Beautiful, Dirty, Rich

by J. D. Mason

  “All I see is a chance to clean up after my name, and showing everybody the dirt that’s on his.”

  Sue left without saying good-bye, but without asking for her money back.

  Their Crooked Mile

  “I got something in the mail.”

  Tom Billings sounded like he was drunk. His voice cracked and he was slurring.

  “Tom,” Russ said, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “It’s after two in the morning. Why don’t you go sleep it off and call me tomorrow at a more reasonable hour.”

  “It’s a picture of me and some … some kids, Russ.” His voice trailed off.

  Russ sat up on the side of the bed.

  “Russ?” his wife asked, sleepily. “What is it?”

  “Just Tom, honey. He’s a little drunk. Go back to sleep.”

  She moaned. “Take the phone downstairs, please,” she said irritably.

  Russ got up and left the room. “What kids, Tom?”

  Tom sighed irritably. “You know good and damn well what kids.”

  Russ fought back the panic that started to grow in his chest. Something was going on. “Who sent it?”

  Tom hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  “Well is there a return address, a P.O. box, something?” Russ said, angrily.

  “I said I don’t know who sent it, Russ! It’s just…”

  Russ took a deep breath to calm himself and hopefully it was deep enough to calm Tom’s fears too. “It’s just a picture? A picture of you and some kids,” he said, trying to rationalize the situation. “So what?”

  “I knew it would come to this,” Tom said, woefully. “I knew it.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Russ asked frustrated. He filled a small shot glass with scotch, and drank it quickly.

  Tom was so quiet on the other end of the phone that Russ thought he had hung up, or passed out. “You mess around with the devil long enough, Russ, and sooner or later, he’ll beat you.”

  Russ grimaced. “You’re fuckin’ drunk off your ass!” he growled. “Go to sleep, Tom.”

  “Ida Green cursed us, Russ.” Tom chuckled menacingly. “She cursed us the day we put her daughter away in prison.”

  Now, the man was just talking nonsense. “Ida Green’s dead and buried in the ground. She ain’t in the business of cursing anybody these days.”

  “We got greedy, Russ,” Tom continued, unaffected by anything coming out of Russ’s mouth. “I knew it in my gut that someday—somehow it would come back to bite us in the ass.”

  Russ hadn’t given energy to a single thought about Ida or about what had happened back then. Shit, too much time had passed to care. Desi Green was out, and ended up being a very rich woman.

  “We saved that girl’s life,” Russ explained.

  “We took it. And we kept on taking lives, Russ. For too long. Too many.”

  Rage flushed over Russ like a heat wave. “Don’t you put that shit on me, Tom! Don’t you even think of trying to put what you did on me!”

  “You reaped the benefits of what I did, Russ,” he said, quietly.

  “Fuck you! What I do ain’t illegal! It ain’t a crime if two people are consenting adults!”

  Tom chuckled. “And that’s the rub, ain’t it? They tell you what you want to hear, and it makes it fine as wine in your mind? Is that how it works, Russ?”

  Russ rubbed sleep from his eyes. Tom was a fuckin’ alcoholic, and tonight he was drunk and talking out of the side of his head about nonsense. “What’s in the picture, Tom? So, it’s you and some kids. What? Are you beating the kids? Eating them? Stuffing them into burlap sacks and tossing them in the river? What?”

  Again, Tom was quiet, and the empty sound on the phone was deafening. “I’m just … taking the kids. I’m taking them—putting them in the truck.” An anguished sob crossed the phone lines. “I think she sent it.” Tom finally admitted out loud, a thought that had probably been driving him crazy ever since he found out that Desi Green was writing that book.

  “How? Tom, how could she know?” Russ asked with desperation. In his mind, she couldn’t know a thing about either of them. Desi was nothing. She was just—a woman who’s suffered under some unfortunate circumstances in her life, but that was such a long time ago. Russ and Tom were probably nothing more than distant memories to that woman.

  “You remember,” Tom started to say, drifting off onto another conversation. “You remember how Ida cried that day? You remember how she begged and cried…”

  Russ squeezed his eyes shut trying to block out a memory he thought was long gone.

  “She begged us, Russ.… Begged us to…”

  “You know she didn’t do this!” Ida’s eyes were bloodshot red. She was on her knees, for crying out loud. On her knees tugging at Tom, and then she crawled across the floor to Russ.

  Tom had called Russ when he’d gotten the call from the Gatewood lawyers. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what—”

  “Oh, God!” Ida sobbed. “Tom—Tom, please! Judge Russ! She’s just a baby! She’s my baby!”

  It was hard to watch. Deep down, conscience convicted both men, but not enough.

  “Sign your statement, Ida,” Tom told her, after looking at Russ. “You have to sign it.”

  “No!” Ida shook her head so hard and fast that she nearly fell over. “No! I won’t! I ain’t signing nothing! ’Cause you know it’s a lie!” She struggled to her feet, and took a defiant stance in front of both men. Ida pointed. “You know it’s a lie! And you know it! And I ain’t signing a motha fuckin’ thing!”

  Finally, Russ stepped forward. “You sign it, Ida, or I swear to God I’ll put the death penalty on the table when it comes time to convict that girl!” He stood nose to nose with her. “And you know just like I know that the jury will find her guilty!”

  Tom pulled out the chair for her. Ida deflated right before their eyes, and she signed the document.

  It hadn’t affected him back then. Russ stood in the middle of his kitchen feeling like he’d been bathed in mud. Ida had inherited some of Julian Gatewood’s money, but not enough to keep her daughter out of prison.

  “Take me instead,” she said, solemnly, sitting down at that table over the statement she was supposed to sign. “She’s too young. Take me.” Her voice trailed off.

  Tom shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. “I’ve got witnesses who saw her with the gun in her hand, Ida.”

  She looked up at him with hooded, red eyes. Tom turned away. Ida signed her official statement.

  “Men like us take liberties with people’s lives, Russ.” Tom spoke unemotionally into the phone. “We’re not gods, but we pretend to be. We have no right to do the things we do.”

  “You need to get some sleep, Tom. It’s late.”

  Tom sighed. “It is late. Too damn late, and we’re about to be held accountable for all our trespasses, Russ. Just like Mary. You get ready.”

  Tom was drunk. And he was being eaten alive by his guilt over something that had happened too long ago to matter anymore. He just needed to sleep it off, and he’d be fine in the morning. “Tom, call me in the—”

  The sound of the gun going off startled Russ to the point that he dropped the phone on the floor. He stared at it, lying at his feet. His heart pounded in his throat. He slowly bent down to pick it up.

  “Tom?” he asked, over and over again, but his friend didn’t answer. Tom Billings was dead.

  Handle Me

  Mary Travis was close to eighty when she died. She’d lost both kidneys and was on dialysis, had suffered a debilitating stroke and several heart attacks, but it was a fall that killed her. She’d tripped on an area rug, fell, and hit her head on the corner of the solid mahogany coffee table.

  “The coroner said she’d been dead nearly a day before someone finally found her,” Solomon’s mother said, somberly. She’d come by the house to go through the last of Mary’s things.

  Mary had raised Solomon’s mother and her two sisters after
their mother had died and their father left them, claiming he’d send for them as soon as he found a job out in Colorado, but he never did.

  “It just breaks my heart knowing she laid there, unable to move or to call for help, and all alone.” She shook her head. “Mary was loved by too many people to have been left alone.”

  Mother Mary, he and his cousins had all called her. Solomon had spent so much time over here that he had almost forgotten what his own home looked like. Mary made cakes from scratch, let him help wash clothes on that old scrubbing board she had and crank the handle to that antique washing machine with the rollers that you had to feed the clothes through manually.

  Solomon’s mother picked up what looked like an old photo album or scrapbook, and a photo fell onto the floor. He picked it up, and was shocked by what he saw, a faded school picture of Desi Green smiling back at him, wearing a white sweater underneath a plaid vest, and a plastic headband holding back thick curls. He flipped it over and read the cursive handwriting on the back.

  To Miss Mary. Love Desi, age 16

  “You know who that is?” his mother asked, looking over his shoulder.

  “She looks familiar.” He swallowed, not seeing the need to tell his mother who she was.

  “That’s Desi Green,” his mother announced.

  He looked at her.

  “The one that killed that rich man, Gatewood,” she continued. “Mary was on that jury that convicted her. She was the forewoman.”

  After packing up Mary’s things and moving them across town to his mother’s shed behind the house, Solomon called Desi as soon as he said his good-byes and climbed back in behind the wheel of his car.

  “Solomon?” she answered.

  “Hey, Desi,” he said, reluctantly.

  As soon as she answered he knew he’d made a mistake in calling her. Solomon should’ve thought this through better before giving into impulse and dialing her number. He was usually more levelheaded than this. When things didn’t add up, he’d wait, analyze, and usually discover that nothing was as it seemed on the surface.

  “Um … how are you doing?” she asked, trying not to hide the fact that she was surprised to hear from him.

  “Good. I’m good.”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  Solomon sat in his car parked outside of his mother’s house. “No. Yes, Desi. I think there is something wrong.”

  He replayed the last few minutes in his head of the first time he and Desi met and he had told her that he was on his way to Mary’s funeral.

  “Mary Travis.” He said her name slowly, carefully, so as not to leave any room for misinterpretation. “I thought you said you didn’t know Mary Travis, Desi.”

  She paused. “I don’t.”

  He clenched his teeth and forced his composure to remain in check. Solomon hated being lied to, and Desi was lying. “That day in my office, when I told you that I had a funeral to attend, and you asked whose funeral. Do you remember that?”

  Again with the hesitation. “Vaguely, Solomon.”

  “I remember you asking me whose funeral I was attending.”

  “Then maybe I did. I—I don’t know.”

  “She had your picture, Desi. A picture of you when you were sixteen,” he explained like he was presenting an argument in court. “You wrote on the back, ‘To Miss Mary. Love Desi.’”

  Desi was silent, which confirmed everything that he needed to know.

  “You lied about knowing her. Why?”

  The less she said, the more her silence sparked his anger, and his curiosity. “Desi? Answer me.”

  “I have to go,” she suddenly said.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Manhattan,” she snapped.

  “We need to talk, Desi. Face-to-face.”

  “I said I’m in New York, Solomon.”

  “Where?”

  Again with the silent treatment and then, not surprisingly, she hung up.

  The next call he made was to his assistant. Solomon apologized profusely for interrupting her Sunday afternoon before telling her the reason for his call.

  “I don’t care if you have to call every hotel in Manhattan, find out which one she’s checked in to and call me back.”

  “Today?”

  “To-fuckin-day!”

  * * *

  The next afternoon, Solomon sat on that plane heading to JFK, wondering if he wasn’t just overreacting. Maybe it wasn’t as big a deal as he was making it, and Desi had simply forgotten that she had known Mary. A lot had happened to that woman since she was sixteen. It could’ve been that Desi didn’t want to complicate things between her and Solomon considering that at the time he first mentioned his aunt Mary to her, the two of them had just met and he had made it clear that he was reluctant to work with her. Over time, he could’ve found all those reasons compelling enough to justify why she wouldn’t tell him that she knew Mary. But what he couldn’t let go of, and the thing that had convinced him that he needed to buy a ticket and get on a flight to New York and talk to her face-to-face, was the fact that Mary Travis had stood before the court, and a room full of people, and announced that the jury had found Desi guilty. What he couldn’t make sense of was the fact that Mary was a member of that jury in the first place if she and the defendent knew each other.

  A day after finding that picture and talking to Desi over the phone, he found himself standing at the door to her hotel room.

  Of course she was shocked to see him. “Solomon. What are you—”

  He didn’t wait to be invited inside.

  * * *

  He tossed his overnight bag on the couch, crossed his arms, stood in the middle of the room and stared at Desi. “Help me to make sense of this in my head, Desi.”

  To Desi it wasn’t really that hard. He knew that Desi and Mary did know each other and that Desi had lied to him about it. To her, it seemed pretty cut and dry.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say, Solomon,” she shrugged. “So, I knew her. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

  Never let them see you sweat. Before she was locked up, as scared as she was, Desi had damn near sweated herself to death. But she’d learned some things in the system. She’d learned to keep her cool even when trouble was staring her down. She’d learned to look people in the eye and to never back down if she could help it. Hell! Desi had learned to be a real superhero in that place.

  He buried his hands in his pockets. The intensity in his dark eyes made her knees weak, and not in a good way.

  “Tell me how you knew Mary.”

  She felt like her stomach was being gripped and held between two fists. “She substituted at my school one semester when one of my teachers was on maternity leave,” she admitted.

  He studied Desi, searching for signs that she wasn’t telling the truth. Maybe even trying to find hidden truths between the lines of what she’d said. But Mary had been a substitute teacher at Desi’s school. Desi liked Mary, and she thought that Mary liked her too.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me that?” he asked, accusingly.

  Desi shrugged. “It was easier not to, I guess.” She crossed the room and sat down. “We’d just met, and you’d already had your mind made up about me, Solomon. I just figured—it was easier not to talk about it.”

  She wished he’d sit down. At least if he did, she wouldn’t feel like she was on trial again.

  “Do you want some water?” she asked, all of a sudden.

  “No.”

  “I’ve got cookies,” she said, quickly. “Want some cookies?”

  “She announced the guilty verdict at your trial, Desi,” he said, coolly. “You trying to tell me that that was no big deal too?”

  Desi’s eyes widened. “How did you—”

  “Doesn’t matter. But that’s huge, Desi. And the fact that you never told me, leads me to wonder what else is going on here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If the two of you knew each other, how the hel
l did she end up on the jury?”

  “How should I know? It wasn’t like I put her there.”

  “But you recognized her when you saw her in that courtroom.”

  Desi paused. “Yes,” she murmured.

  “Was she asked if she knew you during jury selection?”

  Desi nodded, and then shook her head. “She said she didn’t.”

  Now it was his turn to pause for thought.

  Did he know? A chill slowly crept up her spine. The way he was looking at her … Desi wanted to tell him. Jesus! She wanted to tell him everything—going to see Mary, just to talk. She wanted to tell him about how all she wanted was to ask Mary Travis why she’d lied and said that she didn’t know who Desi was when the attorneys asked her. He was so close to figuring it out. Desi could see it in the way he looked at her. Solomon was a smart man. It wouldn’t be long before he put all the pieces together. Mary Travis was dead, and every confession she’d ever made had died with her. Would he believe them if they heard Mary’s confessions come out of Desi’s mouth? She knew better than to think that he would.

  “What did you do, Desi?” he asked, gravely.

  “Nothing!” she blurted out. An overwhelming rush of panic washed over her like heat. “You think I—”

  He took a step in her direction. “I’m asking you to be honest with me,” he coaxed.

  Desi’s heart sunk. She was going back to prison. All of a sudden she couldn’t breathe.

  “I’m not stupid, Desi,” he continued, calmly. “I put puzzle pieces together for a living. The pieces of this one are coming together in a way I don’t like. Mary had been your teacher. She sat on that jury that sent you to prison.” Solomon slowly approached her.

  Desi sat in the chair, unable to move. She couldn’t breathe. The room was starting to spin as she realized why he’d come all this way. She couldn’t go back! Dear God! She couldn’t go back! But he knew. Tell him! Just say it! Tell him!

  Desi could see their faces all over again. Every man and woman on that jury refused to look at her when they came back into that courtroom. The judge asked them if they’d reached a verdict and Mary stood up.

  “We have.”