Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  After the judge went to fetch his mule as a prelude to coming by the hospital to see Willette, I told Becky she had excellent potential as a future trial attorney, or an actress. She told me my boots were really cool, and could she maybe borrow them sometime, if they fit? We were fully bonded by the time Bobby found us, and I left them to the remainder of their afternoon so I could round up the rest of the happy gang for the transfer of Willette’s control over herself to her middle child, Dan, the responsible one.

  Thus, through a persistent series of phone calls, and some minor threats, I had gotten Dr. Hodo there too.

  And Dan, bloated and green as he was from eating an entire sweet-potato pie from the church ladies’ booth at the Mule Day food court, had stood by his mother, nodding and frowning.

  Right as Judge Parker had graced Willette’s hospital doorway, the ever-vigilant Simon had bobbed in, swinging his arms and offering to help, and shortly in Simon’s wake, as if warned by a nurse or a deal with the devil, Dr. Weinstein had also appeared. That was how we had all come to hold a guardianship hearing in a hospital room on a Saturday afternoon.

  After Dr. Weinstein left, Dr. Hodo checked Willette’s vital signs and her chart, and patted her hand before turning to me.

  “I’ll taper her off the Thorazine, and we’ll get her eating, and then we’ll talk to her if she’s able,” said Dr. Hodo, my father’s friend and now officially Willette’s doctor of record. “Then we’ll make sure she’s stable, and transfer her to a rehab center I know in Atlanta. It’s the best in the region.”

  “Fine, then,” Simon said, “very good. That’s settled. Very, very good. I’m so glad for you, Lilly, that this is working out.”

  For once, I agreed with the man.

  chapter 33

  One benefit of my making lists of things to do was the warm, fuzzy glow I felt when I could scratch something off that list.

  The bad thing about my making lists of things to accomplish was the cold, nauseous sensation I felt when I couldn’t scratch something off that list.

  So, there I was, sitting on the glider on Dan’s porch, carefully nursing a cup of hot green tea and my last organic apple, letting the good and the bad feelings duke it out inside me.

  On the one hand, by finally taking matters into my own hands, I had wrestled the slow-moving judge into our corner, and Dan was now Willette’s guardian.

  On the other hand, by taking matters into my own hands, I had zip to show for figuring out why Willette allegedly shot a man, and why somebody tried to kill her with red ants.

  Actually, the list of failures was a good deal longer than the list of accomplishments. For one, Willette’s house loomed full of garbage, and no clue had surfaced yet. Demetrious had called me to say the Fish and Wildlife folks hadn’t found anything criminal, or even suspect, at the Deer Den, and had fussed at him for wasting their time. I had no evidence or motive on my Dr. Weinstein theory, and Dr. Hodo said it would take a few hours for the last dose of Thorazine to wear off and for Willette to wake up.

  So, we were all kind of waiting around for Willette to come out of her stupor and tell us what had happened the night she apparently shot Ray Glenn, and as I took the last bite of my last apple, I figured I was somewhere between mopey and bored.

  Plus I had to get home, I had to figure out how to get rid of Idiot Client so I could testify for Henry, and I had a half dozen cases sitting in my filing cabinets and not getting billed on—I’d have to work till midnight for a month to catch up with the firm’s average monthly billing rates.

  Thinking of Henry made me think of Bonita. As it was still Saturday, and I wouldn’t offend her steadfast rule of honoring the Sabbath, I snatched out my cell phone and, in seconds, the calming voice of Bonita came lilting out of the little piece of plastic in my hand.

  “Anything new?” I asked.

  “Oh, hello, Lilly. If you can, take a look at the Rules Regulating the Florida Bar. It seems that you have a mandatory obligation to withdraw when a client tries to enlist your help in committing either a crime or a fraud.”

  Pleased that Bonita was right on that Idiot Client fraud thing, I jumped in too. “So, okay, I should be able to win my motion to withdraw then, right?”

  “But the case law and the rules say that you can’t testify about the client’s fraud because of the attorney-client privilege.”

  “What?”

  “The Ethics Rules require you to withdraw, but forbid you from telling the judge why.”

  So, okay, what lofty-minded yet reality-challenged fool had drafted that catch-22? Since my client was objecting to my motion to withdraw, I had to give the judge a reason, a very good reason. But the same rules that required me to withdraw in the face of my client’s fraud forbade me from giving the judge any reason.

  “So, okay, would that mean I can’t testify against Idiot Client in Henry’s case? Even if I withdraw and am no longer his attorney?”

  “Lilly, I am not an attorney. I do not know the answer to that. I am just telling you what the rules say.”

  My stomach knotted in desperation. I had to get back to Sarasota, to my law office, to our law library, to Lexis and Westlaw on a high-speed Internet connection.

  Because the thing about the law is this: There is always an exception.

  And for Henry’s sake, I would have to find it.

  We said a few more words. And then we hung up.

  My heart was fairly pounding thinking about Henry out there, on his own, without my help, as Idiot Client and Newly ruthlessly ground him and his insurance company into litigation dust.

  I wiped my hands on my pants and looked up at the sound of footsteps.

  Shalonda came walking up. I hopped up from the glider and stepped out to meet her.

  “You all right?” I asked, though it was pretty obvious from looking at her she wasn’t. Her eyes were puffy and she was still sniffling. “I looked all over for you after I heard what happened. Even called your house.”

  “That bitch told Demetrious to keep me off her husband, you believe that? Then she called me a cheating slut and used the n–word.”

  “Well, don’t you worry, we’ll get even with her,” I said.

  “White girl, I already got me a list of ’bout ten–twelve things I can do back at her. I like the way you think.”

  Colleen might have called Shalonda a slut and a very bad name in front of a Mule Day crowd, and Shalonda’s husband might have slugged it out with her ex-lover as a result, but Shalonda was a trooper. I gave her a quick hug and a pat on the back.

  “I’m doing all right, not gonna let that little bitch get me down.”

  “Good girl.”

  “I hate to ask, but…”

  “Ask.”

  “Can you drive me home?”

  “Sure. But where’s your car?”

  “Your mom is still out of it, by the way, but Dr. Hodo left a psych nurse there with her, and she’ll call him the minute she starts waking up.”

  “Oh, good.” But that hadn’t answered the question I’d just asked. “Where’s your car?”

  “Demetrious took me by to check on Willette. Then we kinda had a…a fight. In the hospital parking lot.”

  “Not because of—”

  “Yeah, because of—”

  “I’ll take you home, you know that, but don’t you think you should call him?”

  “I’ve been calling him. He’s not usually a shithead, but he’s not answering the phone, so I guess he’s still mad enough to leave me high and dry in town.”

  Yeah, I wanted to take a long drive in the country to end up smack in the middle of this. But what I said was, “I need to get my shoes.”

  Two minutes later, at the twist of my new car key that had cost me more than the book value of my ancient Honda, my trusty vehicle purred into action, and we were heading out toward Shalonda and Demetrious’s formerly happy home.

  I didn’t ask for any more details about their fight. Once, a long time ago, I’d handled some d
ivorces, complete with all the horrid lies that involves, and I’d developed this highly refined theory about marital discord: Stay the hell out of it.

  We drove in a strained silence, and we were not happy, either of us. Mopey had won out over bored, after all, and anxiety was still a player.

  “Take me by the barn, please,” Shalonda asked. “Maybe Demetrious’s not answering at the house because he’s in the barn. You know, celebrating with Big Beauty. Everybody forgot BB won that Best in Show, what with all that shit Colleen kicked up.”

  I wondered how one celebrated with a mule as I parked on the dirt driveway near the barn. I mean, I don’t think you’d want to give a mule champagne, so—what? Maybe extra apples? So wondering, I stayed inside the car while Shalonda popped out.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said after glancing around.

  Yeah, a number of things were wrong, I thought. But I got out and looked around too.

  Two of Demetrious’s mules were milling around outside the corral, and Demetrious’s truck was backed up to the barn, blocking the door. We didn’t see BB in the fenced pasture, and we didn’t see Demetrious.

  “Why don’t you go put those mules up, and I’ll go see ’bout Demetrious,” Shalonda said, then she ran into the barn.

  Catch a mule? Huh. I studied the long-eared animals, who studied me right back, apparently placid enough. But when I reached for one, it brayed, baring exceptionally large teeth, and backed up from me. Okay, frontal attack didn’t work, I thought, try gentle persuasion.

  While I was trying to sweet-talk the mules into following me into the fence, I heard a heart-stopping scream.

  Now what? As it wasn’t like Shalonda to scream for no reason, I ran into the barn.

  It took a split second for me to process what I saw. A pile of feed. A big pile of feed.

  With feet sticking out at one end.

  And Shalonda at the other. “Help me.”

  I processed and jumped at the same time, squatting beside her as the two of us dug away the sweet feed as fast as we could. “Nine-one-one,” I gasped, “we need to call—”

  “Dig,” Shalonda yelled, “damn it, dig.”

  I kept digging.

  How long, I wondered, as I dug, could someone survive with a big pile of sweet feed on top of him?

  chapter 34

  My own mother, crazy as she seemed to be, with her fear of any air outside her own front door and an apparent tendency, of late, toward psychotic rants, had nonetheless managed to defend herself against one mean bill collector when he burst into her haven.

  Or else she had simply shot the man with no provocation other than extreme irritation.

  But I much preferred to go with the self-defense theory.

  So, there it was, the dominant assumption being that a frail, tiny, crazy woman had successfully defended herself against a big mean man.

  She might have been afraid of damn near everything except garbage, but she wasn’t afraid to get a gun, point it, and pull the trigger.

  Not bad for a ninety-pound woman.

  I had to reevaluate my mother’s strength.

  Especially in contrast to the fact that a man with big feet had apparently stood still while someone dumped a truckload of sweet feed smack on top of him.

  One would have thought the man stood a better shot at self-defense.

  But the ways of the universe are fickle and weird, or worse. And maybe, unlike Willette, he hadn’t had a Saturday night special handy.

  All of this was wildly inappropriate thinking on my part, but it distracted me momentarily from the scene that was taking place right in front of me, that being Shalonda and me digging in the waves of feed, digging to create air passages for the man beneath the feed.

  Digging.

  Until the blue face of one Big Lonnie Ledbetter appeared before us.

  “Oh, my God,” Shalonda said, and then inhaled and started mouth-to-mouth. “Pound on his chest,” she yelled at me between blowing into Lonnie’s mouth.

  Aside from the fact that Lonnie’s chest was still covered in sweet feed, I knew it was too late—the man was blue, and coolish to my touch. A brain dies in ten minutes without oxygen.

  It takes longer than ten minutes for a man to turn bluish and cool.

  But I didn’t have the nerve to stop Shalonda.

  Soon enough, she stopped herself.

  “You can call 911, now, I guess. Get the high sheriff out here.”

  I studied Shalonda closely. She seemed all right, steady, and not on the brink of imminent hysteria.

  “My cell phone is—”

  “Go,” she said. “Get the sheriff.”

  Easing out of the barn and reluctantly leaving Shalonda for a moment with her old lover, I snatched my cell phone out of my glove compartment and called 911. I explained as best I could that Lonnie Ledbetter was dead in Demetrious’s barn, and the sheriff himself should get out here as soon as possible. I declined to answer further questions, and tossed the cell back in the Honda.

  Lonnie dead in Demetrious’s barn. I knew how that sounded. Before the high sheriff stepped out of his car in front of that barn, the rumor mill would have this a love-triangle murder.

  I wanted to run into the barn and grab Shalonda and head out for the high hills.

  But running away only delays the inevitable. This was one thing my habit of running away as a child had taught me.

  So, I lingered outside, giving Shalonda her privacy, and I stared about me, looking for clues as to what had happened.

  Over behind the barn, in the trees, I saw a whole covey of buzzards. Just roosting there.

  And I remembered what Jubal had said about Demetrious collecting roadkill to feed the buzzards so that they would not get smacked by fast-moving trucks on the road.

  Struck with an immediate and intense curiosity, I trotted toward the trees where the buzzards roosted. And came up short in front of a pile of dead something on the ground, a few buzzards lazily circling it. One buzzard looked up, eyed me as if taking my measure, and I flapped my arms. They rose then, awkward and heavy, those huge, ugly heads on top of the big bird-bodies. As I watched, the buzzards finally got their air wings, and rose and rose, and then circled. Graceful in the sky.

  Disgusted, I looked down at the mashed mess on the ground, already telling myself to get back to Shalonda.

  I’d half turned away when something flashed in my head like a cue card. I turned back.

  Crawling all over the fresh carrion were ants.

  What looked like millions of them.

  Ants. Red ants.

  Like the ones in Willette’s room, ants without a nest of red dirt, ants on a piece of carrion that could easily have been tossed into a big Baggie and carried into a hospital room, where a little honey on Willette would have enticed them away from the roadkill.

  Maybe that was why no one ever found a trace of the red dirt from an ant bed in Willette’s hospital room.

  Maybe the ants hadn’t been scooped from an ant bed but gathered off roadkill.

  But now why in the world would Demetrious want to kill Willette?

  chapter 35

  It is the nature of love to survive death. My grandparents had taught me that, first by their words and then by their dying.

  So it was that Lonnie lying dead on the floor of her husband’s barn didn’t stop Shalonda from loving him.

  This was plain as day as I peeked in the barn and watched Shalonda trace the tips of her fingers along the lines of Lonnie’s face, and stop with her ring finger over his lips. Then she leaned over and kissed those lips, and I felt like a voyeur of the worst kind, and eased back out of the barn, letting her sit for a moment longer with the man who, for all his faults, had truly meant something to her.

  I was leaning against the fence, watching the mules and cursing the natural forces of evil, when Shalonda ran out of the barn. “I’ve got to find Demetrious,” she shouted, and frantically snatched my cell phone. The sounds of sirens were close now.
/>   Shalonda understood the situation, I gathered. That being it was Demetrious’s barn, and he and the dead man had some issues over Shalonda, and had traded punches that very afternoon, with Demetrious threatening Lonnie in front of no less impeccable witnesses than a couple of deputy sheriffs. Demetrious would be a prime suspect, right from the get-go.

  “He’s not answering up at the house,” she said, and closed the phone.

  “Is there somebody I can call for you?” I asked.

  “We got to find Demetrious,” she said. “You stay here, wait for the sheriff, while I run up to the house.”

  “I think you ought to stay here.”

  But Shalonda, never one for taking advice, hopped into my Honda and roared up the driveway the half mile or so to the house.

  Just on the off chance we didn’t have enough people wandering around and messing up the crime scene and getting in one another’s way, Jubal showed up a minute and a half behind the sheriff, an ambulance, and a host of cars full of people who seemed to be official but might not have been.

  The sheriff, with a stern face and a deep voice, ordered everybody to stay put and not to be traipsing around in the yard. Jubal was, at that moment, traipsing around trying to catch a mule, and the sheriff trotted toward him as if he were an eyewitness or the key suspect.

  Since everybody else seemed to be milling around, muddling up any tracks and such, I hotfooted it toward the sheriff and Jubal.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” was what I heard the sheriff saying as I got within earshot.

  “Helping out, which is more’n you’re doing.” With that, Jubal grabbed a mule by his mane and stomped off, the snared mule in tow, and the other one following close behind. In a minute, Jubal had them both back inside the corral.