Natural Causes

Natural Causes
Jonathan
Valin

1983

To
Katherine

Chapters: 
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
                
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
                
38
39
40
41
42
 
 

1

I was trying to install an air conditioner in my
office window when a short, bearded man in a three-piece suit walked
into the room.

"I'll just be a minute," I said, waving a
Phillips screwdriver at him. "Have a seat."

"Take your time," the man said in a jovial
voice. He walked over to one of the captain's chairs by the desk and
sat down. "I don't know how you could get by without one in this
heat."

"That's what I told myself this morning." I
fastened the last two screws in the casement, plugged the thing in,
and turned it on. The air conditioner shuddered once then began to
chug and hum noisily. A stream of warm, fetid air came pouring out
the vents. I sniffed at it and frowned.

"It takes awhile for the coolant to circulate,"
the man said with amusement.

"Yeah?" One of the windowpanes began to
shake. "What about the noise?"

He shrugged. "That you'll have to live with."

I sat down behind the desk, wiped my palm on my pants
leg, and held out a hand. "Harry Stoner, part-time electrician."

"Jack Moon," the man said, shaking hands.
He pulled a card out of his coat pocket and held it up in front of
me, like a cop flashing his buzzer. His name was printed on it above
a familiar corporate insignia. I stared at the emblem for a second;
the company had been in the papers a good deal that summer, because
of a rather nasty class action suit filed against it. But I would
have recognized the logo anyway--it was embossed on every bar of soap
I'd ever bought.

"You work for those bad folks at United
American," I said.

"Ha, ha," he said distinctly. He laid the
card on my desk. "Keep it. The way things are going it may
become a valuable charm, like the hexes on Pennsylvania Dutch
farmhouses."

I smiled at him. "It can't be that bad."

"A thousand letters a day after the 'Clean &
Fluffy' fiasco. Boycotts all over the Bible Belt. It's bad."

"I read where you'd taken some legal action of
your own."

He rubbed the nape of his neck. "Yeah, well, we
didn't have a choice. It turned out that a couple of competitors were
spreading the rumor that 'Clean & Fluffy' was the work of
communist conspirators. It seemed to help their business."

"Is that what you're here about? Your
reputation?" I said, picking up the card.

"Nope." Moon plucked a pair of turtleshell
glasses from his jacket, flipped them open like a gravity knife, and
stuck them firmly on his nose. The glasses were round and thick;
Moon's face was round and thick, swarthy and acne-scarred above a
curly black beard. He looked a little like a Hassidic rabbi in
mufti--small, genial, with something lively and clever in his dark
brown eyes. "United wants to take you to lunch, Mr. Stoner."

"They do, do they?"

"They do." He reached into his pocket again
and pulled out a folded document. "But first there's the little
matter of selling us your soul. It's just a formality. Sign at the
bottom."

I examined the document. It was an agreement not to
discuss United's business with any other company or agency. "I
have a standard contract of my own," I said, as I scanned the
fine print.
"I'm sure you do," Jack
Moon said pleasantly. "And we will be happy to sign one of your
contracts after you've signed ours."

"Yeah? What's this about?"

Moon put a finger to his
lips. "It's a secret," he said.

***

We went to lunch--to the Maisonette, no less.

"As long as United is paying, why not?"
Moon said over a bowl of vichysoisse. "You'll find that we're a
very easy company to get along with."

"Is that true?"

"No," he said, spooning the soup into his
Cupid's-bow mouth. "I lied. I'm supposed to say that to put you
off your guard."

"Are you always so agreeable?"

"Always," he said and slurped the soup.
When he was finished, he laid the spoon gently on the saucer, propped
his elbows on the damascene tablecloth, and locked his hands beneath
his chin. "I like you, Harry," he said. "You're a real
Cincinnati square." He flipped his pinkies out and drew a square
in the air.

"I thought you guys were the ones with the
reputations for being squares."

"Oh, we are," Moon said. "At least,
most of us are. Like our competition says, ninety-nine and forty-four
one hundredths percent pure."

"I guess you fall into that other fifty-six
hundredths percent."

He laughed. "What can I tell you?" he said,
unlocking his hands and opening them expansively. "It's a job
and I was tired of living the life of a starving actor."

"You were an actor?"

"You don't think I was born like this, do you?"
he said, pinching the lapel of his suit. "Sure I was an actor.
Off-Broadway in New York. I wasn't a very good actor, but I enjoyed
the work."

"Then why did you stop?"

"Got married, had a kid, got civilized, I
guess." Moon looked uneasily at the cart of seafoods that a
waiter had rolled up to our table. "A man's got to eat, doesn't
he? And for a little guy I've got a big appetite."

Moon dug into a cold lobster tail. "I'm always
hungry," he said, as he chewed. "Only it's the wrong kind
of hunger. That's why I'm living here, instead of in New York. That's
why I didn't make it as an actor."

"Look on the bright side--that's probably why
United hired you."

"Yeah," he said with a nod. "But they
made a mistake. I'm not United material."

He certainly didn't seem to be, from what I knew
about the company. But then I didn't know much. For an organization
that owned most of the city and a good deal of the rest of the world,
United American was a remarkably low-profile outfit. Their products
were visible everywhere; the inner workings of the soap factory were
veiled in bubbles. My impression of the corporation, before I'd met
Moon, was of one vast minion of sedate, gray-suited, clean-shaven,
clean-living men, working in ecumenical harmony--like a band of
angels or the C.I.A.

"What do you do at United?" I asked him.

"Sell soap. What do you think?" He patted
his lips with a linen napkin and called for the check. "I'm in
U.A. Teleproducts, which is a separate corporation from the brands
manufacturers. We make the shows that sell the soap."

"Soap operas?" I said.

"We prefer to call them daytime dramas. I'm the
executive producer on one of the shows--a little number called
'Phoenix.' "

"You guys are going to run out of sunbelt
boomtowns one of these days," I said.

"Oh, hell, we might as well have called it
'Little Rock' for all it has to do with the sunbelt. We were just
looking for a typical American city, full of alcoholics, nymphos,
drug addicts, bitches, and twins."

"Twins?" I said.

"Always," Jack Moon said as he signed the
check. "Everyone in soap opera has a twin. In fact, someone
ought to write a thesis on it. You know, the doppleganger in the
American Southwest or the theory of parallel universes on daytime
television. We've got to have twins, in case we kill the wrong
character off and the audience wants us to bring him back."

"I see."

"Well," Moon said, "are you ready to
sign now?"

I laughed. "Hell, why not?"

"Dandy," he said, rubbing his hands
together. "Then we can go talk to the big boy about our little
problem."

"And what problem is that?"

Moon stood up. "I think I'd better let Frank
tell you," he said. "He's so much more impressive and
dignified."
 

2

We walked down Ninth Street to United American
headquarters. It was a large, ugly, unadventurous building, Spartan
in its plainness.

"From Bauhaus to outhouse," Jack Moon said,
staring up at the unadorned rows of windows. "The place looks
like a giant tool shed."

"At least it's modest," I said, thinking of
the chrome and glass extravaganzas uptown.

"Oh, it's modest, all right. It's modest the way
Orson Welles was modest when he stuck his name at the end of the
credits in Citizen Kane. This is the height of immodesty, man.
Presbyterian chic."

We walked in through the Ninth Street entrance, past
a homely, middle-aged receptionist, over to a bank of elevators. The
place really was as conspicuously unadorned as a Presbyterian
church--no logos, no paintings. Just plainly lettered signs and
arrows and a couple of scraggly rubber trees parked in empty corners.

"See what I mean?" Moon whispered. "This
is a megabillion dollar corporation and the reception area looks
like a suburban bank."

"Why did they do it this way?"

"They don't want anyone to get the idea that
they're not just plain folks," Jack said. "It's their idea
of unpretentious."

The elevator smelled like a fresh roll of toilet
paper. When I asked Moon why, he said, "It's the brands. They're
located on the lower floors and they've got product displays in each
of the lobbies. What you're smelling is the combined essence of
U.A.--a little toilet tissue, a dab of laundry soap, a touch of bath
oil beads. It's the sweet smell of cleanliness, Harry, the very odor
of sanctity."

When we got up to the tenth floor, Jack gave me a
push in the small of the back and said, "You're on your own,
now, fella."

"Where are you headed?"

"Oh, I'll be around, if I'm needed. You just go
over to the secretary, Jodie, and tell her you're here to talk with
Frank Glendora. I'll see you afterward. I've got the terrible feeling
I'm going to be appointed tour guide for this trip."

He wandered off down the carpeted hallway and I
walked over to the reception booth, where a young woman with teased
red hair was reading a copy of Soap Opera Digest. She looked up at me
and her eyes got big.

"God!" she said, holding the magazine to
her mouth. "You're so large!" She tittered like Goldie
Hawn. "I mean, are you a football player or what?"

"I'm a private detective."

"God!" she said again and shook her head in
disbelief.

Jodie was apparently one of those secretaries who
need a secretary of their own--cute but rattlebrained. I gave her my
name and told her who I wanted to see.

"Oh, God, Mr. Glendora," she said. "Is
he in trouble or something?"

"I don't think so," I said.

The girl pressed a buzzer on an intercom and said,
"Mr. Stoner to see you."

"Send him in," a man said.

"It's at the end of the hall to your right,"
Jodie said.

I started slowly down a corridor lined with office
doors, looked back at Jodie, who was craning her neck to watch me,
then picked up my pace. Toward the end of the hall, I had to step
around a couple of guys in vests, who were talking about the contents
of a folder that one of them was cradling in his arms. They lowered
their voices as I got near them and stopped talking as I passed by,
eyeing me with something akin to the wonder in Jodie the Secretary's
voice. I glanced at my shirtfront to see if I'd left a button undone
or spattered myself with cocktail sauce. But I was presentable. It
wasn't really me, I decided; it was the novelty of a stranger in
town.