Dead Money by Grant McCrea Page B

the homoerotic choice of phrase.
    Good job, said Warwick. This could be the start of great things for you.
    I forced a smile.
    Thanks, I said. I’ll stay on it.
    Excellent, he said. We’ll have that morale problem licked in no time.
    I gave that one a pass.
    On the way out, I gave Cherise a wink. I figured I owed her one.
    To the uninitiated, that brief conversation might not have seemed so bad. But in reality it was fraught with import. Venom. Spleen. Fear.
    Morale, shit. The only morale Warwick gave two shits about was his own. And his morale was fed by power, nothing else. The right to squash, humiliate and defile with boundless guile and glee.
    I don’t know, maybe he had a good side. I just hadn’t seen it for a while.
    What made it worse, we’d come up in the business together. Worked side by side in the trenches. Reviewed documents in dingy conference rooms for days on end, until we fairly bled to death from paper cuts. Drank at the same bars. Chased the same women in those same bars. We’d actually had some fun together, back then.
    It was hard to imagine now.
    I called Dorita.
    It was too late to crow about my morning triumph over the moss-eared man. But at least I had Warwick to bitch about.
    Dorita wasn’t in her office.
    That only left one thing.

29.
    SHEILA SPECIALIZED IN ADDICTION . Junkies, drunks, cokeheads, aspirin freaks, whatever. She got a lot of cancellations.
    I called her up. Her three o’clock had OD’d, so she had a slot for me. I decided to walk over. It was a nice day.
    Her office was in an upscale building in the east seventies, otherwise residential. You’d never have known the office was there. I supposed most of the residents didn’t. I was quite sure that the lunching ladies with Pekingese I passed on my way into the building would have been quite scandalized to know that back behind their very own marble-floored palm-plastered lobby, eight hours a day, fifty-five minutes at a time, sat, weeping, whining and rationalizing, scores of the city’s most hopeless slaves to substance.
    The doormen, on the other hand, certainly knew. They knew everything. And being even more snobbish than their tenants, though also professionally discreet, they never failed to give me a tiny nod and a subtle sneer. Which I invariably returned.
    I didn’t have to wait. The door was open. Sheila was in her recliner. I always called her Sheila. I liked the name. It reminded me of old Jack Lemmon movies. I knew she didn’t approve, though she never said so. But whenever she left me a voice mail she never said, ‘It’s Sheila’; she always said, ‘It’s Dr. Schwartz.’ And I would always make it a point to begin my return voice mail with, ‘Hi Sheila, got your message.’
    That was the extent of my rebellion, though. We actually had a very good relationship.
    I hoped so, for two hundred bucks an hour.
    We talked about Warwick. She nodded sympathetically. She said the right things. What a terrible man, she said.
    She made me feel better.
    We got down to work.
    You were telling me about your father, last time, she said.
    Yes, of course, I said. Father, Warwick. Not subtle. But possibly effective. Yes, I was twelve.
    When he died, I meant. He was thirty-seven. Keeled right over. Face in the lasagna. I wasn’t there. I heard about it later. Aneurism, they said. I envisioned a dark-clawed beast, stalking the unwary in the night. The dreaded Aneurism. The reality was simpler, more insidious. A vessel burst, the bleeding uncontrolled. Invisible.
    After that, only women. Mother, sister, wife, daughter. I’d never had a son. I didn’t have a brother, either, anymore. My brother died. But don’t feel sorry for me. I barely remembered him. I was four. He was three. He’d had a fever. They took him away. He never came back. It was really only from stories I was told that I remembered him at all. It was years after the fact that I began to miss him. To regret.
    Twelve years should be enough, I said, to have