J. Jance - Fire and Ice

“This is some kitchen!” Mel enthused. Since I happen to know she barely cooks a lick, I understood this to be another blatant case of her playing good cop/bad cop. No need to specify which one of us was which.

“You should have seen it when we bought it,” Tommy said, smiling at her. “It was framed in, but that was it. No windows and hardly any interior walls. It was a mess. The guy who was building it lost his shirt and his money in the big dot-com bust. Rose bought it for a song. I think most people thought she’d just bulldoze the house and start over, but Rosie’s idea was to finish it and turn it into a showstopper. We’ve been working on it for years. I think she did very well.”

So did I.

Tommy led us first through a breakfast kind of area, then a huge dining room with a boardroom-style table that would easily seat a dozen or so guests. Beyond that was a spacious window-lined living room followed by a much smaller, more intimate room. In the old days it might have been called a sitting room, or maybe it had been intended for use as a library or a study. A flat-screen TV hung on the wall over a cheerfully burning gas-log fireplace. Ranged in front of it were four comfortable easy chairs. Seated in one of them was one of the most stunningly beautiful women I had ever seen. She lifted the clicker and turned off the television set as soon as we entered the room.

I think I may have mentioned before that Ross Connors encourages us to use our own vehicles rather than company cars. That means we don’t drive around with the kind of communications capability that’s now routine in patrol cars. Yes, we have a high-end nav system, but we don’t have a computer that can deliver Records information to us on the road. The clerk I had spoken to had given me a rundown of Rose Marie (Mama Rose) Brotsky’s rap sheet. But from the name, I expected a little Polish woman, short and a bit wide, with a face and body that showed some hard miles.

The records clerk hadn’t hinted that although her father may have been Polish, Mama Rose was at least a quarter and maybe even half African-American. She was stately; she was serene. When she held out her rail-thin arms in welcome, I noticed that her hands were beautifully manicured. When she smiled at me, her face was transformed. She was simply gorgeous.

I noticed that right off. So did Mel.

“Why, Mr. Beaumont,” Mama Rose said. “That is correct, isn’t it-Mr.-since you’re no longer a detective? Welcome. Tommy says he knew you back in the day. And this is?”

“My partner,” I said. “Melissa Soames.”

Mel stepped forward to accept her own handshake. “People call me Mel,” she said.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for not standing up to greet you,” Mama Rose said. “I have MS.” She reached out and patted a walker that was stationed strategically on the far side of the chair. “When they told me years ago that I was HIV-positive, I thought that was a death sentence. And, without all the progress they’ve made in AIDS treatment, it could have been, but it turns out that dealing with MS has been much more debilitating. Won’t you please have a seat?”

Mel and I sat. “Can I get you something?” Tommy asked. “Beer, a soda, coffee, tea. We have pretty much everything.”

“We’re working,” I said, which was easier than saying the truth, which would have been to say that I’m off the sauce and have been for years.

“Coffee,” Mel said decisively. She can drink coffee at any hour of the day and sleep like a baby. I used to be able to do the same thing. Now I can’t do that, either.

“Nothing for me,” I said. “I’m fine.”

Tommy disappeared, but instead of going back toward the kitchen the way we had come, he continued on through a swinging door just to the left of the fireplace. I suspected that it most likely led into a small butler’s pantry.

“You have a lovely home,” Mel said. The compliment may have sounded phony and ingratiating, but it was absolutely true. Mama Rose knew her home was spectacular, and she accepted the comment with good grace.

“It’s easy to have nice things when money’s no object,” Mama Rose said with a small shrug. “When I first got the HIV diagnosis and didn’t have insurance or a place to live or enough money to pay for the medicine, that was scary. Now, whatever the prescriptions cost, I just pay it. Or, rather, Tommy does. It’s no big deal.”

And that’s when it came back to me. I remembered how, years ago, I had encountered the improbable rags-to-riches story of a young homeless woman (the word “prostitute” had been discreetly edited out of the newspaper account) who, within months of being diagnosed with HIV, had been one of the first-ever Powerball Winners in Washington State.

“I remember now,” I said. “Aren’t you the person who had one of the first winning Powerball tickets around here?”

She smiled at me. “Thank you for not saying ‘Weren’t you the whore who won…’ Believe me, I’ve heard that more than once. But yes, that’s true. Mine wasn’t ‘one of the first’ winning tickets in Washington State. It was the first winning ticket. And you’re right-it was a big one-sixty-seven million after taxes!”

Mel was living back east at the time. I doubted she knew any of the story. “Whoa!” she exclaimed. “That’s a lot of money.”

“Yes, it is,” Mama Rose agreed.

“So why do you even bother with something like the Silver Pines?” Mel asked. “Isn’t that more trouble than it’s worth?”

“It is a lot of trouble on occasion,” Mama Rose admitted. “But it’s made it possible for me to help a lot of people over the years. And that feels good, of course. Giving back always feels good. But do you want to know the real reason I keep Silver Pines in business?”

Mel bit. “Why?” she asked.

Mama Rose smiled her serene smile. “Because I can,” she said. “It’s my way of slipping it to those bastards at Planning and Zoning.”

Tommy returned to the room through the swinging door beside the fireplace. He was carrying a tray with three cups and one of those French press coffeepots where you have to lower a screened plunger through the hot water and squeeze the coffee grounds at the bottom of the pot. I prefer Mr. Coffee any day.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Not Planning and Zoning again. It’s a very long story. You’re not going to tell them that whole thing, are you?”

“My house, my rules,” Mama Rose said.

“Whatever you say,” Tommy said with a certain amount of resignation. He finished pressing the coffee. He poured a cup for Mel and handed it her, then turned to me. “Are you sure you won’t change your mind?”

“Why not?” I said. “The night is young.”

And so, knowing I’d live to regret it later, I took the cup of that very strong coffee and sat back to listen.

Tommy turned to Mama Rose. “What about you, my dear? Would you care for anything at all?”

“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m fine.” Her next comment was addressed to Mel. “So I take it you know nothing of my history?”

“Only what I’ve heard here just now,” Mel said.

“Back in the eighties, the idea of safe sex was a joke, especially to those of us who were working the streets. Oh, we heard about HIV and AIDS, but we were young. We thought we were immortal and those awful things only happened to other people. But then it happened to me. Once I had my diagnosis, I quit working cold turkey. I quit and never went back. I may have been a whore, but giving some poor unsuspecting john HIV wasn’t something I could or would do. Just because someone gave it to me didn’t mean I had to pass it along to someone else. The problem was, I didn’t know how to do anything else. I’d never had a regular job and didn’t know how to find one. Do you have any idea how many jobs there are for ex-hookers with no education and no other marketable skills? I couldn’t even type.”