Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 01 - Lickety-Split (12 page)

He looked around the room for agreement. The residents sat in their chairs, stunned, their hands folded in their laps.

“Are we?” Ollie repeated. “Come on, people, if we stick together, we can win this thing. We can have a sit-down strike. Refuse to be moved. Call the media. There’s a guy buys the New York Times at my newsstand, he’s something big over there at Channel 7 in Tampa. I say something to him, we’ll be all over the news. What do you say?”

Myra Strickland, a tall, thin woman with hair wound into two white braids coiled on top of her head, stood up.

“A strike?” She pursed her pale lips in distaste. “No. Definitely not.

“As some of you may know,” she continued, “I practiced law in Wisconsin for many years before my retirement. I’ve checked into Florida’s condominium statutes, at Arch’s request, and what I find, unfortunately, is that it appears that what the new owners of the hotel are doing is perfectly and unfortunately legal.”

“Legal?” Ollie cried. His sweaty hair stuck to his scalp. His face was flushed. “It’s legal to put retirees, folks who have worked hard all their lives, out in the street so some uppity-ass church can sell our homes to the highest bidder? How’s that legal?”

A hum of voices rose around Ollie. People were nodding quietly. Cookie got up and made a beeline for the door. She’d had enough.

“Hey,” Ollie called after her. “We’re not through with you yet, missy. You tell that preacher we’re not leaving. Hell, no, we won’t go!”

“You tell ‘em, Ollie,” somebody said. “Give ‘em hell,” another one prompted.

Arch Barchie had to pound his podium repeatedly with his wooden meat-mallet gavel to regain order in the room.

“Please!” he thundered. “Let’s observe some parliamentary procedure, can’t we?”

“What are we going to do?” Rosemary Pickett asked. “Verbena and I can barely afford our rent now. We don’t have enough money for a down payment. And where else can we go? We’ve got to be downtown, close to the buses. Verbena sold our car three years ago.”

“That’s why we’re here today,” Barchie said, struggling to regain control of his meeting. “The first thing we need to do is appoint someone to get the church to give us full disclosure of pricing and financing for the conversion. Miss Rosemary, would you do that for us?”

Rosemary and Verbena Pickett nodded in tandem.

“Next,” Barchie said, looking down at his clipboard, “we’ll need a legal committee to explore our options pursuant to taking legal action to stop the conversion.”

“Yeah!” Sonya Hoffmayer called out. “Let’s sue the bastards!”

Barchie pretended not to hear her. “Myra Strickland has already agreed to head that committee. Sonya, perhaps you could assist her?”

“Hey!”

Barchie glared out over the rim of his bifocals at Ollie, but Ollie seemed not to notice.

“Has anybody here ever heard of this Cosmic Unity outfit?”

“Never heard of them before,” Barchie admitted. “Anybody else?”

No one had.

“Somebody needs to find out who these people are,” Myra Strickland agreed. “Are they even Christians?”

“That’s what I’m getting at,” Ollie said. “We need to dig up the lowdown on these scumbags.”

Truman slid down in his chair and tried to cover his face with his hands. He sensed what was coming.

Ollie pointed to the back row. “There’s Truman Kicklighter. He used to be a professional snooper. Big-shot newspaper reporter. He can find out who these characters are.”

“Now look,” Truman protested, “I’m retired. I don’t have any press credentials. And I never covered religion. What we need—”

“Good idea,” Arch Barchie said firmly, as though it were his own. “Truman Kicklighter will head up our fact-finding committee.”

Jackie’s hand shot up in the air. “I’ll help out,” she called.

“Me too,” Ollie hollered.

“So moved,” Barchie said. “Do we have a motion to adjourn?”

Ollie ran up to Truman. “When do we start work?”

Truman had been doing mental math. The numbers he came up with were impossible. By his calculations a “unit” like the room he’d rented for the past six months was going to sell for around $30,000. It might as well have been $300,000.

His gaze wandered to the door to the lobby, which Cookie Jeffcote had left open. He saw her at her desk in the lobby, talking furiously into the telephone.

He straightened his shoulders and took a deep breath. “Right away, Ollie,” he said. “We start right away.”

The camera panned slowly across the tiny room, showing the goldfish bowl with its solitary tenant, the adult trike that took up one corner of the room, the stark rust-stained porcelain toilet and sink, the crumbling plaster, and the peeling linoleum. “Christ,” the cameraman muttered to himself under his breath. “Criminals at Raiford got it better than this. This is killer stuff.”

Carmen Quinones overheard his remark and smiled brightly, showing a set of gleaming, slightly oversized teeth. Joe was right. This was definitely lead-story material.

Now the camera panned to where the tiny man sat at the edge of a Lilliputian cot. His hair gleamed with wet comb-marks and he was dressed in a faded cotton shirt, buttoned all the way to the too-large collar.

“Mr. Zorn,” Carmen said, oozing concern, “we understand that this room we’re standing in, which is no larger than the size of the average mop closet, would sell for sixteen thousand five hundred dollars. Can you afford that kind of money?”

Ollie shook his head sadly. “No way,” he said. “I live on a fixed income. I don’t have that kind of money.”

Carmen turned to the camera so that it could capture the empathy etched on her smooth olive face. “Then where will you go if the Church of Cosmic Unity succeeds in its plan to convert the Fountain of Youth Hotel to luxury condominiums?”

Ollie knew his cue. “I don’t know,” he said, near tears. “The streets, I guess. I got nowhere else to go.”

Now the anchorwoman back in the studio was clucking her tongue sympathetically.

“A sad plight all too often shared by the hundreds of thousands of retirees living on the Suncoast on fixed incomes,” Kristin Carpenter commented. “Carmen, does the Reverend Jewell Newby have any comment to make about this plan, which could put thirty or forty senior citizens out of their homes?”

A remote camera now showed tape from earlier in the day. Carmen Quinones standing outside an office door, gesturing toward the brass nameplate.

“We went to the new St. Petersburg headquarters of the Church of Cosmic Unity today and tried to speak to the Reverend Newby, Kristin, but as you can see, church officials refused to admit us to their offices.”

A muffled voice called from the other side of the door, “Go away or we’ll call the police.”

“No comment, Kristin,” she said crisply. “Back to you.”

Jewell Newby slammed his fist down on the remote control, which had been sitting on his desktop. The plastic shattered into dozens of pieces, and the channel jumped from the noonday news on Channel 7 to a station showing a large purple dinosaur cavorting with half a dozen children.

“This is an abomination,” he thundered. “I thought you told me you had the situation with these people under control. This is your idea of control?”

Cookie Jeffcote tugged at her skirt and blanched. “After the meeting, I tried to talk to Zorn. I offered him a special deal. Special financing. He wouldn’t go for it. He’s a nut, Jewell. Just wants attention. I had no idea he’d pull a stunt like this.”

A secretary stuck her head in the door. “I’m sorry, Reverend, but it’s one of the electricians on the phone. There’s a problem at the hotel.”

Newby put his hand on the phone and turned back to Cookie. “Take care of this,” he said. “I want those people out of my building.”

Cookie hurried out of the office.

“Satan is at work at that hotel,” he called after her. “You must smite him and all his works.”

“Smite your ass,” Cookie muttered.

Hutch Goolsby leaned over the engine of the ailing Mercury. The dentist from Ohio had been livid when he’d brought it back this morning. “This is the worst piece of shit I’ve ever driven,” the guy hollered at Curtis, who did little except nod his head. “It backfires, it stalls. The damn thing leaked oil all over the driveway at the condo we rented; now the manager there wants to keep my security deposit.”

Butch didn’t like to downgrade the boy in front of customers. Now, though, with Curtis sitting in the driver’s seat of the Merc revving the engine like he was told while his father fiddled under the hood, Butch felt some constructive criticism was due.

“Shoulda told that shitbag to take a hike, boy,” he hollered over the
pop-pop-pop
backfiring. “Remember this: The customer is never right.”

Tammi had propped herself on the service desk, checking on the previous day’s rental agreements. “Hey, Butch,” she called. “That’s deep. Really deep. They teach you that at that Harvard Business School you went to?”

It was on Butch’s mind to tell Tammi a thing or two, but instead he concentrated on automotive mechanics, applying the business end of a metric wrench with a tremendous whack to the carburetor head.

The car was humming nicely now, but Tammi had her claws in, and she was enjoying herself. “So I guess we won’t be quitting our jobs and moving to the Keys with our winnings from last night, huh? How you two fuck-ups let that Wade guy get away is beyond me. You can just bet that little geek is laughing his ass off at you guys.”

Curtis’s face was beet red. But it was shame, not anger, that had him in its grip. “I’m sorry, Tammi,” he said, switching the engine off and sliding out of the driver’s seat. He took a rag and flicked it over the seat. Butch had made him acutely aware of the dangers of oil on the seat of a rental car.

“You been by that Wade’s place today?” she asked.

“We went over last night,” Butch said defensively. “Right after the cops cut Curtis loose. The kid never showed up.”

“What about his old man’s house?” Tammi wanted to know. “You said the old man lived over on Snell Isle. Did you morons check there?”

“Yeah,” Curtis said sadly. “But there’s a big old wrought-iron gate out front. You can’t hardly see nothing. And there’s private security patrols over on Snell Isle. The guard chased us off.”

“Prick,” Butch said under his breath.

Tammi slid down off the desk and went over to the soft drink machine. She pressed the Fresca button, banged with her fist twice on the machine’s midsection, then retrieved her drink. She opened the can and took a long drink, licking her lips delicately.

“Wade’s got that computer program. He owes us money. And we’ve got what? Nothing.”

Butch felt himself doing a slow burn. He took the empty oil can and tossed it in the trash. “Okay, so he gave us the slip last night. We’ll get him. Him and the program. We’re not done with old Wade-boy yet.”

Tammi sipped her drink, unconvinced. Butch Goolsby was full of big plans. Like the time he tried to get her to pull out in front of a Coca-Cola truck and get hit, so she could make a big insurance claim.

“You know what my grandma used to say? She said ‘Tammi, if you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself.’”

Cookie Jeffcote scooted over until she was right beside Michael in the front seat of the Continental. “So, where were you last night?” she asked, kissing his ear, letting her hands roam.

“I was at the track,” Michael said. “I was gonna call. Honest to God. But Nunz and I had a business meeting. We were supposed to see a guy about a thing, but it got all screwed up.”

“What guy?” Cookie said, loosening the knot of his tie, undoing the top button of his shirt.

“Just a guy,” Michael said. “He was supposed to sell us something. But when he got there, he didn’t have the goods. Then the guy takes off and don’t come back. Nunz’s salad had croutons, so he got mad, and I had to baby-sit and make nice. Everything was fucked up. I didn’t lay down a single bet.”

“Talk about fucked up,” Cookie said. “You shoulda been in that meeting at the hotel today. Jeezus. I thought those old folks were gonna lynch me when they heard how much Newby’s planning to charge for those condo units. Then this fuckin’ midget, his name’s Ollie? First he tries to get these people to go on, like, strike. Then he goes screaming to Channel 7 that we’re puttin’ all these old people out on the streets. I’m tellin’ you, there’s gonna be trouble. Jeezus, I thought Jewell Newby was gonna have a stroke he was so mad. He even threatened to fire me. Like it’s my fault about all the bad publicity about this thing.”

“Don’t worry, baby,” Michael said, running his hand up the inside of her thigh. “Mikey’s gonna take good care of you today. You’re gonna forget all about that hotel and those old folks and Jewell Newby.”

“I wish,” Cookie said petulantly.

Michael got them the honeymoon suite at the newest hotel on the beach, the Dorado Palm. After the bubble bath in the heart-shaped tub and a line of coke, Cookie decided to give him a full-body massage.