Tea Cups & Tiger Claws (31 page)

Mack
looked down at the line by his feet that surrounded the guard station and said, “Yes.”

“
Next time you put a foot inside that line, you’re gonna find your face on the floor and a knee sticking into the back of your head. Understand?”

Mack
stepped away from the line and said, “Ok.”

“Brimwahl,
McKinley, T,” said the escorting guard to one of the men at the station, who responded, “C one-three. We’ll put the goat roper with the stoner. That should make for some interesting pillow talk.”

The guard then took
Mack down one of the rows and stopped in front of a ground floor cell. On the lower bed, which looked like an oversized wall shelf, Mack saw a prisoner lying on his back reading a book. The empty top bed had the same shelf-like appearance. A small desk with an attached bench sat across from the beds, bolted to the wall. A metal toilet, sink combination sat at the back of the cell. Under normal circumstances, Mack might’ve been overwhelmed by anger, or shame, or disbelief. On this afternoon, though, Sarah Evans dominated his thoughts and not much about his current predicament had registered.

A clanking noise echoed through the building, the cell door slid open
, and the guard shoved Mack into the cell. After the door closed back up, he told Mack to stick his hands through the bars, where the guard then removed the handcuffs. Mack turned around and saw the cellmate’s sleepy eyes peering at him from over the top of the book. Mack nodded. The eyes went back to the book. Mack went to work pacing. And thinking.

“Listen, man, that’s not going to work
,” said the cellmate after a few minutes. “No pacing, man. I don’t care if you snore, or talk to yourself, or shit like a gorilla. I can handle that stuff. I can’t handle pacing though. It makes me nervous, like I’m locked up or something and that’s not cool.”

“
Ok. No pacing,” said Mack. “Listen, what happens when my lawyer gets here? How will I know?”

The stoner
stared long enough for Mack to understand that he didn’t care for rookie jailbirds, which Mack had already guessed, then said, “Same as what just happened, except backwards. They call your name. You stick your hands through the bars. They put on the cuffs. You step back behind this line on the ground. They open the door and off you go.”

After that
Mack kept his pacing mostly under control. Instead, he stared at the guard station and strained to hear the sound of his name being called.

Three long hours later they
called it and, back in the interview room, Mack found Millington sitting at the table with tired eyes and a worn face. He’d checked again at Prospect Park PD, at Sunny Slope Manor, at the hospital, at her house, and had found no trace of Sarah.

Mack
, once again handcuffed to the table, tried to jumpstart his brain by awkwardly rubbing his face with both hands. “Did you find her car?” he asked.

“No.”

“How about the cop who followed her out of Sunny Slope? Did you talk to him?”

“He said
he followed her down to Center Street and that’s the last he saw of her.” 

“
How about Grant Wynnethorpe?”

“He’s out of town and nobody at the
senator’s house has heard from her.”

“How about Dorthea Railer, what
do you know about her?” asked Mack, and almost immediately that same uncomfortable look swept over Millington’s face. This time Mack knew he hadn’t imagined it.

“I
don’t know her.”

“
I asked what you know
about
her, not if you know her. And you don’t have a very good poker face. What are you hiding?”

Millington stared
for a few seconds. Then he cleared his throat and started to talk, slowly and quietly. “There used to be a detective in Prospect Park by the name of Bainsteader, real ambitious, determined to make captain by thirty, that kind of guy. Well, after he got hired, he found out that making a name for yourself in a place like Prospect Park isn’t all that easy. So he got a little aggressive. He had a case working on a man by the name of Robert Avellini, who’d gotten the bright idea to sell drugs to the kids on the hill. Since you can’t drag those kids to jail, Bainsteader decided to let Avellini dangle for a while to see if it might turn into something better. And it did. At least that’s what he thought. One day he tailed him to the Park Royale Hotel and watched him go inside. He waited. And waited some more, but he never came back out. Two weeks later, they found his burned-out car down in the wash. Bob Avellini never turned up again, and neither did his body, but they did find Dorthea Railer’s phone number in the car on a charred piece of cardboard. Without talking to his superiors, Bainsteader decided he had enough evidence to bring Dorthea in for questioning. Fifteen minutes later the chief himself walked her right back out the door, apologizing every step of the way. A week after that, Bainsteader fell in the parking garage and cracked his head. It must’ve been quite a fall because he died before making it to the hospital.” Millington stared blandly at Mack for a second and then he stood up. “That’s the kind of story you hear about Dorthea Railer…if you’re unwise enough to admit it.”

When he leaned over to press the buzzer,
Mack knocked away his hand and said, “What are you doing? We have to do something. We have to find her.”

Millington said nothing.
Mack stood up and faced him as best he could with the tether. His fuse had been lit, but he also saw that little red buzzer and knew that once they put him back into the cell, he had no chance to help Sarah. With darts for eyes and an iron jaw, he said, “Listen to me. Listen to me. You’ve got to get me out of here. I don’t care what you say. Tell them I did it. Or make a deal. Or get me bail—everyone gets that, right?”

“I’ll do
it, Mack, I promise, but I’ve got to be honest. The DA’s not happy with this whole thing and he’s going to make you wait the full forty-eight hours for arraignment.”

“No! No!” yelled
Mack, the last of his composure gone. “You can’t let them do that! You have to do something!”

“I’m sorry,
Mack,” said Millington, as he looked down at the buzzer.

“No! You have to get me out of her
e!”

“I’m sorry
, Mack,” he said again. Then he took two steps backward and knocked three times on the metal door. It immediately flew open and Mack saw a frowning guard with a wooden baton.

~~~

Sarah heard someone moan, faintly, as if filtered through a fog. Slowly the sound of distress grew louder and more persistent until it seemed that the person had to be very nearby. But where? She saw no one. Finally, when the sound grew loud enough to penetrate her stupor, she woke up and realized that she’d been the moaning, hurting person, and the first barbs of consciousness revealed why: her head felt like a throbbing bucket of mush.

A violent wave of nausea rose up when she opened her eyes
. She reclosed them and held back the vomit. After a few deep breaths, and rolling her pounding head from side to side, she tried again and this time managed to ride out the nausea with open eyes. The strange thing, though, was that she still couldn’t properly focus. Some sort of yellowish object seemed to be just in front of her face, but she had a hard time making it out. She blinked repeatedly and took more deep breaths. Slowly her vision became restored and she saw, not more than a foot away, a hideous skull with long buck teeth tilting from a gaping mouth. She tried to scream but the bile in her throat stifled the effort.

“That’s Bob.
Sometimes he likes to stare.”

Her body shook, her heart beat wildly, and it took
all her strength to turn toward the voice. She saw a man with a knife. He sat at a wooden table and had a partially peeled apple in his other hand. Sarah looked past the knife and saw a badly scarred face and shaggy gray sideburns. Her hazy brain struggled to remember where she’d seen the face. Then she said, “You’re the one I saw.”

“I’m a loyal subject who does what he’s told,” he said, as he snatched a slice of apple into his mouth like a snake.

Sarah stared for a moment and then looked back at the skeleton on her left. Though its upper body and head leaned over toward her, it actually stood against a block wall, held in place by heavy chains anchored to the wall and attached to its wrists.

“Bob didn’t used to look like that
but then the maggots got to him. And the summer heat. But mostly the maggots.”

She looked at herself, also chained to the wall with a primitive black metal cuff around her left wrist, but instead of standing, she sat on a
cold, dirty floor. Her right arm, from elbow to wrist, had a bandage on it. “What did you do to me?” she asked.

“It’s chloroform. It
knocked you out.”

“And what about my arm?”

“It got scraped when I brung you down here. I bandaged it for you.”

Sarah
looked around the garage-sized space and saw four walls made of cement block and a ceiling and floor made of concrete. With all that cement, and a distinctive musty smell, it had to be some sort of basement. The unadorned light bulb hanging from the ceiling confirmed this conclusion. Other than the wooden table and chair where the man sat, the only other items she saw were two buckets to her right and a footlocker along the far wall behind the table. She looked for a way out and saw a narrow corridor on the left. It rose steeply but had no stairs, just a ramp that looked hard to climb. “Where am I?” she asked.

“The
royal dungeon.”

“Royal…as in special?”

“Royal as in it belongs to royalty?”

“
Please don’t tell me you’re talking about Dorthea Railer.”

“She makes people bow down
, don’t she? That’s what royalty does.”

With the crash course
she’d recently taken on Dorthea Railer, Sarah knew that any dungeon with that name connected to it had nothing to do with harmless medieval nostalgia and everything to do with death. She had a reputation for destroying enemies, not for renaissance role playing, and unless Sarah wanted to spend eternity comparing bone structure with Bob the bucktoothed skeleton, she had better get control of her panic and think of a plan. With no other available options, she decided to concentrate on the kidnapper, who seemed to be more than a few gallons short of a full moat.

“What are you going to do with me?”

“I do what the boss lady tells me to do.”

“What did she tell you to do?”

“Nothing…yet.”

“What happened to Bob?”

“The maggots did it.”

“I’m not talking about that. What did Dorthea tell you to do to him?”

“Stab him in the heart with my knife.”

“And did you do it?”

“Yes, but he died of natural causes.”

“That’s not natural, that’s murder, and it makes you a murderer.”

“No! An executioner ain’t no murderer. The executioner is always forgiven. It’s common courtesy.”

“Who forgives you? Dorthea?”

“Yep.”

“There’s on
ly one problem with that, Mister: Dorthea can’t forgive anything. That’s why we have judges and prisons…and the electric chair! You’ll end up in the chair instead of Dorthea. That’s her plan!”

He abruptly stood up and pointed to the buckets. “That bucket has water in it and the other is your toilet. I have to go.” He walked
toward the narrow corridor with the ramp.

“Dorthea’s going to blame everything on you and the police will take you away in handcuffs!”

“No they won’t. They’ll let me go, just like before. The boss lady told them to let me go and they did. And they don’t bother me no more.”

H
e climbed the ramp and disappeared from view. And she sat there, shackled to the wall, numb and paralyzed. A few seconds later the floor started shaking and a rumbling noise bombarded her ears. The disturbance, whatever it was, came from the corridor and grew steadily in intensity until the floor beneath heaved and bounced and the walls thundered all around. The noise grew from a one note rumble to a cacophony of rattling, shuddering and groaning. She held her breath and covered her ears. Then it stopped. The room went dark, and she sat there, drowning in blackness.

Dorthea barked at the driver and vapor shot from her mouth as hot air met cold winter night. Ernest watched from inside the limousine. He knew her moods better than he knew his own, and tonight he didn’t like what he saw. It probably had something to do with her scheme at Sunny Slope Manor. On most days she hid the anger behind all that rich lady make-believe culture. Like a mountain river, she ran cold and hard, but confined. On some days, though, when the anger overflowed the banks, when the put-on culture got washed away, she traded in her sophisticated little dagger for Ma Barker’s Tommy gun and started mowing people down.

The driver opened the door, she got into the car, and a few seconds later they pulled out of
the circular drive in front of Sunny Slope Manor.

Mowed down by
Dorthea. Most people didn’t have to worry about stuff like that. People like Sarah and Mack. Ernest had seen them that first day at Sunny Slope. They looked into each other’s eyes and talked to each other. They didn’t worry about tomorrow. Ernest wanted to be like that, but since dead people never come back to life, he didn’t expect it to ever happen. Veronica, who slouched next to him on the rear seat that faced Dorthea, looked dead herself. Or at least half dead. If she had any sense, she’d wake up and run. He could tell her but it wouldn’t do any good; dead people, even half dead people, just don’t care.

The car turned left onto Sunrise
. A few blocks later it turned into another driveway on the right side of the street. The driver pushed a button, spoke into the box, and then drove through the gate after it opened. At the bottom of the driveway Ernest saw a man wearing a red smoking jacket and a cravat. The car pulled up next to him. He looked tired. Dorthea lowered the window and the man handed her a slip of paper. Dorthea put the paper on the edge of the liquor cabinet, handed Ernest a pen, and told him to sign it. He obeyed without question, as did Veronica when Dorthea put the pen into her hand. Dorthea then tore off the carbon copy and handed the top copy back to the man. “Make sure this gets recorded with today’s date,” she said. She then raised the window and told the driver to leave.

“You two are married now,” said Dorthea, as the car climbed the steep driveway. “You might as well look like it.” She then handed a large engagement-wedding ring to Veronica, a gold wedding band to Ernest, and told them to put them on.

~~~

Frank Izzo pushed
the food around the plate and monitored the buzz down in the country club dining room. He’d actually tasted the boeuf bourguignon, because the chef wanted his opinion, but not the roasted carrots and shallots. There he sat. Waiting. Doodling his food. He heard the sound of clinking plates, tinkling glasses, and tried not to think about the food and wine that might not get paid for. Each time the room grew quiet, he looked up like a worried father who waited up for his wayward daughter. Dorthea Railer was coming to dinner.

He didn’t know what to do, short of putting a partition around her, so he’d back-slapped and joked, and poured free champagne
; maybe if he got everyone happy enough, and drunk enough, a little thing like hatred might slip their minds. That had been his plan. In the end, after noticing some uneasy stares and feeling like a hawker for the worst sideshow in the carnival, he went upstairs earlier than usual. At eight o’clock sharp the wet blanket fell again, smothered his perfect little world, and left nothing but the uneasy sound of silence. He peeked over the railing and saw glistening haircuts and piled hairdos swivel in unison as the customers tracked Dorthea, being led by the grim faced maître d’ to a table in the middle of the room, as she’d requested once again.

Then,
just as the sinking feeling made its way to the pit of Izzo’s stomach, something happened. He heard gasping, not loudly, and not out of fright, but out of surprise, honest and pure. Following this, a quiet murmur, worthy of the most sordid of scandals, spread through the entire dining room. Izzo stood up by the rail for a closer look and saw the reason: Dorthea’s party of three included none other than Veronica Newfield, scrawnier then the last time he’d seen her, and quite sickly looking too, but definitely Veronica Newfield. The princess had chosen to dine with the pretender. Interesting. Might it possibly be a reprieve, he wondered. After all, how do you snub a Railer without insulting a Newfield when they’re sitting at the same table?

The party
, which also included a skinny, dark haired young man, took their seats. The other guests continued murmuring. Izzo held his breath.

“What did you say?” yelled old Mr. Grant from the patio side of the room.

“Merda!” said Izzo, unable to check the cuss word. “Not him again! Shouldn’t he be in a nursing home?”

The old man’s wife
leaned across the table and her ample bosom vibrated as she whispered enthusiastically. “Who?” he yelled. She whispered some more and before Izzo knew it, all eyes watched the geezer with the scruffy white sideburns shuffle out of the room, napkin still tucked into his collar.

“Merda! Merda! Merda!”
said Izzo, as the same nightmare, with the same bloody ending, unfolded before his eyes. He stood there, frozen, and waited to see who’d be the next out the door, which also seemed to be the question on everyone else’s mind as his once happy patrons looked around, one stony face at another.

Finally
, a man with a flashy bow tie and paisley vest stood up. No, not the mayor, thought Izzo. If he went out the door, the floodgate would surely open.

Ev
eryone watched in utter silence, not so much as the sound of a fork grazing a plate, as the mayor walked solemnly toward the exit. When he came upon Dorthea’s table, however, he stopped, turned, and bowed deeply. Veronica looked around and squirmed. When he had reclaimed his stature, Dorthea offered a curt nod. The mayor then returned to his seat, and the sound came back on, with quiet murmuring at first, then talking, and then the comforting clatter of commingling knives and forks and plates and glasses. Izzo fell into his seat, grabbed a napkin, and wiped the sweat from his brow.

He didn’t know
to whom the mayor had bowed, Veronica or Dorthea, but it didn’t matter. Just as it didn’t matter that Izzo had never had a particularly high opinion of him, being a politician and all. Everything was different now. Bribe taking? Power grabbing? Bad speech making? It didn’t matter. The man was a saint.

As for old
Mr. Grant, until he found himself a happier mood, he’d be seated as close to the front door as possible. Period.

~~~

The good people of Prospect Park first heard about Veronica Newfield’s scandalous marriage from the people who’d seen her at the country club…with a wedding ring on her finger…in the company of Dorthea Railer and her little puppet of a son…who had a wedding band on his skinny finger as well. This almost unbelievable rumor proved to be all too true when the next day’s newspaper carried an embarrassingly brief article about the marriage, accompanied by separate photos of Veronica and Ernest. The article stated that the young couple had chosen a private ceremony out of respect for the recent passing of the bride’s mother, which seemed interesting considering this same grieving bride didn’t have qualms about throwing a winter ball in the wake of her mother’s passing.

In home after home,
both up the hill and down, the good people clucked their tongues and said, “Better for Judith Newfield to be dead than to witness such horror.”

For Veronica the reality of the marriage began to sink in the next morning when she saw something staring at her from her bedroom nightstand. She raised her head from the pillow, brushed the matted hair from her face, and looked closer. On the nightstand stood an elephant figurine, about ten inches tall, with a raised trunk and something sticking out of its mouth. She pulled on the thing in its mouth and out came a tiny spoon with white powder on it. She sat up, looked intently at the elephant, and poked around until she discovered that it had a hinged skull, which, by lifting up on its trunk, revealed a secret compartment. This secret compartment had more coke packed into it then she’d ever seen at one time.

Without a second thought, she drove the tiny spoon into the top of the figurine, took out a scoop of white powder, and put it to her nose.

There’d be no rationing bullshit this week, or trying to fool her raging body with booze and sleeping pills, thanks to Dorthea’s little wedding present. And that’s what it was, because, unless her brain had gone completely faloupoo, she’d married Ernest Dodd last night. And she didn’t care. Creepy Dorthea had come through again. She should’ve moved in a long time ago.