“Good afternoon, Binky, my boy.”
Depositing a small packet of envelopes encased in a rubber band on my desk, Binky gave me a depressing forecast of my afternoon epistles.
“The usual fast-food menus, requests for charitable donations, and a flyer from an X-rated video distributor in Miami.”
“Your job, Binky, is to deliver the mail, not read it,” I reminded him.
Binky suffers from EDS. Employment Deficiency Syndrome. Since leaving school he has held more jobs than mother has begonias, all terminating disastrously for both employer and employee. While clerking in a liquor store in Delray Beach, Binky was held up at gunpoint. Ordered to empty the cash register, Binky told the intruder that the register was controlled by the digital scanner that reads the price labels, therefore the thief would have to make a purchase if he wanted to get his hands on the loot.
Remembering the dinner party he was giving that very evening, the miscreant asked Binky to recommend a pretentious vin blanc to complement his poached salmon. Summoning all he had learned while training to be a liquor store clerk, Binky talked the man into a pr icy white Graves. Pleased, the bandit took home a case, along with the contents of the cash register. This is just one painful example of the entries on Binky’s CV. The full picture is available from the U.S.
Department of Unemployment under the Freedom of Information Act of 1966.
I had been instrumental in securing Binky the position of mail person at McNally amp; Son, and the appointment seemed to be working rather well to date — touch wood, cross fingers, toes, eyes, and remember to light a candle to St. Jude, the hope of the hopeless. Binky is a personable young man, some ten years my junior, who looks remarkably like that famous movie star, Bambi. Older women, like Mrs. Trelawney and Sofia Richmond, find his liquid-brown eyes to die for. Binky’s contemporaries of the fair sex, alas, do not.
Ignoring my grievance, Binky asked me if I was free after work. “What do you have in mind, Binky?”
“Apartment hunting’ is what he came up with.
Since securing employment with us and optimistic about the future, Binky is eager to move into his own pad with cohabitation very much the driving force of his quest. He recently spent his last dime having his collection of Victoria’s Secret catalogues bound in vellum. This is not a healthy sign. Binky lives with the Duchess, the sobriquet of his maiden aunt, who has supported him since the death of his parents when
Binky was just a tad and who is as eager to be rid of her ward as he is to find a soulmate.
Removing a tiny scrap of newspaper from his jacket pocket, Binky proceeded to read aloud: “For rent with option to buy…”
“You can’t afford to buy,” I cut in.
“I will some day,” Binky assured me. “By virtue of my unique talents, I am destined to be an entrepreneur, not an employee.”
The only talent I have ever recognized in Binky Watrous is one for fatuity. “And how do you envision moving from the mailroom to the boardroom?” I foolishly asked.
“I intend to modernize the mailroom, Archy.”
Never knowing when to withdraw while ahead, I rushed in where wiser men would dare not tread. “How, may I ask?”
“Pneumatic tubing,” he proclaimed with great pride.
Had I the room, I would have fainted.
“From my desk I will be able to shoot the mail all over the building in record-breaking time,” he went on, like a pitchman in a carny show.
In spite of our glass-and-chrome facade, McNally amp; Son is a Victorian enterprise within, thanks to its founder and CEO. Prescott McNally has been playing the part of the squire for so long that he actually believes he is one. A rectitudinous attorney, he reads only Dickens and sports an unruly guardsman’s mustache hoping to emulate the English actor Sir C. Aubrey Smith. However, in my humble opinion, he comes off as Groucho Marx, especially when enjoying an ear of corn.
“The only thing pneumatic tubing will help break around here, Binky, is your neck,” I assured him.
Not heeding the warning, as is his wont, Binky continued to read the advert. “For rent with option to buy. Mobile home…”
“You’re going to live in a trailer park?” I cried.
“What’s wrong with that? The Duchess thinks it’s perfect for me.”
The Duchess would put her stamp of approval on an opium den in Macao if she thought it would get Binky out of the house. I was, for reasons that will soon be clear, getting a bit anxious over Binky’s find.
‘ “Kitchen,” he continued,” “dining area, parlor, bedroom, and bath, partially furnished. Contact Hermioni Rutherford at the Palm Court.””
Like I always say, expect the worst and you’re seldom disappointed.
Sergeant Al Rogoff of the PBPD, my friend and sometimes partner in crime busting, resides at the Palm. Was I to be spared nothing this dastardly day?
Four
Culottes. I had not seen a pair in ages and often prayed that I never would again but, like all my petitions for divine intervention, this, too, had gone unheeded. If more tears are indeed shed over answered prayers, my eyes are as arid as the Gobi in August.
Along with the navy-blue culottes came a white middy that lacked only a whistle on a string. Inside this remarkable outfit was Hermioni Rutherford, hope of the homeless. Red hair, the shade of which did not appear on Mother Nature’s palette, and tortoiseshell glasses completed the picture of a Palm Beach realtor of the lower echelons. In a town where eighty-seven percent of the inhabitants are millionaires and where a good number of them run up a four-digit utility bill each month to keep the beach house cool, Hermioni’s clientele content themselves with an electric fan oscillating over a bucket of ice cubes.
Binky pulled into the allotted carport of the mobile home one remove from the stationary trailer Al Rogoff called home. As we emerged, Hermioni charged me with all the grace of a smiling linebacker. “Mr.
Watrous,” she stated.
“I am Mr. McNally,” I replied. “This is Mr. Watrous.”
Eyeing Binky, she asked, “Are you two considering this as a couple?”
That went a long way in confirming my initial opinion of Hermioni Rutherford. “Mr. Watrous is contemplating making the Palm Court his bachelor digs’ weighty pause ‘if what is being offered meets his needs.”
“I see.” Turning to Binky she continued her interrogation. “May I know your occupation, Mr. Watrous?”
Before Binky began his litany of jobs held and lost, I answered, “Mr.
Watrous is in pneumatic tubing.”
“Who are you?” Hermioni questioned. “His spokesperson?” Did I detect a note of hostility in her query? Well, if I was ruffling her feathers the feeling, I am sure, was mutual. However, she seemed pleased with showing the trailer to one in pneumatic tubing. Binky also looked happy with this job title. “Are you thinking of buying or renting, Mr.
Watrous?”
“Renting,” Binky told her, ‘but you never know.”
I kept a watchful eye on Al’s trailer as Hermioni and Binky got acquainted. I had purposely left my Miata in the garage at the McNally Building and had come in Binky’s car, hoping to get in and out of the Palm Court without being seen by Sgt Rogoff should he happen to be off duty and at home. If Binky did take up residence here I did not want it to appear as if I
had encouraged the move. Binky, I fear, is not one of Al’s favorite people.
Into my line of vision came a rather attractive young lady just leaving the trailer that separated Al Rogoff’s
