Stormy Weather Page 10

  The clasp on the watchband was a bitch. Rigor mortis contributed to the difficulty of Gil Peck's task; the crucified guy refused to surrender the timepiece. The more Gil Peck struggled with the corpse, the more the TV saucer rolled back and forth on its axis, like a top. Gil Peck was getting dizzy and mad. Just as he managed to slip a penknife between the taut skin and the watch-band, the dead man expelled an audible blast of postmortem flatulence. The detonation sent Gil Peck diving in terror from the satellite dish.

  Edie Marsh paid a neighbor kid to siphon gas from Snapper's abandoned car and crank up Tony Torres's portable generator. Edie gave the kid a five-dollar bill that she'd found hidden with five others inside a toolbox in the salesman's garage. It was a pitiful excuse for a stash; Edie was sure there had to be more.

  At dusk she gave up the search and planted herself in Tony's BarcaLounger, a crowbar at her side. She turned up the volume of the television as loudly as she could stand, to block out the rustles and whispers of the night. Without doors, windows or a roof, the Torres house was basically an open campsite. Outside was black and creepy; people wandered like spirits through the unlit streets. Edie Marsh had the jitters, being alone. She gladly would have fled in Tony's huge boat of a Chevrolet, if it hadn't been blocked in the driveway by Snapper's car, which Edie would have gladly swiped if only Snapper hadn't taken the damn keys with him. So she was stuck at the Torres house until daybreak, when it might be safe for a woman to travel on foot with two miniature dachshunds.

  She planned to get out of Dade County before anything else went wrong. The expedition was a disaster, and Edie blamed no one but herself. Nothing in her modest criminal past had prepared her for the hazy and menacing vibe of the hurricane zone. Everyone was on edge; evil, violence and paranoia ripened in the shadows. Edie Marsh was out of her league here. Tomorrow she'd hitch a ride to West Palm and close up the apartment. Then she'd take the Amtrak home to Jacksonville, and try to make up with her boyfriend. She estimated that reconciliation would require at least a week's worth of blow jobs, considering how much she'd stolen from his checking account. But eventually he'd take her back. They always did.

  Edie Marsh was suffering through a TV quiz show when she heard a man's voice calling from the front doorway. She thought: Tony! The pig is back.

  She grabbed the crowbar and sprung from the chair. The man at the door raised his arms. "Easy," he said.

  It wasn't Tony Torres. This person was a slender blond with round eyeglasses and a tan briefcase and matching Hush Puppy shoes. In one hand he carried a manila file folder.

  "What do you want?" Edie held the crowbar casually, as if she carried it at all times.

  "Didn't mean to scare you," the man said. "My name is Fred Dove. I'm with Midwest Casualty."

  "Oh." Edie Marsh felt a pleasant tingle. Like the first time she'd met one of the young Kennedys.

  With a glance at the file, Fred Dove said, "Maybe I've got the wrong street. This is 15600 Calusa?"

  "That's correct."

  "And you're Mrs. Torres?"

  Edie smiled. "Please," she said, "call me Neria."

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Bonnie and Augustine were cutting a pizza when Augustine's FBI friend stopped by to pick up the tape of Max Lamb's latest message. He listened to it several times on the cassette player in Augustine's living room. Bonnie studied the FBI man's expression, which remained intently neutral. She supposed it was something they worked on at the academy.

  When he finished playing the tape, the FBI agent turned to Augustine and said, "I've read it somewhere. That 'creaking machinery of humanity.'"

  "Me, too. I've been racking my brain."

  "God, I can just see 'em up in Washington, giving it to a crack team of shrinks—"

  "Or cryptographers," Augustine said.

  The FBI man smiled. "Exactly." He accepted a hot slice of pepperoni for the road, and said good night.

  Augustine asked Bonnie a question at which the agent had only hinted: Was it conceivable that Max Lamb could have written something like that himself?

  "Never," she said. Her husband was into ditties and jingles, not metaphysics. "And he doesn't read much," she added. "The last book he finished was one of Trump's autobiographies."

  It was enough to convince Augustine that Max Lamb wasn't being coy on the phone; the mystery man was feeding him lines. Augustine didn't know why. The situation was exceedingly strange.

  Bonnie took a shower. She came out wearing a baby-blue flannel nightshirt that Augustine recognized from a long-ago relationship. Bonnie had found it hanging in a closet.

  "Is there a story to go with it?" she asked.

  "A torrid one."

  "Really?" Bonnie sat beside him on the sofa, at a purely friendly distance. "Let me guess: Flight attendant?"

  Augustine said, "Letterman's a rerun."

  "Cocktail waitress? Fashion model?"

  "I'm beat." Augustine picked up a book, a biography of Lech Walesa, and flipped it open to the middle.

  "Aerobics instructor? Legal secretary?"

  "Surgical intern," Augustine said. "She tried to cut out my kidneys one night in the shower."

  "That's the scar on your back? The Y."

  "At least she wasn't a urologist." He closed the book and picked up the channel changer for the television.

  Bonnie said, "You cheated on her."

  "Nope, but she thought I did. She also thought the bathtub was full of centipedes, Cuban spies were spiking her lemonade, and Richard Nixon was working the night shift at the Farm Store on Bird Road."

  " Drug problem ?"

  "Evidently." Augustine found a Dodgers game on ESPN and tried to appear engrossed.

  Bonnie Lamb asked to see the scar closely, but he declined. "The lady had poor technique," he said.

  "She use a real scalpel?"

  "No, a corkscrew."

  "My God."

  "What is it with women and scars?"

  Bonnie said, "I knew it. You've been asked before."

  Was she flirting? Augustine wasn't sure. He had no point of reference when it came to married women whose husbands recently had disappeared.

  "How's this," he said. "You tell me all about your husband, and maybe I'll show you the damn scar."

  "Deal," said Bonnie Lamb, tugging the nightshirt down to cover her knees.

  Max Lamb met and fell in love with Bonnie Brooks when she was an assistant publicist for Crespo Mills Internationale, a leading producer of snack and breakfast foods. Rodale & Burns had won the lucrative Crespo advertising account, and assigned Max Lamb to develop the print and radio campaign for a new cereal called Plum Crunchies. Bonnie Brooks flew in from Crespo's Chicago headquarters to consult.

  Basically, Plum Crunchies were ordinary sugar-coated cornflakes mixed with rock-hard fragments of dried plums-that is to say, prunes. The word "prune" was not to appear in any Plum Crunchies publicity or advertising, a corporate edict with which both Max Lamb and Bonnie Brooks wholeheartedly agreed. The target demographic was sweet-toothed youngsters aged fourteen and under, not constipated senior citizens.

  On only their second date, at a Pakistani restaurant in Greenwich Village, Max sprung upon Bonnie his slogan for Crespo's new cereal: You'll go plum loco for Plum Crunchies!

  "With p-l-u-m instead of p-l-u-m-b on the first reference," he was quick to explain.

  Though she personally avoided the use of lame homonyms, Bonnie told Max the slogan had possibilities. She was trying not to dampen his enthusiasm; besides, he was the expert, the creative talent. All she did was bang out press releases.

  On a napkin Max Lamb crudely sketched a jaunty, cockeyed mynah bird that was to be the cereal-box mascot for Plum Crunchies. Max said the bird would be colored purple ("like a plum!") and would be named Dinah the Mynah. Here Bonnie Brooks felt she should speak up, as a colleague, to remind Max Lamb of the many other cereals that already used bird logos (Froot Loops, Cocoa Puffs, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, and so on). In addition, she gently questioned
the wisdom of naming the mynah bird after an aging, though much-beloved, TV singer.

  Bonnie: "Is the bird supposed to be a woman?"

  Max: "The bird has no particular gender."

  Bonnie: "Well, do mynahs actually eat plums?"

  Max: "You're adorable, you know that?"

  He was falling for her, and she was falling (though a bit less precipitously) for him. As it turned out, Max's bosses at Rodale & Burns liked his slogan but hated the concept of Dinah the Mynah. The executives of Crespo Mills concurred. When the new cereal finally debuted, the box featured a likeness of basketball legend Patrick Ewing, slam-dunking a giddy cartoon plum. Surveys later revealed that many customers thought it was either an oversized grape or a prune. Plum Crunchies failed to capture a significant share of the fruited-branflake breakfast market and quietly disappeared forever from the shelves.

  Bonnie and Max's long-distance romance endured. She found herself carried along by his energy, determination and self-confidence, misplaced as it often was. While Bonnie was bothered by Max's tendency to judge humankind strictly according to age, race, sex and median income, she attributed his cold eye to indoctrination by the advertising business. She herself had become cynical about the brain activity of the average consumer, given Crespo's worldwide success with such dubious food products as salted doughballs, whipped olive spread and shrimp-flavored popcorn.

  In the early months of courtship, Max invented a game intended to impress Bonnie Brooks. He bet that he could guess precisely what model of automobile a person owned, based on his or her demeanor, wardrobe and physical appearance. The skill was intuitive, Max told Bonnie; a gift. He said it's what made him such a canny advertising pro. On dates, he'd sometimes follow strangers out of restaurants or movie theaters to see what they were driving. "Ha! A Lumina-what'd I tell ya? The guy had midsize written all over him!" Max would chirp when his guess was correct (which was, by Bonnie's generous reckoning, about five percent of the time). Before long, the car game grew tiresome and Bonnie Brooks asked Max Lamb to stop. He didn't take it personally; he was a hard man to insult. This, too, Bonnie attributed to the severe environment of Madison Avenue.

  While Bonnie's father was amiably indifferent to Max, her mother was openly unfond of him. She felt he tried too hard, came on too strong; that he was trying to sell himself to Bonnie the same way he sold breakfast cereal and cigarets. It wasn't that Bonnie's mother thought Max Lamb was a phony; just the opposite. She believed he was exactly what he seemed to be-completely goal-driven, every waking moment. He was no different at home than he was at the office, no less consumed with attaining success. There was, said Bonnie's mother, a sneaky arrogance in Max Lamb's winning attitude. Bonnie thought it was an odd criticism, coming from a woman who had regarded Bonnie's previous boyfriends as timid, unmotivated losers. Still, her mother had never used the term "asshole" to describe Bonnie's other suitors. That she pinned it so quickly on Max Lamb nagged painfully at Bonnie until her wedding day.

  Now, with Max apparently abducted by a raving madman, Bonnie fretted about something else her mother had often mentioned, a trait of Max's so obvious that even Bonnie had acknowledged it. Augustine knew what she was talking about.

  "Your husband thinks he can outsmart anybody."

  "Unfortunately," Bonnie said.

  "I can tell from the phone tapes."

  "Well," she said, fishing for encouragement, "he's managed to make it so far."

  "Maybe he's learned when to keep his mouth shut." Augustine stood up and stretched his arms. "I'm tired. Can we do the scar thing some other time?"

  Bonnie Lamb laughed and said sure. She waited until she heard the bedroom door shut before she phoned Pete Archibald at his home in Connecticut.

  "Did I wake you?" she asked.

  "Heck, no. Max said you might be calling."

  Bonnie's words stuck in her throat. "You-Pete, you talked to him?"

  "For about an hour."

  "When?"

  "Tonight. He's all frantic that Bill Knapp's gonna snake the Bronco cigaret account. I told him not to worry, Billy's tied up with the smokeless division on some stupid rodeo tour—"

  "Pete, never mind all that. Where did Max call from?"

  "I don't know, Bon. I assumed he'd spoken to you."

  Bonnie strained to keep the hurt from her voice. "Did he tell you what happened?"

  On the other end, Pete Archibald clucked and ummmed nervously. "Not all the gory details, Bonnie. Everybody-least all the couples I know-go through the occasional bedroom drama. Fights and whatnot. I don't blame you for not giving me the real story when you called before."

  Bonnie Lamb's voice rose. "Peter, Max and I aren't fighting. And I did tell you the real story." She caught herself. "At least it was the story Max told me."

  After an uncomfortable pause, Pete Archibald said, "Bon, you guys work it out, OK? I don't want to get in the middle."

  "You're right, you're absolutely right." She noticed that her free hand was balled in a fist and she was rocking sideways in the chair. "Pete, I won't keep you. But maybe you could tell me what else Max said."

  "Shop talk, Bonnie."

  "For a whole hour?"

  "Well, you know your husband. He gets rolling, you know what he's like."

  Maybe I don't, Bonnie thought.

  She said good-bye to Pete Archibald and hung up. Then she went to Augustine's room and knocked on the door. When he didn't answer, she slipped in and sat lightly on the corner of the bed. She thought he was asleep, until he rolled over and said: "Not a good night for the skull room, huh?"

  Bonnie Lamb shook her head and began to cry.

  Edie Marsh gave it her best shot. For a while, the plan went smoothly. The man from Midwest Casualty took meticulous notes as he followed her from room to room in the Torres house. Many of the couple's belongings had been pulverized beyond recognition, so Edie began embellishing losses to inflate the claim. She lovingly described the splintered remains of a china cabinet as a priceless antique that Tony inherited from a great-grandmother in San Juan. Pausing before a bare bedroom wall, she pointed to the nails upon which once hung two original (and very expensive) watercolors by the legendary Jean-Claude Jarou, a martyred Haitian artist whom Edie invented off the top of her head. A splintered bedroom bureau became the hand-hewn mahogany vault that had yielded eight cashmere sweaters to the merciless winds of the hurricane.

  "Eight sweaters," said Fred Dove, glancing up from his clipboard. "In Miami?"

  "The finest Scottish cashmeres-can you imagine? Ask your wife if it wouldn't break her heart."

  Fred Dove took a small flashlight from his jacket and went outside to evaluate structural damage. Soon Edie heard barking from the backyard, followed by emphatic human profanities. By the time she got there, both dachshunds had gotten a piece of the insurance man. Edie led him inside, put him in the BarcaLounger, rolled up his cuffs and tended his bloody ankles with Evian and Ivory liquid, which she salvaged from the kitchen.

  "I'm glad they're not rottweilers," said Fred Dove, soothed by Edie's ministrations with a soft towel.

  Repeatedly she apologized for the attack. "For what it's worth, they've had all their shots," she said, with no supporting evidence whatsoever.

  She instructed Fred Dove to stay in the recliner and keep his feet elevated, to slow the bleeding. Leaning back, he spotted Tony Torres's Salesman of the Year plaque on the wall. "Pretty impressive," Fred Dove said.

  "Yes, it was quite a big day for us." Edie beamed, a game simulation of spousely pride.

  "And where's Mister Torres tonight?"

  Out of town, Edie replied, at a mobile-home convention in Dallas. For the second time, Fred Dove looked doubtful.

  "Even with the hurricane? Must be a pretty important convention."

  "It sure is," said Edie Marsh. "He's getting another award."

  "Ah."

  "So he bad to go. I mean, it'd look bad if he didn't show up. Like he wasn't grateful or something."

&n
bsp; Fred Dove said, "I suppose so. When will Mister Torres be returning to Miami?"

  Edie sighed theatrically. "I just don't know. Soon, I hope."

  The insurance man attempted to lower the recliner, but it kept springing to the sleep position. Finally Edie Marsh sat on the footrest, enabling Fred Dove to climb out. He said he wanted to reinspect the damage to the master bedroom. Edie said that was fine.

  She was rinsing the bloody towel in a sink when the insurance man called. She hurried to the bedroom, where Fred Dove held up a framed photograph that he'd dug from the storm rubble. It was a picture of Tony Torres with a large dead fish. The fish had a mouth the size of a garbage pail.