Condominium (21 page)

When she began making her bathroom sounds and gestures he went and found one of the attendants to help her, waited until she was back in her bed and said goodbye to her, knowing she had no comprehension of any word he could use.

As he reached the foot of the stairs leading down into the front foyer, Mr. Castor came out of the office door, a large, plump, pasty man with a harried manner.

Garver stopped him and said, “Got a minute?”

“Not much more than that.”

“My name is Garver. My wife is in B-four. Stroke and aphasia.”

“Oh, yes, yes. If you have questions about finances, I can’t help you. Mrs. Holly doesn’t work Saturdays. She knows all the regulations and so forth.”

“I wanted to know about her rings and so on.”

“Rings?”

“They were stolen the third day she was here.”

“Mr. Garver, it says very clearly on the admission documents that personal objects of value should not be—”

“Hold it!”

The size and the command timbre of Gus’s voice startled Castor. “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s obvious your staff does the stealing. A lot of it goes on here. It’s obvious your staff neglects patients like Mrs. Garver. She can’t demand attention. I found her twice when she’d messed her bed. I found her once with her good arm caught in the sleeve of her jacket. I was told she’d get therapy here, and I assume she must be getting some, but I can’t find out anything about it, so maybe she isn’t.”

Castor stared at Garver. Gus guessed the man was about forty years old. He had a nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth. His thick glasses looked as if smeared by thumbprints.

“I … am … doing … the … best … I … can,” the man said, voice quivering on the edge of control.

“Which isn’t one hell of a lot,” Garver said.

The control snapped. Eyes bulged behind the glasses. In a feverish half whisper Castor said, “God, how I hate you people. You goddam old lizards, acting like the world was made just for you. You come charging down here by the millions and take over everything and all you want is handouts. Complain, complain, complain. Jesus, I am sick of all you so-called senior citizens.”

As he started away, Gus caught the man by the plump arm and swung him back and said, “You sure you really belong in this line of work, Castor?”

Even that small evidence of any kind of personal interest and concern made Castor’s eyes fill. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. None of you have any idea of the kind of shit I have to take. I’m supposed to clear nine percent on the gross. I can’t pay staff enough to keep anybody good. I’ve got a turnover you wouldn’t believe. People don’t know the hassle we go through processing Medicare and Medicaid and those insurance policies. I can’t keep nurses because they get sick of being bad-mouthed by vicious old ladies and cleaning up after dirty old men. They get shoved in here by their goddam relatives and then they come and spend ten minutes a week with Granny and want … want … expect …”

Garver patted the man’s quivering shoulder. “Take it easy. Take it easy, fellow.”

“I’m just about at the end of … I need …”

“You do something for me and I’ll do something for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve run some big jobs on small money. When we’ve gone over budget and were on penalty, I’ve had to keep things moving.
Sometimes the answers are simple, but it takes somebody coming in from outside to see them.”

“There aren’t any answers.”

Gus shrugged. “Take stealing. Had a job in India, where stealing is a way of life. Small tools started evaporating by the hundreds. So everybody on the payroll put in a voluntary contribution, which I asked for in a loud voice, and when something was missing, we paid for it out of the kitty, bought a new one. So everybody started policing everybody.”

“State and local regulations wouldn’t permit me to …”

“Maybe you haven’t tapped all the sources for voluntary help around here. Is there a vocational training center? Maybe you could get them to send some people here for on-the-job training, for course credits.”

Castor frowned, tilted his head. “Just possibly …”

“And you’ve been so busy you really haven’t had time to see how much of the stuff your people do is really necessary. People tend to do the things they like to do at the expense of more important things which should be done.”

“I can’t really give the degree of supervision …”

“I
know
that. Why don’t you just let me come around Monday and nose around your operation here and look at your records, and maybe I can come up with some recommendations to make things a little easier for you and give a little better service to the patients.”

“I can’t budget anything at all for that.”

Garver smiled upon him. “Just as a favor. And all I want from you, Mr. Castor, is your assurance that Mrs. Garver will be tended to with … just a little more diligence?”

“Well, I …”

Gus found the man’s soft plump hand and shook it strongly, and said, “It’s a deal, then!”

As Garver walked to the parking area he was trying to remember the name of the man who had come up with the idea that every man is sooner or later elevated to that job which he is not competent to handle. Castor was the perfect example. Probably trained in nursing home and rest home administration. A competent and admirable second banana, but a disaster when put in charge. A hostile man, generating hostility in his staff, failure prone, riding the nursing home downhill to disaster. A nitpicker, pausing to pick his nit in the middle of the whirlwind. That was the kind you had to be able to identify and hold back, hold them in that ultimate slot they could manage.

Other men, and he remembered Sam Harrison once more, could never be content with second place.

Speak for yourself, Gus, he thought, as he unlocked his car. Another one like Sam Harrison. Perfectly willing to tell Mr. Castor how to run his nursing home. Tell the mayor how to run the city. Correct the management defects of God’s administration of the universe.

Garver is an old goat, he decided. Or an old horse out to pasture, rather, aching for the weight of the rock sled.

It will get better attention for Carolyn, but that is a rationalization. You itch to run something, administer something, manage something, because you did it all your life and you are better at it right now than in your so-called peak years. Retirement is a strange irony. A curious waste of training and talent.

And that, perhaps, accounts for some of the irritability of these old retired men. They are patronized, ridiculed and shoved around by self-important clerks, by men they would never have hired back in the real world.

But
this
is the real world, isn’t it?

Never, said a loud voice in the back of his skull.

He got into his gray Toyota wagon and drove slowly back out onto Fiddler Key, through the late bright afternoon of July. Between the gulf-side condominiums and apartment houses he could squint into the sunlight and see the sun-brown throngs on the broad white beach, with kites and lotion, towels and Frisbees, with kids and koolers, blisters and beer, tubular chairs and sunglasses. Small waves lifted from the glassy flat, humping as they neared the beach, then curling and slapping at the broken shells and the swift-legged shore birds.

The tall buildings made oblongs of shade across Beach Drive. Traffic was heavy and slow. The several years of heavy construction of the high-rise buildings had broken the road up. The shoulders were crumbled, and the holes had been patched with asphalt over and over again. It was becoming increasingly difficult to turn left from one of the parking areas onto Beach Drive, or to turn left off Beach Drive into an apartment entrance. Bikers with their high red flags pedaled past the clogged traffic as a car waited a chance to turn, blocking all those behind it.

Backwards, he thought. Full speed ahead backwards. Things used to be delivered: milk, butter, eggs. Milkman made a hundred and fifty stops. Now a hundred and fifty cars have to chug to the convenience stores. Trouble with the engineering mind is an infatuation with simple logic. And you, Guthrie Harmon Garver, are just another old fart, yearning for the past, deploring the present.

He wished he could find a time warp, so handy for the writers of science fiction. A permeable membrane, a momentary resistance, then penetration into one of the places of his past. Toyota transformed to one of those noisy durable old trucks on the
mountain roads of Peru, the Garver body transformed to the elastic, tireless toughness of those years. He would be driving to that grass strip where A1 would use all of it before yanking the little airplane over the treetops, and then it would be all downhill to the coast, catch Pan Am’s tin goose, and be home forty hours and a lot of stops later, to the soft perfumed haven of Carolyn’s happy arms.

He drove past Golden Sands and went on to the mall, where he would buy the groceries and supplies written on the list in his shirt pocket. And he wondered, for the hundredth time, if it would be possible to bring Carrie back to the apartment, possible for him to give her the nursing care she required. And if he should do it, even if he could. As the doctor had said, she was a healthy woman. That servitude, once begun, would last through whatever years he had left. And then what would become of her?

ON A SUNDAY MORNING
Martin Liss sat with Lew Traff, Benjie Wannover, Cole Kimber and Drusilla Bryne in the small conference room off Lew Traff’s office on the top floor of the Athens Bank and Trust Company building. Because it was Sunday the computer had cut the air conditioning back to eighty. The men were in short sleeves. Drusilla wore a pale blue tennis dress. All the overhead fluorescence was on, shining down through the plastic honeycomb. The tabletop was stacked with piles of papers. It was a little after eleven. They had been going since eight.

Marty said, “Okay. I am not going to thank you for breaking your asses getting this all set up this last two months because in the first place it is going to make you a lot of money and in the second place I have been going at it as hard as any one of you. But what I do not care to see at this point in time is any kind of goof that is going to wreck the timing, so let’s hit the high spots one more time. Benjie?”

“Okay, I set up the books on the Letra Corporation. Hoo, boy, some strange books! We got in—I mean Letra got in—a $13,550,000 loan from Equity Mortgage Management Shares at ten percent. Equity prepaid interest back to EMMS, $1,355,000. The $550,000 less $55,000 interest, equaling $495,000, went into the Tropic Towers Division of Letra. It got dispersed as follows: $100,000 to Jerry Stalbo for his interest, $119,300 to West Federated Savings and Loan to pay up the back interest, $22,000 legal fees, title and so on. That leaves Letra with title to Tropic Towers, with $253,700 cash working capital in the Tropic Towers Division, and owing $550,000 on a ten percent note to EMMS, interest paid for eleven months in advance, and owing West Federated one point two million at eight percent, and we negotiated a one-year moratorium on principal and interest payments on that one when we took up the back interest. I haven’t done the feasibility on it, but when we multiply out the seventy-two unsold apartments by $24,300 we get the $1,750,000 owed. That’s $6,250 below the average price he’s had on them. And—”

“Work out the feasibility with the idea I want to be out of that project in the next twenty minutes, if possible. Get to the big one.”

“Right. After paying one year interest in advance, the Harbour Pointe Division of Letra had $11,700,000 left. Out of that Letra bought from Marliss Corporation all the plans, documents, permissions, plus a very small allowance for overhead for $131,000. From you personally, Marty, Letra bought the option on the Silverthorn tract for $1,028,000 then closed on the tract for the additional $1,252,000, for total land acquisition price of $2,280,000, for the land, almost $163,000 an acre.”

Marty glanced at Lew in question, and Lew Traff said, “Yes, we’ve got the arm’s-length offers for the land on file, from important
people you don’t know personally and never met. The price is in line—or used to be—for land on the water zoned for high rise. But that price cuts into the expected profits according to the old feasibility studies Benjie and Cole worked out.”

“So does that interest rate,” Benjie said darkly. “Anyway, after I advanced half a million to Cole here, of which he had to advance two hundred thousand to Marine Projects on the dredging—”

“I didn’t advance it. I escrowed it,” Cole said.

“Whatever. Anyway, I had enough left to buy eight and a half million in certificates of deposit from Fred Hildebert downstairs. I staggered them according to Cole’s estimates of when he’d need advances against construction, on percentage of completion. We’ll make back about four hundred thousand dollars in interest on those CDs this first year. The second year will be the zinger, when we have to pay one point three million in interest to Sherman Grome and make back only about two hundred thousand on the remaining CDs. And so, down the road, we better be selling apartments like wild cakes or we are in deep trouble.”

“Will Fred take the mortgages on the apartments?”

“Yes, and apply the proceeds directly to the EMMS loan, with the usual discounts. That is, if we sell any apartments.”

“You’re very funny today,” Marty said, mopping the front and naked half of his skull. “Now you can be funny, Cole. Where do you stand?”

Kimber grinned and laced big fingers behind his neck. “What I have to do is cut back to an average cost of fifty-one thousand an apartment, that cost to cover everything: pools, roads, drainage, yacht basin, tennis and so on. I’ve taken out two million in costs without changing it enough so we have to go back for new permits. I cut back on the specs everywhere I could. It isn’t first class anymore, Marty. I don’t think they’ll move at the price structure
you’ve got to have. So I am now playing hard ball with my old buddies. Every week I lay the bills onto Benjie and he draws my check and the check is good and it includes my cost plus percent, or I pull my crews that same day and walk. If I was dealing with the Marliss Corporation it might be a little different. But, in these times, not a lot different.” He shrugged, popped a match with his thumbnail and relighted his skinny cigar. He was rangy, leathery, sun-baked and virile, like a rodeo performer in a cigarette ad. “No hard feelings?” he said.