[After a pedal-steel break that has always reached in and found Maxine’s heart]
So forth. By which point Maxine is singing along in a pretty focused way, with the wind blowing tears back into her ears, and she’s getting looks from drivers in adjoining lanes.
She hits Exit 70 about midday, and since Marvin’s videotape wasn’t that attentive to what Jodi Della Femina might call shortcuts, Maxine has to go intuitive with this, leaving Route 27 after a while and driving for about as long as she recalls it taking on the tape, till she notices a tavern called Junior’s Ooh-La-Lounge with lunch-hour pickups and motorcycles out front.
She goes in, sits at the bar, gets a doubtful salad and a PBR longneck and a glass. The jukebox is playing music Maxine’s unlikely ever to hear string arrangements of in any lunch venue in Manhattan. Presently the guy three stools down introduces himself as Randy and observes, “Well, the shoulder bag has a sway to it suggestive of small arms, but I don’t smell cop somehow, and you’re not a dealer, so what does that leave, I wonder.” He could be described as roly-poly, though Maxine’s antennas put him among that subset of the roly-poly who also carry weapons, maybe not on his person but certainly someplace handy. He has a neglected beard and wears a red ball cap with some Meat Loaf reference on it, out the back of which hangs a graying ponytail.
“Hey, maybe I am a cop. Working undercover.”
“Nah, cops have ’at special somethin you get to recognize, least if you’ve been bounced around much.”
“Guess I’ve only been dribbled up and down the back court a little. Am I supposed to apologize?”
“Only if you’re here to get somebody in trouble. Who you lookin for?”
Okay. How about— “Shae and Bruno?”
“Oh, them, hey, you can get them in as much trouble’s you want. Everybody around here’s collected their share of karma, but those two… what in ’ee hell would you want with them?”
“It’s this friend of theirs.”
“Hope you don’t mean Westchester Willy? Built kinda low to the ground, partial to that Belgian beer?”
“Maybe. Would you happen to know how to get to Shae and Bruno’s place?”
“Oh, so… you’re the insurance adjuster, right?”
“How’s that?”
“The fire.”
“I’m only a bookkeeper from this guy’s office. He hasn’t showed up for a while. What fire?”
“Place burned down a couple weeks ago. Big story on the news, emergency response from all over, flames lightin up the sky, you could see it from the LIE.”
“How about—”
“Charred remains? No, nothin like that.”
“Traces of accelerant?”
“Sure you’re not one of these them crime-lab babes, like on TV.”
“Now you’re sweet-talking me.”
“That was gonna be later. But if you—”
“Randy, if I wasn’t so wired into office mode right now?”
A general pause. Colleagues in on breaks from work struggling not to laugh too loud. Everybody here knows Randy, pretty soon there is a schadenfreudefest in progress about who’s having the worst time of it. Since last year when the tech boom collapsed, most homeowners out here who took hits in the market have been defaulting on contracts right and left. Only occasionally can you still find echoes of the nineties’ golden age of home improvement and the name that keeps coming up, not to Maxine’s surprise, is Gabriel Ice.
“His checks are still clearing,” Maxine supposes. Randy laughs merrily, the way roly-poly folks do. “When he writes them.” Renovating the bathrooms, Randy has found himself being stiffed invoice after invoice. “I owe all over the place now, four-figure showerheads as big as pizzas, marble for the bathtubs special-ordered from Carrara, Italy, custom glaziers for gold-streaked mirror glass.” Everybody in the room chimes in with a story like this. As if at some point having had a fateful encounter with tabloid figure Donald Trump’s cost accountants, Ice is now applying the guiding principle of the moneyed everywhere—pay the major contractors, blow off the small ones.
Ice has few fans in these parts—to be expected, Maxine supposes, but it’s a shock to find opinion in the room unanimous that he also likely had a hand in torching Bruno and Shae’s place.
“What’s the connection?” Maxine squinting. “I always took him for more of a Hamptons person.”
“Cheatin side of town, as the Eagles like to say, Hamptons ain’t doin that for him, he needs to get away from the lights and the limos, out to some old fallindown house like Bruno and Shae’s where a man can kick out the jambs.”
“They think it’s who they used to be,” opines a young woman in painter’s overalls, no bra, Chinese tats all up and down her bare arms, “nerds with fantasies. They want to go back to that, revisit.”
“Oh, Bethesda, you’re such a pussy, that’s cuttin ol’ Gabe way too much slack. Just like with everythin else, he’s lookin to get laid on the cheap’s all it is.”
“But why,” Maxine in her best insurance-adjuster voice, “burn the place down?”
“They had a reputation there for getting into odd behavior and whatever. Maybe Ice was bein blackmailed.”
Maxine does a quick sweep of the faces in range but doesn’t see anybody who thinks they know for sure.
“Real-estate karma,” somebody suggests. “A crib as out of scale as Ice’s would mean a lot of smaller houses somehow have to be destroyed, part of maintaining the overall balance.”
“That’s a lot of arson counts, Eddie,” sez Randy.
“So… it’s a sizable spread,” Maxi pretends to ask, “the Ice home?”
“We call it Fuckingham Palace. Like to have a look at the place? I was headin out that way.”
Trying to sound like a groupie, “Can’t resist a stately home. But would they even let me in the gate?”
Randy produces a chain with an ID tag. “Gate’s automatic, li’l transponder here, always carry an extra.”
Bethesda clarifies. “Tradition around here, these big houses are great places to bring a date if your idea of romance is gettin rudely interrupted right in the middle.”
“Penthouse Forum did that whole special issue,” Randy footnotes.
“Here, let’s just go detail you a little.” They repair to the ladies’ toilet, where Bethesda brings out a teasing brush and an eight-ounce can of Final Net and reaches for Maxine’s hair. “Got to lose this scrunchy thing, right now you’re lookin too much like these Bobby Van’s people.”
When Maxine emerges from the facility, “Mercy,” Randy swoons, “thought it was Shania Twain.” Hey, Maxine’ll take that.
Minutes later Randy’s wheeling out of the lot in an F-350 with a contractor’s rack on it, Maxine close behind wondering how good of a plan this is and growing more doubtful as Junior’s is replaced in the mirror by dismal residential streets gone tattered and chuckholed, full of small old rentals and dead-ending against chain-linked parking lots.
They make a brief stop to look at the site of Shae, Bruno, and Vip’s old playhouse. It’s a total loss. Green summer growth is vaporing back over the ashes. “Think it was an accident? Torched deliberately?”