Sassafras, Part 11


Rick

I was off work on Thursday, so I went in to the cop shop to see what happened when Joan came in. She was better looking than I thought she would be. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that her driver’s license picture was a piece of shit. Even if I had never seen her picture I would have known it was her. She stood out like a dime in a handful of pennies. Her hair was pinned up and she was wearing a dark burgundy knee length wool coat, and glossy black high heels. When she took her coat off I could see a dark charcoal dress, made out of some soft fabric, cashmere or something, that flowed down her body like smoke. No woman in Sassafras dressed like that. I couldn’t stop staring at her, like I had never seen a woman before.

She was only in there about 10 minutes talking to Sneider. When she sat down besides Sneider’s desk I saw her run her hands down the back of her skirt, smoothing out any wrinkles in the fabric, accentuating every curve. I don’t think she had any idea how seductive that was. When she left I decided to follow her. Even if I hadn’t wanted to find out more about her sister I would have wanted to follow her. She went to the restaurant her sister worked at and met a redheaded woman with two kids. They must have been old friends from school. I was able to sit at the booth next to them and listened to them talking. Her name was Deana, but I never caught her last name.

I kept wondering what connection there was between Jenny and Sneider. He was definitely worried about her sister coming to town, but I didn't know why. I wish I knew who he called last night after talking to her on the phone. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I played enough poker to be able to tell when somebody was nervous. Did she really die in an accident? Would Sneider kill to keep his goose laying it's golden eggs? He seemed like a weasel and a real prick, but I never got the impression that he was a killer.

I thought of all the money he was raking in. I would go to the police station in the evening once or twice a week after getting off at the factory and there would be a lunch bag full of money in a desk drawer. He never said where it came from, and I hadn’t been able to find out. I couldn’t even prove he put it there. I sent a couple of the bags to Boyd, but they never had any fingerprints on them except mine. I don’t know what he had been doing with the money before I got there. Maybe he had been just spending it, or hiding it under his mattress or something.

When I started working for him I explained the money was like frosting. Everybody noticed a great big pile of it, but nobody would notice if you spread it around. They needed some cake, a front operation, some legitimate businesses that I could funnel the money into. Now he and his flunkies were owners of a bar called Tanner’s, a car wash, a little Mexican restaurant named Peso’s, and the local taxi company. I would divide the money in the bag and add it to the books for the different companies, spreading it out over time. It just looked like all four businesses were making a nice profit, even though the taxi company really didn’t make any money and the Mexican restaurant wouldn’t be able to pay it’s bills without the infusion of cash I gave it. Only Tanner’s and the car wash were actually making money legitimately.

While Joan and Deana were talking I noticed McDaniels, one of the local cops, sitting with a county cop in the booth on the other side of them. I didn't recognize the county cop, and didn't want to get close enough to him to read his nametag. I didn't want McDaniels to notice me so I laid low. When the cops left Deana started telling Joan about Sneider’s shady past in St. Louis, when her boy, about three or four, started pulling my hair. I didn’t know anybody in town knew that much about Sneider, but she didn’t even know half of it. All she knew about was the excessive force and tampering with evidence, but Boyd showed me Sneider’s file from St. Louis. They suspected him of taking payoffs even back in St. Louis but couldn’t ever prove anything. There were also a couple of witnesses against a gang leader that came up missing when he was supposed to be protecting them, but once again, nobody could prove anything. Personally, I didn’t think he killed them, but I could see him encouraging them to leave town and enjoying it.

After Joan left I followed her to the funeral home, but couldn’t think of any reason to go inside so I just sat in my car waiting for her. She was driving her sister's car, an old Nissan Sentra, and I noticed a lot of damage to the front end. It almost looked like it had been in an accident. I was going to have to check into that. When she left the funeral home she went to Wal-Mart. I paused as I walked past her car and wrote down the vehicle identification number off the dashboard to run it through the computer later. I was able to follow her around without her noticing me. She bought a couple of things, a coffee maker, some coffee, bagels and frozen dinners.

Her only other stop was the bank. I waited a couple of minutes before I followed her inside. I stood at the little counter in the middle of the lobby filling out a withdrawal slip, and watched her. She was talking to the teller, her coat folded over her arm, asking questions about her sister’s accounts, but not getting anywhere. The teller wouldn’t show her anything about Jenny’s checking or savings account. Joan asked if there was anyone there who could help her, and the teller pointed to a man sitting at a desk across the room.

I watched her walk across the room, waiting to see her sit down again, and I wasn’t disappointed. Just watching her walk across the lobby, her high heels clicking on the tile, was enough to distract me from the withdrawal slip I was filling out. She draped her coat over the back of the chair, then smoothed out her skirt again before sitting down. They shook hands and started talking, but they were too far away for me to hear what they said. I saw him shake his head a couple of times and shrug. Joan just sat there tapping her fingers on the armrest of her chair. While I was getting my money from the teller Joan stood up and put her coat on. I turned around just in time to see her walk out the door.

She just went home after that, so I went to my apartment. Like I said, my apartment was a real shit hole. It used to be the Monte Vista Motel, but it had been converted to efficiency apartments. My ‘apartment’ wasn’t much bigger than my cell in prison, but at least I wasn’t sharing it with three other men. I had never appreciated life’s simple joys, like being able to leave food laying around and knowing it would still be there when I got back, or getting dressed without feeling like people were staring at me. And baths. A little tiny swimming pool for one, the water so hot I could barely stand it. Life was good.

I pulled out my laptop and looked up the number from Jenny’s car, but there wasn’t any information about an accident. I wondered how long that car had been like that. It could have been months for all I could tell. The tape didn’t look very old, but it hadn’t rained much lately so it could have been there for quite a while.