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Here, Gary thought, in the real Do-It Room.
“She’s servin’ me,” Billy said in a dead voice.
“Just a different kind of serving than went on next door,” Monica said. “Kind always goes on next door.”
“This is how you do it?” Billy said. “Blindside me this way?”
Monica said, “One of us was blind, Billy. From the start.”
“You said the papers were in the envelope,” Billy said. “What’s the rest of it?”
“Aren’t you even a little bit curious?” Monica said.
“You’ll tell me,” Billy said. “You always did like being the smart one, even when you were little Miss Congeniality behind your Disney desk, unbuttoning enough buttons on your blouse to show yourself off.”
Monica said, “The binder’s my black book on you, Billy. You got your black book, with all your little whores in it? Now I’ve got mine. The shoe box has got cassettes in it, you can keep them if you want, watch yourself instead of the dirty hotel movies. All of it’s why we’re going to do this nice and easy, which means you can take that pre-nup you had me sign and throw it right out that window over there. I could’ve had somebody else serve you, but I wanted to do it myself. Put it all on the table, so to speak. We’ll call it irreconcilable differences. Maybe throw in a little mental cruelty on the side, just so it sounds more official. Then we smile and call it painful but amicable.” Monica smiled now. “Before I get my half.”
Billy opened up the binder, saw that some of the pages had black-and-white pictures under plastic.
He took the picture out, stared at it.
“Goddamn,” he said. “This here is Charrisse. From last week in New York. The one from MTV.”
Billy looked over to Gary and said, “How’d somebody get a fucking camera in the room?”
“It’s easy, you know where to hide it,” Gary said. “If you can’t have a practical application of all they made you learn with surveillance from the cops, what’s the point?”
All you could hear now in the suite was the hum of the air conditioner, some kind of soft music playing from the bedroom.
“You?” Billy said to him.
From the couch, Monica said, “Us.”
Billy turned and stared at her, then back to Gary, then back at the picture of him and Charrisse in the Do-It Room at the Plaza. Dropped that and pulled out another one. “Selena,” Billy said. Kept going through them and not saying the names now, just saying Cleveland and San Antonio and Phoenix and Detroit. Like he remembered the cities better than he remembered the girls.
Billy Cash stopped finally and looked hard again at Gary, more hurt now than sad, or at least playing it that way. “Why?” he said.
“Got tired of being the boy bringing the girls. Once you do that, all you are is somebody’s boy.”
Monica stood up and said, “You know what they say, don’t you, Billy? My people will call your people.”
Gary Hall walked over then and put his arm around her.
“You two…?” Billy said.
“Us,” Monica said.
Gary Hall said, “Remember you’re always telling me to get my own girl? I did.”
“Rich one, too,” Mrs. Cash said.
WHITE TRASH NOIR by Michael Malone
All of a sudden Dr. Rothma
Mr. Snow goes, “This is Murder One, Charmain. You just ca
I go, “Well, this is Charmain Luby Markell and I’m not talking about my personal private life to a bunch of strangers in a court of law and have them turn it all into lies against me and mine.”
I got this lawyer? He’s young, just two years more than me, and halfway through our first talk in the jail I can tell he hasn’t had a lot of Life Experience, which, between you and I, I’ve already had way too much. Tilden Snow’s his name, Tilden Snow III, and I think it’s lazy for a family to use a name three times in a row when there’re so many nice new names out there you can choose from. They even got little Names for Your Baby books at the checkout counters, which is where I got my Jarrad’s name. That’s what I call my little boy, jarrad Todd Markell, even though his birth certificate says Kyle Lewis Markell, Jr., totally because my husband’s mother worships the ground her son Kyle walks on. Well, did walk on before I shot him.
So Mr. Snow wanted me to get up on the witness stand and tell why I shot my husband in the head and set him on fire in our backyard.
Mr. Snow chews at a cuticle; his nails are a mess. He sighs a long deep sigh and shakes his head at me. “Please won’t you help me here, Charmain?”
Please won’t I help him? Who’re they trying to give a lethal injection to, me or Tilden Snow III? I go, “Mr. Snow-”
He holds up his hand like a safety patrol. “Tilden. I keep asking you, please call me Tilden. Mr. Snow’s my Daddy’s name.” I think he was trying to make a joke so I smiled and said I’d try to call him Tilden but I wouldn’t take the stand and tell why I shot Kyle.
“Oh, Jesus,” he says. “Well, you better hope your friend Dr. Rothma
I say, “What does that mean, she’s going to hang the jury?” But he just pulls on his ears like he wishes they were longer and he runs off with the other lawyers after Dr. Rothma
I’m used to it now but the first time they hauled me into this courtroom, I was crying and grabbing onto my grandma Mawmaw so hard they had to prize my fingers from around her neck. I saw the way it was upsetting her how they had my hands and feet both hooked up to a chain. But Mawmaw whispered at me, “Don’t you cry, baby doll, don’t you let those folks see you cry,” and I tried hard to stop and I did. The only other time I ever went to pieces was when Mawmaw brought Jarrad into the back of the courtroom and held him up for me to look at (he’s two and a half now and he was nineteen months last time I seen him). He had a little toy basketball in his hands and I swear he looked like his daddy, maybe because he started to cry and his face turned purple the way Kyle’s did when he got mad.
The first day I was in court the whole jury kept staring at me like somebody was going to test them in the morning. Right off I noticed this one lady on the front row, a soft pretty lady, small, with a sharp smart face. From day one, she looked right at me with her head cocked over to the side like a little hawk, sort of puzzling about me. They said her name was Mrs. Nina Gold Rothma
Now the State’s done and it’s time for our side to “shred them to pieces,” according to Mr. Snow, except I’m not going to take the stand so there won’t be much shredding likely to get done. Maybe that’s why Dr. Rothma