Riding the Rap

thirteen

When Raylan introduced himself to Ms. Ganz, she looked at his I.D. and his star and said, “Thank God. I call the police every day and you’re the first one to come.”

The old lady sat in a wheelchair, cloth straps around her like a seat belt to hold her in. One of the nurses had told Raylan Ms. Ganz was eighty-five and she looked it except for her blond hair, a white wine color, he realized must be a wig. There was the wheelchair and an oxygen machine by the bed, otherwise this room-with Lake Worth out the window and Palm Beach across the way-reminded Raylan of a hotel suite he’d gone into one time to make an arrest.

He said, “Ms. Ganz, you call the police?”

The old lady looked past him at a nurse, a big black woman, coming in with roses, dozens of white roses in a vase she placed on a dining table full of magazines and photos in silver frames. Raylan watched her pick up the vase of roses already sitting there, the flowers barely starting to wilt, to take out with her.

Ms. Ganz said, “Victoria, are those from Warren?”

Victoria said yes ma’am, they were, and left.

“Victoria’s from Jamaica,” the old lady said, and smiled, looking at the roses. “From Warren.”

Her husband’s name. The woman living in the past.

“Every week he sends me four dozen roses.”

Raylan said that was nice, flowers made a room… it made the room cheerful. Ms. Ganz said the flowers had been coming every week for as long as she’d been here. Raylan didn’t ask how Warren Ganz worked it, being dead. He stepped over to smell a rose, show some interest, and had to look at the framed photographs then, all of the same woman, Ms. Ganz at different ages. Ms. Ganz in big hats, Ms. Ganz by an old-model Rolls in a big hat, with a man and a small boy, the woman wearing a big straw summer hat in that one and holding flowers. It made Raylan think of her property so overgrown and was about to ask if she’d hired a yardman, but she spoke up then.

“Will you talk to them, please?”

He turned to see her looking up at him, helpless in her chair. “Talk to who?” Raylan said.

“I can’t take much more. Will you tell them to stop it?”

He couldn’t help feeling sorry for her, poor old lady in her curly wig; tied up. “You say you call the police?”

“Every day. First it was my underwear. I ask Victoria, I ask Louise, I ask Ada, ‘What in the world is happening to my underwear?’ They say oh, I’m imagining things. I put my underwear underneath the bed wrapped in newspaper. They found it. They’ve stolen my underwear, my good shoes, a lovely pin my grandmother gave me when I was a little girl, all my towels I brought from home, my piano-”

“Your piano,” Raylan said, “you had it here?”

“Right there by the window. That’s how they got it out. My friends here, they used to come by every day and ask me to play. Their favorites were ‘Indian Love Call’ and ‘Rose Marie,’ different ones Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy sang together. I have the records, too. ‘Oh, Rose Marie, I love you…’ I woke up from my nap, I couldn’t believe it. Two colored men I know are Jamaican, because I see them around here, were picking up the piano and shoving it through the window. I said, ‘Put that down this minute.’ They paid no attention. Oh, I was mad. I raised Cain around here. I said, ‘Didn’t anybody see them? My God, they marched off with my piano right down Flagler Avenue in broad daylight.’ Not a person here said yes or no, but you could tell they knew about it.”

Raylan nodded, trying to show interest. He said, “By the way, Ms. Ganz, did you hire a man to do yard work?”

“Something’s going on,” the old lady said, “and I think it’s that Victoria who’s behind it. She’s another one of the Jamaicans.”

“I’ll speak to her,” Raylan said.

“Would you do that? I’d be so grateful.”

The old lady’s eyes shining with hope, or just watery; Raylan wasn’t sure.

“If she denies it,” Ms. Ganz said, “tell her she’s a lying fucking nigger. That’s what I do.”

He asked Victoria about the yardman, Cuban or Puerto Rican, said he came by to see Ms. Ganz and get paid?

“She tell you that?”

“The yardman did.”

“I saw a person like that come to see her last week, but I didn’t speak to him myself. It used to be people came to be paid by her; a plumber fixed something, another one for the air-conditioning. Not so much anymore.”

“She ever go home?”

“She used to, when she first come. Go home for a few days.”

“She said some guys stole her piano?”

“Yes, steal her underwear, her shoes. She goes crazy when nobody believes her. I go in there, sometimes she tries to hit me with her cane, call me something I won’t say to you. You understand this woman never had a piano long as she been here. The roses? She send those to herself, two hundred dollars a week, a standing order, they have to sign the card ‘With love from Warren.’”

“Her husband,” Raylan said. “I imagined Ms. Ganz was the one doing it.”

“Not the husband,” Victoria said, “suppose to be from the son, Chip. But that’s as hard to believe as the dead man sending them. Chip don’t spend ten cents on his mother. You know Chip?”

“Not yet,” Raylan said. “Tell me about him.”