“May I see that?” I said. A cold knot had formed in the core of my gut, and it was tightening.
“Not supposed to, but...” He slid it across the desk.
I pulled my chair closer, spun the printout around. “Oh, dear God,” I said. “Those sons of bitches.”
Vinny sat quietly while I scanned line after line of my credit report. In reality, my house was paid for, although it was of course tied up for the bond. It was worth twice that, easy. And other than some mild credit card balances, I didn’t have a nickel of debt. I busted my ass, and I paid my bills.
The printout in front of me told a different story. According to it, every one of my credit cards was maxed out and delinquent. My car had been repossessed. My house was in foreclosure, and a list of creditors had judgments against me.
“This is bullshit, Vinny. All of it. Every stinking line.” I slid it back across his desk.
“I believe you,” he said, almost in a whisper, “but there’s nothing I can do. I have to go with what the computer says. Especially since—” He cut himself off mid-sentence, his eyes on something outside the office. I looked over my shoulder and saw the bank president, Wayne Collins, walk by. With the sheriff. Ballard looked right at me, smiled, and winked. Not a friendly smile. Not a friendly wink. More a “gotcha” wink.
I turned back to my slightly more immediate problem. “Since what, Vinny?”
“I’m sorry, Gray. I really am. But I can’t help you.” He looked back down at his paperclip.
* * *
I walked into the shop and found LungFao and Penny running the place. Penny handed me a stack of pink phone message slips. I glanced through them and saw that most of them were from someone named Lula Rogers.
“Who is she?” I said.
“Works at the courthouse,” Penny said, and only then did I notice the worried look on her face. “You better call.”
Chapter 39
“Well?” Penny said when I hung up the phone.
“I have three days to come up with the hundred grand, or I wait for trial from jail.”
I filled her in on the credit report, on seeing Ballard.
“Not good timing,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Lucas called this morning. He’s pushing for the retainer, and I’m afraid he might call my hand over a hundred grand.”
The door chimed and an elderly lady I didn’t recognize walked in. She was carrying a Crock-Pot, moving in tiny little steps. Her clothes were dated, as were her glasses—black, pointed outer edges—but there was something about the way she carried herself that held my attention. Her back was stooped, but her chin was high. Her hair white, thin, but meticulously neat. As she drew closer, I saw a multitude of lines on her face, but her makeup had been applied with care and time.
LungFao started toward her, but I raised a hand, palm toward him. “Can I help you today, ma’am?” I said.
“Oh, I hope so, young man. I surely hope so. You wouldn’t believe the week I’ve had.”
Her name was Lucille Boggs. She was eighty-four, a widow, and lived alone in an efficiency apartment at Montello Manor, a depressingly generic retirement village on the edge of town. Her Social Security check had been lost in the mail and she was desperate.
“Let’s see what we have here, Ms. Boggs,” I said.
“Oh dear, do call me Lucille, young man. ‘Ms. Boggs’ sounds so, so...stiff.”
She raised the lid from the Crock-Pot and took out a small package wrapped in a faded velvet cloth. After putting the package on the counter, she pulled back the velvet one corner at a time. Inside was a small, gold cardboard box. She removed the lid and set it aside with the care one might show when disarming a nuclear weapon. In the early days, this kind of ceremony would have had me wondering what precious artifacts lay inside. Thousands of little boxes later, I wasn’t in the least surprised to see a couple of small gold rings and a smattering of costume jewelry. Between the Crock-Pot and the jewelry, she had twenty bucks’ worth. Tops. Maybe.
“How much do you need, Lucille?”
“Are you the ‘Gray’ in ‘Gray’s Green Cash,’ young man?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Gray, I have to have a hundred and twenty-five dollars, and I want to tell you why.”
Someone asking over a hundred dollars on something worth twenty used to shock me. Not now. People have no concept of how business works. To Lucille Boggs, the contents of that box were priceless. She had no understanding of the fact that I’d do well to get thirty bucks from her collection if she didn’t pick it up. But for some reason, on that day, as I looked into her eyes, it didn’t matter. I could see the years in those eyes, along with something fresh, a pain, a quiet desperation. Even more important, though, was the determination that still shone through. Whatever her crisis was, Lucille Boggs intended to meet it head on.
Chapter 40
LungFao walked back in the door with an armload of lunch. “Boss, guess who’s dead.”
“Who?”
“Guess.”
“LungFao, I’m not in the mood.”
“Well, excuse the crap out of me,” he said, a pouting look on his face.
“LungFao,” I warned.
“Mitchell.”
“Tommy Mitchell?”
“You got it.”
“How? Where? When?”
“You ain’t gonna be—”
“Fao.”
“Sorry, boss,” he said. “Guess you’re a little edgy, huh?”
I closed my eyes, drew a long deep breath, and counted to ten. When I opened them, I fired him a look that made it clear the next thing out of his mouth better be a straightforward explanation.
Finally, he got the message. “He got in a shootout with Leroy Huddleston,” he said.
“Goldie?”
He nodded.
“No way.” Goldie Huddleston was a bottom-feeding scumbag crack dealer, but he had also been arrested peacefully many times before and was about as much of a murderer as I was.
“Where’d you hear this?” Penny said.
“Hatley’s. Everybody’s talking about it.”
“He already been arrested?” I said.
“I think so,” LungFao said.
“Let’s go,” I said to Penny. She nodded.
“What about lunch?” LungFao said, still holding the bags.
“Eat it all, Fao,” I said. “And if the shop gets too busy for you to handle by yourself, well...just...handle it, I guess.”
* * *
Fortunately for us, it was open visiting day at the jail, meaning appointments weren’t required. We also got the luxury of face-to-face in a closet-sized room instead of telephones and glass. It occurred to me that life was pretty crappy when I considered this to be a seriously positive development.
“Ain’t shot no cop, man,” Goldie said. “Goldie ain’t crazy.”
“Tell us what happened,” Penny said.
“What good’s it gonna do Goldie, my sister? I done told them over and over. Ain’t nobody listening to the nigger.” Niggah.
“Try us.”
Goldie tilted his head back in an open-mouthed sigh, showing off a mouth full of gold caps. “I’m up on the hill that night, doing business.” Bid-ness. “Up walk Tommy Boy. That’s his street name.
“‘You got something for me, Goldie?’ he say. Meaning he want his cookie dough.”
“Mitchell was on the take?” I said.
“Fifty-two times a year, my man. Anyways, I’m laying it on him, trey bills, just like always, and then I don’t remember nothing else till I wake up. Tommy Boy got a hole in his head, and a piece o’shit pop-gun’s in my hand. I know right off it’s the gun what done him. I stand up, trying to clear my head, and all hell comes down on Goldie. Every cop car in town, man. And here I am. That’s what happened, my sister. Now what you gonna do for old Goldie?”
“We’ll try to help you,” she said as she was standing up. “I’ll be in touch.”
She led the way and we were gone.
“How is it we’re going to help him, Penny?” I said. “He may not’ve killed Mitchell, but he’s still a crack-dealing low-life. He sells that shit to kids.”
“I have no intention of helping him.”
“So you lied to him.”
“Yeah.”
“I can live with that.” I thought of something just as we stepped back out into the brutal heat of a Mississippi August. “Come on,” I said, and turned around and went back inside.
Minutes later, we were back in a visiting room.
“You remember me?” I said to Carlos.
“I know who you are.”
Something about him was very different.
“Appreciate your help in the tank, by the way,” I said.
“Most welcome,” he said, and I realized what it was. He was totally devoid of the gangsta accent and mannerisms I had heard and seen in the cell a few days before. His voice was intelligent, articulate.
I guess the confusion showed on my face, because Carlos said, “When in Rome...”
“Why are you here, Carlos?” I said.
“You’re not here about me, so let’s get to it.”
“What do you know about Mitchell’s death?”
“Goldie Huddleston didn’t do it.”
“You think, or you know?” I said.
“There was a witness.”
My heart quickened. “Who?”
“Don’t know.”
“How do we find out?”
“I’ll put the word out that you’re looking. That’ll shake things up. Keep your eyes open and your back covered.”
I nodded. “Seriously, Carlos, what are you in here for?”
“Save yourself first. Then worry about me. And as far as you know, I’m still just plain old Carlos the thug.”
Chapter 41
Gray was a good man, a good lover, but over time that had proven to be not enough for Abby. She didn’t set out to be a bad wife, certainly not an unfaithful one. It just happened. Bored with a comfortable but routine middle-class existence, she began to crave more. More excitement, more passion than the routine of marriage could offer.
Her evolution occurred in several stages. For many years she ignored all the flirtatious and suggestive comments that came her way. Tuned them out. A couple years ago, she started listening, but forgetting them as soon as the moment had passed. Then came the dwelling on, the fantasizing, the flushed face, the other anatomical responses. And finally, a year and a half or so ago, she decided to give it a whirl.
She didn’t have a partner in mind. Nor did she go in search of one. She simply decided one morning that she would more openly evaluate any “offers” that arose in the future. That afternoon in the pediatrician’s office, where the girls were getting medicated for a round of runny noses and low-grade fevers, the good doctor smiled a lot at Abby, and eventually leaned over and whispered in her ear the most incredibly direct come-on she had ever heard or dreamed of hearing. “I desperately want to fuck you.”
For ten seconds that felt like centuries, she said nothing, flabbergasted. By the end of the ten seconds, her body was on fire, her nipples rock hard, her panties drenched. Without considering the precipice she was stepping off and the consequences that would follow, she quietly said, “I’ll leave a message for you at the front desk of the Courtyard Marriott. Eight o’clock.”
When Gray got home from work that evening and planted himself in the family room with the girls, as he always did, she made up a story about going out to eat with some girlfriends, and went to the Courtyard. She sat in the parking lot for fifteen minutes, deciding whether she could really do it, then went inside and registered for a room under the name Dixie Duncan.
She was in the room by 7:10, having left a note for “the handsome gentleman with blond hair and a tiny mole on his left cheek” who would show up at the desk around 8:00. The note said simply “148,” her room number. In room 148, the indecision resumed, so she drank two tiny bottles of vodka from the mini-bar. As the tingle of the alcohol made its way through her body, her inhibitions melted. Yes, she would do it. In fact, she would not only do it; she would do the hell out of it.
Dr. Mark Craig knocked on the door at 8:02. She opened the door and he stepped inside. As he was pushing the door closed with his foot, she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately. Her senses exploded. It felt like the first time, which had been with Gray in the back seat of his car on a dirt road outside town.
They made their way to the bed, pawing at each other’s clothes in a fit of lust. Mark was five-ten-ish, broad, firm. He shoved her backward onto the bed and straddled her, then grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her head up to his. With his other hand, he reached down and slid the crotch of her panties aside, ran three fingers roughly inside her while massaging a bit higher with his thumb.
Her first climax came within a minute, her screaming at the top of her lungs. Many more followed over the next hour. She sent Mark Craig away after that and lay in bed by herself for a few more minutes, coming to terms with what she had done. She showered, dressed, went home, professed fatigue from a long day, and went to bed.
When Gray came to bed and kissed her goodnight, she pretended to be asleep. As soon as he was asleep, she opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling for the next six hours. At five o’clock, she went to the girls’ room and stood looking at them for an hour. When the alarm clock back in the master bedroom sounded at six, she went to the kitchen and cooked breakfast.
Gray left for work at seven-fifteen, as he did most days. Abby sat at the dining room table, sipping coffee, wondering which was worse, the guilt she had felt since walking out of the hotel room the night before, or the excruciatingly boring, predictable monotony of being Mrs. Good Wife to Mr. Good Husband.
Later that day, she dialed Mark Craig’s office and made another appointment for room 148. He would be the first of three regular lovers over the next eighteen months. Bobby Knight was number three. And Bobby was also the one who presented a couple of unexpected issues to deal with. First, he turned her on to impossible pleasures, pleasures that were causing her to spin completely out of control. Second, she fell in love with him. And now, Gray knew. What else would he figure out?
Chapter 42
“I know this is the key to something, something big, and we’re missing it,” Penny said. She was sitting at my desk behind the counter, holding up the piece of pawn ticket I’d found in Homestead’s things, rubbing it between her thumb and index finger.
Aside from the initial onslaught of the curious, shop business had been slow since the shooting. I’ve heard it’s a natural reaction after a robbery, or any other event that involves shooting. People figure if it happened once, it could happen again, and they stay away. Not all of them, but enough to put a serious dent in my business. And it was even worse this day. We had only had a handful of customers all morning.
“You know,” I said, “We checked the computer the first day to see if he had ever pawned or sold anything in here himself, and he hadn’t. But what if he used an alias? If he was some kind of undercover guy, couldn’t he have gotten a fake I.D. good enough to fool us?”
“Maybe,” LungFao said, “but I don’t remember ever seeing him before. Do you?”
“No, but we see a lot of people come through here. I sure don’t remember every one of them.”
“Hey, your computer takes a picture of each person when they pawn something, right?” Penny said.
I nodded.
“Can you set it up so I can scroll through the customer records? I believe I’d recognize him, even in disguise.”
“You bet. I can even narrow it down for you.” I did a search and pulled up a list of all black male customers. “Here you go.”
She pulled a stool up to the terminal and started clicking her way through the customer screens. After a couple of hours she was rubbing her eyes. “We need a faster way to do this. You have six tho
usand black males in this system.”
I shrugged. “I can narrow it down some more, by age.”
“No, if he’s using a fake identity, who knows what age it or the disguise for it would be. I undercovered a deal as a sixty-year-old woman one time.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “A grandma dealing crack?”
“You’d be surprised,” she said, not laughing.
“Hey, I just thought of something,” I said, heading for the bathroom, digging through a stack of magazines once I got there.
“What?”
“Hang on.” I held up a finger.
She walked in and stood behind me while I looked.
“This is it.” I thumbed through an issue of Computer Power User and found the article I wanted, then held it up for Penny to see. “Can we do this?”
“Face recognition software...works even with disguises.” She skimmed the article for a couple of minutes and handed it back to me. “First, you’d have to have a good picture of Johnny. I could probably get that. Then you’d have to have the software.”
“Where do we get it?”
“We can download it from the internet if you have a credit card. Looks like we can get a package that will work for a couple hundred bucks.”
I pulled out my Visa. “Let’s do it.”
Unfortunately, my card didn’t work. The monkeying with my finances and electronic existence obviously ran deep. Penny used her American Express to do the deed. By closing time we had the software downloaded and installed, and Penny had a police ID photo of Homestead. We started the process running, timed it, and calculated that it should be finished by around four A.M.
Penny wanted to go have dinner somewhere, but I didn’t have the energy. So she headed to her room at the Courtyard, the only decent hotel in town, and I made tracks for home.
Pawnbroker: A Thriller Page 9
