The inside of the house looks like a graveyard for Army-surplus office furniture. Becker, who was a captain in the Marines, knows somebody in Washington and gets the stuff cheap. The lobby area always makes me smile. That’s where Bobby Lee sits in her 1965 beehive hairdo, chain-smoking her Kool filters and tapping her feet to whatever country atrocity is emanating from her transistor radio. Bobby Lee was Becker’s mistress and had been for at least ten years. The only person on the North American continent who did not seem to know this was Mrs. Becker, a woman I’d met only over the phone. She was pushy enough to almost make me feel sorry for Becker. Almost.
Bobby Lee obviously knew about my problem at Channel 3. She had never liked me and I had never liked her, and that accounted for her superior smile this morning.
“I hear our little lesbian got himself in some trouble last night,” Bobby said.
Which should tell you all you need to know about her humor. “Lesbian” is the way she intentionally mispronounced “thespian.” She obviously did not have a lot of faith in my acting career. She resented anybody who aspired to anything more than a blue-collar life had to offer. She blew menthol smoke my way. I’ve never understood people who smoke Kools. Why don’t they just light up a cough drop?
Then she stood up to do some filing. She had an ass a stud horse would have been ashamed of, packed inside a ridiculously tight pair of jeans. Her T-shirt this morning read THE MERLE HAGGARD TOUR ’84. The print was stretched tight over her full breasts. As she sat back down, I checked out her hair again. Somewhere in there was probably a family of birdies eating worms.
“You haven’t turned your hours in yet this week, so I just went ahead and paid you. I’ll put ’em on next week.”
Bitch.
This was another one of our nasty little games. Or rather her nasty little games. She knew I was always in need of money, and so that gave her a certain petty power over me — one she rubbed my face in occasionally by doing my regular hours “early” and making sure that I didn’t have time to put on my overtime hours, which usually amounted to half again as much pay. I would be strapped for awhile.
“Sorry,” she said. Her smile had become a smirk.
“Yeah,” I said.
Becker was waiting for me when I pushed past Bobby Lee’s desk and went into his office. His place looked like a Nazi’s wet dream. Becker, short, chunky, with a graying crew cut and blue contacts that made his eyes almost gaudy, was a model airplane fanatic. The Army-surplus furniture in there was covered, every conceivable frigging inch of it, with planes. The walls were covered with photographs of model planes. He even had a sport shirt made for him that was covered with planes.
He sat back and looked at me and tucked a little but obvious piece of disappointment into the corner of his mouth. That was Becker’s management style. He never yelled at you. He never threatened you. He just let you know, in various ways, how much you’d let him down. Here he was suffering for your sins, and you were too stupid to realize it.
His guilt routine didn’t work on me very well. Unlike the majority of people Becker employed, I have an IQ above room temperature and I don’t have an erotic attachment to guns. One thing you have to realize about security people. Most of them get into the business because for some reason or other they are failed police officers, ones not bright enough or healthy enough or sane enough to wear the uniform. So they become security people for little better than minimum wage and push around citizens whenever they get the chance and are pushed around in turn by military types like Becker, who make small fortunes on them.
“Dwyer, Dwyer, Dwyer,” Becker said. This was going to be a network special of disappointment.
“You talk to Fitzgerald at Channel Three yet this morning?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“He wants me to fire you.”
“Great.”
“You did fuck up, you know.”
“I guess I did.”
“You guess?”
“Well, if I bring up the subject of the plumber who let the kid in the first place, then it sounds like I’m copping out.”
“But the plumber isn’t our problem, is he?”
Uh-oh: Here went his schoolmarm routine. “No, I guess he isn’t.” What could I say? I needed the job.
“You know what percentage of security jobs are lost just because of situations like this?”
“Gee, not offhand I don’t.”
If he picked up my sarcasm, he didn’t let on.
“Forty-two per cent of security jobs are lost because of perceived incompetence. And those aren’t my figures, those are figures straight from Security Times, our trade magazine. I’ve told you, Dwyer, you should read it.”
Now he was shifting into his instructional phase. If you remember Bullwinkle the Moose and his Mr. Know-It-All persona, you’ve got this part of Becker down pat. Becker knows more about more things than anybody I’ve ever known, and that’s the trouble with him — he knows the facts about everything and the truth about nothing. He’s the ultimate B student.
“If you’re going to fire me, let’s get it over with, okay?”
He put some more disappointment on his face. “That would be the easy way out, don’t you think?”
I sighed. “I don’t know what you’re getting at.” I thought I heard Bobby Lee sneaking around behind me. She was enjoying herself. I didn’t want to be her pathetic little show for the day.
“Dwyer, you’re not thinking very clearly this morning.”
“I guess I’m not.”
“You were a detective, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then find out on your own who that kid was.”
“So I’m not fired.”
“Yes. You are.”
I just stared at him.
“But if you can find out who the kid was, you get your job back.”
“I need work now.”
He looked at me. “Check in later. Maybe I’ll change my mind.” Bobby Lee was in the hallway. Eavesdropping. “Bobby Lee, is that you?” Becker yelled.
She peeked her head in. “Yes, Earl. Why?”
He got the Look again. This time it was his own mistress who had disappointed him. “Bobby Lee, we’re trying to have a private conversation here. Now I know how much you like to eavesdrop, but you know how much I don’t like for you to eavesdrop.”
She blushed. “God damn you, Earl. You have no right to talk to me in front of — him this way.”
“It’s all right, Bobby Lee, I knew you eavesdropped before he brought my attention to it.”
“Why you—” she started to say.
“God damn but I wish you two got along better,” Earl Becker said, sitting there amidst his toy airplanes. “You two argue like me and my goddamn wife.”
The St. Francis Medical Center was one of the new buildings along the river. Spring sunlight reflected off its glass and was trapped in the green landscaping of its instant grass.
Three steps inside and I remembered why I don’t like emergency rooms. An infant with scarlet cheeks and a dead gaze sat limply burning in his mother’s lap; an old man holding his chest was fussed over nervously by a sorrowful frail woman, obviously his wife; an eight-year-old boy with what appeared to be a broken wrist sat in a chair while his mother did all sorts of overprotective mother things that apparently embarrassed the kid. Doctors and nurses came and went; the same soap opera played on three different TV screens.
I walked up to the crisp, pretty nurse at the registration desk and said, “My daughter left her umbrella here last night.”