Big Daddy Sinatra: Carly's Cry (2 page)

The jet black Mercedes-Maybach S600
turned onto the dirt road that led into a rough-looking neighborhood, and Jenay
Sinatra looked up surprised.
 
She had
been studying contract proposals for the Bed and Breakfast she ran, and hadn’t
realized where Ashley had driven her.
 
She leaned forward and looked out of the windshield at the neighborhood
before them, at the dogs, the broken down cars, the dilapidated houses and
trailers.
 
Then she looked at her adopted
daughter.
 
“Where are you taking me?” she
asked.

Ashley Sinatra smiled and jerked her
long, weaved hair behind her back.
 
“I
just want to check on something.”

“Ash,” Jenay said like a woman who
knew her well.
 
“Check on what?”

“Nothing, Ma, come on.
 
I need to see something.”

“See what?
 
And why in an area like this?”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she
said.
 
“It’s just country back here,
that’s all.
 
But this is where he says
she lives.”

“But are you sure this is the right
street?
 
Maybe we’re on the wrong street,
Ash.”

“Bobby said this is where he dropped
him off.
 
Bronson Avenue.
 
At the blue house on the right hand side of
the street, something like the eighth house from the corner, he said.
 
I can only go by what he told me.”

Jenay shook her head and leaned
back.
 
“Of all the girls in Jericho, of
all the good, decent girls all around this town, leave it to Beaver to pick
some biker chick from the hood.
 
A biker
chick that might even
wear
a hood!”

Ashley laughed, as the Mercedes drove
past the fifth house on the opposite side of the street, a bungalow on the left
hand side, and Kasper Coffman watched it drive past.
 
It wasn’t everyday a car like that turned
onto Bronson, which was the main reason he bothered to look.
 
But then again, he thought, it wasn’t
everyday Big Daddy Sinatra was standing on his front porch either.

He stared at Big Daddy as he read the
note.
 
“What’s it saying?” Kasper asked
him.
 
“I come home from working a double
shift and I find that orange piece of paper on my door.
 
I know it’s got something to do with the city
because I can see the city logo there on it, but I don’t know what it can
be.
 
I ain’t got no dealings with this
here town.”

“Big Daddy” Charles Sinatra stood on
Kasper’s porch and removed the sunglasses off of his narrow face, dangling them
from his hand, as he read the note.
 
Charles didn’t have time for this.
 
It was a workday, a very busy workday, and there were fifty other far
more compelling business matters he needed to attend to.
 
As the town’s majority property owner, he was
already stretched too thin.
 
But Kasper was
his long-time tenant, a hardworking man, poor all his life, who could barely
read.
 
On those rare occasions when he
needed official documents explained, he called Charles.
 
And Charles, loyal to those who were loyal to
him, always came.
 
“It’s a notice of
inspection, Kass,” Charles said.

“An inspection?” Kasper asked, his
fat, pink face turning red.
 
“What
inspection?
 
I don’t have nothing of
theirs to inspect.”

“It’s the house,” Charles said as he
folded the notice and handed it back to Kasper.
 
“They need to inspect the house.”

Kasper looked at Charles with a wary
eye.
 
He respected Charles above any
other man around town, but they were too different for him to fully trust
him.
  
Charles, for instance, was dressed
in nothing fancy, just his usual professional attire: today it was a brown
suit, white shirt, and brown tie, with a brown bowler hat on his head.
 
But he stood in stark contrast to Kasper’s
oil-stained blue jeans and sweat-stained t-shirt, and the dusty porch they
stood upon.
 
But both men looked
overworked and tired.
 
Neither man wanted
to deal with some notice from the city.
 
“What business is theirs about this house?
 
You got to explain that to me.”

“There’s apparently been some
allegation of unsafe living conditions,” Charles said to his tenant.
 
“And they need to look into it.”

“But what allegations?” Kasper
asked.
 
“What unsafe?
 
What are they talking about, Big Daddy?”

It always felt odd to Charles when
men older than he was, as Kasper clearly was, would call him
Daddy
anything.
 
But that was his fate in Jericho.
 
Everybody called him
Big Daddy
Sinatra as if they were sarcastically making his
extensive property ownership synonymous with
Big Brother
.
 
But because it
wasn’t an affectionate nickname, there was a time when they would only use it
behind his back.
 
But now, as the years
of use and overuse made the term more and more common, and as the meaning
became more and more obscured, they took to calling him the nickname to his
face.
 
It used to annoy the hell out of
Charles.
 
Now he didn’t give a shit.

“I’ve been living here damn near ten
years,” Kasper continued.
 
“What they got
to do with how I’m living?
 
It’s my
business how I keep my house.
 
What they
got to do with it?”

Kasper could tell Charles was getting
impatient with him, but he couldn’t help it.
 
He hated government overreach and he was certain that notice affirmed
his distrust.
  
He looked at Charles as
Charles pushed the rim of his hat up a little, revealing more of his soft
forehead against the beaming Jericho sun.
 
Kasper wasn’t a man given to bromances with other men or anything close
to it, but he could easily see why the ladies loved Big Daddy.
 
With his tanned skin and muscular body, and
his full eyebrows and big, intense green eyes, Big Daddy was a very handsome
man.
 
But he was mean as a junkyard dog,
and Kasper saw that side of him too.

“According to what they’re saying
there,” Charles said to Kasper, “somebody apparently drove by the house, saw
that it was loaded down with junk.
 
And
it is,” Charles added as he looked around at all of the junk appliances and
furniture on the front porch, and all of the junk cars around the yard.
 
“And that person called in a report.
 
To make sure it’s not loaded with junk on the
inside, the city is serving you notice that they’re coming out within ten days
to see inside for themselves.
 
They want
you to call that number at the bottom of the notice and schedule a time for
them to come out.
 
But it has to be within
that ten day window, or they’ll come without permission.
 
They haven’t rendered any judgment yet, but
they will once they get out here.”

But Kasper was still confused.
 
“But what they got to do with anything?
 
You own this house and I rent it from
you.
 
I’ve been renting this house from
you for years.
 
This is between you and
me.
 
What does any of it have to do with
them?”

“They have to follow up on the
complaint, Kass,” Charles said.
 
“They
have to make sure your house is safe to live in.
 
That’s all this is about.”

But Kasper continued to stare at
Charles.
 
Charles exhaled.
 
He wasn’t getting through to this man at
all.
 
So he stopped trying.
 
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said.
 
“The worse they can say is that it’s messy
around the place and you need to clean it up.
 
Clean it up before they get here.
 
If there’s some repairs that need to be done, let me know.
 
I’ll have maintenance out here to handle
it.
 
It’s nothing to worry about.
 
Don’t let it rob your peace.”

“And if my idea of cleaning don’t
agree with their idea?” Kasper asked.

Charles frowned.
 
“Then fuck’em,” he said.

Kasper laughed.
 
That was the Big Daddy he liked.
 
But as he laughed he looked away from Charles
and saw where the Mercedes had stopped in front of his neighbor’s house some
three doors down and across the street.
 
Two African-American women got out of the car: one young, tall, and
slender, and one older and slender, but easily more attractive than the younger
one.
 
“Speaking of fucking,” Kasper said
with a toothless grin, “I wouldn’t mind a taste of those two black gals right
there.”

Charles knew Kasper was a vulgar man
and dismissed his foolish talk.
 
Kasper
wasn’t known as a dirty old man for nothing.
 
But when Charles turned and saw the Mercedes that looked a lot like the
Mercedes he had purchased for his wife, and then saw that those two
black gals
Kasper referred to belonged
to his wife and adopted daughter, he did a double take.
 
Not because Kasper was disrespecting his
lady: he was relatively certain Kasper had no idea who he was married to.
 
But because he had no idea why Jenay and
Ashley would have any business in a neighborhood like this.

“Nicely packed those two,” Kasper
said.
 
“But I’ll take the shorter one, I
think.”
 
But then Kasper turned his
attention back to his own problems.
 
“I
have a confession to make, Big Daddy,” he said.
 
“A real big one.”

Charles turned back toward his
tenant.
 
Was this confession related to
his wife and daughter?
 
“What is it?” he
asked him.
 

“I don’t know how to say this,”
Kasper confessed, “but I may be in trouble.
 
Serious trouble.”

Charles was especially curious
now.
 
“Yeah?
 
Why?”

“The thing is, I don’t exactly have
what you would consider the cleanest house in Jericho.”

Charles smiled.
 
And then laughed.
 
And turned his attention back to the matter
at hand: that city notice.
 
“Nobody does,
Kass,” he said.
 

“But why are they singling out my
house anyhow?” Kasper wanted to know.
 
“I’m a simple man, Big Daddy.
 
All
I do is work my hands to the bone.
 
That’s all I do.
 
Work like a dog
most every day.
 
I don’t have time to be
bothering with no city officials.
 
I don’t
have no fancy education like they have, or no big time job.
 
But I pay my rent on time and I don’t be
bothering none of them.
 
Why all of a
sudden they’re bothering me?
 
Why all of
a sudden they’re talking about showing up here to do all of this inspecting?
 
You own damn near half of the houses in this
whole town, but I ain’t never seen no city inspecting any of your other
houses.
 
But all of a sudden they’re
dying to inspect mine?”

While Charles attempted to explain
the unfortunate prerogatives of city inspectors, Jenay and Ashley stood on the
front porch of another house on Bronson Avenue.
 
Only this house, if Robert was to be believed, was inhabited by Donald’s
latest girlfriend.
 
And Donald had been
dropped off there a few nights ago.
 
Jenay was there because Donald, her youngest stepson who helped manage
the Bed and Breakfast Charles put her in charge of, wasn’t answering his cell
phone and hadn’t been to work in three days.
 
She was worried about him.
 
Ashley, Donald’s best friend and adopted sister, was worried too.
 
She knocked vigorously on the door.

As they waited for a response to the
knocks, Ashley looked across the street, three doors down, and saw first a big
Ford F-150 pickup truck that looked very much like her adopted father’s.
 
Then she looked further and saw her father
standing on that porch in conversation with an older man.
 
“Uh-oh,” she said to Jenay.
 
“There’s Dad.”

Jenay looked too, placing her hand
over her forehead to shield the sun.
 
When she saw Charles, she was astonished.
 
“Goodness gracious,” she said.
 
“Does he own property on this street too?”