It had been three days since the assistant, what’s-her-name, had called to inform him of Uncle Glenn’s steep and sudden decline. The cost of flying the next day would have been ruinous, and he’d been too embarrassed to ask for the airfare, although the woman had cautioned him that Uncle Glenn might not last more than a day or two. With a bit of digging on the Web, he discovered that he could save over five hundred dollars by waiting three days and flying out of Kansas City, even factoring in the price of gas and a night in a hotel. The airport was four hours’ distance from home if you did eighty the whole time, and at 5 p.m., he was almost at the halfway point. He pulled off at the Auxvasse/Mexico exit for gas.
He’d forgotten to eat lunch, and once he’d filled up, he went into the C store and picked a sandwich out of a cooler, ham and American cheese with mayo, sliced diagonally and preserved for the ages in cling wrap. He ate it sitting in the parking lot and called on long-dormant fifth-grade math skills to calculate the Cutlass’s mileage per gallon. After several false starts, he was pretty certain he’d nailed it at nearly thirty MPG, which impressed him; despite its lack of modern amenities, like satellite radio, the twenty-year-old Cutlass was turning out to be quite a satisfactory vehicle. He made a plan to buy his mother a better car to replace it once he was rich again, maybe one of those Caddies that zigged.
He’d managed to get a four-and-a-half star hotel room for seventy dollars and change. The only drawback was its location: the Kansas City airport was miles from downtown and anything you might want to do of an evening. It was seven-thirty when he arrived, and after a shower and a change of clothes, he crossed the hotel parking lot to the adjacent Outback Steakhouse, where he ordered a pork porterhouse and a twenty-ounce Foster’s lager in a chilled glass rimmed with frost that gave him a violent twenty-second headache.
Afterward he stopped in the hotel’s lobby bar. The only other customer was a man in a blue suit with his tie loosened, presumably to make room for a double chin worthy of a bullfrog. The bartender, a small woman with cat-eye glasses and close-cropped magenta hair, took his order without enthusiasm, then returned her attention to the Royals game on the set over the bar.
Jerry more or less followed the game out of a need for something to occupy his mind until a tall blond woman sat down a couple of stools to his right.
“Hi, Vickie,” the bartender said, brightening considerably. “Where you in from?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Ooh.”
“Yeah, outside LA, actually, so twice as much driving.”
“Yuck. Well, welcome to KC.”
“Ronny been around lately?”
“Just last week, he asked after you.”
He listened to their conversation, eyes on the television. After a couple of minutes, the man in the blue suit hailed the bartender, and while she tended to him, Jerry turned to the woman. “Did I hear you say you were just in LA? I’m heading there tomorrow. Santa Barbara.”
“Not the same thing. Nice up there, though.”
“I’m going to say goodbye to my uncle. He’s on his deathbed.”
“Are you close to him?”
He hesitated, and then to his own surprise found his eyes welling. “I am,” he said.
“Sorry. Hakuna matata, though, right?”
“Sorry, what was that?”
The woman smiled. She was about his age, he guessed, and had excellent, straight teeth. “You never had kids, I take it.”
He shook his head, feeling as if she were passing judgment on him. “No.”
“Well, sorry about your uncle.”
“What brought you to California?”
“I’m an attorney for a chain of storage facilities, we had a client die in one of the units out in West Covina. You know it?”
“No.”
“It’s a shithole. Out east of town, kind of in the direction of San Berdoo and Ontario and the desert.”
“Ontario, that’s where I’m flying into.”
“To get to Santa Barbara? That’s original, I guess.”
The bartender had returned and was following the conversation without speaking. “Tricia, listen to this. So I get called out to LA because we had a tenant die in one of the units. This guy signs in one afternoon and hasn’t signed out by closing time, so the manager on duty goes to check on him. Did I mention this guy’s in arrears by about a grand? Anyway, manager opens the unit, finds the guy dead with a belt around his throat attached to the rack the door slides open on.”
“What?” the bartender said.
“And all around him on the floor is porno. Now I’m pretty open-minded, but the sheriff showed me and this is, like, bathroom stuff, you know? Sheriff says it’s autoerotic asphyxiation, guy was jerking off and choking himself with the belt and when the moment came he passed out and never woke up. Can you top that?”
Jerry couldn’t remember any woman ever talking to him like this, not just about sex but about perversion.
“So why’d they need you out there?”
“So the widow denies he even had a storage unit and wants to sue. So it’s been in the paper that he died, but not that he hanged himself with his dick in his hand in a storage unit with some of the most disturbing images ever printed lying on the ground in front of him.”
“Could they even put that in the paper?” Jerry said.
“Who knows, but I told her lawyer we’d countersue for his back rent, and I made sure to point out how interested the newspapers would be in the whole business.”
“That’s cold, Vickie.”
“So we comp his back rent and their lawyer backs down, and the manager cleans the unit out. And it’s all porno. All of it.”
He tried to think of something clever to say, something that would sound worldly and sophisticated, something that might make this Vickie find him interesting, but nothing came to him.
“Got an early flight tomorrow,” he said, and got no reaction from either woman. “Can I get another Bushmills to take to my room?”