But never, while speaking memorized lines and pretending to be somebody else, had I felt anything remotely like the danger I was facing now.
I hadn’t been terribly afraid of Denny while at the mission, because George had been there.
But now, with the son of a bitch sitting in my apartment acting like a charm boy, I was beside myself with fear. As the dinner went on, however, I remembered how great it is to transform your fear into cunning. I realized: If he really doesn’t know who I am, then I have an advantage.
“Let’s say,” I said, “somebody’s not performing up to snuff. Not doing their job with enough—alacrity.”
“Well,” Toby responded, “first of all you have to make sure they fully understand their job, you know, maybe you have to do some, uh, retraining. You try to bring them up. You try to think creative.”
Jesus H. Christ, one of the Whale’s favorite sayings. “What if,” I wanted to know, “they don’t come up?”
“After a point, you gotta, you gotta make a change. You gotta terminate ’em.”
“Or if they get caught stealing from the company?”
“Termination for sure.”
“No second chances, is that your motto?”
He sat back comfortably in his chair. “Not so much a motto as a necessity. What’re you going to give a thief a second chance to do—steal again?”
“Right.”
“Isn’t he cute?” said Gina. “He’s got so much cachet. You and George and us ought to go on a double date, you know? What do you think?”
“Who’s George?” asked Toby immediately, smiling.
“I’ve got strawberries for dessert,” I said.
Chapter 28 – Kitchen Work of Different Kinds
“Meal tonight—dig it, sister!—going to be jambalaya.” Amaryllis beamed like a lighthouse. Before her lay an unbelievably huge pile of raw shrimp, heads on, blind black eyes, netted so recently from the sea that they made the sharp-edged, institutional kitchen smell as salty and cool as the wharves up in San Francisco.
“We got fifty pounds to clean here, so let’s get at it. This is just some of what we got today, the rest is in the walk-in. Three hundred pounds we got this morning.”
“Wow,” I said. The shrimp curled onto themselves, heads touching their tails, their undersea feelers tapered to delicate points. “Where did it come from, so fresh? Do they have a shrimp fleet out of L.A.?”
She shook her head. “All I know is a man drove up in a freezer truck and said, I need to not have this load anymore. It ain’t spoiled. The Reverend Bill Culpepper told him, OK, we’ll help you unload.”
“That would seem a little suspicious, don’t you think?”
She just smiled to herself. “One thing I have learned after all these years: when it comes to carrying out your mission, don’t tempt fate. Jesus did not advise us to ask every last question that comes into our mind.”
“I guess he didn’t.”
“Faith, he didn’t.”
“Well, I have a few questions to ask you,” I said with a smile, “and I don’t give a flying crap about Jesus this morning, frankly.”
She gazed at me, hands on hips. “Get an apron, then, and work with me. We can talk. Steve, Katy?” She dismissed her two helpers, who took off, casting uneasy glances back at me. They were civilians, they were OK.
Knowing that at this hour—two o’clock, lunch all done and cleaned up—she’d probably be prepping food for dinner, I’d sneaked into the kitchen via the back passageway and the alley. All I wanted was not to be spotted today by Denny, twin or no twin. Amaryllis had been surprised to see me walk in from that direction.
I’d intercepted Gina last night before she left to go out clubbing with Toby, but just as I’d pulled her aside in the kitchen, he came in, looking for something to wipe up coffee he’d spilled. I shut my mouth and tried to use telepathy to warn Gina, but she misunderstood, thinking I didn’t like Toby. “See ya,” she said curtly, and although she did catch my final, desperate vibe, she’d already committed, and was gone. I’d thought too late of feigning a cerebral hemorrhage or something.
Thank God she’d returned safely, barging in at three in the morning, and falling into her usual deep slumber. We were going to have a long talk before she went out with Toby again.
I watched Amaryllis gather herself to begin working on the shrimp. Food was therapy for her; I would be patient. I wrapped a heavyweight apron around myself and tied the strings. Amaryllis handed me a short knife, and we set to work. I stood across from her, the fifty pounds of shellfish on the worktable between us looming about two feet high, a pink mountain of protein.
If you’ve cleaned shrimp, you know how fussy the work is.
To clean a shrimp for cooking, you twist off its head, grasp the first ring or two of shell, rip those away, then pull the body from the rest of the shell by the tail. Then you take your knife and make a delicate slit along the gut line and try to strip out the icky thing in one piece. If you love the sweet ocean taste of the critters, you knuckle down to the work with a minimum of bitching.
“Yeah,” said Amaryllis, reading my mind, “when I went back to visit my Cajun side, the boys would tote in their mess of shrimp or crawdaddies and all we’d do was tear the heads off and drop them into some spiced boiling water. We’d throw the lot onto a table—you strow it with newspapers first, bottle of Tabasco on the side? Everybody dives in and peels for themselves. Now that’s good eating. If we did that here, a food fight would break out, I’d stake my life on it! Haha!”
These shrimp were the kind that are rosy, not pearl-gray, when raw, their bodies as long as Amaryllis’s sizable thumb. Her fingers moved rapidly, throwing tender pink body after tender pink body into an ice-filled tub. “Got to keep them fresh, like they were still alive,” she muttered.
“How’s Kip?” I asked, preliminarily.
“Better and better. After this job is done, I’ll go and spend some time with him. Going to bring him home next week, no later, the doctor says. He’s been reading those books you brought. Over and over, he’s been reading them. But you didn’t come to talk about Kip.” She made eye contact only with the little shrimps.
“My friend,” I began, “I was reading too, the other day. History. You know I’m a law student, well, I was reading some legal history of the state of California. Had to do with abortion law.” Amaryllis worked silently.
“Before 1967,” I went on, “abortion was illegal in this state. Between 1967 and ’69, a panel of doctors could recommend abortion in special cases. Then in 1969 the state supreme court entirely liberalized abortion laws.”
Amaryllis said, “I’m going to cut up some sausages too, once we’re finished with this. Got to have hot sausages in jambalaya, I feel.”
“I’m most interested in something that happened in 1965,” I went on, “when girls and women in L.A. didn’t have much choice when it came to terminating an unwanted pregnancy. I learned that some women, especially if they had medical training, helped others by providing secret abortions. The local abortionist was often an RN, a woman who knew a lot about medicine and who might have assisted in abortions, or seen one too many young girls with a coathanger wire up her vagina, bleeding to death.”
Amaryllis swallowed. “My secret ingredient is dill pickle juice. I use also bay leaf, and plenty of salt and pepper, of course. The key to a jambalaya is the slow simmer, you know, because that brings out the flavor.”
We continued to rip the heads off the shrimp, strip off their protective shells, and slice into their bodies.
“There are,” I said, “lots of women walking around L.A. today, silently grateful that they didn’t become mothers when they were in junior high or high school. Women of position and achievement. Mothers today, many of them, and grandmothers, who had children at the right time: when they could provide for them. They’re not going to go on TV and shout about it, and I’m sure they wouldn’t rush to be a character witness if their back-alley abortionist win
ds up in court for some reason.”
Amaryllis just kept listening.
“It was sheer luck I didn’t get pregnant when I was a teenager. I had hormones and about half an ounce of horse sense. It was luck, Amaryllis. But by my day, abortion was legal. Would I have gone through with a pregnancy, or would I have killed my own flesh and blood? I’m glad I didn’t have to find out.”
Amaryllis was skipping ahead in her mind, wondering how much I knew, and how much I’d say.
“One morning a fifteen-year-old girl woke up vomiting, and she’d missed her period, and she went oh shit. Well, that happens all the time, doesn’t it? Except this girl was the daughter of a federal judge, and her parents had high expectations. By the look of her, she had high expectations of herself too—I’ve seen the determination in her eyes, the set jaw. She was a gymnast. She went to a good school, bound for college, I’m sure. She was horrified to be pregnant.”
“Properly, you should have ham in a jambalaya as well,” commented Amaryllis. “Jambon, you know, that’s ham in French. But I’ve got no ham right now.” She paused. “Even if I did have ten or fifteen pounds, I think I’d reserve it for breakfasts. Then you’ve got the great tomato debate: in or out? Cajuns say out, Creoles say in. I’m one-fourth Cajun but I do like tomatoes, so in they’ll go.” She surveyed the mountain of shrimp.
I resumed, “Somehow this girl found her way to you. I bet her mother was instrumental in this, having given up a film career when she became pregnant at age nineteen. But I don’t understand something. With the judge’s position, you’d think the parents could’ve gotten a doctor to do it. A white doctor uptown. Why did this girl come to you?”
Amaryllis said, “You can call her Debbie, for that was her name.” Her fingers still flew over the shrimp. The mound was still dauntingly large. Amaryllis’s face was like a carved version of itself, solid and hard.
“Deborah Keever, yes,” I said. “She came to you, but something terrible happened, and she didn’t survive. Judge Keever was able to cover it up, but nobody—not them, not you—was ever the same. And you’ve been paying for it from that day to this.”
Amaryllis bowed her head as she had when, weeks ago, I’d delivered Kip’s message of apology. Then she lifted it, at last meeting my eyes. “You got quite a bit of it, and I am surprised and sorely dismayed. You don’t have all of it, though. Nobody does.”
“Are you feeling any relief?”
“Not yet. I expect I will. I’m surprised at you. The main facts have been floating around out there forever. But nobody’s figured it out before—nobody’s cared to, I guess.”
“It seems like a few different kinds of trouble are converging on you right now.”
“Yes,” was all she said. Tired, tired voice.
“I’d like to help you.”
A melancholy smile skewed her lips, but she was tougher than to cry. Her hands continued their work on tonight’s dinner, but slowly now. The shrimp bodies plopped softly.
“Amaryllis, tell me what I don’t know. Then we can work out what to do. You realize we’re in this together, don’t you?”
She sighed heavily. “Federal judge doesn’t mean they had it made, you know. He didn’t want to be in any white doctor’s debt for giving Debbie an abortion. No, he went to the colored part of town to find somebody he could pay and be done with it. Somebody who wouldn’t even know who the family was. I had a good reputation; he found me through a black man he’d done a favor. Anyhow, everybody knew me.”
“They called you Nursey.”
Her widely spaced eyes flicked to mine. “Where did you hear that?”
“A wise old junkie told me. You helped her out one time too.”
“Oh, my. Well.” She chewed her lower lip. “Bruce Keever knew me as Nursey, and I knew him as Mr. B. Didn’t know who they were until—later. I did the procedure for the girl; she wasn’t the only white child I’d helped, for sure. It went fine, no problems.”
“It did?”
“Healthy girl, no problems. I made my field as sterile as possible, every time, and I boiled all of my instruments. Funny—Mr. B., he paid in advance, you know, and he expected me to charge him a high amount of money because he wore a nice suit, but I said no, my regular fee is all I want.”
“How much was that?”
“One hundred dollars, for someone who could pay it. Back then a bill went a long way, you know. The mother brought the girl.” She leaned to the pile of shrimp and raked five or so pounds closer to her. Our aproned bellies were turning damply pink. I glanced into the waste bin, where hundreds of severed shrimp heads stared back at me with their peppercorn eyes.
“Afterward, I counseled her,” said the Iron Angel of L.A. “I asked if she was done playing dangerous, having sex with no protection. I love him! she says. She barely knew what sex was. You got to insist he wears a rubber, I told her. I told all the girls that, of course. And like all of them, she was shook up, especially after. It’s not nothing, undergoing a D&C on the kitchen table of a black lady in South Central without anesthetic.”
I listened.
“She says yes, yes, of course, I will. I will. Nobody promises as heartfelt as a scared young girl. Her eyes were like pie pans. I said that’s it, honey. Remember you only get one.”
I listened, staring at the pink curled shrimp in my hand.
“But then her daddy, Mr. B., came around again, four or five months later.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, she’d gone and conceived again, oh, it was springtime then. I said, ‘No, sir, only one to a customer.’ It was partly to protect myself, you understand. Repeat business can get dangerous. It was not a job I liked to do. It was a job I felt it necessary to do. I saw too much. Too much womanly misery, and too much misery of the children no one wanted.” She sighed heavily. “But the man insisted. He didn’t want to find somebody else. Trusted me, he said. I said no. Then he offered me ten thousand dollars.”
“Oh.”
“A queenly sum!”
“I’ll say.”
“The man bought me, sister Rita, he bought me. Ten thousand to me then, in 1965? It was like a million. I did the abortion. Again, the mother brought her. But this time…uhrr.”
She cleared her throat. “The girl panicked partway through. She was pretty stoic the first time, but this time the pain got to her, and the trauma. Also, she was a little farther along this time, twelve weeks or so. She struggled to get off the table, and before I’d got her calmed down, she’d been perforated. I knew exactly what had happened. She began bleeding more, and all of a sudden it was chaos, the girl was bleeding, I couldn’t control it, the mother was cursing me and her daughter, and I was trying to save the girl’s life. She needed surgery, of course. I told the mother she’s bleeding internally, more than what you see, we have to get her to the emergency, and the mother said yes, yes. I got her loaded into the backseat of that car—big black Lincoln, I can still see it, like a fair hearse itself. I started to get in too, to go with her, you know, but the mother stepped on it before I could.”
“Oh, my God.” I stared at six boxes of Morton’s salt on a shelf behind her. One was out of line, and I felt an impulse to walk over and tap it into place.
Amaryllis said, “I waited all night for the police to come.”
“But they didn’t?”
“Instead, later, I received a package with another ten thousand dollars in it, and I knew what that meant. This was one week later. I knew the girl was dead.”
She wiped her hands on her apron, finger by finger. “When I saw a picture of the judge in the paper telling he was quitting being a judge, then I knew who they were. Later on, I learned the mother had taken Debbie home, didn’t take her to the hospital immediately. Hoping she’d get better overnight. No way was that going to happen, the girl needed emergency surgery. By the time she got to the hospital—I don’t know how many hours, maybe even the next morning—it was too late. She did actually hang on for another day or two. I’m n
ot sure how they eventually lost her, but I suppose sepsis played a role, as well. I learned all this later, many years later.”
“From Mrs. Keever?”
“Yes, from her.”
“The Keevers preserved their reputation.”
“They managed that, yes, at the cost of their daughter’s life.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Amaryllis.”
“Oh, yes, it was. I made several mistakes, sister. Shouldn’t have done the second on Debbie. Shouldn’t have begun until she was mentally ready. I don’t think she wanted to go through it again, I actually think she might have wanted that baby. And when she got agitated, I should have withdrawn my curette instantly. It was stupid of me to leave it in while I tried to settle her. I made a very bad error. The memory of that girl writhing on my kitchen table hangs over my head to this day.”
Amaryllis went on to tell me that she stopped being Nursey, she stopped doing abortions, and she used the money from Bruce Keever to found the ABC Mission, beginning with a soup kitchen.
“I’ve tried to atone,” she said. “There never is any atoning, though. It’s just my life.”
She heard nothing more from the Keevers. “I understood their hearts were broken. Nothing could bring back their daughter, and they didn’t want to see my face or hear my name. That’s the way it was for all those years.”
“Did things change when the judge died?”
“Right, when he died, about a year ago? Mrs. Keever came after me. The woman has been angry—and righteous so—and messed up, and obsessed. Been a recluse for most of her life since they moved to Bakersfield. I believe the judge protected her from the world.”
“And the world from her,” I added.
“That’s one way of thinking of it.” Aimlessly, she picked up a shrimp and muttered, “Yeah, I got to work.” She cleaned it, then another, then I joined in again. My fingers were sore from the sharp shells.
The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 56