Эд Макбейн - Beauty and the Beast

“Have we talked already today?” he asked.

“Inside joke,” I said.

“Don’t give me with inside jokes before lunch,” he said. “What’s this with your cockamamie client?”

“Which one?”

“The one who hired Okay Contracting to stucco his house.”

“Okay ain’t so okay,” I said.

“Meaning?”

“He hired them six months ago, Abe. Some of the work isn’t completed yet, and even what’s done has been done poorly. So now your man wants payment, and I’ll be damned if I’ll approve it until—”

“Have a heart, Matthew,” Abe said. “All Schultz is asking for is half what’s due.”

“Is he related to that other legendary gangster?”

“What? Who?”

“Dutch Schultz,” I said.

“Never heard of him.”

“Big Chicago gangster,” I said.

“You’re an even bigger Chicago gangster.” Abe said. “Tell your client to give him the half, willya? Get Schultz off my back for a while.”

“Not a penny, Abe. Not till the job is completed and the remedial work done to my client’s satisfaction.”

“Have a heart, Matthew,” Abe said.

“I’ll hold the balance of payment in escrow till then, how does that sound?”

“You don’t know Conrad Schultz.”

“I know his work, though.”

“Let me hold it in escrow, okay? He’ll feel safer that way.”

“Fine.”

“What?”

“I said fine, you can hold it in escrow.”

“Will wonders never?” Abe said.

“I’ll be out of the office next week, but I’ll make sure the check is sent to you.”

“Where you going?” Abe asked.

“Mexico.”

“Looks like every lawyer in Calusa is going to be in Mexico next week,” Abe said, and I could swear he was leering.

“Only two of us,” I said.

“Well, have a nice time,” he said. “And please don’t trouble yourself for even a minute about those of us in the legal profession who’ll be minding the store while you’re off frolicking in the sun.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“Is that a promise? I wouldn’t want your vacation spoiled by undue guilt or remorse.”

“I promise. Abe, it’s been nice talking to you, but—”

“Send the check,” he said, and hung up.

My lunch date that afternoon was with three Calusa investors represented by our firm. Together, they owned a parcel of Sabal Key land on which they had planned to build 170 condominium units. The owner of the parcel next door to theirs planned to build no units on his land. But because of the vagaries of the zoning ordinance, if my clients and the man next door combined their two parcels, they’d be able to build — within the zoning restrictions and within the law — 300 units as opposed to the 280 if they’d proceeded separately. In unity, there is strength; there is also the two million bucks those additional twenty units, at a hundred thousand a throw, would bring into a combined entity. My three investor-clients wanted to form a joint venture with the man next door, and they wanted me to arrange a meeting with him and his attorney.

They were the dourest of men, these three, singularly intent on making money, determined to amass fortunes for themselves even if it meant manufacturing plastic vomit. (“There are the Vomit-Makers and the Dream-Makers,” my partner Frank is fond of saying, apropos of nothing.) It never once occurred to any of them that crowding an additional twenty units onto the parcels they and their neighbor owned, while within the law if they could pull off their merger, might contribute to the wall-to-wall condominium look Calusa was so desperately trying to avoid. Money was the be-all and the end-all, poor Sabal Key’s natural beauty be damned. They were grim and humorless men for the most part, and it was with some surprise that I listened to (and actually enjoyed) a joke one of them told, “a story a lawyer like you ought to appreciate,” he said before telling it.

It seemed that one of the recreation parks up Tampa way had recently put in a tank with two male porpoises in it, these to supplement the other wildlife roaming free over the park’s vast acreage. But it turned out that the porpoises had developed, of all things, an obscene letch for tender, young seagulls. In order to satisfy their yearning — and incidentally to keep them happy so they’d perform their little non sexual stunts for the thousands of paying visitors who came to the park each day — the owner of the park had taken to secreting nubile seagulls into the tank each night, the better for the porpoises to indulge their appetites for youthful birds.

Well, on a moonless night several weeks back, the owner was sneaking onto the grounds a young and beautiful plump female seagull, carrying her in his hands up the path that led to the tank where the panting porpoises awaited their connubial sacrifice. (One was not supposed to ask, I gathered, how a pair of porpoises could possibly mate with a seagull.) As he moved stealthily forward, the owner of the park was startled by the sight of a lion sleeping across the only path that led to the tank. What to do? Hoping he would not awaken the lion, the owner stepped across his prone body, still carrying the young seagull in his arms, and a policeman came out of the bushes, brandishing a revolver and placing the man under arrest.

“Do you know what the charge was?” my client asked.

“What?”

“Carrying an Underage Gull Across a Sedate Lion for Immoral Porpoises,” he said, and burst out laughing.

I did not get back to the office until almost three o’clock. I returned all the calls that had accumulated while I was out, and then buzzed Karl Jennings and asked him if he could come in for a minute.

Karl was twenty-seven years old, a recent — well, two years ago — graduate of Harvard Law who had decided to begin practice in the South, where the living was easy and the cotton was high. As the youngest member of our firm, he often brought to any difficult case a fresh point of view sometimes sadly absent in middle-aged men like Frank and me. Middle-aged, yes. Or perhaps, if one wishes to stretch a point, already over the hill. I am thirty-eight years old, and I figure my life expectancy to be somewhere between seventy and seventy-five. Thirty-eight is half of seventy- six , so there you are: already over the hill. Karl always dressed for work as though he were about to attend a funeral, a sartorial legacy inherited from his banker father in Boston. He had also inherited from the pater familias a head of wiry blond hair, an unfortunate eagle’s beak, and very weak brown eyes magnified behind thick-lensed tortoise-framed eyeglasses. His voice was tinged with the unmistakable regional dialect one usually associated with members of the Kennedy clan. Cynthia cheerfully referred to him as “The Chairman of the Board.”

I told Karl about the conversation I’d had with Abe Pollock, and asked him to make certain our client wrote a check to Abe, as attorney for Okay Contracting, for transfer to Abe’s escrow account. Karl said he’d do that first thing Monday morning, when he got back to the office after the long holiday weekend. I then told him there was a man I wanted him to talk to while I was gone, a Mr. Harry Loomis at A&M Exxon on Wingdale and Pine. I wanted him to find out from Loomis everything he remembered about the morning George Harper went there to have his truck filled with gas, and especially what he remembered about selling him a five-gallon gasoline can and filling that for him as well.

“I’m specifically interested in learning why his fingerprints weren’t on that can,” I said. “Harper thinks he wasn’t wearing gloves, and he can’t remember whether or not Loomis wiped off the can. Find out.”