Authors: Gretchen Archer
I let out a scream to wake the dead. From now on, she was Jaws to me. I shook my hand up and down. “Why in
hell
did you do that? I’m here to
help
you, Peyton.”
“Get away from me, you crazy bitch!” She bucked all over that bed, her wild hair flying, while I stared at my hand, watching the teeth marks darken. “I don’t even know your stupid husband!”
What? Who?
I had No Hair on the phone. Jaws of Steel Peyton had earned her gag back, thank you very much, and my whole arm was throbbing.
“She thinks I’m Bianca.”
“I don’t care if she thinks you’re Mother Goose. Get her out of there and get that car back here.” The phone went dead.
“Listen up, Peyton.” I began popping the hooks on the bungee cords snaking around her feet, legs, and the bed posts. There were about four hundred of them. Somebody was missing a few Boy Scout badges. All the while, Peyton was desperately working the gag, trying to bite through. “I am
not
Bianca Sanders. See this hair?” I shook my head. “Red! See my eyes?” I widened them to saucer size. “Brown! Ish!”
She’d worked the gag to her chin. “How crazy
are
you, lady?”
I looked up to catch a glimpse of myself in one of the many mirrors. I’d forgotten I was Laura Kasden. My hair wasn’t red at all. My eyes weren’t brown. Ish. And I suppose, in dim lights and $7,000 worth of Ralph Lauren, Laura Kasden favored Bianca Sanders. “You’re going to have to trust me on this one, Peyton. I’m not Bianca.”
I finally popped the magic bungee cord and the rest fell away, just in time for Peyton Beecher Maffini to twist, grunt, then land her foot squarely in my chest, drop-kicking me to the concrete floor. I was too stunned to get up and now my butt
and
my hand hurt. I batted around for my Prada bag without taking my eyes off Crazy, found it, fished around, then tazed the crap out of her before she killed me.
THIRTEEN
It was the middle of the night, either Thursday or Tuesday, I wasn’t sure.
I wasn’t about to take Peyton back to the hospital, if for no other reason, I didn’t want to drive the irritable Porsche again. Especially with her in it. So I dragged her to my place, which was the least amount of fun I’ve had this decade. She was absolute dead weight and I stepped on her hair twice.
No Hair sent a limo after Dr. Jakeaway—who he tracked down at The Penthouse Club on Highway 49, where, as it turns out, Jakeaway is a frequent flyer—to give Peyton Beecher Maffini the once-over. Dr. Doolittle entered the room, stopped short, then delivered his professional opinion. “She looks marvelous.” His eyebrows danced. “I like the restraints. Classy.”
I explained her hands and feet were cuffed to the iron railings of the guest bed because she was out of control. Not for his viewing pleasure.
“She’s been a little hard to handle,” I told him.
“
She’s
a crazy bitch!”
“Peyton.” I turned to her. “Do you want your gag back?” She didn’t bark or growl. “I didn’t think so.”
Then to the happy doctor. “I had to taze her three times just to get her in the bed. She bit the fire out of me,” I showed him, “and she’s staying in those cuffs until she settles down.”
I winked. He winked back.
“Settles down.”
I winked. He winked.
We did this until ridiculous.
“Settles down? Like you settle Bianca down?” I hissed the last part on low volume through clenched teeth.
“You can’t drug me, mister!” Peyton screamed. “I’ll have your license yanked so fast you won’t know what hit you!”
She might be able to pull that one off. She certainly had the résumé for it.
“Peyton, do you drink?” I asked. “Would you like some” (What’s the strongest stuff out there?) “moonshine?”
“I would,” Jakeaway said. “I’d like some moonshine.”
I turned to him. “You’ve had enough. You need coffee.” A strange distant alarm sounded. “Watch her.”
“Just a nip.” The gap between his index finger and thumb measured about five inches.
The noise was coming from a small speaker on a panel beside the elevator. I pushed a black button. “Bradley?”
“It’s us.” Fantasy. “Buzz us up.”
No Hair, just the square footage of him, settled Peyton down. His tie might have helped—it was riddled with bullet holes. (Not real. He hadn’t been shot.)
We were all stuffed in the guest room. Dr. Zhivago declared Peyton’s blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and heart rate all in the normal range. (He said “normal ranch” then corrected it to “formal range”.) After which, he made himself at home, sniffing candles, poking on an antique Royal typewriter my sister had placed in the middle of the guest-room desk. “This is so cool,” he said. Poke poke. He found the carriage return lever and annoyed us with that ten times. “Groovy!”
“Jakeaway!” No Hair shot him a vicious, threatening look. “Get your act together.”
The tipsy smile slid all the way off the doctor.
No Hair turned to the patient. “Now, Peyton.” His voice switched to the soothing channel. “I know you’ve had a rough week. I understand you had an incident with Bianca, were trapped in a garbage chute for days, taken from the hospital, held against your will, and I want to hear all about it from you. You talk, I’ll listen.” No Hair sat back and folded his big arms across his bullets.
“I want everyone to leave,” she said. Her eyes brightened with the promise of tears. “And I want out of these restraints.” She rattled the cuffs against the iron. “I want something to drink,” she said, “and then I’ll talk to you.”
No Hair’s thumb shot up, showing us the door.
I sat Dr. Seuss down in front of the television with the remote, and he went straight to the golf channel. Groovy.
Fantasy was banging around in the kitchen. “Davis, you have a teapot, but you don’t seem to have any tea.”
“I don’t even know that teapot,” I said. “Make her coffee.” I curled up in a raspberry print loveseat that guaranteed me a great nap if only I could get all these people out of here.
“Surely we don’t want her drinking coffee at two in the morning.” Fantasy was opening and closing every cabinet and drawer in the kitchen. And not gently.
Dr Pepper’s head swiveled around. “No caffeine for the patient.”
“It’s coffee or Heineken,” Fantasy said from the kitchen.
“I’ll take a Heineken.”
“I’m not your waitress, Jakeaway.”
“You tell him, Fantasy.”
I only meant to rest my eyes for two minutes, but I don’t remember a single thing after that.
* * *
Growing up in the Bible Belt has its advantages. Southerners don’t gossip; Southerners pray for one other. Of course, you have to know the details of the sinner’s sins to get any good praying done, then you have to recruit others to pray, and they need the details too. It’s called Prayer Circle.
Another Southern convenience is blessing people’s hearts. Say anything you want about anyone, but follow it up with a blessing. “Why would she keep having kids when the three she has are so ugly? Bless their hearts.” It works when you lead with the blessing, too. “Bless his heart, he smells like a pack of dead wombats.”
But the best is hiding behind the Bible. Look long enough and hard enough, and you can find Bible Backup. “I sure did beat him within an inch of his life with a tire iron. God says don’t be coveting another man’s wife.” (God did say that.) “And that means don’t be buying her beer when I’m gone deer hunting.” (I don’t think God meant
that
.)
What Peyton told No Hair until the wee hours of Friday morning took discriminating interpretation of Bible do’s and don’ts to a whole new level. God said take care of the elderly. He didn’t mean take them for everything they’re worth, take them to the cleaners, or take them out.
LeeRoy Gerard Maffini, our own Matthew Thatcher, was raised by his grandmother in a modest two bedroom home on Butler Mill Road in Sprague, Alabama. After a four-year absence, LeeRoy hit the doorstep with his Kappa Sigma T-shirt collection, rolled-up Roll Tide banners, and fresh-off-the-press Bachelor of Science in Finance diploma—only to learn that it was no longer his doorstep.
Jewell Maffini told her grandson it was called a Reverse Home Mortgage with Consolidated Debt Management.
LeeRoy Maffini told his grandmother it was called You’ve Been Had, MeMaw.
Turned out that not having her LeeRoy home to cook and clean for left Jewell with too much time on her hands. She met up with a bank of Cleopatra slot machines at the nearby Fortune Casino. That filled her void, but emptied her piggy bank, and just when she thought she’d never get a Double Mummy Bonus Round to dig her out of the financial ditch she’d jumped into head first, she met a nice man from the So Help Me God Church playing the Cleopatra machine next to hers, and he pulled her out of the ditch.
What she needed was prayer. And supplication. He told her that by his knowledge, her chambers would be filled with all precious and pleasant riches, which sounded like a Double Mummy Bonus Round to Jewell. God would see her through this. It said so in First Maffini 2:16. God told her to sign right here. And here. And here.
Bless her heart.
LeeRoy hightailed it to Beehive to explain the Principles of Investment to Reverend Marion Beecher. He summarized his entire college career, everything from Securities Analysis to Monetary Theory, and he threw in big concepts like convertible arbitrage, esoteric fixed income-trading strategies, and where the hell were they supposed to live? In the end, he demanded Reverend Beecher give back his grandmother’s money and property, and the reverend said he couldn’t do that, but he could give LeeRoy and his grandmother jobs. Having never set foot in a church, having never once cracked the spine of God’s Word, and not knowing a single stanza of
Blessed Be the Name
, LeeRoy landed a job as the new Minister to the Elderly. Straight commission. For every estate he brought to the church, LeeRoy received eight percent off the top, and quarterly dividends of prime-plus-two off the interest each of his accounts earned. Jewell’s new job was to hang out in small Alabama casinos, butter up marks, then toss them to her preacher grandson.
LeeRoy was a born salesman. Jewell was having the time of her life. The good Reverend Beecher hit his knees every night, praying that his Golden Boy wouldn’t grow weary of schmoozing little old ladies in dank, dark, smoky Alabama casinos. Over the next two years, the accounting staff, along with everything else at So Help Me God, grew. It took an additional eighty-seven auditing souls to help count the blessings.
God is good.
About then, twenty-two-year-old Peyton Beecher, who hadn’t been seen or heard from in Beehive for three years, called home. She was in a pickle. She and seventeen of her biodiversified friends had trekked across several states by foot, doubling their number along the way, until they reached Williamson County, Texas, where they were intent on saving the Coffin Cave mold beetle. The beetle, a troglobite, was a cave-dweller, and one of the last two cave habitats on Earth that the obscure insect called home was on the chopping block, slated to be paved over to build a straighter path to the new Walmart Supercenter.
Within twenty-four hours of arriving, the thirty-four environmentalists were all behind bars charged with first-degree homicide (times six each), possession of drugs (times a hundred each), drug paraphernalia, drugs for resale, and drugs for recreational use. They hadn’t found beetle one; instead, they’d stumbled on a body dump. They needed My Cousin Vinnie; they got Reverend Marion Beecher, who said he’d send a team of cracker-jack lawyers, foot the bill, and save the endangered hippies (but if he heard one more word about the damn bugs, the deal was off), if they would all agree to bathe before they got on his new Boeing 727 and if Peyton would agree to come home, settle down, and get married.
God joined LeeRoy and Peyton together, but a few years later the Almighty Dollar, or the Republicans, or the Choctaws, or the lobbyists, or the PACs, or the real-estate developers put them asunder. If the doors hadn’t closed on the small Alabama casinos, LeeRoy would still be behind a pulpit instead of Matthew Thatcher behind a microphone. And the Maffini’s would probably still be married and living in Beehive. And the Bellissimo wouldn’t be feeding wealthy elderly people to the So Help Me God Pentecostal Church.
* * *
“We can’t just march into the church and shut them down,” Fantasy said.
“Right.” If No Hair had any hair on his head, he’d be pulling it out. “They’re tight. They’ve been at it awhile, and they’re good at it. Not only that,” he said, “they’re bound to have a few higher-up friends.” He was elbows to knees; we were in chairs across from him. “We will not get into these people’s politics.”
No one in their right mind would get into Alabama’s politics.
We were in Richard Sanders’ office waiting for our Friday Skype call. Hard to believe he’d only been gone a week; it felt like a year. It was five in the afternoon here, five in the morning in Maui. Or wherever Mr. Sanders was. The three of us had gotten a combined eight hours of sleep the night before—we felt it and we looked it—and had been hard at it all day with So Help Me God.
Not to mention I had a few pressing personal issues.
Peyton Beecher Maffini told No Hair what she knew and what we suspected. The church was a façade meant to divert attention away from the real business at hand, the cash-cow Senior Assisted Living Center.
“She says they put on a big show to get them in the door of the nursing home.” No Hair’s tie was a field of blooming daffodils. “When they find someone who fits the profile, they bring them in through the first-class front half of the operation,” he said, “rope them in, get them to commit, and as soon as the ink dries on the dotted lines, Peyton says they disappear.”
“To where?” I asked.
“The back half of the operation,” No Hair said.
“What happens back there?” I asked.
“She doesn’t know.”
“They’re not tucking them in then putting pillows over their heads.”
“Don’t assume anything, Davis.” No Hair said. “We don’t know what they’re doing.”
“They can’t be killing them,” I said. “Dead people estates can donate, but dead people can’t maintain residence and generate income.”
“Says who?” Fantasy asked.
“The IRS,” I said. “Tax code. They’d be caught in a week.”
“Peyton doesn’t know exactly how they do it,” No Hair said, “and at this point she doesn’t care to know. That girl knows two things: Whatever it is her father’s doing needs to stop, and she’ll help us in return for immunity for Matthew Thatcher.”
“You didn’t promise her anything, did you?”
“Davis.” No Hair’s eyes were so bloodshot they were making mine hurt. “I promised that girl the moon.”
“Tell me you didn’t promise her she could stay with me indefinitely.”
“She’s going to be at your place until we figure out how to shut down this end of it,” he said. “That church is going to stop recruiting their old people here.”
“So she’s staying with me how long?”
“I don’t know, Davis.”
“Here’s the big question,” Fantasy said. “Are we going to tell Mr. Sanders about this?”
“I want to hold off on that,” No Hair said. “We need hard evidence before we accuse Matthew Thatcher of anything, and that’s something Peyton isn’t going to give us.”
“If she didn’t believe he had a hand in it,” Fantasy said, “she wouldn’t be asking for immunity for him.”
“What’s her deal?” I asked.
“She loves the guy,” No Hair answered, “and she’s not going to give him up. We’re going to have to figure that one out on our own.”
“Mr. Sanders won’t be home for another two weeks, right?” I had an idea. “Let’s set Matthew Thatcher up. Let’s put a mark in his face and see if the mark winds up behind the church.” I was on a roll. This is why they pay me the big bucks. “The quickest way to figure out just what they’re doing is to get in there. And to get in there, we’re going to need some bait.”
Fantasy and No Hair reacted with the enthusiasm of two stone-agers watching their redheaded cave friend light the first fire.
“Perfect!” Fantasy said.
“Good one, Davis.” No Hair’s bald head bobbed.
“We need a little old lady with a big fat portfolio,” Fantasy said.
“There are plenty of little old ladies,” I pointed out, “but where are we going to find one rolling in dough?” What were these two so excited about?
“You could roll her in dough, Davis,” Fantasy said. “It wouldn’t take you ten minutes at the computer to take an old lady, any old lady,” she shrugged, “and make her an oil baroness.”
“The widow of a banking tycoon.” No Hair was grinning along.
He refreshed the screen on the laptop we were seated around, which had started blowing screen-saver bubbles. “Where are we going to find an old lady who’ll go along with it? Someone we can trust with this information?”
“Hmmm.” Fantasy tapped her lips with two fingers. “Where, indeed?”
They stared at me.
“What?”
They kept staring at me.
“No way,” I said. “No way in hell. My parents would
never
agree to my grandmother getting into the middle of this. And if I tried to sneak it by them, they’d kill me dead.”
They looked at me as if I’d suddenly refused to share my toys.
“You’re both forgetting something.” I shot up from the chair and began pacing. “I love my grandmother.
I
don’t want her anywhere near this mess. I don’t see either of you offering up your grandmothers to go sacrifice themselves to that crazy church!”
“My grandmother’s the wrong color,” Fantasy said.
“Both of my grandmothers passed away twenty years ago,” No Hair said, “and for that matter, my mother passed away six years ago last March.”
That shut things down. I walked to the wall of window behind Mr. Sanders’ desk and lightly banged my head against the glass. No. No. No.
“Besides,” Fantasy said gently. “We weren’t thinking about sending in your granny, Davis.”
I spun.
“We were thinking your ex mother-in-law,” No Hair said. “Eddie’s mother.”
“She’s perfect, Davis,” Fantasy said. “She’ll lap it up.”
That she would. But if she agreed to be our shill and throw herself at the foot of the So Help Me God cross, at some point, I might have to be in the same room with her. Before I could convince myself it was a good idea or convince Fantasy and No Hair it wasn’t, another voice boomed into the room.
The computer screen came to life and Richard Sanders filled it. “What is this about Matthew Thatcher’s Porsche? What happened to that man’s car?” Mr. Sanders was mad, mad, mad, and then some. Either the volume was set on XXL, or he was shouting at us. “I have exactly two minutes, and you three had better start talking.”
We didn’t say a word.
He kept going, barely stopping for air, for the next five minutes.
Thatch exited the building last night, saw his car (at least I put it back where it was supposed to be), had a gigantic fit, chased and batted at the twelve-year old valet with a long black umbrella (that boy hasn’t been seen or heard from since), then used the same umbrella to pummel a Bellissimo limo that found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time, fired everyone out there including bellmen, doormen, and cab drivers who didn’t even work for the Bellissimo, destroyed half of the outdoor lighting, threw a hundred sets of keys from the valet stand into the fifty-foot-high fountain, the night, and Beach Boulevard traffic, and in the process, ran off dozens of gamblers with his spittle and rage that the newspaper (Page Six) reported went on for half an hour.
There was a short pause when Mr. Sanders asked us to speculate as to how much volume we thought Thatch the Great generated for the Bellissimo’s bottom line. We were still too stunned to speak, so he answered for us.
“Millions! A million in retail
alone
!”
He finished up with, “I think the three of you should work valet for a few weeks, and let’s see if you can’t learn to treat people’s property with a little more respect.”
When it was over and the echoes finally faded, Fantasy and No Hair turned on me.
“Let’s look on the bright side,” I said. “He doesn’t know about Bianca shooting herself in the foot.”