The Extortionist

by Vincent Zandri

  “Is my mom okay for now, Brit?” I ask. “Or do I start making immediate arrangements for moving her?”

  “Let’s give it a little time, Mr. Jobz,” she says. “She’s getting up there in years which, of course, exacerbates the problem, or problems I should say. But I’ve also seen people like her suddenly snap out of it. They regain their sense of reality and begin to enjoy their meals again and also interact with their peers. Let’s hope that’s what happens with your mom.”

  She slips her hand off my arm.

  Damn . . .

  “My mom was never that sociable with other women,” I say. “It’s a jealously thing. She’s a tad . . . how do I say this delicately? Insecure. It used to drive my dad bonkers.”

  She’s smiling again, making my heart pound once more.

  “Let’s see what happens,” she says. “So then, next week? Meatloaf Monday Night?”

  I find myself staring into her big deep brown pools.

  “Do you, umm, have a boyfriend at present, Brit?”

  Her eyes wide once more. “Why do you ask, Mr. Jobz?”

  My veins go so cold with embarrassment I feel like an ice sculpture about to shatter into a million and one pieces. I’m sure my face has turned redder than a fire engine.

  “Oh, what I mean is,” I try for a full recovery, “maybe it would be nice to discuss my mom off campus sometime. Like a coffee shop or maybe . . . umm . . . over dinner.”

  She giggles a little.

  “Mr. Jobz,” she says, “are you asking me out on a date?”

  “Is it that obvious?” I pose. “And please, call me Steve or even Jobz, like my friends do.”

  Now laughing, “Yup. It’s that obvious. And sure, I’ll be happy to call you Steve.”

  “It’s official. I’m asking you out on a date. I know I’m a couple years older than you, but—”

  “—A couple,” she grins.

  “Okay, more than a couple.”

  She places her hand on my forearm again.

  “Sure,” she says. “I’m happy to have a coffee with you, or even dinner.”

  Now my heart is not only lifted, I completely expect it to shoot out of my chest.

  “How will I get in touch with you, Brit?”

  She digs into her pocket, produces a card. Glancing at it, I see it’s got her name on it, the capital letters RN beside it, along with a cell number and email.

  “I don’t work for Ann Lee Home directly,” she explains. “I, like many of the other nurses and orderlies you see all around, are independent contractors. Keeps facility costs down since they don’t have to provide benefits. Our union handles that stuff.”

  “Oh,” I say, “interesting.” Holding the card up. “I’ll call you.”

  She starts walking back toward the front desk, but not without offering me a smile over her shoulder. I head through the front doors feeling like a seventeen-year-old who just found his date to the junior prom.

  Per usual, Henry has not only reserved a seat for me at the horseshoe shaped Lanie’s Bar, she’s already ordered me a cold beer. It likely helped that I’d texted her of my imminent arrival seven minutes ago. It also helps that should anyone even think of attempting to steal a bar stool she is saving for a friend said stealer will receive a tongue lashing that will not only rock their world but will last them for all eternity.

  When I arrive, she’s already started on a pink cosmopolitan. The drink perfectly matches her pink summer-weight satin blouse and long slacks. A strand of white beads around her neck matches her white stilettos. If she were standing instead of sitting, she would tower nearly a foot over my five-feet-seven inches. She would also weigh in a hell of a lot more than my one-hundred-sixty-five middle-weight status. But then, with her big, dark, almond-shaped eyes, her long, straightened black hair and smooth as silk dark face, she’s still a very attractive woman.

  Hard to believe a psychopath took a hammer to her head a couple years ago, and that she survived the ordeal only to come back even stronger and more beautiful than before. How did Hemingway put it? Sometimes the world breaks us and those who survive are stronger at the broken places. Something like that, anyway.

  She removes her leather purse from the barstool, and I sit down, grab my beer and steal a long, deep drink.

  “And hello to you too, Jobzy,” she says in her sarcastic as all hell tone. The same kind of tone she uses when she says the word, “Beyotch,” while doing this odd sort of twisting thing with her torso and hands.

  “Sorry,” I say, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “Needed a drink real bad.”

  “Meatloaf night went that well, huh?” she asks.

  “It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times,” I say.

  “Why is it white people like you always feel the need to express their intellectual prowess over colored folk?” she says.

  “Because I like showing off my brain muscles,” I say.

  “Beats showing off the muscles you ain’t got.”

  “You realize the term colored is a now considered a non-PC racial slight,” I point out.

  “There you go again, trying to be smart.” She smiles. “I’m a person of color, and I preferred colored to black or African American. Shit, I’m probably not even from Africa. Dominican Republic, maybe. Or Panama. I’ll call myself whatever I choose, little man.”

  I steal another drink.

  “I’m big where it counts, Henry,” I say.

  She laughs and spits, “Ha! I bet you get lost in a woman like me?”

  “Finally,” I counter, “a proposition!”

  I put my hand on her leg and she pushes it off like it’s a big nasty insect.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she says. “I’m your boss, and you ain’t my type, anyway.” Then, after enjoying a careful sip of her drink, and just as carefully setting her glass back down, “Now, explain to me this best of times, worst of times, Charles Dickens shit.”

  I give her the CliffsNotes version of my Meatloaf Monday Night dinner with my mom. From staring with disdain at our respective plates of gray meatloaf to Mom insisting my dad was about to pick her up at any minute for a drive to the airport for some major vacation they’d planned to West Palm Beach, to the beautiful and alluring Nurse Brit Boido explaining if my mom doesn’t start eating soon, they’re going to have to transfer her to a different facility where she can be fed intravenously and monitored twenty-four-seven.

  Henry takes a quiet moment or two to soak it all in.

  “That’s too bad about your mama, Jobzy,” she says. “I recall what a sweet lady she is. Plus, she had the misfortune of having to raise your skinny white ass.”

  I finish my beer and order another from the tall, black goateed bartender.

  Nodding, I say, “This is a strange time of life. Seeing your one surviving parent—the one who was always young, always the rock, always the life of the party—get old. Old and lonely beyond words.”

  “It’s the cycle of life,” she says. “That will be us someday. God willing.”

  She finishes her Cosmo and, before she has the chance to order the next one, Goateed Bartender is pouring her another. That’s the kind of organic respect Henry commands. As for me, I could stand on the chair and scream my head off, and the bartender might not even notice me.

  She sips the new drink like it’s the nectar of the Gods.

  “So, when did this little infatuation with this Brit girl begin?” she asks with a grin.

  “Who said I had an infatuation with Brit?”

  “How long we know one another, Jobzy?”

  “Half a dozen years, give or take,” I clarify.

  “And in all that time, I’ve learned to read the signs, and the signs tell me you got a girl on the brain.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “There’s a slight swagger in your walk, and you take on this funny kind of permanent smile.”

  “Okay, snagged,” I admit. “So, I did indeed manage to get a date with my mom
’s nurse, Brit.”

  Henry sips more of her new drink, then presses her lips together like she’s disapproving.

  “Normally, I’d tell you that girl is way too young for you. But if she over twenty-one like you say, then hey, it’s her funeral. But tell me something else, Jobzy, and be honest.”

  “Ask away.”

  “These Meatloaf Monday Nights are all about your poor mother, I should hope, and not some half-assed excuse for you to be setting up dates with pretty young nurses.”

  That smile she just mentioned? It melts away. I know it melts away because I feel a pit in my gut that has nothing to do with drinking beer on an empty stomach. I have to ask myself this one rather poignant question: Have I, in fact, been using the Monday Ann Lee Home meatloaf dinners as an excuse to see Brit? Certainly, I didn’t exactly plan it that way.

  “I genuinely need to see my mother,” I say, but I’m not sure Henry is buying it.

  “Up until a few weeks ago, you had to be dragged kicking and screaming to your mother’s assisted living facility, and you know it.”

  “That’s why I’m trying to make up for lost time,” I offer, but I can tell she’s still not buying it. Then, throwing up my hands, “Okay, maybe there is a small part of me, a subconscious part, that enjoys seeing Brit. But you have to believe me when I say I love my mom, and I genuinely want to make an effort to see her more often.”

  She rolls her eyes, sips more Cosmo.

  “Whatever you say, Jobzy,” she says. “Just make sure your momma come first, or before your love life, anyway, such as it is.”

  She sits up straight as the door to the bar opens and in walks a tall, wiry man wearing a trench coat.

  “Well, look who the cat done dragged in,” Henry says, her big eyes suddenly lit up like a pair of LED headlamps. “If it isn’t that handsome Detective Miller.”

  “Your lucky day, Henry,” I say.

  “Could be yours too, Jobzy,” she says. “Maybe he got a job for you, get you out of the office for a while, and outta my formerly nappy hair.”

  The detective approaches us.

  “Knew I’d find you here,” he says, not without a smile.

  He offers Henry a kiss on the cheek and he shakes my hand with his cold strong grip. A stocky college age kid wearing a New York Giants jersey is seated beside me. His eyes are glued to the flat screen mounted to the side wall beside the bar currently running the NFL highlights on ESPN. He doesn’t look like he’s about to move for anybody and he says so when the detective asks if he would mind shifting to an empty stool further down the bar. But when Miller pulls out his badge and flashes it at the kid, along with, “You old enough to be drinking in this establishment, son?” the kid grabs his beer, slips off his stool, and makes for the opposite side of the bar, even if it does mean he’ll be straining his neck to watch the highlights. Now, that’s power and respect.

  Miller orders a beer from Goateed Bartender. As always, the Chief APD Detective is dressed neatly, if not impeccably, in a blue blazer and pressed, white button down under the trench coat. The blue and red striped rep-tie is held to his shirt by means of a silver tie clip that’s probably older than I am. His gray-white hair is buzz-cut short, but he’s not balding even though he’ll never see sixty again.

  “The beer’s on me, Detective Miller,” Henry says, lust in her big eyes. “And did I mention how handsome you look today?”

  “Why, thank you, Henry,” Miller offers. “You always brighten up my day.”

  I drink some beer. It’s either that or puke.

  “Something tells me this isn’t a social call, Miller,” I inject.

  His beer arrives, he takes a drink, sets the bottle back down on a white cocktail napkin.

  “Good guess, Jobz,” he says. “I have a department job you both might be interested in since the party I’m about to make mention of has just applied for unemployment insurance, which, after I explain to you her situation, will most definitely disqualify her for bennies.”

  “I like a good story,” I say.

  “He also like the young girls,” Henry says.

  “And you have eyes for all the pretty men,” I counter.

  “Glad to see some things never change with you two,” Miller says. “Now, Jobz, let’s talk about a job opportunity.”

  Miller waxed in great detail about a woman named Gladys Carter, a seventy-seven-year-old woman who has been working the lunchroom at Loudonville Elementary School in North Albany for the past five years. She was recently accused by the school’s principal of grafting more than five-hundred K from the school system over the course of her lunchroom tenure.

  I recall hearing about it in the news, and like I did then, I shake my head in disgust. Or is it disbelief?

  “How’s it even possible to extort that kind of cash from a grade school lunchroom?” I ask. “How much can tater tots and soggy chicken fingers cost? Three bucks?”

  Miller cocks his head to the side.

  “A buck here, a buck there,” he says. “It all adds up.”

  “Plus, lots a kids pay in cash,” Henry chimes in. “You can pocket a lot, you know what you’re doing.”

  Miller reaches into his pocket, comes back out with his smartphone. He presses a couple of icons then turns the screen around so we can see it.

  “That’s her,” he says.

  The woman I gaze upon looks nothing like a hardened criminal. She’s small, thin, and while not as old as my mom, she looks like she could be my mother. Her gray hair is styled in a bob, and her long thin face shows off her still prominent cheek bones. Her eyes are blue, and she’s made up her face with red lipstick and some pinkish powder on her cheeks. It’s possible she’s also wearing fake eyelashes. Strung around her neck is a thin chain that holds a pair of cat-eye reading glasses. Below that chain is another somewhat larger chain that supports a gold cross.

  “The picture was taken for the Loudonville Elementary yearbook,” Miller goes on.

  A bit of info that makes sense since she’s seated on a stool at a register inside a brightly lit space. Not one of those new, computerized registers you find at the local mega-mart, but a genuine, old-fashioned manual job where the cash drawer pops open and you need to use your brain to calculate the change. The kind of register that might allow someone to easily graft a couple of bucks here or there. But half a mil?

  “What’s her name again?” I ask.

  “Gladys Carter,” Miller says, shifting the phone to me and Henry.

  My New York State Unemployment Insurance Fraud Agency boss lady gives the picture a good going over.

  “She look like a sweet old lady to me,” she says.

  “That’s just it,” Miller says. “She is a sweet old lady.”

  He does something to the picture with his index finger so that the image shifts or scrolls further down. Her face disappears and words appear. “The 6th Grade Class of 2018 dedicates our Yearbook to the best, most sweetest lunchroom lady ever, Mrs. Carter. We love you!”

  Miller clears a frog from his throat and returns the phone to the interior pocket on the blue blazer he’s wearing under his trench coat. I take advantage of the pause in the conversation to drink some beer. Henry sips more of her second Cosmo. Miller takes a swig, sets the bottle back down onto a round coaster that reads Jameson IPA. The coaster has a photo of a green whiskey bottle on it. Makes me want to order a Jameson shot to go with my beer.

  “Everyone seems to love Gladys Carter,” Miller says.

  “Except for the principal,” Henry adds. “Principals always get the bad rap. They always got to be the bad guy. You a bad kid in school, what happens to you?”

  “You get sent to the principal’s office,” I say, nodding.

  Miller can’t help but smile. “You do your fair share of time in the principal’s office way back when, Jobz?”

  Henry laughs. “Jobzy looks the type,” she says. “Don’t he, Detective Miller?”

  “Yup,” Miller agrees. “A real class disrupter.
”

  I smirk. “Okay,” I say, “everyone laugh it up. I was a small, scrawny, four-eyed kid. I had to do something to make the other kids like me. So, I became the class clown.”

  “So, you really did spend a lot of time at the principal’s office,” Miller says.

  “I went to a catholic school,” I explain. “Trust me, those nuns were tough. My principal’s name was Sister Mary Catherine. She was like a prison warden dressed in a big blue habit with a nasty scowl on her face that made her look like Lyndon Johnson, and she had a nasty limp. She wore a special boot on her foot. We called her “lead foot” because you could hear her stomping down the hall from a mile away. That noise still sends a chill up my spine.” Holding up my hand and making a fist. “You got out of line, she wasn’t afraid to scrap, if you get my meaning.”

  “Jesus, Jobzy,” Henry says, “I’m surprised you don’t have a little PTSD.”

  “It probably explains a lot,” I say, my eyes on my beer. “Reason why I can’t maintain a relationship. Reason why I drink. Maybe I should go on Dr. Phil, reveal my story to the world.”

  “I’m crying on the inside for you, Jobz,” Miller says. “But getting back to the here and now. On behalf of the Albany Police Department, I was wondering if you might wish to look into the matter of our sweet Mrs. Gladys Carter and her alleged pilfering several hundred grand from Loudonville Elementary School. Alleged being the key word in this matter.”

  I lock eyes on Henry.

  “It’s up to the boss lady,” I say. “Naturally.”

  “I don’t have no problem with it,” she says. “I’ll do anything to help you out, Detective Miller.”

  “Why, thank you, Henry,” Miller says. “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” she says. Then, setting her hand on his thigh, “Something tells me you never had to visit the principal when you were a youngster. Unless, of course, it was to receive an award or some recognition for a job well done.”

  I roll my eyes, mutter, “Gimme a break,” under my breath.