Mountain Top(234)
“I got that from the biggest, hairiest dog I’ve ever seen. A dog like that has no business living in Savannah. He should be in the northern tip of Maine.”
“At least he didn’t bite.”
“I was afraid it was a preliminary lick before he chomped down. I ran out of there as fast as I could go.”
“Were these nice neighborhoods?”
“No, the owners spend all their money on dog food. There was one house with two pit bulls. I refused to go inside the gate. A man heard the dogs snarling and came to the door. I yelled questions to him across the yard.”
“What did you find out?”
“We didn’t talk to everyone, but a few people remembered Ferguson because he wandered around after pretending to look at the water meter. I think I’ve figured out what he was doing.”
“You’ve given up on the Halloween costume defense?”
“Yeah,” Julie answered. “I’m serious. I think Mr. Ferguson was scoping out houses to rob.”
“But you said the neighborhoods weren’t upper class.”
“Exactly. Poor people prey on other poor people. There were houses with burglar bars on the windows that I wouldn’t want to go inside if the door was left wide open.”
“And dogs in the yards.”
“Yeah, the people bought those brutes as an alternative to a sophisticated security system.”
“Is your client linked to any of the robberies?”
“I hope not, but if he’s charged with burglary, it would be a felony and take the case out of my basket.”
“When are you going to the jail to talk to him?”
“He’s not in jail. He’s out on bond working his real job.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“Get this. He works for the city’s animal control department.
That’s probably how he got access to a meter reader’s uniform.”
“And explains why he isn’t afraid of dogs.”
Julie rubbed her arm across her forehead. “Are you ready to leave?
I haven’t needed a shower so badly since I played soccer on a muddy field in middle school.”
“I’m not trying to make you stay.”
“Let’s go together. I’m giving you a ride home. I want every detail about your lunch date with Vinny. Did he ask you out to dinner?
Did he talk about his last girlfriend and why they broke up?”
“I didn’t go to lunch with Vince. He had to meet with Mr.
Appleby and a client.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to the jail and interviewed my client.”
“Then tell me about that. At least you didn’t have to worry about getting mauled by a pack of dogs.”
AFTER MEETING WITH TAMI, Moses finished his first trash run of the day. Then the deputy in charge of the dining hall ordered him to clean the tables. Each stainless-steel table was surrounded by four metal stools bolted onto strips of metal that extended like spokes from a central post. Fights during mealtime were rare at the jail, but if an inmate did lose his temper, a chair couldn’t be used as a large blunt object.
Moses carried a plastic bucket of water in each hand. One bucket contained warm, soapy water; the other, clean rinse water. After wiping off each table and chair, he dipped a rag in the rinse water and removed the soapy residue. Moses didn’t just clean the surface of the tables; he also scrubbed under the rims. The deputy gave him a screwdriver to dislodge fossilized pieces of chewing gum. Moses worked slowly. Getting done in a hurry wouldn’t earn him any reward except an earlier return to his cell where he had nothing to do but lie on his bed.
The tall girl who talked to him said she wasn’t a lawyer but then acted like one. It didn’t make sense. She reminded Moses of the young woman with blonde hair who’d met with him a few days earlier. She said she wasn’t a doctor but then acted like one. The blonde-haired woman asked questions about his health, wrote notes on paper, listened to everything he told her, and told the jail nurse to give him a green pill every morning. Moses dutifully swallowed the pill, but he knew getting back to his life along the river was the only medicine he really needed.
As he cleaned the tables he thought about the tall, dark-haired girl who wasn’t a real lawyer. She looked familiar. That’s why he asked if she lived in Savannah. Moses knew a lot of people by face if not by name. He’d met hundreds of people when he worked for Tommy Lee Barnes as a bolita runner and could remember faces for years and years.
A bolita runner collected money from the players of the simple betting game and handed out slips of paper that served as proof of the numbers chosen. Beginning early in the morning, Moses went all over the city calling on regular players and trying to attract new ones. At precisely 6:00 p.m., five winning numbers between 1 and 100 were announced by randomly selecting five numbered Ping-Pong balls from a large bag. Prior to the drawing, Moses and one of the other runners tabulated the most popular numbers of the day, and Tommy Lee would remove those numbers from the sack to avoid a big loss.