Tea Cups & Tiger Claws

by Timothy Patrick

  Of course it meant she had to wait for the little monster to grow up, but it also meant that Dorthea finally had a plan. She intended to execute various details of that plan immediately.

  Chapter 9

  Walter Tubbs, a big man with a quick eye and an eager smile, left San Francisco in 1957 and didn’t plan on going back. Not after getting sacked and run out of town. The senior partners had wanted to do more than that but didn’t have a stomach for bad publicity. So they secretly replaced the money he’d stolen from a fiduciary account and made him disappear. He didn’t go to prison and didn’t lose admission to the bar, which meant he still had the means to make a living anywhere in California—except San Francisco. And when he first drove into Prospect Park, and saw the mansion, and all that money on the hill, he knew he’d found a home. The fact that he had only eighty-seven dollars in his pocket, and couldn’t afford to go much further, also had had something to do with the decision.

  He’d miss the money. And the secretaries. And the chowder at Tadich Grill. The thought of starting from scratch at age thirty-one didn’t sound that great either, but what choice did he have?

  As the first order of business he set about establishing some semblance of respectability; that meant he needed an office to attach to his shingle. Due to certain pecuniary limitations, he resorted to waving his state bar membership card in the face of a few landlords; he hoped to impress one of them enough to let him slide on the rent for a month or two. They turned him down flat and told him to go to Santa Marcela where small offices came easy. That made him want to stay in Prospect Park all the more.

  After a final late afternoon rejection on a tiny office near the outskirts of town, he started wondering where he’d sleep for the night. He pushed through the office doorway, stepped onto the sidewalk, and heard someone say, “Hey mister. Come back here.” He looked back and saw the dipstick who’d just turned him down.

  “The boss says you can have the place. I don’t know why. She ain’t never done it before, but you gotta be caught up on the rent in sixty days, and make good on the deposit sixty days after that.”

  Tubbs stared at the man suspiciously.

  “So don’t take it then,” said the man. “You ain’t doing me no favors either way.”

  That’s what he wanted to hear, no favors, no strings. “I’ll take it,” he said, “and I’m moving in today.”

  “Uh…Ok.”

  Now he had a place to sleep.

  One of eight upstairs offices attached to a long central hallway, fed by a single stairway that led down to the street, his new digs boasted a whopping three hundred square feet, including a small reception room, and sat above Dietle’s Butcher Shop, whose proprietor, a round faced German named Gerhart Dietle, had a holding pen in the back where he received squealing pigs on Tuesdays, and groaning cows on Thursdays. After a few days of the noise and stench, Tubbs understood why the manager had come running after him. At that point nothing could be done. He needed to make some money. Out came the trusty old Philco 90 radio and Walter Tubbs went to work scanning police calls.

  Quick money didn’t happen easily in a small town like Prospect Park, big money maybe, but not quick, so at first he concentrated on Santa Marcela. He didn’t chase ambulances, but did chat it up with plenty of tow truck drivers, and when he got lucky came away with an address attached to one, if not both, of the smashed up cars. Injuries and insurance companies, that’s what he looked for. Besides car wrecks, that included almost any injury that happened on someone else’s property, from a slip and fall, to a dog bite, to one neighbor giving another a black eye. Those worked the best, the neighborhood altercations, because once the fists flew and people started calling the cops, it didn’t usually take too much work to find someone who wanted to talk to a lawyer. And when they really saw red, it made it that much easier to talk them into paying by the hour.

  He sowed his seeds and in six weeks had enough money to cover the rent. Six weeks after that he had enough to live on—provided he slept on a cot in the office.

  After a while he hired a part-time secretary, put a fancy brass nameplate on the wall outside his office door, and even got called up to the manor, which seemed to make a big impression on people, especially the property manager who’d rented the office to him. Adhering to the strictest code of confidentiality, Tubbs kept mum about the details of that meeting—in a way that left little doubt as to their profound importance. In truth, Bill Newfield wanted someone to transport documents back and forth between him and his accountants and attorneys in Santa Marcela. He wanted a courier with a law degree. Tubbs told himself that he’d gotten his foot in the door, and he took the job. If Bill Newfield trusted him that much, surely everyone else on the totem pole would trust him even more.

  It didn’t happen, not with the money on the hill, not even with the well-to-do shopkeepers and professionals down the hill. When they needed legal representation, or estate planning, or a divorce, they went straight to Santa Marcela, just like Bill Newfield. Somehow, before he even knew it, in the age old Prospect Park tradition, he’d been evaluated, categorized, and placed in a box that kept him where he belonged: in the gritty low lands. He didn’t have to work the scanner anymore, but squeezing nickels and dimes out of a bunch of blue collar dipsticks—still mostly from Santa Marcela—wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind when he set up shop. He wasn’t going anywhere and he knew it.

  On a steamy Friday afternoon in August, 1961, he sat alone in his office and contemplated two serious options: keep the window closed and fry, or open it and breathe pig and cow shit vapors. For now, he sat with a closed window in front of a fan on his desk, holding a swatter in hand for the flies that regularly swarmed in from the outer hallway. He’d undone his tie and shirt, which had turned a darker shade of white around the collar where sweat from his blubbery neck had migrated. He heard the mailman enter the hallway, no doubt letting in a new platoon of flies. The bronze doors on the other mail slots squeaked open and closed in sequence until his own slot popped open and a stack of mail tumbled to the floor.

  He shuffled through the usual bills and nuisance letters until coming to a thick envelope without a return address. Normally letters that thick came from the court clerk or the county recorder’s office, but they always had a return address on them. Plopping his large body back into the chair and hoisting his feet onto the desk, he slit open the mystery letter and instantly recognized the contents: cash. He lowered his feet back to the floor, and looked more closely. Twenty dollar bills. Lots of them. He removed the money, looking for a letter, but didn’t find one. He inserted both thumbs and raised the envelope to his eyes to see if it had gotten stuck. Nothing. He started counting, all the way to $2,000, more than he’d made in the last three months combined.

  Who owed him that kind of money? Nobody. Not even close. Could it be a mistake...a post office mix-up? He grabbed the envelope and studied it. Someone, probably a lady judging by the perfect handwriting, had addressed it to him specifically without any errors in the name or address. He didn’t have a clue. One thing for sure, it wouldn’t be going into the bank, not until he figured things out. This pile of money didn’t happen and nobody knew otherwise. Grunting as he leaned down to open the bottom desk drawer, he moved the low level detritus to the front, and slid the cash behind it. He closed the drawer and used a bare hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead. Then he sat still for a moment, thinking, before reaching back into the drawer and taking a small stack of bills. Might as well put it to use, he thought.

  The next afternoon, camped again in front of the fan, miserably hot and miserably hung-over, the screech of the telephone interrupted his recuperative daze. He picked it up and mumbled, “Walter Tubbs, attorney at law.”

  “Did you get the money?” It was a woman’s voice, low pitched, pleasant. He waited for his brain to wake up. The trouble had come, just like he’d suspected. He needed to be alert.

  “Who is this?” he asked.

  “Since the
envelope didn’t have a name that probably means you don’t need to know it.”

  “The answer is no, I didn’t get any money, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, when it comes, we can talk some more,” she said calmly.

  “Instead of that, why don’t you save yourself the trouble and pretend it’s already come?”

  “Because I want to know if you’re the kind of lawyer who takes money for a job before he knows anything about it.”

  “It’s never happened but I can tell you that’s not how I run my business.”

  “You don’t have a business. You run errands for the Newfields and make beer money off clerks and factory workers.”

  “I don’t know what your bag is lady, but I don’t want any. You keep your money…don’t even bother sending it.”

  “That will be difficult since you were out spending it last night until two in the morning.”

  Wondering who’d been spying on him, he briefly lost concentration, and then said, “And did you obtain a receipt for this supposed sum of money, or any proof to back up your story?”

  “None at all.”

  “Well, there you have it.”

  “Yes, there you have it…except you still haven’t told me what kind of lawyer you are. Are you the razor sharp negotiator? Or the flamboyant courtroom showman? Or a big company man who used to work in San Francisco?”

  Dead silence.

  “That’s right, I know all about you.”

  “Then you know where to find me. If you have something to say, you can say it to my face. This conversation is over.”

  “Even if I tell you there’s more money where that came from?”

  “What do you want lady?” said Tubbs, exasperated.

  “I told you. I want to know what kind of lawyer you are.”

  “I’ll tell you what kind I am! I never got your money, and you can’t prove otherwise, so you’re screwed! Does that answer your question?”

  “Yes it does, very well, but I knew it all along. Now you need to listen closely, because I have a job for you.”

  “What?”

  “I want to adopt a child, a boy or girl, it doesn’t matter, but it needs to be seven years old, born sometime in 1954 or 55. I want to get it from one of those old fashioned private orphanages, like they used to have twenty years ago, where they stack them in dormitories six rows deep and anybody can pick one off the shelf without too many questions. You won’t find any of those in California, but in Ohio and some other states you will. Use the money you got and when that runs out we’ll talk some more.”

  “And you need a lawyer for this?”

  “Not just a lawyer, Walter Tubbs, a special lawyer like you.”

  ~~~

  Except for his impressive girth, nobody really considered Walter Tubbs special. Or even average. As unofficial courier to Bill Newfield, though, he did have special connections. Dorthea intended to exploit those connections. In the meantime, the adoption business had been a way for her to recoup some of the two thousand dollars it had cost to reel him in, and, if he didn’t mess things up too badly, it also freed her up to arrange proper schooling for the adopted child, whoever it might be. Specifically, she needed to get the little mole burrowed into Tisdale Academy, where most kids from the hill went to school, including Veronica Newfield.

  Once again she turned to Abigail, whose own daughter, Sarah, also went to the school. Abigail had plenty of clout for such a task. Dorthea sat in the drab bungalow for an hour, making chitchat, groping her way through the drizzly fog of Abigail’s brain, before making her move and telling Abigail about the poor orphan who needed to go to school. Deprived orphans worked well with Abigail, Dorthea saw it clearly, so she got bold and laid out the whole plan, telling her that Tisdale Academy might open its doors if she, Abigail, introduced the child as her niece or nephew who’d come to live with her from Timbuktu. That’s when Abigail squirmed and looked doubtful. Knowing about her fear of telling lies, Dorthea explained that she needn’t worry about that because the child would be coming from Timbuktu; it would be her niece or nephew; and, to keep everything on the up and up, it could live with her till kingdom come for all she cared. Abigail sighed and scrunched up her face. In mouse language that equaled a flat out refusal.

  “What exactly is the problem, Abigail? Don’t you want the kid to get a decent education?”

  “Yes, I do. I’m happy about it, but….”

  “But what?”

  “Well…don’t you remember our agreement?”

  “No I don’t,” lied Dorthea. “What are you talking about?”

  “The one about Ermel.”

  Dorthea stared. “You’re still stuck on that?”

  “Yes…I’ve got a love package for her…the ladies from Bible study helped me put it together. It’s got a Bible and a winter jacket and powdered milk and all sorts of nice toiletries.”

  “Does it have swizzle sticks?”

  “No…silly, it’s not that kind—”

  “Alright, I’ll do it. As soon as the adoption goes through and we get the kid in school, I’ll set it up.”

  Abigail sighed and shook her head.

  “What now?” asked Dorthea. “You can’t even wait that long?”

  Dorthea had been cornered by a mouse.

  ~~~

  Twelve year old Sarah Evans sat in the back of Aunt Dorthea’s blue Cadillac and watched her nervous mother, who sat in the front passenger’s seat, as she mumbled and poked her hands in and out of the big gift bag that rested on her lap. Mother had been talking about this meeting for a long time. She wanted to give Ermel a hug, and hold her hand, and tell her that she loved her. Sometimes she cried when she talked about it. Sarah felt nervous too. People took advantage of her mother. Strong and pushy people. Mean and Sneaky people. People like Aunt Dorthea.

  Her mother had told her not to say bad things about Aunt Dorthea, but that didn’t stop her from thinking them.

  The car pulled into a dirt lot and up to an old looking wooden building. It didn’t look like a house. It looked like a shed, like the maintenance shed at Sunny Slope Manor, where the gardeners kept their equipment.

  “Looks even better up close, don’t you think?” said Aunt Dorthea.

  Her mother sat up straight and cleared her throat. Cousin Veronica, who shared the backseat with Sarah, scooted close and grabbed her arm.

  “And you’re sure she knows we’re visiting?” asked Sarah’s mother, for the tenth time.

  “It’s all been arranged,” said Aunt Dorthea.

  “Nine in the morning on a Saturday just seems like a strange time for a social call,” said Sarah’s mother. Then she turned toward the back seat and said, “Now remember girls, it’s not polite to stare…and don’t make a face if she offers you something strange to eat. Just say ‘yes, thank you’ or ‘no, thank you.’ And don’t be afraid if she gives you a hug.”

  “My mother said there are rats and lizards in there and I might catch a disease,” said Veronica.

  “Well, then, you’ll catch it while doing an act of kindness and those kinds of diseases are no bother at all,” said Sarah’s mother.

  “And I’m not supposed to call her ‘Grandma’ either, or go near the outhouses.”

  “That’s fine, dear.”

  The girls clung to each other and stayed behind the grown-ups as the group walked toward the shack. Aunt Dorthea led the way, but before she got to the porch, the door opened and a skinny, shriveled lady poked out her head. Everyone stopped in their tracks.

  She had a long cigarette hanging from her mouth, but it didn’t look like a mouth because it didn’t have any teeth in it. It looked like a bowl of mush. Her short hair stuck up in bunches, like clumps of withered corn stalks, and it made her look like she had bald spots.

  “What do you want?” she asked, squinting suspiciously at Dorthea through the smoke.

  “I don’t want anything, but this is Abigail, your daughter, and she wants to m
eet you.”

  “I’m so sorry Ermel…uh Mrs. Ermel…I mean Mrs. Railer…maybe you’d prefer that we come back later….”

  “Abigail? The one that run off with the butcher?” asked Ermel.

  “Yes,” said Dorthea.

  “Don’t look much like her sister.”

  “That’s just the way she dresses.”

  “And who are those there,” asked Ermel, nodding at Sarah and Veronica.

  “The big one is Sarah, Abigail’s daughter, and the little one is Veronica, Judith’s daughter.”

  Ermel stared for a moment, took the cigarette from her mouth, and said, “Veronica Newfield?”

  “Yes Ermel.”

  “Wait here,” she said. The door slammed and everybody heard Ermel’s feet pound on the wooden floor as she ran through the house. Then they heard a hissing whisper pass through the walls like there were no walls at all. “Wake up Clyde! Wake up! You gotta get in the other room! Quick like! And don’t come out ‘til I say so! And shove some of that mess in there with you. Hurry!”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Sarah’s mother. “Maybe we should come back later. She’s not ready to meet us…which is understandable…I think…since it was very sudden.”

  “She’s happy to see you. Can’t you tell? That’s why she’s running around like a little piglet. She just didn’t get herself ready in time, that’s all,” said Aunt Dorthea, who had a smile on her face, not a polite smile, but a smile that wanted to turn into a laugh because something was funny. Then she said, “You just watch, when that door opens again, she’ll have her teeth put in, and will be wearing a black and white satin dress with a big bow hanging to the right of the neckline. And watch out for the giant hat because it will knock you over if you’re not careful.”