The Gods of Greenwich by Norb Vonnegut Page B

left eyebrow and tilted her head slightly to the right. She saved her Sherlock Holmes face just for these occasions.
    Emi Cusack saw everything—errant eyebrows, stained cuffs, nervous tics—everything except faces and bills. The invoices that originally went to the office now landed in a PO box. Her powers of observation, Jimmy decided, compensated for the prosopagnosia.
    “Next time I’ll use a quarter to scratch,” Cusack confessed to Emi. “And no, I didn’t win the lottery. It’s better.”
    “Okay?”
    “LeeWell Capital offered me a job.”
    “Hah,” she whooped, echoing Cusack from before. “Are you taking it? I want to hear everything! How come you didn’t call from the car?”
    “I have my reasons.”
    Cusack had deliberated about his career and mortgage woes all the way home from Greenwich. His misgivings about sales, however, no longer mattered. Emi, beautiful and slightly broken, was six or seven weeks pregnant. He was a dad.
    LeeWell offered Jimmy Cusack a fresh start, a chance to ring the cash register. He could make big bucks at LeeWell. More money than three blocks of Somerville plumbers, carpenters, and bus drivers earned in aggregate. More money in one year than Cusack’s father earned his entire career.
    “I want you focused on one thing,” Leeser explained earlier that day. “More money and more growth for LeeWell. I want you thinking about our company in the shower, not your mortgage payments.”
    “There are a few details,” Cusack replied to Emi, “we still need to work out.” He tried to sound nonchalant. Force of habit from finance. “It’s more of a sales job than what I’ve done in the past. But LeeWell Capital is a small shop, and I think my role will grow over the long term.”
    “You’ll be great,” she said, sensing hesitation. “Dad says you can sell ice cubes to Eskimos.”
    “Door-to-door at the igloos if Caleb has his way.”
    “Oh, stop it,” Emi scolded playfully. “Grab your wine, Barney, and tell me everything,” she ordered, leading him to the bedroom.
    “You want a purple dinosaur?” he teased. “I’ll show you a purple dinosaur.”
    “Let’s go with Buster.”

 
    CHAPTER TWELVE
    THAT NIGHT IN GREENWICH  …
    Cy Leeser cruised the rolling hills of Greenwich in his cream-colored Bentley, top down. Past the stone border walls that never end. Through the area known as “Mid-Country,” where newer mansions abut the roads and stately 1920 homes hide at the rear of the properties. He glanced at Judge Judy’s sprawling summer estate on the south side of Round Hill Road and shook his head.
    The New York Post dubbed her manor “Judyville.” The 24,000-square-foot residence resembled a transplant from Normandy, but without the fine patina of wear and tear that makes the French countryside so charming. The Post was unfair, Leeser decided. Sure, the house included ten hand-carved marble fireplaces and ceilings that soared two stories high. But there were only thirteen bathrooms.
    Judyville was nothing compared to Valery Kogan’s proposal. The Russian billionaire intended to erect a 27,000-square-foot super-mansion, complete with twenty-six bathrooms and enough flushing power to drain the Atlantic. Kogan’s architectural plans included a Turkish bath, Finnish bath, and even a dog-grooming salon. Now, that was a Greenwich theme park.
    Give the judge a break, Leeser thought.
    Judyville required only five hundred lightbulbs. Paul Tudor Jones, the hedge fund billionaire, put up fifteen thousand Christmas lights every year and synchronized their flashes to a four-minute loop on FM 90.5. His holiday display required a small army equipped with scaffolding and extension ladders just to hang everything. He was the one who needed the arrow at his front gate. The sign pointed left so visitors would not mistake his fiefdom for the Belle Haven Club next door. Judge Judy was not the one with a problem.
    The reality: Leeser never deliberated whether any Greenwich