the keys. Both Weems and Romeo had moved to Key West

twelve years earlier when the New York publishing house where

Weems had been a senior editor was bought by Argentinean

beef producers and most of the house’s functions were moved

28 Richard Stevenson

to Buenos Aires. Now they ran a small B and B, Romeo said,

and only served pork products for breakfast.

Easy to look at in their pale cottons and silks, the two

women seated across from me, one olive-skinned and ample,

one creamy and svelte, were also merrily festooned with skin

cancer Band-Aids, apparently a small price to pay for life in

what was still a pretty good place for getting away from it all.

Key West still had allure, despite cruise ships the size of the

Pentagon lumbering in daily, and the influx of millionaires who

had left the island unaffordable for lesser new arrivals. Gary

Griswold had seemed more or less at home there, and his three

friends said they were stunned when Griswold suddenly

announced, after a vacation trip to Thailand, that he was

abandoning them and his life there for a country on the other

side of the world.

Horn said, “Gary and I were no longer partners in the

personal sense by the time he left. So, emotionally it was more

or less okay. That part of our relationship had petered out more than a year earlier, and we both had been seeing other people.”

“Seeing, ” Weems said. “Such a darling way of putting it.”

“Anyway, I had always been the one to play around,” Horn

said. “Gary, being more serious and focused about everything

he undertook, was more of a serial monogamist.”

“This is true,” Romeo said. “Marcie and I once certified

Gary as an honorary lesbian.”

“I sometimes wonder,” Horn said, “what would have

happened if Geoffrey Pringle had never invited Gary over to

Bangkok. Though, of course, Gary had begun to change almost

a year before that. At the time, we thought maybe it had

something to do with Gary falling off his bike, screwy as that might sound. Another biker ran into him in a race up near

Ocala, and Gary wiped out and landed on his head. He was

wearing a helmet, but he had a bad concussion, and the whole

thing seemed to throw him for a loop like nothing else we’d

ever seen. He went around in a daze for a week after he got out

of the hospital. And it was not too long after that that he got

the astrology bug, and he started seeing a woman on Stock

THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 29

Island who claims to help people get in touch with their past

lives. I’ve read that head injuries can sometimes cause

personality changes, temporary or even permanent, and we all

wondered at the time if Gary hitting his head had somehow

jarred loose his bullshit detector.”

I asked, “Who is Geoffrey Pringle?”

“A longtime Key West full-timer who moved to Thailand

four or five years ago,” Horn said. “It was Geoff who invited

Gary over for a two-week visit.”

“What does Geoff do in Thailand?”

“He’s retired,” Romeo said. “His family in Chicago made a

fortune in grain futures years ago. A while back, Geoff inherited forty or fifty mil, and bingo, off he flew.”

I asked if anybody had checked with Pringle about

Griswold’s current situation. Wasn’t this guy likely to know

something?

“We tried,” Horn said. “But Geoffrey won’t really talk to us.

Apparently he and Gary had some kind of falling-out. I got

Geoff on the phone in Bangkok about a month ago. He said he

didn’t know where Gary was, and he ‘couldn’t care less,’ his

words. Geoff also told me in no uncertain terms that the day I

phoned him was not an auspicious date for him to be taking a

transoceanic telephone call, and he just hoped that I had not

fucked up his entire month.”

Romeo laughed and said, “And Geoff didn’t even land on

his head, as far as we know.”

Some food arrived, an aromatic bounteous antipasti for the

table.

“Don’t be dainty,” Romeo said. “Shovel it down. There’s

more where that came from. Plus, the pasta dishes.”

As we dug in, Horn said, “The numerology thing with Gary

was especially uncomfortable for all of us whenever nine-eleven

came up. Gary had bought into a theory bouncing around the

Internet about the date, eleven, and the shape of the two New

York towers, and some supposed prediction by Nostradamus

made in the fourteenth century that historians say was fake.

30 Richard Stevenson

There was even more to it — something about the flight

numbers of the crashed planes adding up to something

significant — and Gary took it all very seriously.”

“After a while, of course, Gary didn’t really talk to us about

any of that,” Romeo said. “When we were casually dismissive,

or just unresponsive, he tended to drop the subject for a while.

We didn’t want to insult him or hurt him. But we weren’t about

to indulge this looniness, either. What do you do? What do you

say? We loved Gary, but we were just flabbergasted. Some

people are susceptible to these notions and some aren’t, and we

happen to fall into the latter category. It just got terribly

awkward.”

“He obviously cared what you thought of him,” I said. “And

after he moved to Thailand, he stayed in touch. But you said,

Lou, that Gary gave indications that things were starting to go

wrong. What were those indications?”

They looked at each other. Horn said, “You know about

Mango, right? From Ellen Griswold.”

“I do. Apparently Gary was head over heels for the guy.”

“He was,” Janice said, “and then later he wasn’t. In one e-

mail he sent me late last summer — I’ve got a hard copy for

you to take with you — Gary said Mango might not be who he

said he was. This was extremely distressing for Gary. He had

trusted this guy, he said. Gary had also been to a seer — that’s the word he used. And what the seer predicted was ‘bloodshed’

in Gary’s life, and ‘great sorrow for people close to him.’ Again, the seer’s words.”

That’s all? No specifics?”

“No.”

“Did Gary tell anybody the seer’s name?”

“No.”

“Not death, just bloodshed? That was the word? And

sorrow?”

“It is tantalizingly and unhelpfully vague,” Horn said.

THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 31

I asked Janice how she had replied to Griswold’s unnerving

e-mail, and she looked sheepish. “I never really responded,

really. What I thought was, this is supermarket tabloid stuff.

Gary didn’t have to go all the way to Thailand for this. He could have picked up forecasts like that for a couple of bucks at the

Winn-Dixie checkout. He said the seer was some kind of

renowned figure in Thailand, but it sounded like a racket to me.

I wasn’t about to say that, though, so I just let it go. About a week later, I sent him some chirpy message about nothing at all.

I stupidly just ignored this thing that obviously was terribly

important to Gary.”

“Well, if it was a scam,” Weems said, “Gary could afford it.

He had more money than God and Buddha put together.

Anyway, what could you possibly have said? Sometimes when

people are acting screwy, silence from friends is the only kind

and useful response.”

I asked if Griswold had informed any of the three that he

had transferred his entire fortune to a Bangkok bank and that

he planned on a large investment with an early big payoff. No,

they said, they had not known about this until I had told Horn

on the phone. “You scared the bejesus out us of with that one,”