"Dead Giveaway" - The Novel

CHAPTER I. ABOUT ME

I'm in a slump and how I know is, everything keeps reducing to money. This is new to me and it stinks. Not having the rent stinks. Not being able to shop at Zabar's, and having to clip coupons for toilet paper stinks. Not having the stomach to get off the bed and hit the parties, which I must do, to scare up clients for the lousy work I do ---stinks.

I can feel the entropy in my brain and bloodstream where there used to be zestful, motivated activity. I feel apathy for things that used to be interesting, like the N.Y. Times. I'd tell it to a shrink but sympathetic boss that I am, I didn't give myself medical coverage. Only a fool has himself for an employee. And don't say fill out a resume and go work for a major corporation. I am not in the kind of business where I can work for anybody.

I'm a P.I. We're not company men, shiny, brash, loud or smiling. We're lone wolves, invisible, a pair of eyes watching you, but you don't see us. We dine alone in the back booth at that swank restaurant where you're laughing at the front table with a young, beautiful woman with the bloom of youth on her. We wait around in cars with black glass looking up at the window outside a dark building where you're screwing this lovely, stupid girl who gives new meaning to your life.

I peel pistachios listening to all night talk radio in the back seat -- keen, blood-shot eyes trained on the stupid girl's window until the lights go on and you stumble out at 2 a.m. to head back to your wife, at which time for one half a minute, I'm a fuckin' Life photographer clicking away.

I drop the film in the slot at the Kodak drive thru booth, hit another drive-thru for a last burger, then sleep the sleep of the damned, roaches crawling over my face because of the empty beer bottles in bed with me and the burger remains and because I'm not much for doing dishes and my loft is my office and my secretary is my cleaning woman and she doesn't come week-ends.

In the morning I hand your wife (who is not stupid, otherwise why would I be here) the photographs so she can see it's true what everyone was saying. The late night audits were bullshit. She'll weep and threaten suicide and I put my arms around her and pat her back and give her my standard line. "He's not worth dying over. A lot of men do this kind of thing and it means nothing. Men are different from women about sex. To them it's like peeing only they have this strange pee-pee problem, they gotta go inside of a woman. You wouldn't divorce him if he had a medical problem, would you?'

Women always give me a strange look of incomprehension in that part of the speech. I don't know, it makes perfect sense to a man. Then I go on, 'you have children who need Dad on board. Don't send him into the arms of ---' and here's where I bend the truth, 'this little tramp.' I give it my shoulder I tell you, but the wife stares at me with rising hysteria and shows me to the door. I give her my pal Benny the lawyer's card because I get l0% and she pushes me out the door and because she loves you, she'll divorce you and not have a second half to her life and take two kids with her into this kind of doom and for this valiant deed I chip off another small piece of one month's rent on my roach infested loft.

Manhattan rents are grisly. No matter how many cuckolded wives hire me, no matter how many husbands I'm following, I'm always just a little behind on a $1,900 nut I have to crack to live in a crummy loft on lower 14th street. Reality is torture for a spiritual guy like me.

There have been three distinct stages in my life. The early stage, when ignorance about money was bliss. I never thought about money because I had plenty of it. I thought about playing, studying and traveling. I had hobbies. I had teachers for sailing, polo, tennis, golf, karate, flamenco guitar and actually, one summer in Spain, for bullfighting. I spent what I liked. I did everything I wanted to and money never entered my mind. Because money was always there.

Then, there was this second stage, when I had no money but because I had a wonderful new project: earning money I had fire in my belly and creativity about how to do it. Each day I devised a new trick to get clients. I developed friendships with cops, I met Bergen back then when he was a beat cop. I kept my ears open, I schmoozed with lawyers who did lawsuits. I used my ingenuity. And I got to taste the fun of watching my own business grow. The self-reliance was intoxicating. Ahh, the scent of capitalism in the morning.

And now, there's this third stage, where I don't want to wake up and see myself in the mirror, only I don't have to wake up because I'm not asleep because I've developed insomnia. And I blame it of course, not on the beer ragging at my pancreas so that hunger wakes me, but on this line of work I'm in.

The way I got into PI work is this: I was trying to think up the worst way I could make a living that would most infuriate grandpa Winston. Being a P.I. was a brilliant stroke. He never spoke to me again. And I did PI work conspicuously to be sure he heard about it.

I got all the high society, high profile work in the late 70's and early 80's, and in three cities, mind you: Washington, because everyone knew I was Winston's grandson and they trusted me with their delicate matters as they'd trust one of the family. (They didn't know about the whole disinheritance business, and that I no longer had any sense of family and I'd have sold their dirty laundry to the Enquirer for a nickel which, as it happened, didn't want any dirty Washington laundry, as it's not sexy unless it's the president's---only Hollywood celebrity laundry will do. I tried, that's how I know.)

I also did well in Boston where I grew up but mostly because of the race wars there. A Boston Brahmin simply will not hire an Italian detective.

And I did well in New York. A lot of people ask me if racy New York divorces are any different from Stuffy Boston. Not a centavo. Identical. Why don't they ask an Ob Gyn that same question?

I always enjoyed blowing minds when they found out Winnie Fitzgerald's grandkid was a P.I. In Boston where he's a big mucky muck Brahmin and there are still statues to him in parks, my fantasy came true in a special way. People like Judge Warren Dunbar would call Gramps on the phone and say innocently "guess what, I just hired young Joe." I tell you, I brought shame on the man. One does what one can.

In Washington, a Fitzgerald being a PI drew only incredulous frowns as this was where Gramps served in the CIA for 5 decades, which is the main reason, I entered this line. I knew that in D.C. sooner or later someone would take note of what good work I did skulking around alleys and invite me into the Agency.

The Agency had always been my original game plan. I wanted to be a spook so I could get the straight skivvy on CIA covert actions in the third world and bust them off the face of this planet with the definitive book. I got this out of Mao's instruction to the early Communists, swim in the river with the other fishes, no need to walk on riverbanks.

I was going to get invited into the Agency and be a good spook and stay up nights late at Langley and use my computer expertise to break into the files on the Phoenix Program--- specifically to see exactly how rampant the heroin trade was. How rampant was it? Well I'll tell you. There were special rooms in the Base airport at Da Nang where bags of China white were sewn into corpses by French drug addicts, at three in the morning. The corpses were flown back to American Army air bases in Georgia where there were special rooms to unstuff the turkeys before they were handed over to their parents. That's how rampant it was.

I didn't need CIA computers to tell me that. My father heard it from Grandpa Winston and he told me way back during the Nam period, that this small cabal of agency guys were dealing dope. To imply it was the whole CIA is incorrect. It was always a small lineage hidden inside Dept of Cov-ops, a group no bigger than your average collection of cancer cells but during Nam, the tumor made a fiscal decision: give Santo Tranficante Jr. the USA poppy product concession. They had bags of the stuff. Laotian Hmong tribes had been taught to grow it, Air America, their own airline, flew the product, Richard Secord and Ollie North were the bagman and pilot, respectively carrying cash to the Agency's own laundry, the Nugan Hand bank. And part of the profits gained supplying addicts in Harlem were used to fund patriotic dirty tricks in Communist-leaning Asia.

Dope dealing wasn't new hat but simply the spook way: use drug sales to fight Communism. The French did it in the 50's in Viet Nam. Reagan/ Bush did it with their Nicaraguan Contras in the 80's, but with cocaine.

Spooks of the Nam period in the late 60's were taught the 'bucks-out-of-hat-trick' by the E. Howard Hunt, David Atlee Phillips, and Frank Sturgis, the Unholy Trinity-CIA clique who had been Nixon's personal furtives---not just at Watergate but as far back as 1951 when Nixon, as Ike's VP, WAS the Cuba desk.

1951 was when the Mob first came across Dick Nixon. Dick was Eisenhower's V.P. Fidel was 90 miles across the water and Nixon was the White House Cuba officer, with liason to both the CIA Cuba desk and the presidency. And oligarchs who’d been booted out of Cuba leaving massive investments behind were his friends. But Nixon's best buddy of all was Cuban millionaire Bebe Rebozo who had ties to the mob dating back to his wartime rubber tire recycling business. In Havana the mob showed Bebe and Dick a really good time and the oligarchs and the OSS sniffed too. The OSS had a few years earlier sprung Lucky Luciano from prison to get help with the Chinese heroin trade and now they asked the Mob to help nail FIDEL which of course the mob was overjoyed to do –hoping to get their casinos back.

The Mob always worked for the CIA even after Nixon left Washington which Tricky Dick did in a l0 year hiatus after he lost to JFK in 1960. Nixon was supposed to be president in l960. His 'car salesman with a beard' tricky Dick shifty look on t.v. lost him the election. Nixon was murderously jealous of Jack. Jealousy isn't too terribly complex. It reduces to a single emotion. I hate the person who's getting what I want when I have too much self hatred to get it for myself.

I feel Nixon had motives up the wazoo but then so did LBJ. RFK was about to be the next president. Lyndon didn’t stand a chance of he didn’t work fast. The oilmen, oligarchs, top guys in the military, state department all wanted JFK and RFK gone. JFK had just pulled the military out of Vietnam, the Agency out of the Get Fidel line of work. Nixon's people were in both the agency and outside in the mob. And way outside, in the California military complex, including Re-elect Nixon Creep funders Northrup et al and original longtime funder Howard Hughes. So I was torn between Dick and LBJ for the hit and it was killing me to find out who offed Jack.

The Mob's interest in getting Cuba back from Fidel was based on the old axiom 'if your enemies are my enemies, then we can be friends' and this line of thinking dated back to the day my grandfather visited Lucky Luciano at Sing Sing and asked him to use his influence to get Italian dock workers to stop striking. A war was on, be patriotic. Lucky replied 'let me out I'll be patriotic.' Gramps did and Lucky was. If favors make for friends, this one opened the door to a massive friendship, for it was a massive favor.

Others followed. In post-war Italy, when the Communist party got popular, the OSS developed an innovative way of keeping Communists out of public office: hitmen whacked the candidates. A dozen mysterious hits a year on leftist politicians in Rome did not puzzle or trouble my grandfather who never went to Mass or Confession after the War.

In payment, Lucky's syndicate got all the Chinese heroin the OSS could grow and kicked back the profits to the China Desk which reputedly used some of the money to send guns so Chaing Kai Shek could stop Mao.

Chaing sold so many of the weapons to the Japanese that he earned the nick name 'Cash My Check' at Langley. Some patriotic spooks felt this was unseemly and my grandfather was called upon to devise a way to murder him. Army chemists found this one poison, colchine, which left absolutely no traces. Everyone was excited. They got a huge vial of the stuff and tried it on an army mule that was on its last legs. It had absolutely no effect. The mule not only didn't die, he ran out and covered a dozen mulettes that evening. Years later my grandfather discovered that one animal kingdom and only one was immune to that poison. Mules. But enough of my family album.

Back to China. Dope was no joke in China. By l949, so many Chinese were addicted the stuff that Mao ordered the death penalty for dealers, ending a problem that had beset China for centuries.

Drugs were harder to eradicate in democratic countries. Grampa Winston sat on many a scandal when Co Ops and China desk guys became pirates making private fortunes painting American ghettos white and justifying it because nobody took black addicts seriously and there was lots of prison space back then.

The use of drugs by intelligence agencies predated Lucky Luciano as narcotics funding intelligence and military cov ops was a time-honored tradition as far back as the old Road to Mandalay period, the late 30's when a close friend of my grandfather's, Colonel Paul Hellwell, a blue-blood banking and corporative lawyer, served in the first secret army the US ever had, the Flying Tigers and noted Chinese warlords protecting and sharing in the opium trade and using the receipts to fund guns.

Like a modern day Marco Polo, in l945, Colonel Hellwell brought the noodle back to America. He imported China White to the Florida Keys via his own Sea Supply Inc. (an early model of Air America), and Santo Traficante Sr. (the Syndicate's head Florida guy) sold it everywhere east of the Missisippi. Hellwell was a real capitalist. He invented the 'boats go full both ways' high-profit school of import/export. Dope money went back to China as guns. Unconstitutional on several levels.

When Mao dried up the China Supply, Hellwell taught poppy cultivation to the Burmeese. Colonel Hellwell spoke fluent Thai, opened the Burmeese Consulate in Miami and was the American lawyer for the Burmeese royal family. Dope overlords were present at his daughter's wedding and wept at his funeral, mostly because there were no little Hellwells to carry the business forward, but there was a Santo Trafficante Jr. which again, brings us forward to the Viet Nam period when Secord, North and the planners of Iran Contragate were dope dealers not only with impunity but with stripes.

However, there must be a God. Nobody ever got any good karma out of helping nasty drugs to be sold to American teen-agers. IranContra got blasted out of the water, Hasenfus fell out of the sky with George Bushes phone number in his little black book, and Leftists like me hope this scummy spook tradition ended with the Contras or when the Russian countries disbanded, and Communism officially died. But just to make sure, we keep an eye peeled.

At least I do, because I am a political Utopian. My primary interest is seeing God coming to Earth thru organization of the State. To me, Jefferson qualifies as a minor Messiah. Of course, I wanted to find out who really offed JFK and not only because he was a distant relation of mine back in Ireland but because the guy took Ike's warning seriously. Beware of the undue influence of the Military Industrial Complex on government. JFK took Ike one better. In early November of l963, he told everybody he was taking American trainers out of Nam. He heard the Pentagon scream but he couldn't hear the guys behind them. The oil zillionaires.

The South China seas hold the biggest deposit of oil on the planet. The US could have had fossil fuels running out of our ears and noses, smog on top of smog in our cities, from our cheap, plentiful, Asian oil fields. Through the revolving door between the War Industries and the Pentagon pass the most highly paid lobbyists in the world. For a hit on a prexy, there had to be staff inside the 5-sided box. There was. The military is run by an American oligarchy who owns the oil companies just as surely as the thigh bone is connected to the hip bone.

Now, that oligarchy is territory I know. I played spin the bottle with them as a kid, and polo with them in college. My family name allows me to visit them in their offices today. One of those smug sons of bitches is Mr. Big. The octopus to whom all the threads in all the spy nets connect and somewhere in the vaults of Langley computers, that connection is encripted. To find that man I took criminology and computers at Yale. Not to be a P.I.

I was going to use criminology to get into the FBI, do a short stint there ---- just enough to get all the gossip, then use my name and family connections to switch over to the CIA which thirsts for FBI gossip. That was the game plan. That was before my arrest at Yale. After one is a certified communist, neither the FBI or CIA will have you so I switched to philosophy department, but I was already drinking. The bizarre thing about my last two years at Yale was, I don't remember them. I got a masters in Philosophy. I do not recall one word I read. I have a hard time talking about Spinoza. I retained no more than you do if you look Spinoza up in a dictionary.

I forgot everything I ever learned about philosophy as quickly as you forget a dream upon waking. But Hegel shot through me like a lightning bolt. Fourier and Engels and Marx went through me like a Chinese dinner but Hegel is a part of me forever. "It is in the organization of the state that the divine enters into the real." The vitamins from that meal are still in the bones of my soul.

But cut to the chase. I got out of college with no FBI waiting for me, no inheritance, no money. In despair at my shattered dream I moved as far as I could from Connecticut counting the pennies in my jeans which got me to New York.

Never say New York. Say Manhattan. Ahhh, that is a city. I literally dined out on caviar being a PI in the upper East 80's. The posh people who counted, the Lennie Bernstein-Tom Wolfe set found it positively folklorico and oh so curious that a Fitzgerald had chosen this kind of straaange work and hadn't preferred public office.

And I dined out on pastrami in Midtown where the Broadway set wanted to hear all the grimy details. I can't tell you how many little tobacco breathed, moustachioed film, t.v., play producers in leather jackets bought me dinner so they could hear all about my weirdest cases to maybe get a t.v. series out of it. As I had no cases that didn't involve waiting outside buildings peeling pistachio nuts, I would research unusual cases in Bernie Rhodenbarr novels and recite what I'd read verbatim and these illiterates would foam with joy and wave checks under my nose. I never actually took a check as that would be plagiarism and besides, it would mean sitting for months with a recording machine and the foaming tobacco breathed moustache in the leather jacket. But I'd get a free pastrami sandwich out of it and I got off on spinning these colorful detective adventures that had never happened to me. That's how I learned I might make a good writer.

And recently, when screenplays began going for 2 and 3 million dollars, I began to hope I would really get a case like one of Bernie Rhodenbarr's so I could go to Hollywood, ingress in one of those "How to Write a Screenplay in 7 days" Seminars, become a hyphenate, (for those not in the know, that refers to the little punctuation mark between producer-writer which signifies your writing is so bad you got a studio deal and are making a ton of money) and then I would truly come into my own, retire to Majorca and start transshipping guns to Ireland.

So it was late in my second life stage that I began planning the getaway from detective work. But in the first part of that busy, second stage I was positively ingenious at scaring up clients. I had really only discovered money during that period, and it was my pride that I could snap my fingers like a magician and scare clients out of the rafters. The sad thing about lawyers is, they can't hang around disasters looking for work because they get called ambulance chasers. But P.I.s have this edge. Every cocktail party I go to gives me 1.7 clients. That's what I came up with when I calculated on paper how many parties I'd gone to divided by new clients. It's easy. Not that you should go into this kind of work, you wouldn't want to, I'll get to why not later, but how you get the clients is, you simply work the room, sniffing the gossip. You don't get involved in anything else, chatter wise. You move from conversation circle to circle, quickly, looking for two kinds of headlines. Who's fucking around. Whose wife knows or thinks she knows. And who's getting divorced. That's where you pick up your clients.

And I did that dance to perfection in the second stage of my life when I thought about clients and money I made a lot of money. How many P.I.s do you know that can go to Paris and find several hundred hungry impressionist painters and rent this little shop in Soho and dump paintings that cost you fifty bucks on the market for one to five thousand smackeroos. I did that with a flick of my hand just to give me a legitimate reason to go back to Paris every few months because I was into Absinthe, which you can't get here. You hallucinate on absinthe. It's the LSD of the l9th century. Made of wormwood. Witches used to rub wormwood on their skins to fly. I know they did fly, too, because a friend of mine, George, who composed atonal music would sit with me at a café table outside the Pompidou (an atonal piece of architecture if you ask me) drinking Absinthe for hours but here’s the weird part, only our bodies were at the table. We were flying over the Bois de Boulogne , together, just like Superman and Lois Lane. We flew to George’s girlfriend's apartment and saw her hanging stockings out of the window. And when we got back to the Bois, we both rubbed our eyes and talked about it. We'd both been there. The next day we checked with her, she'd been doing laundry, alright. Go figure. What do you think that is?

But this mystery is no more strange than the fact that with lousy, college French I could go to Paris, meet l00 painters who could do lousy Cézanne, Monet type brushwork, buy their stuff, and establish a relationship where they'd paint only for my gallery, and unload it for 20 times what it cost me in New York. I called my Soho space 'Le Rive Gauche' and made out like a bandit.

Anyway, you can do those kinds of things when you have that fire in your belly. Careers are like wind-up monkeys. You wind 'em up and they bang away for a while. But what we're up against is entropy. What winds up will slow down. We lose our stomach for the wind up and the bang. The practice was a moneymaker but I lost my stomach. The gallery was a money maker, but Absinthe was making me impotent and the guy who bought the gallery from me bought my hundred hungry painters and I signed something about never competing with him again, and as the only kind of painting I like is impressionism, I bought a sloop, moored it in Bar Harbor at 500 a month for a slip. There's a lot of Scotch in Bar Harbor. I have a problem with Scotch. Or as the joke goes, I have no problem. I drink it I pass out. I fall down. No problem. (Now, I only drink beer) but in the 80's I used to chain slurp Dewars as if they were beers. Which contributed to slowing down the P.I. practice, so last ditch, I sold the sloop and quit the Dewars.

And then I got into this last stage, the no fire in my belly stage where I do have to worry about money. I'm trying to bring PI work back to where it was when I had the pilot light and a taste in my mouth for sleuthing because now sleuthing tastes like ashes in my mouth. Clients must be able to smell the distaste. They stay away in droves.

This is a hard thing for a Communist to say, but being this poor feels like death. Like I can hear the waterfall up ahead. The bottom line is...there isn't enough cash. This is new to me, because, as I said, in the second part of my life I didn't care and in the first part of my life I never had to think about the stuff at all. The Fitzgerald family was rolling in dollars. Not little singular paper dollars but tubs of gold currency dollars.

Not my great grandfather, Johnny Fitzgerald because he was a mick who'd just come over from the auld sod and been a Boston bricklayer who worked his way up to general contractor and made enough to put his son, my grandfather, Winston Oliver Fitzgerald into William and Mary. Put is not the word. Forced, Squeezed, Coerced. My grandpa Winston had enlisted in WWI in l9l8 and wanted to go into the military. After the war, his father tore off the khaki and stuck his gun-crazy kid in banking grays: via law school. These were the years of the Anarchists and the first post l9l7 commie scares. The menace of Trade Unionism. America had lost its uranium mines in Russia. All early incursionism via the White Russians failed. Grandpa Winston saw banking and international trade law as ways to win the war against Communism and went to work on Wall Street in his mind, still in khaki. Mind you, this was before taxes. He made money by the bagful but down deep, he always was a raving patriot. He got his chance. He re-enlisted December 7th, l941, only his war record and law and banking background got him invited into the OSS, and he stayed on after the war, at a huge drop in salary, but by then they'd invented taxes, so it was just as well. During the second half of the century, Grandpa Winston lived off the interest on everything he'd made in the first half of the century and never made a nick in the principal.

His son, my father, had gone into New York investment real estate after the war and tripled Grandpa's money annually. The two of them were like a well-oiled machine that just planted fields of money and harvested it and stuck it in banks to multiply some more. Neither of them ever spent a dime in their lives, as they both reused teabags, so by l968 when I was in college, I was scheduled to inherit a fortune known to be in the hundreds of millions but with all the offshore, (it is said that Grandpa Winston invented offshore in the wake of taxes) really much closer to four or five billion.

But that fateful year, the year of RFK and Kent State and Nam and Martin Luther King, my mother caught my father in a fling and divorced him. My father married his secretary, Jill. A few weeks later Dad fell off a jumper and killed himself. Everything liquid went to Jill, while the foundations, corporations, real estate and stock, this immense fortune that would eventually have passed onto me, his only son, went back into my grandfather's hands.

And in l968, in the wake of Kent State, I led a student demonstration at Yale and was arrested. I spent the weekend in jail. It was in the Yale Skull and Bones and I was disinherited.

I know, because my grandfather waved it in the air as he disinherited me, and when his lawyers sent me the envelope making it legal, the clipping dropped out onto the floor. And Susan saw it, and took the letter. And we had a fight. And I went out and had a beer. And when I came back her grandmother's portrait was off the wall and my bullfight poster was back on it. Susan was precise and neat that way. Even when she made hysterical life moves, even when she moved out on a guy.

Of course, there are dark nights when I realize that was 't the lady's mood at all. She wasn't like the cuckolded wives with their suicidal tears. No, the perspectives line up with an eerie clarity, and I realize that it wasn't an emotional decision at all. Susan left me because the dollars weren't there any more. I was going to marry her and make her the mother of my children, spend my life with her and that was how deep her love had been.

For 20 years after I could brood and make this colossal awakening from a romantic slumber the reason I could drink bottomless buckets of poison brews, lose my path, forget my mission, get insomnia and stop dreaming my dream. For 20 years I could make Susan the villain in my life script and have the luxury of hating her and mistrusting all women ever since, just for that defection. She betrayed the thing she said she loved and for what. MONEY.

But the irony is that now, when for the first time my life is going down the drain because I have no money and no capitalist moxie to earn it, I realize I am exactly like her. No different. No better. I live in a universe where the dollar is the bottom line. Me, Joe Fitzgerald, worshipper at the tombstone of Marx, Hegel and Fourier. There must be some exact law of physics at work here because, did you ever notice? We become whom we hate. And when we do, and we realize it and the last 20 years of one's vagrant life were death wish for nothing, and fucked up on one's life mission besides, one is more than slightly embarrassed. And one's own soul becomes a battleground, and that is hell. Hell is NOT, as some glad ass antisocial existentialist poet alleged, --- other people. It is oneself.

* * * * *

CHAPTER II. MY FIRST HOT CASE

I understand it was a royal wedding. The wind whipped off the Hampton sound, overturning tables connected to umbrellas and knocking over two ushers who were in their eighties. The ring boy had been in Duffy's Battalion with the groom in 19l9, while the bridesmaids all had names like Tiffany, Nicole and Jade.

The bride, Christine McAllister, was a milk-skinned, buxom, dewy-eyed blonde of 28. There were more karats on her finger than she had years.

The wedding took place at the Sunny Glen Protestant Church and the reception on the terrace of a holistic healing client of the bride, a dowager who gladly told the guests how the had been instrumental in the happy couple meeting.

It seemed that Christine, the dowager's houseguest, had somehow gone out for a nude swim one morning, wandered on to Edward Sterling's terrace, been hired as his personal holistic healer and ended up his wife and stayed for breakfast, but perhaps not in that order, Constance Powers averred with her usual dry wit.

Inside Sunny Glen, beneath the stained glass windows and maple pulpit, an organ chimed out the chords of Lohengrin. Gathered together to be joined in holiest matrimony were the CEO of Sterling Communications Industries, trading at 78$ a share on the day he married a l0 dollar whore from a small town named Sweetwater, Tennessee.

As they were pronounced man and wife, the geriatric guests wept real tears. The adult son and daughter of Edward Sterling wept real-er ones. Ed Junior brought his boyfriend Carlos because, after all, the real scandal was in front of the altar. Sylvia Sterling Gregory brought her new beaux but nobody knew his name yet, he was just the Creamy Crusty Cookie heir, the big game hunter.

As Christine wrapped her arms around the snow-haired groom, and they locked lips, brother and sister just looked at one another in bewilderment.

The groom hadn't been seen out of a wheelchair in a decade. It was joked that Christine, who was a holistic healer by trade, had reversed his arthritic hip the first week she knew him, and taught him to do the achy breaky the second.

The Bride and Groom actually danced this hillbilly dance step while Billy Joe somebody sang and the Statler brothers backed up. The geriatric guests didn't know this wasn't just any hired group of country western singers but celebrities with platinum records who had won actual Grammies---however, they enjoyed them immensely anyway. Those who were unable to give the musicians a standing ovation and couldn't applaud or stamp their feet used spoons on wheelchairs.

A Coronary Unit from the local private hospital had been engaged and stood by in the gravel parking lot of the church just in case. Except for the ushers' scraped knuckles when the umbrellas tilted, no disaster marred the occasion. As I said, it was a royal wedding. The only disaster came a few weeks later, when Edward Sterling Sr. died of a stroke and the will was read and Sylvia and Junior found out that they had been royally disinherited.

So naturally, they hired me. Joe Fitzgerald, Private Eye. The Yalie Gumshoe. Better known as FITZ. P.I.

* * * * *

CHAPTER III. MEETING JUNIOR

I had been thinking about trying to get out of bed that morning, ----o.k., maybe it was closer to 3 p.m. when a knock came at the door. I stumbled out of bed and found an elegant, Frenchified, Clifton Webb type standing there in a navy blazer, red ascot and open collared pale blue chambray shirt (initials E.S.II, which I took to stand for Queen Elizabeth II.)

He does the pleasant, surprised mouth agape thing for a second then his gaze flashes past me across a floor strewn with several six packs, a few dozen Kodak packages spilling photos of assignations, to a snap brim hat, a priest outfit, several expensive cameras, a flock of film cartridges, a fake wig and moustache, another dead six pack and finally to my unmade sofa bed. Inwardly, I cringe and make the door crack narrow. On my wall next to the sofa bed is a poster of Indian mystic Ramakrishna and beneath it, a quote "Beware of two things, Love of the opposite sex and Love of Gold," hand lettered by me. Next to the poster is a candle, incense and a puja bell and a final notice and intention to disconnect from Con Edison.

My elegant new friend stares at it all, looks back at my unshaven, bleary puss and grins conspiratorially, really saying 'I'm just as weird as you are ' but what he actually comes out with is an urbane "Oh I'm dreadfully sorry. I somehow assumed this was your office. Tell you what, I'll call you when you've had some coffee. He pats my hand and is gone.

I let him go because at that early hour of the late afternoon no other solution occurs to me.

An hour goes by, I'm chugging coffee and the phone rings.

"Mr. Fitzgerald. It's me again. Ed Sterling Junior? Let me tell you, you come highly recommended."

"Yeah?" Note how my morning conversation improves dramatically with a slight dose of the Kona bean. I mean, is it any wonder I'm totally caffeine dependent?

"The Hilliard divorce? That was really good work. You helped get Diana quite a settlement."

"Ah the guy was ----" I started to say a fruit, but remembered the QEII. "---not husband material."

"Oh, I knew Dickie well. Guilty as charged. But your work was ingenious. How on earth did you penetrate an all-naked sex club with a camera?"

"Think clutch bag."

"Aha. Ingenious. Well, if only to hear how you solved other obvious problems that night, might I engage your services? "

"Sure. What's the deal? Only two things make people crazy enough to hire me. Love and money. " I yawned. "Which is yours?"

"Money. Love is definitely not involved."

"Money." I rubbed my unshaven chin thinking of Con Edison. "A subject after my own heart. "

"Come downtown and we can talk about your money problems and my own.

"What kind of case are we talking? Theft, infidelity, insurance fraud...?"

"All of the above, with a little dose of murder on top."

My eyes opened. I'd never had a murder case. I was beginning to think they only happened in books about P.I.'s.

"My sister and I believe our stepmother murdered Dad. In a most exotic way. Some untraceable Chinese poison. But much worse than murder, she had the old guy disinherit us. Bloody inconvenient. He took apart the family trusts, which held the properties of which there were nine. She nailed a dozen bank accounts, all the deposit boxes. What a cunt. All we've got left is a very freaky autopsy report and well, we just need your professional opinion. Cops are so sassy to our set."

"I see." I did not. With an autopsy there'd be an open and shut case for the police. It wasn't about sass. I almost said as much but there's no use talking people out of paying you huge amounts of money to look things over and you always tell them what they want to hear and if you can't, well, you've done the research and by then, shit, their check has cleared.

"I'm just down in the village. Why don't you come here for lunch. We can talk. 66 Morton Street."

"Apartment number?"

"The whole building is one apartment. Five o' clock too late for lunch?

I indicated that would be fine. My breakfast of coffee and whole grain toast wore thin fast and always left me rumbly ninety minutes later. I had the family trick pancreas.

After a shower and some calls to Con Edison Collections desk I get into my little yellow VW with the permanent parking ticket on the front window and I tool down to the other end of Greenwich Village. Morton is one of the most beautiful streets there, sloping off at a diagonal giving the regular blocks of New York an almost Parisian feel.

This narrow-shouldered little apartment building, in some more colorful time, had housed 4 families, one to a floor. A deep-pocketed ancestor of Edward Sterling Jr. had no doubt bought the building, evicted everybody and made the central, narrow stairwell wide and airy with a skylight, and joined all four floors with this spiraling, Barcelona plaster balustrade that looked like melted ice cream.

The building's current occupant had spattered the stairwell's walls with rainbow, cubist paintings from the 20s. I hallucinated the addictive aroma of oil paint and turp, salivated and suddenly knew my next gallery was going to be named: The Rainbow Cube.

"Four floors all to yourself?" My voice pingponged off the plaster to the fourth floor landing where he stood, foamy mimosa in hand.

"And my grand mama’s ghost. It was her atelier in the 20's. If I hadn't hung her paintings regularly in my room as a child, she wouldn't have left this to me directly, and it would be Christine's now and she'd be dumping this treasure of a building the way she has everything else. That girl wants cash. No memorabilia thank you.

"So she isn't the soft hearted type. It's a long way from no-nostaliga to murder."

"And all little boys who diddled their chums didn't grow up to be fags but all the fags I know once diddled their chums."

I plodded up the stairs struggling to apprehend the logic of this theorem in a mind dulled by a mild hangover.

"Après vous," Sterling Junior said when I got to the top.

I preceded him into a stunning, high raftered living room dotted with skylights that had Roman shades, featuring another, melting Barcelona plaster fireplace. There was a fashionably set lunch table in a corner near the open kitchen.

I sat on a plush, Indian hassock with Sterling II on the couch across from me. He dished hot, saffron yellow lamb curry onto steaming rice and offered me, beer, Chardonnay, mimosas or me. Beer, I responded. He named a dozen European beers, three Mexican including the hard to find Noche Buena, and was just starting on the American beers when I said Noche Buena would be fine. I preferred dark beers. A few sips into the Noche Buena I knew this was my kind of boss. I hoped he had a few dozen more relatives who needed investigating.

The curry was impeccable. The lamb had been plopped medium rare into a tumeric and raisin sauce thick with sour cream. I ground grainy pear chutney between my teeth. 'Who made the pear chutney?"

"Moi meme, he replied. "Indians just can't get off their damn green mango thing. "

And the fresh mint-coriander-onion relish?'

"Moi meme autre fois." he beamed, suddenly pleased with me. I could do no wrong. It was like being on a date. He was a post graduate palate looking for a junior gourmet to cook for. Little Sterling Junior would be hiring me 'til the millenium came.

With food like this one eats in reverent silence.

I finished and was slugging down the Noche Buena with the major thirst this kind of spicy food works up when he brought out an envelope of clippings.

The late Edward Sterling Senior looked like Spencer Tracy, and was obviously a stand-up kind of guy. I was reminded of the real Fitz, my grandfather---the kind of man other men did not fuck with. He found what he was searching for and handed me a photo of the widow taken at the funeral. She sat slumped on a chair, veiled in black, holding a rosary limply.

"If she could make herself look that heartbroken she must be truly devious." I murmured. "Mr. Sterling, you don't need a P.I. You need to contest the will with a shrewd, scumbag lawyer with ties to police networks all over the country. She's probably had busts as a hooker. Remember the O'Connor palimony in Hollywood? His lawyer proved she gave blow jobs in hotels before O'Connor put her in all those films. Judge held for the star. The girl got zip. Hard evidence like that comes from cops and lawyers. Judges are likely to be swayed by it and rule in your favor, reinstate the old will."

I've got an ex Senator for a lawyer, thank you and we've had cops with FBI ties looking for a prior record but, amazingly, she comes up clean. Before she came to New York, she didn't exist. There is no Kristine Mc Allister with that birth date anywhere in America. And here look at this. The autopsy says he was full of strange chemicals. Over 44 separate substances."

He gave me a sheaf of forms. I scanned it. "Magnesium chloride? Pyrodoxine?"

"Enough to dope him up. I tell you she drugged my father into dishinheriting my sister and me. Girl came away with between two and two and a quarter billion, depending on the auctions and which way SCI stock goes when she dumps it.

"Auctions? plural?"

"Six of them. London, Paris, Houston, Beverly Hills, Manhattan. Which did I forget? Real estate and don't forget the antique furniture collections inside them. And the Sterling family jewel collection. My grandmother's stuff, maiden aunt's, my mother's. Three society women died and left their treasures in my father's safe deposit boxes. The collection surpassed anything the Duchess of Windsor ever owned. My sister Sylvia is having a cow. They read the will Thursday morning, Thursday night Christine had emptied the Swiss Bank accounts, had them wire everything to an offshore in the Bahamas. Now I ask you---how does a little tart from Bumfuck, Tennesse know from the Bahamas?"

"So you think she drugged him to get your trusts broken and everything put in her name then put enough pyrodoxine which is vitamin B-6 I believe---in his Geritol to whack him?

"There were 43 other chemicals, many of them unknown to western science." He noted my lifted eyebrows. "Oh the servants will tell you. She gave him pills and powders day and night. You get them to sign affadavits. Work with my lawyer. You'll be great on the stand. You are clean, aren't you? Reputable? No busts for anything?

"In college---

"Does a person go to college to become a P.I.?

"I was a philosophy major at Yale, criminology minor. Had some feeble minded idea I was going to penetrate the CIA, expose a cabal that ran a secret American foreign policy, give atomic secrets to Cuba. Grampa Fitzgerald was in the OSS--"

"You're Winston Fitzgerald's grandkid? How on earth did you end up doing this for a living?

"My anti-war activities got me thrown in jail. Just for a week-end. They couldn't find a judge to set bail until Monday morning. I had our group stop making demonstrations on Fridays after that." He smiled. "But meanwhile, CIA wouldn't touch me. Grampa Winnie heard about my bust, you knew my father broke his neck on a jumper--"

"---Broke his neck on a jumper---" he said simultaneously.

"And Grampa Fitz thought I'd gone Commie and disinherited me. I could have taught philosophy but the academic lifestyle is degenerate. Co-eds want to fuck you, chase you from morning to night. It's like being a rock star without the private jets. So I became a private eye. Figure if do this a few years I'll have enough material to go to Hollywood, write screenplays, and retire rich and run guns to Ireland.

"Well Grampa was right. You're a communist."

"What do you want? And like them, I have fallen on evil times. But I sympathize with your being disinherited. It's no walk in the sun. No money, no credit cards. No more jackets from Brooks. I had to borrow to start this business. President of the bank was my godfather but I still had to walk in there just like any stiff, in my Loeb boots and Harris tweed hat, lay on the carpet and whine, snivel and beg for five miserable G's...

"So you know what it is to be poor," he said tenderly, handing me a fourth Noche Buena.

"Better not. I should get started on ---" I indicated the photograph of Christine Sterling. I stared. "That is one good looking woman."

"If you like that kind of thing."

"I do."

"Oh," he said wistfully.

"Looks a little like my ex college sweetheart. When I was disinherited she packed and left. No money, no fuckee. Another tender-hearted type."

He smiled and I accepted his compassion as the faena of our encounter. I stood up, moving into the final goodbye-and- he-pays-me-my-advance-ritual. Our share and tell session had ended. I think 'check, money' and sure enough, he goes to his desk and asks about my retainer fee and I tell him five and he writes the check. A very classy guy. Suddenly---and it's not the money,---my heart crosses to his side. I'm stoked. I'm going to discover the nasty truth about this bitch and get this sweet, talented guy's two billion dollars back. He looked like a guy who knew how to spend it on the right things. Pear chutney and cubism. I shook his hand and patted his shoulder. I was going to be his killer. His pitbull.

We had done our client-dick bonding thing and I stumbled down into the late afternoon shadows and walked the streets of the village in one of those nostalgic hazes that beer-drinking, late forty year old men get into. You know the riff. You see this colossal place, The Village, as it had been in some other, better time (the sixties, in my case) and compare the steely punk waifs and warlocks in toe-to-head black drab to the lost patchouli rainbow flower children of one's youth, kenning for what no longer was and never again would be---and in general, being a really cranky drunk. Hey, it's what I do on Sunday.

* * * * * *

CHAPTER IV. HOW THE OTHER HALF OF A % LIVES

The house had Tudor roofs and windowpanes. The great, varnished, carved oak door with its l8th century, brass gargoyle knocker was open, so I went in. The entry hall was gothic revival with vaulted ceilings. A portrait of Edward Sterling the First was in the entry hall. My steps echoed on the Sing Sing marble floors, white marble because it was only a Hampton beach cottage, all 42 rooms of it. It was the kind of house that had a wine cellar where the wine was recorked every 25 years, and the baroque gold salvers were taken out once a summer and sunned and wiped clean of mold. The perfect retreat where their sort only spent Spring as Summer was in the catskills, Europe was for Autumn and of course, Manhattan really suitable only in Winter when they didn't have to take a good look at the grimy city underneath.

Next to Sterling Senior’s portrait, there was one of Christine Sterling. I stopped to take a look. Chiffon dress, every thread of the silk visible like in a photograph, gold finger rings in detail. Pointed finger nails. And in the background French doors led to the ocean and a Prince Charles spaniel peered in from the terrace. Were they producing these things by computer now, with a form that read 'check if spaniels desired.' If I had heard right, the woman had only been married for two weeks. I stick a fingernail into the oil paint and simultaneously heard a noise in the next room. There was this butler in the dining room packing silver. Ladders stood under the chandelier which was at half mast. Furniture was wrapped for shipping. “You are…?”

"Joe Fitzgerald. Mr Sterling's investigator. Thank you for agreeing to see me, Houston. So, all this is going?" I wave a hand to the treasure stash.

"She's selling it at Sotheby's. Not keeping a thing to remember him by. Bizarre." There was acrid distaste in his voice. "She wasn't our kind."

"She must have been his kind." I nodded to the portrait.

"Not really. Southern trailer trash. I spotted it first second I laid eyes on her the morning they met. I always rose same hour as he. I could hear his wheel chair moving about. He would sometimes wake at five. I think it goes with depression. He'd been that way since his legs had become ---unreliable. He'd sit on the terrace reading until the sun came up. Now, you see, that's death wish. The early morning fog could have killed him, even in summer. He plainly wanted pneumonia to take him. “

He crossed to the window and pointed out at the ocean. “I was making breakfast and I hear him turn up the volume on -- probably Rachmaninoff, can’t recall. But I remember that. And I looked out the window, see he's staring out to sea. I look east and there she is, way down on the beach. Venus on the half shell. Dress stripped off, she's standing on tiptoe in the wind, totally nude, this long blonde hair flowing, the hand on the pudenda and breasts just like the Boticelli painting and – hey -- it was cold. At l00 yards you could see the gooseflesh. She delicately tiptoes into the surf --- with huge waves crashing around her and the old man watches her like a statue. She swims up and down then comes out and gives herself a cute little pat here and there I swear she knew he was there and she lets the wind dry her off before she puts the dress back on. Part Mermaid, part polar bear. Mr. Sterling, of course, is mesmerized by the sheer mythic balls of the girl. 'Houston,' he says, 'go down there, see if she wants some breakfast.' So I trot down to the water with his breakfast tray and she takes the juice and thanks me and Mr Sterling gestures ‘come up’. Of course, she does, the coy little witch. There were little beads of water all over her skin. She sparkled like a diamond necklace as she came up the stairs. He invites her to join him only she wants to go in the kitchen where it’s cozy while I'm making breakfast she pretends to be embarrassed, how she didn't know anybody would be up this early, all with this faintest trace of southern cooking in her voice. He put his hand over his heart and tells her she's quite a vision for the dawn hour. And she says she'll find another beach, that she doesn't want to read about him in the papers."

The butler's eyes are turned upwards into his head and crossed slightly so he’s reaching for past visual and audio input so I know he's not making any of it up. "—and then, gad is she coy, she says something about not wanting to read about his death in the papers, and he says no, that's how he'd want to go. Manly. Heroic. And, then, she lays into it, but makes her point, ---why would anyone want to go? Now here's a guy who's in advanced death wish and the perspicacity floors him. You don't want to live? she blinks up at him so naturally, he confesses how his life has stopped being fun, and how his heart seems to be made of crepe paper and when he stands the blood goes to his feet. And then she says they're beautiful feet and she kneels in front of him and takes off the velvet slippers and gives him a foot massage. Right there in my kitchen." The butler looks to me for a reaction.

I give it. "She's a pro alright."

He nods and goes on: "so, then, she works on his feet with only the Rachmaninoff going and the old man goes into a trance. The mermaid makes her move. She asks him if he's tried herbs and all the stuff the healthfood store has for failing hearts. And he asks her if she's in the failing hearts business. 'Failing everything,' she replies. She's a nature healer, massage, herbs, nutritional counseling and all of it but she confesses it’s a racket, I think she said ‘just under the radar of the AMA." 'Why?' he asks' Isn't it legal?' and she explains how it wouldn't be if she says she could heal his heart with hawthorn berries and magnesium. 'Heal' is a four letter word she says, but 'tone the heart?' She could say that."

"'Tone' is also a four letter word he says but she's the kind of a girl he'd trust with four letter words. So right away it's getting flirty and she blushes and acts all consternated and trust me, the old guy's heart, weak though it is, is fully engaged. "Get me some hawthorn berries' he says and she says she doesn't have her notebook, it's up the beach, that she's living with Constance Powers and she's her healer. That's our neighbor. 'Oh,' he says, old girl Powers just needs to slack off on the gin.

"The mermaid says oh, they're going the back way around, getting her vitality to where Powers feels life is worth it, then she'll quit the gin. How she's a wonderful woman. And he asks what she's getting paid, how Constance is cheap.' And the girls says "$300 a day when she lives with them, $45 dollars for a half hour visit, more if Constance buys herbs, and she makes her little intimate joke saying how she always gets the old girl to buy herbs. And how now he wants to hire her and he'll buy herbs. So she's got the hook in, now she pulls up on it. She tells him that she can't quit the old girl. He starts begging. Imploring. Come over in her spare time, to heal him, to tone him in her time off. And of course, she agrees.

So next thing I know she's showing cook how to frappe peaches and berries in the blender and she's dumping envelopes of algae and bee pollen into these gawdawful concoctions. She's over here every day. In fact, Mrs Powers' butler told me that the old lady couldn't get her afternoon yoga class any more because Christine was always over here. But I heard from their butler that Constance Powers was just fine with that. She needed Christine to bring her the gossip --- about his health I mean ---not about women. There are no women. Everyone knows that.

Constance needs to know about his health for stock tips, how when he goes, Sterling industries goes. She wanted to know when he was taking the big cab, checking out of the Grand Hotel, so she could sell her way out of SCI high, then get back in as the sharks were acquiring Sterling Communications. Maybe Christine learned about SCI stock then, maybe she already knew, but she would appear here mornings with this alligator doctor's bag in hand, rub his legs for a while then stay for tofu burgers. She made him drink sea minerals with his V-8. Sea minerals are the best she said. Sold him on this brackish slush if you found it on the floor you’d burn the house. I told you. The perfect mermaid from hell. But with a line of spit! How the modern diet and tea and coffee, bigtime diuretics, washed everybody's minerals and how everybody has to replace bone mass which absolutely could be done. She gave him hope. Everything could be fixed. How strokes were only bioflavenoid deficiencies which turned capillary walls into tissue paper, and how it was all from modern man's lack of berry-eating. Apparently berries were big on cavemen's diets and if Mr Sterling ate strained berries by the pound daily his capillary walls would once again turn to iron. So did he eat berries! The toilets ran purple. And she got him to take magnesium --- in beets of course --- for his heart --we're talking pounds here--- the toilets ran magenta ----and chromium in brewer's yeast for the pancreas and jerusalem artichokes for natural insulin and sodium in celery juice to chelate the inorganic salt in his plaque. I mean, my God, the staff all had these charts hung in the kitchen and it looks like a goddamn produce farm and we're practically shopping at the shipyard trying to find foods fresh off the boat rich in aluminum. It was like buffing for a college chemistry exam. Magnesium made the heart pump faster, zinc would make the sex urge come back.---"

"You get an A in the course, Houston. You've got it memorized."

"Well, we all went on the regimen here, don't think we didn't, and cook's arthritis departed and so did my hemhorroids, I'll give you that. One day Sterling asked her how she learned all this and she said at books and lectures, no schools, she had no money, she'd been poor. And he asked her where she came from and she said a little coal town in Tennessee." I wrote the words 'coal town, TN ' in my note book.

"-----and she'd toast him with these foaming concoctions and say 'to life, an E ticket ride. We bought our tickets. Why go home early?' And he'd chug it down to the last drop because you know, he was already in love with her.

The butler was wistful. I licked my lips. I wanted a berry seafoam mermaid drink at that very second, myself.

"And every afternoon she'd plop him in a steaming tub, put an ice pack and wet towel on his head, I'd stand with two decanters of vinegar on a silver tray and she'd pour them into the tub. He'd sweat and complain that his heart was pounding and she'd say that was how they'd get it strong again. He was afraid his capillaries would come unstrung in the heat and she told him the crucial area ..the brain I guess .. was on ice, and the veins that should open up a little were under the boiling water. And a half hour later she'd wrap him in towels and take him to watch t.v. Only there was no t.v. cuz he doesn't watch it, so they borrowed mine. She couldn't believe he didn't watch t.v. What about CNN, and the war, and CSPAN and he said he'd seen enough wars and Senate hearings --he didn't need one. But what about Roseanne, she said. And he didn't know who that was so they'd watch redneck bluecollars while he'd get a massage from her with some magic oil and he'd tell her she was certainly worth more than 300$ a day if she actually healed people and she said it did and she was. Not a shy girl at all.

"And then?"

"After the massage she wanted me to find his jogging togs and I said, 'madame, he's 78 years old. What togs? And they did their session with him in pajama bottoms using barbells made of bleach jugs. Right out on the terrace. Mrs. Powers joined them because she wasn't getting her yoga classes any more. And I'd make gimlets and nobody would drink them. They'd have more ---" he made a face. "Berry foam frappes and watch Roseanne all night until he got it. Got the joke. Coming from where she came from I don't know how she watched them. It was some kind of a masochistic class thing with her. But I'd hear them laughing into the night. Days they'd walk on the beach.

"Walk? I thought he was in a wheelchair."

"By then he was on a cane."

"No kidding."

"Lazarus from the tomb. Constance Powers was overheard to smirk, 'forget about dumping our SCI stock.' It was true. He graduated to taking walks with her in the village. Once he wanted to buy her a heavy gold Cartier necklace, she refused it and asked for a sea shell instead. And painted it. See?

He pulled a large wooden painting from a stack leaning against a wall. 'Our beach, just the way our waves are, and in the foreground that sea shell.'

I studied the painting, primitive, designy and stylized with a rolling surf tumbling in all the cool, Dufy blues. The words 'South Hampton' were handwritten in the bottom corner.

"She did them of a lot of beaches. The butler flipped through the stack. 'Sea Island' another one said, with another kind of shell, another kind of surf.

"Talented." I wrote 'Sea Island' in the notebook.

"Yeah and if you're good at one thing you're good at a lot of things I understand. Must have been because a week later, he threw away the cane. They'd eat dinner in here, sprouted seed and nut burgers. I grimaced. "No, not bad, actually. 'Why did I eat dead cut up cows all these years,' Sterling would ask. 'So your doctors could make a bundle while you got clogged arteries, osteoporosis and heart disease,' she'd answer. 'And so I could meet you,' he'd say. That's how they plighted their troth. With one-liners cribbed from college Nutrition exams."

"Then one day she told him she had to go back to New York, that Mrs. Powers was chairwoman of the Autumn Cancer ball and needed her in Manhattan. Sterling was upset, said by now Powers' servants knew how to feed and massage her. Christine said she didn't trust them. She had to go. And he went into a frenzy. Would she come back? And she said she didn't know. For a week, he just sat looking at the sea like the French Lieutenant's woman." Houston held up a Louis Quinze figure of a milkmaid with a tiny staff and tiny sheep, coyishly evading the shepherd's kiss. "Oh, she got the hook in good. Just a smart trick from nowhere." He shook his head sadly and placed the milkmaid in a bed of excelsior and closed the box. "The healer from hell."

* * * * *