She shrugged, setting Shorty down on my newly mopped floor. "Better than a poke in the eye with a short stick, I reckon," she said.
I decided to take it as a compliment.
She stood there, her hands on her hips now, waiting.
"You coming, or what?" she said finally.
"Coming?"
"The nursing home," she said. "You said you'd tote the books over there. I'll show you where it's at. Then, I need to get some things at the Piggly Wiggly. Need to get my heart medicine pills refilled at the drugstore. And I need to go to the bank too."
"Oh," I said weakly. I had promised to take the books for her. I went in search of my purse and the keys to the Catfish. Score one for Ella Kate.
18.
Thursday dawned so bright and sunny it almost made me forget the wet gloom of the previous day. I walked around the downstairs rooms, coffee cup in hand, trying to decide where to start the day's work.
I'd had a serious money talk with Mitch the night before. "The roof is probably shot," I told him. "And the kitchen is positively prehistoric. If there's heat in the house, I can't tell. We need to come up with a budget before I get in too deep down here."
"Damn," Mitch said. "Hang on." Over the phone I could hear the tapping of keys. A calculator. "Damn," he said again. "What about the plumbing?"
"The toilets flush," I reported. "But there's barely enough water pressure to rinse out a glass."
"Old pipes," he said. More tapping. "Damn."
"Eighty thousand," he said finally. "That's it. As it is, I'll have to move some money around, make up some story for Pilar about why we can't buy a new car this spring. Eighty thousand, Dempsey. I mean it. Not a penny more."
I had no idea how far eighty thousand dollars would go. But I had a strong idea that it wouldn't go nearly far enough, and that I'd need to invest plenty of my own sweat equity in the project at hand. Right now, the parlor's peeling wallpaper seemed to be calling my name. I cleared some porcelain doodads off the mantel and set my cup down. One firm tug brought a whole sheet of the paper gratifyingly-and cleanly-off the wall. Fine flakes of plaster rained down on Norbert's borrowed sneakers.
With a fingernail, I pried up the edge of another strip of the paper, but no more. "Come on," I muttered, moving on to the next strip, whose edge seemed to be glued securely.
Somewhere, in all those magazine articles that made home renovation seem as charming and effortless as a summer picnic, I remembered reading a how-to article about wallpaper. Something about soaking the old paper off with some kind of chemical solvent.
I went to the kitchen to survey my arsenal of cleaning products. Window cleaner in a spray bottle. Pine-Sol. Furniture polish. A squirt bottle of concentrated tile cleaner. Bleach. Green-apple-scented dish detergent. Scouring powder. Surely, one of these would do the trick. I dumped half a cup of the Pine-Sol in a plastic bucket and filled it halfway up with hot water. Then I carried everything back to the parlor. I spritzed the window cleaner on the edge of the wallpaper and waited a moment, to give the ammonia time to work its magic.
I blinked back tears from the fumes, then attacked the paper with my fingernail. The top layer dissolved into a gooey mess, leaving behind a stubborn layer of yellow backing, clinging tenaciously to the plaster.
Okay, no window cleaner. I dipped a sponge into the bucket of water, sprinkled it with scouring powder, and scrubbed hard on the backing. I managed to rub my fingertips raw, but the backing stayed intact.
Pine-Sol? I dunked the sponge in the soapy, pine-scented water, and dabbed it on the same patch of wallpaper.
A shrill ring echoed from the hallway, startling me so much that I dropped the soapy sponge on the floor. Brrinnnnggg. It sounded like an old-fashioned bicycle bell. For a moment I thought it might be a telephone. But the ring was coming from the hallway.
Brrinnnggg. I trotted out to the hall, and could see, through the now squeaky-clean glass in the door, that the ringing was coming from the doorbell, which was being rung by a man.
I opened the door. My visitor was an older black gentleman, medium height, trim build. His hair was hidden under a red ball cap, but his thin mustache was graying, and he wore thick-lensed eyeglasses. He was dressed in work clothes, but not like any work clothes I'd ever seen before. His pale blue denim shirt was pressed, and livesey contracting was embroidered in red over the shirt pocket. His blue jeans were spotless, knife creased, and his work boots had a dull polish.
"Hello?" I said cautiously.
"Hello. I'm looking for Miss Dempsey?" he said, glancing down at the clipboard he held in his right hand.
"Yes," I said, wiping my own hand on the seat of Norbert's overalls. "That's me."
He eyed me quizzically. In baggy overalls worn over a faded Redskins jersey, my hair held off my face with Norbert's oversize handkerchief, I probably didn't look like Miss anything. "You're the Miss Dempsey called lookin' to have some work done on your house? Roofing, like that?"
"Yes," I repeated. "I'm Dempsey Killebrew. I'm the one who called you."
"Ohhh," he said slowly. "Killebrew?"
"Dempsey Killebrew. I live here."
"That so?" He tugged at the bill of his cap, and looked around the porch, then back at me. "I was thinking Mr. Norbert's family still owned the house. You the new owner?"
"It's confusing," I said, with a laugh. "My father is the new owner. Mitch Killebrew. Norbert Dempsey was his great-uncle. My father's mother was Olivia Dempsey Killebrew. I'm named Dempsey for her."
"Ohh," he said again. "So, your daddy's people were Dempseys?"
"On his mother's side."
A slow smile spread over his face. "All right then. Now I gotcha." He stuck his hand out. "Bobby Livesey. Livesey Contracting. You called about needing some work done? How can I help you?"
It took most of an hour to show Bobby Livesey everything that was wrong with Birdsong. We started with the attic, and worked our way all the way down to the cellar. Along the way, Bobby poked and prodded. He tapped the old walls with his knuckles, like a surgeon sizing up the patient's chest. He dug a penknife into the ceiling beams, shone a flashlight into the crawl space. He clucked and made notes with a small silver mechanical pencil in tiny block letters on his clipboard.
Along the way, I gave him an abbreviated explanation of how Mitch had inherited Birdsong from his great-uncle Norbert. I explained that we wanted to fix the house up and flip it.
"Flip?" He frowned.
"You know. Fix it up. Make the repairs so it can be sold for way more than the ninety-eight thousand the county says it's worth. Invest a little money, sell it, and make a nice profit."
He nodded gravely, made a note on his clipboard, and we moved along with the tour.
"Well?" I said when we'd arrived back in the hallway. "What do you think? Can the patient be saved? Or should we just pull the plug and start all over again?"
"What? This old house? This here is a fine old building."
"You're going to tell me they don't make 'em like this anymore?" I kidded.
"No, ma'am," he said soberly, not taking the bait. "They sure don't. This house is a rock. Solid, through and through. Your roof needs work. And yeah, the wiring's about sixty years out of code. But that ain't nothing. You should see some of these sorry new houses I work on around town. Brand-new houses, I'm talking about three hundred, four hundred thousand, they're sellin' for. Ain't a single plumb wall in the place, skinny old wallboard no thicker than a sheet of paper, all of it held together with a caulk gun and a promise."
He thumped the thick molding of the doorway with his knuckles, smiling, as though he'd picked out a perfectly ripe melon. "This house here is a beauty. One of a kind. You just need to shine her up a little, show her some love."
"You can do all that?" I asked. "A new roof, wiring, fix the plaster?"
"Oh yeah," he drawled. "We can do it. That ain't no problem."
"But how much? I'm on a tight budget," I explained. "And I don't need it all to be perfect. It just has to look good enough to sell."
He looked down at his clipboard, and then back up at me. Bobby Livesey was a taciturn man, courtly as only a Southern man of a certain age can be. But his large brown eyes gave him away.
"Just good enough? If that's all you want, you might oughtta get somebody else," he said finally. "I ain't ever studied doing something halfway. Ain't going to now."
I felt a swift pang of regret at disappointing him. "Halfway, no, I don't want you to do it halfway. I just meant, well, money's tight. We'll have to make every dollar count. And I'm willing to do some of the labor. I want to, in fact."
He looked me up and down, took one of my hands and turned it palm side down. The skin was reddened from the cleaners I'd been using, but my French manicure was a dead giveaway.
"What did you say you did, before moving down here?"
"I'm a lawyer by training," I said. "But I worked as a lobbyist. In Washington."
He blinked. "A lawyer, huh? You studying on doing lawyering here in Guthrie?"
I laughed. "No. I'm studying on fixing up this old wreck. And I'm thinking you're the man who can show me how to do that."
The doorbell rang again. Brrinnnggg. Briinnggg. Briinggg. Whoever was at the door wasn't nearly as patient as Bobby Livesey had been.
"I better get that," I said. "There's a pot of coffee made out in the kitchen. Maybe you could fix yourself a cup and come up with some kind of ballpark estimate on what the roof will cost? And the wiring?"
"Sure," he said. "That ain't no problem."
19.
This time my visitor was female. She was a fair-skinned young black woman, in her midtwenties, I guessed, with reddish corkscrew curls held back by a tortoiseshell headband, dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and snug-fitting black slacks and high-heeled black boots. She had stepped away from the door, and was looking around the porch with frank curiosity when I opened the door.
"Yes?"
"Hi," she said, smiling widely. "I'm looking for Dempsey Killebrew?" Her right nostril was pierced with a tiny silver ring, and the freckles sprinkled over her nose and cheeks looked like bits of black pepper.
I stepped out onto the porch. "You've found her," I said. "What can I do for you?"
Now I noticed a dark green Ford Focus parked at the curb in front of the house. A casually dressed man with shoulder-length blond hair sat on the hood of the car, holding a long-lensed camera pointed at the house.
The woman nodded at him, and he started shooting, stepping away from the curb and onto the yard.
"Who are you?" I asked, taking a step backward into the house, halfway closing the door to shield myself from the camera. "What do you want? I haven't given anybody permission to take pictures of my house."
She wheeled around. "Greg," she hollered. "Cool it." He lowered the camera to his side, but didn't move off the property.
"Sorry," she said, smiling apologetically. "I'm Shalani Byers. With the Post."
"The Post?" I said dumbly. "I thought the Guthrie paper was the Citizen-Advocate."
"The Washington Post," she said, handing me a business card. "I'm a reporter. I was wondering if we could talk?"
My hands went cold, and I could feel my face reddening. "What would the Washington Post want to talk to me about, clear down in Guthrie, Georgia?"
"Aren't you the Dempsey Killebrew who works for Hodder and Associates?" she asked.
"Worked. Past tense," I snapped, closing the door another four inches. "I don't have anything to say to the Post."
"No comment?" she said, her pen poised above a notepad.
"'No comment' is for criminals," I said. "I'm not a criminal. I'm just a private citizen. I don't mean to be rude, but I'd appreciate it if you'd leave now. And," I said, peeking out at the photographer, who was snapping away again, "tell your friend to get off my property and stop taking my picture."
"All right," she said, scribbling away. "But if I were you, I'd want to talk to me."
"I sincerely doubt that," I told her.
"Don't you even want to know why my paper sent me all the way down here?"
"No." I closed the door and started to walk away.
"Alex Hodder has been talking to a federal grand jury," she called. "Our sources say he's claiming that an unnamed junior associate, acting completely on her own, hired those two prostitutes on Lyford Cay, to service Representative Licata."
"What?" I yanked the door open. Now the photographer was on the porch, snapping away again. I slammed the door shut.
"Off!" I hollered. "Get the hell off my porch."
"Hodder gave the grand jury the credit card receipts from your company-issued American Express card." The girl's voice was muffled. The door was a solid two inches thick. Like the rest of Birdsong, it was, as Bobby Livesey had said, rock solid.
"Your signature is on the receipts. Did your boss tell you he was doing that?"
"She was a wakeboard instructor," I cried.
"Named Mahogany Foxx. With two x's? Working for a company called the Pleasure Chest?" I heard the photographer snicker.
I pressed my face against the worn paint of the door. It was cool to the touch, and still smelled of the soap I'd scrubbed it down with the day before. It smelled so clean, but suddenly, I felt so, so dirty.
I was a lawyer, for God's sake. I knew better, but I couldn't help myself. "I was given a phone number to call. A woman answered and I told her Mr. Licata wanted to book a session. She never told me her name, or the name of the company she worked for. I never met her. I never laid eyes on her."
"Miss Mahogany Foxx must be riding something else besides wake-boards for four thousand dollars," Shalani Byers said. "Did you know that's how much your credit card was billed?"
I'd had my company-issued AmEx for six months. It was silly, but I'd been nearly giddy the day Alex called me into his office and handed me my own American Express gold card. "Keep it quiet," Alex had said, pressing it into my hand. "The other associates don't have company credit cards. Just you."