by Glenn Ickler
“Can I talk to him?”
“Why not? He’s just coming out of the john. I’ll hand him the phone.”
“Hey, Mitch, how are ya?” Riley said. “Hang on a second while I finish zipping up my fly.” Riley was as smooth as olive oil in court but not so much in person.
I quizzed the lawyer long enough to confirm the family would be contesting Vinnie’s will and to get the details on when they were filing. When we finished, I said, “Will you do me one favor?”
“What’s that?” the Bulldog asked.
“Don’t call the TV stations.”
“Why would I call those morons?”
“Good point. Thanks for your time.”
I walked back into the living room and sat down next to Martha. “Why do you have that cat-who-swallowed-the-canary smile on your face?” she asked.
“I just got a fresh lead for tomorrow’s Vinnie Luciano story,” I said. “And I’m the only reporter who’s got it.”
Chapter 11: New Lease on Life
My plan to interview Vito Luciano Saturday morning went down the drain when Augie Augustine again called in sick. Apparently he’d had a really rousing Friday night party with his buddy Jim Beam and was paying for his fun with a headache and nausea. I was called upon to co-pay for his binge by filling his chair at the police station.
The best story in the reports file involved a bank robber who really treasured his Milwaukee Brewers baseball cap. Posing as a polite customer, he took off his Brewers cap and laid it on the counter when he greeted the female teller. The robber left the bank with a sack full of money in his hand and nothing on his head, but he returned to pick up the cap long after the teller had hit the alarm. The forgetful Brewers fan was still adjusting his cap when two cops with weapons at the ready blocked his second exit. You can’t make this stuff up.
Before I wrote the police stories, I knocked out a piece about Vinnie Luciano’s family suing to contest his will. Eddy Gambrell, who sat in Don O’Rourke’s chair on Saturday, was delighted to get something fresh on the Luciano story. “I hear the Falcon Heights cops aren’t giving you much to work with,” Eddy said.
“Their investigation seems to be moving with the speed of a glacier,” I said. “If they don’t turn up something pretty soon they’ll have to put Vinnie’s murder in their cold case file.”
My work day ended at one o’clock, and my real day started an hour later when Martha and I approached a two-story brick duplex on Lexington Avenue. We were scheduled to meet the rental agent, Rosie Reynolds, who was going to show us the vacant side of the duplex and, if we decided to take the unit, introduce us to the resident on the other side.
“Looks nice,” I said as we waited for Rosie. A porch with a wooden rail ran all the way across the front. The white paint on the rail was clean and fresh and the gray paint on the porch floor wasn’t chipped or scuffed. The white doors and window casings also appeared to have been painted recently, as did a gray wooden handicapped ramp beside the porch steps.
“What’s with the ramp?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” said Martha. “Rosie didn’t mention that.”
“Maybe ADA requires it for all rental units. You’re a lawyer, you should know.”
“You’re a reporter, you should find out.”
A few minutes later, we were sitting on the porch steps, half dozing in the eighty-something heat, when a black BMW pulled up behind my blue Honda Civic. A short, plump woman who I guessed to be in her early fifties stepped out and joined us at the foot of the steps. She was dressed for the weather in a scoop neck dress made of almost see-through material.
“Mitch, this is Rosie,” Martha said. “Rosie, this is my fiancé, Mitch.”
“You write for the paper, don’t you?” Rosie said as she gave my hand a vigorous shake. I confessed that I did.
“Who do you think killed that guy at the fair?” she said. “There hasn’t been much about it in the paper since the day it happened.”
“That’s because we haven’t found out much about it,” I said. “I don’t have any idea who did the killing and the Falcon Heights cops don’t either.”
“It’s scary,” Rosie said. “Makes you think twice every time you bite into something on a stick out there.”
“The Pronto Pups are safe. At least the dozen I’ve sampled so far this year were.”
“You eat those things? The grease they fry’em in is older than I am.”
“That’s what gives them their unique flavor,” I said. “Your plain old corn dog cooked in fresh oil can’t compete with a real honest-to-god Pronto Pup.”
“Could we look at the house please?” said my vegetarian fiancée. “Listening to comparisons of cooking grease has my stomach rolling like a cement mixer.”
“My opinion is cast in concrete,” I said.
Rosie gave me a long look and groaned before taking a key from her purse, unlocking the door and waving us in. “We’ll take the tour and then stop in next door to meet the neighbor,” she said. The bit about meeting the neighbor raised a question in my mind. Would we have to past muster with this person in order to rent the place?
Entering the broad, high-ceilinged foyer was like walking into a steaming swamp. As previously noted, the outdoor temperature was at least eighty degrees. The air trapped inside the closed up duplex must have been close to a hundred.
“Does this place have central air?” I asked as I wiped a sudden outbreak of sweat off my forehead.
“No, but it has window units on both floors,” Rosie said. “Obviously we don’t run them when the house is empty.”
“Obviously,” I said.
Rosie led us through the house, pointing out the beauty of the oak woodwork and the number of tall windows that allowed a lot of light to enter. And, I thought, a lot of cold air to enter in the winter. On the first floor were a living room with beige wall-to-wall carpeting, and a kitchen, a dining room and a half-bath with beige linoleum floors. Upstairs were two pale-blue-carpeted bedrooms that shared a tiled bathroom, where the temperature was several degrees hotter. I saw air conditioners in the windows of only the dining room and the larger bedroom.
When we returned to the first floor, Rosie asked if we wanted to see the basement.
“Is it cooler there?” I asked.
“It always is,” Rosie said.
“Let’s go.” We descended the stairs and found the basement to be both cool and damp. It contained a water heater and a furnace, both fueled by natural gas, and a scattering of trash that hadn’t been swept up after the previous renter’s departure. Rosie saw me eyeing the trash and promised to get it cleaned up before we moved in.
“Both the water heater and the furnace are practically brand new,” Rosie said. “They were installed between renters three years ago.” I grunted my approval.
We climbed the stairs to the main floor and again were immersed in a sea of hot, stale air.
“Does the air conditioner in the dining room cool this whole floor?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” Rosie said. “Please don’t be obsessed with the temperature. Remember you’re in St. Paul where it’s winter most of the year.”
I mopped my dripping face again and said, “Well, this isn’t winter and I am obsessed with the temperature.”
“You know it cools off right after Labor Day, and if we take this place we can’t move in until October,” Martha said. “Next summer we can put fans in the kitchen and the living room. The big question is: do we take it?”
“Can we go out on the porch to discuss that?” I said. A drop of sweat was tickling the tip of my nose and my shirt was as soggy as a long-haired dog in a dunk tank.
“We can,” Rosie said.
Out on the porch, I could almost feel my sweat glands relaxing and my pores closing to their normal eighty-de
gree circumference.
“Any questions?” Rosie said.
We already knew that the rent didn’t include the cost of either heat or electricity, and we’d guessed at the amount of the required deposit. Including the estimated additional expenses of heat and electricity, the total was at the tip-top of our housing budget, but we had decided we could afford it without having to steal tidbits out of Sherlock’s bowl for breakfast.
“What about the walls?” Martha asked.
“What about them?” Rosie said.
“They’re all white. Can we paint them?”
“I believe you can at your own expense.”
“Fine,” Martha said. “I like to paint.” She turned to me. “Do you want to go home and talk about it or do you want to grab it?”
“If you like it, let’s grab it,” I said. I was reasonably pleased with what we’d seen and I knew how tired she was of house hunting. “As long as you’ll do the painting—”
“We’ll take it,” Martha said.
“Wonderful,” said Rosie. “I’m sure you’ll be very happy here. Now, why don’t we go next door and meet your new neighbor?”
What was this obsession with the neighbor? Meeting him or her seemed to be a standard part of the house tour. Oh, well, what the hell? We followed Rosie to the other front door and stood beside her as she rang the bell.
Several minutes passed with no response, but Rosie stood patiently without ringing the bell again. I was about to suggest that nobody was home when the door opened halfway and a deep voice said, “Afternoon, Rosie.”
The voice came from waist level, so I looked down, expecting to see an unusually short man, a dwarf maybe. What I did see was a woman looking up at us from a motorized wheelchair. Her skin was the darkest I’d ever seen on an African-American face, her coal black hair billowed in an elegant Afro, and her upper body looked sturdy and erect. She wore a pale green sleeveless blouse that revealed a pair of well-muscled arms, which were folded across her chest. Her facial expression made it plain she was wondering why we were bothering her.
“I want you to meet your new neighbors,” Rosie said. “Zhoumaya, this is Martha Todd and Warren Mitchell, who have agreed to rent the other unit. Martha and Mitch, this is Zhoumaya Jones.”
The name struck me as something out of a Neil Simon farce. “Zhoumaya?” I said. “Jones?” My tone of incredulity suggested that Rosie might be pulling my leg.
“You got a problem with that?” said the deep voice from the wheelchair. Her brown eyes, sharp as chips of flint, were locked on mine.
“Oh, no,” I said. “No, no. None at all. Sorry if it sounded like that.”
Her eyes softened and the corners of her mouth turned up slightly. “Want me to spell my name for you?”
I shook my head. “Not necessary.”
“I’ll do it anyway. It’s J-O-N-E-S.” This was followed by a long, loud laugh.
The laughter threw me even farther off base, but I forced myself to join in. “Thanks,” I said when the hilarity ended. “I’ll write that down.”
“So what’s your real name?” Zhoumaya asked. “Is it Warren or is it Mitch?”
“It’s both. I mean my family—my mother and my grandma—and strangers call me Warren, and my friends call me Mitch. Well, actually my grandma calls me Warnie Baby, but I don’t encourage that.”
“And which should I call you?”
“I hope you’ll call me Mitch.” I certainly wanted this woman to see herself as a friend.
“Mitch it is,” Zhoumaya said. She turned her face toward Martha. “And what shall I call you?”
“Just Martha,” she said. “I don’t have any nicknames.”
Zhoumaya turned her attention back to me. “I’ve seen your name in the paper.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m a reporter.”
“I’m not ma’am,” she said. “I’m Zhoumaya.”
“Sorry. Yes, Zhoumaya, I’m a reporter.” God, I was stumbling all over myself in front of this woman.
Zhoumaya opened the door all the way. “Why don’t you come in and sit down,” she said. “I have the air on in the living room and I shouldn’t be holding the door open.”
We accepted the invitation with gratitude and she spun the wheelchair l80 degrees on the spot and led us into the cool of the living room. This half of the duplex was a mirror image of the one we’d just agreed to rent. I settled into a comfortable tiger-striped armchair and surveyed my surroundings. The floor was hardwood, partially covered by a multi-colored, African-looking area rug—a vast improvement over beige carpeting. The furnishings also had an African look and the sky-blue walls were decorated with paintings of African scenes.
Zhoumaya saw me looking around like a kid in a toy store. “We came here from Liberia to get away from the fighting. My late husband owned a shipping business in Monroeville so we were able to bring most of our stuff.” She smiled and added, “His name was Doliakeh Jones.”
“Spelled J-O-N-E-S?” I said.
“That’s right. You’re beginning to understand Liberian names.” I was also beginning to like my new neighbor.
Naturally I was curious about her husband’s death—I doubted it was from old age—but didn’t feel comfortable asking about it. Zhoumaya must have sensed this because she opened the road to questions by saying, “Doliakeh became late in the same accident that took away my legs.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“We had a crazy accident with our motorcycles.” My eyebrows must have gone up because she said, “Yes, believe it or not, we began riding motorcycles many years ago. Doliakeh was on a bike when I met him, and he got me started on my own before we were married. Anyhow, we were riding out in the country north of the Cities, going along about sixty or so, when boom—a tree fell across the road in front of us. Doliakeh was in the lead and he hit the tree head-on. I skidded into it kind of sideways trying to stop. We both went flying when our bikes flipped. He was killed on the spot and I broke my back. That was on Labor day, so it will be three years next week.”
“What made the tree fall down?” Martha said. “Was it really windy?”
“There was no wind at all,” Zhoumaya said. “The tree was hollow and it just picked that time to fall down.”
“Awful,” Martha said.
“Amazing,” I said.
“Like somebody once said, timing is everything,” Zhoumaya said. “I’ve been in this contraption ever since.”
“You get around very well,” Rosie said.
“Hey, I’ve got me a racing chair with a big old red flag on it and I’ve been working out in it on the street. I’m looking to do a marathon—maybe Boston next spring.”
“Good for you,” Martha said.
“That’s wonderful,” Rosie said.
“How are you going to work out when the winter weather hits and the street is full of snow?” I said.
“I go to Florida right after Thanksgiving and I don’t come home until April Fool’s day,” Zhoumaya said. “I’ve got a ground floor condo down there, and I can roll right out the back door onto a bicycle path.”
“Problem solved,” I said. “You should be in great shape by April.”
“I’m in great shape right now.” She flexed both arms at shoulder level and the biceps looked strong enough to propel a truck, much less a wheelchair. “In fact, I might chuck this motorized job and get a self-propelled model for inside the house.”
“I’d keep the motor,” I said. “There must be days when you don’t feel like Hercules.”
“Plenty of those,” she said. “But you two must have better things to do than sit here listening to my problems. You satisfied with the place next door?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “The landlord’s a little sloppy with the maintenance—there
’s trash in the basement from the last renter—but with some fresh paint on the walls we can make it look like home.”
I heard Rosie suck in a lungful of air and I turned toward her to see her face getting red. I was about to tell her not to worry about the trash when Zhoumaya spoke.
“You think the landlord’s maintenance is sloppy?”
“A little,” I said. “But we can live with that.”
“Well, good,” she said. “Then suppose you write me a check for the first and last month’s rent and a damage deposit.”
“Write you a check?”
“Didn’t Rosie tell you? I own this building. I’m your sloppy landlord.”
Now I sucked in a breath of air and felt the red blood rising in my face. “I’ll write the check as soon as I pull my foot out of my mouth,” I said.
“You do that. And I’ll make sure that the trash is gone by the time your check clears the bank.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“Oh, but it is. It’s not every day that I’m called sloppy.”
Martha came to my rescue with her checkbook in her hand. “How much do we owe you?”
“I should add a ten percent surcharge for the insult, but I’ll let it go this time,” Zhoumaya said. She named a figure that exceeded our guess, and Martha sucked in a lungful of air and wrote the check. Zhoumaya Jones, the wheelchair marathon wannabe, was officially our landlord.
Chapter 12: The Play’s the Thing
I once read a newspaper review of a play that began: “Unfortunately, I had a very poor seat. It was facing the stage.” I had seen that play from an equally poor seat and agreed wholeheartedly with the critic.
Our seats at Parkside Players Theatre that Saturday night weren’t quite that bad, but it was a performance I would rather have missed. In fact, if we hadn’t promised to have drinks with the artistic director and his wife after the performance, our little group of four would not have returned to our semi-poor seats after the intermission.
I knew in advance that the script was stultifying because I had seen Waiting for Godot a few years before, and I would have stayed away but, what the hell, we had paid for season tickets. Plus there was always a chance that a talented, energetic cast would lift the production to a level of acceptable mediocrity. This was not to be. Apparently the dreariness of the script had infected both the actors and the director.
