Ice Blues - Stevenson Richard - Страница 26

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"Then Gail will have to do it. She has no choice."

He peered at me, looking a little queasy. "You'd interfere in Gail and Joan's relationship just so you might influence an election in some fur-trading outpost in upstate New York?"

I thought about this, then said lamely, evasively, "It's what Jack Lenihan wanted. It's what he would have wanted me to do."

Eyeing me evenly, Toot said, "Maybe in that respect Jack Lenihan was a heartless creep. Did you ever consider that?"

I had to admit that I hadn't. I had been careful not to. Where was Timmy? He was my moral guardian, not this raffle-ticket-stapling Uncle Vanya. I said,

"Why don't you come over to the motel and meet Timmy? Maybe he can make this whole business clearer than I've been able to. Bring your raffle tickets along and a couple of extra staplers. This evening we can have a wild threesome-click-shoosh, click-shoosh. The motel we're staying in can probably even come up with a couple of extra stapling artists. Though I don't know that they'd necessarily be the safe-stapling type."

"What's the name of the place?"

"The Golden Grapefruit."

"Oh, that guy can get safe-staplers. He can get you anything you want."

"He can? Uh-oh."

Toot followed me into my room at the motel.

"Hi, sake-zy."

"Who are you?"

"I'm Ramon, and this is my friend Juan. Hey, your friend is very cute too, but I wan chu."

They were propped up on pillows on the bed watching Sale of the Century.

Ramon was in red briefs, Juan in tiger stripes. Their clothes were heaped on a chair. Toot tried to look bemused.

I said, "Who let you in here? This is my room."

Ramon winked. "We the sexular human boys. We gonna have a good time, sweetheart, you will see. Hey, you want me go out and pick up some booze? We gonna get thirsty, I'm thinking."

I said, "Out," and pointed to the open door.

Juan looked worried, but Ramon stood up, slithered out of his briefs, walked over and placed my hand on his unexceptional erection. "I gone fuck you till you blow up, man. I gone fuck you till you the happiest man in LA. I gone…"

I led him away. He resisted when we came to the door-sill, but I had a firm grip and he yielded soon enough. As we emerged into the parking lot Timmy pulled up in the rental car, got out, and said, "My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near."

"I found him and his friend in the room. They're just on their way out. They claim to be secular humanists, but I know a couple of Alexandrian Copts when I see them. I told that guy."

Juan sidled out the door wearing pants now and carrying a distressed bundle of clothing and shoes. I released Ramon, who dressed rapidly, muttering and hurling imprecations at me in two languages. "I gonna talk to Teddy, man! I don' like getting fucked over, and somebody gonna pay for this, man!"

I introduced Timmy to Kyle Toot, then went in and rang the desk. "Is this Teddy?"

"Speaking."

"This is Donald Strachey in one-oh-six. I said secular humanist twins and you sent me a couple of Aztec Jehovah's Witnesses. Now if you can't even come up with a pair of certified Unitarians, just forget it. I'm warning you, I'll want to see their ACLU membership cards. Do you understand what I'm saying? My friend and I have very specific tastes."

"I'll have to make some more calls."

"If we have to go back to Lynchburg horny, it'll be your fault." I slammed down the receiver.

Timmy was shaking his head. "Don, really."

"You're making a big mistake," Toot said. "He'll have a set of hot Unitarians in here inside of an hour. This is LA."

I said, "No. It isn't possible."

"You'll see."

I rang Teddy back and said, "This is Strachey in one-oh-six again. Cancel the Unitarians. We just heard about a Trivial Pursuit tournament at a bar in Westwood, and it's first things first."

"Fuckin' eastern kooks!" Teddy said, and hung up on me.

TWELVE

We sat in the motel.Stapling Raffle tickets for an American Legion post in Pomona that was selling chances on a VCR, two cases of Johnnie Walker, and eighteen frozen turkeys. I brought Timmy up-to-date on the day's events, and he described his visit to the LA County courthouse, where he verified the legitimacy of Al Piatek's will. Kyle Toot told us more about Piatek's last days, including his dipping into Lenihan's millions-with Jack's permission-to throw a good-bye party for himself.

He invited twenty-three friends in the recording business; five showed up.

They consumed thirty-seven ounces of Beluga caviar spread on Nabisco saltines and six bottles of Clos Vougeot '64. At two in the morning Piatek passed out in his chair by the stereo, where he had been selecting the tapes to be played. He never regained consciousness and died in a hospital bed three days later. His last words, as far as anyone could recall, had been, "My feet are cold."

At 4:45 my contact at the investigating agency downtown phoned with the news that two toll calls had been placed from Joan Lenihan's phone the previous weekend. One, on Saturday, at 5:43 P.M., was to Jack Lenihan's Albany number, and the conversation had lasted for just three minutes. The other call, on Monday, at 9:12 A.M. was to a number in Troy, New York, listed under the name Florence Trenky. That call lasted twenty-two minutes. I thanked my friend and told him to bill me at my Albany address, thinking he'd say forget it, but he didn't.

I told Timmy and Kyle Toot what I had learned, and asked Toot, "Did Jack ever mention a Florence Trenky?"

"No, I'd remember that one. Though Jack didn't talk much about his current life in Albany. He and Al mostly talked about the old days there, growing up and their secret life in the Piateks' attic. When he came here in October to bring the money out to Al, Jack did tell me about his recent separation from his lover, Warren something-or-other."

"Slonski."

"He didn't really want to leave Slonski, he said, but there was something important he said he had to do that Slonski wouldn't approve of and wouldn't want to be mixed up in. I guess that was the big money and the political wheeling and dealing, right?"

"Right. And he never gave you any clue about where he'd gotten the two and a half million?"

"He joked about being afraid the suitcases containing the money might break open in the plane's baggage compartment, though that hadn't happened. Otherwise, all he said was that what he was doing was completely moral. He kept repeating that to both me and Al, trying to reassure us."

"Maybe he was trying to reassure himself too. Did you ever get that impression?"

Toot put down his stapler and considered this. After a moment, he said,

"No. I don't think there was any doubt in Jack's mind at all about the ethical correctness of what he was doing. In fact, he once said, 'Two wrongs can make a right.' He seemed to be certain of this, and very determined to right some kind of wrong. Whatever it was. Maybe Joan Lenihan knows all about it. I got the impression thajt they were quite close, that they confided in each other. Do you think she knows the whole story?"

"I think so, yes. The essentials, anyway. The question is, will she ever tell a living soul?"

"If she does," Toot said, "it will be Gail Tesney, not any of us."

"We're back to Gail. I'd like to talk with her alone. Does she work on the AIDS unit too?"

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