I’m actually happy for the Kellers. As I keep insisting to my friends and family, I never wanted to destroy them, I just wanted them to start being honest with the public and stop selling teddy bears stuffed with cancer. I got my wish, too. Mr. Cartwright at the Public Health Department announces that Keller’s Department Store has discontinued all foreign imports from unregistered factories. I keep track of his findings online. A month later he says no further health infractions have been found at Keller’s Department Store and no citations have been issued. Keller’s has been given a clean bill of health. Six months later Mr. Cartwright is happy to report that Keller’s status has not changed, but he continues to refuse all Keller dinner invitations.
Another unexpected turn of events occurs.
I’m thrown in jail.
Christopher’s with me when it happens. As the squad car pulls away he shouts he’ll come and get me . . . but he has no idea where they’re taking me. Detective Wojek, the dick cop who picks me up, is clearly being paid by the Kellers to harass me, and he takes his sweet time booking me on purpose. Nobody can find you if you’re not in the system. He leaves me in a locked interrogation room for what seems like eight hours but is probably more like forty-five minutes. I’m trying to keep calm but I feel a panic attack coming on. It’s like a geyser of cold water that keeps trying to bubble up. Then all of a sudden I hear a familiar voice in the hallway. “Well, you damn well better hope she is! Do you hear me?”
I sit up, my heart lurching wildly. Could it be her?
“See this?” she shouts. “This is the mayor’s home phone number. Do you have it on your cell phone? Want me to call it? I will wake R. T. Rybak up right now and tell him that you’re the motherfucker who told me to! Now open this fucking door before I get the governor to come down here and fire you himself!” The interrogation room’s metal door bursts open and the dick cop comes in, his head hung low. Behind him a coiffed blonde sails in, draped in silks and satins, cuffed with sparkle-chunk diamonds. It’s Addi. I feel such a rush of relief when I see her that I burst into big blubbery tears. “How did you find me?”
“Christopher called. He said you were arrested because you threw a . . . gay wedding at Keller’s?”
“No, the wedding was actually legal. They dragged me in on some trumped-up loitering charge.”
“I’m going to pretend that you invited me to your epic event–slash–scandal of the season and blame my absence on the fact I was in Paris.”
“Were you?”
“Of course. How else was I going to get over our fight? I bought shit! Anyway, Christopher called every precinct in town trying to find you, and when nobody had you in the system he panicked and called me. I found you in like . . . four minutes? Three?”
“Thank God.” I smile, wiping back a tear.
The dick cop pokes his head in and Addi glares at him. “What?” she says.
“Um . . . want coffee?” he asks hopefully.
“Seriously? I don’t drink the brown anus water that you call coffee! Why don’t you do something useful and tell me when we can leave.”
“Um . . . that. Right. It’s a little tricky, I have to actually book her before she can go.”
“No!” Addi smacks her hand on the table.
“I’ll do it as fast as I can.”
“You can’t be serious. You’re going to book her? All right.” She narrows her eyes. I’ve seen that look. You do not want to be on the delivery end of that look. “You know what? Now I’m actually pissed. I was going to let this whole thing blow over, call it a misunderstanding, but if you think I’m going to let you book my friend on some bogus charge just so you’re not in hot water with the chief for unjustified harassment of a beautiful high-tax-bracket citizen . . . well then, prepare to meet the Fist!”
“Um . . . okay,” he says, and shuts the door.
Addi whips out her cell phone and punches #3 on the speed dial. She starts barking to someone in German. “Henckles, Luststerben and Grump?” I ask her.
“You know it, sister. Henckles, Luststerben and Grump!”
Twenty minutes later, three large women in matching charcoal-gray suits and black orthopedic shoes show up. They smell vaguely of cabbage and have severe faces like knuckles or gargoyles with dead shark eyes. They wear no makeup, and their short oily hair is bobby-pinned viciously into place. Their suits look as stiff, their arms like stuffed German sausages. They’re aggressively ugly. Without their saying a word, it’s clear they enjoy making people uncomfortable. Detective Wojek openly perspires when he sees them.
The smallest woman is the only one who speaks. “Detective Wojek, I’m Ursula Henckles. These are my associates, Elke Luststerben and Astrid Grump.” Ursula speaks in a strange hoarse whisper, which sends chills down your spine and invisible spiders running into your ear. “We are attorneys from the law offices of Henckles, Luststerben and Grump. The woman you are currently illegally detaining is our client. You have two options at this point. You may release her and we will be done here . . . or you may pursue whatever avenue you’re quite mistakenly on and we will become entangled in a most pointed way. Since you’ve held our client illegally, we will be pressing charges against you, Detective Wojek. You—not the department—and if you think the chief will be eager to spend his precious legal defense funds on a rookie who’s actually lost his squad car while on duty and who has two strikes against him already, not to mention a history of Vicodin abuse . . . think again. Think hard, Detective Wojek. This decision will determine how you spend the next year of your life. With us . . . or without us. Any questions?” Detective Wojek blinks. “Very good. You have seven minutes to make your decision. At that time we will proceed with our prescribed course of action. Good day.”
She spins on her heel and marches out. The other women follow.
I’m not sure . . . but I think I peed my pants.
Four minutes and thirty-two seconds later, I’m free. Outside in the delicious fresh air. We all pile into the oily black Henckles, Luststerben & Grump minivan and I start crying again, thanking them for saving me. Addi says if I don’t shut up she’ll slap me. Ursula urges me to leave town as soon as possible. “The Kellers hired a dumb cop that time,” she tells me. “Next time might be different. Your best strategy is to make sure there is no next time. Understand? I don’t enjoy police stations. I’d rather not fetch you from one again.”
“Do what the Fist says.” Addi nods. “Let’s hop on a plane somewhere.”
Ursula snorts. “Have I taught you nothing? They’ll be looking for you too, Addi. They’ll track your credit cards, your plane tickets, your passport stamps. The Kellers have nothing to gain by leaving Jennifer alone—and everything to lose.”
They won’t stop harassing me. They’ll continue to try to arrest me, dirty up my record, besmirch my character, toss me in jail for anything, not caring if the charges stick. They’ll just want to build up a case that I’m an unsavory character whom they tried to help and who turned around and betrayed them.
Ursula says I should leave town and not use credit cards. They’ll have someone watching my bank accounts. “Do you have someone you can stay with?” she asks. “Not your family or friends. A place they can’t find you, a person they don’t know about.”
Hmmm. I just might.
I call Nick from a pay phone. I tell him I’m looking for a temporary hideout, a sanctuary for wayward girls, and he says, “Look no further!” He invites me and Ace to come stay with him on the SS Nevertheless. On one condition: I have to promise to sleep in my own cabin and to keep my hands to myself and to not sexually harass him unless he asks me too. I tell him I don’t think that will be a problem. “Maybe not for you,” he says. “But I’m down here on my own . . . a devastatingly handsome man, who’s allowing a wanton female to come into his home.”
“Wayward,” I say, correcting him.
“Wanton, wayward, whatever,” he says. “You’re a woman who’s gone wild.”
“True. Which is wh
y I can’t promise you anything. I’m not responsible for my actions.”
“Good enough for me!” he says. “Come on down.”
That night, I move into my cabin. There’s a sign on my door that says WANTON FEMALES ONLY. A greyhound sleeps on my bed. “Hey, Toggle girl!” I say, kissing her forehead. “She looks so much better!” When Nick first took her to the vet, we found out she had severe meningitis, and they didn’t know if she’d pull through. The disease is often fatal and it’s expensive to treat, which is why her previous owners had “opted out” and given poor Toggle to the pound for “immediate extermination.” Luckily, of course, we found her and Nick took excellent care of her. Toggle pulled through.
Nick makes us dinner—baked potatoes and grilled pork chops on greasy paper plates—which we carry outside into the cricketing, croaking soft summer night. We sit on deck and eat our dinner, watching the sky darken overhead and the slowly twisting ribbon of chocolate-colored Mississippi slip past our feet. Ace, Tandy, and Toggle are on hand, all snoring away with full rounded bellies. They ate pork chops too.
Another sign that God might not be drunk at the wheel after all is that the good old boys from the Christian Lambs of God go down pretty hard and take large chunks of their churches with them. Cool Coy Jones gets a ten-year sentence and the IRS fleeces the coffers of Atlanta First Baptist. The megachurch is sold to developers and turned into a VA hospital. Pastor Joe gets five years at Joliet, where he plans to start his own prison ministry, and Deacon Davis flees the country. I imagine he’s mining for diamonds in Bembezi, Zimbabwe.
Nick suggests we pull up anchor and throw off the lines. Take the SS Nevertheless on a trip downriver. That’s when I get the idea. If we’re going to travel . . . why not work on a travel assignment at the same time? I call Susan at Frontier Travel. The stories she offers us to cover are small and I’ll make shit for money, but like Susan says . . . Today’s column about pie festivals is tomorrow’s exposé on sex trafficking. Admittedly with a few stories in between. I tell her it’s all right, give me the little stories.
I’m in.
Nick is in too; he takes the photographs for my articles. We travel all over together working on them. Our itinerary is plotted by where the paying assignments send us and where we want to go. I’ll be honest, we’re not quite National Geographic material yet. Technically, we’ve only left the United States once. We drove up to Canada to write an article in Thunder Bay called “Do’s and Don’ts for White People Attending a Powwow.”
Do negotiate prices on native art and craftwork.
Don’t ask if anything costs “big wampum.”
Next we sail the SS Nevertheless down the Mississippi to Saint Louis for the big Saint Louis Pirate Festival. Which is . . . weird. I’ve never seen so many yoga moms with peg legs or a gas station with a sign that says THANK YOU FOR NOT TALKING LIKE A PIRATE. Next we go to New Orleans for an article about the oddest events at Mardi Gras, which are the “sexiest steak” contest, a voodoo curse-a-thon, and the ever-controversial fat baby parade.
We mostly stick to the Mississippi and to destinations we can reach by water, because we love living on the SS Nevertheless. It comfortably houses us, plus all the dogs and Nick’s hearse, which we drive around upon reaching our destinations. It went over very big at Mardi Gras. Not so much at the powwow.
Our latest destination is the most exotic so far, though it’s still part of the United States: Saint John in the Caribbean. I’m back. This time I’m not staying at any awful all-inclusive Christian resort where the staff kills dogs. This time I’m there with my dogs and living in my lovely houseboat-barge with a person I love. Nick and I sail the barge out across the ocean and we’re not even docked at port for a whole day when I sit up in bed, having just finished an afternoon romp with Nick and some DNA-rearranging sex. I gather the sheets around my naked body while the far less modest Nick gets up buck-naked and heads for the galley to make us an espresso—his standard after-sex drink, so he can gear up for more sex.
The man is a titan.
The first time we made love he went into his office and set one of the clocks to the exact time we started making love. “Seriously?” I arch an eyebrow at him.
“Hey, I mark all the momentous occasions in my life this way. Sorry, chief.” He chuckles. “But you count as momentous.”
My satellite phone rings one morning and I wrestle it out of the sheets. It’s Ursula Henckles, from the esteemed law firm of Henckles, Luststerben & Grump. She took my divorce case on right before I left town. I haven’t heard from her in months; the judge and lawyers have all been locked in tedious stalemates. It’s all been quite boring, but her voice is a pleasant surprise.
“Miss Johnson,” she says. “There’s been significant action on your case lately. I’ll tell you now that we have to get through an oddity, an unpleasantness, and an indecency before we get to the fat sugar cube.”
“Pardon me?”
“It’ll be a shitstorm for a while,” she says, “but you’ll come out smiling. Okay?”
I say okay, mostly because I have no idea what she’s talking about.
The Oddity
Ursula says when I filed for divorce, all my accounts, both personal and joint, were immediately frozen. So were Brad’s. Whatever assets we had were frozen wherever they happened to be. All our money waits in big blocks of ice until some judge makes a verdict. That’s the bad news. The good news is that all this endless waiting around with nobody being able to move any money allowed her financial forensics team to really dig in and hunt for things.
“And when we hunt for things, Miss Johnson, we find them.”
She says she found something very unusual in my account. Then she asks if I knew that Brad had been transferring stock into my name. I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“Are you sure?” she says. “I can defend you if you tell me.”
“What stock?” I say. “Seriously? How?”
Apparently, her crackerjack financial forensics team uncovered Brad’s illegal activity. He’d been hiding shares in my name almost the entire time we were married. He hid them under my duplicate social security number. The one I never use . . . the one I gave Emily. He wasn’t alone; he had quite a few people helping him, including Todd and Mother Keller.
When I ask her why Brad or his mother would hide their own stock, she reminds me of the bylaws, which say no single family member is allowed to have controlling interest in the company. Nobody can hoard stocks in order to gain power. Brad was probably stashing away stocks to be used at a later date, like after he was president and had nominated enough new board members to change the bylaws. Once he did that, he could march out all his little hidden shares and take control of the company completely.
“Well, that explains Brad,” I say. “But why would Mother Keller hide stocks?”
“Good question. We believe there were plans for an impending hostile takeover.”
“Brad’s?”
“I don’t think so, and that brings us to . . . the unpleasantness.”
“Terrific.”
The Unpleasantness
“So,” she says. “Did you know your refrigerator was spying on you?”
“No . . . but I always thought the coffeemaker was stealing money.”
She’s serious.
Ursula says our Ice Empress 3000 routinely videotaped us and recorded thousands of our conversations. It was being activated by remote satellite and transmitted everything it recorded to an unknown location.
I ask her, “Who would do such a thing?”
“The people who gave it to you, of course.”
The Japanese investment group. The ones who’d come to dinner. They’d been planning a hostile takeover and had been using the Ice Empress to spy on us for the past year. That’s why they sent us a ten-thousand-dollar refrigerator. To spy on us. It was like a Trojan horse with a cheese-aging drawer. Ursula tells me that according to her sources, the Japanese investors were never planning
on doing actual business with Brad, except by way of a hostile takeover. They undoubtedly came to dinner for reconnaissance purposes only—to make sure their spy fridge was working, to plant more listening devices, and to snoop around for sensitive documents.
“So that’s why Ace was acting so weird! He kept barking, he wouldn’t leave the top of the stairs. Someone must’ve been trying to snoop around up there and he stopped them! Well, bless your little three-legged butt, Ace!” Ace starts barking and I tousle his ears. “Man, what a dog! And people say I rescued him.”
“I wonder who else rescued you that night.”
“I don’t know, but I nearly killed those men. I almost poisoned them with bad fish and then our chandelier came within inches of crushing them. I ran them out of the house in under half an hour. Plus there was no furniture on the first floor.”
“No? Why not?”
“Because my mother-in-law was hell-bent on ruining the dinner. She deliberately screwed up the catering and then had a steam-cleaning service pick up all my furniture hours before the party. I had no couches, no chairs, no dining room table . . .”
“Brilliant. Nowhere to put a listening device.”
“Pardon?”
“No furniture, no listening devices—and where was all the paperwork?”
“Paperwork? What paperwork?”
“Your office, filing cabinets. Financial papers. Where were they?”
“Well, that was all in Brad’s office, but—”
“It was stripped clean too.”
“Um . . . yes.”
“You see, I think your mother-in-law somehow knew about the Japanese takeover. That’s why she was hiding stocks and that’s why she destroyed your dinner.”
“No, I’m pretty sure she just wanted to make me look stupid. It’s her hobby.”
“If she just wanted to ruin dinner, why clear out Brad’s office? Why remove paperwork? You see, I think her goal was to ruin not your plans . . . but theirs.”
“Um . . . No. You’d need to know her. She was definitely trying to ruin my dinner.”
“Didn’t you say she always wanted to keep Keller’s Department Store in the family?”
Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Married Page 28