Fashionably Late (for My Funeral)

This is essentially a romance story set against a background of international drug dealing with the occasional side plot of the usual mayhem.

Paranoia: (Pron. para-noya) noun; a mental disorder marked by the unjustified belief that one is being persecuted, usually accompanied by megalomania and insane distrust.

Paranoid (Pron. para-noyd) adjective; also called paranoiac of, relating to or affected by paranoia. A person affected by paranoia.

CHAPTER 1

I do not suffer from paranoia. I am not paranoid. I am not a paranoiac. I do not have any mental disorder that leads me to believe, wrongly or not, that I am being persecuted. I am not a megalomaniac and I don't distrust everyone. But I AM being followed.

Let me explain. Ever since the police discovered that my business partner didn't commit suicide by using a semi-automatic rifle to turn the contents of his skull into spaghetti sauce all over my penthouse apartment, and ever since they discovered that my wife, with whom he, my business partner, had been having an affair, had not committed suicide by jumping naked from the balcony of the same apartment, I have been followed.

The main contestants in the 'follow me' stakes are, in no particular order, the DEA and the CIA because I had proof of their involvement in drug importation, the office of the New York District Attorney because the DA wanted, among other things, a conviction in a high profile murder case, and the New York branch of an organized crime syndicate who believed that I had some money that they thought of as theirs. I could probably toss in the FBI for good measure, but you get the message. I have already ruled out the Columbian drug cartels because they don't give a shit who they sell their drugs to, and if one organization can't come up with the money they'll just find another buyer.

Once I'd eliminated the NYPD from the list of followers (I was able to prove my innocence), I for the life of me haven't a clue which of the above is the follower. Actually that's not entirely true, it could have been any one or more of the above, but more about that later. Initially I confused the police, you see they couldn't find me mainly because (a) I didn't know that they were looking for me and; (b) even if I did, it was convenient for me not to be found.

At first the police assumed that a woman found naked and dead on the pavement below her penthouse in which was the body of a man with his brains decorating the wall opposite where he sat, could reasonably be a case murder/suicide. The fact that the male deceased was discovered not to be the husband of the aforesaid female deceased led them to believe, reasonably they thought, that they now had a case of double homicide, and that the person who caused them both to become deceased persons would be the husband of the aforesaid female deceased (me).

When their autopsy investigations proved that she had recently had sexual intercourse with two men, one of whom was splattered around the room and the other wasn't me, a new dimension was added to their enquiries.

What made it even more interesting is that over the last few years I have spent a lot of time at my local precinct and was well known to them, and after the above mentioned incidents they have asked me a lot of questions that I have been able to answer. The obvious suspect when they had identified that the male deceased was not me, was of course, me. The fact that I was, by occupation, a mystery writer given to inventing bizarre and ingenious ways of committing murder and mayhem, similar to the above mentioned murder and mayhem, only served to reinforce their belief in my guilt. What initially looked to them to be an easy collar turned out to be anything but easy. This could have had something to do with the fact that I could prove that I was nowhere near either of the two when they became deceased persons. When I turned up with irrefutable proof that I couldn't possibly have precipitated the deaths of my wife and business partner they were, to say the least pissed.

The thoughts however, that are currently occupying my every waking moment are; if the DA catches me I will spend the best part of the rest of my life in jail, if the mob catches me my life expectancy will be severely diminished, and if the CIA and DEA catch me I'll probably end up as fish food somewhere. The other worry for me is how the hell am I ever going to get out of this?

CHAPTER 2

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Wilbur Smith, a name that I inherited from both sides of my family, the Smith from my father, it was originally 'Schmidt' but had been Anglicized, and the Wilbur from my maternal grandfather, one Wilbur Wright. Now before you jump to conclusions, this Wilbur Wright had nothing to do with Kittyhawk and airplanes, and he didn't have a brother named Orville and wouldn't know a bicycle from a baseball bat. He and I were both the victims of our ancestors' uncanny knack of giving their offspring the name of a famous person before that person became famous.

Because my literary agent, Felix Weisman, (not his real name either but he thinks it makes him sound more important) decided that this name wouldn't sell books, the fact that there is another author using that name might have caused a problem, I write under the name of Jason Feldham. I hasten to add that professionally at least, there are no similarities, in either the content, style or success, between myself and the other Mr. Wilbur Smith.

Unlike that Mr. Smith I have only been moderately successful, but I make more money writing crime fiction than I could if I were a professor of English Literature at some Ivy League college, and enough however, to need a business partner to look after my investments. Actually, again that is not entirely true, I didn't need a business partner or manager, I was quite happy with my finances the way they were, but in deference to my wife I acquired a partner to look after my affairs and as it turned out, my wife.

In case you have reached the wrong conclusion, I'm really not bitter about that particular turn of events, believe me.

As I said before, I write crime novels, not the type with a bullet-proof action hero who drives a fast car, romances a bevy of similarly fast women, gets beaten up and shot at, only to emerge unscathed at the end with the crooks under arrest and a beautiful woman in his bed.

The hero of my more popular series is a flawed character who is at odds with authority, whose marriage has evolved, over the space of several novels, from unsatisfactory through miserable to non-existent. He is handed the worst cases to investigate in the hope that he will fail, attracts trigger happy thugs, or those with a penchant for physical violence, and spends as much time in hospital Emergency Rooms as he does at work. He drinks too much and smokes incessantly, his love life is existent enough to confirm his heterosexuality, and he drives a beat up old car that spends as much time in the repair shop as he does in ER.

Because I try to insert as much realism into my work as possible I have spent a lot of time around various police stations talking to 'innocent' criminals to gain information as background for my work.

When I first started writing I was amazed at the number of these 'innocent' people who had been charged and convicted of crimes that they 'didn't commit'. I could only assume that the police force is either extremely incompetent or corrupt. Of course all was seldom as these people would have me believe.

I suppose that by now you have decided that I am a totally cynical person and in this you couldn't be more wrong. I admit that there are moments when my natural cynicism breaks free of the constraints that I have placed on it and I have made observations that would appear to be of a cynical nature. My experiences with life have unfortunately allowed me to accumulate a number of examples where my view of my fellow man has taken on a particularly jaundiced aspect.

A result of my research is that I have something of a fan club around the 5th precinct. The men and women in blue are never backward in pointing out any errors, as they see them, in my books. On the other hand they are fulsome in their complements when they feel that it is deserved. The feed-back is generally more positive than negative.

I thought, for want of evidence to the contrary, that I was happy right up until the wheels fell off my life.

I had been married for three years to Melissa who I met at a book signing in one of the more prestigious book stores in Manhattan. She had stepped inside to avoid a heavy downpour and had browsed through the books on display. She picked up my latest work, the one that I was promoting, and glancing at the back cover, realized that I was the author and that I was sitting in front of her.

We had been talking, Melissa Blanchette and I, ignoring the line of people waiting for the scrawl that passed as my signature for several minutes before I worked up enough courage to ask her out for dinner. I was surprised, my analyst would have said amazed, when she accepted.

Melissa Blanchette came from a family that believed that appearances and position were the most important attributes that a young person could have in this world. The appearance that she projected was inherited from a long line of appearance projectors. The position that she held was a somewhat new phenomenon, stemming from her desire to overcome her father's total lack of business acumen.

The person that she knew as her father was not her biological parent, but a person into whose arms her mother rebounded following the sudden and unannounced departure of Melissa's real father shortly after the wedding, and the announcement of his impending parenthood.

It wasn't the fathering of children to which he objected; rather it was the thought of the responsibility of showing affection to the smelly, continuously crying products of his sexual prowess. This was not the first time that James Craigmore II had abandoned his new wife when she was pregnant, he had had two previous short term marriages and would have another two before meeting his untimely, and little lamented, demise at the hand of an irate and unwilling future father in law.

Henri Blanchette had the advantage of an obscure connection to impecunious European aristocracy and a willingness to accept his wife's child as his own, providing that the financial reward was sufficiently large. The timing of her birth so soon after their marriage, that followed hot on the heels of his wife's previous marriage being annulled due to a 'lack of consummation', hardly raised any comment in the rarefied and moneyed circles of Long Island. It was something of a practice in those days for young ladies in a certain condition to travel to Europe in search of a conveniently accommodating husband to cover what could have been an embarrassment for the family.

Blanchette, being at that time the last of a long line of poor business managers, and having no money of his own and no real skill with finances, had managed to take the fortune that his father-in-law had managed to save from the great depression and convert it, through a series of business ventures that proved to be more unsuccessful than successful, into a multi-million dollar loss in a matter of years. In one of his more successful moments, before he left his wife for another woman, the first of many, he left her with just enough funds to see their only child, Melissa, safely through the 'right' college where she made enough of the right connections to enable her to find a position with an advertising agency at a level that provided her with the right image and income.

She made the most of this situation and she, by the means of the right discreet alliances, (read affairs) and by allowing her company to use the family name, had ascended to the position of Partner in the firm of Bronson, Fielding and Blanchette. Her parents were individually and separately most impressed, and their disappointment with her reluctance to provide them with a son-in-law and possible grandchildren was put to one side, for appearance sake.

That dinner was a painful experience for me. I am by nature a shy person who finds an outlet for his expression in writing. I have never, until I met Melissa, had a serious relationship with anyone.

* * *

At high school and college I was considered a nerd because I was always reading and could recite great expanses of other authors' work ad nauseam. I was hell at the few parties that I attended and the only people, apart from my parents (I hoped) that thought that I had any redeeming features, were my English Literature Professors. They saw in me some bright future for the youth of the day.

If you were to assign a color to describe me it would be, beige.

My parents were both doctors and it was assumed, by them at least, that I would follow them into the medical profession. In this area I was a bitter disappointment to them because I had no aptitude for medicine. This became clear to me during my high school Biology class when I was supposed to dissect a rat. Not only did I faint at the thought of cutting up what, until a few minutes before had been a living, breathing animal, but I covered it with a regurgitation of what had recently been described, with misplaced optimism, as food in the school dining hall.

My parents encouraged my scholastic ambitions and discouraged anything that involved physical exercise as they were vicarious hypochondriacs, imagining in me all manner of ailments. I was not a sickly person, just one suffering from a surfeit of love, patent medicine and a lack of exercise.

It wasn't until I entered college that I actually sat down and watched television, something frowned on by my parents because they thought that this medium would be too distracting for me. In this they were right, and my first semester at college was spent catching up on what I had missed earlier in life.

It was this interest in television that led me to begin moonlighting as an author. My first literary endeavors were in the college newspaper where, using a variety of pseudonyms to avoid any unwanted pressure from the victims, I wrote satirical articles that prodded several sacred cows including the pretensions of the professors, in particular the English professors who thought that if you couldn't understand a writer it must be art.

At University, I, when not studying or attending lectures, was inclined to further my education by observing other students. This involved sitting in a darkened corner of a student bar watching and making mental notes of the students as they progressed from normal through various stages to very drunk.

The males could be categorized as; Jocks, those pre-occupied with scoring on and off the athletics field. They were usually large and loud, surrounded by Cheer Leaders and those females who thought that there was some advantage by being seen with a Jock.

Semi-serious students, these were those that took their studies semi-seriously but didn't mind getting wasted at the bar on a regular basis. These were usually neatly dressed, in jeans and college sweaters. They attracted females of a similar disposition to whom appearances were the most important aspect of student life.

Nerds, that group of serious, and often self important students, who universally sported nerd cloths and dark rimmed glasses. They usually sat by themselves frowning at the antics of their fellow students and discussing such lightweight topics as differential calculus. They were oblivious to their total lack of dress sense.

The females could be categorized as;

Cheer Leaders whose raison d'être in life was to contribute to the Jocks' score sheets. They were, on the most part, blonde, slim with, in proportion, large breasts, real or enhanced.

Wannabes, these students regarded an education as a secondary consideration to being in the right crowd and working towards a suitable marriage to a successful graduate. They usually dated a year or two above their own status, seeing this as proof of their attractability.

Serious students: These were the female equivalent of the nerd. These had a similar lack of fashion sense, and narrow range of conversation topics.

On one afternoon, when I wasn't at the bar, I had one brief, if one afternoon could be described as brief in an era where one night stands constituted a long term relationship, close encounter with a member of the opposite gender.

It was my senior year and I had taken to tutoring freshman students as a way of gaining some form of social contact outside my close circle of friend (read room-mate).

She had all of the appearances and attitudes of someone who lived in the late sixties or early seventies and the unlikely name of Serendipity Sorenson to go with her appearance. She wore a long skirt over which she wore something that was a cross between a huge knitted sweater and a short knitted dress. Its main purpose in life, I thought, was to conceal from the public gaze the shape of the body beneath.

Her hair was long and, despite the Nordic heritage suggested by her name, brown and curly, tumbling over her face in a mass, almost hiding her features. These facial features were further hidden from view by a pair of glasses that had started life as the bottoms of soda bottles.

She wore no makeup and her skin had a freshly scrubbed look that was somehow appealing to me.

My room-mate was, on my promise of doing an assignment for him, off at the nearest bar displaying his beer consuming prowess when she came to my room for her regular tuition. I was explaining to her the beauty in the imagery of Keats' poetry and before I realized what was happening she was sitting close enough for me to smell her body.

We kissed. My experiences of the art of osculation were confined to the few instances where my parents allowed any show of affection to intrude on their otherwise cool existence and the face powder and lavender encounters with my grandmother. It surprised me to learn that she also had limited experiences of anything like this.

Talk about the blind leading the blind. We fumbled and groped at each other with more enthusiasm than skill until we found ourselves naked on my bed. I realized that the all encompassing knitted tent that she wore did its job extremely well, she had a very well formed body that, to my inexperienced eye, was the most beautiful that I had ever seen. The fact that it was the only one that I had ever seen naked is beside the point.

The mood came to a screeching halt as soon as I attempted, clumsily, to enter her. When she realized what was happening her self-imposed puritanical up-bringing galloped to the fore and she pushed me, unfulfilled, from her. "What am I doing?" She asked. The question was more rhetorical than real.

"What am I doing?" My question was an exploration of my lack of knowledge. We decided that we should both, individually and collectively, do nothing.

I was relieved at this turn of events although I didn't think so at the time. She explained with clear logic her reasons and I had to accede to her wishes.

I continued to tutor her and dream about what almost was, hoping that she was also having the same dream. I was left to wonder, losing contact with her after I graduated from college.

* * *

The reason that I remember the dinner with Melissa being a painful experience for me was that, almost for the first time ever, I had realized that I was with a person who might actually believe that I could be interesting. I discount the stated views of my agent, Felix, who continued to tell me, with the sincerity of a seller of pre-loved automobiles, that I was the greatest author to have ever trodden this earth.