Three Hundred and Fifty Dollars
by Jeffrey Greene
|
Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Mr. Edward Nelby stood on the sidewalk in front of the bar with an air of indecision, looking up at the sign that said “The Miniatures” in feeble neon cursive. He had a rule never to drink before a job, but it was long way on foot, and he was cold and wet from the late-morning rain, so he ducked inside for a quick one.
He stood warily in the doorway, a small-boned man in a dark blue suit and a black fedora pulled low over his eyes. He removed his hat and shook off the water, revealing scanty, web-fine hair and a black eyepatch over his left eye, which imparted a comic-strip rakishness to the thin, hungry face.
His hand passed across his forehead, as if pushing back an imaginary lock of hair, then he crossed the room to the bar and sat one stool down from a handsome, hard-faced woman of forty or so, whose sideways glance at him, because of the eyepatch, was a second longer than cursory.
“Bourbon on the rocks,” Nelby told the bartender. “House brand.” He looked at his drink for a long moment without touching it, then, reminding himself of his destination, raised the glass to his lips and took a medicinal sip.
As one might expect at ten a.m., the bar was almost empty. Besides the woman, who occupied her seat with the relaxed authority of a regular, there were two guys playing pool and sharing a pitcher of beer and an elderly man in an overcoat down the bar, red-eyed and swaying in his seat.
“Lousy out there,” the one-eyed man said to no one in particular.
The woman and the bartender were watching Raintree Defending on TV, the long-running king of daytime trial shows, and didn’t even glance at him.
He took another swallow, a long one this time, as if he’d already forgotten his self-admonition, and muttered, “Lousy day for a funeral.” He finished his drink and ordered another. When the bartender asked him if he wanted to run a tab, he nodded, then said, “Unusual name for a bar, ‘The Miniatures.’ What’s it mean?”
“I don’t know, man,” replied the bartender, making a pushing gesture with both hands. “Just started working here myself.” Even as he spoke, his head was turning back to the TV screen.
“When I saw your sign,” the man went on, “I thought it meant you served your drinks in thimble-sized glasses, but these are nice big drinks.” He toasted the bartender’s generosity before taking a big swig, grimacing slightly as it went down.
“Know what I thought it meant?” the woman next to him said over her bare right shoulder.
“What?” asked the one-eyed man with a big smile that welcomed her into the discussion.
“That this was a ‘little people only’ bar, like that place in Hollywood.” She laughed wheezily, showing strong, smoke-stained teeth, and he joined in with a polite chuckle.
“Ever been to Hollywood?” he asked, looking her over and more or less liking what he saw.
“Just driving through once,” she replied, turning around in her seat and shaking out a cigarette. “Didn’t look like much to me. Give me Vegas or Atlantic City any day.”
“Like to gamble, huh?”
“Turn me loose in a casino town with a thousand bucks, and you better believe I’ll have fun, win or lose,” she declared, with a puff of smoke out of the side of her mouth for emphasis.
“I believe it,” the man said, toasting her manifesto of fun before gulping down the rest of his drink. Pointing to her empty glass, he said, “What are you drinking, Ms.—?”
“Crestline. Mrs. Edith Crestline. Soon to be Ms., but not soon enough for me. And if you’re buying, Mr...?”
“Nelby.”
“Mr. Nelby, let me ask you if you think it’s too early for a martini?” Her expression became penitential as she folded her hands, meekly prepared to accept his judgment.
“Too early?!” The notion seemed to horrify him. “Bartender, a martini of her choice for Mrs. Edith Crestline, and a double bourbon for me. Let’s make it Dickel this time.”
The bartender had been raptly watching Raintree Defending’s star, the flamboyant Seminole defense attorney, Billy Raintree, demolish the prosecution’s star witness. Now he went to work on the drinks, though his face seemed set in stony disapproval of this ten o’clock carousing.
By the time he placed the drinks on the bar, Mr. Nelby had moved to the stool next to Mrs. Crestline, who seemed to applaud his initiative. He proposed a toast to “fun in all its forms,” and they drank, holding each other’s gazes over the rims of their glasses.
“Do you have a first name, Mr. Nelby?”
“Ed.”
“Short for Edward. I like it. And you’ll call me Edith from now on, I hope.”
“Of course I will. Ed and Edith. How ’bout that?” His gaze wandered to the old man down the bar, who was now passed out, his hand still clutching his glass.
He blew out his cheeks and looked away, then turned back to Mrs. Crestline and smiled broadly, as if struggling to recapture the lightness of his mood. “Reason why I asked you about Hollywood a minute ago was, I have been there.” His hand again brushed back a memory of hair. “Did some work there, in fact.”
“Oh yeah?” Her plucked eyebrows rose in an expression of exaggerated interest that threatened to crack the layer of make-up on her forehead. “Well, I thought you were something, with that...” — she started to point at his eyepatch, took hold of her glass instead — “with that look you’ve got. An actor or something.”
“Oh, you mean the eyepatch? Well that’s it, you’ve hit on it, except I’m not an actor — though my job calls for a lot of acting sometimes — I’m a surrogate.”
At her puzzled expression he smiled, and with a theatrical flourish, reached up and whipped off the eyepatch. Taken by surprise, she winced slightly, but it was just an eye revealed under the black silk. Leaning closer, she noticed that, although it seemed to look at her and turned in its socket in time with his real eye, it was made of glass.
“You’re looking at a hundred thousand dollars worth of micro-digital video camera,” he said. “Hideyoshi. The best. It’ll broadcast live and in color — with sound, mind you — anywhere in the world with a wireless hook-up.”
“A TV camera? It isn’t shooting now, is it?” she asked with mild alarm.
“’Course not. But since you don’t know me from Adam” — he refitted the eyepatch — “there. Your privacy guaranteed by Ed Nelby, Surrogate-at-large.”
“I’ll drink to that.” They drank. “Okay, Ed,” she went on, pointing her cigarette at him. “I just made the connection. You’re one of those guys with the ads on TV for shut-ins and retirees: ‘Your Walking Window on the World’ kinda stuff, right?” His smiling nod encouraged her. “They pay you to walk around town, go on a date, or the beach, whatever, and everything you see and hear is broadcast live on their personal channel at home. Guess you do all right, if that thing cost a hundred large. Must have a good union, huh?”
“Tell you a little secret, Edith,” he said. “It didn’t cost me a penny. Hideyoshi designed it especially for me while I was working for them in Japan.” He lowered his voice to a confidential tone. “For corporate espionage. They’d set up jobs for me with rival companies, and I’d go in and scope out the labs, as a quality control inspector or what have you, and my people are getting everything live on TV back at the ranch.
“Trouble was, everybody was doing it. Pretty soon they were checking all new employees for micro-cameras, my cover was blown and Hideyoshi had to let me go. They wanted the camera back, but I said no way and skipped out, left the country.
“Technically, you could say I stole it, but I say possession is nine-tenths of the law, and it was made to fit my eye socket, for Christ’s sake, an exact match of my good eye, right down to the veins in the sclera. So what did they need it for? The bigger they are, the cheaper they are, is my experience with corporations.”
“Weren’t you afraid they’d send out some Ninjas to repossess it?” she asked, with just enough sarcasm to let him know she wasn’t swallowing his story whole.
“Nah. A hundred thousand’s pocket change to them. They just wrote it off. Hey, bartender, we’re dry over here! So anyway, I get off the plane in L.A. with about ten cents in my pocket and a state-of-the-art micro-camera that looks just like a glass eye. What would you do? I hitched a ride to Hollywood and got a job crashing celebrity parties for one of those gossip magazine shows. Made all kinds of money. Then somebody who didn’t like me — long story — tipped off the hostesses on the party circuit and the bouncers all had my picture. So that was it for my spy-on-the-stars career.”
When the drinks came, he tipped his head back and downed a third of his in one go. It was going down like water now, and he knew if he drank any more he wouldn’t make it to the funeral home. Hell, he was drunk already. How could he show up drunk at the funeral of a stranger?
“How’d you lose your eye?” she asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
He looked at her, wincing a smile that hid the shudder of memory. “My best friend’s pellet gun,” he said thickly. “When I was twelve. A lucky accident, as it turned out. You know, I don’t think he ever forgave himself.” His gaze went blank.
“Hey,” he said a moment later, “what time is it?” She told him 10:36. “You know what you are, Mrs. Edith Crestline, besides being damned attractive? You’re a world-class listener.” She smiled and started to respond, but he overrode her. “Which is maybe the rarest quality a person can have. Here we are, a pair of complete strangers — not anymore, though, right? — and you’ve just let me rattle on. And on and on. I drink to you.” He finished his drink, stood up and put on his hat.
“Leaving so soon?” she said. “I was just starting to enjoy the flattery.”
“Gotta go to work. But if you’re still here in a coupla hours...?
“I might be,” she said with a wink. “You never know.”
“Then maybe I’ll catch up with you later. Until then, goodbye and God bless.”
It was still raining when he stepped outside and stood for a moment under the neon sign, squinting sourly up at the sky, noting with dismay his breath in the air and how quickly the raw chill was putting out the liquor’s pleasant fire. He cursed himself for forgetting his umbrella, then began the steep climb up the street, keeping a sharp lookout for a cab, his hat pulled low and his hands shoved down in his pockets. He had a pretty good buzz on, not enough to have him reeling but enough to dampen the recriminations that would come later, when he reminded himself how the “quick one” had mushroomed into four whiskies.
Were the cab drivers on strike? he wondered after five blocks, his good eye searching the street. He heard a tinny voice behind him and turned. Huddled against a building, almost at his feet, as cold, wet, and miserable as himself, was a stray dog, to whose bony back someone had strapped a portable advertising video, one of the cheap plastic models that played a single commercial over and over until it wore out.
A beaming, green-tinted face onscreen held up a day-glo orange bottle and shouted: “One capsule or suppository of Ex-Stinkt Deodorant eliminates embarrassing odors, leaves you feeling clean and confident for up to three full weeks!” Nelby felt sorry for the poor beast. Hoping to cut the contraption off the dog’s back, he took out his pocket knife, but the dog growled warningly and he left it alone.
He thought of Mrs. Crestline and shook his head in amazement. God, how he’d shoveled it at her. He always seemed to home in on the ones who never asked pointed questions for fear you’d ask them some, like how many times have you been married and why are you drinking martinis for breakfast?
But she hadn’t had much chance to ask pointed questions, had she? He’d talked too much again, like he always did. “At least I didn’t lie to her,” he said aloud, and a kid standing under the awning of a delicatessen looked up from his video game and stared at him. Nelby pulled his hat down and walked on. No, he hadn’t lied, not directly, anyway. He told her how he’d drifted into the booming surrogate trade but neglected to mention the precarious position he occupied in the industry. At least for the moment.
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
