Easy Street

by Elizabeth Sims

  "Oh, yes!"

  I brought the picture to her. "Is this your family?"

  "Yes, that would be my family. That much I remember, anyway."

  The picture was a color snapshot that had been blown up to eight-by-ten size. I recognized 201 Adderly Street in the background. A group of people stood on the front lawn on a sunny day around noon—there were no shadows except beneath everyone's eyes: the raccoon effect. I recognized Mrs. Donovan, younger, but with a faraway look in her eyes, a look that seems to precede confusion when a person gets older. There were two dark-haired men, thirtyish, obviously related to each other: same mesomorphic body type, same taste in NFL team jerseys.

  There was another woman in the picture as well, standing next to one of the men, whose arm encircled her shoulders.

  "That's my son Richard." Mrs. Donovan pointed to the slightly taller of the two men.

  Richard! Could such a coincidence really be? Drooly Rick? Richard? I stared at the picture.

  "And would this be Richard's brother?" I asked.

  "That's the one I don't like."

  "How come?"

  "I can't remember. He was no damn good from the minute he was born. That much I can tell you. He was a screamer, you know?"

  "I see. And who's this young lady here?"

  Mrs. Donovan bent closer to the picture. She said nothing for a long time, and, afraid she might be falling asleep, I said, "Mrs. Donovan, do you remember that house very well? The one you used to own, there in the picture?"

  "Hmm." She kept gazing at the picture. "It's a nice house, isn't it?"

  "It certainly is. Do you remember the name Erma Porrocks?"

  "Erma?"

  "Yes."

  "I think I used to have a cat named Erma. There were rocks in the backyard of that house."

  I looked at the picture again. Could Richard really be Drooly Rick in better days? I fancied I saw a likeness. I had no idea how long Rick had been on the streets, but suddenly I speculated, what if Mrs. Donovan was mother to both Drooly Rick and Porrocks! Now that'd be a twist.

  "Ma'am, did you ever store anything inside the walls of your house? Like, did you have a bank account, or did you like to keep your money right in the house?"

  "Oh, I had a bank account. I'm sure I still do. I was never one of those suspicious people. I figure you've got to trust somebody, and bankers are at least clean-cut."

  "Did you rent out that house ever, before you came to live here?"

  "Hmm." She looked up at me, then down again. I waited with a pleasantly relaxed air. Mrs. Donovan turned to look out the window. A man in a ski jacket slammed a car door in the parking lot. Mrs. Donovan turned back to me and said, "I can't begin to tell you how bad it feels when you can't take a dump for four days."

  A woman walked into the room swinging a yellow tote bag. "Hi, Helen!" Her demeanor was solidly cheerful, even though she looked very tired, as if she were just getting over a bad cold. I realized she was the woman in the photograph, older now as well, perhaps by ten years. I judged her to be in her late forties.

  I, sitting at Mrs. Donovan's side with Todd, didn't give her much pause.

  "Hello," I said.

  "Good afternoon to you. I'm Lisette Donovan."

  "Oh, Helen's daughter-in-law. I'm Roberta Klotzak, pet person."

  "How did you know that I'm her daughter-in-law?" She said this with an open smile.

  "Oh, you know. I didn't see all that much family resemblance, so I just took a guess. I do that all the time in my job. Your mother-in-law is a lovely woman."

  Mrs. Donovan gave Lisette a triumphant smile. "I still haven't gone," she said.

  Lisette upended her tote bag on the bed. "Christ Almighty," she said, "things could be worse. Let's buck up here. Look, I've got treats!" I was amused to see that she'd brought a movie magazine, a package of cupcakes, a can of energy drink, and several packs of gum.

  I left the room and visited some other inmates with Todd, keeping an ear toward Mrs. Donovan's door. After about forty-five minutes I went and filled two Styrofoam cups with coffee from the urn I'd noticed in the TV room, and returned to Mrs. Donovan's room.

  Lisette was preparing to leave. Mrs. Donovan saw the coffee cups first. "Oh, you've brought coffee! How lovely! Have you tasted it yet?"

  "Uh, no," I said.

  "Try it," she urged with a malicious smile.

  Lisette smiled at the floor as I took a sip.

  Being too polite to spit it back into the cup, I swallowed and said, "I've drunk lousy coffee all over this great land of ours, but I have to admit, this is the worst."

  Lisette said, "We can't drink it at all. I usually bring Helen a cup from across the street. Today I had my hands full, but I bet you'd like a cup, Helen, wouldn't you?"

  "Yeah, maybe it'll loosen up my bowels."

  "Worth a try. Roberta, would you like to walk across with me and get good coffee?"

  I looked at my watch, then gave Lisette a sympathetic look. I could tell she liked me; a feeling of solidarity passed between us. "Sounds good," I said. "I've got a little time before my next stop." Lisette clearly categorized me as a helping professional: someone who might want to listen to her for a few goddamn minutes.

  So I put Todd in his travel box and carried him with us across the street to a coffee place that smelled bean-toasty wonderful. We decided to sit for just a little while before bringing coffee to Mrs. Donovan. And that was how I found out a few interesting things about her, the Donovan boys, and that house.

  Chapter 16

  Lisette sank into a chair like a sack of flour finishing a marathon. I brought coffee and carrot cake from the counter. She thanked me for paying.

  People often find themselves telling me things, just sharing the details of their lives with little prompting. I've been told I have an earnest face. Moreover, in this situation, Lisette not only was glad to have somebody paying attention to her, she was the kind of working-class person who thought that being voluble was the thing to do in social situations. Her hair was orange and bouncy, her figure pudgy, and her face creased with a variety of long-standing worries. She was sober right now, but I had the sense she could and would gladly drink me under the table at a moment's notice. I also had the sense she was no stranger to buying gas four dollars at a time and putting winter coats on layaway in July when they're the cheapest. Her coat this season was a sack-like thing with one big button in the middle.

  I got things going by saying what an interesting person Mrs. Donovan was.

  "You know," Lisette said, "most wives just hate their mother-in-laws, but Helen's been more of a friend to me, more of a mother than my real mom. My mom was an asshole, frankly. Helen taught me to cook. Things could've been worse."

  We talked about the nursing home and Pet Therapy Walkabouts, and I told Lisette about my life as a veterinary assistant and bowling league secretary. For every personal detail I shared, Lisette supplied five of her own.

  "I saw you looking at that picture in Helen's room," she said.

  "Yes, looks like you married the fellow standing on the porch steps?"

  "Yes, I married Jimmy Donovan. What a piece of work."

  "Did you guys always live in Ohio?"

  That got her going on the Michigan thing. She and Jimmy had hooked up fifteen years ago, when Jimmy worked as a sheet-metal guy in an automobile-customizing shop in Southgate. When he showed up for work, he made good money, but he enjoyed tequila and cocaine more than was good for him. Eventually, they lost their apartment and moved in with Helen in the house on Adderly Street in Wyandotte. Helen had been widowed shortly before that, her husband keeling over with the big one while changing the windshield wipers on his car.

  The coffee and cake were excellent. Café sounds clinked around us, and we heard the low murmur of other customers talking and enjoying the afternoon. It was an Internet café, and a few people were mousing along with their coffee.

  Richard, Helen's favored first son, took a very self-directed path in li
fe. He saw a picture postcard of Phoenix, Arizona, that his tenth-grade teacher had brought to school, and decided that his heart's desire was to be a mail carrier in Phoenix. So he pursued that goal after he graduated from high school and was in fact now a U.S. Postal Services employee there, walking all day in the warm sunshine. Every few years he vacationed in Michigan and would stop in at his mother's house. During one such visit the photo on Mrs. Donovan's bureau had been snapped.

  "I see," I said. So Mrs. Donovan was not mother to Drooly Rick. I let that one go and concentrated on Lisette's relationship with Jimmy and the house.

  Jimmy supported Mrs. Donovan and Lisette for a time on a marijuana business he'd started. He acquired some good seeds from a batch of British Columbian homegrown; he purchased grow-lights, flats, pots, and electric fans and set the little seeds to germinate. He raised several decent crops of marijuana in the basement and found buyers for the stuff, but was forced to stop when Lisette let it slip to the old lady that the plants were illegal. Helen couldn't abide that, and she was willful enough to throw the plants out and make them stay out. So Jimmy turned to dealing cocaine, which was more easily hidden from her, then he branched out to heroin. When Lisette got bored she'd work at little jobs here and there, selling costume jewelry, doing word processing, whatever.

  Jimmy always talked big, always promised Lisette that they'd be on easy street someday, have a place of their own and plenty of leisure time. When he was dealing, he threw money around but not enough to attract huge amounts of attention. Even so, Lisette marveled that he never got busted.

  "I'm from Detroit originally too," I volunteered. "I used to know some kids in high school from Wyandotte."

  "Did you ever know Vic Toretti?"

  "Hmm. Little guy, glasses, pocket protector?" I asked.

  "No. Vic Toretti was scum—a fat, crooked, cocaine-dealing son of a bitch. You would've seen his mug shot in the post office, probably. He loved to get people hooked. He was a real shit, and Jimmy hung with him for a while. They did business together. I think they pulled a few robberies. Jimmy thought Vic was wonderful—the most masculine dude, the best with women, the smartest."

  "How come?"

  "Because Vic was friends with an even bigger dealer."

  "Oh."

  "It's just a scummy life, drug dealing, you know?"

  "Yeah."

  "In fact, the drug business is a lot like this carrot cake."

  "Yeah?"

  Lisette had eaten about half of her cake. She pointed the tines of her fork to the layer of frosting on top. "Drug dealing looks on the surface like this sweet thing. Sweet and thick."

  We both looked at her frosting.

  "Then," she continued, "there's the cake, which isn't frosting, but it's still usually pretty good."

  "Yeah."

  "Then, see, when your cake is gone, you realize that all you've done is buy cake from the store. What if you want to make one?" She laughed harshly. "You don't know how."

  I nodded wisely. "You said it."

  "Things could be worse, though."

  A teenager looking at a computer terminal let out a sarcastic laugh.

  "So what's Jimmy doing today?"

  "Jimmy's dead."

  "Oh! I'm so sorry!" I laid my hand briefly on her arm.

  Lisette sighed, forked up another bite of cake, washed it down with some coffee, and said, "Yeah, some guy found him in the men's room at the Sugar Shack, a knife sticking out of his neck. Happened three years ago September."

  "The topless place?"

  "Yeah. Before he died, he kept promising we'd be so rich. He tried to make me think he was saving money, but he didn't have a dime when he died. I never found anything: no bank accounts, nothing in the mattress. Ha!"

  "Who killed him?" I bent down and extended a crumb of carrot cake to Todd in his box. He nibbled it from my fingertip, then I wiped my finger on my napkin. Sweets weren't good for him, but it seemed wrong not to even let him taste the carrot cake.

  "We never found out. I think he crossed somebody higher up, one of the heroin guys. Or I think Vic Toretti might have done it. I never trusted him."

  "Did they have an argument or something?"

  "I don't know. I never knew."

  "Tell me, Lisette, did Jimmy ever kick you and Helen out of the house for a couple of days at a time?"

  Lisette looked at me. "Yeah!" I could see her mind zinging between Jimmy, the drugs, my question, and sudden memories. "Yeah. He'd give us a couple hundred and tell us to go up to Mount Pleasant, to the Indian casino, or to Birch Run. We'd take the bus and stay overnight at whatever el cheapo place and actually we'd have a pretty nice time. At Birch Run we'd spend too much money on our credit cards, you know—you can't go there and not buy stuff."

  "Was there a casino there too?"

  "No, just the outlet mall. At Mount Pleasant we'd just gamble until our money ran out. It just seemed too sinister of a thing to do to tap into our credit cards at the casino."

  "A slippery slope-type thing?"

  "Exactly." She watched me drink my coffee. Her hands and fingernails were nicely shaped, but she wore two shoddy rings of fake gemstones and gold, and she'd put a muddy shade of maroon polish on her nails. "Why did you ask me that?"

  "Why did I ask you what?"

  "If he ever kicked us out of the house."

  "Oh, I ran with drug dealers myself for a while," I said, "and they did that too. I've always been curious about it. Want some more cake?"

  "No, thank you. What did your dealers do while you were gone?"

  "I really don't know, that's the interesting thing. Sometimes they'd trash the place, like with a party, but other times the house was cleaner than I'd left it."

  She exclaimed, "That's exactly it!"

  "Those guys, you can't figure them out. I mean, they always thought they were so smart, you know?"

  "Boy, do I know it." Lisette told me that she and Helen continued to live in the house, getting by on Helen's Social Security and a pension from GM. No savings, but enough to live on. Vic Toretti had come around a few times after Jimmy died.

  "What did he want?" I asked.

  "He wouldn't say. I mean, he acted like he was just coming to visit. He'd bring a package of Lorna Doones or something, but it was like he had something on his mind."

  "Did he ever try to hit you up for money?"

  "Oh, constantly. But we never gave in."

  "Another slippery slope. Did he hit on you sexually too?"

  "He tried." Lisette suddenly stretched her arms over her head in a ballerina-like pose that actually looked graceful, in spite of her open coat hiking up at her shoulders. She arched her back as if trying to center her body somehow. She brought her arms down with a little uff. "But I just didn't like him well enough. I always thought he knew something about who killed Jimmy. Besides, he had a girlfriend, this real looker who kept him on a short leash, considering. I think he was afraid of her."

  "Yeah? Was she a dealer too?"

  "No, she just ordered Vic around like a slave. Always carping on him to bring in more money. And he did, he did. I think she had some kinky hold on his dick, you know what I'm saying?"

  "What was her name? Maybe I knew her."

  "Uh, Bev, I think, or Barb. No, Bev. It was Bev Something. I met her a couple of times. Spooky little thing. She always reminded me of a bitsy pretty vampire. A well-dressed one. I always felt dowdy next to—"

  "Where is Vic now?"

  "Oh, he got busted for possession, amazingly his first time, and his lawyer couldn't keep him out. He went to prison about a year after Jimmy died. I don't know how long he's in for." Lisette looked into her coffee cup and swirled the dregs around.

  "My guy went to prison too. He's up in Marquette doing twenty. Which one's Vic in, do you know?"

  "Well, they move them around, you know."

  "Right, they do."

  "So who knows or cares where he is now? I sure don't."

  "Me neither," I declared. "D
id Helen always want to retire to Cleveland? Myself, I'd prefer Florida or—"

  Lisette laughed. "Helen got to be too much for me to take care of by myself. A couple of months ago I helped her sell the house. We looked at nursing homes in Detroit, but she's got a sister here in Cleveland, and she decided she wanted to be near her. Unfortunately, Jane's got liver cancer and isn't gonna be around long."

  "Oh, that's too bad."

  "Well, they never got along all that well, but family's family."

  "Yeah."

  Lisette told me that she was helping Jane now too and living in Jane's basement, which was furnished with a large-screen television and a Jacuzzi, so things could be worse.

  Chapter 17

  After a while Lisette went back to the nursing home with a sixteen-ounce coffee-and-cream for Helen. I watched her walk carefully with the hot paper cup. Before we said goodbye she asked if I'd ever been in a support group for friends of drug dealers. I told her no, but it sounded like a helpful idea. Lisette Donovan was a good egg, and I felt sorry for her loneliness.

  I spent an hour on one of the café's computer terminals surfing the Internet for information on Vic Toretti. Evidently, his drug bust had been run-of-the-mill and not made the papers. I looked for Michigan court records but found nothing online. This particular bust, a first offense, was unlikely to have been done by federal agents, but I checked some U.S. sites anyway. Nothing. Then I checked the Michigan Department of Corrections site and found him. It was a Victor Toretti at any rate, whose dates fit the time frame Lisette Donovan had given me. He'd been convicted for possession of less than twenty-five grams of cocaine, sentenced to a maximum of three years, ten months, and been paroled already. The parole date was in August of this year, barely two months ago.

  There it was: Toretti could have been the one who came upon Drooly Rick with Jimmy Donovan's loot.

  The prison Web site didn't show his address at the time of his arrest, so I'd need to check the court records in person to make sure this was the guy. Then I'd have to find him.

  While it was certainly possible that others could know about—or suspect—Jimmy Donovan's private practice of stashing away a percentage of his drug-trafficking income, it wasn't bloody likely. Otherwise the entire house would've been leveled by now by cash-crazed drug crooks.