In the early evening I arrived home in Berkeley, suffering a certain jet lag from moving up and down the Pacific coast. When I got to my street I noticed an unmarked police car two doors down. Tired, too tired to think any more about the case, I drank a Steinlager and turned in early.
I stirred from my sleep and realized I had been dreaming. In my dream Jesus was still alive, and then a faceless figure fired a gun at his head. I stood over his body and once again I smelled both gun powder and a familiar fragrance that I couldn’t place. Half-awake, I opened my eyes and the light showing through my bedroom bay window carved out a thin silhouette sitting in a chair. The face was masked by shadows, and although I couldn’t make out the features, I knew who it was. In either hand was a gun: a large revolver in the right and a small automatic in the left.
“I guess you think you’re pretty damn smart,” said the silhouette.
“Do I?” I responded, suddenly jolted awake.
“What you think is that you’re smarter than everyone else, Jackson, but you aren’t, so don’t make any dumb moves.” The silhouette was pointing both guns directly at me.
“What’s with the two guns? Who do you think you are, Ma Barker?”
“Is that who you think I am, smart guy, Ma Barker?”
“No, Mary. I think you’re Eve Smith.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
“Got it all figured out, do you?” asked the woman I had known as Mary as she placed the automatic in her lap and took the revolver in both hands.
“No,” I said, “but you sitting there with the drop on me confirms some hunches and educated guesses. It’s still a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing. Once I heard of another woman staying in Felony Flats I began to wonder who really died in that trailer park thirty years ago. When I found out David Gass was a regular at your saloon during my time of national infamy, I began to put some more of the scam together, and I’d already concluded that Polozola, dressed as Grace, had murdered Sid Lichtman. What continued to haunt me was that picture of you with Ted Kennedy from way back when. It finally dawned on me that in that photo you looked enough like Grace Lowell to be her mother. By the way, Mom, do you know where your daughter is tonight?”
As I started to get out of bed she pointed the pistol between my eyes. The big O of the barrel of her Lady Smith looked as broad as the circumference of a sewer pipe.
“Stay where you are,” she said as she shifted in her chair and moved into the light where I could see her face. She rested the revolver in her lap, but it still was pointed at me.
“Grace,” she said, laughing. “From Day One, she had an exit strategy. She told me, ‘If things go to hell, I’ll have another life, in another country, under another name.’ Only way you’ll ever find her is if she wants to be found. She knew from the get-go what the bottom line was: that there’d be no turning back. Got brains and balls to go with those looks. More than I can say for any of the men involved. Smitty literally hasn’t the brains he was born with—burned up from a lifetime of pills and booze—but of course, that worked to our advantage. And Jack, hell, he was never smarter than soup, and as for balls, well, as soon as the plan started looking shaky, he takes off like a rat running from a burning moonshine still. And Jesus—felt bad about Jesus—but if he had kept it in his pants and his nose out of our business, well—”
“You wouldn’t have shot him.”
Mary glanced out the window and sighed. She fingered both guns in her lap, then continued, “Jack gets all antsy, says he wants to go to the authorities and make a deal. Make a deal? The dumb shit. We got murder on our heads. What’d he think? Confess, cooperate and walk away with a hundred hours of community service? Jack was ready to sell us all down the river, and it’s not like he wasn’t a killer himself. Twice.”
“Twice?”
“What’s it matter now? It’s over.” Mary gasped. She sat back and for a moment, lost in thought. Then she jumped back to the here and now and trained the small automatic on me. For a moment I thought she was going to shoot.
“There are police outside,” I cautioned. “I’m under surveillance.”
“Bastard’s asleep; I checked. Anyway, they don’t pay no mind to an old lady with a scarf around her head and carrying a shopping bag. And this here don’t make much noise.” She patted the Beretta. Then she pointed to the bag on the floor. “Put your clothes on. Move real slow, and look inside my bag.”
I dressed carefully and picked up her shopping bag. I found a fifth of Wild Turkey 101 Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey and a Mason jar.
“I need a shot of nerve medicine, so pour me a strong one,” she ordered. “I’d offer you some, but all you drink is that foreign fancy-ass beer.”
I poured half a Mason jar full of whiskey and handed it to her. She took it from me with the automatic now aimed at my chest. I sat back on the bed.
“My sister Mary came to visit me, Smitty, and the kids,” she continued after a long swallow. “Twin sister. I left her to babysit and she caught Mary Grace and John Junior playing doctor, least that’s what they called it. I knew they’d been fooling around, even at their young ages. Anyway, Mary cuts a willow switch and was ready to give them a whipping but Mary Grace decided she wasn’t going to have a whipping. Found Smitty’s gun—we all knew where he kept it, he never took it on the road—and she shot her aunt in the head. Seems she was still breathing, so Mary Grace hands the gun to John Junior and tells him to shoot her, too. He does and Mary stops breathing. When I got home, they told me it was an accident. Said it like they’d knocked over a vase. Accident, shit. I remember those two standing there looking at me like, ‘Mom, we had a little accident. We shot our aunt. Twice.’ Took me a while to find out the truth from the little scallywags.”
The sound of a honking horn seemed to distract her for a moment, but as I started to rise, she raised the gun at me again and shook her head.
“I remember staring at my sister’s dead body,” she continued, “and seeing it as a ticket out of a life I hated. I told the kids they were going to be in reform school until they were twenty-one, lessen they did exactly what I told them. We rehearsed the story. Waited till Smitty got home, helped get him black-out drunk, and then got him to fire a couple of shots into a bag of rice. Kids had their story down. Smitty got drunk and shot me, and then Jack, afraid Smitty would kill them too, threw the gun in the river. I took the gun, took all Mary’s ID, and left mine.”
With one long swig, she finished her drink and raised her glass to have me pour another. After I did, she took another long drink and then drew in a deep breath. Mary seemed to be running on batteries that were losing their charge.
“Mary and I ran away from Tulsa when we were seventeen and got fake birth certificates in this backwater Texas town,” she continued. “Funny, ain’t it? Not only did I assume a false identity, I took a fake one at that. I wasn’t worried about the ID on the body. We were twins. It was the kids who seemed to be the weak link, but apparently I put the fear of the Lord in them about reform school. So it worked. I hated Smitty; he deserved to be in prison. Truth be told, I never should have been a wife or mother. And as for Mary, she had become annoying as hell—one of them born-again Christians. Sorry she was killed, but the fact is that the plan worked, and I was born again.”
“How did Jesus end up in all this?” I asked. “End up dead.”
“I’ll get to that. You in a hurry? Got some place to go?”
“No. But you might want to hurry. Hobbs is maybe hours away from figuring all this out.”
“Has-been Hobbs! Fuck him. Always insulting my place. Now, you want the rest of the story or not?”
I shrugged affirmatively.
“One day this good-looking young couple in their thirties comes into the saloon. I get this strange feeling about them, and it turns out it’s Mary Grace and John Junior. Now they called themselves Grace and Jack. I hadn’t seen or heard from them since the day they shot Mary. After they told me who they were, they told me Smitty
was still alive. Grace, being Grace, didn’t wait long to get down to business. Said she had a plan to wash up millions in dirty money using Smitty, but she didn’t have all the details worked out. It was a perfect crime because she’d stolen millions that no one could prove existed. Her husband had been squirreling away profits from his business into diamonds so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes.”
Mary took another sip of whiskey. “It was just at this time that you were getting attention on the news about all that fraud and shit you’d been doing. I tell Grace that I got this customer, David Gass, who says he’s an old friend of this Doc Holiday. Said this Gass was a banker, too, and knew what Holiday had been doing, and how he was doing it. Well, it doesn’t take Grace long to cozy up to Gass, and pretty soon the whole thing is laid out.”
“Gass knew what was going on?”
“Hell, he had Grace leading him around by his you-know-what. Ended up with a Plan B and Plan C. Don’t know all the details of those plans, but one of ’em was to get you down here and make you a patsy if need be.”
“So Gass gets me a job with free office space across the street from you.”
“And I get a Steinlager sign for the front window. Never served that beer until you come around. Gass’ idea.”
“What did he get out of the deal?”
“He got laid. I know that. Grace handled him, and as far as I know he’s been out of the picture for some time. He hasn’t been of any use, and he didn’t know all what we were doing, anyway. Wasn’t involved in the heavy lifting, if you know what I mean.”
“So what spooked Jack Polozola? What got Jesus in a panic?”
Mary finished her drink. Her eyes were glassy and she began to rock back and forth. She looked pale and exhausted.
“That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question,” she said with a shrug. “Neither Grace nor I know how Jack got so flipped out. Anymore than we know how Jesus found out about what all we had done, or why he was coming to see you.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
Mary stopped rocking and sat perfectly still. A tear rolled down her right cheek. She touched it curiously, as if she had forgotten she still had the ability to cry. I moved cautiously from the bed to a chair.
“Couple weeks ago I get a call from Grace saying we got troubles. Now I’m surprised as hell, ’cause here I am, thinking we’re all but out of the woods. Thought we had gotten all the money into real estate and that we were ready to take care of Smitty.”
“Take care?”
“Yeah. His only usefulness was running out; Grace said he had to go by the end of this tax year. It’d be easy. A seventy-two-year-old ex-convict living in a rat’s nest on a diet of speed and booze suffocates himself in his sleep. How long the police gonna work on that case? Two legal heirs, son and daughter, step up and take over the estate. Who’s around to make a claim on Smitty’s estate? That is, ’til you fucked everything up.”
“Rosa?”
“You think we’re going to let someone that deep into things and have no one to keep tabs on her but that dumb shit, Jack? Hell, no.”
“I was betting on that.”
“Beyond that I don’t know what made it all go to hell. Grace says Jack came to her about three weeks ago all in a sweat. Some detective called him up and told him the police knew he was involved in the murder of Sid Lichtman. Said if he would tell where the diamonds were and come clean about his involvement, produce some evidence, then they could work a deal for him.”
I sat up a little straighter on the chair. “The police called him up on the phone and accused him of homicide? You’re kidding? What else did this guy, this so-called police detective, tell Jack?”
A car horn honked that made us both look at the street.
“We don’t know,” she continued, “and it wasn’t a man that called. It was a woman detective.”
“A woman?”
I had an idea just who that woman was; also, I was beginning to get a picture that Jack was just as stupid as advertised.
“Grace tells him to keep his mouth shut. Jack just says fuck it and runs. He wouldn’t listen to reason, so—”
“I get it. Jack’s an idiot who can’t be trusted. But where does Jesus come in?”
“That’s the weird part,” Mary said, looking into her drink. “If he’d been a pervert like other priests, he’d still be alive. But no, he’d been chasing skirts for a long time. He’s screwing Grace’s daughter-in-law when Grace meets him at the funeral. Grace decides she likes him, and well, men that like women always like Grace. He’s in Portland with Grace every Wednesday, but that day he comes back here early and he’s in the bar looking for you. All uptight. I hear him talking to Grace on the phone asking what she got him into. He keeps calling you and he’s nervous as a cat. I call Grace, and she says Jesus has gone crazy. He’s telling her things she said that she never told him. That she never told him! Conversations they never had. Grace said he’d gone off the deep end. Jesus has been telling Grace that he has to warn you.”
“Warn me about what?”
“Don’t know. Grace didn’t either. All I know is Grace says stop him and I do. It was the time of day I take the cash to the bank so no one noticed I stepped out. I didn’t follow him, but I knew he was coming to you and I knew your address. It took him ten minutes longer than me to get here, though I don’t know why. Felt bad about it, ’cause I liked Jesus. But Jack and Jesus were going to bring it all down. And I never signed up for this, and I never signed up ’cause I was greedy. I signed up to save my saloon. I was drowning in red ink. It was the only way I could save the place.”
“Murders, fraud, money laundering … all just to save John and Mary’s Saloon?”
“Get off your high horse, Jackson. You had the world by the tail and you blew it out your ass. What’d you ever do for anyone? What’d you ever do but take dope, chase whores, and break more laws than the original Doc Holiday? Don’t think for a minute that I don’t know all about you.”
I laughed, though there wasn’t much humor in it. My reputation always seems to precede me. “This isn’t about me,” I said. “This is about—”
“What this is about is the saloon,” Mary broke in. “The real America.”
“The what?”
“It’s people like you, Jackson, you white, educated men. You’ve run this country into the ground. It’s a mark against a person if they’re black, brown or slant-eyed like a Chinese or a Jap. It’s a whaddya call it? Stig … stig … something?”
“You mean a stigma.”
“Yeah, it’s a stigma if you’re a Jew, or believe in Muhammad or Buddha, or if you’re an Okie from Muskogee, or God help ya, if you’re a fucking woman! If they thought they could get away with it, men in this country would take away our right to vote and drive cars tomorrow. Equality, shit. In courts, in schools, at work, where you ever been in your life where people are equal?”
Mary took a last sip of her drink and took a deep breath as if to steel herself for her rant.
“You ever notice that picture behind the bar? The one with a woman in an old movie theater? It’s from the thirties, from a movie house in Bakersfield. The sign says ‘Negroes and Okies must sit in the balcony.’ You know the only damn place you’ve ever seen equality in this world? My saloon, that’s damn where. Any time of the day, any day of the week, you go down the bar and you’ll find a city councilwoman, like Irene, setting next to an illegal Mexican whose name you don’t know ’cause he’s using somebody else’s ID and Social Security number, but he’s setting next to a Jew dentist, like Phil, setting next to an unemployed carpenter, like Jesse, who’s setting next to a Korean shoemaker, like Kim, setting next to an ex-bank president like you, setting next to a gay accountant like Scottie, who’s sitting next to what’s-his-name? You know that African schoolteacher asshole nobody likes?’”
I shrugged because I couldn’t remember his name.
“And working girls like Ginger and Viola,” Mary went on, “and I don’t give a da
mn about their business as long as they don’t run it out of my place. Because it don’t matter who you are, what you are, what you do, or what you’ve done. It don’t matter, long as you mind your manners and don’t run dope or sell pussy or stolen shit out of my place.”
“It’s a great saloon, and worth killing for,” I said.
“Don’t high-hat me, dammit. I’ll shoot you dead.” She pointed the Lady Smith at me.
I thought if she were going to shoot me she would have done it already. I believed she needed me to hear her story, and I hoped I was right.
Her eyes turned vacant and her shoulders slumped. She held out her empty Mason jar. “Pour me a strong one, Jackson. Please.”
I poured about three ounces of Wild Turkey into her jar. She downed half of it in a long swallow. The whiskey seemed to revive her.
“Do you know how many people who walked into my place ever went away hungry or thirsty? And I’m talking about people walking in dead broke and down on their luck. Guys that all they had was all that they had on.” She laughed. “Funny thing. Come to think of it, who ever came into John and Mary’s Saloon on a winning streak?”
As Mary threw down the rest of her drink, I started to get up. “Stay put. I didn’t come to kill you, but don’t make me change my mind on that. You just stay put.”
She started to rock back and forth. She closed her eyes and when she opened them, they were glassy. “You could get a tuna sandwich, bag of chips, and a glass of beer,” she continued, now talking more to herself than to me. “All you had to do was pick up a broom, or mop, or clean out a toilet. You didn’t have to sing some bullshit hymn to a god you’d didn’t believe in. You didn’t have to fill out a bunch of welfare forms. No, and no one ever went away hungry or thirsty. Homeless folks that had no address got their mail at my place. So much so that hell, I could have opened a post office branch. And the unpaid bar tabs and the bad checks? They could stretch from here to Oklahoma City.”
The Big Bitch Page 24