open. Do you know that somewhere, someplace, it is always happy hour?"

"I’m sorry, Digger. I just wish there was something I could do."

"You’re doing it," he said. "Help me clean this thing up before those kids and their mother arrive in town."

"What’s she like?"

"Your normal run of the mill ex-wife. Castrating iron for a tongue. Her voice shatters Memorex Tape. Suspicious and narrow-minded."

"Is she pretty?"

"I don’t know. I never looked."

"Come on, Digger, you were married for more than ten years."

"Eleven and one-twelfth," he said, "but who counts? She’s all right looking, I guess. Actually, she was kind of pretty, especially if you get off on fangs. What’d you find out about Wardell?"

Koko’s face brightened visibly. She reached beneath the table for her purse, whose straps she had twisted around her ankle, proving that she was an original New Yorker and feared a purse-snatching even in this restaurant peopled solely by retired octogenarian dentists, doctors, rabbis and their wives.

She opened the bag on the edge of the table.

"The library was full of him," she said. She pulled out a sheaf of photocopied clippings which she placed neatly on the table, then closed her purse and put it back on the floor, her foot securely through the straps again. She handed the clippings to him and he glanced at them while she spoke.

"He and two brothers inherited the Wardell Paint Company from their father, who started it. It’s not Three-M but it’s not a neighborhood candy store, either. Wardell sold out his share to his brothers about five years ago, the
Times
said, for four million dollars. He kept the property in Puerto Rico because that was a gift from his father when he was a kid. Anyway, he took the money from the sale of the business and put it into a trust fund to finance the church down here. The newspapers had a field day with it, how he always wanted to be an evangelist and so forth.
People
magazine did a piece, ‘From Profits to Prophecy.’ They’ve done some follow-ups on him. The church runs at a loss because he won’t shill bibles or pass the plate or what have you, but it’s got to be pretty solid because all the money that trust fund makes should help support it."

"Personal money troubles?" Digger asked.

"Maybe," Koko said. "But none of the stories got too much into that, just talked about how unusual he was in running a free church in this age of religious hucksterism. But he went the whole route. He and his wife took vows of poverty."

"His wife’s in the clippings?"

"Yeah. They’ve been married, I don’t know, six or seven years. The former Candace von Schlegel. She was in college, some kind of homecoming beauty queen, majoring in musical theater. Her family didn’t have any money, so she probably figured she had plucked the golden goose. When he packed in the paint business, she was interviewed and she said something like her husband would follow the Lord and she would follow her husband. One thing was interesting. She said she had signed a waiver never to make a claim against the church in the event of divorce or anything like that."

"I wonder how she likes being poor?" Digger said.

His face shielded by wide wraparound sunglasses, Digger sat on the thinly padded seat and wished for a cigarette. He resented offices that didn’t provide ashtrays for visitors. America had started to go to hell when they took spittoons out of taverns, allowed women in the Clam Broth House in Hoboken, and took ashtrays out of doctors’ offices.

Digger glanced at the three other people in the waiting room. All were women. One had a bright red, runny nose and Digger commended his own foresight in having had a liquid lunch so he was fortified with antifreeze to stave off the common cold virus. Another woman’s illness was obviously fatness. The third kept scratching her scalp.

The nurse was almost as tall as Digger and her shoulders were wider. Digger thought he might once have seen her in a six-man tag team wrestling match—her against five men. She was sitting behind a counter high enough so that only the top of her head and her eyes were visible to the people in the waiting room. The eyes were cold steel as she glared around the room, probably ensuring that no one was lighting up a forbidden cigarette.

Digger waited until her laser beam eyes were off him, then he fell forward off the bench onto the floor and groaned.

"What’s the matter?" asked the woman who kept scratching her head.

"Oooooh," Digger moaned. He held both hands on his stomach and curled up into a fetal position.

"Nurse, you better help," said itchy scalp.

The Fabulous Moolah came out from behind her wall and lumbered over to Digger. She stood over him, staring down, a concentration camp version of Florence Nightingale in her starched whites.

"What’s the matter with you?" she demanded.

"Ooooooh," Digger said.

"Hmphhh," the nurse grunted in disgust. "I’ll get the doctor."

She knocked on the doctor’s office door. A few seconds later, Doctor Josephson opened it.

"Sick man over here," she said.

The doctor squatted alongside Digger.

"What’s the matter?"

"Stomach hurts," Digger said.

"Where?"

"In the middle. Here." Digger pointed with his index finger to a spot just below his solar plexus.

"Does it hurt here?" Josephson said. He dug his fingers into Digger’s lower right side, near the appendix.

"No. It’s passing now," Digger said.

"This ever happen to you before?"

"Yes," Digger said. "All the time. It’s psychosomatic. It’s okay now." He got to his feet. "I feel a lot better now. Really. I feel good."

The doctor looked at him for a few seconds, then said, "Well, sit there and I’ll see you next."

"Thank you. I’ll be fine."

When Josephson retreated into his office, Digger stood up and brushed himself off, then strolled over to Nurse Guano’s desk.

"I’m going out for a cigarette."

She nodded, not even trying to disguise her annoyance at anyone who would disrupt the normal placid routine of her office. Outside, Digger lit a cigarette, then walked around the corner and waited in his rented car.

Koko arrived fifteen minutes later.

"How’d you make out?" Digger asked.

"Got it right here," she said and patted her purse. "And I’ve got great lungs, according to the doctor."

"You’ve got great lungs according to me, too."

"Come on, let’s get out of here. I feel like I’m in the damned Watergate, waiting for the burglar alarm to sound."

"All right," Digger said as he drove away. "One more stop first."

Timothy Baker was in the outer office, talking to Jane, his eyes blinking, when Digger came in.

"Oh, it’s you," Baker said. Jane smiled at Digger.

"Any word yet on your insurance claim?" Digger asked him.

"Not yet. You should know better than me how these bastards make you wait. What is it you want, anyway?"

Jane winked at Digger who nodded slightly to her.

"Just a quick question," Digger told Baker.

"Oh, for Christ’s sakes, go ahead. It’s amazing how big you guys are with the questions and how small you are when it comes to paying up. Come on inside."

Inside Baker’s office, standing between the card-board boxes and the pile of
Wall Street Journals
that had now grown to five feet high, Digger asked, "Did Steve Donnelly ever talk to you about quitting?"

"No. Why should he?"

"I don’t know," Digger said. "Maybe he might just not want to fly anymore?"

"No," Baker said. "He never said anything like that." His fingers had started to drum on the desktop. "Listen, I’m helping you, right, and one hand washed the other. Can’t you do anything to try to get me my money?"

"I’m trying. I promise," Digger said.

"Okay."

Back outside, a man was leaning over Jane Block’s desk, trying without much subtlety to look down into her scoop-necked dress. Digger could only see his back.

"Did you see that egg roll outside?" the man was saying.

"What?" Jane asked.

"There is the most beautiful Chinese broad in the world in that car out there. She is grorious."

Jane saw Digger come out of Baker’s office, then looked through the office window at Digger’s car where Koko sat in the front seat. Jane shook her head and looked at Digger.