Reed Coleman - Empty ever after

“Can I help you?”

“Moe Prager. We met back in the late ’70s.”

She squinted, as if she hoped squeezing her eyes together might help her see into the past. Apparently, squinting was no help with time travel.

“Sorry,” she said, “I got nothing.”

“Patrick Maloney.”

That did the trick. She screwed up her new face as if she’d just caught a whiff of steaming hot dog shit. I didn’t blame her. It hadn’t exactly been a storybook romance between Patrick and Nancy. In a desperate attempt to deny his homosexuality and cope with his burgeoning OCD, Patrick engaged in a series of doomed relationships with women. With Nancy Lustig, the inevitable bad ending was particularly ugly. There was a visit to a sex club, an aborted pregnancy, and violence. He dislocated her shoulder and might’ve done much worse had other students not pulled him off her.

“The detective. Yes, I remember.” She didn’t ask me in.

“That’s right. How have you been?”

“Look, what’s this about, Mr. Prager?”

“Moe, please.”

“Let’s stay on point. What’s this about?”

“Patrick.”

“Sorry, not interested,” she said. “What, he woke up from a coma and wants to apologize or something? He develop a conscience after twenty years?”

“Nothing like that. Patrick’s dead.”

“Did he remember me in his will?”

“It happens that he was murdered shortly after he disappeared.”

If I thought that would shake her up, I thought wrong. She yawned. I might have told her I stepped on an ant.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Prager, but I’m leaving to play tennis in a little while, so if there’s nothing-”

“You sure have changed,” I said, trying a new tack.

She wasn’t sure how to take that. “Thank you…I think.”

“Oh, no, I meant it as a compliment,” I lied. “You’re quite lovely.”

“Thank you,” she said, flashing a satisfied smile. “It was a lot of hard work to bury dumpy old Nancy.”

“I don’t know, there were parts of her I kinda admired.”

Nancy scowled at me like Father Blaney. I looked for clouds to move in overhead.

“Admired! What did you admire, my desperation? My willingness to take crumbs and castoffs? My-”

“Your honesty.”

“Oh, that. Honesty’s easy when it’s all you have.”

“I’m not sure it’s ever easy.”

“Why admire someone for something when they have nothing else? It’s like admiring an amputee for still having the other leg. These,” she said, running her hands over her now exquisite breasts, “are something to admire. On the whole, Mr. Prager, you can keep honesty. I’ll take these. No one desires you for your honesty.” She dropped her hands back to her sides.

“Why is it one or the other?”

Just then, as if on cue, a Land Rover pulled into the long driveway and beeped its horn.

“I prefer tennis to questions of metaphysics. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

“Sorry to have bothered you,” I said, and walked back to my car. I rolled out of the driveway onto Route 107 and parked. A few minutes later, the green Land Rover pulled onto the road and disappeared, heading north. I had to go north too, but I needed some time to mourn the old Nancy Lustig.

So I went from money to more money, from new money to old.

In the early’80s, Constance Geary worked for Aaron and me at City On The Vine for about six months while she finished up at Juilliard. She was pleasant enough, a hard worker, good with the clientele, but we never fooled ourselves she would stay on. I had the impression she got her hands dirty with the common folk as if she were fulfilling a missionary obligation. You know, like teaching Third World children how to read. Or maybe it was just so she could say, “Hey, I had a job once.” It wasn’t Constance I was interested in, but her father.

It was Thomas Geary who’d hired me in 1983 to find out what had happened to Moira Heaton and to resuscitate State Senator Steven Brightman’s political career. I’m not certain to this day if Geary cared for Brightman in the least or if he simply fancied himself a kingmaker. After all, what else was there for him to do besides being wealthy and playing golf? Geary was one of those men who saw golf as universal allegory. If you understood the intricacies of the game, you’d see that life and golf were just the same. Yeah, right! Maybe Steven Roth should have taken up golf instead of God. I mean, who needs the New Testament when you’ve got a copy of the USGA Rule Book.

Crocus Valley was at the WASPy heart of the Gold Coast, a place where plaid pants and Episcopal priests never went out of fashion. Don’t get me wrong, the residents of Crocus Valley had made concessions to the new millennium. Some even painted the faces of their lawn jockeys white! Behind the artifice of taste and restraint, the residents of CV were as screwed up as any other bunch of rich fuckers. I would know. I was privy to their liquor bills. If they ever considered changing the town’s name, Single Maltville would have been perfectly appropriate.

The Geary place was on a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound and bordered on the east by The Lonesome Piper Country Club. It was at the Lonesome Piper, during Connie’s wedding reception, that I first met Thomas Geary. He took me for a stroll along the driving range. During our short walk, he managed to lecture, threaten, and bribe me. All of it done with a calm voice and unwavering smile. He was a reflection of the town in which he lived. On the outside he was all class: well-bred, well-mannered, a perfect gentleman. But beneath his well-tanned skin, Geary was as much a thug and bully as Francis Maloney ever was, only less honest about it.

The corral-type fencing that once surrounded the white country manor had been replaced by a contiguous stone wall. There was an ominous black steel gate now as well. No longer could you simply turn off the road and into the estate. Anchored by massive stone pillars, the gate was a good twelve feet high, double the height of the wall. On one pillar was a security camera, on the other a call button and speaker. Childishly, I waved hello at the camera, then pressed the call button.

“Yes, who is it?” A woman’s voice asked.

“My name’s Moe Prager. I was wondering if-”

“Moe! This is Connie. Come on, drive up to the house. I’ll meet you out front.”

The gate swung open even before I made it back to my car. Connie met me under the front portico just as her father had seventeen years before on my first and only visit to the ten-acre estate. She was very much the same as I remembered: more handsome than pretty. Looking at her now, I realized Constance was naturally what Nancy Lustig had had tried to make herself into.

“Moe, my God, look at you!” Connie grabbed both my hands and kissed me on the cheek. “You look great. How are you? Come inside.”

I followed her into the house. It too was as I remembered it, at least the decor hadn’t much changed. There was, however, an unmistakable medicinal tang in the air and a metal walker in the foyer next to an incongruous pair of hockey skates. Connie noticed me notice.

“The walker’s Dad’s. The skates are Craig Jr.’s.”

“A son, mazel tov. Any other kids?”

“No. Craig’s my pride and joy,” she said.

“How’s Craig’s dad?”

“Fine. We’re divorced almost ten years now.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was all very amicable. We’re all better off this way. You were at the wedding, weren’t you? I remember you being there. You and Katy, Aaron and Cindy, right?”

Just ask your dad. “We were indeed.”

“How is Aaron? I always had a kind of crush on him, you know?”

Of course I didn’t. I loved my big brother and he was a good looking man, but it was hard for me to imagine Connie falling for him.