Mean Woman Blues

by Smith, Julie

  Isaac was silent, probably thinking what a dummy she was. Finally, he said, “You’re telling me they never told you they’d filed charges?”

  She shook her head.

  “Terri, that’s not right. You went there in good faith. It’s just wrong. You’ve got to call the D.A. and explain.”

  “Yeah. Somebody’s got to understand.”

  He stayed with her that night and held her, making her think everything was going to be all right.

  But she found out the next day that she couldn’t call the D.A. and explain. Tiffie told her so, strongly: “Whatever you do, don’t call the D.A.! I’ll see if I can get the charges reduced…”

  “To what?” Issac asked.

  “I don’t know. She said I did do something illegal, even though I didn’t know it was. It’s called check kiting.”

  “I’ve heard of it, but I never really knew what it was.”

  Tiffie had explained, but the truth was, Terri didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. “Tiffie just said it’s when you write a check and there’s no money in the bank.”

  “It can’t be that. It’s some kind of scam.”

  “Well, how could I have been running a scam? Look, I’m an artist; this stuff makes no sense to me. They were the ones charging me twenty-two dollars a check and never telling me, or not until it was too late. Think about it. That’s more than two hundred dollars for ten checks: my rent, the phone, a couple credit cards… I write that many checks every month, and there’s no money left over. None. You know how much two hundred dollars is to somebody like me?”

  Isaac only nodded. She knew he knew.

  Tiffie, whose lips were as thin as her tiny little waist, wanted to plead Terri out and get her six months probation. Which meant Terri would officially be a felon.

  She ate all the time now, when she wasn’t smoking, and bit her nails, worrying that her parents would find out. She stopped going to class, and one day, instead, had her cards read in Jackson Square. “Look for a sign,” said the reader. “Look for a sign and follow it.”

  She felt so damn miserable she just went home and put on her pajamas and turned the TV on. One thing: Her parents had given her cable for her birthday. Really great for depression, she thought. All the TV you can eat.

  She was an hour into a session of channel-surfing when she heard the words “We right wrongs on this show.”

  Riveted, she turned up the volume. The host was a man named David Wright. (Mr. Right was the name of the show.) He was a handsome man, a little slick, maybe, a little Texas-looking, but well-spoken in a Southern kind of way. Truth to tell, Terri found him slightly smarmy, but she sure liked what he had to say. “Let’s welcome Corinne Kay Walker for the second time in a month. Corinne, you look a lot better than the last time you were on.”

  Corinne was a big-breasted blonde who’d evidently just had an expert makeup job done by someone at the station. She looked bright and sassy. The host played a clip of the previous show. Corinne was crying, describing her unfair eviction by a landlord who wanted to sell his building before her lease was up. She was the unmarried, unemployed mother of two small children. In the clip, she had scraggly hair and wore no makeup. She broke down twice as she told her story.

  “My ex-husband declared bankruptcy, and I was on one of his credit cards, so that wrecked my credit. It was as if I’d done it too, you understand? I couldn’t get credit for seven years, and that was only five years ago. I lost my job when the company went out of business, and I got evicted a week later. Mrs. Browning said I broke the terms of the lease— well, I did, Mr. Wright…”

  “David.”

  “Technically, I did, David, but I asked her first. I told her my story, and she said, sure I could have a few more days to pay the rent. But then she denied ever saying it. And then I found out about the firm that wanted to tear down the building and build a hotel. Do you see what she did? She used my own circumstances against me.”

  Mr. Right said, “You know what that reminds me of? It’s like the kind of person who picks up a hitchhiker who’s been robbed and then he rapes her.”

  This was the first of the two occasions on which Corinne broke down. She just had time to cry out the words “You understand!” before she lost it. When she recovered, she said, “I mean, it wouldn’t be so bad if, you know, I could just go out and get another apartment, but who’s going to take somebody with my credit record? And I didn’t have enough money for first and last months’ rent, you know, and some people even charge a damage fee.”

  Mr. Right stopped her here and turned to the studio audience. “What do you think, folks? Can we make it right?”

  A roar went up from the crowd. The show’s theme music came up, and suddenly ushers appeared, as if in church, passing collection baskets into which people fell all over themselves to drop money and coins. The camera lingered over a child dropping nickels in, then an old woman unwrapping a hanky.

  Terri wrinkled her nose. Pretty hokey stuff, she thought.

  And then the video stopped. The camera went back to the present-day, well-groomed, confident Corinne beaming and once again tearing up.

  “Tell me, Corinne, did we make it right?”

  She seemed a bit overwhelmed. “I won my case,” she said. “People wrote letters. And I had lawyers…”

  Wright stopped her again. “Our staff lawyers, yes. You won your case, you say?”

  Corinne added, “People picketed too. She just… dropped the eviction. She said I could stay there until I got on my feet.”

  In addition, someone had offered her a job. She was working now as a secretary but taking computer courses at night toward the moment when she could make enough money to get out of the hole she was in. Subsidized child care had been found for her. The show’s viewers had contributed food and clothing. The show had gotten her a makeover at a salon.

  After Corinne’s story was told, the second guest was called, an elderly woman who’d run a red light on the way to visit her daughter in the hospital, the victim of a traffic accident. The cop who stopped her found she was driving without her glasses, because she grabbed the wrong pair in her rush, and he’d taken away her license, which meant that she now had no way to get to her daughter’s house to take care of her grandchildren while their mother was recovering.

  This time, in the present, Terri got to see the offertory baskets being passed and hear an optometrist offering to fit her with new glasses. She was betting the police department of the woman’s town was about to be shamed into returning her license.

  A piece of her recoiled at the cheesy show-biz tone of Mr. Right’s particular brand of justice, but it wasn’t a big enough piece to stop her from copying down the phone number and e-mail address that flashed on the screen when the show was over. “Do you have a wrong that needs righting?” Mr. Right intoned. “Call or e-mail us before your life spins out of control. It’s what we’re here for.”

  Deep in her heart, Terri knew that she’d been the victim of a scam. Maybe not a deliberate scam— she doubted the bank actually meant to get her thrown in jail— but there wasn’t a single aspect of what had happened to her that was right. She wanted justice, and darling Tiffie wasn’t about to get it for her. She felt as if someone had thrown her a rope.

  She obeyed the impulse and dialed. She got a recording saying to tell her story briefly and someone would get back to her.

  And then it was like her brain returned from a short vacation. “Oh, sure, you will,” she told the phone. “I’m a student without enough money to stretch from one week to another. The bank never told me it was going to hold my checks for a whole week and then fine me twenty-two dollars for each check I couldn’t cover. Do you realize how impossible that made it to cover the next one? I had to borrow money from my mom to pay them off, and they took it and didn’t even have the decency to tell me they’d already put out a warrant for my arrest. They just waited till I got stopped for some traffic violation and had to go to jail! I’ve never kn
owingly broken a law in my life. And now I’m about to have a felony on my record. Sure you care. Sure you’re gonna call me back. I’m really holding my breath on that one.” But she left her name and number anyhow.

  She had no idea why she’d sounded off on the phone, except that she couldn’t help it. In disgust she changed the channel to a daytime soap.

  * * *

  At the same time, in Dallas, the former Karen Bennett turned off her television, reaching, as she always did, for yet another tissue. Mr. Right was her favorite show. It always got to her. She had been one of Mr. Right’s first guests and was perhaps its primary beneficiary.

  She’d fought the biggest Goliath of all— the IRS. She still had the tape of the show, and watched it frequently, reliving the Cinderella saga that had become her life. She was barely twenty-six, and she’d gone from riches to rags to semi-riches again. When her life had gone wrong, it went wrong really fast. And it went all the way wrong.

  It was the kind of thing that could only happen in a prominent Southern family, a Southern religious family in which the men think just because their God is male and they’ve made some money, they must be God too. In the end, she humiliated her father in front of the whole town, but she’d had to end up in the gutter first. Her father’s mistake was he thought he could out-bluff her. It might have worked if she’d had a lick of sense.

  But she was a girl in love, with no idea in hell somebody like her could end up as Cinderella. She thought of herself as Juliet. It was simple (and in her mind, hugely romantic): The McLeans hated the Bennetts— really hated them— and she was a McLean. Charles Bennett, Sr., was her father’s biggest rival in business, in politics, even at the stupid country club. For her to consort with his son Charlie was tantamount to bringing home a serial killer. Her mistake was that she hadn’t understood the depth of the rivalry— that it was more important to her father than she was.

  Her father threatened to disown her if she married him, and the arrogance of it made her even more determined, made her want to do it sooner rather than later. What did disown mean, anyway? If he was going to be like that her mother, too, and all her siblings— no one in the family opposed him— if they all were going to be like that, she didn’t care if she never spoke to them again. It didn’t occur to her she might need them sometime.

  She could hear her father now: “You made your bed; you lie in it.”

  That was what he said when she told him, two years into their marriage, that Charlie was cheating on her. Blithely, she filed for divorce, which was exactly what Charlie wanted, having hidden all his assets from her. So there was really no community property except their reasonably modest house, and Texas law— notoriously unfair to women— is extremely stingy with spousal support, not even granting it in a “young” marriage. Because Karen had been married less than ten years, she got none. But there was still the money from the sale of the house, and she could always get a job.

  However, she failed to get one in her field, elementary school education, and ended up teaching aerobics. She invested wisely in a tiny condo— having barely enough for the down payment— and could just scrape by. She was making it on her own, even going back to school, and proud of herself— until income tax time. She’d had no idea she was going to end up owing ten thousand dollars.

  “No problem; they’ll make a deal,” her accountant said. “Just explain your situation, and they’ll set up a payment plan.”

  But she could never get them on the phone, and they didn’t answer her letters. Then one day they sent her a letter, saying they were going to put a lien on her house if she didn’t pay them by a certain date.

  Well, she couldn’t have that. She needed a new car, but with a lien on her condo, no bank would give her a loan.

  Panicked, she called the accountant, who asked her if she could come up with any part of the money. “Sure,” she said confidently. “I still have my engagement ring. It ought to bring about five thousand dollars.”

  “Sell it,” he said, eyes cold and unfriendly. “I’ll make the deal myself.”

  And he did make the deal: five thousand up front and the rest in monthly payments.

  She sold the ring, paid the five thousand, and within a week, the IRS slapped the lien on her. As if there’d never been a deal at all.

  She was so depressed she started watching daytime TV, which was how she found the show that changed her life. They loved her story.

  Who wouldn’t? Who doesn’t hate the IRS? Hundreds of calls came in from taxpayers who’d been similarly burned, so many that the next week the station abandoned the normal Mr. Right format (one wrong righted, another stated) and devoted a special hour-long show to what it called “The Treachery of the Tax Collectors.”

  The IRS took such a beating they did something no one had ever heard of them doing before: They said there’d been a “mistake” and removed Karen’s lien. Car dealers all over town called her, offering extraordinary deals. But as it turned out, she didn’t need their charity. Her father, in a grand, public gesture of conciliation, gave her a car himself. She’d “suffered enough,” he said.

  But, really, social pressure had shamed him into reconciling, and she knew it. Not that she cared; she’d gotten used to her family’s ostracism a long time ago.

  But the best part was that David Wright, Mr. Right himself, a lovely man, seemed to take a personal interest in her, even got her a job at the station. Like Superman, he seemed to have swooped down from the sky to rescue her.

  One day she asked him to have coffee with her, to thank him personally. He went, and he couldn’t have been nicer or more gracious. But she had known that was how it would be. He didn’t try to grab her leg, didn’t tell off-color jokes, didn’t flirt, didn’t behave in any way at all that a perfect gentleman wouldn’t.

  A week or so went by, and he asked her for coffee. It got to be a regular thing before she realized she was falling for him. She’d never really met such a concerned, loving person. She was definitely interested in him, and she knew he wasn’t married, but there was a problem: He treated her like a daughter.

  She had to get up all her courage to ask him to dinner, and then he refused! She was flabbergasted. “But why?” she demanded, the words falling out before she thought.

  “Because,” he said, “the gentleman always asks the lady.”

  Stung by the reprimand, she kept her head down for the next three days, thinking maybe he wasn’t nearly as nice as he seemed. Maybe he was just an old rattlesnake waiting for a chance to strike. Now he had, and who needed him?

  On the third day, a Thursday, she picked up her ringing phone to hear his voice. “Ms. Bennett, would you do me the honor of accompanying me to dinner Saturday night?” It was the night she’d asked him for.

  She couldn’t help but laugh. “Why didn’t you just say yes in the first place? In fact, why didn’t you ask me first if you’re so picky about who asks who?”

  “First of all, I’m quite a bit older than you. I didn’t want to presume on you. But once I learned you were interested, I thought we should do it by the book.”

  If she hadn’t already been in love with him, that would have turned the trick.

  That night he regaled her with stories of his life. The son of missionaries, he’d lived all over the world.

  “Aha,” she said. “That explains the accent.”

  “Excuse me?” He seemed slightly nonplussed.

  “You sound slightly English.”

  “Ah. Boarding schools,” he said. “But that was for convenience. Actually, my family were very simple, God-fearing people.”

  She found that she liked that— both his claim to simplicity and his announced spirituality. She had felt all along that there was something noble and fine about him. At the end of the date, lying in bed, assessing it, what she felt was safe. She felt that David Wright would never hurt her, would take care of her, would cherish her… Now there was a word, she thought, that you never heard outside a marriage ceremony. Fun
ny she should make that connection.

  On the other hand not so funny. She already knew she wanted to marry him.

  Two months ago, she had. She was Karen Wright now, suddenly a young woman about town, all her family ties reinstated, in demand for committees and charity parties, and the fledgling founder of her own charitable foundation.

  She was so proud of her husband she could burst. So much in love she floated through life, hardly remembering the difficult days behind her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Beset by a strange combination of lethargy and restlessness, Skip Langdon sat at her desk, sighing, drinking coffee, looking at pictures. They were photographs of stone angels, urns, antique wire furniture— cemetery art— currently very hot (in more ways than one) on the antiques market; Aunt Mabel’s angels, Grandpa’s St Francis statue.

  Some of the pictures were from Atlanta, some from Charleston, some from as far away as Los Angeles. But so far, none from New Orleans, except the ones taken in the cemeteries themselves. The pictures from other cities portrayed art currently for sale in antique shops, the ones from New Orleans were blowups of family snapshots— the statues and urns in place at Aunt Mabel’s and Grandpa’s plots before they disappeared. These things weighed tons, quite literally. How were they getting from here to there? That was one of many questions she had to answer, and fast before somebody got lynched, meaning the mayor or the superintendent. From the fury around this one, you’d have thought Mardi Gras itself was threatened.

  The problem was, she couldn’t work up the same sense of outrage as the rest of the citizenry; in fact she could barely keep her mind on the job. She was a lot more interested in finding the man who’d tried to have her killed. And that wasn’t all he’d done to her. At different times, he’d kidnapped two children she cared about with nearly fatal results. That is, he’d ordered them kidnapped. Ordering was something he did well.

  He’d ordered more than a dozen murders that she personally knew about, and he’d done it with the high-handedness of a dictator. When people were convinced they had God on their side, they’d do anything. Indeed, some of his followers seemed to think he was God or had a direct line thereto.