“And Mrs. Shaw doesn’t know this?”
“No.”
“That seems peculiar for this day and age.”
“The Shaws didn’t live in this day and age.”
“When are you going to bring her up to date?”
“The first step is yours, Aragon. Now, here’s the address and phone number of her residence and her club. When you contact her, inform her firmly that she must come to my office to sign some papers. After that, I’ll... well, I’ll simply tell her that she’s not quite as rich as she was at one time and that she’ll have to make substantial reductions in her standard of living.”
“Maybe you’d better tell her the truth; that she’s broke.”
“You don’t tell women the truth,” Smedler said. “Not all at once anyway, and certainly not a woman like Mrs. Shaw who’s been protected and insulated from the world. My God, she might scream or cry or faint. She might even shoot me.”
“If Mrs. Shaw is as insulated from the world as you claim she is, why would she be carrying a gun?”
“I only meant there’s no way of predicting how a woman will act when she’s in extremis. And believe me, that’s what she is going to be. If nothing else does it, the stud farm in Kentucky will.”
“It’s a nice Freudian touch.”
Smedler went over to the water cooler and poured himself a drink in a clear plastic cup. The water looked slightly murky and when he drank it he winced. “Ever taste this stuff, Aragon? It’s lethal. I often suspect my secretary of trying to poison me. The only reason I survive is because I’ve gradually built up an immunity. Have some?”
“No, thank you.”
“Better start working on your immunity. The water situation is not likely to improve. In fact, I predict that some day the world will dry up and blow away. There’ll be no nonsense about floods and arks, just a whole lot of dust. Think about it.”
“Yes, sir.” Aragon thought about it and concluded that Smedler’s weekend bash with his wife must have been worse than usual.
Smedler returned to his desk. “I was your age, Aragon, when I passed my bar exams and assumed I was about to enter the practice of law. What I actually entered was the practice of people. To put it another way, anyone can memorize the criminal code, but what’s important is the code of criminals.”
“That’s very good, sir.”
“I know. I’ve used it in a dozen speeches. Well, you have work to do, I won’t keep you.”
The Penguin Club was a long blue one-and-a-half-story building built on a narrow strip of land between the road and the sea. To passersby, it presented a windowless front except for a series of shuttered air ducts that peeked out from beneath the roof like half-closed eyes. In spite of the club’s reputation as a gathering place for the very rich, the cars in the parking lot were the same size and brand as the ones found outside a supermarket or a laundromat. The only difference was that there were fewer of them — less than a quarter of the slots were occupied. In a time and place of abundance, space was the only real luxury left.
Tom Aragon hadn’t been inside the Penguin Club since the night he and some of his high school friends had come up from the beach to scale the back fence and swim in the pool. Before they even hit the water the lights went on, every light in the place — at the entrance and inside the office, along the corridors and the terrace, under the water and from the depths of shrubbery, the tops of palm trees, the interiors of cabanas. A uniformed security guard appeared, his gun drawn. “Back to the barrio, you bobos!”
This time he was ten years older and went to the front entrance. For the first few seconds he felt nervous, as if the same security guard was going to be on duty and might recognize him.
The fancy gold lettering on the door didn’t soften its message: Members and Guests Only. No Trespassing. Dress Code Enforced. He went inside. No one recognized him or even noticed him. In the office, on the other side of the waist-high counter, only one person was visible, a young woman sitting at a desk with a pencil behind her ear. She didn’t seem to be doing anything except possibly thinking.
Aragon was the first to speak. “Miss?”
She removed the pencil and came over to the counter. She was tall and on the verge of being pretty, with dark hair and serious green eyes. The lids were pink, as if, not too long ago, she’d been crying. He wondered why, estimating his chance of finding out as very slight.
“May I help you?” The hoarseness of her voice tied in with the pink eyelids. “I’m Miss Brewster, the club secretary.”
He gave her one of his business cards: Tomás Aragon, Attorney, Smedler, Downs, Castleberg, McFee, Powell. “I’m trying to locate one of our clients, Mrs. Miranda Shaw. I understand she’s a member of this club.”
“Yes.”
“There are some important papers for her to sign and Mr. Smedler hasn’t been able to contact her at her house. He thought she might be here.”
“I haven’t seen her.”
“Does that mean she’s not here?”
“Not necessarily. She might have come in while I was on my coffee break or before I arrived. I was late this morning. My car wouldn’t start and I had to ride my bicycle.”
“What kind of bicycle?”
“What difference does it make what kind of bicycle?”
“No difference. I was merely putting in time until you decide to tell me about Mrs. Shaw.”
She took a deep breath. It seemed to hurt her. She began coughing, holding on hard to her throat.
He waited, looking toward the pool. A couple of swimmers were doing laps and half a dozen women were taking part in an exercise class at the shallow end. On the terrace an elderly man wearing a tennis visor sat at a table, writing. Most of the deck chairs on the opposite side of the pool were empty.
The lifeguard tower interested Aragon most. It was occupied by a red-haired boy about eight or nine looking through a pair of outsized binoculars. Aragon had the impression that they were focused on him. To test this he smiled and waved, and immediately the binoculars were lowered and the boy climbed down from the tower and disappeared.
The young woman had finished coughing. “We’re not allowed to give out information about our members. It’s in the rule book. Practically everything is, including fraternization.” She gave the word a certain bitter emphasis which he didn’t understand. “I... look, I’m having a bad morning. You’d better talk to the manager, Mr. Henderson. Wait here and I’ll see if he’s busy.”
“Sure. Sorry about the bad morning. By noon things may be better.”
“Or worse.”
“Or worse,” Aragon said. There was no point in wasting happy talk on Miss Brewster. She wasn’t in a receptive mood.
Neither was Mr. Henderson.
Henderson had been going over the delinquent-dues list, trying to decide whether to take the drastic step of posting it on the main bulletin board or merely to keep a copy in strategic areas like the card and game room. There was the added decision of which names should be removed.
Each case had to be judged on its individual merits, or lack of them. The Whipples, for example, were traveling in the Orient and probably hadn’t received the notice that the rent on their cabana was overdue. Billy Parr Davis had run up a two-thousand-dollar bill at his sixtieth birthday party, but it was only a matter of time before his mother sent a check to cover it as usual. The Redferns were in the throes of a divorce and custody of the club membership hadn’t yet been determined, so it was unreasonable to expect payment from either of them. Mr. and Mrs. Quinn were protesting the charges for damages little Frederic had done to the first-aid station and the plumbing in the men’s locker room. Mrs. Guinevere had gone to a fat farm to lose fifty pounds and her bill would be paid when the remaining two hundred returned.