Ladies of Pagodaville Read online

  The Ladies of Pagodaville

  Book Two

  By

  Ellen Bennett

  DEDICATION

  for

  sjvs

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, locales, and events are either

  products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE LADIES OF PAGODAVILLE – BOOK TWO

  Copyright © 2020 by Ellen Bennett.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

  manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher,

  save for brief quotations used in critical articles or reviews.

  Photo credit:

  Published by Smiling Dog Publications, LLC

  www.smilingdogpublicationsllc.com

  ISBN: 978-0-9980277-1-5

  First Edition, September 2020

  Printed in the United States of America

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Editor

  Elizabeth Andersen

  Beta Readers:

  Michelle Byrd, Mari Stark, Joyce Dodrill-Krieger, Diane Long, Renae C. Feldpausch

  Cover design:

  Ann McMan

  Author photograph:

  Katherine Mumma

  Format Guru:

  Karen D. Badger

  IN this situation of writing fiction, I surround myself with characters who may or may not do what I intend for them. When they vanish from existence for a while (like, months), I am lost. If it were not for the home-front beta listener to endure chapter after chapter of rewrites, my brain might easily short out and become a blob of gray mass. A heartfelt and well-deserved thank you to Suzanne J. VanderSalm for listening, commenting, drifting off when necessary, and applauding. You are my rock between hard places.

  Your E-

  So many people from your past know a version of you that doesn’t exist anymore.

  Tiny Buddha

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  About The Author

  Coming Soon from Smiling Dog Productions, LLC

  PROLOGUE

  Monday, September 19, 1980

  Redhook Minimum Security Correctional Facility

  Redhook County

  Miami, Florida

  Irene Boule parked her beat-up tan Camaro at the far end of the facility lot. She pulled the rearview mirror toward her face, applied more color to her lips, blotted with a scrunched-up tissue, dabbed at the corners of her mouth, and then took a deep breath.

  This was going to be her finest hour.

  It was ten o’clock sharp in the morning. The visitation hours for professionals—lawyers, doctors, and law enforcement officers—was between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Irene was going to play this by the book.

  As she walked confidently toward the visitor entrance, she felt a sense of importance.

  Chest out, head high!

  She counted on Georgie’s intel that the shift staff was different from when she normally visited. To make sure she was not recognized, she had tamed her high-teased hair into a straight flip earlier this morning, with just a hint of bangs sweeping her forehead. She even donned a headband to make herself look extra-collegiate. She thought it would be prudent to wear her glasses instead of her contact lenses. The ensemble was perfect.

  Outside the entrance to the facility, Irene gave her breasts one more quick shove toward the middle of her 42 double D-cup bra, and then she undid one more button on her chartreuse-colored blouse, making it three down the line with plenty of tanned cleavage showing.

  Instead of wearing her usual silver chain heavily laden with charms around her neck, she opted for something a bit more professional—a gold necklace that she lifted from a local costume shop just last week for this occasion.

  She relished the fact that she was entering a prison-like facility with stolen goods on her body. The peach-colored skirt suit she wore was a hand-me-down from a drag-queen friend who had left the store without paying for it (accidentally) a few months ago.

  Irene opened the door to the facility and entered the waiting area. The guard on duty, Gary Doper, was a tall, lanky guy with leftover acne divots on his face, a thin set mouth, hooked nose, and watery brown eyes. Georgie assured Irene that Gary turned stupid in the presence of a hot woman and that it wouldn’t take much to derail him.

  Gary sat behind plexiglass, and he motioned for her to approach.

  He visibly reddened as she employed her best vixen walk toward him.

  She cooed professionally. “Good morning, officer …” She made a big deal about checking his name tag, “Dope. Uh, so sorry, Doper. I’m here to see inmate George DiLaRusso.”

  Gary scowled then nodded, “Are you on the schedule?”

  “Yes, Clare O’Toole.” Then after a beat, why not try it out for size? “Attorney.”

  Gary looked down at his list, but his eyes kept skipping back to her cleavage like a broken record. “Sure. Let me just … ah … hmm. I don’t see you here on the list.”

  She delved into the role, cocking her head and furrowing her eyebrows. “No? My associate, Don Holland, was supposed to set this up for me. He was going to come but … his baby boy had to have surgery this morning.”

  Gary asked, “Hope it’s nothing serious?”

  Irene shook her head and, with a look of concern on her face, said, “Circumcision.”

  Gary paled for a moment, then licked his lips and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing quickly.

  “Um, so you’re …” He tried to look down at his list once again.

  “Clare O’Toole. I work with Don. He sent me with some papers for George to sign.”

  “Oh yeah, Don. Yes. Well, you can leave the papers with me since ...”

  “Ah, no, I really can’t.” She leaned in so her breasts were parked on the counter in front of the glass. Her bra was clearly exposed now, but she was on a roll. She watched Gary flinch as if she had just put her bosom in his hands. “You see, I have to explain some things to George, what with his parole coming up in three months. These are very”—she leaned in even farther—“very sensitive papers.” She whispered the last line.

  “Well, okay.” Gary fumbled with his pen. “Spell your name.” His hand was jittery. He didn’t even ask her for an ID—which she had but knew was a long shot. The downtown Miami “establishment” where she went for a new ID was not exactly the cream of the crop. The clerk, a seedy-looking sort with several teeth missing named Vance, told her it was the best she was going to get in town, for the money that was.

  “Of course,” she purred. “C-l-a-r …”

  The rest was easy.

  Gary nodded his head for her to move on, his face firehouse red.

  Irene clacked her six-inch heels on the concrete floor with purpose as she strode toward the Silo. She knew Gary was watching her. She could smell his sweat.

  The Silo, a windowless, brightly lit high-rise tube where visitors entered from the lobby and waited for a guard overhead to mechanically close the lobby door and open a bigger metal
door for entrance to the prison yard, made Irene nervous. She felt sweat drip down between her breasts and legs. She tapped her high-heeled toe on the cement floor as she rebuttoned her blouse. “Come on, come on!” she murmured.

  Once inside the prison proper, the guard on duty directed her to the visitation area. He looked at her chest as if he recognized her and almost said something, but then looked quizzically at her face and shook his head.

  Georgie was waiting for her at a conference table.

  She sat down and smiled at him. Her preference would have been to jump his bones, but in her role of Clare O’Toole, attorney-at-law, she had to rein in the sexual heat.

  He smiled back at her. “Attorney O’Toole,” Then in a much quieter voice, “You look fuckin’ awesome, babe. I barely recognized you. The hair and all.”

  She reached into her “briefcase”—nothing more than a large pleather purse—and withdrew some papers. “I wanted to go over some of these notes with you before you sign.” She watched the guard across the room avert his eyes from her body to something less interesting, like cleaning his nails. “Just read through this paragraph here,” and she tapped the page with a high-gloss red talon. “If you have any questions, we can discuss things when you’re done.”

  Georgie knew that the entire paragraph was in code.

  He was prepared.

  After reading the page he looked up at Irene. His smile told her all she needed to know.

  He got the message.

  He leaned back in his chair and spoke loud enough for the guard to hear. “I think it’s all pretty clear, Attorney O’Toole.” He winked. “I can sign now.”

  Fifteen minutes later Irene drove out of the parking lot and down the highway for ten miles. She pulled into a McDonald’s; ordered a Big Mac, fries and a Diet Coke; then pulled her car into an empty space near the dumpsters.

  While she ate, she withdrew the meaningless papers from her briefcase with Georgie’s signature on the bottom and shredded them into small pieces. Then she stuffed them into the container for the Big Mac, shoved the uneaten portion of the sandwich on top of the shredded papers, added the uneaten fries, and crammed the whole wad into the dumpster when no one was looking.

  She left the parking lot and headed to her dingy one-bedroom apartment in Miami, dreaming about her future.

  Three months and Georgie would be a free man. She would no longer have to work at The Upside Diner as head waitress. And even though she had made many friends with her “regulars,” she was ready to hand her crown to the next in line.

  No, she was ready for the next chapter in her life.

  The embedded code that Georgie had signed was simple: Pagoda Motel. Heatherton County, Florida. Under refrigerator. First cabin on right. About four feet under.

  A cool three million.

  Monday, September 19, 1980

  The Pagoda Motel

  Heatherton County, Florida

  The beach weather for mid-September was glorious, with no clouds to obscure an azure blue sky. A light breeze blew in from the northwest, keeping the surf calm and peaceful. Lorna adjusted the towel on the back of her beach lounger. “This is just what the doctor ordered.”

  Doreen, a Motorcycle Mechanics magazine open in her lap, nodded. “Couldn’t be better.”

  “So, tell me more about your brother, Georgie,” Lorna said.

  Doreen slid her sunglasses down from her head to her nose and closed the magazine. “Well, what do you wanna know?”

  “You said he was named after your father’s brother?”

  “Yeah, well, see, my father had a younger brother named Georgie. He died of pneumonia when he was only, like, ten or something. Weak lungs from birth. My father never got over losing him, so after I came along, he wanted a boy. He got my mother pregnant right away. He had this harebrained idea that if he acted quickly, the next-born would be a boy.”

  “Hmph. Interesting concept, but I’m not sure it’s accurate.”

  “Well, the fact was that she had a boy.”

  “Coincidence, I’m sure.”

  “So, anyhow, my brother Georgie.” Doreen sighed and said nothing for a moment. “Let’s just say that after dad died he just … turned.”

  “Turned?”

  Doreen nodded. “Yeah. He was a sensitive kid. It was hard for him to make friends. He kept to himself a lot and appeared shy. He liked to draw. He used anything around him to make pictures. He colored the walls of the house with crayons and finger paints, and my mother would have a coronary. She managed to get him to draw in sketchbooks. That seemed to help the wall situations. My father called him a sissy. He wanted a son that would follow in his footsteps.”

  Lorna nodded. “Ah. A son to carry on his legacy.”

  “Yeah. So when Dad got gunned down, Georgie turned into a punk. But he wasn’t street smart; he just wanted to look the part. To make a long story short, he started defacing public property with spray paint. I think he figured that for all the years my parents stopped him from painting on the walls of the house he could spread his talents on the sides of buildings. He used to go out in the middle of the night and not come back until mid-morning. My mother didn’t know what to do with him, and after dad died and we moved down to Miami to live with Uncle Vinnie, he got worse. He got caught doing petty stuff, like stealing spray cans of paint, art supplies, that sort of thing. He didn’t have the balls to do big thefts, only stuff he needed for his artwork.”

  “Why didn’t your mother or Uncle Vinnie help him out by buying him supplies? It would have been a lot easier don’t you think?”

  “Because my mother was more concerned with finding a new man, and Uncle Vinnie and his sons wanted Georgie to learn the ropes of the business.”

  “Business? You mean—”

  “Running the service stations Vinnie owned.”

  Lorna left it at that. She redirected. “Georgie has all this talent and nowhere to put it, so he steals his supplies and paints on the sides of buildings. I assume he got caught and that’s why he’s in prison?”

  “Well, it’s a minimum-security prison really. He’s not a hardened criminal. Just a kid who grew up expressing himself … with paints.”

  Lorna shook her head. “Sounds like he got a bum deal. Seems like a talented guy. Did he have a job, a way to pay for his supplies?

  “Never held anything down. Too unfocused. He’s done some small jobs, like in a restaurant kitchen, but never really showed any desire to learn a trade. He’s a talented kid who got pretty screwed up along the way.” Doreen sighed again and shook her head. “His graffiti stuff is amazing. I was, well, am, in awe of how he can see something small and make it big. I mean, do you know how hard it is to paint something on the side of a building and make it look real?”

  Lorna thought of the beautiful mural on her kitchen wall painted by a mother who loved her family and expressed it with paints so long ago. “I guess it’s all about perspective and space.”

  “Yeah, like …” Doreen grabbed her book. “See this picture on the cover here?”

  Lorna nodded.

  “He could re-create this on the side of a building to scale, know what I mean?”

  “I think so. It takes talent to do that. Sounds like true art.”

  “It is art. It’s called tagging. But … after the fourth time Georgie got caught the judge decided to rehabilitate him at Redhook.”

  “Redhook?”

  “A min-sec prison just outside of Miami. They teach the guys how to make useful things for society. Like, y’know, license plates and stuff …” she trailed off, seeming disgusted.

  “So, how is that considered rehab? I mean, just because they take away his tools doesn’t mean they take away his talent. What makes them think that when he gets out, he’s going to revert to sketch pads? It seems that this … tagging … is his emotional balance. Why didn’t your parents encourage him?”

  Doreen sighed. “Lorna, boys in the family grew up to run the family businesses. Period. Not to explo
re talents such as art.”

  “What a complete waste.”

  “I know. The kid is talented and has no direction.” She looked off toward the horizon, and her shoulders slumped. “And I was no help either. After watching Dad get gunned down, I just ran. I was lost, too. We had to go along with the family plans and move from New York to Florida. We had to leave our lives behind, and quick. And when I got to Florida, Vinnie tried teaching me the business—as per my father’s wishes, mind you, because he knew Georgie couldn’t handle it—but I wanted nothing to do with it. All I wanted to do was learn how to fix engines and build stuff. I hung out with my cousins at the shop after school and learned the trades. I had no social life. I just wanted out. So, when I was old enough to get my inheritance, I built my Harley to spec and took off. Georgie chose to stick around and run with some punks, but mostly he wanted to express himself, and the only way he could do that was to tag. No one understood him; no one wanted to deal with him.”

  Lorna had seen some impressive graffiti art in her time—and not just in the United States. When she traveled through Europe with her family, some of the world’s oldest cities flowered with colorful designs on bridges, viaducts, and buildings. “Maybe he can have a future in some way …”

  “If my parents had accepted his talent instead of following the fucked-up family tradition of the business, he might not be locked up today for the stupid shit he chose to do instead,” Doreen said.

  Lorna added, “He doesn’t sound like a criminal. His only crime was trying to pursue a desire.”

  “Yeah, he had to do it on the sly and steal to get what he needed to feel satisfied. Kind of like a drug addict without the drugs.”

  “I’d be thankful for that if I were a parent.”