“Whatever happened to old times’ sake?”
“You killed a girl, Shirley.”
“A woman always blames the other woman, you ought to know that. I’m sorry I did it, though. I didn’t plan the — the mutilation, but when I saw that rake—” She shuddered. “Anyway, it wasn’t her fault. Who could resist Jerry?” She must have read the answer on his face because she changed the subject again. “What do you hear from him, by the way?”
“Red Lot gave him the axe. Not for what happened. A better trumpeter got sent home from the Pacific with a hickory leg. Somebody told me Jerry joined the Coast Guard. They’re not so particular about heart murmurs. If he’s got the brains God gave a cricket he’ll throw the horn overboard. He’d make a better sailor than a musician.”
“He isn’t Harry James, is he?”
“He isn’t even Harry Langdon. And he can’t drink. If it weren’t for Tojo and Hitler he’d be pumping gas in Garden City.”
“What’s the song called? ‘We’re Looking for a Guy who Plays Alto and Baritone, Doubles on the Clarinet, and Wears a Size 37 Suit’?”
“If Bing didn’t sing it, I don’t know it.”
The manager of the Ruby Lounge pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of accessory to assault and battery and drew two years in Jackson, including time tacked on for fleeing and eluding. The prosecutor decided not to press charges against Lungs Nelson, who quit Red Lot to tour with the USO, leaving him short a trumpeter. Lot lost his gig and took the band on the road to open for Jean Goldkette.
A jury rejected Shirley Grabowski’s plea of temporary insanity, based on the planning involved: the doped whiskey, the arrangement with the manager, the phony postcard to establish an alibi. Judge James Blake sentenced her to life in prison, but her lawyer won a bid for appeal. Zagreb visited her in the women’s facility at the Detroit House of Corrections, where she’d been moved pending a new trial. The matron, whose husband had deserted her for a younger woman, took pains to get her a jail uniform that fit. In it, she was, Max Zagreb admitted to himself ruefully, quite a dish.
Bears in Mind
James L. Ross
“Our post-industrial society supports over a half-billion people in North America,” said the man buying drinks. “How many do you think it can sustain after the economic upheaval we foresee?”
The speaker was Darwin Sneed, black bearded and fat, putting on an accent that was English or Aussie, depending on how careful he was. In a flowered necktie and a good navy suit, he looked almost prosperous as he sipped his wine, tapped a napkin to his lips, and reminded me, “Half a billion people, today.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Ten years into the collapse, our projections show the population in North America will be eighty million. That’s an eighty-four percent reduction. A handful of people will have managed to emigrate. The rest—” He waved a hand, the way you’d consign masses to the chopping block if you were a monarch or a social scientist. “Some will die violently, as the civil order disintegrates. Others will starve as food no longer reaches our population centers. Many, I’m afraid, will simply freeze to death after having to switch from oil or gas to coal to heat their homes, and then to wood, until the land is deforested. And, of course, millions will succumb to common ailments in the absence of hospitals and antibiotics.”
He raised an eyebrow, inviting me to choose my fate.
We weren’t a perfect fit, Mr. Sneed and I, even for an afternoon drink. He was peddling doom and gloom to anyone who would listen. As a stockbroker, I had a vestful of software company shares for sale at optimistic prices. Economic collapse probably wouldn’t be good for software or for much else I traded in.
Sneed went on. “Our models don’t take account of the possibility that more virulent strains of bacteria or influenza will evolve. It’s my horseback estimate that a timely flu epidemic could reduce the surviving population to thirty or forty million.” Another little throwaway gesture: He might look like a country parson, but he would be hard pressed to say mass over all those dead.
I spoke a thought I probably shouldn’t have. “That sounds like bad news for the stock market.”
If he detected sarcasm in my voice, he ignored it. “This is far more serious than stocks and bonds, Mr. McCarthy.”
I would have begged to differ. Nothing to me was more serious than stocks and bonds, except perhaps a good martini at Taleb’s Café and February in the Bahamas. If my mother were alive, she would say I’m not really that shallow. She always had hopes for me.
Darwin Sneed’s business card said he was founder and chairman of Logistics Analytics LLC. I knew what “LLC” stood for; the rest could mean anything. The card mentioned London and Hong Kong, implying he had offices there, but it didn’t list street addresses. I’d have bet anything the phone numbers on the card rang in his pocket.
We were sitting, along with Sneed’s factotum, at a little bar on the third floor of the Plaza Hotel, just down the hall from the conference room where Darwin Sneed and assorted other zanies were predicting the end of Western financial markets. Mountains of bad debt were collapsing all over the world, they warned, and the avalanche was going to take down everything with it: real estate prices, stock prices, corporations, governments. I tried to picture an economic winter lasting generations and decided I didn’t want to. I had a mortgage on an apartment in SoHo, and I was fond of the restaurants around it. But Sneed and eight or nine other speakers had an overflow audience of people who looked like they had enough money to care. The whole traveling show fit right in at the Plaza. Two weeks before Christmas, the place was hopping with charlatans trying to get one more grab at the customer’s wallet before everyone went home. A floor below us, a developer was pitching condos a million or so below last spring’s price.
Sneed’s factotum had been discreetly silent. She had introduced herself as Wendy Blue, nicely packaged in her own navy suit and a mock turtle. Now she spoke up. “The next question you should ask, Mr. McCarthy, is how your clients can be among the survivors.”
“I was planning to,” I said.
She gave me a stern look from sea-green eyes. Wendy Blue didn’t believe anything I said. Most clever women don’t.
“There is physical survival,” she said, “and there is financial survival. We recommend three things for physical survivaclass="underline" First, we like freeze-dried food, supplemented by high-potency vitamins. Second, you should have a store of broad-spectrum antibiotics; if you don’t need them yourself, they’ll be useful for barter. Finally, we advise having a place to which one can retreat safely, away from the storms that will sweep the cities. We have an affiliate in Arkansas that builds cedar log homes for that purpose.”
If the log cabin had a fireplace and she came with it, I was sold. That was why she was on the job. Many would be tempted, no telling how many would be chosen.
Darwin Sneed added, “There’s another asset for physical survival that one should consider.”
“What’s that?”
“Firearms. You should have at least one fifty-caliber rifle for protecting your home’s perimeter.”
They both were good at looking at you squarely. I mean, who wouldn’t want a fifty-caliber rifle to protect the perimeter? Only some pantywaist Pollyanna who thought life might go on as normal after the banks imploded. I hoped Wendy Blue didn’t mistake me for one of those.
Instead of trying to keep a straight face, I said, “What about a fallout shelter?”
Sneed almost went for it. Wendy Blue said, “You should take this seriously, Mr. McCarthy.”