Thorazine Beach (2 page)

Why Starbucks had even
thought
about a store on Summer Avenue was beyond reason. Bubba don’t do decaf cappuccino. And Summer Avenue is
all
Bubba country—Mexican incursions excepted—from its in-town beginning just a block east of the zoo and Rhodes College, out past the last, lone Assembly of God and into the land of cotton, soybeans, and tumbledown, wood-frame, septic tank acreages where the road starts to call itself Highway 70 for real. The beginning of Summer Avenue wasn’t a
bad
part of town, exactly. You could send your kids to Rhodes for a couple of semesters, let them pretend, amid the old-South white columns, like they’re going to Vanderbilt—
if
you had 30K searing a white-hot hole in your pocket. Or for twelve and a half bucks, you could hit the zoo on a summer afternoon and see what it is polar bears do when the heat gets up to one-oh-something, relative humidity hovering on the wrong side of a hundred per cent.

But cross the Parkway going east, and you’d start into Summer Avenue proper, the part I know. The Paris Cinema, where the movies they show aren’t exactly, well,
cinema
. Or Parisian. A couple of self-styled “antique malls” whose merchandise might better be described as
debris
. A whole lot of stops aimed at those for whom booze, tattoos, and cheap cigs are regular offerings on the altar of existence. Evident rises and falls in fortune along the way. A decent Chinese buffet here, there a strip of long-lost glass-and-aluminum storefronts, cardboard for lease signs in the windows, faded and curled up to die. And right here, a block east of Berclair Baptist, at Summer and Stephens Station, a bright green Starbucks, plopped on a streetward outparcel of a half-empty, sixties-style shopping mall, looking desperately out of place, like an Armani suit in a bowling alley.

Word on the street is, some ‘Bucks exec had gone wildcat a few years back, bought into this sure-fire, glow-in-the-dark development deal, signed too soon, requisitioned some pretty big company cheques, all without running it past their real estate people. The deal went south about fifteen minutes later. The exec was gone in a jiff, but just before the Starbucks board iced his last latte, they discovered he hadn’t so much as read the lease he’d signed. Twenty years, damn near unbreakable, no sublet, and with enough penalty clauses and liquidated damages they figured that actually running a barely break-even store, though hopelessly misplaced, was cheaper than any way they could see of getting out. Even their own lawyers and financial people said so. Hence this go-through-the-motions farce, casting biscotti before the biscuits-and-gravy crowd.

I’d brought files and my laptop today. Took a few minutes out, my usual warm-up, to check my stamp bids on eBay. I’m a serious, geek collector—Canada bill stamps, used on promissory notes, 1864 to 1882. How’s that for narrow? A few little five-dollar items. But I’d missed the big one—a first-issue eight-cent feather-in-the-bun, mint, fine to very fine centering, original gum, hinge remnants. Plus, I had legitimate stuff to do. As in: actual work. An expense claim I had to submit
today
or I wouldn’t get paid at all, Eileen had told me (as always she told me, “for the last flaming time”). A quickie affidavit to draft on this unsuspectingly about-to-be-divorced guy holed up with the wrong woman at the Rebel Inn on Lamar—pics, digital recording,
Oh baby oh baby
, banging headboards, the whole nine yards. And a rather longer report I almost couldn’t wait to write—
delicious
pics, video, but even better stills, in this insurance fraud case, Dwayne Poteat, the alleged paraplegic plaintiff hanging poised in mid-air, bum about two feet off the seat of a four-wheeler, over a dirt-hill jump just outside Dyersburg, an exquisite, wide-eyed grin smeared across his muddied face.

Starting to take a table, I stopped, decided on the big armchair in the corner, pulled down the sunshade. Overhead, high enough to discourage reaching, bolted to the wall, a single shelf. Books. Nearly all hardcover. Nikki’s doing, I’d discovered the week before. “Gotta give the place a little tone, Jack.” Her own books. A motley little clutch of them.
The Mill on the Floss. Lady Chatterley
. Locke’s
Essay on Human Understanding
—the Nidditch edition, I noted. No slouch, our Nikki. A couple of Loren Eiseley’s essay collections. A favourite poet—Jo McDougall’s
The Woman in the Next Booth
. Armistead Maupin. Tama Janowitz—
Slaves of New York
. A
Moby-Dick
with a half-broken spine.

“Does anybody
get
that?” I asked Nikki. “Starbuck? First mate? Makes coffee on the ship?” Midtown, yes, Nikki told me, once in a while Germantown. Here, no. I smiled.

I looked at the lone paperback on the shelf, a dog-eared beater. Clifford Simak,
Way Station
. Golden age sci-fi. I’d first read it when I was fifteen and the world still held possibilities that didn’t hurt or die or leave you behind, taking your heart. And here it was again, an intergalactic federation of a thousand intelligent species, a guy and a girl who held it all together. And a book that offered the best coffee in the galaxy, too, as judged by a friendly little blue guy, half a human tall—thanks, Cliff.

“Way
Station
‘s a favourite of mine, too, Jack. Loved it all my life.” Nikki smiled. I smiled back, sat, and sank into the book. I met again in its pages the aged mailman, the century-old dog, and the alien Ulysses, checked in a couple of E.T. diplomats from Lord knows where, and my cell rang. Must be Eileen, so I didn’t even look. “Yes, Eileen, I know. I’ll get it in today for sure—”

“Lucky you,” the voice said, and I felt myself blush. MacDonald. First I’d heard from him in the couple of months since they’d promoted him to major, pulled him off the fraud squad and stuck him on that special task force, the whatever-it-was commission.

“You in your office?” he said.

“One of them,” I said.

“Good,” MacDonald said. “I’ll be there in two minutes.”

“But wait—I haven’t told you which—”

“Two minutes,” he said, and hung up.

“She’s a bit…
pissed
,” Jackie, the receptionist, whispered.

From
way
down the hall: “I heard that!”

Jackie nodded, sending me behind her station and back. Fifty feet of hallway separated Eileen’s inner office from Red Line’s front door, but still she’d heard. I walked back, set my stuff on the floor beside her desk.

“I’m, like, fifteen minutes late,” I objected. “You’d think it was a week.”

“Time’s money, Peanut,” she said. “Park it.”

I did. She sat, hands folded, an immaculately bare desktop.

“The dirty look,” she went on, “is for all the times you
were
a week late. Whatcha got?”

“Well, first things first,” I said. “Now, that divorce case—”

Eileen shook her head and smiled. “What
I
want to do comes first.”

“That’s
not
case files?”

“Case files are fun,” she said. “Fun comes later. Paying you is not fun. Expenses first.”

She began shuffling through the papers I handed her. Ticked a couple of items with a blue marker. Flipped pages. Then a circle, this time in red.

“What?” I said.

“Petro truckstop restaurant, West Memphis,” she said.

“I was following this guy”—I held up the divorce file—”and I hadda go where he went.”

“Granted,” she said. “But did you really have to go for the all-you-can-eat chicken-fried steak extravaganza?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because it was a Friday, and Friday is chicken-fried steak. The all-you-can-eat meatloaf extravaganza is Tuesday.”

“Have a salad next time.” She gestured with the red pen. “Take it as personal advice.” She grabbed a blue, ticked the item to say
okay
.

“Et tu, Brute?”

Good Christian woman, Eileen. And she can command a certain gentility on occasion. “As any Southern woman should,” she’d say. But Eileen Leckie’s also an ex-Bartlett cop. Twenty years on the force, she and her husband Les (gone these six years, now), before they started Red Line. The old cop in her can command attention, too, whenever she wants. And thus it came to be that, state-of-the-art intercom notwithstanding, the principal mode of inter-office communication at Red Line Investigations—with no clients present, at any rate—was shouting.

“JACKIE!”

“WHAT!”

“TWO EIGHTY-TWO SIXTY-THREE!”

“ROGER THAT!”

Faint giggles in the outer office.

Not that I minded the amounts of my expense cheques being known to the entire place. It’s an investigations outfit—what
didn’t
they know? I was rarely enough there, anyway—just when Eileen wanted me. And I wasn’t, after all, an employee.

Red Line was the umptie-third agency I’d applied to, after the Garrison Security affair blew up, five-six years ago. Brilliant: I’d managed to bring down my own employer, second biggest security and investigations outfit in the region—not even so much knowingly, just tripped up in a tangle of goings-on in the vein of mail fraud and money-laundering and (just maybe) a murder mixed in there somewhere. Millions in assets seized. Licences jerked. A string of holding and operating companies ended up folded, spindled, and mutilated. Dozens suspected, eleven people charged, nine convicted. About eighty-five of Garrison’s prize former-FBI agents thrown out of work, most with a measure of taint in the job market, even for those cleared in the investigations by the Memphis police, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and half a dozen lettered federal agencies. And every last one of those guys and a couple of gals, it seemed, harboured a resentment. All of it directed, in greater or lesser degree, at me.

Among those never indicted, never charged, never found: Isaac Breitzen, my old boss, the lord and master of Garrison’s clutch of companies. A stand-up guy, early on, as Machiavellians go. Been a great place to work, people said, when his dad Buddy ran the company, when it was just the old, original security-guard outfit. Brown pants, yellow stripe, lunchpails. Regular folk. Friendly, and every employee, top to bottom, called him Buddy. Respectfully. But still,
Buddy
. The Breitzen I’d known was Ike, at first. Then
Mister
Breitzen, when Buddy took sick. Then, when Buddy was gone, Breitzen was simply
sir
—to everyone. Same tone as you’d address the queen’s husband. By then, the job application form had grown to fifty-six pages—fifty longer than for my top secret clearance in the army—and even those of us already there had to fill it out. (Thank God the HR guy owed me a favour, let me fudge an answer or two.) Lie detector. Sworn oaths of allegiance—to the company, to
him
. Pat-downs in the front lobby, on a couple of days when Breitzen had felt the mantle of Roman senator especially heavy upon his shoulder.

Bars on the building, everywhere—even the windows of his eighth-storey office, where he’d had the fire escapes removed. He made all the staff memorize and recite, dead cold, his new, six-page, capital-C Code of Conduct, which he insisted be printed in red italics, a quirky font ripped from the Renaissance. Twenty-year guys, guys who wanted only to serve out their time walking security at strip malls, sitting night-shift desks in empty office buildings, guys who came to work on time and never took a sick day, guys who hadn’t memorized anything since
Jesus loves me
, lost their jobs, no notice, no pay in lieu—Tennessee is a “right to work” state, which means the very opposite of what the phrase implies—because their memories couldn’t get them past the second paragraph.

Breitzen was a small man, and became smaller, we saw, as time wore on. A bantam rooster in elevator shoes. He had a platform built in his office so his desk would be raised a step above the chairs his visitors would sit in. Story goes, Jim Bork, the company planner, wanted him to see some office-layout drawings, decided he’d plop his chair right up there and sit beside old Ike to show him. End of the morning, Bork was gone. End of the afternoon: Carpenters cutting down the platform so it would fit just one desk, just one gigantic leather swivel chair. And just one ego.

Laughter in the hallways became, through the years, whispers, glances, looks over shoulders. The building itself felt soaked in sadness. You daren’t quit—you couldn’t, not without bad references, recriminations. The whole place was simply
waiting
. Some employees—the optimists, we called them—were clearly waiting for Breitzen to die. Some might have been waiting to die themselves.

Middle of the night—not coincidentally the date of the morning raid the feds and Memphis PD had planned: Limo, private jet out of the Olive Branch airport, false flight plan filed. He took, they said, two suitcases, a couple of hundred pounds of hundred-dollar bills, a lifetime supply of Cuban cigars, and several custom crates bearing his precious collection of the drawings of Edvard Munch. Guys in black suits, briefcases full of platinum bars, palladium bars—silver and gold being, in Breitzen’s world, distinctly lowbrow. The guys in suits didn’t get to go, though their briefcases did. Those left behind, in the office or on the runway, all, in their own ways, screamed, sure as Munch’s figure on the bridge. Where Breitzen is, they say, is a warm place. Certainly we all hoped it was.

Eleven
weeks
I was a witness, all added together. Investigation rooms, discoveries, and five courtroom trials—two criminal, three civil. All said and done, I was extruded out the bum end of the legal process with no job, no prospects, few friends, my distinctly unflattering picture in the paper, and little enough coin that I had to cadge my walking-around money off Lynette. Thankfully, no charges. But this last benefit, I’d finally come to grasp, was largely due to the all-too-apparent fact the trial judges and the D.A. both regarded me as too ineffectual, too just plain obtuse, to have had a knowing, causal hand in all this chicanery.

I’d managed to recover my P.I. licence. Barely. But you can’t operate as a P.I. in Tennessee unless your
individual
licence hangs under the umbrella of an
agency
licence. The state government had long since said
okay
to my individual, but
no
to my getting my own shingle. They’d issue the individual when I’d found an agency home. I’d actually filed an administrative appeal, gone to Nashville for a hearing on getting my own company licence. I winced at the words.
Not anytime soon, Mr. Minyard. Too many unanswered questions
. Hence my hoofing the whole city—and a few outlying burgs, too—looking for something, anything, in the investigations line.