style="font-size:15px;"> Miss Spotea’s head popped back into the office. “Satan has ears, Miss Gomez.”
“No shit!”
Outside, Sydney watched the last orange daubs of sunset fade from the sky. He raised his arm and made a pumping motion, the military, form-on-me, signal.
Miss Spotea, who was waiting for just such a signal, reacted like a good soldier. She gathered a stack of correspondence, a fleece lined aviator’s jacket and a thermos of coffee. As she left the building she flipped a switch and the lamps in the gardens lit the dusk like a flock of iridescent fireflies.
After she delivered the correspondence and coffee to a table beside Sydney’s chair, she hesitated instead of going back into the building.
Sydney looked up at her wearily. “What is it now, Miss Spotea?”
She clenched her teeth and girded her loins, or whatever it is the self-righteous do before they screw up a perfectly good day. She blurted out a complaint made many times over the past few years.
“Miss Gomez cursed me. She used the language of the devil.”
“Make up your mind, Miss Spotea. Did she curse you, or swear in your presence?”
“It doesn’t matter; she has the mouth of Satan.”
“You are wrong, Miss Spotea. It does matter. One would be an indication of malice and poor judgment. That’s against my rules; the other is a personal preference for expression, not against my rules. We’ve had this talk before. Do me a favor, drop it. It bores me, especially as it is a subject on which I have already set policy.”
Miss Spotea swelled, saw Sydney’s expression and deflated like a pricked balloon. Her rubbery lips popped incomprehensible protest. She stomped back up the flagstone path to her office.
“Silly damned woman,” Sydney muttered.
He poured a large cup of coffee, took a manila envelope from the top of the pile and looked it over. The return address said: J.K.Heely, State Women’s Prison, Chowchilla, California.
“Hello, hello, what’s this? Another, I didn’t do it! Nice handwriting. Don’t see this sort of thing anymore.”
He opened the letter with a pocket knife and pulled out a dozen pages in the same handwriting, single spaced, both sides. An hour later, half of the coffee gone, Sydney stopped to put his jacket on.
“I love a surprise, ninety million dollars!”
“Lady, you’re bright, logical, and you’re in a world of trouble!” Sydney sat back and locked his fingers behind his head. “If you’re telling the truth, how come you’re not six feet under? Might as well be. Prison! Worse than dead. Didn’t whine though, not once. Good for you, girl. Guilty or innocent, you’ve got me interested.”
He got up, stretched, bending backward in a bow. He’d been sitting so long muscles and vertebrae made audible pops.
“This one has possibilities.”
Chapter 5
Sydney looked out the dormer window at the garden, shimmering softly as a Japanese water-color through the sheets of rain.
“May fourth,” he noted the date on a well thumbed Gary Larson desk calendar. “I guess this is what the weather dorks call unseasonable. Miss Spote...”
She appeared at the door miraculously: Radar O’Reilly reincarnated as Attila the Hun.
“Mr. Lee?”
“Miss Spotea, ask Koban to bring the Rolls around front.”
“Yes, sir.” Her voice reeked disapproval.
“What’s the problem, Miss Spotea, does Jesus also disapprove of my Rolls Royce, or is it just me?”
“Egregious displays of wealth are an offense in the eyes of the Lord.”
“Hmmm, and what is God’s choice this year? A Ford? A Chevrolet? A Volvo? No, something more functional I suppose.”
Her bloodless lips drooped at the corners. “It is not patriotic to mock American products.”
“Right! Obviously God doesn’t think much of Volvos. I’m not sure I understand, Miss Spotea. Has God chosen you as arbiter of good taste in automobiles, along with everything else?”
“The Grace of God is alike unto patriotism.”
Sydney grunted. Stupidity and dogma affected him like a straight right to the gut. He felt a strange numbness creep over him as he tried to follow the tortured maze of her logic.
“Ask a foolish question,” he muttered, “proving once again you get what you ask for.”
Sydney Lee had long since concluded that as a rule he did not welcome the conversation of bigots, and trying to talk to Miss Spotea hadn’t done anything to change his mind.
“Ask Koban to bring the Rolls, Miss Spotea, without the drama or disapproval if you please.” Sydney put more snap into the second request.
She left the office abruptly, but not without the⎯see how wrong you are, and right I am⎯long-suffering sigh of the unfulfilled martyr.
Sydney Lee didn’t drive. He knew how, but if anyone asked, he said he didn’t. He had loved Rolls Royce automobiles since boyhood, especially if someone else drove. As soon as he could afford a driver, he bought an old gun-metal gray Rolls Royce Phaeton as big as a mobile home; some would say the steering wheel was on the wrong side.
Koban Mitsunaga, Lepidopterist and gardener, liked driving the Rolls almost as much as Sydney liked being driven.
Koban was Sydney’s expert on gardens, butterflies, insects, birds. A couple years before, Sydney hired him to write a report for a lazy Professor of Botany at UCLA. Doing research and writing reports was a staple of Mysteries Unlimited Ltd., the business establishment of which he was CEO, President and owner. There is an over abundance of lazy professors in the California university system.
“Tenure encourages sloth, stupidity and undeserved arrogance. Write that a thousand times on the board, please,” Sydney murmured.
In the two weeks during which Mitsunaga was supposed to write the report he pestered Sydney constantly about the gardens.
Koban was bad tempered and opinionated. He watched the Mexican gardeners constantly. Every time they stopped working, he screamed curses in Japanese, and to get his point across, beat the ground with a large ebony walking stick. They smiled cheerfully and in Spanish, suggested he perform anatomically and athletically impossible acts with a variety of farm animals.
When they came the next day, Koban ran them off and went to work on the gardens himself. He finished the report in an evening, and then hollered at Sydney in atrocious English.
“I am butterfry person,” he shouted. “You tlap me into Amellican steleotype. You sink all Japanese are gardeners.”
Sydney
