I shut it.
“I started to say something in the restaurant lot,” Givens said, “but you see, part of the problem was who I had lunch with today. I wanted to get out of there as swiftly as possible. Before he came out. I didn’t have your number, so I called your boss.”
“Sometime boss,” Leonard said. “Actually, he can’t do without us.”
“So you weren’t there to eat?” I said.
“I lied,” Givens said. “I went in and I sat in a back booth in a conference room and got talked to by a person who is part of the problem. Him and his bodyguard.”
I looked at Leonard, said, “Is any of this making any sense?”
“Not to me,” he said. “But I’m still trying to figure out the ending to The Sopranos.”
“I’m sorry,” Givens said. “Please sit down.”
There were two very comfortable leather chairs, and we sat in them.
Sharon Devon had not spoken a word. She looked as if she had been crying. Her eyes were red as sunrise and she looked more her age today, as if she had finally lost the war against it. I felt sorry for her. I feel sorry for just about everybody.
“We led you along some,” she said.
“Figured that,” Leonard said.
“Me and Henry,” Sharon said, “we weren’t really having trouble.”
“Okay,” I said.
“We were just pretending,” she said.
I glanced at Givens. He didn’t look too happy. I couldn’t tell if it was about Henry and her not actually having trouble, or about something worse. I decided a little of column A and a little of column B. I had a suspicion there might even be a column C.
“So we were just sort of window dressing?” Leonard said.
She nodded. “Yes. You see, we have a daughter, Nora.”
We knew that, of course, but we didn’t say so.
“She is by Henry’s previous marriage. I was never able to have children. But, I love her quite a bit. Nora was precious to me. She wasn’t quite a teenager when we first met, but I took to her right away, and she to me. After that came the teenage years and Nora was pretty wild. Not that uncommon. I was pretty unruly myself. Nora started seeing boys we didn’t want her to see, and she started experimenting with drinking and drugs. It made what happened later easy.” She paused. Givens got up, went to a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of water, got a glass and a coaster and brought it over to her. He placed the glass on the coaster and unscrewed the cap on the water bottle and poured about half a glass.
Patiently, she waited while he did all this, as if a pause like this was the most natural thing in the world. For the two of them, maybe it was. When he was finished she sipped her water, delicately, placed the glass back on the coaster.
“You see, Henry really was in oil,” she said. “And he really did have a loss of money. But part of the reason wasn’t just a shift in natural fortune. There was a dismantling of fortune, and Henry was the cause. He liked to gamble. He liked to gamble a lot. Then the business went bad and he got into debt with the wrong people. He bet on some football games, some horses. He bet on just about anything. He would have bet on the number of freckles on my ass if I’d have been willing to let someone count.
“I loved him, but he was a gambling addict, and no matter how bad the people were he got into debt with, he kept letting the debt get deeper. Then they put interest on what he owed. Lots of interest. About double. They wanted him to get in deep, because they assumed he was a big shot, and that whatever problem he was having paying would go away, because they had had a few ups and downs with him before, and in the end, he had paid it off, and with interest. Lots of interest.”
“But the downs didn’t stop,” I said.
She shook her head. “No. They didn’t. He went to them and told them there was no way he could pay all that back if they kept compounding the interest, which they were doing. They didn’t listen. He was late, so they added on a late fee, and added interest on that. He told them if they stopped compounding it, maybe he could pay it back, in time. He probably couldn’t have paid it back if they had let him go back in time to the beginnings of the earth and work it off up until now. The business, it wasn’t coming back. Not the way they thought it might. Fact was, he had lost the business, but they didn’t know that.”
Sharon paused and drank some more of her water.
“He let them think he was still making money. Maybe that was the right thing, to let them think that, because if they didn’t think he could pay, they didn’t have any reason to let him live. They even threatened me. We had some money. But it was just eating money, gas, enough to pay a few bills. We didn’t have enough to pay them so that it would mean anything to them. That’s when we came up with a plan. Idea was we’d divorce and sell the house.”
“I don’t see why you would have to divorce,” I said. “Don’t see the plan in that.”
“Turns out it wasn’t too good a plan,” she said. “We tried to get clever because we thought we were smarter than a bunch of thugs.”
“You probably are smarter,” I said, “but not as clever. They’re two different things.”
“Or as ruthless,” Leonard said. “That’s something makes them real different.”
“Why didn’t you just go to the cops?” I said.
“For the same reason I said,” Sharon said. “We thought we were smarter. We didn’t want people to know about Henry’s gambling debts. We thought we could work things out and no one would know, and we could make some kind of life together again.”
“So what was the plan?” Leonard said.
Sharon drank more of the water and looked as if she might break out crying. She didn’t. She said, “Thing was, Henry thought if we were divorced, at least they’d leave me alone. They didn’t. And the man that I said I dated, that got beat up—”
“Let me guess,” I said. “He isn’t really your type.”
“No,” she said. “He was a messenger for the people Henry owed.”
“And Henry beat him up, causing more problems,” Leonard said.
“Yes,” she said, “but there was already a problem. You see, the messenger came to my house because he said he wanted us to know that if we didn’t pay he had our daughter. She had been seeing someone that was part of the problem. Jackie Cox. She was in with the wolves already.”
“Ah, I got it,” I said. “The Dixie Mafia Cox family.”
“You know them?” she said.
I shook my head. “I know who they are. They took the place of someone who used to run this area’s business. Those people we did know. They came to kind of a sad end.”
“Rumor is,” said the lawyer, “you were involved.”
“Rumors are all over the place,” I said.
“Jimson and his crew,” the lawyer said, “they got killed in a filling station in No Enterprise, and the rumor is from cops I know, you and Leonard might have had something to do with that.”
“We had our problems with Jimson,” I said. “But no. That wasn’t us.”
And it wasn’t. It was a young and lethal lady named Vanilla Ride who had put them down, but that’s a different story.
I said, “I don’t want you to be too disappointed about that, though. Me and Leonard, we’ve had our moments, and I figure you wouldn’t have asked us here if you didn’t know that, and didn’t want us to have a moment again.”
“Jackie was seeing our daughter,” Sharon said. “She met him because of my husband and his gambling dealings. He didn’t intentionally introduce her to Jackie, but he used to have these tough guys coming around, and Jackie, he’s the son of one of them.”
“Richard Cox,” I said.
She nodded her head. “They got tight quick. Maybe because he was a bad boy, and Nora liked bad boys. But then Henry owed them the money, things went bad, and then they sent this Unslerod around.”
“He was kind of a tough guy they used,” Givens said.
I didn’t mention that he wasn’t that tough
anymore, and unless Marvin got in touch with his cop friend, Unslerod and his girlfriend were still collecting flies in a trailer out in the boonies.
“He said they had our daughter,” Sharon said, “and if Henry didn’t find some way to pay half, soon, and the other half almost as soon, they would harm her. Henry was already living apart from me, trying to set the divorce up to maybe make me safer, and then this guy came around. He was looking to talk to Henry. He thought he was tough.”
“But Henry was tougher,” I said.
“Much more so,” she said. “He gave him a beating and they didn’t get any money. It was a foolish thing to do, them having our daughter. I don’t think Henry believed them at first. Then they sent this.”
She opened her purse and took out a plastic bag and dug in the bag. When she got through with that she pulled out another plastic bag and unwrapped that. There was a pair of red thong underwear inside.
“These are hers,” she said. “I bought them for her and her father didn’t like that I did. All the girls were wearing them, she said, and I thought it was harmless. Anyway, they’re hers. I know they are. It proves to me they have her.”
“What we would like,” Givens said, “is that you go and get her back. That you make these men stop bothering Sharon. They killed her husband and took her daughter, and now they’re pressuring her to pay. She can’t pay. They have come through me with all this. They said Sharon goes to the cops, or doesn’t pay something on what she owes, and by something they mean a substantial amount, they will send the part of her daughter that fits in the underwear to her in a cardboard box with a bow on it.”
“How much time did they give you?” Leonard asked.
“Three days,” Givens said, without waiting for her to answer.
At Marvin’s office, he said, “So, how do you read it?”
“I think Henry got his dick in a crack,” I said, “and he was too arrogant to take care of matters when he could, so he just kept it there and the crack got tighter. He didn’t pay, so they took his daughter. They sent around a guy they thought was tough to collect and tell Henry how things were, that being Unslerod, and maybe he thought he’d play tough on Henry. Henry was tougher. Maybe Unslerod pissed Cox off with his failure, or maybe it was some other reason, but it seems more than likely Cox had him taken care of. His girlfriend was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Later on it was Henry’s turn. I figure Unslerod and the woman were dead some days before Henry, considering how their bodies looked. Way I understand it, Cox doesn’t like failure, and he gives it a very short shelf life.”
“Question comes to me,” Marvin said, “guy owes you, why whack him if you want the money that bad?”
“That’s the question me and Hap got to thinking on coming over here,” Leonard said. “We got to thinking on it hard enough that I cell phoned Sharon. I asked her how they expected her to pay what was owed, and she said—”
“Insurance money,” Marvin said, and snapped his fingers at the same time.
“Yep,” Leonard said. “You are a wizard. She has a shit-full policy. Seven hundred and fifty thousand. Henry managed to keep that up, as protection for Sharon. That isn’t even all Henry owes, but it’s a good part of it. She told me that, I cleverly asked, doesn’t it take time for the policy to pay out? And she said it did, and you know what?”
“The lawyer is helping her out,” Marvin said, leaned back in his desk chair and placed his hands behind his head. “He’s going to put the money up for her in return for the insurance money.”
“Yep,” Leonard said. “He’s not only an ex-husband carrying a torch, he’s a fucking saint.”
“Sure he is,” Marvin said. “Sure he is.”
We drove over in my car and met the lawyer. We were going to go with him to the Dixie Mafia guy and they were going to give us the girl in exchange for the lawyer’s money. When the insurance paid off, Givens was going to get his money back from Sharon. He was carrying a briefcase when he came outside his office and met us at the curb.
It was a nice day, and I wondered, as I often wondered, if it might be my last day on earth, if this might be the day I set out to do something simple and it turned bad and I’d end up in a ditch with crows pecking at my eyes.
Givens climbed in the backseat with his briefcase. He said, “We got to drive to Tyler.”
“All right,” I said, and I slipped away from the curb. “We meeting in the city?”
“That’s the plan,” he said. “It should go easy enough.”
“They explained it to you?” Leonard said. “You got all the particulars down?”
“They just want the money,” Givens said.
“What about the boyfriend?” I said. “Cox’s son?”
“He was just the bait,” Givens said. “He was the one that got her to trust him.”
“And that’s kind of what we are, aren’t we?” I said.
Givens was quiet for a long moment. “I don’t think I follow you.”
“I might have to throw a few words in, but I figure you’ll put it together pretty quick. I’m talking about you getting us to trust you, same as you say Jackie did with Nora.”
Givens didn’t say anything. I looked at his face in the rearview mirror. He was doing a fair job of looking puzzled.
“Let me see the briefcase,” Leonard said.
“Why?” Givens said. He put a hand on top of it where it rested on the seat.
“Because if you don’t,” Leonard said, “I’m going to have Hap pull over by the side of the road and I’m going to kick your ass so hard you’ll be peeking out of your asshole.”
“What in the hell is wrong with you guys?” he said.
“Let’s just say we don’t like your story,” I said. “We look in the suitcase, see the money there, we might believe you better.”
“It’s there,” he said.
“Show it to us,” Leonard said. “And right now. I’m feeling edgy.”
“He wanted vanilla cookies,” I said, “but he got up too late, and I had eaten all of them with my coffee. You don’t want to make him mad when he hasn’t had his cookies.”
Givens had no idea what his life had to do with vanilla cookies, and frankly, neither did I, but it was on my mind. Cookies are not cheap, I’ll have you know. Not when your brother eats them by the bagful. What really made me mad was Leonard didn’t gain a pound. I looked at cookies too long and I could feel myself gaining weight.
Leonard leaned over the seat and held out his hand, said, “And that gun you got under your coat. I saw it when you got in the car. Reach for it and I’ll be over this seat pronto and stick it up your nose.”
“I just brought it for safety,” he said.
“But you told us they said not to bring guns,” I said. “They making like a special deal just for you?”
“Hand me the case,” Leonard said. “While you’re at it, hand me the gun. Never mind.”
Leonard went over the seat and was on top of Givens so fast Givens probably thought Leonard had a warp drive up his ass. I glanced in the mirror. Leonard was practically sitting in Givens’ lap. He reached the gun from under Givens’ suit coat and threw it in the front passenger’s seat. Then he slapped Givens across the face, twice, fast as the beat of hummingbird’s wings, then got off Givens’ lap and picked up the briefcase. Givens held his hand to his mouth as blood dribbled between his fingers.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Givens said.
“I thought I did,” Leonard said. “Soon as I saw that bulge in your coat, I knew you’d lied to us, that you were putting our lives in danger by bringing your gun, or that there was more to things than you wanted us to know.”
“Another thing,” I said, “just for the record, we brought guns ourselves. Because, you know what? We didn’t believe you. First, you’re a lawyer, and that’s a mark against you, and second, you still got a thing for Sharon, and third, you putting up that kind of jack for your former wife seems unlikely, love her or not. You m
ay be a lying scumbag lawyer who makes a lot of jack, but it’s hard to think even you got seven hundred and fifty thousand just lying around? Possible, not likely. So, that means you got something else going on here. Something that might even make you look like a bit of a hero, and we would be there to witness you turning the money over and taking the girl back. That could ingratiate you to Sharon, couldn’t it?”
“We don’t do this right,” Givens said, “it’ll turn out bad. Real bad.”
Leonard opened the briefcase. “Well, now, ain’t this some shit,” he said.
Leonard turned the case toward me. It only had a pile of empty manila folders inside.
“That won’t pass for money,” I said.
“No,” Leonard said. “It won’t.”
I pulled over to the side of the road and put the car in park and looked back over the seat at Givens.
“Lay it out,” I said. “No stalling. No stories within stories. Lay it out.”
“No one was meant to get hurt,” Givens said.
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s all fun and games till someone loses an eye.”
“Henry owed the money, and well, I know the people involved. You might say I handle their affairs.”
“You’re their lawyer,” I said. “The Cox family.”
“That, among other things.”
“That’s goddamn typical,” Leonard said.
“I do odds and ends for them here and there. Henry owed them and they wanted their money, and they knew I knew Sharon and that I had been married to her.”
“Favor time,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “They wanted me to put the screws on her to make Henry give up the money. I thought if we had someone threaten Henry he’d give it up. I was sure he had money in some hidden account somewhere. They sent Unslerod around and he didn’t work out so well.”
“Henry turned out to be tougher than they thought,” I said.
“He did,” Givens said. “Then Unslerod decided he’d blackmail me by threatening to let Sharon know I worked for the organization.”
“The organization,” Leonard said. “I like that. The Dixie Mafia and Cox you mean.”