Wildcat Wine (11 page)

Well, a few things, but I continued to exercise my right to remain silent.

“So, something is going on and I want to know what.” Tired glowered, and leaned over at me. “You seem to be slap dab in the middle of this. Now what is going on?”

Damned if I knew. I shook my head. “Honest, Tired, I don't know.”

Despite my assurances that I didn't have a personal clue as to what sinister plans were at work, Tired persisted and we went another twenty rounds, and I got plain rude and demanded to see Dave.

Tired went somewhere and brought Dave back into the room. Dave looked healthy enough and nobody had cut his pigtails. After a full-toothed smile, Dave gave me a big bear hug.

“Hey, Lilly Belle, my old sweetheart.” And he gave me another bear hug.

“How are you? You handling this all right?” I asked.

“Well, beats picking cotton, but not by much,” he answered. “Tell you what though, I'm about give out.”

Dave did look exceptionally worn out and while I considered chastising someone for failing to take better care of him, Tired insisted we all sit down. “Let me handle this,” he said to me, and then Tired turned to Dave and asked, “Do you know a man named Mike Daniels?”

“Nope.”

“Did you find a body in Myakka Park last Saturday night?”

Dave paused, looked over at me, which caused Tired to look over at me, and I thought we needed Philip Cohen here because I didn't know the general rules of criminal defense and had the feeling I hadn't done so well with Tired myself, and I dug my cell out of my purse and punched in Philip's number. When he answered, I snapped, “Why aren't you at the jail?”

Tired sighed.

Upon Philip's advice, I told Dave not to say anything at all until Philip was able to get to the jail.

“Look,” Tired said, “if you're not going to be any more help than this, you might as well go.”

Okay, I suspected Tired wanted me out of there on the off chance he could trick Dave into telling him something before Philip got there to tell Dave to shut up, but I trusted Dave to keep his mouth shut, he wasn't like Gandhi, all right? and I was desperate to change clothes and shower off the jail.

“Well, all right, be that way,” I said, got up, clumped out of the jail, and shook my hands in the warm air and headed toward my car.

My parting words to Dave were, “Keep your mouth closed, and I will see you later.”

Chapter 18

When I was in first grade,
my grandmother, who lived in a brick house on a dirt road in the middle of Bug-Fest, Georgia, taught me to gut and skin a squirrel, how to pee in the woods without getting it on my feet, and everything my six-year-old head could hold on the subject of snakes.

The snake thing definitely proved useful when I crawled into my cobalt-blue Honda after sniping with Tired at the jail. Both windows were down, and the door wasn't locked, and I didn't remember leaving it that way, and swore that if my priceless collection of germ-killing Handi Wipes was gone, I was going to raise holy hell. But I wasn't going back to complain now. I was thinking about showering and my hand was poised in midair to stick the key in the ignition.

But then I saw it. Sprawled out on the floorboard of the passenger side was a snake.

A big snake.

And not just a big snake.

A big rattlesnake.

Even in my limited-caffeine stupor, I couldn't mistake the rows of diamond-shaped brown markings outlined against the cream-colored scales. I was close enough to see the white oblique stripes on the side of the snake's face.

Sit still. Don't move. That much of the childhood lessons came back to me. My grandmother's voice floated down from the cosmic rays in perfect clarity. “Don't piss that snake off,” she said, “and don't move.”

The thing is, a snake doesn't see the way we do. It sees by sensing motion and vibration. Apparently I was lighter and more graceful than I might have believed, since I had slipped into the car without disturbing the snake into a coil or rattling mode.

If I didn't move or vibrate, that diamondback wouldn't know I was there.

So, how long could I sit perfectly still with my hand in midair?

The rest of my life was my immediate goal.

I had begun to sweat profusely when I saw, from the corner of my tearing eye (I was afraid to blink), Tired Johnson sauntering toward me with that cowboy gait that seemed so out of place in Sarasota, even for a county sheriff's investigator. I was too scared to wonder then what afterthought might have led him to the parking lot to catch me before I drove off.

As Tired began to lean into my opened window, I said, “Snake.” I willed the word to come out of my very pores, and didn't move my lips. Later I wondered if I had a hidden talent for ventriloquy, but at the moment I was concentrating on not moving and not pissing off that snake.

“Don't move,” Tired said.

Quicker than I could blink, Tired whipped out a long-blade knife and threw it with his right hand, and at precisely the same time he yanked open my car door with his left hand, and I fell out in a thunk against his legs and landed bottom down in a pool of greasy car oil.

Tired snatched me up and dragged me bodily away from my Honda as if it were in flames and due to explode at any second.

“Stay put, ma'am,” he said, and began to stalk back toward the Honda.

As I picked myself up from another puddle of grease, a crew of trusties from the county jail who were washing the patrol cars all came a running.

To my relief, but no doubt the great sorrow of the rattler, the snake had been neatly decapitated by Tired's knife throw. The trusties, arriving en masse at the scene of the execution, took great glee in tossing the poor headless thing around at each other as if it were still capable of biting one of them.

One of the trusties giggled as he wrapped the snake around his neck like a feather boa.

“You boys stop that,” Tired said. The trusty just pranced off, on his tiptoes, adorned by a headless rattler, sashaying like a chorus girl, and I hoped I never went to jail.

One of the trusties knocked down the snake-dancing chorus girl and grabbed the snake. As I watched him examine the snake, I saw disgust on his lean, weathered face. When he threw the snake down, and the trusties began to drift off as if the show was over, I walked toward him, my curiosity up.

“Ma'am, ma'am, you better stay away from them. They're prisoners. Ma'am?”

No, duh? I thought the gray-white overalls were just some new kind of fashion statement, like a retro-disco leisure suit for the workingman crowd. I kept walking. The jail parking lot was more or less full of men with guns, and I couldn't imagine one of the inmates making any kind of move on me. Tired pattered after me, ma'aming me the whole way.

“What's wrong with the snake?” I asked the lean-faced man. He looked like one of the men out of the famous Depression photographs, with squinty, drained eyes in a sharp face.

“It's dead.” He wiped his hands on his overalls, took a pointed look at my breasts, and then turned away as an armed guard approached.

“Of course, it's dead. Tired cut its head off,” I said to the departing trusty.

“That deputy man done cut the head off a dead snake then,” the inmate said, and kept walking.

By then Tired was beside me. I bent down and touched the snake, then picked it up. Like hard rubber. Definitely dead. Definitely dead for longer than five minutes.

Somebody had put a dead snake in my Honda. Which, on balance, beat putting a live one in the car, but in my mind, Tired was no less the hero.

“Now why would anybody do a thing like that?” Tired asked the humid air around us.

A dead snakebit man in a swamp. Poor smashed Earl under his grape harvester. A dead rattler in my car.

I guess Gandhi Singh's appellate argument hadn't been so bad after all.

Chapter 19

I couldn't get out
of those clothes and into my shower quick enough, and while I was letting the hot steam work out my aggravation and flush off the jail germs, the phone rang. The machine kicked in, but over the flow of the hot water I couldn't hear the message.

When I played the machine, it turned out the message was from Philip. Checking on me, worried, dead-snake assault and all, and asking that I call him to let him know how I was doing. I penciled myself a note to challenge any bill for that call, as it was strictly personal.

Once dressed, I called Philip back, and asked where Dave was.

“I dropped him off at Waylon's duplex. It seemed that Waylon decided he did not like the wine business so much after all and he has returned to Lakeland. As his rent was paid until the end of the month, he bequeathed his duplex to Dave for the next two weeks.”

Well, Waylon sure bailed out at the first sign of trouble, I thought.

“Dave did ask me to remind you that he would need, what he referred to as his . . . I believe the phrase was, just how did he put it?”

“Spit it out, okay? What'd he want to remind me about?”

“His ‘sack of personal assets,' that's the phrase, I believe.”

Okay, I thought, Dave wants that grocery bag of money back. But not until I deducted from the cash what I had already paid Philip from my personal checking account.

Then Philip went back to the snake thing, and what did I think it meant, and was I really all right. Dadeda, dadeda about the snake thing, and I reassured him a hundred times that I was just fine, and finally he said, “Lilly, it is the beginning of the weekend. Might I have the pleasure of your company for dinner tonight?”

The pleasure of my company? Did this man live in the nineteenth century?

“Business or pleasure?” Translation: Was he going to bill for this?

“Absolutely pleasure.”

Ahhh, that Dean Martin voice just radiated out of that phone and melted over me like warm lavender lotion.

Of course, it took me a few minutes after the phone call to remember that I needed to talk with Benny and find Dave, and that if I had a date with Philip, I would have to put off Benny and Dave until Saturday. So how much harm could there be in that? I blithely thought, and peered into my refrigerator for a light lunch before returning to work.

My mood lifted, especially for someone so recently assaulted with a dead rattler. By the time I finally returned to the salt mines at Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley, well past the noon hour, I was flushed with anticipation over a date with Philip Cohen, the crooner-voiced, sensuous-lipped man who had once rendered me practically mute simply by touching the skin of the inside of my arm and smiling at me.

This could be just the thing I needed.

I actually whistled when I sauntered in the back door at Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley. Whistled until I saw Kenneth glowering over Bonita, who was seated behind her desk in her cubbyhole outside my office.

The infernal Muzak, which is piped into every office and hallway and corridor as a fundamental part of our office manager's experiment to see how many of us she can drive stark, raving mad, must have drowned out my whistling. But then Kenneth looked up, saw me, and glared back at Bonita and said something in Spanish I couldn't catch over the sound of piped-in pseudo-music.

Kenneth turned from Bonita and started down the hallway without further acknowledging me.

“What was that about?” I asked.

For a moment, Bonita slumped at her desk, her normally perfect posture lost to the moment, and then she put her head down on her desk.

“Bonita? What's wrong?”

“That Kenneth,” she said, and lifted her head, straightened her shoulders, and pointed at a clipped collection of paper on the top of her neat desk.

As Bonita put the iron back into her spine, I reached over and picked up the paper. A quick glance told me it was a refined version of the complaint for relief from judgment that Angela had shoved at me just days before.

“He told me . . . he told me that he could convince the company to file it, or not. Depending upon—” Bonita stopped.

“Depending upon what?”

Bonita continued to sit, and not speak, her face a filling-in-the-blank slate.

Okay, I thought, she doesn't want to make me feel bad that Kenneth's going after her to get back at me for stealing the money that he stole from me. “He's just bluffing, Bonita, he's just . . . trying to get back at me.”

A flit of puzzlement crossed her face as I studied her, and then the blank slate was back.

But the puzzlement stopped me. Then logic interceded. Kenneth had started this nonsense before he knew I had taken the money from his credenza.

But not before he knew I had the money in the first place.

This had started right after Farmer Dave went on his adventure to the county jail.

So, maybe this wasn't just about me.

“Kenneth hasn't filed this yet?”

“No.”

“Did he tell you what evidence he has for his claim, this totally spurious nonsense about your children?”

A hint of an expression I couldn't recognize crossed Bonita's face, but was gone too fast for me to read it, and she fingered the gold cross on the chain around her neck and finally said, “No.”

“Bonita, it will be all right. I'll figure something out, right now, to stop him.”

But before I could even begin to fathom what I might do, Bonita, in a wholly uncharacteristic display, released a stream of invectives, both in English and Spanish, the likes of which I had never imagined the normally calm and religious Bonita to even know, let alone say.

I was impressed by her vocabulary. And troubled by her predicament.

Bonita was my secretary, and my friend, and I needed to help her.

Meanwhile, I figured Bonita should just go home. After all, it was Friday afternoon, and sending her home early seemed the kind thing to do.

“Bonita, look, I'll think of something.” For starters, I'd have to seriously consider giving Kenneth the money back, even if that meant I lost any leverage I might have. “Why don't you just go home?”

“No, I'm fine.”

“Anything pressing going on here?”

“No.”

“Then go home, spend some quality time with Benny.”

At the mention of Benny, something like worry crossed Bonita's face and she nodded. “Okay. But first I have to do some bookkeeping stuff. By the time I finish that, Benicio will be home from school.”

Idly I wondered what pressing bookkeeping she needed to do, then figured she needed to catch up on my billings, and I nodded, and retreated into my office.

An hour later, I poked my head out. “You okay?” I asked Bonita.

“I have finished my bookkeeping task, and I am going to leave now. You'll call me later?”

“Absolutely.”

Bonita gathered up her purse, eyed the cardboard carton full of Girl Scout cookies, sighed, said, “If Henry comes by, don't let him eat them all,” and left. I heard the back door shut after her.

Wondering what my next-best move might be, I stood there for a moment.

Then Bonita came slouching back in. Despite her earlier recomposure, she did not look good.

“You all right?” I asked despite the plain evidence to the contrary.

“Someone is double-parked, and I'm blocked in. I don't recognize the car.”

Our parking lot had not been expanded since the firm doubled in size and added a second floor to the building, and clients frequently just left their cars wherever rather than hunt out something on a side street.

Bonita could wait or I could just let her take my cobalt blue, repainted, re-windowed, practically ancient Honda, and recent haven for dead rattlers. That would be the easiest, I thought, giving Bonita my car, assuming nobody had blocked it in, and I could just take Bonita's car home later.

“Here,” I said, grabbing for my keys. “Take my Honda. Give me your keys, and I'll drive your car home tonight. We can trade tomorrow.”

“Won't you be stuck here?”

I was always stuck here, I thought, there was no life outside this building, this law firm. But I shook my head. “By the time I leave, whoever double-parked will be gone.”

After Bonita took my key and left, I marched into Kenneth's office only to find him gone. Instead of the efficient, if blond and beautiful Cristal, I found a woman I dimly recognized as someone from the word-processing pool upstairs, and she assured me, though I didn't ask or care, that she was competent to be a legal secretary.

“Where's Kenneth?”

“He had a hearing in Tampa at four. Said he wouldn't come back to the office.”

“Where's Cristal?”

“Don't know.”

Thus, frustrated again, I thanked her and left, and actually billed some time on some files before I snuck out early for me. At home, I made a quick call to Bonita, who, once updated that there was no update, assured me she was fine.

“Fine,” I said, and asked to speak to Benny. After a wait, Benny came on the phone and did that I'm-fifteen-so-I-don't-talk-to-grown-ups thing, and I promised myself to go over and see him tomorrow and make him talk to me. Then I showered and dressed for my date with Philip, going a little conservative for a Friday night with a linen dress in pastel green and flat, forest green sandals.

Philip was punctual and brought roses and wine, and I was glad I went conservative. This man
was
from the nineteenth century.

And nineteenth-century men apparently didn't take suggestions from their women. No matter how I tried to convince Philip to take me to the Café at the Granary, the health food store in town, or the health food, vegetarian restaurant on Siesta Key, Philip insisted upon taking me to a new, fancy place on Palm Avenue, one of those places where the cool and the rich and the old who live in the condos on the bay front near Palm Avenue like to gather and show off their expensive clothes. One of those places whose slogan ought to be “High Prices, Small Servings.”

And so it was that I found myself in the odd position of having nothing on the menu that I could order, other than the Zephyr Hills bottled water, though I noted that at $3.50 per bottle for what sold for about a buck at the grocery store, I wasn't sure I'd even order that.

I tried to convince myself that the salad would be fine. But I didn't know their source for raw vegetables, or how well they were washed, and I had to assume that nothing was organic.

Glancing at the other tables, I was able to tell that the bread was strictly white.

The place specialized in aged beef, and no way I was eating a dead cow, especially a dead cow that had been dead for quite a while.

When pressed, the waiter admitted the vegetable of the day was both frozen and cooked in chicken broth.

When pressed further, the waiter brought the manager, who assured me of the cleanliness standards of his fine establishment, but no, for insurance reasons, he could not let me examine the kitchen.

BS on the insurance, I thought, this man had a dirty kitchen, and I gathered my inner resources to tell Philip to pay for the wine and take me to the Café at the Granary, or home.

Philip leaned back in his chair, sipped his wine, and said, “I didn't realize you suffer from cibophobia. That explains why you are so thin.”

I'm thin because I do wind sprints, keep my face out of high-fructose corn syrup, drink lots of coffee, and work out like a fiend at the YMCA, and I'm not cibophobic, whatever that is.

“I didn't realize you were such a chauvinist you couldn't take suggestions from a mere woman on a good place to eat.”

“Perhaps it's not cibophobia, which, incidentally, means ‘fear of food.' Maybe you have orthorexia nervosa. Do you know what that is? It's a new term. Fear of eating anything except organic foods is one of the symptoms. Health food eating carried to extremes.”

“Look, short man with thick glasses, I paid good money for a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder from somebody with an M.D. and I don't need any new diagnoses from a prissy-talking attorney who can't even get a man out of jail for misdelivering a little wine.”

Philip leaned back in his chair and burst out laughing.

As dates went, this one was actually going pretty well, so far.

“Just take me to the Café at the Granary, or home, please.”

Philip paid the bill for the wine, slipped the waiter a big tip, and draped his arm around me as he herded me out the door.

We had a perfectly fine dinner at the Café at the Granary, a place I've eaten at many times and where I've had many a guided tour of the kitchen, and where they know how to make a vegan cheesecake that doesn't taste at all like soggy cardboard. Using the cheesecake as demonstrative evidence, I plunged my fork in and said, “See, no fear at all.”