Concrete Angel (36 page)

“D
o you think Christine might have any idea of how to deal with this? The money I’m forking over to that school should buy me something useful.”

Bud and Eve were driving home from Wilmington in a stinging rain, trying to make their nine o’clock deadline. Adele had told Eve flatly she wouldn’t keep Ryan past nine.

“Why can’t he spend the night?” Eve asked. “He loves to sleep over.”

Her mother refused, saying she needed some time to herself. “He’s always awake once or twice a night. You forget how old I am. It’s not like it was with Christine. And where is it you go three or four times a week, Eve? Why does a masseuse need to travel so much? And overnight trips?” The pipes howled as she turned on the kitchen tap to fill the kettle. “I know you’re up to no good.”

“He’s not a masseuse, Mother,” Eve snapped. “He’s a physical therapist, a holistic consultant. He gets referrals throughout the tri-state area now. His out-of-state patients pay for his gas and time, you know.”

Adele shook her head. “And why is it you have to go along with him? What exactly do you do on these trips?”

“Oh, it’s hard to explain, Mother.” When her mother continued to stare at her, she added. “He likes to have company on the drive. Narcolepsy, I think it’s called.” Her mother was stymied by the word. “He falls asleep at the wheel.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Evelyn. You’d better drive.”

E
ve had no idea how she came up with that one.“For the love of God, don’t speed, Bud. Especially not in this weather. All we need is for some cop to pull us over and go through the car.”

She glanced back at the rear seat where various folders and a few unreturned items sat. They’d have to return them at the King of Prussia Mall or something. It was always easiest to return merchandise at the store where you purchased it, but sometimes it didn’t work out.

He slowed down. “You know what they convicted Al Capone for, don’t you?”

“What the hell are you talking about? Speeding?”

He gave her a look of disgust. “They convicted Capone of tax evasion when they figured out how much money was sitting in his bank account. He couldn’t account for it. That’s the thing. You have to show where money came from. Keep records”

“Why would anyone think to look at our bank accounts? And we have a few dummy ones, right? Your guy set them up? It’s not all in two accounts?”

Bud shook his head. “We need someone smarter than Willie Bishop. He’s okay for making fake IDs, stuff like that. But not for this kind of thing. We need someone smart enough to hide it good.”

“I don’t think Christine knows enough about such things to “hide it good” if that’s what you have in mind. It’s not something they teach in an introductory business course. Plus I don’t trust her anymore. She’s moody. And this boyfriend of hers…”

“You don’t trust her? After all the stuff you told me? She took the rap for you with the beverage salesman, right? The one who put the moves on you?”

Is that what she’d told him? She couldn’t remember exactly. Pillow talk. When she thought back on her life, there was a gauzy curtain over parts of it. Maybe the haziness was a result of the drugs she’d taken. Or the shocks. Hank and his bevy of doctors had made her loopy. Burned through essential circuits in her brain, clogged them up. Something.

Bud reached over and fiddled with the radio. “Disco might be over, but damn it ruined music. Will you listen to this shit?” A wailing voice filled the car. “Who the hell are
Jack and Diane
?”

Eve shrugged. “Find an oldies station. Yeah, Christine helped me out back then. It was shoes, wasn’t it? He sold shoes. How ridiculous.”

“I think you said you met him in a shoe store.”

“Oh, right. Soda, he sold soda. Anyway, recently Christine’s turned into a —daddy’s girl. The two of them hover over her course selections, spend time together every weekend. It figures Hank would take an interest in her now she’s an adult—after I put in all the hard years—supported her all this time.” She brushed his hand away from the dial as another song began. “Hey I love that song—
Private Eyes
. Leave it on.”

“Those two are the biggest fags I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

“You don’t know that. And so what if they are. It’s a cool song.”

They crossed into Pennsylvania, a sign announcing it. The rain had tapered off and Eve finally relaxed, listening more intently as Bud said, “Anyway, we’re getting off the subject here. We need to deposit this money in banks. Lots of banks, lots of accounts. I heard some guy in Florida refer to it as smurfing.”

“You mean like those little blue squirts on TV.”

She guessed giving each one of those Smurfs an occupation was the only way to tell them apart, to sell more than one to kids. She remembered one with a hockey stick, another on a bike. A mushroom hut to live in. What the hell were they anyway? Smurfs?

He nodded. “That’s where the term came from. For our purposes, you get a lot of little squirts or Smurfs to head out to a lot of little banks, open accounts, and deposit small sums. I’m talking a dozen or more. Two dozen even. Spread the wealth around.” He thought for a minute. “You don’t want more than a hundred bucks or so in each account at first. You don’t want to attract attention. Smurfs are the kind of people you get to deposit small change. They get a little cut.”

She shook her head. “No way am I gonna bring a dozen people into this. Remember what happened with my return business. I was practically a wage slave of the postal carriers union by the time I pulled the plug. Let’s find something else. Some other way of hiding the dough.”

He continued patiently. “Don’t you have a few friends from your days at the hotel? They’d probably do it for some phony IDs, green cards—something easy to get.”

“Maybe. But in the meantime, maybe we can do it ourselves. We’re not big-time yet. We can open accounts in banks around here using various names and disguises.” A frown came over her face. “Let’s leave things alone for now. The more people, the more worries.”

“You’re thinking too small, Eve. Leave it to me. I’ll work it out.” He jerked the wheel suddenly as they almost missed Roosevelt Boulevard.

“Geez, I hate this drive. Let’s shop in New Jersey next time.”

I
got to Box#74 before I came on something interesting. Woolworth’s Five and Dime had sent my grandfather, Herbert Hobart, a letter in 1954, outlining certain conditions to be met to avoid the prosecution of his daughter for theft of several objects. This was a duplicate of the original, which he’d apparently signed and returned. My mother would’ve been sixteen. It was not one of Mother’s boxes, I noticed, looking at the top where it read Hobart. It was my grandfather’s records and included mostly tax information, social security paperwork. It was a miracle I went through it.

So Mother’s thieving had begun in high school. Not so unusual. Had she told me this story? Over the years, I had heard many tales but perhaps not this one. Did my grandfather’s antipathy for her begin with this?

The most unusual thing about her behavior was that it continued, unabated, for the next twenty-seven years.

More than a dozen boxes held the records of the return business, much of it in my childish handwriting. Along with the records, I found copies of letters various businesses had sent to Mother, some threatening her with prosecution for attempting to extort goods and/or money, some shaking a finger at her but nothing more.

I found the remnants of other endeavors, too: things I’d never heard about. Dummy receipts for items customers purchased at Morans Stationery Store in Hatboro in the early seventies. Receipts for more recent purchases of expensive items. I had only the faintest memory of Mother working at Daddy’s store. I found box after box of cheap jewelry, the tags still on them, things that looked like gold but weren’t. And finally, I found the box of transactions for the cars. Mr. Kowlaski’s antique cars. I assembled my own box of things and managed to get out of the house without too many questions from my grandmother.

“Find what you need?” my grandmother asked me, looking over the top of her glasses as she sewed a small tear in a terrycloth dishtowel. I nodded. “Hope your report gets a good mark,” she said as I left. “You’re a much better student than your mother. Can’t remember her once writing a report.”

“Oh, Christine,” she said as I headed for the door. I turned around. “You did leave it tidy, right? Just like you found it?”

Nodding, I left, wondering what her reaction would be if she knew what was really in my red-striped cardboard box.

I had no precise plan for these records, but knew they weren’t safe at home. A stray box would immediately attract Mother’s attention. Keeping an eye on things that entered our apartment came naturally to her. So I rented my own small storage box—finding a place she hadn’t used in the phonebook. I knew all the ins and outs of storage rental and my unit was hardly bigger than the size of a foot locker. But it was large enough for now. I badly wanted to talk with someone. Daddy? Grandmother? Aunt Linda? None of these possibilities felt right. These people had all jumped headlong into the murky waters Eve stirred years ago. Each had sins to cover, their own guilt or innocence to protect. None would want to admit they’d aided and abetted Mother in her crimes.

Of course, I’d played a bigger role than most of them. It was my childish handwriting on the returns; I claimed to have murdered her lover; I sat home with Ryan while she bilked Charlie Kowalski out of tens of thousands of dollars.

So Jason became my confidante. We sat in his car with the box between us. Where else could we go? I passed him documents, one after the other, watching the expression on his face. Every so often he exhaled his disbelief, but he didn’t say much. Just asked a sporadic question.

“Who’s this guy?” he asked when he got to the antique cars. I told him what I knew—which was little. We knew his name from the signatures and an address. I could only remember a few words here and there about “poor Charlie.” I hadn’t paid enough attention to her since I had begun to acquire a life of my own.

“My grandmother will fill me in. Mom kept house for him for a while.”