Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) (18 page)

“How about any of the people you do business with? Your cat-meat man—”

“No. How do
you
know about cat-meat men?”

“Your stocker?”

“No. Have you been visiting the library?”

“Do you know anyone at
all
with a Spanish accent?”

“What’s all this about a Spanish accent?”

“
Do
you?”

“Well, no. Well,
yes
.”

“Who?”

“We used to have a Mexican cook...oh, ten, twelve years ago, I guess.”

“Where is he now?”

“He went back to California.”

“Anybody else?”

“Not that I can think of. This isn’t Miami, you know.”

She drained what was left in her glass. I thought she might go to the bar for another refill. Instead, she put the glass down and said, “I’m getting tired, aren’t you?”

I looked at her.

“Why don’t we go to bed?” she said.

A smile touched her mouth. She arched one eyebrow.

“Why don’t we?” I said.

5

W
E WERE
both dressed and out of the house by a quarter to nine the next morning, a scant fifteen minutes before Lottie and Dottie were certain to arrive. Lottie and Dottie were the two women who came to clean my house and do my laundry every Tuesday and Thursday. I called them the Speed Queens because, rather than hourly payment, we had settled on a flat weekly rate, which gave them license to go through the house like a pair of cyclones. They usually arrived at nine, by which time I was normally at the office. That was why I’d given them a key.

The widow lady next door was out picking oranges when Veronica and I came out and walked to the Porsche. The widow lady, whose name was Mrs. Martindale, was forty-seven years old, ten years younger than Veronica. Her husband had died of a heart attack at the age of fifty. She told me that this was because he’d refused to drink the orange juice she squeezed fresh each morning from the oranges she picked in her own modest citrus grove of two trees. She was constantly inviting me in for fresh-squeezed
orange juice. I was constantly finding excuses. She looked at us now, doubtlessly reflecting on the early morning hour, reflecting as well on the white nylon cocktail sheath and high-heeled slippers Veronica was wearing. I could just imagine what thoughts would be racing through her mind as she squeezed her oranges this morning.

I opened the door on the driver’s side of the car. Veronica climbed in. I had held her naked in my arms the night before, but I could not resist looking at her legs now as she slid in behind the wheel. She grinned in appreciation. I called a cheery good morning to Mrs. Martindale, went around to the other side of the Porsche, and got in.

“Where to?” Veronica asked, and turned the ignition key.

“My office, please,” I said. “Corner of Heron and Vaughan.”

She backed the car out of the driveway. Mrs. Martindale was still watching us. I waved as we went by her house. I was hoping she’d realize Veronica was ten years older than she was. I was full of praise for older women this morning.

“When am I going to see you again?” Veronica asked.

“Tonight?”

“Greedy man,” she said, and smiled. “What time?”

She had smiled a lot last night, too. I had kissed the smile off her mouth more times than I could remember. She had told me that people of her generation were very good kissers. This was because when she was growing up (and here she smiled wickedly), young girls weren’t even allowed to attend the weekly chariot races. “Going all the way” was unthought of back then, when everyone was a vestal virgin, and so there’d been a lot of kissing. Kissing at parties, kissing in the back seats of automobiles, kissing at the movies, kissing on the beach or in the park, kissing whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself, which seemed to be quite often. The people of her generation had had a
lot of practice kissing. They were experts at kissing. The trouble was that when they grew out of their teens, they
still
thought kissing was all there was to it. It had taken her a long while to learn that kissing, even
good
kissing—even
soul
kissing, which she’d learned when she was seventeen—wasn’t the be-all and the end-all of sex.

“I was a virgin when I married Drew,” she said, “can you imagine? Twenty-seven years old and a
virgin
!
A
very good kisser, yes—do you like the way I kiss, Matthew?—but
oh
, such a late bloomer.”

It was a well-known fact, I told her teasingly, that women reached the peak of their sexual prowess at the age of thirty-two, and that after that it was all downhill. “Late bloomer,” she said, and pounced on me again. We had pounced on each other a lot last night. When the alarm woke me at eight, I was exhausted. Veronica was still asleep, lying on her back, the sheet pulled to just below her breasts, one arm bent, her hand lying palm upward on the pillow above her head. She looked serene and radiantly beautiful and completely irresistible—but the Speed Queens were due at nine.

I touched her cheek gently.

“Mm,” she said.

“Veronica?”

“Mm?”

“My cleaning women are on the way.”

“That’s right,” she said, and rolled over, turning her back to me.

“We have to get up,” I said.

“Okay.”

“Veronica?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We really do have to get up.”

She rolled over again, opened her eyes, and looked at me in surprise. “Matthew?” she said, and grinned, and snuggled into my arms. “Oh, good
morning
,” she said, and kissed me, and despite the imminent arrival of the wondrous whirlwinds, we lost ourselves completely for the next twenty minutes.

I kept watching her as she maneuvered the Porsche through the early-morning traffic.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“I’m dying to kiss you.”

“The next light.”

I kissed her at the next light. I kissed her at the light after that.

“We’ll get arrested,” she said.

I put my hand on her knee.

“
Matth
-yew,” she warned.

I began sliding my hand up under her dress.

“Matthew!” she said sharply, and closed her thighs on my hand, and looked swiftly at the traffic on her right and left. She was blushing. “Where do I turn off?” she asked, flustered.

“Where are you going after you drop me?”

“To my chiropractor,” she said, and turned to smile at me. “You weren’t very good for my back, Matthew.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“Why?” she said, surprised.

“I don’t want to leave you yet.”

“Don’t be silly, you’ll be seeing me tonight.”

“What time did we say?”

“We didn’t. How’s eight o’clock?”

“Why so late?”

“Seven?”

“Make it six. No, wait, I have to see Bloom at five.”

“I’ll be there at seven-thirty.”

“Too long to be apart,” I said. “I’m coming with you to your chiropractor.”

His office was on Main Street, a white cinder-block structure wedged between a store selling jeans and a store selling inexpensive kitchenware. A large plastic chiropractic symbol hung on the wall beside a mustard-yellow entrance door; it looked very much like a hybrid between a medical caduceus and a representation of Christ hanging on the cross. The naked man depicted, however, had no beard and no crown of thorns and his arms were spread wide against a pair of oversized wings. In place of the glow of light that normally shimmered above Jesus’ head, the word
HEALTH
was lettered on a trailing banner that curved serpentinely behind the man’s body and then emerged below his hips to cover his groin with the word
CHIROPRACTIC
. Hanging horizontally and slightly to the right of the figure was a white plastic sign lettered in blue with the words
CHIROPRACTIC CLINIC
. Whenever anyone talked about reviving Calusa’s downtown area, they had in mind these one-story cinder-block buildings that lined Main Street like dwarfed Apache pueblos, most of them painted a mildewing white, some of them painted a mildewing pink, which was infinitely worse.

“I hope you like back-issue magazines,” Veronica said, and pushed open the yellow door. I followed her into a small reception area furnished with a green metal desk and several padded green metal chairs. The cinder-block walls were painted the same white as the exterior walls. A young girl in a white blouse and a black skirt sat behind the desk. She looked up as we came in. The door on this side, I noticed, was painted green, to match the beautiful furniture. There was a calendar advertising feed and grain hanging on one of the walls. Its illustration showed a farm girl in ragged cutoff jeans, a red blouse knotted under her full breasts, a straw hat angled back on her head, a wide grin around a piece of hay tilted rakishly in her mouth. The slogan read
FATTEN ’EM
WITH SIMMONS FEED AND GRAIN
, but the only reference to cattle was a minuscule cow standing against a wooden fence in the far background. This was August, but the calendar had not yet been turned from the month of July. Aside from the calendar, nothing else hung on the spartan white walls.

“I’m Mrs. McKinney,” Veronica said. “I was just passing by. Do you think he can take me?”

“Oh,” the girl said. “You don’t have an appointment?”

“No,” she said.

“Oh, then this is going to be
complicated
,” she said, fluttering her hands aimlessly in the air and conveying the distinct impression that anything more complicated than “run, Spot, run” would naturally be overwhelming to a mere country girl. She studied the buttons on the base of her phone as though they were numbered in Sanskrit, and then—with a bewildered look on her face—pushed down boldly on one of them. “Doctor?” she said into the phone, seemingly surprised that her haphazard stab had produced
any
result at all. “There’s somebody here doesn’t have an appointment. Her name—” She looked at Veronica, her eyes widening in panic. “What was your name again, ma’am?” she asked. “McDonald, did you say?”

“McKinney,” Veronica said.

“I thought you said McDonald.”

“No, McKinney. I’m a regular patient here, the doctor knows...”

“Well, let’s not get into
that
,” the girl said, and rolled her eyes. “Her name’s McDonald,” she said into the phone, “I mean
McKinney
.” She looked at Veronica again. “Phew, what a name,” she said. Into the phone she said, “Shall I send her in or what?”

She listened for a moment, cautiously replaced the receiver on its cradle, and then said, “You can go right in, Mrs. McKinley. Through the door there, and then...”

“I know the way,” Veronica said. “And it’s McKinney. Veronica McKinney.”

“Yeah,” the girl said. “Right.”

Veronica winked at me and disappeared through another green door, on the opposite wall. The girl looked in surprise at her electric typewriter, as if discovering that a Martian spaceship had landed on her desk. Placing both hands carefully on the keyboard, she began moving her fingers. Nothing happened. Either to herself or to me, she said, “You have to turn it on first.” She looked for the on-off switch. She looked on the right of the typewriter and then on the left. She lifted the typewriter and looked under it. She found the switch, at last, on the left-hand side of the machine, near the back. She was reaching to turn it on when her eyes opened wide and she said, “Oh!” and looked at me and said, “What’s
your
name?”

“Hope,” I said.

“Come on, that’s a
girl’s
name,” she said.

“It’s my last name.”

“Then what’s your
first
name?”

“Matthew.”

“Do you have an appointment, Mr. Matthews?”

“No, I’m waiting for—”

“Did you want to see the doctor?”

“No,” I said.

“Then why are you here?”

“I’m with Mrs. McKinney,” I said.

“Oh, right,” she said. “Well, have a seat, okay?” She looked at the typewriter. She looked up at me again, bewildered. “Where’d that switch go?” she said, and began searching for it all over again.

The door to the inner office opened not ten minutes later. Veronica, in white and in mid-conversation, came through into the white reception area, followed by a man who was also dressed in white. For a moment it looked like a sudden snowstorm.

“—ever you did, it feels much better already,” Veronica said.

The man nodded, pleased. He was tall and burly, with an olive complexion that seemed deeper against the white of his tunic. His eyes were brown. There was a shaggy black mustache under his nose.

“Matthew,” she said, “I’d like you to meet Calusa’s miracle worker. If ever you’ve got a muscle that refuses to behave, you just call him. Dr. Alvarez—Matthew Hope.”

“Nice to mee’ you,” Alvarez said, with an accent I could have spread on a tostada.

I called Bloom the moment I was in my office.

I told him that Veronica McKinney’s chiropractor had a Spanish accent.

He said, “Yeah?”

I reminded him that Sunny McKinney had overheard her brother in conversation with a man who had a Spanish accent and that—