Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  And immediately, I began to shiver.

  Violent, whole-body, teeth-chattering, shivering. I mean, this place was cold. Colder than I, a woman with a Deep Dixie childhood and Gulf Coast of Florida adulthood, had ever experienced. I mean, come on, I had never in my life lived where it snowed. In Sarasota, if it gets down to fifty in February, we bitch about the cold. A southwest Florida winter coat is more like a flannel shirt.

  Hell, I didn’t even like air-conditioning.

  But I reminded myself I was not moving in for the night, checked again to make sure the door was still open a crack, flipped on the light, and looked around.

  As I took in all the stacks of frozen stuff, all those Jack London stories about men dying in high snowdrifts came back to me in one horrible rush.

  chapter 28

  I confess that when I was in college and taking all those English lit courses they make you take, my efforts focused more on Cliff’s Notes than actually, you know, reading the assignments.

  But still, I thought I remembered this: Dante’s version of hell was cold.

  I could be wrong on that, of course. But if Dante hadn’t pictured it that way, let me tell you, it’d sure work.

  Okay, so just hurry up, I told myself, and stop pondering the lost literature of the extreme cold.

  Angling around but still standing by the door, I studied stuff closest to me first, on the theory that if I didn’t have to walk any further into the freezer, that would be fine with me. Not helped at all by the massed assorted frozen carbs, I felt a little hint of panic kick me in the gut. I checked the bag of peas propping the door open. Still there. I wasn’t trapped. And I didn’t want to add another phobia to my list: fear of cold. So, I went forth to be useful.

  Rubbing my arms futilely for warmth, I pushed myself deeper into the cooler until I was at the meats, and studied them, looking, I suppose, for monkey meat or koala steaks. Alas for both Demetrious and the animals, all the frozen carcasses were some version of cow, pig, or chicken.

  But then, I saw an ice chest jammed in the back corner, behind a bunch of dead quail. An ice chest inside a walk-in freezer seemed more than a tad redundant, so naturally, I yanked the lid off.

  And there it was: the stash of turtle eggs. Frozen. Clearly labeled.

  Within shivery seconds, I had that camera out of my purse and was snapping away.

  Got it, I thought, after several shots.

  Proud of myself for getting both a voice recording and photographic evidence, I didn’t pat myself on the back too long. I had to get out of here before hypothermia set in.

  But before I could move from the ice chest of illegal eggs, I heard the clear and unwelcome voice of Manager Man just outside the cracked door. “Nobody goes into the meat locker but us.”

  I started cramming that camera into my purse like a shoplifter maxed out on cappuccinos.

  “Well, she has to be here someplace. This is the only place you haven’t looked,” Simon, my hero in blue, said.

  When they both stepped into the freezer and stared at me, I smiled in what I hoped was a tipsy sort of way, and said, “Oh, hi there.”

  “What are you doing in there?” they both asked in a weird harmony. I wasn’t sure if they’d seen the tail end of the camera disappearing into my purse.

  Telling the truth was clearly out of the question. “FDA,” I said. “Checking for any dairy with bovine-growth hormones.”

  “That stuff isn’t illegal,” Manager Man said. “And it doesn’t have to be on labels.”

  Ignoring the argument that BGH should be illegal, I wholly made something up. I snapped out in my most authoritative voice, “The alpha-simulator variety has been recalled, and—”

  “Let me see your identification,” Manager Man demanded.

  Oh, that again.

  Time to leave.

  Jumping past them both, like a cornered coyote who sees an escape route, I jogged back down the hallway to the dining room. By the time I reached the front door, where the puzzled hostess was staring at me, Simon had caught up with me. “Are you all right?”

  So, how many times had Simon asked me that tonight? Poor guy. “Fine, fine,” I said. “But we should probably leave.”

  With that, I turned back to see Manager Man giving me one of those if-looks-could-kill stares. But he made no move toward me, and I sprinted out the door, Simon at my heels.

  As I trotted toward Simon’s spiffy red sports car, he kept pace beside me. “Lilly, I was worried. You were gone so long. We looked everywhere. I had to insist that man look in the freezer. What were you doing in the freezer?”

  “Oh, Simon, how sweet of you to worry, but I’m fine. Still, we should go, right now. I was just checking expiration dates. You wouldn’t believe how many places serve expired food.”

  We jumped into Simon’s sports car, and he squealed his tires as he sped out of there.

  Simon said something I didn’t register because I was studying my rearview mirror. No one was chasing us. But still, I asked, “How fast can this car go?”

  “Fast.”

  “Prove it,” I said.

  “Can do,” Simon said, and punched up the speed and the power, and his little foreign sports car took off, and then, get this: The man laughed.

  “What an adventure. I don’t care what you did back there. I haven’t had to run out of a place with a pretty woman, a very, very pretty woman, in, I don’t know, years. A very, very pretty woman.”

  Poor Simon, he probably thought I had been trying to steal a couple of porterhouse steaks or something. So, I let the very, very thing slip by. After all, the man was speeding at my request, and not demanding any real explanation. Maybe I’d ask Eleanor to have a word with him about adverb abuse. And I leaned back in my seat, and I laughed too.

  What a particularly generous dose of good karma, I thought, to be on a date with a man who apparently found extreme weirdness attractive. You’d be surprised how rare that is.

  chapter 29

  Simon’s mother had a cold, cold heart, okay, I got it. But ten thousand very, verys later, I decided to have a nightcap with the staph germs in my mother’s hospital room rather than with Simon.

  It was either that or slap him the next time he said anything with a y on the end of it.

  A little wobbly now in my borrowed spike heels, thanks to general fatigue and an ample amount of wine before, during, and after dinner, I had trouble at the ICU until somebody finally admitted Willette had been moved back to a private room. A brief scenic tour of the hospital hallways later, I wandered past a young man in a uniform, who demanded an ID, then eyed my legs and my driver’s license with equal attention, before I stumbled into Willette’s room for one more good-night bed check.

  There, I was surprised to find Jubal and Hank sitting with Willette, who appeared as comatose as ever, though I noted the red spots from the ant bites seemed less vivid.

  “Hank and me came by to check on your momma, but we could tell Eleanor was just plain wiped out, so we told her we’d stay till Dan got over here. Hank’s a good man, to do something like that, ain’t he?”

  “Hank’s a good man,” I said. And smiled at him just to watch him blush and duck his head. But I also registered the fact that Eleanor obviously trusted Jubal and Hank. Bone-tired or not, I didn’t think Eleanor would have left her charge unless she was sure Willette was in safe hands.

  Still red-faced, Hank asked if I’d keep his dad company for a few minutes while he stepped outside to get a breath of fresh air.

  “It’s too late to be calling that lady lawyer, you hear me?” Jubal said.

  Hank ignored him and left.

  All in all, it looked to me like Jubal could probably handle sitting in a hospital room with Willette by himself. But I sat down on the edge of her bed, and kicked off those damn shoes. “Everything okay?”

  “Oh, sure, I mean, good as I reckon it can get. Dan’s supposed to come stay the night. Since we been here, she’s not said one word, but nobody’s bo
thered her any. And no bugs. She sure seems to be resting easy.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “You have you a good time?” There was an edge to Jubal’s question I registered but chose to ignore.

  “Fine, thank you,” I said. Wanting to change the subject before I got the Hank-as-potential-husband chat, I zeroed in on Jubal’s other obsession. “I’ve been thinking about your property and the eminent domain—”

  “You found out anything about that resort and my land?” Jubal asked.

  “Nothing specific, I’ve just been thinking about it.”

  “Damn that Lonnie. That man promised me and Hank flat-out, time and time again, that he wouldn’t vote to go in as partners with the resort, but he’d changed his mind, and now look where we’re all at.”

  Well, we were sort of in the same boat, I thought, and I explained to Jubal how Lonnie had agreed time and time again he would call me first if he ever sold his house.

  “And he promised Shalonda he’d up and do right by her, time and time again, you believe the gossip any,” Jubal said.

  “So I gather Lonnie isn’t a man to trust.”

  “Worse’n that, I’d say.”

  “So what about this Dr. Weinstein? What do you know about him?”

  “I ain’t got no use for that man a’tall. He’s a low-down skunk, you ask me.”

  Ah, potentially interesting, I thought, and rubbed my feet.

  “Stick your feet over here in my lap, let me do that for you.”

  That seemed way too familiar, and I shook my head.

  “Aw, come on, I ain’t getting fresh with you. I know how women torture their feet for the sake of looking good. I had me a wife once, you ’member?”

  My feet did hurt, I was a tad tipsy, and yeah, it always felt better when somebody else rubbed my feet. So, I put them in Jubal’s lap, and sighed in pleasure at the way he began to massage them, one at time.

  We sat quietly for a few moments after that, me feeling better by the minute.

  But I didn’t want to drop the Dr. Weinstein query.

  “So, Jubal, why don’t you like him?”

  “Man fired me as his patient all ’cause I was going over to the V.A. clinic in Albany. Said he wasn’t getting ’nough money from me ’cause of the V.A. I went and saw that lawyer woman Hank’s hanging around with—she’s not near as pretty as you—and wanted her to sue him. She filed something with some agency, and he got this letter fussing at him, but that was all. I went back to see her about maybe suing him for discriminating against veterans, but…well, she got…all huffy, and we, um, well it wasn’t a good visit, not at all.”

  So, the Georgia Medical Society had reprimanded Dr. Weinstein for something like wrongful termination of a patient? Perhaps abandonment? Hm? Maybe getting that censure for booting out Jubal explained why Dr. Weinstein was so set on hanging on to Willette. That is, if the doc had already been warned about dumping patients, surely he didn’t want to risk sanctions by dropping yet another one.

  Or maybe Dr. Weinstein wanted to keep Willette totally in his control until he could kill her.

  After plying Jubal with a few more pointed Dr. Weinstein questions, I finally figured he’d told me all he knew about the man, and I was ready to move on. As he massaged my aching toes, I asked, “So, Jubal, did you actually stay in touch with Willette? I mean, after high school.”

  “Oh, sure, I been knowing her all along. Shoot, you ’member when you and Little Toot”—and he stopped to giggle like a man who’d had more than a nip of sour mash—“Lord, that man hates it when I slip up and call him that—”

  “Willette,” I said, to prompt him.

  “Sure, when you and Hank got in trouble that time, I called her. But, truth is, I didn’t really see her none till your daddy moved out. By then, my wife, she’d done crossed over, and I had this notion…well, it’s silly now. But I had me this idea I might could court Willette.”

  Court Willette?

  That idea was so weird I started to pull my feet out of Jubal’s lap, but his big, thick fingers were doing such a good job, I left them there.

  “She’s a bit odd, but, you know, she’s not a bad sort.”

  Oh, well, yeah, he didn’t grow up inside that house, I thought, but kept my mouth shut.

  “Your momma would call me now and then, after she got to where she didn’t go out at all, to ask me to do odd jobs for her. Mostly picking up packages at the P.O., or getting something from the IGA. Truth is, Dan did most of that for her, but now and again, she’d call me.”

  So, he volunteered the information and solved the mystery of why those half dozen phone calls to or from him were in Willette’s list of phone calls. Even I couldn’t make anything too sinister out of a man who up and tells me out of his own goodwill that he used to play fetch for my reclusive mother—all this while easing my aching feet. So, I launched off on the next topic.

  “What do you do at the Tru Blue Drugstore?”

  “Ever thing. Stock shelves. Clean up. Ring you up and make change. Count out your pills when nobody’s looking and the pharmacist is real busy.”

  That sounded helpful. “You got access to the pharmacist’s computer?”

  “Yep, especially when nobody’s looking.”

  Two when nobody’s lookings in sixty seconds. My kind of guy!

  “Could you plug in the RX numbers on the pill bottles we got from Willette’s, maybe even the partial numbers from ones where the labels were half torn off? That way, maybe we could find out who was supplying her with drugs.”

  “How’s that gonna help anything?” he asked.

  “Probably won’t. But I’d sure like to know.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I was working up at the U-Save Pharmacy by the hospital—say, you need any prescriptions, now that’s a good store to go to—and the pharmacist there, Bill, he’s a real nice fella, and just as smart as they come. Only I got let go there and I might not want to be messing around like you ask at the Tru Blue, case I get let go there too.”

  When I heard Jubal’s reluctance, it recrossed my mind that he might have been supplying Willette with drugs from the Tru Blue. Or that he wasn’t as free and skilled at the job as he pretended. I didn’t want to beg him. But I thought a little trick might induce him to try—unless, of course, he was her dealer.

  “What I’m thinking is that Dr. Weinstein is supplying her with those narcotics. I don’t see how that ties in with her shooting Ray Glenn, but if Dr. Weinstein is—”

  “Yeah, okay, I get it. Could be him, sure, sure. Could be. By gosh, you give me those bottles and I’ll sure see what I can find out. Might take me a while, working as I’d be when the druggist is on break.”

  Maybe I was trusting Jubal too much—not my usual persona, but then I had no other way of finding out this information. And the way he jumped in to volunteer when I mentioned my suspicions regarding Dr. Weinstein made me hope again that Jubal was not Willette’s dealer. Maybe whoever had supplied Willette with those pills had also bruised her mouth and jaw trying to force her to take a fatal dose. Maybe not, but I still wanted to know who my mother’s dealer was. And Jubal, trustworthy or not, was about my only source. But at least I didn’t have to hand the actual bottles over to him. “I don’t have those containers with me right now. Let me copy the numbers and bring them to you. When are you working next?”

  “Monday, so take your time.”

  So, there I was, enlisting the aid of a man who wanted to be my stepfather and now also to be my father-in-law, with my feet in his lap, when Simon the very, very irritating date danced into the room without so much as a knock.

  “Well, Lilly,” he said, “I’m surprised to see you here. Very surprised.”

  And very displeased, I gathered from his tone of voice and the hard look he gave me. Possibly Simon was put out because not more than a half hour earlier I’d insisted I was so tired that I just had to go right back to Dan’s and collapse into bed to sleep. This being my response to his
invitation to go dancing in Tallahassee or go back to his house for a nightcap. Of course, what I had planned to do was check on Willette in a hurry, then drop off the camera and tape recorder with Demetrious, along with a full report of my evening at the Deer Den, and then collapse at Dan’s.

  Instead, here I was, having obviously lied to Simon, and with my feet in another man’s lap.

  Well, I never intended to go on a second date with him anyway.

  Before I could think of anything to say, Jubal butted right in. “When do you think y’all can wake Miz Willette up and feed her? She looks like she needs a few good meals.”

  I seconded the thought, pointing out this was not the first time this particular issue had been raised.

  But Simon said that was up to her physician, that she was getting plenty of nutrients in her IVs, that he was administration, not patient care, but he’d sure put in a call to Dr. Weinstein first thing in the morning to find out why he was still keeping Willette so sedated that she couldn’t even eat.

  That, of course, reminded me that I had to tackle Judge Parker with my concerned-daughter routine and get those guardianship papers done, so Dan could replace Dr. Weinstein with Dr. Hodo.

  “Are, by chance, either of you friendly with Judge Parker?” I asked, thinking if they were, they could damn well engineer a gathering in which I could corner the good judge.

  But it turned out Simon was too new to the city to socialize in that high a circle, and Jubal did not run much with the business-suit crowd.

  After that, we just all strained at small talk about poor Willette. To my great relief, Dan stuck his head in the room, greeted us, then said he was here for the night shift and everybody could go now. A nurse came in and told us it was after visiting hours and only one person could stay, so everyone else shuffled around and left.

  In spite of what the nurse had said, I stayed behind to speak with Dan, I mean, I’m immediate family and I was going to stay and talk with my brother if I wanted to, and I dared anyone to try and pitch me outside.