Chapter 2
#1: Valerie: The investment begins
The door opened and the woman stood there. She had long flowing, shining brown hair and a filled out, hourglass figure that tried to hide behind the sweat shirt and pants but could not. She held out a package.
"I believe this is yours." She said, jerking it a bit towards me. Her head was back and her eyes were half closed. She reminded me a bit of Ingrid then except she had much darker skin and the smooth hair of the Mediterranean. Oh, and much, much larger breasts!
I did not open the door all the way. "Why?" I asked, narrowing my eyes.
She pulled it back and squinted at it. She was maybe thirty-five, perhaps a couple years more or less either way. "Are you Joshua Gale? You are, right? The address is 10 Holdingsfield Place. That is this house, right? That would be you but the messenger brought it to me." She shrugged. The sweat shirt undulated. No bra. I wondered what that meant. Whether she knew it or not, I knew what that meant. She thought it meant contempt and I thought it meant invitation. It was a contest to see who was right. I invited her in and opened the package, clumsily so that the cash inside spilled out onto the floor. I hurriedly picked it up and dumped it on the table, grabbing a plastic bag and shoving the fifty thousand dollars in cash into the sack. When I looked back at her, she was studying me, rather like a snake studies dinner. This visit suddenly was more than an expression of contempt, it was now 'game on'.
I had succeeded in purchasing Sharon's residence in Holdingsfield. It had taken several months, buying in first through an intermediary, a bank we owned which could buy the mortgage. The Holdingsfield LLC was actively trying to sell the resident mortgages and Livingston was actively buying them through various fronts and associates who were then selling then to my alter ego, Joshua Gale. I needed a way to travel without the name and prestige Alan Livingston carried with it and had often used Joshua as a way to escape the Livingston bubble as Sharon referred to it. Though I disagreed with her youthful reaction to it, I did not dispute the accuracy of her observation.
I had been in the house two nights when the woman came knocking. The misdelivery was easy to arrange. After staring at the cash, the woman sauntered away from my door but not without a single backwards glance over her shoulder.
The next night, her husband, Ted or Theodore as he insisted, was knocking on my door offering to help me with investment, though he brought a bottle of gin and claimed to be 'welcoming a new neighbor'. Before the night was over and before the gin was gone, we were buddies and I agreed to come to the office the next day to discuss investment opportunities. I arranged to have my agent arrive with the final notice of foreclosure on his house just ahead of me. Crowley was a tall stately man with wispy hair who resembled Kaiser Soze's chauffer. He was very good at his job and when he left, Theodore was pale as a sheet. I waited in the foyer and watched the jittery exchange of pleasantries as they parted. Crowley's stiff and inflexible menace had the desire effect.
I asked if Ted was all right as I entered his office. He imploded right in front of me. I took him by the shoulders, slapped him across the face, not hard, rather like people did in the movies of the fifties when slapping the odd hysteric seemed to be the accepted solution. Oddly, it still worked. The man quit blubbering. I handed him a hanky and told him to get himself together. We walked out together to an early lunch where he poured out his tale or rather tales of woe. He had squandered his wife's inheritance and now they were broke, many thanks to me and my associates who had stalked his endeavors and spent thousands to wreck his every plan. It had not taken long. He said the man who had just visited him owned his mortgage and informed him that he was to be out of the house by the morning or 'gentlemen of singular powers of persuasion would arrive tomorrow evening to remove you and your pretty little wife.' Then he said it.
"Valerie, my wife, said you had cash, that you are liquid. Perhaps you can help a guy out?"
I steepled my hands and looked at him through the bars of my fingers. "Valerie. The woman from yesterday?" I said slowly, breathing the name out like a puff of smoke. "She did not bother to introduce herself. Nice name."
"I am sorry she was rude . . ." Ted began but I cut him off.
"I only just met you and you are asking to borrow money?" That quieted him. He had the gall of a man accustomed to opaque transactions, the more esoteric the better. He had no awareness of the enormous gall to suppose that someone would want to do business with him after seeing him collapse into hysterics. He had an undented belief in his ability to charm his way to anything—which in no small way explained his marriage to dear Valerie. She had been charmed but did not admit it, having hidden it behind a curtain of barely concealed contempt.
Ted was speaking. "I do not want anyone else to know the problems we are having. I have investors whom I am managing money for. If they find out I have lost ours, they will pull out and I will lose my job. We'll have no income at all!" I thought that a good idea and made a mental note to arrange it. "That would really be the end." He threatened to start crying again but I held up my hand.
"I might be able to help you. But there is a price, a steep price to borrowing from me." I said.
The man actually smiled. After the many months of impending doom, he saw the first glint of hope and he bloomed like a tulip. "Anything. I'll do anything!" He said.
I nodded, dropped my hands into my lap and looked down. "Yes, but would your wife?" I asked softly.
The meaning of my question punched him in the gut and he wheezed. I looked up and his face was once more drawn and pale.
"I want to purchase your wife." I said carefully.
"I do not need that much. Just three grand for tomorrow, then I'll pay you back . . . if the vig is not too high."
I almost laughed at the word, a word I had never used in a sentence or heard except at the movies. I shook my head. "You are asking to borrow money and I barely know you. You are nearly out of cash and you have less than a day or you lose everything. You cannot even arrange to move out in that time. You'll be out with barely the shirt on your back. I am investing in this neighborhood and I do not want houses standing empty or people I do not know moving in. You have to stay. Your wife has to stay. I will see about gaining control of your mortgage and they would be doing business with me. On one condition . . . "
"I sell you my wife?" He said incredulously. "What sort of man do you think I am?"
"You should not ask that. I might tell you. I invest in real estate but empty houses ruin the community values. I do not want that to happen and want to help you both but I am not going to do it for nothing. Here is the deal. Tonight, I am going to fuck your wife. You will send her to see me. If I fuck her, if she agrees to keep fucking me, you will agree to sell her to me. But here is the catch, you have to borrow at least twenty grand from me. That way I can have her often and thoroughly. She will work it off for me till you get back on your feet."
His mouth worked. I could almost see the words 'on her back' going past like a little blinking, red marquee behind his eyes, flashing and glittering while he calculated. "How would it work?"
The hook was set, all I needed was the net, and then the fun part would begin. "She is mine. She is going to fuck me when I want, where I want, like I want. Understood?" I said it softly. I wanted the situation to be clearly understood. "Any time she spreads her legs, I deduct the value from the twenty grand till it is all paid up." I stopped, intentionally leaving the math alone for the moment.
"How much." He hissed, a bit of spittle budding on his thin, Frank Burns lips.
I waited, as though considering, pondering, figuring. "Say a hundred a pop." I shrugged. "But I am not a bad guy. I would give her 250 a crack for the first month. If she is worth it."
"Oh she is worth it," the meathead said. "Val is a great fuck. Loves it up the ass." Then he looked shocked at his own words, like he had said too much which of course he had.
"Special things would be extra, calculated at a different rate. At a simple hundred a pop that is 200 fucks. That is more than enough for me. How does that sound to you?"
Ted's face fell. "Will she do it?" He asked, never noticing that the question should have been mine to ask him, not the other way around.
I shrugged. I patted my coat pocket where I had the cash, a clear bulge in the cut of the suit. "I hold the cash till she fucks me. Then it's yours. I'll go back to the house and fuck her. If everything is fine, then you get the three grand. If she does not go for it, you all move out and this conversation never happened. Understood?"
Ted nodded. "What about the rest?"
The greedy fuck, he had no class. Even after seeing the deal closed, one should never show much elation since where there is one deal there would be more. Ted did not understand this. "What about the rest?"
"You mentioned twenty grand."
"I did, yes." To his credit, Ted waited. "We'll settle that matter after your wife's . . . interview."
Ted's smile was a bit sickly but his eyes held a gleam, an eager gleam. I would dim that gleam in a moment.
We were done eating, though Ted had barely touched his salad. My plate was clean. I reached across the table and grabbed Ted by the wrist and kept him from standing, so he could feel my strength. "Oh Ted, no more fucking the wife. If she fucks me, she becomes mine. I'll give you the money, you sign a contract and give me your wife. If you fuck her, it goes on your account at double her going rate. Got it?" Ted's eyes were the size of saucers. But he nodded. "And you'll call Valerie and tell her about your visit from the other gentleman but nothing about this conversation. When she asks about me, ring off."
Ted nodded.
The game was afoot.
That afternoon I rang the doorbell and Valerie Hanson answered. Ted was to send her to me but he called to say she would not do that. So I returned her visit. Every plan required adjustments when it was time to execute it. Her eyes were haunted, distracted. I had to be careful. She invited me in and offered me coffee, I accepted tea. She sat down at the kitchen kiosk, a booth with the Coke insignia all over it, garish but a genuine Coke booth with all the utensils, gleaming scarlet and chrome.
"So? Was my husband able to help you?" She asked.
I shook my head. "No. I am sorry. But there was a guy at the office who scared the crap out of little Ted. He looked like he had seen a ghost when I walked into his office after that other guy left."
"He did. His own." Valerie snorted. She looked down into her coffee.
