Tea Cups & Tiger Claws (14 page)

Judith looked like she
might come unglued right then and there, but she didn’t. “Alright. Alright. Stop crying. You can say something. Just stop crying and come down here and say it.”

Veronica scampered down the aisle. Mother stepped aside and daughter
stepped up to the podium, but it was too tall. She looked up at her mother.

“Everyone can see you
, Veronica. Just say what you have to say.”

“It’s too tall
. I need a chair.”

“There is no chair!
”

Before
Veronica had a chance to launch into another fit, the first man who spoke, the one from Yucky D, jumped up and slid the podium over to where he had been sitting in the front row, on the opposite side of the aisle from Dorthea. He then knelt in the aisle, held down the hinged seat, and told her to climb onto it. She climbed right up and grabbed the podium like a pro. She wore a turquoise poodle skirt, a white short-sleeved blouse, and saddle shoes. Dorthea had seen this outfit on plenty of teenagers but not on any six year-olds, but she figured nobody up at the castle had guts enough to tell that to the little princess.

She unfolded a brownish piece of paper
, the kind used by first graders, where she’d written a few sentences with big, tilting letters and an abundance of eraser smudge. In a loud, crisp voice she said, “My father signed this paper and he said if I read it to you, you have to do what it says.” With her limp brown hair and narrow face, she didn’t have the commanding beauty of her mother, but she certainly knew how to take command. “Are you ready?”

“Uh…yes, Miss Veronica, by all means,” said the
mayor.

“
‘To the Prospect Park Town Council, I want you to vote for the hotel.’”

The people gasped.

“Veronica, you get down from there this instant! He said no such thing! This is absurd!”

“Mother! Please! I’m trying to read!”

Surprised chuckles and hissing whispers passed in a wave across the chamber.

“‘I want you to vote for the hotel,’” she continued reading. “‘It’s a good hotel and I like it. If you don’t vote for
the hotel you will be in big trouble. Signed William Newfield.’ Now you have to do what he says.”

Wild a
pplause and cheerful shouts rang out. Judith grabbed onto her daughter’s arm and tried to drag her off the seat, but she slipped away and jumped to the floor on the other side of the podium, out of her mother’s reach. The mayor pounded his gavel over and over to quiet the crowd, and then said, “Miss Veronica, may we have a closer look at your paper?”

“No
, you may not!” said Judith.

“Yes, you may,” said Veronica, as she held it out to the
m. The clerk rose cautiously from the safety of his desk to retrieve the letter. After handing it to him, Veronica leaned over the half wall partition and turned her head to look down the row at Dorthea. With a big smile she said, “And don’t forget, Aunt Dorthea, we have a deal.”

“She is not your Aunt!” yelled Judith
. The words boomed loudly from her mouth, bounced hard off the walls, and caught everyone by surprise, resulting in a moment of stunned silence, which quickly cracked open into riotous laughter. The flatlanders laughed their asses off, plain and simple, and the little princess from Sunny Slope Manor joined right in. Judith stared in disbelief, then turned around and walked up the aisle to leave the building, cutting through the laughter like a lone pedestrian cutting through fog.

Besides Judith, another person in that auditorium didn’t join in the laughter
: eleven year old Sarah Evans. As Dorthea’s eyes followed Judith on her grand exit up the aisle, they caught sight of Sarah moving in the opposite direction. She looked as sad as a little girl could look without actually crying. She came to the bottom of the aisle and held her hand out to her cousin. Veronica ignored the gesture.

When the
mayor pounded his gavel this time, the people quickly came to order. This most recent endorsement, from a Newfield no less, even a six year old one, had put momentum on their side. Nobody went to the podium when the mayor made the half-hearted offer. They wanted the vote, which they got without further delay.

Going down the row of councilmen, Mr. Fletcher, on the far right of the Mayor, voted yes, in favor of the hotel. The people cheered, the mayor pounded his gavel.
When Mr. Wainwright voted yes as well, they cheered louder, but quickly shushed themselves back into order, lest their bad behavior might somehow invalidate things. They sat up straight and leaned forward, looking for only one more vote to put them over the top. The mayor turned to Mr. Gunther, on his immediate left. Without raising his eyes to look at the people, he voted no. The crowd murmured and quickly locked eyes onto Mr. Jorgensen, who had no such guilty conscience and looked out easily among the people, surely a favorable sign. But with a loud, clear voice, he voted no as well. An audible sigh filled the room, and two hundred bodies slumped into their seats. The mayor, the only member of the council who lived on the hill, held the deciding vote. They had lost.

“And I vote yes,” said the
mayor. “The zoning variance and building permit are approved.”

At first the people stared, and
a few laughed, as some always do at a bad joke, but then the mayor banged his gavel, adjourned the meeting, and it hit them. Like beachgoers hit by a surprise wave, they’d staggered in confusion, and now popped up in unison, out of their seats, refreshed, energized, jubilant. The mayor had voted yes. They’d won! They’d picked the long shot, covered the bet, and watched her take it by a nose. With hugs and pumping fists and mindless shouts, they cheered like crazy sports fans.

And did they know how to cheer.
If nothing else, life on the sidelines in Prospect Park had taught them that much. Only this time, instead of playing the lumpy spectator, swilling beer, munching popcorn, and admiring the local heroes as they drove by in limousines and Rolls Royces, they got to run alongside one of their own. They got to cheer one of their own. They got to cheer themselves. Dorthea might’ve appreciated the small part they’d played but that didn’t make the spectacle any less pathetic.

After taking handshakes, and pats on the back
, and hugs from overwrought simpletons, she looked to the left, hoping to catch sight of Veronica, but instead caught Sarah staring at her. And she kept staring, wearing the only frown in a sea of smiles, almost scowling, really.

What a strange evening
, thought Dorthea. First six year old Veronica kicks her mother in the shins and fearlessly leads the charge, then eleven year old Sarah stares down a grown woman and takes her to task for who knows what unpardonable sin. Who knew children could be such bullfighters? Who knew they could be so wonderful?

And that was the gift Dorthea received that night. Not
the hotel. Not the pats on the back. Not the pleasure of poking Judith in the eye. She received the gift of children. If Veronica Newfield had the guts at age six to shove her mother out of the way, just imagine what she’d be capable of at age fifteen or sixteen. Even average teenagers gave their parents hell and Veronica promised to be way above average. Dorthea had wasted half her life trying to enter Prospect Park’s front door when all along the back door had been left wide open. Let the old money dinosaurs have their little club. Their kids belonged to that club too. Let the stodgy guard dogs prowl the gate. Their kids had a key to that gate. Let them uphold their sacred standards. Teenage kids hate sacred standards and have been throwing such things in their parents’ faces since time began. And Veronica Newfield, with Dorthea’s help, would do the same.

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.

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 neve
r 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,” lie
d 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.”