who were shaking paws with her husband. Seeing her laugh reawakened every terrible pang of losing her. It brought back that night sitting in the Buick when the idea of being married was something I didn’t have to promise. To hear that laugh every day; I would have sold my soul for that. So you can see why I didn’t go across to say hello to them. I didn’t want to be shoulder to shoulder with those jerks when talking with her. It was better to see her from a distance and shuffle through my memories.
‘Hello, Mickey. I thought you might be here,’ chirruped the kind of British accent that sounds like running your fingernails across a blackboard. I turned to see a little British lawyer named Victor Crichton. He was about forty, with the cultivated look that comes with having a company that picks up the tab for everything. His suit was perfect, his face was tanned, and his hair wavy and long enough to hide the tops of his ears.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ I said, in my usual suave and sophisticated way. Vic Crichton’s boss was Sir Jeremy Westbridge, the client who was giving me ulcers. His affairs were in such desperate disarray that I could hardly bear to open my mail in the morning.
‘Did I make you jump, old chap? Awfully sorry.’ He’d caught me off guard; I suppose I looked startled. He gave a big smile and then reached out for the arm of the woman at his side. ‘This is Dorothy, the light of my life, the woman who holds the keys to my confidential files.’ He hiccuped softly. ‘Figuratively speaking.’
I said, ‘That’s okay, Victor. Hi there, Dorothy. I was just thinking.’
‘Wow! Don’t let me interrupt anything like that!’ He winked at the woman he was with and said, ‘Mickey is Sir Jeremy’s attorney on the West Coast.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said. His wife was British too.
‘It sounds good the way you say it, Vic. But we’ve got to talk.’ I was hoping to make him realize the danger he was in. It wasn’t just a matter of business acumen, they were going to be facing charges of fraud and God knows what else.
‘He’s really an Irish stand-up comic,’ Vic explained to the woman, ‘but you have to set a comic to catch a comic in this part of the world. Right, Mickey?’
‘I’ve got to talk to you, Vic,’ I said quietly. ‘Is Sir Jeremy here? We’ve got to do something urgently.’
He made no response to this warning. ‘Always together. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Lennon and McCartney, Vic Crichton and Sir Jeremy. Partners.’
‘They all broke up,’ I said.
‘I wondered if you’d spot that,’ said Vic. ‘Split up or dead. But not us; not yet, anyway. Look for yourself.’
He waved a hand in the direction of the bar, where I spotted the lean and hungry-looking Sir Jeremy. He was a noticeable figure: very tall, well over six feet, with white hair and a pinched face. He was engaged in earnest conversation with a famous local character called the Reverend Dr Rainbow Stojil, a high-profile do-gooder for vagrants who liked to be seen on TV and at parties like this. I guessed that Stojil was trying to get a donation from him. Stojil was famous for his money-raising activities.
‘Don’t interrupt them,’ advised Vic.
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘We’ve got to have a meeting.’ Vic didn’t reply. He was drunk. I wasn’t really expecting a sensible answer.
Vic and his master were well matched. They were as crooked as you can get without ski masks and sawed-off shotguns. They called themselves property developers. Their cemeteries became golf courses; their golf courses became leisure centers, and leisure centers became shopping malls and offices. They had moved slowly and legally at first but success seemed to affect their brains, because lately they just didn’t care what laws they broke as long as the cash came rolling in.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘The game’s up with all this shit. I know for a fact that an investigation has begun. It’s just a matter of time before Sir Jeremy is arrested. I can’t hold them off forever.’
‘How long can you hold them off, old boy?’
He wasn’t taking me seriously. ‘I don’t know, not long. One, two, three weeks … it’s difficult to say.’
He prodded me in the chest. ‘Make it three weeks, old buddy.’ He laughed.
‘Look, Vic, either we sit down and talk and make a plan that I can offer to them—’
‘Or what?’ he said threateningly.
I took a deep breath. ‘Or you can get yourselves a new lawyer.’
He blinked. ‘Now, now, Mickey. Calm down.’
‘I mean it. You find yourself a new boy. Some guy who likes fighting the feds and the whole slew of people you’ve crossed. A trial lawyer.’
‘If that’s the way you feel, old boy,’ he said and touched me on the shoulder in that confident way that trainers pat a rottweiler.
Maybe he thought I was going to retract, but he was wrong. With that decision made, I already felt a lot better. ‘I’ll get all the papers and everything together. You tell me who to pass it to. How long are you staying in town?’
‘Not long.’ He held up his champagne and inspected it as if for the Food and Drug Administration. ‘We’ve come to hold hands with Petrovitch about a joint company we’re forming in Peru. Then I’m off for a dodgy little argument with some bankers in Nassau and back to London for Friday. Around the world in eight hotel beds: it’s all go, isn’t it, Dot?’
‘What about Sir Jeremy?’
‘Good question, old man. Let’s just say he has a date with Destiny. He’s modeling extra-large shrouds for Old Nick.’ He held out a hand to the wall to steady himself. Any minute now he was going to fall over.
‘What do you mean?’ I said, watching his attempt to regain equilibrium.
‘Don’t overdo it, old sport.’ He put his arm around my shoulder and leaned his head close to whisper. ‘You don’t have to play the innocent with me. I’m the next one to go.’
‘Go where?’
‘You are the one arranging it, aren’t you?’ His amiable mood was changing to irritation, as is the way with drunks when they become incoherent. ‘You buggers are being paid to fix it.’ He closed his eyes as if concentrating his thoughts. His lips moved but the promised words never came.
‘I think we’re boring your wife, Victor,’ I said, in response to the flamboyant way she was patting her open mouth with her little white hand.
‘Victor always gets drunk,’ she said philosophically. She didn’t look so sober herself. She’d drained her champagne and experimentally pushed the empty glass into a palm tree and left it balanced miraculously between the fronds.
Victor didn’t deny his condition. ‘Banjaxed, bombed, bug-eyed, and bingoed,’ he said without slurring his words. ‘Wonderful town, lavish hospitality, and vintage champagne. Very rare nowadays …’ He drawled to a stop like a clockwork toy that needed rewinding.
‘Better if you don’t drive,’ I advised him. At least he didn’t call it Tinseltown, the way some of them
