The Reckoning (9 page)

A very pissed-off Brenda accosted him upon his return to the office.

“That woman is driving me nuts,” she screeched. “You have to do something about her.”

Royce scowled. “What now?”

“She’s called three times already this morning, demanding to have lunch with you. Such arrogance, too. Real bitchy. I finally told her about your lunch in Annapolis.”

Lunch in Annapolis? He checked his watch, suddenly remembering his noon appointment with Cal at the Middleton Tavern. If he left right now and stepped on it, he’d only be ten minutes late.

“Gotta go,” he told her and turned to leave.

“Aren’t you forgetting something, Royce?”

She was holding up two copies of his proposal to the Old Dominion Brewing Company. He snatched the documents from her and stuffed them into his briefcase. On his way out the door, he promised to “take care of Monica” when he returned that afternoon.

Speeding down the Governor Ritchie Highway towards Annapolis, he chastised himself for not getting the letter out to Monica. At the very least, he should have gotten to the office early, before going to Craig’s school, and composed the letter for Brenda to type and messenger out. Now breaking off the business relationship was going to be messy.

He laughed. Hell, it was already messy.

A business of his own, an opportunity to help good people who deserved it, a stable family life—that’s all he wanted. Was that too much to ask for? Why was all this craziness happening to him now?

The Ritchie Highway became Highway 450 and he crossed the Severn River, where he caught scenic glimpses of the U.S. Naval Academy and Chesapeake Bay. Slower paced and quaint, Annapolis reminded him of Santa Barbara. He turned off at Rowe Boulevard and reached the Middleton Tavern at twelve-forty-five.

Calvin Jeffries was mellow about Royce’s tardiness, standing and welcoming the business consultant with a broad grin, a palm-crushing handshake and a booming, “I thought maybe some of Coors’ folks had waylaid you.”

“No chance,” he assured him. “I’m so sorry, Cal. Really.”

Royce had met the Old Dominion Brewery executive only once before, so he still found the man’s mountainous bulk unsettling. Cal had been a linebacker at the University of Colorado back in the late sixties, when CU Buff football was at the very bottom of the heap. After college he’d gone to work for Coors in Golden, Colorado, and gotten even bigger. Working for a company that maintained free beer dispensers in its employee dining rooms hadn’t helped.

About a year ago, Jeffries joined Old Dominion in Virginia.

Royce let Cal maneuver his body back into his chair before taking his own seat at the table.

“I had a meeting at my stepson’s school,” he said by way of explanation. “School principals aren’t attuned to the demands of the business world, I’m afraid.”

“Your boy okay?”

“Oh, yeah. Just a typical fifth-grader, with the typical fifth-grader’s problems.”

Cal grinned again. “I know what you mean. They can scare you sometimes. I’ve got a thirteen-year-old daughter who is already manipulating me for her own American Express card. Can you believe that?”

Royce laughed. “And I thought girls were supposed to be easier.”

“Only till they discover boys, which seems to be right after kindergarten nowadays. We pressure them not to be kids. They get all this nonsense on TV about having relationships, acting grown up, going to parties, making out on the beach. Hell, I should know, my company is responsible for some of those ads. We say we don’t want kids to drink beer, but when they do grow up and go for the gusto, we sure as hell want it to be Old Dominion.”

Royce was shocked—and impressed—by the man’s candor.

“Hey, here I am rattling on, Royce. You look like a man who could stand a drink.”

The waitress arrived at Cal’s signal. He ordered an Old Dominion Light, and Royce ordered a shot of Cuervo Gold.

“A shooter for lunch. I’m impressed,” Cal told him.

Royce suddenly realized what a
faux pas
he’d made, saying, “You and I know I should have ordered an Old Dominion. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t sweat it. If I was a manure salesman, I wouldn’t expect you to sprinkle shit on your cereal in the morning.”

“Thanks.”

The drinks arrived. The pain in Royce’s bladder had sharpened.

“To peace on earth and the triumph of capitalism,” Cal said, raising his glass for a toast.

Royce touched his glass to Cal’s, then gulped when he should have sipped. He winced with the burn. He needed it. The liquor felt good. But business etiquette dictated he take it slower, keep the barriers up longer. Cal seemed like a good guy, but it could be some kind of trap to put him at a disadvantage. He’d seen it happen before. Get the other guy drunk, weak, vulnerable, then go for the kill.

Fuck, he’d not only seen it happen before, he’d done it before.

Cal asked, “So what have you got for me?”

Royce pulled the proposal copies from his briefcase, passed one across the table.

“Cal, this is a basic outline of how I believe my company could successfully support your new Development in Minorities Program. As you mentioned, uh, Old Dominion is targeting to have approximately ten percent of its vendors be from minority-owned businesses, corresponding with the percentage of minority people who purchase your beer. What you’re looking at here…what I propose…”

Royce was having one of those anxiety attacks again, and sweating, too. He broke off eye contact with Cal and cast his glance to his right, saw something that made him sweat even more.

Christine. Mistress Christine. She was at a far table, a silver-haired “suit” with lounge lizard eyes and the look of a politico or Beltway Bandit seated across from her. Probably came to Annapolis so he wouldn’t be recognized. Damn if the man wasn’t wearing a sequined leash!

“Do I have your attention here, Royce?”

He turned back to Cal. “Sorry, what you have here, uh, is a lean outline…some ideas, you know. I really think McCulloch & Company…” The cord that ran from his brain to his mouth seemed to have been severed. “I think I can help you find those qualified companies, those minority companies, that is. Uh…” He rubbed his clammy forehead, squeezed the headachy temples. Ah, shit. He wanted to run and hide.

After patiently listening to Royce’s bumbling, Cal smiled compassionately and said, “Sure you can, Royce. You don’t have to sell me on your capabilities. You come highly recommended. The Baltimore Chamber, the Black Chamber, the Hispanic Chamber and the Asian Chamber. They say you’re one of the best. And Larry Gibson, Schmoke’s main man, says you are some kind of wunderkind.”

Damn, Royce thought. No one was that kind. No one.

The waitress arrived, hovered attentively.

Cal sent her away, promising they would look at their menus immediately.

“If you’re hungry, I can highly recommend the crab cakes,” Cal told him and winked.

Royce gave his dining partner a quizzical look, while at the same time keeping a watchful eye on Christine.

“Don’t you get it, Royce? Everywhere you go out here it’s crab cakes. Me, I’m a frontier boy. I’m going to have one of those Black Angus steaks.”

“Sounds good to me.” He fired another look at Christine, in slinky, low-cut black. She tugged on the man’s leash. Suddenly she turned away from her slave and made eye contact with Royce, ran her tongue over her sharp incisors. Shit, what he really wanted was another tequila.

“You’re from out west, too, aren’t you Royce?”

“Yes,” he finally responded. “California.”

“Heard you were a real LA dealmaker in the wild-assed Eighties.”

“Not quite,” said Royce, uncomfortable about discussing his past, especially what he thought of as his “lost years.” “I was just a commercial banker, then I relocated to Phoenix for awhile. Was a loan officer.”

Royce was glad to see the waitress return, hoped the spotlight was off him. They quickly ordered enough red meat between them to feed a family of four for a week and she departed. Cal was about to make a point when he was interrupted by another presence. Royce shuddered.

Christine, in a black leather, slit-up-the-side skirt, slunk to their table.

“I think this woman knows you,” Cal said to Royce.

“Yeahhh,” Royce gasped.

Christine leaned over and whispered in Royce’s ear: “You’ve been a bad boy, Slave.” She smiled wickedly, stuffed an argyle sock in his suit jacket’s breast pocket. One of his own. He inhaled the musky perfume of her body heat, felt the press of her cleavage rubbing against him. He began to hyperventilate.

“Bad, bad boy!” she chastised again.

Cal’s eyes rolled with astonishment. Royce just wanted to vanish.

Christine leaned into him again, clawed beneath his suit lapels with her talon-like, red-polished fingernails and painfully pinched his nipples.

“Monica sends her love,” she hissed, and chewed on his lower lip with her teeth.

At last she was gone, strutting back to her table and the waiting suit with the dog leash.

“My oh my,” Cal said.

Royce couldn’t catch his breath, the pressure inside his skull mounting. Something else. A strange tightness at his chest. His nipples itched, tingled. He looked down at his swelling shirt front, where there were spots of dark red at his nipples. Cal noticed it, too.

“Jeeze, Royce. What the fuu—?”

“Excuse me,” Royce snapped. He left the table and went to the men’s room. There was a man washing his hands at the sink. Royce ducked into the stall, closed the door, frantically unbuttoned his dress shirt and pulled up his T-shirt. Christ almighty! The bitch had practically ripped his nipples off! And he was developing boobs, like a woman’s!

He touched his left nipple and grimaced. Sore as a hot boil, and bleeding.

Royce gently tucked his shirt back into his pants, closed and buttoned his suit jacket before ducking out of the men’s room. He shot past a flabbergasted Cal on his way out to the parking lot.

Royce carefully wedged his blossoming figure behind the steering wheel, turned the ignition.

“Royce, you okay?”

Cal tapped on his car window. Royce shook his head and gunned the engine. He backed the car—Cal holding onto the door handle as long as he could—and sped away.

The Old Dominion executive became a retreating image in Royce’s rearview mirror.

“Christ, what’s happening to me?” he yelled out. There were tears in his eyes.

By the time he’d driven halfway to downtown Baltimore, two half-dollar-sized circles of blood flowered on his well-endowed shirt front.

Shortly after five p.m. Royce arrived at Tony’s law office on St. Paul Street. It was a small, brick row house that had been converted into offices—Tony’s upstairs and a guy who made TV commercials downstairs. The movie mogul was never in, off to New York or Europe or somewhere. Today, thankfully, was no different.

Royce climbed the threadbare carpeted stairs. The legal eagle was in.

“You look like sheet,” Tony slurred.

“Yeah, you too,” Royce said, schlepping a Target discount store sack. He was delighted Tony had already called it a day and was in one of his once-a-month moods to get stinko and reminisce about the days when he was a radical in the Chicano movement and other things. On the attorney’s desk was a bottle of Presidente, a sweet, strong Mexican brandy Royce found ghastly.

“Pull up a cup and a stool,” Tony urged, waving towards the row of mugs beside the coffee maker. “No ice. Ice no good with this.” He took a healthy sip from a “Being 40 means being twice as SEXY as you were when you were 20” coffee cup.

“I’ll join you shortly. Can I use your restroom for just a minute?”

“Shure.”

Royce headed off to the bathroom down the hall. Once inside he worked fast, removing his suit jacket and tenderly unbuttoning and removing his crimson-stained dress shirt. Next he pulled off the red-soaked T-shirt and looked at himself in the mirror. The swelling had gone down and left behind two palm-sized lumps with scarred, misshapen nipples. He touched one of the bruised bumps and winced.

Bitch

Whore
.

Royce pitched the ruined shirts away, slipped on a heavy flannel shirt he’d purchased at Target.

The brandy line in the Presidente bottle had plummeted a half-inch by the time he returned to Tony’s office.

“Jeez, I thought you’d fallen in or something.”

Royce patted his stomach, saying, “A touch of the stomach flu, I’m afraid.”

“Royce, did I ever tell you my ambition?”

“No,” Royce lied. He poured himself a small amount of the liqueur and took a chair near Tony’s desk.

“Until I was twenty-one years old, my only ambition-‘cept to screw Veronica Montoya—was to beat the shit out of my father.”

Royce sipped. The stuff rushed to his brain, tasted better than he remembered.

“My old man was a drunk, a brawler, a bully. He ran out on us six kids and Mom. Mom he beat up before he left. What about yours? Your dad?”

Royce gave it some thought, then: “My dad was a CPA.”

Tony frowned. “That’s all you can say about your father? He was a fucking CPA?”

Royce conceded to himself that it did sound funny. But what else could he say at this particular moment?

“My father was good with numbers,” he managed.

Tony’s brown eyes blazed proud.

“Mine was an auto mechanic. No, a geenius auto mechanic. He could keep a Tijuana taxi alive for twenty years with nothing but spit and coathanger wire. Fords, Chevies, Mercedes even. Saw him once build a whole pickup truck body out of wood for a dude whose truck had rusted all out with the cancer. Wish he were here. Fix that fuckin’ Volvo of mine good.”

“Yeah.” Royce sipped a little more, liking the burn. “Tony, you know of any good private investigators?”

Tony’s right elbow popped off the edge of his desk, causing him to spill the booze all over his lap. Royce hoped his compadre wasn’t going to start crying.

“What the fuck for? You interested in tailin’ somebody maybe?” He refilled his mug. “You think Les—”

“No no, nothing like that. Just trying to locate a deadbeat. A past due account. That’s all.”

“They got collection agencies fur that.”

“This is a special case. Take some real digging.”

“Rol-oh-dex,” Tony drawled, lips pursed wet. He motioned for Royce to retrieve it off the desk.

Royce handed the card file to his friend, who flipped through it as though his fingers were plump hotdogs. Finally the attorney located a card, pulled it and thrust it in Royce’s direction.

Royce snared the card and read:
Marvin Garden, Private Investigator. Discreet, honest, reliable
. He asked, “This some kind of joke? Is he really named Marvin Garden?”

Tony’s body buffeted in his chair, blowing in a wind only he could feel. The man focused as best he could on Royce and said, “Sometimes I think I don’t know who the fuck you are. Like yur just goin’ through the motions.”