Avon Calling! Season One

by Hayley Camille

  Jacob, who had been studying his notes, jumped to his feet, spilling papers to the floor. Behind Brandway, Adina stood meekly with her notepad and pen. Jacob shot her a wary smile, but her eyes found her shoes instead. Adina tucked her hair behind her ear and smoothed her A-line skirt, apparently trying to maintain a professional distance and the appearance that they weren’t dating, or in fact, it seemed, that they even knew each other at all. Jacob’s smile dropped.

  “Take notes, Miss Sonberg,” Brandway ordered. “I want whatever cock-and-bull story he comes up with written on paper. I’ve had enough of this department not cooperating with my office.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Adina said, and began to scribble on her pad.

  Jacob was humiliated.

  “This whole affair has been fouled up beyond all recognition!” Brandway was yelling. “I’ve got Class Five equipment that is essential to the war effort tied up in red-tape from here to old Aunt Gertie’s ass, and Class Eight medical supplies M.I.A! I’m talking millions of dollars here, Lawrence, and I’m just about ready to send armed convoys through the main street to keep this supply line safe. You want grenades and whizbangs on the road every day with a troop of loaded brownings marching alongside shop girls and baby carriages? You think I won’t do it?!”

  “Most of your crates have been recovered -

  “But not by you! And where are these leads coming from anyway? Who’s tipping you off?”

  “Well,” Jacob hesitated. “I’m still trying to establish -”

  Adina looked away, clearly embarrassed for him.

  “You don’t even know who’s feeding us this information!” Brandway seethed, through gritted teeth. “It’s probably the same hop-heads skimming the rest of my crates. Keeping some for services rendered! Those are military assets, son, and I want whoever is behind these heists to fry!”

  “All evidence suggests it was Carelli that pulled that last heist, sir,” Jacob said, trying to tame his growing frustration. “And Poletti before that. I’d put money on the fact that they killed your GI’s too. Both are dead, along with a trail of bodies leading back into last year. Bodies that we didn’t see the pattern in until I started pulling this investigation together. Someone’s doing the dirty work out there for us. For every heist, we’re getting a corresponding tip-off; bodies and crates. If you ask me, our real problem is finding the bait and switch. Somewhere along the line, you’ve got a weak link. Someone is feeding your transport routes to whoever is bankrolling this operation.” If he was angry before, now Brandway looked livid.

  Behind her boss, Adina’s eyes widened. Nervously, she took a step back. She chanced a look of warning to Jacob, finally acknowledging, to him, at least, that their relationship existed.

  “Are you inferring I have a rat in my ranks, Sergeant Lawrence?” he thundered, beating the younger man down with a stare. “That someone is working against the U.S. military from inside my own office! That’s a treasonous accusation, sonny -”

  Jacob pulled himself straight. He’d had a gutful of tough nuts like Brandway and Mayor Sutherland throwing their weight around his investigation. He was darned well going to run it the way he needed to. The vexation of cold leads and Adina’s witness to this disrespect came boiling to a head. He exploded.

  “That’s exactly what I’m inferring, General,” Jacob shouted. “Flushing out that rat should be just as high a priority as finding the killers I’m looking after. But I don’t have any jurisdiction in your office, which you know darned well! And then there’s the third party involved. Someone is paying for all this. With cold, hard cash. And whoever that person is, they’re more dangerous than the others put together. I’m tracking down two of the three, what are you doing?”

  For a moment, Brandway was silent. A vein on his temple pulsed as he clenched his jaw, finally considering Jacob’s words.

  When he spoke, his tone was quiet, but intense. “We’ve got seventy thousand workers coming through that port every day, Sergeant Lawrence. Now, how do you I suppose I ‘flush out’ a single rat amongst them. It could be anyone.”

  “With all due respect, General Brandway, no, it couldn’t,” Jacob said, sitting back down. “It could only be someone with high clearance. I’ll leave it up to you to figure that one out. In the meantime, if you’ll let me get back to my job, I’m trying to catch a gang of serial killers, as well as find out which high pillow in this town has the gumption to steal government assets from the United States Army under our own nose.” Jacob lowered his voice further, conscious of the curious ears tuning in outside his door. “This is not some street gang of greasers out for a bit of nose-candy and iron, General Brandway – someone big is pulling the strings here. And I guarantee you, this situation is a lot more complicated than you know. So how about you let me do my job and go take a good look at who has access to your transport data.” And with that, Jacob signaled them both out of his office, trying to hide the hurt in his eyes as Adina passed.

  Now, Jacob pulled his hands roughly across his tired face. The driver’s seat of his car was strangely comforting, and he thought he could almost fall asleep right then and there. But his blasted notebook with its’ ever-narrowing list of Avon ladies was still his only lead and if he didn’t dig up answers soon, Jacob felt sure there’d be blood waiting for him when he woke. He gathered his wits and got out of the car. He pulled the jacket of his uniform straight, running his palms down the brass buttons to smooth it out, then fitted his hat. Striding across the road with his papers, Jacob knocked on the front door, ready to launch into his usual introduction.

  The door opened.

  “Mrs. Betty Jones?” he began, head down, reading from the notebook. “My name is Sergeant Jacob Lawrence with the New York City Police Department -”. As his head came up, his words broke away, and Jacob’s mouth fell softly open. His mind jarred and lost thought. His heart took over, hammering in his chest, and he was immobilized, like a man caught in a storm not knowing where to turn. He stood on the doorstep, gaping. Reeling. Because this woman looked just like her. Like Susie.

  But it couldn’t be, because Susie was dead.

  Suddenly Jacob felt cold. He reached out and found the doorframe to steady himself.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, “you just look like someone…” but he couldn’t finish his sentence, because when he looked back into the woman’s eyes, he knew.

  It was her.

  Those eyes had haunted him for twelve years. That face, that mouth. That ghost.

  Time fell away.

  “Susie -?” he breathed.

  The woman in front of him smiled sadly. She seemed to be fighting back tears. Somewhere, under the concern in her eyes, was an odd look of relief.

  “Jake.”

  “But you’re – I was there, at your house -”

  “I know,” she said.

  “You’re dead,” he said simply.

  “Yes,” she replied, “It was the only way I could live.”

  He stood there in shocked silence, drinking her in like a man lost in the desert, finally given water. She had changed, but to Jacob, barely. Her hair was darker, and longer, curled in victory rolls that swept up from her cheekbones to frame her face and then dropped down over her shoulders. There were tiny lines around her eyes and mouth, as if she’d spent years smiling and couldn’t help but show it. The roundness of her fifteen-year-old face was gone and in its place, he found the contours of a beautiful woman. But in her eyes, those depths of dark blue he had known so well, she couldn’t hide from him. Twelve years, meant nothing to a person’s eyes.

  And he knew he had found her.

  And suddenly, inexplicably, he was angry.

  “Why?” he said, his voice cracking.

  “I had no choice, Jake.” She held the door open. “Please, come inside.”

  Jacob stepped resentfully into her sitting room, dragging off his hat. Betty shut the front door softly behind him. Jacob turned to face her.

  “This isn’t a coincidence, i
s it?” he asked, knowing the answer.

  “No.”

  He looked down at his notebook and barked out a laugh. The Avon Calling card, poking out from his notebook, caught his attention like a jagged knife.

  “You led me here.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been leaving the boxes for me. On the station steps.”

  “I have.”

  He shot her a bitter look and slid the Avon card out from his notebook. He turned it over to look at the handwritten address. The writing had always looked strangely familiar. That instinct he had felt, to keep it close, that there was something odd about it, something unsettling, now made sense. It was Susie’s writing. Twelve years displaced.

  “Why?”

  “Please let’s talk first, Jake,” Betty said. “You need to understand.”

  “Understand what? That you left me? That you ran away and broke me into a million pieces?” His voice faltered with emotion that he couldn’t disguise. “That you didn’t want me?” Jacob was wounded, and every part of his body betrayed him by baring it.

  “I knew you’d be angry. And you should be,” Betty said. “I realize I owe you an explanation -”

  “An explanation?” Jacob repeated, dumbfounded. “Twelve years, I’ve thought you were dead, Susie! Not allowed to attend your funeral because of who might be there. Barely allowed to grieve because I wasn’t meant to know you. You have no idea what that did to me. The thought that I couldn’t save you, that I’d been too late to help - I was just a kid! And you - you were alive this whole time? Why didn’t you come to me?”

  “I couldn’t, Jake.”

  “You could! You should have! You must’ve known I’ve thought of you, Susie. Every single day, I’ve thought of you!”

  “It’s not that simple, Jake. You said yourself, you weren’t meant to know me, from my family’s side at least.” Betty wrung her hands together. “We spent so many years hiding our friendship, to protect you. My father would have killed you had he known what you meant to me. And even if I ran away from them to you, they would have found me. They’re insidious. Nothing is secret from them.

  “Friendship? It was so much more -”

  Tears pricked behind Betty’s eyes and she pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her apron.

  “Yes, it was more,” she said. “But we could never have been together, you know that. Your parents, as kind as they were to me, would never have accepted me into their family. They wanted you to marry a nice, Jewish girl and bring their grandchildren up with their traditions and loyalty to your faith – it would have broken your mother’s heart to see you destroy that, not to mention your Bubbe and Zayde, whom adored you so much.”

  She took a breath and looked at him, imploringly. Hesitantly, Betty reached out and took Jacob’s hand. He caught his breath and felt his anger fade. Gently, Betty led him over to sit on the couch. She looked as if her heart were breaking, as his was, all over again. “I could never have ruined the beautiful family you had,” Betty said. “No matter how much I wished I could be a part of it. I loved you all too much.”

  “It didn’t matter to me whether they approved,” Jacob argued, “Only what we wanted.”

  “No, Jake. You’re wrong. It never mattered what we wanted. We were just children ourselves. It was far bigger than us, all along.”

  Jacob sat, lost for words, looking at her. Deep down, he knew she was right.

  All those years he’d pushed relentlessly on, trying to bury thoughts of her in the past, suddenly seemed pointless. He’d never buried them at all. He wore her memory, like a coat against the wind, every day he left the house. The ghost of Susie had become part of his skin.

  Jacob dropped his head into his hands. He was beyond angry now. He felt foolish to think he’d lost years pining for something that wasn’t gone, and that he could never have had anyway. He’d loved her. And she’d loved him. But it was never going to be enough.

  He looked down at his crisp, ironed uniform, at his shiny brass buttons. He thought he’d joined the police force for her, and for the years after he won his badge, he’d striven to uphold the family tradition. Police Commissioner’s oldest son. Jacob’s motivation to bring her justice now seemed hollow. Susie wasn’t dead. But he still couldn’t have her. And in his passivity, he had chosen that path just as surely as she had. It was the same family tradition he worked so hard to uphold that had forced her to disappear from his life, rather than marry him.

  It hurt so much that Jacob felt he might have fallen apart, if his uniform hadn’t been stitched around him.

  Quite suddenly, he realized there was music. He listened to it, strangely detached, playing from a wireless on the telephone stand. Jacob hadn’t noticed it before. But now it stood out, so sweet in its merry tune, that it seemed like an imposter in the room.

  “So, why now?” he finally asked, feeling entirely defeated.

  “A few reasons. Some more urgent than others, I suppose.” She looked uncomfortable.

  “Why don’t you start with this?” He passed her the Avon Calling card and she took it, with an apologetic smile.

  Jacob laughed, with chagrin. “You’re way ahead of me on this one, aren’t you?”

  “How much do you know, already?” Betty asked, gently.

  “Can’t you tell? Just zap into my mind -” At Betty’s hurt expression, he said, “Sorry.”

  “I would never read your private thoughts, Jake. You know that.”

  “I don’t really know anything right now.”

  Betty nodded. “Alright, I’ll start from the beginning. The criminals. I know them, of course. As you’ll remember from when we were children. I’ve been watching them for years. You must understand something – I wanted to contact you earlier, much earlier, for many reasons, but the timing wasn’t right until now. I’ve had - obligations.”

  “What obligations?”

  “Very important ones. I’ll come to that later. In any case, when I first started tracking them down, I just wanted revenge, plain and simple.” At the look on Jacob’s face, Betty scowled. “Let’s not pretend that they don’t owe me that.” Jacob took a deep breath and waited for her to continue. “In any case, over the last few years, I’ve discovered the situation is far worse than I’d imagined. I never told you who I was working for, back when I was a girl. I couldn’t, you understood that. It was far too dangerous, and I’d never have forgiven myself if anything happened to you. Especially with your father being who he was.”

  “I never liked your secrets, Susie.”

  “I know, I never liked keeping them from you.” She looked meaningfully at Jacob. “My father was cruel and opportunistic, but he was just a pawn.”

  “He still deserved to die for what he did to you.”

  “Yes, he did.” She lifted her chin defiantly. “And I killed him, Jake.”

  Jacob blanched, hearing her say it aloud. Of course she must had done it. He remembered his own father’s words as he’d fallen to his knees, coughing and retching by the smoldering house at only seventeen years old.

  “They found Roy in the kitchen, what’s left of him... There were signs of violence… He was already dead when the fire began.”

  “I don’t care if you killed him,” Jacob said, surprised to hear the words coming from his own mouth. Even his respect for the law couldn’t stand up against the hatred he still felt for that man, who had so horribly abused his daughter and wife.

  “Yes, I’ve come to peace with it,” Betty said, ironically. “Anyway, every night that they brought me in to help them judge the men they brought in, not to mention the drugs I sold to junkies, well, I was always working for someone far more dangerous than my father. From the beginning, I was working under the hand of my father’s uncle. Donald Pinzolo.”

  “I knew it!” Jacob stood up, slamming the air with his fist. “I can smell the corruption from here. I’ve been tracking the ties Pinzolo has with underworld crime for years, but he keeps his nose so darn clean! And e
very time I get close, it’s like he slips through my fingers. Slimy bastard.” Jacob looked back at Betty to find her stifling a laugh. “Sorry,” he said.

  “It’s alright. You know I’ve heard worse. Last week, I heard a nun cuss so bad she’d have made a sailor blush. No one else did, of course. It was just in her head.”

  Jacob smiled, ruefully. “I suppose nuns aren’t all virtue, then.”

  “Goodness, no.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. So what do you know about Pinzolo?”

  “Everything. I know he has ears everywhere,” Betty continued. “In your department, the FBI, at Embarkation Ports all across the country. I started small at first, tracking troublemakers and hatchet-men with dirty hands - killers, you understand, that worked for Donny. Only ever the ones with blood on their hands and innocent blood at that - I don’t kill lightly, you know” she assured him. “But when I started intercepting the heists - truckloads of crates too big to dump - I needed someone I could trust to take the stock off my hands without passing it straight back into Donny’s.”

  “You dumped crates of amphetamines?”

  “I’ll give you coordinates, if you insist, but they’re better off where they are. The point is, the military’s been corrupted, Jake.”

  “I guessed as much.”

  “Someone’s giving Donny’s men access to transport routes to foster the underground drug trade. He controls practically every inch of the city black market, and his supply lines stretch all the way to the West Coast.”

  “And Mayor Sutherland?”

  “A highbinder. It’s big business. And to be honest, it’s getting to be more than I can deal with on my own.”

  “This isn’t your fight, Susie.”

  Betty looked away, smoothing her skirt. “Sutherland might not be,” she said. “But Pinzolo is. And Uncle Frank and Marco and Vince, Carlos and Tony and every other sludge-feeder they’ve got out on the streets doing their dirty work. They’ll always be my business.”