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“Hey,” I say. “I’m so sorry, when Naomi said we had company, I just figured it was someone else here to blame me for something over which I never had any control. Won’t you come in?”
“You sound busy,” Helen says. She’s always timid. How she and Troy ever got along is beyond me.
“I’m not,” I tell her. “I’d be happy for the company. Please, come in.”
Helen and I have never really had that many opportunities to talk, but she’s always decent to me. Nervously, she comes into the apartment.
“I really can’t stay,” she says, “but I wanted to make sure you got this.”
She reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out an envelope. “That night when Troy came home,” she starts, “he told me how the two of you had sold everything in the store. He wouldn’t stop going on about it until I got in the car with him and he showed me himself. You should have heard how he was going on about how every time things would start to slow down he’d cause a bit of excitement over this piece or that, and we both knew him well enough to see right through that.”
“It’s all right,” I tell her. “I don’t mind if he took credit for that. I didn’t have all that much to do with it as it is.”
“Whatever the case,” Helen says, “I knew you were never going to see your share of the profits unless I set it aside. You have to understand. Troy never meant to take money from others. It’s just when money fell into his lap, he didn’t know what else to do but gamble it and try to turn it into something more. That’s what he always used to say: turn it into something more. He wasn’t an evil man.”
“I never thought he was,” I say. It’s not quite the truth, but it’s close enough.
“Anyway,” she says, “here.”
She hands me the envelope. It’s thick with money.
“Also, the keys to the shop and Troy’s old office are in there, too,” she says. “I don’t know if you want to try reinvesting that money or not, but the option’s open if you want it.”
“Helen, you don’t have to do this,” I tell her. “You should keep it.”
“Don’t do that,” she says sharply, catching me off guard. “My husband’s dead. I get enough in the way of pity. Besides,” she whispers, leaning in closer, “before Troy left for Tahiti, I squirreled away a little for a rainy day, too.” She winks at me.
“Thanks,” I tell her. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m just delivering money that’s rightfully yours,” she says. “If I may leave you with a piece of advice before I go?”
“Sure,” I answer.
“Don’t make bets you can’t cover,” she says. “Eventually, you’re going to upset the wrong person, and that person might just make a phone call to one of the guys you introduced her to thelasttime you went to Tahiti.”
Without another word, Helen turns and leaves the apartment.
I’m not sure, but I think she just confessed to being involved in Troy’s—but that’s impossible.
Helen came into the store once, and she saw a spider. I offered to squash it for her, but she picked it up with her bare hands and took it outside, saying she never liked to see any living thing come to harm, no matter how distasteful we may think them to be.
It was doubly impressive because the spider was a black widow. I remember, because I’m the one that took her to the hospital after she found a safe place to deposit the spider that bit her.
Nah, Helen would never do anything like that.
Now, with something to do, I tell Naomi I’m going to be out a little while and leave before she can give me yet another list of places to pick up horny guys. I’m nowhere near ready to tell her she can stop the smear campaign. That’s a going to be a whole different kind of a headache.
I get to the store to find the window hasn’t been replaced yet. It doesn’t look like anyone’s tried to cause further damage to the store, but something needs to happen with the window today.
Before I do that, I’m going to want to get this place cleaned up a little. I hadn’t planned on coming back here. Once the window gets replaced, the plan was just to sell the building, give half the money to Helen whether she liked it or not, and call that the end of it.
The unfortunate reality is that I don’t have anything else to do. There are no jobs here in town, and I’m not about to move. No matter how many people leave me threatening notes or call my house and hang up, this is my home, and I’m not going.
First, though, I head back to Troy’s office and unlock the door. He was always on that computer, but he would switch the screen before I could see what he was doing on it. I know it’s immature, but I’m curious.
The surprise ends up not being that much of a surprise. Everything on Troy’s computer is poker and blackjack. His browser history is made up of lists of places to find real-money games on the dark net. I know enough about the dark net never to go there.
I’m disappointed it’s not something more surprising, but also a little relieved the boss wasn’t just in there streaming hours of porn. That would have been awkward.