Nina, the Bandit Queen (12 page)

JannaRose didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Didn’t do anything. It wasn’t as if, because of what Nina said, she wanted to stand totally still so she wouldn’t jiggle the idea around before she got it completely installed in her mind. It was that telling a woman who grew up in SuEz — you having grown up in SuEz yourself — it was that telling this woman that your kids, who at that very moment were growing up in SuEz, had been stealing was as close as you could get to telling her the sky was straight up there, over her head.

“They get caught or something?” It was the only rational thing to say. It was what anybody who knew Nina would have said.

“No. Gwinny told me.”

Which left JannaRose with absolutely nothing to say at all. So they stood there not saying anything, until after awhile Nina said, not so much to JannaRose, but as if she was going over the details in her own mind to make sure she had them straight, “From Frank.”

JannaRose’s head snapped back as if at last, after five hundred years of incomprehension, somebody had said something in the only language she happened to speak.

“Holy fuck,” she said in a low voice.

“Yeah,” Nina said.

They looked up the street, as if wondering where Gwinny had disappeared to. But they didn’t really look at anything. They just stood there, stunned. That’s what they were doing when Gwinny whipped around the corner of the house next door, the expression on her face about what Merlina would have expected to see on the face of a fourteen-year-old who had finally figured out how to get rid of the guilt that had been destroying her personal esteem. All she had to do was rat her sisters out. And it turned out it wasn’t a big problem. Already she felt a whole lot better.

“Here,” she said.

“Here?”

“What we took.”

Nina and JannaRose weren’t exactly certain what 1.18 million dollars would look like, but sort of expected something more than Frank’s shiny old leather wallet that was curved in the shape of his butt. JannaRose later told Ed Oataway it was as if a magician said he was going to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and then pulled out — Tah-da!! — nothing. Not a goddamn thing. Except for his hand, and it was every bit as empty as when he stuck it into the hat.

Gwinny gave it to Nina.

JannaRose laughed. Taking the wallet from Nina, she made a jokey show of weighing it. “Was there millions of dollars in it, honey?”

“I don’t know.”

As far as Nina was concerned, everything was starting to feel quite a bit stranger than whatever had happened just before it, which, whatever it was, had been really strange. “You don’t know?”

Gwinny shook her head.

“You stole the wallet and didn’t notice how much money was in it?”

“It wasn’t me that stole it.”

Merlina saw that when it came to sticking up for Merlina, one person in particular wasn’t going to. “Fuck you, Gwinny!” she shouted, running out on the porch. “And who stood there and watched me? And who wasn’t like, ‘Don’t do that!’ or a single other fuckin’ word?”

“What’s going on?” Nina said.

“It was sticking out of his pocket when he was sitting in the kitchen,” Merlina said. “All bulging way out.”

“Yeah?”

“And it accidentally got nudged when I —”

“It accidentally got nudged?”

“ — accidentally when I gave him a hug, and it fell on the floor.”

Nobody moved for a minute or so. If a bee had flown over right then, nobody would have heard it because they were thinking too hard.

“So was there any money in it before you gave it to your sister?”

“She didn’t
give
it to me.”

“What?” Nina and JannaRose said it at the same time.

“She
sold
it to me.”

Nina’s glare was so ferocious that Merlina backed up. Nina kept glaring at her even when she was speaking to somebody else. “I didn’t even look for money in it,” Merly said, really fast. “I didn’t know anything about any money.”

“So why did you buy it, Gwinny? And what did you buy it with?”

“Things she wanted me to steal —”

“Things she wanted
you
to steal —”

“ — from the Korean’s store.” Gwinny’s eyes were shut so tight, her whole face was squeezed together. It was as if she expected Nina to smack her.

“What did she want you —”

“You really are a dumb fuck, Gwinny,” Merlina said.

“Shut your mouth, you!” It wasn’t until then that Nina took her eyes off Merlina and looked at Guinevere. “What did she want you to steal?”

“Nothing,” Merlina yelled. “Some bubble gum.”

“Excuse me,” JannaRose said, and everybody turned toward her, as if relieved by the interruption. “Before I lose track here.” She brushed some lint off Gwinny’s shoulder. “So why,” she said, “did you want to buy the wallet? When neither of you knew if there was any money in it or not?”

“I thought …”

JannaRose nodded to keep her going.

“She said …”

“What did she say, honey?”

“There was a condom in it.”

“
Why don’t you just stab me right in the fuckin’ heart?
” Nina said, expecting her eyes to fill with tears, but they didn’t.

“A condom?” JannaRose sounded like she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. “No. Condoms leave a round mark, like —”

“
Don’t you fuckin’ tell her anything!
”

“ — like a big O.” JannaRose squeezed the wallet, looking very doubtful. “This doesn’t —”

“I know.”

“
She knows!
” Nina massaged her forehead. “
Of course
she knows. Why
wouldn’t
she know?
Everybody
fuckin’ knows.
Fabreece
probably knows.”

JannaRose unsnapped a fastener and tipped out something that was wrapped in aluminum foil. “You thought this was a condom?”

“Merly’s like, ‘This in here is a condom,’” Gwinny said.

Nina grabbed the little aluminum foil package from JannaRose and waved it at Merlina. “Did you think this was a condom?” she said.

“I’ve never seen one,” Merlina said. “It could have been.”

“So why didn’t you open it?” Nina said, unfolding the foil.

“I didn’t want to touch it,” Merlina said.

“Who wants to touch a condom with their fingers?
Ewww!
” It was Lady. Merlina looked astounded. Her sister was backing her up. It was the first time ever.

“So,” Nina’s nose was about half an inch from Gwinny’s, “you know everything about condoms, but you didn’t know what this is?” She held up the key that had been wrapped in the aluminum foil.

“I know what it is,” Gwinny yelled, like she’d had enough insults.

“I never knew what it was really,” Merlina yelled, trying to make it sound as if she didn’t know what it was when she sold it to Gwinny.

“I never saw any money,” Lady yelled, but Nina just walked up the steps and into the house. “We never took any! We never knew about it!”

Nina went into the bathroom because the door still had a lock. She locked it. She opened the fist holding the key and read the name on the emblem. She’d never known for sure how you say it. Porsh? Porsh-uh?

L. Roy and L. Ray Elwell were identical twins. “We’ve been twins for seventy-one years,” one of them would say.

“Since we turned five,” the other would come in with. “Before that we didn’t look the least bit alike.”

“In fact, we weren’t even related.”

“Those were the good old days.”

“Tell the truth, would you want to look like him?” And they’d point at each other and laugh their asses off. There was nothing L. Roy and L. Ray enjoyed more than their little jokes, and they’d been enjoying that one, and updating it, for a long, long time.

They called their operation a “service centre.” This was another one of their jokes. It was actually a chop shop that everybody else just called Elwell’s. There was no sign on it. They’d inherited it from their father. They’d learned how to be mechanics from the men who worked for him. From him they learned how to run a business, which he’d done by sitting in his office on the front seat out of a 1949 Hudson Hornet and listening to the radio until it was time to go home and listen to the radio. There had been changes around Elwell’s since then. Now L. Roy and L. Ray sat on the front seats — they each had one, they were bench seats — out of 1974 Dodge Dusters, watching TV until it was time to go home and watch TV.

Another change was that nobody worked for them. They rented out service bays and hoists to mechanics who ran their own operations. Some had been at Elwell’s for years and had many clients. Some only needed a place to work on a car for a couple of hours, often late at night. Some had their own tools, some rented what they needed from L. Roy and L. Ray. Frank Carson was just a little kid when he started hanging around. That’s all he did for a long time, hang around. It was all he did anywhere, since he didn’t go to school much, but Elwell’s was where he did it the most. Nobody there minded. He was quiet and always happy to run out for cigarettes or coffee or whatever. By the time he was a teenager he was sweeping floors, jockeying cars. Taking them apart and putting them together again, though — that’s what turned him on. His ability to do it impressed everybody around the place. The thing was, it was the only thing that turned him on, not being particularly interested in girls at that age either, and L. Roy and L. Ray found this the slightest bit peculiar.

“He was like a classical piano virtuoso that only wanted to fool around with the piano’s insides,” L. Roy said.

“What would an old bullshit hound like you know about classical piano virtuosos?” asked his brother.

“Old and
cultured
bullshit hound,” L. Roy replied.

“The only thing that was ever cultured about you,” L. Ray said, “was the specimen the doctor sent to the lab to see if you got the clap from Phyllis Whatsername.”

“Fennaty. Phyllis Fennaty. And it turned out I wasn’t the one that got it. Not that I was surprised. I couldn’t believe anybody would’ve touched her that didn’t have a dick made out of asbestos.”

“That was always the way,” L. Ray nodded sadly. “Left the dirty work to me.”

Not that the Elwell brothers didn’t appreciate that there was something attractive in how the parts of a car fit together and worked, but if it was going to hold their attention for long, taking cars apart and putting them together again needed a purpose beyond the simple pleasure of doing it. Such as money, for instance. Doing it for money was a real good purpose, to their way of thinking. So what was with this kid?

Everybody was starting to wonder, including the pimps and drug dealers Frank got to know because they could afford to have top-of-the-line automobiles stolen for them, and came to Elwell’s when they needed maintenance and repairs. A lot of plain, ordinary car thieves did too when they needed to make modifications — changing serial numbers and external trim so the vehicle no longer precisely resembled the listing in the police computer and at the licence department, and so on. Even though he wasn’t old enough to have a driver’s licence, it wasn’t long before Frank could do this a lot better than any of the guys who worked regularly at Elwell’s. He could strip a Lexus down to its components in under two hours — twice as fast as anybody else. This made a car like that even more easily marketable when you considered the cost of replacement parts through the more usual channels, and when it came to luxury vehicles, it was considered by many individuals in the trade to be a less risky proposition than selling them in roadworthy condition. But Frank didn’t care about any of this. L. Roy and L. Ray got the impression that he only cared about it when he discovered that nobody wanted him to put the car back together again. When that happened, he went around sort of depressed, like he was living only half a life.

It wasn’t until girls entered Frank’s picture that he changed, and even then it wasn’t in the direction of the talent so many people had seen in him, although he did keep working around Elwell’s for awhile to pick up a buck or two. And nobody would have given it a second thought that he got to be one of the smallest of small-time con-men — nobody from SuEz ever expected anybody from SuEz to do particularly well in any line of work — if he wasn’t ignoring so much other potential. L. Roy and L. Ray had never found anybody they were much interested in marrying, and they had no children either, and it surprised them to discover how disappointed they were when he started coming around less and less. Neither one wished to appear sentimental, since it would give the other brother too much leverage in a relationship that had as many landmines as you’d expect with a pair of aging male twins who still lived in the house they’d been raised in and still ran the family business.

However, they both admitted to being more saddened by the news of his death than by the death of anybody else they’d ever known. So heavy was their sorrow that they left the shop right after hearing about it, which happened to be in the middle of the morning, bought a bottle of rye and took it home. Their habits had become fairly moderate in the last few years, so it surprised them to discover they’d emptied it before they’d even started to think about what they might care to have for lunch. And when they did make themselves something to eat, there wasn’t a dry eye at the table.

Now here was Frank’s sister, walking into their office.

“Nina,” L. Roy said, nodding hello.

L. Ray nodded hello, too. “Nina,” he said. “We are saddened by your loss.”

“Very saddened. He was like a son to us,” L. Roy said.

“He probably stole even less from us than a son would have,” L. Ray said.

“A son would have stole us blind,” his brother agreed.

“Not Frank. Frank never stole more than he thought was fair.”

“Than what he needed.”

“Than what he wanted.”

“Than he could carry.”

“When he stole more than that, he had to borrow the truck.”

“Always brought it back, though. The truck, that is.”

“Yes. We’re not saying there wasn’t something a little —”

“— strange. Definitely —”

“— definitely a little strange about him.”

They looked apologetically at Nina. “If you’ll pardon us for saying it.”

“With you we feel like family,” L. Ray said.

But if they felt a huge upset when Frank died, the fright they’d gotten the last time they saw him alive made them wonder why the ground under their feet didn’t shake so hard that all the buildings for blocks around fell down. The memory of that moment nearly flattened the two of them when Nina fished the car key out of her pocket and dangled it between her thumb and forefinger.

“Oh dear,” L. Roy said.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” his brother said.

“It has come back to haunt us.” They shielded their eyes as if the key gave off a blinding light. “The Porsche Carrera GT.” L. Roy pronounced it “Porsh.”

“Pretty fancy car?” Nina asked.

“Sticker price new, five hundred thousand.”

“We looked it up,” L. Roy said when Nina cringed.

“Six hundred and five horsepower. About the most powerful road car ever built.”

“Up there, anyway.”

“We had no idea what was going on, but the first thing we thought was Frank has bit off more than he can fit inside his mouth.”

“A man with a car like that is asking for trouble.”

“When it is not, so to speak, his own car.”

“When possibly he took it without the knowledge or consent of the registered owner.”

“And when it’s bright yellow, to boot.” L. Ray said.

“As yellow as a canary’s keister.”

“We couldn’t have been more worried for him. Here he was, just fresh out of jail.”

“Couldn’t have been fresher if you squeezed him.”

“Said it belonged to a friend of his.”

“A friend indeed.”

“The whole place went dead silent when he drove in.”

“As far as you could tell. You couldn’t have heard an anvil drop. That car sounded like it was taking off for outer space.”

“An almighty roar.”

“Told us his friend’s car needed a little work and could he borrow one of our bays to do it in.”

“When he gets out of the penitentiary, he doesn’t even drop by so we can say welcome home. Then he shows up with this vehicle.”

“Scared the life out of us.”

“Spoken like a gentleman, L. Roy.”

Nina asked what kind of work the car needed.

“Alignment, he said.”

“Said it had a shimmy. Hard to imagine. Hardly looked like it’d been driven.”

“Worked on it one hour and nine minutes.”

“Then, voom. Gone.”

“Told us to put it on his tab.”

“His tab!” L. Ray yipped a laugh.

No, that was the last they saw of it. Of Frank, too.

Yes, as a matter of fact. Not that it was any of their business, but yes they did get the licence. Not that there was any need to have it on record, it being Frank. Just that when a car comes in, they note the licence. Force of habit.

Did they possibly remember —

Without moving from where they sat, without checking a note, L. Roy and L. Ray rhymed off the licence number in perfect unison.

Could they maybe — with their computer —

“Run it?” L. Roy said. And still without moving, they rhymed off in unison the name Junetta Solito. And her address. And her phone number. And that she did not need to wear corrective lenses while driving. Not that it was any of their business. Force of habit.

Nina wrote it down with a stub of pencil that was on the counter, and then smiled apologetically. “I haven’t got any money to pay you for this.”

“We’ll put it on Frank’s tab,” L. Ray said.

When she left, L. Roy said, “It saddened me to hear her say she doesn’t have any money.”

“If it’s true, it will sadden a lot of people.”

“What I meant was, maybe we should do something to help her out.”

“In the circumstances, I’m inclined to wait and maybe see if she might do something to help
us
out.”

“You would take advantage of that fine young man’s own beloved sister?”

“Not unless the opportunity arises. I think he will rest easier knowing that at least his tab got paid. What was it the last time I looked, 1.18 million?”

“Hm. Maybe. At least then the poor woman could get on with her life.”