The Deadly Kiss-Off Page 13

  “In any such future incidents, I can recommend the laundry room as a safe space.”

  Caleb was already standing on the sidewalk when we pulled up. He got in the car, shivering.

  “Dang, these northern winters are hella cold!”

  “This ain’t even winter yet, you doofus. Just wait till the snow is up to your pecker.”

  Caleb laughed. “I’ll just get out my drywall stilts and be safe till there’s another two feet of the stuff!”

  We arrived quickly at a vacant vintage warehouse similar to the one Santo used to store his counterfeit merch, which was only about eight blocks away. Roly-poly Gunther awaited us. We all went inside the vast unheated space, where we could still see our breath. There was no electricity running, but Gunther had come equipped with several yellow plastic Eveready handheld lanterns, and we were able to scope out the interior to our satisfaction. Caleb immediately became enthusiastic, speculating on how he would set up the place for maximum efficiency. He possessed a certain small-businessman’s competence that Stan and I lacked, and I could see how he would be a valuable addition to our enterprise.

  We wrapped up and went outside. Stan said to Gunther, “Tell Vin it’s fine. We’ll take it.”

  “Uh, Stan, maybe I could ask you a favor?”

  “Sure, what?”

  “You think you could find a job for Alice on the assembly line so’s I wouldn’t have to worry about her all the time? You know she can follow orders pretty well, despite her troubles.”

  “Well, let’s ask the foreman here.” Stan explained briefly about Gunther’s cognitively slipping wife.

  “Why, heck, I don’t see but what she’d be darn useful. Maybe put her in the packing department if she can’t handle anything more complicated. She can always fold boxes or something.”

  Gunther’s face wore a look of immense relief. “Thanks, guys. Thanks so much.”

  Gunther went his way, and we brought Caleb back to his place. Before he got out of the car, Stan handed him a roll of cash.

  “First week’s salary. Now you can stock up on grits and gravy.”

  “I’m more of a sushi guy, actually.”

  It was getting on toward evening when Stan and I headed off for Vin Santo’s to pick up the contract.

  “Luckman’s tomorrow?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Stan replied. But he did not look as if he relished the prospect.

  26

  Nothing had changed at Luckman’s drab suburban residence in the few days we were gone, except that the rampant weeds of summer had succumbed to frost, rendering them both less obvious and more dismal looking than before, under leaden skies.

  Luckman opened the door for us and conducted us inside with his authentic old-fashioned etiquette. Rosa was not immediately visible.

  “You gentlemen have the contract, I presume?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Our silent partner—he’s the fellow with the funds, you know, so we always try to keep him happy—was very eager to cut the best deal for all parties. You’ll see his signature below on both copies of the agreement, and we’d be very grateful if you would not mention his involvement here, as he prefers to keep a low profile in order to discourage publicity and forestall his business rivals. But you can rest assured that he has a reputation for square dealing.”

  I supposed that Vin Santo’s predilection for putting his adversaries into a long pine box could be construed as “square dealing” if you squinted. But in any case, Vin’s actual name could be found nowhere on this document. A shell company with untraceable roots had been set up. Nor was Stan or I down on paper officially.

  “You’ll see, Professor Luckman, he kept it very simple. It’s only about five pages, actually.”

  “Let’s take it into my study so I can go over it with you.”

  We went into a room we hadn’t visited before, featuring an old-fashioned wooden desk, more shelves full of weighty physics tomes, and a pair of leather club chairs with brass studs down the arms. The room smelled like old pipe tobacco, and I spotted an antique humidor and a rack of pipes. Stan and I sat down in the club chairs while Luckman went behind his desk. I noticed a framed photo of Rosa there.

  Luckman motored slowly through the legal verbiage, with the intense scholarly particularity of someone evaluating a tricky essay from a hopeful protégé. Stan kept trying not to crane his neck to study Rosa’s angled-away picture, but his restive body language steadily betrayed him. Luckman, happily, was too focused on legalese to catch on.

  Finally, Luckman had examined the document to his satisfaction, though he continued to hold it above the blotter.

  “I see that either party can terminate the arrangement upon thirty days’ notice,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “And that you are just licensing the rights to manufacture my device. You make no claim on the patents or intellectual property. All that remains completely mine.”

  “But of course.” What I failed to say was that thanks to this clause, if any remorseful buyers should come after us for selling useless devices, he would be the one left holding the bag.

  “And I am responsible, naturally, for providing the schematics for assembly of the device, but also for sourcing the various components.”

  “We naturally assumed—”

  Luckman waved a hand. “No, no, you weren’t off base. I know all those suppliers intimately. No point in you reinventing the wheel. Now, as to the division of any profits …”

  Santo had written up the terms he had outlined aloud to Stan and me. And in a fit of generosity, Stan and I had agreed not to try to gyp Luckman of his fair share: one third of the monies left after Santo got his fat slice of the pie. I think Stan’s ready compliance had something to do with Rosa’s stake in the game. But now I suspected that Luckman might consider even this largesse unfair. So I got all my arguments mentally lined up to convince him otherwise.

  Luckman laid the contract down on the green felt and regarded us with solemn and perhaps slightly watery eyes.

  “Gentlemen, if we manage to sell even just the initial five thousand units—an eventuality that I firmly predict—we all will be coming into an immense sum of money. It beggars the imagination; it truly does. I never really contemplated actual numbers like this before. But your contract makes it all seem quite real, and I confess I don’t know how to react. This is a life-changing sum. Are you both quite sure that we face no hidden costs? Could my share perhaps be amended downward to some degree, to maintain a reserve against unforeseen expenditures?”

  I felt a small but easily repressible pang at Luckman’s naive trust in us, and his willingness to make sacrifices for a couple of undeserving grifters like us. But what the hell. Along with all the criminal liability, he was going to get a decent amount of dough. And if he really felt like being a proper Christian martyr, we could always invent some phony expenses that would siphon some of the money out of his pocket and into ours.

  Stan said, “Prof, you can rest easy. This is not our first rodeo. Me and Glen and our big-enchilada third wheel have done this before, and we would not have specified such a division of the kale if it were not all on the up-and-up.”

  Luckman allowed himself to relax and grin. “Very well, then. I’m signing this now with a happy heart!”

  Once both copies were signed, Luckman retained his, and we took ours. He moved to a closed sideboard then and opened it to reveal a few scant bottles of fussy liqueurs—stuff that old ladies drank when they were feeling thirty-nine again.

  “We need to toast our arrangement, fellows! Oh, wait,” he said. “Let me get my wife. She simply has to be here!”

  Stan laid a hand on Luckman’s shoulder. “You do the pouring, amigo; I’ll fetch the missus. Just point me to where she might be lurking.”

  “Oh, just go looking; the house isn’t that big. You’ll find her e
asily enough, I’m certain.”

  Stan left the study. Luckman consulted me nervously about which weak tipple was sufficiently grand and robust to solemnize such a major deal. I couldn’t really pay attention, worried as I was that I might hear a face getting slapped, a shoe connecting with an ass, and Stan being summarily ejected. Time seemed to stretch on forever. But no such crisis intervened, and eventually Luckman settled on a bottle of tawny port. He poured four glasses, and just as he finished, we heard steps approaching.

  Rosa Saxby Luckman entered first. She wore a white ruffled blouse and a black skirt, flesh-toned nylons, and flats. Her solemn face was flushed, and one small tail of her blouse had escaped the skirt’s waistband. Behind her pranced Stan, looking like a rooster just put in charge of a coop as big as the Queen Mary.

  Luckman immediately raced to embrace and kiss his wife. I regarded Stan for a second with horrified disbelief, then silently drew my sleeve across my face.

  Stan did the same, erasing the lipstick smudge there.

  Luckman disengaged from Rosa but kept an arm around her waist. He grabbed a glass and waved us to take ours. Then he said, “Here’s to all success for our happy little fraternity!”

  27

  Stan and I waved at our women as they threaded their way through the TSA line and past the metal detectors. I was glad to see them looking so happy and beautiful and competent together. They redeemed us, they surely did. Somehow, through no discernible merit on our parts and despite all our wickedness in need of comeuppance, we had lucked into these two extraordinary women to walk beside us through the valley of the shadow of criminality into which we had willingly entered. The imbalance of the situation in our unworthy favor almost made me doubt the existence of cosmic justice.

  When we could no longer see them, we turned around and went through the busy terminal and out to my car in the hourly lot. I would have exclusive use of it for at least the three weeks that Sandralene and Nellie would spend in Cape Verde, and I relished being behind the wheel again. Riding around in Stan’s patriotically got-up anachronism had me feeling as if I were out drumming up votes for Ronald Reagan’s reelection.

  After we had merged back onto the expressway, I turned to Stan and broached a subject that had been much on my mind.

  “What the bloody fucking outrageous hell were you thinking, banging Luckman’s wife? And in his own house, with him there!”

  “Oh, Christ, not that again! It’s been, what, five days now and you still won’t let it go!”

  “I am going to continue to ask you every day until I get some kind of answer that makes sense. Didn’t it occur to you that if Luckman found out and got pissed, it could wreck our whole deal?”

  “Of course that practical little thought ran through my head, just before and just after. I’m not an idiot, you know. I can plan for the future just like you. Delayed gratification, right? Key to a lifetime of success! But there was nothing neither of us could do. As soon as we were alone together in the same room, twenty years vanished in a flash. It was like I was sixteen again and Rosa was thirty-five. We were swept up in that same crazy-hot blindness to anything else but fucking each other comatose. Before I knew it, I had her skirt up around her waist and her panties down, and—”

  “That’s enough detail, please!”

  “You don’t think the prof suspected anything?”

  “Now who’s repeating himself? I told you a dozen times, he was blind as a pocket calculator to what had just happened right under his nose. All he could see at the moment was that his lifelong dream was going to come true and make him rich.”

  “Good for him. He seems like an okay joe. Probably worked like an Amish mule all his life, mollycoddling his precious little candy-ass students and sucking up to deans and suchlike. I’da killed myself or, more likely, someone else a long time before I got to where he is. Though he really oughta pay more attention to what his wife is up to. He’s a lucky stiff to have someone like Rosa. If she were my wife—”

  “And that’s another thing! What about Sandralene? Do you think she’d be happy if she knew what you were up to?”

  Stan grinned like Babe Ruth in the 1932 World Series, right after hitting his called shot into the center field bleachers.

  “I told her just before we left for the plane. She doesn’t care. What we got is stronger than that. After all, I don’t tug on her reins, do I?”

  Stan looked meaningfully at me, no doubt as a silent reminder of the one time Sandy and I had done the deed, with his tacit but limited sanction, so I wisely backed off that angle of attack.

  “She actually said,” Stan continued, “that she liked imagining me when I was a kid, before she knew me, and that maybe knocking boots with Rosa would be like some kinda fountain-of-youth thing.”

  “Holy God, you’re not going to keep screwing Rosa, are you? Wasn’t once dangerous enough?”

  “I can’t promise anything. Whatever happens, happens. All I can say is, I won’t go angling for it. Watch the damn road, Glen boy! That was a ’sixty-nine Porsche Targa you almost dinged! Listen, I want this scheme to succeed as much as you! I’m tired of being poor.”

  “You’ve still got the dough you earned from driving the truck?”

  “Yeah, but it’s going fast, what with rent on Caleb’s place and paying him a salary until Vin gets the funding flowing to us, and incidentals like meals and shit and keeping Sandy in Victoria’s Secret. I swear, that woman must own six dozen bras.”

  “You’d never know it to look at her.” Sometimes, I can’t help myself.

  “Ha!”

  “Well, we should see some relief in the cash-flow department soon, once the assembly line gets going and we have something solid to show Santo. Let’s go see how Caleb’s doing.”

  “Any chore that doesn’t involve another lecture from Mr. Keep It in Your Pants Choirboy is fine with me.”

  “You should thank your lucky stars that I’ve got your back.”

  “I thought it was my front you were concerned about.”

  The paint-exfoliating exterior of the dingy warehouse that was to be the LBAS factory presented a modified appearance from just a few days ago. A new small sign announcing the place as luckman enterprises was affixed to the front door.

  Inside, the place was lit and heated, at least in the newly framed narrow corridor that led from the entrance to a sizable office. And another change: the corridor was lined with a dozen job hunters, here to apply for work assembling Luckman’s gadget. Also, from deeper within the building, came the sounds of hammering and saws and drills.

  Stan and I got to the head of the line of applicants just as one of them, a young woman, emerged smiling from the office. Before the next person could enter, Stan and I cut the line with a curt but courteous explanation from Stan.

  “Small delay, folks,” he said. “Business talk between the owners. Just hang loose; it’ll be short.”

  Inside an office freshly appointed with desk and computer, long side table with application forms, file cabinet, coffeemaker, and minifridge, we found Caleb Stinchcombe and Alice Stroebel, Stan’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted former flea-market assistant and Gunther’s wife. Alice was laboriously filing the paper application of the woman who had just left.

  Caleb looked focused and preoccupied but not put-upon.

  “Hey, Stan, Glen, good to see you. I was going to report later anyhow. I think we’re almost up to speed. We’ve got nearly fifty good workers lined up, all with some assembly-line experience and all available immediately. Soon as Ron gives his approval to the physical setup and we get our raw materials in, we can start production.”

  Luckman had shown us the plans for assembling his device, taking hours to go over with us how he had put the one and only working model together. We had brainstormed the process and broken it down into about fifteen steps, to be performed at fifteen workstations, each staffed with
a team of three. We also needed shift supervisors, gofers, packers, and even security guards. Altogether, we were looking to hire close to a hundred people. Luckily, the city’s crummy employment stats were on our side.

  “That’s just great, Caleb. Keep up the good work. You, too, Alice.”

  “I know this system real good, Glen. It’s just the alphabet.”

  We left Caleb and went deeper inside the building to see how Luckman was faring.

  The big, open, brightly lit warehouse space swarmed with carpenters and electricians building the assembly stations and lots of shelving. There was really no automation involved, so the construction was simple. We tracked Luckman down at an open bay door that was letting in chill air redolent of auto exhaust. He was accepting delivery on a cargo of parts from a truck driver. The driver was then persuaded, with some reluctance, to offload the stuff himself, with the aid of a hand truck, since we didn’t have our staff in place yet. While the guy grumpily wheeled cartons bearing the logo of an electronics supplier over to an empty corner, I talked to Luckman.

  “Ronald, how’s it going? Any regrets about leaving the university?”

  Luckman had abruptly quit his teaching job in advance of the semester break for Thanksgiving. By doing so, he had certainly killed any chance at future academic employment, but he didn’t seem to care. He was in the fever grip of this new role as entrepreneur.

  “Oh, Glen, it’s fabulous! I’m getting a real sense of accomplishment here. And we haven’t even begun putting the units together yet!”

  “Does your wife have any worries?”

  “Oh, no! Rosa’s happy as a clam. She’s got ultimate confidence in me and the LBAS. I’ve never seen her so content in years.”

  Stan had suddenly found something needing his attention at one of the workstations under construction.

  “All right then,” I said. “Keep at it. We’ve got to go see our mutual backer now and give him an idea of our progress.”

  Back in my car, Stan said, “Happy as a clam. You heard the man.”