J. Kerley - The Broken Souls

The computer whirred and beeped, and came up blinking:

NO RECORD.

I tried again. Same effect. Harry stared at the screen.

“Either the bust never happened, or it got wiped totally clean. And the second option takes some doing.”

Ms Verhooven gestured for Lucas to follow her. There was no furniture in the room and the realtor’s high heels banged on the parquet floor. Ms Verhooven was as bright as a new trumpet: blonde hair, yellow dress, white shoes. Bright teeth moving behind glossy pink lips. Long legs sheathed in silky hose, rising up past the knee-high hemline toward…Lucas felt himself hardening and looked away, knowing such notions had to be sublimated, to use a term from Rudolnick’s world.

Ms Verhooven pushed open a door and gestured grandly, like a woman on a TV prize show.

“Ta-da!” she said.

Lucas stared at a toilet. “Ta-da?”

The fixture was cream colored, just like the adjoining countertop. Ms Verhooven bent over the counter, stroked it like a kitten.

“Granite countertops in the restroom, Mr Lucasian. Real, honest manufactured stone. Over at Midtowne Office Estates the counters are only Corian.”

Lucas nodded, though he had no idea what she was talking about. He was most interested in the sink.

Note to self, he thought, buy bath towels.

There was a faux baroque gilt-framed mirror on the wall. Lucas glanced at a slender and clean-shaven man with a neat part in his short and trendy, red-highlighted hair. His suit was dark and conservative, like the blue shirt and muted tie. He looked young but affluent. A success-driven young man, a starry-eyed entrepreneur with backing from Daddy, ready to make it on his own in the world. There were plenty of them out there.

Lucas winked at the entrepreneur, then turned his attention to the sink, turning the hot water on and off.

“The neighborhood seems quite nice, Ms Verhooven, a warren of free enterprise.”

“This is mid-Mobile’s most prestigious mercantile complex, Mr Lucasian. An address here has cachet.” She pronounced it catch-hay. “You’re lucky. This location did have an interested party and a hold on the space for several months. But something fell through and it’s now available.”

Lucas almost laughed. They used to be office parks, now they were mercantile complexes. With catch-hay, nonetheless. He looked through slat blinds at several small clusters of offices, red-brick buildings, the tallest four stories. The grounds were nicely landscaped, myrtle and dogwood and circles of hedge. A few magnolia bushes, the ever-present azaleas.

Lucas looked across the street at the nearest building, a hundred feet distant. The top floor, fourth, was large and sparsely populated offices, a quiet little kingdom of teak and brass. On the next three floors, cubicle drones could be seen shuffling papers and talking on phones. There were four levels, but only the top floor interested Lucas. The space Ms Verhooven was showing was on the fourth floor as well, but the building was on a slight rise, putting Lucas above the level of the fourth floor across the way. The angle allowed Lucas to look down on the facing building, which tickled him.

“You’re in a wonderful business community, Mr Lucasian,” the rental agent chirped, seeing his eyes scanning the neighborhood. “Accounting firms, brokerages, financial advisors, that sort of thing. Four or five doctors. Two corporate headquarters, three legal firms…”

Lucas wandered through rooms smelling of fresh paint and cleanser. He struck several poses he found particularly businesslike: holding his chin and nodding out the window, clasping his hands at his belt and arching an eyebrow at the ceiling, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall. Lucas cut a glance toward the building across the way, marveling at the luck of his location. Or had this perfect site been arranged by the man upstairs, divine guidance?

“It feels very businessy,” he said, pushing from the wall. “A place to call home. Where does one park, Ms Verhooven?”

“Around the back of the building. It’s a little out of the way, but –”

“No. That’s just perfect,” Lucas said. “Couldn’t be better.”

Ms Verhooven beamed. “What is it, basically, that your firm does, Mr Lucasian?”

“I’m in securities,” Lucas said. He chuckled at the wonderful double entendre: insecurities.

“Is the space to your liking, Mr Lucasian?” the agent trilled. “Everything you need?”

“Yes, Ms Verhooven,” Lucas said. “Everything is absolutely perfect.”

After catching up on paperwork and calls, we returned to Harry’s. I was eager to look at Rudolnick’s records, Harry less so.

My partner lived in a small enclave a couple miles west of downtown. The yards and houses weren’t large, but compensated with charm. There were trees aplenty, old live oaks and pecans and thick-leaved magnolias. Whenever I pulled into the neighborhood in summer, the shade made my soul feel twenty degrees cooler.

Harry’s house was a compact single-story Creole with a full gallery and a magnolia in the front yard. The paint was coral with mauve accents which, for Harry, showed restraint. In the setting, it looked just right, a contented house.

I felt as much at home as if I’d stepped into my own living room. Harry’s walls were red, the woodwork a light green. He had several pieces of art on the walls, primitive paintings of musicians picked up at the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis. The art was my influence; I fell in love with art in college, passed my enthusiasm on to Harry.

In return, he introduced me to jazz and blues. When we first started hanging out, he asked my musical influences, shaking his head at most. He’d pulled a vinyl of Louis Armstrong from its jacket, set it on the turntable, dropped the needle on a 1929 rendition of the W. C. Handy tune, “St Louis Blues”. It was like nothing I’d ever heard, bright and alive and flowing like a stream, and I was a convert before sixteen bars had passed.

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