Sleep Don't Come Easy

by McGlothin, Victor

  While working cases for former CRUMBS, Vera learned a lot about people and their various bad habits; some of them made television crime shows play out like Mother Goose tales. Catching miscreants doing God knows what was always toughest when Vera had to settle in and videotape their indiscretions. She’d filmed men with men, women with women, men with children and too many deviants with animals to remember. Sickness had taken on a whole new meaning since Vera started working for herself at Miles Above Investigations. The hardest part was doing the job without becoming the job. Unfortunately, the thin line narrowed each time she had to hold the camera steady in order to film an entire reprehensible act in wide focus while collecting the evidence. Having to play it back later, to be dissected on a conference room big screen monitor in a room filled with clients and high-priced lawyers, disturbed Vera down to her core. Private investigating was a dirty line of work to get caught in, one that rarely allowed her to walk away unsullied.

  It was 8:30 that morning when Vera snatched her hair back in a ponytail just before leaving her comfortable three-bedroom home to meet the day. It was a red-brick fixer-upper, a money pit that she felt the need to rescue, like taking in a stray dog then later discovering it needed shots and a battery of other expensive veterinary treatments. The house at 9904 Newhaven belonged to Vera and it was well worth the ten grand of remodeling she had poured into it. After springing for a new roof and replacing the light fixtures in every room, Vera had something to be proud of. More than that, it was the first real thing she ever owned. At first sight, she knew that it was something that needed saving and she needed something to save. That’s what the Realtor called a match made in real estate heaven.

  The Silver Streak, Vera’s metallic-colored ’97 Ford Explorer, was another story altogether. Her grandfather always said, “Buy American and keep our jobs at home.” So, Vera purchased an American automobile and learned something right away. Her grandfather’s advice about waiting around until a good man found her wasn’t the only thing he was wrong about. It seemed that Vera should have kept her pocketbook at home instead. It was a fact that The Streak got her from point A to B, but then so did walking.

  Vera came by her SUV one Saturday afternoon after answering an advertisement for a traveling automobile auction which took place on the other side of town. The man who ran the event sold out of his entire inventory of thirteen vehicles by slashing prices. Twelve of the vehicles he unloaded were stolen property. The only one that hadn’t been boosted had been pulled out of a flash flood in Houston. Based on the hill of maintenance bills Vera had accumulated over the past two years, she guessed that The Streak couldn’t swim. The thought of passing it on to another chump crossed her mind all the time, but she figured on keeping it around as an, albeit costly, constant reminder that anyone could be a sucker if the odds were right.

  Almost laughing at herself, Vera wondered when someone else would try and sucker her as she sneered at the cashier standing on the other side of the teller window. Seven-hundred dollars minus the five-buck non-account holder fee tacked on for cashing Mrs. Everhart’s check suggested the bank was first in line. At least she saw that one coming. Vera climbed back into her vehicle wearing a crooked grin. She felt good about having a few extra dollars in her pocket, just a few. She knew all too well that a little money was a whole lot better than none.

  Driving up to the oatmeal-hued brick covering the small building Vera leased on lower Greenville Avenue reminded her that she hadn’t eaten breakfast. Since there weren’t any potential clients on the schedule, or money coming in, she let the sinking feeling pass right on by when pulling into her personal parking space on the tiny back lot. Vera frequently parked behind the building, making it easier to duck out on bill collectors or unhappy persistent clients. Parking on the street out front was another option when her financial situation improved. Had she accepted that additional check from silly Sylvia Everhart, The Streak would have been lounging curbside for at least a week.

  At the back door, sounds of Ms. Minneola Roosevelt’s transistor radio tickled Vera’s ears. At seventy-two, the receptionist motored along rather well for a woman with her mileage. Outliving three husbands was proof that she more than adequately handled her own back in the day and more than likely still could.

  “Ms. Vera, that you?” was her first salutation of the day. “Good mornin’. I thought I heard you coming in through the back.” Although it was uncomfortable having a senior citizen addressing her with immense respect, Vera understood her assistant was reared in another time where the boss was treated with a manner of reverence despite the age difference.

  The older woman closed the door just after stepping inside Vera’s small office that was separated from the rest of the building by a thin layer of sheetrock. The doorknob brushed across Ms. Minnie’s wide behind. Vera pretended not to notice when the woman lunged forward because of it. “There’s one of them CRUMBS of yours out there in the waitin’ area,” she announced sharply. Her top lip turned up as if she’d smelled something rank. “But I can’t find him on the calendar nowhere.” The receptionist parked her thick fist on her broad hips awaiting directions on how she should proceed.

  Vera smiled, greeting one of her favorite people. “Good morning, Ms. Minnie,” she offered, studying the woman’s soft round face and dark brown worried eyes. “Is everything fine out there?” Vera placed her purse on the floor near her feet where it would be concealed by the office desk. When Ms. Minnie didn’t utter a single sound, Vera questioned with her eyes what was bothering her receptionist.

  “Ms. Vera, this man’s been here since I opened up this mornin’,” Ms. Minnie answered, with an uneasy glance behind her.

  “Yes, and?”

  She swallowed hard before continuing. “And, he’s white.” It was then Vera considered the sort of tragedies that warned Ms. Minnie to be cautious of strange white people, especially white men. A change of the millennium had nothing to do with her changing her mind about that. “Ma daddy always told me that a white man showin’ up unannounced can’t do you nothin’ but harm, even if he was to be sellin’ somethin’,” the elderly woman added for Vera’s sake.

  “Yes, ma’am, I understand,” Vera responded, keeping in mind what Ms. Minnie had likely witnessed at the hands of white racists. “Please send him back and I’ll deal with him.”

  Slowly rocking her sturdy frame on the soles of her black orthopedic shoes, Ms. Minnie stalled. She contemplated sharing numerous apprehensions, in hauntingly grave detail, but Vera stopped her short of a lengthy history lesson.

  “Go on now, Ms. Minnie,” Vera hastened. Then, she glanced down at the top drawer, which cradled Vera’s chrome-plated .38-caliber pistol. “Go on now,” she insisted.

  Ms. Minnie’s past had called out to her, beckoning her to heed the cautions. The old woman listened.

  Vera should have, too.

  Three

  When Vera’s visitor wandered into her office, he wasn’t at all what Vera expected. There were no manicured nails, no expensive timepiece, no exquisitely tailored Italian suit to marvel at and no seventy-dollar salon-styled hair job to impress her. At nine-fifteen in the morning, the visitor’s five o’clock shadow wore him like a two-day hangover refusing to let go. A slight grin almost came over Vera when she envisioned Ms. Minnie tucking tail and running from what she used to call “common folk” before the crafty PI remembered the last time she underestimated a stranger’s strength and guile. It was a slight miscalculation in judgment that landed Vera flat on her back with a pint-sized bail-jumper leaving tracks on her chest after knocking a door off the hinges to make his getaway. With no intentions of being the same fool twice, she saddled this stranger with a long once-over from head to bootheel. Other than the barely noticeable scar that lay along the ridge of his right eyebrow, the man’s face was as handsome as it was perfectly symmetrical. Had it not been for his long, thick blond mane in desperate need of immediate attention, he could have easily passed for a male fashion model, onl
y without the fashion. Movie stars would have stood in line for a chiseled jaw line like his or paid through the nose for a surgically enhanced reasonable facsimile.

  His faded Wrangler jeans were authentic, the first pair of those Vera had seen since leaving her hometown of Waskom, Texas, a speck on the map near the Louisiana border. Every so often, she’d run across some store-bought tourist who paid too much to look the part. This drifter’s twice-broke cowboy boots were the genuine articles. Hand sewn and full grain leather throughout. His weathered Stetson hat and the reddish tint in his tight skin were both bona fide. Vera could tell that he’d acquired the leathery complexion from long days under a sweltering sun, not hours in a tan-in-the-can ultraviolet chamber. Growing up country in a small farming town, Vera could still differentiate between fake ranch hands and fake tans from a mile off. Her visitor was the real deal.

  An initial assessment double-crossed Vera. Everything about this man screamed second-hand, loud and clear. From his well-worn denim jacket, with faulty insulated lining, and plaid cotton shirt, she guessed that each stitch of his clothing had previously belonged to someone else before he’d shoved a fist full of wrinkled dollars across a thrift store counter to claim them for his own.

  Although never having been physically drawn to white men herself, Vera had to blink twice when he asked if it was all right for him to sit down. Motioning with her hand, Vera conveyed to him that it would be fine with her for the time being. He nodded a thank-you and then took a seat across from her desk.

  “So, tell me, Mister . . . what can I do for you?” Vera asked, before their names had been exchanged. Procedurally, Ms. Minnie would have photocopied the potential client’s ID before passing it on to Vera. It was a security measure to verify she was meeting with the person he or she claimed to be. However, there was no recognition of protocol this time around, because Vera’s trusty receptionist wouldn’t have anything to do with this client including a suitable introduction.

  “Rags, ma’am. I’ve never been a Mister anything,” the cowboy answered eventually, while adjusting his posture as if Vera was a new schoolteacher mispronouncing his name. “Everybody calls me Rags.” His twang sounded airbrushed or watered down, less Texan than Vera expected. She picked up hints of a formal education and polished diction trapped beneath a farm boy veneer. The dry coarseness surrounding his voice threw her for a loop. If she hadn’t been looking at him when he spoke, she would have been willing to bet her life that those words came from someone else, someone much older and less appealing.

  “Look, it would help if you told me your real name,” Vera advised him. “I like to know who I’m dealing with.”

  “Unfortunately, Ms. Miles, I don’t have the answer to that.” He leaned forward with a hopeful expression, tucked behind a mask of uncertainty. “You see, I can’t seem to remember anything past two years ago when . . .” he said, before his words trailed off. Moments later, he made up his mind to continue with his jagged explanation. “I’m afraid I might have killed someone but I can’t recall much about it.”

  I’m afraid and I might have sounded even more like the products of a formal education to Vera, but she had run across slews of scholarly criminals before, so she took a moment to reconsider that notion as well. Suddenly, she wished she had listened to Ms. Minnie’s ancestors, when they whispered to her earlier. A strange white man had all but admitted to killing someone and there Vera was trying to figure out what to do next. Having been caught off guard, she lowered her right hand from its resting place on the desk. As soon as she began to ease the drawer open, Rags’s eyes melted into pleading green pools of sadness.

  “Please, Ms. Miles, don’t. That won’t be necessary. I didn’t come all this way to hurt nobody.” The cowboy easily sniffed out Vera’s move before she had the chance to pull it off. Because his words appeared as authentic as his boots, she decided to return her hand to the place where she’d moved it from. “I just need to catch up to some answers and I believe you’re the one who can lead me to ’em.”

  “Me, why me?” she asked utterly confused.

  Rags shrugged his square shoulders. “I can’t rightly say. I just know that I hit town, walked around for a few days and ended up here.”

  Vera sat motionless, thinking she must have been crazy to let the thought of getting involved in this case run around loose in her head. Since putting on a game face was as natural to her as putting on a coat of lipstick, she was smooth and effortless. “Look, Mr. Rags, or whatever your name is, I would like to help you out, but I’m a businesswoman. Charity doesn’t pay the rent, which means you’ll have to find another agency with a pro bono program to climb into that bed you’ve made. I don’t have time to hear any more of what’s troubling you.”

  “Troubling me?” he repeated, with a whiff of disbelief. “Ma’am, I can deal with trouble but this is something bad. I can’t hardly get no sleep and it won’t let my soul rest at all.”

  Vera was intrigued but not enough to go out on a limb that didn’t appear to have a bag of money dangling from it. “I am very sorry for you, sir, but I—”

  “I have money,” Rags offered abruptly.

  Vera’s eyebrows arched dramatically. “How much money?” she asked, in a direct manner that didn’t allow room for being lied to.

  “Will two thousand be enough for you to hear me out?”

  “I’m listening,” her shaky voice replied. Vera wanted to get to the bottom of Rags’s claims and his pockets before he had the chance to wave that two grand in front of another somebody, who wouldn’t be sharing it with her. All she could see were dollar signs, the ones that she’d recently allowed to slip through her fingers after succumbing to a moral dilemma and a temporary overwhelming case of scruples. Rags had her full attention, full and undivided.

  Vera watched him cautiously, this man who wrestled the greenest ripest Granny Smith apple she had ever seen out of his raggedy pocket. When he blushed like a child who’d just won a first place blue ribbon, Vera endured a massive letdown. She’d been on the edge of her seat, silently hoping to get a good look at something green and something to deposit. After noting her immediate and apparent disappointment, Rags quickly set the apple on the corner of the desktop nearest to him before pawing through his pockets again. The second expedition proved more fruitful as the cowboy snatched his hand out to make an impressive showing.

  Vera’s mouth popped open when he displayed a swollen knot of crisply rolled bills, big-faced bills. Even though he counted out twenty Ben Franklins, which moved her like a strong West Indian breeze, she couldn’t stop thinking how large his hands were. They were oddly big and thick for a man with such a wiry build. Suddenly, Vera was moved by something else, an irritation that she couldn’t explain. She loitered between two unsettling states of mind. If those were the hands of a killer, why was he so willing to part with such a large amount of folding money when it appeared that he couldn’t afford a decent haircut? That’s when Vera determined that she’d better watch her step more vigilantly. Treating all men as guilty until proven innocent had worked for her up until then and it was a step in the right direction. Whether Rags was the murderer he believed himself to be or not, a rush to judgment suited her just fine. Experience had taught her that every man was guilty of something.

  Before Vera knew it, she had gone and popped her game face back on and it was staring Rags up and down again, this time for a different reason. Vera’s intuition had her sizing him up. Rags was almost six feet in height, two inches taller than her. A speedy notion came on like the flu. If bad came to worse she might have to plant her size ten in a place that guaranteed a level playing field. She recognized a certain anatomical truth—the one thing that makes a man could also break a man, if her aim was right. The immediate concern was a stack of bills sitting atop the desk longer than Vera was comfortable with.

  The man calling himself Rags had picked up on that too. “If you’re worried about where this money came from, don’t be,” he insisted thoughtful
ly. “Nobody’s gonna come looking for it.” In as much as five minutes, he’d read Vera’s mind accurately. The time had come for her to return the favor. The wandering stranger didn’t flinch when he saw it coming.

  Vera’s eyes begun to burn after two minutes of matching Rags’s sullen gaze in an intense competition of unyielding stares. She had reason to be scared, but Rags needed to see if she could hold her own when it came down to getting what he was after. It appeared that time stood still. Neither of them had planned on looking away as the standoff in Vera’s office became unbearable. Rags noticed how her left eye began to twitch in the same instant that she counted beads of sweat mounting on his forehead. It was a game of nerves, a thrilling game, which Vera championed while standing against hundreds of hardened criminals fresh on parole. She didn’t fold in the midst of their plans to rattle her with their jailhouse bravado either. A long hard gaze was commonly utilized on the inside as a dire form of intimidation. Some of Vera’s parolees brought that thuggish manner of diminishing their adversaries with them after stepping outside the prison gates. During ten years of matching her street survival skills against murderers, molesters and malcontents, Vera had never lost a single game of nerves. Not one.

  She collected the money when Rags blinked first.

  Vera could not have predicted what had begun as a study in white, would have somehow culminated in her professional defining moment. Rags had stumbled into her life like a slow ride. Not the kind that ends when a woman climbs down off the man she loves but one just as rewarding, the kind that ushers in self-reflection and internal growth toward a clearer point of view with a keener eye. Rags represented something Vera had longed for since receiving her PI license. His peril offered the opportunity she’d been waiting on, a chance to discover what she was made of. Rags was the slow ride Vera needed.