Let There Be Linda

by Rich Leder

She was Georganne Dunn, a beautiful dwarf from Manchester, who’d fled England after shooting a man in the head with both barrels of a stolen shotgun. That the now headless man was a known violent criminal would not have helped her defense in a court of law since that same court would definitely have discovered she was illegally selling him drugs and guns in the back room of the working class bar of which she was the owner and proprietor. The fact that she had never paid any taxes and also had active interests in prostitution and grand theft auto would have been bad barrister moments for her as well.

  She had won the bar in a card game from a man who’d stayed on as a bartender and fallen in love with her and impregnated her and whose throat she’d later slit while he slept after learning he had cheated on her with one of her barmaids and also with one of her prostitutes. Harvey smiled at the thought of his mum holding the knife in the middle of the night. She was not a woman to be trifled with.

  After doing the calculus with the smoking shotgun still in her hand, Georganne had grabbed her young son and flown to America, where she and Harvey vanished amidst the sunburned hordes of Southern California. She changed their name from Dunn to Mineral and became the owner and proprietor of a failing pawnshop in Pacoima.

  She was well read and wonderfully articulate and immaculately dressed—and cruel as Cromwell when it came to business. Under her cutthroat (literally) leadership, the pawnshop prospered. She traded prostitution for gambling and ran a high-stakes game in the back room. She continued to “steal cars” and “deal guns” but under the flimsy veil of pawn legality. She lived a cash-only life and gave the government nothing, which is what she gave everyone. She had no patience for people other than Harvey, who she doted on and spoiled and raised with all the love and poison in her hardened heart. She taught him everything she knew about life and business and people and pain and pawn and profit and cash money.

  She died when he was twenty, and he inherited the business, and while it was profitable on the right side of the law, it became a cash cow on the wrong side. Harvey had no interest in poker, and he knew his mother would have been disappointed by that, but he also knew she’d have been so proud of his work as a loan shark.

  “The real money, Mum,” Harvey had said to her as she lay dying of cancer, “is in illicit loans.”

  “Make me proud then, boy,” she had said with her last breath.

  “2012 CL63 AMG, excellent condition,” Omar said. “Like new.”

  “It’s worth a hundred five thousand dollars,” Greenburg said. “I looked it up.”

  Harvey knew exactly what the Mercedes was worth. He had looked up it as well. “The question isn’t the value of your wife’s car, it’s why you’re pawning it in the first place.”

  “I need seventy-five thousand in cash today,” Greenburg said in his most condescending voice while licking his teeth with his tongue, “that’s why.”

  “Too much,” Harvey said.

  “You’ll sell it for ninety next week,” Greenburg said. “That’s fifteen for you, a twenty percent profit. If you don’t want it, I’ll go to another pawnshop. For Chrissake, do the math, Harvey.”

  Harvey had already done the math. He looked at Omar. “Do you like the car?”

  “It’s cherry,” Omar said.

  Harvey turned back to Greenburg and tasted bile. The dentist was a pitiful man living a pitiful life. He detested Greenburg and wanted to cause him physical pain, break his kneecaps or remove his testicles with scissors. But there was something about the dentist today that was unusual: his attitude. It was as if Greenburg thought he was the one holding the cards, as if he knew something Harvey didn’t. Harvey hated that thought, hated knowing Greenburg was thinking it. What could this pathetic excuse for a human being possibly have over him? What information did the coked-out dentist have that Harvey didn’t? Harvey had to know, and he had to know now. “All right, I agree to your terms. Omar, take the doctor’s keys, draw up the papers, and remove seventy-five thousand in cash from the safe. Now let’s go inside before we burn to death.”

  They went into the store, and Omar walked to the office. Harvey went behind the counter and up onto the ramp so that he was eye to eye with Greenburg, who stood across the counter. On the opposite side of the shop, an elderly couple was painfully pawning their heirloom jewelry, and the big-breasted black woman was back again—three days in a row now—working the same Hispanic clerk to get her price for the Civil War sword.

  Harvey looked at the dentist with disgust. Greenburg was lost in the one big thought Harvey was not privy to. It’s the most outrageous, important, and delirious thought that Greenburg has ever had, Harvey imagined, and he was infuriated by not knowing what it was. “Is it experimental plastic surgery?”

  “No.”

  “Three pounds of clean Columbian cocaine?”

  “Stop asking.”

  “Back taxes?”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  “Why do you need seventy-five thousand dollars in cash today, Doctor?”

  “None of your business, Harvey. Just give me the money and fuck yourself.”

  Harvey smiled. Greenburg, he said to himself, does not yet know this because he is lost in his preposterous thought, but he is soon going to share his secret while experiencing impossible pain, and then I will keep my money and his wife’s car.

  Omar arrived at the counter with a sales contract and a large fat manila envelope. He put the contract and the envelope on the counter and took a pen from his pocket.

  “Dr. Greenburg refuses to share his immediate need for my money,” Harvey said to Omar, “and I have lost patience with his insistence for privacy.”

  “I could push this pen through his eyeball,” Omar said. “That might open him up.”

  “I would enjoy that immensely,” Harvey said.

  Omar took Greenburg by the arm and began to lead him to the office. Harvey watched them go, savoring for a moment the joy of Greenburg’s fear. But then the dentist did something out of character. Rather than collapse into silent terror from the anticipated agony waiting for him in Harvey’s soundproofed office, Greenburg pulled against Omar, planted his feet, held onto the counter, looked at the other customers, and shouted at the top his voice.

  “Somebody help me, please. I’m a dentist.”

  Omar turned to Harvey for guidance. Harvey looked at the clerks and customers and knew they were now witnesses and that a new geometry was in play. Should he have Omar drag Greenburg to the office? Should he instruct Omar to let go of the dentist’s arm? Or should he tell Omar to throw Greenburg over his shoulder and carry him, kicking and screaming like a grade school girl, to the piranha tank and toss him in?

  “Please, help me,” Greenburg said, still shouting.

  The elderly couple was frozen, clutching their jewelry as if each piece were a memory they couldn’t possibly part with. The black woman was holding her sword like it was an infant child being put up for adoption. Low risk, Harvey decided. “We’re conducting a transaction,” Harvey said to the customers, “and simply collecting his information.” And he gestured for Omar to get Greenburg into the office.

  “Help me,” Greenburg said as Omar lifted him off the ground. He looked at the clerks, but they knew their places. He appealed to the elderly couple, but they shook their heads in unison. So he looked at the black woman, and their eyes met.

  “What’s in it for me, skinny white man?” she said.

  “Free dental care for the rest of your life,” Greenburg said.

  And then, wielding the Civil War sword like a samurai warrior, with astounding grace and speed for a woman with breasts the size of Catawba melons, she crossed the pawnshop and held the razor tip of the blade to Harvey’s Adam’s apple. It happened so quickly that Omar had no time to reach for his Glock and was still holding Greenburg in the air.

  “Tell the ponytail to put the dentist down or you going to breathe through a new hole in the middle of your neck,” the black woman said. She had a gold tooth in her
smile that caught the light and bounced it into Harvey’s eyes.

  Harvey could feel the tip of the sword digging into his skin. Any increase in pressure and the sword would thrust through and open him up, and he would bleed out and die. “Release Dr. Greenburg, Omar. We’ll collect his information another day.”

  The giant put Greenburg down and let him go, and the dentist walked to the black woman. “Donald Greenburg,” he said, and he sniffed in hard, hoping for nostril residue.

  “Ramona Clifton. What you think?” she said, showing off her smile.

  “Beautiful,” Greenburg said, and he leaned across the counter so that his face was close to Harvey’s. “You want my information, you piece of shit? I wrote you a limerick on the way here. A talent agent named Miller, Had a client who was a real thriller, She came out of the fog, And breathed life in my dog, A giant fuck you to his killer. Ha. Figure it out from there, you sadistic son-of-a-bitch dwarf.” Then he signed the contract on the counter, picked up the envelope, and waved it at Harvey and Omar. “You get the keys, I get the cash. A deal’s a deal. Do you have a car, Ramona?”

  “You got gas money?”

  “Fill her up.”

  “Pedal to the metal.”

  Greenburg went out the door into the blazing sunshine, and Ramona backed out behind him, holding the sword with both hands, ready to slice somebody in half.

  “I ain’t never selling this sword,” she said, and then she was gone.

  The elderly couple took their jewelry and followed the dentist and the samurai into the heat. The clerks went back to work as if nothing had happened. Omar walked to the counter. Harvey was rubbing the spot on his throat where Ramona had placed her Civil War sword.

  “Breathed life in my dog,” Omar said.

  “A talent agent named Miller,” Harvey said.

  SHE’S NOT KIDDING WITH THOSE WEEDS

  Jenny Stone’s mother did not do as directed. She had driven her daughter to Greenburg’s office and, instead of waiting, had left her stranded. So Danny had to take Jenny home to the flatlands of Northridge, near White Oak Boulevard and Hiawatha.

  He had left the dentist’s office in a state of amazement after witnessing the Breath of Life, yet his mind refused to accept what he had seen with his own eyes. The film in his head ran over and over, again and again, but the story stayed the same. The goldfish had died on the desk. It was dead. Jenny had pulled it from the bowl and dropped it in front of Greenburg, and it had suffered a violent, painful death. It was a fact. They had seen it happen. And then Jenny had breathed on the fish, and it came back to life. No matter how many times he replayed it, the fish came back to life. Holy shit, Danny thought, Holy freaking shit.

  His mind was racing. He could hardly contain the mad rush of thoughts and ideas and feelings flying through him. He had witnessed a sight unseen since Christ himself—the dead had been risen. Yes, it was a goldfish in a bowl, but it was impossible and wonderful and miraculous and sensational and shocking and humbling and awe-inspiring. The world had changed, and he would never be the same in it. Everything would be different now that Jenny could raise the dead—his life, his view of the universe, his relationship with the nature of things worldly and otherworldly. The knowledge that the impossible was possible was too much for him to handle. What would he do now? What would he say? How could he translate The Goldfish into words and deeds? How could he live a life worthy of such a transcendental modulation?

  I’m going to get so rich, he thought.

  He knew that one day he would look back at the seventy-five grand from Greenburg as small change. Wealthy people would pay more than that. Hollywood royalty would pay through the teeth to bring back their dead pets. There were too many possibilities in play, too many angles to consider. After tonight, when Chachi was wagging his tail in Greenburg’s living room—living room, ha, the perfect name—he would gather his thoughts. But he couldn’t do that yet. It was too soon. He was as confused as he was excited as he was overwhelmed. There was no way to wrap his mind around The Goldfish. And there was no way to wrap his mind around Jenny Stone.

  What the hell was going on with her? She was sitting beside him as if she hadn’t just taken and then returned life to Greenburg’s fish, as if her day had been ho-hum-plain-Jane checking groceries. And what was with her look? When she first came to his office, she was a little mouse with a Catholic school skirt and knee socks. Her hair was pulled back tight, and she wore zero makeup. She had tried to be nowhere, noticed by no one, and she had succeeded.

  Then at Ralphs, when he signed her as a client while she was working, the Pumpkin in line behind him, Jenny was wearing makeup. He had forgotten about that until she walked into Greenburg’s office.

  He had been shocked by her appearance, so taken aback that he had physically stood up. Not because he was being polite but because he had to do something and standing was his only option. The highlights in her hair, the sundress, the makeup and the jewelry and the green eyes—she had worn thick glasses, but weren’t her eyes brown like coffee? Anyway, now they were green. And they were pretty. She was pretty.

  He glanced at her. They had not spoken during the trip to her house except for her telling him to turn here and turn there. He wondered about her life. Did she date? Had she ever been married? For all he knew, she was married now and not wearing her ring for, well, who the hell knew why she wouldn’t wear her ring. No, he decided, she couldn’t be married. Who would marry a woman that could raise the dead? Her relationships would never get past that little detail. Men would run for the hills the first time she blew on a dead fern or fish. It would be too much, too freaky for them. Her relationships would be doomed to fail. That was most likely her life story. And then thinking about failed relationships made him review the story of his own life.

  There was no shortage of women. He looked like Brad Pitt. There were women whenever he wanted one. But they never went anywhere worth going. Most of the time they were dull, and he lost interest fast, or they didn’t like that he was a talent agent or that he bet on the horses or that (for the last three years) he lived off his mother. One way or the other, the whole thing would fall in the shitter after a while.

  So what? He’d liked to play the field. He liked his life, his women, and his horses fast and loose. Commitment was overrated. (Look at his mother and his miserable asshole brother.) In their own way, relationships were like going to the track. Which horse would run? Which one would punk? Who would finish? Who would place? He had never been married. He had never even been close. If there were a woman out there who could hold his interest or whose interest he could hold, he hadn’t found her yet.

  He had decided to ask Jenny about the hair and the makeup and the sexy red sundress when she pointed through the windshield and said, “That’s my house.”

  It was a sky-blue Craftsman cottage with a covered front porch enclosed by a wood railing and framed by brick columns that tapered toward the top. A brick walkway from the street led to wide steps that rose to the porch. It would have been a cute house if it weren’t altogether skewed at odd angles. There were no straight lines. The shingled roof, the door, the windows, the railings, the brick columns, even the wide steps, were off kilter.

  Jenny saw the confusion on Danny’s face and said, “This was the epicenter of the Northridge Quake in ninety-four. The house was abandoned and empty for years after that. We bought it from the bank for pennies on the dollar and didn’t fix it all the way.”

  Danny remembered the Northridge earthquake. He was a teenager at the time—four thirty-one in the morning on January 17. The small yellow house shook like the devil himself had hold of it. The very first violent jolt cut all the power in the Valley and beyond, crumbled freeway overpasses, leveled apartment complexes that crushed the cars parked below them, caused twenty-five billion dollars of damage, killed some, injured many, scared the skin off everyone else, and woke him and his mother and his brother and sent them screaming in the dark to get the hell outside. It had last
ed twenty seconds that seemed like twenty minutes.

  However, seeing Jenny’s crooked house and remembering the Northridge Quake was not the reason for the confusion on Danny’s face. Instead, it was the sight of Jenny’s mother murdering the scrubby front lawn that made him recalculate his equations.

  “And that’s my mother,” Jenny said without emotion as Danny pulled the Pathfinder to the curb and turned off the engine.

  “What’s she doing?” Danny said.

  “Killing weeds,” Jenny said. “Her name is Margaret. She goes by Maggie.”

  “She’s not kidding with those weeds,” Danny said, and he and Jenny climbed out of the Pathfinder and started up the front walk.

  Maggie was sixty-five years old with weathered skin that looked like leather. She was five foot eight, strong as an ox, and, Danny thought, swinging her serrated grass whip with its eleven-inch blade and hardwood handle like a wild woman with a golf club, looking to make trouble. She wore a denim shirt with the sleeves cut off, white Capri pants that came to her calves, blue Crocs, a wide-brimmed sun hat, and gardening gloves.

  “Who’s the Pretty Boy?” Maggie said, swinging her way across the lawn to where Danny and Jenny waited on the walkway.

  “Danny Miller, Maggie Stone,” Jenny said. “Mother, this is my agent, Danny.”

  “Agent?” Maggie said with a cocktail of derision, condescension, and scorn. “What kind of agent drives a piece of crap Pathfinder?” And she walked to the Pathfinder, kicked a tire, and answered her own question. “A piece of crap agent.”

  “Mother,” Jenny said.

  “What year is it, Pretty Boy?” Maggie said.

  “Mother,” Jenny said.

  “1998,” Danny said, wondering where in the world this woman was coming from. He was going with the flow because this was Jenny’s mother, and Jenny was his golden goose, but he already had a bad feeling about Maggie Stone.

  “How many miles?” Maggie said.

  “Hundred fifty-six thousand,” Danny said.