“Come on in and buy something!” Claire shouted through the glass.
“You look like an asshole!” Violet cried out to a bundled-up passerby.
“This is like being locked in an elevator,” said Natalie quite sensibly.
“No shit,” Claire commented sadly. “Why don’t you steal something.”
“I’m not in the mood. You steal something.”
“We can’t; they do inventory.”
“Then steal from the cash register.”
“You’re pretty naive,” said Violet, looking at Claire. Both ignored the ringing phone and Natalie suddenly felt anxious. She thought of the bulbs of perennials asleep in her garden, wondering how they were doing in this terrible cold. She thought next of Stuart’s unwavering sense of duty and loyalty. Then she thought she might cry but elected to postpone it.
In the opinion of his father-in-law, whose greatest praise for anyone was “reminds me of myself at that age,” Paul was a ball of fire. For years, he had barreled around the State of Montana in a white Ford Crown Victoria, dry cleaning hanging in the backseat, calling on every conceivable customer of their bottled products. And he bragged to his own father-in-law that the towns he visited were chock-full of cheating housewives.
“But where is your expense report?” Sunny Jim demanded.
“My what?”
“Your expense report. You must submit an expense report complete with receipts, after every trip. Where is it?”
“Mr. Peabody’s coal train done hauled it away.”
“What in the hell’s the matter with you, son?”
“I hate it when you’re sore. You’ve got a face that could stop a clock.”
This appealed to Sunny Jim Whitelaw but not at first.
It was Paul’s capacity for unstinting companionship that endeared him to Sunny Jim Whitelaw, whose business acumen and family leadership were matched by another life entirely, that of an unwearying old goat. For this, he needed company, and it illustrated his remarkable ingenuity that he chose Paul to accompany his carousals.
On one such jaunt, before Paul had hit on the bright idea of trading jail time for corporate glory, he had traveled with Whitelaw to Las Vegas for a bottlers’ convention, evidence of which, in the form of brochures and industry newsletters, was strewn in Mother Whitelaw’s path. Paul had long acted as beard to Whitelaw’s secret life, a simple enough arrangement except that he increasingly associated his confidentiality with raises to which he felt entitled, an association Whitelaw indulgently called blackmail while plotting, without so revealing, a severe reprisal. For this secret reason, Sunny Jim had invited a guest on this trip, a business acquaintance named C. R. Majub, whom he described as a “very, very, very old friend.”
At first, they saw little of Majub; he was ailing and he was also a hockey fan. If any sort of game at all was on television, Majub was absent; if the Montreal Canadiens were playing, he took the phone off the hook, piled pillows under his door to remove extraneous noise and drank Crown Royal from a bathroom glass. “You can’t believe a towelhead could love hockey so much!” Whitelaw exclaimed, then added, more thoughtfully, “but he’ll show you how to get rich, so long as you don’t care how you make it.” From the beginning, Majub cheerfully exuded mystery and secret knowledge, and he was one of the few people whom Paul had ever instinctively feared. Majub’s attentiveness was like the savoring of a cannibal.
Sundown seemed prolonged on the eve of their arrival, and it was not quite dark by the time Sunny Jim attached a mercenary showgirl named JoAnne to his arm, a high-kicking hooker with muscular hands. Paul, straggling along like a remora following an old shark, tried to make small talk, citing Evelyn’s love of her horses and cows, and causing JoAnne to moan tragically at the recollection of her North Dakota yesteryears. For obvious reasons, the two men kept separate rooms, the latter a suite where Whitelaw could entertain. Indeed, he entertained so many that Paul began to wonder just what demons drove his father-in-law; it was hardly a moral judgment, since Paul sometimes did some entertaining himself. At such occasions C. R. Majub often appeared, a precise and well-dressed man of forty with a flat midwestern voice. Majub, it developed, was an Ohio Bengali, and too ill to entirely indulge the technical investment questions in speculations as to “where our economy is headed” that so absorbed Whitelaw. Majub seemed to be in Las Vegas looking for a cure, though when Paul asked if it was to see a doctor, Whitelaw said, “Not exactly!” and laughed uproariously. Majub saw no humor in this and continued sizing Paul up. Whitelaw beamed upon his sick friend. Trying to curry his favor, Paul told him, once Whitelaw had left the room, “His teeth are loose but he still wants sex.”
Whitelaw enjoyed Paul’s prying nature and was willing to feed him tidbits about Majub on the rare occasions when the whores were elsewhere. He was, it seemed, a successful broker of businesses who’d helped Sunny Jim acquire, with leverage, several—“semi-mom-and-pop”—going concerns in the Midwest, including a sign company, a foundry and a Dunkin’ Donuts. During a steep and unforeseen downturn, in which the offspring threatened to eat the parent company, Majub saved Whitelaw’s bacon by “spinning the subsidiaries way offshore.”
“This guy knows from loyal,” Sunny Jim said. “He’s on the business end of loyal. P.S. I owe him.” As he almost never acknowledged debt, Paul figured this was merely a figure of speech.
Paul’s only private exposure consisted of a single drink at the hotel bar where Majub acknowledged that he was not well; but when Paul asked what he was doing about it, he merely shrugged and said, “Waiting.” The brown rascal’s Perrier made Paul’s Budweiser seem the epitome of vice, and Paul was further discomfited by the silence of Majub, a quality that — being unattainable by Paul — he always rather admired. At length, Majub turned to him wearily and said, “Sunny Jim isn’t going to be around forever,” then handed Paul a card that read C. J. Majub, broker and, after finishing his Perrier at a swallow, added, “I make companies get bigger or I make them get smaller. Best of all, I make them go away.”
That night, chatting blearily with his father-in-law in the latter’s suite, Paul showed him his latest plan for a promotion, which consisted of a fistful of Polaroids with which the girl from North Dakota had provided him for five cool century notes. Whitelaw didn’t show a bit of annoyance at the connection between these pictures and his son-in-law’s economic well-being, and Paul could hardly have known that he himself was about to go on the black market. Sunny Jim took possession of the Polaroids with inexplicable gratitude and, resting a heavy paw on Paul’s shoulder, said, “I just like getting my ashes hauled.” Then he announced he was tired and wished to go to sleep. But for a nightcap, he recommended the Capitol, in Henderson, where Paul could use his credit by just identifying himself as his son-in-law. After giving him directions and begging Paul’s indulgence, the old fellow rolled over and closed his eyes.
The Capitol was next door to Seizer’s Palace, an agency specializing in repossessing unpaid-for goods. Its motto, emblazoned on poured concrete walls, reminded Paul of a book he’d once read. “Render unto Seizer, that which is Seizer’s.” The cabby who’d dropped him there said the women wouldn’t be prostitutes, but they’d be close. The Capitol had white columns fastened directly to its stucco facade and its discreet entrance promised high jinks. Overhead, the sound of arriving and departing airliners was constant; the night air smelled of jet fuel, and desert clouds were lit repeatedly, at heartbeat intervals, by strobes and beacons from the city. The persistence of odd-hour life gave the town a kind of fluorescent alpenglow.