Devil's Food

by Anthony Bruno

  “Ah . . . no.” In fact, she had gotten it, but she hadn’t read it yet. She was too busy getting things ready for Luis. They’d been working on this scam for months, and today was the big day, the day they finally got the ball rolling. “What IRS guy?”

  “His name is Lawrence Temple. He’s from their Office of Criminal Investigations, and he wants to see the books. You didn’t get my memo?” Roger looked a little panicky.

  “Why does he want to see the books?”

  “To get more money out of us. Why the hell else? We’re okay, though, aren’t we? The books are presentable now, right?”

  “What do you mean by ‘presentable’?” Her heart was banging dangerously, like her daddy’s old Ford pickup chugging down the interstate, the one with the faulty engine mounts.

  “Christ, Martha, this is why I hired you, to straighten out the company books. They were such a mess, remember? You said you could fix them up for me just in case we ever got audited.” A squiggly blue vein had popped up on his temple. This wasn’t the smooth infomercial Roger. “I’m getting very stressed, Martha. Tell me you straightened out the books. Please!”

  Sweat was dripping down her armpits. “Yes, of course, I straightened out the books. What do you think I’ve been doing here the past five months?” She’d hardly done a thing to those books. She’d spent most of her time trying to figure out some kind of scam that would earn her enough money to take Becky to Costa Rica, where it was warm and sunny and there were no extradition laws.

  It had taken her five months to locate Luis, a Panamanian lawyer, and set this whole thing up. She’d given Luis the last of the money she’d swiped from Tom Junior and his drug buddies to set up the Alvarez Cocoa Company, S.A., in Panama City. Since WeightAway used real chocolate in some of their frozen foods, Martha Lee had worked out a scheme whereby the Alvarez Cocoa Company would bill WeightAway International for ninety tons of raw cocoa. Martha, as one of the bookkeepers for the company, would pay the bill, same as she paid all the others, except Luis wouldn’t be delivering any cocoa to WeightAway, not a single Chocolate Kiss’s worth, because there was no cocoa. Luis was just going to deposit the money she wired to him into two numbered accounts at a bank in the Cayman Islands: one for him, one for her. Half the money in one account, the rest in the other. As soon as she got confirmation from the bank that there was somewhere in the neighborhood of $210,000 in her account, she’d sit tight till Friday, then fly up to Slab Fork, pick up Becky, and hightail it down to Costa Rica as fast as she could. Home free with her baby, safe at last.

  Martha Lee was so close to pulling it off, she was getting light-headed. All she needed was the goddamn bill from Luis so that she could pay it. Plus, she needed Roger to get lost. But he was in a weird mood now, worried sick about the IRS. What if the fax suddenly came through and he looked at it? He’d definitely get suspicious. They didn’t use that much real chocolate in their foods, not even in the Double Dutch Chocolate Shake-a-Meal. Her back was soaked with sweat. She had to get him out of there fast before this whole thing blew up in her face.

  She took the Kisses from his fingers and tossed them in the trash. “Why don’t we go downstairs and have a wheat-grass juice? You look like you could use one, Roger.”

  “But, Martha, don’t you understand? I have to know that the books are all in shape. I want to see—”

  The high-pitched electronic ring of the fax machine made Martha jump.

  Shit!

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, it’s just the fax machine. Don’t be so jumpy.” She was trying to stay cool. She stood up and took his elbow. “Come on. Let’s go sit outside, get some air.”

  “Wait.” He nodded at the machine. “What if it’s important? Maybe it’s from that bastard Temple.”

  “I doubt it. This time of day all you get is junk faxes. People selling office supplies and stuff.”

  It stopped ringing and automatically picked up. The LCD readout on the face of the machine said: “RECEIVING.” Roger was peering down at it, waiting for it to start printing.

  “Come on, Rog. You’re stressed out. Let’s go—”

  “One minute.” The fax machine clunked, then started printing.

  Shit! He was gonna screw up everything. Her supervisor was on vacation this week; that’s why she had waited till now, so that no one would be there to question the bill. But if Roger saw it, he’d start asking questions that she didn’t have answers for, and the foods division up in Illinois wouldn’t vouch for this purchase. She’d be up shit’s creek then.

  The paper started to scroll up over the roller. She could see the letterhead starting to take shape, the tall oversize “A” in “Alvarez” sprouting up first. In a few seconds the word “Cocoa” would be plain as day, and that would be the end of it. Roger would go nuts, and she could forget about the whole thing.

  But she wasn’t going to forget about it, goddammit.

  “Roger!” She grabbed his sleeve. “I need you, Roger! I need your help!” She stooped down and yanked open her bottom desk drawer, pulling out the jumbo two-pound bag of Kisses. “I’m backsliding, Rog. You’re absolutely right. Inside I’m still fat. I need help. I’m afraid of what I’ll do to myself. Help me, Roger. Please!” She locked eyes with him, forcing herself to keep from ^! looking at the fax machine, but she could hear it working away, and it was making her heart thump like crazy.

  He tried to pull away from her, but she thrust the bag of Kisses in his face. “Help me, Roger. Please!” she pleaded, pointing to the photo of her good-for-nothing husband’s sister on the bulletin board. “I don’t want to look like that ever again. Please, Roger!” She started to hyperventilate.

  He sniffed the chocolates in the bag and made a face. Roger thought all sweets were evil, that they could jump right up and bite you on the ass if you weren’t careful. Well, chocolate was sure gonna bite him on the ass. If she could just get him the hell out of there.

  The fax was printing.

  She shook the cellophane bag frantically until it broke and Chocolate Kisses rained down on his suede Ferragamo loafers. “Please, Roger!” she screamed. “Please!”

  “All right, Martha, all right. Calm down. I’ll help you. Now listen to me. Do you have any spring water in here?”

  She shook her head.

  “Okay, then let’s go get that wheat-grass juice,” he said. “And some water. A lot of water. That’ll dilute some of the chocolate and get it out of your system faster.” He took her by the elbow and led her out into the hallway, kicking the Hershey’s Kisses out of his way as if they were cockroaches.

  “I don’t want to be fat again, Roger,” she moaned. “I don’t.”

  “It’s all right, Martha. Don’t worry. I’m here for you.” He put his arm around her.

  “I’m sorry, Roger. I let you down. I’m so sorry.” She buried her face in his shoulder, but inside she was relieved to be out of her office. As they walked toward the elevators together, she could faintly hear the fax machine grinding away. The bill was finally here. She’d come back and get it later, as soon as she got rid of Roger.

  “Take it easy, Martha,” Roger said. “Just breathe in through your nose and out your mouth, nice and easy. You’ll be fine.” They came up to the chrome elevator doors, and he pressed the down button. “We’ll fix you right up. Nothing a good coffee enema won’t cure.”

  Her body went stiff. “A what?”

  “Think you can take a high-colonic?”

  4

  Marvelli crossed his leg over his knee and started shaking his foot, getting more impatient by the minute. He was sitting on the end of a lumpy couch on a screened-in porch in the farm country of northwest Jersey. Loretta was on the other end of the couch, her head still buried in the Spooner file as if something new would materialize if she kept staring at it. A Confederate flag hung on the wall behind their heads, and the coffee table was littered with hot-rod and motorcycle magazines as well as an empty Bud can that had been used as an ashtray. A
sewing machine was set up on a vinyl-top card table facing the road. He kept shaking his foot. He didn’t like being here, even though it had been his idea to come here in the first place.

  He glanced at his watch and made a face. It was almost three. It would take him at least an hour and a half to get home, but he was going to have to swing through Newark first to drop Loretta off so she could pick up her car, and that would take another forty-five minutes, at least. He’d promised Renée he’d be home early tonight, and he knew he shouldn’t be breaking promises to her. The doctor said he shouldn’t let her get upset about anything anymore.

  He looked at his watch again. The doctor didn’t say anything about him not getting upset. But that didn’t matter. Renée was the one who had the problem, not him.

  He crossed his arms and pinched his nose. He didn’t like the smell of this place either. Outside it was warm and sunny, but inside it smelled like a tomb—cold and clammy, musty and stale. In fact, just about everything about Olivette Macrae’s ramshackle house bothered Marvelli because it was so depressing. The roof sagged over the porch, and he was willing to bet the exterior hadn’t been painted in over thirty years. Most of the window shutters were either missing or hanging by a thread. The grass was overgrown, and weeds grew high around an old refrigerator lying on its back in the front yard. A couple of sad-looking junkers sat in the dirt driveway, like two tired old dogs. There was also a “muscle car” back there, a late-sixties Chevy Malibu that was up on blocks.

  The Chevy was flat black with yellow and red flames painted over the hood and front fenders. On the driver’s door “Miss Behavior” was written in flaming, char broiled lettering right under a naked female red devil with horns, tail, a pitchfork, and a wicked pair of 38 D cups. Marvelli assumed this was Olivette Macrae’s son’s car. He could just imagine the kind of asshole who’d have a car like that.

  Marvelli tilted his head back and started wondering if this was what he had to look forward to. Would his house end up looking like this? He didn’t know how to fix things; he didn’t even know how to clean. Renée had always taken care of all that.

  He gazed down at the mess on the coffee table. And what about Nina? he thought. Would his daughter end up with some punk who used his beer can as an ashtray? Nina would be a bona fide teenager pretty soon. How the hell was he going to bring up a teenage daughter all by himself? How? He started rubbing his arms, suddenly chilly.

  He looked over at Loretta. It felt weird for him to be hanging out with a woman who wasn’t his wife, even though this was just work. He wasn’t used to it. He and Renée used to go out all the time, just get in the car and cruise around for the hell of it, no particular place to go. But they hadn’t done that in God knows how long. Renée didn’t leave the house much anymore.

  Loretta finally closed the file on her lap. “Why are we here, Marvelli? I don’t know why you decided to start with the mother-in-law. There’s nothing in Martha Spooner’s file that indicates that she was particularly close to her mother-in-law.”

  “Was there someplace else you wanted to start?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “You’re supposed to know this job better than I do.”

  “No, please. If you have any ideas, just let me know. I’m open to anything.”

  Like getting the hell out of here, he thought.

  “No, no, you’re the senior man here,” she said.

  “Well . . . yes and no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I guess I’m senior in terms of working on the Jump Squad, but you’ve been with Corrections longer than I have. Right?”

  “I don’t know, have I?” She sounded a little peeved.

  “Well, let’s see. I started with Corrections when I was twenty-three, and I’m thirty-two now. And you started when you were twenty-four, and now you’re thirty-four. So you’ve got a year on me. Right?”

  “How do you know I’m thirty-four?”

  She was mad. He could tell. He knew he should’ve kept his mouth shut. Renée’s doctor was right. It’s never a good idea to get any woman upset.

  “So how do you know how old I am, Marvelli?” Her voice was getting up in the bird-of-prey range. “How do you know?”

  “Well . . . I read your personnel file.”

  “Oh, really?” She snapped her head and threw her hair over her shoulder in a huff. She had great hair. The kind you’d like to walk through barefoot, like those women in the shampoo commercials. Too bad she’s so heavy. “And how did you happen to see my file, Marvelli?” Her nostrils were doing that mad-bull thing.

  “Well, I didn’t go looking for it or anything. It just happened to be on Julius’s desk with all the case files when I was in there looking for something else. I happened to spot this nice thin file sitting there, so automatically I thought to myself, Whoa, here’s an easy one for a change, some jumper who doesn’t have a rap sheet like Jack the Ripper. I figured I’d just take this little piece of cake for myself before someone else grabbed it. So I took a look at the file and found out it was yours. That’s how it happened.”

  “And you read enough to find out how old I am.”

  “Actually, I read the whole thing.”

  “You’ve got a lot of goddamn nerve, Marvelli. What’s in my file is none of your business.”

  He pursed his lips and stared straight ahead through the porch screens at the field across the road. She was definitely pissed. He waited a minute, then tried to sneak a quick glance at her to see if she was still mad, and suddenly he realized that her eyes were gray-green. For some reason he’d thought they were blue. “You’re absolutely right, Loretta,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I apologize. . . . Except—”

  “Except what?” She was glaring at him.

  “Except when you think about it, it kind of is my business.”

  “The hell it is.”

  “Well, think about it, Loretta. We’re partners. If I’m gonna trust you, I should know something about you. Right?”

  “And what about me?” she said. “Don’t I deserve to know something about you?”

  “Sure, you do. I don’t have any secrets. Whatever you want to know, just ask. But I’ll tell you right now, my personnel file must be about a half-page long. This is all I’ve ever done really: track down jumpers and bring ‘em back alive. It’s the only real job I’ve ever had.”

  And Renée is the only wife I’ve ever had, he thought.

  “So the way you see it, you’re the pro, and I’m the old washed-up rookie. Is that it?”

  “That’s not what I said, Loretta. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  She was still glaring at him. If looks could kill . . .

  Kovacs, he thought. What’s that, Hungarian? Wild gypsy blood? Maybe. She certainly wasn’t shy about picking fights. He remembered when he and Renée used to fight. Renée always looked incredibly sexy when she was mad—so sexy that he always ended up with a big hard-on for her, which made it impossible for him to keep up any kind of argument. But they didn’t fight at all now. She didn’t have the strength, and he didn’t have the heart.

  Marvelli started to zone out, staring at the cornfield across the road, thinking about Renée. But why he asked for the bazil-lionth time. Why her? Why him What the hell was he going to do when she—

  “Sorry about that.” Olivette Macrae, Martha Lee Spooner’s mother-in-law, came out onto the porch from inside. “That was my mom on the phone,” she said. “Hard to get rid of her when she gets started.”

  Marvelli nodded. “I know the problem.” His own mother-in-law was the same way.

  Olivette pulled out a Marlboro from the pack on the sewing table and lit it with a tangerine-colored disposable lighter. She sucked in a deep drag, her cheeks sinking into her face, which made her look more like a witch than she already did. She had a long, haggard face and stringy limbs, but under her pink sweatshirt she had a basketball-sized belly. Her dull gray-brown hair was dry as straw and hung down long and limp to
the middle of her back. Even though she looked like a moderately old hag, Marvelli had a feeling she wasn’t even fifty yet.

  “Just give me a minute here, folks, so I don’t forget where I was with this.” The woman sat back down at the sewing machine and continued what she’d been doing before the phone had rung. The sewing machine clacked away as she ran up some curtains, guiding the seams under the needle. “So what was it you two wanted?” she shouted over the noise, the cigarette bobbing between her lips.

  Loretta made a face at the drifting smoke. “We’d like to ask you a few questions about your daughter-in-law. Martha Lee Spooner?”

  Olivette stopped sewing. “Did you say Martha Lee?”

  “Yes. Martha Lee Spooner.”

  “Phew.” Olivette shut off the sewing machine and turned sideways in her seat to face them. “When you said you were from the Department of Corrections, I thought you were here about Ricky.”

  “Who’s Ricky?” Marvelli asked.

  “My kid with Bobby. Bobby Macrae was my second husband, bless his soul. Tom Spooner was my first.”

  “Has Ricky ever been in prison?”

  “Not yet. Just a matter of time, though, if you ask me.” Olivette knocked the ash off her cigarette into a plaid beanbag ashtray set next to the sewing machine.

  Marvelli gazed up at the Rebel flag. He knew it. Young Ricky would probably end up a parole jumper, too. Marvelli leaned forward on his knees and studied Loretta’s face while she wasn’t looking. She actually had very pretty eyes. Soul eyes, they used to call them in high school. He’d never seen a color quite like that, a deep gray-green. Very unusual. He tried to imagine what she’d look like about twenty pounds lighter.

  Or maybe thirty.

  “Has Ricky ever been convicted of a crime, Mrs. Macrae?” Loretta asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “So why would you think we were here about Ricky?”

  “Well, I saw something on TV a while back that they were arresting troublemakers and lockin’ ’em up before they did anything wrong. This was out in Oregon or Seattle, one of those places out there. I figured maybe they’d started up something like that here in Jersey. My Ricky’d be the first to go if they did. Sure as shit.”