Bomber's Law (10 page)

“Very cosy,” Dell'Appa had said.

“Oh, absolutely heart-warming,” Dennison had said. “Although actually, if it'd just been that, the two old ladies turning into high-rollers, advised by Alexander Hamilton and FDR, in their sunset years, it would've been just fine. And it was unquestionably very nice for Virginia and for Lucy, too, as long as Virginia was alive, because it meant that what she'd thought all along she could do, but couldn't really've managed, on what Stan'd left her for money—support Lucy living with her—she now really could do. And that made her happy, which from our selfish point of view was also a very fine thing—happy old people're just like happy middle-aged people, and happy young people, and happy-dear, little children: much less trouble to their kinfolk than unhappy old people. No, the real trouble didn't begin until later, after Virginia'd cooked up the house idea and decided there was no reason why she couldn't finally have, at seventy-nine, the house she'd always wanted since she was a blushing bride and she saw it one day with her husband, because his client owned it and Stan'd had to drive down to it to see the man. And goddamned if it wasn't for sale, didn't just happen to be on the market, asking-price: four-hundred, twenty-five-thousand, breathtaking, American, dollars.”

“My,” Dell'Appa had said.

“I should say so,” Dennison had said. “Now, praise God, by the time Virginia began to hatch this harebrained plot of hers, we'd managed after much exertion to get it through her head that the Lottery folks hadn't really screwed up, and she more or less understood that she hadn't really been supposed to've gotten her whole mill and a half in one swell foop, and the way that they were proposing to pay her off was not only the way they paid off all the big
winners, every time; it was also perfectly legal. She still thought it was also a perfectly rotten trick to pull on the people who bought tickets on million-dollar raffles thinking they would get a million dollars all at once if they should win, and I've got to say that even Tory and I found it pretty hard to argue with her on that point, but she did still have it straight that that was the way they were going to do it, and it was not against the law. So, when she found out that the castle of Chillon was for sale, the very same house that she'd visited with her Stanley back when his rich-oddball rug-merchant client was not only living in his dream-house but running his business from it, she went into the whole adventure knowing that she'd have to get a mortgage. Which for a woman in her very late seventies, even one who's just hit the Lottery for a one-half, after-tax share of almost forty-nine K a year, is no mean trick to pull off. For some reason or another, bankers and other lenders—even those extremely-shifty fellows doing business out of low-rent, store-front offices in cinderblock shopping plazas that aren't quite making it and depend on late-night, home-shopping channel, cable-TV advertising to drum up business for them—for some reason or another all of these people are very reluctant to write twenty- and thirty-year paper for people much past, say, forty birthdays or so.

“ ‘They say they won't consider anything over ten years, even though we've got all that jackpot money,' she told Tory. See, the cock-and-bull story she'd dreamed up for our benefit then was that she and Lucy were both going to be on the mortgage, so whatever the monthly payment turned out to be, each of them would be paying half that. And the plan was that she would make a will leaving Lucy enough from her share of the winnings to cover her half of the mortgage if she turned out to be the one who died first—which it sort of figured she would be, since Lucy at the time was a spry young seventy-two-year-old, as lively as a squirrel. But for some reason or another, which Virginia never did manage to explain to Tory's complete understanding, Lucy didn't want to be listed as co-owner on the deed, which we both thought was kind of a strange attitude for a mortgage borrower to have, even when the borrower was an ignorant, unsophisticated, simple elderly lady from the bayou country. I mean, commit yourself to paying two, maybe three, thousand dollars a month, debt and taxes on a great big fancy house, and then turn
around and say you want no part nor share of ownership? That you could pass on to your dear kinfolk? Well, hard as we found it to believe, according to Virginia that was Lucy's wish. She wanted it instead all to go to Tory and me, when she went to Jesus, if Virginia'd died first. Partly because Virginia'd be putting what she got from the sale of the Taunton house, that Tory'd expected to inherit someday, into the Westport Disaster, and partly to show how much she admired us, for taking care of 'Ginia.

“Flattering? You bet. It almost like to turn our poor fool heads. But it still didn't, you know, make a lot of sense to us. At least not until we were sure we were where Virginia couldn't possibly hear us, and then we just busted out laughing. Just goes to show you, I guess: if you're gonna start slingin' the shit, you should get started early in life. Not when you're seventy-nine.

“Well,” Dennison had said, “that wasn't the way it actually was, of course. What Virginia was doing was scheming to buy the house by herself, for her and Lucy to live in. The real-estate taxes down in Westport on that monster were about the same each year as the tax bill on her house in Taunton, rates and assessments being lower down there, so that came to about two hundred bucks a month. On a fifteen-year mortgage, ten-and-a-half percent, fixed rate, that left Virginia about thirty-eight, thirty-nine hundred a month from her annual Lottery check, which meant the maximum she could finance, using every dime of it, would've been just under three-hundred-fifty grand. Total. Her place in Taunton was free and clear, in good shape in a nice location; even though the market was depressed at the time, she figured to clear somewhere between ninety-five and a hundred-fifteen if she could find a buyer who could find a bank. So that meant that as a matter of fact she wasn't being completely unrealistic, not financially at least, when she proposed to buy a house that cost as much as the castle did. Actuarily? Common-sensibly? Sure, she was nuts. Bonkers, bananas, out of her everlasting tree, even to dream of such a thing. But mathematically, arithmetically, there was nothing wrong with the idea at all.

“So, there being no logical way to argue her out of the idea, Tory got involved too. In the inspection tour and then the haggling, I mean. The sellers, the late owner's grandnephews, put up a stiff struggle. It would've been a lot more convincing if they hadn't been a
couple of guys who had their own lives all set up in Syracuse and Washington, hadn't already sold off the remains of the rug business to one of their late uncle's competitors, and 'd had at least some interest in uprooting themselves and their families so they could live in Westport, Massachusetts, but they held out for a while before they finally came down to three-sixty-five. Which, after Virginia put most of what she got from selling her own house into the down payment, meant she and Lucy had a monthly payment of between thirty-one and thirty-two-hundred bucks a month. For her, an old lady with her Social Security, the pension Stan'd left her, not to mention their savings—old Stan'd been careful; Virginia'd been known to suggest, as a matter of fact, that he was rather ‘close with a buck'—that was a comfortable expense, if it happened to be how she wanted to spend her own money, and it was.

“So she did,” Dennison had said. “That was six years ago, and everything went along just tickety-boo for a little more than three years, Virginia and her companion just as happy and contented as could be. And then, contrary to all expectations, Virginia's included, Lucy up and died. Just keeled over in her chair one fine spring afternoon while they were watching Judge Wapner, mooning over how cute his court officer there, Rusty, was, and what a nice smile he had, and boom, that was the end of her. It was also when things started to get complicated. For us, I mean.

“It would've been all right if Virginia when that happened'd still been living in the house in Taunton. Where she'd lived for over forty years. Friends all around who knew her, lived close by to her. The man down at the drugstore'd known her twenty years. The kid who'd used to mow her lawn, shovel out her walks and driveway; he was all grown up, of course, and now he owned the gas station and took care of her car. Police chief'd been with D Troop when I joined this outfit. Tory and I were less'n a half hour up the road, and if something'd happened to her, one of those people would've found out in a jiffy and called one of us right up. She'd been protected there.

“But now,” Dennison had said, “in this goddamned house that she'd bought for herself, all the way down in Westport, for God's sake, she was out there all by herself. Out in the meadow alone, without another soul living close enough to her to even notice if her lights'd come on? Well, that wasn't so good. They don't have much
crime down there, and the place's so far off the beaten track it's pretty unlikely any roving, thieving bastard looking for a rich old lady, living by herself, to break in on and steal from, 'd ever happen to see it. And sure, her health was good. She could look after herself, and we did know some people who'd look in on her every so often, let us know if she seemed to need us to do anything. But it was still awful lonesome for her, down there all by herself all day, with no one else to talk to, most days, after Lucy died.
Real
tough for her when the winter came that year, short days, got dark so early, and the wind just howlin' through there, sounding colder'n it was. She stayed over with us at Thanksgiving, the Wednesday night before and then through the weekend, Tory went Christmas-shopping with her, and it was pretty clear, to me at least, she wasn't in all that great a hurry to get back down there to Westport. Tory sort of revamped her schedule after the holidays, so she could get down there once or twice a week, take Virginia out to lunch or maybe meet her some place, make sure her car was all right, maybe get some shopping done, take her to get her hair done. But it was still a pretty makeshift arrangement. We didn't talk about it to her, and she didn't talk about it to us, but there wasn't any use trying to kid ourselves: it was only going to last as long as it lasted, and that'd only be until something came along and happened, meant she couldn't be alone all the time like that any longer.

“She'd always said when her time came she'd go in a flash, ‘just like that' ” —Dennison had snapped his fingers—“because that's the way it'd been with everybody else in her family, all of them died of heart trouble. And that was the way she wanted it, too: ‘That's the way to do it, you ask me' was what she said, but when it finally happens, it doesn't always happen like you want it to, or like it happened every single time one of your cousins died. And it didn't, exactly, with Virginia, either, although she never really did get to the point where you'd have to say: ‘Well then, no use pretending any longer about this. This woman's just laid up, can't take care of herself anymore.' It was more of a gradual thing, things just gradually getting harder and harder for her, until it was finally clear to everyone that either we were going to move in with her down there, which neither one of us of course wanted to do, or she was going to have to move in with us up in Canton—and she didn't want to do that.”

“So how'd everybody decide it was going to be you two moving
down there?” Dell'Appa had said. “I mean, I know it sounds sort of cold-blooded and everything, but it'd more or less seem to me …”

“… that it'd make more sense for the
two
people who're probably going to be around longer to stay put where they are, and have the
one
person who probably isn't going to be around for at least a whole lot longer move in with them, right?”

“Right,” Dell'Appa had said.

“Right,” Dennison had said, sighing. “Well, I'll tell you the reason. Tory's as good a daughter to her mother as she is a wife to me and a mother to the kids. Tory's a good woman. And I'll do anything for Tory that she ever asks me to, unless she's lost her mind or something that she wants would kill her. Which I do not think will happen. But the reason we moved down there wasn't because Tory saw that as part of her duty to her mother and asked me, and I agreed to do it because I'm in love with Tory. It wasn't even because Tory's mother put the heat on and commanded us to come, because to give the woman credit, she was almost as reluctant to have us make the move as we were to do it.

“No, the reason was much simpler and a good deal less attractive than any of those other possibilities would've been. It was just what my good rabbi predecessor, the sainted Bomber Lawrence, told me when I first came on the job, what the simple explanation almost always is for so many of the lousy things that everybody, even good guys, nice guys like you and me, and good old Bobby Brennan—hell, even Bomber Lawrence—always seem to end up doing. We've always got good reasons for the things we did, but nobody wants to hear them when the things we did were good. It's just the bad and stupid things we do that our friends want reasons for, and for that kind of thing the Bomber reason always is: ‘We did it for the money.' There isn't any decoration and there ain't no colored lights. There isn't any gravy and we're out of salad-dressing and we got to face the facts and just take 'em as we are. We did it for the money.”

“Right there, now,” Brennan said, hunching forward in the driver's seat so that he completely blocked any partial view Dell'Appa might have contorted himself into sharing in the mirror.

“What's he wearing?” Dell'Appa said.

“Ah, the usual,” Brennan said offhandedly.

“Oh,” Dell'Appa said, “so he's wearin' ‘
the usual.
' Well, that certainly clears it right up for me, doesn't it? Case I might've any doubt in my mind, some lingerin' confusion about what the guy is wearin'. Since, you know, I've never seen him before today, and I still haven't seen him today yet, either—thanks to you sittin' there, like Buddha or Jabba the Hutt there, hoggin' the whole view like you're doin'. But now at least I know: all I got to do, I get back the office tonight and I sit down to write my report of the
day's adventures with you and Uncle Wiggily, Squirrel Nutkin, all the guys—Peter fuckin' Rabbit—is put down that even though I never did get a good look at any of them, any of the usual suspects, I'd still know them anyplace now. In the dark in a coalbin at midnight. Because I had your guidance in this. Right.”