Whiskey For Breakfast Page 16

  “I hate to have to leave you girls since you just got here, but I’ve got a yoga class and I don’t want to miss it.”

  “When did you start doing yoga classes?” I asked.

  “About a month ago. I got a coupon in one of those booklets they send through the mail and I signed up for a whole year. I never realized yoga could be so empowering. I tried to get Vince to go with me, but he’s shy about taking his clothes off in front of other people.”

  Her cheeks pinkened and she lowered her voice to a whisper, though I had no idea why since we were the only ones in the house.

  “I guess I could understand why a man might not want to be naked out in public. It’s not like they can hide it when they get affected, if you know what I mean. And he doesn’t like to go anywhere without his gun, and there wouldn’t be a place to put it now that I think about it.”

  “Why in God’s name would Vince have to take his clothes off?” Phoebe asked.

  “Because it’s naked yoga. They turn the heat up in the room to about a hundred degrees and everyone strips down to what God gave us. It’s a very spiritual experience. And by the end you’ve got sweat dripping from places best left unmentioned so it’s not like it’s sexual in any way. You hardly even notice you’re naked. Though I’ve started getting there early so I don’t have to put my mat next to Leon Gardello. He’s got bushy black hair on every square inch of his body and his balls hang clear down to his knees. I’ve never seen them that big before. Makes me wonder how he sits down. It’s distracting.”

  Phoebe grabbed my hand and started squeezing. “I think I have to go now,” I said, backing toward the door. “I’ve got to pick up Rosemarie and do some legwork on a case.”

  “I’ll come with you.” Phoebe was desperate. She grabbed her purse and we both hustled out to the car before we could be scarred any more by the visual images my mother had a talent of painting.

  “Christ, I need a drink,” Phoebe said once we got in the car. “I’ve got to find another place to live. I’m having a car delivered today so I can start looking around the city.”

  “You really want to move to Savannah? I thought you hated it here.”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I’m getting older and I’ve decided there probably isn’t a man out there for me. I’ve tried a lot of them on for size. In the books that’s always what happens when you get old and your body starts to shrivel. You move back home so you can die where your family is. That way they don’t have to spend a lot of money shipping your body back home.”

  “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you, but you don’t look all that shriveled to me.” Phoebe looked like a badass in her ripped jeans and concert T-shirt. She was a couple of inches shorter than me and she had an intricate tattoo on her muscled biceps.

  “Sometimes my knees pop when I go up the stairs now. It’s fucking depressing.”

  “You’re welcome to stay at my place until you find something. I have an extra bedroom.” Though once I mentioned it I regretted issuing the invitation. My house wasn’t exactly a safe haven as of late.

  “I’d appreciate it. I won’t stay but a couple of days. Only until I can find a place of my own.”

  I headed to the other side of town where Rosemarie’s duplex was located and I honked the horn once I pulled in front.

  “Holy mother of God,” I thought I heard Phoebe whisper.

  Rosemarie barreled out of the house in a lavender jogging suit and white tennis shoes. The pants were so tight her camel toe had a camel toe, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the zipper of her jacket didn’t leave teeth marks on her skin. Her hair was curled in tight Shirley Temple spirals and her eyes were lined with dark purple liner.

  I realized we had a problem as soon as she reached the car. There was no way Rosemarie was fitting in the back seat, so Phoebe crawled into the back and Rosemarie dropped down into the seat next to me. I introduced Rosemarie to Phoebe and by the time we made it out of Whiskey Bayou and to Summer’s Eve Assisted Living, the two of them had compared tattoos and Rosemarie was considering getting a nose ring.

  I checked myself in at the gate and parked to the side of the house again.

  “This place is creepy as shit,” Phoebe said. “I might need to paint it. But maybe I’ll add zombies. And more blood.” Phoebe’s art was an acquired taste.

  Vicki answered the door for us again. “Welcome back to SEAL,” she said smiling. “I didn’t know you were coming back. Did you bring your grandmother with you this time.”

  “No, but I brought my sister along.” Vicki’s eyes kind of bugged out of her head when she got a good look at Rosemarie, so when she was faced with Phoebe and pink hair and a nose ring she looked almost relieved. “We’d love to do another walk-through and maybe talk to some of the residents to see how they like it. We just want our grandmother to have the best experience she can in her remaining years.”

  Phoebe absorbed my lie as if it were truth without batting an eyelash. I was a pretty good liar, but Phoebe was champion. I’d pretty much been the good girl of the two of us growing up. I was the honor student and the one who never managed to get away with anything without getting caught. I’d tried being bad. Really I had. I just wasn’t terribly good at it.

  Phoebe, on the other hand, was the wild child. She was two years older than me and was Miss Popularity. She spent more time in detention than in the classroom, and she never got caught sneaking out of her bedroom in the middle of the night to go meet her boyfriend or smoking in the bathroom at school. I’d always wanted to be just like Phoebe when I was growing up, but now that she was having problems with creaky knees I was starting to rethink my goals.

  We made our way to the activity room and it was then I realized why Rosemarie had dressed like she had. I’d told her to fit in and that’s exactly what she’d tried to do, though I wasn’t sure Rosemarie really fit in anywhere. At least four other old women were wearing the exact same lavender jogging suit as Rosemarie, their hair rolled in tight curls on top of their head. It was good to know that Rosemarie took the whole sidekick thing seriously.

  I found Deloris back at the ping-pong table talking trash to a different man who seemed to be holding his own pretty well against her. Deloris took her ping-pong seriously and I didn’t want to interrupt. Mostly I was scared of Deloris. The last time I’d visited and we’d partaken of a couple of bottles of wine, she’d showed me the knife she kept strapped in her garter. I didn’t want to give her cause to use it, so I waited until the match was finished.

  “Do you know where we can find Norman Hinkle?” I asked her.

  “What do you want with old Norm? He get into trouble again? Norm likes to lift things from the sundries shop over in the lobby. Sticks them right down the front of his pants. When he first moved in here he had to fight the women off with a stick. Then they figured out he didn’t have much down there but Slim Jims and those little bottles of wine.”

  I saw Phoebe’s mouth drop open out of the corner of my eye. Phoebe had a lot of life experience, but she had no experience when it came to my life. I was an experience all by myself.

  “It’s not nice to deceive ladies like that,” Rosemarie said, shaking her head. “Men have it easy. They pretty much know what a woman’s going to look like with her clothes off right off the bat. We women have to wait until that critical moment when the clothes come off to know whether the man is going to be worth anything. It’s not like you can just get up and leave if he doesn’t have much to speak of.”

  “It’ll get easier as you get older,” Deloris said. “I don’t have time to waste on those little ones. I could die tomorrow. That’s not the last memory I want to take with me. But I gotta tell you, after they get to a certain age those special parts shrink a little unless they’ve got professional help. Myron Wilkes over there has one of them pumps. He pumps that pecker twenty-four hours a day. It’s not natural. And if you sit next to him during dinner all you can do is watch his napkin go up and down in his lap. It’s damn
ed hard to enjoy a pot roast with that kind of distraction.”

  “I can see how hard that would be.” Rosemarie was wide-eyed and nodding furiously. “I’d hate for anything to distract me from a pot roast.”

  “This time of day Norm’s probably out in the greenhouse. He’s a horticulturist. Or at least he was before he retired. He’s got a real green thumb. We all have beautiful fresh arrangements in our room because of Norm.”

  I thanked Deloris and we all followed her pointed finger to the French doors that led into the garden, and what I assumed, would eventually lead to the greenhouse.

  “This place is pretty nice,” Phoebe said. “I could live here. And it looks like they get good light through the windows. You think there’s an age limit?”

  “I’ve got a pamphlet at my house. I’ll let you look at it.”

  The gardens were beautiful. There were lots of evergreen shrubs, and the red roses and white chrysanthemums were in full bloom. A couple of huge weeping willows provided shade for anyone who wanted to sit at the picnic tables and a cobblestone pathway curved like a serpent toward the greenhouse.

  I knocked on the door first and then stuck my head inside. The heat and humidity immediately dampened my face and I was afraid to see what it would do to my new hair.

  “Yoohoo,” I called out. “Mr. Hinkle?”

  “Close the door! You’ll kill them.” He mumbled something else, but I couldn’t make out what it was. I assumed the person yelling at us was Mr. Hinkle, so we shuffled inside and closed the door.

  “Holy shit,” Phoebe whispered.

  I realized why she’d said it once I got a good look around. I’d never seen so many marijuana plants in one place before. Summer’s Eve Assisted Living had a hell of a crop. I pushed plants aside as I made my way to the back of the building.

  “Mr. Hinkle?”

  “You still here? You’re interruptin’ my work schedule.”

  The closer I got to the voice behind the plants the more I realized what kind of work Mr. Hinkle was doing. The smell of weed was so strong my eyes watered and I got a little light headed.

  Norman Hinkle was sitting on a stool, hidden behind his precious plants like a lazy jungle cat. He wore a plaid button down shirt in green and orange, a pair of khaki shorts, brown dress socks pulled up to his knees, and loafers. Round glasses were perched on his nose and they were fogged from the smoke of his joint. He was bald except for a fringe of wiry gray hair over his ears.

  “My name is Addison Holmes. Do you mind if we join you for a bit?”

  “It’s a free country. Pull up a stool.”

  There were old wooden crates against the wall and we each grabbed one and made a circle with Mr. Hinkle. My eyes widened as he passed the joint to Rosemarie. Her Shirley Temple curls looked like they’d been attacked by mutants and frizzed around her flushed face. She stared at the joint for a couple of seconds, shrugged, and then put it to her lips and inhaled. She immediately went into a fit of coughing and Hinkle pounded her on the back.

  “You gotta pace yourself, girl. This is the good stuff. You see this plant here?” We all turned as one and looked at the plant. Hinkle was touching the leaves like he’d caress a lover. It had purple blooms and sat in a ceramic pot that said Doris painted on the front.

  “This is purple haze. But sshhhh…it’s a myth. It’s supposed to be extinct, but I’m crafty like that. I’ve been cultivating this baby since 1969. Doris never fails me.”

  Rosemarie took another puff and passed the joint to Phoebe. I was having trouble remembering why I was even here. This was like my worst nightmare come to life. I’d never actually done marijuana before. I was always the girl at the parties everyone made fun of because I wouldn’t try it, but I figured I had enough problems stumbling through life without adding pharmaceuticals to the mix.

  “I’d like to ask you a little bit about your mother, Rose Hinkle,” I started.

  “Oh, yeah? She’s dead. Been dead for almost sixty years. Shot herself in the bathtub when my daddy ran off with her best friend. The realtor said she was real considerate because the cleanup was pretty simple. Took awhile to sell the house though because no one wanted to live in a place where a woman shot herself. I thought it gave it character.”

  Mr. Hinkle had obviously been spending way too much time with his plants. He talked about his mother’s suicide like he would a grocery list. Or maybe he was just too relaxed to care.

  “Umm…” I wasn’t quite sure what to say next, but Phoebe caught my attention. She took a quick puff and passed it on to me. Phoebe had never particularly cared for marijuana, but she was the girl who’d do just enough so everyone could see she fit in. Phoebe never got made fun of.

  I took the joint from her and stared at it. Then I looked up and met three stares. “I…umm…I had to quit. It makes me paranoid.” And then I passed it back to Hinkle. I mentally thunked myself in the head and rolled my eyes. It was high school all over again. And I pretty much hated high school.

  “Why do you want to know about my mama?” he asked.

  I told him about Doc Neeley and that there was a possibility his father wasn’t really his father. He seemed intrigued but not altogether surprised. When I told him about the money he agreed to take a DNA test to see if there was a paternity match with Mr. Tannenbaum.

  “You got any chips?” Rosemarie asked after another puff. Her makeup had wilted a bit and her mascara was smudged under her eyes.

  “Nope. They get stuck in my dentures. Besides, it’s about snack time. They got a real nice spread inside. Too bad y’all don’t live here. You could have a snack.”

  “I’m thinking about moving in,” Rosemarie said.

  “Let me know if you do. I’ll share my Slim Jims with you.”

  ***

  We shuffled back to the car, Rosemarie and Phoebe giggling the whole way. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I was the one paranoid that a cop was going to pop out and ask us what we’d been up to.

  “You know what we need?” Rosemarie said. “We need a snack time like they’ve got at SEAL. I’m pretty hungry. I’d like some nachos. Or maybe one of those chocolate dipped bananas with the sprinkles on top.”

  “Nachos sound pretty good,” Phoebe said. “It’d be even better with a margarita.”

  “Now you’re talkin’ my language.” Rosemarie and Phoebe booty-bumped and then got in the car.

  I drove us all to a Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of town that had low lighting and plastic tablecloths. The floor was sticky and it was probably best it wasn’t too easy to see, but they had the best salsa around and margaritas so strong it would kill any germs.

  “You gotta relax, Addison,” Rosemarie said, cramming tortilla chips in her mouth like it was her last meal.

  “I’ve been telling her that for years.” Phoebe sucked down her margarita and then ordered another. “She’s always afraid she’s going to get into trouble with the police. Pot is legal now, you know.”

  “Not in the state of Georgia,” I said. “You’ve been hanging with the west coast crowd too much.”

  “I sometimes forget that this place is like Mayberry.” She took another sip and looked a little forlorn. “This conversation is totally putting a damper on my high. Can we talk about something else now? Like root canals or pelvic exams?”

  “Maybe you should stay away from the pot,” I said. “It makes you a real Debbie Downer.”

  Big tears welled in Phoebe’s eyes. “I know,” she cried, slapping both hands over her face. “I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer.” She was sobbing in earnest now and other people were starting to look in our direction. “I want to be a Susie Sunshine. But I’m a criminal. I’ve been trying to be good and be more like you. And now I smoked pot in Mayberry and I’m going to go to jail.” Her voice had escalated to a high-pitched whine.

  “You’re not going to go to jail,” I said, starting to panic. I didn’t do well with tears.

  “Yeah, Addison’s not going to let you go to the
pokey,” Rosemarie said. “She’s got an in with them now that she’s sleeping with a grade A hunk of detective.”

  “We’re not sleeping together. Not exactly.”

  “Well, that’s your problem right there. No wonder you’ve got such a stick up your ass about doing a little recreational smoking.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, eyes narrowing. I was almost positive I didn’t care for a high Rosemarie. She was a mouthy broad.

  “I think you should do something dangerous and illegal so Nick has to arrest you. Then you can do it in the back of the police car. I saw a porno like that one time. Only it turns out the woman he arrested was really a transvestite and she had dangly bits under her skirt.”

  Phoebe had stopped crying and she and I were staring at Rosemarie with our mouths open.

  “I think maybe my Leroy might’ve spent some time in the big house. He seems to know a lot of things a more law abiding man wouldn’t.” Rosemarie got a faraway look in her eyes that had nothing to do with the pot and everything, I was afraid, to do with her sexual experience with Leroy.

  “How come no one told me you were dating a detective?” Phoebe asked.

  “We broke up. Besides, it’s complicated.”

  “The best things always are.”

  I paid the check with some of the money Nick had given me and left a generous tip considering the conversation our waiter had been privy too. He still looked shellshocked.

  “Please don’t take me back to Mom’s,” Phoebe said, before we got up to leave. “I can’t take another night like the one I had last night. She and Dad were never so…vigorous. It’s embarrassing.”

  I bit my lip and worried about putting Phoebe up in my house for a while. Johnny Sakko could use her to get to me. On the other hand, if it was me in Phoebe’s position, I’d take a chance on death just to not have to listen to my mom having sex in stereo. What I could do is ask Savage and the neighborhood watch to be more vigilant while she was there.

  “Okay, but you’re not going to have room to paint.”

  “That’s okay. Being back home has pretty much dried up my creative juices. I think I need an exorcist.”