Roni Chase’s office was behind me, one of four tenants in what used to be a Denny’s restaurant, the logo still visible in white letters painted on the asphalt parking lot. The owner of the building had gutted and subdivided it into Chase Bookkeeping, Payday Loans Today, New Life Chiropractic, and Andy’s Bail Bonds, each with its own entrance.
I hauled myself off the bench, leaving Peggy Martin’s ball up for grabs, certain that Lucy would catch it for now, and grabbed the one with Roni Chase’s name on it. I stopped in the parking lot, watching Roni through the plate-glass storefront window of her office. She was sitting at her desk, holding a pen in her right hand, twirling it from one finger to the next and talking to someone whose back was to me. He was wearing blue jeans and a denim jacket, leaning over the desk, hands planted, his head bobbing. I couldn’t see his face, but hers was set hard and tight. She pushed back from the desk when I stepped through the door, folding her arms across her chest and cocking her head toward me, signaling that they had company.
“You take walk-ins?” I asked, letting the door close, blocking the exit.
Her guest straightened and turned, arms loose at his sides, cool dark eyes taking my measure. He had close-cropped dyed blond hair, a natural brown chinstrap beard, and a pierced eyebrow. The T-shirt under his open jacket was stretched tight across his body. He was ripped, flexing his hands, balling them into fists, shaking them loose and ready. I put him at five-ten, one-eighty, mid twenties, willing and probably able.
Roni dipped her chin, the corners of her mouth curling into a reluctant smile. “Sure, why not. I’ll catch up to you later, Brett.”
He gave her a narrow look, jamming his hands into his coat pockets. “You remember what I told you,” he said to her.
“Yeah, like I haven’t heard it a million times before.”
“I mean it, Roni. I’m not buying your funeral dress yet. You keep this shit up, I’ll let the county bury you in a pine box in your goddamn underwear.”
She got up, came around to the front side of the desk, hands on her hips. “And let all the money you’ve been saving for my dress go to waste? I don’t think so.”
“Girl, you are out of your mind.”
I stepped aside, holding the door open for him. He hesitated as the wind blew in, fluttering papers on Roni’s desk, and gave both of us a last look, shaking his head, pointing at her, talking to me.
“I shit you not, dude. She is absolutely fucking out of her mind.”
He climbed into a Ford Fusion parked in front of Roni’s office, backed up, spun the wheel hard, and fishtailed toward the street, wheels spinning on loose gravel.
I looked around her office: maple desk and credenza, low-backed swivel chair, flat-screen computer monitor, printer on a stand, twin file cabinets, a fern in one corner, a ficus in another, and paintings of seascapes and meadows on the walls. Her mother’s office, not hers.
“Brett who?” I asked.
“Staley.”
“Let me guess. You and Brett have a history.”
She laughed, easy and relieved. “A lot of history. His family and mine.”
“He your boyfriend?”
“Depends on the day.”
“Is he a client too?”
She cocked her head, hesitating before taking a breath. “No, but I do work for his father, Nick. He has a little grocery on St. John. Brett works for him but not for much longer.”
“Another victim of the recession?”
“Yeah. When times were good, Nick bought a couple of rental properties, figured real estate was a safe investment for his retirement and the mortgage broker made him a sweet deal. That was when the banks would finance anyone with a pulse and a ten-dollar balance in their bank account. Then, when the economy soured, he used the rent money to keep the grocery going instead of paying the mortgages, and now he’s going to lose his store and the rental properties.”
“You think he’ll take it better than Frank did?”
“You can’t tell how anyone will take something like that. He’s an ex-Marine who still thinks he’s a drill sergeant and Brett’s one of his grunts.”
“Let me guess. Nothing Brett does is good enough for his old man. The harder he tries, the worse it gets. So he puts on the tough guy act to convince you and him that he’s a man.”
Her eyes popped, and her chin dropped. “How could you possibly know that?”
“My old man was a Marine. Rode my ass until one day I took a swing at him.”
“You hit your father?”
“In the mouth. Knocked him to his knees. I was eighteen and angry.”
“What happened?”
I let out a sigh. “He got a fat lip and I broke a knuckle, but I got his attention. He started cutting me some slack, and things smoothed out after that. I found out years later that he bragged to his buddies how his kid had tagged him. He was proud of me for not taking any more crap from him, even if he couldn’t tell me to my face.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure if Brett hit his dad, his dad would be bragging to his buddies about how he broke every bone in Brett’s body.”
“Hey, I’m not recommending it. I’m just saying how it was for me. That stuff about your funeral dress. That about what happened at LC’s?”
She went back to her desk chair, motioning me to a pair of black leather chairs in front of the desk. They were the nicest furnishings in the office, Roni’s mother understanding that the customer came first. I sat opposite her. She ran one hand through her hair, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, nodding her head.
“Yeah. Brett’s a romantic.”
“Romantic isn’t the word I’d use to describe him.”
She laughed. “I know, but he’s all hard muscle and soft heart. I think he was more scared than mad.”
“The woman I was with, her boyfriend got on me the same way Brett got on you.”
She sat up. “Got on you? Why? What did you do?”
“Left my gun at home.”
“That’s what I don’t get. Why do men always assume they have to save us?”
“That’s the way people think about the ones they love.”
“Oh, c’mon. It’s more than that. It’s the
you’re the weaker sex so watch me flex my pecs
bullshit mentality guys are born with. You saw the way Brett looked at you when you showed up.”
I nodded. “He lifted his leg a little bit.”
“Like you didn’t. Jeez, men are so pathetic. You should have seen yourself. You had a look on your face, eyes all bunched up, mouth tight like you were about to spit and couldn’t wait for Brett to start something.”
She was right. That’s what I’d done with the gangbangers from the bus, and I’d done it again with Brett. The first time, I knew it. The second time, I was oblivious, on autopilot.
“You don’t even know me,” she added. “And you were ready to throw down with someone half your age and twice as tough because you thought you had to save me. What is up with that?”
I shrugged. “We’ve all got a history.”
“Yeah, and who’s going to save us from that?”
History comes with options. We can ignore it and repeat it. We can learn from it or revise it, changing winners into losers. It gives us opportunities and excuses, lifting us up or weighing us down. Though our history is as embedded in our DNA as the genes that make us tall, dark, and handsome or short, fat, and good company, it doesn’t have to be our destiny. The hard part is being able to tell the difference between being chosen and choosing.
Simon and Roni had told me the same thing: Let her save herself. But here I was anyway, unsure if she needed saving or, if she did, what she needed saving from. Whether I had come to her office because I was gallant or guilty, I was there, and she’d told her boyfriend to leave and asked me to stay.
“Maybe we’ll save each other,” I said.
She smiled. “It’s like I said yesterday. I saved your life, and now you owe me.”
“And I pay my debts in full. So, how’re you doing?”
Her face darkened, and her shoulders sagged. “I don’t know. I didn’t sleep so good last night. I kept seeing Marie lying there on the floor. She was always nice to me. And that stupid asshole Frank tried to trick me so he could kill me too. And he’d only known me my whole life! He was at my Communion, and he was going to kill me and you and your friend and LC. And for what? Because Marie pushed his buttons one too many times?”
She stared at me, her eyes filling, hands gripping the edge of the desk, demanding answers that wouldn’t tell her what she needed to know.
“If you want it to make sense, you won’t get past it because it never will.”
She sniffled, wiping her eyes and nose. “The other thing that gets me, the thing I keep seeing over and over is me shooting Frank.” She shook her head, eyebrows raised. “I didn’t hesitate. I just pulled the trigger. The really crazy part is that when I see it in my head, I’m watching me do it, like I’m having an out-of-body experience. And, I’m not sorry I shot him. I’m just amazed I did. Is that wrong? What does that make me?”
There are no rules for how to cope with shooting someone. Circumstances matter, whether it was premeditated aggression, self-defense, or the heat of the moment, but each person has to navigate through the shock, sorrow, and amazement that follow. Though the law will impose its judgment, Roni was the type for whom the personal verdict would matter most.
“No, it wasn’t wrong. It makes you someone who can be counted on. It makes you a survivor.”
“Maybe, but I like it better when the bad guy just gets voted off the island.”
“Kind of takes the TV out of reality TV.”
“Yeah, and now the TV stations won’t leave us alone. Same for the newspaper reporters. Grandma Lilly unplugged our phone and threatened to shoot the next one who came to the door.”
“Good for Grandma Lilly. All that will pass. The media is a movable beast. They’ll find someone else soon enough, and you’ll be forgotten.”
“Not soon enough to suit me. You can have my fifteen minutes of fame.”
“What have the police said about whether you’ll be charged?”
“Detective Carter said it’s up to the prosecuting attorney, but he didn’t think that I had anything to worry about on the shooting.”
I knew Carter well enough to know that he chose his words carefully. If he’d said she had nothing to worry about on the shooting, he didn’t mean she had nothing to worry about. Frank Crenshaw shot his wife with a stolen gun during a meeting with Roni, who returned the favor and shot him. Carter was leaving his options open, waiting to see where his investigation would take him.
“You should talk to a lawyer.”
“What for? Detective Carter said it was self-defense.”
“All the same. I can give you some names, make an introduction, if you change your mind. What do you hear about Crenshaw? How’s he doing?”
“He’s at Truman Medical Center. I went to see him last night, but a policeman was guarding his room and the nurse at the nurse’s station wouldn’t even let me go down the hall. I asked her how Frank was doing, and she said she couldn’t tell me anything because of privacy laws. On my way out, I ran into another nurse who knows my mom. She told me that she heard that the bullet didn’t hit bones or nerves. He lost a lot of blood, but it looks like he’s gonna be okay.”
“The cop is there to make sure Crenshaw doesn’t check out against medical advice before they can lock him up and to make sure you don’t shoot him again.”
She gave me a sour smile. “Very funny.”
“Don’t be bitter. The state is very particular about these things. You had your crack at killing Frank. Now the state wants its chance.”
“Yeah, that’s wild, isn’t it? Save a life to take a life.”
“Everybody has a job to do.”
She pointed to a stack of papers on her desk. “Tell me about it.”
“I’d rather you tell me about it. What were you doing for Frank Crenshaw besides keeping his books?”
“Trying to figure out a way to keep him afloat, but business had dropped too far off and, in this economy, it wasn’t going to come back soon enough. He’s like a lot of my clients. They aren’t perfect people, but they’ve worked hard all their lives and now they look around and it’s all gone because an economy they can’t begin to understand collapsed on their heads. Some of them, I don’t know how they’re going to survive.”
“How did Marie react when you told her how bad it was?”
“She was mad, not about the business so much as she was mad at Frank for not telling her sooner how bad it was.”
“You think she knew he had a gun?” I asked.
“I’d be surprised if she did. Frank wasn’t into guns.”
“I had a good look at Crenshaw. He seemed unhappy, but he didn’t strike me as homicidal. What were the three of you talking about before you got up from the table to go to the bathroom?”
“Marie kept asking me what else they could do to hold on to the business, and I told her there was nothing they could do, that Frank had tried everything.”
“What do you think set him off?
She shook her head. “He’d been under a lot of pressure since the first of the year, but it had gotten worse in the last couple of months. I had trouble getting him to focus, and he blew up at me a few times on the phone. Hung up on me twice. Even so, I never figured him to go nuts like that.”
“Had he talked about what he was going to do to earn a living?”
“Nothing more specific than look for a job even though there aren’t any jobs.”
“I guess Frank was really up against it,” I said.
“I suppose so.”
“That can make a man do things he never imagined.”
“He did. He killed his wife and tried to kill me.”
“What else do you hear from the police?”
“Detective Carter was here a couple of hours ago with a search warrant for all of Frank’s files. He even took my computer.”
“What about your other clients? Aren’t their records on there too?”
“That’s what I told him. All my stuff is supposed to be confidential.”
“What did Carter say?”
“Hire a lawyer and take it up with the judge.”
“Are you going to do that?”
“I don’t have the time. Frank Crenshaw and Nick Staley are like a lot of my clients. They’re small-business people who don’t have time to pay all their bills, file their quarterly reports, do their payrolls, and run their businesses. My mom knew that so she did that for a bunch of them, and they all expect me to do the same. So I’m more interested in making sure that gets done on time than going to court. I’ll tell my clients that the police are looking at their records and they can hire a lawyer to do something about it if they want to, but none of them will because they can’t afford it.”
“How are you going to do that without your computer?”
“I back everything up at the end of the day to an online server. I’ll pick up another PC and download my stuff. That will put me a day behind, but I’ll catch up.”
“I heard one of the detectives at the restaurant say that the gun Frank used to shoot Marie was stolen from a gun show last month. Any idea how Frank got a hold of a stolen gun?”
“No. This can be a rough part of town. A lot of people own guns and carry them.”
“The detective also said that Frank stole a car when he was a teenager. Did you know that?”
“That was before I was born. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Since he was a convicted felon, he couldn’t buy a gun. Who would you talk to around here if you wanted to buy a gun without a background check?”
She crunched her forehead. “And why do you think I would know something like that?”
I shrugged. “You’re third generation down here, which means you know a lot of people and a lot of their secrets. You don’t have to be a crook to know crooks. You just have to pay attention. And, this being a rough part of town, not everyone who wants a gun can get one on the up-and-up like you and your Grandma Lilly.”
She straightened in her chair, her cheeks turning rose. “This may be a rough part of town and my grandmother and mother may have taught me to take care of myself, but that doesn’t mean we’re either criminals or know criminals because I’m not one and I don’t know anyone who is.”
“I know a little bit about Northeast, and I’d know where to look.”
“Where?”
“I’d start with a drug dealer and move up the chain, asking without pushing because those people don’t like to be pushed, but drugs and guns go together like pancakes and syrup.”
“So why ask me if you already know who to ask?”
“Because I don’t know any drug dealers down here.”
She folded her arms across her middle. “But you assume that I do? Why? Because I’m young? Because I have a lip ring and red dye in my hair? Does that make me a freak in your eyes?”
She did remind me of Wendy, the way she didn’t back down when I tried to pigeonhole her, throwing my stereotypes in my face.
“A lot of people your age do drugs, and if they don’t, they know someone who does and someone else who deals. I’m not attacking you. I’m trying to help you.”
“I haven’t asked for your help, and I don’t need it.”
“You will if this doesn’t go away. Maybe Frank had something going on the side to try and pay the bills, something he couldn’t put on his books or tell you about. While you’re in the bathroom, he tells Marie, and she freaks out. That’s when she jumped out of her chair and said she’d rather lose it all.”
“That’s hard for me to believe,” Roni said. “Frank played it straight on his taxes. He wouldn’t take any chances on an audit, and Marie was the kind of person who if she found a dollar on the ground would spend the rest of the day looking for whoever dropped it and if she couldn’t find them, she’d give the dollar to the church.”
“Anything in Frank’s financial records that doesn’t match up to his normal business activity, something he could have been doing to cover his nut?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been over all of that with Detective Carter. If Frank was trying to launder money through his scrap business or cover up something else, I sure didn’t see it. I’m telling you, his business was ready for last rites. There wasn’t enough cash to wipe your nose, let alone launder.”
“Would you have seen it?”
Roni straightened and squared her shoulders. “I know what I’m doing, if that’s what you mean.”
She was cooperating with the police, and she wasn’t hiring a lawyer. That’s what innocent people did. Naïve people did the same thing, as did arrogant crooks that were certain they were too smart to be caught. She may be naïve, but she wasn’t arrogant. That left innocent. I tossed Simon’s CD on her desk.
“That’s what I mean. I’d like you to take a look at the financials on that disc. Let me know if you find anything that doesn’t fit.”
“Who wants to know?”
“Simon Alexander. He runs a private investigation company called Alexander Investigations. The woman I was with yesterday, Lucy Trent, she’s his partner. I do odd jobs for them. Simon is looking for someone who can decipher dollars. I told him he should give you a shot.”
She picked up the disc, turning it over in her hand, her eyes lighting up. “What am I looking for?”
“Simon wouldn’t tell me.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was afraid I’d tell you to make it easier on you.”
“Would you have?”
“Probably.”
“To save me?”
“Something like that. Simon told me to let you save yourself.”
She smiled and nodded. “Cool. I think I like him better than I like you.”
“I don’t blame you.” I handed her a business card. “My home, cell, and office numbers are on the card. Call me when you figure it out.”