Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  After I cussed out loud and let that paranoid thought bounce around in my head a minute, I made myself calm down. The thing was, I liked Jubal, and I didn’t want to think him a criminal, and stealing controlled substances from a drugstore would surely be really hard to do. Yeah, I’d have to keep that suspicion in mind, but the man I did not like was the strange and rude Dr. Weinstein. He seemed a lot more likely to be the RX-grade dope dealer. After all, he could write the prescriptions legally.

  But even if Dr. Weinstein had been supplying Willette, was that reason enough to kill her?

  Maybe, to a man unscrupulous enough to aid and abet prescription abuse in a frail and mentally ill woman. Maybe, to a man who might lose his medical license if he was caught.

  Maybe.

  I had a big sack of maybes. And five thousand sacks of garbage.

  chapter 24

  Paper.

  Paper rules the world of lawyers.

  Paper is how we wage war.

  Paper filled with legal words is what we lawyers shoot at each other instead of bullets.

  Paper is what offers up clues and tricks and reasons and secrets.

  And paper was what Willette’s house had been full of, in hosts and hordes and heaps.

  So knowing, I also knew I couldn’t not look at the important papers from Willette’s metal box. My lunch and my pondering done, I grabbed the papers Bobby had been sunning for me, took them to the library—the town being too small for a copy center—and made several copies of the more important ones: the deed to her house, the contract for deed for Grandmom’s house, et cetera, et cetera.

  When I had asked Dan last night if he had a safety deposit box where I could store these, thinking a little security might be in order under the circumstances, he’d asked me why on earth would he need a safety deposit box? So, there was nothing to do but take the copies back to Dan’s, where I shoved one set into the metal box, which I then put up in the hallway closet, behind boxes of who knew what, I mean I wasn’t looking. After that, I put the second set of copies into a lockable but unlocked drawer in Dan’s desk, and made a mental note to ask him if he actually had a key to it. Then I put the originals in the trunk of my faithful ally, my Honda.

  Not completely trusting the new hospital security detail, I went to check on Willette. Outside her new room in the ICU, another young police officer guarded her. He made me show my driver’s license and empty my purse before he let me in, and I had to say, irritating as that was, I appreciated it.

  Demetrious was making good on his promise of real protection.

  Inside Willette’s room, I found that Shalonda was gone. In her place sat my old English teacher and Willette’s only known friend, the very woman who had force-fed me sweet tea after her peacock, Free Bird, had caused a three-car pileup in the woman’s own front yard. After proper greetings, I asked her where everyone else had gone.

  “They are all young, and therefore they had things they believed they had to do, and so they left. Shalonda needed to help her husband do something with mules in preparation for Mule Day,” Eleanor Spivey, aging, elegant, and proper, explained to me as she paused in her snacking on pound cake and sipping from a bottle of Coke, which she mentioned Dan had been good enough to bring by in a cooler.

  “Did he tell you what happened? This morning?” I asked her. “With the fire ants?”

  “Yes. And so did exactly nine other people. My phone rang all morning. Are you all right, child?” Eleanor looked at me as if I might burst into tears.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Why would anybody want to kill Willette? So, what do you think?”

  “I think that Simon ought to make the staff keep a cleaner hospital, and that your imagination is working overtime. There is simply no reason why anyone would want to hurt Willette.”

  I sighed.

  Not even Dan and Patti believed my theory.

  “But, nonetheless, Lillian, you need to make your peace with Willette.”

  “How?” I asked. “The woman is not talking to me.” Not, I thought, wholly unlike most of my childhood.

  “The Lord will find a way, you just be ready and open for it,” Eleanor said.

  Notwithstanding my unresolved, and to my own mind, unresolvable, issues with my mother, I was frankly far more interested in what information I could pump from Eleanor, who, oddly enough, launched into a narrative about the virtues of Hank, pointing out he had managed to stay single all these years, but not because the women hadn’t tried to catch him. “You two used to be sweet on each other,” she said, rather obviously, I thought.

  Yeah, sweet on each other in fifth grade. How did that still count?

  Instead of pointing out that Hank and I had probably changed our minds about each other in the ensuing twenty-eight years, I told her I was engaged, furthering the half-lie I’d already told, as only Philip believed us engaged. Me, I was keeping my options open.

  “Where’s your ring?” Eleanor asked.

  “Took it off while I was working at Willette’s house. Clorox isn’t good for gold.”

  “Well, all I have to say is that Hank is a good man.”

  “I can tell that,” I said. “And he’d be a good catch in all the traditional meanings of the term.” Still, I made a memo to my internal file to have Bonita buy me an engagement ring that was fully returnable and FedEx it to me if I wasn’t out of this town by the weekend.

  “That is well and good about Hank then. Which leaves me with my original point. You need to be ready to make your peace with this woman. She is your mother.”

  “Uh-huh.” I paused, waiting for the next volley. But when Eleanor opted to sip her Coke rather than lecture me, I changed the subject. “What’s with all the flowers and the pound cakes people keep bringing Willette?”

  “It’s the pound cakes that caused those ants,” Eleanor said.

  “Yes, that was Simon’s theory. But why are there so many of them?”

  “Ants? Or pound cakes? Be careful of the ambiguous pronoun.”

  I sighed again. “Pound cakes. Why are there so many pound cakes?”

  “I do not mean to sound unchristian, but your mother did this town a favor, shooting that thug, Ray Glenn. He terrorized the migrants, and many other good people, especially people without the resources to hire a lawyer to fight back those ridiculous repossession claims, and there are those among them who appreciate Willette for shooting him. You need never worry about her actually going to jail.”

  No, I was more worried about her going to the great hereafter.

  “What about Lonnie?” I asked.

  “What about him? True, he does not have your I.Q., but he is trying hard to make something of himself. You know, he plans to run for state senator next election.”

  “So it was Ray Glenn, Lonnie’s employee, who was doing all the bad stuff? Not Lonnie?”

  “That would be the general consensus, I believe. People around here like Lonnie. However, if you want the particulars of his business arrangements, I am not the proper person to ask.”

  The “particulars of his business arrangements,” I gathered, included using Ray Glenn to cheat folks out of stuff that was theirs so that he, Lonnie, could have more stuff of his own. It was, of course, in a shorthand way, pretty much the current American-capitalism concept as it had been processed during this last decade of corporate enrichment, and Lonnie was just doing it on a small-town scale.

  “Don’t you think if Ray Glenn is a crook, so is Lonnie?” I asked.

  “Why no, Lonnie appears to be a fine man. Though I do think that wife of his is a bit…overdressed, I guess. Overprocessed too.” Eleanor leaned over close to me and whispered, “I do not think she is a real blonde.”

  We straightened up, and I didn’t figure Eleanor would tell me anything too dirty if she had to whisper about hair dye. “Colleen was a beauty queen, a real one, from up North, and I guess she just has to keep up appearances,” Eleanor explained.

  Before I could point out a thing or two abou
t the vile Colleen, Eleanor changed lanes on me.

  “Do you know that a good many fine people in this town have done their best to take care of Willette?”

  The look Eleanor gave me seemed to suggest these good folks were doing the job I should have done. Then Eleanor told me how Demetrious had checked on Willette every evening on his way home, standing there in front of the locked door, talking to her, and asking if she was all right, and if she needed anything. Eleanor herself checked on Willette every morning by banging on her bedroom window on her early walk, and Willette would bang back, so Eleanor knew she was still alive. “Sometimes, she would have a word or two to say, sometimes she would just hit the window to let me know she was all right,” Eleanor said.

  “And a lot of us brought by food, and left it on the back porch. And, of course, Dan dropped off a case of Cokes every other day, and begged Willette to let him in. Soon as he gave up and drove off, Willette would open the door and drag the Cokes inside the house.”

  “Who brought her the prescriptions?” I asked, thinking of all the narcotic bottles in Willette’s bedroom.

  “Honey, that is your mother’s business, not mine,” Eleanor said.

  I couldn’t help but suspect Eleanor knew more than she was telling on that score, which made her a bit unique in the town, since everyone else seemed generous about sharing what they knew, suspected, or had just plain made up on the spot. But asking her about the pills made me think I needed to prompt Simon to get Willette’s hospital transfer done and quick, and oh, by the way, if the invitation still stood, I’d love to have dinner with him. Perhaps after Simon had sipped a few glasses of good wine, I could learn something from him about the stocky Dr. Weinstein, my grandmother’s house, and those bruises on Willette’s face. Oh yeah, and I needed to bug Dan about that guardianship thing.

  All of which led me to ask Eleanor, “Do you know Judge Parker?”

  “Why, yes, of course, everyone knows Judge Parker. He is an upstanding man, and a proper judge.”

  “Can you introduce me to him? Soon? In a…a nice, social setting?”

  “Why, Lilly? What are you up to?”

  “I need to discuss with him, as quickly as possible, why he should sign those guardianship papers for Dan. You know about that, right? But I need to approach him…as a, er, daughter, not in a formal, legal setting.”

  “Lilly, dear, Dan has a lawyer, and she is a fine attorney and a nice lady. You let it be.”

  So, okay, I guess that meant iced tea and pound cake with the good judge, the errant peacock, and the elegant Eleanor wasn’t in the late-afternoon plan. Still, I was going to have to find a way to meet Judge Parker and push this guardianship plan along.

  Despite the urgent pull of important things I needed to do, and soon, I didn’t want to leave Willette until someone stronger than Eleanor was inside her room with her.

  “When is Shalonda coming back?”

  “Lilly Belle, don’t you go worrying about me. Now that I’m retired, I have too much time on my hands as it is. I volunteer a lot, and nearly every time the church doors open, I’m there. Still, it’s hard to fill up sixteen hours a day.” She sighed, and I guessed that she was lonely. “I enjoy sitting here with Willette, and should she wake up, I’ll be a friendly face.”

  “Yes, but if…” Suddenly I didn’t know how to say to Eleanor that she was a tad old to fight off any killers in the night. “How long do you plan to stay?”

  “Till later tonight,” she said, studying me closely enough to make me nervous. She still had, apparently, an ability to read minds. “Don’t worry. I know how to spot an ant, push a call button, and scream. And there’s that nice young police officer right outside the door.”

  That made sense, and Eleanor at least really cared about Willette, which was half the battle. I decided my time could be better spent elsewhere, rather than overseeing Eleanor guarding my mother. As I stood up to leave, she fixed her hazel eyes on me, fierce with that middle-schoolteacher glint, and I sat back down.

  “There is always another side to every story,” Eleanor said.

  “Yes, as a litigation attorney, I am more than aware of that.”

  “But you do not have any conception that your mother has a side of the story too? With you, I mean. You and Delvon.”

  “You mean, like she’s got a…a what, a justification for…”

  “Your mother was never really strong. Unfortunately, she took after her father’s side of the family. Her mother dying, and dying like that, broke her,” Eleanor said.

  “It broke us all,” I said, remembering, wholly against my will, the long, agonized death by cancer of the woman who had held us all together.

  “No, I beg to differ. In the end it made Delvon, Dan, and you stronger.”

  “Delvon?” I blurted out indignantly. “Delvon is a—” I stopped. What did Eleanor know about him? That in a small town with limited physical and cultural boundaries, a place where troubled young folks escaped to either substance abuse or Jesus, Delvon was two for two?

  “Both of you are strange, like Willette. I don’t say that with judgment, but as a fact. But unlike her, you two are strong. Look at you, a successful lawyer. And your brother, Delvon. You think I do not know he has been running his own business since before he dropped out of high school? You think a weak man, a broken man, can stay out of jail and year after year turn a tax-free profit?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You need to understand, after her momma died, Willette used up most of her daily allotment of energy just to keep herself from becoming one of those poor women who run around downtown screaming and pulling off their clothes.”

  “I’ve got to go now.” I jumped up, my heart pounding, my hands sweating, and my stomach lurching.

  “Stop and face the truth. You and Delvon ran out on your mother.” Eleanor looked right at me and said, “Your mother needed you, and she needed Delvon, and you ran out on her.”

  “My mother did not need us. She had her own father, and my father was still there.”

  “Not to be unchristian, but did you ever know either one of them to be much comfort to anyone? Your grandfather was a good, dear soul, but he didn’t have the backbone to stand up to life, and he certainly was not anyone to lean upon.”

  “She did not need me, she didn’t even like me.”

  “Willette needed you to keep Delvon around, and she needed Delvon, and you took him away from her. The only thing your mother ever loved wholly and passionately was Delvon, her first son, and from the moment you were born, you took him away from her. And then, right at her hour of greatest need, you had him run off with you because you couldn’t stand and face the truth. She didn’t even know where you two were. It was like you both slammed some door in her face. That’s why she locked you out when you came back.”

  I shut my eyes, squeezing them against the way that day seemed to rise in front of me like a big-screen TV. The funeral. The suffocating smell of the flowers, already decaying in the summer heat. Women crying, men shaking my hand and saying stuff I couldn’t hear, my grandfather so drunk only Dan could handle him, my father in his best suit, reading the eulogy and breaking down in tears—the only time I ever saw the man show any emotion other than a benign bewilderment.

  The back of the church was lined with men who stood, in their best Sunday clothes, their John Deere hats in their hands, and their faces downcast, not meeting anyone’s eyes, and the backs of their necks brown and wrinkled from the sun, and their hands, spotted with age but still strong. One by one, these men had come to my grandparents’ place during the spring and the summer and they broke ground, and seeded, and hoed, and tended the animals, because my grandfather was too crushed and my grandmother too sick to take care of their own little farm. All those good, kind souls, with their shy ways and rough hands, would be gone now, like my grandfather, crossed over to what I hoped was their fair reward, their little farms sold by their city-bound children for the value of the timber.

/>   Their mumbled words of sympathy that day, as they had lined up to bow their heads and take my hand, had been more than I could bear.

  Delvon and I had fled. Straight from the cemetery, at the first thud of dirt on the vault with the casket with the body of our grandmother inside. Our eyes had met, and we didn’t need words. We ran. For his car. And we left Georgia, spinning our way down to southwest Florida, where we slept in the car, walked on the beach, and tried to find a way to live in a world that seemed so lonesome we could have died ourselves and not cared.

  I opened my eyes and looked at Eleanor.

  “You ran off when your mother needed you, and then you didn’t even come to your own grandfather’s funeral. Folks in this town will be a long time remembering that,” she said.

  Against my will, I remembered Delvon and me, little children, tied to chairs for hours in a room with curtained-off windows, the door locked against curious neighbors.

  I was not the villain in this story.

  A kind of vicious anger rose up in me at Eleanor, at my mother, at this town, and at all of them.

  And I repeated to myself, I was not the villain.

  But another voice asked back, Was I?

  I let my anger cool a moment, and then I walked toward the door.

  But in the doorway, I stopped and turned back to Eleanor. “Thank you for loving her.” Which was more than I’d ever been able to do.

  And then I left as quick as I could move without actually running.

  chapter 25

  It turned out that the nurses in the Bugfest hospital knew how to keep their mouths shut.

  So, my afternoon of trying to cajole, charm, or bribe information about Dr. Weinstein or what had happened in the ER the night Willette came in, or about anything else other than the general view that “those were mighty fine pound cakes” had proven to be a big waste of my time.

  Oh, except for the fact it kept me from inhaling, ingesting, and absorbing any more of the forty years’ worth of black-mold growth from inside my mother’s wretched house.