12
WHEN HE HEARD A CAR DOOR SLAM, DAVE SET HIS EMPTY coffee cup down and stepped to the window in order to look out into the lot. It was Edmund’s Mercedes, and the man himself was taking something out of the trunk. He shut the trunk lid and then activated the alarm system with the remote button on his key chain. Edmund was thirty-four, with a business degree from Whittier College. He was a racquetball hound who had enough leisure to play every day as well as put in an hour at the gym working out. He golfed, too, twice a week, and got his hair trimmed once a week, and still had time for business lunches and meetings, although whom he met with, Dave couldn’t say; probably the meetings had something to do with the bets he made on the golf and the racquetball. They sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with the Earl of Gloucester. He had an easy smile and an easy way of wearing his expensive clothes, and although Dave had a hunch that he spent a lot of evenings alone, he didn’t have to, since women had fallen all over him for as long as Dave had known him, which was over twenty years now. They never lingered, though.
The smile and the clothes and the expensive cars were all parts of an essentially vacant package, at least as far as Dave was concerned. Dave had never heard Edmund say anything at all that wasn’t calculated. He didn’t have conversations like other people did, never mentioned the weather, the ocean, traffic—no small talk at all. Here he was, working in what had to be one of the strangest and most colorful buildings on the coast, and yet he seemed no more affected by it than if he’d been working at a grommet factory. Probably he simply hated all of it, and would have been just as happy if it had been a grommet factory. It was within his power to understand a grommet factory, but the Earl of Gloucester was beyond him.
Dave realized that he was in a lousy mood—which he might as well blame on Edmund, as long as he was working him over anyway. He wondered if there wasn’t a little bit of jealousy in his dislike for the man, which had intensified over the last year or so. He thought about it for a moment, but he couldn’t find any. Jealous of what? The truth was, Dave had never really been able to see beneath Edmund’s surface.
Earl Dalton, Edmund’s father, was a multimillionaire on paper—dozens of properties in a half-dozen Orange County beach cities. The lot that the Earl of Gloucester sat on was easily worth more than the business itself was worth, and the adjacent lot, the old theatre, and Collier’s bungalow would have been bulldozed ten years ago and sold for apartments if it was up to Edmund. It wasn’t up to Edmund, though, and that was a relentless irritation to him. What he had apparently told Collier about tearing down the bungalow had to be wishful thinking, meant largely to cause the old man grief.
Edmund walked toward the door now, carrying a laptop computer in a leather case, and he seemed to Dave to be smiling about something, as if he had just recalled the punch line of a fairly funny joke. He swung the door open and walked in, looking around suspiciously and pulling his key out of the already unlocked dead bolt. When he saw Dave, his face fell into its usual mixture of gravity and indifference.
“You’re early,” he said flatly, as if he didn’t like it.
“I like to work when it’s quiet,” Dave said. “I’m always early. What drags you out of bed at this hour?”
“Same thing. I like the quiet. And the kind of work you do makes too much noise, so consider yourself finished for a couple of hours. What is all this crap?” He gestured at the litter of casters and door skins and lumber.
“King Lear.”
“More? What the hell have we spent on this one?”
“On materials?”
“On materials.”
“A little under three thousand so far.”
“So far? That’s completely insane.”
“Completely. And of course we need more. God knows how much before it’s through. It hasn’t been painted yet, either. There’s no telling what the art will cost. You might have to sell your Mercedes before it’s over.”
“And there’s your hourly, I guess,” Edmund said back to him. “You like that overtime, don’t you, Dave? A few extra bucks at the end of the week? The eagle flies a little bit higher when he’s got a couple of extra quarters in him, eh? This week he might clear the damned phone lines. Oh! That’s right. You’re not in this for money. You don’t clock in when you work on Collier’s plays, do you? You and my old man, giving something back to the community. Looking out for everybody else’s welfare but your own.” He clucked his tongue and shook his head, as if he could barely fathom it. “That sure is charitable. The world of the theater is indebted. Another loser production trods the boards. Now why don’t you close up shop and run along till ten? I’ve got paperwork to do, and I don’t want to listen to that damned saw. Take a two-hour hike. Freshen up a little. Grab an omelet.”
“You’re the boss. Or at least you’re one of the boss’s sons. That counts for something.”
“It’s the difference between us.”
“It’s one of them.”
“It’s the Grand Canyon, my man.” Without waiting for a reply, Edmund turned around and walked to the stairs, heading up toward his office. Dave waited until he had gone inside and closed the door, and then he switched on the chop saw again and started cutting out lumber for frames, deliberately sawing off a half-inch at a time so that he would have to make about twenty cuts before a piece was short enough. He considered putting a dull blade in the saw so that it would whine louder. Clearly he should have said something that would count as the last word, but, as usual, he hadn’t been able to think of anything. Making a lot of noise with the saw was a childish comeback, but at least it was immediate and effective.
Two years ago he had been employed by an advertising agency in Irvine, but the work didn’t suit him; all it did was make some sham sense out of the years he had put into college. What he was doing working at the Earl’s he couldn’t say, except that it did suit him, at least right now—except, of course, that he had to put up with Edmund. The job paid the rent on his house downtown, and, with his own key to the door, he could come and go as he pleased, working alone until midnight or coming in at four in the morning, whatever seemed right. And he was attracted to the dusty, museumlike atmosphere of the warehouse, to the pure gaudy clutter of stuff in the farthest corners of the old building, to the mice that appeared and disappeared among the lumber of props late in the evening, to the sound of winter rain on the metal roof, and to the ten thousand shadows cast by a hundred hanging lamps.
Also, the Earl himself had no problem with Dave working on his own projects when he wasn’t building something for Collier or for the company. This morning Dave had brought the chop saw out front by the door instead of assembling the frames back in the shop at the rear of the building, just because the frames were big—fourteen by six feet—and the shop was too cluttered. There were industrial-quality power tools in the shop—a big planer, a horizontal mortiser, a twelve-inch radial arm saw, drill presses, band saws, a lathe, an old green-painted table saw that was nearly as big and heavy as an automobile. Dave had half completed a replication of two mission-style Morris chairs, and this evening, if he could finish enough of Collier’s sets during the day, he would steam-bend the slats for the chair backs.
Working at the Earl’s hardly qualified as a job at all from Dave’s point of view. Maybe someday things would change, although for the Earl himself things never had, at least not for the last forty-five years, and each added prop, like an added jewel in a kaleidoscope, had thrown a new pattern of shadows on the walls and floor, and the old warehouse had accreted a more complicated and unfathomable magic as the years had fallen away.
Tired of irritating Edmund, Dave pushed the wood forward to the pencil line and depressed the switch in the handle, making the last cut. The saw wound down, and Dave stood up, taking a step back and laying the wood onto the pile with the rest. There was a crash directly behind him just then, and he leaped forward, kicking the saw table and staggering into the lumber pile. He turned around and saw that the tiki in the Hawaiian shirt had fallen off the balcony, hit the floor, and knocked through one of the panels of the Duke of Albany’s palace, smashing it to pieces. Edmund stood at the railing, looking both sorrowful and surprised.
“My God,” Edmund said. “The damn tiki fell right over the edge. I think its belt was rotten. I tried to stop it, but I just couldn’t. It didn’t hurt anything, did it? Tiki all right?”
“Tiki’s fine,” Dave said flatly, his heart still hammering in his chest. He picked up a scrap of painted Styrofoam, rejected the urge to throw it, and tossed it back onto the floor instead.
“Uh-oh. It didn’t damage your work, did it?” Edmund bent over the railing now, as if to get a better look at the smashed facade. “What was that thing? Nothing important, was it?”
“About two hundred dollars worth of castle,” Dave said evenly.
“And all that work, too! Well, I knew something like this was going to happen. The only thing I can say is that it’s lucky you weren’t standing any closer. That tiki would have crushed your skull, falling like that. To hell with the castle. I couldn’t stand it if one of my employees got hurt. Our workmen’s comp would go through the roof.” He snorted with laughter, walked back into his office, and shut the door.
Various options ran through Dave’s head: going up there and throwing Edmund over the balcony railing, putting a carborundum blade in the Skil saw and chopping pieces out of Edmund’s Mercedes …
He looked out at the car in the lot, picturing the car destroyed, and just then Casey’s old Chevy pickup truck pulled in, driving up to within an inch of Edmund’s car before stopping. Dave walked outside and motioned for him to stay in the car. He opened the door and got in on the passenger side. “Just go ahead and drive,” he said.