Lucky Leonardo (11 page)

The next breakthrough for Marge Blitz came because Susan H. Binh got greedy and impatient. Susan was smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and having her nails painted by her mother when Mulverne called. “Eugene's locked himself in his office,” Mulverne said. “He's making threats…”

Susan hung up. She pulled a long poke of smoke into the deepest part of her lungs, and slowly eased it out.

“What're you thinking?” her mother asked.

They sat at the kitchen table, with Oprah to keep them company. They were working on a marketing list, and what to do about schools if Susan stayed, and whether Susan should lighten up, with frosting and blond streaks. The kids were quiet with a video upstairs. “I'm thinking,” Susan said, “that Eugene doesn't have the balls to pull the trigger. He'll start weeping and apologizing. He's a total worm.”

“I always told you I didn't like him.”

“I should have listened.”

“He reminded me of your father.”

“Mom…”

Mom lit herself a cigarette, which she rarely did after her lumpectomy. “So what will happen?” she asked.

“I assume they'll fire him for being crazy, and he won't make any money, and he'll drive me crazy. If I'm really lucky he'll kill himself. I better call the lawyer.”

Drunkmiller wasn't available to take the call, but his round-faced associate, Bill Remington, was. He listened, then spoke. “Mrs. Binh,” he said, “I'll have to review this with Mr. Drunkmiller.”

Which annoyed Susan. “I got a situation going here,” she said, “and I want to know if I'm supposed to do something. I'm not calling for a fancy twenty-page brief to frame on my wall. I need strategy.”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Binh. I can't think of anything else for you to do, or for us to do, this afternoon. We served the restraining order…”

“Yes.”

“You emptied the bank account…”

“Yes.”

“You changed the locks?”

“Yes.”

“Your children are with you and safe?”

“Yes.”

“I could tell you to sell your DeltaTek stock because it sounds like your husband is about to make it crash, but that would probably violate…”

“I don't own any DeltaTek stock.”

“…securities laws.”

“Besides, I don't think he'll do it, so if anything the stock won't go down, it'll…”

“I'm sorry,” Remington said. “I forgot he sold the options, and that you don't own any stock.”

“I don't own any stock.”

“So I say sit tight. You're safe. Your children are safe. I'll talk to Mr. Drunkmiller as soon as he's available and see if he has any other ideas.”

“Great.” She hung up.

“So?” her mother asked.

“So?” she replied. “These men are clowns.”

For a couple of years she'd been nurturing a rainy day account at Charles Schwab—in her maiden name, jointly with her mother, 1099s sent to her mother—depositing whatever nickels, dimes, twenty dollar bills and expense reimbursement checks she could rescue from absent-minded Eugene's pockets. Trusting her instincts about his need to fail, his destiny to fail, and without bothering to ask technical questions about trends, volume, news or whatever, she bought three hundred shares of DeltaTek stock from this account at about the same time Eugene hit the glass wall running, and felt very good about it. She did. He was unconscious, and couldn't feel a thing.

Marge Blitz sent out an investigator to talk with Susan's mother, who was the buyer of record, who wasn't prepared with an alibi and started talking ragtime, that she was drinking heavily, constantly, always drinking and couldn't remember a thing. The investigator let her walk the plank until there was nothing under her feet but air, and smirked when she panicked and changed her story to implicate her daughter.

In turn Susan, with the benefit of advance notice and Drunkmiller's lawyerly manipulation of the facts, argued that she bought the stock because of insider marital information not insider corporate information. “I knew my husband was a loser,” she said under oath. “That's no crime.”

“I tend to agree with her,” Marge Blitz told Kurt Knight over drinks in her office at the end of the day.

Helen, Chrissie's co-worker at Starbucks, had secrets, including that she was greenly jealous of Chrissie's good fortune in hooking Dr. Lenny, and curious as to how he treated her in their private times. At ten o'clock on the night Chrissie and Dr. Lenny were startled by the ring of the telephone and the scary news from Barbara about Harvey, Helen was restless and pacing her small studio apartment in her flannel pajamas and floppy slippers, not ready to call it a night.

She moved from her refrigerator to her television seat to her unmade bed to the mirror above the bathroom sink to watch her pimple grow, sometimes in under a minute, longer if she paused at one of the stations, like if she worked on the pimple, or caught a scene from the movie, or plopped herself on top of her turmoiled bedsheets and stroked her hair, but she could not obtain respite from the neediness, from the queer feeling of heat rising in her body. “This,” she said, “is how the werewolf feels when he catches sight of the full moon, and the fur spreads on his hands and up his arms. I think I need a night out.”

She knew how Chrissie reacted to sounds in the night, because she coaxed the story out of Chrissie's lips little by little between lattes and cappuccinos, joking it up, urging her to embroider and expand and touch the spot one more time, and because on nights when there was no choice Helen watched it happen in real time from the dark side of the glass.

———

Phantoms should be spared the indignity of public transportation, Helen observed as the street car rattled along the outbound track, and she stood as far away from her late-night fellow travelers, an old man and a fat lady seated near the front, as space would permit. She was wearing her action clothes, her black cat-woman costume, which she concealed for the public part of her commute beneath a hooded cloak which she stowed in her pouch when she stepped back into the night.

She assumed the position against the bare-branched apple tree in the middle of Dr. Lenny's backyard, pushing back against the trunk with her legs spread and her hands free, with a clear view into the room. There was a modicum of satisfaction just being there, breathing the cold night air and observing the familiar room, like the ancient shepherd, the one who with his sheep asleep and endless time on his hands, identified the constellations, not the one who cried wolf. Mythic and mystic, and dangerous since she entered without a ticket.
No plausible deniability here.

She strummed the first familiar notes of her sonata. Pleased with herself. Pleased by her music. Anything more would be gravy.

And on this special night, like when a new planet shoots across the shepherd's sky, Helen found herself drenched in gravy. A light went on in the room. Chrissie entered, and opened the window, and freely disrobed. Dr. Lenny appeared, disappeared, appeared again, amorously circling the naked Chrissie, who had a rounder and fuller chest than one might have expected from such a slender girl, and a brazen face in lieu of her daily innocence. Then the heavens parted and the gravy poured down, as Chrissie spread herself against the glass, pink and lush as a whore, her eyes wide open and staring into the darkness—staring directly at invisible Helen dressed as cat woman—while Dr. Lenny pumped his heart out from behind.

When it was over Helen slumped down to the base of the tree, ass to cold ground, drained and ashamed and satisfied, and watched Chrissie and Dr. Lenny collect themselves and make their way to bed. The light went off. There was silence, or silence from the room, as Helen started to think she was hearing things in the air above her, like a mouse scratching in the attic, sporadic, indistinct, irritating, unlikely to be the wind on this still night. At first she didn't want to give it attention, like it was an alarm clock going off in the middle of a deep and absorbing dream, but as it continued to intrude and was after a few more minutes undeniably a thing in the air above her head she leapt to the insane possibility of Roger LaFlamme, Chrissie's high-school love and the father of Chrissie's nighttime demons. “Roger?” Helen asked softly into the air.

Then the telephone rang inside the room, Barbara's call about Harvey. The ring reverberated into the surrounding darkness, and caused unbalance in the apple tree because branches started to shake, and snap and crack, followed by a percussion of thumps and bumps directly above Helen's head, each closer and louder like the sky was falling. She had only enough time to shield herself with her arms as a body dropped out of the tree and landed with a thud on the cold ground next to her. Before she could breathe, scream, or figure out what had just happened the body bounced to life and bolted madly out of the yard.

Next morning at Starbucks a weary Chrissie told a weary Helen about Harvey's disappearance and the grim fears that were in the air. The news froze Helen. “Harvey used to live at Dr. Lenny's house?” she asked.

“Yuh.”

“He's like thirteen years old?”

“Yuh.”

Helen thought she had news about Harvey—that he was alive and running as of midnight last night—but to give it up would require an explanation she was not prepared to provide. “Oh my God,” she said.

Brockleman was no naïf. He understood that wins and losses are rarely based exclusively on merit, that tactics, pressure, timing, cunning, bluff, guts, muscle, a big bankroll, and other manly arts often make the difference. He understood that fairness, like any object of desire, is in the eye of the beholder. He understood that dogs eat dogs, and had eaten a few himself. But he was still so shocked when Marge Blitz confronted him in Janet's kitchen with accusations of illicit trading that he spit up pepperoni pizza all over Selma Floyd's affidavit.

Marge had given Selma the blue plate special, with extra sauce, stopping her in the street on her lunch break with a posse of trench coats who flashed badges and waved tape recorders and whisked her off to a sequestered room where she was denied telephone access, and accompanied to the toilet, and threatened with the maximum sentence allowed by law unless she confessed during her next breath. “Sign this affidavit, Selma,” Marge urged, “and you're free to leave, no strings attached.”

Selma read the affidavit. It said that she directly or indirectly caused to be purchased shares of stock in DeltaTek Corporation on the basis of knowledge and information which was not available to the trading public for the direct or indirect benefit of William T. Brockleman, her boss and the person to whom she reported in her place of employment, said Brockleman being an attorney at law in active representation of said DeltaTek at said time and privy to certain knowledge and information not available to the trading public and which said he by telephonic transmission caused to be delivered to said her for the purpose of effectuating said purchase, intending thereby to profit therefrom and to aid and abet said her to so profit therefrom, like a greedy pig; and on and on with the backing and filling, sliding and gliding, dancing and prancing with words that circled around and around until they felt faint and needed a glass of water and a cold compress before they could finish their sentence, and further providing, despite the obvious circumstances to the contrary, that she was signing as her free act and deed without coercion, duress, or a gun to her head, hand held, legally licensed, or otherwise, and that she knowingly, intentionally, and happily to a point past delirious waived the right, if any, now or in the hereafter, to be represented by counsel in connection with signing this fair and true testament, so help me God.

They placed a pen in Selma's hand, and moved her hand to the front of the dotted line, and with steady unrelenting pressure urged her to do the right thing and get on with the rest of her life. “But,” she said, “Mr. Brockleman didn't know.”

“What?” they replied. “Are you saying you knew and he didn't?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know or you don't know if he knew you knew?

“I…”

“Or you don't know if you knew he knew you knew?”

“No, I knew.”

“You knew?”

“I knew he didn't know.”

“If you knew he didn't know then you knew.”

“How do you know I knew?”

“We know.”

“I want to speak to a lawyer.”

“We're lawyers.”

Selma had worked with Brockleman for more than five years. He treated her fairly, decently, as a person, as a friend more or less, gave her nice holiday gifts, joked with her, took her out to lunch during National Secretary's Week, didn't often blame her for his own fuck-ups, didn't often hover over her work station, and when he did hover he didn't brush against her chest, or touch her hair, or fart in her face, or speak to her like she was dumb.

She liked him. She liked him a lot. So that even if the affidavit confessing his guilt were true, which it wasn't, it would be horribly disloyal for her to sign.

What happened was that last winter she met a cute rock of a guy from Dallas on a singles cruise to Cancun who told her over drinks and laughs that he would pay for useful stock information, and it would be fun and risk-free, like sex with him if she should have an interest. Which she didn't at first, because he seemed too full of himself for her refined taste, but under the influence of nonstop calypso and rum and an enormous moon she changed and/or lost her mind. Back on dry land she emailed him a couple of times with information that crossed her desk, and considered it a pretty successful relationship. He sent her roses. They planned to re-cruise.

Marge, using the woman's intuition which she kept hidden at the back of her spice rack, sweetened the pot by saying that if Selma signed, they'd go easy on the boy from Dallas as well. “But we have to know right now,” she said. Like she was selling used cars on commission and desperate for the sale. Like she was playing good cop/bad cop by talking out of both sides of her mouth.

Even still, Selma could not believe what she did after she did it. Neither could Brockleman, who sprayed her affidavit with a burst of pepperoni pizza, and roared the roar of the falsely accused, vowing to fight this calumny to his dying breath. Which didn't give him much time. About half an hour.