Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped (23 page)

“That’s the point,” she says.

She looks down at it. “Let me see.” She turns it over. “Ooh, never mind, this is Zoltan’s gun.”

“Who’s Zoltan?”

“He’s my nephew.”

“His name is Zoltan?”

“His father’s Hungarian.”

“Zoltan has a gun?”

“Zoltan is ten. It’s a Nerf gun.”

“You don’t even know the difference between a Nerf gun and a pepper spray?”

“Well, they look a lot alike in this lighting.” I look around. It’s broad daylight. “I wish they did have the pepper gun available in a color other than gun metal gray,” she says longingly. “It’d be cute if it came in like a teal blue, don’t you think?”

“Yup,” I tell her. I shrug. “Why do you have Zoltan’s Nerf gun in your purse.”

“He likes to put things in my purse when I’m not looking. He knows I like Nerf guns,” she adds. “We have Nerf battles when he comes to visit.

“Anyway,” she says, “the pepper gun has a little plastic plug thingie where you put the juice into it. And, of course, it’s heavier than Zoltan’s gun. Oh, turn here,” she says. “Look for number 433. Why don’t people put proper numbers on their houses anymore. I don’t understand that. Look, here are three in a row with no numbers at all.”

“They should be shot,” I tell her.

“Here it is. Pull in.”

“Now wait a second,” I say. “We have no plan about what we’re going to do or say.”

“It’ll be okay,” she says. She snaps her purse shut. She can’t wait to get in there and put him in his place.

“But,” I say.

Squirt is already halfway up the walk. For a big woman, she can really move. It’s a square modular house with beige aluminum siding. The yard is white pebbles with an iron bench plunked right in the middle of the front yard where nobody would ever sit.

I tie Dreamer in the shade of the front porch. There’s a sign that says “Office” and “Enter” over the front door. So, in we go. A bell tinkles. There’s a waiting area with three wooden kitchen chairs lined up and a pile of magazines on a low stool. We sit down. We can hear voices rumbling behind a door.

A woman in a terrycloth sweat suit comes out of the door. She’s heavily made up, and she smiles at us in a stretched way and leaves. The door tinkles shut. We wait. I thumb through
People
magazine. Squirt stares straight ahead. Just when I think she’s going to storm the door, it opens and Ivan Newton pokes his head out. “Which one of you is the lovely Diamond?” he says.

Squirt stands up. She’s got about six inches and sixty pounds on Ivan Newton. “We want to see you together,” she tells him.

“As you wish,” he says and opens the door wide. “I’m Ivan Newton Tarot Master,” he says, like it’s all one word.

I say, “I’m Lola” as I walk past him.

“Yes,” he tells me. Like, with his secret powers, he knew that already.

I don’t know which is eerier, him or his office. The walls are smothered in red paisley wallpaper, and there are red velvet drapes on the windows. A fountain is tinkling in a corner, and the walls are laden with ornate mirrors. For some reason, I get a flashback to fourth grade science class when we watched that movie where the people get shrunk down and swallowed into the human body. “You are now inside the stomach lining…”
That
movie. Incense and candles are burning in sconces, and the room smells like a mélange of mildew and patchouli and male hormones. “Sit down my friends and welcome,” he says.

I don’t know about Squirt, but I want to run. We both sit down on the couch across from him. He’s wearing a loose cotton shirt with a Nehru collar. “I didn’t know they still made those,” I say pointing to his shirt.

“I hab them imborted,” he tells me. His lips are too plump, as if he had a silicone injection that went awry, so he kind of blubbers when he speaks. He looks a lot like a young Alfred Hitchcock. Squirt is staring at him and twitching in her seat. “Will just one ob you be habbing a reading or both?” he asks.

“Just Diamond,” I say.

“The fee is one hundred ub front,” he says. Squirt stares at him and doesn’t move.

I say, “I think Diamond and I would like to hear more about the kind of readings you actually do. She’s a Tarot Master herself.” I gesture toward the immobile Squirt, “and we heard from our friend Feather that you do ‘energy readings?’”

“Ah yes, Feather,” he says leaning back in his chair.

“Could you do something like that for Diamond?” I ask him. I look at Squirt and she looks back at me. I smile at her.

“That’s more intesib,” he says. “Body work is something that we work ub to.” He begins shuffling the tarot cards. Then he places them on the coffee table in front of Squirt. “Are we ready?” he asks.

There is something about a deck of cards that makes you just want to get a hand dealt to you, isn’t there? I can see why these guys make their money. It is almost hypnotic, that full deck. “Deal me in,” I want to say.

Squirt reaches out and puts her hand on the deck. “Which card,” she asks him evenly, “is the one that tells a woman that she should have sex with you?”

He cocks his head and pauses. He appears unruffled.

“Feather told us,” I say. “We’re actually investigating the death of Ernie Stank. He was blackmailing Feather over her…” I’m thinking of the right word “activities… with you.” I don’t know if this is true, but I say it anyway.

“Febber killed him?” he asks us.

“I don’t know that,” I tell him, “but I do know she paid him not to reveal her secret affair with you to her husband.” I lie.

“Why ever would she do that?” he says.

“She loves him. She would never allow her husband to find out,” Squirt says

“Pah,” he says dismissively.

“You don’t seem surprised though,” I say.

“That Ernie man tried to blackmail me too. He said he could ruin me. I told him, ‘Go away, you little worm ob a man.’ He tells me, ‘I hab a tape!’ I laughed at him. Everybubby has a tape these days…”

“So you didn’t pay him?” I ask.

“What for?” he asks me. “I am doing nothing wrong. My clients are grown ubs. They can hab sex with me if they want to. It helbs them free up their frozen selbs.”

“Don’t you have any shame?” Squirt asks him in a clenched way.

“People are so ub tight. Especially those women wib their tight little asses and their big cars.” He looks at me, “They need to let their energy blossom,” he extends his arms out in the heavy red air.

“Blossom?” Squirt asks.

I admit, I’m amazed by the whole tableau. How the guy has a whole theory, how he feels entirely justified in what he does.

“That’s abuse of power,” Squirt tells him.

“Abuse?” he laughs. “I provide a service,” he says. “I don’t hear Febber or Fred complaining about the services I provide.”

“I’m complaining about the services you provide,” she tells him.

He reaches over to Squirt and rubs her thigh. “You need to let your energy flow,” he says. He rubs her thigh some more.

Oh no, I think. The next moment Squirt is standing up and pointing a gun at the tarot guy. “You can’t TOUCH me,” she yells.

“I didn’t,” Ivan says.

“You can’t GROPE me,” she says to Ivan Newton, both hands on the gun.

“Which gun is that?” I ask, but nobody is paying any attention to me.

“I wasn’t groping,” Ivan insists.

“You WERE groping,” she informs him.

“I didn’t MEAN it,” he say,s but Squirt is towering over the little tarot guy. I almost feel sorry for him. He’s curled into the corner of his plush red chair. “Help,” he says. He throws a tasseled pillow at Squirt. She ducks and the gun goes off. It’s the Nerf gun. Ivan the Tarot Master squeals and jumps up and hides behind his desk.

Brightly colored Nerf discs propel out of the gun like flying saucers. About a million of them. They’re zooming around the room bouncing into everything. The gun is making a kind of whirring sound as it spits out the discs.

My mouth is open. Squirt has the trigger nailed down spraying the room with Nerf saucers. Ivan the Tarot Master is huddled under his desk with his eyes closed. He can’t figure out what’s going on. Then one of the discs hits the biggest mirror up near the ceiling. It tips back and forth slowly, and then falls off its nail and slams into about a hundred other mirrors on its way down. For long few seconds there is the sound of a lot of property damage. Then there’s a ringing silence.

“Uh oh,” I say unnecessarily.

Ivan’s head peeks out from the behind the desk. “Eek,” I think he says.

“Run,” I tell Squirt. For some reason, she’s standing on top of the coffee table. I grab her arm and scramble out of the room. Dreamer is standing on the porch, her ears up and her head cocked sideways staring at the front door, when we burst out. I grab her and run for the car. I open the back door and she kind of hops up this time. She’s getting the hang of getaways. I’m in my seat, but Squirt’s door is still open. She’s arranging her purse on the floor, situating her seat belt. “Get in, get in!” I yell.

“Hold your horses,” she says.

We peel away from the curb. There’s no sign of anyone in the neighborhood, no sign of Ivan running after us. “Holy moly,” I say after we put a little distance behind us. “I bet he peed in his pants under the desk.”

Squirt says, “Those mirrors did make a lot of noise.”

“He thought you were really going to shoot him.”

“It would serve him right…,” she announces.

“You better tie a little teal colored ribbon around your pepper gun so you know which is which next time,” I say.

She’s a little catatonic. She nods.

“You need a tootsie roll,” I tell her. “He rubbed your thigh.”

“I know,” she says shaking her head. “I know.”

I shake my head too.

“Green light,” she tells me. I look back at the road.

“You shot his wall with a Nerf gun,” I say.

“Zoltan is gonna be mad. I used up all of his discs. I got over-excited,” she adds.

“They probably have replacement packs,” I tell her.

She nods. “Can we stop off at Toys ‘R Us?”

“What if he calls the cops?” I ask.

“He won’t,” she says. “It was self-defense.”

“It was,” I say automatically. “Maybe you didn’t need to do QUITE so much damage…”

“His business might not be criminal legally, but I don’t think he’d want the cops to know what he’s up to. He won’t call them.”

I’m thinking about what Ivan said and didn’t say. “Ernie blackmailed Feather about her relationship with the tarot master. He tried to blackmail Ivan, but Ivan didn’t go for it. At least he said he didn’t. Ivan said that Fred wouldn’t have cared, didn’t he?” I ask Squirt.

“I don’t think that’s what he said. I can’t remember. I’m very hot,” she says and rolls down the window.

“You’re not going to throw up are you?” I ask, looking around in case I have to pull over.

“I got over-excited,” she tells me again. “I just need some air.” I lower all the windows. We stick our heads out the window like dogs do as we motor along. I didn’t expect my life to turn out like this, I really didn’t.

“I remember,” Squirt tells me, pulling her head in. “He said something about Fred not complaining about the services he provided.”

“As if Fred already knew?” I ask.

“And he said something about Ernie having a tape,” she says.

“How would Ernie get a tape?” I ask.

Chapter 42

When Dreamer and I drive up to my little trailer at five o’clock, it’s buzzing—literally. At first, I think the stress has gotten to my head, but when I get out of the car, I find, no, it’s true. My whole trailer is vibrating.

“What the…?” I say.

When I open the door, I can’t move. Two large folding tables fill up my entire living room. There are two sewing machines going and my mother and Miss Tilney are pushing fabric through them, this way and that. The room sounds like it’s full of bees.

They pause when I open the door. “Hello dear,” my mother says. “We’re making curtains.”

“We got the tables from the rec room and borrowed the machines from the Quilting Bee Club. They only meet on Mondays,” Miss Tilney explains.

I edge around the table into the kitchen. There’s a new TV perched on my counter. It’s tiny, the screen must be eight inches wide, and there’s a DVD player in it, and it’s playing Under the Tuscan Sun. “What’s this?” I ask.

“Your father had that,” my mother says. “He never used it. You’re supposed to mount it up under your kitchen cabinets like a toaster oven.”

“Oh,” I say. “I was getting used to the silence.”

“You like this material?” My mother hold up a hibiscus laden floral.

“It looks like a Hawaiian shirt,” I say.

“That means she likes it,” Miss Tilney snaps, and puts her nose back to the grindstone.

“I thought it looked cheerful,” my mother says.

“We could use a little cheer around here.” Miss Tilney looks around disparagingly.

I don’t say anything. We? I think.

“And the fabric will pick up the greenish beige of the couch,” Miss Tilney adds.

“Couch?” I ask.

“It pulls out,” Miss Tilney says.

“To where?” I ask, looking helplessly around the little room.

“We have to go pick it up tomorrow. There wasn’t room in the cargo van,” my mother tells me.

“Your mother measured,” Miss Tilney says.

“Your father rented a U Haul.”

“How big is this couch anyway?”

“She walked in grumpy,” Miss Tilney tells my mother.

“Something happen at work?” my mother asks.

“I failed my P.I. test. I knew I wasn’t ready for it. Dad was pushing me, pushing me to do it like it was a cliff he wanted me to fall off.”

“Oh, I’m sure not,” my mother says.

“How am I supposed to know about caliber of guns and wiretapping laws?”

“Didn’t you review?” Miss Tilney asks.

“I didn’t like the book,” I say. They both look up at me. “What?” It scared me, okay? I thought it would be better if I didn’t psych myself out. I can take it again.”

“She sabotages herself,” my mother tells Miss Tilney. “Ever since she was a little girl she’s been laying traps and walking into them.”

“What?” I say.

“I’m sorry, dear. Maybe I could help you study. I could ask you the questions,” my mother offers