Chapter 6 of Magic Town ...
Saturday, 5:08 AM: Bernice and the Diner
Shonna
takes Jeff to a shoddy little coffee shop where Jeff discovers the shocking
truth about why he has been suddenly thrust into this middle of the biggest
corruption scandal in Atlanta history!
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- Chris Lamela---------------------------------------------------------------------
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Magic Town, Chapter 6
Saturday,
5:08 AM: Bernice and the Diner
Soon the buildings started to get taller, occasionally Jeff could see
the high-rises of downtown Atlanta still lit up, getting just a little closer.
The car pulled to a curb in a seedy neighborhood with taller buildings. Jeff
figured they were still south of downtown. Without a word, Shonna got out of
her car, Jeff did the same. She pointed across the street to a tiny little
coffee shop, the only lighted-up building along the darkened street.
“Why here?” he asked peering around the dismal scene as they crossed the
street.
“It’s either here or a Waffle House. And there’s way too many eyes in
those places.”
Jeff shrugged following her across the street. They pushed through the
door, straight back to the farthest corner booth away from windows. There was
one man, looked homeless with his big stuffed plastic bag on the bench seat
next to him, a half-empty coffee cup in front of him, his head back, snoring. The
entire rest of the room was empty, no sign of anyone behind the counter.
Shonna slid into the booth, Jeff slid into the opposite side along the pink
plastic-covered bench seat trying to move over a big rip near the end, stuffing
bulging out. Shonna took a napkin from the dispenser sweeping what looked like
a dried spaghetti noodle onto the floor.
Jeff looked up at the bright florescent lights, the translucent cover of
one hanging down over the cash register so that bare blue-white light bathed
the cash register like some kind of religious icon at the Vatican. A row of
swivel chairs turned every which way in the same bright pink upholstery were
lined up in front of the lunch counter. The walls were gray, tinted with old
cigarette smoke, the floors of black linoleum tiles with wiggles of gray lines.
The whole room had a dingy worn-out look.
Depressing.
“So, are you in the game?”
Jeff did a double take, “What?” He leaned forward. “What game?”
“Look, there’s no way I know you from Moses, but something tells me we
can trust you, and nobody knows who you are.” She paused with a deep sigh.
“Look, I can’t tell you everything, but we have a situation that needs your
help.”
“But why me?” She didn’t answer.
Jeff looked around wishing he had a cup of coffee to hold, that soothing
hot black liquid that helps the start of a day feel more cohesive. “Can we get
some coffee?”
Shonna cupped her hands around her mouth shouting to the kitchen window,
“Bernice!” In a few seconds a rotund black woman in a white apron and hair net pushed
through the aluminum swinging door from the kitchen waddling up to the table
holding a coffee pot in one hand, two cups in the other. Jeff smiled at her movements
which were actually quicker than he thought she could do given her girth.
“Okay, okay, Shonna, coffee for you and the gennleman, ah sees ya.” She
set two cups down with a bang, filling the cups with the pot never getting within
two feet of the table, all without spilling a drop, turned without another word
pushing back through into the kitchen, the dented silver-painted metal door
swinging behind her.
Jeff tried to sip the steaming black liquid, looked to Shonna. “Better.”
“Okay, then?” she asked. Jeff nodded at her, sipping again. “It’s gonna
be light here soon. We have to do a little stakeout, then we are going to find
someone that we need to find, have a little talk with him, and you are going to
have to be somebody you are not.” She could see the puzzled expression on
Jeff’s face.
He suddenly noticed that she had a kind of lisp when she spoke. Not
really a lisp, just the slightest touch of her tongue to her teeth as she spoke.
It was so light, barely audible, it gave her soft voice a certain character
that he didn’t notice before. He had already thought that her voice had no
distinct traits, certainly not a voice that you would pick out in a crowd. The
lisp, or whatever it was suddenly caught his ear.
“Look, it’s simple really.” She bent her neck to look up into his face
to catch his eye. “Are you listening? Look, there is a certain, let’s call him
a respectable citizen, who got himself into a certain situation, and now he
can’t get back out. Without help. The problem is that if his situation got out to
the wrong people a lot of other people would probably get hurt.” She looked at
Jeff who she could see was trying to follow along. “And things could get nasty
if it’s not done right.”
“What kind of nasty?”
“People could get hurt.” Her eyes darted sideways as if in very quick
thought, back intently into Jeff’s eyes, “Killed.”
“Now wait a minute, I’m not signing up to get killed!”
“No, no, there’s no chance of that. There’s only one little thing you
have to do, you will be totally covered the whole time.”
“Covered? You’re not any little bookkeeper are you? Who the hell are you?”
“I can’t tell you that.” She paused looking intently into Jeff’s eyes.
“Let’s just say that I’m one of the good guys. And this particular gentleman we
are talking about is also a good guy, at least we think.” She paused. “But okay,
maybe he made some bad mistakes. But we are surrounded by some really bad guys.”
“Bad guys?”
“Yes, I told you that already. Really, really, bad guys. But not the
kind of bad guys that go around shooting people.”
“If they don’t shoot, then what makes them so bad?”
“They shoot alright, but the bullets they use are extortion and
blackmail.” She leaned over the table looking into his eyes, “And those bullets
can hurt worse than the other ones. Those bullets don’t take away lives, those
bullets ruin lives.”
“Extortion. Blackmail.” Jeff said those words almost to himself in a low
voice, he shook his head sleepily, looking back to her, “But why me?”
“Because––” She turned looking around her, stood up to reach back for a
newspaper laying on the table behind her. She straightened it out laying it in
front of Jeff.
“Look at this picture.” She pointed to the picture he had seen in the
newspaper rack at the train station through the dingy plastic that he couldn’t
see through. “This is why you!”
Jeff stared at the picture in utter disbelief, “Wait, that’s me!”
“No, it’s not you, but it could be your goddamned twin brother! Your
hair’s a little shorter, curlier maybe, that’s all, but men don’t notice things
like that. That would take a woman’s eye.” How true Jeff thought. How true. A
woman’s eye. The eye for detail with the detailed memory that not a man on
earth possesses. Not even really gay ones. He half-laughed at the thought of
the thousands of times that he and his wife would be out and about when she
would make some comment about someone they see when he realized that she must
be wearing glasses of a different color or something because she could see
details that were completely lost on him. Or when she would get her hair cut or
colored, two days later she would have to say, “You didn’t say anything about
my hair, you like it?” He would suddenly realize what a dope he is saying yeah
that he had noticed, that he forgot to say anything knowing damn well that she
knew he didn’t notice. Oh, yes, the eye for detail that men just don’t have a
single chromosome for.
Jeff suddenly snapped to, staring in amazement at the photo of himself,
of the congressman on the front page of the paper, reading the caption below
about the missing congressman. “So what––”
“So we have this little situation and we haven’t been able to figure it
out and along comes a guy who is a spitting image of the guy causing all these
problems. Seemed too good to be true.” She gave Jeff her first genuinely big
smile. “And a nice guy, too, who wants to help us.”
He was lulled by her smile, he couldn’t help it, “Help, yeah...” He
looked into those golden eyes with the little black flecks among the gold.
He was lulled.
He sat up snapping back to the moment again, “Wait, not so fast! First,
who is us? And what is this help you need? You need to tell me what’s going on!”
She held up her hands to quiet him down. “Look, not so loud. I can’t
tell you everything. That’s best for you, really, the less you know…” her voice
trailed off.
“The less I know?” Jeff looked intently at Shonna, bending across the
table trying to get eye contact. She looked up, “The less I know, yes?”
Shonna sat intently, pondering the
situation, mulling what to say next.
“Okay, here’s the deal. You are a spitting image of this congressman,
Frank Schedz, and he has a certain habit of wandering off for a few days,
sometimes weeks, without anyone knowing where he is. People think it’s all
harmless, that he has a mistress or something like that. But the fact is that
he has gotten mixed up with some very bad people. All those days off from
official business has been to get all mixed up in the local corruption here in Atlanta
“Frank Schedz. He’s the grandson of the donut king, Earl Schedz, right?”
She gave him a half-smile. “He probably has tons of money. What’s he doing with
those very bad people?”
“He’s trying to rip them off, and so far he is winning. But things are
getting tight. He is about to get himself into a whole lot of serious trouble.
Maybe even physical danger. And that’s weird because the guys he’s playing with
don’t usually work like that, but he is really pushing the limits. There’s a
lot of big names involved, mostly in local politics, but this city is known for
that kind of stuff and so people don’t take it too seriously. But this Frank
congressman is getting reckless and careless and other law enforcement is
beginning to think that maybe this is bigger than just some of the usual
Atlanta hanky panky. For sure it is
big. It may be very big.”
“So where do you fit in?”
“Let’s just say that I carry a badge, but you don’t know what flavor.”
Jeff stared intently into her eyes. “So you’ve been keeping the books in
the middle of all this. You infiltrated their organization, right? How did you
pull that off?”
“It’s amazing what happens when you play the dumb blond,” she pulled a
strand of her hair around with her fingers in front of he face to look at it,
“or dishwater redhead. Those stupid idiots actually believe it!”
Jeff sat back smiling, “So let me see…Magic Town…the guy in the white
Panama…missing congressman…a table of guys there and suddenly not there, then
more guys again…henchmen, waiting for orders to go set a fire to a liquor store
that hasn’t paid up.”
Jeff looked for confirmation from Shonna, she nodded. This made sense
from what little he’d seen. He continued, “… and I’ll bet we can throw in a
little mayor and sprinkle it with a few city councilmen? And maybe the police
for grins?” Jeff sat back. “Graft!”
“What, do you read detective novels?”
Jeff smiled. “Big fan of Sherlock Holmes. Oh, and others, too. You know,
Grisham and those guys.”
“You may be pretty bright there, Jeffery my man, and you got some of the
pieces, but graft is too a small word for this. We are talking corruption that
will blow the lid off of the whole of northern Georgia
“So you’ve been laying low, watching the books, and what, is Magic Town
like in the middle of all this?”
“Let’s just say that those stacks of money we talked about in that room
don’t hardly all come from beer, tits and ass.”
“Payoffs of some kind. All cash, right?” Jeff leaned back. “So I show
up, looking like this guy so you guys start thinking that you can fix this all
up somehow. With me?” Shonna nodded. “But where do I fit in?”
“We haven’t exactly got it all figured out yet,” she stood up, “but let
me see if I can find out what’s cookin’.” She walked to a pay phone hanging on
the wall. Turning her back to Jeff she inserted a coin, pushing buttons on the
phone. He heard her talking clearly, very quietly into the phone, barely able
to pick up two words together. She hung up, made another call spending another
ten minutes talking in the same quiet voice. That was followed by a third
shorter call.
Jeff sat looking through the grimy windows seeing it still dark outside
feeling a drowsy wave wash over him. He glanced at his watch, almost six.
Soon Shonna turned walking to the table, turned poking her head over the
swinging door to the kitchen calling Bernice again, returning to the table
sitting down. A moment later Bernice came out to fill up each of their cups
with her skillful pour from so high over the table, without a word turning back
into the kitchen.
Shonna lifted her cup with a determined smile, “Well, I guess you need
to take first shift, so time to drink up.”
“First shift?”
Shonna told him that they there were two possible places the congressman
would be, that they were going to stake out the place that she liked best.
“So he’s what, kidnapped?”
She laughed, “I doubt it. More likely that he’s laying in some woman’s
bed with a very bad hangover about now. That man really does love his drink.
We’re going to go sit to watch a house where I believe he is. We’ve got to get
hold of him before he leaves, then we’ll have the little talk I told you about.”
“Get hold of him?”
“Damn rights, we can’t have two of him walking around!”
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