day. Only the manager and the assistant manager carried keys, Ralph Bauer, the manager, told Phelan. Yes, they kept the keys with them at all times. Headquarters was planning on adding more security, fancier cameras and monitors, but the manager had seen one of Phelan’s ads in the Enterprise, and he thought maybe they could fix the problem before the company went to that expense.
“Be real good if the problem got fixed fast,” he said.
Ralph wanted it fixed on his watch, get a backslap and a head-rub from the company. Phelan understood that.
“Our current schedule’s pretty busy, Mr. Bauer.”
“Aw, now.” The man pushed out a heavy breath. “I was hoping for quick.”
“OK, I tell you what. We’re waiting on some records, so I could work you in right now.”
Silence. Then, a happier tone. “Hold on, lemme go check on something—”
Bellas Hess’s manager came back on the line to report that, all right, the job could be started this afternoon. He was at the store right now in case Phelan wanted to see the lay of the land, so to speak.
Phelan’d been in Bellas Hess before. The land lay flat like every other big store he knew, a concrete plain broken up into corrals, each with a cash register and a minimum-wage captive. 1973’s hourly ran to $1.60, been stuck there five or six years.
“Six p.m. is fine, Mr. Bauer,” Phelan told him. Now he’d have a while to dream up the plan. He hung up, lit a cigarette, and plotted out the next few days. Then closed his eyes.
Two jobs going, and the first was, if not a piece of sponge cake, then simple—an earnest, stuffy old guy looking to be reunited with his slippery brother.
And Delpha was back. She was back.
Though he had almost lost her again on the very day she returned.
An hour after Bell’s departure, the mail slot had clinked, and a couple of letters had dropped onto the floor. With a light step, he went and scooped up the two envelopes.
One white and windowed, one an unbroken expanse of luscious French vanilla. When Delpha’s hand closed on them, Phelan had recalled that the mail was her job. He let go, then scanned the return addresses.
Gulf States Utilities. Griffin and Kretchmer, Attorneys at Law.
“Pay ’em both out of the account,” he said.
“No sir. I’ll pay this one.” Meaning Griffin and Kretchmer. Which would be Miles’ bill.
He looked at her. “You’re not calling me sir?”
Without moving, Delpha seemed to resettle herself on her feet. “Didn’t mean to sir you. I just meant that I really meant this bill was mine. Mr. Blankenship worked for me. I owe him.”
“I called him. This was a contract between me and Miles.”
“Contract is lawyer and defendant. Ask a judge.”
“Defend—you weren’t a defendant. You weren’t even arrested. He’s my friend, Delpha.”
“He was my lawyer.”
“My name on the envelope and—” Phelan covered her hand with his right one and slid the envelope away with the left. He tore it open and displayed the letter. “My name on the bill.”
Uh oh, she rose to her full five foot six, her slender neck elongated and her chin curved down.
“We both know his time went for me.”
“And we both know you were working for Phelan Investigations when it happened. But listen, aren’t you…are you on the hook for a hospital bill, too?”
Her face went blank. “Joe Ford sent the hospital’s Indigent Fund my parole papers. Now I get that he thought he was doing me a favor, and truth is he did. But he coulda asked.”
She walked over to her desk, pulled open a drawer, and came back thumbing the pages of her miniature dictionary with the red plastic cover. Peering into it.
“First time I didn’t have a lawyer because I was indigent. Wasn’t no law then said I had to have one. Fact, there was a law said I didn’t have any right to one. And you know what happened.”
He nodded.
“‘Indigent,’ that isn’t…the sign I wanna keep dragging around.”
Phelan was beginning to feel like dog food.
She flipped the tiny pages around to him.
“See there? ‘Indigent’ means ‘deficient in what is requisite.’ And ‘requisite,’ if you look that one up—and I did—it means ‘whatever is called for.’ Isn’t that some word? Requisite. Whatever’s necessary. So ‘indigent’ means whatever it takes, you don’t have it. People don’t like people that are indigent, Tom. They think they can catch it.”
Phelan surrendered the vanilla envelope. Lips pressed, he glanced over at her determined face and downward, to where the miniature dictionary blurted its judgmental words. He was not seeing it that way at all. Phelan’s hand had fallen on her shoulder and, well, held it. A verification—on his part anyway—that on the day Deeterman came at her what was requisite was the blindest kind of will, and she had had that, and she was here now in one piece.
But her shoulder had tightened, and he had let go.
IX
DELPHA DROVE AWAY from Kirk Properties. She turned into an abandoned parking lot and sat, thinking about Aileen, balancing what she didn’t understand against what she did: Aileen Kirk against Dolly Honeysett.
Dolly was eighteen when she came in, like Delpha, and not full of rage as Delpha had been, but full of guilt. She had answered her mother’s screams for help by swinging a loaded kerosene heater at the back of her step-father’s neck. If he’d been making off with his wife’s purse or Pontiac, Dolly could have walked—by using deadly force to protect property. If she’d swung with less fright, if she’d just conked him, she’d have been sent home with her mother. But the man was only beating on his wife, not stealing from her, and in court the mother recanted. Why, she’d never urged her daughter to burn George with the heater, she was a loyal wife, you ask any of her neighbors. George, he’d a been sorry later, bless his heart, he always was sorry. She certainly didn’t mean for Dolly to set fire to him like she did…
The Defense leapt howling onto his polished Florsheims and tried to sandbag her with her Grand Jury testimony, but the sobbing witness overran him like a hard rain overruns a ditch. The defendant sat stricken, her wide mouth downturned. Once the judge banished the sodden mother from the stand, the State of Texas went to town on Dolly.
Or that was the story.
Aileen Kirk looked nothing like Dolly Honeysett. Inside prison, Dolly’s white, five foot one, pudgy body faded behind other inmates’. She occupied no fixed spot in the chow hall, only nomadic outposts on the peripheries. Her upper lip was long, her nose a small knob high above it. Her
