The Covenant (24 page)

“She's fading. These last six months, her age finally caught up to her. I hoped she would live long enough to see my church built, but with everything, all the setbacks, and going to the courthouse every other day…” He sighed and sat at the edge of the pool.

“Did you talk to her about Jenny?” He furrowed the old brow and pretended not to know what I meant. “Jenny told me about her financial problems. That's why you wanted me to move in, wasn't it? To help out, pay a little rent.”

“That was one reason,” he said.

“I just thought if Ruth has as much money as you say, she could help Jenny.”

“If Ruth wants to help, she will.”

“But how will she know if you don't tell her?”

“She knows. There's little that passes in this community that Ruth doesn't know about. Anyway, Jenny asked me not to speak to Ruth about her troubles.” He downed the last of his beer and crumpled the can in his hand. “However, Ruth asked me to send you to her.”

“Me? Why?”

“She didn't say. Ruth is a private person. If she wants to tell you something, she'll tell you. If she doesn't want you to know, she lies well enough to fool the Devil himself. I've learned not to ask too many questions. She wants you to visit Monday morning.”

“Are you going to be there?”

“She asked to see you alone, and that you bring your camera. You can borrow my truck.”

*   *   *

My natural inclination was to ignore Ruth's desires. People who expect their least wish to be fulfilled without question rouse the worst angels of my nature. But I knew Deacon would hound me all day if I didn't go. His truck was waiting in Jenny's driveway Monday morning, keys in the ignition, full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes on the dash. Sweet home Chicago.

Nurse Wretched met me at the front desk, all smiles and apologies. If only I'd told her I was a friend of Mrs. Ruth's, our previous unfortunate encounter might have been avoided. She hoped we could start over. I said we could. She nearly wept. Outside Ruth's door she admitted she'd nearly lost her job. “Pastor Falgoust convinced her not to fire me. He's such a good man.”

“Convinced who?”

“Mrs. Ruth,” she whispered.

“She tried to get you fired? Because of me?”

“No, she wanted to
fire
me. She owns this place.”

Ruth was a regular jack-in-the-box. She had more surprises than Christmas morning. No wonder she lived in the penthouse of the old folks' home. I knocked on the door while Nurse Wretched retreated down the hall, banging her forehead on the carpeted floor. I hoped all this power wouldn't go to my head.

I entered without waiting for an answer and found Ruth sitting in her wheelchair at a desk of hand-carved, dark cherrywood that perfectly matched the shade of her lipstick. Her dress was white silk speckled with seed pearls, her earrings gold with black onyx or jet, her oxygen hose the very best medical-grade plastic. She was sitting perfectly upright with her head thoughtfully tilted to the side as though trying to remember the last line of a sonnet, but she was snoring.

On the desk lay a black-and-white photograph of Ruth wearing a 1950s-period white swimsuit over her svelte, un-period-like body, dancing with a beach ball in the middle of a street that, judging from the stoops that lined it, might have been somewhere in Brooklyn. Three men wearing loose jackets and slouchy hats sat on one of the stoops, leering at her with cigarettes in their mouths. In the distance a milkman watched her through an empty milk bottle held up to his eye like a telescope.

“Arthur Fellig took that picture,” Ruth said. She had woken soundlessly, without startling, like a person used to slipping out of bedrooms.

“Who?”

“Weegee,” she said. “Arthur Fellig. They called him Weegee. They said he must have used a Ouija board, because he had a talent for arriving at crime scenes even before the cops got there. He sold his pictures to the newspapers. You didn't happen to bring any cigarettes?”

I shook one out of my pack into her hand. She laid it beside the photograph on the desk. “You remind me of Weegee,” she said. “He was short like you. Same quirky eyes and quirky way of looking at things. He must have taken a thousand photos of me. Some of them would have got us both arrested, but this one is my favorite.”

She backed her wheelchair away from the desk and turned to face me. “I asked you here to do something.” She held out her hand. A bronze key lay across her narrow palm. She must have been holding it when she fell asleep, because I didn't see her go into her pocket. “This is the key to my deposit drawer at the bank. I want you to go there and get a box from it.”

I took the key and turned it over. The number was 066. “What's in this box?”

“You'll see.”

“But how will I know which one?”

“There's only one box. The bank manager is expecting you.” She glanced at the clock on her desk. “Before lunch,” she added, dismissing me.

 

33

I have two daughters who, as yet, have not known man; I will bring them out to you, and abuse you them as it shall please you …

—G
ENESIS
19:8

R
UTH'S BOX WAS IN THE VAULT
of the old Merchants and Farmers Bank in Malvern. It had somehow escaped the bank-consolidation fever of the previous decade and maintained its local ownership. No doubt the bank president lived in Sterling Estates. The Classical-styled building dominated the northeast corner of the town square, its double wooden doors facing the courthouse. It looked like the kind of respectable, small-change joint Machine Gun Kelly might have stuck up back in the day. Its marble floors were worn into grooves from the doors to the teller windows, where sat marble-faced tellers with blousing garters on their pinstriped sleeves. The manager posed like an undertaker, quietly rubbing his hands before taking my key.

Ruth had the biggest safe-deposit box in the vault, big enough to hide a body. Instead of a corpse, I found a cardboard box a little longer than a foot to each side, filled to the top with old photographs of Mrs. Ruth. Beneath it lay neatly stacked rows of bearer bonds and bundles of cash, all hundreds and twenties. There were also gold and silver coins, men's and women's watches, and a careless pile of jewelry, most of it antique. Just a rough guess said I was looking at a cool half million, maybe more, depending on the value of the bonds. I thought about how that money could help Jenny out of her difficulties. I thought about how much it could help me. I thought about how this was just the loose change Ruth had found under the cushions. All I had to do was dump the photographs back in the safe and fill the box with money and bonds, turn Deacon's truck south on I-55, drive until I hit water, then hop a shrimp boat until I reached a climate where it rained every day at four in the afternoon. I stared for a long time, until the bank manager cleared his throat just outside the vault door.

I locked up, returned to the nursing home and set the box of photographs on the desk beside Ruth. She held out her hand for another cigarette. “Did you see anything you liked?”

“One or two things.” The cigarette I'd given her earlier was gone. I hadn't smelled smoke when I opened the door and she wouldn't have smoked it in her room, not with the oxygen going. Maybe she'd bullied her nurse into turning off the gas or rolling her outside.

She said, “I hope you took something for your trouble.”

“Just the box you wanted.”

She shook her head, quietly wheezing. “Jesus Christ. It's no wonder you're poor, Jackie.”

“I'm not in the habit of taking other people's stuff,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I guess that's the way my mama raised me.”

“Do you think I need it? I haven't set foot in that bank in over ten years.”

“If you wanted me to have it, you should have said something.”

“Fortune favors the bold, my dear. If you took every penny, no one would be the wiser, certainly not me. I wish you had. When I die, Luther is bound to find out about it and the last thing he needs is more money.”

I offered to go back, but she declined. “No, it's too late. You missed your chance. Let this be a lesson to you. Playing by the rules is for chumps. My daddy Gus taught me that.” That was the second time I'd heard her call her father Gus.

“I wish you could have known him. When he inherited Stirling Plantation, it was mortgaged up to the short hairs. The land had gone wild because nobody was farming it. He used the old house as a hunting cabin. He quartered his dogs on the first floor and his whores upstairs. But after I was born, he determined to return the estate to the way he remembered it when he was a boy, when it was the largest cotton plantation between Memphis and Somerville. He wanted me to have something to be proud of when he died.”

She opened the desk drawer and took out a small black-and-white photograph. It had been kept folded at one time, probably in a pocket, as the print had degraded along the fold leaving a line of white paper almost down the center. The photo was of a young woman, almost a girl, undoubtedly Ruth, standing with one laced-up boot resting on the running board of a Ford Victoria, a revolver nearly as long as her arm tucked into her belt. Beside her sat a striking Hollywood handsome whose face seemed familiar, though I didn't recognize him right away. I wondered if I'd seen him in a late movie. He held a black .45 automatic, one elbow propped on the butt of a double-barreled shotgun. A winking smile twisted his Clark Gable mustache. The Gladstone bag sitting on the fender was overflowing with loose cash.

“We fancied ourselves the Bonnie and Clyde of West Tennessee,” Ruth said. Gus looked maybe five years older than Ruth, if that, but even by a generous estimate he couldn't have been younger than thirty and was possibly closer to forty. “Gus did whatever it took to buy back the farm. He moonshined, ran whorehouses and crooked dice games from here to Memphis. Robbed, stole, blackmailed and fenced. He never did a hard day's work in his life, because work is for chumps. A rich man gets the chumps to work for him. That's how he gets rich. Gus taught me that, too. He was a pirate and I was a pirate's daughter. We lived life to the balls, sucked the marrow out of every day. I wouldn't trade a minute of my life for a year of yours.”

“How old were you in this picture?” I asked.

“Twelve or thirteen.” She looked like a grown woman. And now I recognized where I'd seen the man before—in Nathan, only about thirty pounds lighter.

“These photographs are almost as valuable as anything else in that safe-deposit box,” Ruth said. She opened the box and showed me her pictures. “These are all of me, my whole career. When I was younger, I dated all the best leading men in Hollywood, several politicians, a couple of generals, three colonels, an admiral, and a spy from the KGB. When I was your age, I was offered quite a shocking amount of money to pose in my altogether for a certain magazine; I think you know which one I mean—this would have been back in the sixties. Later I had the pleasure of entertaining a senator with a well-known preference for young Southern ladies.”

I sat on the floor for hours going through the photos and listening to the stories of her many loves and affairs, none of whom she named outright. She dropped enough hints to fill a dump truck. The pictures on top were the most recent, taken when she was in her sixties. Some were glamour shots, some were nudes and some were candids, vacation photos and photos from events, weddings and cotillions and Coon Suppers past. I lifted out a photo of her naked and very pregnant, lying on a tiger-skin rug in front of a stark white backdrop. She leaned forward to look at the picture. “Oh, dear. How did that get in there?”

Even though there was nothing in the image to date it (and ageless as Ruth was, it was notoriously difficult to guess her age from any photograph without contextual clues), I guessed from the order of the photos in the box that she must have been in her late forties or early fifties. “And how old were you in this picture?” I asked.

“Oh, I don't remember.” Smiling at me from under the oxygen hose, she took the photo and put it in the desk drawer. I didn't ask her what happened to the baby. The picture wasn't old enough for it to be Luther.

Digging deeper into the box was like going back in time. Down through the Hollywood years of the fifties and forties, through the Weegee years and the Irving Klaw period, then a stretch through the thirties when most of the photos bore Malvern and Memphis photo studio logos. The next group was of Ruth as a teen and preteen, some of them seminude or entirely unclothed, others in full flapper regalia or dressed for the cotillion at Twelve Oaks. “Little girl Alice age six,” Ruth said, smiling. “I was locally famous, even then. A doctor from Germantown offered to buy me from my father after an all-night game of pinochle. I thought for a moment Gus was going to agree. He might have, had the doctor not already lost most of his money.”

Beneath these were older photos of other little girls, going all the way back to Victorian times. “I found these among Gus's things when he died,” she said. “I think some of them are his sisters, and his mother when she was a girl.”

With a curator's delicate touch, I lifted out crumbling sepia daguerreotypes of more women and children. And beneath those lay charcoal sketches of naked slaves. “These were drawn by Josiah Overton Stirling, my great-grandfather.”

What I had in front of me was two centuries' worth of erotica, much of it questionable and possibly illegal. Back when I was a vice cop for the Memphis Police Department, I had arrested men for less than this. I had to assume Ruth knew this much about my past, and possibly quite a bit more. “Why are you showing this to me?”

“I'm not
showing
it to you, dear. I'm
giving
it to you,” she said. “I want you to keep these photos so Luther doesn't get his paws on them. My son is waiting for me to die so he can sell these to a bunch of dirty old billionaires. To be sure, he will hold out the best ones for himself.”