By the angle of his head, the way he used his arms and his legs, turned his body into a K closing the side door of the van, somehow Ricky made Fletch watch him do it.
Mortimer may have developed the kid’s body but the kid’s presence was as natural to him as the color of his hair.
Fletch said, “I notice you don’t use contractions.”
Ricky said, “I do not?”
He opened the van’s door for Fletch.
“Bye,” Fletch said.
“Good bye.”
15
“You there!”
Walking his bike on a gravel path skirting the side of Vindemia’s main house, Jack looked up. An older woman was calling to him from a balcony. Wisps of her graying hair and her light bathrobe were being blown by the wind.
“Come here!” She pointed to an open, arched doorway beneath her balcony. “Go in there. Come up the steps.”
Overhead the ten huge flags on the roof were snapping imperiously in the wind.
He leaned his bike against a wall, went through the arch and up the stone stairs in the wall of the house.
She was the woman he had seen possibly weeping in the back of the chauffeur-driven stretch Infiniti the day he arrived.
“Do I know you?” she asked him. “I mean, have we done this together before?”
“What?” Jack asked.
“I need someone to take out my rubbish,” she said.
“Oh.”
“People keep forgetting,” she said. “To take out my rubbish.”
“I see.”
“I need this help.”
“Okay.”
“You look like the last boy who used to help me.”
“We’re infinitely replaceable,” Jack said. “I’m glad you realize that. He was my friend.” She stuck a bill into the pocket of his shorts. “Will you be my friend?”
“Sure.”
“It’s just this bag over here.” On the floor of the balcony near the French doors was a green garbage bag. “People keep forgetting it, you see.”
“I see.”
“If you’d just dispose of it for me.”
“Sure.” When he picked the bag up its contents clanked.
“That will be all.” Looking straight ahead, she went through the French doors into the house.
Jack found the latticed yard behind the kitchen of the house where the many covered rubbish barrels were placed in wooden, hatched bins. The area was as scrubbed as a surgery.
Jack lifted the garbage bag into a barrel.
Then he opened the garbage bag.
Within were many vodka bottles, a few sherry bottles, port bottles, brandy bottles, all empty.
There were also many differently shaped pill vials, all empty. The names of the prescription drugs on the typed labels meant little or nothing to Jack. Instructions limited the number of each pill taken daily and usually recommended taking upon rising or at bedtime. They were prescribed by various doctors, MacMasters, Donovan, Harrison and Chiles.
All the prescriptions were for Amalie Radliegh.
Jack would have thought the woman had just cleaned out her medicine chest of years’ accumulations, but all the dates on the prescription labels were within the last three weeks.
He retied the top of the garbage bag and closed the hatch.
Walking back to his bike, he took out the bill Mrs. Radliegh had stuffed into his pocket and looked at it.
It sure was an easy way to make $50.
16
“Are you marrying Chet?” Jack asked.
“Yes,” Shana answered.
“Why?”
Jack had walked his bike down to the swimming pool and left it leaning against a wall.
Shana Staufel was swimming her laps.
Otherwise the pool area was empty.
Jack waited for her to finish. He sat in a chair in the shade of the wall nearest the house. He could not be seen there from any of the windows, balconies of the house which overlooked the pool generally. He had learned that trick from Nancy Dunbar regarding the office windows next to the Japanese garden.
A small jet airplane circled over Vindemia to land at the estate’s airfield.
Shana had not seen Jack when she first came out of the water.
“Hey,” he had said in a low voice.
Drying her head with a towel, she had walked over to him. Today she was wearing a yellow bikini which brought wonderful light to her skin.
Now sitting on a cushioned chair near Jack she said, “So you know about Chet.”
“What do I know about Chet?”
She said, “He likes boys.”
“Does he like girls, too?”
She shrugged. “No way, Jose.”
“Then why are you marrying him?”
“It’s an arrangement.”
“‘An arrangement.’”
“Yes. Have you never heard of an arranged marriage?”
“A marriage of convenience?”
She nodded. “Very convenient.”
“What’s convenient about it?”
“There are certain ambitions,” Shana said, slowly, carefully, “which easily can be realized. For Chet to pass the Bar Exam, practice law locally, briefly, run for United States Congress, first, then, you know …”
“Buy the hearts and minds of the American people.”
“He’s very bright. He’ll be brilliantly staffed and advised. Already a book has been written for him contrasting the First and Fourteenth Amendments—”
“Written for him?”
“It will be published under his name. The ghostwriters have been well paid for both their work and their silence.”
“That’s nice.”
“The District’s present Congressman is expected to retire after this term.”
“How old is he?”
“Late forties.”
“Why is he retiring?”
