William Lashner - Bitter Truth

Along with the police came a man, tall and blond. He obtained a hotel room for Grimes that night at the Four Seasons, an apartment in a modern high-rise on Walnut Street for him the very next day. Without having to do anything, Grimes’s possessions were in the new apartment, along with a brand new set of contemporary furniture. The lease was prepaid for two years. On his new big screen television set was a envelope with twenty thousand dollars in cash. That was the last he saw of Jackie or her family. The last he saw of his hundred million.

“You’re right,” I told him as we sat side by side at the Irish Pub, across from his new and fully paid luxury apartment at 2020 Walnut. “That’s an absolute tragedy.”

“So when you talk about almost getting a piddling little share of some crappy little lawsuit,” said Grimes, “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Why’d she kill herself?”

“Who knows? There was no note. She was always so sad, maybe it just got to be too much. Or maybe her paranoia was justified and someone in that gruesome family of hers killed her. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t that punkette of a sister, either. But it doesn’t make a difference to me, does it?”

“Guess not. Who was that blond guy who paid you off in the end?”

“Family banker.”

I nodded. “You ever been to a place called Tosca’s?”

“No. Why?”

“Just asking.”

“What’s that, a restaurant?”

“It’s an Italian place up on Wolf Street. Great food is all. I was thinking you can take your wife sometime, make it all up to her.

“Fat chance, that. I tried to go back but she divorced me anyway. I don’t blame her, really. She’s remarried, some urologist, raking it in even with the HMO’s. He’s got this racket where he sticks his finger up some geezer’s butt, feels around, and pulls out a five-hundred-dollar bill. She says she’s happier than she’s ever been. Tells me the sex is ten times better with the urologist, can you believe that?”

“It’s the educated finger.”

“And, you know, I’m glad. She deserves a little happiness. You want to know something else?”

“Sure.”

“I sort of liked her. Jackie, I mean. She was a kook, really, and too sad for words, but I liked her. Even with all her money she was an innocent. We would have been all right together. With her, and a hundred million dollars, I think I finally might have been a little happy.”

He turned back to his drink and swilled the scotch and I watched him, thinking that with a hundred million I might be a little happy too. I took another sip of my beer and started to feel a thin line of nausea unspool in my stomach. And along with the nausea it came upon me again, the same suspicion I had felt before, that somewhere in this unfolding story was my own way into the Reddman fortune. I couldn’t quite figure the route yet, but the sensation this time was clear and thrilling; it was there for me, my road to someone else’s riches, waiting patiently, and all I had to do was discover where the path began and take that first step.

“What now?” I asked myself and I wasn’t even aware I had said it out loud until Grimes answered my question for me.

“Now?” he said. “Now I spend the rest of my life sticking fingers in other people’s mouths.”

I SLIPPED MY MAZDAinto a spot on the side street that fronted the brick-faced complex. I snapped on the Club, which was ludicrous, actually, since my car was over ten years old and as desirable to a chop shop as an East German Trabant, but still it was that type of neighborhood. At thirty minutes per quarter I figured three in the meter would be more than enough. I pulled my briefcase out and locked the car and headed up the steps to the Albert Einstein Medical Center.

In the lobby I walked guiltily past the rows of portraits, dead physicians and rich guys staring sternly down from the walls, and without stopping at the front desk, took my briefcase into the elevator and up to the fifth floor, cardiac care. The hospital smelled of overcooked lima beans and spilled apple juice and I could tell from just one whiff that Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky in Room 5036 was not a happy man.

“I’m nauseous all the time,” said Jimmy Vigs in a weak, kindly voice as I stepped into the room. He wasn’t talking to me. “I retched this morning already. Should that be happening?”

“I’ll tell the doctor,” said a nurse in a Hawaiian shirt, stooping down as she emptied his urine sack. “You’re on Atenolol, which sometimes causes nausea.”

“How am I peeing?”

“Like a horse.”

“At least something’s working right.” Jim was a huge round man, wildly heavy, with thick legs and a belly that danced when he laughed, only he wasn’t laughing. His face was shaped like a pear, with big cheeks, a large nose, a thin, fussy little mustache. He lay in bed with his sheet off and his stomach barely covered by his hospital gown. In his arm was an intravenous line and beside his bed was a post on which three plastic bags hung, filling him with fluids and medicines. The blips on the monitor were strangely uneven; his pulse was eighty-six, then eighty-three, then eighty-seven, then ninety. I wondered if Jimmy would book a bet on which pulse rate would show up next and then I figured he already had.

“Hello, Victor,” he said when he noticed me in the room. His voice had a light New York accent, but none of the New York edge, as if he had moved from Queens to Des Moines a long time ago. “It’s kind of you to visit.”

“How are you feeling, Jim?”

“Not so well. Nauseous.” He closed his eyes as if the strain of staying awake was too much for him. “Helen, this is Victor Carl, my lawyer. When a lawyer visits you in the hospital it’s bad news for someone. I guess we’re going to need some privacy.”

She smiled at me as she fiddled with his urine. “I’ll just be a minute.”

“With what he’s charging, this is going to be the most expensive pee in history.”

“Okay, okay,” she said as she finished emptying the catheter bag, but still smiling. “Just another moment.”

“She’s been terrific. They’ve all been terrific. They’re treating me like a prince.”

“When are they cleaning out your arteries?” I asked. For the past few years Jim had worn a nitro patch and kept the medicine by his side all the time, often popping pills like Tic-Tacs when things got tense. He had had a bypass about ten years back, before I met him, but I had never known him to be without pain and finally, when the angina had grown unbearable, he had consented to going under the knife, or under the wire at least, to clear his arteries by drilling through the calcium deposits that were starving his heart.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “By tomorrow evening I’ll be a new man.”

The nurse fiddled with the drips and took some notations and then left the room, closing the door behind her. As soon as it was closed, Jim said in a voice with the New York edge suddenly returned, “You bring it?”

“I don’t feel right about this,” I said. “I feel downright queasy.”

“Let me have it,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Let me have it,” he said.

I was reaching into my briefcase when an orderly came in with a tray. I snapped the case closed before he could see inside.

“Here’s your lunch, Mr. Dubinsky,” said the orderly, a big man in a blue jumpsuit. “Just what the dietitian prescribed.”

“I’m too nauseous to eat, Kelvin,” said Jimmy, weak and kindly again. “But thank you.”

“You’ll want to eat your lunch, Mr. Dubinsky. Your DCA’s tomorrow morning, so you won’t be getting dinner.”

“I’ll try. Maybe a carrot stick. Thank you, Kelvin.”