Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

John laid the slippery fax on the counter and got out a Dos Equis, then heated up a leftover quesadilla and lit a cigarette. He’d learned to smoke the night he’d lost his first thousand in a poker game. He hadn’t had a thousand to lose, and gambling had seemed a hell of a way to get rid of his money. Smoking hadn’t helped. He’d known it wouldn’t, but he’d needed something to try to assuage his guilt and self-hate, although why he’d thought a cigarette would do the trick he still couldn’t figure out. Now he smoked whenever he felt particularly guilty or rotten. Usually all someone had to do was mention his daughter.

He sat on the tattered couch he’d picked up from the Salvation Army fifteen years ago. He’d always thought he’d have it recovered but never had. He reread his father’s fax. A fax machine wouldn’t intimidate that old geezer. Nicholas Pembroke was the most selfish and egotistical and totally unreliable man John had ever known, but endearingly honest about his failings, and direct, and unafraid-to a fault-of taking risks. John, on the other hand, seldom told anyone what was on his mind and had learned to avoid risk. To him his gambling wasn’t taking risks. It was avoiding them. Popular media opinion declared that his Pembroke genes-a penchant for gambling and adventure and self-destruction-had led to his downfall. He disagreed. He’d been all over the world, gambling, writing the odd travel article, doing as he damn well pleased. But it was a life he’d chosen not for its risk but for its safety. Staying on at Chandler Hotels and being the only parent to his only child would have required greater courage. Staring in the mirror every morning and wondering if he’d driven Lilli off all those years ago. Wondering if he’d helped make her feel trapped and unhappy. If he’d pushed her into making her deal with his father to act in Casino on the sly.

Give him a hot poker game any day.

He stubbed out his cigarette. He hadn’t seen Nick in months. Despite their many differences, the one thing he and Nick did share-this mismatched father and son-was a deep affection for Dani. Daughter and granddaughter, she was the one person they both loved without condition.

And whom both had failed without reason.

John smoked another cigarette and drank another beer. In his gut he knew what Nick was going to ask him to do.

Twenty-five years ago tonight Lilli had disappeared.

How could Nick ask?

“Damn,” John whispered, smashing his cigarette into an ashtray. He’d only smoked half of it. The other half he’d save for another day.

The minute he’d finished reading his father’s fax, he’d known what he would do.

He dressed in khaki pants and a white cotton shirt he didn’t bother tucking in and his ratty, once-white tennis shoes. All in all, he still looked like a desert rat, brown and wizened, squinty-eyed, a pathetic shadow of the proud, determined man he’d once been. When he got to Saratoga-he knew he’d go-some jackass would take his picture and put it in the paper. Dani wouldn’t be mortified. She’d say, “Yeah, that’s my father, the crook.”

She’d always been one to embrace reality.

After tossing a few things into a battered overnight bag, John headed out into the dry, blistering heat to the convenience store on the corner. He didn’t have a car, either. He used the pay phone to call his father collect. Nick accepted the charges. He always did. Dani paid his phone bill.

“You packed?” Nick asked in his famous gravelly voice.

“Yeah. You?”

“I’d drop dead before the plane got halfway to Chicago. No great loss to you and my charming ex-wife, of course, but I’m uninsured. You’d have to bury me. Think of the expense.”

John ignored his father’s morbid humor. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Mattie called.”

John was more amazed than surprised that his parents continued to tell each other most everything after fifty years apart. Their fights-which they preferred to call “quarrels”-had become the stuff of legend. But each knew exactly what the other was.

“Dani called her after being robbed?” John speculated.

“Naturally. Apparently the son of a bitch was still in the house when she got there. Pushed her around a little, but she’s not seriously hurt.”

“Thank God.”

“Yeah. Happened yesterday afternoon. With all the publicity she’s had lately, people think she’s rolling in money. Probably some bastard finally decided to have a look-see.”

“But you don’t think so,” John said.

“Hell, I don’t know. Mattie’s got a bee in her bonnet over the whole thing. You know that gold key Dani found? It was stolen along with some other stuff.”

“So?”

His father didn’t answer immediately, and John waited. He knew better than to interrupt one of Nick’s dramatic pauses. He’d come to the point only after he’d built the tension to a suitable climax or John yelled at him to get on with it. Nicholas Pembroke’s success as a filmmaker, John had come to believe, stemmed not from any particular artistic or technical genius, but from an innate talent for zeroing in on the essence of drama. He simply knew how to wring every drop of emotion out of a scene.

“So if Mattie’s right, Lilli was wearing the key the night she disappeared.”

John shut his eyes and felt the perspiration sticking his shirt to his back and the tightness in his eyes from the low humidity and insufficient sleep. He could see the Pembroke cliffs on a bright, clear Saratoga August afternoon.

Lilli.

“There’s another little gem,” Nick said.

John was losing patience. “This call’s costing you money-”

“It’s costing Dani. The little shark will demand a written explanation, I’m sure.” Nick inhaled and coughed, suddenly sounding old. “Zeke Cutler is in Saratoga, John.”

Exhaling slowly, John retained his self-control. He knew what his father was talking about. Zeke and Joe Cutler had been in Saratoga twenty-five years ago to tell Mattie her father was dying. They’d left the night Lilli disappeared. As far as John knew, the police had never questioned them. There had seemed to be no reason to. But John had read the book on Joe Cutler. The man who’d died in Beirut and the boy who’d come to Saratoga earlier had seemed like two different people, but who knew?

“Why?” he asked his father.

“Mattie doesn’t know. Apparently Dani found him in her garden after the burglary-she only mentioned him in passing when she talked to Mattie. John, Mattie’s never told her about the Cutler boys. You know she hates talking about Cedar Springs.”

And Dani idolized her grandmother, trusted her and believed in her as she couldn’t believe in anyone else, including her own father.

“Do you have a plane ticket?” Nick asked.

“I’ll get one.”

“If you need money, I can try and peel some off Dani.”

“I don’t need money.” His daughter wasn’t nearly as generous with her father as her grandfather, on the grounds, she claimed, that Nick was unreformable and too old to leave to the streets.

“John…”

He swallowed. “I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all I’ve ever asked of you.”

If only, John thought, either of them had asked as much of himself.

In his one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a pink stucco building on one of Beverly Hills’s less exclusive streets, Nicholas Pembroke settled into the leather chair he’d had sent to him in California from his grandfather’s peculiar estate-it seemed like a lifetime ago. Over sixty years. He’d left New York for good after his mother’s death. His father had died when Nick was five. Barely remembered him. He was named Ulysses Jr., but he’d tried hard not to be like his own father-that was a sentiment Nick understood. His own son, likewise, had never wanted to be like him.