Capron

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Color Me DeadA Continuing Adventure of the Color-Blind Detectiveby Bill CapronCopyright � 2001Death is the dark side, the shadow that follows us down the streets of life, darkening with each passing year until it has the body, and we are its complimentary empty shell. But without us, death has no substance, and once we're gone, it too passes from the world of the living, from blackness to nothingness, out of conscious recognition. There is nothing after death, and puns aside, I can live with that. I want to go on as long as possible, but it will be my final triumph to take stalking death with me.Marion Cramer brought her blackening shadow into my office that cold rainy winter day in Portland. It hung on her, under the light gray helmet of her hair, like a second staring set of eyes, almost half a beat behind the living version. It wasn't that she was old, maybe thirty-five, but her gray damp skin bore witness to a losing battle. When she eased herself into the visitor's chair, it appeared briefly she had lost some of the resolve to remain erect in an uncaring world, but she fought it and straightened her shoulders with a visible effort.I knew Marion from her previous life, long before the cancer started eating away her insides. She was a beautiful girl, with a handsome body and a winsome personality. We shared a single thing, a common trait, a bond of separateness, we were both color-blind, the rare kind, total. Though we seldom really saw things the same way, from politics to music to sports, there was the mutual attraction of two people who could talk in black, white and gray without confusion. When we parted, she said it was the only thing we shared, but later, when we were a thing of the past, and just friends, she told me our problems were her fault, but I never really believed her. She was the best year of my life, I sometimes think I was the worst year of hers, but that's a story too long for the telling.I hadn't seen her in nine months. I didn't know she was sick. I said, "Marion ..." but I couldn't put any words after it.She shrugged shrunken shoulders, "It's okay, no one knows what to say." She took in the office with a slow turn of her head, her eyes focusing, then moving on. "You could really use a little color in here, Bob."I almost stammered, "What do you mean?"She put her elbows on my desk, her still young hands steepled together and her lips pressed to her thumbs. "A week ago, I started to see color, like I was awakening from a horrible black and white dream. Now I can see everything. It's a whole new world, so much different than I'd ever imagined."My eyes widened in disbelief, "That's not possible."She placed those lovely hands with stony gray nails on my desk. "That's what my doctor said, but I can see the green of the grass, the yellow of the canary, the red in a rose." She turned her hands to me and said, "Bob, these nails are navy blue, not navy gray. It's a real color. I don't need to describe everything in grays any longer." She looked at me hard. "You've got brown eyes, but there's little green flakes of color in them. Did you know that?" I shook my head, and she continued, "I have blue eyes, not baby grays as you use to call them. Real blue eyes, like everyone else in my family. Blue eyed people can't be color-blind, did you know that? And now I'm not." She seemed to look out from within at the wonder of it all. "I don't know why this gift has been given to me, and for such a short time, but I want all of it I can get."I read the pleading in her light gray eyes, that blue I'd never see. "And?"She was matter-of-fact, "Somebody wants to kill me."Marion Cramer wasn't rich, she was way beyond rich. At twenty-eight, a couple years after we broke up, though we were both still living in San Francisco, her father died and she went home to Portland. Suddenly she was the sole owner of one of the largest independent oil companies in the nation. I'd seen one of those magazines rating the richest, and they placed, no, they guessed her value to be four to five billion, with a 'b'. So she explained how, since then, she had become the center of a whirlwind too much resembling the TV show 'Dallas', with endless intrigues of her grasping aunts and uncles and cousins, all too gainfully employed by her company.I didn't need the world of colors to know her problem. "Somebody can't wait for their inheritance?"She nodded, "I don't have proof, it's just the way some of them are looking at me, treating me like I'm some sort of temporary inconvenience."I had to ask, "And you're sure it's not all in your head, some product of this color-infused world of yours?"A brief look of irritation marked her face, then it was gone. "Of course I'm not sure. That what I need you for."I took another tack, "Why don't you leave it all to a charity, just disown the whole bunch of them. They've always hated you, even before you were rich.""That's not true." Her eyes met mine, then she averted them. This sea of color she now lived in must have blinded her. "Well, not completely true. It's been tough on them, getting nothing." She saw the start of a sneer on my face. "It feels like nothing to them. They had hopes, and when my father died, he dashed them. They have hopes again, I see it in their eyes, and it scares me."I said it again, "If it were me, I'd just disown the whole bunch."There was a hard finality to her words, "No, I'm not going to punish them all for the greed of one. That's something my father would do, and did do. I need you to find out what, if anything, is going on, then I'll take care of it myself."So we talked for two hours as I made notes about the whos and whats of the family, and the business. There were fifteen of them, all sharing equally in the company, all someday getting their six percent, plus a little. I asked why she just didn't give it to them now, but her father's will expressly forbade it with a couple of poison pills she was unwilling to invoke. She couldn't even just give them money, or a fake salary, they had to work for it, and work hard enough that an independent arbiter approved the salaries on an annual basis. I asked if her father so much distrusted them, and she said no, but he so much hated them. Now she was afraid his hate would end in her death.* * * *Marion floated the story that I was her new estate planner, there to ensure the government did not get the business on her death. She ensconced me in an office on the top floor of the company's tower. I had a view of the waterfront, the bridges, downtown, like moving postcards. From here it was so antiseptic, like living a level above the scum that moved in and out of our at times still healthy city. Every so often, I'd see the number on the top of a cop car, like specific white cells targeting some human germ or virus, but too often after the damage was done. The executives in this hermetically sealed building made their way from their safe homes, to the protected halls of the building and back again, almost never confronting the reality of the diseased city. Their brief forays for shopping, shows, dinner exposed them to the threat, but generally they made it through without pain and suffering.My life brought me close to the dark underbelly on a regular basis. I was hired by both the winners and losers of life's lottery, generally to either hold onto, or get back, what was theirs. Too often the chattel was children, the painful pawns in today's divorce actions. Used to be the kids of single parents just had a lousy home life, but now they were expected to bear witness, usually false witness, against one of their parents, almost always the father. Talk about screwing up children in the name of their protection, the courts wielded the sword of Solomon for the aggrieved wives with all the restraint of Atila the Hun. And society, through this perversion of the law, not only condones it, but promotes it, extracting a last ounce of pain, a final poison pill that festers in the Petrie dish of the future until its spawn resurrect the story line to destroy families still unborn.The Cramers were a rich family, and their hatred would fester forever. Dysfunctional is a term reserved for the poor. These people were way past dysfunctional. Petty hatreds backed by big time dollars, they'd wasted the capital of their futures by exercising every opportunity to extract pain from each other. I'd never met a group who seemed to love life so little.Marion gathered us in a conference room next to her office. The gray mahogany walls were her father's intentional slap at political correctness. The giant table was cut from a single piece of wood with a grain like leather. There were twenty chairs, of which all but three were occupied. Marion had a flip chart at the head of the table and she started the meeting by introducing me. She said I needed to talk to each of them to come up with individualized plans to meet their personal needs, for the obvious reasons of her uncertain health. She wanted to be sure they were all properly taken care of. She went through some of the optional methods of transferring wealth, but it wasn't new to these people. They may have been shocked that she hadn't done it already, but I more read suspicion in the serious gray-eyed gazes.I spent the next six hours interviewing them one at a time. It appeared to be a company without closing hours, people without families to go home to. But I knew that wasn't true because of the biographies Marion had prepared for me. So I ran them through the questions we'd developed, to add a personal feel to the hard black words. To a man, and woman, there was a distrust of Marion, her motives, and of course all the other relatives. It wasn't in what they said, but how they said it, a nuance of hatred. They seemed invested with a fear of being cut out, of not having authorit... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]