by Katy Munger
Safely back in my office again, I called Bill Butler and did my best to sound casual. It was a dismal performance for all concerned.
"Why are you calling?" Bill asked. "Need a ride to Alcoholics Anonymous?"
"Very funny. I’m calling to help you with your case. I've remembered something."
"Oh, have you now?” he said. “Why is the hair on the back of my neck standing up?"
There were a lot of nasty retorts I could have made, but I needed him to follow my lead. "I'm going to give you a pass on that one and just tell you that, as you know, I have done a lot of work for Rats in the past. I've been thinking hard about the last time I was with him, looking for clues as to who might have killed him."
There was a silence. Bill had clearly not learned his lines for this charade and was simply going to wait me out. "And…?" he finally said.
"I just remembered that there is a gold plaster Buddha statue in his office," I said, as casually as any other skilled liar would. "He used to hide things inside it. I think I saw him next to it the day before he died."
"What kind of things? Guns? Drugs? Small children?"
"No children, no guns, and no drugs." I said, irritated. "I told you, Rats hated drugs."
"Then what could be in the Buddha I would give a shit about?" Bill asked patiently.
"Maybe a separate set of books?" I suggested. "The real set of books for his business? You told me that Rats had a lot of money going through his club and you didn’t know where it was coming from. Maybe he kept track?”
"Aha, the plot thickens. Tell me everything you know that you haven't told me until now, a good forty-eight hours into my investigation, and remind me to wring your neck next time I see you."
"I only just remembered about the statue," I maintained, adding in desperation: “And I only just heard a rumor that might explain what happened to him. It’s what reminded me of the statue."
"I'm going to take a wild guess and say that, drugs or not, your friend Rats was involved with some very bad men."
"I heard he might have been laundering money for a Mob family up north."
"What family?" Bill asked, his voice taking on a hard edge.
"The Lopresti family."
"They're not a family ‘up north,’ Casey," Bill said quietly. His voice took on a hard edge. "They're a family trying to infiltrate our state. We've been after them for a very long time."
I felt ashamed for my friend Rats, and I hated myself for that. It felt disloyal. "He may have been desperate. I know he wanted to open up a line of clubs. He may have turned to them for financing."
"Or to launder their cash and take a big fat fee off the top," Bill suggested. "I'm sending some guys over to check out the statue now. After that, you and I need to have another little chat about these rumors you’re hearing."
"Any time," I said weakly. I knew I was skating on very thin ice.
The news did not get any better once I hung up the phone. Bobby delivered it to me over dinner at an Italian restaurant a few blocks away at the City Market. We liked it because even Bobby could walk a couple of blocks, sparing us having to move our cars. Everyone knew it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to find a parking spot in downtown Raleigh. Besides, the restaurant had great food and we were sitting outside at a metal cafe table overlooking a cobblestoned street while enjoying the fine night air. Unfortunately, this reminded me of Little Italy, which in turn brought me back to thoughts of the Mob—and that made me nervous.
Bobby was apparently having the same thoughts, since he kept scanning the sidewalks as he plowed through a plate of spaghetti that had meatballs the size of baseballs piled on top of a mountain of pasta. The foot long meatball sub he’d had for lunch, it turns out, had been little more than an appetizer.
“Expecting the kidnappers to pop up with dessert?” I asked him. “Perhaps cannoli dusted with gun powder?”
“Don’t joke,” Bobby said, eyeing the street. “Do not ever joke about the Mob.”
“You really think this is about organized crime?” I asked.
"Not really. And you're not gonna like what I found out about the parents," he told me. "I’ve got nothing."
"You had to have found out something," I said. I was shoveling fettuccine alfredo in as fast as I could, knowing I had only minutes before Bobby’s fork attacked my plate.
"It's what I didn't find out that matters," Bobby explained. "The Tinajero father has no history to speak of. I can't find any records of a Robert Tinajero in North Carolina before 1998. That’s the year he enrolled in Catawba Community College and got his degree in substance abuse counseling. He's been working at an Anson County rehab center ever since, he pays his taxes on time, and he has an absolutely squeaky clean record. I even checked the property rolls. They’re living on a parcel of land that was once part of the Otis Poole family farm, which goes back hundreds of years. It was divided up about fifty years ago. One or the other of the Tinajeros must have inherited a share through marriage. But I can’t find the connection.”
"You found nothing else on him?" I asked, incredulous. Most people these days left footprints all over the Internet. It was impossible to escape being tracked. That is, unless you put an awful lot of effort into staying off the grid.
“That's all.”
"What about the mother?" I asked.
“Looks like those nice round apples didn't fall far from the tree,” he said, referring, I knew, to the Tinajero sisters’ biggest assets.
“Gross, Bobby. I’m trying to eat here. Besides, they’re more like freaking watermelons and they don’t grow on trees.”
He ignored me. “I outsourced the search to Marcus and he found a Lavonia Allen with a long record in Maryland for drug possession, a handful of DUIs, and the usual crap associated with a career stripping in clubs."
I was incredulous. "The mother was a stripper, too?"
Bobby D. nodded. “I think so. The age and height fit on her DMV records and it’s an unusual first name. And get this: apparently, there's a whole family up in Maryland and Delaware consisting of women who don't top four feet but who make a pretty good living stripping. It seems to be a family business. It's passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. There is even a three generation strip act. I swear to god, I'm not making this up."
"And the Tinajero mother was one of them?" I asked, suspecting Bobby had already booked a train to Baltimore to catch the granny-to-granddaughter stripper act.
"She was until about twenty-five years ago. Her record has been clean since then. Well, except for a long line of speeding tickets. Momma’s got a hot foot.”
"So this could be someone from her past coming around for payback?" I asked him. "Someone snatched her daughter because of an old debt or grudge?”
Bobby shrugged. "Could be. But I could come up with a dozen other theories by the time I finish my dinner. All I know is that our hot-headed little vixen, Roxy, is right. Her parents are not what they seem. Their backgrounds are too empty. They’ve changed their names, or something, and we can’t find out how or where or why."
“Witness protection?” I suggested. “Are we back to a Mob connection?”
“You tell me,” Bobby said as he eyed my plate. “You going to finish that alfredo?”
I pushed my plate over to him. I had lost my appetite anyway.
Chapter Six
People say that addicts lie. And, in my experience, that's true. God knows, my ex-husband proved that theory every day I was with his sorry ass. But I've also found that recovering addicts have an almost pathological need to tell the truth, as if they want to make up for all the sins of their past. What I needed now was the truth about the Tinajero parents and I did not think that I could get it from them. But maybe I could learn something new from the people Robert Tinajero worked with—or at least get an idea of whether he truly was the saint that other people said he was.
I was mulling all of these things over as I sped down the high
way the next morning, jumbo latte in hand, heading back into the North Carolina flatlands on another sunny Indian Summer day. I had spent the rest of the evening before hunched over my computer, trying to find out more about the Tinajeros and ignoring calls from Bill Butler. His voice messages made it plain that he wanted to know more about the zip drive with the strip club’s real books on it and I had nothing else to give him that I was willing to share. But in the end, my online searching proved fruitless. I’d found out nothing I didn’t already know, which was little, and the number of calls from Bill had suggested it might be a good idea to get the hell out of Dodge, hence the impromptu road trip.
The rehab center where Robert Tinajero was employed as a counselor had once been a working farm, if you could believe their website. It had been converted in the late 1990s into an addiction treatment in-patient facility called, creatively enough, The Farm. Alcohol and drug addicts worked the land and tended to the livestock as a way to return to normalcy, learn discipline, and supplement their counseling. As someone who had grown up breaking her back and shredding her fingers picking cotton and tilling soybean fields as a child, desperately trying to earn my keep even though my grandfather did not demand it, it was hard for me to find the idea of working a farm therapeutic. But if it helped the poor bastards who were paying $7,000 a month for the opportunity to milk cows and shovel manure, than I was all for it.
I wondered how much its location had to do with The Farm’s success. It was located in the center of a vast ocean of green landscape that was far enough away from everywhere else to give family members a plausible excuse as to why they could not visit more often. It was also far from trouble and a great place to hide from the world.
Security was nonexistent. I drove right through a gate that could have been locked, but was not, and there was no one to greet me when I mounted the front porch steps and poked my head inside the front screen door. “Hello! I’m here with my moving truck. It’s pulled up outside, ready for me to empty out the house of all possessions and drive away!” I called out. No one answered. I stepped inside.
It was cool and quiet in the old farmhouse and I could hear the clatter of lunch being prepared in a nearby kitchen. From the outside, it had looked like home to an exceptionally large family. But the exterior had been misleading. Numerous additions had been added on discreetly to the back of the main farmhouse, housing more and more patients as the years had passed by. I wondered how many people returned to The Farm. I also wondered how many came here and never wanted to leave. The rest of the world, with all of its sound and fury, suddenly seemed a universe or two away.
“Can I help you?" A small wiry woman, who had passed age fifty at least two decades ago, emerged from a nearby doorway, wiping her hands on an apron tied around her tiny waist. She had Eastern North Carolina written all over her weather-beaten face and, without saying a single other word, she managed to let me know that she was in no mood for nonsense and I'd better tell the truth fast.
I had no intention of doing that.
"I hope so,” I said. “One of the counselors who works here is up for an award by the state. I've been asked to look into his background and see if he as worthy as the nomination says. His name is Robert Tinajero.”
The woman looked like she did not quite believe me, but she did not challenge my cover story, either. Her button nose crinkled, adding to the fine map of wrinkles that crisscrossed her face. It was clear that she had once worked in the fields. Her skin was permanently baked to the texture of dried mud.
"Do I smell peach cobbler?" I asked, unable to stop myself.
"Yes ma’am," the woman said. Her face brightened. "It's my specialty. Would you like a bowl?"
It was turning into a very good day.
I sat across the table from the cook, whose name turned out to be Shirley, and dug into my unexpected bounty. The crust was flaky and buttery, the filling thick with stewed peaches and not so much sugar that it made you reach for the insulin. It was all I could do not to lick the bowl when I was done.
"I gather you don't get a lot of home cooking?" Shirley asked as she watched me shovel in the last of the deliciously soggy bottom crust.
I won't admit to being embarrassed, but I did give a nervous laugh. "No ma'am," I said. "I hope I left enough for everyone else." I looked around the kitchen, my unspoken questions hanging in the air.
She ignored my hint for another helping. "I doubt anyone will be back for at least another hour," she explained. "The schedule here is pretty tight. Mornings are devoted to assigned chores. You won't find anyone lollygagging around the house. They’re either out in the fields or down by the barn. They don't mess around here, you know. If you don't do your work, then you're out. Most people who come here want to stay here. There's something about this place that soothes your soul."
I got that. I had grown up on a hardscrabble farm in the Panhandle of Florida, raised by my grandfather on his meager earnings from growing cotton and soybeans. We’d had a truck garden that augmented what little he could earn in the fields. We never went hungry, but we never had extras, either. But despite what others may have seen as deprivation, and the hard work involved, the truth was that I had seen the farm as a sanctuary and had been acutely aware that I had nowhere else to go. I’d sometimes stood on the front lawn of our tiny clapboard house and looked around me, marveling that the seven acres surrounding our home belonged to us and us alone. There was a beauty in owning your own little patch of the planet and a peace that came with working the land, even if the hours were long and the work backbreaking. It was as if tilling the soil and welcoming the rain was a way to honor the Earth. If the addicts who came here to The Farm felt even a fraction of what I had felt as a child, then it was no surprise they wanted to stay.
"What's Robert's role here?" I asked, knowing he would not be at The Farm and so could not overhear. He took Wednesdays off and I had driven by his house first to make sure his car was still in the driveway.
"Robert is special," the cook said simply. She was rolling out dough for chicken-and-pastry with an automatic grace that comes from decades of repeating the same action over and over, mixing the flour, salt, and water into small dough balls then flattening them out with a rolling pin and cutting the dough into thin strips that would be dropped into boiling water seasoned with chicken parts, celery, carrots, and maybe a little onion. My mouth was watering just watching her. I wondered if Shirley’s cooking was another reason why no one ever wanted to leave The Farm.
"What do you mean he’s special?" I asked her.
"A lot of the counselors who work here are former addicts themselves," Shirley explained. "They mean well, but, well… to tell you the truth, a lot of addicts can be very self-centered. I guess they have to be that way to survive the bad days. But even when they kick their habits and are clean enough to help out, a trace of that self-centeredness can remain. Their idea of helping others is to talk about how they beat their own addictions. They talk about inner strength and making the right choices and lots of times about God. But, mostly, they talk about themselves."
She paused and surveyed me, as if wondering if I would be offended at what she had to say next. Apparently, I passed the test. I was pagan enough for her tastes. "Don't get me wrong," she said, wiping a smudge of flour off her nose. "I've gone to church every Sunday of my life. But God alone is not going to be able to help some meth-addicted woman who has abandoned her children and is doing god knows what to get enough money to buy her poison. You know what I mean?"
I nodded. I knew what she meant. People who hit rock bottom have already faced the coldest of realities. Telling them that a benevolent man who lived in the sky could rescue them wasn't going to fly. At least not with the down-and-outs I knew.
"Are you telling me that Robert is not religious?" That surprised me. He had given the impression that he was every bit as pious as his wife.
"Oh, no. I think he's truly a righteous man. In his private life. But he keeps that to himself. Whe
n it comes to helping the patients here, Robert is different from the other counselors."
"Different how?" I asked.
"Well, if you will excuse my French, he doesn't try to bullshit them."
"Probably a good idea," I said. "Every addict I know is a world-class bullshitter themselves. You're probably not going to get far trying to bullshit a bullshitter."
I had never said the word "bullshit" so many times in a single sentence in my life, but Shirley nodded her head in agreement. "Exactly,” she said. “Robert does not mince words. He lays out what's going to happen to them if they don't straighten up. He lets them know how hard it is going to be to find their way back if they delay making the changes they need to make. And because he's telling them the truth, however hard it is to hear, they believe him. When they decide to follow his advice, or come to him when they are faced with temptation, they know that Robert understands what they're going through. They trust him."
"Is he speaking from experience?" I asked, aware that my cover story about giving him an award absolutely sucked. If this was how they vetted for statewide honors, I was a monkey's uncle and needed to ask for a banana. But, again, Shirley did not seem to notice. I think she liked the company. I watched her lift the long strips of pastry into the air and drop them into the bubbling water while she thought her answer over. Despite the peach cobbler, I could feel my stomach stirring. Chicken-and-pastry was one of my favorite dishes. I could eat a vat of it in a single sitting and had come close to doing just that on more than a few occasions. Just ask the waitresses at the Toot-and-Tell Diner in Garner.
"I can't say for certain,” Shirley finally said. “But I think he has had some experience with drug addiction, if not himself than someone close to him. But you can’t really tell much about him when he speaks, you know? He's very unassuming. He's definitely not holier than thou. I don't know how to explain it, except to say that he considers himself one of them, connected to our residents, and they can tell. Sometimes I think he's the only one who can reach them. That he's the only thing tethering them to a clean life. You don't know how many people he's helped just by being himself and telling the truth."