The Big Ugly Read online

  She glanced around at my new dorm, at the broads I'd have to live with and talk to and, in some cases, fight, for the next thirteen months.

  With a smile, she said, "As you were," and turned and left.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When I got back from The Summit, there was a car in Nate's parking lot that I recognized but couldn't quite place.

  I walked around back to the shop and found PO Romandetto waiting for me. He was poking around Nate's cans of thinner, smoking a cigarette.

  "You're going to blow your face off," I said.

  He turned around and plastered his lips to his teeth. "Hiya, parolee."

  "That stuff is flammable, Romandetto. You know what flammable means?"

  "Sure, means it burns." He flicked some ashes on the cans. "But, hell, we all burn sometimes." He waved a hand around the shop. "I was getting worried. I come to check on you, and you ain't here."

  "Where the fuck am I standing?"

  He stuck the butt in his mouth. "I don't appreciate the attitude, parolee, nor the coarse language neither. You can catch more flies with sugar than you can with piss. Something like that …"

  "Just saying, it's nearly five. I was out."

  "Where?"

  "Took a drive up to the mountains."

  "Why?"

  I shrugged like a damn teenager. "Just to drive."

  "Kinda long way to go, ain't it?"

  I hesitated a moment. He was the one who had fixed me up with Charles Hamill, after all. But he didn't know what the job entailed, and I didn't want to tell him that I was searching for Alexis. If he knew she was missing, he would make trouble for her.

  "I was just out for a drive, man."

  "Where'd you go?"

  "Do I have to tell you everything I do?"

  He left the cigarette in his mouth and laughed. "Just for the sake of brevity, let's say yes. And let me also add that the more you dodge the question, the more worried I become."

  "I finished up work early, so I took a drive. I've been locked up for a year, so I wanted to get out and get some fresh air. I went up to The Summit Hotel in Fettle Springs. I used to vacation there. I sat on the veranda and stared at the view for a while. Then, I got in my car and came back here. And now I'm talking to you."

  "Pleasant."

  "I'm not up to anything, Romandetto."

  "Yeah, yeah. What else you been doing? You go see that Hamill guy?"

  "Yes."

  "What'd he want?"

  I knew how to answer that question. Romandetto divided the world between decent people and criminals. He'd be suspicious of anything I said, but in his mind Hamill was one of the decent people. I could hide behind that.

  "He wanted to talk to me about doing some prison ministry stuff."

  "Why you?"

  "You tell me. You're the one who put him in contact with me."

  "He called me looking for you, for you specifically. How'd he hear about you?"

  "Well, I was famous for a minute and half about a year ago. I guess he remembered me. Plus, I was in corrections for a long time. I have a history with it."

  "Sure, the guard-turned-prisoner."

  "Yeah."

  He mashed his cigarette out on the floor. "Well, how about we go next door and take a peek at your living arrangement?"

  "That necessary, man? You think I'm lying about living with my brother's family? Aren't I standing right here in front of you?"

  "You're asking me for a little common courtesy and respect. A little trust."

  "Yeah."

  "That's cute."

  I took him across the street. As we walked over, he said, "Look, I don't know you, Bennett. Not really. Only thing I know for sure is that you couldn't play nice with the other kids, so society felt you had to be set apart from the rest of us for a year. That's all I really know about you. Which don't speak highly of you. So I gotta check in on you, make sure you're on the road to rehabilitation."

  "Enough, already. I get it. You're a stalwart servant of the public interest."

  I took him inside.

  Bethany was in the kitchen feeding the baby.

  "Sister-in-law," I said. "And baby."

  Romandetto said, very politely, "Nice to meet you, ma'am. I'm Ms. Bennett's parole officer, Jimmy Romandetto."

  Bethany stood up and smiled. Her pink T-shirt read: GOD LOVES YOU. She said, "It's nice to meet you."

  "Just coming around to say hello."

  Bethany didn't know what to say to that, so she just smiled. At that moment, I wanted to kiss her. The woman exuded forthrightness and decency. Surely that had to cover up some of my stink.

  Romandetto asked, "Is your husband around?"

  "No, he's gone to make a call on a customer to appraise a piece. I'm not sure when he'll be back."

  "That's fine, ma'am. Perhaps I can meet him another time." He turned to me and said, "Let me see your room."

  I led him upstairs. He glanced around my room and nodded. "Okay."

  We went back downstairs.

  Bethany asked, "Would you like something to drink, Mr. Romandetto? Some water or a Coke?"

  "No thank you, ma'am. I have to go. It was nice to meet you."

  I walked Romandetto outside.

  "Well?" I said.

  "Looks good. I like her. Can tell she's good people."

  "She is."

  Romandetto shook out a cigarette from a pack of Pall Malls and lit up. "See, Bennett, this is how trust is built. You keep it up, you and me are going to get along fine."

  I nodded and watched him walk down to his car. I went back inside.

  Bethany smiled nervously at me. "He seemed nice," she ventured.

  "Nice to you. Hard ass to me."

  "Really?"

  "Sure, but he deals exclusively with ex-cons, so what can you expect."

  "That makes sense, I guess. Is he rude to you?"

  I shrugged. "He's better than the other POs I could have gotten."

  I went upstairs to use the bathroom. When I came back down, Bethany was standing at the living room window staring across the street at the shop. "Ellie …"

  "Yeah?"

  "He's still down there."

  "Huh?"

  "It's been ten minutes and he's still in front of the shop."

  I walked over to the window. Sure enough, Romandetto's car was idling in the parking lot in front of the shop.

  I walked down there. A couple of cars passed by. Bethany stood at the front door watching me.

  He was sitting in his car, cigarette in his mouth, smoke wafting out the open window. The only thing wrong was the son of a bitch had dropped dead.

  * * *

  The whole business took hours. Nate came home to a circus of a fire truck, an ambulance and three cop cars. The 911 folks apparently sent every first responder who wasn't otherwise engaged, all to pick up one dead guy in a car.

  The EMT team was made up of a woman and a man who looked so much alike I think they might have been siblings. They both were stocky and had gapped teeth and curly hair, and when the woman leaned over Romandetto and muttered, "That's a heart attack if I ever saw one," her brother nodded curtly.

  The cops talked to me and Bethany and a couple of the neighbors. We all told the same story, of course, and the cops seemed content.

  It was all about to wind down when an unmarked car with a siren on the dash pulled into the driveway. The cop driving was someone I knew, a detective named Lafaye Jones. When she got out of the car, she strode over and gave me a forceful handshake.

  Lafaye only stood about five foot five, but you'd swear she was six feet tall. The woman had presence. She had the easy glide of an athlete, but her eyes told you there was nothing easy about her. Lafaye had seen the shit—she'd stared right at it, and she'd beaten it back. Meeting her for the first time, you'd accept her as an authority. And when you found out she was a cop, you'd think "Well, of course she's a cop."

  Dressed in a silver pantsuit, she looked sharp. Her hair was relax
ed, cut short, and dyed a rust red. Her skin was the color of mocha, and she had just a dab of lipstick to complement her hair. The only jewelry she wore were some small silver studs in her ears. The black broads in Eastgate used to say that "black don't crack." I don't know how true that is across the board, but at fifty years old Lafaye could still pass for a well-kept forty.

  Seeing her, I felt a pang of envy. And it wasn't about aging well, either. If I was honest with myself, I'd always wanted to be her—to be a cop, composed and professional.

  Didn't quite work out that way.

  "Lafaye," I said.

  "Ellie. You okay?"

  "Sure. Better than Romandetto."

  "What happened?"

  I told her.

  "That's too bad," she said.

  "They always send this many people out for a heart attack?"

  She smiled. "You know, Ellie, I've always liked you. So I'll tell you the truth, when a PO dies while visiting one of his parolees, it attracts a little extra attention."

  I nodded. What was there to say to that? It didn't surprise me.

  "You just got out a couple of days ago, right?" she asked.

  "Yeah."

  Lafaye said, "Well, I hate these circumstances, but it's good to see you, anyway. You look good."

  "Thin. I lost weight."

  "Well, I think it looks good on you."

  "Thanks. How's the crime fighting going?"

  "It's steady work, I guess."

  "Yeah."

  We both smiled politely.

  By this time, everyone was gone. Romandetto's car was taken away. The cops had left. Bethany and Nate had gone inside to feed the kids.

  Lafaye said, "Well, I'm sorry about Romandetto. I guess they'll reassign you to a new PO."

  "Sure."

  I walked her to her car. As I did, I remembered Alexis talking about Lafaye one night in Eastgate, something about how she was pretty decent for a cop.

  "Hey," I said. "You've been on the force for a while."

  "Twenty-six years," Lafaye said in a mocking tone. "1986. Uh."

  "You remember a case you worked involving Alexis Kravitz?"

  "Sure, I remember Alexis. Drugs."

  "Yeah."

  "That was a few years ago."

  "I'm looking for her."

  "Ask her PO."

  "Well, that's a problem."

  "Why?"

  "He just dropped dead in the driveway."

  "Oh."

  "Plus …"

  "What?"

  "Well, I don't want to get anyone in trouble."

  "Then don't tell me anything that would get anyone in trouble. You want to ask me something, though, ask it."

  Lafaye was good people. I didn't think she'd be in a hurry to hassle Alexis.

  "No one seems to know where she is," I said.

  "Why didn't you ask Romandetto when you had the chance?"

  "Well, if she's skipped town or something, I would have gotten her in trouble. I mean, with the kid and everything, I don't want social services to get involved. I'd prefer to keep it quiet."

  "So why are you talking to me? I don't have any idea where she is."

  "But you know her past associates and people she might know. If you were looking for her, where would you look?"

  "You talk to that asshole she was shacked up with?"

  "Mule. Yeah, I talked to him yesterday. He didn't give me much."

  "He's a man without much to give," she said. "But I didn't mean him. I meant the other one."

  "What other one?"

  "She was living at his trailer in Indian Head Estates."

  "That big trailer park in North Osotouy?"

  "Yeah, by the beautician's school. The guy's name is Evan Hastings. He runs the park, and for a while there he was helping run drugs into the state with the help of some of his friends. Including Alexis."

  "You bust him?"

  "Tried. Acquitted. No one would testify against him."

  "You know if Alexis's daughter stayed with him after Alexis got shipped to Eastgate?"

  "Kaylee, right? She got hustled through social services and shipped down to her grandmother in Texas, I think." She leaned against her car and crossed her arms. "Why are you looking for Alexis?"

  "Some people want to find her."

  "What people?"

  "This Christian group that runs a rehabilitation program for drug addicts. Supposedly, Alexis went there, found Jesus, got cleaned up, but now she's run off and disappeared. They asked me to find her."

  "Hmm."

  "Does that seem weird to you?"

  "It seems odd that they would ask you instead of just going through Romandetto."

  "But the part about her getting religion. That seem odd?"

  "I don't know. It happens."

  "But does it seem odd?"

  "Well, that kind of thing always seems odd. I guess that's part of what's miraculous about it. Grace is … unusual. That's what makes it special."

  "You religious, Lafaye?"

  "I've worked out my own thing, made my peace."

  "Mule didn't think Alexis would go in for that sort of thing."

  She waved that away like she was waving away Mule's very existence. "That boy took Freshman Philosophy 101 and now he thinks he's fucking Nietzsche. He thinks nothing matters because he doesn't want to spend the energy or effort to care about anything. A boy like that is going to dismiss the possibility of grace before it could even happen."

  "So you think Alexis could really be out there looking for answers?"

  "The world's nothing but questions. How can you not be looking for answers?"

  I nodded. "I guess."

  "What about you?"

  "What about me?"

  "What you going to do now that you're out? Jobwise?"

  "I don't know. I don't know how to do anything but be a correctional officer."

  "Never anything else you thought about pursuing?"

  "All I ever wanted was to be in criminal justice," I admitted. "Used to think I was going to be a cop. Majored in criminal justice in school before I had to drop out."

  "Why'd you have to drop out?"

  I said, "Life."

  I almost said, a lot of it was my mom's fault. I didn't tell Lafaye that, though. There's nothing worse than a forty-year-old who still blames her parents for her life.

  Lafaye said, "Well, there's no reason you couldn't go back and finish up school. People have done it."

  I nodded. "I guess so."

  We shook hands, and she climbed into her car. She started it up but rolled down the window.

  "Thanks for the encouragement," I told her.

  "You're welcome. But let me throw down some wisdom on you before I leave. If you go talk to that trailer trash Evan Hastings about Alexis, be careful. He's a thoroughly disagreeable man."

  "Hey, I trained with Department of Corrections, Lafaye. I tangled with the fellas in those Krav Maga classes they made us take. I can execute a pretty effective throat strike and eye gouge. I know how to knee someone in the nuts."

  "I get it. You're a badass. I'm just saying. He's bad, for real bad. And he knows people who are even worse."

  "You went up against him."

  "Yeah, but I'm a bitch in heels."

  I smiled. "I own heels, too."

  "Sure, Bennett," Lafaye said. "Just don't be alone with him."

  CHAPTER SIX

  The criminal justice system never moves quickly unless it's to do something that's a complete pain in the ass. I had a new parole officer within twenty-four hours.

  PO Belton was younger than I thought he'd be. He wasn't more than thirty or so, and his baby face made him appear even younger than that. He had blond hair that he wore a little too long, probably to try to obscure his high, wide forehead. As he leaned back in his desk chair looking me over, his cold gray eyes never blinked.

  "So you killed poor Jimmy Romandetto."

  I was nervous, but I didn't show it. I just said, "Heart attac
k was what the cops said."

  "Yeah, but why'd his ticker give out? Poor son of bitch was only fifty-two."

  "He was smoker," I said. "And he didn't exactly have that 'balanced diet' look to me."

  "Yeah, it's a bitch," Belton said lacing his fingers together. "Everything that makes life worth living is bad for you. That's God's little joke on the human race."

  "I guess."

  "Well, so much for Romandetto. Now you're mine."

  "Lucky me."

  His pretty lips pouted. "Aw, I'm a sweet guy. A hell of a lot nicer than ole Jimmy ever was, that's for sure. He was checking up on you when he shuffled off the mortal coil, wasn't he?"

  "Yeah."

  "See, with me you don't gotta have that. I trust you."

  "That's nice."

  "Exactly. I'm as nice a guy as you're ever going to want to meet. I know how it is for a con like you. You get out of the joint and everyone treats you like shit. I don't believe in that. Forgive and forget, that's what my mother taught me."

  "She sounds like a wonderful woman."

  He smiled. "You're funny, Bennett. I like a gal with a sense of humor. I do. Nothing funnier than a female with a quick wit."

  "Thanks."

  "A man can't live on yucks alone, though."

  I sat up straight in his uncomfortable guest chair. We'd arrived at the real point of this meeting. A lot of broads had sat in that same hardback wooden chair, stared across the desk at this asshole, and waited to find out what price he was going to name.

  "Okay," I said.

  "Okay what?"

  "How much?"

  "How much what?"

  "How much do you want?"

  He leaned forward and put his elbows on the desk and contorted that baby face into an expression of friendly confusion. "How much what, sweetheart?"

  "Money. I know you want some."

  He spread his palms out. "I have money. More than you, anyway. Why would I need money? I got a good job as a servant of the public."

  "Okay."

  "But now we have a problem we didn't have when you walked through the door. Attempting to bribe a parole officer … that's not good."

  "I wasn't—"

  "You just offered me money under the table for some as of yet to be determined preferential treatment, sweetie. You realize that I could pick up the phone right now and have you back in jail?"