William Lashner - Bitter Truth

After I had read the papers, twice, I began playing catch-up at the office, returning phone messages, responding to letters, filing motions to continue those matters that I didn’t have time to deal with just then, freeing up my afternoon and the many days to follow. I was, in effect, putting off the whole of my practice while I pursued my ill-starred quest for a chunk of the Reddman fortune. When I cleared my calendar for the next week, I took a deep breath, grabbed a file, stuffed it in my briefcase, and sneaked out of the office, heading for Rittenhouse Square. Before my dinner meeting with Caroline Shaw and Franklin Harrington I had some things I needed to check on.

Rittenhouse Square is a swell place to live, which is why so many swells live there. It is the elegant city park. There are trees and wide walkways and a sculpture fountain in the middle. Society ladies, plastic poop bags in hand, walk their poodles there; art students, clad all in black to declare their individuality, huddle; college dropouts looking like Maynard G. Krebs walk by spouting Kierkegaard and Mr. Ed in the same breath; hungry homeless men sit on benches with handfuls of crumbs, luring pigeons closer, ever closer. It is a small urban pasture, designed by William Penn himself, now imprisoned by a wall of stately high-rises jammed with high-priced condominiums: The Rittenhouse, the Dorchester, the Barclay. It was the Cambium I was headed for now, a less imposing building on the south side of the park, hand-wrought iron gates, carved granite facings, million-dollar duplexes two to a floor. A very fashionable place to die, as Jacqueline Shaw had discovered.

“Mr. Peckworth, please,” I said to the doorman, who gave me a not so subtle look that I didn’t like. I was dressed in a suit, reasonably well groomed, my shoes may have been scuffed, sure, but not enough to earn a look like that.

“Who then can I say is visiting this time?” he asked me.

“Victor Carl,” I said. “I don’t have an appointment but I expect he’ll see me.”

“Oh yes, I’m sure he will,” said the doorman.

“Do we have a problem here?”

“No problem at all.”

“I don’t think I said anything funny. Do you think what I said was funny or is it just the way I said it?”

“I did not mean in any way to…”

“Then maybe you should stop smirking and get on the phone and let Mr. Peckworth know I’m here.”

“Yes sir,” he said without a smile and without a look.

He called up and made sure the visit was all right. While he called I looked over the top of his desk. The stub of a cigar smoldered in an ashtray, a cloth-bound ledger lay open, the page half filled with signatures. When the doorman received approval for my visit over the phone he made me sign the ledger. A few signatures above mine was a man from UPS. “All UPS guys sign in?”

“All guests and visitors must sign in,” he said.

“I would have thought they’d just leave their packages here.”

“Not if the tenant is at home. If the tenant is at home we have them sign in and deliver it themselves.”

“That way stuff doesn’t get lost at the front desk, I suppose.”

The doorman’s face tightened but he didn’t respond.

While I waited beside the elevator, I noticed the door to the stairs, just to the left of the elevator doors. I turned back to the doorman. “Can you go floor to floor by these stairs?”

“No sir,” he said, eyeing me with a deep suspicion. “Once inside the stairwell you can only get out down here or on the roof.”

I nodded and thanked him and then waited at the elevator.

Peckworth was the fellow who had seen a UPS guy outside Jacqueline Shaw’s apartment when no UPS guy should have been there. He had later recanted, saying he had confused the dates, but it seemed strange to me that anyone would not remember the day his neighbor hanged herself. That day, I figured, should stick in the mind. On the elevator I told the operator I was headed for the eighth floor. It was an elegant, wooden elevator with a push-button panel that any idiot could work, but still the operator sat on his stool and pushed the buttons for me. That’s one of the advantages of being rich, I guess, having someone to push the buttons.

“Going up to visit them Hirsches, I suppose,” said the operator.

“Are the Hirsches new here?”

“Yes sir. Moved in but just a few months ago. Nicest folk you’d want to meet.”

“I thought there was a young woman living in that apartment.”

“Not no more, sir,” said the operator, and then he looked up at the ceiling. “She done moved out.”

“Where to, do you know?”

“Just out,” he said. “So you going up to visit them Hirsches?”

“No, actually.”

“Aaah,” he said, as if by not going to visit the Hirsches I had defined myself completely.

“Is there something happening here that I’m not aware of? Both you and the doorman are acting mightily peculiar.”

“Have you ever met Mr. Peckworth before, sir?” asked the operator.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well then that there explains it,” said the operator.

“I guess I’m in for a treat.”

“Depends on your tastes is all,” said the operator as the elevator door slid open onto a short hallway. “Step to your right.”

I nodded, heading out and to the right, past the emergency exit, to where there was one door, mahogany, with a gargoyle knocker. A round buzzer button, framed with ornate brass, glowed, but I liked the looks of that knocker, smiling grotesquely at me, and so I let it drop loudly. After a short wait the door opened a crack, revealing a thin stooped man, his face shiny and smooth but his orange shirt opened at the collar, showing off an absurdly wrinkled throat. “Yes?” said the man in a high scratchy voice.

“Mr. Peckworth?”

“No, no, no, my goodness, no,” said the man, eyeing me up and down. “Not in the least. You’re a surprise, I must say. We don’t get many suits up here. But that’s fine, there’s a look of desperation about you I like. My name is Burford and I will be handling today’s transaction. In these situations I often act as Mr. Peckworth’s banker.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well come in, please,” said the man as he swung the door open and stepped aside, “and we’ll begin the bargaining process. I do so enjoy the bargaining process.”

I entered a center hallway lined with gold-flocked paper and then followed Burford into another, larger room that had traveled intact from the nineteenth century. The room was papered in a dark maroon covered with large green flowers, ferocious blooms snaking their way across the walls. There was a dark old grandfather clock and a desk with spindly animal legs and an overstuffed couch and thick carpets and dark Gothic paintings of judges in wigs with a lust for the hangman in their eyes. Thick velvet drapes framed two closed windows, the drapes held to the wall with iron arrows painted gold. The place smelled of not enough ventilation and too much expensive perfume. On one wall was a huge mirror, oval, sitting like a giant cat’s eye in a magnificent gold-leaf frame.

Burford led me to the center of the room and then, as I stood there, he circled me, like a gallery patron inspecting a sculpture he was interested in purchasing.

“My name is Victor Carl,” I said as Burford continued his inspection. “I’m here to see Mr. Peckworth.”

“Let’s start with the tie,” said Burford. “How much for the tie? Is it silk, Mr. Carl?”

“Polyester, one hundred percent,” I said. It was a stiff black-and-red-striped number, from which stains seemed to slide right off, which is why I liked it. Wipe and wear. “But it’s not for sale.”

“Come now, Mr. Carl,” said Burford. “We are both men of the world. Everything is for sale, is it not?”