From Herring to Eternity (3 page)

“You’re going to dig up my backyard?”

“No.” He handed me the folder. “Your basement den.”

My own eyeball crosshairs fixed on his nose. I didn’t open the manila folder. I knew what it would contain: neatly filled-out forms, documents with embossed stamps and legal writing, letterhead with a curt, impersonal order supporting what I’d just been informed of.

“We’re gonna fight this, you hamstringer,” Thom said.

“You will find, among the documents, an agreement signed by Mr. Murray Katz agreeing to allow authorized personnel reasonable access to the property for a period of no longer than one year if the time should come that excavation was desirable.”

“What a mouthful of marbles!” Thom barked.

“So you’re saying this is a done deal?” I asked him. “No public hearing?”

“A citizens’ forum was held on February seventh, 2010,” Andrew said. “That was where Mr. Katz agreed to the terms of the document. He even provided floor plans to the home, if you care to look.”

“There was nothing about this in Uncle Murray’s papers,” I said.

“
That
is between you and Mr. Dag Stoltenberg, who I believe is represented as the attorney-of-record in the relevant line of the appropriate form.”

“You say a lot to say nothing,” Thom brooded.

I started going through the papers.

“I warned your uncle he needed a full-time lawyer, not a semiretired one,” Thom went on.

“It wouldn’t have altered anything,” Andrew pointed out.

“Lawsy, I’m gonna alter
you
,” she said. “You let them take my baby brother’s fillin’ station!”

“Voice down, please,” I said. I didn’t need to lose customers along with my den.

“Ms. Jackson—until two years ago, only five dinosaur bones had been discovered in all of Tennessee. Three tail bones, a foot bone, and a lower leg bone. The hadrosaurs found under your brother’s concrete slab increased that number fourfold. And your brother got a fair price for his property, not to mention the attorney general agreeing to drop the investigation into price gouging—”

“Ralph was no gouger, you rat!” Thom said. “
He
was being overcharged and he passed that cost along!”

“Sadly, his costs were not the consumers’ problem,” Andrew said.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I interrupted, “but there isn’t anything in here that says I have to sell or relocate. Only that I have to provide access.”

“That’s true,” the attorney said. “However, you will note that structural integrity of the premises cannot be guaranteed due to drilling, so there is a stipend for you to move into a—”

“Not moving,” I said.

“You’re what?” he said.

“She said ‘not moving.’” Thomasina folded her arms.

Andrew looked from one of the defiant women to the other. “Very well. I’ll inform TSU of your decision and let you know if they require an indemnification in the event that you are injured.”

A customer came over to pay. Thom took it.

“I didn’t see anything in those documents that required me to cover their asses,” I told him.

“You will.” Andrew looked at me with a benign smile. “You are new to Nashville, Ms. Katz. You may not understand the importance of the university
or
the African American community whose heritage they have embraced and protect. Let me advise you that those are voices you do not wish to have raised against you.”

“I got an African American voice, too,” Thom warned as the customer hurried away.

“It will echo sadly in an empty deli,” the attorney said, looking around. “That is, if you are able to hear it over the pickets outside.” His dark eyes stopped on me. “Be wise, Ms. Katz. This is not a battle you can win. And that’s coming from a man who’s giving up dozens of billable hours if you take his advice. You should appreciate that.”

I didn’t like that remark. “Why should
I
appreciate that?”

“Because you’re a businesswoman,” he said.

There had been nothing that even hinted of intolerance in my year down here. I told myself I was just being overly sensitive to this man. I hoped so.

“Perry Mason, you want takeout?” Thom asked.

“Thank you, no. I’ve already—”

“Then why’re you still here?”

The man smiled sweetly at her. He looked at me, still smiling, then turned and left.

“God help me, that man fills my good soul with evil purpose,” Thom said.

“It comes with his job description,” I said.

“What’re you gonna do?” Thom asked.

I thought for a moment. “Give this Professor Sterne a call, I think. First, though, I have something to do.”

“What’s that?”

I replied, “Order potatoes.”

Chapter 2

I hate to say this, but I wasn’t really attached to my home. Not in the way that one should be.

I’d lived in apartments my entire life, and a couple of personalized rooms off a common hallway never got to be more than a place to hang my handbag. It’s different for the
bubbes
and
zaydes
who lived in the same Brooklyn or Queens apartments their entire lives, with the same neighbors they’d always had. Homes are built by memories. When you live in a big city and don’t spend a lot of time at home, the city itself tends to be your home. So the prospect of having the finished basement of my uncle’s half-century-old house disrupted during the daytime—when I wasn’t there—didn’t exactly rock my rowboat. I wasn’t even concerned about ownership, since what would I do with old glass bottles and discarded poultry bones except turn them over to a museum or historical society anyway?

But the steamroller nature of the thing ticked me off. You don’t come up to a person you never met and give them an edict followed by a threat followed by a possible insult. I planned to raise a stink about
that
, maybe cost Mr. Dickson some future billable hours.

I ordered my potatoes from Chris Hunter, the Veg-o-Tater, an organic vendor who sold primarily to the growing vegan community and abhorred, with a flaming passion, the kind of greasy foods I serve.

“I hate what you turn these spuds into,” he said again—good-naturedly, but not.

“You might as well just have that printed on my invoices,” I said.

“It’s not just you,” he said. “Most of the city entombs flavor in clouds of boiling oil.”

“Canola oil,” I pointed out. “My grandmother used to use lard.”

He shuddered audibly and hung up.

I was about to get the university’s telephone number online when I heard noise from the dining room. There were shouts, tables and chairs scraping, dishes and silverware banging.

“What is this,
tsimes
day?”

Mad’s comment about the unhappy planet echoed in my brain.

The commotion out front couldn’t be Homeless Elijah. He always smelled very ripe and was occasionally belligerent, depending on what he’d been drinking, but he always came to the back door for handouts. I guessed it was either a mouse or Andrew had come back and Thom was beating him to death. I hurried out.

Thom, A.J., and Raylene were in the open doorway and a small crowd was looking down the street. At least the uproar wasn’t about anything happening in the restaurant. Thom turned before I got there. She had an eerie sensitivity about movement in the restaurant, almost like she was a Lutz in Amityville.

“Someone said Karen Kerr got into a fight with Lippy Montgomery,” she said.

“K-Two?” I said. “The mountain-size mixed martial arts fighter who has horseradish with everything?”

A.J. nodded. “She’s one deadly beyatch. I’ve seen her compete.”

“You have?” I said.

“My daughter wanted to go so I took her,” A.J. said.

“Why would anyone want to fight with Lippy?” Thom said. “He’s a pussycat.”

“I’ve got pussycats,” I said. “I kick them just because.”

Thom looked at me crossly.

“Kidding,” I said.

A.J. was standing on her tiptoes, trying to see. “Too many people in the way—can’t tell what’s going on,” she said as she went back to work at the counter.

“Well, whatever happened, it doesn’t concern us,” I pointed out as a pair of sirens converged on the street.

“Nash, this is
our
community,” Raylene said portentously. “Everything should concern us.”

“You’re just nosey,” I said.

“That, too,” she admitted.

As I turned to go back to the office, I heard someone in the street shout, “My God, he’s dead!”

That sent Raylene and Thom out into the street. I hesitated, not because I planned to join them, but, because—if it were true—that’s what you do when someone you know dies. You pause and reflect on who they were and try again, in vain, to grasp the elusive reality of “here one second, gone the next.” Lippy was a weird egg but a good one.

I noticed, then, that Mad was still there. The table had been cleared and she was just sitting, staring. It wasn’t as if she were in a self-induced trance, because she moved a finger and blinked and smiled now and then. It was more like she was watching a movie play out in her head.

And then she turned—not toward me, but to the door. I followed her gaze and a moment later, someone entered. It was a woman I had never seen, about three hundred pounds worth, with puffy green hair and a pair of wide-open eyes tattooed on her temples and on her left eye. She wore a patch over her right eye and was wearing a long, black skirt with purple moon symbols and a matching cotton cloak. This was not a woman who went anywhere anonymously.

She came through the restaurant like a slow-moving squall, oblivious to the unoccupied tables she nudged aside by her passage. She pulled back the seat across from Mad, sat, turned toward A.J., and raised her hand.

A.J. was behind the counter filling sugar containers. She looked at me. It wasn’t an imploring look, it was a “this is yours, honey” look.

I went over with pen and pad at the ready.

“Raisin Bran, please, with extra raisins,” the woman said before I had arrived. “And ham and eggs and coffee. White bread toast, extra butter on the side.”

“Will that be all?” I asked.

I wasn’t being facetious and hoped the woman didn’t take it that way. I asked that of every customer.

She didn’t seem to take the remark ironically. “Yes, thank you,” she said with a little wink of her tattooed eye. Unlike someone who could wiggle their ears, this was a skill the woman had to have trained for. And not, I suspected, for secular showboating in public places.

The rest of my staff was coming back inside as I handed the order to Luke. Even he—who ate too much of every bad thing—scowled at this one. I stayed behind the counter to stack the clean coffee cups.

“It’s true,” Thom said gravely. “Lippy’s dead, poor guy. K-Two has been taken into custody.”

“I heard her tell the cops she didn’t hit him hard enough to do killin’ damage,” Raylene said. “She said he blew his horn in her ear as she passed and she just reacted.”

“Maybe he hit his head,” Thom suggested—just as she turned and saw Mad’s companion. “Ginnifer?”

The big woman looked over. “Thomasina?”

Thom hurried over and threw her arms around the upper half of the new arrival, who had made a heroic effort to stand but ultimately remained seated. “Ginnifer,
what
are you doing back in Nashville?”

“Oh, just call it an impulse,” she said. “Visit with some friends. How have
you
been? Still at the same church?”

“Still at Baptist,” Thom said, stepping back. “Nothing changes in my life.”

“Be grateful for that,” the big woman said.

“You still in Atlanta?” Thom asked. “With that—that fella?”

“Fred, the Luciferian? No, that was just a ‘thing.’ I’ve been in New Orleans for five years now.”

“Great town! What do you do there?”

“I give all kinds of palm readings in the French Quarter.”

“How many kinds are there?” Thom asked. “Like, for people and dogs and cats?”

“Just people, dear.” Smiling sweetly, Ginnifer took Thom’s left hand gently in her right and held it palm up. She turned with surprising grace and raised her thick left index finger. ”There’s chiromancy, which is the reading of lines,” she said as she teasingly traced a delicate path along Thom’s skin. Then she opened her own left hand and lightly grasped the sides of Thom’s hand from above. “Next there’s chirognomy, a divining form that uses the shape of the hand and fingers to see into the future. And, finally, I use dermatoglyphics, the study of fingerprints.” She touched the tip of her index finger to Thom’s own.

Thom snapped her hand back as though she’d been burned. It took a moment for her to recover her poise.

“I see,” Thom said. “So—you make a living at that?”

“Lord yes,” Ginnifer said. “Folks do things on vacation they would never spend money on at home. And then there are the devout locals. People walk past palmistry shops in Nashville every day. But in New Orleans, the city of mystery—it’s very different there.”

Bending, Thom gave her old acquaintance a brief parting hug and returned to the cash register. Her eyes were a little bit wide and her mouth was a lot open. Thomasina looked as though she’d seen a g-g-ghost, as the old cartoon used to say.

“That was very strange,” Thom whispered. “Almost like she was trying to seduce me.”

“I noticed. Who is she?”

“Ginnifer Boone,” Thom said. She stood with her back to the table, and not just to muffle our conversation. I got the feeling she didn’t want to look back. “I’ve known her since elementary school. Ginnifer was booted from our church eight, nine years ago for selling spell-casting paraphernalia on eBay. I was the only one who spoke up for her at a meeting of the board of trustees. I said we could only redeem her if she was a member of the congregation, but they were afraid she’d pollute the younger, impressionable members and expelled her.”

“If she was a Wiccan, why was she even a member of your church? That’s some pretty heavy Christianity you’ve got there.”

“Her family’s been devout since the eighteenth century. Their roots go back to Kentucky and Daniel Boone.”

“You mean
the
Daniel Boone? ‘Daniel Boone was a man, yes a big man—’?”