Signs of Struggle (25 page)

“Might not be soon enough,” he said. “But actually, I thought I’d buy you people drinks. I’ve finished eating,” he said, gesturing at the dishes he had pushed to the edge of the table. Much of the food was uneaten, an affectation I never learned to tolerate, growing up poor. America will someday have to account for all the food that she throws away.

“For future reference, what did you have, and how was it?” Liv asked.

“Lamb! I do so enjoy eating the flesh of little lambs,” he said, then laughed, “and it was excellent, as is everything on the menu.”

“I heard you had significant appetites,” I said, “but my sources say it’s land instead of lamb. Apparently, it’s both.”

Clontz looked at me. He ignored Liv. There was no humor in his pale eyes that projected intelligence and purpose, but no appetite, no heat. The look in those eyes reminded me of how a shark’s eyes looked, constantly searching for data and food, but without emotion.

“Let’s go into The Embers,” he said. “I really would like to buy drinks.”

“My land is not for sale,” I said.

“Not yet,” he said evenly. Then he laughed.

“Why are you so eager to plunk down your dough to buy us drinks?”

“Just being neighborly,” Clontz said. “I thought a little Northern hospitality might offset the injuries you’ve suffered here, and help expedite the healing of your wounds, physical and emotional.”

“Let’s get that drink, then,” I said, sliding out of the booth and helping Olivia to her feet. Following Clontz, we left the dining room and padded down the deeply carpeted hallway, past walls with hunting prints every few feet. Faint piano music beckoned to us.

The Embers Lounge was cozy and dark, built on several different levels no more than one or two feet higher or lower than each other, effectively providing privacy. One solid glass wall looked out over the golf course and the woodlands and bluffs beyond. Gleaming, walnut-paneled walls on each side of the glass added to the dark intimacy. Oil paintings depicting golfing scenes, thoroughbred horses, and Formula One racing cars, all enhanced by small spotlights, decorated the walls.

Opposite the big window, a solid stone wall rose from floor to ceiling, with a fireplace in one corner and a Baby Grand piano in the opposite. A young girl played the piano and sang “Blessed Are the Believers." Her voice, sultry and sophisticated beyond her years, caressed each note effortlessly.

“Maureen Maloney,” Liv said, “one of my students a while back. Good kid.”

We slid into a booth. I made sure Liv and I were facing the Maloney girl. She was much more pleasant than Clontz to look at.

A cocktail waitress in a mildly revealing black dress appeared.

Olivia said, “Hello, Melanie,” and the waitress replied, “Oh, hi Miss Olson. Nice to see you.” Liv beamed a smile back.

I deferred to Clontz, who ordered a double Chivas on the rocks, then turned to us and asked, “What may I order for you two?”

I said, “I have heard the Pinot Grigio is excellent.” Liv’s thigh rubbed leisurely against mine, and I momentarily lost concentration.

Clontz smiled and ordered Melanie to, “Scoot along now.”

“Coming up,” she said, leaving behind a small silver bowl filled with salted cashews, almonds, and macadamia nuts.

Liv and I watched as the young woman finished her number, demurely accepted the applause that followed, and began, “Just Another Woman in Love.”
Must be Anne Murray night
, I thought.
Fine by me.

Clontz twisted in his seat and followed my gaze, smiled grimly as he turned back to face us and said, “Sings like an angel, and with the morals of one, too. What a waste of fine flesh,” he muttered.

I could feel Liv tense. She said, “Maureen’s a fine person, and her morals are well grounded. Good family, good kid.”

Melanie appeared and Clontz stared at her chest while she bent over and placed the orders on little coasters. He pushed a fifty down the front of her uniform and when she startled, she bumped his glass, spilling some of the scotch, leaving a potent puddle.

“Clumsy!” Clontz hissed under his breath.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Clontz!” Melanie said, quickly soaking up the spill with a stack of cocktail napkins from her apron.

“It’s hard to imagine someone being incompetent at such a menial task. Please, Melanie see if you can keep the next one in the glass.”

She finished wiping up the spilled drink and left, her face flushed. In short order she returned with another double Chivas. Clontz said, “Take that out of the fifty, Melanie, and give me back the change. You can kiss your tip good bye.”

Melanie nodded, completed the transaction as demanded, and left. I pushed the silver bowl to Jurgen Clontz. He waived it away. I pulled it back, scooped out a handful of nuts, and began popping them into my mouth, using a sophisticated technique I had learned in the finest Irish pubs. The smoothness of the action relied on a precise wrist movement. Then I found a thick, rich-looking whole cashew, picked it up with my fingertips, and bounced it off Clontz’s forehead.

“That’s for Melanie,”I said.

Clontz looked incredulous. Then he regained his composure like someone used to having nuts bounced off his forehead. “You take more risks than is wise,” he said tersely. “Are you finished?”

I ignored him and touched my glass to Liv’s, said “To another time,” and sipped, enjoying how clean, cold, and good it was. She smiled at me, which redeemed the entire evening.

Clontz took a sip of his drink, the small ice cubes clicking together in the glass.

“Last guy I knew who drank Chivas Regal on the rocks was lined up against a wall in Kosovo and shot as a mercenary,” I said, and the conversation began in earnest despite Liv’s knee bumping hard against mine.

C
lontz said, “Is that projecting, or wishful thinking?”

“A friend of mine who served three years in the Middle East as a consultant once told me to never ask the question if I couldn’t stand the answer.”

“Oh, please stop, Mr. O’Shea, even before you start,” Clontz said, waving his hand limply in the air and fluttering his eyelids. “I can’t stand the thought of you criticizing me. I will absolutely perish if you continue.”

I smiled at Clontz’s display, which he dropped.

“I can stand anything you can, Mr. O’Shea,” a bit of a challenge in his voice and a look meant to curdle milk. But I’m not milk.

“Perhaps we can field test that assertion someday.”

I could see Olivia shaking her head. She said in a sing-song voice directed at us, “Oh waitress, may we have some more testosterone over here, please? I’m afraid we’ll run out.”

I sought her hand under the table, but she pulled it back, shot me a false smile, and drank some wine. I did, too, only in greater quantity.

“Go ahead, O’Shea, get it off your chest, whatever it is that’s bothering you,” he said.

“I don’t like you,” I said. “You stumbled out of the gate when you dumped on Miss Maloney’s character, and you went flat on your face with your treatment of Melanie. And that’s just tonight.”

Clontz’s eyes had gone as cold as the ice in his Scotch. He said, “I think it is a waste for a young woman with the face and body of Maureen Maloney to be a priss. Silly girl turned down an opportunity to spend time with me in exchange for all that I can do for her. I have been wildly successful financially, Mr. O’Shea, and I could do much to make her happy. You see, I know something that Freud couldn’t figure out.”

“Which is?”

“I know what women want.”

“Are you kidding? Please, let me in on it! What is it?” Olivia pleaded.

“They want money and the security it brings. Women live for
things
, Mr. O’Shea, and they’re all alike. They are all motivated by financial security. The ugly old rich man with the young, alluring wife is not so much a cliché as it is a fact of life.”

“This great insight of yours might have come as a surprise to Mother Teresa,” Olivia said, jabbing at the silver bowl’s dwindling supply of nuts.

“If Mother Teresa didn’t have the body of a whooping crane and the face of a horse, she’d have been like all the rest of the broads. Give her beauty and boobs and she’d have left Calcutta for North Beach in a heartbeat. I understand she questioned her faith the last twenty years of her miserable husk of a life.”

“We’ll have to discuss Elisabeth Elliott and Corrie ten Boom sometime,” Liv said. There was enough heat coming off her words to cook kabobs. She finished her wine.

“Never heard of them,” Clontz said.

“Of course not,” Olivia responded.

I said, “So tell me, Mr. Clontz, since you know what women want, and you can provide it, why aren’t you happily married?”

“I assume this marriage would be to the woman of my dreams?”

“Something like that.” I caught Melanie’s eye and she brought us another bottle of wine. I poured for Liv and me. Then I loudly slurped the wine for Clontz’s benefit.

“I am not married, Mr. O’Shea, because I do not need to be married. Women need to be married. As long as I am wealthy and remain single, I can take from women what I need. Married, I lose my leverage, because her incentive to please would be gone. You must be some romantic, hopelessly stuck in a developmental time back in fifth grade when you could be made happy by a special Valentine from some pre-pubescent cutie.”

“How did you know about Joyce Berkowitz?”

Clontz sighed. “I corrected our clumsy waitress because, as a Board member, I want to make sure the Club continues as the four-star establishment that it is. Spilling drinks is unacceptable.”

“In my book, you were just being mean, and I have little regard for mean people.”

Clontz shrugged. Olivia sipped. I slurped again. Olivia’s knee smacked mine. A little too hard, if you ask me.

“Changing the subject, tell me, Thomas, did shooting those two men at your house make you happy?”

“I can tell you that when the shooting stopped and I was still breathing, I was positively gleeful.”

Clontz finished his drink and looked across the room. Melanie appeared. Her hesitation was fleeting, and quickly overcome. “Melanie,” I said, “would you please bring another round for Mr. Clontz?”

Before she could answer, Clontz said, “Make mine a triple Chivas on the rocks, which is fifty percent more than a double. And see if you can be less messy this time. Now, give me my change.”

She did. I smiled at Melanie. She left quickly, returning almost immediately with the drink and a larger bowl with abundant mixed nuts. I gave her a one hundred dollar bill and told her to keep the change.

I looked at Clontz and said, “Reparations.” Liv’s hand sought mine and I took it.

Clontz fished in his pocket, withdrew a handful of change, extracted two pennies, placed them side by side on the table, and returned the rest of the coins to his pocket. “My tip for ovary brains.”

“As long as we’re engaged in such a delightful repartee, perhaps I could seek your wisdom on another topic involving capital,” I said.

“What? Investment advice?” Clontz sneered. “How ‘bout, let me see now, land?”

“I already have some, thank you. What I’d really be interested in is your take, being local and all, on who the hell’s trying to kill me. What have I done to deserve such a rude reception in this beautiful village?”

Clontz said, “Follow the money trail, Mr. O’Shea, follow the money trail.”

“What?”

Clontz paused, as if waiting for my feeble mind to catch up. Then he said, with obvious fatigue from apparently having to put up with a lesser intelligence, “Money is the greatest motivator there is. I admit it. It’s greater than sex, because if you have money, sex is a cinch. So follow the money trail and you will find out who is trying to kill you. I think even the Bible says that money is the root of all evil.”

“You’re almost right. But it says the
love
of money is the root of all evil. You should know that.”

Jurgen Clontz waived his hand, as if to shoo away my observation. “Whatever, but, as I said, in your situation, someone’s after money.”

“I don’t have any money to speak of,” I lied.

“That’s bullshit, and you and I both know it, but to the point, you are likely impeding someone from acquiring money. I know you are poking around into this Soderstrom situation. Maybe someone is getting nervous. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be taking the extraordinary steps to remove you from the equation,” he said, lifting his drink to his lips and chugging the rest of it.
That’s a lot of
hard liquor all at once
, I thought. Clontz looked at his glass, then set it down.

Maureen Maloney was singing “Proud Mary” in a rendition antithetical to Tina Turner’s style. I liked Tina’s better.

“So tell me,” I said, “what would you do if I were impeding your acquiring eight thousand contiguous acres of prime northeast Iowa farm land?”

“It’s eight thousand five hundred and twelve acres, to be precise.”

“That, too.”

“You mean if I were a person without ethics, professionalism, acumen, restraint, or class? A lowly crook?”

“Yes.”

“I would take you out.”

“Would you do it yourself, or would you hire someone to do the dirty work?”

“There are advantages both ways,” Clontz said, his eyes no longer just cold. They were intense, oddly enthusiastic. Discussing business was right in his wheelhouse. He pounced. “If I did it myself, and this is purely hypothetical, you know, I would be assured of success. It is a truism that one simply cannot get good help these days—observe Miss Slop-and-Mop who has so ineptly waited on us tonight. But if I did it myself, I would chance some aberrant risk factor rearing its ugly head with the end result being my capture, conviction and incarceration, although another truism is that rich people aren’t usually convicted. The alternative is to hire, one-on-one and very privately, a quality professional, so that if he is ever caught, or decides to try blackmail later, it is just his word against mine, which is flimsy stuff when trying to get convictions. No direct contact is critical. Use a middle man, or better yet, several middle men. Nothing that would link me to the event. Nothing in writing. Everything in cash. Conversations at random locations to avoid eavesdropping, human or electronic.”

Clontz was tipsy now, but the land hog seemed caught up in the topic. I disliked Clontz more by the moment, but I had a grudging admiration for the way he went at a hypothetical. There was something vile, something downright odious about the man as the veneer of sophistication evaporated like the trace alcohol in his glass.

“So,” I said, “given the scenario I just presented, which of the two ways would you do it?”

Liv squeezed my hand hard, but when I looked at her, she was staring at Clontz. I think she was seeing the same thing creep out from under his thin patina of civilization.

Clontz leaned across the booth. “Given those factors, I would take you out personally, for the satisfaction,” he said, jamming his finger into my chest.

I considered grabbing Clontz’s finger, pulling him forward, and then breaking the man’s forearm against the edge of the table, but fought off Mulehoff’s Initiative.

“And if I were you,” Clontz continued as he started to slither out of the booth, “I would be ever vigilant until your adversary is neutralized.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

He shook his head, squirmed out of the booth, and stalked erratically out.

“You really know how to bond with the big shots,” Liv said. She studied her wine glass, took a drink, then another, finishing it off.

“It’s a gift,” I said, then I took her hand and we left.