Authors: Delia Rosen

One Foot In The Gravy (15 page)

BOOK: One Foot In The Gravy

4.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

“All of it,” I said.

She looked at me, remembered her lemonade, and took a sip. “Don’t apologize for your entrapment. Despite its rather amateur conception and execution, I respect ingenuity. And I imagine you did not have long to plan it.”

“I did not,” I said.

“No, you did not take time to rinse the odor of grease from your hair. I infer from all this that Detective Daniels came to you during lunch?”

I nodded.

“If I weren’t so fiercely grateful to whoever did this, I would offer to solve this case for him. As it is, I hope they get away. Though I trust you will have the good manners not to tell him that,” she added. “He might think the killer was me.”

She took my silence as assent.

I felt all kinds of inept, not to mention embarrassed, as I walked the bicycle back to the car. I would have to tell Grant the story, of course, at least the bulk of it to make sure it was true. It probably was. There were too many elements that could be easily checked.

The one uncertainty that lingered, though, was whether she might have done it. One of the hallmarks of any good lie—and this is true in business as it is in crime—is to keep as much of the story as real and airtight as possible. The lie is best disguised by hiding it in the truth.

Once again I was leaving an interview with a little more information and no clear idea where it belonged.

Chapter 18

If you’ve never had one of those epiphanies that makes you question everything about your present life and tries to convince you to chuck it out the window, all I can say is you’re not missing anything.

I wouldn’t say the experience with Helen Russell had been transformative in the way that a bad relationship or mugging can be. But it wasn’t good. It reminded me how alien I was here. This woman of the Old South had not only made me feel out of place, she’d made me feel like an idiot. The smart, master’s degree New Yorker led by the nose into a brick wall by a one-time belle who—I checked in the online social register as soon as I got back to the deli—had graduated with a bachelor’s in art history from the Christian-identified Belmont University. Quite possibly a great school, but it wasn’t NYU.

I changed into my work clothes, wanting to get out of the sweats. I shoved them hard in the small locker I kept there. I didn’t want to see them again, maybe ever. I’d got my ass kicked, and I fought the urge to get on the next jet back to my home, back to the great melting pot where the Trumps and the homeless live side by side—at least as viewed two dimensionally on Google Earth.

What stopped me, ironically, was something Helen had said: how she wasn’t going to let Hoppy dictate her moves. She was right. I couldn’t let her dictate mine, as much as I absolutely wanted to for the rest of that long, long afternoon.

Thom noticed something was wrong, but didn’t say anything until after we locked the door.

“You want to talk about it?” she asked as we counted out the day’s receipts.

“I do, but I shouldn’t.”

“Why? Is it those cops you were talking to?”

I was surprised she had made them; then I remembered Deputy Chief Whitman had been at the party we catered. Duh. “It isn’t the cops, though it should be, right? Talking to cops about a murder, wondering if you might be a suspect. . . .”

“Are you?”

“Huh? No!” I said. “That’s another thing that’s wrong!”

“That they don’t think you killed Hoppy? Girl, you lost me.”

I took a breath, stopped trying to count singles. “What I’m saying is that all the normal reflexes were not working, until now. After all these months I’m finally having the right reaction to being here.”

“And that is?”

“Flight, as in ‘fight or flight,’” I told her. “I’ve got panic going on, big-time.”

“New boss lady, that’s just your mental house settling, telling you you’re here.”

“It’s more than that,” I said.

“Hon, you have to relax—”

“I can’t.”

“You got to.”

“No, don’t you see? It’s like everything has caught up to me at once and is piling on: moving from New York, the divorce, changing my career, playing detective instead of playing
Bubble Ball
on my cell in the subway. What the hell am I doing? What the hell was I
thinking
?” I looked at her looking at me. I couldn’t tell if she was concerned, confused, or hurt; probably all three. “It isn’t you,” I added. “I like you. A lot.”

“And I like you,” she said. “Which is why I’m holdin’ back hittin’ you in the ear with this roll of nickels.”

I looked at her left hand. It was a fist and it was pumping lightly at her side. “What would that accomplish ?” I asked.

“If it didn’t clear
your
head, it would make me feel better,” she said. “I hate when the Devil gets the upper hand.”

“The Devil? Thom, I just described why I’m suddenly scared out of my head and you introduce a unified theory that has nothing to do with it.”

“I don’t know what you just said, but the Devil is at the root of every bad thing that happens, every bad decision we make. He plays us like that app you described. He helps move us through events with a hand that’s familiar but ain’t no friend. He takes us to a place where we are weakest and therefore he is his strongest.”

I didn’t want to insult her faith or her intelligence. “I didn’t need anyone’s help getting here,” I said. “I did it all by myself.”

“You only think so,” she insisted. “Do you mind if I ask you something? Something personal?”

“Go ahead.”

“When did you first know your marriage was over? I don’t mean when you first suspected and not when your divorce papers finally got signed. When did you know there was no turning back?”

I thought about that for a moment. The bottom of my throat began to constrict. “When I was looking in the mirror and saw a girl that wasn’t in her twenties any longer and realized that that face, with its couple of wrinkles from age and lots of lines from stress, was going back on the market.”

“In other words, you were alone.”

“Oh, yeah. Very.”

“That, honey, is when the Devil gets you.”

I took a moment to let that Medieval notion seep through all the filters of my Jewish upbringing. We have no devil, at least not like that. Our demons are guilt, mostly self—

“Crap.”

“What?” Thom’s fist was no longer moving. She was all big, inquiring eyes.

“You aren’t wrong.”

“Talk to me.”

“It isn’t the upheaval that’s killing me. It isn’t what other people do to me. It’s what I do to myself, what we all do to ourselves. Guilt. Remorse. Fear. Insecurity.”

“You got it. God tests us,” Thom said. “He sends famine and floods and even crabby customers. It’s the Devil who tries to make sure our worst instincts come up to deal with those challenges. I heard something in church about a year ago, something I truly believe: that the door to hell is locked from the inside. I see you doing that right now. Turning the key, backing away, wanting to run.”

“Maybe,” I said, my doubts rising again. “On the other hand, who says that going forward is the right thing? Sometimes it makes sense to fold and get out of the game.”

“Uh-huh. So why not just hang yourself and get out of all the games?”

“That’s a little extreme,” I said. “I just listed a buttload of things that have piled on. I’m feeling the weight. It’s natural to want to get out from under it and go back to where the world makes some sense. How do you know I wasn’t running when I came here? Some people would say that was weakness, leaving New York.”

“Do you think it was?”

“No. I think of it as a fresh start.”

“So would leaving here now be a fresh start?”

“No.” I had to think about that.

“No is right. It would be running. You know the difference.”

She was right again. Tragically, that made me want to run from her. I saw her and suddenly didn’t know her. Who was this woman? What was this
place
? There was nothing comforting or safe. From me, the zones of unfamiliarity radiated outward : the street without a single Chasid, the block without a street vendor selling Rolex knockoffs from a battered briefcase, the city district without a porn shop, the metropolitan region without anyone I knew a year before. Each one of those was an impenetrable circle—

Like the circles of hell.

I shuddered and exhaled loudly. It must have been loud enough that Thom thought I was going to pass out or something, because she slapped the nickels in the till and grabbed my arms with both hands.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“He left you,” she guessed.

“What?”

“The Devil. You chased him away.”

I hadn’t; I was guessing that what just happened was a mini-anxiety-attack. Tension had been building since I got down here, like pressure under a crystal plate, piling on until I’d just vented it out.

It came again. I breathed in, then out—more than I’d taken in—and the deli got a little tipsy. My legs trembled and refused to hold me upright; Thom was on it and hugged me to her, supporting me, keeping me from falling.

“Holy crap!” I said.

“It’s okay,” she cooed.

“Holy
crap
!” I repeated, and I started to cry.

“Let it all out. Thomasina’s got you.”

This time, I took her advice. With effort, I raised my arms and laid them on her shoulders and heaved out tears I had been holding back for months. I felt her cheek against my tears, her heart against my breast, her hands patting me.

I felt like I hadn’t for about thirty years: like a kid frightened by a big, strange world with only two people I could rely on. In a way, though, it was just what I needed—to go all the way back and start over again on a different path.

“You’re gonna get through all this,” Thom said.

I was too busy crying and sniffling to answer.

“I know ’cause I been there,” she went on. “It gets a bad rap from all you Northern type folk, but it really does work.”

“Wh-what does?” I choked.

“What just started for you,” she said. “Being reborn.”

There was no way Thom and I had the same view of that word or what had transpired. But I couldn’t dispute the fact that I felt better after my cry. I didn’t want to be my usual argumentative self, so as we resumed closing I admitted that I felt—“renewed” was the word I used. She didn’t want to badger me then either, so she accepted that. In her mind, I’m sure, God was responsible for it all anyway.

I don’t know. Maybe He was. My accountant’s brain had always had problem with the logistics, like Santa Claus; it isn’t possible to take care of everyone on the planet. But I wasn’t a rabbi and I didn’t pretend to have the answers. Only questions.

After locking up, we had an impromptu girls’ night out. I wasn’t a big drinker and Thom didn’t believe in the stuff so we started our little adventure at Starbucks. I had always hated the fact that they were all over Manhattan, like a fungus, but I had ended up going there out of convenience, for a fix, when my Chocolate Cherry wore off; now I was glad to be in one. It was a touchstone. For a flashing instant, I could have been in the West Village or on Fifth Avenue or on the Upper East Side. That helped to settle me further, like an architectural Tums.

I used snatches of the familiar there to nail my feet to the ground. The smell. The heads bent over cell phones or underlit by laptops. The texture and design of the napkins. I felt like crying again, grateful for the reconnection, but that was pushed aside by embarrassment. I was angry at myself for having a positive response to a chain store. Then I was re-angry at myself for complicating something that didn’t need to be complicated.

Get thee from me Satan.

We followed the not-bad Joe with a trip to the Mall at Green Hills, where we shopped for utensils we needed at the deli and clothes we didn’t need in our lives, after which we bought a box of doughnuts and went to the nearby Limpscomb University campus. We planted ourselves on the grass. The night was warm and a couple of stars were visible and there were students moving here and there. If I squinted my puffy eyes we could have been sitting in Central Park after a free concert by the New York Philharmonic, waiting for the crowd to leave before venturing out.

“Okay,” I said as I licked creme filling from my fingers. “I guess I’ll stay.”

“You guess?”

“I’ll stay,” I told her. I lightly pounded the ground like a ladylike gorilla. “I’ll definitely stay.”

“To prove something or because you want to?”

“Probably both,” I said.

“Glad to hear it,” she told me. “You gotta look at beat-downs as learning experiences, not defeats.”

“I guess.” That went against my heritage. My mother and both of my grandmothers and, now that I thought of it, all my aunts were in-your-face arguers. It didn’t matter whether they were right or wrong; to them, every loss had to be a Pyrrhic victory for the other side.

“What say we head back?” she suggested. “The sugar rush should carry me home, after which I do need to collapse.”

“Me too,” I said. I was physically and emotionally tapped-out.

I packed up what was left of our baker’s dozen of doughnuts and we left arm-in-arm, drawing frowns from some of the students we passed. Maybe to them we were devils. Lesbian devils. It’s funny the things you can get wrong about people when you rely on first impressions.

Which, as it has a way of happening in my life, brought me back to the matter of the murder of Hoppy Hopewell. And Helen Russell’s performance this afternoon before her grander—truer?—performance. How much of that, how much of what the others said and revealed, was a lie? Or, at the very least, a withholding.

I would stay in Nashville and I would hit this thing hard and I would find out who killed that son-of-a-bitch.

I was back.

BOOK: One Foot In The Gravy

4.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads