The Grass is Always Greener and other stories Page 4

  "It probably doesn't rise to criminal negligence. It's up to Mrs. Tazak to decide whether she wants to pursue a civil suit against Cheney Automotive." Starck shrugged. "She doesn't seem so inclined."

  Now that, I thought as I watched Stark drive away, didn't surprise me one iota.

  ******

  "So you see, Mrs. Tazak, for just three-hundred-thousand dollars you can be assured of getting exactly what you want."

  Doris Tazak was looking at me like I'd grown horns. "You mean 'exactly what I want' when I'm dead? For three-hundred-thousand dollars? Why would I do that?"

  I waited a beat before answering. "So you get what you want, rather than what you...deserve."

  Some of the rosy tones left Tazak's face. "I don't understand."

  "I think you do." I leaned forward. I was sitting in the chair where she sat the first time we'd spoken, intentionally usurping her position in her own home. "After all, how much did you pay Cheney to tamper with your husband's brakes?"

  Mrs. Tazak appeared to be trying to disappear into the overstuffed couch across from me. "Why would I do that?" I could tell she was stalling for time, trying to think.

  "Two words: 'Cost basis,'" I said.

  The rest of the color drained from her face. "No."

  "Yes." I reached across and patted her hand. "Your accountant is my accountant, you see. Marcus told me that your husband wouldn't sell his stock--"

  "My stock," Mrs. Tazak interrupted. "Bank-Corp stock from when I worked there. I had a right to sell it."

  "But the certificates were in both of your names, weren't they? And Fred didn't want to sell." I took her hand between mine. "Fred--a paranoid miser with a genetic disposition to living, if not forever, then..."

  "Might as well be forever," she muttered. "He'd outlive me. And what did anything matter after that?"

  "So why not just divorce him?" I was genuinely curious.

  Mrs. Tazak pulled her hand back, looking like I'd socked her. "We don't divorce in my family."

  But apparently they murdered. We all have our own eclectic set of values, don't we? It's wrong to kill, unless it's wartime. It's wrong to cheat, unless someone cheated you first. It's wrong to steal, unless you're starving. Well, who was I to quibble? "So back to your funeral."

  "So...so, if I pay this money you want, you'll leave me alone?" Mrs. Tazak looked like she wanted badly to believe it.

  "I will."

  "I don't have that kind of money just laying around, you know. I'll have to go see my accountant."

  "Not to worry. He's expecting your call." Marcus and I had worked this all out before I left his office. "You may find his commission on the transaction a little higher than you're accustomed to paying."

  She nodded numbly and went to the phone. The whole business was completed in fifteen minutes, and Mrs. Tazak wrote me a check. I, in turn, would hand it over to Marcus, who would put it in my account after taking his cut. The circle of life. Or death.

  Speaking of the circles we ran in: "I'd keep an eye on Cheney, by the way. In my experience, he has a nasty habit of expecting...tips, for services rendered."

  Her hand went up to her mouth. "You've hired him, too?"

  I shrugged. "Funny, isn't it? We make a lucrative...'deal' with someone, and we assume we're the only ones they've bent--or downright broken--the rules for. It's like a philandering husband or wife." I winked at her. "They did it once, likely they'll do it again. Only question is, with whom?"

  I started for the door and then turned. "So tell me. You said you 'didn't cheat on him once.' Just how many of those men did you have affairs with?"

  "Eleven. Fred was right about eleven of them." Mrs. Tazak smiled suddenly, making a stab at bravado, and I could see the woman she'd been before life with hubby had worn her down. "So you tell me, Mr. Cardigan: How many of your clients have you 'hurried' along?"

  I stopped, hand on the doorknob. I was about to deny it, but what the hell. She wasn't in a position to tell anyone. "Only the ones who were going to cash in soon anyway. Just not soon enough."

  Mrs. Tazak looked at me.

  I said, "Mine is a big ticket business. Sometimes you have to rob Peter to pay for Paul's custom, radiation-proof vault. And if Peter won't give it up..." I was suddenly weary. "We all do what we have to, don't we?"

  She cocked her head. "I know I did."

  I opened the door. There, at the foot of the walk, was Police Detective Christina Starck.

  And Fred Tazak. In the flesh.

  ******

  "Party Planner for the Dead" Buried

  By Brian Colorez

  Rocksville Sun

  Joseph Cardigan, colorful owner of "Going Out in Style: Funerals Done Your Way," was buried today. Cardigan had been the target of a police sting operation, and was killed while attempting to evade police. Reportedly, his car failed to negotiate a curve and plunged off the Lake Drive bluff. The investigation is ongoing.

  The setting is traditional, the air stale. Outside the window, the lights of a trailered rent-a-sign flash the deceased's name and the time of the service. 7 pm...7 pm...7 pm...

  It is exactly the antithesis of a Joe Cardigan funeral. Which is ironical, because this is THE Joe Cardigan funeral.

  The undertaker is at the lectern. "I've been asked to read the final words left by the deceased..." He looks down to check his notes, and the sign's reflected lights dance across his glasses. "...Joseph Cardigan."

  Slipping a folded sheet of paper from a plain white envelope:

  "At first, you can't believe the idea crossed your mind. Horrified, you set it aside. But there it stays, on the outermost fringes of your consciousness. You sniff around the edges. Nudge it with a toe.

  "Before you know it, the idea is your new best friend."

  -The End-

  MIA

  by Sandra Balzo

  Some might argue that life in Las Vegas is one long "cantina moment."

  You know the scene in the first Star Wars movie? Han Solo and Luke Skywalker walk into this cantina and it's filled with space creatures. Unearthly beings, certainly, but all of them doing very earthly things: Drinking, eating, chatting up the . . . species next to them.

  Well, that's what Hutch's felt like when I walked through the door. Familiar, but alien at the same time. A cantina moment. The kind of moment when you feel adrift. When you wonder whether you're the only normal person left on the planet.

  Like I said, though, that's not an uncommon feeling in Vegas.

  As I stopped to survey the place, one of the few just-off-The-Strip bars frequented by locals and tourists alike, a blonde woman teetered in on four-inch stilettos. She pulled off an evening coat to reveal a spangly blue dress.

  Hooker, I thought as I swatted at a fly that had followed us in.

  "There he is," Blondie said to the shorter dark-haired woman with her. The blonde was pointing toward a gray-haired man in a dark suit sitting near end of the long bar. "I'm going to go chat him up. You take the other end."

  She slid onto the barstool next to the man, not bothering to tug down the skirt that had ridden up nearly to her crotch. The brunette continued down the length of the bar.

  Now I was certain they were hookers. Two women come in together and then separate to sit alone? Divide and conquer: It not only made the women easier for men to approach, but it doubled the hookers' opportunity to "reach out and touch" some john.

  I tried to get a better look at them. Maybe I'd seen the duo's photos on the cards handed out on The Strip, otherwise known as Las Vegas Boulevard.

  The cardboard rectangles looked like the baseball cards that "Officer Friendly" gave out to kids in our neighborhood. Only thing was, these girls played a different kind of ball and the guy pimping them was more "Orifice Friendly" than "Officer Friendly."

  I wondered whether this was an arranged meeting, based on the blonde's . . . stats.

  Blondie had taken the open stool, so I followed the brunette back. Men--most of them middle-aged with more
matted hair beneath their gold chains than on top of their heads-—filled the place. Each swiveled in turn to get a look at the brunette as she shimmied by, smiling.

  A guy I knew swore he could tell if a woman was a hooker because she made eye contact and smiled at him. "You kidding?" he said when I had protested. "A nice attractive girl would never even glance at a mutt like me."

  Well, I guess I qualified as a "nice girl," at least. I made no eye contact whatsoever as I followed the brunette back and right into the Ladies Room.

  While the rest of the bar was red-and-black Rat Pack kitsch, Hutch's restroom was state of the art. State of the art, that is, if the art was peeing and primping. Marble sink, fresh flowers and sensor-driven toilet, faucet, and towel dispenser. The ones that promise you flushes, washes, and wipes at the wave of a hand, but seldom deliver.

  The sole stall in the room was occupied and a woman in her late forties was huddled in front of the mirror. The brunette glanced at the closed stall door, then at the mirror. With an impatient "tsk", she turned on her heel and left.

  I watched for a moment as the woman at the mirror continued to painstakingly apply makeup to skin already beginning to sag off its bone structure. Then, not needing any reminders of what would happen to me all too soon, I followed the brunette.

  The bar hadn't changed much in the fruitless thirty seconds I'd spent in the restroom. Happening aliens, out to have a good time. The brunette already had snagged one of the "Chain and Chest-hair Gang," so I went back to check on Blondie.

  Still no stools, but now people were lined up two-deep.

  I eased in next to a fake wood column, hovering as close as I could get to Blondie and her mark.

  He must have worked up enough nerve to buy her a drink while I was gone. Now he introduced himself as "Tom."

  "Yup, Valentine's Day is going to be a tough one for me," he was saying. "That's the day my late wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer."

  Tomorrow was Valentine's Day, probably why he'd brought it up. Not so apparent was why he had chosen this tidbit as an opening gambit with a young woman he didn't know.

  Because this was no appointment or "hook-up," I realized. Tom honestly didn't seem to know that all he needed to impress Blondie was a C-note and a condom. His naivete didn't surprise me. His gaze sure hadn't drifted up from her 38-Ds long enough to register the eye-contact thing.

  "So sad", he was saying. "Mia did everything right. Ate good, ran, lifted weights, even went to those damn spinning classes."

  Tom picked up his drink--a martini. "Never quite saw the sense of that," he said into it, like the glass was a microphone. "Bunch of people in a room riding bikes to nowhere. Sounds like my idea of hell." Tom took a sip and set the drink back down.

  The blonde didn't answer, but took a slug of her own drink. She had a martini, too, but hers looked rosy. Maybe a cosmopolitan or whatever the fru-fru flavor of the week was.

  Tom switched gears. "Well, you certainly look like you keep yourself in shape, too," he said, lifting his gaze to her fleshy shoulders.

  Way to go, Tom. Nothing sexier than comparing a girl to the little woman. The little dead woman.

  Blondie seemed to be trying to size up him and his wallet. "I'm so sorry. How long ago did your wife die?" she asked, and I had to give her points for cloaking the fact-finding in a considerate question.

  "She left us last August." He swirled his martini and some slopped out as it circled the rim. "I had a trip to Tuscany planned for her birthday in September, a surprise. But by then she . . .was gone."

  Talk about a surprise. I wouldn't have thought Tom had it in him to plan anything as sweet as a birthday trip--to Italy, no less.

  He sniffled. "Yeah, the tour company wouldn't even give me a full refund on the deposit, the bastards. So I went myself. Took a bath on the other ticket though, and Mia's insurance company still hasn't coughed up a cent."

  Kudos to State Farm.

  "Really?" the blonde said. "It's been what?" She had to tick off August to February on her fingers. "Six months since she died?"

  "Well, that's just it." Tom took a slug of martini. "Mia just sort of . . .left."

  This was getting good.

  The blonde sat back. "Wait a minute. She's not dead?"

  Tacky, but to the point.

  Tom's shoulders lifted and dropped. I noticed the white shirt under the suit was un-ironed tonight. "Mia liked to swim in Lake Havasu, where we spent weekends. I keep a boat there and a double-wide."

  "A double-wide." Blondie said it deadpan, seeming to lose a little interest. Financially, anyway.

  "A trailer. Actually two trailers, together." Tom met her eyes finally. "That's why it's ‘double.' And ‘wide.'"

  Now the blonde's eyes got that "faraway" look, but not like she was picturing herself Lady of his Manor a mere hundred and fifty miles away. More like she was plotting her course as far from both Tom and his double-wide as she could get.

  "It's really nice," he said defensively. "Better than a house, because you can take it along if you move."

  "Yeah, sure," the girl said impatiently. "Now, about your wife?"

  "Oh, yeah, right." Tom seemed eager to regain the sympathy he'd lost. "Well, the weekend after Mia was diagnosed, she went for a swim and just never came home."

  "You said she was your ‘late wife.'" Snippy now. "Late what? Getting back to the ‘double-wide'?"

  Tom squirmed, and a bead of sweat trickled from his receding hairline down his cheek. "Yeah, well her towel was on the beach, but Mia was . . .gone. I think she knew she was going to die no matter what and didn't want to waste the chemo and all."

  He sighed. "We have a really high deductible."

  Jesus, he was an idiot.

  The blonde's waxed eyebrows were halfway up her forehead. "So you think your wife just swam out into the lake?"

  Tom looked back down into his martini. "Never found her body. They say it's not a bad way to die. Just keep swimming out until you're halfway across the lake and exhausted, and . . ."

  He left it there, but I could finish the thought: And even if she changed her mind, she might not have the strength to swim back to shore.

  Much like you'd assume if someone had tossed her out of a motorboat, say, in the middle of a lake.

  "Listen," the blonde said, clearing her throat. "I really appreciate the drink and all, but I have to get back to my friend. Looks like she might be leaving." Blondie nodded down the bar to the brunette, who looked to me like she had no intention of abandoning "Oldie But Groovy."

  Tom stood up as the blonde did, probably hoping to get a better look at her legs as she slid off the barstool. "Well, listen, can I get your number? Maybe--"

  Whack!

  I jumped a foot.

  A redheaded bartender had zeroed in on the fly that had been buzzing me earlier and smashed it on the column not three inches from my head. By the time he'd wiped up the splattered insect with a bar towel and moved away, the blonde was gone, and Tom was sitting back down.

  Damn.

  Tom made a show of downing the half-inch that remained of his drink and raised the empty glass. "Benjy," he called to the redhead, who had segued from exterminator back to bartender and was now drawing a beer. "Another one, please?"

  Benjy nodded, slid the beer to a guy four stools down and started mixing the martini. "You want her to stay, Tom?" He chin-gestured toward the blonde who was talking to the brunette. She'd apparently ditched her ‘date.' Or else he'd died on her. "You want to send over another cosmo?"

  Tom shrugged as Benjy handed him the martini. It had six olives in it, three on each toothpick. There was more vegetation than vodka in the drink.

  "It's no use, Benjy." Tom picked up the drink and then set it back down again. "It's just hard. I'm not looking for a quickie or a one-night stand. I'd be happy with . . . a friend. Someone to just spend time with."

  Fine time to be thinking about that, wasn't it? The blonde kept glancing back this way, but she seemed to hav
e no intention of rejoining Tom.

  Benjy grinned. "I'm your friend, man."

  Tom countered with a weaker version of the grin. "Much as I appreciate that, it's pretty pathetic that my only friend is also my bartender, don't you think?"

  "Seems natural to me," Benjy said with a grin, then sobered. "But you must have other friends. You said you and your wife used to come in here with a lot of people."

  Tom spread his fingers wide. "Me and my wife, is right. Once Mia was gone, so were they. All of them turned on me, like they blamed me or something." He looked around. "So many people, even some of ‘em I know, and they won't talk to me. Won't even look at me. Vegas is the loneliest place on earth, you know that, Benjy?"

  The bartender just shook his head in sympathy.

  "You know my office has been broken into?" Tom continued. "House robbed twice? Somebody vandalized my boat. My electricity was even cut off for no reason this morning. I can't take it anymore. I'm falling apart."

  You and me both, I thought, as I watched him pull an olive off one of the toothpicks.

  A second olive slid off the pick into his martini with a splash. Tom didn't seem to notice. "You know, I read somewhere that women don't remarry when they're widowed or divorced later in life."

  Benjy nodded, attention diverted by someone down the bar whistling for him. Beethoven's Fifth. Classy place. If you didn't mind shag carpeting and the waxy remains of lipstick on the glasses.

  "Us men, though?" Tom went on. "Most of us hook up with someone again." He looked wistfully across the bar at Blondie, who was now pulling on her coat.

  Figuring Tom would be crying in his martini for awhile, I wandered back to see what was happening on the other end of the bar.

  As I came up on them, the brunette flashed a suspicious glance around, then whispered something in the other woman's ear.

  Blondie grinned. "I got a free drink out of it. And the double-wide. Not a bad night." As I edged by, the imitation Gucci handbag slipped off her shoulder. She caught it before it hit the floor, more's the pity.