House of the Rising Sun

CHAPTER THIRTY

The next morning, Ray was up early. He stuffed himself at the all-you-can-eat breakfast bar in the hotel restaurant. After that he went back to his room and called Jenny. Still no answer.

He decided to take a walk.

It was ten blocks to Jenny’s apartment. He tried to come up with something to say to her. Some kind of apology. It didn’t matter. Her car wasn’t there.

He remembered what she had said about wanting to go back to California. He leaned on the buzzer outside the main door to the building for a good thirty seconds. A third-floor window jerked open and a young guy with long hair stuck his head out. “Knock that shit off!”

Ray didn’t recognize him. He bit back his first response, waved up at the guy, and said, “Sorry.” Then he walked away.

Back in his room at the Doubletree, the red message light on the telephone was blinking. He had not told anyone where he was staying. He picked up the phone. On the hotel’s voice mail system was a recorded message telling him to call the front desk for an urgent message. With a growing sense of dread, he dialed the front desk. The girl who answered wanted to know if he would be staying another night.

Ray told her he would be staying at least one more night. He was enjoying spending someone else’s money. Since he was using cash, he had to pay up front. He pulled the garbage bag out from the closet, grabbed two hundred bucks, then wandered toward the lobby. On the way out of his room he double-checked that the do-not-disturb sign was still in place. He didn’t want housekeeping throwing his garbage bag out with the trash.

After paying for another night, Ray went back to his room and spent the next two hours staring at a movie on pay-perview. When it was over, he realized he didn’t even know what it had been about. Instead of watching it, he had spent the last two hours trying to decide what he was going to do for the rest of his life. He had not made any decisions.

That was too much thinking, so he pulled the money out and counted it-$247,374, not counting the small stuff in his pocket. He went to the gift shop and talked the clerk out of three shopping bags, the stiff, square kind with the twine handles. He put $100,000 each into two bags, and the rest in the third bag.

At 4:00 PM, he called Jenny again, and still got no answer. A gnawing feeling in the bottom of his stomach told him she was gone for good.

Ray loaded the three shopping bags into the trunk of his Mustang. Then he drove past Jenny’s apartment. Her car still wasn’t there. This time he didn’t stop. At a store on Esplanade Avenue, he stopped and used a pay phone to call the House.

Someone whose voice he didn’t recognize answered. No, the voice told him, Jenny Porter wasn’t at work. As soon as he hung up, Ray hated himself for making that call. She had said she was through at the House. When Jenny said something, she meant it. There was something to be learned from that.

Ray took the expressway toward Metairie. At the hotel where they had stayed, he circled the parking lot looking for her Firebird. It wasn’t there. He wandered into the lobby. At the front desk he asked the clerk if Jenny Porter had checked out. The clerk, a young Pakistani man, eyed him for several seconds, then said, “Are you Mr. Shane?”

Ray nodded.

“Mr. Ray Shane?” the clerk asked in his lilting accent.

Ray fought the urge to reach over the counter and choke the shit out of him. Instead, he said, “Yes, sir. My name is Ray Shane.”

The clerk reached under the desk and then handed Ray an envelope with the hotel’s logo and return address in the upper left corner. Ray Shane was written in pen across the front. Jenny’s handwriting. So she had at least left him a Dear John letter.

Ray mumbled his thanks. He trudged across the lobby and sat down on a sofa. The envelope was sealed and didn’t appear to have been tampered with. He used his Swiss Army knife to slit open the flap. Inside was a single sheet of hotel stationery. On it, written in Jenny’s hand, it said, Call me, and gave a downtown phone number.

In the back of the lobby, next to the restrooms, was a pay phone. Ray got change for a dollar from the Pakistani desk clerk and dialed the number.

A hotel receptionist greeted him. He asked for Jenny Porter. His call was put through and Jenny answered on the first ring. Her voice was cautious. “Hello.”

Relief flooded through him. “I got your note.”

She was at a hotel a block from the Doubletree. She had read in the paper and heard on the news about all that had happened. She didn’t feel safe at the hotel in Metairie, or at her apartment. She had left the note just in case he decided to look for her.

Ray went to her hotel. Two steps into the room they were in each other’s arms. They trailed clothes from the door to the bed. The fear, the anger, the longing-all of the emotions Ray had been feeling came out in a gush that left them sprawled on the bed, panting and exhausted.

“Whew!” Jenny said. “What the hell got into you?”

Ray had to catch his breath before he could speak. “I don’t know. I feel better than I have in a long time.” He looked over at her. “Why?”

“No reason.” She smiled at him, just a hint of wickedness in it. “You think you can do that again?”

He grinned and rolled toward her.

“You think it’s safe?” Jenny asked.

“Carlos and Vinnie are dead and Tony is in jail,” Ray said. “You and I are nothing to them. They’re not going to look for us.” He wasn’t really sure about that, there was always Rocco. Tony’s butt-boy wasn’t going to forget Ray so soon, but there was no sense worrying about that.

The sun was coming up and they were still in Jenny’s room. They had barely slept. During the night he had told her everything that had happened. If they were truly going to start over, he had to be honest with her, but there was one issue he had skated around. He didn’t say how much money he had slipped into Tony’s car. Nor had he mentioned that he still had close to $250,000 packed in shopping bags in the trunk of his Mustang.

Still, something in the back of his mind nagged at him about that money. Having it didn’t feel right. He couldn’t remember ever having had a feeling like it before. How could you not feel right about a quarter of a million dollars?

Sometime during the night, Jenny had nodded off for a few minutes, and Ray had propped himself up on one elbow and just looked at her. She lay on her back, covers pulled down to her waist, breasts exposed. Ray was happy, happier than he could ever remember being.

When the sun came up, he asked her if she felt like taking a trip.

“Where?” she asked.

“I know you like California, but how do you feel about Florida?”

She told him Florida sounded great.

That afternoon they piled into his Mustang and drove to her apartment. She only took ten minutes to get what she needed. While she was upstairs, Ray sat in the car. She came back lugging a soft-sided suitcase and a cosmetic bag. Ray helped her stuff them into the backseat. He didn’t want to open the trunk.

“What about my car?” she asked.

“Leave it.”

“Let’s sell it. It’s paid for, and we might need the money.”

The girl was practical.

They went back to her hotel. She got her old Firebird and followed Ray to a used-car lot on Canal Street just past Claiborne. They sold her car for cash.

Ray took five minutes at his apartment. He threw his shaving kit and some clothes into a zippered duffel bag. Then he stuffed the bag into the backseat on top of Jenny’s suitcase. He still didn’t want to open the trunk.

From his apartment, he took Robert E. Lee Boulevard to Canal Boulevard, then drove river-bound past the cemeteries to where it turned into Canal Street. Jenny said, “I thought we were going to Florida.”

“I have to make one more stop.”

“Where?” she asked.

“A friend of yours.”

A few minutes later, Ray turned off Canal onto Rampart Street. He pulled to the curb in front of the Catholic Children’s Home.

“What are you doing, Ray?”

“Remember that nun we saw, the one with those kids?”

Jenny nodded, her expression suspicious. “Sister Claire?”

“This is the school she runs, right?”

“Yeah.”

Ray reached into the glove compartment and punched the trunk-release button. “Come on.”

She followed him to the back of the car. He pulled the two heaviest shopping bags out. “I’ve got something for her.”

Jenny spread the top of one bag open and peeked inside. Her eyes lit up. “Oh, my God!” She looked inside the other bag. “Oh, my God,” she said again.

They walked in and asked a nun sitting behind a reception desk if they could speak to Sister Claire. Five minutes later the old sister walked into the vestibule. Her face was kind. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“These are for you,” Ray said, feeling clumsy as he set the two shopping bags on the floor at the nun’s feet. “Something for the kids.”

After she bent forward and opened one of the bags, Sister Claire looked too stunned to speak. Her mouth moved but nothing came out. As Ray and Jenny turned and hurried out the door, he heard the sister behind him stammering her thanks.

Ten minutes later they were on the interstate headed east to Florida.

Jenny kept staring at Ray. “Why did you do that?”

He couldn’t tell if she was happy or mad. “What do you mean?”

She pulled a tissue out of her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Keeping it just didn’t feel right.”

“How much was it?”

“Two hundred thousand.”

“Do you know what she’s going to be able to do with that money?”

“A whole lot, I hope.”

“How much did you put in Tony’s car?”

“I didn’t count it, but it was around fifty grand.”

She jerked a thumb toward the back of the car. “What’s in the other bag?”

“What bag?”

“The other shopping bag in the trunk.”

He smiled. “I kept a little. Starting a new life costs money.”

She smiled at him.

Three weeks later, Ray sat on the little sundeck of the town house he and Jenny had rented. They were across Highway 98 from the beach, about sixty miles east of Destin, in a small town full of retirees. The morning paper sat folded on the glass-topped breakfast table. Ray stared over the railing at the Gulf of Mexico. “What do you think about a corner grocery?”

“What about it?” Jenny called from the kitchen.

He could smell bacon and eggs. Mrs. Jenny Porter-Shane was a hell of a cook. “I’m thinking about buying one. That one down the street is for sale. It’s got a deli in back and a couple of gas pumps.”

“Does that mean I get free food and gas?”

He couldn’t tell if she was pulling his leg. “It wouldn’t be free, Jen.”

She walked out on the sundeck carrying their breakfast on a tray. “But I’m married to the owner.” She set the tray down and kissed his cheek. “Doesn’t that entitle me to a discount?”

He pulled her face close and kissed her on the lips. “Yeah, I’ll give you a discount.”

After they finished breakfast, Ray piled everything back onto the tray and carried it into the kitchen. A minute later, Jenny called to him, her voice edged with excitement. “Ray, Ray, come here. Look at this.”

Ray stepped onto the deck. She held the newspaper open, staring at it. “What is it?” he asked. Jenny pointed to an article on the second page. The headline jumped out at him.

MOB FIGURE STABBED TO DEATH IN JAIL.

It was an AP story, dateline New Orleans. According to the article, Anthony “Tony” Zello, reportedly a soldier in the Messina organized-crime family, was found stabbed to death in the shower of the Orleans Parish Prison the day before. Zello was being held without bond for the murders of his wife, Priscilla Zello; alleged mob boss Carlos Messina; and Messina’s brother, Vincent Messina, also a high-ranking mob figure. A sheriff’s official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Zello had been stabbed more than a dozen times.

Ray still hadn’t had a cigarette.