Pagan Babies

by Elmore Leonard

  * * *

  TERRY’S BROTHER FRAN PRACTICED LAW in Detroit, specializing in personal injury, taking on doctors, big corporations, and their insurance companies. During the winter and the dreary spring months Fran liked to fly down to Florida to play golf and speculate in real estate.

  The first morning of this trip he told Mary Pat he was going to look at property adjacent to a new development and drove from Boca Raton to Fort Lauderdale and then thirty miles inland to the Sawgrass Correctional Institution, a medium-security facility for women. Fran was here to visit a young lady named Debbie Dewey, who was finishing up a three-year fall for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

  Before her incarceration Debbie had been doing investigative work for lawyers, a lot of it for Fran, checking out slip-and-fall victims Fran would represent in legal actions against the places where they had slipped and fallen. Also checking out the records of doctors who, Fran would like to believe, had misdiagnosed and malpracticed on his clients.

  Debbie wore a gray-green sack dress, prison issue, she had taken in and shortened. Fran told her she looked cute, he liked her hair clipped short like that. It was light brown today, at other times blond. Debbie ran her fingers through her hair and tossed her head to show Fran that it wouldn’t muss, saying she liked it, too, and called it a Sawgrass bob. They sat at a picnic table in the visitors compound surrounded by double fencing topped with razor wire. At the other tables were inmates with parents, husbands, boyfriends, some who had brought little kids to see their mommies.

  “How’re you doing?”

  “Don’t ask. Mary Pat and the girls with you?”

  “At the condo. Mary Pat comes down to watch the maid vacuum, make sure she gets underneath the furniture good. The girls sit around waiting in their plastic inner tubes. I left, I don’t remember if I told her I’m playing golf or looking at property. If I’m playing golf I stop at the club on the way back and change. But if I’m looking at property, why’m I coming home with different clothes on?”

  “I wish I had your problems.”

  “What about your release?”

  “Next Friday, if I don’t kill a guard.”

  “You coming back to Detroit?”

  “I might as well. You know what I’m thinking of doing? Try stand-up again. But with all new material from here, different situations you get into.”

  “You’re kidding—prison humor? Like what?”

  Debbie got up from the picnic table and held the skirt of the dress out to the sides. “I wear this in an extra-large with the white socks and the shitkickers? And model the latest in prison couture. I do a bit on forever standing in lines. Another one, getting hit on in the shower. I’m bare naked and this sexual predator I call Rubella makes the moves. The usual stuff.”

  “You tell how you tried to kill Randy?”

  “I mention him in the opening, the reason I’m here.” Sitting down again she said, “What’s he up to, anything?”

  “Well,” Fran said, “we won’t be seeing him on the society page anymore.”

  That perked her up.

  “His wife divorced him, threw him out of the house.”

  It made little Debbie sit up straight, a gleam in her eye. She said, “I knew it. When?”

  “It just became final.”

  “They were married what, a year?”

  “A little over. There was a prenuptial agreement, so her fortune won’t be seriously broken into. Randy’s paid off and gets to keep the restaurant.”

  “He got a restaurant out of it?”

  Little Debbie showing resentment.

  “Downtown Detroit, on Larned.”

  “The son of a bitch. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “The divorce was only final a couple of days ago.”

  “I mean about the restaurant. What’s the name of it?”

  “Randy’s, what else. He bought a bar and put a lot of money into it, his wife’s.”

  “Why does he get to keep it?”

  “As part of the settlement. She doesn’t like the neighborhood. So it’s in his name, but I think there might be a partner involved. At least that’s what my source tells me.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Debbie said, “why it took his wife over a year to find out he’s a fucking snake. She should’ve known the first time he shed his skin.”

  “You use that in your act?”

  “I just thought of it.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “What snakes do, they molt. I’ll see if I can make it work.” She said, “I’ll bet he got a boat out of it, too, the son of a bitch.”

  “The ex-wife keeps the boats and the country clubs, Detroit and Palm Beach. Randy can have his membership at the DAC if he wants to pay the bills. I have a lawyer friend in the same firm as the guy representing him. That’s how I happen to know about the settlement, the main points. Randy comes away with the restaurant and a few million after the lawyer takes his cut. You would think the ex-wife,” Fran said, “a woman with all her dough and clout, would’ve had Randy investigated before they got married.”

  “You don’t know him,” Debbie said, “he’s a world-class bullshitter. I believed him, didn’t I? And I make a living looking for fraud.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset, I’m still pissed, that’s all.” She looked over at a table where a child was crying, brought her gaze back and her expression was calm, a cool look in those blue eyes. “Have you been to the restaurant?”

  “Only for a drink. It looks like a men’s club. You see tables of business suits, out-of-towners, guys calling on the car companies.” Fran paused. “I’m told you might see bimbo-type ladies there in the evening.”

  “It’s a pickup bar?”

  “Not the kind you’re thinking of. I’m told the ladies are pros, high-class call girls.”

  “Imagine,” Debbie said, “your purpose in life is to give blow jobs to auto execs. I’ll have to drop by when I get my release, say hi to Randy. I always knew he was a pimp.”

  “You realize,” Fran said, “I hesitated telling you.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t do anything dumb.”

  “Now that you know what it’s like in here. You’re out next week, start with a clean slate . . . Which reminds me, my brother should be home soon, from Africa.”

  “That’s right, the priest.”

  “If he hasn’t gone native on me. He writes a letter, it’s about the weather. Or what the place smells like.”

  “He’s due for a vacation?”

  “First one in five years. There’s still that tax fraud indictment hanging over him. We have to get that cleared up.”

  “What’d he do, cheat on his income tax?”

  “I thought I told you about it.”

  “You didn’t tell me about the restaurant, either.”

  Randy the snake still on her mind.

  “This is state, the Wayne County prosecutor’s office. I’ve been on it since he left. They’ve just about agreed to drop the indictment, but want to talk to Terry first, when he gets home. It comes down to his word against statements made by two other guys. But since Terry’s a priest, and I find out the assistant prosecutor I’ve been dealing with is a devout Catholic—”

  “Fran, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Really? I would’ve sworn I mentioned it to you. The allegation involves Terry smuggling a truckload of cigarettes from Kentucky to Detroit, the purpose, to avoid paying the state tax, Terry and two other guys, the Pajonny brothers. Terry left right after they were busted and the Pajonnys rolled over on him to plead down, saying it was his idea and he took off with their share. So on the strength of that Terry was indicted, but by then he was in Africa.”

  “Your brother the priest,” Debbie said, “I want to get this straight, is a fugitive felon?”

  “He didn’t know about the charge. He went over there to help out our uncle Tibor, forty years a missionary, Tibor Tor
eki. I told you about him, how he used to stay with us?”

  Debbie said, “I’m confused.”

  And now Fran was shaking his head. “I didn’t tell it right. Terry wasn’t a priest yet when he got involved with the cigarettes. He wasn’t ordained till he got over there, and took his vows.”

  She still looked a little confused, saying, “All right, how does a guy who’s about to become a priest get into smuggling cigarettes?”

  “He drove the truck, that’s all. He didn’t know it was the pop crime of the nineties. The state raised the tax to seventy-five cents a pack, but didn’t add a stamp, so a lot of people got into it. It was low-risk, no one got hurt—” He could see Debbie, hunched over the table, thinking up another question, and he tried to head her off. “Terry gets home, you’ll have to meet him. You remind me of him, your attitude about things.”

  “The two guys,” Debbie said, “the Pajonnys—I love the name—they were friends of his?”

  “From school, years ago.”

  “It was their idea?”

  “They hired Terry to drive the truck, period.”

  “And they tried to put it on him and went down.”

  “The state,” Fran said, “claimed they were losing a hundred and fifty mil a year in tax revenues, so they made an example of the Pajonnys, hit ’em with five to ten. Johnny’s already out.”

  Debbie said, “Johnny Pajonny. It gets better. Was he in any trouble before?”

  “On occasion, but he’d never done state time.”

  “What about Terry?”

  “Never in any trouble before this—even though he was always kind of a tough kid. When we were little and I was what you might call pudgy?”

  “What’re you now, hefty?”

  “Be nice. Who else comes to visit?”

  “The other kids picked on you.”

  “The morons, they’d call me Fat Francis, make fun of my name. ‘Oh, Fran-cis, where’re your dolls?’ Or they’d call me Frannie, which I hated. But if Terry was around, uh-unh, they left me alone.”

  “Your big brother.”

  “Actually he’s two years younger, but was a real hardnose, played football three years in high school, liked to box—he’d take on bigger guys, it didn’t matter. Even if he was getting beat up he always hung in.” Fran’s expression softened, seeing Terry the priest now in his white cassock. He said, “I’ve been thinking, five years in an African village—he comes home, I might not even know him.”

  “Maybe he’s a saint,” Debbie said.

  Fran smiled at the idea. “I wouldn’t go that far. But who knows?”

  Ten women, seven of them black, occupied the wooden benches that faced the TV set in C dorm, waiting for their favorite sitcom to come on. Debbie came down from the second-floor tier above their heads and stepped in front of the TV set.

  “What she doing?”

  “Gonna try her act on us.”

  “I’m still working on it,” Debbie said. “How I got conned out of fifty thousand and ended up in the joint.”

  “Is it funny?”

  “That’s what I want you to tell me.”

  “Fifty thousand? Where you rob that kind of money from?”

  “I worked for it.”

  “Hookin’?”

  “Shame on you. Debbie’s a lawyer, fucks people in court ‘stead of the bed.”

  “I’m not a lawyer. I took pre-law, but that was it.”

  “Then why you go to school?”

  “I thought I wanted to practice law.” Debbie paused, changed her mind about trying out the bit and said, “Let me ask you something. What’s the best way to make a lot of money without working for it?”

  “Hit on the five-number lottery.”

  “Find a man has some.”

  “Yeah, and have to put up with his shit.”

  Debbie said, “What about armed robbery?”

  “You want to get high, you rob.”

  “Have any of you ladies ever robbed a bank?”

  They looked around at each other saying, “Yeah, I know people have.” Saying, “Rosella in B has. You know who I mean?” Saying, “Yeah, Rosella.” Saying, “Rosella owed five hundred to a shy. She went in the bank with her boyfriend’s gun and said, ‘Gimme five hundred dollars, girl,’ to the teller? Took it and paid the shy.”

  Another one saying to Debbie, “What you think is the best way to make it?”

  “I want to do stand-up,” Debbie said, “but I also want to con the son of a bitch who conned me.”

  The mother of this group, twenty-four years inside for killing her husband with a cast-iron frying pan, said, “Save the comic shit, baby, and do the con. You haven’t said nothing funny since you been standing there.”

  Driving back to Mary Pat and his two little girls, Fran turned on his current favorite daydream:

  Debbie comes out and he has a furnished apartment waiting for her in Somerset, where she used to live, not four miles from his home in Bloomfield Hills. He helps her get settled, maybe paint a room, rearrange the furniture, get in some groceries, booze. They have a drink, kick back. “Boy, it’s good to sit down, huh?” Debbie gets high. Naturally she’s a little horny, not having been with a man in almost three years. She gives him the look . . . one Fran has been waiting for ever since he and Debbie met and she started doing investigations for him: the look that says it would be okay to become intimate, not seriously intimate but for fun. Fall into it and say, after, “Wow, how did that happen?”

  He had told Terry one time, years ago, he had never picked up a girl in a bar, even when he was single. Terry said, “You never tried or you never made it?” Fran told him he’d never tried. Why didn’t he have the same confidence in a bar he had in a courtroom? Terry said that time, “You’re too buttoned up. Lose some weight and quit getting your hair cut for a while.”

  Terry’s answer to any problem was based on the serenity prayer. If you can handle it, do it. If you can’t, fuck it.

  5

  * * *

  AT NIGHT CHANTELLE KEPT HER pistol close by, a Russian Tokarev semiautomatic she bought in the market with money Terry had given her. There were hand grenades for sale, too, but they frightened her.

  This evening she brought the pistol outside with her and laid it on the table where he was twisting a joint he called a yobie. She had told him that here marijuana was sometimes called emiyobya bwenje, “the stuff that makes your head hot.” From that he had made up the word yobie. They had smoked one before supper—goat stew left over from last night, Terry complaining always about the fine bones—and now they would smoke another one with their brandy and coffee, the mugs, the decanter, and a citronella candle on the table.

  Always before when they smoked he would tell her funny things he heard in Confession, or about his brother the lawyer, what he did to get money for people who were injured. Or he’d tell jokes she never understood but would laugh because he always laughed at his jokes. This evening, though, he wasn’t saying funny things.

  He was serious this evening in a strange way.

  He said he had never seen so fucking many bugs in his life. He used that word when he was drinking too much. The fucking bugs, the fucking rain. He said sometimes he would turn on a light in the house and it would look like the fucking walls were moving, wallpaper changing its pattern. She said, “There is no wallpaper in the house.” He said he knew there wasn’t any wallpaper, he was talking about the bugs. There were so many they looked like a wallpaper design. Then with the light on they’d start moving.

  She was patient with him. This evening there were lulls, Chantelle waiting through minutes of silence.

  Now he surprised her, coming out of nowhere with “Some were mutilated before they were killed, weren’t they? Purposely mutilated.”

  Lately he had begun to talk about the genocide again.

  She said, “Yes, they would do it on purpose.”

  He said, “They chopped off the feet at the ankles.”

  “And took
the shoes,” Chantelle said, “if the person was wearing shoes.” She believed he was talking about the time they came in the church, an experience of the genocide he had not spoken of in a long time.

  He said, “I don’t recall them hacking the feet off with one whack.”

  It sounded to her so cold. “Sometime they did.”

  He said, “This was your observation?”

  She didn’t like it when he spoke in this formal manner. It didn’t sound like him and was another sign, along with that word, he had been drinking too much. She said, “Some they did with one blow. But I think the blades became dull, or were not honed to begin with. The one who injured me—I raised my arm to protect myself as he struck. He then took hold of my hand as I tried to pull away and he struck again, this time severing the arm. I saw him holding it by the hand, looking at it. I remember he seemed surprised. Then his face changed to a look—I want to say horror, or disgust. But was he sickened only by what he saw or what he did to me?”

  “What if you run into him again?”

  “I hope I never see him.”

  “You could have him arrested and tried.”

  “Yes? Would I get my arm back?”

  Terry smoked in the light of the candle. After a moment he said, “The ones they murdered in the church stood waiting, crowded together, holding each other. The Hutus would drag them into the aisle and some of them called to me. I never told you that, how they called to me, ‘Fatha, please . . . ‘ “

  She didn’t want him to talk about himself, what he was doing or not doing that time. “You know,” she said, “all over Rwanda they were cutting off the feet of Tutsis, so they not taller than the Hutu killers anymore.”

  He brought it back to the church saying, “They stood there and let it happen.”

  She wished he’d be quiet. “Listen to me. If they had no weapons they knew it was their fate to die. I heard of people in Kigali, they paid the Hutu killers to shoot them rather than be hacked to death with the machetes. You understand? They knew they would be dead.”

  Her words meant nothing to him. He held the yobie to his mouth but didn’t draw on it, saying, “I didn’t do anything to help them. Not one fucking thing. I watched. The whole time they were being killed, that’s what I did. I watched.”