Authors: Lisa Sandlin
LINDA MILLER MET Phelan at the door with a petroleum smell and a stained towel around her shoulders, see-through plastic gloves, and porcupine-head: strands of white goo-coated hair pulled through a frosting cap. Didn't seem to faze her meeting the public like that, even though it was about fifteen hundred miles farther down the ugly road than those women who wore curlers to the store. She brought Phelan into the living room where James, leg propped on the coffee table, watched
The Edge of Night
. Then she disappeared into the bathroom. James stared at Phelan's empty hands.
“Sherry wouldn't give it to you.”
“No. She said she would if she got that rocking chair.” Phelan pointed to the Judgment Chair. Low-backed so that the sitter's head would clear its last rail, painted black with plenty of chipped spots, especially on that last rail. “Said you knew she wanted it. Means for her daughter to have it when her baby comes. I'll run it over there, pick up the leg, and bring it back to you.”
A flush had stained James Miller's neck and was rising to his jaw. “Sherry can get Missy a load of rocking chairs with her credit card. This is the only one I want.” He had his crutch under his arm and hoisted himself up. “Linda!”
Linda Miller flip-flopped out of the bathroom missing a plastic glove, blowing on one hand of fingernails painted orange-pearl.
“Go hold the back door open. I was waiting till I got my leg back but shit, you do what you got to,” James Miller said, planting his crutch. He grabbed the rocking chair by its top rail and stumped toward the kitchen, dragging the chair.
“James,” Phelan said, following, “what's the deal here? I can be back with your leg in twenty minutes.”
“You can take her the chair, all right. Just hold your horses.” The red climbing his face flooded high tide into his hairline. “Promised myself I'd do this if it was the last thing I ever did. Goddamn it!” The rocker had skidded through the kitchen over the slick linoleum, but now it locked legs with a tall stool that sat at the bar dividing kitchen and dining room. James yanked. The bar stool crashed into the one next to it, which crashed into the last one, which hit the wall and remained there.
“Don't mess up my furniture,” Linda's voice complained around the back door. “It's gonna get scuffs on it.”
Phelan righted the three bar stools, then took the black rocking chair from James Miller's hand and set it down outside a few yards from the door, at the head of a small yard planted in Bermuda grass. The Millers had a wood fence and a barbecue cooker that looked new, a redwood picnic table, benches attached, and a couple of old metal lawn chairs with the scalloped backs. A spindly tree had not resigned itself to a cramped spot between the house and a metal storage cabin. It twisted away, branches thrust out toward the yard like a man with feet caught in cement.
James crutched over to the storage hut and came back out with a chain saw. “Stay where you are, baby.”
“Sweetie. That won't change a thing.”
James Miller just clamped his jaw. His wife walked over to him and set her hand on his shoulder. “Just so you know.”
She leaned over to kiss his cheek, and her husband turned his face so that they kissed on the mouth. A red-faced gimp muscling a chain saw and a woman with her head spiked like a medieval weaponâand it was a tender kiss, like a permission or a leave-taking.
Linda Miller shook her head at Phelan as she passed him.
“Fifteen minutes,” Phelan said. “Lemme trade her the chair. I'm guessing your sister won't go for splinters, James.”
But Phelan's client squinted defiantly into the distance, like a squad of rifle barrels topped his fence, and he was about to feed them some dirty last words.
Phelan tried again. “Leg's worth more to you than spiting Sherry, isn't it.”
“Not Sherry he's spiting,” said Linda, back in the door.
James wedged the crutch into his armpit.
Phelan got it. OK, nothing complicated here. This wasn't any Democratic Headquarters with secret files to B&E forâjust a guy's last gesture to a daddy who regularly humiliated him. James Miller was destroying a crime scene.
The chain saw sputtered and caught. James revved it a few times. Not many human beings Phelan would have charged a chain saw for. He was tempted to sit down in the blue metal lawn chair to watch the show, but knew he should stay on his feet.
James Miller, Jr.'s chainsaw split the rocker's top rails down the middle and bit through the lower rail. About twenty seconds later, James leaning, his crutch punching into turf, the saw chewed into the upholstered seat bottom. James's chin jutted tremblingâmaybe from the saw's vibration, maybe on its own, his eyes were wet. The guy was soul-deep in this mission.
The saw was biting through the seat cushion when Phelan
charged forward semaphoring for James to cut the motor. A greenish edge had emerged beneath the old batting. But there was no halting James. The chainsaw hacked and spit through brocade and cotton batting and two slim stacks of green money. Some of the half-bills spurted up as in a shuffle gone wrong. The saw didn't stop till the front lower rails parted and the sudden lack of purchase lurched James forward.
The chair's two halves, yawning apart, lay themselves down. When neither a staggering James nor Lindaâplastic-clad hands over her mouthâmoved toward the corpse, Phelan squatted and autopsied its innards. He extracted three stacks that had book-ended the severed Franklins splayed on the Bermuda grass.
“Keepsake, my flat white ass.” James used his crutch to sit on the ground. He was shaking his head, but he couldn't seem to shake his sister's name out of it.
Linda stood there a minute longer, her eyes white-rimmed. Then she whirled and ran into the house.
“Baby!” James called.
“I'mon get some scotch tape,” his wife called back. “And this frosting has ate through my scalp.”
Phelan and James sat at the shiny oak veneer dining table over beers while Linda taped. Her wet, platinum-striped hair lay down on her head now, but her right-hand nails still lacked the orange-pearl polish. $47,800. She chattered about the four-bedroom house they could buy outright over on the west side. The kind of house that had a kitchen with an island in the middle of it and swag curtains in the living room and no check to write to the Savings & Loan.
Ever so often she'd peek at James, who had some kind of convention going on inside his head. A spectator, he registered
a frown here, a twitch there, as various speakers elbowed to the mike. He inhaled his first beer and plucked eight hundred off the pile of unsliced bills. James scooted these over to Phelan, who thanked him and reminded him there would be expenses on top of this generous fee, and his secretary would figure out the bill. Didn't faze James.
Linda rhapsodized over a page she'd seen in
Southern Living
, and Phelan asked one question. A girl who knew too good to be true when she saw it, Linda let
Southern Living
drop and got herself a Tab from the refrigerator, pulled the lever on an ice tray and knocked out some cubes. She reached down a pint of Jim Beam from a cabinet shelf, topped her Tab with just enough to get a roach drunk.
She brought two beers to the table and tossed Phelan the can opener. They waited on her husband. The delegates at James's convention grew so rowdy he pushed on his temples. But finally they must have gathered their satchels and lit out. James answered the question, and they drank their beers while they worked it all out.
“You shittin' me, right,” the cabinetmaker said. He pushed safety glasses up on his forehead. “Or you're crazy as a betsy bug. Glue ain't gonna hold a chair been sawed in half. First person to sit on it busts their rump.”
Phelan assured the aproned man that consequence was not his problem. The rocker's repair was for legal purposes only.
“I neverâ¦what?”
“Glue it, including the cloth, and clamp it. Here's twenty dollars.” The guy's craftsman-brain was roiling, but his hand closed on the twenty.
Phelan picked up the Millers' rocking chair several days later. Glued, restained, retouched. “Way too good a job.”
“What in the worldâ¦listen, youâ”
“No. Really. Buddy, you're an ace.” He hefted the chair, angled it gingerly into his trunk and tied down the trunk so it did not touch the rocker. He drove to Sherry Boatwright's, constantly checking the no-view in his rearview.
The question he'd asked James was
You want to keep on fighting about your leg?
No
.
Phelan and James had waited, silent and respectful though occasionally making eye contact, while Linda mentally downsized her dream-mansion blueprints. Down, down, down to one third of $47,000â$15,666.00âand the super-deluxe family room she could add on with that amount. Pool table, wet bar, fireplace. Maybe a swimming pool out back.
Sherry Boatwright, her acreage upholstered in plaid Bermuda shorts, held wide her door so that Phelan could carry the rocker into her tiled foyer. She approached the chair, but he shook his head. The big woman frowned, left and returned to the foyer with her brother's tan leg. Phelan lifted the chair farther from the door, setting its runners down on the pale carpet of a formal living room. Sherry's broad face pinked, as though the rocker was now safe across her state line. She laid the leg into Phelan's waiting arms.
“Thanks for talking some sense into my brother. Now my daughter can rock her baby here, keep up a family tradition.”
Side of her mouth curled. Sherry walked over to the chair, bound on claiming her prize, and turned her fifty-inch hips around.
“And there's this from James, too,” Phelan added hastily, bending to slap onto the entryway tile a manila envelope containing her share of the cash. “Thank you, Mrs. Boatwright.” He shut her front door, sprinted, dove into
the driver's seat and had the car started and rolling before he reached his door shut. Imagining the winsome crack of glue releasing its hold and her plaid ass hitting the floor, he screeched out of Forestgate with the leg.
Twelve minutes later, James Miller strode on two legs over to Linda Miller, bent her backward, and stuck his tongue inside her V.I.P.-pink lips.
That was heart-fluttering to witness, but Phelan Investigations was now officially between jobs again.
THE TELEVISION FRAMED a stricken white man with gray eye-bags, licking his dry lips. A former aide to President Nixon had just admitted to the Watergate Committee that the Oval Office was equipped with a secret taping system. At the New Rosemont, Mrs. Bibbo scooted down the TV couch to make room for Mr. Finn and Mr. Nystrom. Oscar from the kitchen, waiting on Calinda to figure his paycheck, pulled up a chair. He had the evening off and the next day, and he'd done a job on himself in the employee bathroom, brown three-piece suit, lavender shirt, and kiss-me cologne.
“See! See!” Mrs. Bibbo was shoving her hand at the replay on Channel 4 News. “It'll all be on the tape recorder machine. You saw how nervous that assistant was. They know they did wrong.”
Mr. Nystrom scoffed. “You believe everyone has a conscience, just because you do. No Italian woman your age should be that naive, Roberta.”
Delpha looked toward Mrs. Bibbo and the television. The room receded like a tide, hazed, and then abruptly splashed into its former placement. She verified that she was indeed perched on the worn arm of a velour couch, in the middle of a conversation with four people who were not in prison. Later in a room upstairs, a boy would make love to her. She tuned in again to Mrs. Bibbo's polka-dot shirtwaist, her sandals with the thick straps.
“That John Erlichman has eyebrows like Satan,” Mr. Nystrom was saying.
Mr. Finn said, “I suppose you'd know.”
“I would. In restaurant supply, I met Satan at least twenty times. I sold him a fryolator. Who I'd really like to meet is that chickadee, that John Dean's wife. Her blonde hair and her little button nose.”
“That's what all the women look like where your people come from, huh, Mr. Nystrom? White as cake flour.”
“That's what people say, Oscar, but lots of Swedish women are as ugly as anywhere else.”
Mr. Finn nodded toward the television. “The system's working.”
“What they want you to think,” Oscar countered. “They get off camera where you can't see 'em, they're slapping each other's backs.”
“Not this time,” Mrs. Bibbo said. “They're in trouble. They're on the tape recorderâand there's no way they can fix that.”
Mr. Finn nodded in agreement with Mrs. Bibbo. Mr. Nystrom began to side with Oscar, but the young man hopped up and jogged to the lobby door where a girl could be seen peeking through the glass. They all watched his easy run.
“How you doin', Shayla? Lookin' like a stone fox this evening.” He leaned into the girl in the doorway.
Mr. Nystrom sighed heavily.
“Don't be sad, Harry,” said Mr. Finn.
“Little Simon Sunshine. This system”âMr. Nystrom pointed at himselfâ“it isn't working.”
Oscar came back in, bent to Delpha's ear, and told her Miss Doris wanted a word. The Rosemont commentators were off again.
Calinda was in the little office room at the end of the kitchen, bifocals on, writing in her big two-ring checkbook. Delpha poured a cup of coffee, left a dime on the kitchen counter, and took it out.
Miss Doris, stationed in one of the New Rosemont's sidewalk-viewing chairs, welcomed the cup. “Hot coffee cools you off on a hot evening, folks don't b'lieve that. Looky here now, what a artist-man give me.” She lifted up her speckled arm to show a bracelet made from all sorts of stuffâwashers, buttons, toothy watch gears, brass keys.
“Clever. That a bullet casing?”
“Don't it make a jingle?” Miss Doris shook her little wrist and clinking and tinkling broke out. The women smiled at each other. Delpha had to catch a bus, but she didn't feel like hurrying. Still hot as Arabia out here. She slouched in the chair and stretched out her legs.
“How you getting along?” Miss Doris turned her wrist one way and another, admiring every angle.
“Way ahead of where I was day we met. Got work. Got a place to live.”
“Got a friend too, huh?”
Delpha turned her head.
“Somebody watching you one night. Pants, hat, middle-size-tall, skinny, stay back in the alley cross the street. Coulda been a man, coulda been a woman. That business, you know”âshe cast a shrewd sidelong glanceâ“it ain't so cut and dried. You and your friend come out the side door and whoever it was picked up and studied you. Left when you went back in.”
Delpha absorbed this information uneasily.
“Listen at it again.” Miss Doris set the little metal pieces dancing. “I cain't get over how sweet it sounds.”
“Miss Doris, how come you stay out so late?”
“Oh, honey. The moon. She make me feel like a queen nobody knows about.” She laid the hand with the bracelet on her trousered knee and spread out its charms, regarding them with wonder, one by one. “You feel like you're back yet?”
“Sometimes it slips.”
Miss Doris smiled at a tiny key. “Good to be out here, open air, see all over, go all over. Don't like being inside much.”
“Got that. You have somewhere you sleep?”
“Well, I sleep me some odd hours. I got a little Social Securityâdon't you go thinkin I'm no-count.” Miss Doris regarded her fiercely, lower lip pushed out.
“Oh, now.” Delpha smiled. “Never thought that. Thank you for what you told me. Got to get my purse and go to work now. That bracelet is precious.”
She passed by the television-watchers. Oscar was standing, slipping his paycheck envelope into his brown jacket's inside pocket. His cursory glance at Delpha lingered a tick longer than usual. It said he was clued into her legal history in a general way, but not curious enough to press for an explanation that would cut into the evening spreading out starrily ahead of him.
“Look at you, young man,” Mr. Nystrom sneered, from his spot on the couch. “Aren't you just clean and neat and smelling sweet.”
Oscar floated above the old man's nasty tone. “Accurately observed,” he agreed. “I shall hit the street. Good night, one and all.”
“Night, Oscar.” Mr. Finn smiled him out.
Delpha ran up and retrieved her purse. She was running late. Mrs. Speir might be marinating even now, poor old body. No sign of Oscar when she got out to the bus stop. Shayla either.
It ruffled her, what Miss Doris had said, but then Miss Doris also saw haints. In particular, a striped-shirt gent from the pool hall who'd sometimes light-foot it down the alley. He didn't open the back door to get out there.