DROP DEAD BEAUTIFUL
By Michael Conniff
Copyright © 2005-2006

All Rights Reserved

Chapter Four
Knight’s Errands
 
“Mr. Bagkidian,” Charles Evans said. “I didn’t know you had a suit. I was under the impression that all the accoutrements of your former life had been cast aside in favor of a fleece vest.”
 
“I kept a few,” I said. “If you’re going to slay dragons –”
 
“Then you’ve got to dress up like a knight.”
 
Charles Evans finished my sentence for me. He did that for people. There was enough room in his office on Fifth Avenue to play singles tennis and enough room overhead for an offensive lob. I looked up and there was a skylight that looked further up into a blue New York sky, the kind the poets call cerulean. The mahogany on the walls was buffed up to a gleam where you could see yourself and the carpet on the floor was plush enough to lose a golf ball in. His mahogany desk was so big Charles Evans looked half his normal size behind it, and Charles Evans was no longer a small man.
 
“I know you don’t need an appointment, Mr. Bagdikian. But I need some kind of explanation.”
 
I just looked at him.
 
“What do you charge?” I said.
 
“Are you in the market for a financial advisor, Mr. Bagdikian? I could recommend someone more in line with your assets.”
 
“Are you worth it?” I said.
 
“Every penny.”
 
“What do you make in a year?”
 
“Much more than I will ever spend in this life.”
 
“Is it worth it? To make what you make? To do what you do?”
 
“I don’t think of it that way,” Charles Evans said.
 
“How do you think of it?”
 
“It’s what I’m trained to do,” he said. “It’s what I actually do. Just as you are actually a lawyer.”
 
“But I’m a lawyer who walked away from it when it became me instead of what I wanted to be.”
 
“You are so very noble,” Mr. Bagdikian. “Have they erected the shrine in Montauk as yet? Have they scattered your ashes across the mighty Atlantic? I forgot to read today’s obituaries in The Times.”
 
“You won’t find her in there,” I said.
 
“I beg your pardon,” Charles Evans said.
 
“She was beautiful. A beautiful creature. I don’t think she had ever hurt anyone in her life. Did you know that about her?”
 
Charles Evans knew how to go blank and he went blank now.
 
“She was 34. Long blonde hair that she always wore loose. A beautiful figure, full of curves. A beautiful soul. A smile bigger than all outdoors. She tended bar at Jimmy’s, where the locals go in Aspen. You would have liked her. Everyone did. Her name was Samantha Albrght. Sam to her friends. But you know that.”
 
Blank.
 
“You’re good,” I said.
 
Blank.
 
“But I’m better.”
 
Blank.
 
“I know you’re just a bag man but you better tell that to the O’Kells. You better warn Diana Campobello.”
 
“Perhaps you should speak to your Sheriff out there,” Charles Evans said.
 
“Sheriff Picatti, is it?”
 
“You son of a bitch,” I said.
 
 
I needed a drink before noon and I knew where to get it. I had never been to Frangello’s, the place Jimmy Burns had opened in Soho for the former Angie Frangello, but I wasn’t surprised to see that Jimmy and Angie had built a brick house with a brick oven that nobody was ever going to be able to blow down. The walls were brick, the floors were brick, everything but the ceilings were brick, but all of it was distressed enough to look as if the place had been there forever. All the waiters, men and women, were dressed in black pants with hard creases and black shirts with black buttons buttoned all the way up to their throats. All the tablecothes and linen and plates and dishes were whiter and brighter than Snowmass on a sunny day. If you lived your life in Frangello’s, you would have thunk everything in the world consisted of black, white, and brick.
 
The new joint in Soho was the place Elvis had built. Up front, behind the cash register, in a glass case with the glass an inch thick, with the whole thing bolted to the wall, there was the best of the best of Jimmy’s Elvis collection: a first edition from his first cut at Sun; one of Lisa Marie’s bronzed baby shoes; splinters from the television Elvis shot with a gun; the guitar he played on the Christmas albums; and the pair of shades the King had worn in his last performance.
 
“That’s all I got, Baggie,” Jimmy Burns said from behind me. “Souvenirs.”
 
I didn’t turn around right away because I wanted to feel everything there was to feel about Jimmy and Angie and Presley’s, Jimmy’s old place by the courthouse out on the Island. Presley’s had been Jimmy’s way of trying to forget what he did to Angie, but when the offer came from the Okinawa Elvises he countered with a number so ridiculous it was off the charts. The Okinawa Elvises did their little Late Elvis bows, pushed the shades back up on their noses, tightened the belts on their too-tight white jumpsuits, and handed him cash in the form of a wire transfer initiated by Nokia cell phone that meant Jimmy and Angie would never ever have to worry again about putting pasta on the table. Jimmy sold them everything from his Elvis collection except the few things that you could see for yourself under the glass at Frangello’s. That made Jimmy and Angie richer than sin times two.
 
“No blue suede shoes?” I said.
 
I turned and Jimmy and I gave each other a bearhug and he slapped me on the back. The hair on Jimmy’s big head had gone longer now and it was slicked way back so that his forehead took over his face. He was in great shape – Pilates, yoga, stretching – because Angie had him believing there really was a New Age. He hadn’t had a drink since the first time he went to see Angie in jail.
 
The kitchen doors swung open but I didn’t recognize Angie until she glided across the brick floor to whisper something into a waiter’s ear that allowed no compromise whatsoever. The black in her hair had been overtaken by the blonde but now the blonde was almost white and extremely spikey. Angie had gone downtown: she was dressed in a tight black short-sleeve sweater, something soft and expensive, and black leather pants that did justice to an outstanding backside. She finished off the whisper to the waiter with her lightbulb smile, the same one she used on everyone, the one that gave rout to every crinkle and line on her face. I waited for her to look up and see me, and as she came closer she tilted her head up to make sure it really was me. She started to clap and jump up and down. You had to love the way Angie shows that she loves you.
 
“Oh Baggie,” she said. “Glory hallelujah! Now we can baptize this place!”
 
She jumped up into my arms and I remembered how microscopic and fragile she could seem. Angie had put in four of a six-to-eight at Sing-Sing because her lawyer had been a very drunk very often Jimmy Burns. Jimmy never forgave himself for it, and he never stopped trying to get her out. When he finally did, Angie was no different that day than every day in the jail: never once blaming or shaming the man she now loved for what he had done to her. The pardon I got her from the Governor of New York was icing on the cake. Angie was no longer a felon. She had the vote.
 
“Jimmy! Can you believe it’s Baggie?”
 
The three of us moved to a big booth at the back of Frangello’s. Angie’s head kept trolling back and forth across the room for signs of trouble. She would miss nothing from where she sat facing the mirror on the wall above our heads.
 
“So to what do we owe this honor?” Jimmy Burns said. “Another book tour? Another appearance on the ‘Today’ show for our favorite author?”
 
I looked at him and then at Angie but I said nothing.
 
“Oh no,” Angie said.
 
“Say it ain’t so,” Jimmy said.
 
“Afraid so,” I said.
 
“Christ Almighty,” Jimmy said. “Why don’t those O’Kell bastards crawl back into the hole they came out of? God invented hell for people like that.”
 
“They’re not all bad,” I said. “Not all of them.”
 
“Just most of them,” Jimmy said.
 
“They’re mutants,” Angie said. “Freaks.”
 
“X Men,” Jimmy said. “Aliens.”
 
“They’re billionaires,” I said. “That means we live in their world and not the other way around.”
 
“Mother of Christ,” Jimmy said because he used to be a card-carrying Catholic.
 
“I’m going to pray they’ll go away,” Angie said because she went to Mass every day and twice on Sunday. “Dear God in Heaven.” She blessed herself and made a steeple out of her fingers and she pressed the top of her fingertips into her lips. “Lord, please make the O’Kells go away. Please banish them to eternal damnation or however You want to put it.” She crossed herself again to finish off the prayer and she looked up. “Goddammit, Baggie. I don’t believe it!”
 
“The O’Kells are the one thing on this earth you can still believe in,” I said.
 
“Like vampires,” Angie said. “They suck everybody’s blood but they never die because they’re worse than dead.”
 
“What’s the skinny?” Jimmy said.
 
“Follow the money. Atomic Tom O’Kell dies and then so does Eleanor O’Kell. The money’s just lying there.”
 
“May the best lawyer win,” Jimmy said. “The one with the best judges in his pocket.”
 
“So?” Angie was looking up again in the mirror. “Why do you care?”
 
“I don’t. Or at least I don’t want to. But there’s a problem.”
 
“I’ve been reading about this,” Jimmy said.
 
“You remember Eleanor O’Kell? The last town along the canal? Upstate?”
 
“I do,” Angie said. “The nuthouse. The one with all the test-tube babies.”
 
“Eleanor O’Kell –”
 
“The nun,” Jimmy said. “At least she used be a nun.”
 
“The billionaire ex-nun,” I said.
 
“She’s the one got rid of all the men in that town along the canal,” Jimmy said. “I remember now.”
 
“The one and only,” I said. “She tried to create a race without men, made up entirely of women.”
 
“I remember too,” Angie said. “Test-tube babies instead of sex. I read it in Ms. She wanted baby girls but what she got was one boy after another. She tried to kill all the boys before they stopped her.”
 
“And when she died,” I said, “she left behind God knows how many kids, none of them with a father, some of them without a mother.”
 
“A billionairess with no will,” Jimmy said.
 
“And no lawyer,” I said.
 
“Here we go,” Jimmy said.
 
“So who better to represent the interests of the little people,” Angie jumped in, “than the man who dumped Atomic Tom in the ocean to drown.”
 
“He killed himself on a red flag day,” I said, “thereby proving there is a God.”
 
“And you want nothing to do with it,” Jimmy said.
 
“Wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole,” Angie said.
 
“Not in a million years,” Jimmy said.
 
“Because you’re too smart for that,” Angie said.
 
“Too busy skiing Ajax,” Jimmy said.
 
“Schussing,” Angie said.
 
“So,” Jimmy said. “Are you in?”“They killed a very good friend of mine in Aspen this week. Somebody who had never hurt anybody in her life.”
 
“Your girlfriend?” Angie drilled me between the eyes: she knew all about Amanda Madison and what should have been.
 
“Oh boy,” Angie said.
 
“Here we go,” Jimmy said.
 
“I’ve got to go,” I said.
 
“Did you tell him?” Angie said to Jimmy.
 
“No,” Jimmy said back. “You?”
 
“I was going to tell him,” Angie said.
 
“What?” I said. “Tell me.”
 
“We’re having a baby,” Angie said.
 
“Oh my God! That’s great! That’s perfect!”I grabbed Angie around the waist, lifted her up off her seat, and left her down just so at arm’s length. She gave a happy little hop when she landed back on the seat.
 
“And you’re not even showing,” I said.
 
Angie looked at Jimmy. Jimmy looked at Angie. Angie and Jimmy looked at me.
 
“I’m not pregnant yet, silly Baggie,” Angie said.
 
“I don’t get it,” I said.
 
“Uh, see, that’s just it, loverboy.” Jimmy lowered his voice a notch and an octave. “The problem. I’m not playing with a full deck, Baggie.”
 
“He doesn’t have any bullets in his gun,” Angie said.
 
“All bark and no bite,” Jimmy said.
 
“No motility,” Angie said.
 
“Motility?” I said. “What the hell is motility?”
 
“You’re on a need-to-know basis,” Jimmy said. “And you don’t need to know.”
 
“Spit it out, Jimmie,” Angie said.
 
“We need your fucking sperm,” Jimmy said. “Like yesterday. I’m not getting any younger. And I want to be able to hit fungos to my kid.”
 
Jimmy had been a minor league infield instructor in the Yankees system before he went straight as a drunk lawyer. Sometimes Boss Steinbrenner let Jimmy come out the Yankee Stadium on an off-day to smack a few to Derek Jeter and A-Rod. Sometimes Jeter and A-Rod returned the favor by coming down to Frangello’s after a game in The Bronx. Jimmy could still whack it and I could see a rack of fungo bats behind the bar just in case time ever permitted and a diamond – or a scofflaw – was at hand.
 
“Boy or girl,” Angie said. “We don’t care.”
 
“You want me?” I said. “Why me?”
 
“Not you.” Angie had a smile that could light up Soho in a brownout. “Just your love juice.”
 
“You’re smart enough,” Jimmy said. “You weren’t a bad athlete.”
 
“Teeth are good.” Angie looked around. “Nice hair. Curly. Skin’s very soft and pretty.”
 
“That’s enough out of you,” Jimmy said to Angie. “I already know how much you like Baggie. Don’t rub it in.”
 
“You don’t have to sleep with me.” Angie twinkled. “This isn’t ‘The Big Chill.’ Unless Jimmy can watch.”
 “We just need your sperm in a jar, asshole,” Jimmy said. “You can keep your dick to yourself.”

“We just need your sperm in a jar, asshole,” Jimmy said. “You can keep your dick to yourself.”