In the Unlikely Event... (4 page)

“Did you discover what the problem was?” Gitana said.

Chase was still trying to figure out the GPS thingy-jigger. She glanced at Nora. “Where would you put something like that?”

“We’ll look under the car,” Nora said.

“I’m quoting. She said you’re seriously late for the super-serious board meeting and that you had better get your ass, followed by sixteen—I counted—expletive-deletives, to the meeting before she is forced to do something serious,” Eliza said.

“Would that include firing you?” Gitana said.

“I wish. I’ve been trying to extricate myself from the Institute ever since Lacey first got the idea, and it hasn’t worked yet.”

“You should buy her a thesaurus because she seriously needs another word for serious,” Eliza said.

“And tell her to stop swearing around Bud,” Gitana said, rapidly tapping her pen now.

Everyone rolled their eyes in universal acknowledgment of that never happening.

Gitana shrugged. “We can at least try.”

“Okay, well, I better go,” Chase said reluctantly. “If she calls any more people, my mother will use her APD influence and get a missing person’s bulletin going.” Chase’s mother, Stella, had friends in high places.

“Preferably before she sends out Dixon and Chino to haul you in,” Gitana said.

Chase shuddered. Dixon and Chino, part of the Pink Mafia, were currently employed as Lacey’s henchwomen. She wasn’t even sure if those were their first names or their last names. No one seemed to know. She’d met them in OfficeMax, where they had cornered her in the binder aisle and forced her to consider writing lesbian novels again, something she had quit after the mainstream mystery series she’d written as Shelby McCall had started to sell and make the big bucks. The book that resulted, her lesbian novel about life in a commune, had inadvertently illuminated Lacey’s brain, becoming the operating manual for Lacey’s Illumination Institute. The Pink Mafia never let up. Sometimes Chase felt that between Lacey and the Pink Mafia that she was a prisoner on the Isle of Lesbos.

“Speak of the devil.” Nora pointed out the window of Gitana’s office at a black Mercedes sedan with tinted windows. Dixon and Chino were getting out of it and making their way toward the office.

“Are they on steroids?” Eliza asked.

“I don’t know, but Lacey’s tailor, Joseph, is making a killing off their black suits,” Chase said.

“With those suits and dark sunglasses they look like FBI agents or friends and family of the
Sopranos
,” Nora said.

“I guess we can’t all be Girl Scouts,” Chase muttered. She handed Gitana her car keys. “I might not be back for a while.”

Chino and Dixon didn’t have to say a word as they stood in the doorway. Well, as parts of each of them stood in the doorway. Chase kissed Gitana’s cheek and dutifully followed them out.

Chase was escorted into the boardroom of the Institute. “Like I’m going to run off,” Chase muttered as she tried to wriggle free of their grasp.

Chino grunted.

“There you are,” Lacey said, leaping up from her high-backed leather chair. “We have a major fucking emergency here and I needed you.”

Lacey had been Chase’s best friend for as long as she could remember. It was a documented fact that children began forming memories at the age of four, so Lacey must have been there then. In moments like this Chase wondered if she preferred the happy-go-lucky-man-chaser Lacey had once been to this radical lesbian megalomaniac with her brown tight-bun hairdo and trim somber business suit intent on changing the face of the lesbian nation. Chase glanced around the long boardroom table looking for an ally.

She saw Isabel, the Institute librarian and archivist. Isabel at least was still recognizable with her long, dark hair and tie-dyed T-shirts. When they first met, Isabel had been a member of Chase’s SUP class—a group program for socially unacceptable persons. Their mentor, Lily Hirack, now taught at the Institute. It appeared from the attendance rolls that there were a lot of socially unacceptable lesbian persons on the premises. If someone was reported and then cited for SUP behavior they had to attend Lily’s class—like when you got a speeding ticket and you had to go to driving school.

Donna sat next to Isabel. She had the squeezed colon look she often got when presented with a Lacey-istic Problem. Donna was Chase’s personal assistant as well as the Chief Financial Advisor of the Institute. Out of consideration and necessity for Donna’s increased workload, Chase had learned to be more self-sufficient. Well, kind of—she had Bud to help her with her tech snafus, and she had Myrna, her publicist, to handle all the stuff on the ongoing mainstream mystery series she wrote under the pen name of Shelby “Fucking” McCall. Donna did not approve of the middle name she had given Shelby of late, but Chase hadn’t planned on being the next Sue Grafton when she started the series, and she now harbored a great dislike of Shelby. Shelby, however, didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about her creator’s discomfort—the fucking little bitch in her penny loafers and elbow-patch herringbone blazers.

Chase scowled as she sat by Donna. “Are you thinking about Shelby?” Donna whispered.

“Why do you ask?” Chase said, taking a Dasani from the tray in the middle of the long mahogany table.

“Because you have that look.”

“Myrna is in the process of scheduling my annual New York trip and Eliza P. Newman is planning a big gala party for Shelby, which is going to require an expensive new suit.” Chase groaned. “I’ll have to take her to see Joseph. At least now that I am on a first -name basis with my tailor we can tell each other inappropriate Jew and lesbian jokes while Shelby gets fitted.”

“Chase, you do realize that you are talking about yourself, right?” Donna said, her face a portrait of concern.

“Of course, I do,” Chase said petulantly. She glanced around to see if anyone had been listening. On the opposite side of the table was Dixon, who along with henchman duty was also in charge of lesbian protocol. Dixon was busy glaring at everyone and apparently hadn’t heard.

Chase smiled at Sophia, a lovely Italian woman with long black tresses and seductive eyes. She should have been a movie star in a spaghetti western instead of a chef in charge of the three kitchens—a vegan one, a meat and potatoes one and an epicurean, eclectic one. Chase referred to them as the Rabbit, Cow and Orchard kitchens. To the dismay of all, the monikers stuck.

Next to her was Gloria, the head of maintenance—a proud butch of the old-school ways, dressed in Dickies work pants and a black T-shirt with “Maintenance” written across the front. Only you couldn’t quite make out all the letters because of the Appalachian-like formation of her breasts, which she fondly called her bazooms. Chase looked up “breasts” in the
Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus
and “bazooms” was listed as a synonym much to her surprise. Bazooms made her think of weapons of mass destruction, which Gloria’s breasts could be. On one occasion, Chase had come out of Lacey’s office, not paying attention to where she was going, and walked right into Gloria’s bazooms. Chase had been so stunned she actually nestled there for a moment until Gloria plucked her from the crevasse between the letters “E” and “N.”

“That’s a danger zone, darlin’. I’ve lost women in there,” Gloria twanged. She referred to herself as a big-breasted woman from southern Oklahoma in homage to a k.d. lang song about big bones and a Canadian province. Chase found her accent charming; it had a calming affect on her. When the Institute got too much for her, Chase would stop by Gloria’s cave of a maintenance office and talk. Gloria ran a tight ship, and Chase was not only amazed by her bazooms but also her organizational skills. Gloria’s maintenance office and workroom was like Badger’s hole in
Wind in the Willows.

Chase often had the inexplicable desire to sit on Gloria’s lap and nestle between her breasts—not in a sexual way, more like a child in need of comfort. She wanted to stick her face in between the “E” and the “N.” Was that really too much to ask to relieve a boatload of stress? And why, she wondered, does that particular metaphor still have a descriptive place in this world when boats are no longer as prevalent in delivering supplies to port cities? Why didn’t we use a fifty-seven-foot semi-tractor trailer as a source of measurement instead—a semi-load of stress?

Gloria must have sensed Chase’s desire because when it was a particularly bad day, she would give Chase a long hug and then “talk her down from the ledge,” as they called it. Chase tried to imagine how she would explain being found in the nestling position.

Lacey banged her gavel. Chase had a hard time with this corporate incarnation of Lacey.

“Okay, listen up everybody—let’s get this party started.”

If this was a party, Chase thought, she’d rather attend a Southern Baptist revival under a tent with ninety percent humidity, a hundred and five degrees temperature and a seat in a rickety folding chair next to someone who smelled bad.

Gloria must have been thinking the same thing. “If this is a party, I’d prefer a funeral.”

Chase snickered.

“What did you say, Gloria? Is it something you should share with the group?” Lacey widened her eyes, in her what-the-fuck expression that made Chase think of Marty Feldman after corrective surgery.

“I was telling Chase that the pipes in the lavatory…” Gloria said.

Lacey interjected, “You mean the Human Relief Room.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Chase muttered under her breath. Why did Lacey have to rename everything?

Lacey eyed her suspiciously. Chase wondered if she had heard her muttering. “The pipes in the Human Relief Room are…” she prodded Gloria.

“Working perfectly after I replaced the P-trap.” Gloria smiled at her.

“P-trap? We trap pee now? Is that a civil liberties issue that we need to address?” Lacey said.

Chase and Gloria looked at each other in astonishment.

“You’re kidding, right?” Chase said. Chase wasn’t a plumbing expert, but Lacey had to know something about under-the-sink pipes and even if she didn’t the context would supply clues.

“No,” Lacey said, adamantly. “The Institute, as we all know, is very concerned with the rights of its citizenry. If we are trapping people’s urine, they should be informed.”

Chase stared at Lacey. “We have citizenry? When exactly did we become a country?”

“I am speaking metaphorically. As a weaver of words, you should understand the use of a political metaphor.”

Chase shot her a dirty look. Was there such a thing as a political metaphor—politics used metaphor but could it be a metaphor in and of itself? It dawned on Chase that she didn’t understand the political term anymore than Lacey understood plumbing.

Dixon cleared her throat. “Could we get this meeting started? Some of us are on a tight time schedule.”

What, Chase thought, could be so urgent? Rounding up socially errant lesbians?

“I want to get this P-trap thing settled first,” Lacey snapped.

Chase’s stress and annoyance level had reached its beyond-the-tolerable level notch on her psychic meter. First, this school thing and Commies and then getting hauled in here by the thug-girls only to become embroiled in the politics of the Republik of Lesbekistan. Then to top it off, Lacey’s ignorance when it came to plumbing.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Lacey, a P-trap is the U-shaped pipe under the sink—it has absolutely nothing to do with urine entrapment,” Chase blurted.

Gloria smiled as Lacey scowled at her. “Well, why didn’t you say that in the first place?” Lacey said.

“And when would I have inserted the proverbial word-in-edgewise with you going on about lesbian civil liberties?” Gloria inquired.

“Hmmph, I just think you could stand to be more specific in your reports,” Lacey said.

Feeling the need to defend Gloria, Chase said, “With your current level of the understanding of building mechanics and maintenance issues, it should be no problem.”

Lacey ignored her. She organized her notes, straightened her shoulders and began. “There is a serious rift here at the Institute that must be addressed. The Left Ovaries have, in effect, declared war on the Menopausals. We cannot have this kind of division in our beloved community. We live in a new and tender country and this is the first incident of this nature.”

“Does she really believe in this Lesbekistan thing?” Gloria whispered to Chase.

Chase nodded. Gloria raised her eyebrows in that this-is-absurd-you-realize-that look.