by Ben Rehder
After the affair, Donna was racked with guilt. She could hardly think of anything else and it was driving her crazy. In an attempt to keep from obsessing on it, she threw herself back into her work. She found that the busier she was, the less she dwelled on her bad judgment.
One night, just before closing, Donna was putting up a new window display. When she turned to lean a mannequin against the glass she saw a man standing on the sidewalk watching her. She wondered how long he’d been there. He had a fat, stubby cigar in one hand but it wasn’t lit. Donna gave a slight smile which the man acknowledged with a nod before sauntering into the store. She couldn’t say what, but something about the guy put her ill-at-ease.
He was wearing casual clothes and a hounds-tooth check hat like he was Bear Bryant, though he was a smaller man and slightly more narrow between the eyes. When Donna climbed out of the window she found the man sitting in a leather wing chair. To her surprise, he gestured at the chair opposite him and said, “Miss Moore, why doan-cha take a load off?”
She tilted her head slightly. “Do I know you?” Friendly but cautious.
“Well, not yet,” the man said. “That’s why you oughta siddown and pass some time.”
Donna glanced around the showroom and said, “Much as I’d like to, I’ve got stuff to do before I can close up.”
The man pushed back the brim of his hat and said. “Awww, now, don’t be lack ‘at.” He pointed at Donna. “You know what they say, no ham and all hominy. . .” He gestured again for her to sit.
Donna said, “Are you interested in the wing chairs?”
The man’s smile faded. He said, “I’m innersted in you takin’ a seat, Miss Moore. Now c’mon, you’re wastin’ my time.”
This got Donna’s hackles up. “Excuse me? You obviously know who I am, but you haven’t introduced yourself properly.”
The man showed a few yellowed teeth and said, “Well what’ll my mama thank? I tell you what, you just call me Boss, or hell, Shirley Temple, I don’t much care.” He pointed at the chair again. “Now sit yer ass down,” he said. “We got a business proposition to discuss.”
Donna’s stomach churned into a knot at the way he said it. She sat down thinking it might be the best and quickest way to get rid of this guy. “What sort of proposition?” She was beginning to think he was running a protection scheme.
“Real simple,” Boss said. “I represent a, well, what would you call it? A group of businessmen, let’s say, who know a good investment opportunity when they see it.”
Donna shook her head. “I’m not following you. You got friends who want to invest in Moore Furniture?”
The man pointed his stubby cigar in Donna’s direction. “Exactly.”
“I don’t need any investors.”
The man gave an avuncular chuckle and said, “Well, now, Miss Moore, we ain’t too concerned about what you need.” He sat forward in the chair. “Lemme just tell you how it’s gonna be, save us some time. My associates are going to invest in a whole mess of inventory for the store here, lotsa big ticket stuff, you know? Prob’ly some real expensive antiques outta New Orleans. Big old French arm-whars and chase lounges and stuff lack ‘at, you know. Primo stuff. We talkin’ in the neighborhood of fitty thousand dollars. Uh-course you gonna need to insure all this fine furniture. In fact, my associates will insist on that, you know, just to protect their investment in case something should happen.”
Donna gestured around the store. “Well, first of all, as you can see, I don’t have the space for that,” she said. “And secondly–”
“Shhhhhhhh.” The man put a finger to his lips. “All you need to do is getcha some more insurance to cover that fitty thousand of new inventory. We’ll take care of the rest.” He pulled his cigar lighter out of his pocket and continued talking, though Donna didn’t really hear what he said. She realized this was neither a protection scheme nor was it a clumsy attempt to launder money, which had been her second thought. It was plain old garden variety insurance fraud with her as the unwitting go-between.
With this in mind, Donna just sat there imagining the worst. All her hard work? Down the drain. Sacrifices? Wasted. Bright future? Dimmed. She’d be ruined. And she wondered why. How had this come to be visited upon her? Was her husband so threatened by her growing success that he had arranged this? Had he found out about her affair with Clay? Maybe both those birds had come home to roost at the same time. In any event, it seemed to leave Donna with only two choices. Surrender or fight.
Donna said, “I think you should leave. I’m going to call the police.” She started to stand but the man reached over and grabbed her arm, pulling her down violently. He gave her arm a terrible twist and pinned it on the table that was between the two chairs.
“Now you need to learn to co-operate,” the man said. With his free hand he snapped his cigar lighter to life. It shot a blue flame like a NASA rocket. The man leaned into Donna’s face and spoke with gamy breath. He said, “You know how, when you’re fixin’ to whup your kids and you say, ‘This is gonna hurt me a lot more’n it’s gonna hurt you’?” He shook his head. “This is different.”
35.
“I guess I passed out,” Donna said, touching the scar. “When I woke up, the son of a bitch was gone and he’d taken that wing chair with him. All I found was a card with a phone number on it, said to call when the insurance was in place.”
“What’d you do?”
“What could I do? I called my insurance agent and told him to increase my policy limits. Of course he said he couldn’t do it on the phone, said he had to come see the inventory, get it appraised. So I called the number on the card and told ‘em. A couple of days later this big-ass truck pulled up to the loading dock and they unloaded all these expensive antiques. God knows where they came from. My insurance guy came over with an appraiser and they put the value around sixty thousand. Two days later the truck came back, they loaded the antiques and left a bunch of crap behind, old chairs and desks and tables not worth a hundred bucks. Then I was told I oughta go spend the next three day weekend down on the coast. So that’s what I did.”
“And they torched it while you were gone,” Rick said.
She nodded. “What could I do?” She held up her arm. “He said it’d be easy to make my face look just like this.” She put her arm down and said, “About a month later a cassette comes in the mail addressed to me. No note with it. No explanation about what it is, so I listened to it.” Donna shook her head. “Crackin’,” she said with a shake of her head. “First time I’ve heard it called that. Anyway, I figured whoever sent it wasn’t far behind. And sure enough, the next day, this man knocks on my front door not five minutes after my husband left to work.”
“Jack Carter?”
She nodded. “Asked if I’d listened to the tape. I think he could tell from my reaction that I had. He stood there on my front porch and laughed at me. Said he figured I’d gotten the check from the insurance company and he wanted a thousand dollars or he was going to let Mr. Moore hear the tape.”
“Did you pay?”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Donna said. “I know it was stupid but. . .” She shrugged. “The son of a bitch came back a week later for more. That’s when I knew I was screwed. I figured he’d keep coming back as long as I paid him, so I refused. I told him that I’d already told my husband about the affair with Clay and he didn’t have anything on me.”
“And he called your bluff?”
“Yeah.” Donna looked past Rick as if searching for her past out in the parking lot. “Two days later my husband came home from work and put the tape on the stereo real loud while he packed his bags.”
“Ewwww.”
Donna smiled sardonically and shrugged. “It wasn’t much of a marriage anyway. Not by then.”
“He left you?”
“Yeah, made a clean getaway, too. Didn’t cost him a dime. Took the tape with him, said he was gonna play it for his new girlfriend.”
“You thi
nk Clay had anything to do with the fire?”
“I don’t know why he would,” Donna said. “I was a good account, you know?”
“Yeah, but Clay’s a short-term thinker,” Rick said. “Maybe he got a cut of the insurance proceeds.”
“You got a reason to think he was involved?”
“Just the timing, I guess. The fact that the guy with the cigar lighter didn’t show up until after Clay had broken things off with you.” Upon hearing himself say the words, Rick realized how thin his reasoning was.
“Yeah, well, all I know is, the day after I got the check from the insurance company, I called the number on that card. The guy had me meet him at the bank and get him a cashier’s check for fifty thousand dollars. Then he thanked me for doing business with ‘em and told me not to worry, said I’d never see him again. And I haven’t.”
Rick thought about that for a moment then said, “They probably don’t want any patterns in who’s collecting insurance money on their scams.”
“They?” Donna gave him a look. “They who?”
Rick shrugged. “They who organize crimes like insurance fraud involving unwitting third parties.”
It took her a second but then, in a surprised voice, Donna said, “You mean organized like the Mafia?”
“Well, I haven’t looked in the phone book,” Rick said. “But I’d bet there ain’t no Gambinos in Deckern County. You know anything about the Dixie Mafia?”
“Oh, I know people talk about it like it’s real,” Donna said. “But I don’t think it’s like The Godfather or anything as grand as all that. I think it’s usually just the local powers-that-be, you know? Politicians, cops, prominent businessmen, people like that. They all know each other, go to deer camp together, belong to the same clubs and churches and so forth.”
Rick nodded. “What about the girl named Tammy that Clay talks about on the tape? Do you know who she is?”
Donna looked genuinely confused by the question. She shook her head. “What Tammy? There’s no Tammy on the tape I got. It’s just Clay braggin’ about puttin’ the ‘Takin’ Inventory’ sign in the window and goin’ to the back where the mattresses were and crackin’ back there, as he so romantically puts it.”
“How long is the tape you got?”
“I don’t know, about thirty seconds, I guess. Like a snippet from a longer conversation.”
“Yeah, he sent you an edited version,” Rick said. “The original’s six or seven minutes. And it mentions quite a few other names.”
“Well, I mean I know a girl named Tammy but who doesn’t?”
Rick wondered why Captain Jack didn’t send the whole tape. He thought of a couple of reasons. First of all it kept the blackmail victim focused on his or her problem. And second, it would keep the blackmail victims from knowing about one another and possibly joining forces and conspiring against him. Rick didn’t see any point in asking if Donna knew Lisa Ramey, and he’d only asked about Tammy in hopes of getting a last name. But given what Clay said on the last part of the tape, he knew the next two names would ring a bell. “What about Holly Creel and Bernie Dribbling?”
Donna blanched. “Oh my God.” She put a hand over her mouth. “What happened?” She grabbed Rick’s arm and said, “Does he say what happened to Holly?”
Her reaction surprised Rick. He was expecting a bit of shame, maybe, or regret, but not this. “Well, he talks about the loan and the uhhh, the collateral,” Rick said. “But from what’s on the tape, it sounds like whatever happened to Holly is still going on.”
“No.” Donna shook her head. “She’s missing. That’s who I thought you were talking about when you came in here talking about a missing person. I haven’t talked to Holly in over a month,” Donna said. “I think she’s dead.”
36.
Donna didn’t have any evidence that her friend Holly had been killed, only a bad feeling in her stomach. “She gambled,” Donna said. “A lot. After she maxed out her credit cards, she borrowed some money from a guy she shouldn’t have. When he started to threaten her, she came to me. Of course I didn’t have anything to lend, but, anyway, that’s why she needed the money. So I said something to Clay and he put her in touch with Bernie Dribbling.” She shook her head. “I talked to Holly after the first time she met him at the hotel and she said it wasn’t that bad. But after that she said things started getting really weird. A couple of weeks later she stopped returning my calls,” Donna said. “At first I figured it was because she was ashamed about it or maybe she was mad and blamed me for getting her into it but then I called her job and they said she didn’t work there anymore. So I went by her apartment but she was never there, day or night. That’s when I started to get worried.”
“She paid back the first guy?”
“I think so. That’s what she used Dribbling’s money for.”
“Did you say anything to Clay about her disappearing?”
“Hell no,” Donna said. “I figured if something bad had happened to Holly, he probably knew about it and if I brought it up, I don’t know, same thing could happen to me. Besides, after hearing that tape, I don’t plan to talk to that son of a bitch again except to testify in court about his lack of character or to go cuss him at his funeral.” She wrote down Holly’s address and gave it to Rick. She asked him to let her know if he found out what had happened to her.
After he left McRae Tool and Equipment Rental, Rick drove by Holly’s apartment complex to see what he could. There was an eviction notice stuck on her door. The curtains were drawn. He went to the manager’s office. The guy there just said that after three years of paying her rent on time, she’d stopped. After the required amount of time passed, he submitted the necessary paperwork and got the eviction notice. The guy started to complain about having to put Holly’s stuff in storage but Rick cut him off. He had to get back to work.
37.
Back at the station Rick found a stack of production sheets warming his IN box. There were a few national spots that needed to be localized. They came with pre-produced jingles, some on CD, others still came to the small-market stations on reel-to-reel tapes. The instructions from sales told Rick to use the thirty second donuts on most of them, which meant he just read fifteen seconds of copy over the music bed in the middle of the commercial.
Next came Rick’s favorite type of small-market radio spot. The supermarket ad, a staple of radio advertising since the 1950's. Such spots had been rendered antiquated jokes by the 1970's. Their continued use in the twenty-first century proved only that there was still one being born every minute.
“This week only, Florida pink grapefruit four-for-a-dollar,” Rick said as if Florida was a shade of pink and his life depended on it. “Shasta sodas, twelve-ounce returnable bottles, regular or diet, just two-ninety-nine. Russet potatoes, five pound sack, just three forty-nine.” He wondered if there was someone out there in the piney woods of south central Mississippi, listening to their rock and roll radio station who would hear this and think, Russet potatoes, huh? Hell, I might just have to get up from here and run down to the store and get me summa them. But who wouldn’t budge if it was long whites. “Iceberg lettuce,” Rick said. “Cello-wrapped, ninety-nine cents a head. Extra lean ground beef in the five pound chub, just six dollars. . .” The chub, Rick’s all-time favorite unit of meat measurement. The spot went on and on, ticking off so many products and prices and store times and phone numbers and sale dates and store addresses that you’d have to be a court reporter to get half of it.
Rick was dubbing one of the spots for the AM when he noticed the yellow light on the wall flashing. He picked up the phone and said, “Production.”
“Hey.” It was Traci calling from her desk in the front.
“Hey,” Rick said. “Let me ask you a question. What’s a chub?”
Traci paused. “A what?”
“Never mind,” Rick said. “What’s up?”
“I just called to say, if you don’t let me hear the tape soon, I’m just gonna have to
ask Clay if he remembers what he said in that conversation.”
“Wait until you hear what Donna Moore had to say.”
“You talked to her?”
“Yeah,” Rick said, cradling the phone in the crook of his neck. “The plot thickens. But I can’t go into it now.”
“Sure you can. You have to. You can’t tease me like that and not give details.”
“No, there’s too much to tell and I’ve got a dozen spots to cut before I can get some dinner.”
“You mean supper,” Traci said. “Dinner is lunch.”
“Whatever. You can join me if you’d like but I’m going to Kitty’s.”
“Can’t, I’ve got exercise class. How about tomorrow night?”
“I’m doing that Booster Club party for Stubblefield. You wanna be my assistant?”
“Love to, but I’m. . .” She paused before saying, “. . . baby sitting for my sister. How about after the dance?”
“Goin’ home, goin’ to bed.”
“Oh, don’t be such an old fart,” Traci said. “I’m coming over after the dance. And if you’re in bed. . . I’ll just deal with it.”
38.
Rick was standing in front of the music library thinking about Traci’s last comment. Would she wake him up and make him play the tape or would she slip under the sheets and get her information that way? Assuming she meant the latter, Rick wondered if should let her. He knew that he would let her, but he wondered if he should. He’d gotten involved with co-workers before and the end was always some degree of ugly. He figured the easiest way to avoid the problem was not to go to bed before she showed up. But how much fun was that?
He turned his attention back to the task at hand and began to pull music for the Booster Club party. Based on Clay’s description of the crowd he was gathering some seventies pop-rock-dance stuff. He was reading the song list from an Average White Band album when Autumn breezed into the room and posed. She was wearing a flowery headband, a white cotton blouse with billowy sleeves, hip-hugger bell bottoms, and a peace medallion. She said, “Am I a groovy, far-out chick or what?”