back. Turning to leave him, I stopped as if struck by a thought. Had he seen anyone around the farm lately?
Since I’d been gone, I added. Wade thought about it before shaking his head.
‘An old burgundy Mercury Marquis maybe?’ I prodded.
Wade smiled. ‘I seen that!’ I pushed for details, but the giant only smiled. ‘Driving by kind of slow like.
He parked down the road, in that lane.’ Wade pointed toward an old service road out in the cornfields that was hard to spot and pretty much sheltered by weeds and brush. Kids sometimes pulled in there at night, but it wasn’t the best place to go, just handy if you were desperate. On the two nights Lucy had been late getting back from dates I had checked down there first. Lucy’s boyfriends hadn‘t been perfect fools.
‘How long was it parked there?’
Wade scowled as if the process of thinking actually hurt him. ‘He drove in around eleven o’clock, left a few minutes before midnight.’
Did he remember what night it was? We had another spell of pain. Sure didn’t. Best guess? Wade grinned and told me that back in school he’d never guessed the right answer no matter how many times he tried.
‘You see that car out there again and you let me know right away,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you twenty bucks.’
The giant grinned happily. ‘Every time?’
‘Every blessed time,’ I said.
I left Wade calculating his newfound fortune.
I had a meeting scheduled with Gail Etheridge before I drove to the airport Wednesday. For the first time since the diary had surfaced, Gail was showing a bit of lawyerly optimism. With my permission, she had brought suit in state court immediately after the hearing. Critical to our case, she thought, was the committee’s refusal to let me finish my verbal defence.
Additionally, she said that after the vice president adjourned the meeting he proceeded to instruct the committee as to the procedure they should follow.
‘Major screw-up, David. First, you had walked out.
Second, the meeting had been adjourned, meaning his instructions were never actually given. I’ve been sleeping with the university handbook, and the procedure is all spelled out. Any variance and they’ve violated their own policy.’
Due process was only part of it. According to Gail the state had set limitations on jury awards resulting from violations of due process. Defamation was another issue. There were no limits on defamation. ‘Defamation makes them nervous. Right now, we’re fast tracking the case, which will let me begin deposing key players as early as December. Once I do that, we’re going to catch Dr Blackwell in some pretty embarrassing mistakes, like this thing with your bodacious ta-tas.
The bad news is things are going to get expensive real fast. Depositions cost money.’
‘I need to talk to Molly about the money,’ I said.
Molly and I had set the bulk of our funds in an account requiring both of our signatures for withdrawal.
‘I’ve got them on the run, but without the depositions to prove Blackwell screwed up the witness interviews, we can’t push them as hard as we need to.’
‘I can sign over my retirement funds to you, if you can carry me,’ I said.
Gail seemed uneasy. She needed something. I asked her how deep I was into her. She said she would get a bill worked up. Roughly, I said. Roughly, I needed to get her about five thousand dollars for her to keep going. My truck was worth between three and four at auction, but I knew it would list retail at close to five. ‘How about title to my truck?’
‘How about cash? How much can you get me?’
‘I’ll get something lined out next week,’ I said.
‘I hate to do this to you, but I can’t carry you on this, not with divorce proceedings going forward.’
Chapter 18
I sounded like a bogue. Bogues can always get you the money next week. I didn’t blame Gail for worrying. We were bailing out of our property. My job was in jeopardy. With a divorce Molly was likely to get most of the cash, and that left the lawyer standing in line with the bankers and credit card companies.
I decided not to worry about it for the time being.
I had enough worries on my mind just going home.
Home always made me think about Tubs, because even dead the old bastard wasn’t finished with me.
My mother hadn’t collected on Chrysler stock, of course. That was just typical David Albo bullshit. The thing I told Buddy happened, though. Up to a point.
Tubs had predicted a comeback. The salespeople had laughed their asses off, and he had called his broker ordering five thousand shares! The broker talked Tubs out of it.
Mom had a pension and a big old house in the downtown that wasn’t worth much more than what they paid for it forty years ago. She imagined herself a poor old widow, though she was mostly just afraid to spend her money. She had plenty, actually, but her fears let her miss out on the cruises her friends were taking. She drove an old car she was afraid to trade because Tubs always took care of the cars, and even with four sons, well, they didn’t know cars like Tubs, did they?
When Mom wasn’t worrying about her own finances, she liked to scold her prodigal sons for the debts we took on so blithely. We all lived in nice houses and drove nice cars, and charged whatever we liked on our nice credit cards, the typical American family.
Suddenly, I wasn’t in the mood to hear her scolding, because her dire predictions had come true for me. I was in trouble, and beginning to imagine everything I had juggled for years would come crashing down on me. But there was no way out of it once I’d called: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday: the smothering embrace of home.
It wasn’t quite as bad as I anticipated. A lot of TV, a lot of beer, a couple of late night escapes from the nieces and nephews down to our favourite watering hole, and, on the last night, a heart-to-heart with my oldest brother in which I suggested it was maybe time for me to change careers. If not now, I said, it was never going to happen. What was I looking at? The question hung between us until we both grinned: Anything but cars!
‘The old man,’ my brother told me with a shake of his head, ‘stayed at it too long. With the money he made, Tubs could have bought his own dealership.
Instead, he just kept trudging down to that Ford lot until it killed him.’
I shook my head. ‘Tubs was a lousy manager. As a dealer he would have lost his shirt.’
I was the baby in the family, my brother reminded me. I didn’t know how it was when Tubs was still fairly young. He remembered hearing Tubs talk about how much he hated the car lot. His comments sparked a memory: a long morning in the sun, Tubs making a rare offer to buy me lunch. He drove us out to a little restaurant at the edge of town famous for its pies.
Tubs was not a serious drinker. He might hold a drink all night, then set it down untouched. He would drink a beer on the Fourth of July and talk about how good it tasted, but that was it. He never went back for a second bottle and might not even touch another until the next Fourth. Pie was different. The man lived for pie. Sometimes his lunch was a store-bought apple pie.
Sometimes he would raid the vending machines with a stack of quarters and take every pie in sight. Given a choice, he naturally preferred freshly baked pies. He could talk about hot apple pie the way poets of old crooned about unrequited love.
On the afternoon that he took me to lunch, the air was rich with the odour of apple pie. The waitress knew Tubs just like bartenders know the alcoholics.
‘Fresh out of the oven this morning, Tubs!’
Tubs ordered a whole pie for each of us without asking me what I wanted. As we walked toward an open booth, he said to me, ‘The car business, Davey, is just too hard on a man. One of these days, I’m going to buy a little place like this and sell pies! You don’t have to twist a man’s arm to get him to take a piece of pie!’
I was still young. I hadn’t finished my undergraduate degree. I could make more money in three months than some people made in a whole year, and all because of what I had learned at my father’s knee. Tubs was, in my
