MY Unlikely SAINT
ACT 1, BOOK I
By
CC Carlquist
Published by Carolyn C. Carlquist
Smashwords Edition
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Copyright © Carolyn C. Carlquist, 2012
Cover art and design by Stephanie Dalton Cowan
e-book formatting by Guido Henkel
My Unlikely Saint is a work of fiction. Street names and locations have been stage-managed. Any errors in this story are of my own making. Veteran Minnesotans who see a resemblance to actual people and events, I assure you, it’s a coincidence.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Thank you Rob, Elaine, and Suzy for what you said.
A special thanks to Eleanor Brekke and Muriel Krusemark, my partisans long ago.
For Sammy, custodian of seclusion.
Only you know where you are.
PART I
1. Toni Padua
Anthony, the Patron Saint of Lost Things
Standing next to her at the front desk already checked in and settled in with no business other than to locate an open bar in the hotel, I could hear every word she said. Something about the woman’s demeanor kept me from interrupting with my menial drivel. That the person she was seeking was not registered seemed obvious to me. Bart behind the desk strained to hear over the hotel ruckus. She asked would he please try a different spelling? Ac maybe? Es? Each time he checked, she’d duck her head as if her troubles might be airborne. Our eyes met once. The pan-beige smear under one eye barely concealed the purple crescent. I smiled kindly and looked away. Could he check the first name? Claire? Bart offered her the desk phone instead. She shook her head and ran a hand through her hair, soot black with the unmistakable dull luster of a dye job. Bart waited, his customer service smile on hold. She glanced down at the boy standing beside her. His blue parka was zippered to his chin. His unruly hair needed a comb. I resisted the urge to brush it out of his eyes. I could have, because he stood still as a sentry with his hands clasped behind his back. Odd behavior for a kindergarten kid. But what did I know?
The woman pulled a curled-up photo from her coat pocket and smoothed it flat for Bart to see. “She’s thin and blonde and looks like Dusty Springfield.”
Bart leaned in for a closer look. “Dusty who?”
I headed into the lobby in search of a bar, pub, lounge, maybe a canteen. The lobby served as midway for the Romance Writers Conference: tables and kiosks loaded with cliché-a-day calendars, promo mugs and clip-on mini lights, Nooks next to the books. And record attendance this fall, these divas of the heart, amongst whom a dozen possible Dusty Springfields were trolling for the buzz and a glimpse of Nora Roberts.
Ah, there. The concierge. Busy on his laptop.
“Excuse me, sir.” Keys clicked, then the mouse. “Ahmm, I know it’s early…” I lowered my voice, “…but is there a–”
“Stonehenge. Follow the green vine carpet, take a right at the Saxon swords.”
“–bar open somewhere?”
“Through the double doors,” he added. His eyes hadn’t left the screen. Didn’t need to. He’d suffered it all before, a thousand times ten. Someone needed to tell Mr. Snappy here that this was a hotel—a midday cocktail didn’t mean a thing. I’d had a testy morning, that’s all. His cell phone rang. He felt around for it. I followed the green vine carpet.
I missed the Saxon swords, but the double doors were open. The lounge was empty, no more than a nightlight behind the bar. I considered the mini-fridge up in my room, the discreet mini-fridge up in my room, and turned to go, but a shadow pop-up in the nightlight caught my eye. It was all I needed to cross what was now red vine carpet and take a stool. I dropped my backpack and settled in next to a faux marble pillar at the corner of the bar. The shadow popped back up in front of me like a Jack-in-the-Box, stormy hair and all, but minus the happy face. BOB was satin-stitched to his porter jacket.
“How about a martini?” I chirped. Still smarting from the concierge’s whiz-bang appraisal of my deflated self, albeit correct, I added, “No fuss. On the rocks is fine. Stoli, if you got it.”
Bob pulled a long-stemmed glass from the rack and shoveled it full of ice. He twisted the lid off a jar of olives, set the jar down, and tossed a curled-up lemon rind into my glass. Not even a programmed hello.
I slumped against the faux marble pillar, which scrunched like Styrofoam, and focused on the four tiers of liquor bottles aligned in a single-minded manner; clear graded to amber, a swatch of watermelon, a slash of lime, medicinal and untouched. Grappa. Ouzo. Kümmel. Kümmel was caraway seeds.
“Who drinks Kümmel?” I asked, favorably conversational.
Bob turned away to find the vodka. It’d been a turn-down-day so far, so this blatant incivility should have meant nothing. Plainly, it stung. I swiped a cocktail napkin from the tray, dabbed at my eyes and sniveled, dabbed again, then folded my arms and peeked around to see who might have witnessed my pathetic display of self-pity.
She had.
I hadn’t noticed her against the wall, L-shaped bar that it was. Her black hair, pale face, and mottled sweater blended like calico with the rag-rolled stucco wall. She wore the posture of a parochial schoolteacher, and tidy with her overcoat arranged on the stool next to her as if that seat were taken. Eyes with a halfway Asian slant appraised me without sentiment. She took a sip of her drink, the glass wrapped in a cocktail napkin, a rather matronly idiosyncrasy, I thought, not knowing at the time that she never left fingerprints.
My eyes had adjusted to the dark, which wasn’t so dark after all, and I saw right away why the bar was called Stonehenge. On the wall to my left, knights on horses rode into the Highlands, or some such place, where baby clouds floated up onto the pocked ceiling tiles, crossed the room and floated down into the ladies-in-waiting, who, seemingly unaware of the departing horsemen, were gathering roses. A curious incongruity separated the people from their landscape. The people, rendered flat and stretched like faded Modiglianis, had been stuck into scenery painted by the Norman Rockwell Club, who should have stopped with their crazy brushes, but had gone on and converted the entrance into dungeon doors, striated stones and all. A wacky side exit, similarly painted, cut through the ladies-in-waiting. Equally peculiar, the old-timey tables and knobby chairs conjured up a Sam Shepard western, not Canterbury. And not one lunch straggler. The schoolteacher and I were Bob’s only customers.
Back behind the bar, steam gathered like a galactic nebula in the middle of which stood Bartender Bob. With his stormy hair and smooth, flat face, he could be the man from Mars come up out of the mist to mix my drink. He poured the vermouth, then the vodka (which didn’t look like Stoli) into a cocktail shaker, capped it and shook the life out of it—after I’d told him not to fuss. The man from Mars. That would explain it: this offense to good sense of a bar was a prop, a cunning distraction, a cover for some red planet experiment—romance writers drugged and transported into a parallel world. Or Canada.
And a fitting end it would be, having stumbled out of university with a degree in history, having spent the last decade writing uber-zealous romance novels, and at long last, mercifully terminated in a human species recruiting station disguised as a castle disguised as a bar. Modigliani knights in a Norman Rockwell landscape. Martian paintings.
What cooked behind the bar continued to steam. Space Bartender Bob poured the soylent solution into my glass and set the potion in front of me, spun around to the register and slipped on a pair of Oakley knockoffs and tapped his secret codes onto a keyless pad that could double as a rocket-launcher. The mirror detailed his peevish face, which might better explain the empty bar. He’d not said one word to me.
Sure, I could lose a few pounds or ten (twenty if we go for svelte). But I’m not an ugly Betty. Maybe more like a plain Betty in a prairie Nordic sort of way. Straight nose. Straight teeth. Straight hair forever clipped up having more to do with an unsightly tsunami at ear level than any sense of style; its forever black color accentuated my forever pale face—even more so in dark rooms. Years ago in a South Dakota beer hall, a tequila-soaked bass player told me that my eyes reminded him of sun-bleached brownstone. Obviously, I’ve hung onto that snippet. How many calories in a martini?
The concierge, the snappy one who’d given me directions to Stonehenge, appeared at the bar, helped himself to a pineapple chunk, glanced at me, but, having never laid eyes on me before in his life, gave no sign of recognition. Should I have tipped him? That was so vague anymore.
Space Bartender Bob kicked a door shut and my steamy space station disappeared. He leaned into the bar and talked to the concierge. They talked like they were dating.
Martian bar.
I turned my attention to the schoolteacher. Her narrow eyes fixed on mine. She held her napkin-wrapped glass like a knick-knack, but did not take a drink. Having all but emptied my martini in two swallows, I conveniently drew the assumption that she might welcome conversation.
“I’m a romance writer,” I said.
“Why would you write something you know nothing about?”
What do you say to that? Crap, she might have flat-out diagnosed my problem in one simple sentence. Did she know me?
“You’re too young to know those stories,” she added.
I opened my mouth to protest, but lacked the passion to explain myself. My eyes welled up again. I pulled at the cocktail napkins and sent a stack floating to the floor. That brought Bartender Bob. He swiped them up and stuffed them in the trashcan. Before he could punish me with attitude, the woman pointed to her drink and said with a nod towards me, “And another for her. Make it Stoli this time.” She talked like the boss.
Too depressed and lightheaded to protest both her preposterous criticism of my choice of genre and what amounted to a twelve-dollar pour of alcohol, I mumbled, “I’m not sure what I’m going to do.”
“Crime,” she said.
I snorted a laugh, then considered my lack of accomplishment, which translated to lack of money; next step would be the soup kitchen and those black plastic bags and cardboard boxes, campfires in the alley—tumbled to homeless. If it weren’t for my convenient and loving commitment to cat-sit Mystery Man, my mother’s orange tabby, while my parents kicked around Florida nine months out of the year, I might very well be homeless.
“Crime,” I huffed. “It just might come to that.” Having swilled down an entire martini, I felt bold aiming my finger at Bartender Bob. “Stick ‘em up and give me all your Kümmel.” He turned up his nose and set the fresh martini next to my smudged-up glass, which I jerked closer, a good half-drop clotted to that lemon rind. The schoolteacher wrapped a fresh napkin around her glass and took a polite sip.
“On second thought,” I said. “Nobody pays cash anymore. Banks have all the money. And armed guards, too.” I sighed, dramatic. “That leaves convenience stores.”
Her mien suggested critical interest or reserved disbelief. Maybe both. Maybe she was entertained by my antics. Then my brain cleared and I shook my head. “Sorry. It’s been one of those mornings.” I kicked my backpack, which contained three hundred and five pages of Love is a French Verb schlepped to the Romance Writers Conference on the off chance that my assigned agent, having read the first fifteen pages, would beg to see the entire novel. I would snap open my pack and present her with a perfectly typed manuscript. No such thing had happened. At the end of the fifteenth page of my perfectly typed, first fifteen pages, she’d written that both characters and storyline needed a wee bit less swoon.
“You’re suggesting I write crime instead of romance. Right? Crap. I know less about crime than I know about romance.”
“Crime is mechanics,” she said. “Romance is lunacy, only clear in hindsight, years too late.”
“That never stopped anybody.” Which brought to mind my older sister, almost forty, who’d recently married a pinched-faced dentist from Taiwan because she wanted a baby. They’d flown to Reno, but not before she’d signed a prenup. I gave it two years. “You bite down knowing full well there’s a thumbtack hidden in the bonbons, and one day it up and–”
“Rob a bank and you’ll know right quick if there’s a thumbtack. A Kimber 1911 is precise. A box of chocolates is not.”
“But that’s exactly my point. Chocolate is like romance. It’s vague. You can make it up as you go along. Who cares how many chocolates are in the box? Crime is precise. I can’t do precise. Dave—he’s a guy from up home, but that’s another story—anyway, Dave read this book where the guy pulls out a revolver and flicks off the safety. Uh-uh. Not with that gun he didn’t. Dave still laughs about that.”
“Like dropping a magazine out of your revolver.”
“Only an accountant can work that kind of detail.” I captured the re-hydrated lemon rind from the bottom of my glass. I spit it back. “And, anyway, there isn’t a crime that hasn’t been hacked to death in the pulps. Money laundering, murder, smarmy cons—flat out, worn out.” I slid my empty, finger-smudged glass an arm’s length down the bar. “There are no new stories.”
“I can tell you a story.”
I didn’t roll my eyes, but I thought it. Everyone had a story. Everyone believed their experience to be so extraordinary they should write a book. When they told you what was so extraordinary, you could nod off in ten different languages. It was always the same damn story. There are more storytellers than there are stories. I was sitting in a hotel full of storytellers. The world was full of us. But the schoolteacher had bought me a twelve-dollar pour. Schooled in manners, the least I could do was act interested, listen a minute, ask a few questions. Be polite, Jenn.
“What kind of story?”
“True crime.”
“True crime,” I repeated with my best, good-natured look. “True, huh?”
“It’s my story.”
Even worse. Another victim. Victim, schmicktim. There should be a victim genre. Or would that be Memoirs? I glanced at my watch. Forty minutes until my Writing Romantic Memoirs class. Two martinis and no food, not even a peanut—I might not make it. I stifled a yawn and said, “Why don’t you write your own story? Everybody’s writing memoirs.”
She spoke in an offhanded manner, almost a shrug, although her shoulders remained taut. “I’m not a writer and you need a story.”
I needed something; that it was her story I needed was doubtful. Add a twelve-dollar martini to the social equation: “Your story, huh?”
“My story, yes.”
Husband? Brother? Boyfriend? Some criminal misfit without any swoon and she had the goods on him? But why would she tell me? Why would I get involved? Find myself peering through the peephole one day at some B-movie guy named Mugsy. Then what? Drop that magazine out of my revolver.
“How soon before some creep comes asking how I came upon this incriminating and confidential information?” I sounded light-headed, not to mention disingenuous, but I couldn’t stop myself. I tapped my head. “Crazies.”
She appeared to be considering my fatuous inquiry. Then she said, “I don’t believe that will be a concern. Those who hire me, I do not call them by their names.”
That took a second. “Hire you?”
“We were all a bunch of phantoms.”
I lowered my voice. “You’re the criminal?”
“You would write that in the past tense. I’m working one last contract, then I’m done with this nasty business. Unfortunately, the job has become impossibly complicated. The pieces don’t link. And I work alone, so I’m quite at a disadvantage, which is why I’m sitting here in this ghastly place.”
“I thought you were a schoolteacher.”
“I wish I were.”
It might have been her deliberate tone, the calm assuredness that brought me and my martini around the faux marble pillar to her leg of the bar. The entire conversation seemed odd, so odd that maybe, just maybe, it had wheels. This from a man, I would have dashed out the dungeon doors. I settled on a stool, her coat between us, with time enough to figure out if this was a ruse.
“What sort of impossible job? Can you talk about it? What you’re in the middle of?”
“I’m not in the middle,” she said, fingering her pendant, a Celtic cross or something, thick and silver, some high-energy metal.
I waited, vaguely aware that my curiosity had slipped out of balance with its antidote, caution.
“I’m on the outside.”
“Well, then…” I flicked my hand. “…walk away. Who would know?”
“Not a soul.”
I nodded as if that made sense and reached in my bag for my notebook and my Sony VOR cassette recorder. “I’m at a writing conference here in the hotel. We could set this up like an interview. Did you read Interview with the Vampire?”
“No.”
“Anne Rice wrote it. The pithy twist was that the vampire told a hellish story about life as a vampire. Hellish didn’t matter. In the end the boy goes looking for the rogue that will change him into a vampire.”
“How does the boy know where to find this maker of vampires?”
“He figured it out from the tapes. The vampire had inadvertently told him, never dreaming the boy would want his terrible life. Having lived so long as a vampire, he’d forgotten that people don’t want to die.” I pushed the tape recorder towards her. “We could start with your background. How you got started. Maybe a crime or something. Then I can see if I, ahmm…” not sure how to describe our improbable relationship, I suggested, “…if I might interview you.”
“A crime or something,” she repeated. She folded her arms as if considering, then said, “That seems undeniably reasonable. I am compromised; therefore, I am no longer honor bound.” Her dark eyes met my brownstones. Up close, I could see she wasn’t Asian. “Yes. I will tell my story.”
I punched RECORD. “This is voice-activated.”
“My name is Toni Padua.” She spelled it for me and glanced over at my notebook. I wrote it down.
“Padua is a town in Italy. Toni is short for Anthony, Anthony of Padua, the Patron Saint of Lost Things and Missing People. Saint scholars consider Anthony to be one of the greatest teachers of all times. He is also the Patron Saint of Barren Women. I haven’t a notion how he garnered that accolade.”
“So you were named after a saint?”
“Yes, but not that one.” She held up a hand. “It will make sense later. I will begin with my mother.”
“That sounds right,” I said and almost added, “for a criminal.”
“She might have had something to do with things. Then, again, maybe not.”
Or was this indifference? Don’t criminals blame everything on their mothers or some big-breasted woman figure? Even without the criminal element, the neutrality of indifference seemed unlikely in any mother-daughter relationship, most certainly not in storytelling. Some sound psychological blather and a virgin observation would be essential for the story. My best friend Penny, her dad was a psychologist in the Minnesota Education system. He’d help me with the blather. The virgin observation would need to come as an epiphany.
“My mother,” Toni said, “got banished from the Order of the Sisters of St. Bibiana because she refused to give up her illegitimate child.”
“Whoa. Your mother was a nun?”
“That is correct. She spent the rest of her unacknowledged life doing penance by caring for the sick in the name of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and the freight load of saints who ride with it. She worked at the prison. Every crazed and ruined lunatic who made it to the infirmary on my mother’s watch got canonized and sent back to his cell with the name of a saint tattooed on his soul. My mother referred to her sinners by their martyrs’ names that she cataloged in her head like favorite recipes. I can still hear her, raptured to the heavens, always the heavens. ‘God Praise, Saint John of Capistrano has come home.’ God praise, was right. Her good Saint John killed a bank guard in Duluth and skipped back into prison, his retirement secure.
“Growing up, I spent time at the prison while my mother worked. Prisons weren’t as locked down and litigious back then. She considered it a valuable life lesson, my helping out, not to mention charitable. Young and dumb, I had an eye for the mean James Deans who made their way into prison like it was some kind of casting call. Always in need of a patch job, these boys provided my mother the opportunity to save them.” Toni shut her eyes, her thin lips pressed tight. I waited. She opened her eyes and said primly, “Of course, I knew all along her true life’s mission was to get back on the good side of God the Father. My mother’s narcissistically righteous life was hatched out of one miscue.” She tapped her Celtic cross. “Me.”
Her face, fixed like a mask, gave no clue to the nature of her reality. Cocktail in hand, the napkin stuck like paper maché, she brought it to her lips, but set it down untouched. “And like my mother… I, too, got a miscue.”
“A miscued what?”
“Start. A miscued start. They come easy when you’re young. You already know that, don’t you?”
I already knew that.
She peeled the napkin from her glass and replaced it with a dry one. “One night while pouring drinks at the Triangle Bar on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota, I met the only man north of Miami who drank pineapple Daiquiris. He told me he was an accountant for a large corporation downtown St. Paul. I told him I was an actress playing the role of a bartender forced by the evil universe to pay off a worthless degree in theater. I detailed for him, with a modicum of pride, my expertise in costume and make-up. The next two months he drank his Daiquiris on my shift.
“I could spot him at the door. His whiteness was clearly out of step with the West Bank hippie culture back in the day. He’d come wearing the same beige, checkered leisure jacket and tan pants hiked up over sloppy fat. Squinty eyes, fat face, hair too thin for a comb-over. You know the look. But if you tip well, social gaffes are overlooked. He was a shy guy, my Pineapple Daiquiri, and seemed interested in me, but not in a wolfish way. Then one day he asked if I might like to capitalize on my theater expertise, make some money, pay off the evil universe. Behind in my college loans, behind in my rent, desperate for daylight, what could I say?
“One week later at precisely ten-fifteen A.M. Central Standard Time, I marched into his high rise office disguised as a rent-a-cop and arrested him, handcuffs and all. I read him his rights and escorted him out the door and down the elevator to the garage. From the trunk of his blue Ford Pinto, he handed me a Donaldson’s shopping bag, which contained a trench coat that covered my uniform and enough money to pay off my college loans, the back-rent on my apartment, and then some. I’d never seen so much cash. I dropped my wig and hat into the bag, fluffed my hair, walked up the ramp to daylight and caught the University Avenue metro home. I never saw him again.
“Of course I suspected something not quite right about our mini pageant, but I didn’t know how much not right until I read in the newspaper that a great sum of money had gone missing from said company and said accountant’s blue Ford Pinto had been found in the parking garage right where I’d left him. Seems they’d been on to him, but slow to move. I believe his hoked-up arrest bought him flight-time by confusing the issue. And much to law enforcement’s dismay, and to my surprise, nobody could describe the officer who’d arrested him. I thought about that for a long time.”
“Nobody noticed you?” My eyes flicked to Bartender Bob who was slicing fruit. “I know the feeling.”
“They were his associates, his friends. All eyes stuck on him or the floor, embarrassed for him. Nanny cameras didn’t exist. In the mind’s eye, I was a uniform. That’s all. Not a thing about me memorable. A face like mine was part of his plan.”
I squinted at her in search of a mole or a dimple, a defining crease between the brows, something that flagged her. Neither her thin lips nor her strong chin seemed noteworthy enough for memory. The narrow eyes were an earmark, for sure, but her overall semblance appeared downright ordinary. She could be glamorous made-up at one of those celebrity photo salons or quite homish with a hangover. She turned and faced the liquor bottles. Her dark hair, pulled into a chignon, underscored a profile as unremarkable as a store mannequin.
I pointed to her hair. “That’s a wig?”
She pulled a wisp at her ear and wound it around her finger. “Every so often I think about my Pineapple Daiquiri. I call him that because, come to find out, nobody, including me, knew his real name. Imagine that. No one knew his real name. And then he was gone. I hope he found his Venus rising. He was my only mentor. He showed me how to employ my expensive skills.” She took a sip from her napkin-wrapped glass. I remembered my martini and did likewise.
“In my mother’s honor,” she said, “I continue her celebration of the saints. Cataloged by patronage, these glorious martyrs are my identities. It is how I’ve kept my business organized. It is how I know in any given situation, at any given moment, and without hesitation who’s addressing me.”
My Sony VOR clicked off. “I’ve got cassettes in my room,” I said, fully prepared to skip Memoirs.
She glanced at a thin silver watch on her wrist. “I will come again at six.”
Book signings were scheduled for six, but I couldn’t remember who was signing. “Six is good,” I said.
She reached in her coat pocket and pulled out a bill. Holding it by her fingertips, she tossed it on the bar like a dirty tissue. It was a fifty-dollar bill.
“What’s your name?”
“Jennifer,” I said, momentarily taken aback that we’d talked like co-conspirators and my identity had not yet been considered. I’d forgotten to say my name. And she hadn’t asked. My nonentity status had worsened. “Sands,” I said, needing to be remembered. “Jennifer Sands.”
“Jennifer,” she said with a tic of a smile that went no further than the corner of her mouth. Missed, if you’d blinked. “I’d know your age within three years without ever laying eyes on you.”
“Yeah,” I said wretchedly. “The Jennifer Years.”
She stood up from her stool and bent primly, knees together, and retrieved her pocketbook from the footrest. She straightened and said, “Also known as The Bee Gee Years.”
“There are a bunch of us out there. For sure.”
“That could be an asset.”
Clarification anticipated. None came.
She draped her coat over her arm. “What’s your middle name?”
“Allison. Jennifer Allison Sands.”
Half turned to go, she said, “I will call you Jas.” She nodded once, as if pleased with herself.
“Okay,” I said, not sure what to add to that. I watched her disappear through the dungeon doors with her perfect posture, tight as the knot in her hair.
Jas. With an s, of course. I was as far from jazzy as I was from being a published romance writer. Jas could be my city name. Nobody back home would call me Jas. People didn’t listen to Jazz in towns like mine. Jazz was city music. I closed my notebook and stared at my name, big and monkey-bold, scrawled across the cover. She’d known all along.
Bob removed her glass and the fifty-dollar bill. He raised an interrogatory eyebrow at me.
I pointed to her glass. “What was she drinking?”
“Water.”
2. Alex Edessa
Alexius, the Patron Saint of Beggars
One thing was certain: I wasn’t a memoir writer. Maybe in twenty years, when I had something to remember. Nobody writes about my kind of childhood. Boo Radley, Almira Gulcho, Fagin—none of them lived in my town. No one owned the Baskerville hounds. My father was an accountant who came home every night at six, except during tax season. My mother worked mornings at Anderson Florist. They danced to the one-hit-wonders of The Sixties on the jukebox in the basement. They didn’t drink, at least not in front of me. Even more boring, I graduated high school without a delinquency. I got grounded a couple of times for curfew violations, and TP’d somebody’s yard once and lost my allowance for a month. My childhood lacked literary color. No one put the dark on me.
I did not return to Memoirs after the break, but spent the rest of the afternoon in my room with a nap to shake off the booze and a shower to wake up. I played and replayed the tape I’d labeled TONI#1. Listening to that cool, judicial voice, I was unable to determine true or false. But why would she waste her time fabricating some bizarre story? What would be the point of that? I would meet her at six like she’d said. Raised in the rural Midwest by third-generation American Legionnaires, when it came to age, showing respect trumped common sense, and she outranked me by a good twenty years.
She seemed like a nice enough lady.
Parked on the same stool where she’d left me, I had a power view of Stonehenge: a table of unattended soda pop tweens, a table of lushed-up romance writers, two business men at the bar working their laptops, and one woman done up like a realtor. But maybe not a realtor—her fawn brown suit and washable silk blouse suggested more than Open House and a yard sign. Perfectly blunt-cut, chestnut hair with salon highlights argued banker-lawyer, pulling a salary my history major would never generate. Throw in a brass nameplate.
Washed out from my two-martini lunch, I stifled a yawn. Two sips of Stoli would straighten me out. I cleared my throat. Twice. Apparently not loud enough. Bartender Bob lolled at the register, busy in a notebook, done with me and my glass of ice water served up without a word. He probably had a day job writing for Popular Mechanics. I decided to call the hotel and ask them to ring the bar, give Bartender Bob my drink order on the phone. I dug around in my bag for my cell phone, but that social crutch was not to be found. Last seen in my room. If I ran to fetch it, I might miss her. Or not. She might not come at all. Changed her mind. Her crazy mind.
I settled in to wait.
A chichi blonde Dusty Springfield joined the romance writers at their table reminding me of the woman at the reservation desk and her ill-fated hunt for… I’d already forgotten the name. Probably her agent. That would make perfect sense. But there’d been that sad little boy, so still. Something unmanageable had been kicked at the two of them. I wondered if I could have helped. Why hadn’t I asked?
Claire. Yeah, that was it.
About to admit that Toni Padua had gone back to the asylum, I let go an indignant sigh. The banker-lawyer lady glanced at me with notable blue eyes. I sent her a “sisters in wait” nod and took a sip of my water capturing an ice pellet in my mouth. She returned the nod and took a sip of her drink. And there it was. The napkin-wrapped glass. I choked on my ice.
“Toni?” I sputtered and patted my chest. She’d been there the whole time.
Drink in hand, she slid off the stool and with a long, fashionable stride as authentic as Toni Padua’s short, prim steps earlier, she rounded the faux marble pillar.
“I’m Alex,” she said, energizing the dead air that, up until that moment, I hadn’t noticed. She set her drink down, hooked her purse on the backrest and slid onto the stool. “Alex Edessa by way of Alexius, the Patron Saint of Beggars. Born rich in Rome, he dropped the glam and moved to Syria where he lived a penniless life championing the homeless. There was a brief period in the history of the almighty, rich-beyond-righteous Catholic Church when street poverty didn’t exclude one from sainthood.”
“Isn’t sainthood about miracles?”
“Money is miracles.”
No way was this the same woman. “Your eyes.”
“My eyes,” she said.
We all knew that Teen Magazine trick: brown shadow in the crease, highlighter on the arch; but Toni Padua’s Asian eyes had not been transformed to Caucasian contour with the swipe of a shadow wand. And Toni’s nose had been narrow. Or was that the other Teen Magazine trick: Cover Girl Umber up the sides, voila! the Roman nose? And the chin… diminished? Lips plumped? Squinting, close enough to kiss, I could distinguish her natural lip line, spot-on, which meant that Toni Padua’s lips had been in-lined with white pencil. I studied the altered face. A box of creams and wands and humongous patience—yes, this was possible. Except for the eyes.
This was not Toni Padua.
“Indeed,” she said, as if reading my thoughts.
“I’d have sat here all night and we could have talked about loans and the sub-prime. I wouldn’t have known.”
Alex had a feathery laugh, more like a thought than a sound. She held up her napkin-wrapped drink. “But you have keen observation.”
“Not a lot of people do that napkin thing. Is that water again?”
She smiled, as if pleased with my research. “This is Pernod. Toni Padua doesn’t drink alcohol.”
I chuckled at what I assumed was good humor.
Her mouth slid into an easy smile with perfect teeth reminding me that Toni Padua hadn’t smiled, much less laughed aloud. The woman’s entire demeanor was changed. Completely. Alex Edessa presented herself as a relaxed and congenial businesswoman. Toni Padua had been a stiff and proper schoolmarm.
“How did you learn to do this?” I reached into my bag for my recorder.
“Like I said, when I got my worthless degree in theater, I specialized in theater make-up. It seemed prudent at the time, like a musician knowing how to tune pianos or a history major knowing how to lay bricks.”
I set the recorder on the bar and punched RECORD.
She leaned towards it and spoke: “I own fourteen ventilated, lace-front, human hair wigs. I carry more tinted contact lenses than Pearle. My inherited eyes are pale which allows me to change color and not look like a spice junky out of Dune. I use eyeglasses, too—nonprescription, I’m proud to say, although lately I’ve added reading glasses to the mix. Throw in professionally crafted theater teeth: European country, Hollywood perfect, and a rather unfortunate overbite. Designed and fit to flawless in Gothenburg, Sweden. My teeth are my most expensive props. I also wear single, double, or triple caps—plumpers, we call them—that broaden my cheekbones or add girth to my jaw or a new curve to my mouth. The theater holds a heap of trade secrets, and I have a few of my own. Both Toni Padua and Therese List—that’s Therese of Lisieux, the Patron Saint of Florists—wear a thin band under their wigs fixed with tiny combs and a spot of glue.” She pulled the skin back at her temples. Her eyes narrowed.
“I knew it! That’s Toni Padua. But is that reliable? Combs and glue?”
“It’s good for a couple hours. The strip can also come up over the head for a junior face lift.” She positioned her fingers at her temples, pushed upwards and lost ten years.
I said, “Get that in the big chains, you’d make a fortune.”
“Every time you smiled you’d peek in the mirror to see if anything had slipped.”
“Toni never smiled.”
“You’re a good witness.” She took a sip of Pernod and surveyed the room. Her new blue eyes with their redesigned lids seemed to register everything with pointed patience, including me. I didn’t know it, but at that point in our relationship, she knew all she needed to know about me.
“I kinda see the mechanics, even in the dark here.”
“Nobody gets in my daylight face. And winter is best, when coats and parkas are standard fare, and most importantly, gloves are in season.”
“How many of these saints do you have?”
“They come and go. Some stay for years because their employment is steady. These veterans have their own voices, handwriting styles, facial tics, their own scents. Toni smelled like Ivory soap.” Alex waved her wrist and I caught a scent both spicy and musky like fresh cut wood. “This is vetiver.”
I wrote that down, plus the detail that Toni Padua’s thin, silver watch had been exchanged for a brown leather band.
Alex settled in on the stool. “So, my bonny biographer, where were we?”
“Pineapple Daiquiri and the police officer disguise job.”
“Ah, yes. The directive from Pineapple Daiquiri was to play the role of the arresting officer as if you truly are the arresting officer, as if that is all you have ever been, and that is all you will ever be. Pineapple pulled a stack of business cards from his pocket and told me that if the arrest got botched, I was to laugh and sing out, ‘Happy Birthday from Lenny!’ Then announce that I’d just started a freelance party joke company and this was my first job. Pineapple said, ‘I’ll laugh with you. We’ll all laugh. You’ll undo the handcuffs and I’ll go back to my office. You pass out these cards and disappear.’ The business cards read Party Joke Company.
“Was I the arresting officer type? Hardly. But I became one. I studied cops on TV, stalked them on the streets, followed them into city hall. I carried on as if some coveted award lay on the table. Understand, Jas, that the change in personality is equally important to the change in costume. And always, always, always stay within the cliché. Blonde hair and ruffles. Black hair and leather. Never draw attention. And never, never, never, no matter how tempting, send out extremes like Mrs. Doubtfire or The Princess Bride. Casts and molds, foaming sponge gelatin and alginate make magnificent disguises, but a major overhaul like that does not hold up under fluorescence. People notice. Not to mention peeling off your face in the backseat of a police car. You betcha. Opens one up to troublesome questions.”
“Toni Padua had…” I tweaked my chin.
“Yes, Toni had chin.”
“I like yours better. Your chin. Alex’s chin, I mean.”
“Good-looking is never the goal, no matter how tempting. Well-groomed and clean are not priorities. Marty Bethany—Martha, the Patron Saint of Cooks—is a mess with her stringy brown hair and slept-in clothes, skin blotched with tanning gels.”
“Why so many saints?”
“To spread the risk. You can’t find someone if you don’t know who it is you’re looking for.”
“Who’s looking for you?”
“Someone’s always looking. And it’s never the Prize Patrol.” Alex sat with one arm propped on the bar. She watched the romance writers squeeze past a blustery couple blocking the dungeon doors. Her eyes moved to a fat man in a workout suit flushed and radiant from the free-with-your-room mini gym. He joined the two businessmen at the bar.
“Is somebody looking for you here?”
“Not as Alex Edessa.”
I wondered how she could be so sure. “You said… or I guess I should say that Toni said… anyway, Toni said earlier that she’d been compromised.”
“Yes, the contract is a landmine. I don’t do domestic. But two years ago I did. On the cheap. You’d think I’d learn, but here I am again, sitting on another landmine.”
“What happened two years ago?”
“I kidnapped a kid.” She met my astonished look with a nod. “Domestic is always a landmine.”
The woman had kidnapped somebody’s child, and the breadth of her regret was that it’d been domestic.
She said, “You look somewhat scandalized.”
“That blows. Kidnapping.”
“Maybe this is where you start the story. Jolt them on the first page.”
“Kidnapping is not so cool. People who kidnap children are not likeable characters. We’ll need to come up with some heartfelt reason why you kidnapped somebody’s child. Maybe start with your own childhood. Or maybe the regret factor. Redemption is crucial here.” I shook my head. “Kidnapping, that’s a soul stealer. It must have cost–”
“I lost money, that’s a fact.”
“What I meant–”
“The snatch was out of Canada,” she continued unabated. “Gas, food, lodging. Cha-ching. But I felt sorry for the mother, a beleaguered angel, poor dear, what with the boy’s father one fork short of the devil. And here I am again, one base short of a ballgame.” She chuckled at her verbal caprice, then frowned and said, “This new contract is loaded with tricks, and I can’t figure out who’s oiling the rim.”
“This new contract is another kidnapping?”
“It is.”
“Screw the rim. Go to the police. Tell them what you know.” The look on her face suggested I might have just told her to get a racing tip from the pope. “Quite frankly, Alex Edessa, Patron Saint of Beggars, readers will not identify with you.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to make me a soccer mom, but can we get somewhere in between? People can’t relate to their goddamn neighbors, but they expect familial vibes from some ignis fatuus in a dime novel? Ridiculous.” She stopped, eyebrows raised. “I should give a talk at your writing conference.”
“You’d need to know about writing.”
She shrugged. “I know someone who writes river guides.”
“I doubt very much that redemption has ever come up in a river guide.”
“Redemption.”
“That’s the key,” I said. “Oprah’s beat the trash out of it. Agents love it.”
“Well, there then. I must be redeemed. And you’re the one to do it.”
Redemption would throw the story into the fantasy genre. This interview was sliding out of my comfort zone. Was this even the same woman from earlier? Maybe I’d beg off, excuse myself. I tried to remember who was signing books in the lobby.
She must have sensed my faltering. “Or don’t redeem me. Redemption doesn’t happen in real life. People would be forced to admit that they’d misread the tealeaves, that they hadn’t understood the instructions, or they’d misjudged the miles. To admit error, you must wriggle back and resurrect some inset moral code you’d learned in catechism but long since abandoned. Few people concede those things.”
“People do that on a daily basis.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Are we talking about the same thing here?”
“Redemption.”
“What exactly is that?”
“Atonement,” I said. “Make amends. Saved. Redeemed.”
“Store coupons.” She grinned.
I frowned.
“Say we have this criminal,” I said, not sure who or what I was defending, but provoked beyond good sense to explain the favorable moral code necessary for redemption, “and he’s bad to the bone, but he goes out and risks capture to save someone’s life. That’d be redemption.”
She snorted. “When in real damn time has that ever happened? Name me one real person you know, a friend of a friend, anybody anywhere, who’s atoned for their mischief.”
I didn’t know any Hester Prynnes or Raskolnikovs. Unable to produce a real-life kite runner, I said, “Sometimes criminals find God in prison and they–”
“Oh, stop. Those outlaws are making the best of a bad situation. Otherwise they’d have found God on the schoolyard instead of the prison yard.”
“Redemption, more often than not, is private. Neither the transgression nor the atonement ever makes the neighborhood gossip circuit. It’s small, personal things you atone for on a daily basis.”
“What, my dear, did you atone for today?”
“Okay, not every day, but you know what I mean. Maybe your confessing, I mean, your telling your story is your redemption.”
She sobered. “I never intended to tell my story.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“The boy.”
I liked Alex better than Toni, but reminded myself that this was the same person. I would need to meet the real person. I needed tenor with the real person, or all I’d have was a voice on tape. Two voices on tape, neither of which was the mainsail. I checked the recorder, just in case, and promised myself a new microchip miniature once I got my bills paid. Or a job. Or some Pineapple Daiquiri walked into my life. How likely was that?
“Tuesday,” she said. “My downslide started Tuesday, before I even took this damn contract. We were riding down Hennepin, Kerby and me, in his jet black, right-off-the-rack Lexus ES 300 discussing my being arrested for breaking and entering and who he can press to make it go away.”
I picked up my pen.
She spelled the name. “K-E-R-B-Y.”
“Who’s Kerby?”
“My lawyer.” She smiled fondly. “He’s the only one who calls me by my name. We went to high school together.”
An accomplice? At the very least, an associate. I’d track him down. Find him on some lawyer list, in the phone book, Google. “Does Kerby know about the saints?”
“Nobody knows my file system.”
“For the record, can you clarify this file system?” I repositioned the tape recorder again. I couldn’t stop fussing with it.
“It’s simple. Each client knows a saint. No two clients know the same saint. If my mother had been a gemologist instead of a nun, you would be talking to Crystal instead of Alex. I’d be organized by jewels, not saints. Opal, Ruby, Amber.”
“Turquoise?”
“Turk for short.”
“My mother is a gardener,” I said. “Flora actually radiates personality, you know. I could be Rose or Daisy. Marigold Mary.”
“Your last name could be the color you associate with the flower. Mary Gold. Rose White.”
“Rose White,” I repeated. “That is so metrically stark. I could like that. Speaking of disguises, what do you do when you’re handcuffed in the backseat of a patrol car?”
“I’m not dressed as Wonder Woman or Wendy the Witch. My costumes are street clothes. With a couple swipes of my hand, I’m back at base. Or close enough. Wigs and make-up are everyday attire. I’d swallow my plumpers if I had to. Demolition is nothing more than knocking down blocks. Assemblage is the real operation. Assemblage and control of all the parts. Control of something as simple as a smile.” She demonstrated a quarter moon smile. “That was Brigid Ireland.” She tightened it. “That’s Angela Folly.” She smiled again as Alex. I had never considered the many possible muscle contractions and their varying chi, much less pointedly managing them.
“The Risorius muscle draws the angle of the mouth sideways. Learn to manipulate that muscle. There are books that show how to tighten your facial muscles for a cheap face-lift. I’ve expanded that.”
“How do you keep it all straight? As in what muscle maneuver belongs to what saint?”
“Toni Padua’s trademarks could not be confused with Brigid Ireland’s.”
I would meet Brigid Ireland soon enough, and that statement would prove true.
“I’d show up somewhere in the wrong wig.”
“Four saints are the most I’ve ever worked at one time. Too much motion can compromise a job. Just recently Barbara Dios, the Patron Saint of Architects, had business in Wayzata. That same day Cecil, Cecilia, the Patron Saint of Music, had a contract in Medina. Barbara drove across town to St. Paul and changed into Cecil, then drove all the way back to Medina. What could have taken two hours took all day.”
Such a major production—the elaborate camouflage and the complicated timing. Except for the kidnapping, she didn’t seem criminal enough to warrant such obsessive coverage. Most criminals use aliases of some kind, but what a crazy application, commandeering the saints for her dirty work. Her mother a nun.
Nutcase?
“Your mother was a nun, and you are the polar opposite.”
“Truth be known, I enjoy the saints and the church and all the chaff that comes with it. I appreciate that ‘Sin on Saturday, Saved on Sunday’ way of life. I appreciate the pragmatic sanction of Christianity and hang close to the simplicity of self-service in the name of God the Father, that old wild goose.”
I blurted a laugh. “You’ve transformed these holy do-gooders into criminals.”
“The favorable intersection of crime and philanthropy is not a comfortable notion for the truly God-fearing. But few people are truly God-fearing. I can count on one hand the truists I’ve met. Most who claim to live by The Word have their own interpretation of what the words mean. I told Father Robel once that religion was like five different versions from five different eyewitnesses who all saw the same accident. Each believes earnestly in his own experience. Father Robel said matter-of-factly, ‘God is not everything we’ve come to depend on him for. Never was.’”
“Father Robel?”
“Father Robel is a peppery old gladiator and an ambitious fundraiser over at St. Vitus. He knows me as Zita, the Patron Saint of Maids and Lost Keys. Young Zita from Lucca cleaned houses, helped criminals and poor people, performed miracles. Four hundred years later she got sainted, for all the good that did her back when she was scrubbing her knuckles raw. Father Robel is a living saint, a holy man, but also a practical man. He questions things, and sometimes he has issues that need tooling. About twice a year I get paid to clean the vicarage, although I’ve never seen the inside of that French-splendid chateau du tithe.”
“You do work for the church?”
“Which Father Robel forgives. After he forgives himself, of course. Forgiveness abounds in Christianity, which certainly suits my lifestyle better than that New Age crap where bad deeds boomerang back at you. You’d have to be a saint to live like that.”
That this might not be the same woman from earlier nagged at me. Alex Edessa seemed years younger than Toni Padua and appreciably more cheerful. Maybe Toni and Alex were friends and this was a ruse. I couldn’t shake the uneasy notion that I might spot Toni Padua and friends gathered around a table watching us. Typical. Me, outside the joke, pranked by “Girls Behaving Badly.” But the room had emptied. The men at the bar were gone, their places wiped clean. Bob vamoosed.
“Were you ever married? Have kids? Mow a lawn? Clean a cat box?”
It took a minute for her to answer. “You see this guy at the diner with his kids and their greasy faces, hamburger wrappers and French fries flying around, and you wonder what your life would be like if you’d married the likes of him. I’d have grandkids now. You can’t help but wonder these things.”
“Did you ever consider a different career?”
“Keep yourself off the floor once you’ve slipped.”
“Becoming a criminal was out of your control?” I scoffed.
“You can decide that when you write my redemption chapter.”
“What do you do on holidays? Like Christmas.”
“Christmas is my busiest season, like retail.”
“Who are you?”
“That’s not important.”
“I want to know.”
“I know you do.”
3. Alex Edessa
Heroines do not kidnap children for money. A heroine who murdered for money would be an easier sell. And why would this flimflam saboteur of saints tell me, Miss Anybody, about it? The whole thing was sounding like somebody too long on Pernod. Was she setting me up for some kind of scam? I reached down and felt my purse.
“Tell me about your identities. How do you get them?”
“A timely question, indeed. My identities were established long before the internet, back when moving numbers involved Wite-Out and laminate, back when fifty bucks on Lowry got you credentials clean enough for social security. I haven’t established an identity that carries paper in fifteen years. No need to.”
It was a satisfactory enough explanation. Identity theft was sleazy and so easy it had become a crime without aptitude. No swank. Lower than robbing convenience stores. And I didn’t have the savvy to write about something as plebeian as identity theft and create an appealing identity thief all in the same story. There I was again, centered on an appealing character. I didn’t need an appealing character. This was True Crime. Just the facts, ma’am.
“About this breaking and entering thing. This lawyer guy from your high school bailed you out of jail? What was that about?”
“Broder Circle, yeah. We’re driving down Hennepin, Kerdy and me.”
“Wait. I think I wrote Kerby with a B.” I scanned my notes. “You just said Kerdy with a D.”
“It’s K-E-R-B-Y. Kerby with a B.”
“Earwax, I guess.”
“B’s and D’s are phonetically muddy. And I’ve got my Hollywood teeth installed.” She tapped her front tooth. “Anyway, I’m explaining about the wrong address this dildo Matzo gave me.”
“Matzo? As in matzo ball?”
“He’s an Eastern Bloc, displaced, alien outlaw.” She folded her arms on the bar, seemingly annoyed. “Can’t get a green card, and there he is, camped on Jug’s desk like some backyard butch. He’s got this thick yellow tablet, arm up around top. You know how people write upside down like this?” She demonstrated. “All hunched over, mouth skewed-up like some dim-wit first grader, one little number at a time, one little letter at a time, like he’s drawing stickmen, for God’s sake. You want to jump up and yank the damn pen right out of his stubby fingers. I should have.” She shuddered. “How do you say dyslexic in Russian?”
“They might not have that in Russia. Is Matzo part of the breaking and entering job?”
“He is the breaking and entering job. A nothing job. So easy it was laughable, if it’d been somebody other than me with a Glock 17 stuck to my thoracic five in the middle of the night in the middle of the room in a subdivision designed by communists. You’ve seen those places with the same square front yards, the same putty plastic siding, the same worthless front porch and cut-rate bay windows, and the same identical damn floor plan. The back room of Three-SIXTY-FIVE Broder Circle was an office that contained my target file cabinet. The owner of that complicated cabinet was in Hong Kong. The back room of Three-FIFTY-SIX Broder Circle was a bedroom. The owner was in bed. I could have been shot.
“The reason I wasn’t shot was because the man in charge of the Glock, mid-fifties respectful, didn’t have the bristle to shoot a mid-life woman in black chiffon, even though he had every right to do just that. I feigned drunk in search of an old boyfriend. I swore the front door was unlocked and called up some tears for him. He called up the police for me.” She took a sip of her Pernod, then said with a kind of reflective resignation, “These past few years I’ve been broad-sided with the disheartening evidence of my diminished powers of persuasion. Ten years ago that man would have fixed me a drink.” She appraised my face with the eye of a salon technician mining for pores. “Coming your way faster than you can say facelift.”
Not that fast, I thought, but rolled my eyes at that rank injustice and steered her back to Broder Circle. “So the police came?”
“The police came and charged me with breaking and entering because of the small and very expensive case of proprietary lock picks in my black satin clutch. Lucky me, I wasn’t carrying. I own a gun, but never carry, which has always worked in my favor. Truth be known, I’m not fierce enough to use a gun, which might appear contradictory for someone in my trade. But, then again, maybe not; I fulfill my obligations with meticulous planning. There is no call for antediluvian violence. I’ve never seen brass knuckles in real time. The only slice I make with a knife is through a hunk of cheese. I couldn’t roundhouse my way out of a KinderCare. Those long-legged, collagen-lipped Hollywood babes who can dropkick a Suma wrestler into retribution and not break a sweat are such fun and as unlikely as Harry Potter. I keep a can of pepper spray in my purse and run like hell. Black Betty stays under the bed.”
“Black Betty?”
“That’s a period expression, my dear, before your time.”
“You own a gun, but you’ve never shot anybody?”
“I’d liked to have shot Matzo, but it would have been for trifle. Broder Circle was the last job I’ll ever do for those corkheads. Jug’s in jail for grand larceny and his idiot brother-in-law can’t run a vacuum cleaner. Poor Jug. It doesn’t look good for him. I hate that he went down. Never argued a fee. Oh, he’ll talk. They all talk.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Jug knows me as Terry Avella, Teresa of Avila, the Patron Saint of Headaches.”
“There’s a saint for headaches?”
“There’s a saint for everything: cabinetmakers, candlestick makers, perfume makers, mountaineers, lighthouse keepers. Name it, it’s sainted. I’m peeved about Terry Avella with her cruel headaches, forced into early retirement. She carried good ID, which included a Wisconsin driver’s license that worked in the system, a BP card, a graduation diploma, a library card, a fishing license, and a major merchant card. She walked with a limp. She had nice handwriting. A bastardized Snell Roundhand.”