Aces Full

by Alan Lee

“Ronnie,” I said.

  “I’m going for some…food. Take out. Chinese, maybe.”

  She got to her red Mercedes and fumbled with her keys.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Who is she? No, don’t disclose that. Seeing her was a surprise, that’s all.”

  She was scratching the paint with her keys. I placed my hand on hers. She trembled.

  “It’s not locked,” I said.

  “I can’t make my hands work.” She kind of laughed. “I don’t have any right to be jealous, Mackenzie. I know that.”

  “True.”

  “It’s just…every time I park at this house I know I don’t belong. And a girl like her, she does. And she’s so pretty, and I know I can’t keep you.”

  “Relax,” I said. “Take deep breaths. You’re stronger than this. I’m right here.”

  “You’re the only good person I’ve ever met, the only good person who sees me, or is trying to, and I’m ruining it.”

  I squeezed her hand. “That’s Candice Hamilton. A defense attorney from northern Virginia. We’re working together. We’re colleagues.”

  “You don’t need to explain. I don’t deserve it. I know I don’t, not yet. It was just the shock of her walking out of your door.” She was talking as if from a trance, staring hard at her hands. “I can’t breathe. I don’t know what to do because I feel like I’m drowning, or you’re drowning, or Kix is drowning, and I don’t know how to save any of us and I’m running out of time and oxygen.”

  “That’s fear and abuse and abandonment talking. It’s messing with you. Which is nothing to be ashamed of. You’ve earned the right to struggle through a few abandonment issues.”

  “Fuck, I’m pathetic.” She wiped at her eyes. “You’ve put up with so many surprises of mine and you never cried.”

  “Balderdash. I cried.”

  She went a little limp and leaned against me. “That woman is pretty and she’s the type of girl who deserves you and I want you to be happy. Did you really cry over me?”

  “Of course I cried. I’m smitten with you,” I said. And I squeezed her hand, which still held the keys.

  “Ugh. I’m a mess. I can do this, Mackenzie. I promise. I can get to a point where you being near another woman won’t send me into a tailspin. If you’d warned me beforehand…"

  “That makes sense. You’ve been through a lot.”

  “Damn it, she’s cute and my face is destroyed.” She wiped more at her cheeks. “And she’s already acting so fucking proprietary and intimate towards you.”

  I laughed.

  “She’s lonely and a little needy,” I said.

  “I won’t kill her. I promise.”

  “Good to know. Baby steps.”

  The screen door opened again. Fat Susie, looking unhappy.

  Ronnie took a shaky breath, then another, and called, “Let’s go, Reginald. I’ll get us burgers or chicken or Chinese or something.”

  “Good,” he said, coming down the stairs. He moved well for a big guy. “Manny only got salads in there.”

  Ronnie put her free hand flat on my chest and pushed, getting herself a little space.

  “I’m fine. I promise I am,” she said.

  “Fine as hell,” I agreed.

  “I’m serious. It doesn’t look like it, but I’m much healthier than I was months ago.”

  “Yeah but your face is purple,” I said.

  “I’m not jealous. I don’t get jealous. That’s not something I get to be, after what I put you through.”

  “Okay.”

  “But if you sleep with her, I’m going to key your car. And have sex with everyone you know. And send you the photos.”

  I squeezed her hand a final time. “Not sure those are baby steps.”

  She smiled. “You’re in love with a train wreck and she expresses affection through irrational covetousness.”

  “I never said I’m in love with you.”

  “Maybe do a better job of picking whom you fall for, Mackenzie. But not her. Please.”

  “Fat Susie,” I said. “I’m serious. You see Darren Robbins or Toby or anyone, you fire your weapon. If you see them, they’re coming for Ronnie and they’ll kill you too.”

  “You got it, white man.”

  Ronnie kissed my check and opened her car door.

  “Ronnie,” I said.

  “Yes Mackenzie.”

  “Stay safe.”

  “You got it, white man,” she said.

  20

  “I need to prove Grady Huff had feelings for Juanita Yates,” I told Kix at the breakfast table. “And that his romantic notions were reciprocated.”

  I don’t care, said Kix.

  Then he proclaimed something enthusiastically about his Cheerios and ate one, carefully guiding it into his mouth.

  I drank some coffee.

  “But I don’t know how to prove that.”

  Where’s the blonde lady? I miss her. She always kisses my face. The other woman, she was too preoccupied with herself and her heinous daughter.

  “So you know what I’m going to do?” I said.

  Put some chocolate syrup into my milk?

  “I’m going to pester people.”

  Kix raised his milk.

  What a coincidence. Those are my plans today too.

  Claytor Lake was smaller than Smith Mountain Lake and the houses perched on the shoreline less expensive. With enough digging, however, gold could be found in them there hills, and it was to those more affluent neighborhoods that I steered.

  The day was gray and moisture hung in the air like a veil. The lake sat smugly at two thousand feet above sea level and it held onto the chill.

  To complete the disguise of classy and erudite gentleman, I wore my overcoat and jaunty herringbone cap and driving gloves. I knocked on ten doors off Cedar Point, near Ms. Yates’s small brick ranch. I showed the six people who answered a photograph of Juanita Yates and asked, “Do you know this woman?”

  They did not.

  I followed with a second question, “Do any of your neighbors have their house cleaned professionally by a young Hispanic girl?”

  The first five people did not.

  The final woman glared and closed the door.

  No dice.

  I drove to another affluent neighborhood, farther away from Ms. Yates and repeated the process. These houses were stately and colonial, newer construction off Cardinal.

  The first lady, middle-aged, a little chubby in the neck, short bob haircut, flowery shirt, said, “Yes? Do I know you?”

  I raised the photograph. “Apologies for the intrusion. I’m looking for this girl. Do you know her?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t.” She made ready to close the door, clearly overwhelmed with my genteel smile.

  “She was a cleaning lady. Maybe if your neighbors—”

  “You know,” she said, interrupting me. “Now that you mention it, that girl looks like the Mexican woman I’ve seen driving around. But in the photo, she’s younger.”

  “Mexican.”

  “One of them places down south,” she said and she closed the door.

  I knocked at her neighbor’s.

  A man answered, less decorous than me. He looked about seventy but still fit. He had a good tan for his age, and a lot of silver hair. Gold chain around his neck. It wasn’t noon yet but he had a White Russian in his left fist.

  I showed him the photograph.

  “Maybe I know her,” he said, looking from the photograph and back. “Why you asking?”

  “She was murdered several months ago.”

  The man hooted, “Murdered!” He threw open the door and stepped aside. “God almighty, that’s why she quit showing up!”

  I went in, out of the chill, and he closed the door. We remained in his foyer, tastefully decorated with nude paintings of women. Plus a tasteful marble statue of a woman who was nude and happy about it.

  “You’re kind of a big fellow, huh?” he asked.

  “I gotta b
e. I’m compensating.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t have pornography in my foyer,” I said. “And I feel rotten about it. So this girl, did she clean your house?”

  “She had just started. Less I miss my guess, that’s Carlotta.”

  “Carlotta,” I repeated.

  Ah hah! A clue. She used different names. Less inspectors might’ve missed it, but not me and my jaunty cap.

  Elementary, my dear Watson.

  He said, “Right, Carlotta. Sweet girl, with an ass like a butterball ham. A friend recommended her. But after her second cleaning she vanished. I suppose she went and got herself killed, huh.”

  I pretended to make a note in my phone.

  “Sweet girl…ass like…a…butterball…ham. Got it.”

  He looked mildly alarmed.

  I said, “Who recommended her?”

  “Hey now, just a damn second. Are you looking for her killer? I’ll guaran-damn-tee you it wasn’t my pal.”

  “We already know who killed her,” I said. “The guy confessed.”

  “The killer confessed? What kinda nut job…don’t he watch cop shows? Never confess!”

  “Right? What an idiot. Can I get the name and number?”

  “Hell, I’ll do better than that. He’s my next-door neighbor. Or he was. His wife still lives there. She can tell you where he is, the rascal, though he shows up here now and then.”

  He marched out in flip-flops and started across his damp front lawn.

  “You in the market for a boat?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “I am not.”

  “Make you a good deal. I got dozens.”

  “Do you have speed boats?”

  “Sure I got speed boats!” he said.

  “I hate speed boats.”

  He turned enough to squint at me, look me up and down, and kept going.

  The neighbor’s house was built into the side of a hill, above the water. The front was only one story, but the land fell away in the back and exposed three stories. There was a metaphor in there somewhere…

  He banged on the green slab door and shouted. “Sally! You home?” He tried the knob. “Sally!”

  A minute later a woman answered. Maybe forty-five and severe, her eyes sharp and cut at us unhappily. Black turtleneck, black slacks.

  “George, you know I don’t like when you shout. What business do you have over here? None that I can imagine,” she said. “Who’s this, who’s your friend?”

  “Carlotta got herself murdered!” hooted George the speed boat salesman. “You believe it?”

  “I have nothing to say about that girl.”

  “God almighty, murdered. I had wondered where she ran off to.”

  I tipped my cap to the woman. “Mackenzie August, ma’am. Carlotta was murdered and her killer is in custody. I’m doing some follow-up questioning.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know how I could help.”

  “Can we talk? Five minutes,” I said.

  “You’re with the police?”

  “Franklin County sheriff’s office.”

  It was mostly true.

  She made a little shooing motion. “Run on home, George. I’ll speak with your friend. Run on.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he said, turning towards home. “Cute as can be, that Carlotta. Who’d want to kill her?”

  Sally let me in. She closed the door and locked it. We sat on white wicker chairs near a coat stand. All the rooms I could see were sparsely decorated—plain and serious, like the owner.

  “That George, banging on my door every few days, always with a cocktail.”

  I showed her the photograph.

  “Look familiar?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s Carlotta, plain as day. She used to clean our house.”

  “And then one day about six months ago she quit showing up?”

  She arched a thin and imperial eyebrow. “Oh no. I ran her off before then. She tried to get fresh with my husband.”

  Ah hah! A romantic tryst with a second client. So it wasn’t just Grady Huff.

  Had Juanita/Carlotta been so irresistibly nubile and vulnerable that every male client was destined to fall for her? Or was something more disquieting and baleful at play?

  I pushed my cap backwards and whistled.

  “Is that so.”

  “Surely is. I ran her off and then a couple weeks later I threw him out too. Got so I couldn’t stand the sight of him,” she said.

  “Your husband.”

  She had a way of speaking, with her head cocked, that lent her righteous indignation. Like a disgruntled southern baptist preacher.

  “Alvin, yes. He’s still pals with George and he comes banging on my door asking for forgiveness every few days.”

  “How’d you know Carlotta tried to get fresh with Alvin?” I asked.

  “I saw it with my own two eyes. At the boat dock.”

  At the boat dock. Which is where Grady Huff had shot her, at his own dock.

  “How’d she take the news, when you fired her?”

  “Well, I suppose, it wasn’t all her fault. George, he’s a philanderer. Been caught half a dozen times with his pants down. Carlotta, she handled it as a girl ought. She struck me as contrite and mortified. Left without complaint.”

  “How old is Alvin?”

  “Fifty-one.”

  “And you believe Carlotta, a cute twenty-five year-old, was desirous of him?”

  “Alvin,” she said with a faint smile. “He’s always been a charmer. He has his ways.”

  “That Alvin sounds like a rascal.”

  “Surely is.”

  “Where’d you learn about Carlotta’s housekeeping services? A reference?”

  “You’d have to ask him. Alvin, I mean.”

  “Where can I find him?” I asked.

  “A bar, probably.”

  “You have his number?”

  “I suppose I do,” she said.

  I stopped at a gas station in Radford to fill up my shiny spaceship and took the onramp north towards Roanoke.

  After a few miles I realized the same black sedan that’d followed me into the gas station was hanging off my tail at a distance of a quarter mile.

  A coincidence?

  I slowed.

  After a half minute delay during which the gap between us shrank, the black sedan slowed too.

  “Zounds,” I said. “Evil doers.”

  I slowed further, dropping to forty-five and hoping to get a glimpse of the plate number, but the pursuing criminal masterminds kept their distance.

  “I need a crime-fighting canine companion,” I told myself. “To whom I could make pithy and laconic jokes about situations such as these.”

  The cosmos did not reply.

  Exit 141 came over the hill and I gunned the engine. I took the pretzel offramp at sixty-five, executed a highly illegal and highly sexy maneuver which involved running the stop sign, cutting through traffic on 419, nearly causing an accident, and hiding in the parking lot at the LaQuinta Inn.

  And I lay in-wait within the crowded lot and my own smuggery.

  Twenty-seconds later the black sedan rushed to the stop sign and braked hard enough to squeal the tires. From the distance, I couldn’t make out the plate but discerned there were multiple villains within the sedan. The sedan waited. And waited some more, to the frustration of the cars piling behind.

  “Where’d I go?” I wondered on their behalf. “How’d I get away so quickly? Raw skill? Supernatural driving ability?”

  They had to be goons hired by Darren Robbins, that no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing hack of a prosecutor, the ex-fiancé of the girl of my dreams.

  The car behind my pursuers, tired of waiting, honked.

  The sedan burnt the tires, spun in a circle, cut across the oncoming traffic, and raced down the northbound ramp and fled into the distance. Sensing a trap, perhaps.

  I tried to follow but at the poignant moment in time an elderly couple stepped in fron
t of my car, on the way to theirs. She moved slowly and her doting husband stayed with her, hand under her left arm. Their progress was discernible but only just. They reached the far side and she noticed me in the driver’s seat. She raised up a little bit, smiled, and waved.

  I debated running them over.

  Or explaining to them that their advanced age had spoiled my fool-proof snare.

  But they had charmed me. And one day in the future I hoped to be helping the love of my life to our car, and I’d rather a young and shockingly attractive man not run us over.

  So I waved back.

  21

  Tuesday afternoon I was driving to meet Alvin at All-Sports Cafe when Marcus Morgan called.

  “August, you got your meeting,” he said. “A meeting of the muscle and the minds. Over a game of poker.”

  “Atta boy, Marcus.”

  “You ‘atta boy’ me again, I break your right knee cap.”

  “But that’s the leg I use for the gas pedal. And of tantamount importance, the brake,” I said.

  “Meeting is Saturday night.”

  “That’s forever.”

  “I asked him to lay off you til then. Cashed in some credit. Toby’s another story, though. Darren wanted Friday but we got our first playoff game that night,” said Marcus.

  “We? You playing?”

  “No. My son is, you know this. And I live vicariously.”

  “When you’re on speaker phone, your voice loses some of it’s gravel. You’re less Idris Elba and more Steve Urkel,” I said.

  “Now I think about it, I hope Darren shoots you in the ear.”

  He hung up.

  All-Sports was your typical local bar—designed on a budget with no real theme other than loud paint and a panoply of televisions. Drop ceiling, black chairs and stools, shiny tables, framed sports pictures, pendants, jerseys, that kind of place.

  Alvin stood from the bar to shake my hand.

  “Mackenzie?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Alvin Bradley.”

  Alvin was thick around the middle, the face, and every where else. He had a full head of hair and decent brown beard. Open face, eyes maybe too closely set, and he wore a Coors Light rain jacket.

  I signaled the bartender and he wandered over.