The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [174]
She whispered in a rage. “I figured that out! You and my father told me he made up the name Ronny Buchstabe! Golden Days sent me here to his funeral!”
“Miss Napp?”
“Yes!”
“Doesn’t have a brain in her head. Poor Chamayra, they just fired her. And she has—I regret to say—possibly as a result, expressed the desire never to see me again in this world, or the next. ‘There is no following her in this fierce vein.’”
“Where’s my dad?”
“We need to talk about that.”
One of the young mothers with a big baby turned around. “Shhh!” she said loudly. The teenaged girl had resumed playing a mournful “Amazing Grace” on the electric organ keyboard.
Rook leaned closer to Annie’s ear. “Chamayra let your dad, well, borrow Room 540, I guess because the poor old coach had gone to ICU and then I guess the coach all of a sudden, or maybe it wasn’t sudden, died. ‘Gilded monuments of time, tomorrow and tomorrow and—’”
“Rafael, please!” Too upset to sit still, Annie slipped into the aisle and started up the exit. The Cuban hurried after her.
“Come back here!” Annie turned to see Buchstabes staring reproachfully at her. Jackie was pointing her out to the family, no doubt as the evil young woman who’d stolen Coach Ronny’s affections and was planning to grab his estate from the rightful heirs.
Jackie’s brothers grabbed her stout arms. Other Buchstabes grabbed the brothers’ arms. Bursting out of the middle of this huddle, Jackie ran screaming at Annie, “I want my mama’s sterling coffeepot back! And her diamond solitaire! I know you took them!”
The teenaged girl on stage stopped playing the keyboard, the singers stopped harmonizing, just stared with their mouths open. The teenaged boy slapped his hands in air. “Keep it real, Jackie! Fuckin’ A!”
With a grunting noise Jackie charged down the middle aisle after Annie, her thick Buchstabe hands reaching out in an angry twitch as if to grab her. She was not nearly fast enough.
Chapter 45
The Lady Lies
The wet Florida heat steamed from the asphalt of the parking lot. Feeling nauseated, Annie borrowed Raffy’s cell phone. (“I don’t want to know where you got this phone!” she told him.) She reached Georgette, who was between patients. “Georgette, you didn’t tell Sam that Dad was dead, did you? It’s the guy whose name Dad stole, Coach Buchstabe, that’s dead.”
Georgette made a phht phht laughing noise. “No, I didn’t tell Sam anything. Frankly I wondered if you were still drunk.”
“Drunk? When was I drunk?”
“Phht phht!” repeated the young doctor. “Now you don’t make any more sense than the rest of us. I love it. Where’s your detective, Sergeant Hart?”
“I left him asleep at the hotel.”
“Um hmm. Seriously, Annie, you need to come home. Your friend Trevor called. He said you’re not answering his messages. He says to stay out of your father’s problems. Chérie, je m’excuse, but are you involved with Trevor—I hesitate to say ‘too’ but…too?”
“Trevor?” Annie snorted, which made her teeth hurt in a way she’d never before experienced. She watched Raffy, who’d run back to Rest Eternal and given his arm to Coach Ronny’s elderly sister, Clara Louise, widow of McGreb Wholesale Plumbing. It vaguely occurred to Annie that Raffy might be lifting the old woman’s wallet out of her large embroidered purse. “Georgette, please, it’s 110 here and that’s just the humidity. I’m hung over in a parking lot at a cut-rate funeral home in Miami with a criminal Cuban that I was kissing a few days ago and I’ve got a headache and last night I went windsurfing and had sex with a cop who wants to arrest me.”
“Because of the sex? Was it while you were windsurfing? Damn, I’m proud of you.”
“Georgette, stop, why do you