by Jeff Crook
“Don’t be ridiculous!” She closed the door and locked it. “You’re not underfoot.”
The old man reeled in his line. He pulled up a bare hook and set the pole aside, clucking his tongue. “Little babies keep stealing my bait.”
“You and Sam used to catch some big ones here,” Jenny said. She introduced me to Bert Quinn.
“Catfish as long as my arm,” he said as he baited his hook. His knuckles were as big as walnuts and the veins stood out like worms across the backs of his hands.
“Bert was Sam’s shop foreman at the plant before it closed. When Sam started the landscape business, he brought in Bert as his partner.”
“I wasn’t much of a partner,” he said. “Sam did all the work. All I did was make sure we had people to work.”
“You see that the job gets done, too. Sam would have been lost without you,” Jenny said. “I’d be lost without you, Bert.”
“Truth is, I ain’t so sure I can do it without Sam.” He stared at the bare planks between his feet. “I can’t run the business by myself, Jenny. Sam always handled that end. I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m too old to start over. I’m near seventy years old this October. I need to retire, but all I got is Social Security and my stake in the company.”
“But you’re doing fine. There’s more business than ever, Bert,” Jenny said.
“There’s plenty of business, but there ain’t no money in it. I haven’t paid you the first check, nor me neither. I don’t know how Sam did it. I guess I ain’t got his head for figures.”
Jenny rested her hand on his shoulder. “Neither do I, but we’ll get through this. It will all balance out in the end.”
“It pains me to say, Jenny, but I was hoping you might buy me out, so I can retire.”
She stepped back as though he’d hit her. “I don’t know, Bert. You and Sam built this business. I can’t run it all by myself.”
Bert cleared his throat and stood up. He looked at me, then back at Jenny with a pained expression, his old fingers working themselves into knots. “I’m just gonna … I need to use your facilities.” Jenny nodded and Bert passed me, headed toward the house.
Jenny walked to the end of the pier and stood, gripping the rail and staring out across the lake. I’d been there before. Not at this particular rail, but one just like it, staring into a whole lot of empty while your life slowly fell apart behind you. Husband, job, everything gone. “I take it you don’t have the money to buy him out,” I said.
She shook her head and tried to tuck a strand of loose hair behind one ear. “I don’t understand how Sam did it. He must have had some kind of magic with numbers because I can’t get it to add up. The company is doing more work than ever. Bert has secured several new contracts since Sam died, but the money isn’t there, so I haven’t been drawing Sam’s salary. The weird thing is, Sam didn’t pay himself enough to cover our expenses. I haven’t paid the mortgage in two months, Jackie. The bank is threatening to foreclose. I don’t have the money to get the air-conditioning fixed. We’ve been living off the HELOC and the credit cards since Sam died, but the cards are maxed out. If it weren’t for Eli and Cassie’s survivor benefit checks from Social Security, I couldn’t put food on the table at all.”
Back in the day I would have suspected Sam of dealing, but that suitcase full of cash, combined with the photos of his daughter, made me think he was into something far worse than selling blow to his neighbors. It was too bad I couldn’t just drop that suitcase full of money on Jenny’s doorstep and disappear, but I knew she’d only turn it over to the cops and never see a dollar of it. The only thing I was sure about was that somebody had killed Sam Loftin.
Somebody might have had a damn good reason.
I looked back up at the house and the pool party. Three more neighbors had just arrived. Some of these people brought food and drinks, but most of them were mooching off Jenny, drinking her liquor and cleaning out her fridge. She had hidden all this from me, just like she hid it from the people at the party.
“Why don’t you sell this place, move somewhere you can afford?”
“You’ve seen the For Sale signs on our street. In this market, I’ll never be able to pay off what we still owe on the house. We’re under water. Jesus, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
“What about Deacon? He could probably get the money from Mrs. Ruth. Enough to get you through, anyway.”
“He has offered a hundred times. I won’t take charity.”
I knew how she felt. I’d lived off people’s good will for the last seven years, doing everything short of hooking just to keep body and soul together. I’d sold myself in other ways, some of them worse than turning a trick.
And here I was still on the dole, living with Jenny. The rent I paid barely covered the food I ate. I didn’t like it, but sometimes people don’t have choices. Jenny didn’t have many choices left. She just didn’t realize it yet.
32
JENNY PUT BOTH KIDS IN HER bed with the fan blowing across them to keep them cool, then joined me outside. We sat in a pair of teak deck chairs watching the light in the pool play over the brick chimney. I wore a fleece pullover, my hair wrapped in a big towel. Jenny borrowed one of my cigarettes and tried to smoke it and coughed a lot. The night was as warm as bathwater, buzzing with cicadas, the single light bulb above the back door swirling with bugs, but it felt better outside than in the house.
“I think I’d rather sleep out here,” I said.
“The mosquitoes would eat you alive.”
Jenny had gone to the grocery store that morning but now the fridge was empty. Her friends and neighbors had cleaned her out. I only had a couple of dollars in my pocket, but I offered to go to the store in the morning if she would lend me her van. She didn’t say no, but she didn’t say yes, either. Instead, she started talking about Sam again.
“We went through a rough patch about a decade ago, back during the recession. Sam was a plant manager, he made good money, enough to buy this house. I didn’t have to work. I stayed home and took care of Reece and worked on my art.”
She had never mentioned her art before. I never saw her working on anything. There were a few paintings around the house that weren’t the usual hobby-shop or furniture-store stock pictures, but I hadn’t paid enough attention to them to look at the signature. I supposed she had given it up.
“Then the plant closed. Nobody was hiring. Sam couldn’t find a job, so I got a job as a teacher’s assistant. Sam started cutting yards here in the neighborhood and before you know it he had built a landscaping company literally out of nothing at all. It was amazing. He got his first big contract doing the landscaping here in Stirling Estates. After that he always said we were doing OK and I never worried about money. He took care of everything.”
So, Sam’s first big contract was through the HOA where he was the treasurer. Jenny didn’t seem to see anything unusual in that, and I guess there wasn’t. That’s just the way the world turns—for the wealthy. I didn’t resent her for it. She had never known any other world. But if I didn’t find a way to get Sam’s life insurance money for her, she was going to find out. Soon.
It was getting late, but not too late for Deacon to pop by. We hadn’t seen him all day. Jenny excused herself and went to bed. Deacon grabbed the last barely cool beer floating in a tub of melted ice. “Shouldn’t you be practicing your sermon?” I asked. “Tomorrow is Sunday.”
“I never prepare beforehand.”
He had slipped off his usual black coat and undone his tie. “I just let the spirit move me.” He sat on the edge of the deck chair Jenny had recently vacated, kicked out of his shoes, peeled the black socks off his enormous feet, rolled his pants up to his knees and walked down the steps into the water. “By God,” he sighed.
“Busy day?”
“You could say that.” He took a long swig of his beer. “I’m run off my feet. I had to make three trips into Memphis to pick up lumber just this afternoon, then Ruth asked me to
stop by.”
Malvern had a perfectly good building supply store of its own, but Deacon’s people stopped shopping there after the third time they were accused of shoplifting. “How is Mrs. Ruth?”
“She’s fading. These last six months, her age finally caught up to her. I hoped she would live long enough to see my church built, but with everything, all the setbacks, and going to the courthouse every other day…” He sighed and sat at the edge of the pool.
“Did you talk to her about Jenny?” He furrowed the old brow and pretended not to know what I meant. “Jenny told me about her financial problems. That’s why you wanted me to move in, wasn’t it? To help out, pay a little rent.”
“That was one reason,” he said.
“I just thought if Ruth has as much money as you say, she could help Jenny.”
“If Ruth wants to help, she will.”
“But how will she know if you don’t tell her?”
“She knows. There’s little that passes in this community that Ruth doesn’t know about. Anyway, Jenny asked me not to speak to Ruth about her troubles.” He downed the last of his beer and crumpled the can in his hand. “However, Ruth asked me to send you to her.”
“Me? Why?”
“She didn’t say. Ruth is a private person. If she wants to tell you something, she’ll tell you. If she doesn’t want you to know, she lies well enough to fool the Devil himself. I’ve learned not to ask too many questions. She wants you to visit Monday morning.”
“Are you going to be there?”
“She asked to see you alone, and that you bring your camera. You can borrow my truck.”
* * *
My natural inclination was to ignore Ruth’s desires. People who expect their least wish to be fulfilled without question rouse the worst angels of my nature. But I knew Deacon would hound me all day if I didn’t go. His truck was waiting in Jenny’s driveway Monday morning, keys in the ignition, full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes on the dash. Sweet home Chicago.
Nurse Wretched met me at the front desk, all smiles and apologies. If only I’d told her I was a friend of Mrs. Ruth’s, our previous unfortunate encounter might have been avoided. She hoped we could start over. I said we could. She nearly wept. Outside Ruth’s door she admitted she’d nearly lost her job. “Pastor Falgoust convinced her not to fire me. He’s such a good man.”
“Convinced who?”
“Mrs. Ruth,” she whispered.
“She tried to get you fired? Because of me?”
“No, she wanted to fire me. She owns this place.”
Ruth was a regular jack-in-the-box. She had more surprises than Christmas morning. No wonder she lived in the penthouse of the old folks’ home. I knocked on the door while Nurse Wretched retreated down the hall, banging her forehead on the carpeted floor. I hoped all this power wouldn’t go to my head.
I entered without waiting for an answer and found Ruth sitting in her wheelchair at a desk of hand-carved, dark cherrywood that perfectly matched the shade of her lipstick. Her dress was white silk speckled with seed pearls, her earrings gold with black onyx or jet, her oxygen hose the very best medical-grade plastic. She was sitting perfectly upright with her head thoughtfully tilted to the side as though trying to remember the last line of a sonnet, but she was snoring.
On the desk lay a black-and-white photograph of Ruth wearing a 1950s-period white swimsuit over her svelte, un-period-like body, dancing with a beach ball in the middle of a street that, judging from the stoops that lined it, might have been somewhere in Brooklyn. Three men wearing loose jackets and slouchy hats sat on one of the stoops, leering at her with cigarettes in their mouths. In the distance a milkman watched her through an empty milk bottle held up to his eye like a telescope.
“Arthur Fellig took that picture,” Ruth said. She had woken soundlessly, without startling, like a person used to slipping out of bedrooms.
“Who?”
“Weegee,” she said. “Arthur Fellig. They called him Weegee. They said he must have used a Ouija board, because he had a talent for arriving at crime scenes even before the cops got there. He sold his pictures to the newspapers. You didn’t happen to bring any cigarettes?”
I shook one out of my pack into her hand. She laid it beside the photograph on the desk. “You remind me of Weegee,” she said. “He was short like you. Same quirky eyes and quirky way of looking at things. He must have taken a thousand photos of me. Some of them would have got us both arrested, but this one is my favorite.”
She backed her wheelchair away from the desk and turned to face me. “I asked you here to do something.” She held out her hand. A bronze key lay across her narrow palm. She must have been holding it when she fell asleep, because I didn’t see her go into her pocket. “This is the key to my deposit drawer at the bank. I want you to go there and get a box from it.”
I took the key and turned it over. The number was 066. “What’s in this box?”
“You’ll see.”
“But how will I know which one?”
“There’s only one box. The bank manager is expecting you.” She glanced at the clock on her desk. “Before lunch,” she added, dismissing me.
33
I have two daughters who, as yet, have not known man; I will bring them out to you, and abuse you them as it shall please you …
—GENESIS 19:8
RUTH’S BOX WAS IN THE VAULT of the old Merchants and Farmers Bank in Malvern. It had somehow escaped the bank-consolidation fever of the previous decade and maintained its local ownership. No doubt the bank president lived in Sterling Estates. The Classical-styled building dominated the northeast corner of the town square, its double wooden doors facing the courthouse. It looked like the kind of respectable, small-change joint Machine Gun Kelly might have stuck up back in the day. Its marble floors were worn into grooves from the doors to the teller windows, where sat marble-faced tellers with blousing garters on their pinstriped sleeves. The manager posed like an undertaker, quietly rubbing his hands before taking my key.
Ruth had the biggest safe-deposit box in the vault, big enough to hide a body. Instead of a corpse, I found a cardboard box a little longer than a foot to each side, filled to the top with old photographs of Mrs. Ruth. Beneath it lay neatly stacked rows of bearer bonds and bundles of cash, all hundreds and twenties. There were also gold and silver coins, men’s and women’s watches, and a careless pile of jewelry, most of it antique. Just a rough guess said I was looking at a cool half million, maybe more, depending on the value of the bonds. I thought about how that money could help Jenny out of her difficulties. I thought about how much it could help me. I thought about how this was just the loose change Ruth had found under the cushions. All I had to do was dump the photographs back in the safe and fill the box with money and bonds, turn Deacon’s truck south on I-55, drive until I hit water, then hop a shrimp boat until I reached a climate where it rained every day at four in the afternoon. I stared for a long time, until the bank manager cleared his throat just outside the vault door.
I locked up, returned to the nursing home and set the box of photographs on the desk beside Ruth. She held out her hand for another cigarette. “Did you see anything you liked?”
“One or two things.” The cigarette I’d given her earlier was gone. I hadn’t smelled smoke when I opened the door and she wouldn’t have smoked it in her room, not with the oxygen going. Maybe she’d bullied her nurse into turning off the gas or rolling her outside.
She said, “I hope you took something for your trouble.”
“Just the box you wanted.”
She shook her head, quietly wheezing. “Jesus Christ. It’s no wonder you’re poor, Jackie.”
“I’m not in the habit of taking other people’s stuff,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I guess that’s the way my mama raised me.”
“Do you think I need it? I haven’t set foot in that bank in over ten years.”
“If you wanted me to have it, y
ou should have said something.”
“Fortune favors the bold, my dear. If you took every penny, no one would be the wiser, certainly not me. I wish you had. When I die, Luther is bound to find out about it and the last thing he needs is more money.”
I offered to go back, but she declined. “No, it’s too late. You missed your chance. Let this be a lesson to you. Playing by the rules is for chumps. My daddy Gus taught me that.” That was the second time I’d heard her call her father Gus.
“I wish you could have known him. When he inherited Stirling Plantation, it was mortgaged up to the short hairs. The land had gone wild because nobody was farming it. He used the old house as a hunting cabin. He quartered his dogs on the first floor and his whores upstairs. But after I was born, he determined to return the estate to the way he remembered it when he was a boy, when it was the largest cotton plantation between Memphis and Somerville. He wanted me to have something to be proud of when he died.”
She opened the desk drawer and took out a small black-and-white photograph. It had been kept folded at one time, probably in a pocket, as the print had degraded along the fold leaving a line of white paper almost down the center. The photo was of a young woman, almost a girl, undoubtedly Ruth, standing with one laced-up boot resting on the running board of a Ford Victoria, a revolver nearly as long as her arm tucked into her belt. Beside her sat a striking Hollywood handsome whose face seemed familiar, though I didn’t recognize him right away. I wondered if I’d seen him in a late movie. He held a black .45 automatic, one elbow propped on the butt of a double-barreled shotgun. A winking smile twisted his Clark Gable mustache. The Gladstone bag sitting on the fender was overflowing with loose cash.
“We fancied ourselves the Bonnie and Clyde of West Tennessee,” Ruth said. Gus looked maybe five years older than Ruth, if that, but even by a generous estimate he couldn’t have been younger than thirty and was possibly closer to forty. “Gus did whatever it took to buy back the farm. He moonshined, ran whorehouses and crooked dice games from here to Memphis. Robbed, stole, blackmailed and fenced. He never did a hard day’s work in his life, because work is for chumps. A rich man gets the chumps to work for him. That’s how he gets rich. Gus taught me that, too. He was a pirate and I was a pirate’s daughter. We lived life to the balls, sucked the marrow out of every day. I wouldn’t trade a minute of my life for a year of yours.”