Union City is anything but a city. It’s a little nub of a community on the eastern edge of Hannawa’s suburban sprawl. There are some impressive houses out there these days. And some pretty modest ones. The woman with the patio furniture lived in one of the modest ones. She led me through her house to the patio. It was a ten-foot square of red brick overlooking the back alley of a strip mall. “When we moved here it was a beautiful woods,” she lamented. She was in her late fifties, overweight, overwrought and newly widowed. She was selling her house and moving into a condo.
Well, the patio set was not exactly charming. But it wasn’t horrible either. The iron frames on the chairs and tables were painted a pale yellow. There were a few speckles of rust here and there. The cushions were faded from years in the sun, making the crazy red and orange floral pattern a tad bit easier on my eyes. “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for,” I said. I wrote a check for the full $250.
When I got home I bolstered my nerve with a strong cup of tea and then called the Kingzette Moving Co. “I just bought this patio set on the other side of town,” I told the unfriendly man on the other end, “and I was hoping you could help me out.”
“That’s why we’re in business,” he said. From the pitch of his voice I gathered he was a younger man, presumably Kingzette’s son.
And so I made arrangements for them to deliver my patio set the following Thursday afternoon. It would cost me another $150.
Thursday, May 17
Right after lunch I told Eric I was starting to “feel a little woozy.” Which was a lie. I was actually feeling a lot woozy. My wooziness had been growing all week, since I’d made those arrangements to have Kingzette Moving deliver that awful patio set.
Eric dislodged the Mountain Dew bottle from his mouth long enough to speak. “I suppose that means you’re going home early.”
“You think I should?”
He rolled his Chinese-American eyes. “Maddy, you’ve been preparing to go home since you got here.”
So I drove home and camped in front of my picture window, getting woozier and woozier waiting for that truck to pull up.
It pulled up at three. There was a big gold crown painted on the side, along with these words:
KINGZETTE MOVING
Expect The Royal Treatment
I looked over my shoulder at James, who was sprawled on the floor in front of my sofa, gnawing on a log of rawhide. “I don’t expect you to turn into Lassie-dial 911 with your snoot or anything-but if things start going wrong I do hope you’ll reach down deep in that wolfen soul of yours and maybe growl a little.”
James gnawed away, promising nothing.
Two men slipped out of the truck. The driver was young and tall, and had way too many muscles for his tee shirt. The other man was a foot shorter, but just as burly. He had the thin gray hair of a man pushing sixty. He leaned against the fender and lit a cigarette while the younger man headed for my door. I opened it before he could knock. “You’re Mr. Kingzette, I gather?”
“One of them,” the young man said. His face was as sour as Howard Shay’s lemonade.
I nodded toward the older man. “And that’s your father?”
“Where you want the furniture?”
I ignored his impatience. “It must be nice to work together like that-I remember how I used to help my father milk the cows.”
“Patio in the back, ma’am?”
“Screened porch,” I said.
I followed him back to the truck. There were only six lousy pieces of furniture in there. If I was going to make an adequate appraisal of the older Kingzette, I’d have to get in their way as much as I could.
I greeted Leonard Kingzette with a wiggle of my fingers. He nodded at me. Took a long, painful drag on his cigarette and then flicked it into the street. I joined them at the back of the truck.
They unloaded the furniture onto my front lawn. It took about thirty seconds. The son picked up the two chairs and headed for my backyard. I helped his father with the coffee table. “I have a confession, Mr. Kingzette,” I said, as we waddled sideways with the table. “When I told my neighbor who I’d hired, he got a little nervous. Because you’d been in prison.”
The word prison hit Kingzette like one of those poison darts Indians in the Amazon use to shoot monkeys out of treetops. His chest caved in. His eyes sagged against the bridge of his nose. The coffee table between us quivered. I moved quickly to reassure him. “But I said, ‘Good gravy, James, if the man has done his time, then the man has done his time. He has the right to make a living.’”
He recovered. Gave me a quick, uneasy smile. “Not everybody’s so charitable.”
“James is a real worrywart. He’s probably peeking out the window right now. Anyway, you checked out just fine.”
A second dart struck him.
“With the Better Business Bureau,” I said quickly. “They didn’t have a single complaint.” That part of my lie was true. I had checked with the BBB.
Kingzette managed another smile. “Well, Mrs. Sprowls, I appreciate your going the extra mile.”
We reached the back of my house. Kingzette’s son trotted past us, heading back to the truck for more. “Your son’s all business, isn’t he?” I said.
Kingzette pushed the porch door open with his backend. “He sees to it I don’t get into any more trouble-that’s for sure.”
And that was pretty much it. By a quarter after three, the patio set was on my porch, the old wicker crap was on my tree lawn, the Kingzettes were on their merry way. And I was regretting the whole miserable affair.
Oh yes, I’d had a few minutes to take my measure of Kenneth Kingzette. But like the damned fool I am, I’d also given Kenneth Kingzette a few minutes to take his measure of me. So instead of enjoying my new patio set that evening-sliding back and forth in my glider with a mug of tea, sleeve of Fig Newtons and that new Dana Stabenow mystery I’d been dying to read-I was perched by my living room picture window, in that uncomfortable wingback chair I just hate, watching the street like a nervous parakeet. I had my phone on one armrest and my butcher’s knife on the other. I just knew that any minute I was going to spot Kenneth Kingzette sneaking through my hostas.
There were so many things about my encounter with Kingzette that bothered me. For one thing, he’d called me Mrs. Sprowls. “Well, Mrs. Sprowls,” he’d said, “I appreciate your going the extra mile.” Fair enough. It was my name. It was written on the bill. But he’d said it in such a familiar way. As if he were sending a subtle message that he knew who I was.
And why wouldn’t he recognize my name? I was no longer the anonymous newspaper librarian I used to be, was I? My name was all over the news during that Buddy Wing business. And just a few weeks ago that awful girl with the green hair told the whole world I was looking into Gordon’s murder.
And even if he hadn’t recognized my name at first-even if he’d arrived at my house thinking I was just some sweet old penny-pinching broad-I’d sure given him a lot to worry about. I told him I knew he’d been in prison. I told him I’d checked him out. What if I’d made him as nervous as I’d made myself? Nervous enough to check me out?
I sat by that picture window all evening. The darker it got outside the madder I got inside. Mad at myself for concocting such a damned-fool idea. Mad at myself for not realizing it was a damned-fool idea until it was too late.
What exactly had I expected Kingzette to do? Confess his sins to me? Somehow convince me with his body language, or some soulful Bambi-like look in his eyes, that while he’d once been callous enough to dump those drums of toluene, he wasn’t the kind of man who shot people in the back of the head?