Thorazine Beach Read Free Page A

work” state, which means the very opposite of what the phrase implies—because their memories couldn’t get them past the second paragraph.
    Breitzen was a small man, and became smaller, we saw, as time wore on. A bantam rooster in elevator shoes. He had a platform built in his office so his desk would be raised a step above the chairs his visitors would sit in. Story goes, Jim Bork, the company planner, wanted him to see some office-layout drawings, decided he’d plop his chair right up there and sit beside old Ike to show him. End of the morning, Bork was gone. End of the afternoon: Carpenters cutting down the platform so it would fit just one desk, just one gigantic leather swivel chair. And just one ego.
    Laughter in the hallways became, through the years, whispers, glances, looks over shoulders. The building itself felt soaked in sadness. You daren’t quit—you couldn’t, not without bad references, recriminations. The whole place was simply
waiting
. Some employees—the optimists, we called them—were clearly waiting for Breitzen to die. Some might have been waiting to die themselves.
    Middle of the night—not coincidentally the date of the morning raid the feds and Memphis PD had planned: Limo, private jet out of the Olive Branch airport, false flight plan filed. He took, they said, two suitcases, a couple of hundred pounds of hundred-dollar bills, a lifetime supply of Cuban cigars, and several custom crates bearing his precious collection of the drawings of Edvard Munch. Guys in black suits, briefcases full of platinum bars, palladium bars—silver and gold being, in Breitzen’s world, distinctly lowbrow. The guys in suits didn’t get to go, though their briefcases did. Those left behind, in the office or on the runway, all, in their own ways, screamed, sure as Munch’s figure on the bridge. Where Breitzen is, they say, is a warm place. Certainly we all hoped it was.
    Eleven
weeks
I was a witness, all added together. Investigation rooms, discoveries, and five courtroom trials—two criminal, three civil. All said and done, I was extruded out the bum end of the legal process with no job, no prospects, few friends, my distinctly unflattering picture in the paper, and little enough coin that I had to cadge my walking-around money off Lynette. Thankfully, no charges. But this last benefit, I’d finally come to grasp, was largely due to the all-too-apparent fact the trial judges and the D.A. both regarded me as too ineffectual, too just plain obtuse, to have had a knowing, causal hand in all this chicanery.
    I’d managed to recover my P.I. licence. Barely. But you can’t operate as a P.I. in Tennessee unless your
individual
licence hangs under the umbrella of an
agency
licence. The state government had long since said
okay
to my individual, but
no
to my getting my own shingle. They’d issue the individual when I’d found an agency home. I’d actually filed an administrative appeal, gone to Nashville for a hearing on getting my own company licence. I winced at the words.
Not anytime soon, Mr. Minyard. Too many unanswered questions
. Hence my hoofing the whole city—and a few outlying burgs, too—looking for something, anything, in the investigations line.
    I’d actually begun going back to freelance editing. Theses and dissertations, mostly. Tenure-hunting Memphis State assistant profs scrambling to squirt journal articles out of unreadable, turgid dissertations.
The
and
an
and
a
for Tamil- and Hindi-speaking engineers who thought their English was
almost
good enough. Verb tenses for work-all-night lab scientists from cold northern Chinese cities, smart enough to know their English blew. And from a Princeton business PhD, the most exacerbating case of gratuitous philological exhibitionism I’d ever seen. At first, all that wordsmithing was just to keep my hand in—we had more than enough money, on the home front, to ensure I needn’t worry about that.
    Then there was the call from Lynette. That