Say You're Sorry Page 4

  *

  The man with the short haircut and the shoulder holster under his navy blue wool suit was named Special Agent Tom McGuire, and he was very pissed off. It wasn’t so much that he minded having to come in from Washington to consult with the local agent on a case that should have been closed weeks ago. He was always glad to visit the Big Easy. Except nobody told him the temperature in New Orleans was 85, and he was sweating like a pig in his navy serge. But what had really gotten his wind up was his early morning meeting in the office of Kendall Arthur Stanley, the president and CEO of New Orleans Cookin’, who was the subject of the case on which McGuire had been called in to consult.

  “Sit down, McGuire,” Stanley had said, not so much issuing an invitation as an order when he pointed at one of the two red leather chairs on the other side of his antique mahogany desk. Stanley’s expensively appointed, book-lined office reminded you that he’d been a rich lawyer before he’d become an even richer packager of imitation Creole frozen TV dinners. “Now listen, McGuire, I know you’ve been sent down here to clean up the local agents’ mess, but I have to tell you that I am singularly unimpressed with y’all so far.”

  “Well, Mr. Stanley, that’s—” McGuire had started, but Stanley, a tall, meaty, good-looking man with wings of wavy silver hair, McGuire’d put him at about fifty-five, went right on.

  “It’s a simple matter, really. Some damned fool son-of-a-bitch gets it in his mind to mail me one of my frozen crawfish étouffée dinners that he’s sprinkled with razor blades and broken glass, and then writes me a semi-illiterate note demanding a half-million bucks or he says he’s going to randomly doctor my product the same way in grocery stores. You all tell me to make a down payment of a hundred grand in these two numbered accounts the blackmailer’s set up at the First National and the Whitney banks.”

  “Mr. Stanley, I know—”

  “You don’t know shit! None of you know the first goddamn thing! What I know is that I deposited the hundred grand, and the son-of-a-bitch has managed to withdraw $35,000 from automatic cash machines all over Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. He’s making a fool of you all, he’s robbing me blind, and I won’t have it, do you understand! I am someone in this community. My family has lived in the Garden District for ten generations. I have been president of the Boston Club. Furthermore, I’m captain of Zeus.” And with that, Kendall Arthur Stanley slammed his fist down on the antique mahogany so hard a silver-framed photograph of a bunch of fat guys in Mardi Gras costumes jumped off and the glass shattered.

  Tom McGuire, who’d grown up on the wrong side of the tracks in Boston and worked his way through school, hated Stanley’s kind of pompous bastard so much, he was tempted to let the damned case slide. Let the stuffed shirt bleed a little more cash. Except there was always the chance the blackmailer might carry through on his threat and some consumer might swallow a razor blade.

  Nope, the blackmailer had to be stopped.

  Though last night McGuire had tried a New Orleans Cookin’ jambalaya, and it was his opinion that the city ought to sue Stanley for using its name on this donkey doo-doo.

  But what really frosted him was that the local agents had dropped the ball. They kept focusing on the fact that they could never catch the culprit in the banks’ surveillance cameras, a fact that had mystified and stymied them, and completely missed the obvious: there was a pattern to the withdrawals.

  Today, unless McGuire missed his guess, was Garden District day. He didn’t know how the perpetrator had slipped past him at the Whitney. The silly blond lady in the pink-and-green golf clothes he’d nabbed hadn’t known dick and furthermore, had been one transaction after the one he was looking for, but by God, he was going to be ready at the First National. He had already radioed the local cops for backup.

  *

  “Excuse me, sir,” Bone said to Ponytail as they roared down Prytania in the green Oldsmobile. “I don’t mean to bother you, but could you let me out?” Bone knew it was a long shot, but what the heck? The man might.

  Ponytail just laughed. He had a really ugly laugh like all the bad guys in horror movies. The guys who liked to set people’s barns afire, torture cats.

  Now they were coming up on Bone’s house. There was his ma, Clementine, stomping across the yard with that determined look on her face, headed toward Cutler’s front steps.

  “Uh oh,” said Bone. He could feel it in his gut. Clementine was onto him.

  “What?” Ponytail turned and looked at him, jerking the wheel so they almost crashed into old Miz Guste’s front yard and her yardman, Henry.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t you nothing me, boy. I’ve been nothinged all my life, and I’m sick of it, do you understand?” And with that, Ponytail jammed the silver revolver hard in Bone’s left ear.

  It seemed to Bone that if there were ever a time to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, so help him, God, this was it.

  So he did. He told Ponytail all about doing Cutler’s banking and his mama not knowing about it, and how she’d say he ought to do favors for neighbors and friends like Cutler without charging for it, and then she’d whip his butt and make him give back all the cash he’d earned, and he could kiss his blue-and-white seersucker suit goodbye, when Ponytail barked, “Which bank?”

  “Well,” said Bone, “I already went to the Whitney, but if you take a right on Louisiana and cross over St. Charles to that office building on the corner, there’s the First National….”

  “If you’re lying to me, you’re dead. Do you understand?” said Ponytail minutes later as they climbed out of the Olds and walked past a wall of hot pink bougainvillea toward the bank.

  “I understand,” Bone said solemnly, thinking he was probably going to be dead anyway before this whole thing was over with. But, on the other hand, he was a Sagittarius, and his was a lucky sign. “What you want me to do is walk up to the machine the way I always do and deduct the five hundred dollars and hand it to you and you’ll let me go. Right?”

  “Right.”

  The honky son of a bitch is going to shoot me dead, is what Bone thought. And he was right. That was exactly what Gordon Armbruster, aka Ponytail, was going to do—because why would he want a smart little kid who could ID him running around—except just before they went through the door to the lobby and the cash machines, Gordon turned around and grabbed the plastic bank card out of Bone’s hand.

  “What’s the code?” he said.

  “M-A-M-E.”

  “Mame?”

  “Uh-huh, it’s Cutler’s favorite musical,” said Bone, but before he could finish, Gordon had marched over to the machine and punched in the code, and the silent beeper on Special Agent McGuire’s belt was activated by the bank’s computer, and McGuire stepped forward from just inside the bank’s main door. Bone could feel the blast of air-conditioning on his skinny arms.

  “Sir?” Special Agent McGuire said to Gordon.

  Gordon whirled with a mad dog snarl on his face. He reached for his .38, and McGuire yelled Freeze! which Gordon didn’t do, of course. So McGuire shot him in the shin. Gordon’s Smith & Wesson made that now-familiar Blam! that Bone thought he would hear forever in his dreams, but Gordon’s shot missed and ricocheted around the small lobby, at which Bone decided to get the hell out of there. He slipped toward the glass door and was almost through it when a volley of gunshots rang out, and Gordon Armbruster’s body did a weird jerky dance as the bullets of New Orleans’s finest punched his liver, his lungs, his gut. Bone ran.

  *

  Later that afternoon, looking both ways before he left the cottage, Bone crept over to Cutler’s. “I withdrew the five hundred from the Whitney, and then—” he started, but never finished as Cutler swept him to his sequined chest. “You poor sweetheart. You dear thing. You could have died, and all because of me. You could have been shot.”

  Blam! Bone had been lying in the tub since he’d gotten home trying to erase that sound. Blam! Blami Blam! Those poor tourists and that redhead,
splattered all over First Street. So far, Clementine’s lemon bubble bath hadn’t made him feel a bit better. He didn’t know what ever would. For a while there, he’d been high on adrenaline, but now he felt sick to his stomach.

  And scared.

  “Look, it’s all over the TV,” said Cutler, pointing. A woman newscaster with big blond hair and lots of teeth was standing right there under that live oak tree where the Rising Sun/Big Easy tour bus had parked.

  “…a woman who seemed to be an accomplice of Gordon Armbruster,” she was saying, “and two tourists from Osaka, Japan, were shot here,” she pointed, “and here, and here.”

  “And you were there.” Cutler buried his face in his hands and sobbed. “They said there was this little black boy on a bike that bastard snatched up and drove to the First National. I knew it was you! Oh, Bone!”

  Bone couldn’t stand seeing a grown man cry, even if he was wearing a dress. He changed the subject to get Cutler’s mind off the shooting. “So, tell me, Cut, what was the real deal with the banks?”

  Cutler explained the New Orleans Cookin’ scam.

  “Jesus, man, how’d you think that up?”

  “I didn’t. I read about it in the Picayune. A Scotland Yard detective did the exact same thing in London, except,” Cutler picked at his gown, “he was man enough to gather his own money from the cash machines. He wore a motorcycle crash helmet with one of those dark face guards so the security cameras at the banks couldn’t photograph him.”

  “And I was too short, right? Cool, Cutler, very cool.”

  “You’re not mad at me? I put your life on the line, not to mention your freedom. Of course, I’ll do at least twenty years. That’s what they gave the Scotland Yard detective. But I’m sure I can talk them into letting you walk. You’re only a kid, and you didn’t know what I was up to.”

  “Wait, Cutler, hush,” said Bone. He pointed at the TV. “Who’s that they’re interviewing now?”

  “Oh, Jesus. It’s Kendall Arthur Stanley, that ass who owns New Orleans Cookin’.”

  “Shhhhh.”

  “…appreciate the wonderful cooperation of the FBI and the New Orleans Police Department in stopping this terrible Armbruster man who not only killed our unfortunate Japanese visitors but extorted thousands from New Orleans Cookin’. But you can be assured that New Orleans Cookin’s jambalaya and crawfish étouffée and blackened redfish are not only of the highest quality but completely free of….”

  “He’s doing a commercial,” said Cutler. “A fucking commercial. I can’t believe it.”

  “We’re home free!” Bone was jumping up and down on Cutler’s purple taffeta sofa. “Don’t you get it, Cut? They think the shooter was the extortionist!”

  On the television, Kendall Arthur Stanley was still talking. “And New Orleans Cookin’ is offering a reward of five hundred dollars as a token of our appreciation to the little boy who was kidnapped by Armbruster at the shooting on First Street and dragged to the bank.”

  Five hundred dollars! Bone forgot the shooting, the blood, the guts, the screaming. All he could see was his seersucker suit flying out of the store, softshell crab piled high on fancy china, alligator loafers, a new dress for Clementine….

  Bone looked at Cutler and Cutler looked back at him and handed over the five hundred Bone had withdrawn from the Whitney that morning.

  Cutler said, “There’s plenty more where that came from. Don’t even think about that reward, y’hear, honey? Put it out of your mind.”

  Just in Case

  For almost twenty years, as long as she’d had the grocery store, Momma had kept her gun right there on a shelf beneath the cash register. The old Colt revolver, a smaller version of the ones cowboys drew from their hips in the Saturday Westerns, was at the ready, just in case.

  “In case of what?” I asked again and again with a child’s insistence.

  The gun nestled beside a small square cigar box, the repository for each and every silver dollar that came sliding across the smooth wooden counter. When the box was full, Momma and I would, with great ceremony, take it to the bank, where the heavy coins were translated into numbers carefully inscribed in purple ink in my savings book. Both the cigar box and the Colt were off-limits to my small hands—and loaded.

  “In case of trouble,” Momma said.

  Before Daddy and I had come to town, Momma, who was my stepmother actually, had run the tiny corner grocery store in West Cypress, Louisiana—a burg in the northeastern corner of the state—all alone. She’d worked twelve hours every day but Sunday through the bone-hard years of the thirties and early forties. She’d opened for business early and never closed until after dark.

  Then Daddy had climbed onto a Greyhound bus in New York City—Momma’s letters in his pocket, me, a baby squalling on his hip—and made the long trip south. My own mother dead since I was two weeks old, he was in need of another, and Momma’s hands itched for a baby girl. The two of them had reached a tentative understanding via the U.S. mail, and three days after Daddy stepped off that Greyhound into the heart of Dixie, the deal was sealed.

  Daddy wasn’t great shakes in the store. He was shy. He was a Yankee. He stuttered. But even so, he provided relief for Momma, giving her time to rest a bit when she wasn’t looking after me.

  They’d quickly fallen into a pattern: she’d open in the mornings, then Daddy would take over for the long middle stretch of the day. Come early evening, she’d close up, maybe keeping the door open a bit later in the summer when the days were longer, selling an after-supper ice-cream cone or two while she caught up on paperwork.

  One such evening the summer I was nine found Momma sitting on the high metal stool behind the cash register, toting up bills. Daddy had gone downtown to play dominoes with his cronies. It was getting on toward eight, dusk falling, and the store was dim, but Momma hadn’t switched on a light yet, saving the electricity. I was doing some accounting too, emptying the cigar box of my silver dollars, stacking them in tens. Then I asked Momma about the Colt for the millionth-and-first time.

  “No, there never has been any trouble. Not yet.” She answered slowly, as if she didn’t really mean it.

  “But there could be?”

  Momma shook her head. “You can never be too careful in this world.”

  At that a cold hand gripped my guts, and I wished I hadn’t asked the question. Momma’s dark outlook weighed heavily on me. I was an only child. I didn’t want to be careful. I didn’t want to worry. I slipped out from behind the counter and twirled down the center aisle, then on through the front door, outside, into the world.

  I stepped over a couple of crispy red worms that hadn’t made it across the burning desert of concrete earlier in the day. Then I looked to the right.

  If the trouble were coming, it’d surely be from that direction. Not because it was north—though it was—but because that way lay the quarters. Colored quarters. That’s what everybody called the neighborhood that began just on the other side of the drainage ditch that marked our modern property line.

  “You have to watch them, the colored,” Momma warned. “They’ll steal you blind.”

  Why, I wondered, would people steal if they could just walk in our store without a dime and ask for what they wanted? A box of cornmeal, three yards of checkered gingham, two scoops of strawberry ice cream from the icebox so deep I couldn’t reach the bottom. Momma or Daddy would write up the purchases in the credit book with their name penciled on the top, and they’d pay when they could.

  “Who stole?” I asked Momma. “When? What’d they take?”

  Her mouth grew tight. “Don’t dispute my word, Emma. I know what I’m talking about.”

  Out on the sidewalk the light grew softer, fading. The kerosene tank, with its sharp smell, made popping noises as it cooled. There was something about this time of day that made me wish I had a sister. Or a brother, an older brother. Someone to play with after all the other kids had gone home to supper. But I didn’t, and Momma said I wasn�
�t going to either. This world, she said, was such a terrible place that she didn’t want to bring another child into it. That’s why she’d wanted me, she said, because I was already here.

  What was so terrible about the world, I wondered.

  Then I made a quick run through the hopscotch grid I’d chalked on the sidewalk in front of the store. One, two, three boxes on a single foot. Both feet for the double box. A fourth single. I was about to twirl myself midair for the last double, the trickiest maneuver of the game, trying not to step on the lines, when I spied two little colored boys lollygagging down the road in my direction.

  I’d seen these children countless times before, though I didn’t know their names. One boy was near my age, the other a year older. I knew that they lived in the very first house—small, unpainted, sagging porch—on the other side of the drainage ditch. Sometimes when I played with my friends among the blackberry brambles and paths that lined the ditch, I saw the boys, but we never talked. They went to the colored school, and we lived in different worlds on either side of that narrow strip of water.

  “’Scuse me,” they said shyly as they passed by me, climbed the step, and slipped inside the store.

  I stepped up and watched through the screen door as they headed for the big square red Co-cola box filled with not-quite-freezing water, but cold enough to make my fingers ache when I fished for a soda. Momma left off toting up bills to keep an eye on them.

  Would she pull out the Colt and shoot them if they tried to steal something? I wondered. No, surely not. She’d just holler at them. Momma’s voice, even when there was no reason to be upset that I could see, always reminded me of a fire bell.

  She was still watching the boys, who hadn’t made their choices yet. She stood and crossed the center aisle, hovering over them. “What do you want?” she asked. “Don’t keep that box open all night.”