Lu and I had taken the time to pick up my Firebird in Muskego and sell back my Impala to my used car guy there. We had decided neither the Camaro nor the Impala would look right in a lot filled with the kind of high-end rides the other attendees would likely roll up in.
I’d also done some clothes shopping. This would not be a t-shirt and jeans affair. Best I could do was the Chess King at Parkland Mall. Probably too hip for the room, and not exactly Brooks Brothers, but I was the right age to get away with the pair of tapered dark suits I picked up — as well as several shiny medium-color shirts and solid-color skinny ties.
Lu needed no help with her wardrobe, starting out in a hot pink jumpsuit with a sash at the waist, hair brushing her shoulders, around which was a neon pink ski coat. For now I was in my black leather jacket from home, and a black-and-white tropical print shirt, also from Chess King.
Our overnight bags strap-slung over our shoulders, we left the Firebird in the small paved (and otherwise empty) lot fronting the chalet. This was almost exactly twenty-four hours after yesterday’s meeting with Dan, who greeted us at the lower level’s door. As the parking lot indicated, we were the first to arrive. A seven o’clock supper was on the docket, after which the seminar would begin with an introductory session.
“Most of tomorrow,” Dan had told me, “will be taken up by a morning session, then individual meetings between our attendees and our guest lecturer.”
“The investment ‘guru,’ ” I said.
Dan nodded. “The rest of the weekend will be recreational.”
“How so? No skiing, no golf, and you’re sequestering the guests here for the duration, right?”
“We have entertainment tomorrow night.”
“Oh?”
“Buddy Greco and a trio.”
I frowned. “A name artist? How many are attending this thing?”
“Just five, like I said, including yourself. And not including the female guests.”
“So ten people get Vegas entertainment? That must have cost a fortune.”
“Not a big deal, Jack. Not when the participants are looking to squirrel away cash in the Caymans.”
Once Lu and I stepped inside, we were immediately in the main room, which lacked the high ceiling of a lodge, instead with claustrophobic, low-riding open beams; wood was everywhere, a wheat-stained pine — ceilings, walls, floors, even heavily framing the fireplace. Floor-to-ceiling windows provided a view of the golf course whose still-frozen-over water hole made for a sort of lake view. The windows were to your back as you faced the fireplace, which was going, and over which redundantly hung a framed oil of this very chalet, against its Mountain Top backdrop.
Despite the low ceiling, the room was spacious, and the obvious setting for the presentation the Cayman Islands guru would make. Two long low-slung dark blue sofas faced each other over a throw carpet with images of ducks and geese and pheasants flying on a light blue sky, fleeing invisible hunters. A smaller, lighter-blue couch, with its bigger brothers to its left and right, those tall windows to its back, looked across the hunting-scene carpet toward the fireplace.
Dan — in another Gucci of Chicago suit I’d wager, a tan number this time with a yellow, collar-open shirt — carried a clipboard with him and had me initial a few places. Seemed I was registered as William Wilson, and Lu as Mrs. Wilson.
Dan smiled and nodded at Lu, giving me a raised eyebrow glance that said, Nice going, buddy, and handed me a room key — 305.
“Elevator back with the conference rooms,” he said, gesturing vaguely, “but also stairs off the kitchen through there.”
“There” was to the left as you faced the fireplace, a farmhouse-style dining area with intentionally clunky carved-wood chairs around two big round matching tables. I asked Dan, “When do you expect the others?”
“Around dark,” he said. “No one attending the seminar is anxious to be seen. Yourself included, I’d imagine... Mr. Wilson.”
He was right. Checking in here, and not at the desk of the main lodge, meant no one local would notice my presence. After all, I had dated some of the waitresses, and I still took an occasional lunch or dinner here. Dan also let me use the pool, in off-times — even let me keep a locker on site. So assorted staffers knew me as a semi-regular.
And while I was no local celebrity, some folks did know me from Wilma’s. Best thing all around for William Wilson was to slip in and out of the chalet, like the rest of the high-class sneaks.
We took the stairs off a modest modern kitchen encased in rustic wood — as Dan indicated, these retreats were primarily catered from the main lodge — and dominated by a long table. Though Lu and I were still lugging our shoulder-slung overnight bags, we took the stairs because I wanted to get the layout of the place down. With all that wood, and the inherent fire hazard, I figured there’d be another stairway somewhere, but no — just the one, and the small elevator.
Our guest room was more of the wood-dominated same — floor, walls, open-beamed ceiling, even rough-hewn furnishings, as well as our own wood-framed fireplace, already burning wood (something unsettling about that). Saving grace was the queen-size bed with faux-fur coverlet, a few light-color throw rugs and some cut flowers in vases almost making up for the deer-hoof lamp with a nature-scene pictorial shade that might have depicted its former owner (of the hooves, not the lamp).
“Is it my imagination,” I asked, tossing my black leather jacket on a chair, “or does it smell like a cedar chest in here?”
Lu was already unpacking. She had brought half a dozen handguns, mostly small but very much serviceable, which she was salting around. Here a Colt Auto .25, there a Garcia Berretta Model 70S — little weapons wrapped in underthings in a drawer, or beneath a folded open book on the nightstand. How about a Walther PPK/S .22 under a pillow, or maybe Smith and Wesson .22 in a bathroom soap dish?
Me, I just had my nine mil, which was in a shoulder holster I rarely used and which had required me at the mall to buy a bigger size suitcoat than I preferred.
I sat on the bed. “What exactly do you think we’re in for?”
“No idea,” she said, still fussing with her guns.
“None?”
“Well... somebody killed Vanhorn and his two boys the other night and the ones on the receiving end didn’t seem to be ready for it. We should be.”
I nodded. “Not sure what the program is myself. I do know that the women attending — other than yourself, my dear — are not married to the participants. This leads me to believe you may be excluded from the seminar.”
She was hiding the Berretta. “Most likely. Not that I give a damn. They sound like a bunch of chauvinistic pigs.”
“Ah, then you haven’t stopped subscribing to the feminist newsletter.”
That made her smile. She shut the dresser drawer and came over and sat next to me.
Right next to me.
She nibbled my ear and asked, “Are you still the kind of man who reads Playboy?”
“Yeah. But also Hustler and Climax.”
“Gynecology fan, huh?”
“Big fan.”
“Prove it.”
She stripped out of the pink jumpsuit and, naked as a grape, she bent her bare bottom toward me as she neatly folded the garment and laid it over a rough-wood chair with furry upholstery. She had some, too. Then she climbed onto the bed and put her head on a pillow and her hands behind her head, elbows winged, and spread her legs wide.
“Let me know,” she said, “if you see anything you like.”
After a frozen moment, I dropped trou and — climbing onto the bed awkwardly, using my knees mostly, my pants around my ankles — scrambled over and had a look. Spread the petals and really had a look...