Best Friends (9 page)

“We should probably begin to think about dealing. We don't have to let on to them—as if they wouldn't know! Francine's brother and sister-in-law are represented by Ashford, Fine & Corrigan. There's nobody better.”

While being cockily aggressive with adversaries and obsequious with anyone addressed as Your Honor, Alt habitually employed a professional pessimism with clients, but Roy had never heard him this defeatist.

“It stinks, Sy.”

“I got to go, Roy. We can talk divine injustice on Sunday morning. I hope you're still on.”

“I don't want to look at a golf club at the moment.”

“Make your mind up by tomorrow. I need to fill out the foursome.”

Roy listened to the messages on his machine. The first was from Chief of Police Albrecht, asking him to get in touch. The next had been left by a Midwestern scout of his who had located in an Indiana barn a rusted but restorable example of the classic Cord 810 of 1937.

The final message was registered as of 7:22 the evening before, which signified that it had long been there when he went to bed with Suzanne. He felt an odd initial thrill when he heard the voice, but that was gone as soon as it had come.

“Roy, Kristin. Sam has had another scare. I'm in the car now, en route to the hospital. I'll try your cell phone again. The time is”—she paused to check and then came back to report it. She ended the call. Her voice was cool as ever and did not waste a word.

It was now half a day later, and his best friend could well be dead. They had last parted with jealous rage on Sam's side and bitter disgust on his own. That might have been enough to kill one of them.

R
oy immediately tried to reach Kristin at the bank, but whomever it was he spoke to, perhaps for reasons of security, had no information on Sam's condition and declined to say where Kristin might be found. Calling the Grandy house, he was obliged to speak with the Central American cleaning woman, whose distraught replies were incomprehensible to him. Maria was partial to Sam, the most generous of employers.

Roy had no confidence that the urgent requests he left at both places for Kristin to contact him would ever reach her, but he did not know what else to do at the moment. Showing up at the hospital without first clearing the way might only damage Sam further, if indeed his friend had survived the night.

He forgetfully phoned Mrs. Forsythe, who was not due till noon, and was greeted by his own recorded voice. He punched in the code by which he could listen to the incoming calls that had accumulated on the office machine. Most favored clients had his unlisted home number. All others used either the business line or e-mail. Roy usually let Mrs. Forsythe deal with the latter; she was the one whose fingers operated the keyboard. The texts, responses to his ads on Websites and in classic-car magazines, were supplied by him, but he disliked submitting himself in person to the Internet, which had not existed at the time his youngest cars had been made.

He heard nothing of interest, and two messages had negative connotations. He was insulted by an offer of $10,000 on the ‘63 E-Type Jag, fully restored but needing new paint, for which he was asking a modest twenty-five large; and an overly intimate-sounding vocal note from a woman he scarcely knew would have embarrassed him had it been collected by Mrs. F.

Though not a true man of action, as he had discovered in amateur sports-car racing a decade earlier, unwilling as he was to go quite as far as it took to finish before those who would put their life on the line for a minor trophy, Roy found motion a more useful state in which to deal with his feelings than any pursued through a static means. Meditation, contemplation of his navel or the wall, made him only more anxious.

The reference to the Jaguar XKE reminded him that unless it had been stolen it was parked outside, where uncharacteristically he had left it the evening before. The odd experience with Suzanne Akins now seemed like one of those inconclusive dreams that can barely be remembered a moment after awakening. He went down to the car, which was unharmed by a dry night though somewhat dusty from the driveway, started the throaty engine, and accelerated, recklessly scattering gravel, out onto the road, heading away from town. He had not really driven at speed, 100 mph or better, time out of mind. The thruway, with its long level straightaways, ideal for fast driving to the automotively naïve, was boring; also it was heavily policed, radared and lasered. The twisting back roads could be hazardous, not so much for the skilled driver as for the cyclists and runners who frequented them in strength; but once behind the wheel, with the powerful engine under his control, Roy converted his initial depression into defiance, though against whom he could not have said. Against
what
was a better question, the answer to which would have been: a sequence of negation, bad to worse. Sam, Francine, Sam again and still, the only affirmative having been the newly established friendship with Kristin, which soon enough was denied him.

He drove deep into a corner, braking, then downshifting at the precise point that enabled the car to accelerate out, overcoming centrifugal force, without loss of rpms. He still had the touch. At appropriate points he glanced at the tach and not the speedometer. How fast he drove was irrelevant to the joy of driving well.

The police car announced its presence too soon, sounding its siren when still far behind him. On a road like this, in an E-Type, he could put a second turn between himself and even a souped-up Crown Victoria before the cop could maintain adhesion through the first. And so he did, then just before a sweeping right-hand bend saw a blacktop lane on the left, probably a long private driveway to a house concealed from the main road by the grove of thick evergreens an eighth of a mile away.

Roy braked hard and executed a four-wheel drift, penetrating the driveway a good seventy yards, and stopped before the police vehicle wailed past on the road, probably without seeing him, though he could not be sure and therefore reversed, drove back to the road, and turned in the direction from which he had come. As soon as an intersecting route was available, he took it, lest the cop too soon suspect what had happened and return flat-out.

Circuitously, and at a moderate speed, Roy reached town and his place of business, the hillside building at the rear of which, on the lower level, was a garage. The doors were open now, and he drove the car inside.

Diego and Paul, the mechanics who enjoyed a free lease from him in exchange for which they gave precedence to the servicing of the cars in his inventory, were never seen except at the garage, where they were at work before he ever arrived and often stayed after he left. The guys were masters of their craft. As he had boasted to Sam, he could have brought these wizards a box full of assorted bolts, gaskets, and cotter pins and come back in the afternoon to find an assembled engine that when started would run like the pouring of cream from a pitcher.

To which Sam's usual response had to do with their being gay. He could not have known that for sure, as Roy himself did not. There could be no doubt they were exotic of origin. Diego was not simply Hispanic but a genuine native of Barcelona, whose English had British overtones due to his having served an apprenticeship in the United Kingdom; Paul spoke with an accent acquired during his boyhood in central Europe as the son of a German woman married to a black sergeant in the U.S. Army.

The guys were, of course, at work when he pulled the Jaguar in. Not only were they extraordinarily skilled with internal-combustion engines, they were fanatics about cleanliness and order, or anyway, Paul was and Diego followed his lead. Never could a drop of oil, a smear of grease, or even the stains of earlier drops and smears be found on the concrete floor. All elements of their equipment, from the big hydraulic lift to the smallest gauge of hexagonal wrench, glistened as if new. The men themselves wore powder-blue coveralls, always as pristine as the floor, and at the neck a navy-and-white kerchief, which Roy had once called an ascot but was corrected by Diego, a stickler for precise nomenclature.

“Cravat,” said he. “Ascot is the racecourse. For hosses.”

Paul was nearer at hand this morning. “I don't like what I hear,” said he, as Roy emerged from the E-Type. “Ve'll do a tune-up.”

“No need for that,” said Roy. “It drives beautifully. But the cops may be on my trail, so if they show up, make it look like you've been working on it for some time.”

Paul winked. He was a strikingly handsome man, the color of milked coffee. “Ach, you been a bad boy.”

Diego lowered the hand tool he had been using at a workbench and walked over to them, a stocky man in contrast to his tall and slender partner. The Jag's engine was still running. Diego put one ear as low to the bonnet as he could without making contact. He straightened up to say, “I don't like what I hyeah.”

“Have it your own way,” said Roy. “All I want is for the cops to think it's been here all morning—if they show up at all.”

He left the guys and got the Jeep, the only vehicle he normally would leave all night in the parking lot and, without visiting his street-level office, drove to the Municipal Building. Eluding the police car had rehabilitated his morale. For a short but effective time he had not been the passive recipient of assaults on his moral essence. For a change
he
had chosen the rhythm of events.

Chief Albrecht's manner was different from what it had been the day before. He begged Roy's pardon for asking him to repeat the account of the incident at The Hedges and dictate it this time as a formal statement. Albrecht also scoffingly disclosed that he had heard both bereaved families intended to sue. “In my position I can't take sides, Mr. Courtright, but as I'm sure your attorney already informed you, the whole bunch are scumbags.”

After he had finished giving the statement, Roy phoned Sy Alt and was surprised to be put directly through to the lawyer.

“That's right,” Alt told him. “Harrison Wilkie—that's Francine's brother in case you don't know—he's a registered sex offender. He likes to flash his little wilkie at Catholic schoolgirls, and I tell you it's little. The cops took reenactment photos; you can hardly see it in his hand.” Alt cleared his throat. “The late Martin Holbrook was charged with embezzlement eight or nine years back. It was settled out of court when he agreed never to work again as an investment counselor. I guess you know Francine had a shoplifting record.”

“I did not,” said Roy. “But then I never knew her well.”

“You ought to get acquainted with the women you
shtup,
” Alt said over his raspy chuckle. “Second thought, better you don't. Francine was also arrested for A ‘n' B in ninety-four. She threw chilled soup on another woman in a restaurant.”

“She didn't deserve to get beaten to death.”

“Well,
I
never touched her,” said Alt, rasping again. “I can't wait for those self-satisfied shits at Ashford, Fine & Corrigan to return my call. They didn't do their homework, accepting clients like these. You can pretty much forget about the suit, Roy. Are you on for Sunday?”

“No,” Roy told him. “I'm not much of a golfer.”

“Which is why I always welcome you in a foursome,” said Alt. “You're a lousy player on the course but the best-looking at brunch. You do have a way of attracting the ladies. Wish that wife of mine wasn't too old for you. I'll be in touch.”

“Yeah, with a big bill.” But Alt had already hung up. Roy was depressed again after speaking with the lawyer. He got no satisfaction from knowing about the delinquencies of Francine and her clan. He sincerely hoped he would be allowed to do something for her orphaned children before they joined adult humanity with the failings for which it is notorious.

He was en route to the office he had not visited for two days when his cell phone rang. Recognizing Kristin's voice, he pulled into an empty parking space in front of one of the Main Street antique shops that did little weekday business.

Her tone was demanding. “Is this really you? I've been trying all your numbers for hours.”

Roy asked docilely about Sam.

Her voice softened. “This second episode turned out not to be that dire.”

“Do the doctors know what they're doing?”

“I'm not qualified to judge,” Kristin said with her usual coolness. “But if
they
don't know, who would?”

According to Sam, his cardiologist was, like his electronic gear, top of the line, which might only mean expensive, but neither did Roy have medical credentials. “I tried to reach you at the bank this morning and also talked to Maria. I hadn't gotten your message till then.” He felt she might despise him for supplying too much excuse. Anyway, what he had been doing was his own business. He had had no reason to suspect Sam would have a setback; besides, it had not turned out to be that serious. He wasn't married to Sam or to Sam's wife.

“I'm not checking up on you,” Kristin said, as if she had heard and been chastened by his internal reflections. “I was worried you'd be offended by not hearing from me sooner.”

“Oh.”

“Well, I know you'll want to see Sam. Our trails will probably cross over there.” She was obviously about to hang up. “I'll see—”

Roy spoke quickly. “I'd like to talk with you first, if you could spare a minute.”

“Of course.”

“I don't mean on the phone.”

“Gee…” Her reluctance disappointed him. “As you can understand, I haven't put in a full day at the bank for some time now, and I've got a staggering backlog.”

“All right,” Roy said. “I will say it here and now, because the air has to be cleared. Last time I saw Sam he accused me of having an affair with you. I just walked out. That was too much for me.”

He had never heard her laugh in this fashion, if in fact he had ever heard her properly laugh at all. Over the phone it sounded like splashing water. Finally she said, “That was his joke. You know how he is, you of all people.”

“I never heard him joke about something like that, even when he was well.”

“Then it's the medication. But I assure you he was joking. He told me about it—and thinks you leaving in a huff was part of the joke. You and he have been kidding each other like that since you were boys, haven't you? Trading fake insults?”

No, not that kind, never anything that was really personal, and Roy could not remember a girl or woman for whom they had ever competed. To begin with, their respective tastes in females were so different. Sam of course derided Roy's so-called lechery, but that was another matter altogether from accusing his best friend of an illicit connection with his wife. Such a charge had to do not with sex but with betrayal, with dishonor, with a shame that Roy would have found unbearable…. For all that, he could admit, and in fact was eager to do so, that any wife, and especially one as sensitive as Kristin, would know her husband better, certainly in this area, than any male friend of however many years.