Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  I was about to lose interest in the car wreck, when the radio squawked back.

  “Damn if it don’t look like it’s that Simon McDowell, the hospital guy,” the radio dispatcher said. “Some guy in a blue Honda hit him a good one.”

  A blue Honda? Mierda, I shouted, thinking about my blue Honda, last seen in Simon’s blueberries, with Armando, Johnny, and Jubal somewhere in the general vicinity.

  “What about Armando?” I shouted at the radio. “Was there a kid and an albino ferret in the wreck?”

  But the radio didn’t answer me. Shalonda and I looked at each other, and I could tell she didn’t like this any better than I did.

  “We’re going with you,” I said to Rodney, who uttered some sort of something that loosely translated to he couldn’t take us in a police car, and I shoved past him and crawled into the backseat, Shalonda right behind me. Demetrious jumped into the driver’s seat, and if Rodney hadn’t been way quicker than he looked, he’d be left standing in the driveway of a burning house.

  chapter 62

  Those not as fast as Shalonda, Demetrious, and me had to settle for riding in Dan’s or Eleanor’s vehicles, and we all went like a parade of the nearly insane to the intersection in front of the hospital, Demetrious running with sirens and light, Rodney working the radio, and Shalonda and me holding hands and saying a little prayer together for Jubal and Armando.

  There it was, the wreck, already drawing a crowd. A team from the hospital was rushing over, and I didn’t think the accident looked too good. Simon’s big-ass American car had been plowed into, on the driver’s side, by my ancient blue Honda. I recognized my own car with a pang—a pang for the car, but a larger surge of fear and anxiety over who might have been in it. Who might still be in it, crushed or trapped or both or worse.

  I jumped out of Rodney’s vehicle and ran toward my car, praying as I went that Armando and Jubal were not inside it.

  And there, on the other side of the Honda, staggered a stooped and dazed Jubal and a stocky Armando, complete with Johnny Winter around his neck. They had already extracted themselves from the wreckage of my little car, which looked pretty much like it was dead on the road for all times.

  Armando actually grinned at me and said, “Hey, Tia Lilly.”

  Jubal didn’t speak, or even look at me, but he advanced on Simon’s car until he stood, a bit wobbly, at the driver’s-side window, and stared in. Shalonda and I rushed over to peer in too, but Demetrious came up behind us pretty darn quick for a man who’d recently had a serious licking and was limping to beat hell. “You two get out of the way,” he said, not endearing himself to me at all at that moment. Then paramedic types pushed at him to get out of their way.

  I gave way to the officials once I got a good look. Trapped by his airbag, Simon had not stumbled out like Jubal and Armando, and, in fact, he didn’t much move.

  After I moved to let the firemen and EMTs do their thing, I turned to Jubal and Armando.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, stifling an urge to hug them both but afraid of further injuring them.

  “I done hit him to stop him getting away,” Jubal shouted, and then stumbled back from Simon’s car and sat down, with a sudden thud, into the soft grass in the yard in front of which he’d killed my car stopping a bad man’s escape.

  “That was so cool,” Armando said, heading right for Becky, who had jumped out of the back of Dan’s car. “Did you see that, Becky? Did you? Was that cool or what?”

  I peered at Jubal, then at Armando. Teenage boys bounce back better than an aging ex-logger was my conclusion, and I moved over toward Jubal. “Are you all right? Do you need me to get an EMT?”

  Shalonda plunked down on the ground beside him and took his pulse, and asked him how many fingers she was holding and who was the vice president, and then declared that he didn’t appear to be in immediate danger.

  “They teach you that in social-worker school?”

  “I watch ER and those Discovery-channel shows.”

  “I stopped him, didn’t I?” Jubal asked.

  “Yes, you did. What happened?” I asked.

  “Armando got that little white critter, and then I found ’em and we went right back to where we left y’all, but you were gone. We started looking around and found that shotgun of Shalonda’s—”

  “He knocked that thing right outta my hands like I was some sissy little girl,” Shalonda said, shame evident in her tone.

  “Well, looks like he beat the crap out of Demetrious too, so I don’t think you ought to be too hard on yourself,” I said.

  “You want to know what happened or what?” Jubal asked.

  “Yeah, what?” Shalonda said.

  “After that we found where there looked like a fight, signs in the dirt and all, so we hightailed it back to your car, looking for y’all, and nobody was at Simon’s house, so we called 911—”

  “That’d be about the four-hundredth 911 call today,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s sorta what that gal said who answered. Said we’d set a record for 911 calls in one day. Anyway, she told us to stay put, deputies were already on their way. But I didn’t see that we should stay put when I figured Simon had you and Shalonda off somewhere. Then Armando told me he’d seen a bunch of gas cans in the trunk of Simon’s car when Simon was getting extra rope to double-tie him, when he was putting them in that crypt thing. He’s the one thought Simon meant to burn y’all up in a house.”

  I glanced over at Armando then, who was talking to Becky and Bobby with possibly more animation than I’d ever seen from him, and I thought how proud Bonita would be. I mean, you know, if we ever actually admitted any of this to her.

  “Anyway I didn’t figure you’d mind too much if I hot-wired your car and went off to rescue you.”

  “So you do know how to hot-wire a car,” I said, remembering he had denied this skill the night Simon stole my purse and keys, and left me stranded with a car I couldn’t start.

  “Yep, but you didn’t want me admitting that in front of Demetrious, did you? I do that and ever time somebody gets his car stole, that man’d be coming after me. Now, you want to hear what happened or not?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “We first figured Simon was gonna burn y’all up at Demetrious’s house or barn, and we went off there. When we didn’t see anything there to make us think you two were anywhere around, I got to thinking maybe he meant to burn down Willette’s house, so we were rushing there when I come around the corner…and…er, there was…there was Simon, see, and I could tell he was getting away, and wasn’t no way else I could stop him, and so”—here Jubal paused ever so slightly and rubbed his hands on the grass—“see, I just plowed right into him so’s he couldn’t get away.”

  Uh-oh, I’d been a lawyer long enough to recognize basic Lying 101 signs.

  “Okay, what really happened?” I asked. But before Jubal could answer, Rodney and another police officer came over and shooed me away, and that was that.

  By the next day, the official side of the story came down that Simon had not been able to find Becky, Bobby, or Armando, and figured his game was pretty much up, and, wisely discerning that he would not much enjoy life in a Georgia state prison, he had loaded his car in a hurry with all the essential things he needed to start a nice new life in another country, no doubt one without a strong extradition treaty. The only thing that stopped Simon from if not a clean getaway then at least a prodigious head start was Jubal’s gallant decision to put himself in harm’s way by crashing my car into Simon’s. To block his escape.

  Of course, we all overlooked that he’d put Armando at risk. Honda cars are tough, but there wasn’t any guarantee Jubal and Armando wouldn’t have been hurt. But Armando couldn’t have been happier about being in a big car crash and walking away with full bragging rights.

  And, of course, the only two people who knew what had really happened, that being Jubal and Armando, kept quiet about it. Until later. Jubal was the one who finally told me,
while I was bringing him some fried tofu in his jail cell.

  The thing was, Jubal had swerved my car going around the curve because Free Bird, Eleanor’s peacock, had run out in the road slap-dab in front of him. It was just pure instinct that made Jubal swerve, and just happenstance or cosmic intervention that Simon’s vehicle was what Jubal swerved into. Jubal kept saying he was just “real, real sorry” about my car. The peacock got clean away.

  In truth, Jubal hadn’t known Simon’s car from Adam’s house cat.

  But when he crawled out of my Honda and looked in the window of the car he’d smashed into, he recognized Simon. And Jubal was a man with a good imagination and a fast tongue.

  That night at the jail, after he’d confessed his hero status was purely accidental and due to an errant bird, I told Jubal that all in all he’d done a terrible thing helping Ray Glenn with his endangered-species smuggling. But Jubal was doing his best to redeem himself, and even Patti Lea agreed God doesn’t ask or expect much more than that. I promised Jubal that I’d have Philip Cohen see if he could be temporarily admitted to practice in a Georgia court and defend him, or, failing that, find Jubal a good Georgia criminal defense attorney.

  And, we all learned after a careful investigation by Demetrious, that Simon had fled down that road because he’d had to get a few things from his office at the hospital, like a quarter of a million dollars of bearer bonds. In a less than well-thought-out manner, Simon had stored these bearer bonds in a safe in his office at the hospital because my grandmomma’s house did not have a safe.

  But all this we were to learn later. That night, while we were staring at the car wreck, against the backdrop of a deep indigo sky darkening with the rising smoke from Willette’s burning house, everybody figured Jubal for a hero, and I kept my doubts to myself.

  And while Jubal, shaky as he was, and Armando had walked away from the wreck, Simon had not. As we watched, the EMTs loaded Simon onto a stretcher bound for the hospital that he had once ruled.

  But I only spent a minute or two watching Simon. I turned my head back in the direction of my grandmother’s house, the one that should have been mine, the redbrick house with the porch, resting in its haven among the blueberries, the peach trees, with the living fence of chestnut and pecan trees, all backed up by the little blue lake with the great blue herons and white egrets. Though I couldn’t see the house from here, I could feel it—like the cool breeze on a hot day, which my granddaddy always thought was his beloved whispering to him.

  Well damn, if I couldn’t wrestle a quit-claim deed in my name for Grandmom’s place out of all this, I would personally renounce my law degree and hang up my shingle.

  chapter 63

  The $65,000, what with all the general excitement, had slipped my mind until late night, when I woke with a start and realized all that cash was now ashes somewhere in the eastern corner of what had once been Willette’s house.

  I kept that thought to myself when Dan, Patti, and I walked over after coffee the next morning to stare at the pile of charred timbers and soot that had once been the house Dan and I had grown up in, but which, tried though they might, the firemen could not save.

  “Good thing we got all her important papers out,” Patti the Glass-Is-Half-Full said.

  “Reckon we don’t have to worry about cleaning any more of it up,” Dan the Practical said.

  I had my mouth open to wonder out loud what sort of toxic mold smoke we had inhaled, when Shalonda pulled up in her car and got out.

  “Ain’t pretty, is it?” she asked by way of greeting.

  Then everybody had to hug everybody else, and as soon as that was over, I pulled Shalonda aside and whispered that I’d put the cash in Willette’s kitchen for safekeeping.

  “Good plan,” she said.

  “Well, we couldn’t’ve kept it anyway,” I added. “Just means Colleen is short that $65,000.”

  “Lord works in mysterious ways,” Shalonda said, and grinned at me. “And good thing I never told Demetrious or Rodney about you taking it. Reckon we ought to leave it be. I dang sure don’t want Colleen suing me for that money.”

  While I absorbed the wisdom of that, Patti put her arm around Dan’s shoulders. “I’m sorry about the house, but at least we got the antiques and the money out.”

  Got the money out?

  “What money?” I asked.

  “Willette had $65,000 in cash—in cash, mind you—stuffed inside a picnic basket in the kitchen,” Patti said. “Can you imagine that?”

  Yes, I could, and looked at Shalonda with an expression that dared her to say anything.

  “We just don’t have any idea where she’d come up with that kind of cash money. But let me tell you this, we can sure afford to get her in the best detox center in all of Georgia. Plenty of money to pay for it now,” Dan said. “And you wouldn’t believe the money she’s got in a stock portfolio. That Scott fellow works over at the stockbrokers’ sure gave her good advice. Going to start investing with him myself.”

  Shalonda was the first to laugh. I knew then she wouldn’t be telling her husband anything at all about that money we took out of Lonnie’s Victorian. Later, when Colleen never reported its theft, we figured that Lonnie had never told her about the cash. Her attorney and Simon’s attorney and the state’s attorneys and the IRS all locked themselves into a tizzy of a battle over the funds Simon had paid Lonnie, and frankly I don’t care how that turns out, so long as Colleen the Vile doesn’t get it.

  And yes, Simon had been friends with the CEO of the real estate development corporation, and they’d both had these checkered careers, all told, and when the CEO asked Simon to “grease” the resort-development process, Simon had taken it totally on his own to bribe Lonnie, the holdout county commissioner, or at least that was what all the resort people said. Nobody much listened to Simon’s side of the story. But when the money tracers finished proving that the money Simon paid Lonnie came from the resort’s own corporation, and there were some suspicious deposits in Simon’s stock portfolio strongly suggesting the developers had been generous to Simon, the state and the feds jumped in to investigate.

  As for the resort itself, aside from fraud and bribery criminal actions hovering out there over them, once the story about Lonnie’s bribe came out, the rest of the commissioners naturally decided to rescind the vote to join forces with the resort, and redid the vote—well after Lonnie’s replacement had been appointed. Shalonda stepped up to the plate and, in no time at all, Bugfest County had a brand-new commissioner, the county’s first woman, and in a unanimous vote, the good commissioners of Bugfest decided to have nothing to do with the resort, and to put on hold its plans to dam the creek and make a big lake out of a small lake. So, at least for a while, that resort and any others will just have to wait.

  Jubal, whose only legal sin was finally summed up as aiding and abetting a conspiracy to smuggle, will get out of jail in plenty of time to enjoy quite a few more years on the property his family had owned for one hundred and sixty-five years.

  Dan felt a great sense of relief upon learning that Ray Glenn had not gone to Willette to collect the bill for the refrigerator he had ordered, but had gone there with Lonnie with the full intention of getting Willette’s signature on a backdated deed, and then, at least from Ray Glenn’s point of view, to kill her—per Simon’s orders to Ray Glenn.

  Between what Willette told Demetrious as she was coming off her drugs, and what Simon told Demetrious as he was going under his drugs in the ER, Demetrious pieced it together nicely. Lonnie was slow-witted enough that when Simon offered him $400,000 for my grandmom’s place, instead of explaining the truth to Simon and paying Willette off, he just signed Willette’s name himself on a deed and snuck it into the courthouse. So, when Simon looked, there it was—a forged deed. And when Jubal found out what Simon had paid for the property and called Willette, she’d promptly phoned Simon and explained that, legally, she still owned that house but she’d be glad to sell it to him for $400,000.
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br />   Naturally enough, Simon came unglued after that, and cornered Lonnie with a demand that he get Willette’s real signature on a backdated deed. Simon was in no mood to deal with Willette, a lawsuit to quiet title, public knowledge about the inflated sale price, or any of the rest of the can of worms Jubal had unleashed with his snoop and disclosure moves.

  But, as Grandmom would have said, “once burnt, twice careful.” That is, Simon didn’t trust Lonnie not to screw up again. And there was Simon’s new best friend, Ray Glenn, anybody’s bad man for hire. They’d met when Ray Glenn had started sniffing around Simon, looking for an angle to get some of that big money floating between Simon and Lonnie. In a classic example of takes-one-to-know-one, Simon had spotted Ray Glenn for the evil soul he was, and hired him to dispose of Willette after she signed the backdated deed. But when Willette refused to sign the deed, and Ray Glenn started stuffing pills down her throat, aiming to kill her, Lonnie tried to fight Ray Glenn off to save her life. And while the two men were fighting, Willette got a gun out of the end table. When Ray Glenn shoved Lonnie aside, and started back after Willette, she had simply shot Ray Glenn to death.

  Shalonda takes great comfort in this story, and has repeated to me a hundred times or more, “See, I told you he wasn’t a bad man.”

  Willette herself had shipped out to a detox-and-rehab center in Atlanta, right after she transferred title to Grandmom’s place to me for its fair market value, minus what Lonnie had already paid on it. Detox and deed transfer were both arranged by her legal guardian, Dan, while she was still mentally incompetent. Her prognosis for regaining her mental and physical health is uncertain, given the long years of drug abuse and bad nutrition. But Dan remains optimistic and speaks of bringing Willette home to live with him and Patti Lea, an idea that Patti Lea considers on a par with Armageddon.

  The only things my mother asked for was for Delvon to visit, and for plenty of cold Cokes. Delvon showed up with his girlfriend, Lenora the Saint, and they prayed her through the worst of the detox. And none of the official law came from Bugfest with warrants for Delvon’s arrest, though we remained nervous about the state boys while Delvon stayed in Atlanta at the detox clinic.