Kissing Persuasive Lips Read online

  “Spider, leave the man alone,” Mick said. “Sir, you leave me alone. See how this all works?”

  The paramedic was at a loss. He looked at his companions and shrugged.

  Mick took off into the parking lot, heading seemingly in the general direction of Reno. “Now where did I park my llama?”

  * * *

  They comped him at the Wynn, of course, with a presidential suite. Spider helped him stay up until they both felt like he wouldn’t die of whatever concussion thing made you die if you went to sleep to soon after one. Mick found his cocktail waitress and gave her his old car, which, combined with the money, was almost more than the girl could take. She cried and laughed and thanked Mick repeatedly and profusely, and he invited her to have a burger with him. He could tell that the girl wondered if he had ulterior motives, and assumed she would probably enjoy that, but the truth was, he really didn’t. Maybe if she lost the fifteen pounds of cake she had added to her high school weight he might consider it, but this wasn’t about carnality. It was a good thing. It had no other motive.

  He knew her son’s name, but not hers. He should have known, and kicked himself that he just couldn’t find it. Finally, he broke down and asked. He was embarrassed he didn’t know. He imagined he had asked and just forgotten. She said it was Kelly. Mick got her number so he could send her the title.

  Kelly could now see he wasn’t hitting on her. She caught his eye. “Why are you doing this?”

  Mick, whose head was still splitting, chose and formed his words carefully.

  “Every time I come here, everyone is on the lookout. The women eye me, the sharps want to beat me, everyone has this look like they’re sure I owe them something. All you’ve ever done is serve me and be nice in a ‘real person’ kind of way. In a nice way, supporting Charlie, being legit. The world needs more of that.

  “There’s only one way I’ll come back and take this.” Mick was smiling, but he meant it.

  “If you breathe a word of this to the press, I’ll take it back,” he said sternly. “This is between us.”

  Kelly shook her head, amazed at what was transpiring.

  “I’ll keep it that way.”

  * * *

  There was a young and serious-looking police officer waiting for them to get done with their meeting with Kelly. His name was Tony something-or-other. He said it really fast and Mick still wasn’t picking up everything. Tony was medium height, with short red hair. He was wearing a perpetual Joe Friday frown from what Mick could see, and Mick finally beckoned him over. Spider was not a fan of any member of the constabulary, so he excused himself, and left the two alone.

  “What the hell was that all about,” asked Mick, gesturing to his swamp eye. He genuinely had no idea what had happened.

  “That man says your name was on the foreclosure papers he was given. He’s in the process of losing his home.”

  Mick was still puzzled. He took a one-location Texas bank, moved it to Austin, and at the right moment and in the right economy, made an incredible sum of money. He did it by managing the investments himself, having the most loyal customers in the industry and selling out at the top of the market. Because of Texas’ unusual rules about bankruptcy, he made home loans a very minor part of his portfolio, and even then was known for doing things in a completely different way than other banks, including meeting with borrowers face-to-face and offering them incentive-laden agreements designed to get them back on track.

  “Where is this guy from? I almost remember all the people we ended up having to foreclose on.”

  “Rolla, Missouri.”

  “Missouri? And this was my bank?”

  “Omega. You sold to them, right?”

  Mick shook his head. “That can’t be right. I didn’t do anything in Missouri. They expanded there, after.”

  He had probably left a little money on the table by getting out when he did, but Mick had started in banking listening to local lifers around the coffee shop table. They knew there was a bubble coming. Mick saw the signs of stagflation and other concepts that had killed the Texas market on several other occasions, and so while he was just reading tea leaves and with no actual knowledge of the madness to come in 2008, Mick sold. His portfolio had still done marginally well, but nothing like before. But until now, no one had even tried to claim that he had done anything untoward. Everyone else just wished they had done what he had.

  The officer shrugged. He didn’t have anything else to add.

  Mick did.

  “Where is he?” he asked. “I want to meet him.”

  * * *

  Tony drove Mick to the police station. He had to fill out several forms, and Mick looked outside as it quickly approached dusk. His eye hurt, his head hurt, but his brain hurt more, as he tried to figure out what this was all about. He knew that you never had all business deals work in your favor, but the genuine goodwill generated by his bank was one of the reasons it brought such a high price at sale. The old banker types had given him all kinds of shit when he renamed the First Tyler Bank and Trust as Blue Sky Bank. That sounded too pansy for their ears. But it was new and maybe even surprising, and the results spoke for themselves. Mick had chosen the name not on the atmospheric condition, but because that was the term used in business and accounting for the goodwill a company achieves that’s not completely ascertainable on a balance sheet. When he made the sale, it gave headline writers a field day.

  Stolen his house? This made no sense…

  Tony came out and invited him back. He entered the interrogation room (he was sure they had some more PC name for it but he was still working on a limited bandwidth) and saw the man really for the first time. He was wearing prison orange and scowling. Mick figured him for forty-five or fifty. He had grown a Wild Bill Hickok kind of mustache that stopped you from looking at his other facial features.

  “Mick, this is Jerry Favors. He’s in a whole world of trouble because he didn’t finish what he started.”

  Favors mumbled something. Tony continued.

  “Jerry’s facing many years in prison for the little stunt he pulled today. He could get life, but even I have to admit that’s unlikely.”

  Favors lifted his head for the first time, locked eyes with Mick, and spat at him. His aim was off, and Mick watched the whole thing take place like it was some scene from a surrealist movie.

  Tony grabbed Favors and shook him. “You do that again and this is over. I don’t know why but this man wants to talk with you. I don’t want to do any more paperwork so I’m just gonna pretend that didn’t happen. You need to listen to him or you need to tell him to go, one or the other. I think he can help your sorry ass.”

  “Help walk me out of my fuckin’ home. That’s all that queerbait’s good at helping.”

  Mick waited, not talking, allowing the man let go of some of the anger.

  “Tony, do you mind if I have a minute with Mr. Favors?” He made eye contact with the officer to let him know it was okay. Favors’s hands were chained to the table, and his feet to the floor. As bad an aim as he was with his spit, Mick figured that as long as he didn’t put his head down and let Favors head butt him, he would be pretty safe. Tony did a sweep of the room with his eyes, and came up with the same idea. He nodded and left the room.

  “My name’s Mick Lord,” Mick said after a beat. “You wanted to kill me a few minutes ago.”

  “Still do.”

  “I get that. I just want to know why.”

  “I just told you why.”

  “What if I told you that you were wrong?”

  “I wouldn’t believe you.” Favors lifted his head and for the first time looked at Mick.

  “Okay. Let me ask this a different way. Why in the hell do you think I had anything to do with stealing your house?”

  “All the fuckin’ paperwork, Mick,” he spit the last word out and made it rhyme even more with “dick” than it normally did. “Hell. I was gonna shoot you, put the damn papers on your chest and then blow myself awa
y.”

  Mick scanned the room. Those papers clearly weren’t there. “Do they still have them?”

  “I’m sure they’ve got it all to prove motive and shit.”

  Mick stood up and tapped on the glass. Tony opened the door.

  “Can I see this ‘paperwork’ he’s talking about?”

  Tony stepped into the next room, and Mick help the door open to the room where Favors was, half-in, half-out.

  Two minutes later, he brought back some photocopies of notes and other bank documents. There, on the second page of the bank note, he saw it:

  PAY TO THE ORDER OF

  OMEGA BANK

  BLUE SKY BANK

  BY: MICK LORD,

  PRESIDENT AND CEO

  It had a florid signature on it. It looked nothing like Mick’s handwriting. But there was his name. This was way too much for him to think about right now.

  * * *

  Late the next morning, Spider and Mick headed back to LA in Mick’s new ride. It looked like something out of a movie; Mick’s ultimate red sports car against the sand and stone of the desert, underneath a high and violently blue sky.

  Driving could not be a complete description of what Mick did on the way back to Los Angeles the following day. Flying might be better. Rocketing? Perhaps. Something that took into account what it feels like to drive on an actual highway at 150 miles per hour, when everything in the engine sings like a full-on opera, when your senses are so filled that you can’t listen to music, and if you did, it would pale in comparison to everything going on around you. He didn’t drive that fast all the way; there were too many people to do it more than a few times, to actually see what this car was capable of without endangering anyone else. It was joyful. It gave him the rush. He needed the rush. The rush was all he had left.

  Mick looked to his right and grinned and Spider. That shiner was going to last for weeks. He slowed down enough to put on some Gram Parsons and listen to “Ooh Las Vegas”. Spider was a big Gram fan as well. Halfway through the song, though, he turned the volume down.

  “You know what I’ve been thinking about, don’t you?”

  “The paperwork.”

  “It just doesn’t make any sense. The dates don’t match up, and I was already out of the banking business. If they were trying to be clever, they did a shitty job.”

  “Yeah. The dates clearly don’t match up. What are you going to do?”

  “I guess I’m gonna start by talking to Omega, seeing if there’s something here that I’m missing. But I don’t think I am. And that is bullshit on a couple of levels: Taking the guy’s house, and then making it look like I was the one who did it.”

  “Is there any chance that when you signed all those papers you gave them a power of attorney or something?”

  Mick shook his head. “Don’t think so. Man. This sucks all the way around.”

  He was at the end of his ability to think, with his head still ringing from the day before. He turned up the radio in time to hear Gram and Emmylou and Linda Ronstadt sing those beautiful choruses on “In My Hour of Darkness.”

  * * *

  It had actually been a little over a year since his wife had died. Mandy was The One. She shared most of his varied interests, loved the same music, sang the same song of life. She was an intoxicating combination of sexy, smart and goofy. They were insanely happy and inseparable. They had big plans for a house, but until then were subletting an apartment in Santa Monica, at One Ocean Drive, a beautiful spot actually built into the side of the oceanfront cliff. It was magnificent. They looked out and saw the pristine ocean sky; they looked down and saw the beach. It was a nearly perfect panoramic view, watching that orange California sun glide into the ocean, sitting together on the porch until they were completely in the dark, making love and then falling asleep to the sounds of the surf. It seemed too good to be true, and it was.

  Mick had met her as he was transitioning from banking to television. When he sold Blue Sky, he intended to stay on, but it was clear very quickly that he couldn’t work for someone else, at least not in that industry. The whole sale had been a nice experience, but soon he found himself hating his job, all the men who had left their lives behind and trailed pieces of their soul wherever they went. In the new environment, he saw men willing to cut deals that were beyond offensive, that made money but nothing else. He saw the beginnings of what would become the sub-prime crisis, and he couldn’t make the math justify the mess. At just thirty-two, nearing a billion dollars in his portfolio, he cashed the bank stock that had been given to him as part of the buyout over the next six months and moved on, growing out his hair and growing a beard and starting a new life on television.

  TV producers had given him business cards for years, telling him that if he ever wanted out of the financial world, to give them a call. He finally made that call, and the woman who answered was Mandy, the assistant to Dorrie Gray, the hottest producer in Hollywood. Dorrie pitched three ideas to Mick, and he liked “Self-Made” the best. It led him to meet with the newest and brightest entrepreneurs. It was what Dorrie hoped he would pick, a solid concept that wouldn't go out of style. Mick insisted that Mandy celebrate the deal he had just cut, and the rest of the evening flew by, a wonderful night filled with champagne and laughter and an all-night conversation lasting until morning and including nothing but a chaste kiss to end the evening. It was the stuff of movies. How amazing it actually happened in Hollywood.

  Mandy wanted to be a writer, and she was talented. Mick loved to read everything she wrote, and he knew she had greatness in her. He was her biggest fan, and he told everyone how she would make her name.

  Funny now that the name that would forever be associated with his dear Mandy was one who didn’t deserve to be anywhere near her memory. His name was Lance Herring. He was a loser. No other way to say it. Five DWIs spread over twenty years and he had never seen the inside of a jail cell. Always hired the right lawyer, always knew the judge. He was headed west on Ocean Drive, not too many blocks from their sweet space. He complained he was momentarily blinded by that beautiful setting sun, that this is what caused him to drive into oncoming traffic and maim and then kill his angel. He was blinded, all right, but by the dozen drinks he had. Lance Herring had enough money to hire a dozen chauffeurs, but he hadn’t done that. He had proudly and deliberately taken the wheel, and just half a mile later, he ended Mick’s dear Mandy’s life.

  Mick hadn’t been back to the apartment since. Hadn’t set foot in Santa Monica. He rented a room at the L’Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills until he could find a new place, and went numb and limp. He wanted to react in a heroic way, to be bigger than all of this, but he wasn’t coming close. He wanted to kill Lance Herring, and probably even more than that, he wanted to die. The force that had propelled him through life, the spark of joy that had led him to the top of his profession and then into hosting popular television shows, had not reappeared. His friends made up things, told him it would come back, but there was nothing but a void.

  What do you do when your forever is taken? After he served his solitude the best he could, he tried to drown himself in women. He knew he shouldn’t. Every time he set up a date or met a friend, he felt tiny and miserable. But those hours with someone, not just being physically intimate but also just being around another human, at least helped break up the darkness. He knew it was all unhealthy. Hell, everything he had done had been unhealthy. But he really didn’t care. At all.

  Mick had never shied away from a challenge, but now he was insane. Skydiving. Base jumping. Anything that made endorphins sing and broke up the monotony of being without a job and so alone. His friends tut-tutted and tried to reach out, but it wasn’t enough. His life was sex and big-time adrenaline rushes, and he hated it.

  He didn’t have the ability to concentrate. He didn’t have the ability to fake nice any more. He was out there; way out there. And anyone who came into contact with him knew it.

  Mick wanted to have nice things to say to La
nce Herring. He wanted to be the bigger man. But he couldn’t. And he knew it. He saw himself strangling the life out of Lance. Oh so slowly. He didn’t like that. He didn’t want that. He just prayed that he’d either figure it out or God would send a semi-truck to take him out. Or both. He just didn’t want to sink to the level of acting on the very detailed scenarios that played in his head. Enough had been taken.

  Now, in addition to the many things he had been carrying in his head, he had to consider that his name may have been used to take people’s homes without him having done anything to support that. That was heavy to him. He had gotten over people’s thoughts about him and whatever the hell he did. But he didn’t want to be thought of as a thief. He needed to stop that immediately.

  Dear God, he thought. Just end this.

  * * *

  L’Ermitage Hotel is on Burton Way in Beverly Hills. It’s not on the south side of Santa Monica Boulevard, where the shopping is done and the fancy meals are eaten, but on the north side of the road, with no signs announcing its presence, where the money is. You could drive past it, as Mick had done on more than one occasion, and miss it all together. It looked more like a nice apartment complex rather than a very desirable hotel.

  Mick didn’t get noticed everywhere he went, but TV is the great equalizer, so at least half the time, someone said something or asked for something. They always expected a memorable interaction, regardless. Mick realized that went with the territory, and figured out early in his career that most people meant well, and if you just were gracious, things went much better. That was his general demeanor anyway, so that was easy. But managing the last year, he had much less of a congenial streak, yet another thing he hated. He still managed most of the time to be kind and courteous, but he just wanted less of that type of interaction altogether. But as he had heard, you may be able to become infamous, but you can’t become unfamous. Hence his stay at L’Ermitage.

  L’Ermitage is not a place stars would go to draw paparazzi. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It is subdued and almost tranquil. It only has eight floors, and the decor is understated in the extreme. The low-volume trance music that played and the earth tones the designers used make for a relaxed, comfortable space. Their extreme secrecy policies meant it was the place you went after you had “work” done and didn’t want to be noticed. The way the staff referred to you constantly by name and worked effortlessly to see that your wishes were all granted made it ideal. Mick sometimes thought that there were many people who went through life having never been treated as well as a garden-variety guest at L’Ermitage. Sometimes this made him feel guilty, but it wasn’t enough to make him leave. He had the best feeling of living in a zen garden with occasional guests, and that was about as much as he could hope for right now.