Blood Money Read Free Page A

the trial. They won’t make her do the whole five.”
    “What about you? Who has been taking care of you?”
    The girl shrugged again. “My mother lied to them and said I had an aunt that was taking care of me. I asked her to, and it was the least she could do after something stupid like that: set me free. Otherwise, they lock you up in a county home, or they farm you out to foster parents, who lock you up at their house, and I wasn’t the one who did anything to get locked up. So I bought some ID from a guy I used to watch in a park selling driver’s licenses and Social Securitycards to Central Americans who came to pick fruit. I went all the way to Tampa to search for jobs, so the ID didn’t look too familiar.”
    Jane kept probing, listening for some statement that had to be a lie. “What was the job?”
    “Hotel maid. You work pretty hard, but it was just cleaning and making beds, and I knew how to do that much.”
    Jane said, “All right, Rita. Let’s get to your problem. Exactly what kind of trouble are you in?”
    “It’s hard to say.”
    “You mean you don’t know, or just that it’s hard for you to tell me?”
    “I don’t really know. I was working at the hotel. There was this man who stayed there a lot. He was nice. Kind of handsome for an old guy, and funny. His name is Danny.”
    “How old?”
    “At least thirty.” She saw Jane’s eyes begin to look as though she’d heard the story before, and said hastily, “It’s not that kind of trouble. Danny never touched me. He had a girlfriend. She never even pretended she wasn’t married. The first time I saw her she had a wedding ring on, with a great big diamond. He would meet her at the hotel about once a week around lunch time, and they would do it for about an hour. Then she would slip out the back entrance and go to a parking ramp a block away where she put her car. Fancy.”
    “The car?”
    “The car too, but mostly her. Very expensive clothes, a lot of jewelry, big hair. The car was a cream-colored Mercedes convertible. Danny was there on some kind of business, and for the rest of the day, other men would come to his room, some with briefcases and some with nothing, but all kind of … not quite clean, you know? Like they didn’t get a shower that day, just put on their clothes and combed their hair.”
    “And?”
    “Danny knew that I knew what was going on. One day I’m on his hall when she leaves in a hurry, practically running. He came into a room I was cleaning and gave metwenty bucks to give his room a quick clean-up first. The man who was going to be there in about fifteen minutes was this woman’s husband.”
    “He told you that?”
    She smiled and shook her head. “No. He kind of gave me a sheep-face grin, like I was the one who caught him at something. A few minutes later I couldn’t help knowing. It was the car. The man drove up to the front of the hotel with a car so the valet would park it, and it was the same one the girlfriend had used the week before. Anyway, I had just cleaned the room, got rid of everything that had her lipstick on it or smelled like her perfume.” She frowned. “It was a good thing, too. Her husband was scary. He was maybe sixty, and he wasn’t big, but he had eyes like one of those turtles at the zoo they tell you is four hundred years old—and how they found that out, I’d like to know. I mean, who was there? But you get the picture about him. He had three guys with him. Two came in a different car, but they were all wrong. You know how you can see somebody and something inside you says, This isn’t normal? The three were all young—late twenties or thirties—and they were just wrong. They wore suits, but they didn’t look like men who wear suits. They were all big, like weight lifters, and the suits looked like they all bought them in the same store on the same day, and it was yesterday. You see men like that, but not usually three of them.”
    “So what happened?”
    “Nothing.