He Was Her Man

by Sarah Shankman

  “You brought me a car?” Doc was shaking his head. Maybe there was something to this Laronda.

  “We sure did. Got it off Miss Jinx Watson.” They were climbing the stairs, walking down the hall. “I work for her mother, Miss Loydell, some of the time, and Miss Loydell said Miss Jinx was going to give this car to her fiancé, Mr. Speed McKay, for a present, but Mr. Speed, he’s carried off by some ’nappers.”

  Doc couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but he knew what his line was. “Are you saying this Speed McKay was kidnapped? My God!”

  “Yes, sir, he was. It was a turrible thing, and Miss Jinx, she’s just lying and wailing in her bed, says Miss Loydell, saying over and over something about how she went and done the wrong thing, if she just had it to do over again, she’d do it right. I don’t exactly know what that means, but anyway, Miss Loydell said Miss Jinx couldn’t stand to hold on to this car that she was going to give to Mr. Speed, and so I made her an offer, and she took it.”

  At that, Doc couldn’t keep from laughing aloud. Oh, this was so rich.

  “And I guess Laronda’s right about the car making you happy,” said Fontaine. “Come on, let’s go let her hear you laugh.”

  Then they rounded the comer of the carport, and there was a two-year-old dark blue Mercury Grand Marquis—which Jack Graham had bought from Fontaine’s body shop an hour ago. Lateesha was sitting up tall in it, looking real pleased with herself.

  She stuck her head out the window. “Now, look at that face, isn’t that a happy man,” she said to Fontaine. “Didn’t I tell you? Why anybody’d be happy to have a nice car like this instead of that old hunk of junk, excuse me, sir, I’m sorry for casting aspersions on your car.”

  “No harm done,” said Doc.

  “Well, I ought to know better. God Almighty doesn’t like aspersions.” And then she leaned back in the Mercury to give a better listen to the gospel singing on the car’s radio.

  Thank God, thought Doc, the song was ending, and an announcer was starting in with the local news. Doc couldn’t stand that religious caterwauling, though he had to admit this was something, repentant Holy Rollers bringing him wheels. Didn’t God work in mysterious ways? Praise the Lord. And, thank you, Jesus.

  “Eight o’clock, that man says it is. We ought to be getting on home, don’t you think, Frank?” said Lateesha. “Quit bothering this nice—”

  “Wait!” said Doc, craning his head toward the Mercury’s window to catch the announcer’s words.

  “—tentatively identified as Michaela Steele of Savannah, Georgia, the woman was killed instantly. The truck driver said she was traveling at a high rate of speed and didn’t attempt to stop at the stop sign—”

  “Jesus!” said Doc. He staggered back from the car. It was too good to be true, Mickey out of the way, but still, it was a shock.

  “Oh, that was a turrible thing,” said Fontaine. “Happened late this afternoon, why, not that far down the road from here. They say there wasn’t hardly much left of her, smashed a big silver Mercury.”

  Mercedes, Doc started to say. This is a Mercury, Mickey was driving a Mercedes. But he caught himself in time.

  “Just goes to show you,” said Lateesha, ejecting the tape they’d made—Early doing the announcing part with a clothespin on his nose—from the tape player and slipping it in her purse, having first made sure that Doc wasn’t looking her way. “You just never can tell when the Lord’s gonna call you to be with him. Now, Daddy—”

  “Yes, baby?”

  “We’ve done what we came for. Now let’s be getting on home. Let this nice man here get his rest. We’ve caused him enough trouble.”

  30

  IT WAS LATE when Sam finally got off the phone with Loydell. The old lady could have gone on for hours. I want to get that bastard, she kept saying as they roughed out the next day’s scenario. It was only when Ruby, the Foot-washing Baptist, knocked at Loydell’s door that finally she let Sam go.

  Now Sam was running herself a hot tub, hoping to unknot from what had been, hands down, the longest day of her life.

  She poured bubble bath and slipped in, spread a washcloth over her face, rotated her ankles, wiggled her toes. Ruby, Ruby, was foot washing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost any better than this? If it was, Sam wasn’t sure she wanted to know about it.

  Except maybe for her book, for American Weird.

  Drifting in the bubbles, Sam let her mind ramble over some of the weird she’d collected in the past year. Competitive barbecuers. Bikers for Jesus. The Civil War Reenactment Bungee Jumpers. A mail-order voodoo doll business in Tuscaloosa.

  And what had she found here in Hot Springs? A sweet-faced ex-con who was a member of the Graciousness Society. A former beauty queen/lottery winner who peddled crystal altars. A den of con artists. A gambling entrepreneur nicknamed Mr. You Know Who who nabbed ladies and interrogated them with boxing gloves.

  Entrepreneur? Who was she kidding? Jack Graham was a crook.

  Or was he? If he were running the same operation in New Orleans, he’d be a local hero. On a riverboat, in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or if he were a Native American calling bingo numbers on a reservation, he’d be a professional. Legality was sort of a floating crap game, wasn’t it? Just like morality.

  And why was she lying in a tub of bubbles in the middle of the night in Hot Springs, Arkansas, defending, if only to herself, Jack Graham?

  Because she found him attractive. Because he seemed to think she was, too. Because she was needy, hurting, looking for anything to blunt the empty feeling she’d had inside since she and Harry had had their little heart-to-heart. Half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s used to fill her empty spaces quite nicely, but now she looked around for other things to latch on to. Chocolate was a winner. Good food in general. Movies were way up there. She could spend a whole weekend watching videos, sometimes running her own retrospectives, like the Jeff Bridges canon. Settle down with Jeff, a barrel of buttered popcorn, a box of Texas Millionaires, the time passed real easy.

  And there you had it. Like Jeff, Jack Graham was a big good-looking man, and he knew his way around a crayfish étouffée. Probably a pot de crème, too.

  So far, daydreaming about him was doing the trick. When her mind drifted onto Harry, it didn’t feel so much like biting on a sore tooth. She hadn’t thought about a drink since last night. Hadn’t thought about an AA meeting either, and that wasn’t so smart, was it?

  Well, this had been one hell of a merry-go-round, this 36 hours. That was a feeble excuse. Tomorrow she’d find a meeting and go. First thing. But tonight, there was a screening of Jeff’s Jagged Edge just beginning. In fact, she was climbing out of the tub right now, rolling the TV around, she could watch Jeff from her bubble bath.

  Back in the tub, she ran another couple inches of hot water and snuggled in with a towel behind her head. On the TV, Jeff had this great place in Marin County. Sometimes she missed northern California. She’d always miss Sean, which is why she couldn’t go back there. Not yet, anyway. The phone rang. Damn. There was no extension in the bathroom. She made more puddles.

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, Sammy, it’s Harry.”

  Harry, who’d carved up her heart, like Jeff was about to do to his wife on the TV.

  “What exactly is it that you want?”

  “I want you to talk with me.”

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  “There’s a lot to say. We have too much together to just walk away from, dearheart.”

  “That’s not what you—”

  “Please, don’t. Let’s please don’t get into that again. There’s no excusing what I did. I know that. But I’m sorry. I love you. Can you believe that?”

  “Nope.”

  “Come on, babe. Cut me some slack here. Until four days ago, you’d have had no doubt.”

  “That was then.”

  “Sammy, look. I’m not perfect. I screwed up. I know I hurt you, and I’m sorry.”

  “I�
��m sorry, too. But I can’t pretend it never happened.”

  “But can you understand that your refusal to make any kind of commitment to me makes me nuts? Leads me to do things I might not, otherwise?”

  She didn’t want to hear about her fear of intimacy. She was sick of hearing about it. “So your affairlette is my fault? We’re back to that again?” Somebody was knocking at her door. Good. An excuse to get off the phone—as if she needed one. “Harry, it’s late, I’m exhausted. I’ll talk to you when I get back to New Orleans.”

  “No!”

  On the TV, Jeff was telling Glenn Close he was innocent. He’d loved his wife. He’d never have hurt her, much less killed her. And he was coming on a little to Glenn. Watch out, Glenn. The knocking continued at her door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Room service.”

  “Harry, I’m hanging up.”

  “Do not hang up this phone. Do not.”

  She slammed down the receiver.

  Room service? She knew better than to fall for that old ax murderer ploy. Good thing the chain lock was on. She stood right at the door. “I didn’t order anything. You have the wrong room.”

  “No, I don’t. I know it’s late, but I thought you could use a piece of pecan pie and a glass of milk. Or some hot chocolate. Or a crème brûlée and some decaf espresso. Cereal and bananas. You name it, I’ve got it.”

  Forget you, Harry. Move over, Jeff. It was Smilin’ Jack.

  *

  Doc was lying in his bed in the big stone house up on the hill above Lake Ouachita, feeling like the King of the May.

  The old lady and the car were at the bottom of the lake.

  Mickey was dead, not that he’d exactly wished that on her, but it certainly made things tidy.

  He had wheels.

  The beauty queen wanted to give him some cash.

  And then there was Jack.

  He took another swig from the bottle of Scotch he’d taken to bed, held it out, and looked at it. Johnnie Walker Black Label. Black Jack. Blackjack. Jack. Deal the cards, sucker. Doc held all the aces and all the pictures. No doubt about who was going to win.

  *

  Sam grabbed a robe and unlocked the door. Jack was splendid in his tux, holding a silver tray piled with goodies. The pecan pie, hot chocolate, crème brûlée. “What on earth? How did you—?”

  “I own a restaurant just next door, don’t I? And people in the hospitality business are very hospitable to their friends.” He clicked his heels and did a little bow worthy of the most elegant mâitre d’.

  “Do come in.” Sam opened the door wide. “What a treat.” Then she looked down at the hotel’s terry cloth robe. “Though I’m hardly dressed for the occasion.”

  Jack’s smile said, Oh, yes, she was.

  *

  “He did what?” said Loydell to Ruby, who was sitting in her kitchen. They were sharing a late-night pot of Constant Comment.

  “I told you. He marched right into the service just as pretty as you please. Nobody had ever seen him before, but that’s one of the things the Lord teaches, isn’t it, welcoming the wayfarer and the stranger?”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Young” said Ruby. “A beanpole, tall but no bigger around than you. All in brown. Brown hair, brown eyes, dressed all in tan: suit, shirt, tie. Take him out in the desert, he’d disappear like one of those lizards.”

  “Uh-huh. And when y’all commenced to the foot washing, did he have some kind of fit?”

  Ruby’s eyes narrowed to slits. “How do you know, Loydell Watson? Is this some kind of trick you played on me? If it is, I want to tell—”

  “Don’t be telling me anything, Ruby, and don’t be pointing that bony finger in my face, either. This same boy got hold of me this morning in my car—”

  “Got hold of you! What are you saying, Loydell?”

  “Well, not hold of me exactly. He got hold of one of my shoes, and the next thing I knew, he had his nose stuck up in it and was sniffing away like it was Evening of Paris cologne. It was very weird.”

  “Weird? Disgusting, I’d say.”

  “That depends on your definition of disgusting.” And then Loydell started thinking about Jinx’s daddy and that wild thing he used to do with his old silk ties and her in their iron bedstead, that thing that used to make her squeal like a pig stuck under a fence. Horace had taught her tricks that’d show those Olympians on TV a thing or two about balance, endurance, and doing clever things with your various body parts. Of course, that had all been a long time ago. Jinx wasn’t more than two years old, that time he said he was going out for a pack of cigarettes, and the thing was, the man didn’t even smoke. She didn’t see hide nor hair of him for another 16 years, till they had that drought, and the water went down in Frenchman’s Creek, and they found him and that Sartor girl, or what was left of them. Dental records was how they could tell. Horace had the worst teeth of any man Loydell ever knew. And the most vivid imagination, once he got naked. She still missed him.

  Ruby was saying, “He was washing Sister Ivy’s feet, and he got to sniffing and snorting and carrying on, I’ll tell you, it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”

  Loydell couldn’t resist. “Now, honey, are you sure it wasn’t the best?”

  Ruby drew herself up so tall she looked like her backbone was going to shoot right out the top of her head. “I most certainly do not. This is what I get for coming here instead of going straight to the police. But Ivy insisted on it, and after all, it was her feet, and she said because you used to work for the police department we ought to come and ask you how to proceed. Don’t think we don’t know that there’s those who make fun of us, deride us, call us names—just because we happen to be strict interpreters of the Word of God.”

  “Well, at least you don’t do snakes,” said Loydell.

  Ruby’s mouth was so tight, if it had been a green bean it would have snapped. She picked up her purse.

  “Now, now, Ruby, don’t get yourself all in a lather. Sit down, let’s talk about this. I think you did absolutely the right thing, coming over here and asking me. Because if you marched down to the police and started talking about this toe-sniffer, those old boys would be hee-hawing from now till the middle of next week. Toe-sucker, they’d have it in about two minutes, put out an APB for him, and the boys in blue from here over to Little Rock’d be wetting their pants.”

  “What’s an APB?” Ruby relaxed her posture just a tad, though she wasn’t anywhere close to sitting back down.

  “An all points bulletin. That’s when you want all the law enforcement agencies around to look for somebody.”

  “They wouldn’t have to look for him. I left him sitting right in my kitchen.”

  “Well, Ruby, I swear. What on earth makes you think he’s going to be there when you get back?”

  Ruby didn’t answer.

  “Ruby?”

  Ruby opened her mouth about a millimeter. “I left Lulu watching him.”

  “Who on earth’s Lulu? Your guard dog?”

  Ruby took her own sweet time, but finally she said it. “My mountain lion.”

  *

  Jack had a great laugh. Sam had rerun Jinx’s adventures in the crystal altar business, and he was still wiping the tears off his face. “So, Jinx went for the idea, the meeting with Doc? You think she’ll do okay?”

  “Went for it? She’s chomping at the bit. We’d have to tie her up to keep her away. Mickey thinks she’s a natural.”

  “Mickey ought to know.”

  “I guess. I never thought of Jinx exactly that way, but I suppose that’s what she’s spent her whole life doing, conning people.”

  “And conning herself?”

  “I don’t know that I’d go that far. I don’t think the woman has an introspective bone in her body.”

  “A great gift for a grifter, wouldn’t you say?”

  Sam laughed, then helped herself to another bite of pecan pie. “This is so good.”<
br />
  Jack wiped a bit of whipped cream off her chin. “Glad you like it. It’s one of my specialties.” Then he told her about Fontaine’s call, the big man checking in. “He said his Stepin Fetchit routine went smooth as silk. And Lateesha was something else. Now there’s someone with the gift. I’m telling you, another ten years, when that child grows up, gets through college, grabs herself an MBA, she’s going to be the president of American Express or something like that.”

  “I thought we were talking about the grift, Jack.”

  “We are.” He smiled. “You think they’re different, the guys, ladies, dressed up in suits with the briefcases? You think they’re not on the come?”

  “You think everybody’s on the come.”

  Jack shrugged. “This is America, isn’t it? The land of opportunity?”

  “Maybe.” She reached for the crème brûlée. “So, you think Mickey’s going to hang in here, or she’s going to split?” Right now she was in her own room, just down the hall.

  “Oh, she’ll hang all right. She’s having fun. And she’s afraid we’ll call the cops if she doesn’t.”

  “We are calling the cops after we con the con man. Remember, Jack? That’s what we agreed. We spirit Bobby away safely, we sic the cops on Doc.”

  “Yeah. For all the good it’ll do.”

  “Why are you so certain that Archie’s going to get his way, pin Olive on Bobby?”

  Right this minute the baby-faced ex-con was upstairs in the gym over Jack’s restaurant, snuggled into a sofa bed with Pearl for company. Bobby was oblivious to everything that had happened since they’d found Olive.

  “You know, Sammy,” said Jack, “cops are a strange breed. You talk to any of them, they’ll tell you they do what they have to do to make their cases. Lie, cheat, steal, cook up evidence, kill—there’s a hell of a lot more honor among thieves. And you can take that to the bank.”

  “You’re not saying Doc’s cleaner than Archie, are you?”

  “No way. They’re two of a kind, even if we don’t know for sure if Archie’s killed anybody. But I’d lock ’em up together. They’d be great cell mates.”