Chapter One

    She had the look of a woman much looked at. Not beautiful. Not even pretty. But willfully visible in a way most women are not. It was simply an expectation, Joe Riverton decided. What she expected, she attracted. And that was that. Even now, perhaps especially now, meeting a man for the first time. Joe felt that if he knelt before her, she wouldn’t even notice. Expected.

    “Mister Riverton?” Then there was that voice. Flat and emotionless, conveying nothing. The same nothing he’d gotten from her last night over the phone. But that timbre. It perfectly captured the image before him. She wore a snug black business suit that fit her like a shark’s skin and high heels that would have been too high for most women her age. She carried a large floppy black bag over her arm that probably cost more than the Riverton Agency grossed all last quarter. She clutched a cell phone against her stomach with both hands. Her ash blonde hair, perfectly straight and level and evidently cut by a laser, barely touched her shoulders. As she no doubt expected, he cleared his throat.

    “Mrs. Carroll. Please sit.”

    He indicated the chair across from him and she moved toward it. Then he realized he had not risen to greet her. He pushed his chair back from the desk and stood. She watched him, amused. She sat slowly. He sat quickly.

    “How can I help you? You were pretty insistent that you didn’t want to talk over the phone.”

    She swept the room with her eyes, unblinking, unconcerned, uninterested. They were brown eyes, very dark brown, with a halo of green around the irises. Odd eyes. 

    Using those eyes on his surroundings felt mildly like a violation. A minor one, but still. His filing cabinets were black metal and looked new (-ish). His couch was inexpensive but stylishly angular, uncomfortable-looking and proud of it. His desk wasn’t worth the wood it was crafted from, but he kept the surface neat and uncluttered. His laptop was open upon it. His desk lamp, simple but not stupid, had architectural intelligence. In defense of his surroundings, he felt umbrage rise from its den in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t like to feel umbrage. He didn’t feel he deserved the luxury. He swallowed it. 

 

 

    Her eyes, done roaming, found him. “I was..I was not in a..convenient place for this kind of a conversation.”

    “And what kind of a conversation would that be?”

    “With a..with someone..with a person in your..line of work.” 

    “I see. Well there is no one listening now.”

    Her mouth twitched. “Mister Riverton, in the very near future, unless something is done, I will lose seventy million dollars.”

    He nodded, his eyes fixed on hers.

    “You don’t impress easily.”

    “It’s just a number to me, Mrs. Carroll.”

    “Well it’s not just a number to me. It’s my inheritance. I would have thought you could at least pretend to be interested. I haven’t hired you yet.”

    “That’s true. But I assume other people are showing too much interest. Which is why you’re here, isn’t it? So whose interest particularly is threatening your inheritance?”

    A shudder ran from her shoulders down to her breasts. A spasm rather. If he hadn’t been paying such close attention, he would have missed it. Abruptly, she rose from the chair.

    “Thank you for your time, Mister Riverton, but I don’t think we will be doing business together after all. Goodbye.”  

    She turned her back on him and in three steps was at the door.

    “Mrs. Carroll. Please wait.”

    She turned, questioning him with an eyebrow.

    “This is not the time to play the spoiled brat. As you say, there is a fortune you’re at risk of losing.”

    She swayed and caught herself on the door jamb. 

    “And forgive me, but I don’t buy that.”

    “What?”

    “That. The near-faint-thing.”

    She straightened, smoothed her hair, and sat down.

    “I want to help you, Mrs. Carroll.”

    “Why?”

    “Because you asked for my help.”

    “Oh, I’m that special, am I?”

    “Yes.”

    “Now I don’t believe you.” She looked at him, the eyebrow jacked up again.

    “For now, pretend to believe me. And since you’ve done your research, I suspect you intended to all along.”

    She relaxed and smiled. It was a very nice smile. “My father has clout with several insurance companies in New York. Ergo, I have clout with several insurance companies in New York. You’re well regarded.”

    “So. Shall we start again?”

    “I don’t like being called a spoiled brat.”

    “Spoiled brats usually don’t.”

    “Is it going to be like this forever, or do you stop being a asshole?”    

    “You’re right. I’m sorry. But it wasn’t entirely an act, was it?”

    “What, the blow-off? I kind of meant it. I’m not sure I like you.”

    “Not that. You’re frightened, and I don’t think it’s about losing a fortune.”

    The smile evaporated. “What is it with you? I don’t need this. I don’t like this. I don’t like you.” But she didn’t leave her chair this time.

    “I was tempted to let you walk out, but if I let you go through with it, you’d have to find some excuse to come back. I didn’t want to embarrass you. And you haven’t got the time to be fooling around with this thing, whatever it is. Because your father is dying.”

    “That’s not on Google,” she said, her voice flat, dead-flat.

    “And he’s threatening to cut you out of the will, or has already done so. The lawyers can’t help you or you wouldn’t be here, talking to an insurance investigator.”

    “It has nothing to do with insurance.”

    “Which leaves something that needs investigating. What would that be, Mrs. Carroll?”

    “God! Slow down! I..I don’t know if I can do this. I didn’t expect..I mean, I wasn’t thinking—“

    “That you’d have to tell me things you’d rather not talk about?”

    “Yes. Are you all like this?”

    “Investigators? Yeah, we all dig and drill and push and scrape, usually in places that hurt like hell. You thinking of shopping around?”

    “Stop talking. God.”

    Joe stopped talking and sat back in his chair, watching her.  

    After a while she said, “I don’t like being called missus. Call me Arlen.”

    “Ok.”

    “And how did you know my father is dying?”

    “When you call around insurance companies asking for references, before they give you a guy’s name, they call the guy.”

    “Oh.”

    “Standard operating.”

    “Yes. Well.”

    “They told me who your father is and of course I’ve heard the name. I live here. Bernard Crump is a hard guy never to have heard of in this town. And they can smell a death benefit coming before the ink is dry on the x-ray. And to be honest I figured as much. If he wasn’t dying, what was the urgency? You could have waited for things to turn back in your favor. You never know. So why come to me now? Therefore, he was probably dying.”

    She put down the cell phone on the desktop, picked up her big black bag from where she’d dropped it beside her chair, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She opened the pack and slid one out. She held it up between her fingers. “May I?”

    “Sure. I miss the smell.”

    “God,” she said, and in a small fury pulled the top open again, preparatory to a pissy attempt at stuffing the cigarette back in the box. “Why the wiseass? Just say no.”

    “Sorry”, Joe said, flustered by his growing genius for ineptitude with this woman. “I mean it. Please. Smoke. I really do miss the smell.”

    “Ah-ha,” she half-grinned, closing the pack. “How long?”

    “Three years,” Joe answered. “Nobody smokes anymore.”    

    “Ummm.” 

    He wanted to slap himself.

    She lit the cigarette with a small silver lighter, inhaled, exhaled, and stared at him as the smoke curled around her face. “OK look,” she said in voice that was unfriendly and brittle with decision. “My father is leaving the seventy mil to my daughter. She’s fifteen.” She watched him, as if waiting to see whether the enormity of this outrage had penetrated.

    “And?” It was a legitimate question, but he felt pathetic asking it, like a wiseass.

    “And she’s pregnant. He’s leaving it to her because she’s pregnant. Actually, he’s leaving it to the baby. But my daughter gets it until the baby’s born, then she becomes the whadaya-call-it.”

    “The trustee?”

    “The trustee. The point is, my daughter gets seventy million dollars.” Those odd eyes gripped his own and held them in an eye-vice.

    “It’s all legal, though, as far as you know?” 

    “Yes. But it isn’t right.” 

    “Right and legal aren’t always the same thing.” Really, Joe?

    “He promised us that this, exactly this, wouldn’t happen. We’ve been living with that promise for fifteen years and now he’s reneging. We took him at his word! We’ve got debts! That money is ours. We’ve been living on it, the promise of it. He promised we’d get it. OK not all of it, but not none of it!” Forgetting that the cigarette was in her left hand, she used it to slap the desk, spraying the surface with sparks and ash.

    “Arlen..” Joe began.

    “Yeah, yeah, I know. There’s nothing illegal about it. I know that. That’s why the lawyers are no use to me.” She used the back of her left hand to swipe cigarette debris onto the floor. In her right, forgotten, she still held the little silver lighter.

    “You should have made him sign something back then,” Joe said, and immediately knew his credibility gauge was wobbling dangerously.

    Arlen barked. Perhaps it was meant to be a laugh. Joe suddenly realized this woman had no ear for nuance. She had been listening to what he said, not how he said it, and he was relieved.

    “Sure. Look, Riverton, I’m not trying to make it a federal case. I’m not here because I have a legal problem,” she said, the straight-shooter with nothing to hide.

    “How do you think I can help?” Joe asked, his confidence returning and with it, his determination to clear a safe space for each of them to leave their two scrabbling selves outside of, while their better natures sought some truth.

    “You’ve got to convince him he’s making a terrible mistake,” she said.

    “Why would he listen to me? I assume you’ve tried already.”

    “Because you will have what I didn’t. Proof that she’s using drugs and is therefore a danger to the baby before it’s even born. With all that money, she’ll be an even bigger danger after it’s born.”

    “Do you have such proof?”

    “No, Riverton. I thought you were a smart guy. If I had it, would I be here?” She tried to smile at him. He could see the effort cramping her shoulders, which she disguised by reaching for the ashtray. 

    “There’s something I don’t understand. Why would your father promise you that you would get a portion of his estate? Why would you need him to promise? I mean, wouldn’t it be taken for granted, as his daughter? And why at that time? What happened fifteen years ago? You said your daughter is fifteen.”

    Some truth at last: “Stay with the program. None of that is your concern. Your part is to find the proof, fast, and present it to my father before he checks out. Which could be any day, so can we get started?” Her right hand dove into the big black purse and came out shaking a checkbook.

    “Put that away.”

    “What do you mean?” On some faces, those most unfamiliar with it, truth looks like it looked on hers.

    “Listen,” Joe was calm now. “‘Proof’ is a very abstract concept to a man like Bernard Crump. It’s a tool in his toolbox. His toolbox. Not yours or mine or anybody’s who isn’t owned or employed by him.”

    Arlen waved the checkbook at him, as if, were he only to focus on it in her desperate hand, he would find it irresistible. “You won’t help me? You said you wanted to help me.”

    “Arlen, I can’t do what you want me to do. I mean, it can’t be done. You knew he would never believe you, no matter how compelling the proof. He wouldn’t believe anybody. And you see, Arlen, the trouble is, you know that better than I do.”

    “No I do not. I know no such thing.” Her arm with the checkbook dropped into her lap, powered down. Her face was washed with a tint that suggested nausea. “I came here because you were highly reco-reco-recommended and I needed someone I could trust to, to, to undertake—“

    “Please, Arlen. Mrs. Carroll. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

    He had seen other human beings rise as she did then, not many, and all of them men on their way out of an office door, and onto a path that led to a jail cell, and if they were lucky, through it and out again, but lucky or not, all blessed or condemned to a different life by Joe Riverton. Arlen Carroll made it to the door, cradling the big black bag against her chest, the cell phone crushed in the folds of her jacket.

    Replaying the set-piece of earlier, Joe called to her and she stopped and turned. “Can I ask something that I have no right to ask? You don’t have to answer.”

    She stood at the door. The eyes attempted to grip his but the effect was leaking oil.

    “Who’s the father?”

    Arlen Carroll jerked up and back as if she’d been tased. The eyes bulged. She turned away and fled.

 

                    Chapter Two

 

    He was still thinking about her half an hour later when the knock came. His hunger had finally gotten the better of him after she left, but only for long enough to make the call to Jim’s, which he did daily, automatically, and then his mind returned to her, the image of her at the door. Those eyes. Those odd eyes. Eyes that seemed to have caved in with fear, sucking themselves back into her head to escape what he had made her see. He had been right. He could not help her. Too much lay beneath the meeting, needing to be dug up and exposed before he could be of any use to her. Nonetheless, he saw her standing there and his skin crawled.

    “Come on in, Bobby,” Joe called. The door opened and the opposite of Bobby walked in. Bobby, the delivery boy from Jim’s, was a bright, compact, quirky Mexican. This guy looked like a product of interspecies mating, an orangutan and a pachyderm perhaps. He was dressed in an expensive three-piece suit with an open collar dress shirt so white Joe blinked. Entering, he swayed into the room with the easy lumbering motion of large men and larger animals, up to the chair Arlen had been sitting in. He placed the briefcase he carried on the chair and stood behind it. And said nothing.

    “Are you going to tell me who you are and what you want?” Joe asked, intimidated but not openly—yet. On the floor next to his left foot was a small square plastic matt from which a rounded hump protuded. Slowly, Joe slid his shoe over the matt and pressed down gently.

    “No, Mister Riverton,” the man said. “If I did, that part would have to be edited out.” His voice was soft and pleasant to listen to. As pleasant as he was unpleasant to contemplate. “But, if you’d like, you can call me Spielberg.”    

    “Oh?” Joe said. “Can I help you, then, Mister Spielberg?”

    “Yes you can, Mister Riverton. Because you and I are going to make a little movie together.”

    The big man stared down at him. A crooked crease appeared on his lips, a smile of some kind, not a nice kind, barely a human kind. He bent down to open the briefcase and brought out a a sleek, shiny, semi-automatic with a long, thin, oily-black silencer screwed into its muzzle. He did not point it at Joe, merely held it, then picked up the briefcase and placed it carefully on the front edge of Joe’s desk. Next he moved the chair to one side and stepped up to the desk until his thighs touched the wood. Again he reached into the briefcase and this time extracted a sheet of paper with typing on it. Now he raised the gun until it hovered two feet from Joe’s forehead. All very business-like. All very calm.

    “Here’s your script, Mister Riverton. I’ll give you a minute to become familiar with it.” He slid the sheet across the desk.

    Joe held the page up and scanned the words as they skipped around, playing tag with his eyesight. He grasped the page tighter and began again from the top.

    The script was not long and all the words were easy to remember. Or would have been if he were more practiced at reading in front of a silencer. Not skilled in that technique, he put the sheet down. He was sweating now and felt cold. He looked up at the man.

    “Listen. Spielberg. What’s this all about? I mean, you’re making me a little nervous. Maybe if you explained what’s going on, I could get these lines to stick in my head.” Staring into the hole of the muzzle, the idea that something might stick in his head brought up a gush of air, a snort of abashed laughter, that exited embarrassingly from his nose. “Sorry,” Joe said, wiping his nose on the arm of his jacket. “I’m not used to..” he flicked his eyes from the man’s face to the silencer.

    “Oh, I understand perfectly, Mister Riverton. Of course, that is precisely the value my little friend brings to a conversation such as this. If you were used to it, this would take a lot longer. So are we ready for our big debut?”

    “No! No, we’re not ready, for chrissakes. Tell me what the hell this is all about. What am I doing?”

    “You mean, what’s your motivation?”

    “That’s it. What’s my motivation?”

    The man looked meaningfully at the gun in his hand. The crease that posed as a smile lengthened. He seemed to discount, for now, its obvious explanatory value and opted for language instead.

    “In this movie,” he explained, “you are the star. I will play director and give you your lines. Clear?”

    “Clear.”

    “Glad to see you’re getting into the spirit of the thing.” With his left hand, Spielberg pulled a small plastic gadget out of his pocket. “This little item controls the camera in the briefcase. See right here?” He pointed at a ragged hole about half an inch in diameter cut into the leather case below the metal clasp. Joe could just make out the lens, black in a field of black. “And there is a viewfinder inside so that I can watch your performance.”

    “Ok,” Joe said.

    “Now, you must say your lines and respond to my lines all in one take. Think you can do that?”

    “I don’t know.”

    “I have faith in you, Mister Riverton. Why not read through the script one time aloud, how’s that?”

    “Great idea.”

    “Any time you’re ready.”

    Joe picked up the script again, took a breath, exhaled and read:

    “Thanks for coming. They shake. Did you bring the money? Accept check. Put in pocket. Twenty-five grand. Tell Mister Crump he can rely on me.”

    “There now. Let’s get one in the can. Camera rolling..and action.”

    “Thanks for—“

    “Cut!”

    “Oh, sorry.” Joe put the script aside. 

    “Rolling.”

    “Thanks for coming.” The big man’s hand loomed into view. Joe extended his right hand and the hands shook each other. “Did you bring the money?” The check came toward him across the desk, propelled by the man’s finger. Joe picked it up and immediately put it in his pocket. “Tell Mister—“

    “Cut. Mister Riverton, please,” the man said. “We don’t want to be here all day, do we?” 

    “Sorry. You didn’t like that take?”

    “You didn’t even glance at the check. Do you perhaps feel that this is not an important enough project for you?” The crease had diminished. “Let me impress upon you that your performance must seem real and believable. If it’s motivation you need—“ The silencer spit out a bright flash of fire and a bullet kicked dust out of the wall behind Joe’s head.

    “Let me try again,” Joe said. “I think I’ve got the motivation now.”

    “Rolling.”

    Joe performed acceptably and after two more takes, the big man was satisfied. “I sincerely hope we do not have a chance to work together again, Mister Riverton.”

    “My thought exactly, Spielberg. Or whatever your name is.”

    Spielberg dropped the remote into the briefcase,then the gun. He lifted the briefcase, turned and reached for the door.

    Joe rose and came around the desk and approached the man. He felt damp and disgraced and very, very angry.

    “May I say something?” Joe asked.

    “Is the check real? Oh yes, Mister Riverton. It’s quite real.”

    “That wasn’t what I wanted to say, but now that you mention it, you understand I won’t be cashing it.” 

    “Your decision. What did you want to say?”

    “I told her I couldn’t help her.”

    “Sure you did. Losers like you, they turn down clients named Crump every day of the week. Have a nice rest of your day.” He opened the door and moved through it. 

    “Thanks for coming,” Joe called after his retreating frame.

    “Very nice,” the big man chuckled without turning around.

    Joe let out a long, slow breath which he felt he’d been holding for hours. Weakness seeped into his legs. He turned for the client chair, hit the seat hard and bent forward, putting his elbows on his knees. 

    Behind him, he heard quick footsteps and jumped raggedly to his feet. The big man had left the door ajar.

    “Hey, Mister Riverton. Sorry for the delay. They loaded me up,” Bobby said, pushing into the office. He held out the Jim’s bag with Joe’s long-delayed lunch inside. 

    “Put it there, Bobby,” Joe said, indicating the chair seat. “You just missed my debut as a movie actor.” Joe walked back behind his desk and stood before the framed motivational poster that hung there on the back wall. His eyes narrowed as he searched the poster for the bullet but there was no hole in the glass. He found the hole, very small and round like a nail hole, in the wall six inches to the right. The poster was a remnant of his former employer, AXI International. He would have removed it when he took over the space, but upon reflection had decided he liked it. Not as inspiration—-it was titled “Teamwork” and showed several circular gears meshing. The gears themselves were made of dark metal held in place by silver bolts. In the center of each bolt, the circular metal gear axis showed like a cyclops’s black eye. The same black as that of the camera lens in the big man’s hidden-camera briefcase. Which is why he liked the poster. It was nearly impossible to see which of the silver bolts had had its center cut out and a wireless security camera, operated by a button hidden under a small floor matt, installed.

    “Yeah, Mister Riverton? No kidding?”    

    “No kidding.”

    “When am I gonna see it?”

    “Not that kind of movie, Bobby. Thanks.” Joe turned and handed a bill over the desktop. 

    

    

                    

 

 

                    Chapter Three

 

    Evola Johnson was sixty-three years old, the mother of seven children and the grandmother of twenty-two. She had wrinkle-free, red-black skin and black hair straightened and dyed red-blonde on top. Of these features she was inordinately proud and had often proclaimed that she could never live in a convent because she had heard they did not allow mirrors. She was short and thick with heavy arms and legs, bright brown eyes that seemed to dance a welcome to anyone and everyone, thin, precisely etched eyebrows, and ivory-white teeth that flashed from behind her pert, girlish, bright-red-painted lips when she smiled, which was something she did so often it was possible to believe she slept smiling. 

    She had been a home health care aide for forty-two years and often said she would have done the job even if they hadn’t paid her the little they did. “I could never be happy with nobody to care for,” she always told her children. To which they had responded, “What about us?” 

    “This is how I take care of you,” she had answered, smiling. “By taking care of folks who can’t take care of themselves. Go forth and do likewise.”

    In her pink uniform with white collar and white apron, she sat with half her substantial rump on the edge of the hospital bed in the second floor master bedroom. She held a large ceramic cup of warm herbal tea, lightly sweetened, in her left hand and cradled the small head in her right hand. They both weighed about the same. She brought the tea close to the mouth and tipped it gently against the bottom lip. Tea dribbled into the mouth and the tongue worked to help swallow the small puddle of liquid. She repeated this procedure with great concentration until the cup was nearly empty. 

    “There now,” she said as she lowered the head gently back onto the pillow. “There now. Wasn’t that nice?” She shifted and slid her backside until she was standing. There was a chair beside the bed but she rarely used it. After more than four decades continuously on her feet, sitting had ceased to be an attitude of rest. Other people sat when they were tired. Evola Johnson leaned. She leaned now against the side of the bed as her busy, expert hands refolded the sheet that was already neatly folded, and smoothed the coverlet that was beginning to show signs of wear from constant smoothing.

    “I know, I know. You’re getting excited,” she said, smiling down at the shape in the bed. “You know what time it is. Nearly time for that man of ours to come home. Yes, ma’am, it is, it is. A fine time of day, our favorite time of day. Got to make ourselves presentable. All this hustle and bustle got us both disheveled and in no kind of condition to greet that man of ours.” 

    She picked up the hairbrush from the bedside table and pulled it through the thin dead locks. 

    “Ooo, don’t you look pretty. Don’t take much to touch you up, though, a girl with so much natural beauty. Why, it’s a wonder you don’t have more gentleman admirers. ‘Course, you don’t get out much so that explains a lot. Ha!” She had a big loud laugh that rattled windows like an explosion of joy. She loved the sound of her own laugh, and she loved to laugh, a combination that produced these explosions with little regard for their effect on the people and property around her. “I’m sorry, honey, I couldn’t resist. But we cannot take ourselves too seriously or we’d never find things to laugh at. And that would be no way to live. I know you agree with me. We’re two peas in a pod, we are, and that’s a tight fit. Ha!” 

    She fussed around the bed, patting blankets and straightening dust covers, on her way over to the opposite side, where she fell into a heavy lean to more easily reach the neck of the nightgown. 

    “Let’s fix this nightgown, too. No excuse for immodesty, no honey, not in us girls of a certain age. No doubt if we were forty years younger we’d be showing off what the Good Lord gave us but we’re not and thank God for that.” She buttoned the top button and snugged the material smoothly under the chin. 

    “Now see here? See this beautiful black skin?” she said holding the back of her hand against the gray-green cheek. “They call this color ‘Black Bean’. Didn’t know that, did you. Neither did I! My granddaughter, you know, the one I told you about? The one that has her own design company? At twenty-three, no less? Well, she was telling me about this book of colors called Pantone. And in this book are all the colors you can imagine, and they give each one a number, too.” Still admiring the contrast between her hand and the pallor of the cheek, she reached with her other hand for the eyedrops on the shelf above the headboard and removed the cap with a practiced twist of two fingers. “Black Bean is Pantone Number nineteen dash three-nine-oh-nine. Imagine. My own Pantone Number. Let me give you your eyedrops, in those beautiful brown eyes of yours.” She hovered the small white bottle over the open, unblinking eyes, and expertly squeezed two drops into each one. 

    “Yes, ma’am! So now you can call me Evola, or you can call me ‘nineteen dash three-nine-oh-nine’. Take your pick. I’ll answer to either. Ha!” She rocked back away from the bed, capped the drops, replaced them on the headboard and stood at the foot of the bed. “Put on your best smile, now, ‘cause I just heard the door and I think our man’s home. Let’s greet him with a happy, loving heart.”

    Joe Riverton entered the room and made for the chair beside the bed. Evola floated back toward the door and leaned against the jamb like a muse or guardian angel, above them yet intimately interested. Joe sat and reached for his wife’s hand. It was warm and rough and hard in his own, as if he were holding the claw of a small wounded bird.

    “Ain’t she beautiful?” Evola asked from behind him.

    “She is,” Joe agreed.

    “Getting more beautiful every day she comes closer to Jesus.” 

    “Evola.”

    “Hm.”

    “How is she?”

    “About the same, Mister R. You go ahead and talk to her. She waits all day for you to come home and talk to her.”

    “She’s not too tired from listening to you?”

    “Good Lord, no. I’m just warming her up for when you walk in. Now go ahead. Tell her about your day. Go ahead now.”

    Joe placed his other hand on his wife’s and leaned into the edge of the bed. This quiet, comfortable, and amiable routine, knitting the three of them together in a kind of family tableau, had been playing out for nearly nine months now. Joe enters sheepishly, Evola exorts with benevolent authority, Patty stares blindly.

    But before this, before this sweetness and sadness and togetherness, there had been the years when Joe and Patty Riverton had been, if no longer exactly in love, then not exactly out of it either. It was while on the Hansford case that this realization had become more than an inchoate feeling and Joe had begun to imagine what his life would be like without her. Haley Hansford had very happily provided him with an alternative vision, one which he was in turn happy to contemplate. It was exciting to think of himself with Haley, living in Boston, where he and everything around him would be new, and to feel a new woman beside him, sharing his bed.

    And then the call had come.

    Three days past her forty-second birthday, Patty Riverton had suffered a massive stroke and Joe had said goodbye to Haley and Boston and alternative life visions, and for eight hours, alone in the car on the drive back to Rochester, he had cried until his eyes swelled up. He had forgotten Patty’s birthday—-no, not simply forgotten, the way you forget to pay the credit card bill—-but he had forgotten as if she didn’t exist because before you could forget a thing, there needed to be something there to forget, and there had been nothing there. 

    On that long ride home, he had looked into those swollen eyes reflected in the rearview mirror and seen a self he did not recognize. A self capable of such deep deception that the realization of it staggered him. A self that was content to believe it had lost something when, in fact, it was his own action, willed by him and desired by him, that had produced the loss. Loss? What he had done desecrated the word. He had not lost something but slipped out of it like a snake shedding its skin.

    Three days later, Joe had met and interviewed Evola Johnson by his wife’s bedside in her room at Strong Memorial Hospital. She had been recommended to him by a former client whose mother she had nursed in her last days. Joe liked everything about her after recovering from hearing that laugh in the quiet precincts of a hospital corridor. He had hired her on the spot and set her up in the spare bedroom suite on the third floor that had been his study. Together they had settled Patty in the master bedroom. 

    From that moment, Evola Johnson had smothered his remnant of a wife with an ardent devotion that surprised and shamed him. He had never shown Patty such aggressive, selfless affection. He knew himself to be incapable of it, and this daily master class in how to love with no expectation of being loved in return, combined with the irredeemable guilt that possessed him, brought about a kind of moral collapse. He felt himself in the blackest of black holes, moving with great effort through the sludge of a wasted life. Every thought a lie, every emotion a fake, every action a crime. 

    As it turned out, the Hansford case had been his last for AXI International. Several of their most important clients in the area defected to competitors who, now that Joe Riverton had gone off the rails, aggressively courted their business. They were easy wins. Joe Riverton was no longer himself, and no longer wanted to be. Soon, AXI corporate no longer wanted Joe Riverton, and because Rochester had always been something of an outpost anyway, packed up their big red sign and closed the office. 

    Seven weeks later, Joe emerged, thinner and weaker in body and soul. He had accepted his guilt as his own, as a part of him, with its own value and purpose, like a limb or an organ. He had become free with it, not from it. And he felt a thankfulness for this. Why, he was not sure, except that though he searched his soul for it, there was no resentment in him. 

    Convinced by Evola that he needed an office to go to, he picked up the lease from his ex-employer and moved his meager furnishings into his old AXI space. The sign outside the door and on the directory out by the road now read: The Riverton Agency.

    “Well, Babe,” Joe began, watching his wife’s unmoving eyes for a twitch or a glimmer or, too much to hope for, a blink. “This was a red letter day for The Riverton Agency. We turned away one of the richest women in the city.” 

    Behind him, Evola gasped.

    “And right after that,” Joe continued, “a man who called himself Spielberg showed up. He proposed to make a movie of me accepting money from the woman’s father. To discredit me, I assume.”

    “Why, you would never do such a thing, Mister R.,” insisted Evola to Joe’s back. “I wish I could have been there to see you throw him out of the office.”

    This is how it went. Returning nine months ago from the very first day of his new life as an independent investigator, Evola had intruded herself into this intimate moment of private sorrow. But by that time, Joe had already come to feel she was part of the family because of the weeks he had spent only slightly less immobile than his wife. Then, Evola had cared for them both, tirelessly, never joylessly, and seared into his ruined personality the phrase that summed up her point of view on life, hers, his, everyone’s: Get out of the boat. 

    “Come on now, Mister R., today’s the day you’re going to get out of the boat and walk on the water toward your salvation. Believe you can walk on the water, Mister R., like Peter. Get out of the boat, Mister R.”

    “He was a little too big to throw,” Joe said, speaking of the big man with the gun. “And then, there was the gun he was pointing at my forehead.”

    “Mister R.!” Evola gasped again and sprang away from the door jamb. “Oh, my Lord, Mister R., who was this woman anyway?” she asked, rolling around him to stand on the other side of Patty’s bed.

    “Mrs. Arlen Carroll.”

    “Don’t sound rich.”

    “Her maiden name is Crump. She’s Bernard Crump’s daughter.”

    “Bernard Crump?” Evola erupted. “The Bernard Crump, who owns all that real estate and those companies? Why in Heaven would she want to hire you?” 

    “Thank you, Evola.”

    “Now, don’t you pretend you’re the sensitive type. In nine months the only clients you’ve had is folks who can’t pay, won’t pay, or don’t pay.” She wagged her stubby index finger at him.

    “That’s my niche, all right,” Joe said with a sad smile of self-recognition.

    “Yes sir, and be happy about it,” Evola said. There was proud encouragement in her voice. “No danger of somebody pulling a gun on you from that population.”

    “True.”

    “But answer me this.” She crossed her big arms over her chest. “Why go to all that trouble when you didn’t take the Crump woman as a client?”

    “They think I did. They followed her to my office. They had no way of knowing I turned her down.”

    “Why didn’t you tell the man?”

    “I did. He didn’t buy it. Would you?”

    “Knowing you, yes I would. Not knowing you, no sir.”

    They were silent for a time as Evola mulled the facts as presented, her head moving back and forth on her thick neck. Finally, Evola looked over at him with apology in her eyes. “Don’t get me wrong, Mister R. You’re well out of it. Yessir. 

Mrs. R. and me, we’re both very relieved. But what did she want you to do, that they’d send a gunman to talk you out of it?”

    “It’s an odd setup.” Joe’s eyes went to Patty’s face. “She wants me to find evidence that her daughter, who is pregnant, is using drugs. Then, because the old man would never believe her—I don’t know why—she wants me to present that evidence to him. This, she thinks, will stop him from leaving everything to the girl and her baby, which he has decided to do, cutting her and her husband out of the money. She’s on the verge of losing seventy million or some piece of it.”

    "There are people with problems that can be fixed," Evola said with the authority that came from standing at bedsides viewing suffering close up. "There are other people with problems too big to fix, even no matter we want so badly to try. And this here is one of those latter. Say a prayer for the girl, Mister R. Best thing you can do."

    Joe continued watching Patty's face as if expecting her to express an opinion. Though he knew she would never again have an opinion about anything at all, or smile her crooked smile up at him as she used to when they agreed to disagree about this or that. He knew all this, and didn't care. Talking to her every night was what love meant now. And it had never meant as much.

 

 

    "When she first walked in, I could see she thought she could use me. She had asked around and found a little guy who would be impressed by Crump money and needed it. She was only fifty percent right about me. I wasn’t dazzled. To her surprise, I wanted to help her. I was sorry she left my office the way she did. Now, they know she’s been to see an investigator. They think they’ve neutralized me with Spielberg’s little movie. But her? How will they neutralize her? She’s out there alone and scared to death. And Evola, there is only one kind of problem: the kind you make your own. I shouldn't have to tell you that."

    For the longest time neither of them spoke. 

    Then Evola said, “Well you best get moving then. You’re in a race with the devil and he looks to be winning any day now,” Evola said. 

    Joe turned to her slowly and saw that her eyes had narrowed. It was a reaction he'd seen before, something she did at a turning point, when uncertainty dimmed her otherwise gleaming confidence.

    “What does that mean?” Joe said in a sterner voice than he intended.

    “Means Mister Bernard Crump is soon to be the late Mister Bernard Crump.”

    “How do you know that, Evola?” Joe stood up.

    “Mister R., I’ve been in this profession twice as long as I’ve been out of it,” Evola began, her head rising to follow his rise. “The sick and dying is who I know and the folks who care for them. No way a man as big as Mister B. Crump is near to dying without people in my profession knowing about it. You are well out of that vipers’ tangle, believe me, Mister R.”

    “How do you know it’s a vipers’ tangle? How do you know anything about these people?”

    “Word gets around. You know.” Evola shuffled her feet and let her hands drop onto the coverlet. “The thing we spend our life doing is the thing we mostly talk about when we get together. In the anonymity of it, of course, no names even among ourselves. But a man of his stature, well, if names are mentioned, it’s only among our closest confraternity, if you will. We are not gossips!” She straightened and touched her hair with her hand, very much on her dignity. 

    “So it’s a relative of yours, right? Somebody in the business, too?”

    “Why Mister R., you are good at your job!” She smiled at him across the bed. “My second cousin once-removed has a daughter, Dolores, who is married to one of the Jennings boys from over on Averill Street. Their son, Raydo Jennings, was sent over to fill in for Marilyn..Marilyn..oh I forget her last name. Anyway, she was the aide for the medical team around Mr. Crump and when she fell sick they sent Raydo Jennings to fill in for her and he’s been there at Mister Crump’s bedside these six years. Lives in that big house, too. Nice thing about Raydo, if dumb had a look, it’d look like him. But Raydo is one smart boy all the same. Takes after his Mama, Dolores, in that respect. Along with the brains, she put the ‘do’ in Raydo. Her husband, Ray Jennings, provided the other part of the boy’s name and the unfortunate facial characteristics which lead people to misappreciate poor Raydo. But it’s done him good these years, kept him out of trouble. Nobody in that house suspects he’s got a brain in that dumb-ugly head of his.”

    “You know Raydo personally?”

    “Why, I gave that boy the recommendation that got him into the Comfort Angels Agency. As I say, his looks are against him but Helen Comfort trusts me and put him to work and never had a complaint about Raydo in all these years.”

    “Evola—“

    “Now don’t you go asking me to pump Raydo Jennings about the Crump household, Mister R. Were anything to come of it, they would figure out where the information came from.” The smile had clicked off. “As I say, you’re well out of it. Just you walk away now, while you still can. Mrs. R and I are in complete agreement about that, aren’t we honey?” She patted the coverlet.

    “I would have. I would have walked away. I did walk away. She left my office, terrified of something, I saw it in her eyes. But I knew there was no way I could help her. She was too scared to tell me the truth.”

    “You did the right thing.”

    “Yes. I did the right thing. But then a man with a gun appeared in my office.”

    “Oh, Mister R.”

    “She needs my help, Evola.” 

    “Oh, Mister R.”

    

                    

                    Chapter Four 

 

    The next day, Joe had to drive to Buffalo to do some digging into a questionable claim for an old client, a small one-office independent insurance agent, who had recently come back to him, dissatisfied with the service he was receiving from a competitor. In fact, service was a misnomer. No one had ever come to his place of business to meet with him. There had been only a brief phone call from the principal, a man named Atkins, who had promised the moon on Day One but after several months had delivered moon dust. Joe was glad to have the client back. He needed the money. He needed the work. He needed the reference. But at the moment, he didn’t need the distraction. His mind was elsewhere.

    In the course of the hour’s drive, he had made three calls to the number at the top of his ‘recent calls’ list. Arlen Carroll did not answer and he left her no voice message. He had slept badly that night, a seven-hour wrestling match with the sheets and blankets as stand-ins for the low-grade fever of guilt that gripped him. But unlike those first weeks after Patty’s stroke, when guilt had ridden him day and night and his whole being had yearned for release from it, now he knew it for a kind of motivating force, a force that caused him to distrust the appetite for guiltlessness as he would distrust the appetite for money, or for fame, or for gambling, or for a thousand other activities and conditions a man could desire to distract himself from himself. 

    “Don’t fight it. Ride it.” 

    He had not come to this understanding on his own. It was Evola Johnson, again, who, after days and days of listening to his sometimes-murmured, sometimes-shouted guilt, had crunched down this nugget of insight from the swirling elements of his disintegrating personality.

    Finally, on the outskirts of Buffalo, he accepted that Arlen would not answer his call. Joe took up the phone again, his eyes juggling the road and his contacts list, scrolled down and found a name: Jimmy Schine. He called. Yes, Jimmy was in, his secretary reported, and would love to see him again. Joe took care of business for his newly returned old client, then made his way to a downtown office building and parked.

    Jimmy Schine, Esq., was forty-two years old but looked much younger. His hair was thick, sleek, black and styled with no part, a perfectly fitted soft black cap that made his name—Schine—a kind of commentary on his hair, and his entire persona. At first glance, he was attractive, tall, not too thin, with good shoulders from which his expensive suits hung like sentient beings in thrall to his body. But his eyes were too close together and too small and this disproportion tilted the rest of his features out of whack. The whole presentation, when it finally registered, was of a dissolute male model with dirty fingernails.

    He had been a very successful lawyer when Joe first came to his notice. Jimmy had been asking around for an investigator and had been referred to Joe. They met and Joe found he liked Jimmy well enough, at a distance. He suspected the young lawyer was too slick but the work was honest investigation and Jimmy paid fast and well. 

    “You’re smart, but not too smart,” Jimmy told him. “Like me. I’m smart, too. Smart enough to know I’m not smart enough to play above my IQ.” 

    Except that it turned out Jimmy was not even that smart. He’d been disbarred a month later—without receiving lesser sanctions first, which was pretty rare in legal circles, and indicated a serious, likely felonious, breach of some kind. Joe never knew the full story and didn’t want to know. There was plenty of rumor and innuendo concerning certain people in certain organizations. 

    In any case, while “on sabbatical” as he called it, Jimmy had hired Joe to help uncover facts that had not been available to him at his hearing. These facts had been crucial to the success of Jimmy’s petition to have his license reinstated. That was four years ago, the last job Joe had done for Jimmy Schine.

    “Joe! I heard you were up and around again.” Jimmy rose slowly from the big chair behind his big desk, his voice louder than it needed to be. There was what could be described as a smile on his face but the eyes lied about that. There was no delight in them, only a calculating caution and sly apprehension. He slid around the edge of the desk and offered Joe a hand. Joe took it and shook it but didn’t like the feel of it. He didn’t like the feel of anything at the moment and was sorry he had called. Nonetheless, he needed information and he was sure Jimmy would have it.

    “What’s doing, brother?” Jimmy said as he dropped Joe’s hand.

    “Here for a client,” Joe said. “Thought I’d stop by, maybe ask a question or two. I won’t take up a lot of your time.” 

    Jimmy gestured to the chair in front of the desk and Joe sat.

    “That all?” Jimmy tried to contain his relief but it escaped. “Sure. Sure. Ask away,” he said expansively. “Anything you want. How’s the wife? Patty, right?”

    “Right. Thanks for asking. Yeah, she’s great.”

    “No kids?”

    “Nope, no kids.”

    “Smart. Kids. Never could figure what people see in them myself. You gonna be around awhile? We should get a drink, some dinner, schmooze a little, booze a little. No ladies though. You’re a married man!”

    “No, I’ve got to get back. Just thought you might know a guy I ran into yesterday. Didn’t get his name. Big guy, square, like a refrigerator. Nice voice, though. I enjoyed listening to him talk.”

    “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

    “Really big guy. You see him, you can’t forget him.”

    “Sorry, brother. No bells.”

    “OK, thanks.”

    “Well listen. You still at the same number?” Jimmy asked, handing Joe his business card. “If something comes up, now that you’re back in the saddle, I’ll put you on it. You were the best.”

    “Thanks, Jimmy. Yes, same number.”

    “Next time you’re in town, leave a little room in your schedule, OK? We’ll do it right.”

    “Will do. Thanks again.”

    “Sorry I couldn’t help.”

    “No problem. It was a longshot. The only thing I know about the guy is that he works for Bernard Crump. So he’s no nobody. I’ll find him. Seeya Jimmy.”

    He counted his steps down the hall, betting with himself on the fifteenth. At the twelfth step, he heard the secretary call to him. “Mister Riverton? Mister Schine would like you to come back in for a minute, if you have the time.” He didn’t mind losing the bet to himself.

    Re-entering the office, Joe re-sat in the chair in front of the desk. Jimmy Schine was leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed tight and a hostile expression in his eyes. He was watching Joe from under his lowered, beetled brow.

    “What’s going on, Joe?” Jimmy asked, a different man now.

    “I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”

    Jimmy said nothing, just sat squeezing himself repeatedly, as if suffering from convulsions.

    “I was hoping you might know who this guy was, or something about him. You were close to that life. Once.”

    Jimmy continued to watch him in silence. Squeeze, squeeze.

    “There’s a woman involved who needs my help but I can’t help her because she won’t me tell anything. After meeting this guy, I understand.”

    Squeeze, squeeze.

    Squeeze, squeeze.

    Suddenly, Jimmy threw his arms outward as if blasting caps had detonated in his underarms. “Jesus, Jesus, JESUS!” The chair seat slammed forward, his feet pounded the rug and he shot upright, his voice this time as loud as he intended it to be. “Goddamit.” He crushed his hands down into his pants pockets and pinned his elbows at his sides. “You know this is not something I can talk about, right? You understand what you’re asking me, right?” he said, taking up a defensive position behind his chair, as far away from Joe as the office walls would allow.

    “Yes,” Joe answered, “I do now.”

    “OK, I owe you, Joe. I know I do. If it weren’t for you..we don’t have to go into that again.”

    “No. That’s not why I’m here.”

    “I know, I know. You’re not that kind of guy. I know.” He was losing steam by the second. His brow cleared. His lips wilted. His eyes, fixed on Joe, reminded him of the eyes of a beef cow in the on-deck pen.

    “He’s a contractor. They call him Bivi. Bivi Biviano. And he doesn’t work for Crump, like work-for-him, work-for-him. You understand? How did you meet him?”

    “Doesn’t matter. That helps, though. Thanks, Jimmy.” Joe was starting to fidget. 

    “Well yes, it kind of does. It does matter. Because he’s not a guy you just meet. He’s a guy people send to meet other people, and those other people don’t meet anybody after that, ever again.”

    Joe stood. Listening to Jimmy was getting on his nerves. “Right. Well, thanks again, Jimmy.” 

    This time, he didn’t count his steps down the hall. The elevator bank seemed to have shifted about a mile away.

    It was half an hour later before Joe realized he’d been burning up the highway and that if he hadn’t been pulled over yet, it could only be because today was National Be Kind To Troopers Day and the flat-brims were back at the station eating cake.

    Now that his irritation and low-grade disgust had dulled in proportion to his distance away from Jimmy Schine’s office—and his speed had dropped out of mach range—he felt dissatisfied and unsettled, as if he had left something undone but couldn’t think what. Actually, he could think what, but didn’t want to. Because the thing he’d left undone was the duty of sympathy he had not performed. The positive effort of self-forgetfulness, the emptying of the space between two souls, the invitation of entry to the other that displaced the self. Easier to accomplish for an Arlen Carroll, an attractive mystery, than for a Jimmy Schine, an unattractive loser.

    But this was the test. The Holy Luck had put it in his mind to see Jimmy Schine but blocked the memory of what he would see and what he would feel. And now he had a choice to make. He made it.

    The secretary asked him to hold; she’d see whether Mister Schine could speak with him.

    Jimmy came on the line. “What did you forget?”

    “Listen. Are you alright? Is everything alright?”

    “What’s this?” Jimmy asked.

    “You scared me a little bit,” Joe said.

    “You should be scared,” Jimmy said.

    “No. I mean you scared me.”

    “I told you what I know. I owed you that much. It was good advice. Take it or leave it. But we’re even now.”

    “I mean, I’m scared for you.”

    “I’m scared for you, too.”

    “Look, I don’t know what you’re into these days, Jimmy. But I think you’re in it deeper than you used to be.”

    “You don’t know anything. None of your business anyway. Have a nice life. Stay out of mine, OK?”

    A scared man who is not courageous hides his fear badly behind bravado. And Joe felt Jimmy Schine was terrified. Though the invitation was rejected, he would not withdraw it. He would perform the duty of sympathy if only in his imagination and let the worth of it be that he believed in its efficacy.

    Thirty miles outside of Rochester, his cellphone rang and a number appeared on the console display. He recognized the number and pressed the phone icon on the steering wheel.

    “Hello. Thanks for calling back.”

    “What do you want?” Arlen Carroll’s voice asked.

    “Look, I’m in my car. I hate talking over bluetooth. Can we meet? I could be at your house in less than an hour.”

    “Why? You can’t help me. Isn’t that what you said, you can’t help me?”

    “Something happened after you left my office. I..I received some new information. Where do you live anyway?”

    She didn’t respond. Joe waited to a count of ten.

    “You there?”

    “Yes.” The voice was soft and uncertain.

    “Listen. I’m still not sure I can help you, but you should be aware of..of this new call-it-a-development. Can I have your address?”

    There was a pause. “Can you be here before three?”

    Joe looked at his watch. “It’s only twelve-thirty now. I’ll be back in the city in about half an hour.”

    “Fine.”

    Less than an hour later Joe pulled up in front of a large white center-entrance Colonial on Highland Avenue. A nice enough house. Not nearly nice enough to be the house of a Crumb relative. 

    He had stopped at his office to download the video from the security camera hidden in the “Teamwork” poster onto a thumb drive.

    Arlen Carroll opened the door, looking past Joe across the street and up and down it. “Come in,” she said, “Quickly, quickly,” still not meeting his eyes, and slammed the door behind him. 

    “So what’s this new information,” she demanded.

    “I’ll need to show you on a computer.”

    She turned and led him down a hallway into a Florida room outfitted as a home office. 

    “Will it take long?”

    “No. A few minutes. Are you in a rush?”

    “My husband will be home around three.”

    “Was he the one you were afraid would hear you last night?”

    “Yes.”

    Joe plugged the thumb drive into a USB port.

    “He’ll find out, you know. They always do.” He double-clicked the icon and a Quicktime movie appeared.

    “He’s been acting funny,” Arlen said. “I think he knows already. We don’t agree on.. things.”

    Joe played the movie. Arlen sank onto a chair as it played. When it finished, she closed her eyes and turned away from Joe. 

    “They’ll use it to convince you I’m bent,” he explained. “I imagine you’ll be getting an email soon with this as an attachment. And I think you’re reaction ought to be what they expect. The man who directed this little masterpiece is a guy named Bivi Biviano. Ever heard that name?”

    “No.”

    “Unfortunately he’s heard of you. And me. He followed you to my office. He’d been alerted.”

    “He told them. Terry. My husband. I’m sure he didn’t hear me last night but he suspected me, that I was doing something that might…cause a problem. He’s terrified that I’ll wreck everything and give the old man an excuse to cut us off. What he doesn’t know—I haven’t told him yet—is we’re out. The old bastard has cut us out of the will and the money he pays us will stop when he dies. That’s the reason—I mean, our only hope is to make him afraid for the baby, that’s why you have to find some proof, anything, something…”

    “Arlen. Listen to me. I will help find the proof, even though it will make no difference to Crumb. But it just might to a probate judge. But you have to promise me two things. That you will make no attempt to contact me from now on. From the moment that video arrives, you must appear to have learned the lesson. You must convince them you have given up on outside help. And second, you must tell me everything. These people are allergic to being investigated. I can’t go stumbling around, not knowing the territory. Agreed?”

    “But why? Why are you signing on now? The guy pulled a gun on you. And shot it.”

    "You have him to thank. Before he came to the office, yours was a private matter. You wanted to bring me into it a little ways. Fair enough. But it doesn't work like that. People think they want help from somebody like me, but then they find out being alone with their problem isn't as bad as going public with it, even if I'm the only public. But if I'm not in, all the way in, I'm out. Spielberg brought me all the way in. Now I'm at risk as much as you. I feel the same fear you feel. The only way out is through you, through your problem, through your privacy. That's how it works."

    Joe noticed she glanced at her watch more than once. "Yeah. OK. God you talk a lot."

    "Now it's your turn."

    "Ok, Ok. But not now. Terry will be here soon. I’ll text you an address where we can meet.”

    

 

    Chapter Five    

 

    “Oh, hello Shontelle. Where’s Evola?” Joe asked as he entered Patty’s room. Shontelle Beverley, Evola’s third cousin twice removed, was sitting in the chair beside Patty’s bed. She often filled in for Evola, but only for short periods when Evola knew no medical action would be needed in her absence. She could trust the girl to sit and watch a patient, provided the patient was comatose.

    Shontelle’s head swiveled around with the heavy slowness of a gun turret. “Oh, hello Misstar,” she mumbled, rising from the chair in slow motion. 

    Shontelle was twenty-two and thickly built like her older cousin, but much taller. This was due to the fact that her father was the late NBA perennial sixth-man, Jeff Lemon, who had died twenty years before in a plane crash. When the girl was eighteen, Cousin Evola brought her into the home health care industry where she worked (to put the kindest spin on it) as a temporary fill-in for the more experienced staffers. 

    Shontelle offered Joe her hand and he took it—a large, warm, lifeless thing that allowed itself to be squeezed in greeting. “Evola says to tell you she’ll be right back presently.” 

    Joe dropped the hand and the girl eased herself back down onto the chair with great care. 

    “Where’d she go?” 

    “She said she’d explain it all to you when she got back.”

    “It needed explaining then?”

    Shontelle giggled and raised a hand to her lower lip. She took it between her forefinger and thumb and pulled it up over her top lip. This, Joe had come to recognize, was the sign of her embarrassment. 

    On the rare occasions in the past when he'd come home to find the girl sitting at Patty's bedside, it had been as a result of Evola's prior request and with his blessing. And each time the girl's discomfort in his presence had pained him. It spread out through the room like an oil slick, slow, heavy, thick and unreasoning. Any attention from him, even the slightest word, made it worse for her. Kindness demanded he ignore her until Evola returned. And on those other occasions he had been content with this arrangement. 

    But today, a blue-hot anger flamed up inside him. It was precisely at times like this—when the ferocity of his natural desires sprayed out like blood from a severed artery—that he found it impossible to feel the least inclination toward kindness.(even after Jimmie) And with the anger, its accompanying wraiths, the excuses that swirled instantly to his aid: Evola should have called, she should have cleared it with me; Jimmy Schine could have responded with a touch of gratitude; why did Arlen put me off? He knew them for what they were, just the most recent reminders of his spiritual retardation. He saw this clearly and understood it deeply, yet the urge to harm this poor, slow girl nearly took his breath away. 

    In controlled movements, he pulled up the chair on the other side of Patty’s bed and sat down. He took his wife’s hand and looked into her eyes and made himself listen to her breathing. Eventually, the attack passed. It left him, as it always did, awed at the vast, uncharted, unbridgeable chasm that existed between the selfless practice of the simplest virtue and the self that wanted what it wanted. This must be what religions meant by The Fall.

    Half an hour later, her uneasiness, and Joe’s, was relieved with the sound of the front door opening and closing and Evola panting up the stairs.

    “Oh, Mister R., I wanted to be back before you got home but—hello Shontelle. How’s our girl?” Evola dropped her coat on the bed and leaned over the footboard to peer at Patty.

    “She’s fine, Miz Johnson.”

    “Yes she is, isn’t she. Fine, she’s just fine, aren’t you sweetheart.” She caressed the woman’s toes, then turned to Shontelle and shooed her out of the chair. The girl rose but didn’t move, waiting for further instructions.

    “You just stand right here, Shontelle,” Evola commanded, grasping the girl’s upper arm and repositioning her gently between the chair and the head of the bed. Here, she could watch them but not be in the way. It was a kindness to her that perhaps the girl herself did not perceive. It was hard to know what she perceived. But Joe saw and perceived and he smiled.

    Evola collapsed in the vacant chair. “Well now,” she said, “I’ve been to see Ray and Dolores Jennings.” She crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her chin as she made this announcement. 

    “Thank you, Evola,” Joe said.

    “Oh don’t you be thanking me, Mister R.! I don’t know what you’re getting us into but into it we must get. Yessir. We must gird up our loins and prepare for battle. In this day and age, no less! Why, it tempts a person, it surely does, to renounce their faith in the Lord Jesus and take up the old pagan ways of vicious retribution on your enemies and all their issue.”

    “So this is what you sound like when you’re feeling guilty. Guilty people exaggerate.”

    Evola levered her large body forward, as if by minimizing the space between them, she could jump a spark of her excitement into him. “Oh, Mister R. You’ve got yourself a real case this time. And a real client ready to pour out their resources for your investigative assistance.”

    “Alleluia, Miz Johnson!” Shontelle cried. The spark had evidently bounced off Joe and shocked the girl. She was watching them now as if she had just been awakened from a life-long coma.

    “What does that mean?” Joe asked, unnerved by the fervent energy of Evola’s report and Shontelle’s eruption.

    Evola explained. “It means congratulations are in order. You’ve been hired by Ray and Dolores Jennings!”

    “Alleluia!” Shontelle boomed again, performing a startling shimmy as she raised and lowered her arms over head.

    “Shontelle!” Evola’s voice cracked like a whip and the girl slid back into her primordial docility. “You just stand there and hush up.”

    “Yes ma’am.”

    “It was Ray’s idea, Mister R. He said—-wait a minute.” She looked up at Shontelle standing beside her. “Now Shontelle, you know whatever you hear in this house stays in this house. You understand that?

    “Like in Vegas?”

    “Yes, girl. Exactly like in Vegas. What you hear us talking about is a privileged conversation, between Mister R. and me and nobody else.”

    “I understand.”

    Evola took a breath and went on. “Well, then. As I was saying, Ray Jennings said he didn’t know you or anybody who knew you and anyway he wouldn’t dare talk to anybody investigating the Crumbs for fear it would endanger Raydo. You see? They’re afraid of that Bernard Crumb, too. He heads a fearful clan. I wasn’t exaggerating about that.

    “But Dolores, she did want to talk. She was afraid for Raydo and didn’t know who to turn to, and then I show up, sent by the Lord in answer to her prayers. She said that if Ray didn’t talk to you, then how would they ever find out about Raydo, who they haven’t heard from in more than a month! And that’s when Ray said, alright, he’d talk to you but only through me. I did not press him or insinuate myself into his thinking in any way, as the Lord is my judge.”

    “Amen,” Shontelle blurted involuntarily.

    Evola skewered her with a raised eyebrow. 

    “He refuses to come to see you or have you over to their house. I, on the other hand, am not suspicious. Perfectly natural that I should visit my old friends, the Jennings. Perfectly ordinary. But, he said he wanted to be certain you would give their family your best effort and he never knew anyone to do that who had no economic interest in the outcome. You can’t trust a man who ain’t getting paid. That’s how he put it. His own words. And that’s when he said he would hire The Riverton Agency. Well, I was so happy for you because Ray and Dolores, they’re savers, you know. Big savers. They have the resources, if you know what I mean.” 

    Here she raised her left hand and rubbed her index finger and thumb together. 

    “Those Jennings kids, they always looked like they had nothing, like the family was beat down and cast off. But it was just the result of their parents’ over-fondness for security in the future. Weren’t right, I always thought, but now I thank the Lord for making them such a far-sighted couple and I will no longer think of them as greedy, selfish, covetous or any of those sins of a materialistic nature.”

    “Very generous,” Joe said.

    “You asked for my help, Mister R.,” Evola said. “And as you well know, the Lord works in strange ways. But mostly the strangeness comes from who He chooses to work through. And I’ll be the first to admit that there is nothing stranger than choosing yours truly to be the vehicle of His amazing grace in this instance.” 

    “Amen, Miz Johnson! Amen!” 

    “Shontelle.”

    “Sorry, Miz Johnson. But you do make yourself sound wonderful.” The girl looked down at her cousin, enraptured.

    “Thank you, dear. Now you just stand there like I said and hush up.”

    “Yes’m.”

    “So now by helping the Jennings, you have a chance to help Mrs. Carroll and get paid a handsome retainer, too. A wonderful day. Yessir, a God-blessed day. And all because you asked for my help. He does have a sense of humor, does the Lord.”

    Joe had to agree. It was undeniably comical that this elderly black woman with dyed red hair was sitting across from him in a bedroom in which his wife lay comatose, and whose response to his recent experience with a semi-automatic pistol was to throw in with him as if she were joining his church choir. Despite this, there were issues.

    “Why does Raydo need help exactly? Help me out here.”

    “Weren’t you listening? They haven’t heard from him in more than a month.”

    “You know boys. You’ve had a few of your own. They figure their parents will be around forever, so what’s the hurry. They’ll call later.”

    “Um hm, boys do tend to be somewhat more weak-minded than their sisters, but that is not the case here. Raydo is being held prisoner in that house.” 

    “Evola—“