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All original art. I get the feeling prints are as good as toilet paper here. The frames are more expensive than most prints. Small decorative touches like glass jars filled with garlic cloves and red pepper slices suspended in olive oil, a mason jar meticulously layered in baking ingredients that could be poured out, mixed and turned into brownies. Food as decoration.
But the real impressive sights are the kitchen gizmos. Joann, plopped on her ass and crying, all the things she didn’t say to Mickey or the things she did say and now can’t apologize for, they come rushing back and I’m looking at the one gallon food processor she has on the counter next to her automatic paper towel dispenser next to her electric tea kettle next to her hand soap warmer. And that’s not all. That’s the first countertop. She’s got miles of granite top counters in here. There is no island counter top. There’s an entire archipelago.
Her coffee maker isn’t just any coffee maker. It probably cost more than my car and it’s about the same size. I see a digital read out on the motherfucker and that just doesn’t look right. It has a steaming pipe for milk and a separate attachment for espressos. Then the water machine. Filtered, purified, reverse-osmosis or some shit. Her coffee bean grinder also has a setting and a digital read-out.
There are some muffins under a thick glass lid on a Lazy Susan within reach. I snag one. Cranberry citrus. I eat two before she is finished enough to speak English.
“You said he worked for you?” she asks, face buried in her hands.
“Yes.”
Tell her you suspect he was murdered. She might fill you in on what she knows, but you have to make it sound good. Like Mickey wasn’t going to do anything bad, Carla said.
“Prison set him straight,” I say. “He was going to help us catch some guys we’d been looking for. Guys we had tied to the rape of a woman who was unfortunate enough to come home during a burglary.”
Between sobs. “Now that you mention it, I remember him talking about helping you.”
What? “He did, huh?” I ask, tuning in much more carefully now.
“Yes. When he got out he said he was going to help a guy. I could have sworn he said CO but he must have been talking about you.”
“He said he was going to help a CO? With a burglary?”
“Yes. He said it was all planned out. I didn’t want to listen. I just...I just told him to leave.” Starts crying again.
I stand up as the dots start to connect. Well, I’ll be damned.
25
“Petticoat, I’m going to kill you,” I mumble low enough so Joann can’t hear it but I have to say out loud because some small part of me hopes he hears it wherever he is.
No wonder he was so off from the very beginning. Why his bullshit story was flimsy. Why he was so nervous just talking to me and why, even though he thought he was doing a good job being discrete, the rapist was still able to brazenly tail him to my office.
The plot: Petticoat knew Carla at Happenstance, gets transferred to the all-male prison for porking the women—they didn’t fire back then they just shuffled their people. Geographical cure. Petticoat knows about Mickey because of Carla so he strikes a deal with him: I’ll take my wife out to dinner and you burglarize my house for whatever end Petticoat was trying to reach. It pays both. Mickey gets all the scratch and Petticoat gets whatever it is he wanted. Insurance fraud, something. Maybe he just hated his TV and his wife wouldn’t let him buy a new one. But instead Petticoat comes home, gets attacked and his wife gets raped. Where is Mickey and how did the rapist get brought into the picture? The wife whacks herself and now Petticoat is left holding the bag for this whole stinking pile of shit. He gets rich in real estate, gets blackmailed by whoever actually raped his wife. He’s not sick and dying but he can’t squeal without the rapist revealing what he did all those years ago. The whole thing about Carla sleeping with Martins was bullshit. Petticoat was just trying to get me started on Mickey’s trail without letting me know about his involvement. Of course he wants me to kill the rapist. The assassin part. That keeps his hands clean, gets rid of the blackmail and shuts off whatever valve is ready to spill over and tell about how bad he fucked up back in the day. His own wife.
But why the Monday deadline?
Petticoat is still traveling to Three Mile High. The blackmail price just went up. He might have a deal up there that he won’t have the money for if he pays the rapist. Got to be it. This guy isn’t that complex. Clarence T. Petticoat is far from a mastermind. He’s little more than a used car salesman with a smidge of imagination.
Connect Mickey to the rapist. This is all about him now.
I start to walk out the door when I remember Joann is still here, sobbing. I stop and stand there, looking at myself in the reflection of a glass cabinet. My eyes crawl off of my own ugly mug and onto Joann. Here is a woman I do not know. One man connects her to a woman with whom I have spoken. Carla says that her dead boyfriend’s sister is a bitch and an elitist who is ashamed of her roots. I can believe that. I don’t know her roots, how she was raised, her parents or anything else. I came here with that prejudice. I wouldn’t have seen Joann any other way.
Of course, I barely know Carla. What I do know is she is a felon, in love with the memory of a dead felon. I think I’ve seen a glimpse of her heart when she opened up about Mickey. She made no bones about who she was. One reason she hates Joann is because of how cruel she said Joann was towards her love. But maybe another is because both women come from the same place and Joann spent her life trying to get out of it while Carla never did. Roots.
I’m not ashamed of my roots, but they are shameful. There is a difference. No matter what Joann is outside of our little moment in time here—snobby, bitter, falsely affluent—what she is now is a broken woman. I can see the guilt on her face about how she treated Mickey. How she felt about him. There are secrets there, deep inside, that make her cry for more reasons than loss. Everyone has those. When you tell enough people their loved ones aren’t coming back, aren’t going to keep their promises, aren’t going to be around to continue their annoying habits like leaving the toilet seat up or drinking milk from the carton, all of a sudden the family want nothing more than to see the toilet seat left up one more time.
People want people around. They want their people around. And sudden acts of life and death prevent that. Here I am, most of the pieces of my puzzle fall into place, and I leave a woman on the floor to bear that weight by herself after I had the biggest hand in putting it on her.
If Joann Cantu-Pierre were a man, I’d continue to walk out the door. Since she is not I turn around and lift her to her feet. I am easily three times her size and I wrap my arms around her. Pull her in. Gently hold the back of her bedhead halo and rest my cheek against her ear. She cries again. She lets it out. Whatever deep secrets she has in there she has harbored against her brother, whatever thoughts she would be ashamed of admitting to, they come out with her sobs. I do the work of holding her upright so she may concentrate on
cleansing herself of the guilt.
We stay like this for as long as she needs.
26
After a time, Joann separates herself from me and leans on a barstool before she finally sits down.
