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PART II
ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS

58

TREY SAT IN HIS throne, noise and controlled chaos going on all around him, reading his investigator’s report and wondering what to do with the information.

“You sure?” he asked the Pinkerton man.

“Yes,” the detective answered in a sympathetic tone. “Gladys was quiet, kept to herself, and was working herself to death. She left quite a bit of money that’s just sitting in the bank collecting interest. Not much by some standards, but better than a laundress would normally do. The landlady was surprised to know that, but they said she was frugal and charged more than going rate, but she also had a knack for crisp shirts. She solicited business in the financial district.”

“Smart,” Trey muttered. The police report was short on details, just that Gladys Truesdell, Marina’s mother, had been found hanging in her boarding house room when she didn’t show up at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There had been a note: “God have mercy on my soul.”

She’d left no diaries, no instructions for her money, and had been buried in a pauper’s grave.

“Are you sure the father didn’t have anything to do with it?” Trey flipped through the report again. “Egg her on, maybe? Put the noose around her neck, figuratively speaking.”

“No. I talked to the man himself. He was very proud of getting one over on Scarritt, had no interest in Marina, and he only heard about Gladys’s death from me. All he cared about was getting Truesdell—Scarritt—run out of town.”

“Was he still with his wife? The one Scarritt was fucking, I mean.”

“Yes, but from what I could tell, she’s little more than a maid who runs into a door occasionally and falls down a lot.”

Trey’s mouth twisted. No, he didn’t care about the sex of folks who broke his few rules, but he issued a few warnings before he did anything. He didn’t hold with a man knocking his own woman around. Shoot, his people yelled at him all the time and he didn’t mind. Some cathouses, simple disrespect would get a woman a beating unto death, never mind how Trey’s girls talked to him.

So the wife cheated. Knowing Scarritt, it was probably a seduction worthy of Valentino, drawing her into his web and keeping her there with good sex like the rest of his women. Trey was of the opinion that if a man treated his woman right, she wouldn’t succumb to some other man’s embrace. Maybe she was a rotten housekeeper, he didn’t know.

He was still trying to figure out what he wanted to do with Marina’s natural father.

“Is he tetched in the head?” Trey asked absently.

“He’s mean as a mama ’possum with babies on her back.”

Trey grimaced. “Drunkard, too, I see.”

“He drinks like a fish, but holds his liquor well enough to go to work on time every day and has had the same job for twenty years.”

That was impressive. Very few cats could do that.

“How do we get Gladys’s money to Marina?”

The detective gestured to his report. “I thought you might ask. You’ll have to get her birth certificate, if she has one, from the Truesdells. Scarritts. Or a sworn statement from the father.”

Trey pursed his lips. “That’ll be easy.”

“He won’t give that money up without a fight, once he knows she has it. It’s a little over three hundred dollars.”

Trey whistled. “A washerwoman? She had to have a side hustle.”

The detective shook his head. “The boarding house did not allow gentleman callers and its curfew was ten p.m. The mistress said Gladys was doing laundry six days a week, and only because she wouldn’t let her use the clothesline and iron on Sunday—her idea of making her rest. When she went out to the office buildings to leave her card, she took another of the tenants with her. That only lasted a year or so, then her business grew by word of mouth. She lived there for almost twenty years. She went out on Sundays, but only brought home stationery.”

“Wonder who she was writing to.”

“Ledger paper,” he clarified. “That’s why I knew about her money. They’re a mess, though. Her handwriting is almost illegible and her sums aren’t correct. They’re scratched out and written in a different hand. Someone was checking her work. But she could count money and give change accurately.”

“You got all her effects?”

“Yes. They’re in my car.”

“What to do,” he whispered. “What to do.”

“I don’t think you’ll be able to get her money without your wife knowing, even if you can get past her natural father.”

Trey looked up, an eyebrow raised. “He connected?”

“Oh, no.”

“I am.”

The Pinkerton man nodded. “I see your point.”

But Trey did his own dirty work. That money belonged to Marina, and Trey wasn’t going to get in bed with the Chicago outfits over a nobody for three C-notes. Even if he did go to Chicago, he couldn’t do it without explaining to Marina.

Maybe she’d like a trip to Chicago. Now that was a good idea.

“That’s it?”

“Yes. If I think of anything else, I’ll be in touch, but we pride ourselves on our thoroughness.”

“Okay. Come on back and I’ll get the rest of your fee and a bonus.”

 

59

MARINA STARED AT Trey in complete shock, all sorts of ugly things swirling in her mind and chest. There were images, sounds, memories of Mother beating her and Father casting her out so nonchalantly, as if she were a bad purchase. She supposed that to him, she was.

“She hanged herself?” Marina whimpered helplessly.

“Yeah,” Trey said soberly, grabbing another piece of bacon off the platter. They were sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast. The detective’s report was spread in front of her and she wished she had never asked Trey to find out about her real parents.

“I’m sorry, Sugar,” he muttered. “I’ve sat on this for three days, wondering what to do, whether to tell you or not. But you deserve that money and to get it, you have to be the one presenting proof.”

Three hundred fourteen dollars and seventy-two cents. It was more than the refrigerator-freezer cost, but it had taken Gladys Truesdell—Marina’s mother—almost twenty years to save.

“What did she save it for, if not for living on it when she had enough she could stop working? Someone who wants to die wouldn’t bother, would they? I mean—” She closed her eyes and fists. “No! I mean, savings is … It’s, um … ” She wanted to scream with frustration.

“Savings is hope for a future,” he said matter-of-factly when her thoughts wouldn’t come together. “Something better. When she was your age, she was making plans to leave home and counting the minutes until she could, then she was making her way in the world and saving. Who knows what her plans were, but you don’t think about the future at all. Nothing exists for you past tomorrow’s chores, which is a dangerous way to live.”

“Why is it dangerous?” she asked. “All the wives in the neighborhood are the same as I am. We were all raised the same way. This is our lot in life. It’s what we were trained to do and be. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again. “I’m going to have to think about that some more. But your mama—real one, I mean—she was working toward something, making plans.”

“But then she didn’t. Did she wake up one day and decide to die or had she been thinking about it for a while? And if she had been, why didn’t she stop working and do it when her money ran out?”

Trey looked at her, befuddled. “Those are mighty good questions, Sugar,” he murmured. “Didn’t think to ask. So … Chicago? Want to go? I can go see your gramma and see what information she has.”

Marina focused on Trey again and said, “Going to Chicago will be fun, and I should go with you to see Mother and— I don’t know what. But I don’t want to go.”

“I’ll tell you now then. I’m going to beat the bitch half to death,” he said bluntly. “With a belt. With a big buckle. As long as I can see that gash on your arm and see you scratching it and picking and peeling that big scab till it bleeds, I’m going to be hot. It’s not worth killing her for—”

Marina gulped.

“—but don’t think I haven’t considered it.”

“Are you— What about Father?” she whispered.

“What do you think?”

“He was always kind to me. Not loving. He checked my marks. Liked my cooking. Allowed me to run with Dot and gave me enough pin money to do so. I— I know what he said to me at the last, but it was one moment out of my lifetime and … ”

Trey shrugged. “Taking his stuff was decent revenge, if you wanna leave it like that.”

Marina nodded.

He squinted at her. “I just told you what I intend to do to your mama and you didn’t raise a fuss. How come?”

Marina bit her lip and looked away, putting her hand to her wound and beginning to scratch again.

“Stop that. I want you to watch so you’ll stop doing that. I’m going to put a big gash in her arm, is what, and hope it gets infected and she dies of a fever.”

Marina still didn’t say anything, but when she thought about that day, huddled and begging for mercy she had known she wouldn’t get, her fingers dug deeper.

Trey stood and caught her hand. “C’mon now,” he wheedled. “Once I take a knife to her arm, you can let her scratch hers and yours will heal. That’s the point anyway.” He snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Answer the question. Why aren’t you asking me not to do that to her?”

“Because,” she said breathlessly, unable to disobey a direct command, “because … I don’t know why, because I was so scared! She, she, she—”

“You know she would’ve killed you, don’t you?”

“Um … yes,” she whispered.

“Why don’t you want to watch? Lord it over her? Make her beg the way she made you beg?”

He wasn’t goading her. He was merely curious.

“She scares me,” she whispered. “I think, I think she always has. I think, maybe, I always knew she might have done that.”

“It’s probably what she did to your mama. Real one, I mean. Learned her lesson and got another chance at a dutiful daughter.” He paused. “I intend to go over there tomorrow, because we need to get your money and get this put to bed. I promise I will not incapacitate her, much less kill her. You aren’t a party to what I’m going to do because I’m your husband and I have the say and I’m going to do it anyway, with or without your approval.”

It was nice, she thought, a warm feeling trickling through her that this nice man she was stuck with wanted to avenge her. The Jewel Tea man inadvertently rescued her, but Trey wished to give Marina peace—peace she could only get by taking an eye for her eye.

“I should say no, shouldn’t I?” she pled, staring into her husband’s ice blue eyes.

“Some folks,” he murmured, cupping her cheek in his hand, “don’t want justice. I might have figured you for one of them until you asked me to pay Gene to walk out with Dot correctly. Then you took to the books like you did, even though you knew it would make you complicit with me.”

Her mouth twisted.

“You have a pragmatic streak a mile wide, and I’m pleased as punch about that and I want to make you happy and I think this might help. I am not telling you you have to go. But I know you want your vengeance and I know you aren’t going to feel like you got it unless you see it happen.”

She sighed in defeat, feeling guilty that she felt no guilt. “All right.”

58-59

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