The hushed conversations Rodney Brisco heard in the Top Hat lounge made him think of going to confession on Saturday mornings when he was a boy, awaiting his turn to whisper a few made-up sins to the priest. Sitting with a beer at a corner table, Rodney thought that he might as well have visited the Franciscan Chapel around the corner from the Top Hat, except the friars didn’t let you sip a beer while slumbering in the pew. The mid-July heat cast a heavy spell over Providence, and the air-conditioning provided by this hole-in-the-wall bar with the neon sign that no longer flashed offered a refuge for Rodney from working in the hot sun painting houses. The Top Hat was the type of place that existed, not too long ago, where a particular clientele conducted a particular type of business. It was a place strangers walked into only to turn around and walk out again for they sensed they had entered a sanctum where they did not belong. The comforts of the Top Hat were modest, a scattering of wobbly tables, bentwood chairs, and one or two food items served buffet style, take it or leave it. Rodney had heard that it was the place to go if he wanted to meet the right people and no longer make day wages slopping paint.
Back in the apartment, Eunice had reacted adversely when she had seen Rodney put on his clean slacks and sport coat and not his painting clothes. He told her he was looking for work, and she thought it best not to ask too many questions after he refused to tell her what kind of work he was seeking. What he wanted was something like what Archie the painting contractor had, riding from job to job in his blue Cadillac convertible driven by his girlfriend with the silk kerchief wrapped over her bobbed hair and knotted snugly under her chin. Rodney worked for Archie on a steady basis for Archie kept three or four jobs going at once and always needed painters. Rodney often told Eunice that Archie was the luckiest man in the world, with money pouring in from multiple jobs and a girlfriend who never complained. Eunice didn’t share Rodney’s envy of Archie. Her father would have told her that Archie was successful because he worked hard and used his wits. And she couldn’t help it if she wasn’t pencil slim and compliant like the woman with the kerchief.
“You need to make your own luck,” she told Rodney, speaking to him as her father spoke to her.
One day, a man emerged from the scrum of bodies crowded around the Top Hat bar and asked if Rodney would take a moment to speak to him. The man wore dark trousers and a short-sleeve white shirt, and his hair gleamed as though shellacked. He placed his glass of beer on the table and offered a smile that could crack cement. Rodney knew this guy had the goods.
The man called himself Lenny Jeffries and offered Rodney a job picking up packages from one place and delivering them to another.
“You mean I’d be a mule,” Rodney said, for he liked to think he knew how the world operated.
“You could call it that,” the man said.
“All right,” Rodney said. “Let’s hear the particulars.”
He would be given a bag to deliver to an address he would be given. He would receive payment for his services at the endpoint, a hundred dollars for each run, which would be to different addresses each time. He started the next day, driving from East Providence to Central Falls, back and forth. Rodney wasn’t supposed to open the bags, folded over at the top, not taped, but he considered it within his rights to do so. He found banded-together cash, mostly hundreds, fifties, and twenties, and small boxes wrapped in aluminum foil. These he left intact for he knew the aluminum would tear and wrinkle and show that he had violated the packages, but from the cash, which seemed randomly bundled together, he withdrew the occasional fifty and sometimes three or four twenties. Who would ever find out? he reasoned. The organization was clearly making so much money they weren’t bothering to count accurately.
Rodney hid the money in an old gym bag in the bedroom closet back at the apartment. Eunice would never find it. She asked him what job he had found, and he said he was tending bar in a private club. She didn’t believe him.
***
“Don’t try to paint the whole blasted house like it’s the Mona Lisa,” Archie instructed from time to time. With his crooked smile, a laugh seemed always about to roll off his lips but never did. “Just keep it moving. Fast. Fast. Fast. See how much I’ve done.” He demonstrated with rapid brushstrokes, never slopping a drop. “This isn’t Picasso. And don’t make a mess. Keep those tarps tight against the house. Clean-up time is wasted time.” He dipped and swiped with a speed and a blissful joy that could not be replicated by any sane person. Rodney was sick of the man’s tutorials, bored from the monotony of physical work, tired of seeing the aloof woman in the kerchief driving Archie from one money-making project to another. He wanted the blue Caddy and the wad of cash Archie carried with him. He even wanted the solemn, mysterious girlfriend who would honor his success with imperious silence instead of badgering him.
Rodney started out getting one or two mule runs a week, then he worked up to three. Lenny Jeffries and his people obviously liked him, he figured. He saved the money in the gym bag and used painting money for expenses.
Eunice expressed displeasure any day he didn’t dress in his paint-splattered clothes. His painting job was something she could understand. She was positive he wasn’t bartending at a private club like he had told her. Back in high school, they had met at someone’s birthday party. She had laughed at his jokes, liked his flashy shirts and neatly combed pompadour, and they both had made the mistake of thinking he could joke his way to success in a world that lacked humor.
When Eunice’s father told her she should take a beautician course right after high school, it made sense because she couldn’t think what career she might want to pursue. All she wanted was her own apartment and independence. Her father, an insurance investigator, argued that the beautician course would be a wise choice. He offered his oracle-like wisdom from behind the pages of The Wall Street Journal in the evenings when he sipped his two Old Fashioneds and waited for dinner. He tried to steer Eunice’s combustible venery to safe shores, thus he encouraged the beautician route as being the best way to keep her focus away from boys and partying, at least until she could pay for the mishaps that would ensue.
As soon as Eunice married Rodney, she recognized her mistake in misinterpreting his oleaginous bravado as something that could translate into success. It took only three months and a black eye for her to come to this conclusion.
***
One day when Rodney was out on a painting job, a man came to the apartment door and introduced himself as Detective McAlpin. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with sharp brown eyes and beautifully combed salt-and-pepper hair that rose up and down like the scroll work on the leg of Eunice’s mother’s sideboard. He carried himself with the limpid confidence of a nightclub crooner.
What could a detective possibly want? Obviously, it involved Rodney.
“Eunice Brisco?”
“Come in,” she said.
She placed herself on the sofa, the demure wife conscious of her desirability at all hours of the day.
“I have a few questions for you.”
He was considerably older than she was, but he carried his vitality like a trophy of the hunt. She could see his energetic spirit in his beautifully coiffed hair and in the gilt edges of his sonorous voice.
Motioning for the man to sit in a chair opposite the sofa, Eunice touched her fingertips to the mascara she had applied to the bruise around her left eye that Rodney had given to her when she had asked too many questions about the mysterious job he went to a few times a week. Her experiment in marriage had already ended, she told herself. But still a dose of pitiable sadness needed to be applied so the girls at the salon could revel in her fortitude. With this strange man, she needed to balance buoyancy with chagrin for she didn’t know if she wanted to protect Rodney or let him go to the dogs.
“May I get you anything to drink, detective?” she asked softly. Something about this man’s visage, the flush of rosacea on his cheeks, his nervous tick of squeezing his eyes tight every so often, told her he was a drinker.
She knew he wasn’t a detective. She hadn’t asked him to show a badge. A man who looked like Dean Martin had come to visit her, after all. It was three in the afternoon, not too early for a little pick-me-up.
“No, thank you,” the man said after a hesitation. She knew he desperately wanted to say yes.
“I have reason to believe your husband, Rodney, is running with the wrong crowd. Has he mentioned a man named Lenny Jeffries to you?” the man asked.
Eunice was the grand lady now, somber, barely able to pass words over her trembling lips, steeling herself for any news that would cause her to squeeze herself into a ball of grief.
“Oh, yes,” she whispered. She really wished she had a cold vodka on the rocks and one of the girls from the salon dropping by to keep her company.
At this point, she noticed that the man’s brown eyes, which at first seemed stilled with weariness and empathy, were alive and predatory like a turtle’s. His voice sounded familiar. Then she remembered hearing it over the telephone. Ever since Rodney had started that job, a man with a silken voice named Lenny Jeffries would call from time to time asking her to pass along a message for Rodney.
“Has he been bringing home large quantities of cash?”
She had seen Rodney fumbling about in the closet a few times. When she knew he would be out of the apartment for a few hours, she felt around and discovered the nine thousand, eight hundred and sixty dollars in his old gym bag.
This man couldn’t fool Eunice. Maybe her father didn’t think she was teacher material like those cute girls in high school going on to get their teachers’ certificates, but she knew how to keep someone from taking advantage of her. Perhaps this man with his cool avuncular air wished to make her feel the spiritual release of a full confession, plead for mercy, and willingly offer to pay her debt to society in the women’s penitentiary. What the man didn’t know was that Eunice was ready to give up Rodney in a second if something better came around.
“You’re Lenny Jeffries, aren’t you? You’re no detective.”
“You are quite a lady,” the man said. “I’ll have that drink if it’s still on offer. A bourbon on the rocks, if you’ve got it,” he said.
“Sure do,” she said, bounding up from the sofa and going into the kitchen.
“You see, Mrs. Brisco,” he began when Eunice returned with his bourbon and a glass of wine for herself. “I am Lenny Jeffries to some, but I am also an undercover detective. Your husband unwittingly helped us crack a narcotics and numbers ring. Of course, he committed a crime, for he cheated us, so he will be brought to justice.”
Eunice didn’t know where this was leading. The police were always out to trip you up. She reminded herself to be controlled, to play the sorrowful, confused wife to the hilt.
She waited for anything more that the man had to say and worked up an impulse to cry. But the detective, hardened she was sure by years of dealing with chicanery and malfeasance, had risen above the confining dimensions of sentimentality. He must know that a wife sporting a black eye could hardly be counted on to offer a fair appraisal of her feelings toward the man who had inflicted it.
“If you know where this money is, we need to have it.”
“I might know,” she said. “But what’s in it for me?”
“We can discuss a split. You have done nothing wrong, Mrs. Brisco,” he said.
He allowed his eyes to caress her soft body perched on the edge of the sofa.
“A refill?” she asked.
He looked at his unfinished drink. “You can top it off,” he said as if to indicate that he was imbibing under duress.
Eunice added a solid dose of bourbon to his glass and added a little more red wine to her own, after taking a few quick sips.
“Cheers,” she said, returning to the living room.
“Likewise.” He seemed abashed that he was raising a glass to someone he was interviewing, but the crisp wash of bourbon that cascaded over his tongue abolished all hesitation.
Eunice knew she had to catch him on the upswing. She wanted to negotiate before he started getting cranky and defensive like Rodney.
Yet Eunice still didn’t know what to make of this man. Something about his manner, the way he seemed too comfortable sitting across from her, told her that he was not to be trusted. And what kind of detective, if she was to accept that he was one, would offer to split the money with her?
“You never showed me a badge,” she said.
“I’m with a special unit that doesn’t carry them,” he said.
“Fat chance,” she said. “Let’s go back to splitting that money. Shall I call you Lenny or detective?”
“Lenny works,” he said.
“Let’s discuss our business arrangement,” she said.
“I’ll tell you something confidentially,” he began. His voice had taken on the deep, silken resonance of Dean Martin in one of those Christmas specials she used to watch with her parents. Martin would put his elbow on the baby grand, swirl the ice cubes in his glass of amber liquid, and give the supine viewers watching on television from home the feeling that he was going to tell them and only them a joke and maybe he was going to sing a song and maybe he was going to recount a risqué tale involving his Hollywood friends and maybe he was going to tell them to go jump in the lake, but he didn’t care one way or the other what he said because he was too contented with life to care one way or another. Lenny, like Dean Martin, seemed to be calling forth the glowing man he used to be. That’s what Lenny Jeffries or Detective McAlpin or whoever he was reminded her of, Dean Martin in his cups. Lenny was the man Rodney should have become after high school. Eunice knew she could recover from her losing situation if she could figure out how to profit from the situation Rodney had put her in. She had already decided that Rodney was expendable.
“We gave Rodney a simple job. An opportunity to do something well. But he’s been opening the packages and clipping sixty, eighty, or a hundred dollars and more here and there. What we’ve been paying him wasn’t enough for his greed. He had to go and cheat us. That’s the crux of the problem.”
A philosophical cloud of calm had settled over the man as he gazed upon the forlorn ice cubes in his glass.
“Wait a minute. If you’re a cop trying to bust this numbers ring or drug ring or whatever, why do you care if he was cheating? He led you to the people you were trying to bust, didn’t he?”
Lenny leaned back thoughtfully, his cunning eyes roaming over her body again. “If he is dishonest with us, he will be dishonest in a court of law. He is a walking case of perjury. That’s the problem.”
He waited for her to say something, but she remained silent. She couldn’t figure out what he was getting at.
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
“The money,” he said.
She stared at him, then took a sip of her wine, unsure how to proceed.
“We can be partners in this, Eunice. I’m looking to close out my career on a high note. Three more months. Then on to Ft. Lauderdale.”
“Ft. Lauderdale,” she said wonderingly. “I would like that. Do you golf?”
“Sure. Why do you ask?”
“Because I want to be with a man who golfs. That way he’d be out of the house all the time,” she said, emboldened. The wine was speaking. Her ability to say what she was thinking had made her popular in high school. She detected interest in his face at her suggestion of being with him.
Lenny settled back in his chair and gazed about the room that Eunice had decorated with castoff furniture her mother had given her. An old treadle sewing machine framed in polished walnut resided in the corner. The high-backed chair Lenny was sitting in had been dusted off from her parent’s basement and dressed with a large doily on the back cushion. A few photographs and decorative vases crowded the top of the cabinet television set. A small children’s chair sat under one of the windows, a philodendron in a decorative ceramic pot resting on the seat.
“How long have you been on the force, detective?”
“Thirty-five years.”
“Is Mrs. McAlpin looking forward to Ft. Lauderdale?”
“Mrs. McAlpin passed a few years ago,” he said, draining the watery residue from his glass.
For the first time, she thought he might be telling the truth.
“Cancer,” he added. “Took all my savings. Of course, she had my insurance, but we tried all sorts of oddball therapies that were expensive and not reimbursed.” He tilted his glass in the vain hope there would be more fuel there.
“Another splash?” she asked, vaulting from the couch.
He assented readily. “A tiny bit. I mean that.”
Drinkers never meant it. She knew that much. “Let’s come to terms,” she called from the kitchen.
“Fifty-fifty,” he said. “Is that fair enough?”
“No,” she said. “I want something else.”
Lenny watched her settle her soft body back onto the sofa and take a demure sip from the wine glass she had replenished. He waited for her to speak, having entered the somnolent period of his intoxication that, with Rodney at least, preceded either loquaciousness or hostility.
Eunice felt him staring at her, and she was not sure how she intended to express what was on her mind. Thoughts rose up from the swollen river of her subconsciousness, and she gave them voice.
“Take care of him,” she said. “Get him out of my life. What’s the point of my taking half the money if he comes home and fights me over it?”
“What exactly do you want?”
“Interpret it any way you want. Promise me I’ll never have to see him again, and I will bring out the cash and we’ll divvy it up.”
“All right,” he said. “Deal.”
“He’s with the paint crew today.” Her voice was as dark and soothing as a forest stream. “I can give you the address.”
“I already know it,” he said. “It’s up on Atwood Avenue in Johnston. The big old Greek Revival.”
“That’s the one,” she said.
“You get the money,” he said. “I need to use your phone.”
While he dialed the wall phone in the kitchen, she retrieved the gym bag from the bedroom and brought it out to the coffee table. She waited, listening to him mummer orders into the phone. He hung up and dialed another number and spoke softly again. She wondered if anyone else in the world had a job like her father, going to work at eight-thirty, heading home at five, drinking the first of two Old Fashioneds by five forty-five. She had at one time thought every man was like her father. But most were like Rodney and Lenny, secretive and deceptive.
“Open it up, baby,” Lenny said when he emerged from the kitchen.
She was baby now, one step closer to Ft. Lauderdale. Eunice knelt on the floor, moved the brass lock hasp, pulled open the mouth of the bag, revealing the greenbacks, banded together by Rodney, as prim and orderly as sardines in a tin.
“You do the counting,” he said. “I trust you.”
He stood over her. He trusted no person.
She separated the money into two piles.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Put all that money back in the bag. You keep it.”
“Why, Lenny? Or whoever?” She thought of him now as Lenny Jeffries and Detective McAlpin rolled into one, a poor man’s Dean Martin.
“Call me Lenny. That’s my real name. I want to make sure you deposit that money safely. Then we’ll go out for Chinese tonight and talk about Ft. Lauderdale. But we’re going to take care of Rodney. You’ll get to see with your own eyes. You follow me to that house. I want you to see we know how to take care of things.”
“Why can’t I just stay home?” She wanted another glass of wine. She was scheduled to begin her shift at the beauty parlor in another hour. She could do perms while tipsy. The ladies enjoyed the buoyancy the wine gave her, but she knew that driving required skills that diminished with drink.
“Come on, grab your car keys,” he said. “We’re not going to let him hurt you anymore.”
He saw her hesitation. “Look, we’re both lonely, right?” He was Dean Martin now, soothing, charming, confident, but Dino was never lonely. She didn’t consider that.
She grabbed her car keys from the kitchen counter and picked up the bag. “All right,” she said.
“We’ll go to the Ming Garden later,” he said. “We’ll get to know each other. Make plans.”
She placed the bag of money next to her in her Dodge Dart with the dented door that Rodney had kicked one day and followed Lenny in his red Camaro. The two cars passed through a gritty factory precinct and on up Hartford Avenue, past the projects where the big flowers scrawled on the sidewalks in chalk by little girls made Eunice think of the real flowers awaiting her in Ft. Lauderdale.
She then turned west toward the farms and orchards. She no longer saw the red Camaro in front of her. Maybe Lenny had taken a different route. All the way to the work site, Eunice resisted her father’s sensible voice inside her head, informing her in his quiet reproving manner that she was allowing herself to be taken in by the suave charm of Dean Martin just as she had been attracted to the shallow bravado and glib humor of Rodney Brisco.
She drove slowly and steadily, clutching the steering wheel, struggling to be conscious of everything around her.
As she neared the work site, she didn’t see Lenny’s red Camaro anywhere. She pulled up behind the blue Cadillac convertible she had heard so much about. The kerchiefed woman sat in the driver’s seat, looking straight ahead.
In the distance, atop an embankment above the sidewalk, Eunice saw two painters on ladders slashing glistening ivory paint on the clapboards of the Greek Revival. She couldn’t tell if one of the painters was Rodney. She looked around. Where had Lenny and his red Camaro gone? Her father, whispering to her always, told her this was all wrong. Perhaps, she wondered, in this fleeting last moment of her life, she should get out and warn Rodney that his life was in peril from the poor associations he had made. She could give him the money and tell him to flee and start over somewhere else. That might be the morally propitious thing to do.
A tall man in a dress shirt and jeans stood near the painters as though he had been cheering them on. He turned toward her. This was the famous Archie, the man with the crooked face and remarkable good luck. Now Archie was shouting and gesturing toward something in the distance. Eunice couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she heard the screech of brakes just before the dump truck hit the side of her car, crushing her ribcage and causing the passenger door to explode from its hinges.
The dump truck sat in its metal kiss for just a moment before the driver shoved the howling gears in reverse, backed up, and drove away, followed by a speeding red Camaro.
As Eunice’s vision clouded and dazzling pain shot through her body, she saw long fingers and a slender arm reach into the car and withdraw the bag of money. The kerchiefed woman, her own date with destiny waiting patiently, stared at Eunice, her face as sleek and unforgiving as a knife blade. Eunice wanted to say something to the woman with the kerchief, but her words remained locked in her fading brain. She closed her eyes for the last time.
Upon the embankment above the sidewalk, Rodney had climbed down from his ladder at the sound of the crash. He stood next to Archie.
“That’s Eunice’s car. What was she doing here?”
“You see, pal,” Archie said, “those new friends of yours are giving you a warning. You must have done something to upset them. Better stick to painting.”
[Image Credit : Photo by Bob Kozel on Unsplash]
by 
Chris Fortunato
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Thank you for sharing your unique perspective and story-telling talent with us all!