Count Geiger's Blues (30 page)
“Holy schmoly,” said The Mick, sidekickishly.
“I’m sick,” Stickney said. “As sick, in my way, as them Silvanus County folks. But who cares? Who cares ’fie die in this orful rathole?”
“Put your radiation detector on him,” Xavier said, and The Mick obeyed. The counter began clicking like a caffeine-crazed typist. “My God.” Xavier told The Mick to stick with Stickney while he went down the hall to telephone the police, to report that he had found Environomics Unlimited’s disposal agent. The men in the office were still playing their game. The thinnest, who had four more pie wedges, appeared to be gloating.
“
‘What was the code name of the U.S. military’s assault on the forces of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega?’
” read the man facing the door.
“Operation Just Cause!” cried the gloating Asian. “
Hai yah!
”
“Buffalo dung,” said the third player.
As unobtrusively as possible, Xavier made his call and returned to Stickney’s apartment. Stickney had fallen asleep, again. His boxing tape was rewinding, again. The Mick stared blurrily at the stick-figure pornography on the wall. His eyes had begun to water. He pinched his nostrils to ease the burn from the pokeweed stench and the stale acridity of Stickney’s B.O. He obsessively shifted his Geiger counter from one hand to the other, and Xavier agreed that, yes, they could probably leave this rathole even before the cops arrived: Stickney wasn’t going anywhere.
In Jarboe Lane, Xavier and Mikhail walked meditatively: two shadows in a cramped, starless tunnel.
“Finesse,” The Mick said. “Betcha ol’ Tim Bowman’s gonna love
that
piece of scandal.”
Xavier, thumbs hooked inside two of his belt loops, remped the neighborhood for hostility or danger, but registered none.
“Boy, that place was the cheesiest,” The Mick said. “You’d have to be a skidder with like complete and utter antinoolity to camp there.”
“Flamingos,” Xavier mused. “A few plastic flamingos would’ve perked it right up. . . .”
57
The Rap on Mr. Finesse
To few people but UC’s employees
and immoderate fans like The Mick was F. Deane Finesse solely the owner and publisher of Uncommon Comics. To Finesse himself, the comic-book business was mostly a gratifyingly profitable sideline. Indeed, some viewed him as the South’s foremost entrepreneur and his surname as synonymous with Salonika (although, today, if the prompt in a word-association test were
Salonika
, more would say
Bari
than
Finesse
). According to current received historical mythos, the city had begun as a trading post and river port established in 1788 by Philippe Jean Yves Paul Finesse, one of several French volunteers with General Lafayette at Jamestown Ford, and elsewhere, during the American War of Independence. Today, then, Finesse’s name appears on everything in the city from street signs to pocket parks to cancer clinics.
The morning after visiting Stickney in Jarboe Lane, Xavier called the
Urbanite
and asked for Donel Lassiter. He asked Donel for as much information—the “straight skinny”—about F. Deane Finesse as Donel could extract from the newspaper’s files, computer or otherwise. He invited Donel to his Franklin Court condo that evening to reveal his findings. Donel arrived on time. Moved, he hugged Xavier and then The Mick, as if they had been freed after long prison terms. The Mick retreated to his room with a homemade milkshake. Finals were approaching, and he actually wanted to prepare.
Said Donel, “You really think Finesse is behind the accident in Silvanus County?”
“Yes. Also, the misdirectioning of used radium implants to the Hazelton farm,” Xavier said.
Donel told Xavier that a rumored clean-up operation on the Hazelton place would begin tomorrow. Preliminary tests on the section of Placer Creek identified by Xavier as contaminated showed measurable traces of radiation. An associate of Dr. Lusk’s from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities had found gamma-radiation levels from one to ten roentgens per hour at and around the canister-filled rock pool in the creek. Water flow diluted these measurements, but drinking from or swimming in the creek, on Hazelton’s farm in particular, was potentially risky.
“Why would Finesse involve himself in a penny-ante scam like a misdirected radwaste shipment?” Donel asked.
“Lots of penny-ante scams, taken together, can amount to a sizable wad,” Xavier said. “Tell me what you have on Salonika’s wealthiest citizen.”
“Second wealthiest. Letitia Bligh Brumblelo, widow of Prather Brumblelo, founder and CEO of KudzuCo Enterprises, tops him in that category.”
KudzuCo, an organization begun in the late 1950s, specialized in the processing and recycling of kudzu, the run-amok Japanese vine introduced as a soil-erosion measure and as fodder and forage for cattle. KudzoCo converted the leaves of this ubiquitous plant into everything from loose tea to attic insulation to shawls to wallpaper paste to skin astringent to infield tarps to pet food to jeep fuel. KudzuCo had conversion facilities and subsidiary divisions from Louisiana to North Carolina. So, to give Mr. Finesse his due, Xavier decided, it was hardly a knock to call him less wealthy than Prather Brumblelo’s widow. KudzoCo was the thirteenth largest business in the U.S., a financial colossus.
“Of course, Finesse is no bush leaguer himself,” Donel said. “In addition to Uncommon Comics, he owns”—he read from a printout—“the Salonika Cherokees, Finesse Chemical, Goober Pride Foods, Cherokee Software, and Oconee-Oregon Transport Systems. He’s also on the board of directors of dozens of foundations, libraries, public utilities, historical societies, and medical institutions, including the Miriam Finesse Cancer Clinic, which he dedicated to his mother’s memory in 1959, six years after her death of ovarian cancer.
“More: He has partnerships in, or links to, the publishing and communications industry, the construction industry, corporate Hollywood, the pharmaceuticals industry, and, as you know, the fashion industry. Uncommon Comics recently licensed Bari’s of Salonika to make design use of the copyrighted costumes of some of its stalwarts for a line of ready-to-wear clothing, exempting only the costumes of the Decimator and Count Geiger, the former because of its importance to the UC empire and the latter because a new Nick City ordinance forbids anyone to impersonate you.
“Finesse has been married four times,” Donel rattled on. “He is currently a bachelor . . . with two sons and four daughters, all grown, all living somewhere other than Oconee. In the winter, Finesse dresses only in black. On the opening day of baseball season, though, no matter the temperature, he begins wearing white-linen plantation suits or lightweight seersucker ensembles, often with a Panama hat and a silver-tipped walking stick. He often escorts—
dates
would overstate his level of commitment—women two, three, or even four decades younger than he. Over the past several years, he’s spent as much time traveling abroad or networking on the West Coast as he has overseeing his financial empire here in Salonika.
“The world at large knows F. Deane Finesse just as you and I do, Xavier, as a curmudgeonly sports enthusiast and a high-profile humanitarian businessman. Ex-wives and disgruntled ex-employees depict him as tight-fisted and petty, a control freak with a two-ton ego and featherweight verbal skills. He succeeds, detractors allege, by projecting a charismatic aura of menace and willpower. In conversation, his speeches are either gnomic or nonsensical, depending on your view of the man. It sometimes seems he needs a translator.” Donel stopped, looking up from his printouts to see what effect his words were having on Xavier. “What else did you want to know?”
“Oconee-Oregon Transport Systems. What’s that?”
“OOTS? A cross-country trucking line from Oconee to Oregon and vice versa.”
“Does Finesse have any stake in Environomics Unlimited, the bogus hazardous-waste-disposal firm?”
“Nobody but Wilbon T. Stickney, the guy you sicced the police on, knows much at all about Environomics Unlimited—
if
it exists. And Stickney—get this—is in a secure area of Salonika General being treated for a kind of radiation poisoning and an unknown piggyback ailment that kept the police from jailing him.”
Xavier mulled this, a fresh indictment of the sensitivity marking his behavior of late, as if his whole personality rested on that quality. He should have stayed with Stickney until the cops arrived. Stickney’s nodding head and slurred speech—from his grogginess and stink—had signaled that he needed medical attention. Instead, he’d gotten himself and The Mick out of Satan’s Cellar as fast as possible.
“Donel”—Xavier beating back these self-recriminations—“does Finesse have any reason to wish Consolidated Tri-State ill?”
Donel flipped through his stapled printouts. “Until construction began on Plant VanMeter, he belonged to Con-Tri’s board of directors. The president of Con-Tri had him removed shortly after company stockholders thwarted a try by Finesse Chemical to acquire a majority interest in Con-Tri. The year you came to the
Urbanite
from Atlanta, Finesse left Con-Tri’s board of directors. He left it kicking ’n’ screaming, but he left, and, very soon after, Plant VanMeter came fully on line.”
“Ah.”
The Mick rejoined them, carrying his milkshake cup in one hand and a dog-eared copy of
The Selected Prose and Poetry of Jonathan Swift
in the other. “
‘Nor do I think it wholly groundless,’
” he read, “
‘that the Abolishing of Christianity may perhaps bring the Church in Danger.’
I don’t get it.” He slurped at his cup. “I mean, is this guy for real or a total poked-out charl?”
“Charl.” Xavier felt a tad charlish himself.
“Charl this, charl that.”
He appealed to Donel. “Where do these retropunk upstarts get the term, anyway?”
“
The Ten Commandments
,” Donel said. “
Ben Hur. Major Dundee.
Or, a tad later on,
Chiefs
.”
What? Xavier thought. Then the answer opened like a night-blooming flower, and he had a vision of Tim Bowman, heavily armed, shooting three slugs into him at point-blank range. Sweat popped out on Xavier’s upper lip, a line of tiny liquid domes.
Charlatan
Heston.
“I’d like to meet Finesse,” he said. “What are my chances?”
“Finesse seems to be in town,” Donel said, “but he doesn’t exactly run an open-door operation anywhere. What can you offer him?”
“Nothing. An accusation, I guess.”
“Then your chances are zilch. He won’t want to see you.”
“Grab a hang strap,” The Mick said. “Have Bari get you to him, Uncle Xave. Would she be an instant in, or what?”
Xavier looked at Mikhail, a whiz kid who’d just blown a fuse: “No, she wouldn’t. We’re kaput. Bari may not want anything to do with me.”
“Get real, unc. It’d tickle her to help you bring a charl like old F. Deane down.”
“Not if it killed her fashion-franchising of UC characters.”
“Hey, doin’ good’s a bigger kick for her than making money. You know that?”
Xavier could only shake his head.
The Mick continued to astonish: “And you keep forgetting that Uncle Xave is also Count Geiger. Even if Bari can’t or won’t do the intros, Finesse’d love to meet him. I mean, the sorry old fart gets his ego revved rubbing hips with fellow hotshots and media stars. Besides, Count Geiger’s really just a big-name field hand on the old UC plantation. If you stalled out on other stuff, you could even talk business.”
“Thank you, Mikhail,” Xavier said sincerely. “Apply that same level of brain power to your finals and you’ll ace them all.”
“Maybe not. Once past the second book of
Gulliver’s Travels
, Swift and me don’t exactly mesh.”
58
Skybox
Less than two months into the season,
the Salonika Cherokees had an unheard-of, for them, .632 winning percentage. They had just begun an important home stand against the Dodgers. Xavier and Bari sat high above the tawny diamond of the infield and high above the soothing fan-shaped green of the outfield—where, not long ago, Count Geiger and the Salonika city police had carried out a successful sting.
Tonight Xavier had a fresh perspective on the ballpark and on his role as an urban stalwart. He and Bari were guests in F. Deane Finesse’s skybox, a bulletproof bunker tiers and tiers above home plate. Along with Finesse, they occupied the middle three wingbacks in a row of seven posh chairs before the skybox window. Behind them, as Xavier had noted earlier, the rear wall was lined with photographs of past and present Cherokee players, each black-and-white photo alternating with a full-color portrait of a UC stalwart. Legendary center fielder Moses Hammacker stood between an E = MC
2
poster and one of the DeeJay throwing a 45-rpm record like a discus. Little Vin Caputo, meanwhile, was fielding a fungo batted by a club-wielding Warwoman. (Bizarre.)
Finesse, in starched seersucker and suspenders with brocaded roses on the elastic webbing, played Magnanimous Host. He spoke charmingly to Bari, confidentially man-to-man to Xavier, making pronouncements like “It’s no good winning if a loss would’ve up-spirited everybody more” and “A stitch in nine’s better than a hitch in the trenches.” He repeatedly sent his black waiter, Linzy, back to his darker barman, Geoff, for fresh cocktails, napkins, and servings of finger food, from tissue-thin cold cuts and cheeses to spicy-hot toothpick sausages. The atmosphere was one of casual formality. Casual in that Finesse was relaxed and jovial. Formal in that the other men, not only Linzy and Geoff but also a pair of prissily dressed young white guys, to whom Finesse did not bother to introduce Xavier and Bari, were so obviously at his disposal. The white guys, across from each other near the back, eyed the crowd for likely menaces: bodyguards, of course, even if they looked like uptight CPAs.
“Glory!” Finesse yelled. “Another leg hit for Newton!”
At just the third inning, the score was already 4-1, Cherokees. Vilified for years in the
Urbanite
as the architect of his team’s unending ineptitude, Finesse now hugely enjoyed its possession of first place in its division. That an ex-newspaperman, Xavier Thaxton, alias Count Geiger, was on hand to witness the latest chapter in the ongoing miracle only heightened his pleasure. The Cherokees were winning consistently. That proved that all those nitpicky sportswriters were ignorant shits. It had taken a decade, but at long last the verdict was in. Xavier was happy for the team’s fans, but utterly indifferent to Finesse’s stumblebum bliss. Bari, no baseball fan, was equally unmoved by the upturn in the team’s fortunes.
“The pennant clincher,” Finesse said. “When do you all think it’ll be? Care to lay odds on the day, Count?” From the start, Finesse had insisted on calling Xavier Count, perhaps because the title elevated Xavier to the lordly peerage but also subtly reminded him of his debt to Uncommon Comics. “Come on, you all, lay me a wager.”
“I have no idea,” Xavier said. “You wouldn’t make me bet an uneducated guess, would you?”
“Sportswriters do. All the time.
All
the time.” He appealed to Bari. “Come on then. Pick a day, Bari honey.”
“I hate baseball,” Bari said. “Even when it’s exciting, it’s boring. That isn’t nonsense, it’s true. The only reason I’m here, sir, is so that you and Xavier—”
“The Count,” Finesse corrected her.
“—you and the
Count
”—a half-apologetic smile for Xavier—“could meet.”
“And we have,” Finesse said. “A historical run-in. If you’re bored, Bari child, you may leave with no fear of bruising my feelings.”
“Oh no,” Bari said. “I’ll stay. What happens between you fellas could make up for all the crotch-tugging and tobacco-spitting down there.” She crossed her miniskirted legs, sipped at the murky amber orangeness of her Manhattan. She could go, but her departure would violate a crucial tenet of her Suthren sense of decorum (in a way that devouring Xavier erotically on the back seat of a taxicab, once upon time, had not). So she stayed, frowning on the between-innings antics of the team mascot, a costume-party Cherokee who led cheers from atop the dugout and made ritualistic fun of the umpires. Glancing sidelong across Finesse’s chair, Xavier saw that she was having a hard time maintaining her charade of aloof interest in the game. The tension of their reunion, he felt, also played a role in her distraction.
The Dodgers were at bat. Their first two hitters had grounded out. Now the third batter was up, his count stalled at 3-2 after a tedious run of foul tips. Bari, Xavier saw, had set her drink on the floor. Now she was hugging herself in the vast wingback, her knees drawn up and her head lolling against its cushion, like a sleepy waif at an overlong adult party. Seeing Bari that way, Finesse cupped her knee with one hand and winked at Xavier. Xavier tried to remp him. Was there lust in his apparently avuncular, but oddly ambiguous, behavior toward Bari? Or malice toward Xavier? Xavier got nothing back from him but waves of goodwill, as if his enjoyment of the game had drowned his deeper feelings in combers of psychic energy and a deafening tidal white noise.
Every inning, the Cherokees’ lead grew by a run or two. Soon, Finesse was talking earnestly to Xavier, leaning over to share dull confidences, humidifying Xavier’s space with a mist of exhaled scotch and the medicinal reek of throat lozenges. He congratulated Xavier for his recent heroics, including the sting in the Hemisphere (“Another gut-check win”), and he noted that on its evening news WSSX had attributed the arrest of the Environomics Unlimited con artist ultimately responsible for the disaster in Philippi to Xavier’s clever detective work.
“Plus you made a brave call from Stickney’s hell-hole apartment, the paper said.”
“Nothing brave about it, sir. The men in the front office posed about as much danger as a coven of piano teachers.”
“But you and yore little brother—uh, nephew—whatever he is—you fellas went into the Cellar. Right?”
“Yessir, but—”
“Yessirbutt, yessirbutt, yessirbutt.” Finesse’s singsong implied friendly mockery. “You did it. Went in there after dark. So yessirbutt
what?
Come on. Don’t false-modesty me, Count. You caught the guy who caused that radiation accident, right?”
It surprised Xavier how angry this badgering, disguised as admiring solicitude, made him. “Actually, the guy ‘ultimately responsible’ for the screw-up in Philippi may have been you, Mr. Finesse.”
Finesse’s lower jaw dropped like the hinge on a hot-dog bun.
“Mr. Stickney told me you were his boss,” Xavier went on. “He said you once personally handed him his pay.”
“That bastid,” Finesse said. “That two-bit stoolie bastid. A dadblamed liar. A dope fiend. A pokehead.” With each epithet, he flicked Xavier’s chin. “A blame-shifting crook. B’lieve a thing he says ’n’ you’re as sick as he is, Count.”
“He’s your dupe, sir, your designated fall guy.”
So big grew Finesse’s eyes that their green irises seemed primed to drop into the bags dissolutely pouching them. He looked over at Bari, still asleep. He noted the places of his bodyguards. Side by side at the leather wet bar, Linzy and Geoff were watching the game on television. In fact, Finesse was making a rapid 360-degree assessment of the situation. Xavier shifted into remp mode again and reflexively lifted his arm to ward off Finesse’s surging anger. Finesse seized Xavier’s forearm, levered him out of his chair, and shoved him into the skybox’s long tinted window. Xavier struck the shatter-resistant polymer and rebounded from it so that he faced not only Finesse but also the bodyguards and barmen. Geoff and Linzy tried to ignore what was going on, but the bodyguards drew down on Xavier with guns from under their coats—two CPAs with lethal Desert Eagle automatic .357 Magnums equipped with baffled suppressors.
“Hold it, Mark. Hold it, Bud.”
Retreating from his near-ballistic rage, Finesse put a finger to his lips and nodded at Bari, as if killing Xavier were forbidden because the noise would wake her. He wasn’t afraid of Xavier, the so-called living stalwart. And Bari . . . Bari was an overworked couturière in need of her “inspiration rest.”
“You had Stickney misdirect at least two radwaste shipments,” Xavier said, feeling a sweat curl slither down his spine inside the near skintight lamination of his Suit. “The Therac 4-J ended up in Silvanus County where—”
“Shhhhhh,” Finesse hissed, waving a hand and looking down at the playing field. “Damn you, son,
shhhhh!
”
“—twenty unsuspecting people where contaminated. Several years ago, you had Stickney and some other fool dump radium-implant charges on Deke Hazelton’s property, not far from the reactors at Plant VanMeter.”
“Sweet Jesus!” Finesse blurted.
A Dodger homer had triggered this outburst, not Xavier’s synopsis of Finesse’s alleged criminal activities. Two antlike figures in blue jogged from base to base ahead of the home-run hitter. On the Scoreboard in center, an animated caricature of the Cherokee pitcher shed sweat and tears. Finesse muttered obscenities.
“You’re ranking member on the cancer clinic’s board of directors,” Xavier said. “When you finally learned from Dr. Di Pasqua about Mrs. Roving’s trouble getting rid of Dr. Huguley’s old radwaste, you had someone telephone her posing as an officer in Environomics Unlimited. Arrangements were made, and Stickney dumped the stuff in Placer County, as near to Plant VanMeter as he could get without giving himself away to Con-Tri’s security force. The point of your—”
“Dog it! Can you b’lieve sech self-destruction? Morrison’s th’owing the bastids rabbit balls. Damn!” Beside Xavier at the window, he gazed down on the second Dodger in a row to park a slow change-up and to circle the bases. Despite these back-to-back homers in the top of the eighth, the Cherokees continued to lead, 10-5. Maddeningly, Finesse found the prospect of a Dodger comeback a bigger personal affront than he did Xavier’s reconstruction of his role in illegal waste dumping.
“Look,” Xavier said. “At the expense of a cancer clinic named for your mother, you made a small, almost meaningless profit. You put the general public in jeopardy—the Hazeltons and their neighbors, a drudge named Wilbon T. Stickney. In that first case, you must have wanted to make Plant VanMeter look like the guilty party if anyone ever found high levels of radiation in the area. Stickney’s effort was scientifically sloppy, but you wanted to get back at Con-Tri, not only for rebuffing Finesse Chemical’s takeover bid, but for unseating you from their board of directors.”
Finesse said, “Gratefully shut yo’ mouth.” (
Gratefully?
) “Garavaglia’s leaving Morrison in! Where do I get these eptless lineup shufflers anyway?”
Xavier remped the skybox. The two bodyguards—Mark and Bud—tensed, their baffled weapons trained on him. One man radiated a vague discontent with the other’s opinion of him; the second wanted to exult in the violent feedback of Xavier’s exploding skull. Jesus. As for Linzy and Geoff, they emitted only mild alarm. To see Xavier blown away would have horrified them, briefly, but the prospect of his murder wasn’t enough to make them cry “Stop!” or run for help.
And Bari? Xavier remped her too. Her dreams rippled past in vivid swatches, which wouldn’t piece together. She was recharging her psychic batteries, heedless of any danger. Xavier tugged Finesse’s sleeve. “Sir, forget the game. People from Silvanus County are dying from radiation poisoning. You triggered the chain of miscalculations that made them sick—
you
, nobody else, no matter how far away from the disposal process or its results you try to place yourself.”
“Damn you!” Finesse appealed to his bodyguards: “Stifle this fool.”
Bari stirred. The flickering of her eyelids was one interesting event in a swirl of developments. One bodyguard took a shooter’s stance. Across from him at the rear of the skybox, his counterpart hurried to offer cover, positioning himself to shoot at Xavier, who stood between the wingbacks. Finesse’s lips framed a jutting sneer. Xavier realized that some stalwartly aspect of himself was slowing time, as if he had given everyone a drug inducing a grand lethargy, every person in the skybox an ice statue thawing toward life. Xavier could have walked among them the way a curator strolls from statue to statue in a closed museum. A slug from a bodyguard’s pistol inched toward him, haloed by a red flash and a nimbus of almost motionless muzzle smoke: beautiful, scary.
Once, years ago, Xavier had seen a daredevil on a TV program called “Can You Believe It?” catch a slug in his teeth. The bullet had been fired from a stationary handgun about forty or fifty feet away, across a studio soundstage. The daredevil had stationed himself in front of the handgun, a plastic appliance in his mouth to absorb the bullet’s impact, and it hurtled between his lips to lodge in the unlikely vise of his teeth. This stunt had amazed Xavier. If it was real, there was no margin for error. If it was an elaborate put-on, to boost ratings, it betrayed its audience. Another problem was that the audience’s fascination—hell, even his own—had struck him as tawdry and voyeuresque, its credibility as entertainment tainted by the promise of the daredevil’s death. If the slug shattered the appliance in his mouth, it would either burst out the rear of his skull or rattle around in his cranium like a pea in a gourd.
Anyway, a drum roll had sounded. The gun fired. The daredevil’s braced head snapped back as if someone had slugged him. The camera zoomed in. There, between his teeth, more like a bitten-off pencil eraser than a deadly piece of ordnance, was the bullet whose flight he’d halted. The daredevil had braved death, defying the humdrum, the quotidian, the stodgy, and Xavier, although skeptical of what he had just seen, could not help admiring the man. . . .
The bullet coming toward Xavier looked like an underpowered fly, bumbling forward on a low rising curve. A second bullet emerged from the .357’s muzzle, the third right behind it, so that the other bodyguard, driven to it by his partner’s action, squeezed off two slow-motion shots of his own. Xavier sidestepped the first slug, which hit the bullet-proof window and ricocheted across the bunker to dimple Warwoman’s arm (on a poster), as the barmen dove like dreamily delayed albatrosses behind the bar. The second slug, which seemed to pick up speed as it flew, Xavier grabbed out of the air and hurled into the carpet. The other slugs, each buzzing faster than the one before, Xavier dodged or slapped aside.
