Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  Back we marched to Willette’s room, where we found Simon standing by Willette’s bed, having a nice visit with Bobby, Armando, Becky, and the still-sleeping Willette. I noticed that Johnny the Ferret was off the bed and out of sight, and decided not to ask.

  Simon, who was dressed all in gold once again, was most gracious to me, even flirty, and I saw Shalonda cutting her eyes at me over this, but then Simon started asking about Willette. He was being so nice about Willette I wondered if he thought she was rich enough to leave them an endowment.

  Maybe he was hoping I’d give the hospital an endowment in appreciation for their special care of my mother. Yeah, in a pig’s eye. This hospital would be lucky if I didn’t sue them. Then I momentarily got tickled with the idea of a lawsuit as a kind of reverse endowment, and studied the intense, long face of one Simon the Hospital Administrator.

  Yeah, that was it, I thought—fear of a lawsuit. No doubt, Simon suspected the ER had screwed up the night they admitted Willette and nearly gave her a fatal overdose, and there was still that unexplained fire-ant episode. My new guess was that Simon was hoping if he were attentive enough, I, the lawyer daughter, would be perfectly willing to overlook these breaches of the hospital’s duty of care.

  Still, I was gracious back to Simon’s graciousness, and we all just about outdid each other in the nice category. But what I was about to do was this: explode. I wanted to get into Lonnie’s Victorian and see what I could see, and, all things considered, now was better than later. Just as I was about to suggest Shalonda stay there with Willette and the kids, the psych nurse came back in, fairly reeking of cigarette smoke. Great. That meant a few more smoke breaks in the future.

  Before I could fully articulate my unhappiness with her service, her habit, and her abandonment of Willette, Simon did it for me, even threatening to fire her.

  “You can’t fire me because you didn’t hire me,” Psych Nurse said.

  “No, I hired you and I can fire you,” I said, jumping in on Simon’s side.

  “No, Dr. Hodo hired me, and only he can fire me.”

  “See, I told you that you should have left Dr. Weinstein in charge,” Simon said to me. Then, to Nurse Stubborn, he said, “We are very unhappy with you for leaving your post. This woman needs constant attention. Very, very unhappy with you.”

  Every very, very was costing me precious time in my breaking-and-entering project, and I cut in. “I’m calling Dr. Hodo and telling him to fire you, okay. So you can stay or go, but you are not getting any money from me or Willette. And Shalonda, will you stay with Willette? I’ll be right back, as soon as I, er, finish my—”

  “Nope, I’m going with you.”

  “We can stay with Willette,” Becky said.

  “Yeah, we can stay with your mom,” Armando said.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Bobby said.

  “They do seem to be very responsible young adults,” Simon said.

  Well, yeah, they did seem to be so, but sixteen is sixteen, and I knew about the pot in the tree house. Or, at least, I suspected I knew about it. So, no offense and all that, but I called Eleanor, who was just freshly home from church and said she would be right over. She assured me she was glad I had thought of her.

  After that, I put in a call to Dr. Hodo’s answering service, his answering machine, his cell-phone voice mail, but not, alas, to the man himself. I had to settle for explaining the situation—and huffily, at that—to the various recording devices. With that chore done, Shalonda and I left, with Simon escorting us to my Honda and then hovering about me.

  “I would love to take you out to dinner tonight. Both of you, very much,” Simon said, gracious enough to include Shalonda, though his look was all for me.

  “It’s really hectic right now,” I said, “what with Armando visiting, and…why don’t I call you later. When things quiet down.” Translation: in the next lifetime.

  “Fine, please do.” And with that, the man with the long arms and the very, very habit leaned over and kissed me. On the mouth. Lightly, and strangely sweetly. Like we’d had a real date. And a real date that hadn’t ended with me getting a foot rub from another man right after I’d lied to Simon. Then, making matters worse, Simon hugged me, tightly, crushingly, and I was reminded again of the strength of the man. In a different situation, this could have been sexy. At the moment, it was merely irritating, and I struggled out of his grasp.

  “Well, back to work, no rest for the weary,” Simon said, shaking off my shaking him off without much obvious embarrassment. And then he walked back toward the hospital.

  “You’d be better off holding out for Hank, you wanting to date homeboys.”

  No, I didn’t want to date homeboys. I wanted to break into a dead man’s house before his wife came to and went home.

  chapter 42

  Henry had many sterling qualities. I was glad Bonita had finally agreed to marry him.

  But I was not sure he was such a great teacher, at least not of the fine art of picking a lock. That is, what with his rudimentary lessons and his cautionary tales, I had apparently failed to learn how to actually pick a lock. I had my lock picks, the ones Henry had purchased specially for me as a birthday present—somewhat to Bonita’s disapproval—which my-purse-and-car-trunk thief had left behind. But I could not for the life of me make the damn picks work in Lonnie’s locks.

  While I was tinkering, Shalonda kept making suggestions, as if she knew something about picking locks. Naturally, I got snappy, and so she wandered off.

  Well, stomped off.

  And the next thing I knew, the front door burst open and there she was.

  Strong and smiling—from the inside of the house of her now-dead former lover.

  “How’d you do that?” I asked, a little put out at her for beating me inside.

  “Climbed up that big live oak, scampered right into the open upstairs window,” she said, apparently over her pique at me for my snarling at her suggestions.

  Okay, so she was better at climbing trees than I was, and quick to forgive. Potentially good qualities both, I thought, and turned myself to the task of exploring Lonnie and Colleen’s love nest.

  I stepped inside and looked around. The first thing I thought was expensive.

  The place had that interior design–decorated look that costs money. A lot of money. Museum-quality antiques. Paintings and rugs and Victorian knickknacks that didn’t look like they came from Target, and window treatments with big pouffy things that definitely weren’t from the Sears sale catalog.

  “Whoa, you wouldn’t think a barn-burner trash-mouthed godless Yankee woman would have this kind of good taste,” Shalonda said. “And I know Lonnie didn’t care what his furniture looked like.”

  Yeah, an interior decorator had been through here.

  And that meant even more money.

  I thought about Ray Glenn’s big, expensive house, and now this. Those trips to Miami’s ports were sounding bigger than just saving transportation costs on refrigerators. Bigger even than stolen goods.

  “Would Lonnie be into smuggling drugs?” I asked.

  “No, he wouldn’t, and you better not be talking bad about that man. He’s dead, you know.”

  Yeah, I knew he was dead—I’d helped dig his face out of the sweet feed. But hearing Shalonda’s tone of voice, I decided to keep my theories to myself for a while, and set out to look for his office, or his desk. Shalonda decided to snoop through Colleen’s stuff, and I let her go.

  An hour later, I’d covered the downstairs and had decided Lonnie didn’t have a desk, safe, or filing cabinet, or anything else interesting on the ground floor. I dashed up the stairs and hunted down Shalonda, who was still studying Colleen’s stuff.

  “You look at all this shit,” Shalonda said. “That woman got more shoes and things than a department store.”

  I peered into the closet. And into the chest of drawers. And under the bed. And, yeah, Colleen had a whole stash of expensive-looking shoes, clothes, and jewelry. “This
clotheshorse habit must cost a whole lot,” I said, “plus all the furniture.” Translation: drug smuggling out of Miami for sure.

  “That ain’t the worst of it,” Shalonda said. “Look in here.”

  Inside the shoes inside the shoe boxes, there were several bottles of tranquilizers and painkillers. I picked them up, one by one, studying the label.

  “You know this doctor?” I asked, looking at the name of the prescribing physician.

  “Nope, and that drugstore ain’t even close to local, and there’s a good reason for me not knowing that doctor. Let me show you something else.” And with that, Shalonda led me to a little den-type room with a computer, one that was up and running. “She didn’t even have it passworded or nothing. I went to the bookmarks and found where she’s been ordering that shit off of one of those so-called pharmacy sites on the Internet. You know the kind I’m talking about?”

  Yeah, the kind of pharmacy site that charges a person a large sum for a so-called consultation with a doctor, who writes the prescription, and then the Internet drugstore mails the drugs to the person. “Yeah,” I said, and looked at my old friend with expanded respect. Wow, Shalonda had a talent for this sort of thing. Then I looked back at the computer screen for a minute or so, hitting buttons and satisfying myself that if I didn’t mind spending a ton of money, I too could have pharmacy-grade—or at least that’s what they claimed—drugs mailed to me.

  This drugs-for-money scam would put the black market and the street dealers out of business if it wasn’t so expensive.

  I wondered if this was the source for Willette’s own stash. Not that Willette had a computer, but that someone had used a site like this to get drugs for her. Had Lonnie been supplying Willette’s own habits?

  But before I could get too caught up in wondering about the pill bottles, something wholly new caught my eye.

  A locked drawer on the computer desk.

  One that had recently been busted open.

  “You do that?” I asked.

  “Damn straight, it was just a toy lock, didn’t even need them lock picks you so proud of. You know, that woman’s been calling me names since she hit town. You think I owe her anything?”

  “Not a thing,” I said, and pulled open the drawer.

  “Yeah, you gonna want to look at some a that stuff.”

  Yes, I was. There it was, the Big Clue. A deed, backdated three years, for the transfer of title of my grandmother’s house to Lonnie.

  The only thing was, the line for Willette’s signature was blank.

  chapter 43

  Obviously it had never seriously occurred to either Colleen or Lonnie that anyone might go through their house.

  Or else they were stupid.

  Or both.

  No password, no serious lock on the desk, no especially clever hiding places, and no safe.

  Instead of a safe, they used a picnic basket.

  Like a crook, or a snoop, wouldn’t think to lift the lid and look inside.

  Of course, Shalonda and I thought to do just that, and there it was. Cash money.

  A lot of it.

  We stopped plundering through the upstairs of poor dead Lonnie and vile but sedated Colleen long enough to count it.

  Sixty-five thousand dollars.

  Exactly the amount Lonnie had owed Willette under the terms of the contract for deed.

  Well, hell, what had Lonnie been up to? I mean, even if there were angels of coincidence floating around, that was just too much coincidence not to have some specific meaning.

  “We’ve got to take this,” I said, pondering theories of coincidental versus true clue.

  “No we don’t, that’d be stealing,” Shalonda said. “Why’d you want to take it anyway?”

  There was an old maxim around in my courthouse crowd, that if someone offers you money, you take it, and who was I to argue if the cosmic forces offered up a picnic basket with exactly the amount of money a dead man probably had owed my mother. So yeah, it wasn’t precisely like someone had offered it to me, not in person or anything, but the cosmic forces certainly had offered it up for grabs in my general vicinity. Close enough, you ask me.

  But Shalonda, not being a lawyer and therefore not trained to follow the money (or keep it, I guess) wasn’t going to buy that explanation. So, I tossed her another explanation.

  “We need to make sure this money is safe,” I said.

  “What makes you think it’s not safe right here? ’Sides, we broke in to find out who killed poor ole Lonnie, not to steal his money,” Shalonda said.

  “Well, he’s dead, so that makes it Colleen’s money. You want her to have it? You think it’s safe to leave it in her hands?”

  Shalonda had to think about that a minute. “Well, it’s not our money, is all I’m saying.”

  “I’m not taking it to keep it, I’m taking it to protect it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Until we know what’s going on, I don’t think we should trust Colleen with this money. It’s material evidence. What if somebody killed Lonnie for this money?”

  “Then how come they didn’t take it?”

  “They might not know where it is, or maybe they’re coming for it later.”

  “What do you think this has got to do with Demetrious running off?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Also, I wasn’t sure Demetrious had run off. I didn’t like the feeling I was getting over the possible fate of Demetrious now that I knew money was at play. Money and drugs, and smuggling stuff out of Miami, and now two dead men. This wasn’t some heartbroke love triangle we were dealing with.

  And Demetrious hadn’t struck me as the kind of man who’d run away.

  But I didn’t want to worry Shalonda worse than she already was by voicing any of this.

  “What we need to do with this money,” I said, “is take it now and put it someplace safe.”

  “Nope, we ought to call Rodney, he’s in charge now that Demetrious is…gone off. We’ll have Rodney take it into protective custody.”

  Forcing myself not to sigh, I tried to explain: Rodney could not just take the money into protective custody. Not without warrants and all that. It was stupid but not illegal per se to have $65,000 in cash in a picnic basket in your closet under some winter coats. “So, see, Rodney has no legal right to the money.”

  “Oh, and we do?” Shalonda snapped at me.

  “Look, I’m not going to go buy a gold Lexus with it, all right? I’m just keeping it safe.”

  Bicker, squabble, argue. Mierda, but people with inflexible moral codes about stealing are tough to break and enter with.

  Finally, Shalonda said we would take the money, but only if we delivered it to Rodney for safekeeping. I pretended to agree.

  But once we had it in the Honda, and were speeding away from the dead man’s Victorian, I tried to reason anew with Shalonda about the wisdom of telling Rodney we had this money.

  “Because technically, in a purely…you know…technical sense, we stole that money. We took the money after we illegally entered the house and that makes it a crime, and I don’t think we want to tell Rodney that.”

  “He won’t arrest us,” Shalonda said.

  Well, not her anyway, as arresting your boss’s wife probably wasn’t a good career move, even if that boss was currently missing in action. But I was outside that protected zone and not at all interested in finding out how flexible Rodney’s professional code of conduct was.

  But Shalonda had stopped worrying about the money, and was back to worrying about her husband. “Give me that cell phone, white girl, and let me call ever body again and see if Demetrious showed up yet.”

  As it turned out, he hadn’t.

  chapter 44

  The mournful sound of Patsy Cline lamenting about walking after midnight greeted us at the door.

  The door to Willette’s house.

  Where we’d gone because Shalonda got Patti on the cell phone and Patti said we should all meet up there,
and she had some questions for me about this boy from Sarasota, like why he thought he was moving in with her and all.

  What we found at the house of Willette was not Patti and her questions, but Armando and Johnny Winter, happily hanging out in the den, with Armando playing a Patsy Cline record on a truly ancient but obviously functional turntable, while looking through some old records as if they were museum pieces, which I guess they were. In short order, Armando told me Becky and Bobby were outside in the tree house, and Dan and Patti had gone for food, and he was fine, thank you, he liked it here, and maybe he’d just stay in Willette’s house as there seemed to be some question about whether he was staying at Dan and Patti’s.

  Not wanting to argue with him, especially since he was discovering real country music—and apparently for the first time in his deprived, child-of-rap-music life—I left him to it.

  Shalonda started looking through the records and found an old Stevie Wonder, and when Armando said who, nothing would do but for her to play it for him.

  Perfect. The world around us had gone to hell in a handbasket, and the grieving survivor of a love triangle and perhaps a drug-smuggling/land-fraud scheme was teaching a teenage boy she’d just met all about purely American soul music.

  Go figure.

  Leaving them to lessons of early Motown, I went in search of a proper place to stash the sixty-five thousand, that is, somewhere other than my Honda, seeing as how somebody who didn’t mind stealing stuff had my stolen key to it. Plus, with Shalonda at least formerly all fired up to confess our crime and hand the money over to the acting police chief, relocating the cash seemed like a decent idea. Once that picnic basket was relocated, Shalonda couldn’t turn it over to Rodney if she didn’t know where it was. Simple enough.

  It took me a few minutes to figure out the safest place to hide the picnic basket was probably the kitchen, especially since Hank’s high school boys had cleaned it up so nicely. So, I crammed the basket in the cabinet over the stove.