Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  Skinhead: “But now you don’t have fun no more.”

  “That’s true.” Arney sighs, still not looking at him. “But I do like to see Skinhead have fun. I like to see Skinhead enjoying himself. I like to see him with his prostitutes, his whores.”

  Freda, shocked, turns to Skinhead. “Is that what you do?”

  Skinhead, still sprawled across the Corvette’s engine, says matter-of-factly: “Yes, it is. I don’t have much time for relationships, Freda. But I do have needs.”

  “So I don’t know,” Arney says, “why Billie Ruth goes on about all that ‘I love you’ shit.”

  I point out that his cousin is religious. Arney shrugs. “I think all religious people are pretty fucking weird, because they believe in something that isn’t there,” he tells me. “I believe in food, money, pussy—something I can put my hands on.”

  The exchange seems to recalibrate the interplay between Arney and Skinhead. When I ask Arney about it, he says he’s done a lot of reflecting of late, and has come to see that he’s in debt to a few people for “assisting me in creating Tommy Arney.” And “part of the mechanics of me,” he says, “is to be loyal to the people who have been good to me.”

  So things seem back on somewhat sturdier footing when, in early March, I receive an unsigned text that reads: Tues is Tommy’s birthday and I’m having a lil get together at Havana around 7. Would love to have you there. May be last one for a couple years. :(

  I don’t recognize the number. I figure it’s from Arney’s wife, so I text back: Krista?

  The reply: No. Victoria. :)

  Slick’s party proves to be an upbeat affair attended by a wide range of Arney’s friends, family, and business associates—including Norfolk patrol cops in civvies—and distinguished by enthusiastic alcohol consumption. Arney closes his fifty-seventh year in fine spirits, regaling us with tales of his youthful indiscretions late into the night. “They weren’t fast, and they didn’t know where to hit,” he says of some college football players he took on as a teenager, “but they were so fucking powerful. When they hit you, it was more like they were pushing you, know what I mean? Only they were pushing you in the fucking face, with their fists.”

  It’s a good party.

  The trial starts a few days later.

  WE’LL NOT GET bogged down with all the details of Arney’s testimony, which occupies a day and a half of the court’s time. Suffice to say that under the direct questioning of prosecutor Katherine Martin, he says he had a “lending relationship” with the bank for eight or nine years and got “monies any time I needed them.” That he “got special treatment,” explaining: “You did things for them, they’d do things for you.” That he didn’t prepare the loan documents he signed—“I never really looked at these things”—and thus didn’t know that his purported buddies at the bank arranged for terms that were not to his advantage, financial or otherwise.

  On cross-examination, he testifies that he alone, of his family and crew, is guilty of any wrongdoing. His children signed documents because he told them to. Slick served as a nominee borrower after a banker suggested the arrangement. It was he, Tommy Arney, who needed and got the money. It was all his doing.

  He tangles with one of the defense lawyers, a brusque fellow out of Chicago named Vincent “Trace” Schmeltz III, whose aggressive approach is precisely the wrong one to take with this particular witness. Schmeltz’s first words to him are “Mr. Arney, my name is Trace Schmeltz. Can you hear me?”

  To which a serene-looking Arney, outsized for the snug witness booth, replies: “I can hear you just fine. What did you say your name was—Smells?”

  In his subsequent parries with the lawyer, he remains so cool and friendly that it almost seems he’s enjoying himself. In summary, it’s a bravura performance. It will prove key to the multiple convictions that crash down on Stephen Fields and Ed Woodard several weeks later.

  And it will reverberate beyond that, because he testifies that he bribed a Norfolk city councilman, paying the man’s girlfriend twenty-five thousand dollars in exchange for his promise to deliver the votes Arney needed to open his gentlemen’s club. Arney paid the money, he says, but the votes never materialized. The revelation appears on the front page of the newspaper.

  That is not, it turns out, the most sensational part of the trial for Arney or those closest to him. The first hint of what’s coming occurs during Katherine Martin’s direct examination, when she asks about Slick’s role in Arney’s businesses. “She did everything,” he replies. “She paid the bills. She did all the paperwork.”

  Martin asks whether they’ve had a personal relationship. “Yes,” Arney says.

  An intimate relationship? “Yes,” Arney says.

  That doesn’t make the newspaper, but late the following morning the prosecution calls its next witness—Slick herself, who is testifying in exchange for the immunity Arney insisted she get. She tells the court that she and Arney had an on-and-off affair that lasted nineteen years. That does make the paper.

  As Arney tells it, he and Ryan are having lunch that day when his son, surfing the Web on his cell phone, comes upon coverage of the morning’s testimony. “Ryan turned his phone to me and he said, ‘You had a nineteen-year affair with Victoria?’ And I said, ‘I’ll explain it to you later.’ ” Arney drives home and goes upstairs to the bedroom to relax his mind for a while, and so fortified calls the family together in the living room. It is a difficult meeting. Tears are shed.

  Later, in a long, late-night phone conversation, I ask Arney how the news could come as a surprise. He and Slick spend a lavish amount of time together. She hauls around a purse stuffed with his various must-have supplies: emery boards, with which he files his nails several times a day; antiseptic wipes and hand gel; toothpicks, nail clippers, and ibuprofen; the hot sauce he applies to most everything he eats. She is his go-to source for advice and hard data. She tells him, as no one else will, when he’s out of line. As Arney acknowledges, “I’m sure that anyone who ever saw Victoria and me together suspected.”

  I certainly wondered, though I never witnessed anything to confirm the notion, and any circumstantial evidence I encountered was flimsy. To wit: When I spent a Sunday afternoon with the Arneys more than a month before the trial, poring through their scrapbooks and a mountain of family snapshots, Krista gave me a brief tour of the boss’s home office, during which she plucked an old newspaper clipping from a pile and announced: “This is my favorite picture of him.”

  The clipping was the story I’d written nearly twenty years before about his tussle with the Alcoholic Beverage Control people. In the accompanying photo, Arney was seated and wearing a grin that suggested he was the luckiest man on earth. Standing just behind him were two bikini-clad, hard-bodied dancers, visible from bust to thigh. I knew that one was Slick—because she’d told me so—and pointed to her midriff. “That right there is Victoria.”

  Krista stared at the picture for a moment. “Oh,” she said, her voice suddenly small. “I didn’t realize that.” She folded the clipping, returned it to the pile, and we left the room.

  Suspicions or no, Arney tells me on the phone, “not a human being knew” of the affair. Yes, Skinhead thought something was afoot shortly after it began, and others caught a whiff of it later. “I just denied it,” he says. “I just said, ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

  Krista might have asked him point-blank about Slick a time or two, but “I’m thinking that I lied,” he says. “She probably said something like ‘You’re probably fucking her,’ and I probably told her she was crazy or just laughed. She would never press it. My children never asked me.”

  Ending the affair was Slick’s decision, he says. Every few months she’d have an attack of conscience and tell him she couldn’t continue. She loved Krista, Ryan, and Ashlee, and fretted about hurting them. Sometimes he and she went on hiatus for months. Eventually, he says, Slick decided it had to end for good.

  But back to the scene in the living room, as he
shared the details with the family. “I asked them not to take it out on her, because it was my responsibility,” Arney says. “I said that when she came to work for me she was twenty years old. And because of my age, and my experience, and what I knew about women, and my ability to manipulate women, she didn’t stand a chance. I took advantage of her. I completely took advantage of her.

  “I told them I had been with so many women it would be impossible for me to ever count them up, even with a calculator. I had become addicted to sex. I almost felt like being involved with Victoria was almost like a cure for me, because I went into a semiretirement program in my mind.

  “I told them that if they were mad at me I understood,” he says, “and they could stay mad at me as long as they liked. And I told them that if they had any questions I’d try to answer them. But I told them that if they had any questions they needed to ask them, because I wasn’t going to keep answering questions after that day. As far as I was concerned, it was in the past. I was moving on.

  “Krista asked me why. I said simply my mother was that way, my aunts were that way, my brothers and sisters were that way. I don’t know if it was something in the blood. It was how we were.

  “I’m not blaming it all on that, because I enjoyed myself,” he says. “If I had to do it all over again, would I do it again? Yes. I told Ryan, Krista, and Ashlee that. Krista said, ‘You don’t have a guilty bone in your body, do you?’ I said, ‘No, ma’am. If I told you I did, I’d be telling you a lie, and I’d rather not tell you any more lies, if you don’t mind.’

  “Now I don’t have any lies anymore. Everything’s out in the open for the whole world to see. And I’m never going to lie again.”

  20

  SO NOW COMES the crunch.

  Arney’s sentencing is set for July 22, leaving him less than four months to figure out how Havana might continue to operate, presumably under Slick’s stewardship, when he goes away—and whether Moyock Muscle will survive, at its present site or elsewhere—and of greater import, whether all or part of the Arney Compound can be kept from his creditors and/or the government, so that his wife, children, and crew will have roofs over their heads.

  None are rhetorical questions, because Arney’s deal with the government requires him to surrender “any fraud related asset” and “any property that is traceable to, derived from, fungible with, or a substitute for property that constitutes the proceeds of his offense,” which describes close to everything he has. Rather than seize the booty, the feds would prefer to present him with a dollar amount he has to meet through his own liquidation of his assets. It promises to be so big a number—millions on millions—that selling everything is almost certain to leave him short. The feds acknowledge as much in their paperwork, which says that after forfeiture, his net worth will sink from $1.58 million to a negative half million.

  Then there’s the matter of restitution—of repaying the money his admitted crimes cost the taxpayers. He has no cash on hand to meet this obligation. To the contrary, he’s struggling to pay his bills: The government’s own assessment is that his monthly expenses already exceed his income by $3,149. It looks as if he’ll go to prison in deep debt to the U.S. Treasury.

  Alongside such serious business, the Chevy is a trifle. But Arney has vowed that he’ll drive the wagon before his incarceration, and by God, he intends to do everything in his power to fulfill the promise. So in April, he puts Painter Paul back to work on two of the car’s faulty doors, and in a search of the loft over the Quonset’s workshop finds two more, in pristine condition, that will fit the car. By month’s end, one of the project’s recent setbacks has been eliminated.

  At the same time, Arney acquires an engineless four-door sedan that for all of its flaws—and it has too many to count—boasts a perfect left fin. He has Paul and a local welder named Bubba cut out the fin’s outboard panel and graft it to the inner half of the wagon’s. It is a surgery that some body shops would rule impossible—the sedan and wagon have very different metalwork on their tails—but Arney conjures a technique to pull it off, and it works. For the first time since Mary Ricketts’s ownership, the wagon’s left side runs straight from nose to tail.

  I allow myself to think: Well, maybe this thing will be finished.

  On my next visit to Moyock Muscle, the car’s doors hang straight and flush, and each closes with a reassuringly deep thud. Paul has just painted the wagon’s floor in a glossy black—a detail that will be covered in jute matting and carpet, but leaves no metal unprotected—and has masked the window openings in paper and tape to protect the still-drying enamel while he sheaths the exterior in a final coat of icing and blocks it smooth.

  Arney and Skinhead arrive with lunch well into the afternoon. Paul and I walk to the Quonset under a fast-moving sky reflected on hundreds of windshields—a dragonfly’s view of the heavens. “You know,” I tell him, “it’s been more than three years that I’ve been hanging around here, watching you work on that Chevy.”

  He shakes his head and, grinning, says: “I told you.”

  It’s warm in the office. As I find a chair I see that Arney has wadded up several paper towels and shoved them down the front of his wifebeater. Skinhead offers us a tight-lipped smile, having misplaced a dental appliance that stands in for his AWOL upper four front teeth. “Paul, what have you done today?” Arney asks. “You look tired.”

  “A little,” Paul says as he sits. He rubs an arm dusted with dried icing. “Blocking and blocking.”

  Well, Arney says, he and Skinhead have had a full day themselves. Among other tasks, they’ve picked up some belts for the fan that vents the hood over the stove at Havana. The fan runs thirteen hours a day, every day, and what with Skinhead being too weak to adequately tighten the belts when he installs them, they wear out quickly.

  “This has nothing to do with me being weak,” Skinhead objects.

  “A weak motherfucker,” Arney insists.

  “What the fuck,” Skinhead says, “does this have to do—?”

  “Tell me this, motherfucker,” Arney interrupts. “How the fuck does a motherfucker lose his teeth?” He glances my way. “He lost his teeth a week ago.” It’s Arney’s theory, which he now shares at some length, that one or more of the five cats living in Skinhead’s house took them.

  “The cats didn’t touch my fucking teeth,” Skinhead counters.

  “Well, where the fuck did they go, then?” Arney asks. “What happened is, you put them down somewhere, and the fucking cats took them. Because in all reality, there’s no other explanation.”

  “The cats didn’t do it,” Skinhead says. “The cats can’t even get to them. I put my teeth in the same place, every time, and the cats can’t get up there.”

  “So where the fuck are they?”

  “I don’t know,” Skinhead says.

  “He shouldn’t even have the fucking cats in there,” Arney tells me. “He only has them because he thought it would get him some pussy if he looked after this bitch’s cats.”

  “Is that true?” I ask.

  Skinhead is typically forthright. “Yes.”

  “Did it work?”

  His expression is blank. “No.”

  Arney clears the remains of his lunch from his desktop, then reaches for a roll of paper towels and wipes down his neck and arms. His thoughts shift to the Chevy. “Paul, the windows will be here Thursday. And the gaskets and all the other shit. And the windows are already assembled. They’re all on tracks and everything.”

  “And the vents are already assembled?” Skinhead asks.

  “Yeah. They already have chrome on them.”

  “All right,” Paul nods.

  Arney tears off a long stretch of paper towel and soaks his desktop in spray cleaner. He’s brought in a new fax-copier to replace an old and broken example, and in anticipation of setting it up, directs Skinhead to clean his desk, which is back-to-back with his own and piled with manuals, keys, empty cups, assorted paperwork. “You can’t let your desk get li
ke that,” he lectures as he scrubs his down. “It doesn’t look good when people come in.”

  “It looks like I work,” Skinhead replies. He leafs through a stack of papers.

  “No,” Arney says, “it makes it look like you’re a filthy, nasty, cocksucking motherfucker, to be truthful.”

  The sniping continues as they disconnect wires from the old machine, set it aside, and carefully position the new device. It peaks when Arney snatches up the outgoing copier and lobs it across the room at Skinhead, who sees it coming just in time to catch it with his gut and a backward stagger. “One of these days,” Skinhead says, feigning as though he’s going to toss it back.

  “You wish you could kick my ass, don’t you?” Arney asks him.

  “I do,” Skinhead says, with a gaping black scowl. “If I could, I would.”

  Arney, chewing on a toothpick, regards him silently for a moment. “Well,” he says, “I wish you could almost kick my ass.”

  THE CHEVY’S NEW windows arrive on schedule. Arney tells me he intends to have them installed at once, and to follow that work with a new interior—upholstery, carpeting, door panels, headliner. After that, he’ll have Paul paint the car. But Paul, who is finishing the last of the blocking on the car’s tail, convinces him that it makes sense to paint first, to better avoid fouling the glass and new vinyl with his spray gun.

  So in early June, Paul paints the interior of the car and the doorjambs above the beltline in Timor Beige. Once sheathed in the glossy paint, which tends to reveal the slightest imperfection in whatever it covers, the quality of his earlier metalwork is plain: The wheel wells in the cargo hold, once perforated with rust, are flawlessly smooth. The next day he finishes the lower portions of the jambs in Tangerine Twist, and I can’t stifle my amazement at the sublimity of seams and joints that two years ago were nonexistent, having been devoured by rot.