Shoot the Money

by Chris Wiltz

  “And that’s probably the last thing you remember.”

  “I was very woozy. And the drink. The drink tasted funny.” She told Karen about going to the bathroom, finding the note from the cowboy. “Oh my God, I could have been raped.” She looked at Karen. “I don’t think I was raped.” She seemed to be asking Karen for a definitive answer.

  “I don’t think you were. I think he was taking you somewhere, but you might want to get checked out.”

  Raynie nodded and looked away from Karen, embarrassed. She sipped the juice and put it on the coffee table.

  “What’s your name?” Karen asked her.

  The girl’s head jerked toward her. She looked perplexed, then she panicked. “My clothes, oh my God, I’ve lost my clothes. What day is it? If I’ve lost that job…”

  “Hold it. I’ve got your clothes.” From the bedroom Karen got her purse, shoes and the shopping bag. “Are these the clothes you mean? And it’s Thursday, barely. Six a.m.”

  Raynie went through the bag. “Thank you, thank you. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Just tell me you remember your name. There’s no ID in your purse.”

  Raynie sat up straight. Karen watched as she composed herself, smoothed her hair back.

  “I’m Raynie Devereux. From Rayne, Louisiana.”

  She told Karen she’d moved from the backwater to the big city to make a new life for herself, that she’d lived on a frog farm and didn’t want to spend the rest of her life growing frogs, selling them, and frying up frog legs. Frogs were all that was left from Earlene Dick’s life.

  “Who’s Daniel?”

  Karen watched as Raynie cast her eyes down. She picked up her purse and played with the toggle on the zipper before she looked up, frowning, and said, “Daniel? I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

  “Because you called his name several times last night.”

  Her face softened.

  This one, though, was quick. She tilted her head and one side of her mouth tipped up, a playful, quizzical smile. “The man of my dreams?” She shrugged, unzipped her purse, and counted her money.

  ***

  Karen had thought a lot about money in her life, the usual—that there wasn’t enough and how to get more of it. It had been nice, thinking of all that money in the safe deposit box, a different kind of feeling. It was as though she didn’t have to scrounge any more, yet it wasn’t freedom from worry because of Solo lurking with his unfailing memory, and it wasn’t a lifting of the crushing weight of credit card debt; she barely maintained staying below max-out level. It didn’t have to do with the ability to go shopping whenever she wanted. Karen hadn’t spent a frivolous dime unless her two acrylic nails fell into that category, and in her mind they didn’t.

  What did it matter? The feeling was an illusion since she couldn’t leave Jack to Solo and keep the cash, but she’d rented an apartment she couldn’t afford based on something that felt all warm and fuzzy, for Christ sake.

  Raynie zipped her cash into the inside pocket of her purse. “At least he didn’t take my money. It’s all I have left.” She looked around the living room as if she was just now taking it in. “This is a nice place. Now that I have a job maybe I’ll be able to afford something like this soon.”

  “Where are you working?”

  “This’ll be my first day. Le Tripot. Over on St. Louis?”

  “I know the place. It’s all decked out to look like a whorehouse. People like to say there’re rooms on the third floor. I even know a few men who claim they’ve been upstairs with the help, but they’re probably full of it.”

  Raynie looked faintly alarmed. “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing. It’s just rumors. You work there long enough, you’ll find out.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to find out.”

  “I mean, you’ll find out they’re rumors. Don’t worry about it. It’s a very hot restaurant right now. You’ll do fine there. People tip well when their imaginations are engaged.”

  Raynie pictured men putting money down the waitresses’ bras, snapping it under their garters. “I’m not a waitress,” she said. “I’m the hostess.”

  “Even better. They’ll be laying money on you to get them the best tables—next to Lulu White’s corset, the painting of the redheaded nude…”

  “What is it, some kind of men’s club?”

  “Believe it or not, women like to go as much as men. Watch the lunch crowd. Four-tops of women on both floors.”

  Raynie made a face. “That’s weird.”

  “Yeah, but when you think about it, it’s not any weirder than women who like all that gangsta rap about pimps and whores. Look, why don’t you take a shower. I’ll take you to breakfast. You’ll feel a lot better.”

  By the time they finished pecan waffles, scrambled eggs, and a pot of coffee at Café Envie on Decatur, Karen had asked Raynie if she wanted to move in with her for a while. Raynie thought the daybed in Karen’s living room was a luxury after the Goth mansion where the foot of her bed was always damp. As they walked over to Esplanade to get Raynie’s things, she told Karen about the red, white and blue rat and the crucified doll in the next-door apartment.

  But Karen had lived in downtown New Orleans too many years to be bothered by anyone’s kinky idea of cool. What gave her the creeps was the hole in the ceiling straight through to the roof above the stairway, and Raynie’s room, the dirt embedded in the floor, caked on the window sills, filmed over the glass panes, the grubby stained mattress, the mildewed bathroom down the hall. She’d lived in a few places that had the same stink—old house, mold, cockroach shit—but none that rivaled this, none with gaping holes in the roof, not even one of those blue FEMA tarps to cover it.

  She started to wish she’d never taken the money from the hotel safe, because standing here in the middle of this squalid, expensive tenement room, she feared ever being without it.

  ***

  Karen drove out to the suburbs to see her mother in LaDonna’s Classic Silver Prius, which Ramon had insisted she buy so she could be environmentally conscientious like the Hollywood celebs he’d read about in Us Weekly. Driving to Metairie she thought about what would happen when Jack showed up, which she expected any time now. No matter where her thoughts turned—to handing the money over to Jack, the phone call to Solo, the showdown between Solo and Jack—her imagination stalled. It was all too unpleasant; her mind resisted believing that any one of these scenes could become reality. The only thing real was the money. She had held it in her hands, counted it, placed it in the safe deposit box, taken five hundred dollars out this morning after seeing Raynie off to Le Tripot. Real, yes, but elusive. Karen had never been able to hold on to money. It slipped through her fingers like slick well-dressed men.

  Judy Honeycutt lived in a tan brick box of a house on a quiet street lined with similar houses, half dozen different facades and shades of brick if you counted. The roll-down steel storm covers over the windows of several homes had been there long before the hurricane. The owners had used them more for security than storms. As usual they were rolled down tight on enough houses to give the neighborhood a blank, uninhabited look. A few FEMA trailers sat in front of houses.

  Her mother’s block showed the mark of Katrina—trees cut to stumps, blue tarps flapping on roofs, landscaping a little rough around the edges, big brown spots on the lawns—but when Karen pulled up in front of her mother’s house she saw that the patchy grass and the weeds that had once grown up close to the foundation had become a thick manicured lawn and flowerbeds. The best looking house on the block, gardenia bushes loaded with flowers and a young crape myrtle tree blooming near the curb. An overflowing basket of impatiens decorated the small concrete entranceway to the house.

  As soon as Karen cut the engine, the front door flew open and her mother came running down the walkway to her. Gone were the flowing clothes Karen had last seen her wearing, that she’d worn for years, long black skirts and wide-legged pants with tunic tops and loos
e jackets in dull floral patterns that might have been inspired by turn-of-the-last-century upholstery. Today she wore a body-hugging sun dress, her preference still florals but not your grandma’s sofa. A white dress splashed with bright red flowers, sophisticated, up-to-date. Now. Finally, she was showing her body, rich-bitch thin and hard from her yoga practice.

  Gone too were the sturdy Birkenstocks and thick-soled walking shoes. The spike heels on her pink thong sandals tapped down the walk, red toenails glittering, and her hair, released from its messy barrette-anchored upsweep, swung free, grazing her shoulders.

  As they embraced Karen said, “Mom, you’re transformed. The only thing I recognize are your glasses.” Her large thick-rimmed tortoise-shells.

  Judy hooked her arm through Karen’s to walk her to the house. “Karen, a woman needs to reinvent herself at certain stages of her life. She needs to…” her hand spiraled through the air “…recapture her youthful enthusiasm.”

  She stopped before the step to the doorway so she could face Karen. The sun made her red highlights, salon-bought reinvention, sparkle.

  “You know how there are times in your life when possibilities are all around you, there are choices in front of you, but none of them seem quite right?”

  Karen recognized the talk, what she used to call swami-talk, the calm, quiet tone that started out with a question then went into words of wisdom.

  “That is a time when you must be still and be with yourself. It is not a time for decisions. You must sit and wait. I don’t mean that you give up. You face the uncertainty and wait until you know deep down what is right for you.”

  It must have been ninety-eight degrees on the blazing concrete. Karen felt a bead of sweat work its way into her cleavage. “You know what Dr. Phil said?”

  “No.”

  “He said there are no wrong decisions, just decisions.”

  Judy lifted her hair off her neck. “No decision is still a decision. It’s a decision not to make a decision.”

  “You told LaDonna you were finished with all this New Age shit.”

  “You brought up Dr. Phil. Except Freud said that, not Dr. Phil. What’s New Age about him?”

  “The hell if I know,” Karen said. “Do you think we could go inside, Mother? I’m frying out here.”

  ***

  Transformation continued inside the house. The kitchen was in progress, with the wall down between it and the den. The den’s heavy drapes had been removed. Outside Karen could see that the old garage had been opened up on the yard side to become an outdoor party house. All it needed was a pool.

  Judy was behind her, still talking about reinvention. “What I’m trying to tell you, Karen, is this is not about looks. It’s nothing less than the entire psychological evolution of a woman, the next step to becoming the person she was always meant to be, her best person, not the person who’s trying to meet everyone’s expectations but her own.”

  Karen stared out the sliding glass doors to the yard. “Who’s the new guru, Mom?”

  “There is no guru. I know you think this sounds like the same old stuff…”

  Karen turned to face her. “No, it sounds new. You were talking about being, not becoming, when Swami Heart Attack was hanging around.”

  Judy headed for the kitchen, her heels making a dinky sound on the new parquet floor, as if it was made of plastic.

  “Harguchet, Karen, the man’s name was Harguchet, and he’s a brilliant Hindu thinker. And being and becoming can exist simultaneously.”

  “O-kay.” Karen sat on one end of the sofa.

  “If you’d just listen and stop being your flip self, you might find you’re interested in this.” Judy’s heels ticked across the den to the sofa. She handed Karen a glass of iced tea.

  “It’s the constant excitement, that’s all,” Karen said. “It makes me tired.” She said it and thought that she never gave her mother much of a break.

  “I’m so sorry I bore you.”

  “Bored and tired are different.”

  “You’ve never had it in you to get really excited about anything. I guess that’s what passes for cool these days.”

  Karen stifled a yawn. “Thanks. I don’t need to be excited to be interested. Tell me what’s going on.”

  Judy pushed herself into the corner of the sofa and sat up straight, her body wired with enthusiasm. “I got to Baton Rouge—you know, when I evacuated for the hurricane—and after the flood when I knew we couldn’t come back for a while, I felt relieved; strange since I was as worried as anyone else about my house. I knew I’d have a job, and I knew I was supposed to feel lucky about that, but fifteen years of pushing paper at the construction company, I didn’t want to go back.

  “I needed a change, Karen, but not another paper-pushing job. I needed a challenge. I wasn’t unhappy, but I didn’t feel really alive any more. Not because of the storm. This had been going on for most of the year. It was time to be still. To go into the dark room and wait. The possibilities swarmed around me…”

  Judy came out of the dark room with a clear decision to go into business for herself. She didn’t know what kind of business. “You know how it is, Karen, when you ask for it, it comes to you.”

  Three days later it came to Judy in the form of Kirkley Hope—“I mean, can you believe his name, Karen?”—one of the young men who worked at the construction company and had also evacuated to Baton Rouge. Judy ran into him at a coffee shop. Over coffee, Judy told Kirk about her revelation. Kirk said he’d always wanted his own construction company. They got back to New Orleans as fast as they could.

  “Honeycutt and Hope, LLC, and we’re making money, Karen. I get the jobs, do the estimates, keep the schedule, and in my spare time—not much of that!—I’m taking a real estate course online. Three years I’ll get a brokers license then we’ll start building houses and selling them ourselves.”

  “Where’d you get the money?”

  Judy grinned and shrugged, her hands palms up. “The money comes from wherever it is.”

  One of Judy’s hardcore beliefs, inspired by the Swami Heart Attack, whose money had come from Judy’s savings account. Karen stared at her, hard.

  “It didn’t take much money, okay? The cost of the LLC, signs to tack to the telephone poles, living on FEMA money. We took small, quick jobs at first. I’m telling you, Karen, the money is out there. We’re not gouging anyone either, and Kirk and his guys are doing great work. No cut corners. Not one complaint so far. Here’s the deal—I wouldn’t be involved any other way. I don’t like tainted money. It brings bad luck to anyone who touches it.”

  “Tainted money,” Karen repeated.

  “You know, money from a bad source, stolen money, ill-gotten…”

  “Yeah, I know.” Karen finished off her iced tea. “And what about Kirk?”

  “You mean me and Kirk? He’s hopelessly in love with me.” Judy smiled. “But he’s still in the guest bedroom. Right now, I’m more interested in money than men.”

  Nine

  Pascal Legendre and his business partner James Johnpier lounged back in their well appointed office on the third floor of their restaurant. At the wet bar Pascal poured himself a small glass of Porto Rocha and a generous Glenlivet for Jimmy. Across the room, against the exposed brick wall, Jimmy lit one of his Cubans and stretched his arm along the back of an expensively distressed brown leather sofa. He had furnished the room with discards from his house: a large age-frayed Tabriz rug under an octagonal coffee table of glass and burled walnut, the leather furniture, and an antique cherry desk looking very old-world against the backdrop of shuttered French doors to a balcony. The amenities included a built-in limestone bar. Pascal put the Glenlivet in front of Jimmy on the table, the rug’s medallion directly beneath its glass top. The man was ugly as New Orleans sin, his face under his prominent brow bone messy, as if he’d been given life before it had a chance to set properly. One of his dark murky eyes drooped as though trying to slide off his cheekbone; his nose had taken the dive
into an off center bulb; his lips were puffy and asymmetrical. But it couldn’t be denied that the man possessed a sense of aesthetics, precise and fine. He could definitely put a room together; with the assistance of a top designer from Houston, he’d put an entire St. Charles Avenue mansion together. It had been featured in Architectural Digest.

  Pascal sat in a well-worn leather club chair and took a small sip of the port. “Are you giving odds on LaDonna Johnson?”

  Jimmy puffed at the cigar. “She’s a tough call. Fifty-fifty without knowing why she borrowed money in the first place. As far as I know, the woman runs a tight ship, just like her daddy did. Ole Toots Johnson had a sharp business head. You know why he bought that club?”

  “No idea.”

  “Too damn young to know. He was marching with his band, Toots Johnson and the Midnight Revelers, at one of the night parades. Someone threw a brick, hit him square in the mouth. The way it scarred, he could never get the same sound out of his trumpet. He was one of those players his horn just poured honey. He opened the club, did so well he eventually bought the building.”

  “He named it La Costa Brava?”

  Jimmy nodded. “He married an Isleños woman from St. Bernard. She always wanted to go to the Costa Brava, so Toots told her she could go every day.”

  “You know some weird shit,” Pascal said.

  “That’s because I’ve been around a long time. I know this particular weird shit because I sold Toots the building. I’ve known LaDonna since she was, uhm, maybe fifteen and Toots had her working as a barmaid. That’s why she called me.”

  Pascal tossed the bottom of the port down the hatch, got up and poured a bigger one in a small Old Fashioned glass. Jimmy had hardly touched the scotch.

  “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,” Pascal said. “This is more of a personal favor than a business deal.”

  “Why would you think that? She’s into us for fifty large. I must have been poor too long ’cuz I still think that’s a lotta money.”

  “Right. Pocket change during a slow month.”