Chapter 41: Interview

There was SO MUCH paperwork to fostering three children! Not that I personally considered Shanda a child, but she certainly wasn’t an adult yet, and legally she was still a child. Anyway, the clerks had trouble. Yes, she’s white and I’m black. No, we’re not married. Her husband’s missing. Frankly, we’d just as soon he stayed missing, but Alice needed a divorce before we could get married. Then, maybe, when we were legal, we could formally adopt our children.

We had to give Alice’s address for where the kids all lived. Dammit. I know, my house wasn’t all that, but it was MINE! I worked hard to buy it, and I worked hard getting it fixed up. I didn’t want to live in someone else’s house.

Still, what was it that George Carlin said? “Shit happens. Sometimes, it’s good shit.” As near as I could figure out, Tom’s attorney partners didn’t want to accept those letters that Alice showed them, and they challenged them. That got the man who had notarized them called in, and he stood his ground. Yes, he’d watched while a man who looked like the pictures they had of Thomas O’Donald and had his ID signed those documents.

It got out that the notary had had to go to the Top Hat to get that done, and suddenly Tom’s partners wanted to wash their hands of the whole thing. Whatever Alice wanted, she would get. They knew what that place was, and if Tom had been visiting that place ... they didn’t want Tom’s name associated with their firm any more.

That, in turn, got back to the family services people, and then to the judge who’d presided over our custody hearing. Some time in the spring, when Alice was beginning to show, we got called back in. The judge wanted to know how everything was going, and that was our biggest issue: We should be married, certainly before our child was born, but we couldn’t get married until she got divorced from Tom, and we still hadn’t heard from him.

Judges get to cut through a lot of red tape, when they can justify it for some reason. In order to give three and a half kids a good home, he granted Alice a divorce. Done. Boom. Then he turned to me and told me that he’d been raised as a good racist. He wasn’t sure that that was right any more and he didn’t want to cause us any problems, but HE wasn’t going to marry us. We’d have to get someone else to do that.

That caught us all flat-footed. We were not expecting an instant divorce like that. We had to scramble some, but we got a wedding in one of the churches where the people were a mix of white and black. I wore a black suit, Alice wore a white dress that didn’t show her bump too badly, Melanie and Shanda and Sandra were maids of honor, and I had Tiny and Bubba and Coach Lou beside me just to make the numbers even. Nellie was the flower girl and Andy brought us our rings.

By then things had quieted down a lot. Irene brought her ‘best friend’ -a white girl named Jill- to the wedding, and if anyone noticed that Jill always deferred to Irene on everything, nobody said anything that I heard. Dimona and her little sister Daisy were there, as were Horace and Beverly.

Toby and Sammy were there, too, but they left Toby’s ‘girlfriend’ at home. Probably chained to a bed stuffed with three cocks, but I didn’t care enough to check. As long as Toby said she was still alive and still under control, I was good.

That bastard feebie Sandridge showed up for the ceremony, too. How the fuck did HE find out about it? I sure as hell hadn’t invited him. He caught my eye once and nodded, and then he was gone the next time I looked, after the ceremony was over.

Tiny was doing great as manager at the Crib. I brought him in for 12% of the gross. Well, 40% of net after the daily expenses. The whores, shift managers, and security people got paid from the gross, and then we set another 10% aside for overhead. That only left 30% of the gross income and he got 40% of that. It came out to 12% of gross. I got the rest, 10-19% of gross depending upon how many bouncers we had working.

With Lucy gone and decent management in place, I dropped the shift managers from 8% to 6% which pissed them off, but what did they really do? Until I had Tiny there they spent most of their time fucking off, and with Tiny there we didn’t need them that much anyway. It wasn’t the drop in official pay that really got them, it was the complete loss of all the under-the-counter pay that they couldn’t get anymore with a manager actually watching the girls and tracking the money.

Tiny brought Sandra in to keep the books. She, Melanie, and Shanda were all going to W-C, and after school Sandra spent an hour or so at the Crib catching up the books from the previous day. HER books were open, anyone with a good reason could look at them. I didn’t need secret accounting bullshit. Neither did Tiny.

The people who wanted the books kept secret were the people who’d been stealing from the Crib. You know, from me. I’m looking at you, Lucy. And Gail. And Jenna. The three main shift managers were all stealing from me. And from Lucy, but her theft from herself pretty much evened out. It was me the three were stealing from, and Tiny and Sandra stopped it.

Well, one of the shift managers getting killed dropped the theft by a third right there. The rest didn’t stop until I’d showed Tiny, and then Sandra, how the money was supposed to flow and they actually made it happen. The Crib was a pretty profitable business, once all the theft and graft and cheating got stopped.

Did I ever mention how much I hate cheating? I’m a high school athletics coach. I HATE cheating.

Stopping all that shit also lowered the complaint level from the workers, too. If any of the workers weren’t getting paid for what they’d done, it was because they hadn’t gotten the customers to pay us for what they were going to do, first. Once we opened the books, once we had books that we COULD open, they all trusted us to pay them what they earned, and most of the under-the-table crap stopped.

The ones who wouldn’t stop that ended up working elsewhere. You have to pay the house its cut. Someone’s gotta pay for the lights, and the clean sheets, and all the stuff down in the Dungeon that the customers keep breaking.

Oh, yeah, I forgot the TV interview. That’s definitely part of the story.

After the custody hearing, most of the police ‘help’ we were getting went elsewhere, working on other crimes. You know, like investigating all the VMC people who kept disappearing as we went through Tom’s notes on who he’d paid or collected money from to help Cunt One do her thing.

We tried to forget about being news, what with all the other stuff going on, but a couple of days after we got Nellie and Andy someone from one of the big networks came up from the City to interview ‘the gun girl’ and her family.

There wasn’t anything I could do to prevent it. If I’d tried, everyone would want to know why the girls weren’t allowed to talk to the press. Man, I sweated every second of that interview.

Mel called Liz and we all went back to my house for the interview, since she was there for the shooting and all the police aggravation afterwards. Naturally, we also got her parents, but they promised to be quiet and not interfere. They sat at the table while we were on the couch and a couple of chairs.

We got a female reporter with microphone and a male cameraman who stayed behind her and to one side, where he could film everyone. She was oriental-looking and very pretty. He was basic whitebread.

To start with, they wanted to know why Melanie had held a gun on the police, but she hadn’t been arrested. And in New York at that! Threatening the police was a felony, wasn’t it?

There was a lot of talk, but it all came down to “I never threatened the police. They minded their business, and I minded mine. I was just sitting here in my living room, protecting my home and family from crazy black kidnappers. There’s nothing wrong with that. As long as none of them crossed the yellow police line, nothing would happen. It was my Dad who told the police that I’d shoot them if they crossed the line, not me.”

But, why was that an issue?

“Because this is a black man’s house, in a black neighborhood, and the white police here are famous for just running rough-shod over any black man they meet. If I hadn’t been here with a gun, they would have kicked him out of his own house and destroyed it looking for drugs or guns or whatever. They’d leave Dad homeless and just walk away pissed off because they hadn’t found anything to put him in jail for. With a white woman inside telling them they had no reason to enter the house and backing it up with a gun, and the FBI right there watching, they had to actually follow their procedures and not enter the house without a warrant. And they had no reason to get a warrant. Not to ransack THAT black man’s house!”