Free Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery by Dallas Murphy

him.” She began to cry. She said something else, but it got lost. “You know what I was to him? I was a fuck-you gesture. Trammell Weems—of the great Weems family—married a pool player from Sheepshead Bay. That was a laugh. Even her name was a laugh! Crystal Spivey. Let’s take our clothes off and get into bed.”
    “Sure.”
    And so we did. But we didn’t make love, we just held each other. “Can he come up?”
    “Sure.”
    Jellyroll floated up onto the bed and began licking her face. I told her he’d keep doing that until her cheeks were gone, so she should call him off when she’d had enough. “Crystal—”
    “Hmm?”
    “Do you want to get out of town for a couple days?”
    “What did you have in mind?”
    “I have a neighbor upstairs who owns a place in Fire Island.”
    “I went there once. A bunch of us rented a share in Kismet one summer.”
    “Jerry’s place is in Lonelyville.”
    “Sounds wonderful. Can I stop and see Uncle Billy on the way?”
    “Sure.”
    I phoned upstairs. A woman answered.
    “Hello,” I said, “I’m with the Sierra Club.”
    “Just a minute.”
    “Hi, Artie, what’s up?”
    “Can I rent your Fire Island place for a few days?”
    “Cash?”
    “Cash.”
    “Come on up. But if you see any strangers on the stairs, don’t stop.” Jerry was holed up in his apartment to skip the process servers. He was wanted by the SEC to testify in the matter of something or other. I never ask. Nobody was lurking on the stairs.
    Jerry answered my coded knock in a terry-cloth bathrobe. He was barefoot, tousled, and his eyes looked like burnt holes in a smallpox-infested Army blanket. The guy couldn’t have passed for fifty. He was twenty-six years old. He opened the door wide enough for me to sidle in. Two years ago, he was pulling down two hundred grand a year. I used to feed his cat while he jetted off to merger acquisitions and subordinate debentures. There were summer homes and boats, cars and fancy women in short black dresses, but then the bottom dropped out, and the Jerrys of the financial community plunged into a narrow pit.
    His apartment was identical to mine, a one-bedroom in a prewar building undistinguished except for the view. From the western windows, Jerry and I could see all the way north to the George Washington Bridge and the bend in the river beyond. Looking south, we could see to the World Trade Center. ButJerry had the shades drawn tightly against the view. Except for bars of daylight beneath the shades, the only light in his living room came from a flickering, muted TV. Until my eyes adjusted, I didn’t even see the young woman sprawling on the leather sofa. She, too, wore a frumpy robe and no shoes.
    “Artie, this is Fritzi Kellior.”
    She waved unenthusiastically. She was even more unkempt than Jerry, but gradually, in the TV light, I could see that her features were long and patrician. Her short, unwashed hair was expensively cut. Humphrey Bogart caught my eye.
fie Treasure of the Sierra Madre
.
    Jerry and I quickly settled on a price for three days. Jerry asked me if I wanted to buy the place. I said no. “That’s right. You don’t own anything, do you? Except a dog.”
    I just let that slide by. “Have you ever heard of Trammell Weems?” I asked.
    “Yeah. Glub-glub,” Jerry said.
    “What about before the glub-glub?”
    “What about it?”
    “What did he do? The paper said he was a banker.”
    “Yeah, right,” said Fritzi.
    “Ponzi banks. There probably used to be an honest man at VisionClear Bank and Trust, but he died in the last cholera epidemic. The interesting question is, who pulled the strings? How high did it go? You know?”
    “No. How high did what go?”
    “The cover- up.”
    The intercom buzzed. Jerry went off to answer. Fritzi stared blank-eyed at the TV. Bogart staggered through the purgatorial thicket blabbering about gold. Jerry hustled back. “We gotta split. That was the super. I paid him a hundred bucks to tell me when