Coyote Highway
By
Jerry Kalman
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Jerry Kalman
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FORWARD
"Hate to be the one to tell you this, sir, especially in this kind of a moment for you. It looks like your ..."
"Grandfather."
"Yes, grandfather." The mortician with the sad eyes that were moist with eternal tears of grief wore a dark suit and matching dark tie. He paused and spoke in a slow manner, choosing each word as he went along to make sure every syllable expressed his sorrow. "It looks as though your grandfather was, shall we say, sexually mauled before he died."
The grieving young man in his early thirties with a fashionable three piece suit and expensive shoes returned the solemnity with a shocked expression as he studied the features of the dull faced, hand-wringing mortician, waiting for the older man to continue.
The mortician stayed in his somnolent monotone. "I don't ordinarily do this, but a friend is, uh, a medical examiner, a pathologist with the county, and I asked her to perform a, uh, limited autopsy on your grandfather to make sure there was no foul play."
The young man, James Decatur, silently snapped his fingers, reflecting impatience at the slow way the mortician doled out information. "What do you mean 'sexually mauled'? He was seventy-five years old. How, why does anyone sexually assault someone that age?"
"If it weren't for the abrasions on his penis and several other signs of, uh, stress on that part of his body, we'd have ordered and completed the, uh, cremation by now, on schedule, as you ordered. However, that something I mentioned made us a little cautious. Please forgive me, us. The pathologist, however, was here earlier today, studied the body, found no other signs of trauma and took blood samples. She said that it may take a week or longer to get the results, but at least there is no other sign of malice."
"No sign of malice. What does all that mean?"
"Puncture wounds, being struck with a blunt instrument, ligatures, other signs of trauma."
"I see. So, you thought there might have been something wrong, foul play as they say, and you had the coroner's office investigate. Doesn't that require a hearing or inquest?"
"Only if the preliminary finding shows something, uh, suspicious."
"And a mangled penis alone is or is not reason for an inquest?"
"Not a reason. He could have, uh, done that to himself."
"I see."
After the mortician left for other duties, James eased a cylindrical, polished, stainless steel device from his suit pocket and looked around the spare viewing room of the mortuary. No one else was nearby; nor did he hear anyone in the hallway outside. James approached his grandfather's lifeless body on the gurney and studied his last relative for a moment, noting again the differences and similarities between the two of them.
Muttering, he told the dead man in front of him, "Grandpa, you and I didn't look much alike, mostly because I took after my father's side of the family; but we are a lot alike in other ways. I never found out how much we synced on issues until a couple of months ago, the last time I saw you. At night, after dinner when it was dark, we took one of those long walks you liked to take up the hill behind your place and you talked about whatever came to mind, mostly important things you wanted to talk about, like the stars overhead, the space program, encroachment of housing on raw land. I let you go on because your deep baritone voice was like a symphony to me, resonant, mellow at times, full of energy always.
"I saw you as a god; and now I'm sorry we weren't any closer to each other than we were. It seems, in retrospect, that I feel like I hardly knew Al Garrett, though you always took the lead in our conversations. I know you were circumspect about your love affairs, for obvious reasons, at least to me; not wanting to confuse my image of Grandma with the others that followed her in your life. I understood that, and honored your silence on that part of who you were."
He paused a moment to wipe away a tear, gazing at the patrician features of his grandfather, the still tanned narrow face relaxed in death, the aquiline nose, the nearly wrinkle-free forehead and faint touches of eyebrows, bleached to almost nothing by constant exposure to the sun.
"I don't know what else to say right now. I had a nice little speech in mind to give you here but what the mortician said has thrown me off." A surge of anger coursed through his body as his hands clenched into fists, the right one holding the small discrete device. "I'll look into it, somehow, Grandpa and, if the record needs to be set straight on whatever happened to you, I'll do it. No matter what. If someone did something wrong to you, I'll make them pay."
Then James pulled up the dead man's eyelids, slid the cover off the lens, aimed the unit into each eye, and clicked the activator to take what he hoped was a digital image of the last thing Al Garrett's eyes recorded before death snared him forty hours before.
James took a last look at his dead grandfather, a distinguished looking man even in death. Someone had prepped his grandfather's silver hair. They had left him in the hiking clothes he wore when found and taken to the mortuary, those being a pair of well-pressed khaki pants and a white cotton shirt. It was one of several dress shirts his grandfather often wore to work at JPL and then used in later years for his chores around the house. He noticed that someone had dusted the dead man's shoes for the showing. His grandson also noted that Al Garrett did not have any jewelry on. Since his wife, James' grandmother, died, his grandfather stopped wearing a wedding ring.
He wiped one last tear from his dark brown eyes and walked out of the room, out of the mortuary and into the hot summer afternoon in an exurban part of northeast San Diego County. As his last living relative, he was the one man James did not want to disappoint in life and now he vowed to honor that commitment in death.
An hour later, an attendant moved the body into the crematorium for Al Garrett's last moments as a human corpus. By then, James had navigated his black Porsche SUV over San Diego County freeways to the country home in Eden Falls his grandfather built and lived in for twenty years. The RC-1, with images from his grandfather's right and left eyes, sat on the seat next to James. As the lead investor in the company that developed the RC-1, James had more than a familial interest in what Al Garrett saw in his last seconds.
Reaching the bungalow before the first guests arrived for the memorial service, he grabbed his laptop computer from the grey-carpeted floorboard, carried it into his grandfather's home office, and turned on the computer to verify the working condition of the prototype device in his hand. The handle separated from the base of the RC-1, exposing a USB connector. Inside the RC-1, a high capacity memory chip held the two twelve-megabyte images recorded by a special lens that read visual purple data taken from the rods of the dead man's retina. James transferred both pictures into a folder for review later on without checking the resulting TIFF files. He was concerned that an early guest might catch him with whatever Al Garrett saw in his last moment before the stroke or perhaps something else killed the gentleman.
1. Veronica
The memorial service for my grandfather ended when the guests left around five that afternoon. After the last person was well away from the place, I went into the master bedroom and changed from my suit into shorts and a T-shirt, put on a pair of sandals and filled a glass with white wine from the bottle one of the mourners brought to celebrate Grandpa's life. Without any more of an agenda than letting waves of grief and remorse wash over me, I walked outside and sat down on the edge of the porch to soak up what was left of the warm late afternoon sun.
Leaning against a square hardwood post that held the overhanging eave up, I sipped at the glass of wine; and, after a particularly long swig, took a deep breath to inhale the dry southern California air of July that a breeze pushed in from the fields around me. As usual in Eden Falls, away from the smog and exhaust of automobiles and well past the flowering season, there was very little to smell in the atmosphere. That was one of the things I liked about Grandpa's place, that is, where he lived until a couple of days earlier.
In the absence of anything positive to inhale, I savored the aroma of the wine, glad to smell something other than stale perfume that lingered after a couple of the women left. Despite the sadness I felt at losing him so suddenly, being in that quiet spot and away from others gave me a sense of calm. I used those moments to reflect on my disjointed relationship with him, a relationship marked by long periods of separation though we only lived a couple of hours apart.
During the time of quiet reflection, the pain that comes from grief continued to gnaw at me as I sat on the hard sandstone porch and looked west toward the late afternoon summer sun. Even though he had a couple of bent twig captain's chairs set on the porch, I liked the hard feel of the sandstone on my haunches.
Looking up into the raw underside of the eave that formed the overhang, I noticed a couple of boards appeared to be rotting. Then, I looked across the field of dried out buckwheat that surrounded his forty-acre place toward the backs of fences that separated two sets of tract homes, all with neatly arranged orange roofs made of clay so often used in southern California architecture, from his, probably my property. The sameness of the homes, with their unvarying colors, styles and stucco surfaces amplified the grief I felt from the loss of my grandfather.
To keep from thinking about the hole that grew bigger the more I thought about him passing on so suddenly, I let my mind wander, sometimes to painful topics, other times to fond remembrances. The guilt associated with not being closer to him in those recent years amplified the pain. And. all the while, as I sat there, I asked questions, mostly of myself about the sudden and seemingly questionable circumstances surrounding the way he died. To get my mind onto other things, I also wondered about his lifestyle in the last year when it seemed we were even more apart. That happened more because of me as I let an increasingly busy work schedule keep me away so often.
What was about this place that kept him here for so many years, both as a commuter to JPL in his final days there and then in his retirement? How could a vital man like him just up and go. There was nothing in his history I know of that even remotely looks as if he ever had a heart attack or prior stroke.
He was only in his mid-seventies when he died a couple of days earlier. Regrettably, I had taken it for granted he'd live a lot longer than he did; and guessed for so long that that active gentleman, so fit for his age, would persist like that pink bunny selling batteries on television. It seemed perverse that a hearty guy like him who never smoked and was fastidious about what he ate would go so suddenly while others with more degenerate lifestyles carried on and on into their eighties. Where was the justice in that?
Through it all, while angered over his sudden death and confused by the questionable circumstances of his passing, I kept coming back to my feeling of guilt at not being more actively involved with him since I came out to California five years earlier. It was my looping back and trying to make sense of what happened and, perhaps, get my own kind of closure that made me decide to hang out in his different world.
It was quieter there in Eden Falls, much quieter than my usual haunt on the west side of LA with all its noise, activity and energy. It was also the center of gravity for my consulting and investment practice. Therefore, to give me a chance to soak up his life a little more than I ever did, I decided to stay there in Eden Falls for a week. I picked that timeframe in part to put his affairs in order, less obviously to try to find out what happened to him that morning two days earlier when he died or was killed by someone.
Was someone who knew more than me one of those who attended the memorial service? While everyone was there, I was distracted by being social; however, when the last of the few guests left, I thought about those who attended and wondered who, if any, were with him when he died. Some of those who came by I knew, particularly the small number of former work colleagues of his that came down from Pasadena. Though I'd visited him in Eden Falls countless times, I'd never met any neighbors from the two nearly identical housing tracts below who showed up, nor did that give me any insight into any of the women who lived there had, at one time or another, competed for his attention.
One of those at the service was Cissie Waterman, the woman who notified me of what happened to Grandpa a couple of days ago. She also organized the memorial, which I was glad for. Needing to get back to work, she left the service shortly after she pulled things together that Sunday afternoon.
So, there I sat, thirty minutes after the final guest wandered away, sucking on a glass of wine and letting random thoughts pass through me, trying to avoid the real pain that I felt over losing my last living relative without even a chance to say goodbye. Sadly, the wine did little to make me feel any better about my guilt and the questions that remained after he passed away so suddenly. All the pain did was to remind me I was alive and that I had to deal with the loss of my last relative. As much as I tried to look at his passing philosophically, I felt hollow, disconnected, loose on life, unaffiliated. Orphaned. Al Garrett had done his best to continue his family name, but with one daughter, my Mom, who only had me, a couple of lineages neared extinction. While not the most important thing on my mind, I guessed it was up to me to continue the clan, one way or another.
To change my perspective, I walked down the path toward the housing developments to take in the place from a different angle. A hundred yards away I stopped, turned and studied the way he located his house on the property. The adobe-style home with a buff-colored concrete tile roof faced the developments at the end of the road. The house, sitting in a copse of white barked sycamores that grew naturally in the area, had windows that opened to the east and west but none on either side of the structure. The trees shaded the side with the most exposure to the sun during the hot summer months.
To the right of the house sat a detached oversized two-car garage made of the same color of brick. It contained his Alfa convertible, a workshop and a small tractor, which he used to mow down and keep clear a hundred-foot swath of desiccated vegetation around the home and along the two fences that separated his place from neighbors on three sides of his property. The local fire prevention authority required this of all homes in high-risk fire areas in that part of the county.
Around the sycamores and closer to the house and garage, he kept a wide area clear of low growing vegetation by covering the bare earth with pea-sized rocks that crunched underfoot when someone walked on them. He put the gravel there to keep weeds down, discourage critters from crossing it and alert him when someone approached the house on foot. About ten feet in front of the porch, he had a long hitching post where my Porsche SUV sat. The peeler log stretched across the two posts kept visiting cars from parking too close to the house.
Grandpa's place preceded the two tracts below him by fifteen years. His two-thousand-square-foot home sat about four hundred yards away from the nearest home on either side; and his property stretched back and up half a mile behind the home to a hilltop. The property ended down the other side in a ravine choked with brush that hid the rear of the parcel's boundary markers.
The large hill that occupied the middle third of the forty acres rose up well behind the house, terminating at a ridge with a couple of massive California oaks off to the right that spread their evergreen canopies over a barren swath beneath them. I often wondered why he didn't put the house up there to separate him more from the other homes as well as to take advantage of the grander views. I guess I'll never know that, too.
On my way back up to the house, I returned to thinking about what might have been the last images that lingered on his eyes. Though back in the glove compartment of my SUV, the RC-1 stirred curiosity on several fronts, the first being its reliability; the second, the quality of any scene it captured after death and the third its marketability. Returning to the porch, I sat and took another sip of the wine and stared off toward the more contemporary homes below me.
That was when a chance encounter happened that disrupted my thoughts; but it also provided me with the first clues into the mysteries of Grandpa's lifestyle.
Movement a down the hill along the access road that served his property caught my attention as someone approached the iron gate at the entrance. A tall and slender brunette walked around the triangular barrier I closed earlier. With a confident stride, she approached the house along the short paved portion and then onto the smooth dirt section that led toward Grandpa's place. She stopped a few feet from me, one hand on her hip, the other carrying a small basket. If she wore a red cape, I would have thought her something from a fairy tale.
After a pause to catch her breath, she studied me for a moment. That made me uncomfortable as she made not attempt to hide the fact that she was scanning me from head to toe.
Once she took me in as completely as she intended, she said in a soft voice, "You probably don't know me, though you might have heard about me from conversations with Al. I'm Veronica. Veronica Selene. I live down there." She turned and pointed into the cluster of average-sized middle class single- and two-story homes, all painted the same shade of beige.
That gave me a chance to assess her attractive figure more completely. I liked what I saw.
"Though I know you were here quite a bit, I never got a chance to meet you."
She resumed her appraisal of me, ending with a long stare at my face.
"You're about the same height as Al, though I think he might have shrunk a little in the last few years. I recall from some of his pictures he had brown hair like you do when he was younger. Where he was lean, almost skinny, you're athletic. Work out much?"
I nodded, preferring to let her go on while I reciprocated with my own personal scan of her. Her trim figure, accented by a nice pair of breasts, showed well in silhouette against the late afternoon sun. I kept a puzzled expression on my face, preferring to let her take the introduction wherever she wanted.
"I take it from your reaction that my being so forward with a brazen analysis of your physique makes you uncomfortable. Sorry if that bothers you." She paused, dropping her gaze to her feet before looking back up at me. "Actually, I'm not sorry since I do that all the time; but that's neither here nor there. Al and I are, were, friends. As you can tell, he was quite a bit older than I am. We never dated or anything like that. Friends, only." She approached a little closer. "Platonic to the max. Sometimes hung out together. I couldn't make the service today. Had to work. Just wanted to come by and pay my respects."
I set my glass down and narrowed the distance between us, my hand extended. "With all that history with Grandpa, you probably know that I'm his grandson, James, and I guess the one who's inheriting this place."
She had the relaxed features of someone comfortable in her own skin. A slight flicker of surprise marred her attractive and youthful face. "You guess? Not sure?"
"Reading of the will is in a week or so; but, over the past couple of years he and I occasionally talked about what I was supposed to do when he was gone. And, since I'm the only living relative I know of, it looks as though if what he said as recently as a month ago holds, this," I waved my hand to encompass the house and forty acres of raw land surrounding it, "probably becomes my responsibility. That is, it is mine if there's nothing he added lately to the will that negates his wishes or makes it untenable for me to keep it."
She gave me another one of her full body scans and apparently liked what she saw. "Interesting way to phrase it, James. I'll enjoy having you as a neighbor, then."
Veronica came with a couple of feet of me and I noticed a touch of mirth reflected in her pale blue eyes that must have belied the way she felt about losing a friend. She presented the basket to me and, in the nearness of handing off the basket, she finally changed her demeanor to reflect grief at Grandpa's passing. "If I could have been here earlier, I would have given you this for the service. Breads I bake. It's a hobby. Al loved my cracked wheat sourdough, in particular."
"Thank you, Veronica." I took the basket from her, noticing as I did she wore no make-up, making her clear complexion even more alluring. The absence of artificial colors did nothing to diminish her attractiveness one bit. "Would you like come in and have something to drink? There's beer and white wine left over from the service." I gestured with my hand toward the front door. "They drank all the red."
"Perfect," the moment of sadness vanished as she flashed a smile that showed brilliant white teeth, the pride of some cosmetic dentist. "So, after the formality of the will, do you think you're going to live here, sell it? What do you plan for the place, assuming it does become yours?" She asked as we walked together onto the porch.
"Not sure." Though it was a natural kind of question to ask, I suspected she might have an interest in the home, however, her well-worn jeans, faded chambray shirt and scuffed boots suggested a more modest income than one who could afford the acreage that sat between two different subdivisions in exurban San Diego County. "Because he paid it off years ago and there are only minimal estate taxes to speak of, I have the luxury of taking my time to think about what to do rather than being forced into hasty action to settle a tax obligation."
She broadened her smile and her expression warmed as she spoke. "Nice. That's the way I like things, too. Time to think things through. If you keep it, will you be changing anything here?" She asked once on the random pattern of sandstone slabs that formed the flagstone porch.
I shook my head, my expression a frown, not to indicate a negative reaction but to reflect uncertainty over what I planned to do. "I'm really not sure what I want to do with it, whether to keep the whole thing intact as a retreat or sell some or all of the land off."
We reached the entrance and I held the screen door to invite her inside.
Someone unfamiliar with the arrangement of the house would have spoken hesitantly as she or she entered the living room. Because it looked as though she had been there many times, she walked inside and stood and faced me. "James, it's probably too soon to make that kind of decision, anyway. Where're you from?" She had paused halfway between the living room and kitchen and waited for me to respond, not once taking inventory of the room.
She's been here a lot, I can tell. I wonder how platonic that relationship really was.
"I live and work about two hours drive from here in the LA area." The hinges on the screen door creaked as I let it close. I smelled the fresh clean aroma of soap. As if ignoring my comment, she looked around the living room still littered with paper cups and plates.
"Looks like you could use a little light housekeeping. Mind if I help you clean up while I have some of that wine?"
"No, not all. In fact, I appreciate it. I'll find a clean glass for you. An open bottle's over there in that ice bucket, there's another in the fridge. Why don't you tell me about some of the things you and Grandpa did when you got together? I know that after Grandma died, Grandpa waited a while before going out with other women. My parents told me he got quite active when the housing development went in, though neither of them provided any details. When Mom and Dad died in a car crash a few years back, that sort of detail went with them."
Veronica turned back and studied me for a few moments. "It's interesting that you said all that. I fully understand any hesitation you might have to get into a conversation. Grief does that. If my chatter annoys you, please let me know; meanwhile, I'll accept the burden right now for conversation, at least I will until you either throw me out, tell me to stop or want to change the subject. Don't worry about hurting my feelings. Yours matter more than mine."
"I appreciate your sensitivity, but it's not necessary to apologize. I'm glad for the company." Especially with someone attractive. Is this shaping up as one of those "any port in the storm" moments for me?
"Cool. Then let's straighten Al's place up a little."
"Al's place." I repeated. The term struck a chord and I wondered what reaction I would let show. After a moment and to my surprise, nothing happened. I accepted the term. It didn't seem odd to refer to the place still as his, at least, in conversation.
"Since you're probably dealing with your loss and seem to be on the shy slide, I'll tell you something about me and then you can talk some more about you. That OK?"
After handing her the full glass of wine, I grabbed a large black trash bag, thinking I am anything but shy, but let her think that if she wants. "Sure. Go ahead. I think that'll work fine. Though, I'd also like to hear a little more about how you and Grandpa did things."
"Let's start there and leave the autobiographical crap until later." She took a small sip of wine, looked around the room for a place to set the glass and took a deep breath. "Al and I used to go line-dancing together down at The Stagecoach, a country bar ten miles further out into the valley." She pointed to the east in a vague way.
"He danced at his age?" I tried to imagine an older man slowed by arthritis wearing a cowboy hat, bandana and boots in a line with her and others of Veronica's generation.
"Mid seventies is not that old, besides, line-dancing doesn't tax the bod like the stuff kids do. Anyway, we had an arrangement that if either of us got lucky, we'd split up and leave whichever car we drove there to the solo player. Half the time he drove, the other half I did. It never really happened, though. Therefore, we came and went together, but, truthfully, he had as many opportunities to score as I did. After all, there are a lot women his age out there desperate for a guy like him and, quite frankly, it made me proud to be seen with Al. He was a handsome man right up until he passed away." A sign of sadness crossed her face. "Never knew he had a problem." She looked down at her hands, clutching a stack of soiled paper plates. "He never told me there was anything ..."
"I never knew either, but then he and I weren't very close after my folks died."
"I'm sorry. You mentioned that before and I should have picked up on it. You've had a double whammy then. When'd that happen?" She thrust some paper plates into the open maw of the black plastic bag.
I frowned as I added up the years.
"Never mind, James. You can tell me some other time." She sipped from the glass again, grabbed a few soiled paper napkins from the dining room table where food remained and dumped more debris in the bag.
"Oh, it's not a problem. I needed to count the years since they died. It was ten years ago. Car crash. Victims of a drunk hit and split. Never did find the guy."
"Sure it was a guy and not some toasted woman?"
"Witnesses at the scene verified it was a male."
She stuffed a few more items in the bag.
"What else did you and Grandpa do?" I asked.
She stepped back, put one foot behind the other and turned in time to some imaginary tune, saying over her shoulder: "I suppose you know he had an advanced degree from some fancy school somewhere."
"Doctorate from Cal Tech."
"Yeah. Never hung out his diploma, but he showed the framed parchment to me one day when I asked to see it. Probably felt like it intimidated no-nothings like me as well as some of the others that came around."
I guessed her frown reflected disapproval of those other competitors for his attention.
"That was his way, always modest about his achievements," I said. "He was quite well-known for some of his interplanetary discoveries when he was part of the Voyager effort; he headed the imaging program."
"He told me about the project but never described what he did. Things like that made me feel comfortable around him, you know, so I could kick back when we were together and never feel inferior. In fact, Al went out of his way to dumb things down for me, though I wasn't supposed to know it at the time."
I thought about how I flaunted my MBA from Wharton around some of the women I dated. It embarrassed me. To hide any shame that may have showed on my face, I moved toward the table and studied the remains of a vegetable platter someone brought. I tossed the sauce from the center ring into the bag. Veronica went into the kitchen and retrieved a plastic freezer bag for the remainder of the still edible food.
I thought back over the last time I saw him alive a few weeks back. "You brought up a good point there," I called after her.
"How's that?"
"About his health. I never knew he had a heart condition, much less a rogue blood clot, though people his age eventually do have some sort of a problem, one way or another."
She started her response on the way back from the kitchen, her words preceding her. "They say on the day he died he even did his daily hill climb to take a picture, which he always did at exactly eight every morning, come rain or shine. He came back down to the house and stretched out to wait for his coffee to brew. That was it. I guess Al died sometime before he ever had a cup." She used a long elegant finger to wipe a tear from her eye. "As I understand it, one of the bimbos from the neighborhood who tried to hit on him from time to time came over and found him stretched out, peaceful like, a smile or what was left of it, still on his face." Veronica sniffed a couple of times and pulled out a handkerchief to daub away the tears.
I thought about the comments made by the mortician and then the RC-1 images on my computer and wondered again what or who he saw. "That's pretty much what I heard, though I don't know much about the woman who found him, only that it was a neighbor paying a social call."
"Social call's a nice way to phrase it. That bitch ..."
"Someone said it was Cissie, who I met during the memorial service."
"Yeah, that was her. Lives across the street from me in the tract. Cissie felt threatened by me from the first day I met Al."
I ignored the competitive reference, thinking that I was about to get the first dollop of neighborhood dirt, which I didn't want to hear much less foster unless it gave me any insight into the dynamics of his death. Dynamics. Interesting way to look at perhaps an accidental death. Manslaughter?
"How'd you meet Grandpa?" I hope it's OK to change the subject like this.
"He came into my shop one day and we sort of hit it off; and it grew when we found out how close we lived together."
"What kind of work do you do?"
"Massage therapy. I own the store and personally handle a small number of my favorite customers. Al was one of them." She gathered a bunch of unused plastic forks and spoons and held them out above the bag with a questioning look on her face.
"Dump 'em, please."
She tossed the plastic flatware along with a handful of damp drink napkins into the bag, saying as she did, "You seem like a nice guy. With what you've been through, why don't we finish up and then I'll give you a neck rub. I'm sure you could use it after today. You staying around or heading home this evening?"
"Staying around tonight and for the next week or so to make sure nothing of value gets left for looters, notify some account holders of his passing, that kind of thing, clear up some things that may need closure."
"Good then. A massage it'll be this afternoon when you're ready. What do you think he may have left that anyone other you and a few close friends would be interested in? There's no big honking stereo or home theater system, no stamp or coin collection or expensive art. What would there be?"
Hmm, how does she know what's here? Guess she was close to Grandpa in one way. "I don't know. That's my challenge."
"Well, since we're on the subject, let me show you some of the things I think he valued most, if you don't mind my being intrusive in that way."
"No, that's fine. I'd like that very much. Other than the couple of summers I came out here for a few weeks in between semesters at school a long time back, we never really spent a lot of days at any one time together so I guess I never got to know him the way someone like you did. And some of the time we got together was up at my place, anyway."
"Were you always in the LA area?"
"No. Born and raised in Denver."
"So it wasn't until lately that you moved to California."
"Last five years, well after my parents were killed. He came back to Denver for the funeral and then gave me a few contacts in my field he still had in the LA area. One of them had traction and I eventually got work out here."
"To be near Al?"
I blushed. "Not so much as that but to re-start my career."
"I should have asked earlier. What do you do, James? Seeing that fancy car out there tells me you must be pretty good at whatever it is."
I wanted to tell her I sold insurance to keep the truth buried a little longer because of client confidentiality issues but somehow I found her honest, open demeanor disarming and so I let some of it leak out. "I'm what they call an angel investor."
"You invest in angels? That sounds a little New Age-like to me." Her face showed the innocence behind the question.
I laughed. It felt good. "No, not quite like that. I provide seed capital to new ventures, mainly high tech companies, so the founders can grow their enterprise, and then I bail out, most of the time in a following investment round."
"You did that in Denver, too?"
"Sort of. Many companies there are in the oil patch; but what's going on over here on the coast is a lot more interesting to me, so I repotted myself with Grandpa's help. Most of my clients come from the entertainment or aerospace and defense industries"
"Good for both of you." She paused and studied me in that same appraising way from before, however, I couldn't tell if there also seemed to be a look that signals lecherous intent. It made me uneasy; but also got me thinking a romp in Grandpa's rack with her had appeal. Her tall, lithe body clad in rough and well-worn clothes looked sensuous; and the casual thrust of her hip out to the side while she scanned me put an exclamation point on the possibility of a sexual break from thinking of my loss.
Behave yourself, James. I rubbed my middle finger and thumb together, but stopped short of snapping them. Then I shrugged off any thoughts that might have led to a sexual encounter and resumed cleaning away debris from the memorial service.
Fifteen minutes later, we sealed the last of the garbage bags and tossed them in my SUV.
"OK, cowboy, time for that massage. I can tell by the twisted way you carry yourself it's been a while since you got any kind of an adjustment to settle you down. Is business that stressful?"
I nodded, not sure what to say. As we re-entered the house, the sun finished sliding below the homes in the westernmost tract leaving a warm yellow and orange glow in the sky. I grabbed the remaining open bottle of wine from the cooler and gave it to Veronica who poured herself another glass, taking a long sip, looking over the rim at me as she planned where to work first. She put me on a dining room chair so my chin rested on the top of the ladder back and gave me the most intense massage on my neck I ever had. As Veronica dug deeper and deeper with her thumbs and palms through the soft cotton of my T-shirt, months of tension vanished, leaving me relaxed, close to comatose.
"James, this isn't what I consider the best use of my talent. Do you mind if we try something different? I think you'll enjoy it a lot more. I certainly will."
I wonder what that's leading up to? "Hmm?"
"Al's got a lightly scented massage oil in his bathroom. I used it on him all the time after we went dancing. Would you like me to get some and use it on you?"
"Sure, if it's what you normally do." Good God, I'm unsure where this is going but so far I like it.
She stepped away from the ersatz massage chair, walked with a comfortable stride to the bathroom, and returned with a bottle in her hand. "He liked this particular brand because the scent is 'light and outdoorsy', as he described it. Here, take a whiff and tell me if it's OK with you."
Veronica unscrewed the cap and held the bottle under my nose, moving it back and forth so the first sniff did not overwhelm. It made me think of gin and, when I saw juniper berries and coriander on the label, it confirmed the aroma. Grandpa liked exotic gins, particularly Old Raj, a couple of bottles of which I discovered in his liquor cabinet. They went untouched during the memorial service. While fad drinkers of the day embraced the smooth but tasteless designer vodkas that hit the market, he stayed with that gin as his beverage of choice, one I figured he adopted years ago, perhaps after a business trip somewhere or other. I guessed it was the strong flavor and pronounced yellow tint in the gin that appealed to him.
"I can tell from the look on your face you connected the massage oil with his gin," she said, her voice a silky whisper. "Are you a gin drinker? Al loved it."
I'd bet she's got a great manner in a darkened massage room, her voice matching the smooth, velvety touch of her hands. "No, not really. One of a few areas where Grandpa and I parted ways." My chin resting on the top of the chair made my words sound forced so I lifted my face to complete the thought. "Did you join him when he uncorked the gin?"
"Once in a while, though I prefer white wine. I can stretch out the event longer without losing touch with myself. Sort of my way to sustain sociability, if you know what I mean." She stepped around in front of me, placed her midriff at my nose, reached over my head and shoulders, and dug her fingers deeper into the cords where my neck joined my shoulders. "Does this hurt?"
"Nope. Feels good." My face stayed close to her thighs, and that aroused me.
"You mind taking your T-shirt off so I don't mess it up with the oil?"
"Not at all." I leaned back away from her and the ladder back of the chair and pulled off the shirt. As I tossed the garment onto the couch, she said, "Tell me more about the work you do."
That's not a good idea, lady. Too much confidentiality at risk. "I don't want to ruin the pleasure I'm getting from what you're doing with an autobiographical moment, Veronica."
"Should I stop?" She stepped further away from me, the moment of tantalization over. "Most men like to talk about their work."
I kept my eyes focused on a small table across the room. "You can stop if you'd like, but it's not going to get me talking about work. While it's an important part of my life, I keep that separate from most other things."
She stepped back toward me and resumed probing the loosened muscles extending down my arms. "Not necessary." She slid each hand down toward my lats and used more pressure on her way back up toward the shoulder, her thighs coming closer to my face the deeper down the back her technique moved. "You're different from most that way."
"It disappoints you?"
"No. At least, not yet. Al used to talk about his work." Her thighs pressed against me again.
I spoke to the button on the top of her jeans. "He was retired. What did he talk about?"
"Mostly, astronomy, news of the day and what he'd do if still working for JPL."
"I guess that's another area where Grandpa and I differed. Small talk about work is ..."
"None of my business?" She pressed against the chair, my nose riding over the top button of her jeans.
She has a way of hitting the core of things verbally and digitally. Refreshing in an odd way. "Probably less interesting in my field than astrophysics, especially the way I'm sure he could describe things."
Her weight carried her abs into my face as her probe down along my spine went deeper toward the small of my back. "He had a nice way of explaining things for me, as I said. Like when he discussed Black Holes or other unusual things like that."
If she leans anymore over me, I'll be eyeball and eyeball with her breasts. "Do you think you know enough about that to explain them to me?" My voice was muffled by her blouse.
"You're playing with me now, aren't you James?"
She stepped back and my moment of indecision about raising my face just slightly vanished. Maybe that wasn't fair of me. "No. I'm serious. When it comes to his field, I'm as clueless as most. I'm not a technically oriented person at all." That's not completely true, but it doesn't hurt to soften my slight of a moment ago a little there.
She leaned forward, without any mid-body contact and dug deep into the rotator cuff. I winced. Payback.
"Maybe another time." Veronica tapped me on the shoulder to indicate the free massage ended and then she walked away.
"Thanks," I said, rising from the chair and flexing my sore shoulder muscles, ruing the lost opportunity to give my loneliness free-reign in an intimate way. "I bet you've got a growing clientele with the quality of care you give."
"I do alright. Have a couple of others who share some of the load, a guy and gal for those clients who either want the same sex to work on them or don't." She looked down and reached for my hands. "You're an impatient sort, aren't you?"
"What do you mean?"
"You probably snap your fingers a lot, trying to get people to move at your pace." She studied the backs of my hands for a few more moments before letting loose.
"How do you ..."
"I can just tell. The knuckles on your index fingers are a little large. Early onset of arthritis. You should watch that, as much for your hands in a few years as for your moods now."
If given half a chance, I bet she could reshape my life from the inside out. "Can you tell me more about Grandpa's last days? No one else seemed to have anything to share with me."
Veronica pouted, saying, "Can't get you to talk about you, can I." She moved with grace across the room to the wine bucket, poured the straw-colored fluid into her glass and stared at me. After a couple of sips, she said, "You know, James, I invested a considerable amount of energy in your grandfather and got to know him quite well. Even sort of fell in love with him in a family kind of way. Platonic thing, only. Moreover, here I am face to face with his grandson and only living relative, someone more my speed, if you know what I mean. I'd like to know more about where that old guy's gene pool ended up. Call it a proprietary interest, if you will."
Well, that's disarming.
"Before you start reading too much into that, I want you to know I never slept with Al in the sexual way, though God knows there were many opportunities, especially when we had too much to drink. But, I guess we never found each other sexually attractive, at least while sober." She smiled at an inner thought. "To be sure, I must have pissed off more than one of those old biddies down in the tract who wanted more of him than I should have had." She chuckled as she sat down in a side chair at the table, spread her legs and leaned forward to rest elbows on her upper thighs. "I guessed he was a pretty randy dude when he wanted to be, which is why he was so popular with some neighbors." She looked up into the Santa Fe-style viga log ceiling and licked her lips.
As long as we're talking about him, the spotlight's not on me. "You say he had a relationship going with one or more of the women in your tract?"
"From time to time, I'd bet, with most of the single ones. Though he was always circumspect in that way, I mean, not letting one know about the other."
"How did you ..."
"He confided in me sometimes, but not often, which is how I came to know about some of his activities when we were not together." She leveled her pretty eyes at me and waited a long moment before continuing. "And you ain't going to find out nuthin' about them until you tell me more about James, whatever your name is."
There is some kind of an attraction between us and I feel a little conflict in me growing because I am unsure whether to pursue it more or not. I could end this right now and call her bluff because, ultimately, it's not that important for me to know what she knows about him, though she may have some insight about what's on the RC-1, if it's someone she might recognize. On the other hand, I can play along and see what she thinks I might have a need to know. Then again, playing games with a stranger about family matters is in poor taste. What the hell. Let's see where this goes. "Well, Veronica, you drive a hard bargain." I smiled at her and continued, "I was born ..."
"Don't you go pulling my leg that way. Al could be fun and lively and all that, but when confronted with someone who had a serious intent on, well, her mind, he responded in kind. You're just playing me and I don't like it." She rose from the chair and set the glass down. "Maybe, James, I should just leave and let you wallow in whatever misery you feel. But, if I walk out that door and down the hill, it'll be the last time you get a chance to hear some interesting things about Al."
She's right on one thing, I'm probably wallowing in something but if it's my misery I don't feel it. While her confrontation is on target, should I cave to a stranger? What's that got to do with anything, anyway?
I sat still, pondering the challenge before answering her. "You're right, Veronica, I shouldn't be that way."
"What way, James?"
Now the confrontation started to bother me.
"Well, for the record, I'm not gaming you, though my response was out of keeping with the sincerity I assume you meant that by. In the spirit of honest disclosure, you should know there really isn't much to my life that's interesting. It's not interesting to me, in fact, quite uneventful; and I always assume that it has less relevance to others. That's one reason why I evade talk about it. Because if it bores me, I'm sure I convey that boredom to others. The more practical reason is that my work is often confidential and should be treated as a secret between me and my clients." I narrowed my eyes to reflect that last point was far more serious than the first, and amplified the concept with a terse remark meant to tell her I didn't care what she thought about that, the most important aspect of my silence on some issues. "Does that make sense?"
Apparently satisfied with my rejoinder, she reached for the wine glass, took a small sip and set it down, though she remained standing as she considered my comments. When she responded, the edge had left her voice. "I understand and am about as sad for you as I am for the loss of Al. Why is it so many people base their involvement in life on what they do for a living and not in what they live to do?" She stared at me. "Set that aside, James. I didn't mean to imply you're shallow."
She let the words hang in the silent room as we shared space and time with Grandpa's ghost. Sitting back in the chair she left moments earlier, Veronica leaned forward and studied the way her long fingers wrapped around her wrists.
"Though?" I asked.
"Don't be defensive. I didn't mean, make that I shouldn't have attacked you that way on this day. It wasn't nice. I was merely trying to pull you out of your funk for a few moments." She rose again from the chair. "Maybe I should go, anyway."
Opportunity is about to be lost again, James. You'd never let a client off this easy. "Please don't, at least don't because of either thing here."
"Either thing?"
"Yes. My reticence to talk about me and your sense you wounded me with the comment."
"I did, though, didn't I?"
"Sometimes the truth hurts. At least while I was defending myself or evading the issue, I was not wallowing in my grief as you so aptly put it." I hated myself for repeating the cliché but it seemed like the only thing that fit the situation, and the fire and spunk I saw erupt from her over my comment intrigued me because it added a dimension to her I never saw in any of the women in my life. Perhaps that says something about the chicks I date.
"By the thoughtful look on your face, James, I think I may have hit a raw nerve. Care to talk about it?"
"Well, it really has nothing to do with me in a direct way. It's more, well something about others in my life."
"Like Al?" Her stare drilled a hole in my head.
"No, not even about him." I tried to let a chuckle soften the tension in the room.
Standing, she placed her hands on her hips, palms in rather than fisted against her side, which suggested to me the combative tone had passed, leaving room for the memory of Grandpa to reassert itself and divert our attention from me and my thoughts about the shallow women I hung out with up in the LA area.
"I suspect you're grappling with more than the loss of your last living relative," she said after a long silence.
"Take some ownership. I am now after you pulled a couple of layers of mindlessness back."
"How so?" Her expression gave me the impression she was becoming compassionate.
"You're radically different from most of the women in my life, past and present. Either they didn't care how I felt about things or didn't know how to ask. You're different. Somehow, in just these few minutes since you came up here, you figured out how to get me, maybe others, too, to open up."
"They probably don't care, James." The words came out on a small puff of a breeze.
I stood and walked over to the table near her and poured a glass of wine, using the time to reflect on her assertion. "Possibly, you're right. Maybe that's an indication of how little I mean to them and how little they must mean to me." I stayed at the table, feeling her presence only a couple of feet from me. It was like it was a few minutes earlier when I was nose to thigh with her. The tension in the room increased with the silence, and I counted on her to do something to break it. Time never moved as slow as it did while each of us waited for the other to make a comment.
When I could no longer handle the weight of neither speaking, I closed my eyes and shrugged, expecting to hear some sound of acceptance and then, when I looked up, to see her movement toward the door. When she inhaled, I figured that to be her final comment. "I bet you're one tough customer in your world. Tell me, James, are you a good poker player?"
That tack surprised me, but the meaning behind the words didn't. With lowered head to indicate a humbler attitude and to avoid eye contact at first, I swiveled to face her. "Sorry, Veronica. Apparently, this is going to come as a surprise to you, but I'm not into card games, rarely gamble even in football office pools and certainly don't pose or posture with clients or my other contacts. It's too damn hard to remember that kind of nuanced behavior, so I play it straight with all those people as well as anyone else in my personal life."
With a soft sympathetic tone to her voice, she said, "And this may come as a surprise, but I believe you. I honestly don't think you've got a manipulative bone in your body, though you may work in a world where it is common. I get the sense, James, you are indeed a straight arrow, though as I've said before, not very much in touch with yourself. And for that I don't feel angry or irritated like I may have seemed a few moments ago. I sort of feel sorry for you."