Tyrone’s Quickbail is in a chipped yellow stucco building near the capitol, Fulton County courthouse, tons of county service offices, block after block of bail bonds companies, and some pretty good soul food. I found a metered spot across the street from Tyrone’s office in the three-hundred block. I saw him through his third-floor window at the desk that looks out onto Mitchell Street. I got out of my car and dropped a couple of quarters in the parking meter, then went back for the bag I dared not leave. A block and a half from about a million cops around the government offices and it was still a terrible place to park a classic car. I wished I would have thought to bring the other car, a banged-up Plymouth Neon no one ever seemed to notice. It was like driving around with some kind of cloaking device.
I grabbed my bag and looked at the green-and-white box of doughnuts I’d stopped for on the way. What was left of them. Krispy Kreme had picked up where alcohol left off. Few things sent oxytocin surging through my system like the glowing neon Hot Doughnuts Now sign and the promise of an original glazed right off the line. Dr. Shetty says replacing one addiction with another is dangerous. She recommends developing better coping skills instead. Apparently, my love of and perhaps obsession with food is symptomatic of the larger problem, which is: I’m insecure, needy, controlling, and stressed out, and I have intimacy issues out the wazoo. Oh, let’s not forget the penis-envy thing. I cannot believe I pay a shrink to tell me this stuff. I mean, what’s the friggin’ problem with a little replacement therapy? I exercise, if you count pacing. And it’s not like I’m shut in a closet somewhere with sugar all over my face and my finger down my throat. I often remind my brainy doctor that sometimes things are exactly what they seem. I love food because my mother, Emily Street, is just about the best cook in town and I grew up with her gourmet take on traditional southern. I love doughnuts because, well, they’re good. Okay, so maybe my cut-off switch is broken. Thankfully, my metabolism is something like a wood chipper. I thought about that. Would it last? Once I moved past the mid-thirty point, would it slow to a crawl? Shit. Okay, so maybe I needed to get the goddamn doughnuts out of my vehicle and into Tyrone’s hands.
“What up?”
I heard a deep male voice behind me. I turned and found myself looking into the soft brown eyes of a young man standing too near—skinny, eighteen, nineteen, jeans hanging off his hips exposing white boxers and a flash of brown abs, jacked-up Nikes. He was cute, although I had a bad feeling cute wasn’t what he was going for. His eyes dropped to my breasts.
In the background, three guys about the same age leaned against a brick storefront, watching. One of them made a big show of licking his lips. I leaned back against my car, looked him up and down. I didn’t want to show him anything. Guys like this feed on fear. “What can I do for you?”
“What can you do for me?” He turned to his friends. “She wanna know what she can do for me.” This brought on waves of laughter from the theater section, more lip licking than a supermodel photo shoot. “I tell you what you can do.” His tone had changed. He was talking tough now. “How ’bout you be my bitch for the day.”
“Seriously? Has a woman ever once said yes to that?”
“Bitches don’t always know what’s good for them.” He folded his arms over his scrawny chest. “They need somebody smart to tell ’em.” His friends applauded his genius, shouted encouragements.
“If you’ll excuse me,” I said, and tried to move past him.
He blocked my way.
“Look, I’ve had almost no sleep. My cousin, who may actually be delusional, is in my house. My boyfriend the cop never sleeps. And I just delivered background reports to a fucking nanny agency. One of them had bad credit. That’s it. Bad credit. Exciting stuff, right?”
“The bitch” oversharing momentarily stumped him. He was smiling at me, but his eyes couldn’t stay still. Bad sign. His nerves were firing. A tranquilizer gun would have been nice. He took a step forward. I looked up into his muddy eyes, smelled beer and cigarettes on his breath.
“I swear to God, if you take one more step, you’re going to be my bitch.”
He grabbed my arms at the shoulders. The heel of my eight-hundred-dollar pumps sank into his bony shin, and when he let go, my hand came out of my bag with the 10mm and slammed it against the side of his bony head. He yelped, hopped backward, went down on his butt. His buddies had that wide-eyed, excited schoolyard stare kids in packs get when a fight breaks out. I made sure they all got a good look at the Glock.
The lobby door opened across the street and Tyrone came out fast, wearing a white suit and wingtips. He looked like a mocha latte. Not a lot of guys could pull it off, but Tyrone looked cool in anything.
He jerked the street thug up one-handed by the collar with forearms about the size of Virginia hams, held him in front of me like a puppeteer. “You look at her real good, son. She’s one of my people, which means she will flat kill your dumb ass.” He turned to the group. I saw the shoulder holster loaded with his 9mm under his coat. “Any y’all mess with one of my people again, we gonna hunt you down.”
He let go of the thug. We watched him wobble off to his friends, holding up his droopy pants with one hand and his bloody ear with the other. Not one of them looked back.
“Remind me not to get on your bad side.”
“Don’t get on my bad side,” I reminded him.
He pulled an envelope from an inside pocket and handed it to me. “Steven T. Wriggles. Robbery, grand theft auto, and resisting arrest.”
I scanned the report, looked up at Tyrone. He was grinning at me. “He robbed a Seven Eleven with dried nasal mucus?”
Dimples cut craters in his handsome face. On a normal day, I might have swooned a little. But not today. “Clerk gave him three hundred from the register,” Tyrone told me. “Which just proves nobody wants a booger touching them.”
“Good Lord.” I sighed and looked back at the report. This wasn’t exactly a step up from nanny backgrounds. After the robbery, Wriggles had commandeered the convenience store clerk’s vehicle when his own car had stalled in the parking lot. He then stopped at the McDonald’s on Ponce for a cheeseburger, the very McDonald’s that happens to be one block from the cop shop. Just so happened three of Atlanta’s Finest came in for lunch. Wriggles didn’t get halfway through his Big Mac before he was arrested. Given his weapon of choice and because he had no priors, the judge set bail. Tyrone had guaranteed it. Wriggles didn’t show up for court. There was no known address.
“Is this all you’ve got?”
“Is that all? Oh come on, Keye. I saved this for my best tracker.”
I took the box of Krispy Kremes from the front seat and handed them over.
“Thanks.” He opened the box. “There’s only eight. Dang, girl. You gonna have a huge booty.” He tore one in half and stuffed it in his mouth, licked the sugar off his fingers. “Your eye is twitching. You know that, right?” He shoved the other half in his mouth with no apparent concern for the size of his own booty. “It’s kind of creeping me out.”
I got in my car and slammed the door.
“What?” he yelled, as I pulled out of the metered space. “Hey, wait.
What’d I say?”
The door slammed behind me when I walked back into my office. I went to my desk, wished yet again I had walls instead of a big wire fence. Neil spun around in his overpriced desk chair and squinted at me. “Anything I can do?”
Most days, I am at peace with where my life is now. I’m sober. I’m making a living. I’m in love. I own my own business. I’ve been luckier than most in this economy. But sometimes there’s a big hole where meaningful work used to be. I needed to buck up and take it like a man. There are consequences for actions. I torched my career, drank it away. I thought about Miki, about her awards, her soaring success. It never seemed to matter how much she drank or how many drugs she played with or how many times it had interrupted her work. She was so wildly talented, she was always welcomed back. I loved my cousin. I wanted
the best for her. I wanted to celebrate her accomplishments … deep down. But some days, it was a very bitter pill to swallow.
“Where are you on Miki’s boyfriends?” I asked Neil, and logged in to one of the programs we use to assist us in skip traces. I started a search for Steven T. Wriggles, Tyrone’s bail jumper, the mucus guy. A dispossessory had been filed a couple of months back and he’d been evicted from an apartment off Briarcliff Road, his last known address. I located his mother, jotted down her address and anything else that might lead to Wriggles, including a first cousin.
“As far as I can tell so far, it would have only worked logistically for one of them. The country singer, Cash Tilison. He has a house up near the lake.”
“The Lake” is what Atlantans call Lake Lanier. Not only is it the main source of water for the metro area and a major recreation area, it’s where the well-off build waterfront homes and dock their boats.
“He made an appearance at the children’s hospital yesterday. Fund-raiser from six to eight. He would have had plenty of time to get to Miki’s before she came home.”
“He also fits the body type for the guy in the window,” I said. “Hey, I’m sending you info on a guy named Wriggles. See if you can dig up a current address before I have to go knocking on his mother’s door.”
I called to check on Miki. Voice mail. I paid a few bills and pulled up the receivables program. Billing. It was mind-numbing. But a necessary evil. I worked for a few minutes, tried Miki again. No answer. Maybe she was still sleeping. Maybe she slept all day and partied all night. I had no idea about her routines. I knew one thing: I was dreading going home to another confrontation.
“Bingo,” Neil said, and spun around, smiling at me. “He wrote a check for eight hundred and fifty-seven dollars made out to Sunshine Duplexes. The notation says rent plus late fee.” He gave me the date. It was the day after Wriggles held up a store clerk with some, well, DNA. I didn’t ask how Neil got access to the information. We have an office “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
I typed Sunshine Duplexes into my search engine. “I couldn’t find current employment information. You see anything?”
Neil said he couldn’t find an employer for Wriggles either. Why work when you’re okay with taking what you want? I don’t have a lot of patience with takers and deadbeats. I’d worked for everything in my life, and what I didn’t provide for myself, my parents had worked their butts off to give me. I thought again about Miki and her goddamn awards. A little spurt of anger flushed my cheeks. I was in exactly the right mood to pay a visit on Steven T. Wriggles. But first I needed to go home, get into the right clothes, and see how—or what—my cousin was doing.
5
The Georgian Terrace was built less than fifty years after Sherman’s red-hot March to the Sea torched our architectural history. It’s all buttery brick and limestone, a French Renaissance design meant to evoke Paris in a city that was literally rising up out of its own ashes. That I had scored living quarters here at all was still a source of amazement. The first-shift manager and his crabby concierge in the little black blazer would agree with that. They are the only hotel employees who flat-out refuse to warm up to me. Who can blame them? I have the only two thousand square feet in the hotel the manager can’t control. I try to be respectful. I’m fully aware that I’m a visitor in every other pocket of the Georgian Terrace. I made the deal with the previous owner to buy and renovate his private living space after I helped him resolve some personal matters. Okay, so I got the goods on his cheating wife before she walked away with a disproportionate slice of his fortune. My contractors jammed the garage with their oversized trucks, set up a construction dumpster, marched in and out with drywall dust on their boots, and were not always sensitive to the new management’s daily trials. On those rare occasions when White Trash needs to leave the building, I’m aware of their displeasure at seeing me hauling an awkward carrier through the lobby with a yowling cat. What is it about towering ceilings and crystal and glass and marble that creates something like an echo chamber when an unhappy feline’s voice is thrown into the mix? And White Trash doesn’t know when to stop. It’s not just a little meow; it’s a howling torrent of misery. By the time we get from the tenth floor to the lobby, she’s just getting warmed up. Anyone who had been unlucky enough to share the elevator ride stumbles out a glassy-eyed cat hater for life.
Having the only privately owned living space in the hotel took some getting used to at first. While the anonymity of a revolving neighborhood is really nice on a bad-hair day, I missed having a sense of community. But over time, a working-class neighborhood came into focus—servers, housekeepers, the baristas, chefs, cabbies and security guards, clerks and valets. Once it was clear I did not have to be treated like a guest, I was allowed to tiptoe my way into this after-hours society where food is shared along with complaints and gossip about guests and supervisors and sometimes fellow employees. A couple of months ago, Rauser and I were invited to a rooftop pool party. All very hush-hush. Management had gone home for the night, uninvited and uninformed. Second- and third-shift employees staggered their hours to relieve one another and showed up in waves. Rauser drank too much and went swimming in his briefs along with Marko, the brilliant chef at the hotel’s Livingston Restaurant. When it got very late and there were only a few of us left, we all took a chaise longue next to the pool, Rauser and I sharing one, me leaning back into his arms. With Atlanta’s purplish chessboard skyline in front of us, we all took turns saying something about ourselves and our lives. Every story seemed to lead us into another conversation, and I remember the gradual brightening of dawn and Rauser’s breathing changing. He’d fallen asleep with his arms around me.
“Hello, my friend.” I heard Marko Pullig’s thick Slavic accent and big booming voice. I had nearly reached the gleaming brass elevators. “I was just taking this upstairs to Miki.” He was balancing a covered tray. He bent and gave me one cheek, then the other.
“Room service isn’t one of the perks I’m allowed here, Marko.”
He glanced at the manager, who was having a conversation with a clerk across the sprawling, gleaming lobby. “The order came directly into the restaurant. Since I was fortunate enough to meet your charming cousin today in the lobby, I volunteered.”
“Marko, you’re hitting on my cousin?”
“Keye, please. Find your romantic self. We’ve talked about this. There is such a thing as being too firmly grounded.”
Oh yeah. That’s me. Grounded.
“I prefer to think of it as exploring the possibility of new love,” Marko said.
“Uh-huh. Well, I don’t think Miki’s here. I tried to call a bunch of times.”
“You look worried. Relax. She was out shopping. That’s how we met. I helped her with groceries. She told me about the break-in at her home.”
The elevator doors opened. “You want me to take that up, or are you going to make me watch you flirt?”
Marko bowed with his usual flair, handed me the tray. “Please deliver this with my compliments. And in the event she has further needs, feel free to give her my private number.”
I smiled as the doors closed. I love this hotel and the people.
It’s interesting that I would end up living in a hotel. Before my drinking days came to a screeching halt, I had a kind of love affair with hotel rooms. It was where I was free to do what was unacceptable everywhere else—drink until I was out cold. Even now, when room service is at full-blast on weekends and holidays, the smell of tomato juice takes me back to a cold Bloody Mary with a stalk of celery and a lime twist. I’m no different from any other addict. I romance the memories. Tipping my chair over backward in a nice restaurant is never what springs to mind when I want a drink. No, what I remember is the way good cognac coats a glass, meets your nose, then your palate, like liquid calm. Or the cold, hard edge of vodka and soda loaded with ice and lemon on a hot day. My mouth still gets wet when I think about it—the cellular memories of a drunk.
I pushed open the door to my loft and smelled cooking food. Miki was in the kitchen, wearing jeans and a T-shirt that looked very familiar.
“Hey, you’re early. I was going to surprise you with dinner.” She was standing over a steaming saucepan, tasting something with a wooden spoon. “I took a shower and borrowed some clothes to go to the market. Not quite ready to go home alone. I hope that’s okay.” She was surprisingly perky. “What’s that? It smells yummy.”
“The food you ordered from downstairs,” I said, setting it on the bar. I headed down the hall to change. “Marko offered his phone number too, by the way.”
Miki appeared at my bedroom door. “Why would I order food? I’m making dinner.”
“I wondered the same thing,” I told her, and got out of my skirt, pulled on some Levi’s, searched my closet for a blouse.
“Keye, I’m serious. I didn’t order anything.”
“Okay,” I said lightly. But what I was thinking was Ooo-kay, sure. I pulled out my running shoes. I discovered awhile back that comfortable shoes were necessary equipment for bond enforcement. “You okay today?”
“Yeah. I mean no. I mean, I didn’t order that food.”
I looked at her. She seemed to be fraying. Oh boy. Would the fun ever stop? “Hey, it’s no big deal. Maybe Marko just wanted to come upstairs.”
A slight smile. She touched her hair. “He helped me with groceries earlier. He did everything but dim the lights before I could get him out.”
I slipped into a pullover and followed Miki back to the kitchen with my shoes in my hand. “He’s a charming guy, huh? Any interest?”
Miki lifted the cover on the tray and we eyed Marko’s shrimp ravioli with shaved truffle, an arugula salad, his famous homemade leek bread, and a flourless chocolate cake about the size of a hockey puck on a white plate with a sprig of mint.
Stranger in the Room Page 4