Three Predators

© 2001 by Newman George

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This novel is a work of fiction. Its action and characters are inventions of the author. No resemblance to persons living or dead is intended; any such resemblance is coincidental.

ISBN: 0-595-16870-1

ISBN: 978-1-469-79006-0 (eBook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

I

Lacey Woodstock was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. Lacey was as dead as a door-nail.

The night before her funeral, I stood before her open casket in the visitation room at Ed Cook’s funeral home, contemplating the certainty and permanence of her condition. Three musicians played nostalgic music in a corner of the parlor. Other visitants remarked on the evident sinew of in dominance that held together the muscles of Lacey’s rosy cheeks, even in death. But it was certain that the fight was gone and that there was no restorative for her condition. My mortal friend, whom I had first met almost forty years ago when a frisky teenager, would not take home work or pleasure again.

Lacey had suffered horribly with an erosive terminal illness. She died thin and broken, misshapen really. The funeral director had made an artful effort, but the woman’s skin was a different color and consistency in death than it had been in life. I touched her crossed hands. I kissed her cold forehead. The life had departed from her. She had proved her finitude. It was Lacey’s body, or the body that had contained Lacey, there before me. But Lacey’s body without Lacey was about as useless as Lacey’s heart without blood pumping through it, removed and on an operating table. It could just as well have been Dagny Taggart or Nana or the Lady Dulcinea del Tobosco reposing before me.

Standing there before her, the power of the Great Leveler hit me like a sharp clash of cymbals. Life was short and eternity was long. Life was the random noise around the certain trajectory that led here. It appeared complex but elementary it really was. An immense range of variables overstated the underlying simplicity of the equation. Lacey’s ashes were indistinguishable from Alexander’s.

That night it began to snow. It snowed heavy wet drops, whose weight you could feel when they landed on your head. There were no tracks in the roads as I drove away from the funeral home; it was as peaceful and deserted as Christmas Eve after midnight. Silent night, Holy night, all was calm, all was white. The streets, the curbs, the sidewalks, the brown lawns, the front porches, the flowerbeds around foundations, the little mounds in some of the yards, everything was covered with a smooth blanket of concealing snow. The only despoliation was in my rear view mirror, where the tracks of my tires rutted the pristine canvas of white darkness.

The next day, the November morning of her funeral, was cold and nascent white. Winds gusted and ears ached. It was bright and sunny, typical of the day after a thorough snowfall, dominated by a crisp high-pressure pocket. Inside an automobile the sun through the windshield was over-heating. It was a distance over familiar serpentine roads from my mother’s home, where I was staying, to Chapel Hill Methodist Church, and in a time I turned into the parking lot.

I was stunned by the unexpectedly large number of mourners who were arriving for Lacey’s memorial service, and tears filled my eyes involuntarily before I had even parked the car. Apparently, she had touched very many people in her fifty years. There must have been a hundred or more cars squeezed together in the principal parking area. All of the parking most convenient to the church was occupied. Several Mercedes and BMW’s occupied remote spots, away from the rest. I recognized one of these as belonging to Charles Douglas III. A steady stream of couples in dark business suits were fighting their way towards the entrance against the cold and the several inches of snow that fell over the tops of loafers. I noted several John Marshall classmates hustling across the parking lot, including Rick Haley and his wife, Kevin Kross, and Mike and Andy Snider. Rusty Smith lived in New York City and telephoned his condolences.

The curvilinear movement of persons both strange and known, in couples and singles, rapidly across the parking lot, one streaming after another, like the arcs of very many tracer rounds in the night on the Plain of Reeds—these movements in space evoked the multitudinous intersecting hyperparabolic tracings in time that bound me to many of the mourners, their friends and acquaintances, and to the deceased.

There wasn’t a bell-tower or any bells at this suburban church, but apparently there was a sound system that could produce the sound of a bell. For one tolled ceaselessly. …DONG… Every sixty seconds, it sounded ..DONG. It took me a minute to remember where I had heard an effect like this before. And then I remembered the repetitive, sonorous tolling of Big Ben as they rolled the Princess Diana through the streets of London. Pretty soon that baleful …DONG…, so regular every sixty seconds, starts reverberating inside your head.

The sanctuary at Chapel Hill Methodist was standing room only. The Reverend Stakeley was presiding. Though new to the area, he related passably well the particulars of Lacey’s accomplishments: high school pep-club member, worked her way through college, graduated from the university, went on to law school and finished in the top half of her law school class, registered financial advisor at the age of twenty-six, finished over one hundred 10K races, beloved wife of the Doctor Dewer. Golfer, skier, gardener, dog-lover. They didn’t play funereal music, but hum-along tunes from the sixties: ‘Sally Go ‘Round the Roses,’ ‘A Lover’s Concerto,’ ‘A Fork in the Road,’ and the like. A slow motion clockwork ..DONG. kept time above these melodies, a doleful percussion accompaniment.

When he had finished saying some nice things about Lacey, the Reverend Stakeley invited anyone who was moved to do so to stand and remember in words anything about Lacey Woodstock they cared to share.

Lacey’s best friend Janet Jarrett rose to speak first: ‘Lacey and I have been best buddies since the first grade,’ she began. ‘I was with her the night her father died. That was forty-two years ago. We cried our eyes out together that night. She nursed me through my cancer. How I wish I had been able to loose her from hers. As a friend, she was more reliable than any man was. As a girl, as a woman, ..DONG. she was an inspiration; she dared things I never could. She was generous as blood kin. I loved Lacey Woodstock. She was a woman who always wanted to be somebody and, with God as my witness, she was. She gave the truth to whoever said: Let us endeavor so to live that, when we come to die, even the undertaker is sorry.’

I should have expected, I guess, seeing present a large number of what appeared to be mover and shaker types. Lacey, after all, had made a living investing the estates of the wealthy and the aspiring. A gentleman who looked to be perhaps six or seven years senior to most of the rest of us stood and related his twenty year business relationship with Lacey. She had, he said, a sixth sense for the likely direction of the investment markets; her recommendations not only earned above average rates of return, but never carried excessive commissions. She thought of the customer .DONG.and not herself. She could not be pressured by her management to push investments that were not one hundred percent suitable for her clientele. She was, he said, among the best and the brightest of her generation.

A very tall and thin man with a nose the size of a toucan’s rose to speak of the professionalism he believed to be Lacey’s cardinal quality. He had served her and her firm’s travel needs for many years, and always found her a patient, knowledgeable, and reasonable client. She had not infrequently brought him an inexpensive but thoughtful memento .DONG.of some faraway place; he had a collection of shiny medallions, pocket patches, tiny liquor bottles, and contraptions made of straw, bone, horsehair, wool, driftwood, and seashells.

I really wanted to say something, but I didn’t know if I could get it out. And the damn bell kept tolling. Every sixty seconds—.DONG. I couldn’t help but think of the procession of the past thirty-four years and of the years remaining. Whenever a bell tolls, you eventually start thinking about for whom it really tolls. .DONG. I was not sure I would bear up under the emotion of speaking about Lacey to a crowd of more than two hundred. If I said anything, I would want to say enough to honor the special nature of the relationship I had had with the deceased, but not so much as to reveal anything of its repeated, if approximately septennial, intimacy. Not that there weren’t those in the room quite aware of these connections.

I determined to seek the floor after a suave looking Latin, who had met Lacey on a ski hill, stopped talking. ‘She prevailed in a dog-eat-dog business,’ he said, ‘and did so with grace and style, etc. etc.’ By the time he had finished, I had chickened out. I would have had to have strode .DONG. from my position in the back of the sanctuary down the aisle that bisected the seating and turn my back to the people in the bottom half of the rows to face those in the top half—but that was just an excuse. I just could not muster the vigor.

The church part of the funeral and many touching testimonials being over, I made my way towards my car to join the procession to the Greystone graveyard. On the way out the door, Barbi Brown, whom I had not seen in almost thirty years, hugged me.

‘Can I ride with you to the graveside ceremonies?’ she asked. ‘My son needed my car this morning.’

‘Sure. Stay here. I’ll get the car, swing around, and you can run out.

I was happy to have someone to ride with in the procession of cars that crawled down May Avenue and out Northwest Highway to the burial spot. It was going to be a slow and thoughtful ride to the cemetery through streets heavy with unplowed snow.

I said, ‘The last time I remember snow here this early was in the late 1950’s. I still lived on Andover Court. That year it snowed in late November and again after Christmas. Don Criner and I scoured the neighborhood for used Christmas trees and built a Christmas tree fort for the ages. It was the beginning of my illustrious career as a hunter/gatherer. I don’t ever remember snow on the ground on Christmas Day, so it must have snowed after Christmas but before school started back up after the holidays. Don and I must have been in fourth or fifth grade. He was my first friend, and my constant buddy back then. I grew up with him. We trudged from house to house, first scouting the house to see if they had taken down their Christmas tree, then ringing the doorbell to ask permission from the owner to haul their tree away. The conditions were cold and wet. We wore several pairs of socks and old black rubber boots—galoshes—but our feet got very cold despite this hardy preparation. Our hands and our feet eventually got numb and we would have to go in and dry out. Of course, there was a contest to see who could stand the cold dampness the longest. The one who went in first was the wimp that day.’

‘Well, it’s a good thing we don’t have to prove anything childish like that to each other anymore,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ I echoed. ‘It’s a good thing we have all proved ourselves to ourselves so that we don’t have to waste any more time proving that we are somebody.’

The line of cars, aided by an escort, and by the virtual absence of competing traffic on the inclement day, arrived at the cemetery after a time. We parked on the shoulder of a road that circled the infield where the bodies were buried. We had to find a path from the road across the snow-covered grounds to Lacey’s gravesite. No doubt we stepped on many a head of an interree. There wasn’t any way to avoid it in the snow-cover. I should have worn my earmuffs, and I should have rolled my trousers legs up, but I was too vain. That wind was more biting in the open area than it had been in the church parking lot, and we mostly shivered at the gravesite, hoping the Reverend Stakeley would say his peace and give us quick permission to go. My ears were aching and my feet were cold. Nearby—within two hundred yards of Lacey’s last resting-place—lay at rest my four grandparents, two uncles, a great aunt, and my father. At least I hoped they were at rest. As we stood at attention near the flower covered casket, Barbi Brown put her arm through mine, and I squeezed my elbow towards my ribs a little to signal appreciation.

The Doctor Delbert Dewer, Lacey’s bereaved husband, appeared uninterested, somewhat like a dog trying to nap in the midst of children playing. Lacey had married him less than five years back, and much of their life together had revolved around her illnesses and series of treatments. Probably he was simply worn out with the emotional output required by dying and death. I did not know him at all at that time, but I wanted to say a word of condolence to him. At the cessation of the service, I moved through the crowd towards him, but he moved away quickly and departed the grounds.

After the graveside services, a half dozen of us gathered at Janet Jarrett’s mother’s house. Lacey’s mother, whom I had known for a long time, was there. At a loss for what to say to a mother who has just interred her daughter, I tried to allude to what I hoped Mrs. Woodstock knew were my forty odd years of fondness for her daughter, like that would console anybody. She was gracious enough to ask me to pay a visit ‘in a few weeks,’ and I assured her that I would.

Rick Haley and Red Robb and Bill Boneley came by. Usually whenever these three got in a room together, with or without me, the noise level rose and laughter multiplied. But after a funeral of one of our own, all remained subdued. We all hugged each other a lot, and it dawned on me that the only explanation for this much show of emotion was the realization that Lacey Woodstock was the first of our In-Crowd to die. Or, more precisely, the realization that a trend had started.

‘Would you like to come over for a while?’ Barbi Brown asked, as we pulled away from Janet’s mother’s house.

‘That would be nice,’ I said. She directed me to a pleasant but not ostentatious ranch house in one of the better neighborhoods. On the way, along treeless ways, we passed many houses whose occupants at one time I could identify.

‘Did you know that Lacey died with a lot of money?’ she asked, as soon as we were seated in her sunroom.

‘Yeah, I guess the Doctor did pretty well.’

‘No. Her own money.’

How Barbi knew this I didn’t ask. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘she made good money and was a professional investor. She also spent her whole life making her dates pay all the expenses. I guess she should have saved a lot.’

‘No, I mean a lot of money.’ Barbi emphasized ‘a lot.’

‘Like how much?’

‘Like, Janet didn’t know for sure. But she was as surprised as anyone, and she knew Lacey the best. Janet thought mid-nine figures. Like, maybe fifty million dollars.’

‘Whoa. Fifty million dollars. I knew Lacey pretty well, too. And she made and saved good money. But she could not have made and saved fifty million dollars.’

‘Where do you think she got it?’ Barbi asked.

‘I don’t know. My guess is that Janet is mistaken.’

‘No.’ Barbi was emphatic. ‘Janet had spoken with Lacey’s mother, and Lacey’s mother was certain that Lacey had accumulated many millions.’

This was a pretty interesting trail of information. But I was incredulous that it could be remotely true. I had known Lacey Woodstock well for a long time. She didn’t have many big secrets from me. Or at least I hadn’t thought she had. I didn’t know how else to pursue the subject at that moment, so I turned the conversation in other directions. But I couldn’t wait to talk to Janet Jarrett to see what else she knew.

Barbi Brown and I had never spent a lot of time together, but neither were we strangers. She would have said about me ‘I’ve just always liked him.’ And I the same about her. We talked easily, sitting in the sunroom of her home in the familiar neighborhood. Time sped. The dinner hour approached. As we had more to say to each other and were hungry, we drove up Western to Flip’s, and enjoyed several glasses of red wine and some penne marinara. A few old friends came by our table and shook hands.

After dinner, we neither had to ask whether we would be intimate. It was as natural as wanting a warm bath at the end of a cold day. Death produces longing in the souls of middle-aged adults and a natural healing for these retrospections is found in wrapping arms around each other. Back at Barbi’s house, we blended together like so many colors in a soft flickering flame and slept soundly.

In the morning, Barbi made bacon and eggs. We found, over the breakfast table, that we had more we wanted to talk about, and we spent the next day and night together. We reminisced freely about our junior high days. Barbi had started John Marshall Junior-Senior High School as a seventh grader in 1959 when I did. Her picture was in the seventh grade yearbook. She had moved out of the John Marshall school district at the end of the junior high years and had finished her schooling in a high school system in a distant city. She did not graduate with our class and did not attend the periodic reunions, but we shared a sufficient reservoir of memories.

I described to her a slice of an evening she and I had shared in the summer after ninth grade. We had ended up alone out of doors on the patio of her parent’s home, listening to 45-RPM records on a warm night, and talking awkwardly. At least I was awkward. Barbi was fifteen years old, was very pretty, and carried ample emerging breasts unselfconsciously. I definitely sensed that she liked me. We chatted as pubes-cents did in 1962, moronically. I felt an insistent urge to kiss her lips. I couldn’t think of anything else but of trying to kiss her. I was babbling as one does whose mind is fixed on something other than the words he is uttering. Barbi kept looking at me as if she wished I would kiss her. She might even have had in mind permitting me to touch the breasts that filled her summer top. But I had neither nerve nor style. I was too shy to make any advance, and I am sure I was a disappointment to her. As I was leaving she gave me a present, which I still treasure: one of the records we had been listening to—the original 45-RPM record of ‘Image of A Girl’ by the Safaris. On the label she wrote in her hand ‘To the Stud.’

Charmed by my description on that long ago summer evening, Barbi nonetheless had no recollection whatsoever of it.

She did remember a later time when I had developed some resolve. It was seven years after the junior high evening on the patio, in 1969. It was another warm-winded Oklahoma night. I spent the first half of the evening with the guys in a bar and called Barbi from a pay phone as I was heading home. She accepted my offer to drop by ‘to say hello’; it was 10:30 at night or later. I had not seen her or been with her in seven years.

On that night in 1969, Barbi lived alone with an infant. She was what we now call a single mother. I knew this but did not know the father or whether there had been a marriage. When I had called ‘to say hello,’ she had received me as if we were still on that patio hoping our lips would meet. I knocked on the door, now without trembling, and awaited her swinging it open. She did and the smile on her face was invitational. I do not think I was inside the door more than five minutes, when, feeling a need to explain why, after seven years I had suddenly called at 10:30 at night ‘to say hello’, I said, very lamely: ‘I have always wanted to see your breasts uncovered.’ To which she, not at that time to my surprise, but to me today astonishingly, said, ‘Well, then, you shall.’ And, leading me by the hand into her bedroom, she shed her loose blouse and let me know I could have from her what I wanted. I did, although I finished prematurely.

I was married about a month after that night and Barbi and I did not see each other again until Lacey’s funeral. For a time I knew that she had become a teacher at John Marshall and had my younger brother and sisters in her classes. Then I lost touch with her. Her young child, who slept agreeably while I made love to his mother, was the young man who had needed to borrow his mother’s car on the day of Lacey Woodstock’s funeral. Although many years went by between the first time Barbi Brown and I shared intimacies and the recent weekend, I never doubted that, were we to meet on the street, we would embrace as if no time had passed. And so we did.

I came from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, an unremarkable bit of America most people hadn’t thought much about prior to 9:02 a.m., Wednesday, April 19, 1995, when a dirty little fucking ignorant coward named mcveigh, masquerading as a social theorist, bombed a building and killed 168 people. A million times that number suffered injuries that would never entirely, wholly, and certainly vanish. Barbi Brown and Lacey Woodstock also hailed from Oklahoma City, and Lacey died there.

II

I returned to my hermitage in southern Indiana on Sunday evening, incandescent as a firefly and warbling like an oriole after bounteous hours with Barbi Brown. It was the beginning of nothing probably, but a comforting reminder of change or changelessness. I couldn’t decide which.

I faced few real worries in my business, but many tasks to accomplish, and dived right in that Monday morning as I had trained myself for thirty years to do. I had a staff meeting at 9 A.M., after which I checked and responded to e-mail and voice messages until 10:30. I needed the remaining hour and a half available before lunch to prepare for a difficult meeting at lunch with a demanding prospective client. The luncheon developed about as well as could be expected but, like so often in business, the parties agreed upon no real decision, but adjourned with a consensus to do thus and so next. This non-decisive result was about as consequential to each side as a dry spot in the road.

After lunch, there was a message that Lacey Woodstock’s brother Mickey had telephoned for me. To my recollection, Mickey Woodstock had never in his life tried to reach me. Of course, I knew him well and long, and it was not a complete twister of a surprise that he might want to communicate with me. I phoned him back immediately, even though I had many other commitments that afternoon.

‘Newman,’ he began, ‘I need your help. Lacey needs your help. Lacey told me repeatedly over the years to rely on you if anything ever happened to her. Now it has and I need your help.’

‘I’ll do anything I can,’ I replied without thinking. ‘How can I help?’

‘People are coming out of the woodwork. Three Frenchmen knocked on my mother’s door this morning wanting to discuss Lacey’s business affairs. A man who described himself as attorney for the Dr. Delbert Dewer called to request a meeting. Three or four persons who would not identify themselves called to ask whom Lacey had stipulated as her personal representative. Dane Delback called to get your current address. He asked me to ask you, if I should talk to you, to contact him. He said he