Widow's Row

by Lala Corriere

  Only a dozen or so people, and all with high stakes, knew about the junk Viagra and bogus anti-aging products being mass-produced in Mexico. It was a fact the first-year projected earnings of US$180 million, with more to come. That would be a drop in their proverbial golden bucket.

  Goals for the Baird owned Russian business ventures were bi-directional from day one of operations. The blue-eyed cherubic babies went for big bucks in the business. Slave-brides, decent money. Soon enough he realized the enormous wealth to be made on the younger girls. Human trafficking to pedophiles. A flourishing business. Got the stalkers off the streets. No harm in that.

  The numb-nuts ranch owner didn’t have a clue, nor did anyone else working or living at the ranch. Kate Vander Ark, George’s own private-reserve fuck-feast, wouldn’t know what his business was if it rose up and bit her on her tight ass.

  But one person’s existence riled him. The newcomer. Baird hadn’t figured on anyone getting in the way. “Who’d of thought?” Baird turned from the mirror and stormed away.

  I barged through the screen door leading to my father’s living room. His sullen face appeared ash gray under the unshaven beard. His right arm shook with such violence the nurse had to grab it with both hands, attempting to soothe it back down into his lap.

  “I didn’t want to bother you,” the nurse said, “but I can’t calm the man down.” She nodded toward an empty martini glass. “I even gave him amitriptyline on top of that, enough to knock you and I both flat on our butts, but he ain’t settlin’ down. Then he started askin’ for you. That’s when I called.” She looked over at the restraining belts she’d gathered. “I really don’t want to use those. Not in his own home.”

  I kneeled by his chair and curled his still trembling hand in mine. “I’m here, Daddy. You’re going to be just fine but I think maybe we should get you to the hospital.”

  I could only guess he’d suffered another storke, and considered calling for an ambulance rather than risk driving him myself.

  He drew my hand up against the leathery side of his face. The first tear I had ever known James Lemay to shed trickled down his cheek and collected between my thumb and forefinger.

  The words sounded as if they came off an old and sun-warped LP record. His voice cracked in rhythm to his shaking fingers. “You’ve been worried about Naomi. Good old Naomi Gaines.”

  “Yes, Daddy. I’ve been very worried. I still am. I can’t help it.”

  “She won’t be coming back to Trinidad.”

  “Why? She loves it here. She’ll be back, Daddy.”

  My dad dropped our entwined hands onto his lap. His heavy eyelids swooped low. “Breecie, there’s something you need to know, but I’m feeling a little tired now.”

  “Dad, you can’t just leave me hanging like this. Can’t you just say it?” Jesus. Now’s a fine time for the martini-chasing drugs to kick in.

  He let go my hand in his lap. “Naomi is dead.”

  I pulled my hand to my chest. “I don’t understand.”

  “They found her north of Taos, probably on her way home. She was in a motel bathtub.”

  “She drowned?”

  “Electrocuted.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Ready. Aim. Aim. Aim>.

  Kate was probably right in discounting my audacious plans to talk to my dad at The Raging Bovine in between line dances. But the dining room opened up at four and the band didn’t start playing until five. A juicy steak dinner, even at four in the afternoon, sounded better than trying to confront him over a bowl of oatmeal in the morning.

  Between Dad’s cane and the helpful owner, he managed up the flight of stairs and landed in a comfortable booth overlooking the bar, the dance floor, and Widow’s Row.

  “This place isn’t new to me, you know,” he announced as he fanned his napkin across his lap. “Best damn steak I’ve ever had.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have brought you here months ago?” Did you bring Erin here?

  “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  “You’re my dad. You don’t need an invitation.”

  “Then why one now?” He sipped on his water, then barked out his order to the timid waiter, “Double Dewar’s. Splash soda.”

  “Give him the twelve year,” I added. I got a kick out of knowing if they didn’t have a cabernet wine they surely didn’t stock specialty scotches.

  “Where do you want me to start, honey?” he asked, after dismissing the waiter. One moment gruff, the next—quite gracious. That was Dad. Lawyer Dad, anyway.

  Once again, I’d lost my nerve. My grandfather used to preach it to me all the time, calling it courtroom confrontation paralysis. He’d say, ‘Ready. Aim. Aim. Aim. Aim.’

  I sipped the cheap wine as Dad slugged down the Dewar’s, and by the way, twelve-year-old Dewar’s, before his steak arrived. I could imagine another wasted opportunity as he sank into the abyss of too many drugs and too much alcohol. What a safe haven he has created.

  As if he saw my frustration and anger, he spoke. “I’ve already told you your mother and I had no love lost. She was a good woman, but ours was a marriage of political convenience.”

  “And it’s not easier to hear it a second time, but I’m glad you told me your feelings, Dad.”

  “Well, you want more. You’re going to get it. Just tell me for sure. For sure, you want to know. You have to tell me this.” His pattern of speech slipped to a slow and repetitive slur, but I knew it wasn’t the alcohol. Not yet. I’d seen him do this when under stress.

  “I guess us Lemay’s say ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’.”

  Dad winked at me with a half smile, but not far beyond it I could see his eyes wince with emotional pain. “Well, for starters, Naomi’s death was no accident.”

  “What in the world makes you think that?” The idea was preposterous. And what I feared most in the pit of my very being.

  “I don’t think. I know. Her prying nature was going to be her demise. I’ve known that for years.” He pawed his empty glass. “I met Erin the old-fashioned way. In a bar.”

  I had to agree with him, no one seemed to meet his or her soul mate in a bar anymore. But we were talking about Naomi.

  “I’d just won the biggest case of my life. A real homerun deal for me. Even the judge wanted to kiss my royal ass. We were all going over to a little club in Georgetown to celebrate. Can’t remember the name of the joint. I frequented it. Your mother despised it. I called her up, invited her, even told her I’d send a car for her, but she wanted nothing to do with it. As I recall, her excuse was it was her night for Mah Jongg. That was her way of staying away from me. One night a week for Mah Jongg, one night of bridge, and one night of her B&S”

  “B&S?”

  “She and her friends called it ‘bitching and stitching’. They all got together with their damn needlepoint projects, and bitched about how horrible their upper class lives were with shallow husbands, endless tennis matches and charity fundraisers. I say, ‘Fuck ‘em all’.”

  “Oh my god. Are you telling me you met Erin McGinnis that night?” If I didn’t bring him to the point of all this, Dad would be too drunk, too tired, or just too ornery to keep talking.

  “I fell in love with her that night. Hell, the moment I saw her I started swooning; when she spoke it was all over for me. I’d been faithful to your mother up until then, and I’m telling you, I should be awarded sainthood for that. Your mother and I hadn’t had sex...”

  “...She was frigid, Dad. You can say it. I pretty much figured that out.”

  The steaks arrived and Dad and I dove in, with discernable agreement that a pause in conversation would do us both good.

  “Trinidad’s a great little town. I just love it here,” he said, crunching on steak fries.

  “I agree. It offers a lot of charm.”

  “More than charm. Native Indians called those mountain peaks Wahatoya. The Breasts of the Earth.”

  “Yes. I already knew th
at.” It was my home, now.

  “And did you know that those breasts nourished everyone that came. Coal mining and cattle ranching beckoned. Italians and Jews, Germans, and Irishmen. Slavs and Poles. They all came to find their livelihood here amongst the old Spanish settlers, and at the great breasts of Mother Earth.”

  “That’s nice, Dad. Sounds like your opening arguments. What does that have to do with Erin?”

  “This town seems to be open to just about anything. That’s when I first brought Erin here. We had to get her out of D.C., and this was the perfect place.”

  I swirled the cheap red wine in my glass and brought it to my nose. I knew there would be no fancy legs trickling down the sides, and no aged-oak aroma of a fine Honig or Caymus. The motion just gave me something to help pace myself. Ready. Aim. Aim. Aim.

  “Your detective friend came close,” he said.

  “He turned up very little.”

  “He knew Naomi’s maiden name was McGinnis.”

  “I confronted her. Naomi told me there was no connection.

  “Naomi lied. She was Erin’s sister.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  All In The Family

  Usually I could handle second-hand smoke at The Raging Bovine. It was an inherent, albeit prohibited, part of the gritty atmosphere. But as it wafted up from the bar below I felt my stomach grow queasy. “Dad, maybe coming here wasn’t such a good idea.”

  I’d seen all the family photos in Naomi’s living room. There was no sister. There was no sister.

  “Breeze, we’ve only just begun.” He ordered both of us a second drink, catching my scowl. “Don’t look at me that way. Battle-axe Nurse Ratched has me off the sedatives. A little imbibing will do my blood pressure good.

  “Anyway, let me just get this said.”

  The more anxious he became, the more sluggish his words. I could almost watch as he struggled to repair short circuitry between the thoughts whirling inside his head and the words that finally came out.

  “We came down here to finish what Erin had started in Washington. She needed more surgeries.”

  “I don’t understand.” Columbia Hospital. Georgetown University Hospital. Walter Reed. George Washington University. The credentialed list of D.C. health institutions went on-and-on, I thought.

  “Erin was Naomi’s sibling. Eleven years younger. I’m going to have to spell it out for you. The given name on the birth certificate was A-A-R-O-N. Aaron Michael McGinnis.”

  I held my hands in front of my face in sheer frustration. My shoulders went up in a deep shrug. The band was setting up below and making all sorts of piercing warm-up noises, adding to my exasperation.

  “Don’t you get it, honey? Stop and give yourself permission to think. Erin was born a man. She was Naomi’s little brother. Of course, when I met her I thought she was every bit a woman.”

  “Dad.” I had no other words.

  “There was still some housekeeping to do. I brought her down to Trinidad for her surgeries.”

  His voice demanded that I understand, but I didn’t. I fought to pull the pieces together, but couldn’t. I settled for stuffing another piece of meat into my mouth, comfortable that chewing and talking at the same time was frowned upon at any Lemay family gathering.

  “You have a generous heart, kiddo. All I hear about is how you love all those tranny-gals over at The Lost Cat. Why is this so hard for you?”

  “Daddy?” I screeched. Hot air rises. I hoped my voice would too. But when I looked down below at the bar, the band and the few early-bird consumers stared straight up at me.

  Dad cut at his steak the way a mother would prepare a toddler’s plate, indifferent to my scream. In seconds, one-inch squares replaced the filet. “You have a lot of nerve,” he finally muttered.

  “Don’t you get it?” I conjured up a firm whisper. Ready. Aim. Aim. “You’re still babbling. Okay. So, you fell in love with a tranny. I can take it. At least, give me some time and I can take it. But you aren’t telling me what this has to do with Naomi’s death. That’s what you started to tell me. Where’s the end of the story?

  “What about Mom? Her death? You’re talking in circles, just like a goddamn lawyer.”

  I glanced down at the band. They had more important things to attend to than the freaked-out daughter of a washed-up esquire.

  “Do you remember, not so long ago, I told you that a good lawyer, I mean a lawyer that was really going to get somewhere, had to be willing to go beyond the letter of the law?”

  I squirmed in the leather booth. “I have a sinking feeling we’re talking about a whole lot more than alphabet soup here.”

  “Sooner or later it became inevitable. Erin and I were going to be a couple, and your mom, still, couldn’t have cared less. But she wasn’t going to grant me a divorce so easily, not without making a scene. Her idle threats morphed into an acceptable arrangement for all of us. That is, until we reached the next logical step in our relationship.”

  “Nothing about this is logical, Dad.”

  “Then hold on for the next chapter.” He took a swig of liquor. Then another. “Erin wanted a child.”

  “You adopted?” I was clinging to the memory of my mother like a life-preserver. My sister. God, I needed my twin sister beside me.

  “In those days single-parent adoptions were unheard of, even with money. Not to mention the obvious flaws in any background checks. No one was going to allow an adoption by a transsexual. Truth is...” He abruptly stopped.

  “Yes?”

  “There was the whole transsexual issue but also, Erin had a history.”

  I stuffed another piece of meat in my mouth, content to let him fill the silence even though I wanted to spit the meat back out.

  “Drug abuse, mental illness, a couple charges of male prostitution. It all had to do with her real illness, of course. She was a female trapped in a male body and desperate to get out.”

  I shook my head.

  “That was all in her past. Believe me, she wasn’t anything like that anymore once she figured out who she was.

  “A friend introduced us to George Baird.”

  Some friend.

  A new waitress came by to check on us. Dad called her ‘Mildred’. It reminded me that I was the newcomer to his town.

  Ready. Aim. Now FIRE.

  “You say Naomi’s dead because she was a snoop. Why is that? Being the sister of a transgender doesn’t call for murder around here that I know. Why is Naomi dead? How do you know her death wasn’t an accident?”

  He cleared his throat while I gasped for air and cleared my soul, readying for the next round of revelations. And not the kind found in a bible.

  “I think everything would have been okay if it weren’t for that private detective of yours. Why couldn’t you just stay back in D.C. with that thriving practice of yours? You had everything you needed. Money. Prestige. And a great marriage ahead of you.”

  Naomi was dead. My private detective was dead. And dear old Dad still wanted me married to Adam Chancellor.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The Bermuda Triangle of Men

  I extracted my sense of self from the conversation and forced the attorney in me to take over. It was a position I grew less fond of, but random facts and hard questions began bursting through my mind. It was time for me to ask the questions and listen to my father’s answers. Hopefully he would speak the truth.

  “There’s more to George Baird then meets the eye. He’s moving and shaking in another player’s world. Nothing’s impossible in his realm of thinking.”

  Yeah, like parting the Red Sea. Only with him, it’s no two legs that are impossible to part.

  “He had some Russian contacts and the resources to make things happen. He had the supply. I had the demand. We struck a deal.”

  “What resources?”

  “It’s not unheard of these days. But George was one of the first. He could get us a Russian baby, an infant, and deliver it right into Erin’s outstretched a
rms. The only hitch was we had to be there to pick the baby up and bring it home.”

  The story was mildly fascinating, if it weren’t my father talking. “Legit?”

  “Hell no. But that wasn’t our problem. We had that end covered.”