Good Christian Bitches (13 page)

T
he difference between an evildoer and a martyr is spin—it’s not what happens that matters. It’s how people perceive what happens that makes the difference.

Such was the case for Susie Caruth, whose husband, in spite of the rumor, promptly bailed her out of jail even before she had so much as set foot in a holding pen or drunk tank. Word reached Edward’s office of Susie’s arrest even before she and her two police escorts reached the station house for processing. One phone call from Edward to the desk officer ensured that Susie would spend her entire “incarceration” in the women police officers’ lounge, an astonishingly lavish facility donated to the department by the husband of a repeat drunk driver who got sick and tired of hauling his wife out of the drunk tank and thought that a major gift might smooth troubled waters the next time she got pulled over.

While the police department was naturally elated with its over-the-top new lounge, which featured a huge flat-screen TV and large leather swivel chairs, the donor’s wife’s habit of driving while intoxicated continued unabated, and her rap sheet continued to grow until finally her husband was quietly convinced by his attorney to move to their spread north of Lubbock. There, she could drink and drive all she wanted, putting at risk no one but herself and a lot of prize cattle.

Susie was not fingerprinted, photographed, cavity searched, or subjected to any of the other indignities that an arrested person normally faces. Instead, she sat watching
Days of Our Lives
until her husband came and collected her. But that’s not how the story was spread around town. Instead, rumor quickly took flight throughout Hillside Park, conveyed by voice, texting, instant messaging, furtive whispers, and a variety of other high- and low-tech methods of communication, that Susie had been (take your choice) strip-searched, locked in a holding cell with candidates for deportation, roughed up by police officers, roughed up by fellow inmates, assaulted six ways to Sunday, or, according to one feverish instant message that rapidly made the rounds, that she had all but been murdered behind bars. None of this had happened, of course, but the overall effect was to create a wave of sympathy for Susie, the “innocent victim of vicious police brutality,” that far outweighed any remaining outrage the women felt toward her for screwing up the Longhorn Ball. Adding to the drama was the fact that Susie was nowhere to be found. Her husband had spirited her away on a ninety-day round-the-world cruise, to keep her from blabbing to friends, enemies, frenemies, and even the local media about what she had done or not done with piles of cash, some of which she had brought home in brown paper bags from the office, much to the consternation of her husband. Edward rightly feared that criminal proceedings could be instituted against Susie, not just for stupidity, but for malfeasance and for sticking her hand in the till. In his mind, it made more sense to get her out of the country until the whole thing died down.

Edward knew she had left behind a trail of wreckage starting with the Ball itself and extending outward to all the banks, donors, and vendors involved with the event. All he could do was hope that the three and a half million dollars he had donated would cover any shortfalls or accounting irregularities, of which, he felt certain, there were tons. His fondest wish was that people could forgive, forget, and move on.

The rumors of Susie’s brutal incarceration, combined with her sudden disappearance, created an unexpected halo effect for the train-wrecked socialite. As her cruise ship steamed toward Gibraltar, people back home were raising her to the level of Christian saint, a victim not of her own arrogance and bloated ego but a victim of the “system,” whatever that meant. The upshot of all this was that the absent Susie had somehow managed to accrue, as a result of the rumors swollen out of proportion around her arrest and “confinement,” the kind of warm and loving thoughts that she had never generated in person. And the more Hillside Park loved the absent Susie, the more likely they were to judge harshly whoever filled her strappy sandals at the office of the Longhorn Ball, namely Amanda Vaughn.

Amanda’s first indication of the canonization of Saint Susie occurred when she went to pick up her children from Hillside Park Middle School at three o’clock. Thanks to the documents her mother had given her, she had successfully opened an account with an Internet bank and had FedExed the checks and a cashier’s check for all of the cash, minus a thousand dollars for petty expenses. Elizabeth would have to write all of the checks once they came in from the Internet bank, but they both figured that the creditors had waited this long for their money—another week wouldn’t kill them.

Things only got strange at school, where a woman Amanda did not recognize approached her and said, out of the blue, “I think what you’ve done to Susie is hideous.”

Amanda, stunned by the unexpected criticism from this unknown source, stared at the woman, who promptly turned her back on Amanda and went off in search of her children. Amanda, puzzled, stared after the woman, trying to figure out what that was all about. She collected Will and Sarah, who both looked pleased with their first day of school.

“How was school today?” Amanda asked, after kissing Sarah and punching Will playfully on the shoulder.

“Beats me,” Will admitted. “I spent the whole day skateboarding.”

“You did what?”

“I spent the day skateboarding,” her son repeated. “I don’t like school. Dad didn’t like school, either, and he said he ditched all the time. And now he’s a millionaire.”

Amanda’s head swam. Putting what to do about Will’s truancy aside for the moment, she turned to her daughter. “Sarah, how was it for you?”

“One of the girls told me there’s a Whole Foods here in Hillside Park,” she said. This was clearly the first piece of good news she had received since she had moved to Dallas. “Can we go and get dinner there? Can we? Can we? Please, Mom!”

“I don’t see why not.”

“And there’s a church retreat this weekend,” Sarah added enthusiastically. “Can I go? All the girls in my grade are going.”

“That sounds nice,” Amanda said, happy that her daughter was already in the middle of the social whirl. “Of course you can go.”

They started to walk home, Will skating, his ears plugged with his iPod buds, and Sarah chatting about the personalities of the teachers and students. From the way she was talking, it sounded as though her transition would be relatively smooth. Amanda had worried enormously about how Sarah would fit in with the materialistic Texas girls at Hillside Park, but coming from Newport Beach . . . well, one place wasn’t really that different from the other. Sarah had indeed found some other children just as committed to eating healthy and watching their weight as she was, so it looked like her situation was handled.

Will, on the other hand—ditching all of his classes on the first day to go skateboarding with the other truants—that was another matter.

As they walked the six blocks home, Amanda had the strange sense that someone was following them. She turned around, and a Bentley with Texas vanity plates was crawling behind them. The driver was a huge military-looking man in his early thirties. He rolled down his window. “Are you Amanda Vaughn?”

Puzzled, she nodded. “If you’re suing me, I’ve never seen a process server driving a Bentley before. You can just drop off the papers at the Longhorn Ball office.”

“Nobody’s suing anybody,” the driver assured her, his tone friendly. He reached his hand out the window to give Amanda an envelope. “This is from my boss.”

“Your boss? If you drive a Bentley, what does he drive?”

“This is his car. Please.” Amanda took the envelope as he stepped on the gas and the Bentley purred away. “Have a nice day!” he called.

“What’s that, Mom?” Sarah asked. Will had been oblivious to the whole exchange, playing air drums as he skateboarded alongside his mom and sister.

“I have no idea,” Amanda admitted. She opened the envelope. It contained a check along with a sticky note on it that read: “Congratulations on taking over the Longhorn Ball. Here’s something to get you started. Dinner Tuesday night, 7:30, Nobu?”

Amanda lifted the sticky note off the check and gasped. It was made out to the Longhorn Ball in the amount of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. She looked to see the name of the account holder—General Services Inc., with the address a post office box in Fort Worth. It could have been anybody.

“He just keeps raising the bidding,” she muttered, reeling from the size of the check.

“Who gave you the check, Mommy?” Sarah asked. “What’s it for? Is it for the Ball? Is there going to be a Ball next year? All the kids in school say there’ll never be another Longhorn Ball. What is a Longhorn Ball, anyway?”

Amanda thought back to the days when Sarah was a baby and she couldn’t wait for her to say her first words. What had she been thinking? It seemed like Sarah hadn’t stopped talking since the day she started. Smiling at her precocious chatterbox, Amanda reached for her cell phone and called her mother.

“Amanda?” Elizabeth answered.

Amanda had never gotten used to the idea that people no longer said “hello” when they answered the phone. Thanks to caller ID, people just skipped the hellos and went right to first names. It was still a little unnerving for her, even though she had been carrying a cell phone for almost twenty years.

“Mr. Black Mercedes just gave us a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Ball,” Amanda said.

A long pause ensued.

“Did he invite us to dinner again?” Elizabeth inquired playfully.

“He did.”

“And are you going?”

Amanda thought back to the incident at the school, when a mother she had never met before accosted her about wrongdoings toward Susie that she had never committed. She was done with worrying what others thought of her. “I’m going,” she said firmly.

“Good answer. No offense, but with what I’m starting to hear from some of my friends, we’re fixin’ to need all the friends we can get.”

Elizabeth hung up before Amanda could ask what she meant by that. Amanda and the children were almost at their house.

“Are you going on a date, Mommy?” Sarah asked.

“It’s not a date exactly. The ink isn’t exactly dry on your daddy’s and my divorce. I consider it more of a business dinner.”

“I hope you do. Is it with the man who gave you the car and the clothes?”

Amanda sighed and shook her head. Her daughter was smart.

Maybe too smart. “That’s the man,” she said laconically.

“Good!” Sarah exclaimed gleefully. “Is he a health nut?”

Amanda stifled a grin. “I’ll have to get back to you on that one, honey. Let’s get inside and see if you have any homework.” Sarah skipped ahead while Amanda mulled over this newest piece of the puzzle. This mystery man is
some
kind of nut, that’s for sure, she thought to herself.

“H
i there,” Sharon Peavy said in her friendliest Texas twang to the first male salesperson she encountered at Neiman’s. She had on full makeup, and her Versace V-neck plunged extra low, another score from another unsuspecting male she dragged shopping one day. It just so happened that the individual to whom she was speaking was gay, but she definitely had his full attention nonetheless.

“How may I help you, ma’am?”

“I’ve got a gift card? Actually, it belongs to a friend of mine? And it’s her husband who asked me to bring the card in, because he wants to know the balance. That way, since their anniversary is coming up and everything? He can replenish it, if it’s gone down below a certain level. You understand, I’m sure?”

“We can do this very discreetly,” the salesman answered.

It was six thirty on Monday evening, a time when Neiman’s was not likely to be busy, and therefore a good time, in Sharon’s mind, to find out how much money was left on the card. Sharon’s attitude was that since the card had obviously belonged to Susie, it would be fair compensation for her hard work—not just on the Ball, but also for protecting Susie from the wolves and jackals baying for her to be fired, or worse, prosecuted. And after all, Sharon and Heather were personally seeing to it that Amanda would bear the brunt of all the blame. Susie definitely owed her for that.

Sharon figured that Amanda had found the card in a desk drawer and rationalized that Amanda was going to do the very same thing, taking it as kind of an early bonus for agreeing to try and resurrect the Ball. Sharon found it absolutely outrageous that Amanda would have claimed that the card was her own. Imagine that, Sharon told herself, whipping herself into a frenzy of righteous indignation. It’s Amanda’s first day on the job, and not only is she stealing Susie’s Neiman’s card, but she’s probably dipping into that big old stack of cash that Amanda had shown her. And if she isn’t, well, it sure sounds good and that’s how the story will go.

The fact that Sharon had never known Amanda to be a liar didn’t make a damn bit of difference to her. Everyone knew Sharon had never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

“Right this way, ma’am,” the salesman indicated.

Sharon followed the immaculately tailored young man off the floor, sauntering over to the customer service department and into a private office. He invited Sharon to take a seat, then slid the Neiman’s card through a magnetic reader attached to the computer on his desk. He looked with amazement at the figure that popped up on his screen.

“Is it a lot?” Sharon asked, intrigued by his visual response. Neiman’s salespeople had a knack of playing things cool, accustomed as they were to high-dollar clientele and their proclivities for massive shopping sprees. But even he wasn’t prepared for the number that he was about to share with her.

“There’s ninety-eight thousand dollars on the card,” he said, swallowing hard. Even in the rarified world of Neiman Marcus shoppers, that was a pretty large number—or at least it was a large number for a gift card.

Sharon leaned forward. “Did you say . . . ninety-eight thousand?”

She struggled to conceive of so valuable a piece of plastic. Her mind rapidly translated ninety-eight thousand dollars into couture, shoes, handbags, sunglasses, makeup, and other items. Despite all her previous life training at spending unearned money, she still felt herself struggling to come up with ways to spend the whole thing.

Given enough time, though—say, two hours—she knew she could. “That’s it,” the salesman said, relieved that he could share his true emotions about the number with Sharon. The amount was more than what he made in a year, and it brought home to both of them the wild disparity between what people earned at Neiman Marcus and what other people spent there.

“Do you wanna . . . run that thing through one more time, darlin’?” Sharon suggested, perched precariously on the edge of her seat. “Maybe a decimal point got transposed or somethin’ like that.”

The salesclerk nodded. “If you like. But I’ve never seen the reader make a mistake.”

“If you don’t mind.” Sharon held her breath.

“Let’s see,” he said, running it through again. He pursed his lips as the same number came up.

“Your . . . friend,” the salesclerk remarked, “has a very generous . . . husband.” It was evident to Sharon that he did not believe for a minute her story about the origin of the card.

Sharon thought hard about her next step. If the young man became too alarmed, he might call security in to have a little conversation with Sharon. He didn’t really have grounds to do so, but she was on store property, and she did have one of the biggest gift cards the salesman, or perhaps anyone at the store, had ever seen. So some sort of authoritative action might be appropriate. Sharon decided to stick with her story. “May I ask you—what was your name? I didn’t catch it.”

“I didn’t throw it,” he said cheekily. “Travis.”

“Mmm. Travis. Do you think you might be able to tell me whether the card was registered in my girlfriend’s name or her husband’s name?” She tinkered with her Michele watch as her right knee began an anxious bounce.

Travis glanced at the screen. “It’s not in any name at all, ma’am. It’s basically like cash.”

“Really . . .” Sharon was almost drooling. They locked eyes, studying each other intently, like poker players. It was evident to Sharon that Travis knew the card was not hers. It was equally evident that Travis was looking for a way to cut himself in on Sharon’s surprisingly good fortune. Many high-end stores had trouble with their sales staff, some of whom ran a scam involving selling expensive items at retail prices, taking them back as cash returns, then reselling them to the same customer at a fraction of the original price, also for cash, which never saw the inside of a cash register. So Sharon had reason to believe that Travis could be tempted.

“When do you think your friend’s husband is expecting to get the card back?” he asked cautiously.

“It’s hard to say,” Sharon replied, equally cautious, not wanting to give away any more than she had to. “What were you thinking?”

“It would just be a pity,” he said with a hint of sorrow in his voice, “if your friend’s husband couldn’t derive maximum value from the card.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Well, I think it’s a little bit dangerous for a woman like yourself to be walking around with such a valuable card. I mean, God forbid if it were lost, right?”

“God forbid,” Sharon said, resisting the urge to cross herself. “Perish the thought.”

“May I recommend,” Travis said, “dividing the card into, say, twenty gift cards of approximately five thousand dollars each. That way, if one of them were lost, nothing bad would happen. It would just be five thousand dollars lost, and not ninety-eight thousand.”

“I see.”

“In addition,” Travis added, in as professional a voice as he could muster, “we see tons of five-thousand-dollar gift cards at Neiman’s every day. They wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Whereas, a gift card for ninety-eight thousand—that’s almost an invitation for further . . . shall we say, scrutiny?”

Sharon shook her head and gave a slight grin. “Well, we don’t want to invite scrutiny, now, do we?”

“Discretion is everything.”

“Mmm-hmm, it certainly is. . . . Would there be a fee for transforming this ninety-eight-thousand-dollar gift card into a bunch of five-thousand-dollar gift cards?”

Travis looked at the door to his office, and glanced out into the hallway, checking to see if anyone was listening.

“I think a ten-percent fee is what the store typically seeks in situations like these.”

Sharon thought about it. Ninety-eight hundred bucks? And she’d be left with almost ninety thousand in five-thousand-dollar gift cards?

“If I can count on your discretion,” Travis promised, “you can count on mine.”

“I think we have an understanding.”

“Wait here. I’ll be right back.”