The Baxter Trust

up someone’s drugs?
    He sat on the couch, picked up the phone and called his answering service. There was one message from Judy Meyers: “Where are you?”
    He sighed. Hell. He’d forgotten to call and cancel. This was the third time he’d stood her up, too. Only this time he had a legitimate excuse.
    That thought made him realize the other two times he must not have had a legitimate excuse. Was he avoiding Judy Meyers? Not consciously. He hadn’t really thought about it before.
    He looked at the clock. 11:30. Where had the day gone? Well, not too late to call. He reached for the phone. Stopped. Shit. It was too late to call. Judy had an audition tomorrow morning. That’s why they’d made an early dinner date. She’d be asleep now.
    He suddenly realized how tired he was. What a day. He should be sleeping too. But first things first. Take care of business.
    He went in to the bathroom and took the packet out of his pocket. It was a small brown envelope. He tore it open. Inside was a small plastic bag filled with a white powder. He tore the bag open, dumped the powder into the toilet, then threw the plastic bag and the brown envelope in too.
    He flushed the toilet. It didn’t flush. It gurgled encouragingly for a few moments, but then quieted. The ripples in the bowl smoothed out, and the water moved in a gentle circle. The envelope and plastic bag floated like ducks on a pond. The coke floated on the surface too—white pond scum.
    He stood looking down at the bowl and chuckled. Well, a fitting end to the day, somehow. Sometimes the toilet worked and sometimes it didn’t. He’d been after the super for weeks to fix the damn thing. Well, he couldn’t call him now. “Yeah, it won’t flush. Please ignore the cocaine floating in the water.”
    He moved the pile of old magazines and assorted junk off the tank of the toilet and took off the top. About five minutes of fiddling produced the desired effect. Water coursed down, and envelope, plastic bag and cocaine were flushed away. He kept watching to make sure they didn’t pop up again. They didn’t.
    He emerged from the bathroom, bent down, untied his shoes and kicked them into the corner, then pulled off his jacket and tie and threw them over a chair. He stepped out of his pants and hung them on the doorknob. They missed, fell to the floor. He let them lay. Well, fold out the couch? Screw it. He was too tired. As usual.
    He flung himself facedown on the couch and was instantly asleep.

27.
    “Y OU SON OF A BITCH !”
    To understate it, Sheila Benton was not happy. She was glaring daggers through the wire mesh screen in the visiting room.
    Steve Winslow, on the other hand, was in rare good humor. He had gotten a good night’s sleep. He had showered and shaved, and attended to his cuts and bruises. His jacket and tie were the same, but he had put on clean socks and underwear, a clean shirt and a clean pair of pants.
    And he had money in the pockets.
    “Nice talk,” he said sardonically. “Why am I a son of a bitch?”
    “You know why,” Sheila said between clenched teeth. “You told Uncle Max I was taking drugs.”
    “He was here, then?”
    “I’ll say he was here! Do you know what you’ve done? Do you have any idea? You’ve probably fucked me out of my entire inheritance.”
    “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. You’ve got eleven years to work your way back into his good graces.”
    “Yeah! Great. Why the hell’d you have to tell him I was taking drugs?”
    “I had to.”
    “Yeah. I know. He told me. You needed the money.”
    “That was only part of it. I had to get him to call off Marston, Marston, and Cramden before they bungled you into a first-degree-murder rap.”
    Sheila laughed sarcastically. “Oh, sure. Here you are, the great savior. What the hell makes you think they’d do any worse a job than you’ve been doing?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’d sure like to hear what they would have said when you asked them to pick up your cocaine for you.”
    She had been preparing another angry retort, but that stopped her. “Oh. Did you get it?”
    “Yeah. I got it.”
    She lowered her voice. “Do you have it on you?”
    Steve looked at her in disbelief. “No, I do not ‘have it on’ me. I have enough trouble without walking around with drugs in my pockets. Did you know the police picked me up and frisked me last night?”
    “That was before they knew who you were. Now that they think you’re clean you’ll be