Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

Eduardo poured.

“Well, haven’t we put you through a lot?” Trey Annunziato said. “It’s just been one crook after another, hasn’t it? Not Lyle, here, of course. We all know he’s true to the badge.”

“I’m used to crooks,” I said.

“Well, of course. I mean, being one, and all. But still, most of us prefer to choose our company, and you’ve been hauled from place to place, I’m afraid.” There was something studied about the way she moved and talked, accentuated by the semi-British construction of her sentences, even though she avoided the dread mid-Atlantic vowel syndrome. “Please, Eduardo.” She held up a hand and he put a glass into it, very carefully, and then condescended to serve the mortals in the room. I took my glass and hung onto it, and Hacker buried his nose in the Scotch. His sigh when he lowered the glass could have blown out a window.

“So nice to see a man enjoying himself,” Trey Annunziato said. Then she said to me, “How in the world did you get so nicked up?”

“I was swinging on a chandelier to escape some dogs, and the chain broke.”

“Oh, well,” she said. “Ask a silly question.” A moment earlier, I had glanced back at the large awful painting, and her eyes flicked over to it. “What do you think of the picture?”

“I like the original better.”

I got the kind of smile Pollyanna might have offered a passing butterfly, all innocent delight. “How gallant.” It came out “gall ahnt ,” “And what about him ?” She inclined her head toward the man in the white shirt.

“You want the truth?”

With the smile still in place, she said, “Do you think I have time to sit here and listen to you tell lies?”

“He’s too handsome for his own good. That kind of handsome stifles personal growth.”

She leaned forward as though I were too far away for her to hear, and her eyebrows came up an inquiring quarter of an inch. “Personal …”

“Growth.”

Trey Annunziato looked over at Hacker. The smile was down to a muscle memory, just a meaningless tilt of the lips. “What do you think about that, Lyle?”

Hacker sighted over the edge of his glass. “We talking about Tony?”

“We are, and please try to keep up.”

“Tony’s an asshole.”

“He is indeed,” Trey said. “Do you know who Tony is, Mr. Bender?”

“No.”

“He’s my husband.” She turned her face slightly to the left and regarded me from the corners of her eyes, the angle you sometimes see in self-portraits where the painter is looking at himself in a mirror. There was nothing spontaneous in the gesture; it looked like someone had told her it was a good angle, and she’d been practicing. “As you should have surmised from looking at the painting.”

“We all make mistakes,” I said. “He was probably one of yours.”

Her perfect eyebrows came together a fraction of an inch, an attractive way to suggest perplexity. I was beginning to think that Trey Annunziato was one of those people who see their lives as a series of close-ups.

“Mmmmm,” she said. “How candid.” She rested her chin in her hand the way Charlie Rose sometimes does when he knows he’s on camera. “Do you know anything at all about me?”

“As little as possible,” I said. “As an intentionally disorganized criminal, I try not to get anywhere near the organized variety. I know you went to Stanford, took some sort of graduate degree-”

A nod. “Business administration.”

“And I know you’ve been running the show since your father, ah …”

“Had his accident.” She sipped her wine, the brown eyes cool on mine, as though she were daring me to have a reaction. “What did you expect me to be like?”

“I didn’t. I never thought much about you until I was on the way over here.”

“Did you, for example,” she said, crossing her legs, “expect me to be a woman?”

My eyes were drawn to the fire from the diamond circlet around her ankle. “I’d heard a rumor, but Frederick G. Annunziato the Third isn’t a conspicuously feminine name.”

“Good old dad,” she said unfondly. “He would have preserved the name if his only child had been a donkey. My older brother died when he was three, and I was the last baby my mother could have, so he just unpacked the name again and gave it to me. Nicest thing he did was not calling me Fred when he talked to me. He always called me Trey.”

“That’s mildly interesting,” I said.

“And you’re wondering why in the world I’m telling you about it.” She lifted the glass to her lips and then did a good job of pretending to notice I hadn’t tasted mine. “Please,” she said. “Try it. I’d like to know what you think. It’s the second growth from our new vineyard.”

I tasted it, and then I tasted it again. “I’m not a wine connoisseur,” I said, “but it’s good enough to swallow repeatedly for a long period of time.”

She threw her head back, shook her hair out, and laughed. The laugh might have worked if she hadn’t thrown her head back. When she was through simulating affectionate mirth, she turned to Hacker and said, “You didn’t tell me he was cute.”

“I guess I missed it,” Hacker said.

“Well,” she said, leaning forward to demonstrate that she was going all frank on me. “Here I am. I’m a girl who should have been a boy, who got a boy’s name, and was handed a life sentence at birth: Run the business. The enterprise, as my father always called it, was created by my great-grandfather, broadened and deepened by my grandfather, taken international and expanded exponentially by my father, and handed to me. With the expectation that I’d pass it on even bigger and more profitable than it was when I got it.”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” I said, since she seemed to be waiting for someone to say something.

“I’m sure I would, too,” she said. “If I weren’t in the process of shutting the whole thing down.”

The sun, most of the way down to the treetops, made a farewell appearance through the window, and projected itself into the bottom of Trey’s wine glass to create a fiery little point of light there. It was so bright I had to look away from it, which at least had the advantage of giving me something to do.

“When you say closing it down,” I said, “do you mean, um, closing it down?”

She said, “You could at least try to paraphrase me.”

“You caught me off-balance,” I said, “which is what you wanted to do.”

This time she didn’t throw back her head. She just laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh, maybe a two-stop chuckle, but it was about eighty percent real. “This is a quiz,” she said, holding her glass up a couple of inches, which doused the miniature sun. “Where does the wine come from?”

“Your vineyards. Second growth.” I sipped it again. “It’s a little heavy on the tannin.”

Hacker pulled his nose out of his glass long enough to hiss, “ Bender ,” but Trey waved him off. She sipped and said, “Does a vineyard sound like a criminal operation?”

“Not if the wine’s any good.”

“At the moment,” she said, “I own a vineyard, four dry cleaning shops, six Seven-Eleven franchises, a real estate holding company that controls nine office buildings on Ventura, including the one that Mr. Wattles occupies, and I just bought a chain of two-hour optometrists.” She sat back. “They’re called ‘Dr. Simon’s’ now, but I want to change it. What do you think of ‘Look Fast’?”

“How about ‘The Frame-Up’?”

“Something that says speed,” she said.

“Second Sight?”