From Herring to Eternity (16 page)

And then he offered it himself, again.

“Yo, they oughta talk to that crazy-ass biddy with the teeth tats,” Fly said. “I heard her ask him for the pepper.”

“Why would she do that when she had some on her own table?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe it was clogged.”

That didn’t sound right, but I was already hustling over to fill Leigh’s cup—and wondering, with a mind on overload, if there was any socio-ethnic significance to the fact that
yo
and
oy
were mirror images of each other.

“Thank ya, darlin’,” she said in a rolling southern welcome that made her sound like Elvis in
Viva Las Vegas
but also sounded like a come-on. Maybe I was wrong. She didn’t check me out. I didn’t know whether I was pleased or insulted or both.

“How are you ladies today?” I asked.

“Life is good,” said Leigh. She was very slender, kind of concave on top, but her bare, freckled arms showed muscle. She wore a baseball cap on her short, red hair. Jackie was a larger woman who strained her blue bus driver uniform. Her platinum blond buzz cut had green tops, like a strange hybrid asparagus.

“Is there anything new about Lippy?” Jackie asked. Her voice was even lower than Leigh’s.

“Not really,” I said.

“Looks like some new evidence turned up.”

We all fell silent as Grant came by. He stopped beside Nicolette, bent over her. We heard him ask her to step out to the car and give him a statement. They left together without a look or a word.

The three of us remained uncomfortably silent. I had gotten a dose of freezer burn from the chill. I had no idea whether the two ladies did or didn’t know about me and Grant, but they seemed frozen for a moment.

“Did you guys know Lippy?” I asked as I went to pour, forgetting that I already had.

“Except to hear him tooting in the distance, no,” Leigh said.

“He rode my bus a couple times a week,” Jackie said.

“Well, there ya go,” Leigh said. “That’s why I wouldn’t’ve known him. PTG—public transport guy. He would have had no need of my services.”

“Any of them,” Jackie winked.

“Dawg,” Leigh fake snarled.

Oy.

“Y’know, it’s strange about Lippy,” Jackie said, mercifully getting back on point. “He looked lonely but he never acted like he was missing out on anything. He was always busy with something.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Fussing with his instrument, mostly,” she said. “Smiling to himself. Reading a newspaper or magazine he picked up off a seat. He’d spread it out on his trumpet case like it was a feast. He didn’t seem unhappy.” Then she said, “Sometimes he would sit there writing on a yellow legal pad.”

I came alert, like
shtetl
dwellers hearing hoof beats. “What did he write?”

“I don’t know. Writing.”

“Was he intense or kind of casual?”

Jackie rolled her shoulders as she swallowed coffee from her refilled mug.

“How’d you see all that, drivin’?” Leigh asked.

“I stop at lights, check around,” Jackie said. “I also look back when people make sounds that could mean trouble. My job is more than just steering a wheel.”

“You’re so capable, you multitasker,” Leigh cooed.

Meh keyn brechen
as Uncle Oskar used to say.
You could vomit from this
. Public lovebirding of any persuasion is not for me. So was the next thing.

“But I couldn’t do what poor Tippi could in
Cirque de So Laid
,” Jackie said soberly.

I jerked so hard the coffee sloshed in the pot. “What?”

“Her first adult film,” Leigh said. “We did a minimarathon, watched all three of her movies the other night when we read about her death. That girl could—contort.”

“Lippy was actually in one of them,” Jackie said.

“
What?
” This conversation had seriously stunted my vocabulary.

“The movie was called
Come Blow Your Horny
,” Leigh explained. “It was set in the 1950s. Lippy was playin’ horn in a jazz club where Tippi was workin’ as a cigarette girl by night, an exotic hooker by later at night. It was her last picture, according to the AFCACDB.”

“The AFCA—what?”

“The Adult Film Cast and Crew Database,” she said. “The other one was called
Lifeguard on Judy
, in case you want to download them,” Jackie added. “That was more of a period piece, heavy on the—”

“I get the picture,” I cut her off.

“It was during her red period,” Leigh snickered.

“Literally,” Jackie added.

“Hey, I’ve got to get back to work,” I said, backing away with a sense of urgency.

I turned to go, Leigh and Jackie tucked back into their breakfasts, and I wondered what Lippy could possibly have written, then torn from a pad and tucked into the ripped flap of his case . . . and whether that could in anyway qualify as a “treasure.” Something that Robert Barron or someone else found out about and would want. Then I remembered what Fly had said about Mad, who happened to be sitting right where I was facing. I looked down at her and she looked up at me and there was a moment of awkward silence. Her expression was still noncommittal, but I had a feeling she wasn’t quite a blank slate. We had unfinished business, and this was another rare morning visit.

“Hello, Mad,” I said.

“Not happy,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “The earth can take a number and stand in line. Listen, Mad, I’m truly sorry about what happened at the house and I want to figure out a way to make things right. But I have to ask you something. On the morning he died, did you ask Lippy Montgomery—he was sitting right there, at the counter—did you ask him for pepper?”

“I did not,” Mad said with a strange mix of certainty and innocence.

“Someone says they heard you.”

“They’re mistaken.”

“You didn’t speak with him at all?” I asked.

“I did speak to him,” Mad said.

“What did you say?” I asked. I would have described this Q&A as “pulling teeth,” only in Mad’s case the metaphor didn’t quite apply.

“I asked him about the paper,” Mad said.

I thought back. I didn’t remember a newspaper, but he may have picked one up on the bus. “Did Lippy give you a newspaper? Was there something marked on it? Circled? An ad or something?”

The Wiccan looked away, stared straight ahead. I couldn’t tell if she was being passively belligerent or was just being her usual, oblivious self.

“Mad, everything that happened while Lippy was here is important,” I pressed. “Isn’t there
anything
you can tell me?”
And please don’t tell me “the earth isn’t happy
,”
or I can’t be responsible for what happens to the coffeepot.

“Yes,” Mad said thoughtfully. “May I order now?”

Chapter 16

I left Mad humming some witchly sounding ditty as I left the dining room for the sane, controlled security of my office.

Putting aside the necessity of making a living, there are many, many reasons why a person goes into a particular profession.

They might love it—an actor, for example, or a bake shop owner. A journalist, maybe.

They might be expected to go into it—a family business or a family trade, like the
shmatta
business—literally the “rag” business but only euphemistically. Your father made shirts, you made shirts. Your father imported bulk cloth from Taiwan, you sold bulk cloth from Taiwan. That didn’t hold true for women in my culture; your father repaired shoes, you married a heart surgeon.

Some people go into a line of work because they want to serve the public good, they want power, they like a challenge, they want to serve God—the reasons and choices go on and on.

Occasionally, someone takes a job to radically change their life. To transfer to another country, put their shoulder against a new challenge. A subset of that is to flee an old life, to palate cleanse, which was my reason. Not that choosing to be an accountant had been driven by anything profound; it was an interesting enough field with plenty of opportunity, a glass ceiling that had enough cracks for me to rise, and a chance to meet what my grandmother called “a fella.” I was lucky. At the time when my life was in shambles, when Wall Street became so scandal-ridden that it was less embarrassing to admit to porn semi-stardom, the opportunity to take over Uncle Murray’s deli came along. I grabbed it like it was the last chocolate creme–filled donut on the shelf.

Now, a year later, came the self-analysis: While it was the right move, did I want it to be a permanent move? Was I happier than I was a dozen months ago? Yes. Lonelier? About the same. More optimistic? I’m a Jew. That doesn’t apply.

Every time I went into the office to place orders for supplies, it was a weird collision of careers, a mix of deli needs and financial savvy. It was the time I liked the least, since it took me back mentally and emotionally to the
other
time. And yet— Today was different. With Grant giving me the cold beef shoulder and the Wiccans probably casting spells and the school about to chop up my home and my anchor Thom lost in a psychological Mariana Trench, not to mention the lingering weirdness of the Barron-Candy run-in, plus a message from Yutu thanking me for a great going-away present, which it wasn’t, it was more like an I’ve-got-nothing-to-do-right-now-so-this-will-fill-the- time-nicely—I felt emotionally and physically exposed and was beginning to yearn for the comforting anonymity of New York, where even the sexually “out” folks were comfortably casual about their lifestyle instead of in your face. New York, where I hadn’t known my father had a long-time love affair with a crazy lady. New York, where my ex had the good manners to just fade away. New York, where I had never found a dead body in my backyard or accidentally fed an acquaintance a fatal dose of poison or had a man fall through the ceiling into dinner.

Was it time to get the hell out of Nashville? Or was I missing the point of everything that had happened? Should I embrace it and never let go? Because, whatever else could be said about my one-year anniversary, I had learned more about myself and faced more growth-inducing challenges than I had in the first three-plus decades of my life combined.

And yet,
I thought,
there was probably a limit to how many tidal forces a person could endure.

I wasn’t sure I was designed for this kind of exponential growth. Or if it was necessary or even healthy. There was something to be said for sameness, for limitations. Everyone who spoke of Lippy, for example, mentioned that he seemed to be secure in his own world. I could have been, in New York, with a small accounting practice.

I think.

That was the problem. One could never know and, in any event, nothing was ever perfect. And here I was.

“What the hell
are
you doing here?” I asked myself. A desk full of papers and folders, a drawer full of
tchochkes
, a dining room full of strange people, and a life full of people I wished were somewhere else.

I had no answer. But here I was, and I wasn’t one to cry about things I could change if I chose to.

Even though Lippy’s trumpet case had only been there a few minutes, the office felt naked and spacious without it. That poor, flimsy thing had history; it had weight. And it probably had a message for whoever was clever enough to figure it out.

I looked at the scan I had made of the bit of paste, blew up the image, rotated it, and saw nothing new in it. I e-mailed the image to myself so I could look at it later and turned to the daily inventory. I went to the kitchen, counted. We were low on carrots and cabbage for the coleslaw, low on onions—which made me think of Grant’s dopey comment—low on Diet Coke and low on coffee. That was probably my fault. I was drinking enough to float a horseshoe, as I once overhead someone say down here.

Lunch came and went in a blur. When it was over, I did something I’d been putting off: I called K-Two to see how things were going. To my surprise, they weren’t.

“No one from the university showed,” she said.

“Did anyone call?”

“Not a soul. I’ve been sitting here tailgate-watching videos on YouTube—oh, I used some of your outside juice. I hope you don’t mind.”

It took me a moment to figure out that she meant electricity. If you work in a restaurant long enough, words like “juice” and “fried” only have one meaning.

“That’s fine,” I told her. “So no one’s been there all day?”

“Just a Cherokee lady on a motorcycle,” K-Two said. “Said her name was Sally. She had a cat with her, in a basket. She let the cat out—it ran off and I haven’t seen it since—and then she put something in your mailbox.”

My stomach gurgled. “Was it a letter?”

“I guess,” K-Two said. “What else?”

“Something dead,” I said. “Would you mind taking a look?”

“Glad to. Don’t really feel like I earned my pay today.”

K-Two hummed as she walked to the curb. I’d heard the melody before.

“What’s that you’re humming?” I asked.

“I don’t know. A song.”

“Did you hear it on YouTube?”

“Maybe,” she said. I heard the mailbox door squeak. “It’s a business envelope. Typed. Just your name on it. Return address is—Trial of Tears Law Offices, PO Box 602206B, Nashville. Want me to open it?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Hold on.” She hummed again as she slit the envelope. “It says—oh, this is interesting.”

“What is?” K-Two was exasperating. It was both a testament to our culture, and fortunate for our citizens, that there was a place in the world for this woman.

“It’s not addressed to you but to Andrew A. Dickson III, Esquire,” she said. “This is a cc.”

K-Two proceeded to read what I pretty much expected to hear: that my house was now a temple and that no “desecrating hands, feet, or souls” would be permitted access to the grounds for any purpose other than “prayer and the worship of the mother,” which I took to mean the earth. The one who was not happy. It further stated that a representative of the Cherokee people, Mrs. Sally Biglake, would be camping on the property when her familiar—Little Pie—had disbursed any rats and evil spirits.