Mean Woman Blues

by Smith, Julie

  “Isaac, what’s happening?” Her voice was full of fear.

  “Well, the good news is, you’ve got a tough cookie of a lawyer.”

  “Great.”

  “The bad is, she’s named Tiffie.”

  She didn’t laugh. “Oh, very funny.”

  “I swear. She’s Pamela’s sister-in-law. She’s very good.” He felt a twinge, realizing he didn’t yet know how good she was. “Anyway, she’s very conscientious.”

  “Well, then, why am I still in here?” She sounded as if she were losing it.

  “To tell you the truth, you were lost in the system for a few hours. We’ll get you out soon. I promise.”

  By one o’clock, Tiffie had caught up with him. She called to say that Terri was indeed in Jefferson Parish Lockup and a judge would set bond at five o’clock.

  Isaac had a question, but he didn’t really know how to ask it “I’m wondering, ah—”

  Tiffie closed in on his indecision. “Look. Isaac. That’s it. That’s the whole story. There’s no way to get her out till then.”

  “I wasn’t… I was just…”

  Her voice was supremely tired. “Isaac, there’s nothing more I can do.”

  He had no idea why she’d so suddenly gone off on him, but he really needed an answer to his question. His urgency gave him sudden clarity of speech. “Look,” he said, “would you just hear me out?”

  Tiffie backed off. “All right.”

  “Can you go to court with her?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Of all things he expected to hear, that was the last. Maybe this woman wasn’t a good lawyer. Evidently, she had a poor comprehension of English. He tried again, “When she goes to court at five, can you be there?”

  “She’s not going to court.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “They’ll just do it on the phone.”

  “I never heard of that.”

  “I guess that’s the way they do it over there.”

  Okay then. Nothing more to be done. He could grab a much-needed nap and then go get her. Ah, but how was he going to do that on his scooter? He really needed Terri’s car. He hoped she’d call back and tell him where it was and where to find the key.

  He lay down on his bed but found himself absolutely unable to relax. Dammit, okay, he thought, and turned on the TV that Pamela had insisted he take when she bought a better one. He’d had it on about twice. Some sort of midday news show was on, a sniper somewhere… Jesus, in the French Quarter. The shot had “narrowly missed a police officer,” the reporter said, and all of a sudden he was looking at an inset photo of someone he knew well— Skip Langdon.

  His stomach turned over, and his heart started pounding. Jesus. Did it have to do with Daniel? His father had good reason to kill Langdon— a string of them, actually— and would. Oh, yes, his father certainly would. If the thought entered his head, he wouldn’t rest till it was done. And the timing. Somehow, with Daniel about to be sentenced… he couldn’t explain it, it was just the kind of thing his father would do.

  Isaac was working up to a pulse rate of about a thousand when the phone rang. He snatched it up, unable to believe he’d been distracted for a moment. He felt like Chicken Little: The sky was definitely falling. “Terri?”

  “No, but Terri asked me to call.” It was a man’s voice. “This is Mike with Lincoln Bail Bonds over in Gretna. Terri said you might be willing to help her.”

  “I’m trying, but bond hasn’t been set yet.”

  “It’ll be about five thousand dollars.”

  “Mike, what are you telling me? It hasn’t been set and won’t be until five this evening.” How dumb did they think he was?

  “I can get a bond set right away.”

  “I beg your pardon? Her lawyer can’t even get a bond set. Why should I believe you can?” Isaac was outraged. He saw the scam immediately. You went all the way across the river, and they said it would just be a few minutes and then three hours later, when the judge was scheduled to set bond, he did, and you were already committed to Lincoln Bail Bonds. Furthermore, you’d wasted your afternoon.

  But just to be sure, he gave Tiffie a call, pretty much expecting to be brushed off again, yet determined to do whatever it took to get that poor scared girl out of jail. To his surprise, the lawyer said, “I’d go for it. Bail bondsmen are in business; if they say they can do it, they must have a way.”

  It sounded crazy to him, but he was still too keyed up to sleep and too tired to do anything else. Why not just take a ride over there?

  In the end, he borrowed Pamela’s car, and to his enormous surprise, all the papers were filled out, awaiting his signature and a nonrefundable cash accompaniment.

  Nothing was what he expected. The bail bond office wasn’t any cheaper or uglier than any other office— indeed it had been rather nicely furnished with fake oriental rugs and fake Queen Anne desks— and the people seemed perfectly nice. Not at all the sort hanging in front of Central Lockup the night before. There was a young black man with a huge cross around his neck, a yuppie-looking dude in a blue polo shirt, and a middle-aged lady with as polite a manner as you’d expect in a person whose customers weren’t a captive audience.

  “I’m Kay,” she said. “Come on. I’ll take you over.”

  “Just like that?” Isaac couldn’t believe the hours of anxiety were really over.

  Inside the lockup, there was a wall of glass, behind which sheriff’s deputies were displayed at work— or, rather, horsing around and talking on the phone. They assiduously avoided Kay’s eye. She didn’t even shrug, just leaned an open hand containing the papers against the glass so they could see what she was there for, in the event they wanted a break from flirting and arranging their kids’ soccer schedules.

  Kay was telling Isaac about her job. “Every hour,” she said, “we come in and get the docket. Then we can start calling people’s relatives.”

  Actually, Isaac found it pretty riveting, but he couldn’t help thinking about poor Terri chewing her nails in there. He tried, unsuccessfully at first to catch a deputy’s eye, but he kept at it until he succeeded, a task that took about ten minutes, while Kay just leaned and chatted as obliviously as if this were a way of life she was used to.

  When someone finally took the papers, she left with a nice friendly good-bye. “How long,” Isaac asked, “before Terri comes out?” He dreaded the answer.

  “Well, I’m sorry to tell you it could take as long as forty-five minutes if they haven’t processed her yet.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  An hour and forty minutes later, the doors finally opened, and out walked a bedraggled Terri, who started crying the second she saw him. “The asshole ate french fries!” she managed to blubber.

  Isaac wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “What asshole?”

  “The deputy. They processed me an hour ago, but he knew I hadn’t eaten all day, so he made me sit on a bench and watch him while he ate his fries. One at a time. Slowly. Chewing twenty times each.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  David Wright (“Mr. Right” to an increasing number of Americans) sat in his paneled wood den in University Park and nervously fingered his remote as he tried to digest what he was seeing on television. It was a news story about his own son’s sentencing for what the newscaster called “heinous crimes.” He flicked the remote again and again, trying a bunch of other stations, and it was the same damn thing.

  He should have been watching a story about the shooting death of New Orleans’s hot-dog cop Skip Langdon. He tried not to think about that part because if he did it was going to make him mad and he was going to throw the remote, wrecking the expensive oversized screen and scaring Karen half to death. This kind of fuck-up just didn’t happen when Errol Jacomine was there to run the show. The ironic part was that it was Devil-Woman’s fault Jacomine didn’t exist anymore. So she got to live a little bit longer while Daniel spent the rest of his life in the joint. David Wri
ght simply could not countenance it. Absolutely had to make it right. Was driven to.

  Actually, Daniel had defied the Lord and deserved what he got. David Wright had no real problems with that part and in truth had nothing but ill will toward his son. It was Langdon’s arrogance that galled him, that she could think she could do this to him, David Wright, and get away with it. That was what he found insupportable.

  He was afraid of her too. She was probably the only person in the world who could bring him down at this point and not because she was so almighty smart and talented.

  Because she had special knowledge, goddamn her.

  “Honey, what’s wrong? You look like you’re ’bout to cry.” Karen spoke in that Texas twang so many of them had around here, that soft feminine musical way that let you know the speaker was a blonde before you even saw her.

  He said, “I’m listenin’ to the news. That’s all.” (Sometimes, at home, he dropped his g’s; he never did in public any more.)

  They had two big, deep, plaid-covered sofas arranged in an L for watching television, which was now part of his job; when you’re on television, you watch it.

  Karen came and cuddled up with him. Idly, he grabbed a breast. Ever since he could remember, he’d gotten all the pussy he wanted, but he’d had very few women in the same class as Karen.

  Rosemarie Owens— now that was another matter. She was one of a kind.

  He always pretty much expected the best around to come his way; he just hadn’t been around the ones like Karen much. Karen came to him because she had a problem— the reason a lot of people had come to him over the years and especially came now— and she had stayed and become his wife.

  There were things about it that tickled him. She didn’t know either of his true ages; in fact she thought he was in his mid-fifties, though his body was older. That part would probably fly, she was so crazy in love with him. But he was also less than two years old. That would probably give her a start.

  The last time he saw that bitch Langdon he knew Errol Jacomine had to disappear, and fortunately he had the wherewithal to make it happen. Or Rosemarie Owens did. He’d laid low for a while, staying in cheap motels and wearing a pulled-down baseball cap in the daytime, and found it was pretty easy to get along if you looked like nobody in particular. He wore jeans and T-shirts like everybody else, and for a while he shaved his head, but nobody paid him any mind anyway. He was just another itinerant nobody, going no place and no place to go.

  For the first few nights, he had a hidey-hole, an abandoned house scoped out far in advance. He also had enough money to last awhile and a car registered to someone else, but not stolen— a car someone had bought for him under their own name; thus, a perfectly legitimate registration. The house was in a neighborhood where there were both blacks and whites, neither with much money, none with any love of the police. He’d stocked it with canned goods, so he didn’t have to go out much, but the place was disgusting. After a few days he got on the road, figuring as long as he didn’t get stopped, he was safe.

  He needed to stay in the South, because that way he’d mend better, and he needed to stay in fairly big towns so he wouldn’t stick out. The Redneck Riviera ought to be about perfect; everyone looked the same and talked the same, and no one cared what anyone else was up to; they were too busy falling all over each other trying to make their money disappear.

  So he headed for the Mississippi Gulf Coast where he found any number of losers hanging out in casinos and bars, two of his least favorite kinds of places, yet better cover for it. These were people who needed help, people to whom the Reverend Errol Jacomine could have given direction and purpose. People whose money he could have saved— his followers didn’t gamble because it was forbidden, and it was forbidden because it wasn’t smart. Jacomine was known as Daddy, and it wasn’t for nothing. Daddy didn’t let people throw away their lives and their money. That was for suckers, and that was what most people were. They needed to be taken care of, and Daddy was a natural-born caretaker. You just treated them like children, that was all: set boundaries and didn’t let them cross. They toed the line, or they got punished. If they did right, they got rewarded.

  But he needed a bigger canvas to get his message across. It wasn’t any big unusual thing, just that God was love and people who did right and followed His laws would be saved. Everybody knew that anyway.

  The thing about Daddy was, he had a unique talent for saving them. It was like— he didn’t say it much, only to his very closest associates— but it was like he was the one who’d been sent by God to get everybody saved. He felt the power; he knew that was his mission. Not just everybody for a few miles around. Everybody in the world.

  Things at the start of the millennium were not going so well, and all of a sudden nuclear weapons were in the news again. Somebody had to do something. In his heart of hearts, Daddy knew the somebody was he; he just wasn’t sure yet what the something was. But he did know that, in this period before he could call Rosemarie, while he was lying low and pretending to be a loser, he would be given a sign and he would know what to do. And then he would find Rosemarie, and she would help him do it.

  For the moment, he just wished he could get these dumb fucks to quit gambling their lives away. It made him sick to see corporate gangsters taking these poor people’s money this way. He read up on gambling, so he knew just how much the odds were stacked in favor of the house, and now and then he’d tell somebody but never in a casino and never if it wasn’t a pretty loose situation.

  Nobody cared. Nobody was interested. But he knew it was all a matter of the way you put it. When the Lord was in him, Daddy could convince a cat it was a dog. He couldn’t wait to get back to his calling.

  During those grim and gray days, Daddy watched a lot of television. It was a good alternative to throwing his money away, and the more he sat in his room out of sight, the less chance he had of being recognized.

  The Lord spoke to him while he was watching television, though not in one single blinding-white moment. The message came gradually and surely, the way an idea starts from a germ and refines itself. But since Daddy had prayed for a message and since God often spoke to him, he was able to recognize the divinity of this one almost as soon as it was given to him. What he had prayed for was divine guidance regarding God’s future plans for him.

  Daddy had never thought highly of televangelists, finding them rather slick and transparent, but he tuned in from time to time because he felt it was part of his job to keep up with the competition. One Sunday morning, as he was watching one of his least favorites, the kind of thought came to him that for various reasons made him uncomfortable: This guy is an amateur. I’m a million times better than this guy.

  Having had the thought he almost immediately forgot about the preacher and went into a reverie about envy and the Biblical prohibition against it. It occurred to him that when you had a thought like that, even if it happened to be true, other people at the very least would take it for envy. Even if you knew it to be God’s truth.

  God’s truth. How had that phrase come into his mind? God had put it there. He knew that because he was good at recognizing that very thing— God’s truth.

  So he was better than the other preacher. That was a given. Why was God being so insistent with him? He turned it over in his mind a couple of times, knowing that the rest would unfold in its own good time, exactly as God intended and no other way.

  He knew that God did not intend him to become a televangelist. He couldn’t have said how he knew, but he knew it quite well, perhaps because it was an anticlimactic idea. Daddy had been a preacher and he had been a politician and he had been a soldier for justice. Deep in his heart he was still a preacher, but he knew that that was only the core of God’s plan for him. His mission was a much bigger one.

  He forgot about the revelation of the televangelist— to the extent that it was one— until a week or so later when he was watching a talk show. This guy is terrible, he thought. I could do that.r />
  And in a split second he had it: He understood how a talk-show host could spread the word of God (though of course he never need mention the three-letter word). And, perhaps not coincidentally, he saw how such a host could also be a politician and a soldier for justice.

  He turned off the television, went out to get some yellow pads, brought them back to his nondescript motel room, and began to fill them up with the ideas that now flowed out of him like a sacred river.

  He filled up two of the pads and then made himself a checklist of the things he had to do and the order he had to do them in. First on the list was call Rosemarie Owens. He couldn’t do another thing until he did because she held the purse strings.

  Rosemarie had all the money in the world, thanks to him. Thanks to Errol Jacomine and no one else. Not only that, she was family.

  And fortunately the connection between them had never been publicly made, probably because Rosemarie had the money and clout to dissociate herself from him. Still, the FBI knew, and the Devil-Bitch knew. No matter how much Rosemarie wanted to help him— which was probably not at all— her hands might very well be tied. Her phones were probably tapped, and they very likely watched her house as well. Or did he give himself too much credit?

  The media had made him into a monster (with the help of Detective Devil-Bitch Langdon), but maybe he was small potatoes to people with real crooks to catch. He’d have to proceed carefully.

  When he judged enough time had passed, he fired up his car, checked it for any burnt-out lights or other excuses for cops to stop it, and drove to Dallas. Once there, he registered at a crummy motel, paid cash, and began to scope out the very fancy Ms. Owens.

  She lived in the kind of neighborhood where any stranger was suspect, so it looked as if he’d have to watch from a distance. He didn’t like that. If the FBI was also watching from another building, he’d be visible.

  Maybe they were checking her mailbox. He had no idea what lengths they were willing to go to.

  Should he send flowers with a rendezvous note? But what was to stop the feds from showing up at the meeting place?