The Fixer Upper (12 page)

T
his time my visitor was female. She was a fair-skinned young black woman, in her midtwenties, I guessed, with reddish corkscrew curls held back by a tortoiseshell headband, dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and snug-fitting black slacks and high-heeled black boots. She had stepped away from the door, and was looking around the porch with frank curiosity when I opened the door.

“Yes?”

“Hi,” she said, smiling widely. “I’m looking for Dempsey Killebrew?” Her right nostril was pierced with a tiny silver ring, and the freckles sprinkled over her nose and cheeks looked like bits of black pepper.

I stepped out onto the porch. “You’ve found her,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

Now I noticed a dark green Ford Focus parked at the curb in front of the house. A casually dressed man with shoulder-length blond hair sat on the hood of the car, holding a long-lensed camera pointed at the house.

The woman nodded at him, and he started shooting, stepping away from the curb and onto the yard.

“Who are you?” I asked, taking a step backward into the house, halfway closing the door to shield myself from the camera. “What do you want? I haven’t given anybody permission to take pictures of my house.”

She wheeled around. “Greg,” she hollered. “Cool it.” He lowered the camera to his side, but didn’t move off the property.

“Sorry,” she said, smiling apologetically. “I’m Shalani Byers. With the
Post
.”

“
The Post
?” I said dumbly. “I thought the Guthrie paper was the
Citizen-Advocate
.”

“The
Washington Post,
” she said, handing me a business card. “I’m a reporter. I was wondering if we could talk?”

My hands went cold, and I could feel my face reddening. “What would the
Washington Post
want to talk to me about, clear down in Guthrie, Georgia?”

“Aren’t you the Dempsey Killebrew who works for Hodder and Associates?” she asked.

“Worked. Past tense,” I snapped, closing the door another four inches. “I don’t have anything to say to the
Post
.”

“No comment?” she said, her pen poised above a notepad.

“‘No comment’ is for criminals,” I said. “I’m not a criminal. I’m just a private citizen. I don’t mean to be rude, but I’d appreciate it if you’d leave now. And,” I said, peeking out at the photographer, who was snapping away again, “tell your friend to get off my property and stop taking my picture.”

“All right,” she said, scribbling away. “But if I were you, I’d want to talk to me.”

“I sincerely doubt that,” I told her.

“Don’t you even want to know why my paper sent me all the way down here?”

“No.” I closed the door and started to walk away.

“Alex Hodder has been talking to a federal grand jury,” she called. “Our sources say he’s claiming that an unnamed junior associate, acting completely on her own, hired those two prostitutes on Lyford Cay, to service Representative Licata.”

“What?” I yanked the door open. Now the photographer was on the porch, snapping away again. I slammed the door shut.

“Off!” I hollered. “Get the hell off my porch.”

“Hodder gave the grand jury the credit card receipts from your company-issued American Express card.” The girl’s voice was muffled. The door was a solid two inches thick. Like the rest of Birdsong, it was, as Bobby Livesey had said, rock solid.

“Your signature is on the receipts. Did your boss tell you he was doing that?”

“She was a wakeboard instructor,” I cried.

“Named Mahogany Foxx. With two
x
’s? Working for a company called the Pleasure Chest?” I heard the photographer snicker.

I pressed my face against the worn paint of the door. It was cool to the touch, and still smelled of the soap I’d scrubbed it down with the day before. It smelled so clean, but suddenly, I felt so, so dirty.

I was a lawyer, for God’s sake. I knew better, but I couldn’t help myself. “I was given a phone number to call. A woman answered and I told her Mr. Licata wanted to book a session. She never told me her name, or the name of the company she worked for. I never met her. I never laid eyes on her.”

“Miss Mahogany Foxx must be riding something else besides wake-boards for four thousand dollars,” Shalani Byers said. “Did you know that’s how much your credit card was billed?”

I’d had my company-issued AmEx for six months. It was silly, but I’d been nearly giddy the day Alex called me into his office and handed me my own American Express gold card. “Keep it quiet,” Alex had said, pressing it into my hand. “The other associates don’t have company credit cards. Just you.”

I used the AmEx card for business lunches, to book work-related travel, and occasionally, always at Alex’s request, to pay for miscellaneous expenses he didn’t want billed to his own card. Because of the “bean counters,” he’d said. It’d look better for the accountants if certain expenses didn’t show up on his card.

“Did you hire a masseuse named Tiki Finesse for Representative Licata?” Shalani asked.

I squeezed my eyes tight and thought back to that night in December, when we were down in Lyford Cay. I was supposed to meet Alex for dinner that night, but he’d canceled the dinner because he said he needed to meet with Licata privately. I’d been bitterly disappointed.

I vividly remembered the conversation.

“Licata doesn’t want to go out, because he pulled a muscle in his lower back, working out with the hotel’s trainer,” Alex told me. “What a fucking baby.” Alex’s tone was conspiratorial. “Keeps whining about his fucking back. Can you do me a favor? Call that number I gave you
earlier, and tell them to send a massage therapist up to the room. Just charge it to your company card.”

I’d called the same number, and a different woman had answered the phone. The first woman had sounded faintly British, but the second woman had a harsh, New York–sounding accent. I’d given her Licata’s room number, and my credit card number, and she’d assured me all would be taken care of.

Obviously, she’d taken care of the congressman in a way I’d been too dumb to anticipate.

“Licata was complaining of back pain,” I told Shalani Byers. “It was supposed to be a therapeutic massage.”

“Sixteen hundred dollars, according to my source, who’s seen all the records,” Shalani Byers retorted. “You ever hear of a sixteen-hundred-dollar massage? I mean, one that doesn’t include what the pros call a ‘happy ending’?”

“I never see the statements for the AmEx card,” I whispered.

“What?” Through the glass sidelights I could see that Shalani Byers was standing with her own face pressed up against the door.

“Go away,” I said.

“What’s that?” Shalani said. “Come on, Dempsey. Let’s sit down and talk. You know. Face-to-face. Like, woman to woman. What do you say?”

“No comment,” I said dully, walking away from the door and upstairs.

From the upstairs bedroom window, I watched Shalani Byers and the photographer go back to the Ford Focus. He poked the lens of the camera out the passenger window one more time, and then they drove off.

I waited until I saw the car turn the corner before I took my cell phone out of my purse. Even while I was punching in Alex’s cell phone number, I was gripped by paranoia, wondering if, somehow, the girl had managed to plant some kind of listening device on the porch.

“Stop it!” I told myself.

Alex’s phone rang once, and went directly to voice mail.

“Alex, it’s Dempsey.” I was whispering, my paranoia lingering. “A
reporter for the
Washington Post
just showed up at my house down here. She’s saying awful things.” I gulped. “She says you’ve given my company AmEx receipts to the grand jury. Alex—I really need you to call me and tell me what’s going on up there. Okay? Please?”

I sounded desperate and needy and pathetic. I felt exactly the same way. I waited five minutes, hoping the phone would ring immediately, that Alex would hear the panic in my voice and call back to reassure me that Shalani Byers was totally misinformed. But the phone didn’t ring. Finally, I tucked it in the pocket of Norbert’s overalls and went back downstairs.

I stumbled into the kitchen, where Bobby Livesey was punching numbers into a pocket calculator.

I sank down on the chair opposite his. With shaking hands, I picked up the coffeepot and poured myself a fresh mug, sloshing some on the table. I took a long sip, trying to steady my nerves.

“Everything all right?” he asked, putting the calculator down. “You look like you got some bad news just now.”

My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I clasped them in my lap, willing them to be still.

“My past seems to be catching up with me,” I said finally.

“Past?” he looked amused. “What kind of past can a young gal like you have? What’d you do—rob a bank or something?”

I bit my lower lip until I tasted blood.

“Hey now,” Bobby said, startled. “I was just kiddin’. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“It’s all right,” I said, struggling to gain control of my racing emotions. I nodded toward the clipboard. “What do you think? Do you have more bad news for me?”

He tapped the paper with his mechanical pencil. “You serious about what you said before? About doing a lot of the work yourself? You ever done any home improvement before?”

“I’m dead serious,” I said. “And no, I’ve never done any manual labor before. You’ll have to show me how. But I’m a hard worker, and I’ve been told I’m a quick study.”

“The roof’s the big-ticket item,” Bobby said, eyeing the figures on
the page. “That roof is slate,” he added, pointing his finger toward the ceiling. “Some of the tiles are broken, some of ’em are missing. I’m gonna have to peel ’em all off, replace the old tarpaper with one of the new impervious neoprene skins, then put all the slates back. I’ll need to see about getting a source to replace the damaged slate tiles. Probably have to be special ordered. I won’t lie to you. It’s gonna cost.”

“Can’t we just patch it up—”

“No, ma’am,” he said firmly. “No patches. No shortcuts. That roof—you need it done right. Or you sacrifice the integrity of the whole structure. Ain’t no use spending money on plaster or wiring or anything else if you don’t do the roof just right. You see what I’m saying?”

“I’m beginning to,” I told him. I took another long sip of coffee.

“All right then,” he said, nodding contentedly. “Now you’re talking.”

“What else? Besides the roof?” I asked. “You’ve already told me about the wiring. What about the plumbing? The water pressure in the house is pathetic. Please don’t tell me we need all new pipes.”

“Naw,” Bobby said. He got up and went over to the sink, turning on the faucet. “You got solid-copper commercial-grade pipe in this house. That pipe will be good long after you and me are both dead and in the grave.”

He picked up a drinking glass from the drain board and filled it with water. “See that nasty rust in the water, when you first turn on the faucet? The problem is, the old line to the street is cast iron. It’s rusting from the inside, you probably only got a half inch clearance inside a two-inch water line. We’re gonna have to dig up the front yard. It’ll mess up Mr. Norbert’s lawn, for sure, but once we replace that cast-iron mess with new pipe, we’ll get rid of the rust, and your water pressure will be fine.”

“No kidding? It’s just the line running to the street? You’re sure?” I hadn’t had a lot of good news lately, so I was grasping at straws here.

“Oh yeah, the plumbing ain’t no problem,” Bobby said.

“What about this kitchen?” I asked, gesturing around at the dingy cupboards and outdated appliances. “What’s it gonna cost to bring this thing into the twenty-first century?”

Bobby got up and walked over to the sink. He ran his hand over the
deep porcelain sink, opened and closed a cupboard door, and said, “Ain’t no doubt about it. This kitchen’s got some age on it. So, you could just rip everything out. Go over to the Home Depot in Macon, get you some shiny new cabinets, one of them new farmhouse sinks, order up some granite countertops and some stainless-steel appliances.”

This was exactly the plan that had been forming in my mind. In my suitcase upstairs, I had a file folder devoted exclusively to pictures of fabulous kitchens, which I’d ripped out of magazines over the years. My favorite one—my dream kitchen—was a Tuscan farmhouse kitchen, with tumbled-marble backsplashes, fumed oak cabinets, an enormous imported blood red Aga cookstove, and a glass-doored Traulsen refrigerator. That kitchen had ancient, exposed hand-hewn ceiling beams, and a separate butler’s pantry. According to the magazine, the kitchen belonged to a software entrepreneur who’d sold his company at the age of thirty, and retired to a quail-hunting lodge in Thomasville, Georgia. Of course, that kitchen had probably come in at a neat quarter of a million dollars. At least.

It wouldn’t be possible, or even desirable, to reproduce a kitchen like that at Birdsong. But the one thing this kitchen did have in common with that dream kitchen was space.

This dreary old dud was big. It had high—although water-stained—ceilings, and a bank of windows that looked out on Birdsong’s weed-infested backyard. It too had a butler’s pantry. Of course, its glass-paned cupboard doors were coated in multiple layers of chipped and peeling paint, and somebody had chosen to wallpaper it in imitation redbrick Con-Tact paper, but it was, nevertheless, a butler’s pantry.

“New cabinets—let’s say just stock cabinets, not custom; stainless-steel appliances; granite; new flooring; the whole shebang. What would that run—ballpark?” I asked Bobby.

His fingers raced over the calculator keys, and he winced when he saw the final tally. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. Minimum? If we did all the demo of the old kitchen ourselves—maybe find floor-model appliances—you save a little money that way. We’re talking thirty thousand. And that’s assuming we don’t move any of the water lines or mess with the floor plan.”

“Oh.” Mentally, I put the kitchen file folder in the far recesses of my mind.

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Kitchens eat up a lot of money. Still, we could make this here kitchen real nice without spending anywhere near that much money.”