Dear Debbie,
That’s great! I’d love for you to learn more about NBG. We’re having a prospective Naturalist meeting tomorrow night and I’m one of the people leading it. It would be great if you could come, although that might be a little soon. You’ve probably got a busy schedule. I think you’d be a great fit and NBG could be great for you.
Looking forward to seeing you soon, Vincent.
Would it be too much to say that Vinnie was not a great prose stylist? He gave me an address in Metairie, one of the suburbs of New Orleans. His e-mail had an automatic signature, giving contact info and repeating his name. Vincent Tranner. I had to leave to meet the McConkles, but once I was back, I could see what I could find out about Vinnie. I had not only his name, but his license plate number.
Getting to the address that Mrs. McConkle gave me was a straight shot up Elysian Fields, then squirreling around several turns into a residential area I’d never been in. Before Katrina this had been a tidy zone of G.I. Bill houses for the working class and lower middle class. It was slowly returning to a decent neighborhood, only a few houses empty and desolate as if no one had been there since August 29, 2005. Some of the houses were clearly repaired, newly painted, cars in the driveway. Others were on the way, a FEMA trailer parked out front, or the kinds of trucks that indicated carpenters and electricians.
The house I pulled in front of had a big blue pickup in the driveway, an indication that someone was actively working here.
The workers turned out to be the McConkles. He was a carpenter, she was an electrician. I found them inside the gutted house. He was framing walls and she was running conduit.
“Break time,” she called when she saw me.
I suddenly liked them both a whole lot better. Fletcher had the sense to hook up with a woman who was both good with money and good with her hands. They seemed to be working together as a team. He was pulling his weight and had the sawdust in his hair to prove it.
“This your house?” I asked.
“Naw,” he answered. “Donna’s second cousin on her mother’s side. Just close enough to get the family rate.” He smiled a friendly tease at her.
“You offered,” she rejoined. “They would have paid going rate to get it done right.”
“They’d already been ripped off once. Thought they needed a break.”
“Any chance their rip-off artist was named Prejean? Or Pearlman?
He looked at her and she shrugged her shoulders. “No, don’t know the name,” he made explicit. “Why?”
“Another case I’m working on. Bunch of folks ripped off by this lowlife,” I explained.
“I can call Dad and get the info,” she said.
“How are you doing about my aunt?” Fletcher asked.
Almost as an offering, I handed them the printout of what I’d found on NBG. Fletcher took it, then handed it to his wife. She paged through it.
He looked dubiously at the stack of papers. I gathered that reading wasn’t his favorite activity. I did a verbal rundown of what I’d discovered, finishing with, “I think Vincent succeeds by giving your aunt attention. He’s a true believer, not just in the pills but in living well, and is trying to get her to improve her eating habits and make other healthy lifestyle changes. Maybe you should visit her more often.”
They gave each other a doubtful look.
Fletcher finally said, “The problem is that my aunt thinks us visiting means we’re trying to get in her good graces and get her money. So she spends the entire time haranguing us about being greedy relatives.”
His wife shot him a look and then said, “She’s got her reasons. After the storm we were struggling, our house destroyed, not enough insurance. We knew we’d be working nonstop and would eventually make good.”
He took over the narrative. “So we asked her for a loan. A loan. I made it clear this was a loan. She acted like we were walking on her grave and out to steal her blind. Instead we had to struggle for the last two years, six months bunking in a friend’s living room, then a FEMA trailer, paying jobs during the day and working on our home whenever we could find time. After almost a year of not speaking she calls me up out of the blue and asks me to come clean her gutters. I know her well enough to know she’ll never apologize, not outright, but maybe this is her way of healing the breach. Instead of working on our house or making money working on someone else’s I take a morning to go clean her gutters. After I’m done, I wash up in her kitchen and she shows me all her herbal stuff and how great they make her feel even if they’re costing her a pretty penny. A year of what she was paying was all the loan we were asking for. Then she thanks me and tells me her favorite program is coming on and she hates to be disturbed and shows me the door. Making it clear that the gutters were a favor from her nephew.” He shook his head in disgust.
“We’re all right,” his wife said. “We’ve been working nonstop since the storm and making decent money. We’ve picked up some well-to-do clients. We finished our house about six months ago. But it would have made a big difference if…” She looked down at her hands, the calluses on them.
“So, it’s hard to hear her perfectly willing to drop tons of money on dried plants, expect me to help when she needs it, and then get turned down flat when we ask for something. The last thing she yelled at us is that we’d get it when she’s dead. I don’t want that slimy bastard to take it all before then,” he said.
“I don’t know your aunt very well,” I said carefully, “but she seems to have been alone for a long time, and like many lonely people, she’s lost the habit of paying attention to other people.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” he burst out. “If she didn’t need me to do something around the house for her, I doubt she’d be aware of my existence.”
“I can keep digging if you want, but I might not find much that can help you. From what you’ve said, you’re doing well now and the struggle is behind you. Your aunt could have helped you when it would have meant a lot, but she didn’t. It’s a tough choice, but maybe you should let it go.”
“What do you mean?” Fletcher asked.
“You’re angry at her—justifiably so. She wouldn’t help family after the disaster of the century, but spends freely on unproven herbs. Not fair. Your aunt is a capricious old woman who wants her control. If you let go of ever wanting something from her, she loses her control over you.”
“It’s not fair,” he said. But he ignored the rest. “She said we’d get it when she’s dead. I’d like her to keep her word at least once.”
His wife gave me a look as if to say I understand, but she’s hurt him too often for him to let it go.
I didn’t push. Instead I asked, “Have you ever seen you aunt use something with a label that says ‘The Cure’ on it?”
Both of them shook their heads. Fletcher added he’d been there just that one time and only seen what his aunt had shown him.
“I’ll keep digging,” I said. “I can’t promise I’ll find anything.”
“That’s okay,” his wife said. “Just do your best.”
I turned to go, but Fletcher called after me, “Hey, I saw you on TV. That guy is a real asshole.”
I spun back. “That guy? Dudley? How do you know him?”
“I don’t,” he made clear. “We’re working on a fancy place out in Old Metairie, right across the street from where his parents live. Can’t miss him when he roars up in the big, ugly truck of his, way over the speed limit, then screeching to a stop. He wants everyone to notice him. I’m pretty sure he’s the asshole who broke our taillight, but I can’t prove it.”
“He’ll be going to jail for a long time after this adventure,” I assured them. “Your taillights will be safe from now on.”
“Good thing,” he agreed. “That fellow is doing major work, new pool, adding a home theater, billiards room and sauna and major upgrade on the kitchen. We’ll be there for a while.”
It was time for them to get back to work.
And fo
r me to find some new way to make the time pass and keep my brain occupied.
I glanced at my watch. Only midafternoon, not nearly time to go home. If I knew Cordelia—and I did—she’d stay at work as if she had something to prove, that being a patient didn’t mean she couldn’t be a doctor.
I remembered that I needed to do a search on affable Vincent. If I was going to meet him tomorrow night as perky Debbie, the more info I had, the better armed I’d be.
So, back to the office and my friend, the Internet.
Vincent was a true believer, certainly enough of a one to use all the capitalist tools at his disposal to get the message out. He had an elaborate website, with his face front and center—his smile and puppy-dog eyes alone probably accounted for half of his sales. He was good at pitching himself. He had a grandfather who was shrimper and had lost everything in Hurricane Camille, but the family had struggled back after that. Camille had struck in 1969, so given Vincent’s age, the struggle was well before he was born. His family was “hardworking, striving for the American dream”—a quick Internet search found an insurance agency with his last name that was founded around his father’s time. Insurance agent just wasn’t as romantic as shrimper on the high seas of the Gulf. He briefly mentioned studies, but listed no degree, so I guessed that hitting the books wasn’t one of his favorite pastimes. He did prominently list various certificates testifying to him being a NBG “naturalist” of the first degree—whatever that signified, being a physical trainer, having gone through a “healthy living” seminar, a long list of the kind of things that might take a day, at most a week of training. He filled the space with a lot of pictures—an old one of a shrimp boat, putatively sailed by the paternal line. He had a number of himself—at the gym in a tight T-shirt that showed his muscles. And a big one that did ample justice to his puppy-dog eyes and big smile.
In big, bold print was a link to his selling page, with glowing descriptions of all the products offered by NBG. Vinnie listed all the ways you could get the products from him—in person (extra charge), pickup hours, delivery (and delivery charges), carrier pigeon, space wormhole. Okay, not quite, but he covered all the selling bases.
At the bottom was a links page. You had to click on that, and at the bottom of that page was a link at the actual official NBG site.
But the point of the website wasn’t to impress people like me—skeptical and college educated. It was to impress his clients that Vincent was a healthy lifestyle expert and would only recommend products that could help them. Nothing as crass as making money here.
He pushed a long line of NBG products, but there was no mention of The Cure. He also sold himself as a lifestyle coach.
But this was the stuff he wanted people to know. It was time to search for the information he didn’t want people to know. I did a quick and dirty search, using the databases available if you’re willing to pay for them—tax deduction for me, so I was.
It seemed Vincent had led a wild youth. He’d racked up some DUIs, including one for possession of pot, but nothing in the last year or so. He’d moved to a number of different addresses, including back in twice with what I was guessing was his parents. He now lived in one of those young, single type apartment complexes out in Metairie. If I’d been straight and considered a dalliance with Vinnie, that would have nixed it in the bud—suburbs and pre-fab apartments with paper-thin walls were a major turn-off for Bachelorette Number One.
Ah, interesting. He liked to park his truck in the French Quarter on weekends, but he didn’t like to pay to park and he hadn’t wised up on how to avoid tickets, as he had a pack of them. He also had a bunch of unpaid ones from Houston, like that was far enough away he could blow the tickets off.
He had stopped breaking the laws with the worse consequences—drinking and driving—but there was still a little rebellious boy in there who was a scofflaw on traffic tickets.
His truck was new, only a year old. His apartment wasn’t cheap; he had a two-bedroom and, as far as I could tell, no roommate. He had a membership in an expensive gym, and the money he was saving on parking (and paying later in tickets) was probably spent in the bars and eateries of the French Quarter. Assuming that he didn’t get a ticket every time he was there, that still made him a regular party boy, and partying isn’t cheap.
Aunt Marion and Nature’s Beautiful Gift were very, very good to Vincent.
It was hard to see how working for himself as an herbal Avon lady could ring up the coins to keep Vinnie flush. It was possible that he had others working for him; they were the grunts and he raked in the bucks. It was possible that insurance Daddy didn’t want his baby boy living in what insurance agents from Chalmette referred to as “not nice” neighborhoods, so he bankrolled junior. It was possible the Insurance Daddy had a bad heart and Vincent had inherited a bundle. Or that he was still dealing, just being smarter this time around.
Or one of the old ladies wanted more than pills in a bottle and he was a gigolo.
I turned off my computer.
Maybe I’m just cynical, always digging into what people want to keep hidden, seeing the sordid side of life. NBG could be only one of several jobs—although nothing else had surfaced. Two hours of Internet searching isn’t going to reveal a complete person.
Nothing I’d found much changed my opinion of Vincent. He seemed to have been a lost little boy, searching for something besides a life selling insurance in Chalmette. Nature’s Beautiful Gift gave him a cause—a profitable one, from the looks of it. He could truly believe that he was helping his community while making enough money to party hearty in the French Quarter.
Then the phone rang. It was one of the heirs from the property records case—one of the found people had been impolite enough to pass away (she was ninety-two) and now her heirs had to be tracked down. I was pulled away from true believers into musty records and their labyrinthine trail to ownership. NBG went to the back shelf for the next few days.
Chapter Eighteen
Another morning, another day. Cordelia still insisted on working, but she was taking a break in the day to see a lawyer. She wanted to update her will, power of attorney and medical power of attorney.
Yes, it’s necessary, but I hate this kind of paperwork drill, so she waved away my offer to accompany her.
When I got to my office there was a message from the police officer who’d let me into Reginald Banks’s house. The tox screens had come back and they wanted to look at the stuff I had taken. She left a number to call her back.
Vincent had e-mailed me—well, pink Debbie, to say that he’d missed me at the meeting but there was so much interest that they had scheduled another one for this afternoon. This very afternoon—how could I resist? He hoped I could make it. I’d blown off the last meeting because it just seemed a whole lot more important to go out to dinner with my girlfriend.
I called Officer Ferguson. It was a brief conversation. She asked if I still had the stuff, and when I said I did, asked if I could meet her at the house, show where I’d taken it. I started to ask a question, but she cut me off, making it clear that she was at the station and couldn’t—or wouldn’t—talk.
After locating the bags, I headed back to my car. Not how I’d planned to spend my morning, but I was relieved to be rid of what I’d taken from Reginald Banks’s house. It wasn’t mine to worry about, and now these talismans would be taken from me.
The day was overcast, with an occasional spit of rain, a gloomy start to the week. The gray day wasn’t kind to the neighborhood, leeching out the color of the faded coats of paint.
Officer Ferguson wasn’t there when I arrived. I stayed in my car and waited. There was nothing I wanted to see here.
She arrived after about ten minutes. She seemed no more happy to be here than I was.
“So what’s the deal?” I asked as I joined her on the porch. “Why the interest in his herbal junk?”
She handed me the key, indicating that I was the lucky one who got to lead.
“You didn’t hear them from me, got it?”
I put the key in the lock. “Heard what from you?”
She waited until I had opened the door and we were in the living room. “They found ma huang—you know what that is?”
“Ephedra. It’s a banned herbal stimulant.”
“You should be on Jeopardy. That plus traces of amphetamine.”
“Meth?”
“No, the old stuff, prescription kind. So the narco squad has some interest. They’re wondering if maybe he was a drug dealer.”
“More likely he was dealt drugs.”
She gave me a look. I put the bags on his coffee table and pulled out one of the bottles labeled The Cure. The police had resources I didn’t have. I would play straight with her.
“He had sickle cell anemia. It’s lifelong, chronic, and can be pretty miserable, painful, and causes infections. My guess is that he fell out of treatment, thought he’d be okay in a day or two, but got worse instead. He may have thought he’d be okay because he was taking this shit.” I tossed the pill bottle at her.
She easily caught it. Softball dyke, I guessed.
I continued, “Want to make people feel better? Like they’re cured? Crank them up. Want to lay odds on whether those things contain some ma huang and speed from below the border?”
“Could be.” She examined the bottle. “It’s not going to make the narco boys happy.”
“Why? Instead of one minor dealer, they have a major illegal drug running operation.”
“Yeah, this stuff is illegal.” She tossed the bottle in the air. “But it’s a slap on the wrist. The company claims that they had no idea how this awful stuff ended up in their perfectly legal supplement. They might pay a fine. End of case.”
“Even if someone died?”
“He took them voluntarily. Maybe if a relative has standing, he can sue the company. Still, it’s all civil, not criminal.” She shrugged. “You can report it to the FDA. They might do something.”
I started to argue, but Officer Ferguson wasn’t responsible. There was no point.
J.M. Redmann - Micky Knight Mystery 7 - I'll Will Page 20