Five Fortunes (20 page)

“But
why
?” Eloise wailed, finally. “Why would he do that? He had his pleasures, he was warm and safe…”

Rae for one instant wanted to lash out at her. He was warm and safe? That’s what you’d say about a baby. He was a man, not some father-shaped dummy who owed it to you to keep breathing.

Instead she said quietly, “He had killed a creature who loved him.

How would you feel? He was not willing to go any farther in that direction. He’d woken up day after day to find more and more pieces of himself missing. I think he always had some kind of line in mind that he would refuse to cross.”

There was a silence. It went on so long that even the children began to fall silent and glance curiously toward their elders.

“You think he’d been planning to kill himself all along?” Eloise asked, and it sounded suddenly very loud in the room. Now all the children were listening.

Rae said, “Yes. I think he must have been. He wasn’t afraid of death. Or perhaps I should say he used to speak of it as he did almost everything else in life. That it would probably be more interesting than advertised, if you looked at it the right way.”

Eloise stared at her. Cordie had taken her husband’s hand; she thought Rae was probably completely right.

James came in at that moment and said that coffee was ready in the living room.

C
arter told DeeAnne she’d hold the fort over Thanksgiving. She had closed the office for the day itself, so that she and her brother, Buddy, could drive down to La Jolla to have Thanksgiving dinner with their dad. Carter had offered to bring a turkey from the fancy deli near her house, but her father had said he wanted to cook for them.

When they arrived, Carter was touched to see how carefully he had tried to do what their mother had always done when entertaining. The table was set with the clean white damask cloth she used at holidays. There were cocktail peanuts in the same leaf-shaped dish she had always used. There was a glass bowl filled with tiny sweet gherkins. There was a plate of shrimp, boiled and peeled, and a small bowl of red cocktail sauce and a shot glass filled with colored tooth-picks for spearing and dipping the shrimp.

There was a disturbing smell coming from the kitchen, however, and when she went to investigate, Carter found that her father had accidentally pushed the Clean button on the stove instead of the Bake button, so that the scrawny little chicken he was trying to roast had been cooking for two hours at about eight hundred degrees.

They had hot dogs and cranberry sauce for dinner, and played some canasta, and she was home in time to take over a surveillance in the evening. The surveillence was an insurance company job; a guy was claiming complete disability after a minor traffic accident, but so far they had photographs of him putting up a swing set for his daughter, changing a tire, and mowing his lawn. Yesterday, Mae Ruth had gotten a good

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Five Fortunes / 151

series of him in the supermarket checkout line and then in the parking lot, carrying two sacks of groceries, one of which contained a twenty-four-pound turkey.

Friday morning Carter was in the office manning the phones and reading case files. Mae Ruth and Candy were out in the field.

DeeAnne was at the beach with her husband and kids. Leesa was working on a missing person case; the client, whose husband had been declared dead seven years before, looked out the window of a city bus while on a visit to San Diego and saw him walking down the street eating a Dove Bar. Not unexpectedly, the woman wanted to have a few words with him.

Carter was about to make some calls on a case that had gone cold, a noncustodial-parent kidnapping. She looked up to see a very pregnant young black woman with a toddler on her hip making her way through the office. It took some maneuvering; the woman was not small in the first place, and she was carrying a lot of extra humanity. And as usual, there were stacks of phone books, zip code directories, piles of files, and boxes of detritus around various desks in her path. Private investigators were not the tidiest bunch.

The young woman reached Carter’s desk. She held out a card she had in her free hand, the one not balancing the baby. It was one of Carter’s own business cards.

“Is this you?”

“
C’est moi
,” said Carter. “Take a pew.”

The woman sank into the oak office chair beside Carter’s desk, shifting the child around to perch on her knee.

“I’m Shanti,” she said.

Carter reached a hand to her, and Shanti shook it. Shanti’s skin had a glow of health, almost a sheen. She wore a loose dress of kente cloth and her hair was in glossy cornrows.

“Where are we here, about seven months?” Carter asked.

Shanti nodded.

“And who’s this?” Carter peered at the little girl on Shanti’s lap.

She made a face that made the little one suddenly smile.

“This is Flora,” said Shanti, bouncing her knees.

152 / Beth Gutcheon

“Hello, Flora.” Carter reached out her hand and the little girl clutched a finger, shyly, and then giggled.

“Shake hands,” said her mother. “You know how to shake hands.”

Flora shook her head. “Well, then, can you give her five?”

There was a long moment of apparent paralysis. Carter, giving the child a cool gaze, held her palm up flat. With a little swagger, Flora gave it a slap.

“All
right
,” said Carter. Shanti smiled and patted Flora’s back.

Carter sat in neutral. The first meeting with a client told a great deal, and since people who hired detectives often wanted something very different from what they claimed they wanted, it was important to listen carefully and jump to no conclusions. What she saw so far was an attractive, confident woman who was sizing her up with equal care. Maybe this wasn’t a client, Carter thought suddenly, maybe it was a job interview. She’d never taken on a new hire who was seven months pregnant, but so far Shanti had all the earmarks of a good one.

“So, Flora,” said Carter. “You’re going to have a brother? Or a sister?”

The little girl gave a tiny nod.

“Have you picked out a name for her?”

Shanti said, “If it’s a girl, we’re thinking of naming her Fauna.”

Carter looked at her quickly to see if she was kidding, and then laughed loudly. Flora wriggled off her mother’s lap, and careened across the carpet to where she had spotted an open box of thick rubber bands on the floor beside DeeAnne’s chair.

“Is it all right if she wanders?” Shanti asked.

“Sure, there’s lots of trouble she can get into.” But Flora had settled down and emptied the rubber bands onto the floor, and looked as if she could keep herself busy right there for quite a while.

“Terri sent me your card,” said Shanti.

Terry Chihuly? Terry Chihuly was a retired cop Carter often used when she needed some extra muscle.

“Terri Johnson. She met you in Arizona?”

Terri the fitness babe! From The Cloisters.

“Got it,” said Carter. “She said she was from L.A.”

“Yes, from my block.”

Five Fortunes / 153

“So, what’s up?”

“I grew up in the house where I live now. Terri lived two doors down. We used to play hopscotch and jump rope in the playground on the corner. Rode our little tricycles. Evenings, the dads would barbecue by the basketball court and afterward, when the babies went to bed, the dads would play dominoes on the sidewalk. Sitting out there in their lawn chairs. It was nice, you know? Now I’m trying to raise a family.”

“I’m with you so far.”

“There aren’t any more dads. There are lots of babies, but their fathers are in the joint, or running with gangs, or dead. Babies can’t play in the playground because the sandbox is full of glass. Junkies want it that way; they don’t want no kids around there. Only kids in that park are the ones whose parents are there too, nodding or drinking.”

Shanti did a little pantomime of a junkie slumped on her seat after shooting up. “Yo, Mom. Great,” she said, straightening up.

“Flora—what did you put in your mouth?” Flora looked sheepish, then fished a pencil eraser out of her mouth. Shanti put out her hand, and Flora obediently toddled over and presented the slobbery pink thing. “Thank you so much,” said Shanti. Carter handed her a tissue, and the wet eraser went into the wastebasket.

“Last week, a fifteen-year-old girl was shot on the next block. She got in the way of a turf dispute.” Both women looked at Flora, who had pulled a Seattle telephone directory into her lap and was turning the pages while softly chattering, reading herself a story. There were apparently a lot of baby bears in Seattle.

“You could move,” said Carter.

“Right. I could move to another neighborhood, where I didn’t grow up and don’t have any memories, and I don’t know anybody.

And if the dealers and the junkies and the crackheads aren’t there now, then they will be next week. Or else it’s the gangs. Or I could move someplace white, where we’ll be
real
welcome.”

“There are a lot of mixed neighborhoods…”

“I know it. But my neighborhood used to be just as nice, and this pisses me off.”

154 / Beth Gutcheon

“Are there others like you on the block, who want to fight?”

“Hell, yes. We’ve got an association. We’ve got cameras. We put up a banner that says that the neighborhood is watching…”

“Does that do any good?”

“Dealers don’t care, and the junkies don’t care. But the guys in fancy cars coming in from outside the ’hood to score…they don’t like it at all.”

Carter was impressed. “Good point. I bet they don’t.”

Shanti reached into the soft woven bag she carried. First she pulled out a small square picture book, and looked at it, surprised. “I’ve been wondering where that was. Flora? Look, here’s Mr. Frog.” Flora scrambled to her feet and came to fetch the book. She took it back to her nest and began vivaciously telling Mr. Frog’s story to her friend the telephone book. Shanti then produced a thick envelope from a FotoXpress shop. Carter opened it. It was a stack of photographs, about three dozen, of drug buys. They were taken from different houses at different times of day. Four or five dealers appeared again and again, and several customers became familiar. A few of the pictures were taken at dusk; the rest were in broad daylight.

“We’ve got twenty dealers on the one block,” Shanti said.

“I see the problem. What do you do with the pictures?”

“We give them to the police. Once in a while they bust someone, and either he’s back the next day or somebody else takes over his territory. Police got enough to do going to burglaries and murders.

If you just call them up and say, “This shit is ruining our lives,” they say, ‘Maybe later.’”

Carter riffled through the pictures again. She put them down and looked at Shanti. “How can we help?”

“How much do you know about how street dealers work?”

“Probably not as much as you.”

“You got three people, at least, working in sales together.” Shanti picked up the pictures, and pulled out one of a kid of about fourteen talking to a man in a black T-shirt with a shaved head. She pointed to the kid.

“This one’s the steerer. He’s on the street, bopping and humming
Five Fortunes / 155

his little drug tune. ‘Smoke, rock, smack.’ He sings it to the wrong person, nothing happens. Can’t bust him, he isn’t carrying. He says it to the paying customer, customer says, ‘Yo,’ steerer says, ‘My man’s over there.’”

Shanti pulled out another picture, this one taken with a telephoto lens, of a scene in a vest-pocket park, a dreary patch of concrete with a ruined basketball hoop at one end and a row of benches along a fence. A man in a porkpie hat with a deep scar on his cheek was looking at something in his hands. The man with the shaved head had turned half away from him. One hand was in his back pocket.

“Bust this one,” she pointed to the porkpie hat, “and you find a lot of cash, and maybe a vial or two, or a little junk. Not a lot more than a user would hold. Hardly worth carrying him to the station house; he’ll just be out on bail in an hour. But you watch him, and pretty soon, he goes to get more merchandise from his holder.”

She took out another picture. This time you could see two men with their backs to the camera, seemingly looking across the street.

One was the porkpie hat, and the other was another kid, this one about seventeen.

“Holder keeps the stash. Course, he doesn’t keep it on his person.

He might keep it on top of the wheel of a parked car. Or in a bag inside a garbage can. Once you know where it is, you can call the cops. They come in and take it away.”

“And arrest the dealer.”

“You
don’t
arrest the dealer, man. You don’t want to do that. You want to leave him right there on the street to explain it to his suppliers. You arrest him, man, you protecting him. People he work for can’t blame him if he gets busted. But if he keeps losing the drugs, man, he has to pay for them, and if he can’t, he seeks early retirement.”

“This is very smart,” Carter said.

“Thank you. There’s a problem though.”

“Let me guess. The police.”

“You get Mrs. Aaron Spelling calling up, ‘They dealing drugs in my garden again,’ you get a fleet of cop cars in two minutes. Shanti Amos calls them up and says, ‘There’s a stash of crack in a wheel well

156 / Beth Gutcheon

right outside my window,’ they say, ‘Oh, my goodness, there
is
?

What was that address again?’ And they show up next week.”

“I see.” Carter stretched her long legs out and recrossed them. She opened her desk drawer, looking for a pack of cigarettes. She closed the drawer again.

“We can’t be taking the stash ourselves,” Shanti said. “They know us all, they know where we live. What we need is people they don’t know, who come quick when we call, and then disappear. Dealers have enough trouble doing business on our block, they’ll take it somewhere else.”

Carter sat thinking. “This would not be the safest thing we ever did. Just guessing.”

“We can pay.”

“I’m delighted to hear it. Let me get some more information from you so I can talk this over with my partners. Your name?”