Three Twisted Stories Part 1

Three Twisted Stories.

Karin Slaughter.

Contents.

Go Deep.

Necessary Women.

Remmy Rothstein Toes the Line.

Go Deep.

APRIL 5, 1974.

Chapter One.

Charlie Lam stared out his open office doorway at a stacked blonde carrying a purse the size of a briefcase. Long straight hair slapped at the curve of her a.s.s. Black eyeliner and heavy blue shadow brought out the violet in her eyes. Her lips were wet with red lipstick. Even from fifteen feet away, he could see the dark of her nipples underneath the pale yellow blouse she wore with a skirt that was short enough to raise a man from the dead.

She was looking at the used convertible Mustang in the center of the showroom floor. There was a sugar daddy somewhere in the equation. A girl that pretty couldn't afford the bus fare to the car lot, let alone a convertible anything. If she had a rich father, he'd be here making sure she didn't get ripped off. A husband would be making sure she didn't get hit on. Only a very wealthy man with a wife and kids would let a pet like that off the leash.

Charlie licked his lips. He'd had girls like that before. They could take it so deep you felt the strain in the back of your eyeb.a.l.l.s.

"Mr. Lam?"

Charlie's gaze didn't move off the blonde. His secretary had been hired by his wife, which meant on a bad day in a good light, there still wasn't enough hand lotion in the world.

"Mr. Lam?"

The blonde moved out of his line of sight. Charlie scowled with every muscle in his face. "What is it?"

"Your wife called. She needs-"

Charlie waved her off. His wife always needed something. "What else?"

"Mr. Chop is on line three."

The pleasant tingling from the blonde drained like p.i.s.s down a sink.

"Close the door." Charlie's hand was shaking when he picked up the phone. He put the receiver to his ear. He waited. He waited some more. He cleared his throat.

"Mr. Lam?"

Charlie had to clear his throat again. "Mr. Chop?"

"The dry cleaner has your suits ready."

"Thank you." Charlie's hand was still shaking when he put the receiver back in the cradle. He took out his handkerchief and tried to stanch the line of Niagara Falls pouring down his forehead.

Mr. Chop's real name was Mike Thevis, a tough-guy mobster whose violent temper was so legend that just the thought of his name scared the hair off Charlie's b.a.l.l.s.

Charlie looked down at his hand. Still shaking.

The speaker on the phone shot a burst of noise into the office. "Mr. Lam?" His secretary again. Her voice was a cheese grater on his eardrum. "Your brother needs a consultation on pricing the Mustang."

Deacon. Of course that worthless a.s.shole had grabbed the blonde the minute she'd walked through the door.

Charlie grabbed his suit jacket off the back of his chair. He checked himself in the mirror, straightened his tie, smoothed down his hair. There was some gray, but it looked good on him. His mustache was still dark. He was growing out his sideburns, which his wife hated and his girlfriend loved. He'd been tempted to tell the former if she screwed him like the latter, he'd happily grab a razor, but that conversation had died like an electrocuted elephant in the back of his brain.

Charlie walked onto the showroom floor. Deacon's mouth was open like a braying jacka.s.s's as he fake-laughed at something the blonde had said. Twenty seconds ago, Charlie would've been looking forward to this. Now, all he could think was that there was a timer ticking somewhere, and if he didn't move fast enough, Mike Thevis would explode.

The hi-fi was playing Karen Carpenter through the giant speakers in the corners. Instantly, Charlie had a headache so bad that he could taste it in his mouth. The lights were too bright. The posters advertising on-lot financing and the best deals in town seemed to be screaming at him. Worst of all, the life-size cutout of Charlie dressed in a chicken suit mocked him by the front door. Chicken-Charlie was holding a sign that read, "I'M TOO CHICKEN TO GIVE YOU A BAD DEAL!"

Some jacka.s.s had stuck an Atlanta Braves baseball cap on top of the chicken's head. Charlie felt his lips twist into a sneer. He didn't give a s.h.i.+t about baseball, but three days from the big game, just about every customer who walked through the front door did.

"Hey, boss." Deacon Lam flashed a smile at Charlie that reminded him so much of their father that his stomach barbwired into a rabbit snare. "Let me introduce you to-"

"That's a pretty name, honey." Charlie said the words automatically. He wasn't thinking about the blonde so much as what would happen if he wasn't at the dry cleaner's soon. "I see you're looking at the Mustang. She's a solid ride. Only one driver, a little old lady who took it to church every Sunday." He winked at her, like he hadn't watched the porter cleaning up oil underneath the engine fifteen minutes ago. "You're a smart cookie. I can see we're going to have to give you a good deal."

" 'Charlie Lam the Chicken Man.' " The blonde hummed the jingle from the commercials. "I grew up watching you on TV."

Charlie didn't want to think about her sitting in front of the tube with pigtails and a bowl of cereal. He thought about her sitting in his lap. And then he thought about Mike Thevis coming in with a knife and slitting both their throats while Karen Carpenter sang "Ticket to Ride."

He put his hand on the blonde's arm. "That's great, sweetheart. Listen, I don't wanna rush you, but we're busy men here. We can't waste time, even on a pretty little thing like you."

She had a puzzled smile on her face. "I'm sorry?"

"Maybe you could get your husband or your friend ..." He let the word hang between them. "... to come down here and handle the transaction. Like I said, the Mustang's a good car. You'll look pretty in it." He remembered his job. "I mean, not that you don't look beautiful already."

"Course you're beautiful." Deacon narrowed his eyes at Charlie. "Ain't I been tellin' you that since you walked in? Pretty little peach."

"Yes, you have." Her smile lightened, but then she told Charlie, "I'm not a wh.o.r.e, Mr. Chicken Man. I can pay for my own car. I have a job and everything."

Charlie looked down at his watch. He didn't have time for this.

"The sign outside says you finance here." She reached into her purse. "I've got paycheck stubs from-"

He grabbed her arm a little tighter this time. "Look, doll, I meant what I said. You're a knockout. That's great that you've got a job and everything, but what happens when some lucky fella s.n.a.t.c.hes you up, you quit working, and your new guy doesn't want to pay off your old debts?"

"I imagine you'll repo my car, keep the money I've paid you so far, and sell it again to the next sucker who walks through the door."

Charlie said a silent prayer of thanks that he hadn't hit on this b.i.t.c.h. He was well past his quota for mouthy women in his life. He told Deacon, "Get her out of here. And take that hat off the chicken. You wanna get us shot?"

The blonde yelled something at his back, but Charlie easily tuned her out. He pushed open the gla.s.s door and walked across the parking lot. Lam Auto Sales. Six acres of new and used cars, none of them getting sold because the whole city had shut down over a f.u.c.king baseball game.

Charlie stuck his keys into the door of a Buick LeSabre. This was a real convertible-white body, burgundy top, matching burgundy leather on the inside. Charlie didn't know what was under the hood. He didn't care. Any car salesman will tell you that people buy with one question in mind: how good am I going to look behind the wheel of this baby? If you find yourself stuck with some gearhead talking about thrust and torque, you've already lost the sale.

The Buick's steering wheel had baked all morning in the sun. Charlie could feel the skin of his palm searing against the leather wrap. He turned the key in the ignition, pumped the gas, and felt a thousand seconds pa.s.s in the blink of an eye. He'd wasted three, maybe four minutes talking to the blonde. He wondered if that was the sort of delay that Thevis would understand. The FBI had tried to catch the man for years, but people were too terrified to turn on him. By most accounts, Thevis controlled half the country's p.o.r.n, from magazines to movies to peep-show booths.

Surely on occasion the King of p.o.r.n had caught a whiff of s.n.a.t.c.h that unexpectedly detained him.

Charlie turned on the radio as he pulled out onto the road. He fiddled with the dial, trying to find something other than talk about Hank Aaron's chances of hitting his 715th home run against the Mets in three days. This was history in the making. A black man breaking a white man's record. A young guy pus.h.i.+ng out the old guard. There were some people who were happy about this and a lot of people who were hotter than two h.e.l.ls. Rumor was that the editor of the Atlanta Journal was preparing two headlines for the story: one that celebrated Aaron breaking the record and another that introduced the ballplayer's obituary.

Charlie switched to FM. He didn't care about the death threats against Aaron, or that Sammy Davis, Jr., was going to be in the stands, or that Governor Carter was calling this an historic time for the state. What he cared about was that everybody in Atlanta had chosen a side, and they were too busy arguing about who was wrong and who was right to get out of their houses and buy cars.

He finally found a station that wasn't talking about the game. Then he let out a hot stream of curses. Karen Carpenter. "Ticket to Ride." What had Charlie done to p.i.s.s off G.o.d today?

"Jesus!" He jerked the wheel hard, but he was too late. A homeless man bounced across his winds.h.i.+eld like hail before a tornado. The guy's elbow popped against the winds.h.i.+eld. His jacket flew up. The back of his greasy pants left a streak across the gla.s.s.

Charlie pounded on the brakes. The car skidded several yards, then finally came to a shuddering stop. He held his breath as he stared at the body in his side-view mirror. The guy was flat on his back, unmoving. His overflowing grocery cart was parked beside him. Black trash bags filled with aluminum cans stuck out like polyps.

Charlie's eyes went up to the vacant buildings around him. He scanned the street front and back. He was calculating whether or not to keep driving when he saw the man's legs kick into the air. He jumped up to standing like all of his strings had been pulled. He was black, with a scraggly beard and an Afro that looked like a mushroom cap.

Charlie let out a long breath of air as he rolled down his window. "Watch where you're going, motherf.u.c.ker!"

The guy shot him two birds, one with each hand. "Motherf.u.c.k you, you honky-a.s.s motherf.u.c.ker!"

That was it. Charlie got out of the car. "You motherf.u.c.kin' me, you black motherf.u.c.ker?"

"That's right, honky motherf.u.c.ker."

They were doing Shakespeare here.

Charlie kept a bat in his trunk and a Sat.u.r.day night special in the glove box, but he didn't have time for either. This guy was obviously a vet. He was about the right age and had that same vacant look in his eyes they all had when they got back home. His camouflage jacket had stripes on the shoulder. Charlie had missed the draft by a few years. He felt guilty, and then he felt mad because who the f.u.c.k was this guy anyway?

Charlie walked back to his car.

"That's right, motherf.u.c.ker," the man yelled. "Walk away from me!"

Charlie got into the car.

"Coward can't handle takin' on no homeless brother."

Charlie put his hands on the wheel.

"White boy too scared to go deep in the street."

He watched his fingers wrap around the lever sticking out of the side of the wheel. Instead of going up into drive, the gear went down into reverse. Charlie's foot slammed into the gas pedal. The car swerved back down the street so fast that the homeless man barely had time to dive out of the way. The shopping cart exploded with a satisfying bang. Something cracked the Buick's back window. The tires screeched for purchase. Charlie b.u.mped the gear into drive and sped off down the road. He felt a smile on his face, and he tried in vain to remember the last time he was happy about something.

This was not a new exercise for Charlie Lam, trying to find something that he was happy about. Generating a long list should've been easy. He had everything a man could want. He owned a successful business. He could f.u.c.k any slit he put his mind on. He had a wife to keep his house clean, his s.h.i.+rts washed, and his kid out of his hair. He had a girlfriend who went down on him every time she saw him. He was a deacon in the church. He led his Kiwanis club. People came to him for advice. They looked at Charlie Lam and saw the sort of man they wanted to be.

And Charlie saw a skinny kid, half-starved, with nothing but fear in his eyes.

He'd grown up dirt poor, his pockets filled with lint and low expectations. There were twelve of them by the time Charlie, the eldest, left home. He was sixteen. He'd never had anything permanent in his life except for turmoil. Every three months or so, the family would have to move because the owner of the shack they were squatting in would show up with a rifle. If they were lucky, they managed to take the floorboards with them to the next shack so they didn't have to sleep on the dirt. Sometimes there was a loft, but that was for Mama and Papa, which meant Mama would start to get fat a month later and they'd end up either finding b.l.o.o.d.y rags in the burn pile or another mouth to feed nine months later.

Married white women couldn't work back then. You just didn't see it. The old man was their only source of money. They all knew Papa had another family somewhere. Charlie used to spend his nights thinking about them, wondering if they had a house with windows filled with gla.s.s instead of newspapers. Did they wear shoes that n.o.body else had ever worn? Did their underwear come from a store, or was it made out of the cotton sacks the flour came in?

When Charlie thought of his current life, he didn't feel a sense of success or pride. He still felt that impermanence. The anvil hanging over his head was tied to a pulley that could swipe everything away at a moment's notice.

The threat wasn't just above Charlie's head. He employed sixty-eight men at the dealers.h.i.+p. Eleven of them were single, but the rest had wives or ex-wives who depended on those paychecks. Last count, there were seventy-two kids depending on Charlie to help put food in their mouths, shoes on their feet.

That wasn't even counting Charlie's personal life. He had a wife at home who expected him to buy her mink coats and expensive jewelry and fancy dinners at the Polaris restaurant at least once a month. A girlfriend across town who depended on him to help pay the rent and keep gas in her car. A spoiled daughter who was in private school, who took dance lessons she would never use, who drove a brand-new Mustang and went to nightclubs every weekend where she wasn't pretty enough for men to buy her drinks.

What would happen to all of them if Charlie made one big mistake, or even several little ones, and the business went under? Here was a list that Charlie could easily generate. He knew his men. Most of his employees lived paycheck to paycheck. You could see it in their eyes if Charlie was late signing checks: the panic, the fear.

The mechanics would probably be all right, but the parts department, the porters, the salesmen would all be fighting each other for sc.r.a.ps from the other dealers.h.i.+ps around town. At least twelve of them would go to the bottle. He knew this for certain because they were halfway there. Another six might end up on the streets; porters, car cleaners, runners. They were all black, but still. Another nine just wouldn't go home. They'd move in with their mistresses. They'd never see their children again. They'd grow their beards long and follow Skynyrd back and forth across the country.

And this list didn't even include Charlie's siblings, who routinely came to him with their hands out. He was the only one of them who had made a success of himself, and they felt he owed them for it. He had left at sixteen with a broken eye socket, cracked ribs, and a sprained wrist that still ached when it rained, and he was the selfish b.a.s.t.a.r.d who owed them for abandoning his family.

And what a family it was. They were all one long series of Irish twins, born close together because Charlie's mother had figured out there was only one thing that would stop their father from beating her. Deacon was the closest to Charlie in age. He was a charity case who couldn't sell a car if you held a bazooka to his head, which scenario often played like a silent movie in Charlie's brain. Then there was his baby sister who always had her hand in his pocket. His s.h.i.+fty brother who showed up once a month with the law on his a.s.s. His stupid brother who kept losing his money on the c.o.c.kfights. His other stupid brother who kept losing his money on tail. His a.s.shair of a brother who had so many kids that he'd given two of them the same name.

Charlie tapped the brakes. He was so lost in his worthless family that he'd almost driven straight past the dry cleaner's. He slid the Buick into the parking s.p.a.ce beside a police cruiser. There was no one behind the wheel.

Charlie walked across the lot toward the building. The gla.s.s windows were floor-to-ceiling. He could see Mr. Salmeri behind the counter doing his crossword puzzle. The cold sweat was back, but not because of Mike Thevis. Charlie's mind was veering toward panic lately. The constant sensation of something bad about to happen followed him around like a shadow. He didn't know where this came from. Nothing had changed. Nothing except there had been a lot more calls lately from Mr. Chop, which was a good thing if you looked at the face of it. More Chop, more money. More money, more security. More security, less worry.

Why didn't that math play out?

The bell over the door clanged as Charlie walked in.

Mr. Salmeri did not look up. He was a hairy Italian guy with a push-broom mustache and hair so black it glowed blue under the fluorescent lights. Gold rings were on his fingers. A rope chain as thick as Charlie's pinky wrapped around the man's neck. His s.h.i.+rt was unb.u.t.toned so that the way the yellow necklace lay on his hairy chest reminded Charlie of the green polyester gra.s.s and pastel eggs in the Easter baskets he used to buy for his kid before she got too fat for candy.

Charlie guessed his daughter got her gluttony from him. He was a textbook example of somebody who didn't know when to stop. He had a thriving business. He lived a good life. He lived in a big house and drove a smart car. But then he'd run into Mike Thevis at a party and decided he wanted more.

How it worked was like this: Mr. Chop called Mr. Lam and told him to pick up his dry cleaning. Charlie hightailed it over to Salmeri's, where he was given a suit. The suit pocket contained a slip of paper with a very important man's name written on it. The next day, that very same man showed up at Charlie's dealers.h.i.+p ready to pick out a brand-new car. Charlie would give the man whatever he wanted, no questions asked. Then he'd go to Mike Thevis's joint and walk away with the cash to cover the cost of the car and then some.

Not that Charlie sought out the details, but usually a few weeks later, the commissioner or judge or deputy whoever it was Charlie had given the car to could be found in the newspaper or on the local news talking about how he was supporting or not supporting something that in the end would greatly benefit Mike Thevis.

Charlie wasn't stupid enough to think he was the only man Thevis was using this way, but he was smart enough not to ask. He visited the dry cleaner at least once a week now, and while he never saw anyone else in the building, there were always plenty of clothes on the rack. Salmeri had a warehouse over in Colored Town where sixteen black women ironed and washed clothes for him. It was a nice warehouse, not what Charlie had been expecting. The women laughed and listened to the radio. n.o.body laughed at Charlie's dealers.h.i.+p. Maybe he should hire some black women.

"Mr. Lam," Salmeri said, his code to let Charlie know there was somebody else in the building. Everybody called Charlie by his first name. n.o.body called Salmeri by his.

Charlie jammed his hands into his pants pockets. He was sweating for real now. It was always damp inside the dry cleaner's, even though no work was done on site. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief. He could hear humming, which annoyed him, then he realized the humming was coming from his own throat.

That f.u.c.king Carpenters cover of the Beatles. He couldn't get it out of his head.