I leaped forward to make the catch, but missed by a country mile. The keys landed in the oyster-shell lot, sending up a puff of sand.
He allowed himself a small smirk of satisfaction at seeing me bend down to pick them up.
“I’m going over to the marina,” Sorrentino said. “Be back this evening. The door to unit seven is warped. You gotta really yank on it. I haven’t gotten to the roof on nine and ten yet, so there’s probably still some water on the floor in there. Lock up when you leave, okay?”
“Sure thing,” I said through gritted teeth. I wanted to pick up something heavy and chunk it at him, but there wasn’t anything handy to throw, and anyway, I hated to give him the satisfaction of seeing my klutziness a second time.
He walked toward the battered station wagon, but paused as he opened the door. “So you really haven’t made a deal yet to sell the place?”
This was getting old. “No,” I said. “Not yet.”
He whistled then, and a tiny white ball of fur came hurtling through the open door of the manager’s unit. It was a dog, some kind of terrier, but since I’m not an authority on dogs, I couldn’t be certain of the breed.
“Come on, Jeeves,” Harry called, stepping away from the driver’s-side door to allow the dog to jump into the front seat. He was smiling for the first time since I’d met him. “Let’s go for a boat ride.”
“Jeeves?” I turned to Weezie with a raised eyebrow. Sorrentino caught the look, and his smile was gone.
“I happen to like Wodehouse,” he said. “You got a problem with that?”
I had no idea who Wodehouse was, but I wasn’t about to admit that to Sorrentino. “I didn’t know you had a dog living here.”
“Well, now you do,” he said. And he got into the car, slammed the door, and drove off in a cloud of oyster dust.
Weezie grinned. “He seems nice.”
My hands were covered in dust. I wiped them on the seat of my pants and headed toward the manager’s unit. “He’s history,” I said. “Just as soon as I sell this place.”
16
Weezie
BeBe turned the key in the lock and leaned against the door. Nothing. “I have a bad feeling about this,” she said, grimacing.
“Let me try,” I said, shoving her aside ever so gently. I turned the key and slammed my hip—much more substantial than hers—against the door. A moment later I was inside—sprawled out on the floor.
“Eeeewww,” BeBe said, sticking her head inside the door. “You’re going to have to burn those jeans.”
I stood up and wiped my hands on the seat of my jeans, which were, admittedly, now caked in some kind of unspecified crud, and took a look around.
The room was small, maybe fourteen by sixteen feet. The walls were pine paneled and crusted in sixty-year-old grime. Two big picture windows should have looked out on sand dunes, but they too were coated with dust and dirt. A naked lightbulb swung from a fraying cord in the middle of the ceiling, and underfoot was the gnarliest avocado shag carpet I’d ever seen.
“Come on,” BeBe said, grabbing my hand and pulling me toward the door. “We’re out of here. The only thing that’s gonna help this place is a can of kerosene and a big box of matches.”
“Hang on,” I said, yanking her back inside. “Don’t be such a pessimist. It’s not that bad.”
The far end of the room had a kitchenette, with a green Formica countertop over built-in metal cabinets, an ancient under-the-counter refrigerator, a tiny stainless-steel sink, even a two-burner stove. An abbreviated countertop had two old faux-bamboo bar stools pulled up to it, their green vinyl seats cracked and patched with duct tape.
“It’s an efficiency,” I said, turning the handle of the sink faucet. A groaning noise came forth from the wall, and dark brown water trickled into the sink. “Plumbing works,” I announced.
“Yippee,” BeBe muttered, nevertheless coming over to take a look. “We’ll just check you right into Motel Hell.”
I ignored her, flipping the dial on the stove top. Within minutes, the burner glowed orange, and an incredible stink filled the room.
“Jeezo-Pete,” BeBe said, gasping for air. “Turn it off before the place explodes.”
I’d already turned it off, and was trying to crank open the tiny jalousie window in the kitchen area.
“This is great,” I said, fanning in fresh air. “The plumbing works, and the stove works. That means you won’t have to look for a replacement. I doubt anybody makes this small a unit anymore. Look at how cute this thing is. All this old chrome and stuff. It looks like something Donna Reed might have cooked on.”
“If Donna Reed lived in a crack house,” BeBe said, shaking her head in disgust. “Honestly, Weezie, look at this place. Not even you can think it’s worth saving.”
“This must be the bathroom,” I said, turning toward the doorway on the long wall of the kitchen area.
BeBe clasped her hands over her eyes. Always the drama queen. “I can’t look,” she said. “You know I have a weak stomach.”
I switched over to mouth breathing. You never know, you know. The bathroom door swung open on creaky hinges. Rusty water dribbled into a filthy pink porcelain sink. A naked hole in the pink and turquoise tiled floor showed the spot where the commode had once been. The pink bathtub showed multiple rust rings. There was a window above the tub, but it had been boarded over. The walls were painted a garish hot pink, with turquoise dolphin decals pasted around the ceiling line.
I took a deep breath. “Okay. It has potential. Definite potential.”
BeBe peeked from between her fingers. “Sick.” She groaned, backing away.
I closed the bathroom door behind me and caught up with her outside as she locked up.
“There is no way,” she said, shaking her head as she tried to extricate the key from the lock. “No way in hell this place could ever be made livable. I’m sorry, Weezie, but you saw for yourself. If nothing else, it’s a health hazard.”
“It’s not,” I insisted, following her across the parking lot. “Let’s take a look at the other units.”
“No,” she said, marching toward my truck. “I’ve seen enough. As soon as your uncle gets this Sandcastle thing straightened out, I’m putting the place on the market.”
I grabbed her arm and spun her around to face me. “It’s not that bad,” I insisted. “It’s dirty, that’s all. Run down. But believe me, this place could be a gold mine.”
“You’re nuts,” she said flatly. “I know you know a lot about antiques and stuff like that, but, Weezie, I happen to know a little bit about real estate. And the land under this motel is worth far more than I can ever make by running a motel.”
“Nuh-uh,” I told her. “Look. You know I just got back from a buying trip down in Florida. And there’s nothing like this left down there. It’s all high-rise hotels and condo towers, all up and down the beaches. Except for one place. One of my antiques dealer friends took me to see it. It’s down in Sarasota. Called The High Tide. It’s little dinky concrete-block cottages, just like these. And it’s not even on the beach. It’s across the street. But a couple of gay guys bought it four years ago and fixed it up. Babe, I wish you could see the place. Each of the units is painted a different pastel color—from the street it looks like a box of dinner mints. The units are arranged in kind of a horseshoe shape, around a little swimming pool, and they’ve turned the old coffee shop into an espresso bar. It’s the hottest place on the beach. Linda, my dealer friend, says they have an eighteen-month waiting list for the units—summer and winter. It’s been in Southern Living, and they shoot television commercials there all the time.”
“That’s Florida,” Bebe pointed out. “Hip. Trendy. This is Tybee. Tacky. Worn-out. The only thing anybody would ever shoot here is one of the roaches.”
“You don’t even know Tybee,” I protested. “It’s changed. There’s stuff happening out here. And the Breeze Inn is unique. There’s no other place like it left.”
Bebe le
aned up against the bed of my pickup truck and crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re not listening, Weezie. I can’t do it. I just can’t. Not even if I wanted to. I am dead broke. I don’t have any money to fix up this place. The only way out of the mess I’m in is if I sell it.” She pushed a strand of blond hair off her forehead and smiled grimly. “And once I’ve sold it, I’m going after Roy Eugene Moseley.”
“Who?” I opened the door of the truck and got in.
“Roy Eugene Moseley,” she said, hopping up onto the passenger’s seat. “Of course, he told me his name was Ryan Edward Millbanks III. Can you believe I fell for that?”
“Reddy,” I said.
“Reddy,” she agreed. “I’m going to hunt him down like a dog. And I’m going to get my money back. And my house. And my granny’s pearls. And the painting of my aunt, and every other damn thing he stole from me.”
“Oh-kay,” I said slowly, starting the truck. “Can we go get a drink first, before we start hunting him down? And maybe a sandwich? I didn’t have lunch.”
She turned toward me with a sad little smile. “Can’t.”
“I’m buying,” I assured her.
Fifteen minutes later we were seated at the bar at the North Beach Grille. The place was nearly deserted, and the guy at the bar was too busy watching a golf tournament on the wall-mounted television to pay us much attention. I ordered for both of us, crab-cake sandwiches and a couple of iced teas.
BeBe nibbled warily at her sandwich. “Not bad.”
“It’s great, and you know it,” I said, taking a forkful of coleslaw. “What’s up with you and Tybee? What have you got against it?”
“Nothing,” she said, wiping her fingers on her paper napkin. “I’ve got nothing against Tybee. I just don’t happen to think it’s as swell as you do. Is that a sin? You know me. I’m a downtown girl.”
“Living in a white-bread world,” I agreed.
Her cell phone rang then, and she snapped it open.
“Hey, James,” she said. “What did you find out?”
She listened intently. “You’re kidding. Steve Arrendale? As in the Steve Arrendale who lives next door to me? You’re absolutely sure it’s the same guy? Unbelievable. I’ll kill him. I really will. Well, no, not literally, but he’s going to be sorry he messed with me.”
She listened for a while, swore, peppered my uncle with questions, and then, finally, snapped the phone shut. The bartender gave her an annoyed look, which she pretended not to notice.
I ate my sandwich and waited for her to fill me in. She took a long sip of tea and finally pushed her plate away, her lunch barely touched.
“Sandcastle Realty,” BeBe said, “is Steve Arrendale.”
“Your neighbor,” I said helpfully.
“Ex-neighbor. I no longer own a house on West Jones.”
“This is the same guy who bought your Maybelle Johns painting?”
“Yankee scum,” she said, nodding. “Devious, social-climbing, name-dropping Yankee scum. It turns out that the painting isn’t the only thing Reddy sold him.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“It’s complicated. According to your uncle James, this was just another of Reddy’s rip-off schemes. He bought the Breeze Inn, at a fire-sale price, using my money. Then, before the ink was even dry on the sales contract from the Breeze Inn, he turned around and sold a three-month option on the property to Steve Arrendale for three hundred thousand against a three-million dollar purchase price.”
“Why an option?” I asked. “Why not just sell it outright?”
“James doesn’t really know,” BeBe said, shrugging. “He thinks maybe Reddy planned to sell options to more than one person, but just didn’t get around to it before he skipped town with my money.”
“Is that legal?” I wanted to know.
“Hopefully, not,” BeBe said. “James is going to file an injunction against Arrendale and Sandcastle Realty in superior court. He’ll claim fraud, which is what it is, and ask that Arrendale be enjoined from selling units in his so-called town-home community.”
“Which is good, right?”
“James hopes to get a temporary restraining order,” BeBe said. “But it’s just that, temporary. He says if the judge grants it, which he probably will, it’ll keep Arrendale from selling the units. But James says it also means, for the time being, that I can’t sell the Breeze Inn either. Not until the whole thing is ironed out in court.”
I had to duck my head to keep her from seeing my smile.
“Shit,” BeBe said. I looked up quickly. Her eyes were filling with tears.
“Shit,” she said again, dabbing at her eyes with her paper napkin. “I can’t believe this is happening to me.”
I reached over to the dispenser and grabbed a thick wad of napkins, which I handed to her.
“I hate this,” she said fiercely, swiveling around on the bar stool so that her back was to the bartender, who’d suddenly found our conversation entirely too fascinating. “I can’t go back to my grandparents’, Weezie. I can’t face them.”
“Why not?” I asked. “They don’t care if you’re broke. They love you, BeBe. They’re your family. And they need you too.”
“You don’t understand,” she whispered. “It’s not just my money that’s gone. It’s theirs too. Reddy took it. He took all of it.”
“How?” Lorena and Spencer Loudermilk were old-time, old-money Savannah. They were as close as it came to local aristocracy. They had once owned the ritziest furniture store in town. It had been closed for at least twenty years, but I was sure that their family fortune was intact. BeBe’s grandfather might have driven a beat-up old hoopdie of a car, but I knew for a fact that he was a member of the Oglethorpe Club, and that most of the exquisite furniture and paintings in BeBe’s West Jones Street house had been on loan to her from her grandparents since their move into an assisted-living cottage.
BeBe bit her lip. “Stupid. I was so goddamned stupid. You know I took care of their finances, right?”
I nodded.
“Granddaddy’s not senile. Not at all. He’s just gotten so forgetful. And it upsets him when he finds out he forgot to pay a bill or something. He’s still so old-fashioned. He can’t stand the idea that somebody would think he was a deadbeat. So he had my name put on all their accounts. My brothers couldn’t be bothered with that kind of thing. And I was happy to be able to do such a little thing for them. And now…”
She sobbed and buried her head in her hands. The bartender turned away, embarrassed by such a naked display of emotion. I reached over and stroked BeBe’s arm, at a loss for words.
She sat up finally and straightened her shoulders. “It’s my own fault. After Granddaddy bought that stupid new Lincoln, I tried to get the dealership to take it back. Only they wouldn’t. And Grandmama was in the hospital, and she was so sick, and I don’t know, it was like everything was so overwhelming. And Reddy was right there. He said he’d take care of things, and he did. He made them give us back the old Buick, and they refunded the price of the Lincoln. And he offered to deal with my rental properties, and I let him. He said he wanted to take care of me. You know?”
We exchanged sad, knowing smiles.
“Nobody ever did that for me before,” BeBe said. “I always took care of myself. Even when I was a little girl, Mama said that even though I was the youngest, I was the only one she could trust to do things the way they ought to be done.”
“You’re the strongest woman I know,” I offered. “And the smartest.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head vehemently. “I’m a fraud. Look at me. Three marriages. Twice to the same guy! I never learn. And now it’s too late. Reddy didn’t miss a trick. After that thing with the car, he knew where I kept my grandparents’ bank book. He emptied out their money-market account. Every last dime.”
“Oh, Bebe,” I said, blinking back tears of my own. “I didn’t know.”
She blew her nose on the wadded-up paper napkins. “The
y don’t know either. I can’t bear to tell them. I can’t bear to look them in the face. They trusted me. And look what happened.”
“What’ll you do?” I asked.
She shrugged. “They’re all right for the short term. They own the cottage, outright, and they actually have meals paid for in the center’s dining room, although Granddaddy insists all their food tastes like boiled brussels sprouts. They have hospitalization, so I’m not too worried about the medical bills. It’s the other things. Walking-around money. I used to dole it out to them. But now I just don’t have it. They don’t have it.”
“What about your brothers? Can’t they help out?”
“They don’t know. And I intend to keep it that way. They’d never let me live it down if they knew. And anyway, I’m not so sure any of them are in a position to help out, financially.”
“So now what?”
“I find a buyer for the Breeze Inn,” she said, hopping down from the bar stool. “And then I find Reddy Millbanks and get my money back.”
17
Restaurant life usually means freakish hours. In the past, I’d get home from Guale around twelve-thirty, or sometimes one A.M. But most nights I was too keyed up from work to go right to bed. I’d stay up, have a glass of wine, read, or watch old movies, and turn in around two. And head back to the restaurant by ten the next morning.
But my old life was gone, as I was reminded in countless ways, every day. In its place, I was left in a kind of twilight zone, trying to figure out how to piece together a new existence.
Not everything was awful. Grandmama was getting stronger every day. She insisted on taking short walks, and was even fixing breakfast some mornings. I knew she was truly on the mend when she reinstated her standing Friday beauty shop appointment. And Granddaddy was better too. He drove her to her doctors’ appointments, took her grocery shopping, even met his old buddies for lunch again.
I was the one who was a pity case. I was still camping out on the sofa at their apartment. I made endless clandestine phone calls to James Foley, checking on the progress of my legal action, and took catnaps at odd hours because I still wasn’t getting much sleep at night. Just the previous evening, for example, the lake effect was doing something in the Midwest, and between that and a nasty wild-fire in the Sierra Madres, Granddaddy sat up watching television until nearly three A.M. After he finally did go to bed, Grandmama was up and down at least half a dozen more times, going to the bathroom.
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