Killer Move (3 page)

He thought for a moment.

“I’ll discuss this with Marie,” he said, standing. “Not going to promise more than that. But that I will do.”

“Thank you, Mr. Thompson.”

“The name’s Tony,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand. “As you know. You may as well start using it.”

F
ifteen minutes later I was standing at the end of the pier on The Breakers’ beach, surrounded by the flatness of the ocean. I still had an hour before my appointment down on Siesta Key, in reality nothing more than a meet-and-greet and something to tweak Karren White with. I’d take the meeting, of course—a key tenet of the Bill Moore brand is that if he says he’ll do something, it gets done—but right now it seemed very unimportant.

There were a few couples meandering up and down the water line, and a group of kids twenty feet away being encouraged to look for shells. Most people were indoors, out of the noon heat.

My hands were now still. For ten minutes after the meeting they’d been shaking. Sure, I’d planned to get man-to-man and cards-on-the-table with Tony at some point—but not today. The bottle of wine had been intended merely as an opening gambit. I’d logged the name and year, put out a notice on a beginners’ wine board I found on the Internet. A guy got in touch, declaring himself able to supply one and to also be in possession of another vintage that was an even bigger deal and guaranteed to be a huge hit with anyone who was searching for the first. I’d quickly snapped up both bottles—at a cost I hoped my wife did not discover before I’d had a chance to capitalize on the expense—and had been intending to get serious with Thompson only on production of the second. I actually had very little to offer him at this point. I’d taken a degree of license when describing the level of owner dissatisfaction, too, and was aware that Tony was a golf-and-drinking buddy of Peter Grant, founder-owner of Shore Realty. The two went back to the boom years, had been to school together, and socialized all the time. I was a Shore employee. Implicitly offering to set that to one side in order to run interference for The Breakers’ management was a very high-risk strategy.

And yet . . . it had felt like the thing to do.

Or I’d gone ahead and done it, at least, and it hadn’t yet exploded in my face. If Thompson had gotten straight on the phone to his friend, there’d be a message on my phone telling me to clear my desk and go fuck myself from here to Key West. No such missive had arrived—which hopefully meant I’d taken a massive step in the right direction.

I wasn’t even having a cigarette to celebrate, either. Behold the man, see how he grows.

There was a blarping sound from my pocket. It made me jump. I yanked out the phone and was relieved to see it was just a calendar reminder.

But then I swore—loud enough to startle nearby children and have their wrangler glaring at me—and ran up the pier toward the resort.

CHAPTER THREE

B
y nine thirty I was pretty drunk. This is something all the blogs and self-improvement gurus advise against, but I felt I deserved it. Not only had the day seen strides toward me becoming a bigger blip on Tony Thompson’s radar, but I had reason to be relieved to be where I was—at a great table in a great restaurant, enjoying another big glass of Merlot and hiding the effects very well, I believed.

“You’re pretty drunk,” Steph said.

“No. I’m just high. On the vision of outstanding natural beauty across the table from me.”

She laughed. “Corny. Even by your standards. Still, twelve years together. Eight, postknot. Can’t say we didn’t give it a try, right?”

“You’re still the one, babe.”

“You too.”

She raised her glass. We chinked, leaned across the table, and kissed for long enough to make nearby diners uncomfortable. She was happy, and so was I. I’d bought her something nice from her favorite jewelry store and also gotten huge props for fulfilling her primary request, securing a table on the upstairs balcony at Jonny Bo’s. This is the premium spot in the place, with the (alleged) exception of a fabled private upper dining room, which no one I knew had even seen, and which I was ninety percent sure was a suburban legend. Our table booking still had me a little mystified. I’d broken into foul language at the end of the pier because I realized I’d failed to make the reservation. I’d tried, a number of times, but the number had always been busy—I recalled muttering about this in the office a week or so ago (mainly, of course, as a way of bragging about the venue I was trying to book). And yet, when I’d called that afternoon on the slim chance of a cancellation, I discovered I
had
made a reservation after all. Obviously I’d got through at some point, become wrapped up in some other piece of business, and forgotten. Whatever. Today was evidently one of those days when the universe elected to throw me a couple of bones. Hence the extra glass of wine.

Our waitress appeared. She was a little older than most, late twenties, but otherwise standard issue: black pants, starched white shirt, black apron, capable-looking ponytail in blond or brown. This one’s was midbrown.

“Can I interest you fine people in the dessert menu?”

“Hell yes,” Steph said. “Thought you’d never ask.”

I declined, picked up my glass, and looked down over the Circle. Dessert selection is a serious business with Steph. It can take a while.

It was the other side of twilight, and the streetlights looked pretty. The storm—smaller than I’d hoped, but effective—had burned itself out, and the air was comfortable. The Circle lies in the middle of St. Armands Key, providing the entry point to Lido and Longboat. It is, as the name suggests, a circle, holding a small park with palms and firebushes and orange blossom in the center and exits at the cardinal points. It’s lined with chichi stores plus a Starbucks and Ben & Jerry’s, and eateries including an outpost of the stalwart Columbia chain—and now also the bracingly expensive Jonny Bo’s, high days and holidays favorite for well-heeled locals over the last two years. There are still a few T-shirt and tourist stores to leaven the mix, but they’re in decline, and the Circle represents some of the highest-priced retail space on the gulf. With all the redevelopment happening over on Lido Key—which can only be accessed via the Circle—that situation was only going to improve.

But fifty or a hundred years ago?

Where I was sitting had been nothing but a dusty crossroads on a chunk of sand and scrub back then, holding orange groves, a shack or two, and little else except wading birds. Back in the 1920s Sarasota itself had boasted a population of only three thousand, with nothing to say for itself beyond agriculture and fishing. What I saw beneath me had been just another piece of speculation, in other words—like The Breakers, the huge Sandpiper Bay development on Turtle Key, or the new condos going up to replace the old family motels along Lido Key’s southwest shore.

Making money out of land is all about time. Understanding it, using it, knowing what to do when. Some guy spied a location and thought—Hmm . . . what if?

I could be that guy.

Steph had made her selection and was watching other diners at the candlelit tables inside. “Isn’t that the sheriff?” she said.

I looked and, sure enough, saw Sheriff Barclay making his way across the restaurant from the direction of the restrooms. He’s a big guy, both in height and front to back, and not hard to spot. He saw me, too, raised his chin about an inch. We’ve run into each other at business functions, charity events. I saw a couple of other people clock the connection between us, and smiled inside. They weren’t to know we’d barely exchanged a hundred words in total; they just saw a guy with good contacts.

“I just realized,” I said, “I’m about the same age Tony was when he started to build The Breakers.”

“It’s ‘Tony’ now, is it?”

“At his specific request.”

“Call-me-Tony did start with a preexisting construction business and a few million dollars cash, though, right?”

I sighed theatrically. Healthy skepticism on your wife’s part is appropriate, however. As focus groups go, they don’t come much more focused than the woman who stands to lose whatever you lose.

“True,” I said. “Plus, he had a wife with drive and determination and a good honest faith in her man. But, you know, what I lack just makes me stronger.”

She grinned and flipped me the bird, just in time to be witnessed by the waitress as she returned.

“I’m so sorry,” the girl said. “I do hate it when I interrupt a special private moment.”

“Nah, business as usual,” I said. “You know any
nice
women, give them my number.”

We all laughed, Steph made a concerted start on the complex confection on the big square plate she’d been brought—Steph doesn’t screw around when it comes to dessert consumption: she’s all about shock and awe—and as the waitress walked away, she glanced back and looked right at me. Which was nice. It always is.

But being in love with your wife is nicer.

S
teph drove us home over the bridge across the bay and out the south side of Sarasota to Longacres. Longacres is a gated community of thirty artfully mismatched minivillas around a small private marina to which our house does not have direct access—as we don’t care enough about boats to have made the dockage price hike worthwhile. The houses are dotted along a meandering drive, and though you never feel hemmed in, you have the comfort of neighbors, of seeming like you’re living somewhere in particular. Those neighbors are all people like us. Most had a child or two already, however. We do not. This had started to become a topic of discussion, a recurring item cropping up, low down on the agenda, but no longer just Any Other Business.

It had not come up tonight, thankfully. I want a family—of course. I want to make sure I’ve got my goals on a roll, however, before a row of gynecological
forces majeures
start directing the run of play.

I went and sat out by the pool. Steph disappeared indoors, leaving me time to think back over the day and be pleased with progress. Your life is your real job—and you’re being lazy and dumb if you don’t make the best of it. One of the reasons I believe this, I guess, is my dad. Don’t get me wrong, he was a decent guy. He was patient and generous, not overly bad-tempered, and could make you laugh when he had the time and inclination. He sold paint for a living—the kind you use to decorate your house. He kept up with the fashionable colors and finishes and accessories and tools. He was cheerful and friendly and he’d help carry your goods out to the car if you were old or female or simply looked as if you could do with a hand, and if it turned out you’d bought too much paint he’d cheerfully take back the excess and try to sell it to someone else. He did this for thirty years and then one day went out back to get something for a lady who wanted to finish the basement of the house she’d just bought—and he bent down to pick up a pair of gallon cans of brilliant white, and never came back up.

He died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine, seven years ago, and though people in town were content to say it was the way he would have wanted it—right there in his store, in the act of being helpful—my mother privately expressed the view that my father would have preferred it to have happened many years later, possibly in Aruba. She was joking, in the way you do around a death, and I knew by then that Aruba wouldn’t have been where he’d chosen. When I was a kid I’d started to notice that in my dad’s den (and dotted around other bookshelves, in low-prestige spots) were a lot of books on French history and culture, all of them ten or fifteen years out of date; annotated grammars and vocab books, too, with studious jottings in pencil, in a version of my father’s handwriting that looked exotic to me—a tighter, earlier style than I was accustomed to seeing in shopping lists or reminder notes on the fridge. I don’t think I ever heard my father say a single word in French, but when I looked at those grammar books for the last time—when I was at the house in the week after he died, helping my mother make sense of what was left behind—I realized they were pretty advanced, and that the marginal notes said this was not a guy who’d just been looking at the pictures.

I’d asked my mother about all this one day, way back when I was around thirteen. She shrugged, said my father had been on long family vacations to France as a child and liked the idea of spending more time there. I took from this observation, and the offhand manner in which it had been delivered, that moving to France had been a dream of my father’s back in the pre-Bill era of the planet. Something he’d thought about, talked about, probably kind of bored her with over the years . . . before the ship of his dreams ran aground on the sandbank of lack of dedication, becalmed by a slowness to act.

In the aftermath of his death, reconsidering him with the vicious perspective that comes when someone has committed their last actions and has nothing else to say—I realized that my assessment had been correct, but only up to a point. Half-correct, but also half-wrong and naive and cruel—in the heartless way children often measure the worth of the adults they are here to supersede.

There are men who would have made their dream happen without reference to how inconvenient it was to others. Patriarchs who would have put their foot down, made their love a hostage, and turned their family’s lives into a living hell until they got what they goddamned wanted. My father was not that guy, and as the years went on, I came to realize how it had more likely been. That the money was never there. That my mother would have gotten herself involved in events around town, part-time jobs, school jamborees—never mission-critical, but enough to stay the hand and compromise the ambition of a man who loved her, and valued the things she did, and wanted her to be happy. That there was a kid in the house who had friends and a community nearby: and there’s always some marker, some birthday or test or rite of passage that seems essential to pass on home soil, some relative who might not last the year. Something to clip the wings.

But there was also the fact that my dad was fundamentally an abstract noun, and not a verb: a feeling word, not a doing word. It was sad he didn’t get what he’d wanted, but it was not Mom’s fault or mine or the world’s. He was a nice guy and I’m sure he had nice dreams, but we’re only asleep half the day, and dreaming is therefore only half the job. Nobody gets points for living in a conditional tense.

Dad lost his cherished future by himself, dropped the ball one night in his sleep, and probably didn’t even realize it until it was too late. Maybe he
never
realized it. It could be that on the day he bent to pick up those two big old cans of paint, part of his mind was still noodling around the perfect little French fishing village, and how to convince his wife that now—finally, the kid having left home—was the time to make the move.

But I doubt it. Dreams are immortal, fickle, self-possessed: the cats of the subconscious. Once it becomes clear that you’re not going to step up to their demands, they desert you and go rub up against someone else.

I had no intention of letting mine do the same.

Bill Moore is not that kind of guy.

Bill Moore is a verb.

Believe it.

S
teph returned carrying a couple more glasses of wine. She’d changed out of her dress in the meantime, put her long blond hair up in a ponytail, and was wearing a thin robe and nothing else. She looked tall and slender and beautiful.

“The day just keeps getting better,” I said.

“Don’t make any promises you can’t keep,” she said, smiling as she handed one of the glasses to me. “You’ve not stinted on the wine already, tycoon-boy.”

I stood, meaningfully. “You ever known me to break a promise?”

“Actually, I have not,” she admitted, coming closer.

Afterward we cooled off in the pool, not saying much, content to float around in each other’s orbits and look up at the moon and stars.

Suddenly it was late. Steph headed upstairs to the bedroom around one thirty. I went through to the kitchen to get us a couple of glasses of mineral water. As I poured them from the bottle in the fridge I noticed a small manila envelope propped against the coffee machine.