by Jan Brogan
I didn’t even hear Walter’s key in the lock, just the door swinging open. “You been ransacked or something?” he asked, glancing at the newspaper mess I’d made on the floor.
“Very funny.” But I didn’t elaborate or try to explain. Walter looked like he’d had a hard night, his eyes red from the cigarette smoke, his lips chapped and bitten.
“Tough crowd?” I asked.
“The worst. At least three requests for ‘Leather and Lace.’ As if I could sing that sappy duet alone.”
Not the best time to ask for money, I decided. Let him relax first.
Besides his two guitars, Walter also had a small amplifier and a PA system that he didn’t want to leave overnight in his cab, so he had to go back down the stairs to get the rest of his equipment. I made a quick search for the tickets when he was gone, hoping to scratch myself a winner before he finished unloading. No such luck.
At least the panicky feeling had begun to subside. Walter wasn’t a huge guy, but he was smart and street savvy, and the silver bracelet he wore looked like it could hurt somebody. I felt safer now that he was in the apartment.
Walter was about to fling his cowboy hat on the bar, but spotted my bowl of tomato soup. “Fine dining again?”
It occurred to me that this was the perfect opening to ask to borrow money, but I decided to wait. Let him relax. Have a cup of tea. Put his feet up on the coffee table. I dropped to the bar stool and picked up the spoon. My long-ignored tomato soup was now completely cold. “Want some?”
He shook his head. He was working an early cab shift tomorrow morning and was going straight to bed. He took his overnight bag with him into the bathroom, which meant he’d be in there for a while.
I sat there, mindlessly stirring the cold soup as I prepared my speech. Walter, I’ve had a setback, and I was wondering… Walter, I know I should have listened to you and found a meeting first thing when I moved here, but… Walter, I’ve learned the hard way that I really have to stay away from casinos.…
My stirring grew agitated. When I looked down, there was a puddle of red broth encircling the bowl. Grabbing a sponge from the sink, I returned to the bar and lifted both the bowl and the place mat to wipe up. Five scratch tickets were lying underneath, about a quarter inch from where I remembered putting them.
A miracle. A symphony. A shaft of sunlight streaming through my ceiling. It was as if the tickets were some kind of gift from heaven and not something I’d misplaced all along. I scooped up a Caesar’s Palace ticket, the one Barry had recommended, found a quarter in a teacup on the counter, and scraped off the latex. It was a complete dud. I slipped it back under the place mat and listened for the sounds in the bathroom.
Sometimes when he had to get up really early, Walter showered at night. Often, he sang songs from his show, mid-seventies Eagles, Jackson Browne, Steve Miller. But tonight, not a peep. Not a good night to ask for money. I started scratching the next ticket. So much for Barry’s good advice: The second and third Caesar’s Palace tickets were duds, too.
The last two tickets were Green Poker Game tickets, the ones Barry hadn’t wanted me to buy. But the leprechaun who had been lucky before came through a second time. I won $50 on the fourth ticket.
Gratitude rose in my chest. Thank you, Barry, I said softly. But luck was a greedy thing. I couldn’t possibly stop here. Fifty dollars was not enough. The gray latex on the last ticket was especially stiff. I scraped relentlessly. The green leprechaun was holding a flush. I had to match diamonds.
I scraped off my first two boxes: a king and a deuce, both diamonds. The bathroom door opened, but I didn’t even bother to look up. The third and fourth boxes both revealed diamonds and I slapped myself in the head.
Walter walked toward the bar, draped in a towel. “What are you doing?”
I didn’t answer. I had one box left. The quarter, now coated with bits of latex, had lost its edge. I had to put all of my weight into it, angling the coin into the cardboard.
Walter was looking at me with a curious expression, trying to figure out what I was doing; why I was gasping without taking in air, why I kept smacking my forehead, and opening and closing my eyes.
I didn’t try to explain it to him, I just pointed to the scratch ticket, begging him to read me back the cards, to verify what I saw. To make sure I was awake. Because unless I was dreaming, I’d just won $10,000.
CHAPTER
18
THE LOTTERY OFFICE was an impressive one-story brick building with intensely manicured shrubbery and mulched gardens. It also had an enormous parking lot that was empty at seven-fifteen in the morning.
It was a cold day that promised a clear sky. I parked in the space closest to the building and sat in my car, doors locked, heat on, staring alternately from the ticket to the front door, waiting for it to open. Walter had been happy for me—nothing like a winning scratch ticket to squelch a lecture on gambling—but he’d had to leave at six A.M. for his cab shift. So once again, I was alone, completely alone for what had to be one of the single biggest moments of my life. But I didn’t care. Every time I glanced at the ticket in my hand to make sure it was still there, I won all over again. I could feel elation in my fingers, my elbows, my toes.
I was afraid to put the ticket down on the console, or even zipper it inside my knapsack for fear it would disappear, dissolve, or self-destruct in some way uniquely tragic to me. A winner. A little piece of cardboard worth $10,000. Still here, still safe.
Thank God I’d found the scratch tickets. Thank God I hadn’t thrown them out in an antigambling purge. As I fingered the cardboard ticket, I daydreamed about driving to Worcester tonight and handing my mother $2,000 in cash. I imagined the look of surprise on her face, which would be followed by an instinctive, suspicious concern about where the money had come from. This would be followed by relief, then joy. She’d love the story about finding the winning scratch ticket under the place mat and would be at the senior center in no time telling her friends about it.
Two Toyota Camrys pulled in and parked next to each other about a hundred yards away. Two middle-aged women got out of their separate cars and I could tell by the familiar way they walked together toward the building that they were employees. One of them looked over her shoulder at my car and said something to the other. I guessed I wasn’t the only winner who’d arrived at the lottery office at the crack of dawn.
I checked my ticket again, making sure it was still a winner. The five red diamonds were still there, no mistaken heart smuggled in. The cardboard was getting damp from my palm, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to put it in my pocket or in my knapsack. I sat there holding the ticket as the cars filled the employee spaces and the digital clock in my car finally snapped to eight o’clock. Still clutching the ticket, I checked to make sure no one suspicious was walking around the parking lot, turned off the car, and ran to the door.
Out of breath, I entered a reception area with a polished marble floor and a bottled-glass floor-to-ceiling window that let in a flood of morning light. I felt as if I were walking into a stage set where the director had cued the sunlight. Soon there would be music as the camera followed me, recording this momentous event.
Beyond the reception area was a tall counter, walled off, with a protective glass shield, like a bank. No one stood at any of the terminals. I wondered if Gregory Ayers was back there. Maybe he’d come out from some office to award me my check in person. I felt myself getting giddy. Maybe he’d want to do it on TV.
The reception desk was empty, too. A door to the walled-off bank area opened and a man walked out. He glanced at the empty desk. “She’s probably in the ladies’,” he told me. “Just be a minute.” I forced myself to settle down, check out the framed photographs of previous lottery winners that adorned the walls: Raymond Olson of Cranston, $100,000 in Powerball. Norman Picard of Cumberland, $47,000 in Lot-of-Bucks. I glanced back at my ticket. Hallie Ahern of Providence, $10,000 in the Green Poker Game.
“Can I help you?�
� a kindly voice asked. An older woman was putting a coffee mug down on the reception desk. She wore enormous glasses with a rhinestone star in one lens.
“Yes,” I said, waving my ticket.
The reception lady saw my scratch card and smiled. The little rhinestone star caught the light and glittered. “Your lucky day?”
“You bet,” I said, smiling back.
She pointed to one of the terminal windows far to the left. “That’s the validation area, right there. You go ask Tina to help you. She’ll give you a claims form.”
I stood at that window for a couple of minutes before a woman appeared from one of the back offices. Tina was about thirty years old, with large breasts revealed by a dress that fit her like a dance leotard. She had a very large, Mick Jagger mouth and the whitest teeth I’d ever seen.
“Oh, wait a minute.” I’d remembered the $50 ticket, which I’d stuck in my pants pocket. She looked surprised when I passed it to her. “Guess it really was your lucky day,” she said, handing me two claims forms and a pen.
I returned to a table in the waiting area and began copying the serial numbers from the tickets onto the forms. When I’d finished adding all the pertinent data and digging my photo ID from the bottom of my purse, I returned to the validation area.
For a moment at the counter, I felt nauseous. I didn’t want to let the tickets go. Didn’t want to pass them under the glass for fear my luck would disappear. Tina saw my hesitation and laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t eat them.”
Reluctantly, I surrendered the tickets. Glancing at the leprechaun’s hand of cards, Tina said, “I always tell my husband I got the best job in the world. All I do all day is deal with winners.”
The nausea disappeared. I was a winner. Not a newsroom reject. Not a talk-radio junkie. Not a lonely woman without family or career.
Tina scratched off something from the bottom of the first ticket and glanced up at me a second before feeding it into what looked like the base of the terminal. The machine beeped. She did the same thing with the second ticket, and the machine made the same high-pitched sound.
“Something wrong?”
“Lawrence!” she called over her shoulder to offices in the back. Her voice sounded shrill, but when she saw my expression, she caught herself. Leaning forward, she explained, “I’m gonna need him to cut you a check!”
I was overwhelmed with relief.
Lawrence walked over with an air of managerial authority. His suit must have been too warm for the sunny office because he already appeared to be sweating. He took both scratch tickets from Tina and studied them carefully. She handed him my claims forms with my Massachusetts driver’s license. He studied the license as if Massachusetts didn’t count. “We like to have two photo IDs,” he said slowly. “You got anything else?”
I dug into my knapsack for my Chronicle ID. My hand swam over the familiar shapes of my keys, my notebook, lipstick, pens, wallet. I dove deeper into the knapsack for the thick plastic square. It occurred to me then that it might still be on the kitchen table where I’d overturned my knapsack last night. My hand began to flail in panic. I squatted to the marble floor to empty the entire contents onto it. Nothing. “I must have left it at home.”
Tina smiled at me in an apologetic way, but her voice sounded strained. “We’re always extra careful with the big winners.”
“State police have to review any payoff over a grand. It’ll be a few minutes,” Lawrence said in a practiced way. He pointed to a row of upholstered chairs against the wall. “Make yourself comfortable.”
I gathered my possessions from the floor and stuffed them back into my knapsack. In the waiting area, I found a People magazine. I had no idea who the celebrity was on the cover, but sat down, prepared to flip through the magazine without being able to read a single word. What was taking so long? Finally, Tina reappeared from a back room followed by a state trooper. I heard a buzzing sound and the state trooper left the glassed-in area and headed toward me.
He was an older man, early sixties, but still very much in shape. He hadn’t lost any of the state-trooper swagger and he held the scratch tickets tight enough to inflict permanent damage. “Where did you get these?” he asked.
I noticed he said “get” instead of “buy” and I had to squelch a panicky feeling rising in my chest. “I bought them. In Providence. The Mazursky Market.”
The kindly reception lady was shaking her head as if she’d seen it all. The state trooper asked me to come into the back office to answer a few questions.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
The state trooper pulled a magnifying glass from his pocket and waved it over the bar code on the bottom of both scratch tickets. “What’s wrong is that you have two winning scratch tickets and both are counterfeits.”
There was an empty hole of time while I stared at the scratch tickets that could have changed my life. My heart started pounding with a ricochet effect in my brain. Instantly, all major body systems were in distress. All my stupid hopes, my new furniture, my noble plan to pay back my mother. Counterfeit?
As we walked through a hallway to a private office in the back, the state trooper scraped a fingernail along one of the cards and stopped to show it to a secretary. “They did a helluva job duplicating the latex,” he said.
In the office, I wound up sitting at someone’s desk, staring at a framed picture of two children poking their heads out of a leaf pile. I tried to take deep breaths to slow the whirlwind inside me. I’d missed a question. “What?”
The state trooper asked me when I’d bought the tickets, and then, why I’d taken so long to cash them.
I thought of the scramble in my apartment last night, the thrill when I’d found the tickets under the place mat. Counterfeit? A heavy feeling settled over me, a feeling of futility and depression. “I misplaced them for a couple of weeks, that’s all.”
He gave me a look that said he didn’t believe me, but I didn’t care. He asked me if it had struck me as unusual that I’d had two winners from the same game. What did it matter? I wanted to ask. I was a loser after all.
And then the state trooper asked me if I’d bought scratch tickets at any other stores.
“Fraser’s Liquors in South Kingstown.”
“How about Mazursky’s Smith Hill Market? Or the one in South Providence?”
Slowly, the murky, heavy feeling began to lift. I could see through the devastation to my first positive thought. “Why? Have you come across counterfeits from those stores?”
He didn’t answer.
“Is there an investigation into this?” As I heard myself ask this question, the sky above me opened and the light hit. I was wrong about why Barry was murdered. But it wasn’t an armed robbery, and the cops have known it all along. Barry had been selling counterfeit lottery tickets. This was why he was killed. And Drew Mazursky had proof of it. On tape. “Have you come across counterfeits from the other Mazursky Markets?”
The state trooper’s eyes narrowed. “What did you say you did for a living?”
“I’m a reporter for the Chronicle.”
He pulled himself up from his chair. “That’s it. We’re going to headquarters.”
“What?” It was nine-thirty. I had to meet Leonard in half an hour. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I paid for those scratch tickets. Bought them at a convenience store. A registered lottery agent. I can’t go to headquarters. I’ve got to go to work.”
This only seemed to strengthen his resolve. “I have to ask you to come in for questioning.”
“What if I say no?”
“Then I’ll have to take you into custody.”
* * *
State police headquarters was a complex of buildings at the end of a long, circular driveway hidden in the woods. I was escorted into the first building, past the dispatcher and into a spartan room with a desk and a small conference table.
The state trooper, who’d finally introduced himself as Corporal Linsky, asked me questions I had already
answered at the lottery offices: how long I’d lived in Rhode Island, who I knew in Providence, the restaurants I frequented, and the other places I hung out. But now he also wanted to know if I was claiming this winning scratch ticket for someone else.
“You think I’m working for someone else? Passing counterfeits?” I was insulted by the implication. “Hey, I’m the victim here. I told you, I paid good money for those things. Could I just use the phone?” I needed to call Leonard, tell him where I was and what was going on. I wished to hell I’d been able to pay my cell phone bill and hadn’t canceled my service.
“Give me a minute,” said the state trooper, getting up from his desk. “I’ve got to call the detective sergeant.”
He disappeared through the door before I could ask how long that would take. After several minutes passed, a female state trooper entered and asked if I wanted coffee. She was short, with a wide Slavic face and purplish-red hair tied in a ponytail. I told her I wanted to make a phone call instead. She said she’d go find Corporal Linsky.
The room was colorless, with cold, hard chairs and very little sunlight. There was an abundance of fluorescence, though, and I felt my nerves begin to cook, as if I was under a warming light. I needed to call Leonard. And Carolyn, and maybe a lawyer.
I rubbed my right hand. The small bones just beneath the knuckles ached in a strange way, and I realized it was from the way I’d been clutching the counterfeit scratch ticket. But I couldn’t let myself think about all that early-morning hope, all those solutions to my problems. I was broke again. That was it. I had to focus on the opportunity, the story: Barry Mazursky had been selling counterfeit lottery tickets, and someone had killed him because of it.
I heard footsteps in the hallway, and straightened. If I wasn’t under arrest, they couldn’t keep me here. I could demand to leave. Demand to be driven back to my car, at lottery headquarters.
