2020 (18 page)

“Whoa,” I heard Kaplan shout. “Señoritas at eleven o’clock!”

I looked ahead. Three elderly women were pushing along a narrow white table high with what I took to be catered food.

“What’s he talking about?” Ortiz asked.

“Señoritas,”
Kaplan said. “Babes.”

“Good grief,” I said. “They’re pushing a gurney.”

“Tell me what they look like,” Ortiz said.

“They look as old as we are. Except the one in front—Kaplan’s right—she’s some . . . babe. Big blue hair, leopard-skin outfit, wide black belt, gold high heels. Great legs. Behind her, alongside the gurney, there’s a woman who looks like . . . I guess you’d say a giant robin. Big bosom, big behind. Grandmotherly. She’s got a red and white striped cane. Laser guidance.”

“Come to Papito,” I heard Ortiz say to my surprise.

“The thin one on the other side reminds me of Pinkie. My late wife. She’s using one of those electric canes. That woman up front, though. She’s got to be somebody’s daughter.”

“Faster, Doc,” Kaplan urged, leaning forward into his wheelchair and pushing hard. “Let’s cut them off at Orange Julio’s.”

* * *

“An all-woman Geropod?” Judge Ortiz marveled. “I’m absolutely charmed.”

“Such a gentleman,” the blind woman replied, feeling around the table discreetly for her Venison Burrito with one hand, fingering the straw in her fluorescent green Margarita with the other.

We were clustered at the rear of Casa Escobar. There’d been some trouble about the gurneys, but we arranged to park them just outside, in a quiet alcove with a little birdbath. To my great relief, the woman who reminded me of Pinkie turned out to be a retired intensive care nurse. Between us we checked vital signs on Tiger and started a new IV line on her temporary patient, a one-hundred-and-twelve-year-old woman whose hair was so white, whose still smile was so beatific, she looked like a porcelain angel.

Kaplan had settled deep into the red booth alongside the woman with the blue hair. Her name was Bette. Her makeup was very thick, but expertly applied. She was as old as the rest of us, it turned out, and a marvel. Her artificial lungs gave her a breathy voice and she’d somehow managed to keep her figure, or at least had tucked and squeezed it into the leopard skin suit in a way that belied her age. Unless you looked closely, you might have easily mistaken her for a woman in her early fifties.

“Were you in the industry?” Kaplan asked. “Films? Holos?”

“I was on a poster once,” she said coyly.

“If you’d had the right representation . . .” Kaplan speculated, flattering her in the easy way of an experienced professional.

Bette’s false eyelashes fluttered so vigorously I thought I felt a breeze.

And so we ate and talked. By the time it came to coffee and flan, the restaurant was almost empty. Ostensibly to try one another’s laser canes, Ortiz and the blind woman groped their way into a separate booth for dessert.

The ex-nurse and I went out to the alcove to check on our charges again. Her name was Barbara.

“So how do you like being old?” I asked, adjusting my hat.

“Today is fun,” she said. “But it’s hard to do things.”

I nodded. “I suppose I had some training. In med school they had us put on scratched-up goggles—like we had cataracts. Plugged our ears with wax, gave us heavy rubber gloves . . .”

“Like arthritis.”

“Put marshmallows in our mouths . . .”

“Mmmm. Post stroke paralysis.”

“. . . corn kernels in our shoes, braces around our necks. The worst thing was the padded diapers.”

She laughed and blushed. “Let me guess. They had you try to read prescription labels with the goggles on, count out pills with fat fingers, eat around the marshmallows.”

“Exactly.”

“In nursing school, we had to spend a morning in a hospital bed, got applesauce shoved into our mouths every half hour. Isn’t it great to be out here?”

“Want to walk down Alvarado?” I asked.

It took us forever, but not since Pinkie died have I spent such a pleasant hour with a woman. We lingered in Casa DIY, admiring the lawn furniture and the barbecue grills. Outside Burrito Loco her electric cane got confused by a passing mag lev scooter. She started to stumble, and I reached out to hold her arm to steady her.

When she regained her balance, she slipped her warm fingers into mine, and we made our way back down the sidewalk holding hands.

“I’d give you my heart,” she said as we approached the restaurant, “but it’s plastic and I think it needs a new battery.”

I laughed. “Like my kidney,” I said. “But how about if I ask you for a date sometime?”

* * *

Back at the big red booth in Casa Escobar, Kaplan announced that he had a plan.

“I hope you don’t have too much for me to do,” I admitted. “I’m bushed.”

“Not necessary,” Kaplan said. “Bette here’s going in.”

Kaplan explained that he’d sent Miguel over to the office supply store next door and was faxing over some forged NASA stationery from an FX vault he used to work with. The idea was to mock up a letter from Story Musgrave Junior to Boots Bacci—as Kaplan recalled, Junior had been a guest on Boots’ talk show some years earlier during a tribute to his dad. The letter would personally introduce Bette as a talented performer whose career just wanted the kind of help Bacci could provide through his extensive contacts. “Let’s see,” Kaplan muttered as he scribbled notes. “We’ll put in something about using Boots to host an old astronaut special. ‘Please give this warm lady your special attention, the Boots Bacci boost we all know about, that big, stiff rocket. . . .’ ”

Bette was going to take a cab and present herself at the front door of the Brentwood house with the letter in hand.

Kaplan set down his notes. “Then we let Nature take its course.”

“What was—uh, is—your career?” I asked Bette.

“She was an exotic dancer,” Barbara giggled.

“Use what you’ve got, honey,” Bette said. “Just get me to Casa Charo on the way so’s I can get a blonde wig and some sunglasses. And I’d like another Margarita.”

Kaplan was radiant. “She’s gonna be a star.”

We all wanted to be there in Brentwood, if only down the block, to see if she’d get into the house. But were stumped about the gurneys.

“We could get arrested for harassment,” the Judge said. “I’d hate to see them in a cell.”

Barbara pointed out that our charges had been in comas for months. Kaplan said he didn’t see anything wrong with leaving the gurneys side by side in the alcove, and giving the busboy a hundred dollars to page us if there was any noticeable change in their condition.

The busboy was not only willing, but even trained in CPR. Though it was a little irresponsible, Barbara and I went along. Kaplan hacked away at the letter, and when it was finished, Miguel moved the van around and helped us in.

I really was tired. There in the back of the van, I settled in for a bit of a nap. I woke up with the mid-afternoon sun in my eyes and realized that we’d stopped. My companions were hushed. When I looked down the street, I saw a blonde in a leopard skin outfit at the front door of the Brentwood house—the blonde was Bette—falling into a big hug from Boots Bacci and being ushered in.

“I still don’t get it,” I admitted.

From the front of the van, Kaplan placed a call to Studio City, telling Monica that Boots had had a seizure and was unable to get out of bed and that she needed to rush right home.

* * *

What really frosted Monica, she told us later, was the way Boots hadn’t even folded back the family quilt (an heirloom in colorful interlocking circles, the classic “wedding ring” pattern). When she burst in, distraught, limping on a shoe whose high heel she’d broken during her breathless climb up the stairs, he was sitting right on it, back against the teak headboard, stark naked except for the silk bathrobe Monica had only recently given him for Christmas (strike two). From behind a handheld holocorder, he was apparently directing Bette in some sort of “audition” (strike three). The holodisc, of course, left as little doubt about his guilt as the famous bin Laden tape from before the Aussie War. In a somewhat empty tribute to virtue, leggy Bette had never in fact had to get out of her leopard-skin outfit, which was probably just as well, even though she’d closed the drapes and dimmed the lights. Monica confessed that the affair confirmed growing suspicions she’d had about her husband, who had been taking uncommon interest in a series of female trainers though he never seemed to exercise, and had started locking himself in the screening room.

From the street, the sequence was elegant in its economy—Monica running in the front door, Boots ejected from the rear, hopping past the pool and cabana, struggling to pull on his clothes. He nearly lost it all together when Kaplan punched the garage door’s remote.

* * *

There were repercussions, of course. Bacci maintained that he had been harassed, entrapped, and defrauded. Before the day was out, we actually had to answer some questions posed to us by an investigator at the L.A. prosecutor’s office.

Bacci himself was there, his eyes puffy, his silver boots scuffed, his anger palpable. He’d inflicted a long scrape on the side of the silver Lamborghini as he’d peeled out of the garage.

“OK,” the investigator, an anorexic attorney, began, “Who’s Story Musgrave?”

“I am,” the Judge said.

“I am,” Kaplan added, then he pointed to me.

I waved. “Did you say Story Musgrave?” I asked, adjusting my cap. “That’s me.”

She sighed. “Mr. Bacci maintains that earlier today, February 7th, you gentlemen, particularly Mr. Kaplan and Judge Ortiz, colluded to defraud him. Now, Mr. Kaplan, I want you to tell me your precise whereabouts from the hours of . . .”

“Excuse me,” he interrupted. “Let’s cut to the chase. The medical record will show that I have suffered a massive, debilitating stroke, and the legal record will show that specialists under Mr. Bacci’s own supervision had me declared incompetent as an individual not six months ago. Any testimony I might give can’t have standing in the State of California.”

“Mmm,” she mused, consulting her softscreen for a long moment. Then she turned to me. “Doctor, did you hear any conversation between Mr. Kaplan and Judge Ortiz that would suggest such a conspiracy?”

I fiddled with my cap. “Would you please put your question in writing?” I asked.

When she did so, I read the sentence, fiddled with my hat again, and replied. “I’m so sorry for the trouble, counselor. I was trained to be a good listener, but, you see, I’ve become stone deaf, and my hat’s not entirely reliable. So I could hardly . . .”

“Judge Ortiz,” she said, looking down at her softscreen again, sucking her upper lip. “Did you see anything today to call into question the legal standing of the woman known as Bette Waters as a legitimate entertainer seeking professional advice from Mr. Bacci?”

Ortiz twirled his red and white cane, and a bright red dot flew around the room. The dot finally got her attention. “Justice is blind,” he said, setting his cane on the floor and rising. “Now can we go?”

That hour at the prosecutor’s office, however, wasn’t the strangest thing that happened toward the end of that day. Miguel, who said he’d never had a better time in his life, and who still is with us as our driver, ran us back to Casa Escobar to retrieve the gurneys.

They were there in the alcove, all right. But Tiger Montelban wasn’t, and neither was the 112-year-old lady.

The busboy was distraught. He’d checked every quarter hour, he told us. He’d been a bit late just after five because he’d had to help set up for dinner. When he’d finally looked in the alcove, they were gone—the tops of the gurneys empty landscapes of rumpled sheets and dented pillows punctuated by a trailing IV line. The restaurant staff had searched the neighborhood. People on the street spoke of an elderly couple in white who looked to be romantically involved, but it was just impossible. There was no report back at the nursing home, nothing from the nearby hospitals, nothing from the police or the morgue. To this day, we don’t have a clue to what happened to them, except for a series of charges that appeared on Montelban’s credit chip at a resort in Cabo San Lucas. The chip had been embedded in his wrist.

These days we count on Arcadia for our medical care three days out of every seven, but otherwise we spend extended weekends at the house in Brentwood, sitting in leather furniture, watching sports in the den, taking in old movies with Barbara and Bette and Ramona in the screening room—that’s really a treat, as Marv has remastered digital holos of all the great ones from the past hundred and fifty years, from
Birth of a Nation
to the ten Lucas
Star Wars
sequels. Monica’s a regular angel, kind and considerate and a world-class caterer, though we do our best to look after ourselves as much as we can.

Barbara and I have taken to light exercise in the pool and lounging beside the cabana. Every once in a while, lying on my back, relaxed and at peace—a third try with stem cells has reduced my tremor—I look up and think of them, Tiger Montelban and his angel. Occasionally I see them in the shapes of clouds rolling in the sky, soft and free as floating gauze or down, white as bright moonlight on a snow-covered mountain, drifting in the heavens together, arm in arm.