Richard Greener: The Lacey confession

“Hello, Walter Sherman,” she said.

“Do we know each other?” he asked, in a warm and friendly, neighborly tone. For a moment, an instant disconnected to any other, she struck him as a brown-skinned, dark-haired, tropical incarnation of Mae West. A playful yet confident woman. A woman on top. He looked up from his food and smiled, as much at himself as to her. She smiled back. Walter’s ears actually tingled. She smelled great.

“Only by reputation,” she said. “May I?” She pointed at the empty seat next to him.

“Of course.”

“You have a nice island here.”

“It’s not all mine.”

“It’s killing my hair,” she said, seated comfortably atop the wooden stool between Walter and the kitchen door. She ran her hands through the ends of her tumbling locks, gently tugging at the stray ends, lightly touching, practically caressing her pointed nipples with the tips of her long, elegant fingers. Her nails were sparkling red. She looked straight into Walter’s eyes as she did this. It stirred him. My God! he thought, for what man would it be otherwise? As if she knew what he was thinking, she let the thought register then said, firmly but in a low voice, “I need your help.” She opened a small silver case, removed a very strange looking cigarette and lit it. “Do you mind?” she asked.

Walter shook his head, still smiling all the while. He answered her first question- I need your help is always a question-in a clear and straightforward tone. “I’m sorry. I don’t work anymore.”

“Me too. At least sometimes it seems that way.”

“You’re too hard on yourself, Miss Crystal. The last I heard, you were still a big star.” She was alone. He didn’t ask, but he was tempted to ask her where her people were. She was well known to travel with an entourage fit for a head of state. Wherever she went, she attracted a crowd, a good portion of it in her employ. Walter was careful to pronounce Conchita Crystal’s name the way she liked it, Kree-STAL, rolling the r as if he too was Puerto Rican, with the emphasis solidly on the second syllable.

“?Habla espanol?” she asked.

“Tengo espanol en mi corazon, pero ingles en mi boca.”

“Now it’s you who’s too hard on yourself, Mr. Sherman. But, if you prefer, ingles it is. Can we speak here?”

“About?”

“As I said, I need your help.” Walter started to say something-something Conchita Crystal was sure she would not want to hear. “I’m desperate, Mr. Sherman,” she said, interrupting him before he got a word out. “I’ve nowhere else to turn. You’re the only one.”

He felt the tremble in her voice, saw that look in her eyes, a tremble and a stare he’d felt and seen so many times before in the hectic pace of nearly four decades. There came a moment, even for the richest, the most powerful and most famous, when they were undone by whatever loss they were about to spill at Walter’s feet. The fear, the dread, the surrender to melancholy-he could hear every bit of it in their voices, sense it in their demeanor. Conchita Crystal was no different from the rest.

“Please listen to me,” she pleaded. “Let me tell you why I’ve come to you. Then, if you still feel you can’t do anything, I’ll go away. I’ll understand. But, please, just hear me out.” She reached over and put her hand lightly on his wrist. “It’s matter of life and death-mine.” She paused, never breaking eye contact with him. Walter said nothing-not right away. His knees weakened. He took a long, deep breath then said, “Not here. Take a walk. Go across the square to the ferry dock. I’ll be out in a minute. Okay?”

Conchita Crystal instantly regained her composure. Walter couldn’t be sure if it was her relief at knowing he would listen to her story or if that was just what she did for a living. He certainly wasn’t about to come to any conclusion at this point. She nodded and smiled. She smiled-a smile he’d seen a thousand times, in TV commercials, on billboards, magazine covers, CDs, and in the movies. This smile, however, this one right now, was special. It was all his. She slid off her barstool, stood facing him, dropped her cigarette to the floor and stepped on it, then turned and left, the sound of her footsteps already filed away in his memory. It was all Walter could do not to watch her every step as she walked away. Conchita Crystal once and maybe still had the best-looking, most famous ass in the Western world.

He took a last forkful of eggs, a final bite of toast and finished his Diet Coke. He folded his newspaper, put it down on the bar, then got up to leave, following her as he said he would.

“That who I think it is?” asked Billy Smith from behind his bar.

“Who’s that?” deadpanned Walter. Billy threw his arms up in mock frustration. “Hey, go for it, Walter,” he shrugged.

On his way out, Walter passed a very old, stick-thin black man with a fuzzy white beard cut short and close. The old man, whose name was Ike, had a crooked, homemade cigarette dangling from his lips. Smoke completely surrounded his head, floating away in a line of blue haze, swirling out in the direction of the sea. A warm smile, one some said was always there, dominated his aged, wrinkled face. He sat alone at the table closest to the sidewalk, the one right up against the white picket fence that separated Billy’s from the street. He was protected from the sun only by the Florida Marlins baseball cap on his bald head.

“That’s Chita whatshername, ain’t it Walter?” Ike asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“Walter!” Ike called after him. “I thought you was retired.”

Walter Sherman kept walking, but he turned his head back toward the old man. “You’re right, Ike. I was retired.”

The frail black man looked at Billy, who had moved up the bar and was now as near to the front as he could get. This time they both shrugged their shoulders.

Walter Sherman had never officially retired. He hadn’t made any announcement, sent out any notices or thrown a party and invited his friends to celebrate the event. And, of course, there was no one to give him a gold watch. It just sort of happened. The last job he took was almost four years ago. After that one, he just stopped. He started saying no. People continued to come to him, continued to call. But, after the second year, they must have gotten the message. They stopped. It became known he no longer took clients. Nobody had approached him this way in more than two years.

When he quit, he told himself it wasn’t because he couldn’t do the work anymore. But he knew it really was. He was getting tired and his was not the kind of work to do if you weren’t up to it. In his busiest times as a younger man, he never did more than a dozen jobs a year. While occasionally he caught one he couldn’t wrap up in less than a month, two at the most, most of his assignments had been completed in a few weeks. Some took only days. He’d always had a lot of downtime. So, retirement didn’t call for a major personal adjustment.

About the same time Walter stopped working, he stopped eating meat, red meat and pork altogether, and he limited his intake of chicken to once monthly-a special day that was. He allowed himself to eat fresh fish two or three times a week, sometimes more often. He’d been told people who ate fish regularly lived longer, healthier lives than those who forsook it for meat, especially beef and pork. That sounded right. He reworked his diet to include a lot of fruits and vegetables, rice, beans and pasta. He cut out the French fries and most other greasy, fried foods. Out with the burgers-in with the grouper. It wasn’t difficult for him. Walter ate most of his meals at Billy’s and those he didn’t were cooked by the old woman, Clara, or since her death, by his new housekeeper. All concerned were happy to oblige his new, healthier habits.