Unpaid Dues (25 page)

Every day in a person's life, every action taken or
not taken went against his or her final grade.

With all these images from her past raging in her
head, Munch arrived back at work. Safe, comfortable work, where all
her customers knew her as the lady mechanic—the woman they could
count on to fix their problems and give them a fair deal. The guys
she worked with knew she had some problems in her past, but they
didn't talk about them. It wasn't relevant. God, please, let me keep
my lifie. Don't let this end.
 

Chapter 21

Munch looked up as a pickup truck outfitted for
construction work pulled up to the self-service pumps. She saw the
HIGHER POWER bumper sticker and watched to see who got out. The
driver looked familiar. He was big, well over six feet, and about
forty judging by the gray in his hair and the seasoned look to the
muscles in his arms.

She walked out to greet him. "You a friend of
Bill W.?" This was program code. Bill Wilson was one of the
founders of AA.

The guy grinned. "Sure am."

They exchanged names and lengths of sobriety He was
Mike, he told her, Big Mike.

"
Yeah," she said, "I've seen you
around. What do you run in this thing?"

"
Regular," he said, "especially at
these prices."

Munch made no apology The station was in Brentwood.
Everything cost more, including the rent.

She handed him the pump nozzle and flipped the cradle
up. "Do you have a job around here?"

"
Mandeville Canyon."

"There's been some trouble up there lately."

"The cops came by yesterday They wanted to look
at my employee manifest."

"Did they say why?"

"They were investigating a murder. Some woman
was found down by the junior high school."

Munch held her reaction in check. "In the storm
drain. I've been following it in the newspaper. What I did it have to
do with your job site?"

"
I don't know. They wouldn't say. Maybe they go
after all the working stiffs. All I know is I got a lot of guys
working for me who are trying to get their lives together. Guys with
records. I know these guys.

They're sober. They're trying. How would it be if
they knew I gave them up to the cops?"

"You got a guy named Cyrill painting for you?
He's on the Program. "

"We're not far enough along in the project for
finish work." The gas pump clicked off at $19.85. Big Mike
removed the nozzle from his gas tank and replaced his gas cap. He
handed Munch a twenty before she could explain that she wasn't a pump
attendant. She went to get his change, but when she looked up from
the cash register, he was already driving away

She went into Lou's office and sat behind his desk.
He had been calling junkyards earlier, looking for a steering column
for a Ford Econoline van, and the phone book was still lying on top
of his desk. She was thinking about all those TV and VCR boxes Rico
had that were stamped PASCOE APPLIANCES. She didn't want him to be
crooked, necessarily but it would level the playing field between
them if he was.

She turned to the Yellow Pages and looked up Pascoe
Appliances. They had a quarter-page ad that claimed they were a
family-owned business established in 1952. The phone number was in
bold red ink. A man's voice answered the phone. "Pascoe. How can
I help you?"

"I know this is going to sound strange, but have
you been robbed lately?"

"
Personally?"

"The store, I mean. "

"
No, and nobody better mess with me either. My
daughter is engaged to a cop."

"Would that be Kathy?"

"
You know her?"

"I know the name. I hadn't heard about the
engagement."

"We just found out ourselves. We couldn't be
happier. And who are you?"

She mumbled that she had to go and hung up just as
Lou walked into the office.

"
I'm not feeling too good," she said.

"
I can see that. You want to take off early?"

"
Yeah, I won't be any good to you here."
They talked a few minutes about the jobs in progress and what she
expected to come in.

"You think this bug is going to last?" he
asked.

"
Too soon to tell."

"
Go now if you want."

"Thanks, I just have a few more calls to make."

He held her gaze for a minute. "You need
anything else, ask. What about Asia?"

"She's got rehearsals after school. I don't need
to pick her up until six."

"Good, good. Well, then. I'll, uh, be outside."

"
Thanks."

She didn't know where she wanted to go, she just knew
it needed to be somewhere where no one would know to look for her.
She reached into her purse and pulled out Roxanne's phone bill, then
she turned to the front of the phone book. This time she looked up
prefixes, checking them against the Los Angeles phone numbers Nathan
had called from Roxanne's. She found two calls to the same number in
Compton, several more to three different numbers on the Westside, and
one to a Valley exchange.

Deb kept up connections, it seemed. Were any of these
dope connections? Is that where Nathan had gotten his drugs'?

She called the Compton number. "Is this Mrs.
Franklin? Doleen Franklin?"

"
Yes it is."

"
You don't know me. My name is Munch Mancini."

"
You the girl Nathan's been staying with."

"Yes, ma'am. Do you think I could come visit
you? I want to discuss something that involves your grandson."

"
What' s he done?"

"
Nothing too terrible. I was hoping to keep it
like that."

Munch wrote down the address and told the woman she'd
be there as soon as traffic permitted. Doleen Franklin had a small
wooden clapboard house with a cactus garden. The spiniest species
grew beneath the windows. Munch knew this was no accident. All the
windows on the block were protected by burglar bars. Likenesses of
big-jowled dogs and the business ends of large-caliber revolvers hung
on chain-link gates. Red-and-white signs read BEWARE OF DOG and
BEWARE OF OWNER.

Munch parked on the street. The front door opened; an
older black woman emerged and lifted a hand in greeting.

"Mrs. Franklin?"

"Call me Doleen. That or Mama D. The onlyest
people ever call me Mrs. Franklin want my money or come to tell me
bad news."

"I'm here for neither."

She chuckled and held the door open. "Come on
in. I made us some lemonade."

The house smelled of fried food. Doleen was a big
woman with fleshy arms and wide hips. Her fingernails were trimmed
short. Her mostly gray hair was permed in tight curls and held flat
against her head with a hair net. She was wearing a flowered
housedress, cotton hose, and sensible shoes—black and rubber-soled.
She wore thick-lensed eyeglasses with dark, no-nonsense frames. Munch
sat on the living room couch on cushions wrapped in knitted blankets.
The chairs on either side of the coffee table were upholstered in
fabric from different decades, but coordinated with lace doilies on
the backs and arms.

Religious statues adorned the bookshelves. The
television was on and tuned to the soap opera
All
My Children
.

Doleen shuffled into the room with a lacquered tea
tray Munch stood and took it from her.

"Bless your heart. You want some cookies? I got
some HoHos up in the freezer. "

"No, I'm fine. Please sit. I don't mean for you
to go to any trouble,"

Doleen sat next to Munch and fixed her attention on
the television, where skinny white women plotted against each other.
She chuckled at their antics, shaking her head and murmuring, "Don't
that beat all?"

Munch watched the soap people confront each other on
the fuzzy black-and-white screen. Years ago, she and Deb had followed
this same show, and when Munch went to jail that month, she learned
that prisoners, male and female, followed the series with religious
fervor. Susan Lucci's Erica was as conniving as ever and still
beautiful. It wasn't difficult to pick up the story line. Erica was
scheming to break up yet another happy couple.

Munch waited until the show broke for commercial to
broach the subject of her visit. "Nathan's a great kid."

Doleen's eyes loomed large behind her thick lenses.

"
Um hmm." She said it as if she were
waiting for the "but."

"He's working hard. Got himself a job as soon as
he got to town."

"
Bless his little heart. You see what he gave me
for my birfday?" She got up before Munch could stop her and
lumbered off to the bathroom. She returned moments later holding a
glass swan hand-towel holder.

"When was your birthday?"

"January."

Munch turned the swan over in her hands. She would
treasure such a gift. "I never met Walter, but I knew Deb pretty
well."

The older woman closed her eyes as if in prayer and
said, "Deborah."

Doleen limped stiff-legged down her hallway telling
Munch over her shoulder, "Wait here." When she returned
from the back of the house, she had a photograph album. She set it on
the coffee table, moving aside the bowls of waxed fruit and
peppermint candy. She opened the thick cardboard cover and showed
Munch pictures of smiling black people.

"This is my Walter," she said. Walter was
sitting in what appeared to be a living room, looking up and smiling
at the camera. His arms were skinny but knotted with muscles. He was
wearing a white sleeveless T-shirt, a thick gold chain, and a big
smile. His hair was styled in a big Afro and he was no-lie gorgeous.

"Walter was one fine-looking man," Munch
said.

Doleen smiled fondly and traced his picture with
weathered fingers. "He was beautiful just like his daddy"

"
Was he always into music?"

"
Um hmm. " Now her voice was deep and
melodious. It often seemed to Munch that black people had a way of
tapping into a rhythm of a world that she had no access to, some
undercurrent of beat that connected them all. Infinitely hip,
dangerously seductive. She heard tantalizing wisps of that cadence in
every "uh-hub" and "That's right" uttered by
people of colors mysterious to her. Her old boss Wizard was suffused
with it. She used to time herself to the rhythm of his nodding head,
falling easily into the beat of it when she was standing next to him,
as if she were listening to a song with a contagious pulse. It was a
wondrous thing about him—perhaps born of a heritage of pain—its
root in exotic lands rich with color and texture. Nathan didn't have
it, she realized suddenly. Another thing they'd stamped out of him.

"
Black is beautiful" wasn't a sentiment
expressed much up there in redneck land.

"
Walter played the piano over at the church when
he was li'l. Such beautiful hands." Doleen kissed her fingers
and touched them gently to the photograph. .

"
Deb said he worked three jobs at once?"

"Oh, child, yes. That boy was going places. Alls
he ever wanted was to make his music. The ladies loved him too. Yes
they did."

Doleen turned the page to a picture of young Nathan
dressed in his Sunday best—a powder—blue suit that Deb had sewn
herself.

"I remember when Deb had these taken,"
Munch said. "We got these coupons from someone who came to the
door. "

"
She was always good about pictures, bless her
heart," Doleen said, then added, "Yes she was," under
her breath, talking more to the past than to Munch. She turned the
page to show Munch a group of four more photographs, this time of
Nathan and Walter side by side on the Venice boardwalk. Munch
wondered if the Social Security people would accept pictures as
proof. Nathan was wearing his little Levi's coat, the one with the
Harley wings patch sewn on the back and treble clefs embroidered on
the collar. Their little Boogieman. Walter wore a leather vest with
nothing underneath and was making a peace symbol with his right hand.
Nathan squinted into the sun, his Kodak slung around his neck.

"Do you have any of Nathan's work?"

"I do indeed." Mrs. Franklin cast a longing
look at the images in her scrapbook and then pulled herself to her
feet. "Come on this away"

Munch followed the older woman down the hallway
matching her pace to,Nathan's grandmother's lumbering gait. They
stopped at a room at the end of the hallway. The smell of candle wax
filled the air. There was a single bed in the corner covered with
another knit Afghan. On the dresser beside the bed, a Christmas card
stood propped atop a lace doily. The front was a blue angel. "Holiday
Blessings" was the printed inscription. Someone had added a
handwritten note. "I haven't forgotten you."

Doleen's hand made a sweep in the direction of the
card. "Sends me one every year. She shore does."