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  They disappeared into the house. Minutes passed. No yelling. No screaming. No shooting. I heard a small, distant thump and shortly after that the front door opened. The guy cop stuck his head out.

  “Ms. Harper, could you and your friend come in?”

  He led us into the kitchen which was messed up, but not exponentially more messed up than usual. I was most interested in the cabinet doors which were all hanging open. I could still see the string peeking out from under its rubber stopper. I gave it a hasty, confirming glance, and congratulated myself on being a crafty ticket-hider.

  Our policeman did not offer any information. He had a folded piece of paper he was using to make some detailed notes to himself about our crime. The silence was heavy, awkward, and bewildering. Tom and I waited as patiently as we could. And then the other cop appeared in the kitchen door with a prisoner, hands cuffed behind her back. Looking royally pissed off.

  Margo.

  Margo?

  Undeniably Margo.

  Still disheveled and bruised from her earlier encounter with the now-dead dip-shit, exhibiting as much dignity as possible under trying circumstances, she appeared to be righteously enjoying herself.

  “Margo?”

  There were at least six or seven questions in my voice.

  Here’s a thing I was finding out that morning: Large sums of money drive everybody nuts, and furthermore, they breed suspicion like warm pond water breeds tadpoles. Before I could shut off the rush of bioelectricity through the synapses of my brain, I had ever so slightly suspected Margo of ransacking my—or actually her—house. And before I could ridicule my own electric rush with a firm This is Margo, you dope. Your best friend in your current world, she had seen the whole scenario unfold on my face.

  “Al…” She used her calmest Buddha tone. “You know I didn’t break into your house.”

  Damn you, Margo Intuition.

  “Margo.” I gave her back calm for calm. “I do. I do. I merely needed a couple of seconds to sort that out for myself. Things have been… but, hey, what were you doing here?”

  She forgave my unforgivable breach of our friendship with the beatific Margo Smile Of Absolution.

  “I was hiding.”

  This part made some sense to me.

  “I came over to wait for you so I could give you more advice.”

  I knew that part was true. This was my Margo, after all.

  “I saw the mess and went upstairs to make sure nobody was still here.”

  I opened my mouth to comment on how dumb that was and then shut it back. I, myself, had not been Stephen Hawking today.

  “And Al, listen, I gotta say, that bed. Those are some good vibrations.”

  For not the first time during this conversation, I steeled myself to ignore the presence of the officers of the law.

  “Margo, knock it off. Look around. Pay attention. Somebody actually broke in here. Keep explaining so these officers will understand you’re not a criminal and take the cuffs off you.”

  “Okay. So I heard the downstairs door open and I thought, ‘More robbers and killers.’ I guess that must have been the cops. But how was I supposed to know? So I snuck into the bathroom and closed the door. But it stuck. Well, to be honest, I was holding it closed because, if you’ll recall, I was expecting robbers and killers. So naturally, these…”

  She was clearly reviewing her impressive store of epithets.

  I held my breath.

  “These…people in blue…”

  I exhaled.

  “They kicked the door in. They must have mistaken me for a breaking-and-entering person holed up in your bathroom. So please, Al, tell them I’m not.”

  She smiled at me.

  I smiled back.

  Best friends again.

  Chapter Twelve

  A phone call back to Fifth District headquarters filled the officers in on a report from the police who’d visited Margo this morning. I vouched for her. Tom vouched for her in a surprisingly heartfelt manner, in spite of the fact they not known each other long. He even mentioned what a devoted gardener she was.

  I felt a little jealous.

  After the reports and our vouching, the cuffs came off. There were some moderately sincere apologies from the police and a gracious, “No worries. I’m sure I appeared quite dangerous…to you” from a vindicated and self-satisfied Margo.

  She left.

  A few minutes later, reinforcements, in the person of our own Officer Robert Clark—in his civvies—arrived to give us a hand. It was turning out to be a lovely, lovely post-breaking-and-entering-party.

  The crime scene investigation was more perfunctory than I’d been led to expect by primetime television. Nobody put down those yellow numbered tent thingies. I deduced that maybe it was because there were no shell casings, praise the lord. The officers looked the situation over and were polite. Told us to inventory anything that was missing and to come into the station and file a report about that.

  They found the point of entry, which was a window on the west side of the house. They dusted it for prints. That part was quite authentic. And messy. But there weren’t any on the window frame or its environs. Things had been wiped down. Like I figured, maybe smarter than your average dead dip-shit.

  After the cops had moved on in their cursory inspection, I saw, on the floor by the window, a scrap of fabric which I didn’t recognize as ripped anything-belonging-to-me. I presented it, with some pride, to the officers and suggested maybe my intruder had ripped it off himself when he came through the window.

  I guess the forensic ability to identify any garment and the owner of that garment from a quarter-size scrap of plaid is not as inevitable as it looks on TV. They shrugged and shook their heads and, in the absence of any high-tech instrumentation of my own, I stuck it up on the kitchen windowsill and walked away.

  In due course the regular cops left and Bob stayed. He’d asked us to call him Bob. He was off duty. He’d been headed to the grocery store when he heard the call come in over his personal scanner. He was driving his own car, a beat-up Camaro convertible, and in his jeans and periwinkle blue polo shirt, looked even younger, blonder, and more freshly scrubbed than he had in uniform.

  “It was nice of you to stop by, Officer…Bob.” We were sitting in the kitchen drinking some lemonade I’d made from concentrate after moving a few things back into place and hunting down three unbroken glasses. The intruder hadn’t been intentionally destructive, but he/she/they hadn’t been scrupulously careful either.

  I wasn’t freaking out the way I would have expected. I didn’t even feel violated like you’re supposed to. Maybe the reason was that there hadn’t been much damage to my house and nothing was missing as far as I could see. But mostly it was that my freak-out threshold was up about ninety percent over yesterday’s reading.

  “I felt like I had to follow up.” Bob drained his glass and then rose from his stool and put it the sink. Thoughtful guy. Or maybe he’d been trained by a very buttoned-up woman. I was never able to teach my former spouse to pick up a towel.

  “After you left, I realized we should have followed you home. You shouldn’t have been out on your own with everything that was going on. We went too much by the book. Not enough common sense.”

  “No, no. That’s okay. We were fine.” All things being equal, I was pleased they hadn’t come home with Tom and me. We did great on our own. I checked Tom’s expression, saw his thoughts overlapping with mine, and darted my eyes away so Bob wouldn’t catch both of us looking like that. “And don’t worry,” I added, “the ticket’s safe.”

  Bob brightened up. “Is it? That’s good. I went online and researched what you need to do. There’s a regional office over on Snowdon Road. You call them, sign the ticket, take it there, and fill out a form. I wrote down the phone number and address.

  “You sho
uld get rid of the ticket, Tom. Only stupid people would be after it now that everybody knows the winner is not just some unidentified black kid. But trust me, stupidity can be godawful dangerous. I’ve seen it myself. If you want to go right now, I’ll follow you in my car, make sure you get there safely. Then at least, you’ll get the money.”

  Tom had been listening intently to everything Bob was saying. I wondered if his blind spidey sense had been activated by Bob’s keen interest in the ticket, but he was nodding and looking grateful. Good. I felt pretty positive that Bob was on our side. I was thrilled that someone had given us the very information we’d been trying to get a handle on when assorted crimes had intervened. In fact, I felt happier than I had since the kissing-in-the-kitchen-before-breakfast episode, which seemed like a long time ago.

  After the lemonade, Bob and I walked around, checking to make sure things were locked up as tight as we could make them. We switched on some lights even though it was daylight, because by then we knew for sure Tom and I wouldn’t be coming back that night.

  I went upstairs and took one last long look at the bed in which I’d been so happy the night before as I changed into a freshly laundered version of the jeans I’d been wearing. Then I tossed some odds and ends into a gym bag.

  Hurray. And done. I pride myself on my extreme portability.

  My last official act before we left the house was to pry off the rubber plug and reel in the ticket from the inside of the door. The ticket roll wasn’t as easy coming out as going in. The round edge balked at the opening several times and I was afraid the thread was going to break and we’d have to take the door apart. Or, worse, the whole thing might rip into shreds too small to be reassembled.

  It didn’t help that Officer Bob was observing my efforts with a look on his face that could have been either consternation or hysterical laugh-suppression. His lips were compressed so that no clue of whatever emotion it was could slip out. I appreciated that.

  In the end the ticket slipped free. I pinched it with my fingers, pulled it through, untied and unrolled it.

  Here’s the deal. It is impossible to unroll an insignificant, beat up, nothing piece of paper and, like, get that it represents 550 million dollars. I read the numbers to Tom so we could reassure ourselves. The way things were going it would be worse now not to have won. We needed the money to get the vultures off our backs.

  But that was one thing that hadn’t changed since last night. 7-9-16-34-57-8. All in a row.

  I found Tom a pen and showed him where to sign. Then we called the number Bob had found for us and they were all, “Come on in.” So we went.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The lottery’s regional location on Snowdon Road was not the glittering pleasure palace one might have envisioned. The office occupied an unassuming, two-level building with the standard commercial entryway. Our off-duty police escort got out of his convertible, followed us all the way to the door and watched us go in before he left us.

  His parting words were, “Rent a car, Allie. Figure out how to get your friend Margo her Volvo without you going back there. Drive around for a while. Make sure you’re not followed. Stay in a hotel. Don’t tell anyone where you are. Not even me. I have your cell numbers. And you know how to reach me.”

  His stolid expression opened a crack, and a grin sneaked through. “Dial 9-1-1.”

  He put the top down and drove away, his blond brush cut gleaming in the sun. I imagined him announcing for his own benefit, “My work here is done.”

  We went in. No fanfare. No pearly gates. One of those security airlock things you buzz in and out of. That was it. Inside, the office exuded the atmosphere of a business where paperwork rules. The afternoon light was dusty yellow, filtered by Venetian blinds. Phones rang. Printers hissed. Keyboards clucked. No music played. It smelled like cleaning products and slow time.

  The lottery people were nice enough. Mostly they were middle-aged women. The glamour of working for an organization responsible for the disbursement of incredible amounts of money didn’t appear to have turned their heads.

  There was more than one form to fill out, of course, and scrupulous attention to correct forms of ID. All this reminded me that the lottery, in spite of the dazzle of its advertising, is government-regulated out the wazoo. Showing up to file for your millions had quite a lot in common with trying to get your driver’s license renewed.

  But not entirely. Mary, who handed us the forms and offered her congratulations, was visibly nervous. Her hands trembled as she showed us what to do. And I couldn’t miss how people were popping up like gophers and passing through in larger numbers than their daily routine might require. They were jockeying to get a glimpse of Tom, and they could feel free to stare as much as they wanted because he wasn’t staring back.

  I thought the odds were excellent—because the odds of anybody, anywhere, ever winning were so incredibly terrible—that they’d never had a MondoMegaJackpot winner through the door before today. I heard muffled exclamations, laughs, and whispers, and my tadpole pond of suspicion heated up. I speculated about what it would be like to be so close to Mondo money and yet pull down a civil service salary. I bet these folks got paid more than a part-time librarian—but not Mondo more. I pondered how much personal contact information about Tom was going into the forms and how a little careless access to that data might be disseminated rather indiscriminately under the right circumstances. Then I slapped myself—mentally of course—and stopped focusing on the predatory negative.

  Clearly, nobody who was sneaking glances in my direction knew what to make of me. “Gold digger” was the obvious conclusion. I wondered what they would say if they knew I’d met Thomas Bennington III, PhD, almost exactly twenty-four hours ago and had fallen into bed with him about five or six hours after he found out he’d won. “Gold digger slut.” That would be my guess. I didn’t care.

  I particularly didn’t care since, after the ticket had been submitted and verified and Tom had asked me to help him fill out all those forms and show him where to sign, and I’d helped him and showed him, and we’d handed back the forms, and all was approved, he leaned in close to me and whispered into my hair. “Ten million, Alice. My offer stands.”

  One thing was sure. We weren’t getting the money in time to pay for tonight’s hotel or anything that might go on there. Time would pass, quite a lot of time, before the check was presented. There was a protocol that needed to be followed. Legal stuff. Routine. And Tom needed to decide where he wanted to put it all, once he’d got it. He was going to walk away with a little bit more than 200 million dollars after taxes. No way the FDIC had a plan for insuring all that in one location.

  Under Ohio law he could claim his prize anonymously, but he’d “need to set up something called—” Mary paused in her explanations, and her neck got all red and splotchy, while she struggled with the unfortunate, embarrassing but intractable, phrase: “a blind trust.”

  For that he’d need a lawyer. Or two. There was more to be done before we could grab Rune and Margo and fly off to Tahiti. But for now, we’d handled what we could. We bade goodbye to Mary, and Tom charmed her by reaching out for her hand, which she gave him readily, and remarking on how helpful she’d been. He told her he bet she’d never had to say “blind trust” to a blind person before and that she’d been wonderfully tactful. They shared a lovely chuckle about that and she splotched up again but in a good way.

  When we departed the lottery fortress, it was after five o’clock and the staff was leaving, too, their hungry glances stalking Tom and me as we made our way to the car. The sun had hidden itself behind a bank of threatening clouds, but the afternoon was hot and thick with not the slightest whisper of a breeze.

  The Volvo was a bake-off. I put the windows down and the air conditioning on. Between the two actions, we survived the drive to the rental car place. It was one of those that is set up to bring a car to your house, s
o I paid them extra to take Margo back her own car. That wasn’t the usual way but they were service-oriented, flexible, and proud of it. The flexibility came as a relief after our sojourn at the Lottery/BMV.

  I drove our silver Nissan Maxima slowly and carefully from the rental lot to the Marriott Hotel in the Key Tower in downtown Cleveland. We were way beyond settling for economy lodging—a La Quinta or a Days Inn—either of which would have been perfectly acceptable for either of us the day before.

  We required a hotel with a serious lobby and people paying at least cursory attention to who came and who went. A decent restaurant within its sturdy walls would be a bonus. Moreover, Tom was approaching a moment when money was no longer going to be an object ever, ever again. And I was with Tom. Big time. Those factors in combination made the selection of the fanciest Marriott within a hundred miles our most efficient choice.

  I admit I was looking forward to a nice hotel. I liked fancy. I wasn’t sorry I’d walked away from all that and the lying rat who went with it, but I still had fond memories of the upscale world.

  So why was I feeling so unthrilled, heading downtown to the Marriott at Key Center with Associate Professor Mondo Fabulous? Well, probably because the Number One thing I was feeling was scared. So scared I was choking the steering wheel of our rental car with both my sweaty hands.

  I kept hearing Margo saying, “They’re all dead.” Three actual guys—one of whom I’d more or less met. All dead, and probably at the ME’s right now, covered up with sheets in a chilly gray room.

  I was checking behind us. And around us. And in front. The more I checked the more sinister vehicles and scary people I found. I could see I’d had minimal training in distinguishing ordinary Clevelanders from axe murderers. I was going to have to get a crash course in that one.

  There was a spot in the center of my chest, close to my heart, that was jumping and cringing like it wanted to get out and run some place safer. I freed up a sweaty hand and pressed on it. Hard.