The Immaculate Deception

by Sherry Silver

  The Acme Real Estate lady drew a deep breath and plopped her big fat bottom onto the couch. A tune came into my head about fat-bottomed girls. I slightly shimmied my shoulders, lost in the recollected lyrics. Hey, my shoulder didn’t hurt much. I should get the stitches removed soon. What did my discharge instructions say? Two weeks? I’d have to dig up the paperwork and check.

  Opening her reptilian briefcase, the fat-bottomed girl said, “Okay, the comparable properties in the area—well, other houses in the neighborhood, none are as crappy as this one—are selling in the four-hundred-thousand-dollar range. If you don’t want to make the repairs, we can list it as a handy-man special and ask ninety-nine nine fifty.” She punched some numbers on her jewel-keyed calculator.

  I didn’t want to be here. Why did I have to be the one to deal with Miz Squiddy? I tried my best to ignore her. I was craving a hamburger. Yum…just like the one in my dream.

  Carla said, “Minus closing costs and my four percent commission, plus three percent for the buyer’s agent, you should net in the neighborhood of eighty-eight thousand. That is, assuming a full-priced contract. Realistically, I think house-flipping investors will bid at about half that.”

  She stuffed her calculator back into her briefcase. “The judge gave me a key for the lockbox. I’ll have it in the multiple listing service by the end of the week. Meanwhile, you need to get it emptied and cleaned. I have a brother-in-law, Ed, in the hauling and salvage business and his girlfriend Fanny cleans houses. I can get you a package deal for about twenty-five thousand.”

  A hamburger with ketchup, dill pickle slices and raw onion. Yep, that would be great. And maybe some jalapeños on the side. Yum.

  That Carla person was shaking my hand. I smiled and escorted her to the door. She affixed a lockbox to the knob. “I’ll be in touch now,” she said.

  As she waddled away, I said, “And blah blah blah to you too.” I closed the door.

  Ain’t no way that lady was gonna give this house away for, what did she finally predict? Fifty grand? Fifty bucks? Minus the commissions—seven percent? The going rate was six percent. How stupid did she think I was? Perry probably told her I never went to college. His white-trash half-sister. Bad blood. Hey, he’d better watch out, they said insanity ran in the family. I sighed. Momma. I had to go and get Momma. But where would I take her? I looked around. Well, this was her home, damn it. I’d bring her home.

  Rushing outside, I quickly grabbed my wallet from inside the orange hospital bag behind the railing, stuffed it into my purse, then slid into the Corvette, fired up the engine and drove off.

  The mental hospital was easy to find. Up on the hill, next to the fire-training academy, the one with the condemned training tower. Downwind of the poop factory. The water treatment plant. Mr. Meddlestein had bought a big load of sludge there one year for fertilizer. He spread it all over his yard. No one played with his kids that summer.

  I drove past the hospital. I just couldn’t do it. I could not go in there and see my momma all drugged up, naked in a straightjacket. I could hear Tammy scolding me in my head. Sissy-girl. Sissy-girl. It was nearly three o’clock. Right smack in primetime rush hour. No way would I make it across any of the bridges and home in the next four hours. I might as well go on back to Momma’s house.

  But first, while I was out and about in the District, I figured I might as well make a visit to Judge Payne’s place of business. Payback time for deserting me with Miz Squiddy. I drove over to the courthouse and parked illegally, more or less. Entering the building, I offered my purse up for searching and stepped through the metal detectors. The young security guard seemed friendly.

  He said, “Haven’t seen you around. What firm you a partner in?”

  I tried to suppress my smile. “Payne, Calamari, Jomomma and Jomomma.”

  He said, “Oh yeah. They’re over in L’Enfant Plaza, right?”

  “Right.” I thanked him for my purse and strutted attorney-like through the lobby. Finally energized, I bounded the stairs to the second-floor office of Judge Perry Payne. I opened the door. His secretary was missing. I knocked on the door to his honor’s chambers. No answer. I opened the door. What a mess. Papers and books and potato chip bags, candy bar wrappers and mail all over the place.

  I wiped the crumbs off his ergonomic feng-shui leather chair and plopped my not-so-fat bottom down. I leaned back and propped my feet on his desk. Okay, Perry, old boy, where are you hiding Daddy’s will? “Whoa!” I leaned too far back and the chair fell into the window. Crushed the metal blinds a little. I scrambled up and decided to check out the leather couch.

  I moved two rainbow-colored faux-suede throw pillows and plopped down. What was that odor? Something sharp was sticking in my thigh. I scooted over and lifted the cushion. I dug out a badge. A Fairfax County, Virginia, police badge. Interesting jurisdictional transposition in a DC judge’s chambers. Wait, it was stuck to some cloth. I leaped up and threw the cushion onto the floor. I started to pull the cloth out and then dropped it and wiped my hands on my skirt. It was a pair of panties.

  Hey, I’d seen these in movie trailers. They were the new boy shorts. Lacey panties, cut like hip-hugger shorts but not quite enough material to cover your cheeks with. I tugged the badge loose and stashed it in my big purse. Someday it could be useful to blackmail Perry with. Or maybe I could impersonate a police officer. I laughed, then took the waterless hand-sanitizer out and rubbed three loads onto my hands and wrists. Up to my elbows.

  I knocked the other two cushions off, tossed them on the floor. “Wow!” I found a Kennedy piece and “Eww!” a chartreuse turkey sandwich. It was smashed. Congealed mayonnaise oozed out over the bread and on the couch cushion. Mayonnaise had grossed me out since I was about three years old. I gagged handling it. I couldn’t even dine across the table from someone eating mayo.

  I snatched a piece of paper from the trashcan and used it to cover my hand as I grabbed the moldy poultry. I threw it away. I left the crusty panties on the industrial-tiled floor. I shoved the fifty-cent piece in my jacket pocket. Tossing the leather cushions back on, I rocked them into place. I had to use my knee to get the middle one to stay down in the back. I threw my weight on it, leaning onto the back of the sofa. My gaze fell down between the sofa and the wall. No, it couldn’t be. I clambered up and picked up one end of the couch, pulling it diagonally away from the wall. My shoulder reminded me I should take it easy.

  Neatly lined on the floor, stacked about a foot high, were uncut bundles of old hundred-dollar bills. The kind with Benjamin Franklin’s picture centered. Four across and eight down, so that would make each sheet worth thirty-two hundred bucks. Wow. I snatched up a stack and fluttered the ends. Just because. The date on the dough was 1945. Dust blew up. I coughed.

  I slipped one sheet out and held it up to the light. Not that I had a clue how to tell if it was counterfeit or not, that just seemed to be what they did in the movies. These looked good to me. I turned the page over. Wow, Benjamin Franklin on both sides. This looked familiar somehow. I gasped and remembered my dream. I remembered standing on the Fourteenth Street Bridge, just before I met my mate for the first time. I remembered pulling a pearl-handled pistol out of my coat pocket and throwing it down onto the frozen river. And then there had been a bloody, double-faced hundred-dollar bill in the other pocket.

  Another flashback shot through me. This was just like a story Momma had told me about one of her adventures when she worked the counterfeit division for the Secret Service. Her cover job at the place where they printed the money had been to inspect the currency. One day they had had an office party and nearly everyone had gotten drunk. The printers had run the money through the press twice without changing the plates, so instead of an engraving of Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the back,

  Benjamin Franklin’s portrait was printed on both sides. Could my dream have anything to do with my mother’s adventures in the 1940s? Could I somehow be reliving them? That couldn’t be…or? Now, Donna, think st
raight. Still, it didn’t make sense that I hadn’t thought of Momma’s story when I pulled that bloody bill out of the fur pocket. Guess meeting my mate had blown my logic reasoning a bit.

  Well, this bill wasn’t bloody, it appeared crisp and uncirculated. It hadn’t been cut into individual notes. But it had Ben Franklin’s picture on both sides. I picked up the stack and flipped it over and fluttered through. They were all like this. I chose a few other stacks and examined them. These were defective United States currency. Why hadn’t they been destroyed? Printing presses flashed through my mind. Oh my God, these must be worth a fortune to collectors. Collectors on the black market. They couldn’t be sold outright. Well, on an online auction site like eBay maybe. No, eBay would delete the listing as soon as they discovered it. Hey, maybe this was the money the pirate boy, Bill Blandings, was talking about in my dream. But he insisted Momma had it. So what was Perry doing with it? And wait a minute. Daddy had been talking about Momma trying to get his money. Did Daddy possess counterfeit money? Was that how Perry obtained it?

  I tried to cram a full sheaf into my purse. Shoot. Wouldn’t fit. I slipped three pages out of the pile, folded and crammed them in. Yes. That worked. I returned the rest to where I’d found them. As I was shifting the couch back into place, I stepped on a document. I picked it up. It was the Last Will and Testament of Nathan Lucifer Payne. Well, isn’t this interesting. Why had Perry hidden Daddy’s will? Did it actually say what he had told me? I pushed the couch back, picked up my purse and carried the document out through the courthouse.

  I got the will and I discovered Perry’s dough pile. Double whammy. For Perry. I felt smug, excited like I was on the brink of cracking a big news story, like Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate scoop when they uncovered the illegal activities that got President Nixon into trouble. They won a Pulitzer Prize for that one. Well, I could pretend, in my own mind, to be a Washington Post reporter, the family couldn’t take that away from me. I got to the car. Shoot. The Vette had been ticketed. I grabbed the ticket off the windshield. But too late. I already heard the beep of the tow truck backing up.

  Chapter Six

  “No, no! I’ll move it, you don’t have to tow it away.”

  The Neanderthal hooked my momma’s car up and absconded. Adventurous girl, I decided to make the best of things. Since I only had three dollars, the fifty-cent piece and a bundle of hot antiquated C-notes, I proceeded to the Courthouse Metro Station. I minded my commuting manners and stayed to the right on the long escalator down to the trains. I was a bit spooked because it wasn’t in service and I had to walk down those huge metal steps in high heels. I wasn’t used to wearing high heels. I always wore sensible shoes to PIF all day in. I guess I assimilated correctly with the commuters. Only four people passed me.

  I trekked over to the fare card machines and waited in line. Well, in a mass-mob queue, more or less. Craning my neck, I thought I made out credit card symbols on the machine. Yes, I did. They did take credit cards. I relaxed a bit. Finally, my turn. I purchased my fare card and darted to the turnstile. I pushed through and then went down the stairs and waited for a yellow line train. One came. I hopped on.

  There was an empty seat, next to a transvestite. (S)he was flapping his/her lips about the shopping at Pentagon Center Mall to everyone on the train. Nobody was listening. I chose to stand, holding onto the pole by the door. I flipped through the will and sighed. According to this document, Perry and Tammy got everything. I tucked it under my left arm. I’d get Mr. Meddlestein to read it over to see if it really was Daddy’s last will and testament. I wasn’t going to take Perry’s word for it. My purse was strapped across my chest since I stuffed my head through the strap. My feet smarted. Especially the right one with the bunion. I flexed and released my toes.

  Shoes. I thought about how I’d be more comfortable in my sensible black flat shoes with the blunt tips. Not that my feet weren’t pulsating at the end of a workday in them. My mind wandered to those pretty sparkly silver ones I wore with the powder blue taffeta ball gown. They had been some comfy shoes. And he was such a great dancer. Just like Fred Astaire…or John Travolta. But a lot better looking than both of those guys. My dream man. Mr. Jones. I sighed. If only he really walked the earth. But at least he came to me in dreams. My soul mate through history.

  I conjured up his scent. He smelled good. Like a man. Like a clean man. He smelled like soap and deodorant. Maybe he just oozed with pheromones. Oh yeah. The seventh sense, the sense of hormones. Bodily functions gone wild. Primal urges. The unexplained connections between two people. Where did he go? He wandered off into the Miami Beach midnight…

  At the L’Enfant Plaza stop, the crowd shoved me out onto the platform. The place where the law firm that I was a partner in had its offices. Yeah right. It was a great pretend though. As I painfully plodded through the underground mall, I passed a post office. I went inside and took care of business. I filled out a change of address card for my parents’ mail. Since I wasn’t at a Reston, Virginia, branch, I couldn’t actually rent a PO box. So much for pretending to be anonymous. I forwarded everything to my place on Spyglass Street.

  I really needed a car. I could get around within the District by Metrorail and by bus. But Metrorail only went as far west as Vienna, into Virginia. There was a commuter railroad, Virginia Railway Express, but they only had two lines, one out west to Manassas, one south to Fredericksburg. And neither of those went anywhere near my little home sweet home in Reston.

  I got back on the subway and took it to the station closest to my parents’ home.

  I marched right into the old Payne homestead. Little Mount Vernon. The door was unlocked. No, I didn’t sign a listing contract with Carla Calamari, real estate agent extraordinaire. And her sign wasn’t in the yard. But she must’ve gone right to her office and entered the information into the multiple listing service because the house had been shown. I had to pull hard to pluck two business cards off the moldy kitchen counter. Yuk. I dropped them back where I’d found them. Jeeze Louise, Momma really didn’t make an effort cleaning anymore. She was just too depressed. Oh who cared if the house was a filthy hovel? Calamari was right. I wasn’t gonna fumigate it. The ambition just wasn’t in me. Besides, I had my one good suit on.

  I had no funeral to go to. No closure. That Tammy. She never ever did the kind thing, the nice thing for others. She always did the kind thing, the nice thing for Tammy. So long as she benefited to heck with everyone else. It didn’t take too many left brain waves to figure that girl out. Her longest marriage, cohabitation-wise, had been seventeen months. Not that she didn’t draw out the divorces as long as suited her.

  When one person was divorced six times, it couldn’t just be poor pitiful Tammy’s bad luck with men. More like it was bad luck for the men who ever fell prey to her breasts. Enormous they were. And perfect. The kind that didn’t fall down when she lay down. And boy did she lay down a lot. I was being catty.

  I needed to go home. To my home. I really should go and buy a new car. Or rent one. No, that would cost a fortune. I really needed to call the automobile insurance agency and see what’s what. I had heard that with some insurance companies, in lieu of paying you cash for your totaled vehicle, they’d find you a replacement, just like the old one before the crash. That option sounded doable. Of course, that wasn’t available from my friendly Heavenly Automobile Insurance Company, a subsidiary of the lovely health maintenance organization that paid my salary. Figure that.

  I threw Daddy’s will on the coffee table in the living room. Perhaps I should read it again to make sure I’d fulfill his last wishes. Like making sure my greedy siblings got everything. My eyes were tired. I felt really sleepy. I yanked one of Daddy’s flannel shirts from the coat closet where he kept them. I peeled off my blazer, untucked my blouse, unbuttoned my skirt, kicked off my shoes and struggled out of my control-top pantyhose. I curled up on the leather sofa in the living room and covered up with Daddy’s shirt. He always covered me up when I’d f
allen asleep here.

  I heard the music. I smiled at the Latin melody. Happy music. I distinguished the color. Orange like a tropical island sunset on fire. Here came the wind. I held my hands over my head and thrust my face into it. The irresistible force propelled me forward. I submitted in heady anticipation.

  ~♥~

  I opened my eyes. I scanned a long narrow room. Smoky, with laughter permeating. There was a mariachi band at one end. Men in uniform. Umm…that one looked like Mr. August in my computer screensaver calendar. I peeked ahead a few times at him. A United States Marine.

  He walked up to me. “Hello, dollface. Can I buy you some alcohol?”

  “Sure.” Why not, I was thirsty.

  “What’s your pleasure?”

  “Anything long and cool.”

  “How about a beer?”

  “I’d adore a beer. Make it a long-necked bottle, will ya?”

  He said, “I’ll be right back.” He sauntered toward the center of the room, to the bar.

  We seemed to be moving. Shadows zipped past. I peered out one of the numerous windows, lining each side. We were moving. Hey, we were on a train.

  The Marine materialized with a beer and a hot dog. He said, “Here you go, dollface.”

  I took them both. “Thanks. How’d you know how hungry I was?”

  “I just want to watch you take a bite of that and then decide if I’ll let you have me.”

  Okay, my face flushed. I handed them back. Both objects. “Thanks, but I’m just not that kinda girl.”

  “Aw, sweetheart, c’mon. Sure you are.”

  “Oh no I’m not.” I traipsed to the end of the car and yanked the steel door. It slid open. I stepped into the diaphragm and opened the opposing door. I stepped into the next car. Sweet. An old-fashioned, honest to goodness Pullman sleeper. A sign on the wall indicated this was the “colored” sleeping car. I felt a lump in my stomach. Jim Crow laws from back in the days when they segregated the races. I wondered if I was allowed to pass through. Well, one way to find out. I strolled around the corner and down the hallway. I felt like I was in an old movie. There were dozens of upper and lower berths. Heavy blue drapes were drawn at each cubby.