much money you make in butterflies?” He almost said butterfries.
“You sink I do this for money?”
“I don’t know. Answer the question.”
Koban grunted something in Japanese, and then looked at Sydney slyly. “Not much.”
“I didn’t think so. Okay, here’s the deal. I pay you two thousand a month and bonuses. You can be my resident flower and insect man, write papers, do research, whatever. The rest of the time you’re the gardener. I’ll even throw in a place to live if you don’t give me a lot of shit.”
“What is, give shit?”
“Trouble.”
“Hah! I don’t give shit. I am Zen Master, always selene.”
“Selene like a moon beam. Sure you are. What’s your answer?”
“I will take job, but don’t try to exproit me, I know Bill of Lights.”
“Pardon me? Look, just go mow the lawn or something. Try being inscrutable. Say Richard writes Roger Rabbit rapidly over and over.”
It was fine. Sydney ignored his tantrums when people, mostly himself, dropped cigar wrappers in the garden, and when he needed someone to drive the Rolls, Koban volunteered.
Life, Sydney thought with satisfaction, is filled with the unexpected.
He waited on the steps while Koban put their overnight bags and a large picnic basket in the boot. Koban insisted on calling it the tlunk. Sydney couldn’t even say the word.
“Koban, I hate to say this old pal, but you are giving ethnicity a bad name.”
Sydney’s daughter, Charlie Lee, joined him on the steps.
“Don’t do anything silly at that prison, Daddy. They might not let you go.”
“Might not be so bad. A couple years in jail with a thousand sex-starved women.”
“I estimate three hundred and fifty five, Daddy. The rest don’t like men very much, and probably have more body hair than you do.”
Sydney laughed. “You’ve ruined a perfectly workable fantasy, Charlie Lee.”
As the Rolls glided down Franklin Avenue to the Hollywood Freeway, he thought about Charlie Lee and smiled.
“The Gods give and the Gods take away.”
On the drive north to the Mojave he put his attention on the new project. Before he decided to interview the erudite Miss Heely, he made a few discreet inquiries, called in a few favors.
“It doesn’t make sense, Koban.” He thumbed through a growing file. “She was in excellent financial shape before the ‘May Day Massacre’. That’s what the newspapers called the theft.”
Koban sucked his breath in, and hissed.
“Hisssss, So ka.”
“Ninety million, Jesus! How in hell do you steal that much?”
“Carefully.” Koban said with perfect diction.
Sydney looked up at Koban who didn’t change expression.
“Cute, you’re probably not even Japanese. Matter of fact I’ve noticed a certain Korean caste to your face.”
Koban grunted enigmatically and did not rise to the bait.
Sydney went back to the file. “She had a good securities portfolio, stock in the bank and more every year; salary seventy-seven thousand, bound to go higher. It’s crazy. She made it in a profession where she’d have to be twice as bright as every man who wanted her job. Articulate, outspoken and obviously competent; definitely on the fast track.”
He thumbed through his notes and pulled out Miss Heely’s vital statistics.
“Zippedy do dah, Zippedy hey....mmmm, thirty two, never married, I wonder why?”
Attached to the page were several pictures: one from a book dust-cover, another from a newspaper Sunday supplement, titled: Executive Women on the Rise.
“Dresses like a woman; nice figure.”
He continued to sort through the data. There was another picture taken at the trial. She looked puzzled; the wounded puppy look.
“Well, Jean, it looks like you got your first taste of the real and sometimes ugly world.”
Because it was a first offense, the Judge sent her to a minimum security facility in the mountains west of the Mojave Desert.
It hadn’t been easy to arrange the interview. The Warden blathered like a man with a secret. He said Miss Heely couldn’t receive any visitors.
Why so nervous, Sydney wondered?
When Sydney suggested that the newspapers might be interested in how an ordinary prisoner wasn’t allowed visitors, the Warden backed off in a hurry: Peculiar.
The entrance to the prison was in a bone dry canyon that could have passed for a western movie set. After going through three layers of ten foot fences, he filled out forms and answered rude questions from a female warder with bad breath and worse teeth, which she sucked constantly, creating truly disgusting noises.
After that he was finally ushered into a small outdoor area with cement benches and picnic tables covered with brightly colored Cinzano awnings. Several prisoners were there with family, and men friends.
Two butch guards banged long oak sticks on a nearby fence and screamed every time some desperate husband or boyfriend tried to touch that which human frailty and the law had put beyond reach.
The guards at the gate went over Sydney and his hamper like an airport security team. While he waited for Miss Heely, he laid out a checkered table cloth, two sets of silver, two crystal goblets, and linen napery. Next came cheeses, a selection of fruit, fresh French bread, creamery butter, and an assortment of finely sliced meats.
Lastly he produced a bottle labeled Dom Perignon ‘75’. It didn’t contain champagne. Apple juice was as close as he could get to champagne.
Two guards escorted Miss Heely across the yard. At first he didn’t recognize her. Her hair was cut short and she wore a shapeless cotton dress in faded institution blue. In the book jacket picture she appeared to be carrying ten pounds extra. Since then she’d lost fifteen.
Her expression was closed, wary. Sydney stood and indicated the bench across from him. The two guards moved in and stationed themselves menacingly on either side of her.
“You can leave.” Sydney waited, but they didn’t move.
“Fine.” He walked over to the nearest one with notepad in hand. The guard had a name plate and a numbered badge like a policeman. Sydney wrote the number and name down carefully. Then he looked at his watch and noted the time.
Sydney
