“This money’s dirty.”
“It’s not polite to question a man and his money.” Saying this, I’m reminded of Tully and the affront he took at the accusation of it being drug money. Maybe the money’s dirty, but it’s the only money I have. Simpkins picks up another hundred-dollar bill and scrunches his eyes at it, a grimace on his face. Perhaps it’s the hangover or the sip of top-notch hooch, but it’s almost as if he decides he doesn’t need my money. He grins contemptuously. I surreptitiously switch back on my phone’s recording function, so suspicious am I of his change in behavior. “Hey, who’s to say which money is cleaner than others? All money is dirty when you come down to it.”
Simpkins paws one of the bills, rubbing it between his fingers. When he opens his hand, releasing the bill back onto his desk, his fingertips are black with grease. “That’s what I meant.”
“What’s a little dirt between friends, right? If God didn’t want money to be dirty, he wouldn’t have invented hand soap. Or regulatory agencies.”
The quip gets a little rise out of Simpkins. He grins, but just as I think I’ve got him coming around to being friendly again, he opens his desk drawer, pulls out a bottle of hand sanitizer, and squirts a dab into his hands. Years ago, I met Al Gore at a meet-and-greet for would-be venture capitalists looking to fund a renewable energy start-up he was fronting. This would have been two or three years after he lost the 2000 presidential election, and Gore was already viewed as a political has-been, yet I found him charming and in firm control of the facts and figures of his presentation. Afterward, Gore pulled me aside for a glass of port. We shared a dry sense of humor and swapped anecdotes about my father-in-law, whom I gathered had a hand in Gore’s 2000 presidential fundraising operation. Later, as we shook hands and bid each other heartfelt Hey, it’s been great meeting you! adieus, an aide appeared at Gore’s side with a bottle of lemon-scented hand-sanitizing gel, making me feel as if Gore and/or his aide suspected me of being contaminated with germs—which is how I feel watching Simpkins sanitize his hands: icky.
“So, Mister—hey, what did you say your name was?” Simpkins asks.
“I didn’t. Remember?”
Simpkins takes another underwhelming swig of the Macallan. I’m honestly surprised he hasn’t figured out who I am or why I’ve such a vested interest in the affairs of a spurned wife and the young woman who gave birth at Sibley.
“I’ve got bad news,” Simpkins says, setting down the bottle.
My head jerks up.
“Inflation. It creeps up on you. You know what I mean?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That woman yesterday, the one who thought she was getting a good deal at two thousand dollars for all the dirt I could dig up on that chick in the hospital?”
“Yeah? What about her?”
Simpkins eyes me for what seems like an exceptionally long time, unnerving me. “She ponied up another fourteen hundred dollars today.”
I grab the bottle and take a healthy, man-sized swig of the Macallan. Closing my eyes, I hold the Scotch in my mouth for a good five seconds, reveling in its taste. “So what’s this mean?”
“You’re in a bidding war. That’s what this means. I can’t say for certain, but I’m pretty sure I could squeeze a couple hundred dollars more out of her, too.”
“A couple hundred?”
“Yep.” Simpkins folds his hands together again. His smile is the greasy smile of a used-car salesman fleecing an aging pensioner out of his last $1,000 for an ancient Ford Festiva that’ll break down as soon as it’s driven off the lot. As much as I want to hate him, I’m astounded at his stupidity: Trish could afford to fork over way more than a few hundred dollars. Surely, he knows this. But he doesn’t. He has no idea who Trish is. Simpkins takes the Macallan bottle from my hand and raises it to his lips, but rather than taking another slight sip, he gulps down the kind of huge desperate swig a man takes when throwing himself at the mercies of stupid fate or searching for courage. He wipes his mouth against the arm of his Adidas track jacket. “So how much more do you think I might be able to squeeze out of you?”
It’s me against Trish in a bidding war I can’t afford to lose, which is unfortunate: me, with no real money of my own, pitted against my wealthy wife. If bidding is to go on piecemeal, each day Simpkins hitting us up to raise the ante, I’m bound to lose. My only hope is to blow Trish out of the water with an insanely high opening bid.
“I can guarantee you one thing: I’ve got way more money than your other client.”
“Prove it.”
Loath as I am to part with Tully’s cash, I toss the entire bag onto Simpkins’s desk. Even after what I’ve already given to him, plus the gift shop candy bars and Macallan, about $8,000 remains in the oil-stained lunch sack, enough dirty cash that Simpkins will need two bottles of hand sanitizer by the time he’s through counting it.
“How much is in here?”
“A shitload. That’s how much. Do I win the bidding war? Or should I take my money and walk away?”
Simpkins glances into Tully’s money bag.
“You’ve got ten seconds to make up your mind, Simpkins. What are you going to do?”
Simpkins, like me, has likely not seen so much cash in one place before, but, greed being the world’s greatest motivator, he rubs his thumb through the stubble on his chin and angles his head at me as if to figure a way to outsmart me out of more cash.
“By your silence, I’m assuming you’d rather I take my money back,” I say, eager not to appear too anxious.
“I’ll take your money. I won’t tell the wife anything I found out.”
“Ahh! You’re as smart as I thought you were, taking the bird in the hand rather than gambling on what the wife might be willing to throw into the bush.”
Simpkins should be ecstatic, but instead he’s underwhelmed. That or he’s an incredibly calm poker-faced man too wary and wily to let anyone guess his emotions. Tonight, he’ll stroll into Taylor’s and tell his pal how he gamed me out of a whole shitload of money, but tomorrow, after he fills out a deposit slip and drops off the money at his bank, he’ll rack his brain for ways he could’ve extracted more money out me. I, too, should be elated, but I’m no closer to amassing the boatload of money I need to make good on my investment tip, and now I’m ten grand in the hole to Tully.
“Tell me what you found out about this woman who had the baby. At Sibley, you said, didn’t you?”
“That was never part of the deal.” Simpkins’s voice hardens. Perhaps he believes I was bidding against Trish out of purely altruistic notions. “You never told me you wanted the information yourself.”
“It’s the winners who make the rules. That’s the first rule you should know about operating in this town. Whoever pays the most gets to write the rules of the game. How could a man as smart as you not know this? Tell me about Laurel Bloom.”
Simpkins reaches behind him to open a drawer of his metal filing cabinet. The manila folder he grabs out of the drawer is slim, perhaps containing ten sheets of paper, but the first thing I notice is one of Laurel’s sonogram pictures. I have no idea how he hacked into the hospital records to get that sonogram picture, but my esteem for his sleuthing abilities skyrockets, and yet, watching the way he studies that sonogram picture, I get nervous. A grin appears on Simpkins’s face. He picks up a pencil and writes something in the folder, takes another drink from the Scotch bottle, and then fishes out a nude photo of Laurel and some young blond-haired, blue-eyed guy who must be as young as her. They’re lying on sumptuous red silk sheets atop a four-poster queen-sized canopy bed, sated smiles on both their faces.