All That Was Happy (16 page)

“
Where it stands now,” Beckie said, “is
that I’ve scheduled a meeting with my new lawyer, Lauren Shane over
in Century City--we’re going to discuss our strategy for the
meeting with Bernie’s lawyers--to tell you the truth, I’m not ready
to go through all that legal claptrap. The truth is, I’m so worn
out by all these things, I’d prefer to take the day off and simply
recuperate.

“
Why don’t you?”

“
You know? I think I will. I’ll pop in
to see Lauren for a minute, but from here, I’m canceling whatever
Bernie had prepared for me and taking my dog to the beach. I want
to see if Mr. Boopers will eat a corn dog. Tonight, I’m attending a
charity function with Huntington downtown, and that will pretty
much finish up my day.”

“
I’m going to suggest that we continue
to meet every day for awhile,” Black said.

“
That’s funny,” Beckie said. “Because I
was thinking of cutting back to once a week. I mean, what’s there
to discuss? The crisis is more or less over.”

Black smiled. “We need to work through your
anger,” she said.

“
But Doctor Black, I’m not
angry.”

“
Anger has many disguises,” Black said.
“Two days ago, I was talking to a woman who was ready to commit
murder-suicide after her husband walked out on her. Now I’m talking
to the same woman who’s taken a lover and tells me everything’s
just fine. I can’t just let that go. I can’t just scratch you
behind the ears and flatter you.”

“
You know, that really irritates me,”
Beckie said. “I’ve just gone through a whirlwind and come out on
top, and I don’t appreciate having my past thrown back in my face
the way you just did.”

“
Does it make you angry?” Black
said.

“
To tell you the truth, I’m sick of
this whole head-shrinking routine you’re playing with me. I was
fine until I walked in here. When I walk in here, I feel like I’m
here because everybody expects me to be here, not because I need to
be here. As far as blowing Bernie away, after what he did to me, it
would have been the least he deserved! Do you know what he did with
my car? The car that he stole from me? He gave it to his secretary!
You don’t think I have a right to be angry over that? What am I
supposed to do--just smile and say, Oh, that’s okay, Bernie, dear,
you go ahead and have your fun? Let me tell you something,
Doctor--the real reason I canceled the meeting with Bernie’s
lawyers today is because if I see that fat little toad, and have to
listen to some slime ball in a five-thousand-dollar Italian suit
tell me what I can and can’t do with my own money, which Bernie
stole from me, I don’t know what I might do--the honest truth is, I
don’t trust myself enough not to blow Bernie away right then and
there!”

The room was silent for a few moments.

“
If I were in your shoes,” Black said.
“I wouldn’t enter a legal office full of snakes armed with only a
handgun and four bullets. I myself would toss in a grenade and take
out the entire stinking nest.”

“
Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh,” Beckie
chortled.

The two women smiled, the smiles connecting
into an energy pathway which fired up their faces into full-blown
grins. The laughter came, then, flowing and free, from the deep
spaces seldom touched by anything else as Black and Beckie, flopped
back, mouths open and bellies shaking, allowed the pureness of the
event to fill them in cleansing waves, until at last their spirits
connected with something greater than themselves, a something which
understood energy and release, a something which delighted in
resistance to injustice, and the fragging of evil men, a something
which flowed for a very long time into, and through, the two women,
empowered, as they’d just become, with the glories of their
newfound sisterhood.

They laughed on and on for the longest time,
preferring the place it took them to the one they’d just left.

Chapter
27

“
Do you have a shopping service?”
Beckie asked the concierge.

“
Yes of course,” the concierge said.
“Shall I call them for you?”

“
No, just tell them yourself,” Beckie
said. “I’m in need of absolutely everything--and I mean everything.
Here’s the list--I’ll be back in my room this afternoon, and I’ll
need everything by then. In particular, I’d like her to make sure
she picks up that fabulous pair of silver python mules I saw on
display in one of the shops down the hall.”

The lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel-a
massive structure with a tower commanding impressive views of the
ocean and all of Los Angeles on the Avenue of the Stars in Century
City, which had begun its useful life, as had many thing in Los
Angeles, on the location of a former back lot of a Movie
studio--where Beckie had stopped in to book an outrageously posh
Tower suite before going on her merry way to the beach--was
bustling from the mid-week energies generated by the various
conferences and conventions. Beckie, with her distinctive platinum
cut matched by an even more distinctive black-eye, drew more than a
few glances from the visiting corporate drones who flitted here and
there through the lobby on their way to a day of captivity in some
subterranean hive, where they received, along with a buffet lunch,
any and all necessary reprogramming deemed necessary by the under
lieutenants of the current Corporate Mindset.

“
Excuse me,” the concierge said. “But
one of the items on your list is a box of 50 cartridges of
Winchester .38 Special ammunition...I believe the note specifies a
half-jacketed hollowpoint tip. Is this some kind of a
joke?”

“
Hey, I appreciate that you guys are
into gun control, especially since you just turned the entire 30th
floor into the Ronald Reagan suite, but let’s just say Senator
Feinstein and I don’t share the same values as regards personal
ownership of a handgun,” Beckie said.

Having visited her room and changed
appropriately into a pair of pretty, printed peg-leggers and a
simple pink nylon Tee for her afternoon at the beach, Beckie headed
across the massively constructed concrete bunker which surrounded
the Plaza and which was flanked by the Shuman Theater and the ABC
entertainment center--along with a bunch of high-end yuppie
drinking establishments--and soon was headed upward via high-speed
elevator into the northernmost of the landmark, triangular-shaped
Twin Towers to the twenty-fifth floor, which brought her to quickly
to Lauren Shane’s impressive corner office.

“
Bernie’s lawyers want to see us at 2
P.M.,” Lauren said. “They’re in the tower next door, on the 31st
floor. He’s got a high-powered firm representing him. The founding
partner was a real animal. Back in the late 70’s, the guy got a
break when he represented a certain famous late show host’s wife.
The late-show host was so impressed by the fleecing he received at
the animal’s hands, he hired him to “do to his business competitors
what had just been done to him”. Anyway, this original
animal/lawyer who fleeced the late show host retired to his lair
recently, but he somehow replicated younger versions of himself who
continue the tradition, and who are about to attempt to come down
on us like a bad case of plague.”

“
Cancel the meeting,” Beckie
said.

“
Say again?” Lauren said.

“
I’m not dancing to Bernie’s tune
anymore--I just got bailed out by a rescuing angel. Bernie thinks
he’s going to squash me like a bug. He thinks he can shoot my dog
and climb over my fence and go through all my garbage, the way he’s
done to his business competition over the years. Well, he’s
wrong.”

“
I’m not sure we should start delaying
tactics,” Lauren said. “It may be viewed unfavorably in the future
by the judge who will see you as being uncooperative.”

“
There’s something I want you to do,”
Beckie said. “I want you to hire the best private investigator you
can find and I want you to find out everything you can about the
co-op Argon Tools is forming. Secondly, I want to know everything
there is to know about four other people who may or may not have
anything to do with any of this. I want credit reports, bank
activity, travel destinations--the works. I want everything that’s
legal--and otherwise--to obtain. And I want all this information by
tomorrow morning.”

“
You should think over what you’re
asking,” Lauren said. “You need to be aware that you’re possibly in
what we call “court shock”--you’re making an emotional response to
the stripping of your financial and property rights.”

“
You’re darn right,” Beckie said. “This
is an emotional response to my husband’s actions, which have shown
no regard for my life whatsoever. I’m on a wave of fury, and I’m
going to ride it all the way to the shore.”

“
I have an excellent investigative
agency,” Lauren said. “I’m assuming, when you said you’d been
bailed out by an angel, that you have sufficient wherewithal to
cover the costs?”

Beckie pulled out her temporary money market
checkbook. “Here’s a check for five-hundred grand,” she said. “Let
me know when that runs out. We’ll meet again tomorrow and go over
what you found out.”

“
And the names of the four people you
want investigated?” Lauren said.

“
There’s a chick named Nolene,” Beckie
said, “I don’t know her last name, but she used to work with Bernie
as a mistress-slash-office manager and she’s probably driving
around in my old silver Roadster. For all I know, she still works
there. The other three I want checked out are Bernie’s brother in
law, Ira and his wife Leah.”

“
You suspect your in-laws?”

“
I started thinking,” Beckie said. “We
had dinner recently and at no time did either of those two
encourage me to contact Bernie or seek a reconciliation. I think
that’s abnormal--also, he’d moved in with them and they didn’t tell
me about it--I had to force the information out of
them.”

“
Okay,” Lauren said. “You said you
wanted four people checked out, in addition to Bernie. So far,
Nolene, Ira and Leah make three. Who’s the fourth?”

“
Huntington,” Beckie said.

“
Huntington?” Lauren said.

“
I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid,”
Beckie said. “The man just wrote me a check for five million
dollars with no strings attached. There’s only three possible
reasons he would have done it. One, because he’s in love with me,
two, because he’s insane, or three, because, by some bizarre
turning of events, he’s somehow connected to my Divorce
proceedings. When he gave me the check, he told me that I was free
to dump my past baggage and leave everything to Bernie--after I
thought about it, it kind of smelled of a payoff. I’m praying I’m
wrong--I don’t really believe Huntington is involved, but I need to
make sure.”

Lauren removed her glasses and stood before
the west-facing window, where the Pacific Ocean glittered in the
sparkling sunshine. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” she said.

“
Sure it is,” Beckie said. “On the
surface, that is--from up here, you can’t see the
sharks.”

“
But that doesn’t mean they’re not
there,” Lauren said.

Chapter
28

“
It’s a good thing you’re so tiny,”
Beckie said. “It makes it a lot easier to violate the No Dogs
rule.”

Mr. Boopers, hidden in the straw purse,
showed no inclination to report the unjust violation of the law
which found him on the Santa Monica pier. Perhaps he’d succumbed to
bribery, being as how he was certainly enjoying the corn dog he’d
been given to keep him busy where he sat at the bottom of the purse
on top of the bag holding the hundred grand while Beckie strolled
to the end of the pier, past the arcade and motley assortment of
enterprises ranging from street artists who painted ocean scenes on
tiny mirrors, to a Mexican restaurant where patrons could be seen
enjoying traditional south of the border fare along with, of course
the ubiquitous, blue-green margaritas, themselves the color of the
sea over which they were sipped, and which sent waves of entirely
another sort through the minds of those who sipped them.

Away to the south, another in an endless
string of Jumbo jets departed from Los Angeles International,
giving rise within her to an urge to just up and chuck it all, and
depart for some part of the world in which Argon Tools and its
subsequent merging with whatever hydra-headed consortium was thus
far unknown.

Her life was trashed--that much she knew. The
reality that her husband could, by proxy, hand her a piece of paper
and start in motion a process whereby her worth as a wife could be
decided by a judge was somehow repulsive, especially when it would
be in a court where the judge--considered by some to be as a
god--was most likely a god for hire by the right people--a player
who could be counted on to lay the cards down at the right time and
in the right way and thus seal her fate behind the scenes.

She leaned against the rail, enjoying the
feel of the breeze on her face, intrigued by the fisher people,
always present, who dropped their lines and made their catches with
the absolute faith of a Saint that they’d be rewarded for their
meager attempts to fool a hungry fish or two. The edge of the
western world was a great place to think--a place where one’s soul
could face any problem, drawing strength as it did so from the
incredible energies imparted from the surrounding depths. Where a
troubled mind could drop a line to God and perhaps reel in a good
idea or two.