Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped

by Sandy Gingras

  “She’s just helping me today,” I say.

  “I thought I was your partner,” Miss Tilney says.

  I sigh.

  “I’ll come along as back up,” Miss Tilney says.

  “We don’t need back up, we’re just having a conversation.”

  “So I’ll come along and converse.”

  “Next time you can come,” I tell her. “I think Squirt and I can handle this one. C’mon Dreamer.”

  Squirt and Dreamer and I troop out.

  “Thanks for nothin’!” Miss Tilney yells.

  We walk to Dick and Gladys’ trailer. Squirt has a tight polyester suit and skirt on with heels. Her thighs make swishy noises when she walks. Maybe I SHOULD have brought Miss Tilney instead of her.

  We hear the party before we even get there. It’s just the two couples but they’re whooping it up.

  “Let me do the talking,” I tell Squirt. “We’re just getting information here. We’re not revealing that we know anything.”

  She looks at me askance.

  I ring the doorbell and Gladys comes to the door. “Oh hello,” she says all fake smiley.

  “I was wondering if I could talk to Dick about that prospectus,” I say. “Oh, and this is Squirt.”

  They nod at each other. “He’s not really working now. He’s having his cocktails,” she tells me.

  “Maybe he could just give me a brochure.”

  “Come on then,” she says.

  We follow her through the fishy living room out to the lanai. There’s a little silence when we come in. Then Gladys tells them why we’ve come.

  “Oh, we don’t use those prospectuses anymore, do we Richie?” Dick says. “It just confuses people. Most people don’t want to know what we’re doing. They just want to know the bottom line.”

  “We don’t have any left,” Richie tells me.

  “So then how would I know if I wanted to invest in your company?”

  “Richie would just explain it all to you.”

  “Okay,” I say, and then I wait like I want to hear all about it right now.

  “When I get back from Disney,” Richie tells me, “we’ll meet up then.”

  “But it is a REAL company?” I ask, “With statements and everything…?”

  “Well, we’ll give you a statement if you request it. We don’t really have the secretarial staff or office to produce one every month.”

  “So most people don’t get them?”

  He nods. “It’s just technical stuff anyway. Most people don’t even glance at it.”

  “How would they know then what you were trading and how they were doing?”

  “They can get their money back anytime,” Richie insists.

  “But what if they just wanted to know, say, if their trades were legitimate.”

  “Or if they were phony,” Squirt pipes up. “Or illegal.”

  I told her to be quiet, but now look what she went and did. The whole place is stunned.

  “What?” Susie says.

  “What are you talking about?” Dick says.

  “Or if there was no cash in the cash fund and no trades that ever happened,” Squirt says.

  “What?” Susie says.

  “Uh oh,” I say.

  “We have proof,” Squirt goes and says.

  The detective is gonna KILL me.

  “What?” Richie says. “Where? That’s absurd.”

  “I don’t happen to have it with me…,” I say, trying to hurry Squirt out of there.

  “Come on ,Richie.Let’s go home and finish packing,” Susie says.

  “The cops have it,” Squirt says.

  “Cops?” Susie asks. “You people are crazy, you know that?”

  “They don’t know anything,” Richie says to her. “You’re just wrong,” he says to us mildly. “You’re dead wrong.” He stomps out. Susie scurries after him.

  As we’re walking away from the trailer, I tell Squirt, “What did you go and say all that for? That detective is gonna hate me.”

  “I got over excited.”

  “Not THAT again. I can’t take you anywhere.”

  “So, one of them killed Ernie because Ernie found out about their business?” Squirt asks me.

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’re running a bad business but that doesn’t necessarily mean that one of them killed Ernie over it. Let’s go talk to Marie again, see if she remembers anything else about that day.”

  Joe is at Marie’s lighting up her grill. “We were going to have hotdogs,” he says, “Come and join us.”

  Marie comes out of her trailer with a big bowl. She says, “Just in time for dinner.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I introduce Squirt.

  “We have a ton of coleslaw,” Marie says. “I just can’t contain myself when I make coleslaw. I make so much and then everyone eats just a tiny ramekin of it.”

  “What do you put in yours?” Squirt asks.

  “Oh, my secret ingredient is a dab of ranch dressing.”

  “How interesting,” Squirt says. “My mother used to use relish.”

  “Oh my,” Marie says. “That must make it tangy.”

  As we’re setting the picnic table, I ask Marie if she remembers anything else about Ernie’s last day.”

  “I’ve been wracking my brain…”

  Just then Miss Tilney drives up in her golf cart. She’s got one blue oar sticking out the back.

  “Going canoeing?” Joe asks her.

  “I brought it along in case I needed to whack someone,” She raises both arms up and then lowers them like she’s chopping wood. She’s got this fiendish little look on her face, and suddenly I’m not so sure she wouldn’t have been capable of killing Ernie.

  “I went to see for myself what Dick and Gladys’ party was like,” she says. “I saw you and Squirt in there. I don’t think you did such a good job of getting information either…”

  “Where were you?”

  “Behind the pineapple palm near their lanai.”

  “With your oar?” Joe asks. The oar has to be six feet long.

  “I left that in the cart,” she says disdainfully.

  “Good idea,” I tell her.

  “After you left, they had a big fight,” she tells me.

  “Really?” I say.

  “I heard the whole thing,” she says proudly.

  “Are you going to tell us or what?” I say.

  The hot dogs are grilling nicely. The air is full of that crisp salty browning smell. “Ooh, coleslaw,” Miss Tilney says.

  “The fight?” I remind Miss Tilney.

  “Well,” Miss Tilney says, taking yoghurt covered pretzel stick out of the mix in the hors d’oeuvre bowl, “Gladys was yelling at Dick. She was saying ‘How could you get us into something like this again?’ And Dick was saying, ‘I didn’t know.’ And Gladys goes, ‘How could you not know?’ and Dick goes, ‘I didn’t pay that much attention after a while.’” Miss Tilney is enacting the dialogue in a high voice for Gladys and a low voice for Dick. “’How could you not pay attention?’ Gladys goes, and Dick goes, ‘You kept telling me to stay out of it and just let Richie handle it.’”

  “It was funny,” Miss Tilney says. “I always thought Dick was the boss of them all, but it was like he was a little kid and Gladys was his mother.”

  “So they don’t know about Richie and his investments?” Squirt asks her.

  “Maybe at first they did, but now, they seemed just as confused as anyone.”

  Marie holds the large fork for the hotdogs in her hand. “Do you mean they’ve lost all my money?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her.

  “I gave them almost $15,000,” she whispers.

  Chapter 52

  By the time we finish our hotdogs and our ramekins of coleslaw, Marie has said, “What if they lost my money?” a hundred times. I know I have to answer her question, or get her money back, so I tell her I’ll go over and talk to Richie. I don’t know what I’ll say, but that hasn’t stopped me
before. Joe and Miss Tilney, of course, want to come with me. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I tell them.

  “Why not?” they chorus.

  I look at their eager faces. “I don’t want to scare him,” I say. “I’ll just go alone. It’s easier to talk that way.”

  There’s a collective groan.

  “If I’m not back in an hour, come looking for me,” I tell them.

  “I knock on Richie’s door. I launch right in. “Someone saw you talking to Ernie the night he was killed,” I tell Richie.

  “What?” Susie says coming up behind him. “He was watching TV with me.”

  I wait. I’m getting better at lying.

  “I suppose it was Fred,” Richie says.

  I nod, although, what do I know?

  “Ernie called me, said he needed to talk to me. It was about the bogus statement I sent to his sister. I shouldn’t ever have done that.”

  “Bogus?”

  “She kept insisting. You know how she is. I just made something up. I should have just given her her money back then and there. I knew she’d be a pain in the ass.”

  “So you made it all up.”

  “Listen, I don’t have a secretary or anything. I know what I’m doing but I’m not giving statements. I just winged something off to get her off my back.”

  “So you DIDN’T lose all the money?”

  “Ha,” he laughs. “I’ve made her a great deal of money. She can have it all if she wants it tonight. The only thing I’m guilty of is giving her that stupid statement.”

  “And talking to Ernie…”

  “Oh well, that. He wanted to know about the statement, said I was a phony. I told him what I told you. His sister can have her money back, plus everything I made her, tomorrow. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “So why didn’t you say anything about this conversation before?”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “When you left, Fred was coming up the driveway?”

  “He saw me. Fred saw that Ernie was alive after I left. Ask Fred. I never killed Ernie.”

  I walk over to Fred and Feather’s place. Fred is sober. Feather is tottering about in the kitchen.

  Their trailer is furnished ultra-modern. All white and glass. Immaculate. Fred is watching TV. He looks at me blankly like he can’t remember who I am for a second. “Can I talk to you about Ernie?” I ask him.

  “Why? I’ve told everything I know to the police, Linda.”

  “Lola,” I say. “I know you went to see him the night he died.”

  “What?” he says.

  “Yup,” I tell him.

  “Hmmm,” he says. “Listen, it wasn’t anything. I didn’t kill him. I was just sick and tired of the little worm pressuring me. I wanted to tell him to stick it. I don’t know if anyone ever stood up to him before. He was so slippery. But when I told him, ‘Go ahead, tell all,’ I meant it. ‘Talk till you’re blue in the face,’ I told him. We’re moving out anyway… We’re going to buy a condo on Pelican Bay. This was Feather’s mom’s place and she wanted to give it a try, but we need a new start.” He glances back at Feather. “We’re moving as soon as we can sell this place.”

  “Then what did you do after you left Ernie?”

  “I came home. I watched TV.”

  “Did you nap?”

  “I might have closed my eyes.”

  “So Ernie was alive when you left him?”

  “Of course,” Fred says.

  I’m going out the door when Feather says, “You live next door to Miss Tilney, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Can you let her know that the cowhide belt she was asking for, well, I don’t have it anymore. She wanted to borrow it and wear it to the dance. She was inquiring…,” she says. She cracks an ice cube tray and a couple ice cubes jump out and go skittering across the floor.

  “Oh, was it one of those brown and white ones?” I ask.

  “Just tell her I don’t have it anymore,” she says.

  I walk home. I call Joe. “Tell everyone I’m okay,” I say.

  My mother is sitting in my trailer knitting. She taken to coming over here while my father is working. She says she finds it “more restful” than my father’s condo.

  “I don’t know what to do next,” I tell her.

  “Why don’t you call your father?”

  “My father?”

  My mother looks at me. “He just worries about you, that’s all. Deep down inside he’s proud of you. This is hard for him, but he seems happier than I’ve seen him in a long time.”

  “Happy? What are you two all buddy-buddy back together again?” I ask. I know I sound mean.

  “I don’t know what we are, Lola. We are different together down here. Or maybe we’ve both changed. I actually find your father kind of… fun now. I mean, his heart. Well, he’s different.”

  “I find him exactly the same noodge he always was.”

  The needles click along. My mother is almost impossible to provoke. It used to drive me crazy as a teenager. I would make myself perform feats of pure awfulness just to get a rise out of her. “Remember what a bad teenager I was?” I ask her.

  “Not really bad,” she says, “Just needy.”

  “Needy?” I say. “More like rebellious.”

  She nods and knits. “I know it would mean a lot to him if you called him,” she says.

  “Mean a lot?” I say. I laugh.

  She doesn’t laugh along. She has her pink half glasses on. She looks at me over the top of them.

  “What am I going to say?” I ask her.

  She shrugs. “Just reach out,” she says.

  “Dad?” I call him.

  “Yes?”

  “About this whole Ernie thing…” I tell him all the recent developments. “I think they all could be lying,” I say. “What if Richie came back and killed Ernie. What if Fred killed him? What if Sal did? They were all there and could have come back.

  “Why don’t you let the cops handle it? I think they have a grip on the situation. Dave Johansen is a good cop.”

  “But Richie and Susie are leaving. I can’t just let them go.”

  “Let them go,” he says. “The cops will handle it.”

  “What if Feather really does have a cowhide belt?”

  “Could be nothing. Stay out of the way.”

  This is the thing with my father and me. He tells me no, but I can hear the yes… the go for it… the cop voice behind it. I wonder how frustrating it is for him not to be a cop anymore.

  Chapter 53

  “They’re packing,” Miss Tilney says. My phone rings right after I hang up with my father.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Richie and Susie.”

  “They’re going to Disney,” I say.

  “Do you take pictures off your walls when you go on vacation?”

  I pause. “Were you looking in their window?”

  “Of course. Someone’s got to do some detecting around here.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I came home to get my black sweatshirt. I could use some camo.”

  “Camo?”

  “It has a hood,” she tells me.

  “Stay home. I’ll go check it out. Oh, and Feather says to tell you she doesn’t have her cowhide belt anymore. Why didn’t you tell me she had one?”

  “Missy Blake just told me the other day. I didn’t tell you because I wasn’t sure it was true. Missy has a touch of Alzheimer’s. Some days, she thinks she’s Cleopatra and does her eye liner all the way out to her ears. Plus, you don’t let me do anything around here.”

  She should talk about eye make-up. I say, “Well, Feather says she doesn’t have it anymore.”

  “That’s what she says…,”

  I hang up the phone. My mother says, “What now?”

  “Miss Tilney saw Richie and Susie packing their photographs. I’m going to talk to them again.”

  “Oh dear,” my mother says. “Shouldn
’t you call the police?”

  “And tell them what? They’re packing to go on vacation. I don’t think that’s a crime.”

  “Oh dear,” she says again.

  “All right,” I say. I call and leave a message for Detective Johansen at the station. I don’t really want to talk to him. I say Susie and Richie are taking pictures off their walls and packing. I tell him Feather had a cowhide belt, but now, she says she doesn’t. It’s short and sweet.

  My mother nods uncertainly and wraps her arms around her chest.

  Ten minutes later, I’m in a bush looking in Susie and Richie’s living room window. Any second now, a tarantula could crawl onto me. I try to pretend I’m a rock or a branch—something inedible. There ARE a couple blank spots on their wall of photographs, but everything else looks normal.

  “They’re in the bedroom,” a voice whispers.

  “Ah!” I jump.

  “What kind of watchdog is that?” she asks pointing to Dreamer. “I snuck right up on you and your dog didn’t even give you a warning woof.”

  “She knows you.”

  Miss Tilney’s got black leggings on and a black hoodie tied tightly around her face. Even her eyebrows are black. She looks like a big black ant.

  “What’s that stuff on your face,” I whisper.

  “I smeared mascara on my cheeks.”

  I look at her.

  “Cuts reflection,” she tells me.

  I shake my head. “What are you DOING here?”

  “More than you are. You’re looking at an empty room.”

  I can’t say anything because she’s right. Just then Richie and Susie come back into the living room. I duck. Miss Tilney takes a step back. “Why are you shaking?” she asks me.

  “I don’t like suspense,” I tell her. “This is the part in the movie when I always close my eyes.”

  “Your dog is shaking too.”

  “When I get nervous, she gets nervous.”

  “That’s weird,” she whispers.

  “Ssh,” I tell her. But already the front door is opening and Richie is looking out. “Who’s there?” he says peering toward our bush. He takes a few steps toward us.

  “Stay here, “I tell Miss Tilney. I pop out of the bush calling, “Here Dreamer, here girl…”

  “What are you doing in my yard?”

  “I lost my dog.”

  “She’s right behind you.”