Chapter 1 #2
Holly is in her office that afternoon, filling out insurance forms. She sees the futility of hating big insurance companies, but they are definitely on her Poopy List, and she loathes the ads they show on TV. It’s hard to hate Flo, the Progressive Insurance lady—not in the least because Jerome Robinson once said, “She looks a little like you, Holly!”—but it’s easy to hate Doug and his silly Limu Emu, and Allstate’s Mayhem Guy. She detested the Aflac Duck… who has been mercifully retired, along with the GEICO Caveman (although it’s not impossible that both duck and caveman will make a comeback). As an investigator who has worked with adjusters from many companies, she knows their big secret: the fun stops once a claim, especially a big one, is lodged with the company.
This afternoon’s forms are from Global Insurance, whose TV pitchman is Buster the Talking Donkey, with his irritating hee-haw laugh. Buster is on every form, grinning at her with his big (and somehow insolent) teeth. Holly hates the forms but is delighted to know that in this case Global’s Talking Donkey will soon be on the hook to reimburse for a cache of jewelry taken in a home invasion. Sixty or seventy thousand dollars’ worth, minus the deductible. Unless she can locate the missing gems, that is. “So who’s the donkey’s behind today?” Holly says to her empty office, and just has to laugh.
Her phone rings, not the one for business calls but her personal. She sees Barbara Robinson’s face on her screen.
“Hello, Barbara, how are you?”
“Great! I’m great!” And she sounds it, absolutely bubbling over. “I’ve got the most wonderful news!”
“Your book hit the bestseller list?” That would be fine news indeed. Her brother’s book peaked at number eleven on the Times list, didn’t quite make it into the top ten, but still not bad.
Barbara laughs. “With the exception of Amanda Gorman, poetry books don’t chart. I’ll have to be content with four stars on Goodreads.” She pauses. “ Almost four.”
Holly thinks her friend’s book should have five stars on Goodreads. She certainly gave it five. Twice. “So what’s your news, Barb?”
“I was caller nineteen on K-POP this morning and scored two tickets to see Sista Bessie! Hasn’t even been announced yet!”
“Not sure I know who that is,” Holly says… although she almost knows. Probably would know if her head wasn’t stuffed full of insurance questions, all subtly slanted to favor the company. “Remember, I’m getting on in years. My knowledge and enjoyment of popular music pretty much ended with Hall and Oates. I always liked that blond one.”
Also, she has zero interest in rap or hip-hop. She thinks she might like it if her ears were younger and sharper (she misses many of the rhymes) and if she were more attuned to the streetlife serenades of the artists Barbara and Jerome listen to, people with exotic names like Pos’ Top, Lil Durk, and—Holly’s favorite, although she has no idea what he’s rapping about—YoungBoy Never Broke Again.
“You should know, she’s from your day, Holly.”
Ow , Holly thinks. “Soul singer?”
“Yes! That and gospel.”
“Okay, I do know,” Holly says. “Didn’t she cover a song by Al Green? ‘Let’s Stay Together’?”
“Yes! It was huge ! I karaoke that one! Sang it live at the Spring Hop when I was a senior.”
“I grew up listening to Q102,” Holly says. “Lots of Ohio rockers like Devo and Chrissie Hynde and Michael Stanley, but they were white. There wasn’t much Black music on the Q, but that version… I remember that one.”
“Sista Bessie’s kicking off her comeback tour here! At the Mingo Auditorium! Two shows, both sold out, but I have two tickets… and backstage passes ! Come with me, Holly, please say you will.” Wheedling now: “She does some gospel, too, and I know you like that.”
Holly certainly does. She’s a big fan of the Blind Boys of Alabama, and the Staple Singers, especially Mavis Staples, and although she barely remembers Sista Bessie, or most of the music from the twentieth century’s last decade, she loves that good old solid-gold soul from the 60s, people like Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson. Wilson Pickett, too. She tried to go to one of the Wicked Pickett’s shows once, but her mother forbade it. And now that Mavis Staples has crossed her mind…
“She called herself Little Sister Bessie in the eighties. I used to listen to WGRI back then. Tiny AM station, went off the air at sundown. They played gospel music.” Holly only listened to GRI when her mother wasn’t home, though, because many of those groups, like BeBe that was Holly herself. Bad associations or not, she can’t refuse Barbara anything. Or Jerome, for that matter. If Barb said she had two tickets to see YoungBoy NBA, she would have said yes. (Probably.)
“When is it?”
“Next month. May thirty-first. Plenty of time to clear your calendar.”
“Will it be late?” Holly hates late evenings.
“No, not late at all!” Barbara is still bubbling, full of happiness, which cheers Holly’s day up considerably. “Starts at seven, it’ll be over by nine, nine-thirty, at the very latest. Sista probably doesn’t want to stay up late, she’s old, got to be pushing sixty-five by now.”
Holly, who no longer thinks of sixty-five as particularly old, offers no comment.
“Will you come?”
“Will you learn ‘Sit Down, Servant’ and sing it to me?”
“Yes. Yes, absolutely! And she’s got a great soul band.” Barbara’s voice drops to what’s almost a whisper. “Some of them are from Muscle Shoals !”
Holly doesn’t know Muscle Shoals from a muscle strain, but that’s okay. And she still wants to make Barbara work for it a little. “Will you also sing ‘Let’s Stay Together’?”
“Yes! If it gets you to come, I’ll karaoke the hell out of it!”
“Then okay. It’s a date.”
“Hooray! I’ll pick you up. I’ve got a new car, bought it with my Penley Prize money. A Prius, like yours!”
They talk a little longer. Barbara tells her she hardly sees Jerome since he came back from his tour. He’s either doing research for his new book or hanging around the Finders Keepers office.
“I haven’t seen him the last few days, either,” Holly says, “and when I did, he was kind of mopey.”
Before ending the call, Barbara says (with undisguised satisfaction), “He’ll be mopier than ever when he finds out we’re going to see Sista Bessie. Thanks, Holly! Really! We’re going to have an awesome time!”
“I hope so,” Holly says. She adds, “Don’t forget you promised to sing for me. You’ve got a very good v—”
But Barbara is gone.
4
Izzy and Tom Atta take the elevator to the fourth floor of Kiner Memorial. When they get out, arrows on the wall offer them either Cardiology (right) or Oncology (left). They turn left. At the nurses’ station, they flash their badges and ask for Cary Tolliver’s room. Izzy is interested to see the momentary flash of distaste on the duty nurse’s face—a pulling-down at the corners of the mouth, there and then gone.
“He’s in 419, but you’ll probably find him in the solarium, soaking up the sun and reading one of his mystery novels.”
Tom doesn’t mince words. “I’ve heard pancreatic is one of the bad ones. How long has he got, would you say?”
The nurse, an old vet who still wears head-to-toe white rayon, leans forward and speaks in a low tone. “His doc says a matter of weeks. I’d guess two, maybe less. He would have been shipped home except for the insurance coverage, which must have been a hell of a lot better than mine. He’ll slip into a coma, and then good morning, good afternoon, goodnight.”
Izzy, mindful of Holly Gibney’s pet peeve about insurance companies: “I’m surprised the company didn’t find a way to wiggle out of it. I mean, he did frame a man who got murdered in prison. Did you know about that?”
“Of course I know,” the nurse says. “He brags about how sorry he is. Seen a minister . I say crocodile tears!”
Tom says, “The DA declined to prosecute, says Tolliver’s full of shit, so he gets a pass and his insurance company gets the bill.”
The nurse rolls her eyes. “He’s full of something, all right. Try the solarium first.”
As they walk down the corridor, Izzy thinks that if there’s an afterlife, Alan Duffrey may be waiting there for his one-time colleague, Cary Tolliver. “And he’ll want to have a few words.”
Tom looks at her. “What?”
“Nothing.”