Mockingbird (21 page)

“This sounds like Sugar to me.”

“The sexiest thing a woman can do is to want sex,” Candy said.

“What about those other pictures? The violence.”

“That's . . . that's a little different. That's not about fucking, that's about jerking off. That's men not really wanting to think about their partner. Jerking off is about forbidden things. Screwing your boss, your secretary, your eighth grade teacher, your babysitter. Go a little to the fringe and you can include your sister. Five years ago anal sex was
it.
Now maybe anal sex is becoming routine, so the magazines have to find a new taboo.” She stopped and tapped a photo with one fingernail.

In a moment of shock I recognized it as essentially the same scene as the one in
damage
, only without the overtones of real violence. In the
Hustler
picture, two naked babes were on a beach. One of them had “broken the rules” and was being punished. She was tied to a post with a few loose loops of twine, arms above her head. Everything about the picture, from the stagey poses to the enormous breasts, had a jokey, let's-pretend feeling—but once again there were clothespins clamped to the victim's nipples. “I don't know exactly how far this is going to go,” Candy said thoughtfully. “Not too far, I hope. I mean this, this is just playing. This much can even be fun. But you look at the stuff underground or on the Internet, a lot of it is very rough. Really rough. Some of it is people playing with dominance and submission and getting a kick from it, but a lot of it is by men who truly hate women. Just hate us. Just hate the fact they can't fuck us at will. We're not people to them.”

“So what do you do?”

Candy shrugged. “Lots of people want to steal your car, too. I don't know. Watch your back.”

I finished my iced tea. “Candy?”

“Yeah?”

“I'm sorry about, about what you told me. I always wanted to look after you. Always. And I'm sorry that—”

“Hey! Here I am, mailing out wedding invitations. Gonna be an aunt soon. Tía Candy. No tragedy. You keep acting as if sex were just dirty, nothing else. I like it. And it's not the only thing in my life, okay?”

“Okay.”

She looked at me. “Jesus. I'm gonna start feeling like I didn't turn out good or something.”

I wanted to laugh at that but I couldn't quite manage it. “I think you turned out fine. Really. And you've been really good to me since this happened,” I said, pointing to my belly.

“Hey, Ms. Magnum cum laude. Someone has to look after
you
sometimes too, you know.” Candy scooped up her magazines and shoved them back in a drawer. Over her shoulder she said, “By the way, if it makes you feel any better, we're both going to make it through the hurricane okay.”

“Hurricane! You dreamed one?”

“Mm. Last night. At first I couldn't figure out what was going on, there was all this noise. We were in the garden at the house and it was a
mess:
all the flowers gone, the bananas hanging from the tree with their peels split open. Mud everywhere. Big cracked branch hanging in the middle of the garden. Then I realized the racket was chain saws. Zillions of 'em, all around us, like the morning after Alicia blew into town.”

I leaned back in my chair. Hurricane Alicia had been an early lesson in privateering and free enterprise gone wild; in the aftermath of the storm, ten-pound bags of ice had been going for ten or even twenty bucks as people tried desperately to save the contents of their freezers from going bad in the protracted power outages. Parts of the city had taken two full weeks to get power back. Things spoil fast in a Houston summer. “There has to be some way to make a profit out of this.”

“What?”

“Momma did it. She made money off the future. We've never really tried.”

Candy looked at me. “Momma paid for it, too.”

“Well, the Riders are in my head anyway, and I'm not getting a thing from it. Paying off Momma's debts again.”

“Toni, don't. You just . . . it's no good messing with that stuff. The future doesn't work that easily.”

“I need the money.”

She looked at me even longer.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh Lord.”

“What?”

“Mary Jo. A
hurricane,
Candy. It's going to bring her house down. Her roof will never take it. The water will be three feet deep on her living room floor.”

“Oh my God,” Candy said. “Then I guess you better make some money in a hurry.”

And thanks to Bill Friesen Jr. and his need to prove his manhood, I no longer had the comfortable job I had trained for years to earn.

The phone was ringing when I got back from Candy's place. “Toni Beauchamp speaking.”

“Toni?”

“Bill?” I said. “Bill Friesen Jr.?”

“Uh—”

“I was just thinking about you,” I said. “Not good thoughts.”

“Oh. Um, look, Toni, I guess you're still angry at me, but I need your help.”

“Then you are in one sorry predicament.”

“Please. I'm willing to pay.”

“You know I have my own consulting firm now.” As of exactly this second, in fact.

“Toni. I'm begging. Things have gone . . . Things aren't very good for me.” He sounded desperate. I could imagine his blinking round face, the bemused expression he wore whenever things started to go wrong, as if he could evade any responsibility by slipping into a doze while events careened around him.

I really did not wish to see him. “Always glad to help an old friend of the family. My rates are, ah”—pick something insane and impossible—“four hundred dollars an hour.”

“Fine. Is now a good time?”

I dropped the phone. “Damn, wait just . . .” I got it back onto my shoulder. “Did you hear me, Bill? I charge four hundred dollars an hour.”

“Yes, fine, look, it's just past one now, can you do a late lunch meeting today?”

I kept forgetting what life was like for the really rich. I kicked myself for not charging a thousand. “Actually, I've just finished with a client here.” Lord, Toni, you just lied again. You're getting more like Momma every day. “Lunch might not be a bad idea.”

“Oh, great.” The relief in his voice surprised me. “Where do you want to go?”

Since Bill would be buying, I tried to think of an obscenely expensive restaurant, but ended up asking to go to Pappadeux instead. It was moderate by Bill's standards—fifteen to twenty dollars for the entrees—but I worshipped their food. The Pappas brothers were Greek immigrants who came to Houston in the thirties and opened a restaurant. As time went by, they grew more and more successful, opening Pappasitos Tex-Mex Cantinas, Pappamia Italian food joints, Pappas Brothers Steak House (with a selection of fine cigars and a smoking room to enjoy them in), and Pappadeux cajun seafood restaurants. The one kind of food the Pappas family does not serve, anywhere, is Greek.

Pappadeux is always loud and full of junior executives and upwardly mobile twenty-somethings and an unfailingly pleasant “waitstaff.” It has a lot of cheerleader yuppie ambiance I usually don't like, but I forgive it for the sake of the food, which is unfailingly superb. Even their iced tea is superior.

By the time Bill and I arrived, there was a fifteen minute wait for a table in nonsmoking, so we sat on stools at the full service bar and studied the menus. Bill ordered a frozen strawberry daiquiri. I meant to be good and take only a glass of water. There was no point breaking my pregnancy diet, caffeine was a one-way ticket to a low birthweight baby. I was not my mother's daughter in this. I had some strength of character.

“Glass of iced tea,” I said. “And could you put a wedge of lime in that?”

How much caffeine could there be in one little glass of iced tea? Anyway, I promised myself I would make up for my weakness by feeling guilty and miserable the whole time I drank it.

Without booze—I certainly wasn't risking fetal alcohol syndrome—there was no way I could run up a truly horrendous tab for Bill, but at least I could order the day's special: grilled mahi-mahi in a sherry cream sauce with shrimp, scallops, and roasted pecans; served with fresh green beans and dirty rice. (Dirty rice, if you have not had it, is sort of like the shrimp fried rice you might get at a good Chinese restaurant, only instead of soy sauce, the dish is flavored with a particularly tasty sprinkle of mud. It is hard to explain why this is appetizing. Trust me.)

Bill ordered the same. His frozen daiquiri came. He poked at it with his straw and then looked up at me. “You were right. First we took a couple of hits on some currency speculations. Nothing major, but enough to hurt. We saw an opportunity in a biomedical company, way undervalued. We went for it. Two days later the FDA repealed their chief product.”

“What was it?”

“Something for hair loss. Didn't work. At first the FDA passed it because it didn't do any harm, you know. It wasn't toxic. Then it turned out the company was making false claims about the success rates of their treatment. This stuff was nothing. Nothing! Like insect repellent without the stinky stuff in it.”

“You invested in hair tonic, Bill?”

“The growth was just too good, Toni, really. Dollar growth, that is. Not hair. Obviously.” He ran his hand over his own hair. It was starting to recede, making his face look even rounder. He sucked up a little more daiquiri. “But it's the oil deal that has me strapped. Go ahead and say ‘I told you so' if you want.”

“I told you so.” One of the bartenders dropped a salver in front of us with a miniature baguette wrapped in white linen. I cut off a slice and slathered it in whipped butter. Fat is good for babies. Truly. You can look it up. “You're paying good money for my advice, Bill. Let's hear the details.”

They weren't pretty. About a year before, Jim Edmonds, a friend of Bill Sr.'s, had come to him trying to sell his company. He had invested heavily in a parcel of land in the Hill Country not too far from Fredericksburg. The geologicals indicated good potential for large oil reservoirs. The oil was deep in Ordovician-age rock, about 10,000 feet down. Edmonds drilled four test wells; two of them hit, one stripper well at about ten barrels a day, but one good one at three hundred and twenty. No gushers, but decent production. He was making very good money off a series of wells he had drilled in Cuba for a song, so he decided to expand both the Hill Country and Cuban fields into major plays. He had stepped up drilling on both sites, starting ten wells in the Hill Country play, when the President slapped an embargo on Cuba. Not only could he not get his already-bought new equipment into Cuba, he couldn't get the oil from his existing wells out of it. His loans came due and he found himself suddenly stretched out like a drumhead, effectively broke, even though he had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of functioning equipment sitting on perfectly good oil fields.

So he came to Bill Sr., who said he was no longer of an age to be interested. He was content to put his money in T-bills, dabble in the market, watch his mutual funds grow and play a lot of golf. Bill Jr. was more ambitious. “I wanted to
do
something for once. Dad was funny about it, not saying much . . . I thought maybe he was testing me. Seeing if I had the guts to make a move on my own.”

“So you bought the Hill Country play. The week Momma died, as I remember.”

“That's right.”

“How much?”

Bill looked down at the bar. “A hundred million.”

“What! We were only valued at sixty-five million, and that's with obligations of our own!” I noticed Friesen had become “our” company again in my speech. So much for Antoinette Beauchamp, lone wolf consultant.

“Work it out, Toni. He had started ten more wells. If seven of them hit, even at only a hundred barrels a day, we would make the money back plenty fast enough.”

“If,” I said. Bill looked away. “Okay. Tell me about the financing.”

“The hundred million for the company I borrowed at the bank.”

“Sixty-five of that secured? Eight percent interest?” I dug my calculator out of my purse.

“Seventy secured, eight percent, and simple interest, not compound.”

“Good deal. You did that part right, anyhow.”

“The banker was a friend of Dad's.”

“Ah. Go on.”

The other thirty million dollars of the bank loan had been unsecured at eleven percent, but against the company, meaning that, should things go sour, Friesen Investments would be the only party liable; Bill Jr. could walk away untouched.

“So much for buying the company. How about completing the new wells?”

Bill didn't answer at once. Our entrees arrived in a cloud of scented steam. I tried a mouthful of the mahi-mahi and closed my eyes in bliss. After three months of noodle soup, hamburger, and red beans and rice, the taste of restaurant food was overwhelming.

Bill still hadn't answered. I opened my eyes and looked at him. Then I stared. Then I squinted. “Oh. Oh, Bill. You put out a junk bond issue, didn't you?”