Walter Mosley: Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

Juana pushed a button on the big blue office phone.

“Yes, Juana?” a woman said.

“It’s Debbie for you guys.”

“Send her in.”

Their desks were positioned across the room from each other, slanted away so that where they’d meet (if you continued the lines) they would form a perfect right angle. This seemed appropriate; they led away from and toward each other at the same time.

“Hey, Deb,” blond-haired, green-eyed Chas said.

“Hi,” his counterpart, the mousy brunette Darla, murmured.

Whenever approaching the partners you were faced with a choice: sitting next to one desk or the other. This wasn’t odd seeing that they rarely represented the same client.

Theon and I were one of the few exceptions.

“You cut your hair,” Chas noticed.

“And had your tattoo removed,” Darla added.

“Theon got electrocuted in the bathtub with some teenage girl. They were trying to make a movie but the camera fell in.”

The accountants stood in unison and moved toward me, Chas pulling his chair and the guest seat and Darla rolling her own, specially made, wicker office chair.

“I can’t believe it,” Chas mumbled.

“Sit down,” Darla said.

I went over the details I cared to share. Big Dick Palmer didn’t make the cut; neither did the name Jolie. I went into detail about Richard Ness and his seventy-two-thousand-dollar request.

“But, baby, you guys are in hock up over the line,” Darla told me. “You know that, don’t you? You signed all the documents.”

“Sign the papers on the kitchen table, will ya, babe?” How many times had Theon said that to me? I hated legal mumbo jumbo, so I rarely read, and never understood, what I was signing.

“There’s nothing left?”

Darla squinted while Chas looked down at his feet and hands. There was no sense in me blaming them. There was no comfort to be found in recriminations or rage.

“What about the Hummer?” I asked.

“If you don’t pay fifteen hundred dollars a month the bank will take it away,” Darla said softly.

“Where did all the money go?”

“I don’t know what all he spent it on,” Chas added, “but he was funding some preproduction expenses for a movie with Johnny Preston.”

“A legit?”

“I think so. We’ve been in contact with Preston’s business office.”

“Any money on the horizon?”

“Not yet.”

The youngish surfers each took one of my hands.

I held on tight. I don’t think I would have ever let go except I had a funeral to plan.

I looked at my watch before getting out of the Hummer. It was five fifty-eight. I was almost always on time to any meeting or appointment. It’s not that I looked at the clock or anything; it was more of an internal timepiece that ran like a little motor in the center of my being.

“Hello, Mrs. Pinkney,” Lewis Dardanelle said when I walked through the front door of Threadley Brothers Mortuary.

The entrance hall was large, pretending to be vast. The floors and walls, even the ceiling, were tiled with varying shades of gray and green marble. The only furniture was a unique stone desk that the undertaker sat behind.

“Hey, Lew,” I said.

He was up on his feet before I crossed the bleak expanse to the granite table. He gestured at an aluminum chair with a dull finish and I sat as demurely as the occasion required.

“I’m very sorry, Deb,” he said. “Theon was so full of life.”

“He was. Thank you.”

“It was so unexpected.”

Dardanelle was created to be a mortician; nearly six-six, he didn’t weigh a pound over one sixty. His skin was pale, head bald, with rectangular glasses that were both thick and wide. Lew’s fingers would have made great albino daddy longlegs; when they moved they seemed to have lives of their own.

He sat down, lacing the lanky digits of his hands.

“What shall we do?” he asked.

Theon and I had spent an inordinate amount of time and money at Threadley’s. People died in our business with frightening regularity. STDs and cancers, some murders and a nauseating number of suicides, drug overdoses, and the odd death that even the county coroner couldn’t explain — people who died in their rented houses, apartments, and trailers simply by exhaling and leaving this world behind.

We had paid out of pocket and chipped in with friends for many funerals: longtime acquaintances and one-night stands and ex-lovers who didn’t have family. If I still had the money we’d spent at Threadley’s I could have retired and moved to Wyoming, where the cost of living would have fit my purse.

“I’m broke, Lew,” I said. “No stocks, no bonds, no cash, no property. Theon wasted it all. Or maybe he stole it — I don’t really know.”

Lewis’s gray eyes were magnified and elongated by his lenses. They widened further to take in my words.

I’d spent a week with him when we planned the funeral of Oceanna Patel, who knew men so well that she could make them ejaculate without touching their genitals — on camera.

That funeral cost eighteen thousand dollars.

Death wasn’t cheap and the funeral director met with would-be charity cases every day. Poor sad widows and confused children, brokenhearted lovers... they all came to him asking for a deal.

“There are certain rules,” I once heard Dardanelle say to a sad, fat, fifty-year-old woman whose husband had killed himself. “We cannot make monetary exceptions. The city has resources for people in your circumstance.”

I wasn’t expecting Lew to help me but I had to ask — not for Theon but for myself. Nothing turns to dust faster than a dead sex worker. When I died no one would lift a finger to lay me to rest. At least I could try.

“You know the Threadley brothers have made it a rule that we have no economic flexibility.”

“I know that.”

“But we...” Lewis Dardanelle said and then paused. He frowned and then, quite uncharacteristically, smiled. “We have the names and contact information for people that you invited to other funerals.”

“The guest lists,” I said.

“I could have Talia call them and ask if they would donate something to the services.”

“It could be a graveside ceremony,” I offered. “We don’t need a chapel.”

“I’ll call Talia at home and get her to start calling tonight.”

“Why, Lewis? Why would you go out of your way like this?”

“Theon was always generous with the staff. He was a friend to me in many ways and I believe that I would be judged badly if I didn’t help him on his way.”

I don’t know why I was surprised that an undertaker believed in an afterlife.

I ate dinner at a small French bistro called Monarc’s a block north of Pico on Robertson. It was a simple meal of green beans and almonds with chicken cooked in a white-wine sauce. For dessert I had flan with raspberries and peach tea.

I read a few pages from a book I’d been carrying around in my big blue purse — Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock. It was a story of time travel and a kind of alternate Christianity.

“Excuse me, miss,” a man said.

He was young and unremarkably dressed in business work clothes — California style: a herringbone jacket and light gray trousers, no tie but crystal cuff links on his white shirt. He was sitting at the table next to me reading a newspaper.

“Yes?”

“I see that you’re reading science fiction,” he said, smiling.

“Yeah... I guess. So?”

“Not so many single young women can be found eating alone and reading Moorcock.”

“I’m not looking for company.”

“Obviously not.”

He was of mixed race, black and some kind of Caucasian or other light-skinned group. There was a gap between his front teeth and something like a question in his eye.