Peter Abrahams - Lights Out

The Mount Olive Extended Care Residence and Spa? The Palazzo bill? What else was there? Eddie didn’t know enough about Jack’s world to even imagine. Raleigh: how much was he owed? He remembered the way Raleigh had emerged from his talk with Jack behind the closed bedroom door, smoking a cigar.

“What was left over I stuck in a really hot thing in Singapore that’s going to earn it all back by the next quarter,” Jack went on. “It’s locked in till then, of course.” He made a fist again, stared at it, then hit himself in the forehead, hard.

“Don’t,” Eddie said.

“Why not?” A welt rose on Jack’s forehead; his whole face reddened. “It’s all over.”

“I don’t see that.”

“Don’t you? Karen wants her money back. I don’t have it. She’ll call her lawyer. He’ll go right to the SEC, the D.A., everybody. Then it’s what I told you-fines I can’t pay and jail. I’m talking about prison, Eddie.”

That had no shock value for Eddie. He felt the balance shifting between his brother and himself. It had begun to move when he’d caught Jack’s arm and stilled it. Now what had always been static was suddenly in motion.

“What was her reason?” Eddie said.

“For what?”

“For wanting the money back.”

“She doesn’t have to give a reason. It’s her money.”

“But she gave one anyway.”

Jack looked at Eddie, nodded. “She said there was a family emergency.”

“Whose family?”

“Hers, of course. Do you find something funny about this?”

Eddie almost did, felt that if he could see a little better he surely would. Or maybe if he could see it from Karen’s point of view. “When do you have to pay her?”

“Yesterday, today, tomorrow. Now. She wants it. I can stall for a day or two, that’s it.”

“How much do you need?”

“The whole bundle. Two thirty. I told you already. And that’s just to get to next week. To get out of this hole, I need twice that. And I could have made it in Singapore. It was a sure thing.” Jack formed another fist but this time did nothing with it.

The phone rang. Jack picked it up. “Hello?”

The person on the other end spoke. Jack flinched. Eddie had watched a lot of men go down without letting it affect him; but he was having trouble watching this.

“There are a few technicalities, Karen, that’s all. Paperwork. We’re going as fast as we can.”

Karen said something that made him flinch again. She wouldn’t make it easy, Eddie knew that from those cool blue eyes. He knew too that Karen had lied about that hockey game, just so she could get in that line about Jack never mentioning him, in the hope that Eddie would reveal something damning.

“I will,” Jack said. “You have my word.” He put down the phone.

“Just an upstate girl with a lot to learn,” Eddie said.

Jack glared at him. “You’re taking some pleasure from this, aren’t you, bro?”

“No,” Eddie said. “But it’s worse than you think.”

“How can it be worse?” Jack said, with contempt in his tone but fear in his eyes.

“She’s a cop,” Eddie said.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Or something like it,” Eddie continued. “You can trust me on that. We ran into each other at your health club. Actually, it was a setup. We talked. This and that. Your business came up, but of course I knew nothing about it. Then she took me to see Evelyn.”

Jack sat down on the couch. It was more like subsiding, as though his legs couldn’t support him any longer.

“She’s not in good shape,” Eddie said. “My long-lost sister-in-law.” Jack flinched again. “When did you two get together?”

Jack took a deep breath. “After the Galleon Beach fiasco. She left Packer, and I couldn’t stick around. Brad blamed me for what you-for what happened. Didn’t she tell you all about it?”

Eddie remembered that Evelyn had placed the beginning of her relationship with Jack a little earlier: What a nasty suggestion. I couldn’t help myself . But he let it go. “She didn’t make much sense,” he said.

“No. She doesn’t. I did everything I could for her, Eddie, believe me. The best shrinks, the latest medications, you name it. Nothing did any good.”

“She wasn’t like this before.”

“It was there. I just didn’t see it.” Jack closed his eyes. Eddie saw the exhaustion on his face, digging out an engraving of how he would appear as an old man.

“What happened to your seven and a half percent of Galleon Beach?”

Jack’s eyes opened. They gave Eddie a look that revealed nothing. “Seven and a half percent of zilch is zilch.” Jack untied his tie, unfastened his belt, loosened his pants. “What does any of that matter now? Nothing matters. They’ve got me by the balls. It’s a sting, Eddie. I can trace it back to the Associates thing. They wanted me, not Raleigh.”

“Why didn’t they get you?”

“I told you-it was just a bullshit technicality.”

“But Raleigh took the fall.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“Why did he do that?”

Jack didn’t answer.

“It goes all the way back to USC, doesn’t it?”

Jack shook his head. “USC’s like some dream place to you, El Dorado. It’s just a school in a bad part of town. Drop the subject.”

“I can’t do that,” Eddie said. The balance had shifted between them. It opened a new way of talking. “You and Raleigh got into some kind of trouble there. They kicked you out. A few months later you were a partner at Galleon Beach. Fill in the blanks.”

“Blanks are what you’re firing, bro. I didn’t get kicked out of USC. I left because I wanted to.”

Eddie crossed the room, stood over his brother, lowered his hand, laid it on Jack’s cheek, just touching him. “Don’t call me bro,” he said.

Jack jerked his head away. “You’ve turned into a fucking crazy man, you know that?”

“A crazy man who doesn’t like being lied to,” Eddie said. “I know for a fact you were kicked out. I’ve known it all along. Now tell me why.”

He didn’t want to hit Jack. Jack wasn’t some degenerate in the next cell, some rapist, murderer, thief. He was his brother. But now, with the balance shifting, he could do it if he had to.

Perhaps Jack realized that. He sighed and said, “All right. Why not? I’m in the toilet anyway.” He lit another cigarette, inhaled. The smoke puffed him up a little, restored some of his confidence. “It was just child’s play, really. Raleigh and I started a little business. Raja Research. Raleigh and Jack, get it?”

“What kind of business?”

“The essay business. We sold essays. In a gray area, I suppose, but so are Cliffs Notes and Monarch , right?”

“Monarch ’s all right.”

Jack looked puzzled for a moment. “We bought product from fraternities all over the country,” he went on. “Brad lent us a grand to get our library stocked. We paid him back in a month. Everything was going great. We had a sliding price scale, depending on subject, difficulty of the course, length of the paper, all that. Then one day Raleigh sold one to the wrong guy. They took it so seriously, threatened to take us to court, held an investigation. Brad was afraid his name was going to get dragged in-they wanted to know where the start-up money had come from.”

“So you blackmailed him for the seven and a half percent.”

“That’s a prejudicial way of putting it, br-Eddie. I’d decided by then, this was February or March, that college wasn’t for me. I knew what I wanted. The opportunity presented itself. I kept Brad out of their tinpot investigation, made them think that Raleigh was just an underling who didn’t know what was going on, and got on with life.” Jack paused; he watched Eddie. “There. The whole truth and nothing but. Is that so bad?”