School of Fortune (13 page)

That sounded fantastic. However, on second thought, “That sounds like a bribe.”

“A more gracious person would call it a gift.”

“A more grateful person would have offered the gift himself.” Pippa turned up the air-conditioning: Woody's voice made her blood boil. “As you may guess, I'm not looking for souvenirs of our relationship right now. Thanks to Lance, Thayne will disinherit me. My grandfather's dead. I'm hiding out like a criminal at Ginny's. Enriched plutonium has more friends than I do.”

“I feel your pain. Lance has been banished to Brazil until Cowboys training camp.”

“I couldn't care less about your pain.” Pippa felt an invisible hand squeeze her heart. “I want my mother to know the truth. She'll forgive me when she knows the whole story.”

“Are you sure?”

Not totally. Thayne would not be above strangling Pippa for terminal nai'vete.

“Thayne must first get past her fury,” he counseled. Besides ministering to Lance's knees, Woody considered himself a gifted amateur psychoanalyst. “She must want you back. Need you in her life again. Your mother must understand why your wedding meant so much to her in the first place. That's going to take a lot of self-analysis.”

“And meanwhile I disappear and wait for the Second Coming?”

“That's a good way of putting it. Yes.”

Pippa sighed: Jesus had already taken two thousand years. Thayne wouldn't settle for a minute less. “I can't believe I was so blind. Lance really had me fooled.”

“He didn't do so deliberately.”

“You mean he honestly thought he was AC-DC? Give me a break.” Woody sighed. “Can you move on, Pippa? Find someone else?” “Just like that? It's going to be a long time before I trust a man again.”

Women were so messed up, Woody thought; they actually had to know and trust a guy before they could bend over for him. “Lance wants you to keep the ring. Keep everything. He told his mother under no circumstances was she to ask for any jewelry back, even if she wins the lawsuit.” “That is so heartwarming, Woody.” “What about the Maserati?”

“Take the tailpipe and shove it.” Pippa snapped her cell phone shut. Woody
help
her? That was like Henry VIII offering to sew Anne Boleyn's head back on.

Carrie-Jo rapped on her window. “Can you lend me three bucks for lunch?”

Pippa looked in her wallet. All she had was a pair of hundred-dollar bills. “I'll come in with you,” she sighed.

They entered the motel's humid, moldy coffee shop. Pippa got a cup of coffee that tasted as if it had been simmering since St. Patrick's Day. While paying for that and Carrie-Jo's lunch, she happened to glance at the television above the cash register. She gasped to see Thayne, her father, and another woman emerging from a limousine. Thayne's black veils floated in the breeze as she and Robert followed a horse-drawn wagon into a cemetery. Pippa recognized the gravestones of the Walker family plot in Crockett, Texas. She saw Anson's favorite horse, Scamp. That big long box in the wagon must be his coffin. On top of the coffin stood his alligator boots with the six-inch spurs. Anson claimed they spun a bit whenever he was standing on top of oil.

Pippa's father, back from golfing in Morocco, looked as if he had just swallowed a divot. Thayne seemed emaciated and unsteady on her feet, perhaps because she was wearing a pair of Guccis with four-inch spikes, not the best choice for walking on grass.

A television reporter appeared and said, in case any of his viewers were totally blind, “This is a sad day for the Walker family.”

Transfixed, Pippa watched live coverage of Anson's funeral. The Reverend Alcott, back for an encore, read from the family Bible. Cedric the substitute wedding planner was there, standing tall in a tartan kilt and reflective sunglasses. Pippa was surprised to see Kimberly, her erstwhile bridesmaid, standing at the graveside in a strapless black dress and her Mad Hatter hat, recycled for a second media blowout. For the benefit of the paparazzi's zoom lenses, Kimberly dabbed at her dry eyes with a handkerchief at regular intervals. At Thayne's elbow stood a vaguely familiar woman in a black hat with a swooping brim. Pippa finally identified the face behind the sunglasses as that of Dusi Damon, her mother's college roommate. Dusi hadn't been able to make the wedding because she was having plastic surgery in Rangoon. Now sufficiently mended to be seen in public, Dusi wore a low-cut black sheath, three-quarter-length black gloves, and a neckful of rubies. Whenever Kimberly whipped out her handkerchief, Dusi gazed stonily at her. Pippa recognized some long-lost cousins from Corpus Christi, all fatter than ever. There were so many fluttering veils and hankies at the graveside that each time the wind picked up, the mourners looked as if they might sail away.

At the height of the ceremony Thayne wobbled over to the coffin and heaved Anson's boots into the open grave. Pippa bit her lip so hard that it bled: Anson had promised her those spurs! Now they, and his oilman's luck, would be buried with him? She watched in horror as her mother threw a handful of dirt on top of the boots. Her father tossed some more dirt on top of that. Dusi picked up a handful of dirt and, completely missing the large hole in the ground, sprayed Kimberly with soil just as Kimberly was pretending to wipe her eyes with her handkerchief. Fascinated, Pippa watched Dusi guide her parents back to their limousine.

“Anson Walker has joined the oilfields in the sky,” the reporter said. His next attempt at poetic utterance was cut off by a commercial for dog food.

“From dust to dust,” the little old lady at the register said.

Realizing that she had been staring at the television for almost half an hour, Pippa headed into the hallway.

“Hey! You in that driving school? You be goin' the wrong way.” The cashier sped after her. Before Pippa could prevent it, she was marched back to class.

The shades were drawn. Officer Pierce sat behind a slide projector, whence he was flashing a series of geometric shapes against the wall and barking, “Octagon: stop signs. Triangle: yield signs. Circles: railroad warnings. Pentagon: schools.” He paused. “Yes, Millicent?”

“This one tried to get away,” the cashier reported. “She was watching a funeral.”

“Don't just stand there, Perdita. Come join the party.”

“Hey, doesn't she automatically flunk?” a voice whined from the dark as Pippa returned to her front-row seat. “You said we had to be here on time every time.”

“I'm so sorry,” Pierce answered. “Did I neglect to mention that each time you're late, you have to score five points higher on all four tests? That means seventy-five, Perdita. Across the board.” Watching a funeral? That was pretty twisted. “Let's review colors for the latecomer. A red sign means stop. A yellow sign means warning. Orange means construction. Brown, recreation area.”

“This is too hard, man,” Seymour muttered. “There are like a hundred signs in the book.”

“You're an urban artist, aren't you? You're supposed to have an eye for shapes and colors.” Pierce turned off the slide projector and had his class recite another five chapters from the manual. “Homework: duh! Traffic signs. We'll have a quiz tomorrow.”

“Does it count?” Billy the farmer groaned.

“Absolutely.” As Pierce yanked its cord, a window blind zipped upward, emitting a cloud of dead beetles as it slammed into the top of the frame. “Class dismissed. Perdita,” he called as she was bolting for the door. “One moment.”

She stood quietly in place as her classmates shuffled out. Pierce thought she looked pale, trembling almost. Maybe she thought he was going to smack her. His voice softened. “Were you really watching a funeral?”

“My grandfather,” she blurted.

The poor kid was delusional. Nothing was on this time of day but the soaps. “The one who was going to increase your allowance if you passed the course?”

“Yes.”

Pierce reached for his wallet. “How much allowance were we talking about? “

“A billion dollars,” she said with a straight face.

“Would you settle for ten bucks today and ten tomorrow?”

To his surprise she didn't snatch it out of his hand. She simply gasped and ran out.

Bawling, Pippa blasted the SUV out of the parking lot. Officer Pierce had no doubt meant well, but mistaking her for a charity case was humiliating beyond belief. Attending her grandfather's funeral via television had been equally crushing. And all the while she was enduring this unearned tribulation, Lance was in Brazil working on his tan! Well, it was time to spread the misery. Houston was four hours south of Dallas. If she started now, she could be kicking down Rosimund's door by sunset. That seemed like an intelligent plan, so Pippa drove onto Route
45
and engaged the cruise control, careful to stay under the speed limit. Through her tears she studied the shape and color of every passing road sign: homework. She rehearsed exactly what she was going to say and imagined the look on Rosimund's face when she heard the truth about the perfect son who had ruined Pippa's life.

After an hour of vindictive nirvana Pippa was startled to drive past a large green sign for Crockett, where her grandfather had been buried just a few hours ago. She screeched over three lanes to the exit ramp: Rosimund could wait while she paid her last respects.

Thirty minutes later Pippa arrived at the cemetery where her great-great-grandfather Cougar Walker was interred along with his wife and four generations of progeny. Dinnertime was the high point of the day in Crockett, therefore the place was deserted. It was also one hundred ten degrees Fahrenheit on the open prairie, which tended to curtail lingering expressions of grief. Pippa parked the SUV beside the mound of fresh dirt in the family plot. She had almost convinced herself that the funeral had been an elaborate hoax when she saw a bunch of square holes in the grass where Thayne had been standing. Those punctures had been made by four-inch Gucci heels.

It really happened.

Pippa sank to the dry grass and sobbed anew. When she could see again, she read the names carved into the surrounding gravestones. She knew all their stories by heart: Uncle Landon had slipped into a vat of crude oil, lost his dentures, and gone toothless for the next fifty years. Despite getting struck twice by lightning, Aunt Eliza had outlived three husbands. Great-grandma Patsy, who never finished eighth grade, tripled the family business while her husband was fighting the Japanese. Cousin Jeb, aged seven, had shot and killed a thief making off with one of his mother's famous shoofly pies. The tales went on and on: the Walkers were proud, smart, strong people. Generation after generation had proven it wasn't the money, it was the attitude. Pippa could almost see her forebears shaking their heads, wondering how their superior genes had produced such a dud. She heard Anson's voice:
Get that diploma.
She heard her great-grandma Patsy:
Don't blow a billion, honey.
She even heard Officer Pierce:
You are not a victim.

Chastened, Pippa drove slowly back to Dallas. Screw Rosimund. The Hendersons were losers.

Stanley, the guard at Ginny's gate, motioned for her to roll down her window. “A Maserati was dropped off for you today, ma'am.” Pippa had told Woody to go shove the exhaust pipe. Apparently he had taken that as a yes. “We parked it in a corner of the garage. Under its cover.”

“Keep the keys. It might be there for a while.”

Pippa microwaved a few frozen dinners. She opened the Texas Drivers' Handbook and began cramming her brain with road signs. That beat thinking about her grandfather's spurs buried under six feet of prairie dust.

T
he phone rang at seven o'clock sharp. “Good morning,” Sheldon said. “How's driving school?”

“The teacher is really tough.” Pippa yawned. Her legs felt like logs. “Officer Pierce.”

“He's got an excellent reputation. Stern but fair. How's your alias working out?”

“I'm getting used to it.” Pippa removed the manual lodged between her ear and the pillow. “I saw Grampa's funeral on television. I can't believe Thayne threw his spurs away.”

“As I said, she's not herself.”

“That's why I need to be with her.”

“Most unwise, considering her reversal of fortune. Speaking of which, I've transferred sixty thousand dollars to your money market account. An envelope containing petty cash and a driver's license in the name of Perdita Rica has been delivered to the Happy Hour Motel. You are a student, after all.”

His sarcasm was not lost on Pippa. “I know it's not exactly what my grandfather had in mind, Sheldon, but it's a means toward an end. I could do a lot of good with a billion dollars.”

If Sheldon had a dime for every oil heir who had told him that, he could buy Conoco. “We'll revisit that concept once you graduate.”

Pippa dressed in her second Wal-Mart outfit, a white pique shift with large purple flowers. The color scheme looked putrid with her inky hair. Before leaving she studied herself in the full-length mirror. She was not a convincing Latino: the proportion of boob to butt was the inverse of the ethnic ideal. Another serious problem caught her eye: her tattoos had washed off in the shower.

Heart racing, Pippa looked at her watch. She'd never have time to restencil herself before class and she couldn't be late again, so she grabbed a couple of Magic Markers and the first sweater she found in Ginny's drawer. Rush-hour traffic was awful. The SUV tore into the Happy Hour Motel lot at two minutes before nine. Pippa sprinted past the exterminators fumigating the first floor. She slid into her front-row seat as Officer Pierce was opening the windows. “Sorry, class. AC's on the fritz today.”

“You don't expect us to take a test in this heat,” Gordon the fisherman protested as Pierce passed out the quiz.

“I not only expect you to take it, I expect you to pass it.” Few people ever did; Pierce had made the quiz extra difficult in order to scare everyone into studying harder for the final. Perdita seemed to be much more with it today, except for the mohair sweater. It was heavy enough to suffocate a llama. “Those of you wearing ties or jackets may feel free to remove them.” She didn't budge. “Perdita?”

“No thank you.” She smiled as sweat teemed down her legs, forehead, and stomach.

He hoped she wasn't trying to hide needle marks on her arms. That sexy perfume of hers was billowing off her like heat from a radiator. Officer Pierce forced himself to keep moving. After ten minutes he collected the quizzes. “You may visit the water fountain while I mark these.”

Pippa rushed into the hallway and peeled off her sweater. “Seymour,” she called the moment he emerged from class. “Could I ask a huge favor?”

“You name it, cream puff.”

Pippa gave him a Magic Marker. “Would you mind drawing a couple of tattoos on my arms? Whatever inspires you.”

They went to the lobby. As a few hookers watched, Seymour expertly covered Pippa's arms with black lines and squiggles. “There you go. That ain't comin' off for a while.”

Pierce did a double take as she returned to her seat, arms bared. They seemed to be covered with artistic renderings of male and female genitalia. Perdita seemed either totally unaware that everyone in class was snickering at her body art or she was taunting them with some twisted personal agenda.

“All but one of you failed,” he said, dropping her quiz on her desk. She had scored a ninety-eight. Maybe she was an idiot savant. “That's phenomenal, negatively speaking. Explain yourselves.”

“The NBA finals were on last night.”

“There were too many signs.”

“Morning is not my best time.”

“Those are excuses, not explanations. Perdita, you may sit by the pool while we review road signs.” Before she left Pierce handed her a thick envelope couriered to “Perdita Rica, Driving School, Happy Hour Motel.” No return address.

From his desk Pierce observed Perdita at the swimming pool ripping open the envelope. It seemed to contain an enormous amount of cash. She tucked that into her purse then stared at the overchlorinated water for a spell. Then she made a call on her cell phone. Soon an Asian woman in a white lab coat arrived; Pierce watched in fascination as she gave Perdita a manicure, pedicure, and foot massage. He could barely take his eyes off Perdita's disturbingly long legs as the woman applied layer after layer of polish to her toenails. Perdita dozed for a while; the sight of her lying innocently on her back made Pierce very itchy to go outside and lie somewhere on his stomach.

Around eleven-thirty he saw a Lincoln roll into the lot. A uniformed chauffeur removed a picnic hamper from the trunk and snapped a tablecloth over the plastic table next to Perdita's lounge chair. The fellow's white-gloved hands removed china plates and a bouquet of roses from the hamper. As Perdita ate the first of three courses, the chauffeur retired to an imaginary sideboard, staring at the dilapidated train tracks beyond the chain-link fence as he waited to clear the table. The whole scene looked like a clone of
The Great Gatsby
but with major chromosomal damage.

Pierce gave his class a second signs test. This time four students managed to answer seventy percent of the questions correctly, so he dismissed them for lunch. Perdita was just paying the butler as Pierce sauntered to the pool. He read the insignia on the man's uniform. “Hotel Adolphus? That's a step up from McDonald's.”

Perdita quickly said, “My grandfather works in the kitchen.”

“I thought he just died.”

She blushed a rich red. “That was my other grandfather.”

Yeah, right. Pierce went to his official Texas state car. He had to pick up a video for this afternoon's class. He turned the keys in the ignition but nothing happened. “Son of a bitch!”

As he was bending over the hood, Perdita pulled up in her SUV. Its front grille looked like an automotive version of Hannibal Lecter's restraint mask. “Need a ride? I was just going to drop off some laundry.”

“Heading anywhere near the motor vehicle agency?”

“It's right on my way.”

Pierce sank into the passenger seat. The SUV had every bell and whistle imaginable, yet Perdita dressed like a pauper. He pondered this inconsistency as she waited for a break in oncoming traffic.

Ten breaks came and went. “Sorry,” Pippa said. “You make me a little nervous.”

“Take your time.” He could stare at those legs all afternoon.

At last Pippa pulled onto the highway. She didn't dare talk lest Officer Pierce think she wasn't paying attention to driving safety. The SUV plodded forward, never getting within three car lengths of the vehicle ahead of it. “Relax,” he said finally. “You're doing fine.”

Her perfume was burning a hole in his nose. Last night he had searched for it online: no one on the planet made a scent called Thane or Thain. Google kept trying to wing him over to some society lunatic. “Left at the next light.” He smiled as her blinker immediately went on; the next light was a half mile away. “You seem to be feeling better today, Perdita.”

“Yes, thanks. I'm learning a lot. You're a good teacher. Stern but fair.” Stem? Where'd she get that idea? He said nothing until she made the turn. “New tattoos?”

“They're very big at my restaurant. I'm a waitress.”

“Heard you the first time.” Pierce didn't want to ask what sort of cave Perdita worked in. He had her drive in circles downtown as he etched the silhouette of her calves in his memory.

They passed the courthouse three times. Pippa didn't dare tell him he was lost. On the fourth pass he said, “There. Pull over to the curb. I'll just be a second.”

“Officer Pierce, are you asking me to wait in a No Parking Anytime Tow Zone?”

“If anyone gives you grief, tell them you're with me.” On second thought, with those tattoos, “Or maybe just circle the block.”

Pippa watched him run up the crowded courthouse steps easily as a cat. Within seconds a meter maid rapped on the window. “See that sign? Move it.”

She drove around the block. When she returned to her starting point, the meter maid was still waiting in ambush so Pippa cruised by the courthouse, searching for Officer Pierce. A space cleared on the busy steps and she glimpsed a flash of red. Pippa stared into the lunch time crowd, not believing her eyes but yes, that was a tall, horsy woman wearing a crimson suit: Rosimund, flanked by two men with major briefcases. Photographers buzzed in their wake.

Lawyers! Paparazzi! Of course! Rosimund had just filed her lawsuit against Thayne!

The sudden blare of a horn snapped Pippa's attention back to the street. She stomped on the brakes as a Vespa zipped in front of her. The Mexican driving the overloaded pickup behind her did the same. With a great squeal of rubber, his vehicle stopped inches from Pippa's taillights; unfortunately the forty crates of chickens he was hauling to market kept going. Chatting on her cell phone, the woman in the Escort behind the pickup never even moved her foot from gas to brake. She was rear-ended in turn by a teenager who had been changing a CD in his mother's Volvo.

Videotape in hand, Officer Pierce emerged from the motor vehicle agency just as the Vespa cut in front of Perdita's Lexus. He heard the Mexican skid to a halt and he saw the chicken crates topple over the busy street.
Boff! Boff!
He witnessed the next two collisions. As he was hurrying down the steps, a tall woman in a red suit pointed at Perdita's car and shouted, “That's one of her nymphomaniac bridesmaids! I'm sure of it!” Pierce was almost trampled by a herd of photographers rushing past him toward the Lexus. He bolted after them.

Paparazzi were swarming the SUV by the time Pierce got to it. All telephoto lenses pointed at Perdita, who had had the presence of mind to cover her face with a lacy thong she was taking to the dry cleaners. Pierce collared the guy who was trying to yank open the driver's door and tossed him at a squawking chicken. “It's me, Perdita! Open up!”

By some miracle she heard his voice above the fray. She unlocked the door and slithered to the floor, keeping the thong over her face. Pierce hopped inside. “Can you get us out of here?” she whimpered. “I didn't do anything.”

“I saw.” Pierce rolled down his window. “You have three seconds to get lost,” he told the photographer plastered to the windshield. “One. Two. Three.”

Pierce floored the accelerator. The guy on the hood nearly broke his nose on his own Nikon before sliding over the fender. Pierce looked in the rearview mirror. The street behind him was a blizzard of angry chickens and drivers. “You can get up now,” he told the thong.

Pippa crawled to her seat. “Are we leaving the scene of an accident?”

“You didn't cause an accident, the guy tailgating behind you did. Rear-end collisions are one hundred percent the fault of the driver in the rear.”

She looked out the back window. “Oh no! They're still there!”

Pierce confirmed in the rearview mirror that a green VW Bug and a white Mini Cooper were bearing down on them. They probably weren't the meter maids. “Seat belt fastened?”

Yes. Pippa sat rigid as a mannequin as Pierce zigzagged through Dallas, never overtly breaking traffic laws but not exactly observing them, either. He blasted through a series of yellow lights; the VW and Mini shot through them red. “Persistent,” he said, squealing onto McBride Boulevard. “Are you married to the mob?”

“No! Please leave marriage out of this!”

“The woman in the red suit said you were a nymphomaniac bridesmaid.”

“She's a drunk.”

“Your ex-fiancé is sending a posse to bring you back,” Pierce guessed.

“You couldn't be more wrong.”

Pierce gunned the Lexus past four cars in a row, narrowly missing an oncoming Airstream. As they approached Route 208, Perdita's voice became wild. “They're getting closer! I'll kill myself if they catch me!”

“They won't catch you.” Maybe she was a streetwalker and her pimp was trying to kidnap her back into prostitution. Pierce sped down the highway while allowing the VW to pull up alongside on the right. He waved at the short, bald driver, then slammed on the brakes. When the VW shot a car length ahead, Pierce tapped its left rear end with his right bumper, throwing it into a spin. “One down,” he said as it spiraled into the trees.

The Mini was still on his tail. When he saw a break in oncoming traffic, Pierce ripped on the hand brake. His locked rear wheels spun in a semicircle around the front wheels, pointing the Lexus in the opposite direction. In one smooth motion Pierce released the hand brake, hit the gas, and wrestled the SUV from the shoulder back onto the pavement. In seconds the Lexus blazed past the Mini going the other way. Whistling, Pierce exited the highway onto a residential street. “Not even close. He said, grinning.

“Where'd you learn that?”

“I was a stunt driver.” Pierce hadn't had such fun since. “Why were those men chasing you?”

“They thought I was someone else. I do slightly resemble the person they're looking for.”

Pierce drove a while before saying, “I learned a couple of things as a stunt man, Perdita. One is I can spot a phony a mile off.”

“I am not a phony,” she protested. “I'm just having a small identity crisis.”

“You're a really bad liar.”

Pippa brightened. “That's a relief.”

Officer Pierce revised his theory for the tenth time: maybe she was a sadistic state auditor. Any minute now she'd whip out her badge and fire him for a multitude of infractions. “Whatever you are,” he sighed, pulling into the motel lot, “I'm sure it's unique.”