Tales Out Of Court

Measure of Success

by .....© 2000 by John F. Clennan, All Rights Reserved

Adapted for Short Story Form from Dream Street © 1992 by John F. Clennan

Easter Monday traffic had just started to build along the two major thoroughfares which met to form the Golden triangle of the distant eastern suburbs. I turned to 30 year old Gale Petrowski, whose gentle curl in her long chestnut hair suggested a vivacious at odds with the grim mission of the evening. Streetlights had just flickered a tribute to the dying sun when I turned my rickety chevy onto Dream Street.

In my time, I had been through this many times. First they said it was the war, then the drink and then plain incompetency and soon they'd say...Age. I couldn't understand Gale Petrowski's attraction for me. I frankly didn't deserve it.

Our destination, 350 Dream Street, stood in the heart of the commercialization which swept through Eastern Long Island. Among towering glass and steel giants which overran potato fields and pine barrens, it, a Roman Villa sat as a reminder of the days of ex-urban splendor.

I remember the first time I saw the genteel retreat slumbering among tinted glass upstarts. I was with Dick Angelo, who with me had been unceremoniously tossed out of an up and coming law firm. Though short and overweight, Angelo bounced through his treasure with grace. At his right arm was Joe Curren, the elven humorless man whose real estate manipulations put Dick and me in our predicament with the old firm.

Dick had set up a heavily discounted sale from a distressed widow to Currens with a lease back, acted as lawyer for both parties and took a handsome broker's commission.

"It stinks," the senior partner dispatched Dick in a rage, "And take Sergeant John Dukes with you. He should have reported this to me."

Told of the firings, the client Currens curtly promised, "On your own, you may be useful to the cause."

Dick Angelo accepted the fall from holy hell of the fallout in old firm to the wholly hell of a new adventure with bravado. Speaking of Dream Street, Dick boasted, "Got it dirt-cheap...Not suitable as a residence... too costly to knock down for a strip mall. Ideal for a law office," Dick told me as we walked through an arched foyer which led to a spacious living room connecting the two wings of the one story mansion.

Pointing out the circular bath in the east wing, Dick explained, "Wouldn't it be worth $250 G's to bathe in that tub once."

I looked at Dick strangely. I knew the price was only $199. Curren grunted in disgust. He had other business to attend to.

As Curren left, I complimented Dick, "The palace befitting a prince." I hesitated to ask the logical question. "We just left the old firm... with nothing. How will you pay for this ?"

Dick looked at me as if I asked the stupidest question ever posed. "OPM, Other people's money... Curren arranged it, through some...er... European friends. And I'll have some start up capital to the good."

In free wheeling 1980's money magic, enchantment reigned supreme over practicability.

"Anyone at the old firm daring enough to join with us ?" Dick asked.

"Only Gale Petrowski," I replied,"and I honestly don't know why."

Nor did I. She was offered a promotion to stay in the reshuffling of the old law firm. "Sarge," she called me, "You watch out for your people. I'm going with you."

Did I really ?

In Korea, I had returned alone. The little slit trench we defended to the last man had been given up to the enemy in the truce and still is visible from the wire on our side of the barrier.

"If you call me Sergeant, I'll call you Spec 4... and"

"Not likely," she said with an evil grin. "One privilege of never having made rank."

I stopped the car dead center on the oval in front of 350 Dream Street. My highlights bounced off the living room's picture window. No one was around...Good...

"Sarge, are you going to be okay ?" Gale gently place her long fingers on my right arm.

I closed my eyes and prayed. I was too old for pretending another failure to be a success. After the Marines rescued me from the slit trench, the Army had called me a hero just to close the books on an inconclusive war.

Was it yet another personal defeat? I asked myself as I stepped out of the car into a early spring twilight, where the cold of passing winter meets the promise of summer to come.

Gale and I walked proudly and deliberately into 350 Dream Street to stress a departure on our own violation, as if any of the motorists rushing home or cared about our dilemma.

Thoughtfully Gale had brought a box to pack up our meager belongings.

Our march to the front door reminded me of a different march... to a Colonel's Office... After my rescue, I had been held in a replacement detachment, while they debated whether to court-martial me or to send me home. I had walked as proudly as I could, impervious to the consequences.

When Gale and I entered Dream Street this Easter Monday the lights were on inside.

Gale went to the back where the small office we shared had been carved out of kitchen space. I looked in at the living room, which had been converted into a large waiting area. As big as it was it was hard to picture the crowd gathered at Christmas.

Dick Angelo and Joe Curren had stood in the center of the checker-board black and white tiled room together with an executive of Western Nugget Bank... surrounded by an assemblage waiting to pay homage. Then, negotiating with the Bank to buy Brooklyn Bridge Mortgage Company, Dick met his competitors' envious glares. Pushed by the weight of the crowd to the counterstage, I shook hands with the Bank Executive who drawled, "Mr. John Dukes, you about the only lawyer here, who ain't offered to kiss my old rawhide butt."

"And it's not very likely that I'll try." I replied tartly.

Curren and Dick roared in laughter. "That's old Sarge John Dukes: hard money and hard liquor."

"I gave up the latter and never saw the former." I retorted.

"But not fast women ?" Curren roared. Alcohol had stained his nose red.

I turned away in disgust. Gale and I kept our relationship... personal. It was not fair game.

In the present tense of that grim duty this Easter Monday, I wandered past the secretarial station into Dick's spacious office on the west wing. It was here Dick asked me. "What would you say, if I bought Brooklyn Bridge Mortgage Company for $2 mill ?"

"How could something that didn't exist last year be worth that much ?" I said in amazement.

I wandered back through the kitchen to the small office which had been carved out of appliance space for Gale and me.

Gale summoned me back to the present. "You're in a fog. I'm almost done... We want to be gone before...," Gale warned.

It was in this room several weeks ago that Joe Curren discussed an eviction with me.

"It won't float. The tenant sold the house to you on a buy-back. Both you and the tenant used Dick as a lawyer. Do you expect any New York Judge to toss the widow lady out ?"

"For Dick's sake," Curren replied non-plussed. "My European friends have made successful completion of this eviction as a condition of Dick's 2 million dollar loan."

I gasped. Dick had not yet gotten the $2 million dollars, but he had already bought the mortgage company. Where had the money come from ?

"My European friends are patriots, not financiers," Curren snarled. "If Dick wins, Dick gets the money. They'll let the old bat stay in the house forever if she wants."

By Good Friday the answer came soon enough. The case was lost and the firm's escrow accounts... Other people's money... were overdrawn beyond belief.

"You're dreaming on me," Gale said as she picked the box off the desk.

"Is there anything else you want to take ? I have to loot the supply cabinet but Currencies men come back... " She looked nervously to the door. She shuddered in exaggeration. We walked to the entrance way where the final act was played out.

"Where's that daydreaming guinea?" Curren yelled a few hours earlier.

"Dick Angelo has an early appointment with good old St. Pete." Behind Curren, stood two men: one as burly and as menacing as a dock worker and the other as refined as a old fashioned banker replete with a dark three-piece suit and pencil thin moustache.

"I say dear Curren; grab hold of yourself. We'll deal with the fair lad in due course." To us, the well dressed man offered a sick smile and ordered: "Scurry off to your tea break and return for your personals later." When neither Gale or I moved, he added, "Is something I say droll? Be off with you ?" To his companions, the well-groomed man, knitting his brows, exclaimed, I say, don't these people speak bloody English ?"

As Gale and I turned to leave Dream Street, the well-appointed stranger assured Curren, "Stout fellow. I'm sure when we meet this" the banker-type grimaced in pain, "...Barrister...He'll be happy to execute whatever deed or patent to this..." he added a gasp to emphasize his disdain, "chambers that we might require."

As Gale and I walked to the front door, I took one last lonely sigh. Suddenly Gale gasped, she dropped the box; I turned Dick Angelo was squatting on the floor with a rifle pointed at his head.

As I was racing toward Dick, I thought of my drill instructor's favorite saying, "When someone's pointing a weapon, you have less than a heart beat to duck or to disarm the bastard." I easily pushed the butt of the rifle into Dick's face, knocking him cold on the floor.

My mind went blank. The next thing I remember was Gale yelling, "Sarge, the war is over." I was standing over Dick trying to bayonet him with the barrel of the rifle.

Gale easily seized the weapon, cleared it, tossed the magazine across the checkered tiled floor under the couch and threw the rifle toward the secretarial desk. The rifle skidded across the floor.

The Marines had found me the same way, bayoneting some long dead enemy bastard. "You're lucky the skipper remembered you guys went out here," they said. "The war's over; this real estate goes to the other side. After today you'd be on the wrong side of the wire."

I walked out of Dream Street in a daze. Yet Gale became strangely cheerful. "All in all, Sarge, it was a success."

"Success ? Are you crazy ?" I stared in astonishment at her translucent green eyes. "We're stealing off in the dark of night; Dick attempted suicide..."

"We walked out alive and free," Gale responded.

A grim overwrought Army Colonel had presented me a medal right before my departure from Korea. "It's over. That's the only good thing I can say of it," he said.