Reggie turned away from an old guy to look up. Slither-sucking his cigar from the right to the left side of his thick lips, he shook his head.
“Why not, Reg?”
“I ain’t paying you to think, Jerzy,” he yelled up. “I’m paying you to do. The boots go on the tables. And Jerzy?”
“Yeah, Reg?”
“First, find a men’s size eleven for my friend the detective, here.”
“I wear a size nine,” Reggie’s friend the detective called up.
“Eleven, Jerzy; they’re running a little small,” Reggie shouted, slither-sucking his cigar back to its rightful right-hand side.
Jerzy busted the tapes on the boxes, making his arms windmills, pushing through the stinky boots. Reggie liked to see hustle, always the hustle. He found a men’s eleven and ran them down.
THE KID POUNDING down the stairs like the roof was on fire wasn’t really a kid, Edrow realized. He was a big, hulking young man in his late twenties. But he had a kid’s expectant look on his face, like a beagle’s, waiting for a coo and a scratch. The fat guy ignored it, grabbed the boots, and handed them to Edrow with a slight bow, like he was presenting Cinderella’s slippers. The young man’s face fell. He should have learned by now, Edrow thought. Thanks were hens’ teeth, especially in this turdweasel town.
“Your size and color, sir,” the fat man said, making a joke.
Edrow made his own joke. Glancing up at the fans whirling overhead, he gave the boots a long sniff to let the fat guy know he wasn’t being fooled by the tornado blowing through the store. The boots stank, but they’d be dry. Edrow handed the bandit one of the two fifties he kept hidden in his wallet.
“Call it eight even.” The fat man smiled around his limp cigar, a big shot giving away a few pennies of the state’s sales tax. He put the fifty in his right pants pocket, already bulging, made the change, two twenties, two singles, out of his left. It wasn’t Edrow’s concern if the bandit never rang the register; Edrow wasn’t the Illinois Department of Revenue, chasing sales-tax cheats. It was a turdweasel town.
Edrow turned to push through the babushkas.
“Spell me for a minute, Jerzy,” Edrow heard the fat man say behind him. “I gotta make a pit stop.”
Outside, Detective Edrow Fluett stopped to look through the window. Jerzy was pulling a big carton through a swarm of old women. Farther back, the fat man was pulling himself up the stairs by the handrail like he was dragging cement. It was painful, watching him. He must have weighed four hundred pounds.
REGGIE NORMALLY WAITED until the end of the day for the pit stop, so as not to make the climb twice, but as the older man started pulling himself up the stairs, Jerzy saw that his pants pockets were already packed solid. Lots of babushkas that morning, buying two, three pairs of boots. That meant lots of fifties. Reggie thought Jerzy was too stupid to know about the hidey- place under the chair mat. But Jerzy was the one who mopped the floor. And Jerzy was the one who brought the deposits to the bank, deposits that never had fifties. Jerzy knew. He just never said anything.
Fifteen minutes later, the toilet flushed, which could have been just for fooling, and Reggie thumped down the stairs, for sure his pockets, and maybe his body, emptied. Jerzy ran back up, in a hurry to wash the stink of fire off his hands.
But as he crossed the storeroom, he saw that Reggie’s chair mat was bumped up in the middle. Reggie hadn’t put the floorboard back right.
Jerzy stopped, but kept clumping his feet on the floor. Even above the babushkas, a part of Reggie would be listening to make sure Jerzy was being purposeful, crossing the floor to get right back to work. Jerzy thought about fixing the board, but maybe Reggie had left it that way as a test to find out if Jerzy knew about the hidey-place. Best to leave it alone, he decided, and clumped to the bathroom to wash his hands.
At his desk, he kicked off his shoes and tried again to work on the sales-tax form. It didn’t require much, just recopying the numbers Reggie had already penciled on a photocopy, then signing “Jerzy Wosnowski, President” on it. It was capital B Boring, copying all those numbers, and it took forever. Jerzy once asked, since Reggie always did the calculations to begin with, why he didn’t just sign the form himself instead of making Jerzy recopy everything. “You’re the president, Jerzy. You have to sign the official documents,” Reggie had said, and that had made Jerzy feel good, being trusted to sign important documents.
But that snowy, gray afternoon, feeling good about responsibilities wasn’t enough to stop the boring, and Jerzy’s eyes kept wanting to look at that bump in the chair mat. What if Reggie hadn’t left the board cocked up on purpose? He’d think Jerzy was being a nosy neighbor. Reggie hated nosy neighbors.
Jerzy had never really wondered what was in the hidey-hole, figuring it was only a day or two’s worth of the fifties Reggie grabbed before they hit the cash register. And, for sure, Jerzy had never thought seriously of looking. Reggie had the ears of a cat. He could hear from downstairs whenever Jerzy crossed the room, moving inventory or going to the can.
Except on a day like today, when there was too much racket from the babushkas.
Jerzy stared at the bump in the mat and decided it wasn’t obvious enough to be a trap. Reggie had just been in too much of a hurry. Best to leave it alone.
Except when Reggie came up after they closed the store for desk time – that’s what Reggie called it, “desk time” – he would see the board sticking up and would think Jerzy had been snooping.
Jerzy crossed the floor in his socks, careful to stay off the squeaky boards. Downstairs, the babushkas shouted, the cash register rang, and Reggie hummed.
Jerzy moved the chair, then the mat, and got down on his knees. For a minute, he paused. He had to lift the secret board anyway, to put it right. It wouldn’t be snooping, just glancing.
He pulled up the board. And stopped his breath.
The space between the joists was crammed with bundles of money, each an inch thick. He pulled one out. They were fifties, rubber-banded together. Jerzy counted the bills. Two hundred. He made the numbers on his fingers. Each bundle contained ten thousand dollars. There were twenty-six bundles jammed in the narrow place. Two hundred sixty thousand dollars. Jeez Louise. He put the bundle back. He didn’t want to know about that much money.
But as he reached to set the floorboard back, he saw the two white envelopes scrunched next to the money. The closest one was addressed to Jerzy and was from the State of Illinois Department of Revenue. He picked it up, took out the letter inside. It was dated two weeks before and said “Third Notice” in scary dark letters, followed by a bunch of words about an audit of sales-tax returns, discrepancies, and liability for prosecution. “Discrepancies,” “prosecution”… the words beat loud around him, like he was inside a dinosaur heart. They were bad words.
He reached for the second envelope. Thank God this one was not from the State of Illinois. It was blank except for his first name written in pencil. There was something about the handwriting…
Then he knew. His hands shook as he pulled out the slip of notepaper.
“Dear Jerzy,” Agnes wrote. “I’m not going to call the store anymore. Reggie always tells me you’ll call back, but you never do. So for the last time, come with me to technical college in Milwaukee. My aunt says you can live in her house too. You have to be brave. Agnes.”
He dropped the letter, squeezed his goofity hands together to make them stop shaking. She must have left it with Reggie just before she went to Milwaukee, ten months ago. About a month before she’d been killed by a bus.
Reggie, you son of a bitch.
IN THE CAR, outside the courthouse, Detective Edrow Fluett held his stocking feet under the heater vent for a blessed last few minutes. On the floor next to him, the blistered tan leather on his lightbulb-store shoes looked like butterscotch pudding, bubbling and puckering in midboil. He pulled on his new boots. The vinyl was rigid and didn’t want to bend. But the boots were dry.