Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  “Did she have the bruises on her face when you found her at her house, or did she get them here at the hospital?” I asked.

  There was a long pause, and I had the distinct feeling I’d stepped in it.

  Finally Demetrious said, with an air of resignation, “Truth is, there is some debate. I do not recall seeing bruising. But the admitting doctor swears there was already bruising on her face.”

  “Like someone was holding her mouth shut, forcibly,” I said.

  “Yes.” Demetrious walked over to my mother’s still body and positioned his hand over her jaw and mouth, but very carefully did not touch her. But we could all see how his hand and fingers fit the pattern of the bruises.

  And I could see it would fit either way—to force her mouth open, or to force it shut.

  So, the hospital could be covering up for its own lack of gentleness, or Demetrious maybe clamped down a bit rough to shut her up, or maybe Ray Glenn had been trying to shut her up.

  Or somebody tried to force something down her throat.

  “What kind of OD did she nearly have?” I asked, to everyone’s apparent discomfort.

  “What?” I snapped when nobody answered.

  “Tranquilizers, was my understanding of it, plus some painkillers,” Demetrious said. “A potentially fatal dose. Apparently she has a pretty high tolerance.”

  I figured as much about the tolerance levels, since she’d been at the pills since I was a kid, but I decided not to illuminate Demetrious on that score, and stuck with my initial goal.

  “And she got it, the overdose of tranquilizers, where? In the ER? Or at her house?”

  “Dr. Weinstein says she came into the hospital already doped up,” Demetrious said.

  Yep, just what Simon said. So, either it was the truth, or the doc I’d yet to meet and the hospital administrator who’d all but drooled on me had gotten their official stories straight.

  “But, you know, the plain truth is this, I don’t think anybody really knows.” Demetrious looked me in the eyes, as if daring me to say exactly what I said next.

  “Well, is anybody trying to find out?” This in my best, steely-eyed cross-examination voice.

  “Lilly, you need to calm down,” Dan said, and stepped up beside me and put one hand on my arm.

  By Sarasota courtroom standards, I was calm. By Miami courtroom standards, I was positively passive. But this was Greater Dixie, where one, especially a woman, is expected to have exquisitely good manners even upon finding out that one’s mother had nearly died from too many drugs while under arrest in a hospital and no one seemed to know if the OD was accidental or deliberate.

  I inhaled. Made words that sounded like a polite apology, waited till Dan took his hand off my arm, and then smiled a let’s-start-over smile at the police chief and asked if anyone saw Ray Glenn break in, or saw his car in Willette’s driveway.

  “Nope, none of the neighbors saw Ray Glenn get in. It was after ten on a school night, and everybody was pretty much in bed, or getting ready. Ray Glenn’s car was parked on the street a block past her house, so I guess he walked over, not wanting his car in the driveway to attract attention.”

  “This is just all my fault,” Dan said.

  “Nope, Dan, you can’t be blaming yourself,” Shalonda said.

  “Londa’s right, that Ray Glenn was a bad man, a downright nasty man,” Demetrious said, “but you didn’t make him that way.”

  “What do you mean, your fault?” I asked.

  And this time, Lilly Belle, I commanded myself, actually listen to your brother.

  chapter 5

  All for the lack of a refrigerator.

  All those extreme environmentalists who think we should unplug and squat in tiny tents and not drive cars would have loved the fact that Willette was definitely a low user of electrical energy. And that she didn’t have a car. But Dan didn’t like those facts.

  “Refrigerator broke,” he said. “And without even a car, wasn’t any way she could get to a store to get one, or even get her fresh food.”

  “So? How did that lead to a fatal shooting?”

  “See how skinny she is? She’s been living on Coca-Cola, peanuts, and fried pork skins,” he said, as indignant as if this were all my fault. “She was drinking all them Cokes hot,” he said.

  How was it this woman wasn’t already dead, I wondered, while Dan kept explaining.

  “See, I told them the delivery men had to call me before they showed up with the refrigerator, so I could meet them there. No way Willette’s letting strangers into that house.”

  No way she’s letting Dan in, from what I’d heard, but I nodded.

  “But it all got screwed up. Nobody called me, and they showed up with a deep freeze, not a refrigerator.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, still waiting for the proximate-cause connection between the deep freeze and the dead man.

  “Naturally Willette wouldn’t let them in, so they left the appliance on the back porch,” Dan said. “Willette called me, yelling that I had to come over and get the thing off her porch because she had looked in it and it was full of ‘jelly eggs’ that she thought meant someone was trying to put a voodoo curse on her.”

  Putting aside for the moment my surprise that Dan actually had real, day-to-day-stuff conversations with the woman, I asked the obvious: “What do you think she meant by that?”

  “Who knows? She might’ve imagined the whole thing.”

  “But she talks with you?”

  “Oh, yeah. She always has.”

  “Then why won’t she talk to Delvon, or me? Or our father?”

  “Maybe because none of you tries to talk to her.”

  Hey, she started it, I thought, but said nothing.

  “See,” Dan continued, “I took off work to go see about the deep freeze, but when I got to Willette’s, the store had either picked it back up or it was never there in the first place. But they hadn’t left a refrigerator. I tried to get it straightened out, but the store claimed its records showed a completed delivery of a refrigerator and nothing about a deep freeze.”

  “So, what happened?” I asked. “How’s this end with Willette shooting a guy?”

  “Well, no matter how many times I told everybody at the store that no refrigerator had been delivered, the store kept pestering Mom for payment. I reckon that’s why Ray Glenn was at her house, that store manager must’ve finally sent Ray Glenn, their bill collector and repo man, to call on Mom in person, and that’s how come he broke in,” Dan said.

  “You wouldn’t believe the things we hear ’bout how that man repos stuff,” Shalonda tossed in there.

  “And then I asked Mom if anybody had tried to ever actually deliver a refrigerator, and she said no.”

  What I still couldn’t get over was that Dan talked to Willette on such a regular basis. I mean, yeah, I knew from his periodic reports that he kept up with the big-picture stuff, but I hadn’t appreciated the amount of routine conversation they must have had—albeit, apparently, only through a closed door or over the phone.

  Delvon and I did not talk to her. Even when we tried to buy Grandmom’s house after it passed to Willette at our grandfather’s death, we had a real estate agent call her with our excellent offer. That having failed, apparently to spite us, Delvon and I gave up any attempt at contact, direct or indirect. Yet, Dan talked with her.

  And Patti Lea had Bobby talking to her through a locked door.

  While I was cogitating on the wonders of my brother’s attempts to keep up a relationship with Mom, Demetrious agreed that as best as he could figure, Ray Glenn was sent there to collect on an erroneous bill, and possibly got rough with Willette. “Maybe that’s where the bruises came from. I don’t know. Another thing nobody knows is where your mother got the gun,” he said, and looked at Dan for a moment.

  “I told you already, twice, I didn’t give that gun to my mother,” Dan said.

  Well, if Dan said he didn’t give her the gun, he didn’t give her the gun. But
before I could open my mouth to defend his honor, Demetrious said, “I know, Dan, I know.”

  “So who did?” Shalonda said.

  That seemed to me to be a minor point, except perhaps that I needed to thank the gun-giver for the gift that saved Willette’s life. But more important than a note of appreciation, I was going to have to ask around about this Ray Glenn Fussele thing myself, as I didn’t exactly hear things adding up in clear, neat columns of good sense and reasonable reactions.

  And even if my mother and I didn’t much like each other, I would have to find out if someone had tried to kill her, and I would have to keep her out of jail.

  After all, she was my mother.

  chapter 6

  I stood in the front doorway and gulped a breath of fresh air before I peeked inside.

  Willette’s house.

  History was in this house. My history. A history I didn’t much enjoy remembering.

  I didn’t want to be anywhere near that house. But here I was, because Dan had asked me politely, and after all, he almost never asked me for anything.

  Just moments earlier, we’d said good-bye to Demetrious at the hospital, and I’d sat in my car with my cell phone, making calls, badgering Henry until he satisfied me that our father’s old friend, Dr. Hodo, had never been sued, sanctioned, arrested, or disciplined. Then I had the rare pleasure of dealing with a host of the women who answer phones after office hours until I had extracted a promise that Dr. Hodo would come by the hospital tomorrow “as soon as he could.” I’d taken aim for tonight, but he was up-county on a nursing-home run, and physically unavailable. Even getting him there in the morning took a fight. Yeah, okay, I exaggerated the family connection a bit in bending these gatekeepers to my will, but things might be dire with old Willette, I just couldn’t tell.

  After that, Dan had taken me to our mother’s house, where Bobby was carrying trash to a Dumpster on the street, the yard lit by the streetlights and a big moon, what we used to call a harvest moon.

  I didn’t see any yellow tape, and I asked Dan, “Isn’t this a crime scene? Are we allowed to be here, messing around in all this…mess?”

  “Demetrious and his crime tech spent a good deal of time in the house and the yard right after the shooting. Finally they said it was too big a mess, and they couldn’t handle it, and couldn’t find anything. Besides, it seemed pretty cut-and-dried to Demetrious,” Dan said.

  That didn’t sound like good solid police work to me, and as much as to avoid having to do anything, like actually stepping inside the house, I said, “I think we should call Demetrious and make sure. Make them come back and…I don’t know, dust for fingerprints—”

  “Lilly Belle, I promise you, they’ve done all that. I know you need a little time to get used to the idea of being back here. Why don’t you walk around in the yard, look over things, and when you’re ready, come on inside.”

  Reprieved, I backed out of the doorway, and stood in the side yard. Shrubs and bushes and weeds and the occasional chunk of rusted metal cluttered the area around the house, and threw off eerie silhouettes. Good thing I wasn’t one of those people afraid of snakes or werewolves. Just airports, piles of paper, and unwashed vegetables, I thought, and glanced again at the spooky shadows cast by the big moon as I stomped through some thorny blackberry bushes on my way to the backyard. I wanted to see if our tree house was still there.

  It was. Nestled in the branches of a classically huge live oak was a yellow-pine plank tree house that Brother Delvon and I, with the help of our grandfather, had built when we were just puppies, and Granddad was still allowed to babysit us. That this gift from our grandfather still stood was a testament to his skills as a carpenter.

  I walked up to the base of the live oak, and positively admired that tree house. From what I could tell, it seemed solid. I turned back to Willette’s house, which, even in the eerie glow of reflected streetlights and the moon, looked shabby, beaten-up, and neglected.

  My mother’s house. After she kicked my father out, he made no further claim on the house, moving northward to a TVA lake community. He apparently intended to stay gone, even now. I admired his resolve, and wished for a moment I’d done better on my own pledge not to return here. Nonetheless, I tramped through high grass and trash, back to the front door of the house. A house I had not been inside of since the day Delvon and I returned from an adolescent rampage across the greater southeast and found our mother had sold our clothes and our bedroom furniture and changed the locks. We only got in that day because Dan was home and had opened the door when we’d pounded on it after our keys would not work. Dan’s stuff was gone too, but he had already borrowed a sleeping bag, and told us he hadn’t really liked his clothes that much, and he had a job bagging groceries at the Pig and could buy some more, and as far as he was concerned, it was all just a minor inconvenience. None of us ever figured out why Willette sold Dan’s stuff too; he hadn’t run away. Maybe she was just ready to give that empty-nest thing a try. But Dan wasn’t ready to fledge yet. Rather, he had dug in; he intended to stay in that house.

  Delvon and I took a different view of the matter.

  We left.

  We moved in with Farmer Dave, Delvon’s friend and, in short order, my first love. Farmer Dave taught us how to run a very profitable home business in growing and selling marijuana.

  And, having left, Delvon and I didn’t come back.

  Until tonight. So, here I was, standing in the doorway. Every light in the house was on, but still a dungeon ambience clung to it all as I glared inside and looked around. Staring into the physical embodiment of some of my worst phobias.

  The house was beyond dirty.

  Spidery webs of gray and black hung from corners and from the ceiling. Piles of yellowing papers filled every surface, and crowded the floor in bundles. The walls were black and soot-colored with what I took for mold. A stench I didn’t want to identify wafted out of the kitchen area toward me.

  Garbage. Raw garbage. Mold. Debris. Trash. Dirt.

  Germs.

  Patti Lea, my sister-in-law, with whom I had a cautiously optimistic relationship, was standing in the middle of the living room, with a mask over her nose and mouth, yellow kitchen gloves up to her elbows, and a pair of coveralls buttoned up, completely hiding her own clothes. Tufts of her thick, blond hair stuck out in wholly untypical wayward waves. Above the mask, I could see her eyes were red.

  “I haven’t even made a dent in all this…this mess,” she said, by way of greeting.

  “Well, don’t wear yourself out. We got plenty of time,” Dan said. “Maybe we can get somebody in to help us.”

  “Inside this house? No way you’re letting anybody see in this house. It’s bad enough what they can see from the outside,” Patti Lea said, with an edge of what might be the beginning of hysteria in her voice. “I don’t want anyone in town knowing we let it get to this, this…all this crap!”

  That was about as close to cussing as I’d ever heard her come, and I nodded toward her, afraid to smile or speak till she calmed down, which she did in an instant.

  “Why, hello, Lilly. I’m glad you could come visit. We’ll need to catch up. Pardon me if we don’t hug, but I’m just a mess.”

  Mess was quickly becoming both the byword of the day and an understatement.

  I nodded again, mumbled something that I hoped was pleasant, but the truth was I was somewhat numbed and muted by the sights in front of me.

  After a more controlled visual scan of the room, in case my first look had been some kind of hideous hallucination brought on by too much sugar in that iced tea I’d drunk earlier, I saw things were actually worse than I’d first thought. Gulping, I made myself look back at Dan and Patti.

  “Well, it’s just got to be done, that’s all there is to it,” Dan said.

  “You are going to help?” Patti asked me, carefully pronouncing each word in a way that warned me how stressed she was. “We need your help. We need…Can you help us? Clean this up?”
<
br />   Though the phrase “Hell, no, that’s why I have money, so we can hire this done” sprang readily to my mouth, I didn’t say it. This was, as Patti Lea already had indicated, a family matter. It was up to us. We’d let this mess happen, and we had to clean it up. Dan and me. And Patti Lea too, I guess, on the theory that “for better, for worse” included her crazy mother-in-law and all that encompassed.

  “So you will stay and help us?” Patti asked again. I had the feeling this was a test.

  “Yes,” I said, as the muscles in the back of my neck clinched and burned at nothing more than the thought of walking farther into the mess.

  We stood for a minute, the three of us, Dan, and Patti Lea, and I, and we each silently contemplated the task of cleaning up Willette’s house. Unimaginably, pathologically filthy, moldy, and cluttered with forty years of pure crap. No one would believe me if I tried to describe it.

  But hey, who in the world would I admit this to, let alone try to describe it to?

  “Come on, I’ll show you the bedroom,” Dan said.

  I followed, holding my breath as long as I could.

  Willette’s bedroom was in the back of the house, and its only saving grace was a big plate-glass window that looked out over the yard, with a view of the big live oak with the tree house. As a child, I used to sneak into her room and stare out the window at the squirrels and the birds in the live oak—until Willette caught me and banished me from her room.

  Still, I had liked that window, unencumbered as it was by any interior wood frame or cross ties, a big, single, sheer piece of glass between the room and the outside. A window I now saw was covered with filthy drapes that might have once been blue. Or maybe that was the mold. I wanted to look out the window, but couldn’t bring myself to touch the drapes.

  Instead, I studied the room. The mattress where she slept had thin, filthy sheets on it and was indented and stained from use. I could not see the floor for the used Kleenex and trash thrown about. An urge to cry crawled up into my throat, but I swallowed until I could will it away.