It's a Crime

by Jacqueline Carey

  How different this was from the spring, such a simple season, with its clear colors and clear shapes. Hart Ridge was full of azalea bushes that in April sprouted crimson and magenta blossoms as if ripped from the jugular. Hard reds splashed loudly in front of the car wash, behind the bus shelter, beside the Dumpster in the CVS parking lot as if crying “We’re alive, we’re alive!” until the innocuous green smudge of foliage closed up around them. Today’s few autumnal reds, which peeked out from a limited number of ornamental bushes and dwarf trees, were mottled, muted, slightly frayed. Later the last of the oaks would burst briefly into scarlet, but they would be so quickly overtaken by brown that they would seem to gasp, “Oh, sweet death, sweet death…”

  Yesterday she had finally emptied and thrown away the dozens of wine bottles in the kitchen. At first she’d kept them out of respect for Frank—to show herself that she was as distraught as he was. But the bottles created an atmosphere that might have been a bit too disturbed for a middle schooler, even Ruby. It would probably have been better if Pat drank more. Then she would have finished off a bottle or two already.

  Last night she hadn’t been able to sleep (as usual), so she’d wrapped two hundred purple crocus bulbs in cut-up chicken wire, several at a time, to protect them from squirrels. Then she wrapped four hundred creamy-white-striped crocus bulbs. Eventually they filled two galvanized steel tubs on the kitchen counter. When she popped downstairs this morning, as animated as if she no longer had any need for sleep at all, Ruby asked tensely, “What are those things in cages?”

  Cages! As Pat pierced the turf with her bulbing trowel, and scraped at clay, and pried at rocks, she could not stop thinking about Frank and their past together.

  Rose celebrated her twelfth birthday right before LinkAge bought LGT. It was Frank’s job to clean up the books in preparation for the sale. Already, he’d started to make real money. So they gave in to Rose’s request for a party at a hotel out on Route 17: plush red carpet, fountain in the lobby, fake stone in the large dim catacomb of lobby, restaurant, and bar. Because Frank probably wouldn’t get off work in time to drive a second car, Pat hired a white limo to accommodate all the young guests.

  “Cellular” phones were rare back then, and although Frank scoffed at the cancer risk, they had a dangerous aura, like the cigarettes Pat still occasionally snuck. She tended to hold her new pocket-size cellphone a few inches away from her head, so as not to encourage the growth of brain tumors. When Frank called the first time, it was hard for either of them to hear. Pat was more interested in keeping the girls in their seats, anyway; they were whirling and squealing and poking and yelling to passersby, “I know where you were last night!” She didn’t want anyone to smack the driver in the head, causing him to veer sharply, hit a bread truck, and set off a series of accidents up and down the highway. Besides, all Frank had to say at that point was that he was going to be later than expected.

  What great fun it had been: Pat Foy, aka Mallow, trot-trotting up and down the red wall-to-wall carpeting of a tacky New Jersey hotel (and let’s face it, it was really tacky) in gold ankle-strap sandals with four-inch heels, the sort of sandals that a dangerous noir heroine might have worn at one time but were now routine attire for New Jersey matrons who were indistinguishable from their overpriced and overlandscaped suburban homes. (Overlandscaped, definitely, although Pat benefited from this trend.)

  She had reserved two hotel suites, one across from the other. Rose and her nine guests disappeared into one to drop off their bags. Pat and Ruby waited in the other, Pat alert for unexpected loud noises, Ruby peeking out occasionally to hiss, “What are they doing?”

  Pat heard a thump, which might have just been a duffel bag thrown down, but as she stood up to investigate, her phone rang.

  “The trouble is that we can’t show all these uncollected receivables,” said Frank without preamble.

  “Really,” said Pat, carefully holding the phone away from her head.

  Frank could tell she wasn’t listening. “The gum ashtray companies,” he said impatiently. “And the astrologers. And the pornographers.” Those that LGT resold their telephone time to, in other words. “All those bad debts will give LinkAge the wrong impression. They won’t want to go through with the purchase, and that would be a mistake for everyone.”

  Another thump.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” said Pat.

  “I won’t be too much longer. I’m going to use my LGT time machine.” He was referring to postdating invoices or something equally dull, but it did sound a bit as if he were going to get into a time machine and meet her as she entered the hotel.

  “Well, we’re fine here.” She could hear the girls running up and down the hall outside the room.

  “You should see Dominic,” said Frank, lowering his voice. “He’s really into this. One of the High Risk boys asked him how he should describe the promissory notes, and Dominic told him if he repeated any numbers to LinkAge, he’d throw him out the fucking window.” Frank laughed. “He’d do it, too. He told me he thought he was having a heart attack, and I said he had to have it later.”

  This time Pat joined in the laughter, picturing Dominic straightening up in mid-attack. He’d do it, too.

  The girls fit into the elevator only after a lot of pushing and squealing and general percolating. Little Ruby stood with exaggerated compactness, back and head against the wall, palms flat out beside her. The rest of them were like a shook-up soda can, ready to blow. They swarmed through the lobby to the restaurant, which was everything you’d expect: chandeliers like pirates’ treasure, a dessert cart in one corner, a grand piano in another. The girls sat at two large semicircular red leather banquettes. One kid or other was always kneeling up on the seat in order to speak to the adjacent table. Pat ordered a martini and took out a lipstick mirror, which was immediately shanghaied.

  Her phone rang. “I swear, it won’t be much longer,” said Frank. “We’re close, we’re real close. Neil said that uncollectible debt can’t be recorded as thirty-three million. He said it’s got to get down to three. We’re at about six now.”

  “Six million dollars?” said Pat. “That’s a lot of…” She glanced around at the girls squabbling over her mirror. She could hardly finish up with “…phone sex for hire,” so instead she said, “…phone cards. And horoscope readings!”

  Rose’s voice piped up above the others: “Watch it. You can get addicted to lip balm.”

  “Woodstock was pretty tame at first, too,” said Pat, “so I’ve got my eye on them. I think we’re safe as long as the medical supplies hold out.”

  “Love you,” said Frank.

  “Love you,” said Pat—to the phone, to her daughters, to the table at large, to the shuttered piano, to the tiered desserts, to the glittering chandeliers. And later, after all the corridors were explored and all the beds were jumped on and all the pillows were rearranged and all the pay-per-view movies were quarreled over, Pat was still riding high across the hall in her suite, her body deliciously spent, her mind soaring. Ruby was asleep in the bedroom, and Pat was spread out on the red velvet couch looking at her gold film noir sandals propped up on the matching red velvet hassock, when in walked Frank with a bottle of champagne. “Room service is over,” he said, sounding giddy with fatigue. “But the bar was still open. Let me sit for a moment.”

  She stretched and crooked her arms behind her head.

  “I had some of the High Risk boys call all the scumbags we could find phone numbers for, whether they’d gone through Chapter Seven or not. We told them if they didn’t send out a FedEx letter today we were going to block all their calls at the switching point. That’s not actually possible: We’d have to shut down a whole section of the operation, but they don’t know that. They don’t know a thing about the industry, the leeches.” By now Frank had the cork out, and he took a long drink directly from the bottle.

  “How funny, that that would work,” said Pat, twisting a little in place. The warmth
that she’d been feeling earlier had shot all through her. Soon they would be making love. Frank never could resist a hotel room.

  “It worked well enough,” said Frank, taking another long gulp. “I’d drop dead on the spot if any of those letters had valid checks in them. But all we needed were FedEx tracking numbers. Then we could record the bills as paid.”

  Pat drank, too. All these years later, as she planted the crocus bulbs, she could still recall the cool glassy lip of the champagne bottle in her mouth.

  Her work on the side slope was mechanical: pierce turf, wriggle trowel, embed wire ball, smooth earth. But her progress was slow. The clay was cold and hard. Despite her black canvas Mary Janes, she was intensely aware of her feet folded back toward the house and her heels pressed up against her bottom. She could feel an odd chilly texture of pebble, acorn, and twig through her jeans. And although she was wearing her goatskin gardening gloves, ghostly impressions of struggling with the trowel, or twisting and pressing the wire, remained in her palms.

  LinkAge had barely glanced at the LGT books, either before or after the purchase. Oversight of their individual acquisitions was minimal. The stock price was not affected by such trivialities, and LinkAge was not interested in the tedious process of coordinating the back office systems. When Frank followed Neil to LinkAge headquarters in the Meadowlands, they applied their talents to a larger scale, but the crazy deadlines continued. The LinkAge financial year ended with the calendar year, so for the next four years the Foys did not celebrate New Year’s Eve. Such festivities were for ordinary folk, who did not expect sacrifices—or greatness—of themselves. The Foys would schedule a suitably sumptuous trip during the first week in January.

  Frank expected nothing different for the millennium. Neil Culp ended up quitting a month later, but no one had any inkling of it at the time. The debt, however, was particularly recalcitrant that year. (LinkAge was more concerned about the debt they owed than the debts they couldn’t collect on, as LGT had been.) Frank could not leave for West Palm Beach on January 4 as scheduled. He told Pat that she and the kids should go without him and he’d join them later, but she nixed that idea; she would miss him too much. Besides, the extra fees the postponement entailed were part of the cost of earning all the money that he did. They decided to go in mid-January, when the financials were sure to be resolved. Pat bought Frank new snorkeling gear and three Hawaiian shirts, one with a bird of paradise pattern. She hid them in his suitcase as she packed.

  The mid-month deadline came and went. “There’s only so much the High Risk boys can do with revenue,” said Frank, tying his blue-and-gold-striped tie the next morning. “They’ve put their fingers on every soft spot they can find. But don’t worry. Neil will figure it out, and then we’ll just hop on a plane at the last minute.”

  Pat kept the suitcases packed and turned the uncertainty of their departure into a guessing game for the girls. “Whoever comes the closest gets a chocolate orange,” she said, wielding a glue gun. (They were way behind on their Christmas crafts.)

  It was Pat herself who won when Frank called Friday of that week and said, “Neil’s devised contracts that transfer the debt from the corporate books to the books of individual acquisitions like LGT. He’s such a genius. The idea is simple, but the execution is exquisite. Get us some tickets for tonight. We can meet at the airport.”

  “You think this is really it?”

  “Yes,” said Frank. “We’ve finally got it.”

  When he called again, Pat was in the first-class lounge with a martini, and the girls were each sipping a Shirley Temple, which they’d ordered without batting an eye, although Pat had no idea where they’d heard of one. At their feet were three matching leather shoulder bags that looked as if they could be diplomatic pouches.

  “Is there a later flight?” said Frank. “We’ve run into a…bit of a…snag with the auditors.”

  “Maybe you could run onto the plane at the last moment,” suggested Pat. “That’s always fun.”

  “Okay,” said Frank. “You go ahead and board. If I don’t make that flight, I’ll be on the next one.”

  It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. Frank took a different airline and joined them at the West Palm airport half an hour after they arrived. The car that Frank had called from the plane was waiting for them. As always, Florida was like a postcard come to life: hard, glossy, lukewarm, the night sky decorated with interesting coconut palm silhouettes.

  “Oh, it was wild,” said Frank in the car. “No one can read the books but Neil at this point. Some of it has to be taken on faith. Believe it or not, we ended up locking the door. Neil told a couple of the High Risk boys to bar the door until the auditors signed off.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “They were going to sign off, anyway. They had no choice. They couldn’t risk losing our business. If they were comfortable making waves, they wouldn’t have become auditors. But they appreciated the theater.”

  Pat had not wanted to jinx Frank’s arrival by making a hotel reservation, so, in a rush of exhausted exultation, they simply stopped at the first motel they saw. It was a squat series of boxes next to the highway. The girls waited with the driver while Pat followed Frank inside carrying his wallet, which he’d left on the seat. A ceiling fan sliced the air, a wire rack promised cheesy delights. The clerk was apologetic. The only room available was a double for a thousand dollars—clearly a rip-off of monumental proportions. Frank leaned across the counter, looked the clerk in the eye, and said, “I was looking for something much, much more expensive.” It was hilarious. It was also, come to think of it, true.

  Two weeks later, LinkAge was forced to issue a major financial restatement.

  If Pat had counted right, she was on her two hundred and ninety-eighth, two hundred and ninety-ninth, and three hundredth bulb. She went inside, washed her hands thoroughly in the mudroom sink with her Gardener’s Friend, and sat down and wrote a note to Ellen Kloda on one of her sunflower cards. Before sealing it, she added a check for ten thousand dollars.

  CHAPTER

  9

  To get to Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex you drive west from Hart Ridge through the heavily screened and decorated suburbs of the New York metropolitan area, past rows and rows of trees being strangled slowly by Asiatic bittersweet vines, and into a rural corridor of towns like Lake Hopatcong, once a little resort where Frank’s family had been proud to go for two weeks every summer and now a mix of expensive summer houses and ramshackle starter homes for people who commute to Morristown. New Jersey turns into Pennsylvania at the raffish Poconos, where fraudulent development left a scrim of pink champagne and pink bathtubs. Keep going and dairy farms give way to the Appalachian Mountains. Amid a rolling feast of forest that was gorgeous even on this black and white day were several prisons, a clutter of small but valiantly kept-up houses, a few trailers and shacks, and a scattering of motels more dismal than the one in Florida. “TV” bragged one sign, and more meanly, “American owned.”

  Ruby kept her eyes fixed out the window the whole trip, headphones from her CD player stopping up her ears. She was looking rather tarty, if truth be told, in her magenta lipstick, tight bright pink top, rolled up painter pants, and three-inch heels. Until recently she had been a tomboy, and she had always thought she could do anything, maybe because she was able to climb trees and swim lakes and make caterpillars do her bidding while other girls hung back and watched.

  Her mind was as unfathomably twisty as the inside of a shell. Rose, who was very smart, much smarter than Pat, had never gone through a “code” phase. But after Pat took Frank to Allenwood, Ruby started using a code that was as obvious—and confusing—as pig Latin. She doubled up her responses, first saying the socially acceptable, then “slash,” and finally what she really thought—or wanted people to assume she thought. Pat got lost somewhere way back.

  When Pat got an envelope from the Bureau of Prisons, Ruby said, “Are they after you, too?” And when it turned out t
o be a form advising them that inmate Frank Foy had submitted Pat’s name on his list of approved callers, Ruby said, “It will be nice to talk to him slash oh my God.”

  In the Touareg, on the way to Allenwood, Pat reached over and squeezed her daughter’s knee as she always did when struck with a memory, and Ruby jabbed her back, hard, with her elbow, which was probably due to surprise. Route 78, of course, wasn’t the best place to be jabbed, because here she was alone with Ruby—and hundreds of cars, trucks, and SUVs ready to kill them both after an instant of her inattention. Still, the intense physicality of her daughter’s reaction reassured Pat that she was still a tomboy under all that fabulous tawdriness. Evidently Ruby felt she needed a different costume for her adventures now. “Do your friends dress like that, honey?” asked Pat.

  “Like what?” said Ruby, one of her earpieces having shaken loose in the struggle.

  “Oh, you know, like a prostitute.”

  “How colorful,” said Ruby, straightening up with dignity. “Slash disgusting.”

  Up in the country, where poverty must lead to problems with wayward children, Pat had once noticed a youthfully dressed man give Ruby a measuring eye. It was annoying, because he was clearly of the helping professions, and he must have thought she was “at risk.” Pat wanted very much to say that Ruby was most at risk from men like him, but she had to force all this information into one steely look.

  The handsome, locally quarried stone pillars that marked the entryway to the prison camp loomed ahead. There were no gun turrets, no enveloping spirals of barbed wire. A month ago, when she’d been dropping Frank off, they’d snacked on black caviar, red grapes, and Bucheron cheese in the visitors’ parking lot until an official in a blue suit rapped on the car window and said, “We were wondering what you were doing here.” She had been quite nice, as Pat pointed out a dozen times, but the picnic took on a pathetic, tattered air, and Frank ended up reporting to the prison door fifteen minutes before it was absolutely necessary.