Savannah Blues

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Sort of the neonun hooker look?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” she said. “I’ve gotta have this statue.”

  Something in the parking lot caught her eye. “Look,” she said, pointing at a big black pickup truck parked in the row nearest the door. It had a Marine Corps bumper sticker. “Look who’s here. Daniel.”

  I turned on my heel and started marching toward my own truck.

  “Weezie,” she ran after me. “What’s wrong?”

  “If this is your idea of a fix-up, you truly do have the worst sense of timing in the world,” I said, feeling my face get red.

  “What?” She seemed offended by the suggestion. “I swear to God. I had no idea Daniel would be here today. It’s Monday, Weeze. His only day off. He probably read the paper, saw the story about the convent closing, and decided to come over here and check it out—just like we did.”

  I was not in the mood to deal with Daniel Stipanek.

  Still, this was not a sale I wanted to miss. All my life I’d heard my mother tell stories about the little gray nuns. They’d come to Savannah from their mother house in Philadelphia shortly after the Civil War, to minister to the South’s underprivileged black children. The convent and the school had been built in the 1930s, with money donated by a wealthy Pennsylvania industrialist.

  It stood to reason that the place should be full of good old stuff. And I had never been one to let a mere man—even an annoying man like Daniel Stipanek—stand between me and my junk.

  “All right,” I relented. “We’ll go in. If we see him, we’ll be polite. But in no way will you give him any idea that I might be interested in him. Understand?”

  “Understood,” BeBe said.

  We pushed open the heavy carved-oak front door and I was instantly transported back to my own parochial-school days. Institutional green linoleum lined the floors of the hall, and the walls were dotted with faded pictures of saints and popes. The smell of disinfectant mingled with the smell of crayons and chalk dust, mixed with that peculiarly Catholic smell—was it the candles and the incense? Or maybe just eau de holy water?

  The hallway itself was lined with scarred old oak pews, each one four feet long. The backs were carved with scrollwork, each side held a slot for hymnals. The sign on the wall said “Pews. $25. As Is.”

  I felt my neck tingle. This was very, very good junk.

  “I’m buying four of these,” I said quickly, digging in my tote bag for the roll of masking tape with the “Sold—Foley” lettering. “And if you really are going to do a lounge in the restaurant, wouldn’t these make great booths, facing each other with a table in between?”

  “Great,” BeBe said. “Now what?”

  “I’ll put the sold stickers on ’em. You go inside and find the cash register. Tell the person in charge you want to start a tab for Weezie Foley. Tell them you’ve already marked the pews. How many do you want?”

  She did some quick math. “Six booths, down the wall opposite the bar. Make it twelve pews.”

  I gave them a cursory glance. “Better get some spares,” I said. “The sign says ‘as is,’ so some of them probably have broken seats or something.”

  “Sure, fine,” she said.

  “And ask them if they have somebody who can start loading them for us.”

  “Already? We haven’t even started really looking around yet.”

  “I recognize a lot of dealers I know here,” I said, lowering my voice. “That big panel truck outside, that’s Zeke Payne. He’s a great big fat guy, always wears red sweats, summer and winter. He’d steal the gold fillings off his grandma’s corpse. Last year, at the church bazaar at Isle of Hope Methodist church? I’d found a stack of old Limoges plates, marked two bucks apiece. I’d stashed them in a laundry basket full of smalls. I put the basket down to look at something, and when I turned back around, Zeke was walking away with my stack of dishes. I went after him and told him he’d taken the dishes out of my basket, but he just ignored me. Finally, one of the church ladies saw what was going on, and made him give ’em back. He’s been pissed at me ever since.”

  “Geez,” BeBe said. “You could get hurt doing this.”

  “Don’t remind me,” I said.

  I was putting the last of the sold stickers on the pews when BeBe raced back. “It’s taken care of,” she said. “Give me the keys to the truck so I can back it up to the front of the school. I paid a kid ten bucks to load us up.”

  “Excellent,” I said, handing her the keys. “How’s the sale look?”

  “Pretty good,” she said, holding up a beautifully filigreed silver orb hanging from a long silver chain. “Look. Isn’t this a gorgeous lamp?”

  “Gorgeous,” I agreed. “But it’s not a lamp. It’s a censer.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  I took the chain from her and held the censer with my right hand.

  “You burn incense in it, and the priest walks up and down the aisles, swinging the censer and smoking the place up with it.”

  She took the censer back. “For fifty dollars, it’s a hanging lamp. I’ll put it in the hallway between the bathrooms. It’ll be great.”

  “According to the cashier, everything else for sale is all piled in the cafeteria,” BeBe said. “There’s a mob of people in there. And I saw your buddy Zeke. He was shoving a little old lady out of the way to get to a pile of folding wooden chairs.”

  “That’s Zeke.”

  The cafeteria, as promised, was packed. It had been a small room to start with. Little Sisters of Charity School had probably never had more than two hundred pupils. Now the lunchroom was serving as warehouse.

  BeBe spied a group of statues up near the stage. “Look, Christ on a cross.”

  I looked. “Those are stations of the cross,” I told her. “I really don’t think you want those in a restaurant.”

  “Let’s split up,” she said. “I’ll meet you outside in an hour, all right?”

  “Fine,” I told her.

  One corner of the room was taken up with piles of scarred desks being sold for ten dollars apiece. I wasn’t interested in desks, but I did find a good-looking old solid brass gooseneck lamp with the original green glass shade. The thing weighed about ten pounds, but it had that great 1940s machine-age look young collectors are paying big money for. I put it in the bottom of my tote bag. Next I grabbed a tabletop-sized set of card catalogue drawers, priced at a buck apiece. Nobody uses card catalogues these days, now that everything’s inventoried on computers, but I estimated the drawers would make ideal CD holders. There were twelve of them, and I managed to fit ten in my wheeled bag.

  A woman I knew slightly from Saturday-morning garage sales was reaching for the other two when she saw me. I had never known her name, just the nickname all the dealers knew her by: “Early Bird.” She drove a battered 1970s era brown Mercedes and was notorious for showing up at sales two hours early—even for Saturday-morning sales that started at 7 A.M.

  Early Bird’s face got a little pale when she saw me. “Oh. Hello there. I didn’t know you were out of jail.”

  I felt like I’d been slapped across the face.

  “Yes,” I said. “It was all a misunderstanding.”

  “Of course,” she said. She gestured at the card catalogue boxes. “You can take those two. I don’t really want them.”

  I knew what she was thinking. There’s that Weezie Foley. She killed a woman. Don’t mess with her.

  Early Bird scuttled away as fast as she could, glancing back over her shoulder to make sure I wasn’t following. I tried to shrug it off. Early Bird was a weirdo. Talked to herself, always bought canned goods at estate sales. Who buys dead people’s canned goods? I started flipping through the books. After some judicious digging, I found a nice reading primer from the 1950s. It was the same Dick and Jane series my mother had used in elementary school—the same one she had taught me to read out of before turning me over to Blessed Sacrament School. It had a price of fifty cents penciled on the inn
er cover.

  I stashed it in my tote bag. One of the shops on Whitaker Street did a nice business in framed and matted pages from old books. I could get an easy thirty bucks for this one.

  It was just past noon, and the lunchroom was really starting to get crowded. There was no air-conditioning, of course, just a series of ceiling fans trying ineffectively to move the stifling air around. I grabbed my tote bag and wheeled my way toward the checkout table.

  An older black lady wearing a bib apron sat at the table, manning an adding machine like she meant it. I called out my purchases and she tallied them up. “I’ve got a tab started, with four pews at twenty-five dollars apiece,” I said. “The name’s Eloise Foley.”

  She looked up, startled, with a wide smile. “I know you.”

  “You do?”

  “I seen you on the TV. In the paper too. You the gal killed her husband’s girlfriend. And I say, you go girl! Teach that woman to mess with another gal’s man.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” I said quietly.

  “Oughta give you a medal,” the woman said, shaking her head. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like junking anymore. Other people behind me in line were starting to whisper. I put my money on the table, then walked away, craning my neck to look for BeBe, but all I saw was a sea of sweaty faces.

  The hallway was cooler, and blissfully empty. At the far end I saw a set of carved doors, opening inward. The school’s chapel. At one time, I remembered, there had been wonderful stained-glass windows in that chapel, salvaged out of an old church in Augusta that had burned down.

  Most of the pews had already been removed from the simple white-painted chapel. I found an old metal folding chair over near the confessional box and sat down. The windows were there, hanging from hooks in front of simple white window frames.

  My favorite one was shaped in a gothic arch, with a simple rose fashioned out of colored glass, inset with sparkling prisms that caught the afternoon sunlight and refracted it into a hundred shards of light on the worn wooden chapel floor.

  I stood in front of the window and looked up at it. A piece of masking tape was stretched across the bottom of the window. It had writing on it, but it was just above my eye level. So I dragged the chair over to the window and climbed up to get a better look.

  A hand touched the back of my knee.

  “Christ!” I nearly fell off the chair, but then two hands circled my waist and steadied me.

  “Haven’t you learned your lesson about crawling out of windows?” Daniel Stipanek was laughing up at me.

  I scowled down into his smiling face. “You can let go of me now.”

  Chapter 21

  Daniel let go. I climbed down off the chair.

  “I wasn’t trying to climb in or out of the window,” I said. “I was trying to see the price tag on the stained glass, until you grabbed me and scared me shitless.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry. How much is it?”

  “I can’t see,” I said.

  He stepped up to the window and looked. “Hundred bucks.”

  I chewed my lip and thought about it. The gothic shape to the window gave it a lot of appeal. It was in good condition, not missing any glass. It wasn’t all that old, maybe seventy years or so, but it had a certain appeal.

  “I’ll buy it if you don’t,” Daniel said.

  “What would you do with it?”

  “I’ll find a place for it,” he said. “Maybe in a bathroom.”

  “In a rented apartment?”

  “I have a house,” he said with a touch of smugness. “At Tybee. Near the North End.”

  “Chefs can afford Tybee prices?”

  Tybee Island was Savannah’s beach community. Used to be, it was the tackiest beach community on the whole East Coast, with a grimy little street carnival, cheap T-shirt shops, and an abundance of cheesy mom-and-pop motels and all-you-can-eat family restaurants. The houses were hit-or-miss affairs. Along the ocean side you did have some turn-of-the-century beauties, but the rest of Tybee was mostly ramshackle wood frame cottages or concrete block bungalows straight out of the fifties.

  When I was a kid, Tybee got so bedraggled that lots of people from Savannah preferred to drive an hour north to the classier Hilton Head Island, or an hour south to St. Simons or Jekyll Island for a beach weekend.

  But in the last six or seven years, Tybee had gone and gotten chic. Those ramshackle shacks were now “period Tybee cottages” going for over two hundred thousand, even as much as two blocks away from the ocean, and as for the fifties concrete block babies, those were now “midcentury modern” and red-hot with the retro rehab crowd.

  Daniel saw my jealousy. I’d always secretly pined for one of those cute little beach shacks.

  “Chefs can afford more than you might expect,” he said. “But I’ll let you in on a secret. This place has been in my family for thirty years.”

  “What street?” I asked, curiosity getting the better of me.

  “Gladys,” he said.

  “Right on the water?”

  “Right over the dunes,” he said.

  “Concrete or wood?”

  “Wood,” he said. “Of course, the only reason it’s still standing is ’cause all the termites got together and started holding hands. It’s in pretty rough shape.”

  I nodded. A lot of the cottages on that end of the beach had seen better days. Still, Gladys was a good street. And he did have waterfront property.

  “Are you good with your hands?” I asked.

  His eyes swept me up and down. “You tell me.”

  I felt myself going beet red. “Are you going to start that again? For God’s sake, it was a long time ago. Can’t you just forget about it?”

  “Why would I want to do that?” His blue eyes were serious now. “That wasn’t just a one-night stand for me, you know. I was crazy about you.”

  “You were just horny,” I retorted. “You would have humped anything that got in that boat with you.”

  “Not true,” he said. “Well, yeah, I was horny. But it was your fault. You made me nuts in those tight little T-shirts and shorts. And my God, that bikini. How was I supposed to act?”

  I felt myself blushing again. “We’re in a church, you know. This is not the place to have this discussion. In fact, there is no place to have this discussion.”

  “You dumped me,” he said, like he still couldn’t believe it, even after all these years. “I called and called your house, first time I got home on leave, and your mother acted like I was some kind of poison.”

  I sighed. “Look. It was a mistake, OK? I drank too much and got crazy. Anyway, that fall I met somebody else.”

  “Talmadge Evans? That’s the asshole who left you for the woman who got murdered?” He certainly didn’t pull any punches.

  “Yes,” I said. “Tal. My ex.”

  “BeBe says he’s a shit. She says he screwed this woman in your bed, in your house. She says he got everything in the divorce, left you living in the garage or something.”

  “BeBe should keep her mouth shut,” I said, choking back sudden tears. It had all been too much. People staring at me, whispering, talking about me behind my back. And now even Daniel Stipanek knew my life story. I wanted to slink back home and hide under the sofa with Jethro.

  “Hey,” he said, touching my shoulder. “I’m sorry. Really, Weezie. I didn’t have any right to say all that stuff about your ex. I don’t usually gossip about people, you know. It’s just that, after I found out BeBe was your best friend, I kinda wanted to find out what had happened with you after all these years.”

  “My life went to shit. Now will you please excuse me?”

  “What about the window?” he said, pointing up at it.

  “Offer them seventy-five dollars.”

  I started out of the chapel, wheeling my cart behind me, but he was right beside me.

  “Hey,” he said. “I was supposed to let you know. BeBe had to go.”

  “What do you mean she had to go?” I asked,
alarmed. “She doesn’t have a car. We came in my truck.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She has the keys, remember? Sylvia, the manager at the restaurant, beeped her ten minutes ago. Our linen supplier showed up with the wrong tablecloths, and on top of that, we’ve got a backed-up commode in the men’s room. She took your truck. I’m supposed to give you a ride home.”

  I sat, stony-faced, on the far side of the passenger seat while Daniel loaded the truck.

  It took him three trips to get it all in. Finally, my curiosity got the better of me. I climbed out and peeked over the edge of the truck bed. “What all did you get?” I inquired.

  “Bunch of stuff,” he said. He pointed at the stained glass. “The window you picked out. They settled on eighty dollars. Plus another smaller one I can use as a transom over the front door. They only wanted forty for it.”

  A steal.

  “And a bunch of old slat-back wooden folding chairs.” He prodded one with the toe of his shoe. They were adorable, almost like vintage French bistro chairs.

  “How much?”

  “Buck apiece. But I could only get ten. The rest were all in pieces.”

  “Not bad.” I was green with envy.

  “That,” he said, kicking the side of a huge wooden wine crate, “is full of old dishes.”

  “What kind of dishes?”

  “I dunno,” he said. He squatted down and pried the top off the box, handing over a heavy white vitreous china soup plate with a thick blue ribbon around the rim and a circular “C of G” monogram in the middle.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Railroad china. Where did you find this?”

  “In the kitchen. Off the lunchroom,” Daniel said. “What’s railroad china?”

  “China they used to use in railroad dining cars,” I said, turning the soup bowl over to see the manufacturer’s mark.

  “See,” I showed him. “It’s Shawnee.”

  “That’s good?”

  “It’s great,” I said enviously. “The C of G was the Coastal of Georgia Railroad. They had a line that ran from St. Augustine all the way up to Baltimore. My meemaw used to ride that train to Maryland to see her sister every summer. They had pink damask tablecloths and fresh flowers in cut crystal on every table. And fried soft-shell crabs.”