Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence by Judith Viorst Page A

could sell and quadruple your money in just a few months.”
    “And who,” Jeff asked him breathlessly, “gets to own?”
    “Could be us, kid,” Mr. Monti replied. “Sixteen buildings are up for sale, and I’ll cut you in on eight—if you can find four hundred thou for the down payments.”
    Jeff gasped. “I don’t have that kind of money,” he said. “I was thinking of something smaller. A whole lot smaller.”
    “Never think small,” Mr. Monti said. “Let’s examine your resources—all of them.”
    At the end of the examination Mr. Monti offered to lend Jeff most of the money he needed for the down payments, with Jeff putting up as collateral the two houses he owned out in Rockville (bought, he explainedto me, after a fabulous day at the races and on which, he explained to me, he still owed plenty), his Watergate condo (bought, he explained to me, in the wake of a brilliant stock-market killing and on which, he explained to me, he still owed plenty), his brand-new Jaguar (bought, he explained to me, with the winnings from a high-stakes poker game and on which, he explained to me, he still owed plenty), and the twenty-five thousand dollars that his grandfather had left to him (but which he would not come into until he was thirty).
    In the contract Mr. Monti. drew up, it said that his loan to Jeff was “payable in full upon demand.” But, he assured Jeff, “that’s just a formality, to keep my accountants happy. Listen, we’re practically relatives—you shouldn’t give the matter a second thought.”
    The buildings were purchased in March. They figured to sell them in early June when the project went public. That’s also when Jeff intended to pay off the loan. But in May, Mr. Monti found out—though he neglected to notify Jeff—that the urban renewal project was dead in the water. Mr. Monti unloaded his buildings. Jeff did not.
    “And then,” Jeff said to me, “you know what he did? He called in my loan. He said he wanted payment in full, immediately.”
    What a surprise, I was tempted to say. I didn’t. I bit my tongue and said, “What a shame!” instead.
    I completely understood why Jeff had made this high-flying deal with Mr. Monti. My boy was greedy. I also had some thoughts about why Mr. Monti had chosen to do what he’d done to Jeff.
    I think he had lent Jeff the money as a way of trying to get his hooks into Wally, who was far moreindependent than he liked the men in his daughters’ lives to be. By helping Jeff make money, he would be saying to Wally, “Look what I’ve done for your brother. I’ll do it for you—if you’ll submit to me.”
    And when Wally didn’t submit» when Wally appeared to mock and defy him on this stupendously supercharged issue of conversion, take-no-prisoners Joseph Monti took his revenge by striking out at Jeff.
    Trying to look on the bright side, I said to Jeff, “You’ve still got the Anacostia buildings. Couldn’t you fix them up—make something out of them?”
    Jeff groaned. “I said I had trouble figuring out if a neighborhood’s going up or going down. Well, I’m not having any trouble trying to figure this neighborhood out. It’s going down. Fast.”
    He groaned again. “And Mom, so am I So am I.”
    •  •  •
    I once got a touching letter from an “Inadequate in Islip,” who wrote:
    D EAR B RENDA:
    When it comes to the daily disasters of life I do great like you wouldn’t believe. If my furnace conks out, if my tire goes flat, if my water, pipes freeze and burst, I am cheerful and calm and on top of things because I always can say to myself, Could be worse. My problem is that when it is worse, when disaster really strikes, I fall apart at the seams and am incapable of rising to the occasion. I am not pleased, for instance, with the way I behaved when my husband embezzled this money from his company, and ran away with the bookkeeper on exactly the day I had surgery for my . . .
    I won’t go into the rest of the letter