The Immaculate Deception (11 page)

“
Here in Miami? At this time? I dunno! Why is there an APB? Must be some mistake. A horrible mistake.”

“
She’s wanted for counterfeiting and murder one.”

“
What? No! My momma is no murderess…or counterfeiter. She doesn’t even pick up pennies from parking lots.”

“
The information we received from the Secret Service indicated Chloe Lambert was a dirty agent, she made a counterfeit money drop in Bermuda.”

“
No. That’s wrong. You must be mistaken.” I returned to the fountain and perched on the rim, sticking my legs in. I’d just wait here for my mate. Perhaps he’d have some answers for me. He’d come and make everything better.
Please come back quickly. I need you with me now.

“
That’s my brief, Miss. Chloe Lambert is still a fugitive.” He slapped the cover on his notebook shut. He stashed it in his pocket, along with the pencil. Walking over to me, he took me by the hands and glared into my eyes. His were gray and bloodshot. “Get outa there now. Making wishes in a fountain never solves nothin’.” He helped me out of the water.

“
Thanks,” I begrudgingly said.

“
Don’t leave town, Orpha Payne.”

Orpha. Nobody calls me Orpha. People at dentists’ offices call me Orpha. But they screw it into Oprah, like Oprah Winfrey, the talk show host. It’s so embarrassing. And poor Oprah’s real name was supposed to be Orpha, from the Bible, but someone wrote it down wrong. The cop said, “I’ll be around tomorrow to take a statement from ya. I’ll call for ya at the YWCA. You be there now. And if you find your mother, ask her to turn herself in now.”

I could still feel the effects of the medication I took. I was groggy and feeling a little loopy. I giggled.
YWCA
? Like the Village People song, “YMCA”,
where it’s fun to stay?
I broke into disco dance moves spelling out the letters with my body, mouthing the words.

The cop said, “Miss, what’s wrong? Are you having a seizure?”

I giggled and giggled.

“
How much have you had to drink this evening?”

“
Drink? I had a diet soda and some tap water to wash down the aspirins and Benadryls.”

“
Diet soda
? What in carnation is that? And you say you did
Bennys
? Oh lordy. Let’s get you a room before you… No wonder all these men are taking advantage of you.”

He escorted me into the YWCA. The matronly gargoyle behind the desk was reading the racing page of a newspaper. She barely cast an eye our way.

The cop said, “Evenin’, Mother Mary. I have a wayward young woman in need of a safe place to sleep off some narcotics.”

“
I did not take
narcotics
! Benadryl is just an allergy medicine that helps me sleep. It’s readily available at lots of stores. No prescription is required.”

He said, “Maybe after you come down from your high, you and I should have a little talk about which pharmacists are selling you the Bennys. I’ll be around on my shift tomorrow evening. Now, Mother Mary, would you please show this young lady, Orpha Payne, to a room and be sure to lock the door. She’s already been molested by two men that I know about.”

Mother Mary Gargoyle eyeballed me with her bulging ones. “What happened, child, you fall into a swimming pool?”

“
No. There was an incident at the Lincoln Road fountain… Oh never mind.”

Mother Mary waddled up four flights of stairs.

I limped along behind, my ankle smarting. Some cover story dream boy made up. I didn’t even hurt my ankle but now it does. And where is dream boy?

The cop took up the rear and made sure the desk clerk escorted me to a room and locked the door.

Good, they were gone. Some room. More like a closet. I thought about the closet under the stairs at my parents’ house. That one was much bigger. It was stifling hot in this one. I shuffled to the window and heaved the sash. It flew up and then right back down, smashing my hand. “Oww!”

I tried opening it again, this time quickly putting my hands under my armpits as soon as I launched the pane upward. It slammed back down. Great. The counterweight must be broken. I glanced around and found a
Holy Bible
to prop the window open with. Before I placed it in the sill, I realized that wasn’t very nice. So I scouted around in the dim light of the lone bulb. It had a brown shoestring for a pull chain, just like the big walk-in closet in my childhood home. I spied a brown rubber doorstop on the dusty hardwood floor. Yes. That would do. I raised the sash and positioned the doorstop vertically against one side of the window.

A tiny breeze flitted in. I knelt on the floor in front of the window and crossed my arms on the windowsill. I laid my head on them. I felt flakes of paint crunching under my arms. I heard helicopters. Loud, louder, quieter, gone. The neon lettering on the building buzzed. I could see it sideways, without moving. Pink neon letters,
YWCA.

I heard a noisy motor. It looked like a green pickup truck. A really old classic one. It parked under the streetlight in front of the bakery across the street. Paddy Cakes Bakery.
Hey, this is where Momma used to live
. I couldn’t wait until they opened in the morning. Maybe they could give me some answers. I sighed. I started to get up when the door opened on the truck. A bearded man, dressed in a gray suit, emerged from the vehicle. I recognized him. He was the cute guy in the sepia photo with Momma that I was looking at before I had my first special dream. I called out to him but he’d already disappeared inside the building. Oh well. At least I must be on the right track finally. I just had to wait until the morning. The fresh air felt good on my heated skin but my jumbled mind was still racing.
That pirate boy had said Momma had his money. What money? And what was with his eye
?

I shut my own eyes. Very grateful to have mine intact. It was finally cooling off. The wind rustled through the street trees. I heard water gushing through pipes in the wall. Other tenants. Or occupants or renters or, wait, I knew, other “wayward girls” like the cop called me. If only he knew exactly how respectable and honorable and what a good girl I really was. Back in the twenty-first century where I belonged.

Where I belonged
? Oh how I wished I didn’t belong there. I didn’t, did I? In the Payne family. How I came from them, I had no idea. I was nothing like them. Maybe I was adopted? That would be great. No, my birth certificate was black and white. I was begot from Chloe Lambert and Nathan Payne. The all-American couple. Sure, they clothed and fed and sheltered me, kissed my booboos, sent me to public school and drove me to church. But they always treated me like the odd girl out.

Tammy and Perry were always more important. And they were invariably in trouble. Nothing Momma’s money couldn’t remedy. Chirping hatchlings devouring the regurgitation.

I wished I belonged here. Right here. If
here
was real, that is. I would have had a much more glamorous job in the forties. Maybe I could’ve been a switchboard operator? That would’ve been fun. I heard men used to dial the operator just to have a girl to talk to. Maybe I could’ve made dates with some classy guys. Yeah, perhaps switchboard operator was not much better than being a file clerk in the peon job category but, hey, it would’ve been more enjoyable. I knew it would have.

Or maybe I’d have been a girl newspaper reporter. War correspondent. No, not that. Dangerous. How about covering the gossip scene in Hollywood? Yeah, that’d have been great. Interviewing Cary Grant and William Powell and hey, why not, Vera Blandings. At least that way I’d have known what the first love of my father’s life had been like. I wonder why they broke up.

And I’d write Pulitzer Prize-winning articles for the front page, on important issues of the day. Wouldn’t I be something? And I’d be respected. And I’d have friends. Witty, intellectual friends. We’d go to parties and premieres and jet set. Not just an email relationship with a roommate that I’d never actually seen face-to-face. I didn’t even know what Ashley looked like. Probably heavy, with short hair. Taller than me though. Everyone was taller than me.

It would have been fun living in the forties with my dream man. He wouldn’t have let me miss our wedding. Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Donna Jones. I couldn’t wait to drop my maiden name. I wasn’t going to hyphenate. Speaking of my Mr. Jones, where did he evaporate off to? He’d said I would meet someone from Momma’s past. Check. Been there, met Bill Blandings. Now I was done.

The wind roared in. I heard music. Oh no. Not that one—yep. The darned “Donna” song again.

~*~

I blinked my eyes open, shielding my face with one hand. An annoying bell rang out. And rang and rang. I opened my eyes all the way and focused on the canopy of my queen-sized bed. Big Ben blared on the nightstand. Six o’clock. Thursday morning. Exactly a week since my accident.
I have to go to work.
I reached for the wind-up alarm and smashed the little pin in the back to shut it off.

But I didn’t want to go to work today. I didn’t want to ever go to work again. I knew Cynthia didn’t delegate my filing to anyone else in my absence. There were probably a hundred and seventy baskets of Place-In-Files to pigeonhole. I hated PIF-ing. The sallow blue computer pages were so uninspiring. I moaned. I pictured her telling me she wanted me caught up by the end of today.

I’m not going in. Not today
. Admittedly, it was a good union job and it paid my mortgage. I’d been there so long that I was at the top pay step, on the peon scale anyhow.

Bet Cynthia would make me bring a doctor’s note, explaining my absence. Even though they had the inpatient bill by now. Not that it would even be opened for eleven weeks. The mailroom was that backed up. All the time. In my nineteen years there, I’d actually caught up on my PIF’s around six times. Maybe eight? And Cynthia always found me more work in another letter to do. Usually the pink C’s. They always had trouble keeping regular employees in the C’s. It was the punishment letter, being right in front of Cynthia’s glass-walled office. Talk about working under a microscope. I shuddered, remembering feeling incompetent under her piercing scrutiny.

I currently had forty thousand files that I was responsible for. Everybody whose last name began with the letters T, U or V had goldenrod-colored files. Crammed into industrial bookshelves. Metal and two feet taller than I was. I had to kick around a three-wheeled stool and step up and down on it. Except that one wheel had always been missing. So it didn’t kick well. Cynthia had had me on the T-U-V’s for two years now. The bitch knew that I was the shortest girl in the file room.

It was pretty mindless work. We filed by order of the insured’s last name, first initial, middle initial and then the last four digits of the Social Security number. Occasionally we had to take it deeper, to the first three numbers. We rarely got down to the middle two. A monkey could do it. And very possibly did. My colleagues were all right. Although we were not quite sure what species, sex or IQ level Angel on the green M’s had. Short butch hair. Heavy but not morbidly obese. Couldn’t really see defined breasts or a waist or hips or a male bulge. Androgynous gray or brown clothes. But Angel did plod along and got the job done.

There was a major cut-through hallway in the aisle of my last two rows. So I got interrupted and distracted a lot. Even though I had to admit that the biggest distraction was Scott, the really cute mailroom guy. When I saw him, I automatically lost track of my alphabet. Well, the job did have some perks.

I decided I would not be returning to work today. I swung my legs over the bed and shuffled to the bathroom. I turned the shower on and peed while waiting for the hot water to come through.
Hey, I know, I’ll call in now and leave a message. I don’t have to talk to Miz Cynthia.
I shut the water off and found the phone. It was still off the hook, where it landed on the floor beneath the window. I hung it up, set it on the nightstand and plugged the cord back into the wall. I picked up the handset. I had a dial tone.

I dialed, listened to Jean-the-receptionist’s recorded message and then pressed six–six–nine, Cynthia’s extension. I listened to her screechy voicemail message. At the beep, I cleared my throat and said, “Cynthia, this is Donna Payne. My father died. I will be taking my three days’ bereavement leave as listed in my union contract. His name is Dr. Nathan Payne and he will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.” I hung up.

I was required to reveal those details because they always checked. Nice, compassionate company that I worked for. I should have included the date of burial but I couldn’t remember what Tammy told me. Did she tell me? I didn’t think so. Oh I didn’t wanna call her. Or Perry. I didn’t even wanna see them. I shouldn’t have to see them again. I was gonna bust Momma out of the loony bin and get her set up in a nice retirement campus. The kind with ballroom dancing, ceramics, internet classes, a beauty parlor, bank, doctor and field trips to Atlantic City. And an intercom in her cottage, to call for help, just in case. And staff to check in on her every day, just in case. And then an assisted care unit to step up to and then a full-scale nursing home for her final days.

She couldn’t come and live with me. She pushed my buttons, masterfully, like only a mother could. I couldn’t stand being witness to her doling out the dough to my siblings while I paid all of her living expenses. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to hold my tongue and I didn’t want to break my momma’s heart. No, I wouldn’t tell her off. Tammy? Oh yeah, babe. Been there, done that. Told her off good. Felt marvelous. At the time. But then I missed her.