The money. He didn't know what to do with it. He'd bought some expensive boots, another old Caddy, some good breather gear for painting his cars.
When he got his first lump-sum payment from Calb, he'd made the mistake of showing it to his mom. She'd claimed it, most of it, and had come back every week since, demanding more. Then he'd introduced her to Jane, and they'd gotten their heads together, and when the big money came in, she'd taken most of that.
Singleton had stood up to her-a little bit, anyway-and claimed fifty thousand. Fifty thousand would almost get him a small shop somewhere. A Morton building, maybe, with space to work on a couple of Caddys at once, and maybe even space to rig up a paint booth.
Big dreams…
WHAM!
The back door banged open. Only one person entered like that, without warning. Singleton had a few hundred dollars in his hand, and he hastily shoved it into his pocket, pulled the string on the overhead light, and headed up the stairs.
Margery was waiting in the kitchen. She was a small, thin, wrinkled woman; a woman who was to other women what a raisin was to a grape. Her eyes were pale blue, and her hair, once blond, looked gray at first glance, but was actually almost colorless, translucent, like ice on a window. Her lips were thin, her chin was pointed; Katina called her the Witch.
"What the hell have you been doing?" she demanded. "Why'n the hell didn't you call me about Deon and Jane?" She turned her nose up, sniffed, stepped close to him. "You've had that whore in here, haven't you? I can smell her juice."
"Not a whore, Mom… "
She slapped him, hard, a full-handed slap. "She's a whore if I say she's a whore," she shouted. "She's a whore."
Singleton stepped away from her, a hand to his face, furiously angry. His mom had a thin neck, and sometimes he thought about snapping it. Take that goddamn little cornstalk neck and snap it off. He bared his teeth at her, ground them, felt his heart pumping.
Margery hadn't forgotten about the bathtub. She stepped farther away, took the tone down. "Whoever did this, they might be coming for us," she said. "That fuckin' nigger would sell us for a quarter, and you know it."
"Mom, what can I do?" He heard the plaintive whine in his voice. He didn't hate the whine, only because it had always been there when he was dealing with Mom and he didn't recognize it.
"You coulda called me," she shouted. "But you were up here with your whore when you coulda been callin' me. I gotta think about this." She looked around, eyes narrowing. "What're you doing here, anyway? You oughta be downtown, seeing what you can see."
"I was already down there for a while, and I didn't hear hardly anything. The cops found Deon's money. It was stuffed away in his house, somewhere. They got it all."
"Goddamnit,"Margery said. "They got it all? Goddamnit."
"That's what I heard. There're state cops in town, and they're supposed to be really good. I think we better lie low."
"Nothing they can connect to us."
"Not unless… I mean, what if they've got Joe?"
"Joe's dead," Margery said. "We all agree."
"But what if he's not?"
"Then we are," she said. She pointed a trembling finger at him. "You get back down there, you find out what's going on. And you call me. Dumb shit."
They both turned to the sound of a car in the driveway. Singleton looked. "Katina," he said.
"I'm getting out of here," Margery said. "I'm not talking to that whore."
Margery and Katina met at the door, and Margery went on by with a sideways glance and not a single word. Katina, on the other hand, smiled and said, "Hi, Mom."
When she was inside, with the door closed, she asked, "What'd the Witch want?"
"Borrow money," Singleton said. That was always good for an excuse, because his mother genuinely did love money.
Katina bustled around, getting some coffee together. "What's the word on Deon and Jane?" she asked.
"Nobody knows what happened, but the BCA guys found a big pile of money and a bunch of dope up in Deon's bedroom," Singleton said. "They're gonna be all over the dope angle."
"Sheriff Anderson's out? Completely out?"
Singleton dipped his head. "He's out. He's smart enough to know that he was over his head-and if he wasn't smart enough, half the county commission went over to his office to tell him. Harvey Benschneider stood right over him while he made the call to St. Paul."
"Ah, boy," Katina said. She pulled off her gloves, parka, and ski hat, shook her hair out. "I can't believe they're dead. Gene's going crazy. You talk to him?"
"Yeah. He thinks maybe Jane was dealing cocaine at the casino," Singleton said. "Could they be that stupid?"
"Deon was a stupid man, and Jane wasn't much smarter," Katina said. She took cups out of a dish rack in the sink. "My question is, what do we tell the police?"
"Youdon't tell them anything," Singleton said. "Let Gene do the talking. No reason for any of us to get involved. Deon worked for Gene, not for us. If Gene's smart, he'll point the state cops at the casino. There's so much shit going on up there, they could investigate the place for the rest of their lives and not get to the bottom of it."
"Only one problem with that idea," Katina said.
"What?"
"Joe. Where's Joe? Jane told me that all of his stuff was still in the house. If Joe's dead, then it wasn't the casino."
"Could be. Could be if it's coke they were dealing. Can't tell with dopers. The other thing is-what if Joe came back and did this? What if he was looking for that money?"
"Hmm." They sat silently for a moment as Katina struggled with all the conflicting possibilities. Finally, she looked up at him and said, "Whatever happened to all three, we've really got to worry about our own positions."
"That's right. We all ought to stay away. If the state guys find one string, and pull it hard enough, the whole sweater's gonna unravel."
They talked for a while over their coffee, a middle-aged couple who got along. Singleton wasn't like the men she'd met in the Cities, Katina thought. He had some steel in him, some flint. Some Ugly.
She liked it-a man who'd stand up.
She just didn't know.
THE PARTY AT the West house started when two newspaper reporters, accompanied by two photographers, showed up at the front door and asked for interviews. Letty was pleased to do it, though Martha was a bit embarrassed by the mess the house was in. That didn't seem to bother the photographers, who got a couple of shots of Letty sitting in her mother's old rocker. Then the first TV truck showed up. The newspaper people were okay, but compared to the TV people, they were mongrels at a dog show. The TV people were stars- Letty'd even seen some of them on her own TV.
The TV people agreed on one set of lights, and set them up around the living room, while Martha scurried around moving all of her best furniture into place, moving the worst of it into the kitchen. A guy came in with a couple of sacks of black-corn chips, cheese dip, and Coke, and then somebody else brought in a twelve-pack of Bud Light. They asked Letty to get some traps, and she did, and they put them on the floor by her feet, and some of the cameramen crawled in close to get a shot of the traps, using the lights on top of their cameras. Somebody else challenged the cameramen to snap their fingers in the traps, and being cameramen, they did, although none of the on-air talent would do it. Then somebody else asked Martha about her singing career, and she got out her guitar and sang an old Pete Seeger song called "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," and then the main lights came up, and were adjusted, and the first interviewer, a blonde with a foxy face and feathery crimson scarf, said, "Letty, tell me about yesterday."
"I was up in my bedroom… " she began. Letty told them about the traps and the 'rats and the.22 and the bodies hanging in the dark. Then she told a dark-haired Italian-looking guy from Fox, and did it again for CNN, and as many times as they wanted, she stayed on top of it, fresh.