Greenwich Read Free Page B

state in the Union. At Chapel Hill, he had refused a football scholarship, graduated among the top ten in his class, working his way through college as a short-order cook; and then, refusing an offer from General Motors to become what he called “a well-paid showcase nigger,” he had taken off for Paris via a thousand-dollar scholastic prize and enrolled himself at the Cordon Bleu. He supported himself with nightclub gigs, playing a tin whistle, and it was there that he met Delia, a lovely coffee-colored singer from New Orleans, whom he married.
    Offered a job as a pastry chef at the Hill Crest Club in Greenwich, he accepted it. Now, twenty years later, he was head chef at a salary of seventy thousand a year.
    Frank Manelli was drying his hands at the sink when Josie came into the kitchen wing with her mess of wet towels. Frank handed her the plunger, telling her to keep it handy. “You get a toilet won’t flush down, Josie, just drive this plunger into it, slow and firm. That’ll save me a trip out here to the Back Country.”
    Josie nodded. Both Abel Hunt and his assistant, Joseph, his nineteen-year-old son, who had just finished his first year as a pre-med student at Harvard, were smiling—slightly it must be said—and Frank said to them softly, “I don’t like these people no better than you, Abel, but Jesus, to just let that toilet flush the shit all over the floor—”
    â€œI’m a cook.” Abel shrugged. “Anyway, there isn’t a plunger in this whole stupid house. And I don’t use the powder room.”
    Frank nodded and sighed. He had been through a long, hard day, and by now, every muscle in his body ached. All he could think of was to get home, take a hot shower, and have dinner. He liked Abel, the only black man he had made a friend of since Vietnam, where you made friends of black men and sometimes died with them; and anyway, they were neighbors and went to church with their kids, and he was not going to be pissed off because Abel had not foreseen that he would be called to fix the goddamn toilet.
    â€œI’m sorry, Frank,” Abel said. “The truth is, I didn’t know about the powder room until after she called you, and she’s a nice lady but—you know.”
    â€œI know.” Frank picked up his bag of tools and went out through the kitchen door. As he opened the door of his truck, Richard Castle drove up in his two-seater Mercedes, and called out to him, “Hold on a moment, Frank.”
    Frank waited for Castle, anticipating that he would offer to pay in cash. Richard Castle always liked to do business with service in cash.
    â€œNothing serious, I hope,” Castle said. It was Friday, and he always drove to New York on Friday. He was a slender, handsome man, wearing his sixties well, a good head of white hair and blue eyes that sent a false message of innocence.
    â€œNo, not serious. A stuffed toilet in the powder room.”
    â€œFixed, is it?”
    â€œYes.” Frank had a problem with Castle. The man had always treated him decently, so Frank struggled with the stories he had heard, and none of them were good.
    Now Castle put his hand in his pocket, took out a money clip full of bills, and asked Frank, “What do I owe you?”
    â€œI haven’t made out a bill yet. No hurry.”
    â€œMoney doesn’t wait, Frank. That’s the trouble with you guys. Trusting.” He grinned. “I wouldn’t trust my own mother. Come to think of it, I never did.” He peeled off two fifty-dollar bills from the wad in the money clip. “They look phony, but they’re real. Some jerk in Washington decided on the new design,” he said, handing the bills to Frank. “Does this cover it?”
    Frank shook his head. “Too much. Why don’t I send you a bill?” He was trying to recall what a plunger cost—five dollars perhaps, no more.
    â€œBecause my time for writing