Authors: Thomas Fleming
Hours of Gladness (3 page)
Mick turned into Delaware Avenue. All the shore towns had named their streets Atlantic City style. Marie O'Toole opened the door as they came up the steps. She had obviously been awake most of the night. Exhaustion had sunk deep lines into her once pretty face.
“Jesus Christ,” Marie said. “I can't stand much more of this.”
“I blew another twenty,” Bill O'Toole said. Mick sensed Uncle Bill enjoyed making this announcement.
“That makes sixty thousand dollars!” Marie screamed.
“Where are we gonna get sixty thousand dollars? Daddy can't do anything for you anymore. Do you expect him to mortgage his house?”
“Where are we gonna get sixty thousand dollars? Daddy can't do anything for you anymore. Do you expect him to mortgage his house?”
“There's lots of ways to make sixty grand,” Bill O'Toole snarled. “Lots of ways that don't have anything to do with kissing your father's ass. So why don't you shut your goddamn mouth for once in your life?”
“I'll shut my mouth when you tell me what happened to your wonderful
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in the federal attorney's office who didn't pick up a phone when those bastards were on their way down here to grab those bonds.”
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in the federal attorney's office who didn't pick up a phone when those bastards were on their way down here to grab those bonds.”
“I told you a hundred times they weren't from New Jersey. They came direct from Washington, D.C.,” Bill roared.
Most of the time Mick tried not to think about the arguments in the family. Since they'd lost the bonds, Uncle Bill had taken a hate to Sunny Dan Monahan. Bill had always hated Desmond McBride and his wife. They had made a lot of money from their fishing business and took trips to Ireland and Florida and Bermuda and were always talking about their son Leo, who was the right testicle of their district's congressman, the Honorable James Mullen, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, no less, and one of Senator Ted Kennedy's playpals.
Leo still wanted Mick to sue the Marine Corps for giving him a dishonorable discharge. He wanted to smear the Corps and turn Mick into a media hero. Leo was a liberal asshole.
Was Uncle Bill a conservative asshole? Was his brother-in-law Desmond McBride with his shamrocks and leprechauns and his blathering about the ould sod an even bigger asshole? Mick went back to the squad car trying to avoid answering these questions.
I
n Mick's squad car, the radio was squawking. Tom Brannigan was getting pretty upset. He had an emergency call from Leeds Point and Yummy O'Keefe had gone back to his snooze behind the high school. Mick took over and headed out to the Point. It was unusual to have anyone in those houses during the winter.
n Mick's squad car, the radio was squawking. Tom Brannigan was getting pretty upset. He had an emergency call from Leeds Point and Yummy O'Keefe had gone back to his snooze behind the high school. Mick took over and headed out to the Point. It was unusual to have anyone in those houses during the winter.
The call was from Number 13, at the very tip of the Point. That house belonged to Jacqueline Chasen's mother. But she had not lived there for years. She made a nice dollar renting it in the summer and usually closed it for the winter. Mick had not noticed any signs of activity around the place during his midnight house checks. Whoever was there must be living a quiet life.
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Out on Leeds Point, while Mick was en route, Jackie Chasen was flushing $500 worth of cocaine down the toilet off her bathroom. She was angry with herselfâand
also very frightened. Going back to cocaine was alarming proof that her rehabilitation program was not working. Meeting Joey Zaccaro was exactly the sort of reminder she needed.
also very frightened. Going back to cocaine was alarming proof that her rehabilitation program was not working. Meeting Joey Zaccaro was exactly the sort of reminder she needed.
Suddenly Jackie was back six months, ruefully, wrathfully, hatefully, lovingly, fearfully, carefully, carelessly, calmly rubbing creamy oil on Joey Zaccaro's olive skin as he lay facedown on the deck of this house in the September sun. All those words describing the way she was rubbing on the oil were true. They were all alive in the theater of Jackie's mind.
In that place of untime the audience was always the same. Her grandfather, Marcus Teitlebaum, sat in the first row wearing a Harris tweed suit and a dark blue club tie. Beside him sat his tearful, frightened wife. Grandfather glared at Jackie on the stage, his brush mustache twitching with rage. Behind him sat Jackie's mother and father and her great-grandfather. Her mother, pearled and jeweled for an evening out, was reading a book. Her father had his eyes closed. Great-grandfather Yid in his smelly old coat and dirty, tieless shirt and yarmulke gaped. His mouth was a round
O
in his Hasidic beard.
O
in his Hasidic beard.
The sun was over the ocean. It slanted down on Jackie's tanned breasts and belly. It filled her thighs, the inky black hair of her pubis, its blank, blind heat swarmed in her belly, its fierce whiteness permeated the theater of her mind, x-raying the faces of the audience, revealing the hollow gourds of their skulls. Her mother's pearls were black around her proud neck, like a noose.
Joey Zaccaro turned over. On his back he became someone. His face spread, the cheeks loosening with forty-five years of time and tumescence, the hair thinning at the forehead, the ears weathering. His thick lips had dozens of little cracks. Black veins protruded in the lids of his closed eyes. The hairy, bulky chest had developed folds that intimated androgyny (the ultimate secret?), the slack belly protruded, the penis was a crumpled stump.
Jackie poured on more oil and rubbed it down the belly
through the shiny, matted hair around the penis and down the shrunken thighs to the spindly shanks, strangely blotched and pale. Then she coated both her hands with oil and began massaging the penis back and forth between them.
through the shiny, matted hair around the penis and down the shrunken thighs to the spindly shanks, strangely blotched and pale. Then she coated both her hands with oil and began massaging the penis back and forth between them.
“Hey,” Joey said, shoving her away. “What ya tryin' to do? Didn't you get enough last night?”
Jackie fell on her back. She raised herself on one elbow. “I told you, I never get enough.”
“C'mere.”
“You c'mere.”
He lay there, blinking in the sun. “I said c'mere.”
Jackie's eyes drifted past him to the sliding glass doors that led to the living room. One door was half-open. In the dark rectangle stood a thirteen or fourteen-year-old girl in a white linen dress. Her hair fell in a dark cascade down her back. Her lips were parted in a half-sad, half-mocking smile. She was incredibly beautiful and proud and fine, like Elizabeth Taylor before she bloated. In her eyes was a glow worthy of Anne Frank before she went to the death camp.
It was not the first time Jackie had seen her. She had appeared in a half dozen recent dreams, looking at Jackie from a great distance, standing on a sand dune at the southern end of the beach or at the far end of Ocean Avenue, Paradise Beach's main street. The sun had glared on her white dress, creating an angelic, almost a demonic aura.
Her appearance here made perfect sense. She was telling Jackie that Joey had to be the last one. Maybe, in a desperate, inverted way, Jackie had done the right thing, choosing someone like Zaccaro, someone totally repulsive. Maybe she was trying to make sure he was the last one.
Jackie tried to tell this to the girl in white. She tried telling her about the two months of midnights she had spent here with Dick Stapleton. The WASP prince, scion of the most powerful family in New Jersey, had talked
about divorcing his wife, about moving to Hawaii with Jackie. Then one midnight instead of Dick there had been a voice on the answering machine, a robot from nowhere-space telling her in glottal tones he was
sorry as hell but this wasn't gonna work.
about divorcing his wife, about moving to Hawaii with Jackie. Then one midnight instead of Dick there had been a voice on the answering machine, a robot from nowhere-space telling her in glottal tones he was
sorry as hell but this wasn't gonna work.
The girl in white did not seem to be listening. She stood there, perfectly still, the half-sad, half-mocking smile intact, like a painting. She only made Jackie resolve to find someone, somewhere, who would let her tell him about Dick Stapleton. The girl in white made it clear it was not Joey Zaccaro, whose only recommendation was his access to free cocaine.
Jackie thought of all the men she had balled since 1968, the year the world had exploded. The long-haired, golden-eyed war protesters in Chicago, the manic rockers at Altamont, the boastful junior professors at Brandeis, the failed poets in Greenwich Village, the sneering black-power put-on artists in Newark, the panting Jewish princes in Glen Cove. She saw the curve descending from ecstasy to pleasure to boredom to loathing. First for the men and then for herself. It was the self-loathing that the girl in white was telling her she could stop, if Jackie would only listen to her for a while. If she would follow her into the dark rectangle of the past where she was waiting.
“Get out of this house,” Jackie said to Joey Zaccaro.
In memory now, the new theater of her mind, Jackie strolled across the deck and entered the living room. The girl in white was not there, of course. Jackie knew she was not going to find her that easily. She paused in the center of the dim roomâiron gray drapes were drawn against the sunâand listened to the purr of the central air conditioner. Yes, she thought, yes.
Jackie padded past the Lucite furniture and dropped a record on the stereo. Mick Jagger began howling mockery about love and lust. In the huge master bedroom, where similar drapes were drawn, Jackie popped two Valiums and pulled on a pair of tan Gucci slacks and a white blouse. Sunglasses.
Back in the living room she encountered Joey Zaccaro, still naked. His slumped chest, his potbelly, his spindly shanks, were even more repulsive when he was standing up. He looked like a defoliated orangutan. “I want you out of here when I come back,” she said.
He grabbed her mane of black hair and spun her around. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“I don't know. Bianca Jagger. Yoko Ono. Princess Leia.”
He tried to drag her against him for a kiss. Jackie drove her knee into his crotch. Joey's eyes bulged, his jaw went comically askew. Clutching himself, he sank to the rug in marvelous slow motion. “I'm coming back here with a cop,” she said as he writhed at her feet. “Make sure you're gone.”
Outside in the hot sun, the Valiums took hold. Jackie smiled at her electric green Lamborghini Miura P400 SV glistening in the sun, waiting for her orders like an obedient animal. She slipped into the driver's seat and savored the view for a moment. The curve of each front wing cradled the top of the low, gleaming snout. The stainless-steel figure of a naked Greek athlete raced into the distance on the tip of the hood.
Like most Italian cars, the Miura was well adapted to a woman driver, a being with short legs and moderately long arms. Jackie turned the key and the twelve-cylinder engine rumbled into life. Even on a crowded highway, the Miura could make you feel as if you were sharing the road with the sun and wind. That was what the copywriter wrote. As the Vals took deeper hold, Jackie believed it. She saw the Miura catapulting her into the past like a time machine ⦠.
Jackie could barely tolerate the rest of the memory. The way the Miura, the copywriters, the Valiums, had betrayed her, the way she had missed a curve on the Garden State Parkway and ended up at the bottom of a ravine, smashed, broken, an object that took almost a million dollars' worth of medicine to re-create.
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When Mick arrived, Jacqueline Chasen was in the living room, which was full of modern furniture that bent and curved in all sorts of weird directions. “I thought I heard a noise,” she said, pointing upstairs.
“I'll check things out.” Mick flashed his light around the two upstairs bedrooms and the attic. When a woman started hearing noises, she often wanted a cop around for more than protection. Last year, there was a redheaded divorcee out on Maryland Avenue who kept hearing noises and only calmed down when Mick started visiting her regularly off-duty. The year before that he had calmed down two of them, both blondes. A lot of divorcees with kids rented houses in Paradise and worked in Atlantic City.
Except maybe this dame really needed protection. When she recognized Mick, she started to cry. “You saw Zaccaro try to kill me tonight. What can I do? I'm afraid he'll come after me here.”
Mick knew that was a needless worry. Hoods like Joey Zaccaro stayed out of Paradise Beach. They wound up with busted jaws and maybe fractured skulls if they tried any loan-sharking or drug peddling in Bill O'Toole's bailiwick. But he did not tell this to Jackie Chasen. Instead he played worried investigator.
“Why's Joey got it in for you?”
“I was his girl for a while. He didn't like the way I walked out on him.”
“Why the hell were you fooling around with a piece of slime like Joey Zip?”
“I was mixed-up for a long time. I'm not anymore.”
Mick liked the way she said that, head up, eyes bold. At the same time, he was listening with his cop's ears, noting the holes in Jacqueline Chasen's story. People with straight heads did not play baccarat at 4 A.M. in Atlantic City. Joey Zip did not beat up every woman who walked out on him. Otherwise he would long since have become a permanent resident at Trenton State Prison.
“There's only one way to stop worrying about Joey Zip. You gotta keep a cop around the house.” Mick was smiling now. Making his move.
Jacqueline Chasen got the message. She thought it over without the slightest hint that she considered it an unreasonable suggestion. “I haven't ⦠in a long time. While I was straightening myself out ⦔
“I'm in no rush. I've been wanting to meet you since I played lifeguard while you and your sister swam at Havens Beach back in the sixties. I remember you and your grandfather on the boardwalkâalways in white.”
Jacqueline Chasen stared and things connected. “You're the famous Mick O'Day!”
“Once upon a time,” he said, concealing how much the words hurt. “I've got to take the car back for the next shift. I'll see you in about a half hour.”
In exactly thirty minutes, Mick gunned his white 1970 American Motors Rebel, with a rebuilt engine that put it in the Lamborghini league, back to Leeds Point. Jackie Chasen was in a negligee in the master bedroom, which had a pair of sliding-glass doors onto a deck overlooking the ocean. The surf thundered on the sand, the northeast wind moaned like the voice of the devil in the dawn. Jackie lay on the bed, watching with obvious approval as Mick slung the shoulder holster with the Colt .38 in it on the back of a chair.
“Maybe fate is at work here,” Jackie whispered as Mick lay down on the bed, his big body gleaming from the shower.
“Maybe,” Mick said, untying the negligee, letting his hand curve down the firm belly to the warm hair, the liquid flesh beneath it. He believed in preserving the spirit of romance as long as possible.
“I've been wanting to meet someone who could take me back to the person I used to be. That girl in white on the boardwalk.”
“Anything's possible,” Mick said, though he had no desire to go back to that airheaded athlete on the lifeguard
stand, the dum-dum who had fallen for Trai's brilliant smile in Binh Nghai.
stand, the dum-dum who had fallen for Trai's brilliant smile in Binh Nghai.
“Oh. Oh,” Jackie whispered as his finger found that special place. “I'm beginning to realize ⦠how much I need a cop around the house.”
It was a nice ending to a lousy night.
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