Maybe it wasn’t sorrow, but it surely sounded like sorrow. It was the way Curtis himself sounded all too often on the phone these days, as he tried to get his head back in the game.
“Johnson…Curtis,” Grunwald said in his plodding voice. His recorded voice paused
longer, as if debating the use of Curtis’s given name, then moved on in the same dead
and lightless way. “I can’t fight a war on two fronts. Let’s end this. I’ve lost my taste for it. If I ever had a taste for it. I’m in a very tight place, neighbor.”
He sighed.
“I’m prepared to give up the lot, and for no financial consideration. I’ll also
compensate you for your…for Betsy. If you’re interested, you can find me at Durkin
Grove Village. I’ll be there most of the day.” A long pause. “I go out there a lot now.
In a way I still can’t believe the financing fell apart, and in a way I’m not surprised at all.” Another long pause. “Maybe you know what I mean.”
Curtis thought he did. He seemed to have lost his nose for the market. More to the
point, he didn’t seem to care. He caught himself feeling something suspiciously like
sympathy for The Motherfucker. That plodding voice.
“We used to be friends,” Grunwald went on. “Do you remember that? I do. I don’t
think we can be friends again—things went too far for that, I guess—but maybe we
could be neighbors again. Neighbor.” Another of those pauses. “If I don’t see you out
at Grunwald’s Folly, I’ll just instruct my lawyer to settle. On your terms. But…”
Silence, except for the sound of The Motherfucker breathing. Curtis waited. He was
sitting at the kitchen table now. He didn’t know what he felt. In a little while he might, but for the time being, no.
“But I’d like to shake your hand and tell you I’m sorry about your damn dog.” There
was a choked sound that might have been—incredible!—the sound of a sob, and then
a click, followed by the phone-robot telling him there were no more messages.
Curtis sat where he was for a moment longer, in a bright bar of Florida sun that the air conditioner couldn’t quite cool out, not even at this hour. Then he went into his study.
The market was open; on his computer screen, the numbers had begun their endless
crawl. He realized they meant nothing to him. He left it running but wrote a brief note for Mrs. Wilson— Had to go out—before leaving the house.
There was a motor scooter parked in the garage beside his BMW, and on the spur of
the moment he decided to take it. He would have to nip across the main highway on
the other side of the bridge, but it wouldn’t be the first time.
He felt a pang of hurt and grief as he took the scooter’s key from the peg and the other attachment on the ring jingled. He supposed that feeling would pass in time, but now
it was almost welcome. Almost like welcoming a friend.
The troubles between Curtis and Tim Grunwald had started with Ricky Vinton, who
had once been old and rich and then progressed to old and senile. Before progressing to dead, he’d sold his undeveloped lot at the end of Turtle Island to Curtis Johnson for one-point-five million dollars, taking Curtis’s personal check for a hundred and fifty thousand as earnest money and in return writing Curtis a bill of sale on the back of an advertising circular.
Curtis felt a little like a hound for taking advantage of the old fellow, but it wasn’t as if Vinton—owner of Vinton Wire and Cable—was going away to starve. And while a
million-five might be considered ridiculously low for such a prime piece of Gulfside
real estate, it wasn’t insanely low, given current market conditions.
Well…yes it was, but he and the old man had liked one another, and Curtis was one
of those who believed all was fair in love and war, and that business was a subsidiary of the latter. The man’s housekeeper—the same Mrs. Wilson who kept house for