Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  It was pretty clear Frankie didn’t think of the police the way she did, although after the first moment of shock he smoothed out his face and put on a different expression. He didn’t say a word as they walked straight towards the pizza counter. It was left to Audrey to say, “Good day, officers, can we help you with anything?”

  “We’re looking for Francis Holloway,” said one.

  The “Francis” should have tipped her off. Even so, Audrey was about to be helpful and tell him that Frank wasn’t there, he was at his own place over on Freshwater Road, when the cop added, “Junior.”

  “That’s him over there,” she said, when Frankie still didn’t say anything.

  “Francis Wesley Holloway Junior?” the cop said.

  “What? I never done nothing!”

  The cop put his hand on Frankie’s shoulder. “Francis Wesley Holloway Junior, you are under arrest for the possession of marijuana for the purposes of trafficking, and possession of hashish for the purposes of trafficking. Please put your hands behind your back.” Audrey watched, fascinated, as Frankie turned around and the cop put handcuffs on him. The other cop turned to her. “We have a warrant to search these premises,” the officer said.

  “You can’t search my shop!” Frankie said.

  “Please be quiet and come with us, Mr. Holloway,” said the cop, at the same moment as Audrey said, “You won’t find nothing in this shop, we got nothing to hide!”

  Frankie, escorted by the two officers toward the door, shot her a glance, and Audrey wished she could bite back the words. She never went over onto the pizza side of the shop. What did she know about what he had hidden away over there? She thought of all his useless friends coming into the shop, all the times he darted out for a few minutes for no reason, the phone calls from people who only wanted to talk to Frankie. I’ve been a damn fool, she realized.

  At that moment the door pinged again.

  Audrey hoped it would be some snot-nosed school kid. Instead, it was Selena Ivany, the last person she wanted to see. The mouth on that one, she’d have it all over Rabbittown by suppertime that the cops were at Holloway’s and young Frankie was being arrested.

  “My Lord, Audrey, what’s on the go in here? Have ye had a break-in?”

  That certainly would have been the best thing for Selena to think, but it wasn’t like she could miss the fact that the officers had Frankie by the arm and were leading him towards the police car. As they led him out the door Audrey could hear the cop telling Frankie he had a right to legal counsel. “Ma’am, could you please leave the shop for now,” another policeman said, and Selena’s mouth got round till she looked like a fish just pulled up on the wharf and gasping for water.

  As Selena backed out of the shop, still agape, there were footsteps on the stairs. Henry, who had been out playing at some bar till three in the morning, was just now getting up and coming downstairs. He paused in the entrance to the shop, taking it all in. “You all right, Mom?”

  Audrey nodded at the cops who were just leaving the store with Frankie. “The police are in here. They’re after arresting Frankie.”

  “Sweet Lord. What for, drugs?”

  He certainly didn’t sound surprised, Audrey thought. “He says they got to search the place.”

  “They’re probably going to want to talk to both of us, too,” Henry said.

  One of the police officers came back in. “You’ll need to close the shop while we carry out our search,” he said. “Both of you stay here, please; we’ll need to ask you some questions.”

  Audrey flipped the sign in the window to CLOSED.

  RACHEL

  “You should have told me,” Rachel said to Larry as soon as she hung up the phone from talking to Nan.

  “Told you what.”

  “About Frankie. Selling weed out of the pizza shop. You knew, didn’t you?”

  “I…ah, I heard stuff. I didn’t know if there was anything to it.”

  “Tell me right now, exactly, what you heard.” Rachel was reaching for her jacket, getting her shoes on.

  “It was...who was it? Oh, Brian Wells and a few of the b’ys from Skeet Patrol. We were talking, I don’t even remember about what, and somebody said, Is Rae any relation to Frankie Holloway. And someone else laughed and said, Frankie Holloway, d’you want pepperoni, pineapple, or pot on that? Then another fellow said he was amazed the cops hadn’t busted that place by now.”

  “So everyone knew. Nan says Henry wasn’t surprised either. But I guess he’s got a lot of experience knowing where people are selling stuff.”

  “Brian was talking like it was a well-known fact, like everyone knew the pizza shop wasn’t where Frankie was making his real money. I guess there’s not that much money in selling crappy pizza by the slice.”

  “It’s not like Frankie’s going around driving a BMW and taking vacations in the south of France,” Rachel pointed out.

  “No, but he’s doing all right at a time when hardly anyone else is, and I guess that’s enough to make people suspicious.”

  When she got to Audrey’s place, Rachel let herself in through the closed shop with her key. It was three o’clock in the afternoon; Audrey had called her as soon as the police left. “I came as quick as I could,” Rachel told her grandmother.

  Audrey was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, a cigarette burning down in the ashtray. The TV was showing the weather channel with the sound turned off.

  “So the police talked to you to?” Rachel asked.

  “They talked to me, and your father, and they said they might need to talk to us again tomorrow or the next day, and they’ll probably want to talk to anyone in the family who had anything to do with the business. I think they’re looking for Deb now, wanting to have a word with her. You knows she had to be in on the whole thing.” Deb was Frankie’s latest girlfriend.

  “Where’s Henry?”

  “Gone over to Frank’s to tell him. He said Frank shouldn’t hear about it over the phone.”

  When Rachel told her what Larry had said, Audrey said, “It’s like all the men knew what was going on and all of us women didn’t have a clue.”

  “I doubt Uncle Alf knew. He would have said something. Or Uncle Frank either.”

  “I’m sure Alf didn’t know but I wouldn’t be so sure about Frank. He’d protect Frankie no matter what. You know they found the weed stashed away in pizza boxes in the back room? Nobody ever went in there except Frankie and Deb. All that crowd used to come in here, and the people who would call and hang up if Frankie wasn’t there—they all knew. He had regular customers, like.”

  “Did the police say you had to keep the shop closed?”

  “For today, while they were investigating. I can open it tomorrow if I want, but I don’t know if I can. If people come in they’ll only be coming in to gawk and ask questions.”

  “I could come in and work, I don’t mind.”

  “What for? Sure all anyone comes in for anymore is the pizza and I’m not going at that.” Audrey stubbed out her cigarette, shook another out of the pack and lit it. “We never closed the shop. Not for anything. We closed Christmas Day, that was it, and Good Friday. And Sundays, of course, till they brought in the Sunday shopping. Mom wasn’t best pleased about that, she thought it was flying in the face of God to have the shop open Sundays. But you couldn’t stay closed when everyone else was opening up. We were closed for renovations when Dad died. Oh, and St— we closed for your poor mother’s funeral. That’s the only times I can remember the shop ever bein’ closed. This is going to break Mom’s heart.”

  “You don’t have to tell her about it, do you?”

  “It’ll be on the news,” Audrey said. “Oh my, Rachel, I got to get over there. You know she watches Here and Now every night. If she sees young Frankie arrested—”

  “She won’t see anything, there wasn’t any TV
camera there, was there?”

  “No, but they could say the name. There was four or five cops down there, I think this is a big deal.”

  Rachel crossed to the window and looked down at the street. “There’s somebody down there now,” she said. “With a camera. Not a TV camera, but a big camera. Like maybe from the Telegram or something.”

  “Oh, that’s the start of it. They’ll all be here soon, swarming around like flies round a carcass. I got to get out and go see Mom—is some reporter going to stick a microphone in my face as soon as I puts my foot over the door, I wonder?”

  Rachel and Audrey got out the door unmolested by reporters. The man with the camera had gone away and nobody else appeared as they got into the car to drive to St. Luke’s. Perhaps, Rachel thought, it wasn’t that big a deal after all.

  Ellen’s hearing was starting to go and she forgot things, but she didn’t have what Audrey called Old-Timer’s Disease; as long as she could hear what you were saying she made as much sense as she had ever done. She listened as Audrey explained that young Frankie had been arrested.

  “What, Frankie? Not my Frank…?”

  “No, his son, young Frankie. Your grandson.” Audrey pitched her voice to Ellen-level, torn between her desire to be heard and her desire not to have everyone know their business.

  “Young Frankie…arrested? For stealing?”

  “No, for selling drugs.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  Rachel and Audrey exchanged glances. Did Nanny Ellen even know what marijuana was? Rachel wondered.

  “Illegal drugs. Stuff he shouldn’t have been at,” Audrey said, and Ellen shook her head.

  “Well, that’s shocking,” she said. “I thought Frank brought him up better than that. Of course, it wasn’t easy, rearing him up without a mother those last few years. And even when she was alive, his mother—well, we never knew anything about her people. You never know, with foreigners, do you? There’s a terrible lot of crime up in Toronto.”

  Did she think young Frankie was still up in Toronto? That might be for the best, unless Holloway’s storefront did show up on the evening news or in the paper. But Ellen surprised them by leaping to the conclusion they had avoided. “He wasn’t at that in the shop, was he? In my shop? Didn’t young Frankie work in the shop?”

  Audrey nodded. “He worked in the shop. He was selling pizza, remember?”

  “Pizza,” Ellen said, with great disdain. That, too, was foreign—Italian, like Frankie’s late mother. All these foreign things—pizza, drugs, Frankie’s mother and thus half of Frankie. “Well. It’s shocking, that’s what it is. I can’t believe anyone in our family would do such a thing.”

  They ended up visiting through the news hour and not watching Here and Now, which was good because Treese called later, when they were all back at Audrey’s, and said it was on the news, they said Frankie’s name and they showed a picture of the front of the store. Larry had come up to join Rachel by that time, and Henry was back as well.

  Audrey hung up the phone after listening to Treese and sat back down on the couch next to Rachel. “Treese says she can’t hold her head up in public. What do she got to be ashamed of, I wonder? It’s not like she’ve been the one standing behind the counter of that store day in and day out for forty years. When people think about the store, they don’t think about Treese or Alf. Most of them don’t even think about young Frankie, the little frigger. People in this neighbourhood think about me when they thinks of that store. If there’s anyone can’t hold their head up, it’ll be me.”

  “You got nothing to be ashamed of, Mom,” said Henry.

  The phone rang again. Rachel moved toward it but Audrey got up with a sigh, waving her away. “That’ll be Marilyn. I might as well answer it. I wonder if she’ve called June to tell her yet?”

  “What did Frank say?” Larry asked Henry.

  “About what we expected—he won’t admit Frankie could have been dealing in any kind of a big way, just says he must have been smoking a bit of it and had it on hand for himself and his buddies.”

  “The amount of weed they found down there? For himself and his buddies? Frank’s cracked.”

  “He believes what he wants to believe,” Henry said.

  “Could he have been using the business as, like, a front or whatever? I don’t know, laundering money or something?” Rachel had no idea how any of this worked; it was all stuff she’d seen on American cop shows, except there it was usually cocaine or something. She and Larry smoked the occasional joint when they were out with friends or had someone over, and it never seemed to be a big deal to buy a bit of it off someone, though Larry always took care of it. The cops storming into the store, searching pizza boxes, arresting Frankie—that seemed like a much more serious business. “Could he have been connected to, like, organized crime?”

  Audrey sniffed. “Disorganized crime is more like it.”

  “There’s no gangs, no organized crime in Newfoundland, not like up in Toronto,” Henry said.

  “And if there was, Frankie wouldn’t be smart enough to work for them,” Audrey added.

  “But you knew he was at it?” Rachel asked her father.

  “I was suspicious. I never knew nothing for sure.”

  “But wouldn’t that make it—hard, for you? Knowing it was going on just downstairs, in the same house?” Rachel had always trod cautiously around the edges of this conversation, her father’s history of addiction. It was one of a thousand things they didn’t talk about. Rachel and Henry talked about how Audrey was doing, what kind of help she might need but not admit to. Mostly they talked about music, and that was usually the three of them, her and Henry and Larry. Between the music, and Rachel and Henry conspiring to do things like getting Audrey to the eye doctor to upgrade her ancient glasses prescription, they had carved out a kind of relationship that seemed to work.

  But the list of things Rachel and Henry didn’t discuss was a long one. They didn’t talk about Stella, ever. Rachel wanted to ask him about her, told herself that someday she would. They didn’t talk about him going away, leaving her to be raised by Audrey and Nanny Ellen, or about the places he went or the things he did when he was away. The closest they ever got was once when Henry told Rachel he was going to be out because he had a meeting. It wasn’t like Henry was on a lot of committees or anything so she was pretty sure what kind of a meeting that had to be.

  Now Henry just shrugged. “If you used to be into that shit and you’re trying to stay off it, it don’t matter that much if it’s downstairs, across the street or on the other side of town. You know where it is and you know how to get it. Even if I wanted to be at that again, I wouldn’t have bought off Frankie. You don’t want to go getting mixed up in the family business.”

  Audrey sniffed. “The family business! What am I supposed to do tomorrow, go into that shop and open up? First person through the door is going to be some reporter and the next one is going to be Lorraine Penney or Selena Ivany wanting to know all the dirt. It’s been on the news, it’ll be in tomorrow’s paper. Should I go down there and face up to all that for the sake of the few skeets who wants to buy a pack of smokes or a lottery ticket?”

  Rachel wanted to give her grandmother a hug but they had never been the hugging kind of family. In all her life this was something she had never heard: Audrey saying she couldn’t face the neighbours. Audrey giving up.

  “I can come in and work if you want,” Rachel offered again. “It might not be so bad anyway. I mean, the people on the street are our neighbours. They’ll understand.”

  “That might have been true twenty years ago,” Audrey said. “It’s a different crowd around here now, not many of the old ones left and so many new people.” She stood up and looked around at her own living room as if she’d never seen the place before. “I’m getting out of here,” she said. “Henry, you’re all right here if I goes on over t
o Richard’s for the night, aren’t you? I’m going to stay there till this all blows over. If it ever does.”

  AUDREY

  It was a funny feeling, moving into someone else’s house. The only other time she ever did it, she was twenty and so many things were different: new husband, new country, new life. Leaving her parents’ home for the first time to move in with Harry and his parents in Louisiana had been a huge change, but she could hardly remember being the girl who made that journey. Now she made this shorter journey: three blocks from her house to Richard’s.

  “That man has the patience of Job,” Ellen used to say about Richard Cadwell. “It’s not like I got a gun to his head,” was Audrey’s usual response. Privately she had to admit her mother was right. A good-looking divorced man with a house of his own and a nice little pension; he wouldn’t have had a hard time finding someone to marry him if another wife was what he was looking for. But when Audrey turned him down, over and over, he kept coming around.

  “I know you’re used to having your own space,” he said over a late supper. Audrey had shown up on his doorstep at nine o’clock the night of Frankie’s arrest carrying a single overnight bag, and told him she hadn’t even eaten yet. He heated up the leftovers of his own supper and opened a bottle of wine. “You can keep your things in the spare bedroom if you want, but you’re more than welcome in my room. Just because you’re staying here, don’t worry, there’ll be no talk of weddings or anything like that.”

  “I think we’re both past all that now,” Audrey said. She hung up the few clothes she had brought in the spare-room closet when supper was over, and then sat down with Richard to watch The National. At least with that there was no fear of them covering a story about a drug bust in a St. John’s corner store. The national news had bigger fish to fry.