The Evil That Men Do

by Steve Rollins

  “Oh, screw you!” Riley’s yell of pent up anger made Roberta physically jump backwards, standing on Riley’s toe, who was evidently so angry at their elder sister that she barely noticed, or didn’t give any outward appearance of feeling pain.

  “I’ve had a really, really crappy morning, I stink, and I could do without the third degree from you, alright? Gosh, when did you turn into such a bitch? You’re not Mom. And you never will be.”

  Riley folded her arms in defiance. Ricki stood up out of her chair, finger jabbing and ready to unleash full scale Vaughan family warfare, when her eyes widened at the shape of the man at the door, coming in. Great. A visit from Dumont was all she needed right now. The portly white man—fifty-something and looking a good ten years older, thanks to the combination of what Roberta had always said was a drinking problem of herculean proportions and the wizening effects of the Savannah climate—waddled into the office. Ricki stood motionless, finger in the air. Riley and Roberta turned on the spot and muttered their greetings to the man whose visits invariably accompanied a lecture.

  “Good morning, Mr. Dumont,” Ricki echoed her sisters. “How are you feeling today?”

  Dumont had, for as long as Ricki could remember, been on the verge of dying for any number of imagined maladies, and Dumont had been a friend of the Vaughan family since before any of the girls had been born.

  “Good morning ladies. I do hope I didn’t interrupt any, uh, family business?” Dumont ignored Ricki’s question, and Riley shifted her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot, as she had always done since a child when caught fighting with either Roberta, or Ricki, or both.

  “Nothing we can’t sort out, Mr. Dumont,” Roberta said, falsely cheery.

  “Yes, we’re just discussing paperwork,” said Ricki.

  “Ah, excellent,” said Dumont.

  He rummaged for a moment in the inside pocket of his light summer blazer which was like his pants and shirt an off-white shade that made him appear as if he would be more at home selling high cholesterol pineapple chunks than his usual business of being a venture capitalist and a giant pain in the ass for the Vaughan sisters. He withdrew a sheaf of letters, and passed them to Riley, who passed them to Roberta, even though Ricki was standing close to her. Roberta handed over the letters, and Ricki rifled them quickly, and she was sure that she was unable to keep the horror from her eyes as she fought to restrain her mouth.

  “What are they, Ricki?” Riley said, standing on tiptoes to try and see over the edge of the letters. Ricki instinctively raised the papers to hide them from her view. Riley scowled.

  “What they are, my dear, are bills for the running costs of your business,” said Dumont. “As you can see, the bill runs to some thousands of dollars, which you ladies clearly don’t think is too much of a problem because you have always had me to bail you out.”

  The Vaughan sisters made exclamations of denial but Dumont silenced all protests with a chop of one pudgy hand. His face became dark and glowering and when he spoke his voice was no longer his soft southern drawl but was thunderous with anger and frustration.

  “Enough! I’ve known all of y’all since you could fit in my hand, and I knew your folks way before then. I’ve been like a grandpappy to you since your parents have been gone, but you have to stop taking me for a ride! I agreed to back R3 Recovery, and y’all know I’m happy to, but you have to break even! Thousands of dollars in unpaid bills and a receipt for a new motorcycle!”

  “It’s not exactly new,” said Riley, in a small voice. Dumont glowered, and she was silent.

  “Oh, I might have guessed you’d lose your last one. What did you do, wreck it? Never mind, I don’t care,” Dumont spat, voice still at full volume. Ricki had never seen him quite so apoplectic. “You three characters have exactly one month before the electricity company pulls the plug. I guess Riley would be instructed to repossess her own damn bike and I would think Roberta’s truck too, not to mention all the furnishings in here, and you’ll be working at Walgreens. I’ve backed you for five years, and you have never let it get this bad, but promise to your daddy or no, that’s it. Sort your own mess out. Let me know when you have the cash, or when you’re ready to hand over the keys for R3.” Dumont straightened his shirt which had nearly taken leave of his back during his explosion. “Have a nice day, ladies,” he said, and with that marched out of the offices of R3 Recovery.

  The sisters looked at each other, agape. The room was silent for several long moments, and Ricki felt that she had tinnitus such was the volume of Hubert Dumont in full flow. She had never seen him quite like that before, not even when she had Roberta had broken the windscreen of his Cadillac throwing stones as children. Ricki, Riley and Roberta shared wide eyed looks. Ricki let the unpaid bills drop onto her desk and slumped back into her chair, head in her hands.

  “Ricki, what are we going to do?” Riley said. Ricki raised her face to her little sister, memory of the conflict of only a few minutes previously buried, for now.

  “I don’t know. We need,” she examined the bills, “about eight grand. Eight thousand! I don’t think we can do it.” She felt downcast. R3 Recovery had been her life for five years, and sure it wasn’t all that profitable, but the Vaughan sisters had made it by themselves. It was theirs, and now it could all end.

  “We’ll find a way, somehow!” said Roberta, forcing a smile. “We’re the Vaughan sisters, right? We can do anything if we put our minds to it. Now, we just need to get a few jobs in, a few real big hitters, and we’re back in the game, right?”

  “Yeah!” joined Riley. “We can do it! A few Ferrari repos, some caught fraudsters, they’re always well paid!”

  Their optimism was almost enough to break through Ricki’s pragmatism, but the weight of responsibility hung on her heart heavier than her sisters’. It always had done, as the eldest. Then, out of nowhere, there was an unfamiliar, metallic buzzing noise. Ricki couldn’t place it for a moment, and then it ended as Riley picked up the receiver of the telephone on Ricki’s desk.

  “R3 Recovery? Yes!” She said, and motioned for a pencil. Ricki handed one over. “Mmmhmm… ya huh… OK! Great! We’re on our way!” Riley hung the phone back up and grinned.

  Ricki raised an eyebrow. “So… are we saved?” she said.

  Riley’s smile faltered a little.

  “Well, no, but it’s a repo! I got a repo; it’ll get us, like, two hundred! That’s a start, right?” Roberta and Ricki shared a slightly crestfallen moment. Nothing was going to be quite that easy, it appeared.

  “OK, it’s a start. We have to start somewhere. Get on it, ladies. Roberta, you’re free at the minute. Go with Riley. I’ll get in touch with the courthouse and see if they have any jumpers for you.” Ricki span her pencil that she had received back from Riley. Riley mock saluted, and positively skipped out the door. Roberta merely shrugged and followed her, hips swinging as Ricki picked up the phone.

  Maybe, just maybe there would be a light at the end of all this. Losing R3 Recovery could not happen. Must not happen. She had to find a way of keeping the Vaughan family together.

  Chapter Five

  Roberta

  Despite the oppressive heat and the evident inability of any partner in R3 Recovery to maintain a working air-con unit, neither vehicular nor in a building, Riley was irrepressible.

  As children, Roberta had found her bursts of excitement annoying to the extent that on more than one occasion she had press-ganged Ricki into assisting in flushing Riley’s head in the toilet. As they grew up she had recognized that the youngest sister veered wildly from the depths of self-destruction and depression to periods of near mania, and Roberta and Ricki grew kinder with the understanding of that.

  As the two sisters traveled across Savannah, Roberta barely paid attention to the roads. She had driven these streets for ten years, ridden bikes around them for ten more than that. For all its flaws with the racial divisions and the economic disparity, she did love the city for all its flaws. On one corner, s
he had shared her first kiss with Terence Alderman, by a stand of trees she had been caught by Ricki trying marijuana and threatened with summary jail; by the courthouse steps she herself had done the same to Riley. The Vaughan sisters were as much a part of Savannah as it was a part of them.

  “Hey, Roberta,” Riley said, after driving some distance in silence. “You mad with me too?” Riley looked up with worried eyes at her elder sibling. Had she been worrying about that the whole time? Roberta checked her watch. Twenty minutes, she had been away in her own past and neglected to pay attention to the moment she was in, which was really the only moment that ever really mattered. In this moment, her little sister was worried.

  “Course not kid, I’m sorry. I was miles away, thinking, y’know.”

  Roberta flicked on her indicator lights reflexively as she steered her way through the almost deserted mid-afternoon streets. No one with something of importance to do drove at this time. A police car passed, and the driver, a burly black sergeant by the unlikely name of Ernie McMillan waved to her with the hand that he had dangled out of the side of his patrol vehicle, taking advantage of the scant breeze provided by his forward motion.

  “You know that guy?” Riley said, gesturing with a lazy wobble of her own elbow propped on the passenger side door.

  “I know all the cops in town with chasing bail. I would have thought you’d know them too.”

  Roberta kept her eyes on the road as they pulled onto the main interconnecting road system.

  “Make friends with the police? Me? Ha! No one would race me if I started hanging out with the pigs. Roberta, I know your man is a cop and you know I like Terry, but you have to know he’s like one of the only good ones in this town. Billy got nightsticked unconscious by some of them last week for nothing.” Riley beat her hand on the glove box for emphasis. “Some of my friends, they don’t like you too much. They see you as a bit of a traitor, you know?”

  Roberta almost slammed on the brakes, but instead only reflexively dabbed at them, causing the hood of the pickup truck to dip sharply and jolt Riley out of her seat by a few inches. She yelped in surprise.

  “Whoa, I’m sorry, okay?”

  Roberta knew that Riley had not meant offense, and that her words were true. It still didn’t feel nice to have her own suspicions confirmed to her. The idea that she and her sisters existed on the fringes of both white and black cultures in the city had long been in her mind, and of course she had certainly transgressed both boundaries by becoming romantically involved with not just a cop, but a white cop at that. She could take it all, the sly glances from white girls, the disdain from black men that told her that she had somehow betrayed her color by choosing a white man over them, and the nature of Terry’s employment with the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department naturally pleased them even less. She buried the emotion as it welled in her now as she had done every other time. Even when alone with Riley, she maintained the veneer over her pain, keep it hidden. Keep it hers alone.

  “It’s fine,” she lied. “My foot just slipped a little. I know people gossip, but me and Terry don’t care. It’s no business for anyone to be stickybeakin’ about but ours. Who cares if he’s a cop? He’s a damn good cop.”

  “Sure, I know, but some of his friends ain’t so nice,” Riley said.

  Roberta decided to drop it. It wasn’t worth defending the honor of Terry’s workmates to her own sister. There had surely been enough arguing for the Vaughan sisters that day. She pulled off the main road and into the sprawling mess of apartment complexes and cheap houses that made the west side of town. Here, people were seen more on the streets now the sun had passed its highest point, but no one moved with any speed or urgency. Most of the people were elderly, or the very young. Employment was high, even if most people in this area still struggled to make ends meet. The people of working age in this area, lolling up against lamp posts and sitting on porches drinking malt liquor were quite often Roberta’s prime targets when it came down to the business of retrieving bail jumpers. Guys like Mark Lewis. It felt good to return him into custody, lecherous creep that he was. The people here who were too sick with addiction to work and turned to crime to sate the crippling thirst of heroin or crack cocaine were painful to bring in, both for the jumper and Roberta herself. She forced her mind away from the tragedy of human life in the South as Riley pointed out the house at the end of the road, where they were due to repossess the vehicle of another recently impoverished person. Was that the American dream? Did it really have to be about taking from people to ensure that you kept your own sorry head above water? The news said people had never had it so good.

  The address where they were due to collect a 2013 model Ford pickup truck had no vehicle parked in the yard or on the street in front of the property. The single story building was easily in the front running for most dilapidated abode in the region, but both Roberta and Riley were well used to the results of the recession; not from their own experience, but from the nature of R3 Recovery’s recent spate of work. Despite Ricki’s best efforts to steer them more into the realms of genuine recovery with an emphasis on making positive changes to Savannah, money talked and bullshit walked. Roberta and Riley disembarked from the pickup and made their way to the door. Roberta left her shotgun on the back seat of the vehicle, as was usual. There was no threat here, save for the prospect of some poor junkie trying to mug them for a fix, and that would only end up badly for the junkie.

  The door opened before they arrived. A clean cut man, well dressed by local community standards to the point of gaudiness in comparison to his neighbors, stood smiling in the doorway. He was forty, give or take five years, a smooth pale complexion with no obvious signs of drug or alcohol abuse, steady hands and clear blue eyes that shone with the bright warmth of intelligence. He looked like he would be more at home making a mortgage deal or lecturing students on economics than living in this dilapidated hovel.

  “Mr. Cavanaugh?” Riley said, producing her identification for the man.

  “I am he; what can I do for you lovely ladies on an afternoon like this? Would you like a glass of lemonade, perhaps? I just made some; a whole fresh pitcher.”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Cavanaugh.” Riley’s tone was entirely professional. A natural actor, thought Roberta. “I’m afraid we’re here on business matters. We’re here to take possession of your car; the payments haven’t been made for three months, you see.”

  The man’s brow furrowed and his smile dropped, but not completely. He was confused, not angry as most victims of repossession were. Something felt very wrong to Roberta, but she couldn’t place it. Tingles of unformed ideas and warnings jangled like spiders up her spine.

  “Oh, I’m afraid there must me some mistake,” said Mr. Cavanaugh. “My car is currently in the shop, something to do with the transmission, they say. I really have no idea about cars. That’s why I bought a Volkswagen, you know, they said it would be super reliable, but…” He trailed off.

  His voice was not local. It sounded to Roberta that it was an affected Bostonian accent. Perhaps he had once been a resident of Savannah, but there was little evidence of that in his deportment or speaking voice. Realization hit her at the same time as Riley spoke the words that were forming in her mind.

  “Excuse me, you don’t own a blue four door Ford?” she said.

  “Oh, I see the confusion,” Cavanaugh said serenely. “You are looking for my father, I am afraid. He’s not here at the moment; could I take some details and ask him to call you when he gets back?”

  “Where has he gone?” Roberta said, “I’m afraid we don’t arrange appointments. Kinda goes against the whole idea of repossession if the person who is getting their property repossessed knows when we’re coming. You understand, I’m sure. Tell us where he is, and we’ll give him a ride back here when we’re done.”

  Cavanaugh looked a little taken aback, looking Roberta up and down with a strange, unreadable expression, but he relented and told them that his fathe
r had gone courting. This was a cause for great merriment for Riley, as she was young enough to still consider the idea of an elderly man who must be in his sixties at least chasing skirt to be hilarious. Roberta thanked Mr. Cavanaugh Junior and led Riley back to her vehicle, with the address of where Mr. Cavanaugh Senior had gone; cherche l’amour.

  On arrival at the address, which was across town in a much more affluent area, they found a scene that was bittersweet in its pathos. An elderly gentleman was on one knee on the porch of a grand town house that had seen better days. In the doorway, an even more elderly looking woman was gesticulating wildly at him. It appeared that Mr. Cavanaugh Senior was no Casanova, and from his downcast expression it was evident that he knew he was beaten. His handsome face wore the features which his son would obviously inherit one day, right down to the slightly large ears.

  Roberta and Riley could eavesdrop on the conversation as they pulled up to the curb, right behind Cavanaugh’s old Ford which would soon be driven away by R3 Recovery.

  “Maddie, c’mon, baby! One date, whaddya got to lose, huh?” Cavanaugh said, throwing his arms out. One hand held some withered flowers that had clearly been bought at the gas station.

  The old woman was clearly unmoved, her arms now folded beneath an improbably large diamond necklace that seemed likely to snap the scrawny retiree’s neck at any moment.

  “Never, Joseph Cavanaugh! I will never! Get off my porch, or I will call the police on you again, and this time I’ll ask them to beat you! Hard!” She hopped a fraction of an inch off the floor with her last word.

  “Should we…” Roberta began.