"You did the sign, the poster thing?" he asks without turning around.
"Aye, aye," says Rebecca Vilas. "And a splendid day it is we shall be havin' for the great occasion, too, as is only roight and proper." Her Irish accent is surprisingly good, if a bit generic. She has never been anywhere more exotic than Atlantic City, where Chipper used his frequent-flier miles to escort her for five enchanted days two years before. She learned the accent from old movies.
"I hate Strawberry Fest," Chipper says, dredging the last of the envelopes from the safe. "The zombies' wives and children mill around all afternoon, cranking them up so we have to sedate them into comas just to get some peace. And if you want to know the truth, I hate balloons." He dumps the money onto the carpet and begins to sort the bills into stacks of various denominations.
"Only Oi was wonderin', in me simple country manner," says Rebecca, "why Oi should be requested to appear at the crack o' dawn on the grand day."
"Know what else I hate? The whole music thing. Singing zombies and that stupid deejay. Symphonic Stan with his big-band records, whoo boy, talk about thrills."
"I assume," Rebecca says, dropping the stage-Irish accent, "you want me to do something with that money before the action begins."
"Time for another journey to Miller." An account under a fictitious name in the State Provident Bank in Miller, forty miles away, receives regular deposits of cash skimmed from patients' funds intended to pay for extra goods and services. Chipper turns around on his knees with his hands full of money and looks up at Rebecca. He sinks back down to his heels and lets his hands fall into his lap. "Boy, do you have great legs. Legs like that, you ought to be famous."
"I thought you'd never notice," Rebecca says.
Chipper Maxton is forty-two years old. He has good teeth, all his hair, a wide, sincere face, and narrow brown eyes that always look a little damp. He also has two kids, Trey, nine, and Ashley, seven and recently diagnosed with ADD, a matter Chipper figures is going to cost him maybe two thousand a year in pills alone. And of course he has a wife, his life's partner, Marion, thirty-nine years of age, five foot five, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 190 pounds. In addition to these blessings, as of last night Chipper owes his bookie $13,000, the result of an unwise investment in the Brewers game George Rathbun is still bellowing about. He has noticed, oh, yes he has, Chipper has noticed Ms. Vilas's splendidly cantilevered legs.
"Before you go over there," he says, "I was thinking we could kind of stretch out on the sofa and fool around."
"Ah," Rebecca says. "Fool around how, exactly?"
"Gobble, gobble, gobble," Chipper says, grinning like a satyr.
"You romantic devil, you," says Rebecca, a remark that utterly escapes her employer. Chipper thinks he actually is being romantic.
She slides elegantly down from her perch, and Chipper pushes himself inelegantly upright and closes the safe door with his foot. Eyes shining damply, he takes a couple of thuggish, strutting strides across the carpet, wraps one arm around Rebecca Vilas's slender waist and with the other slides the fat manila envelopes onto the desk. He is yanking at his belt even before he begins to pull Rebecca toward the sofa.
"So can I see him?" says clever Rebecca, who understands exactly how to turn her lover's brains to porridge . . .
. . . and before Chipper obliges her, we do the sensible thing and float out into the lobby, which is still empty. A corridor to the left of the reception desk takes us to two large, blond, glass-inset doors marked DAISY and BLUEBELL, the names of the wings to which they give entrance. Far down the gray length of Bluebell, a man in baggy coveralls dribbles ash from his cigarette onto the tiles over which he is dragging, with exquisite slowness, a filthy mop. We move into Daisy.