Part 6 (1/2)
”What? Oh, sure. That's right. As right as...”
”Rain?”
”Whatever you say, old buddy.”
When my ch.o.r.es were done, we had a talk. I pulled my wandering attention in from somewhere out beyond left field and tried to settle down to the task at hand. I remembered what Mary Alice had said about how long the switch would take and how incredible it seemed to her, how she wondered if any switch had really taken place at all. I tried her approach on Meyer.
”I have to believe Hirsh,” Meyer said. ”If he saw it, he saw it. His mind is very quick and keen.”
”She really knows all that stuff.”
”What?”
”All that stamp stuff.”
”I would think it would be more remarkable if, after five years, she didn't know all about it.”
”What?”
”Never mind. Good G.o.d!”
”I wanted to give her a ride in Miss Agnes. It was a slow afternoon. Jane told us to take off. I followed Mary Alice to her place, in her old yellow Toyota. We had a drink in Homestead and dinner in Naples.”
”Naples?!”
”I know. We were just drifting along, talking about this and that, and Naples seemed like the closest place. So we came back across Alligator Alley and came here, and I showed her the Flush Flush. It knocked her out, like Agnes did. I like the way she laughs.”
”You like the way she laughs.”
”That's what I said. So then I drove her home and by then it was too late to even stop in for a nightcap.”
”How late is too late?”
”Quarter past five.”
”No wonder your face looks blurred.”
”Meyer, the whole twelve hours seemed like twenty or thirty minutes. We just hit the edges of all the things there are to talk about.”
”Are you going to be able to think about Hirsh Fedderman's problem?”
”Whose what?”
He went away, shaking his head, making big arm gestures at the empty s.p.a.ce ahead of him. If he had come back, I would have told him that I had almost decided that there was no problem at all, that Fedderman had been mistaken. If there is no way at all for something to have happened, the best initial a.s.sumption is that it didn't happen.
On that Friday I arrived at the store at closing time and drove Jane Lawson back to her place, a so-called garden apartment in a huge development of yesteryear, about a half-hour bus ride from Fedderman's store.
She sat erect on the edge of the seat and said, ”Our gal was pretty punchy all day, Trav.”
”I haven't been exactly alert.”
”Now turn left again and here we are. I hate that miserable bus, but it would be a worse bus ride for Linda.” She had already told me that Linda was the elder of her two, a scholars.h.i.+p freshman at the University of Miami in Coral Gables. Judy was a junior in high school. Sixteen and eighteen. I had noticed she talked about Linda quite a lot and had very little to say about Judy.
She tried the door and then got out her keys and said, ”Excuse the way the place will probably look. Working mother and two teen gals. I've tried. But they have a tendency to hang their clothes up in mid-air.”
The living room was small and oven-hot. She hurried over to a great big window unit and turned it on high-high, and then raised her voice to carry over the thunder of compressor and fan. ”The house rule is the last one out turns the beast off. It eats electricity. But it will chill this place fast, and then I can turn it down to where we can hear ourselves think. Isn't it terrible? Fix you a drink?”
”If there's a beer?”
”There could be. Let me look.”
She came smiling back with a cold bottle of beer and a tall gla.s.s and excused herself to change out of her working clothes. There was too much furniture in the room. The fireplace was fake. There was a double frame on the mantel, and in one side of it was an incongruously young man with a nice grin, Air Force uniform, lieutenant bars, pilot wings. In the other half was a picture of the same lieutenant in civilian clothes, sports jacket and slacks. He was holding a baby and looking down into its invisible face while a Jane Lawson, eighteen years younger, stood by him, no higher than his shoulder, smiling up at him.
There was an alcove off the living room with some high-fidelity equipment, with racks of tapes in bright dog-eared boxes, with tilted stacks of records. The room was getting cool very quickly. I went over and checked the controls on the beast and cut it from high cool to cool, from max fan to medium. It shuddered and smoothed to about the sound of a good chain saw on idle. I was back looking at the pictures when she came out in an overblouse and faded blue shorts and sandals. She was a slight and pretty woman, with the residual marks of old tensions in her face, with a firmness to her mouth and corners of her jaw.
”That's Jerry,” she said. ”It seems incredible. He was stopped right there in time, just thirteen months after this picture. In another year Linda will be as old as I was when I met Jerry.”
”Combat?”
”No. He was trade school. He wore the ring. They used to have more flameouts in fighter jets back then. He was on a night exercise, just two of them. That particular model, the way it worked, there was an interlock so that if you didn't jettison the canopy first, you couldn't eject, you couldn't make the charge go off to blow the seat out. It was supposed to be a safety thing, so a green pilot couldn't get nervous and blow himself through the canopy. But his canopy release jammed and all the way down he told his wingman exactly what he was doing to try to free it. No messages for anybody. Just technical information. A real pro.”
”They must have to take a special course in cool.”
”If I sound bitter, it's because they were already turning out a better canopy release thing and making the change in the field as the kits came in.”
So I told her about the radio tape years ago, made in Lauderdale, and broadcast only once before NASA came galloping in, all sweaty, and confiscated it. The interviewer had asked one of those good and tough-minded and free-thinking men of the early days of s.p.a.ce orbiting how he felt as the rocket was taking off. Maybe it was because he had heard that question too many times. He answered it with a question. 'How would you you feel, taking off, sitting up there on top of fifty thousand parts, knowing that every one had been let to the lowest bidder?'” feel, taking off, sitting up there on top of fifty thousand parts, knowing that every one had been let to the lowest bidder?'”
”Grissom?” she asked. I nodded. ”I thought so. It sounds like Gus. I knew those guys. I came close to marrying one. The girls were little. They liked him. I was half in love and telling myself the girls needed a father. So maybe the new father was going to end up frozen hard as marble, circling us all forever, haunting us all forever. I dilly-dallied and I dithered and s.h.i.+lly-shallied and all those words. And the tram left the station before I could make up my mind whether to buy a ticket. Maybe it's best. Who knows? Well, my troubles aren't what you came to talk about.”
”This problem could give you trouble you don't need. If the investment items are gone, Hirsh is going to have to make it good with Sprenger. With a man like Sprenger, I don't think there'd be a choice, even if Hirsh did want to look for an out. It might clean him out. It might take the store and the stock to do it.”
She was sitting in the corner of the couch. She pulled her legs up under her and made a face. ”That would really be rotten. For him, I mean. He's been so good to me. I can't believe I've been there fifteen years. I answered a blind ad, and when I found out what it was, I didn't want it at all. He liked my letter. He begged me to try it. He offered me too much money. I couldn't even type. I thought somebody was going to take advantage of this crazy little man, so it might as well be me. I didn't find out until later he'd interviewed at least thirty-five girls before me without finding anybody he wanted. He was looking for a nut who'd go to a business school nights and learn to type just because it would make things easier for him. Trav, don't talk about the troubles I could have. I'll manage. With the pay and the pension and being able to use the PX at Homestead, I've stuck rainy-day money away. Jerry's folks have helped some, and they'd help more if I had to let them. The thing is to help Hirsh so he doesn't have to sell everything.”
”That's what Mary Alice says too, but she can't really believe the good stuff isn't still in that book in the safety deposit box.”
”Hirsh doesn't imagine things like that. Know what I keep thinking?”
”What?”
”Don't tell Hirsh. If one investment account could be cleaned out like that, so could the others, couldn't they? He hasn't had a chance to look at any one of the other five during the past two weeks.”
”You certainly know how to relax a person, Jane.”
”You thought of that already, huh?”
”They're all handled alike, pretty much, aren't they?”
”Yes and no. The oldest account is Mr. Riker Benedict, and that was started about the same time I came to work. In fact, it was the first account Hirsh set up that way, mostly because Mr. Benedict couldn't really believe that the things Hirsh wanted to buy for him would keep going up in value year after year. He's bought nineteen cla.s.sic pieces in fifteen years, famous items. And he's looking for another one now. The collection is worth so much more than Mr. Benedict put into it, there's really no point in keeping on with it in the same way. But it's a ceremony, adding a new piece. The two of them will spend half a morning in the bank going over the great rarities, one by one, whether they are adding a new one or not. With the other accounts I would say that sometimes they go over the things previously purchased and sometimes they don't. The Sprenger account is the one where he never looks at the old purchases or the new ones either. He just sits there like so much dead meat. He nods, shrugs, grunts, and that's that.”
”What would happen to those accounts if anything happened to Mr. Fedderman?”