Salvation Row - John Milton #6 (John Milton Thrillers) Read online

  “Do you want me to speak to them?”

  “Yes. It’s time we upped the ante a little. Get on it.”

  Chapter Twelve

  SOLOMON BARTHOLOMEW opened the door to him. Milton could see at once that the old man was dressed in his best clothes, freshly shaved and fragrant with cologne. It made him feel a little uncomfortable. He didn’t like people to go to trouble on his account. He didn’t think that he was worth it. Solomon extended his hand and Milton shook it. The old man’s grip was strong.

  “Glad you could make it, Mr. Smith.”

  “It’s John,” Milton said, embarrassed again that he was going to have to perpetuate that old lie.

  Elsie Bartholomew came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. “Hello, Mr. Smith.”

  “John,” he said again, smiling, as he stooped to allow her to peck him on the cheek.

  Izzy came down the stairs. She, too, had made an effort for him. She had changed into jeans and a turtleneck sweater, and her long hair looked as if it had been freshly washed. Milton couldn’t help but admire her. She had been attractive before, amid the craziness of that night nine years ago, but the intervening time had been very kind to her. She had been a girl then. She was a woman now.

  “Hello, John.”

  “Izzy.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder and leaned across to kiss him. She smelled good and her lips felt soft against his cheek. Milton had to remind himself why he was here.

  “You get a hotel?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Nothing special, but it’ll do me.”

  “I’m telling you,” Solomon said, “we could’ve put you up, couldn’t we, Elsie?”

  “We surely could.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s fine, really.”

  “You never had the tour. At least let me show you around. Let me show you what my little girl has done for us.”

  Izzy smiled indulgently, but Milton got the impression that she wanted him to see the house, too.

  “I’d love to.”

  “Come and look in here first.”

  Solomon bid him to follow.

  The room beyond was small. It was a third bedroom and would have been big enough to fit a single bed, at a push. It had been turned into the old man’s study. There were shelves on the wall that were laden down with books and old vinyl records. Jazz, Milton saw. There was a desk, with a big ledger that was left open, revealing careful passages of handwriting. Framed pictures on the wall showed a number of different birds, with their names and genus in Latin. The single window looked out onto the backyard. There was a pair of binoculars resting on the sill.

  “What you think?” he said, looking around at his things with evident pride.

  “Very nice.” He indicated the pictures. “You like birds?”

  “Like?” Izzy said. “You’ve got to be kidding. He’s obsessed.”

  Solomon ignored her. “One thing about Katrina, she wiped the slate clean. The months after the storm, you could walk out in the city and you wouldn’t hear nothing. No birdsong, I mean. You could hear a boom box from five blocks away. The birds, they all knew what was coming. They flew away as soon as the hurricane came in and they stayed away for months. Then, after a while, they started to come back. We got all this new vegetation, all these trees and bushes and shrubs, and new birds, ones I ain’t never seen before. They started to show up, too. All the rodents that turned up, they attracted raptors. Hawks, falcons, shrikes. Barn owls started to build nests in the wrecks.”

  He went over to the desk, picked up the ledger and gave it to Milton. “I keep a record of ’em. Every one I see, I put it in there.” He stood next to Milton and stabbed a finger to the entry beneath today’s date. “Look at this, just this afternoon I seen blue jays, cardinals, American crows, Eastern phoebes, killdeer, a loggerhead shrike, kestrel, bronzed cowbirds and a Lewis’s woodpecker. Yesterday we saw an egret, walking right down the middle of Salvation Row just like it owned the damn place, stalking lizards.”

  Milton put the ledger back on the desk.

  “Other wildlife, too, like you wouldn’t believe. I seen armadillos, coyotes. We had a raccoon climbing on the roof last week. I went out to scare it off. Huge, man, I’m telling you, critter was just like a dog. First time I heard it, I thought it was a dude trying to get in upstairs.”

  Elsie put her head through the door.

  “He boring you with his birds?”

  “No,” Milton said. “It’s fascinating.”

  “Well, if he hasn’t exhausted himself, he can tell you more at the dinner table. I’m serving up.”

  #

  THE JAMBALAYA was delicious. The stew included chicken, andouille sausage, rice, shrimp, celery and spices. Milton had never tasted anything like it. He finished his bowl and, when Elsie asked him if he would like seconds, he said that he would. She took his plate and returned it with another full serving, as big as the first, and he finished that, too. When he was done, he felt stuffed to the gills.

  “Jambalaya,” she said. “Means jumbled in French. You liked it?”

  Milton gestured down at the empty bowl. “Delicious. What was the spice?”

  “Onion powder, garlic, oregano, basil, thyme, lots of paprika. Lots of cayenne pepper, too.”

  “It had a kick.”

  “And I toned it down for you, too,” she said. “Didn’t know how you like your spice.”

  Milton thanked her again. She got up to prepare dessert, and Solomon leaned over the table, his fingers steepled. “What you make of what Izzy’s been doing?”

  “I think it’s amazing.”

  He turned to his daughter and reached for her hand. “My little girl’s done something pretty wonderful, right?”

  “More than wonderful,” Milton said. “Incredible.”

  Izzy waved it off, but Milton could see that it filled her with happiness to be acknowledged like this by her father.

  “The city wouldn’t have done nothing,” Solomon said. “Still ain’t doing much.”

  “I’m not defending them,” Izzy interposed, “but, the way they saw it, it’s just a question of math. All kinds of folk moved into the city in the sixties and seventies. City got up to nearly 700,000 people at one point. They expanded into marshland that everyone said at the time was no good for habitation. They were the poorer areas, right, like around here, and it was those areas that got flooded when the levees broke. A year after Katrina, the population dropped back down to 200,000. But the city’s footprint, since the seventies, had increased by more than ten percent. The mayor didn’t think a city built for three times as many people could maintain that kind of size.”

  Elsie’s face took on a distasteful cast. “We don’t mention the mayor in this house. Man’s a low-down crook, you ask me.”

  Izzy continued, “They were asking whether fewer taxpayers could afford to maintain services like garbage removal, policing, sewer pipes and miles of streets, plenty of them still underwater from the flood. Decided they couldn’t. Economics, they said. I don’t know if that was wrong or right.”

  “Yeah, you do, baby,” her father said. “You know.”

  “So they just left them to rot, and the people who were forced out, the ones who wanted to come back home, well, that was just bad luck. I didn’t think it was right to just give up. So we started Build It Up.”

  “She says ‘we,’” Solomon said. “She means ‘I.’ ‘I’ started it.”

  She shushed him.

  “How did you get into it?” Milton said. “You were studying law before the storm.”

  She shrugged. “Gave that up. Didn’t see the point of it no more, not afterwards. But, in a funny way, it’s been useful. There’s red tape to deal with on a project like this. I’ve saved thousands of dollars by doing that myself. And then there’s the court case.”

  This was what she had referred to earlier, the trouble. “You haven’t really mentioned that.”

  She looked at her parents with worry.
/>   Solomon waved her concern away. “Go on. You tell him, girl. We know you got it covered. We ain’t worried.”

  She nodded and then frowned, searching for the right place to start. Eventually she said, “All the land I showed you today, Salvation Row, that’s what we’ve done so far. The way we work it, we get the money together to buy a plot, we clear it, then we build. We can turn a house around, start to finish, in three months. The families pay us, we take the money for the house and put it into the next plot of land. It’s all cheap round here, no one else is doing anything with it. We could keep doing it until there was no land left to build on. And there’s a lot of demand for houses now. People who had to move out, they’ve seen the places we’ve put up, they’ve seen they’re nice, they want to move back again. We could sign up fifty families tomorrow, no problem.” She finished her coffee and rattled the cup as she placed it back on the saucer.

  “So?”

  “So, about six months ago, we find out that this developer is interested in all this land. They offered to buy the houses. Everyone told them no. They came back, offered more than the plots are worth. The Joneses said yes, needed the money for their boy’s medical costs, but most people still held out. We just moved back. Some of these families, they’ve been here sixty years, and they don’t want to move. I couldn’t understand why they’d be interested. No one else is interested in buying land down here, and then these guys come in. They’ve bought fifty acres all around us. Didn’t make sense. So I dug into it a bit and found out that this corporation wants to put up a mall. The kind of place with shops and cinemas, the whole nine yards.”

  Izzy frowned again. “We found out two months ago that the only way they can make their development work is to put their access roads right through the houses we just built. We own the land, but the city thinks the mall is more important than the houses, and they’re insisting we sell.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “We told them that we wouldn’t sell, so they’ve gone to court to get an order that’ll make us.”

  “They can do that?”

  She nodded. “It’s called eminent domain. That’s the case I’ve been fighting. There’s no way I’m going to let them do it. After everything we’ve done, the work we’ve put into these houses, just to let them drive a bulldozer through them? No way. That happens over my dead body.”

  She spoke more and more passionately, her eyes flashing with anger. Her father nodded, his face stern and resolute, and her mother reached across to take her hand. Milton didn’t know what to say. He had no experience in the law, but he knew what was right and what was wrong.

  “Can you fight it?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I’m doing it myself, so the cost is as low as I can make it. But, even so, there are experts and fees to pay. The money won’t last forever. And they have deep pockets. I’ll make it as difficult and expensive for them as I can. We’ll see what happens.”

  “You haven’t had any time to yourself for weeks,” Elsie said. “You work late, weekends—”

  “You know the worst thing?” she interrupted. “It’s not that, or the stress. It’s that it takes me away from running the charity. It stops me from working on new houses, finding new plots, speaking to families who want to move in. We’re not a big team. It’s me and whoever else is prepared to work for nothing. If I’m not running things, everything will stop. We’re already losing momentum.”

  Milton heard the door open and, as he looked up quizzically, saw the concern on the faces of Solomon and Elsie. He had his back to the kitchen door and, as he turned back, it opened.

  Alexander Bartholomew came inside.

  Milton remembered him from that night in the storm. He had aged badly. He could only have been in his late twenties now, but he could have passed for someone ten years older. He was thin, wiry like a speed freak. His hair was a mess, a straggled ’fro that was shot through with grey.

  “Alexander,” Elsie said.

  “Mom.”

  “You okay?”

  “Just passing through. Thought I’d come say hi.”

  “You didn’t say—”

  “I can’t put my head through the door, say hello to my folks?”

  His tone was jocular, but there was aggression and threat behind the words. He was slurring, too, drunk or high. Milton started to feel uncomfortable. The atmosphere had soured. It was obvious that there were developments within the family that he still had to understand.

  Alexander walked across to the kitchen counter. Elsie had prepared a Key lime pie for dessert and, without asking, he took a spoon and clawed off a chunk from the edge. Elsie frowned, more with discomfort than disapproval, and Milton decided, for sure, that Alexander Bartholomew had taken a turn for the worse since the time he had last seen him.

  “You remember John Smith?” Solomon said.

  Alexander put the spoon into his mouth and chewed with laconic hostility as he looked down at Milton. “No,” he said. “Refresh my memory.”

  “During Katrina, him and his friend—”

  “Oh, shit, him. Yeah, sure, I remember.”

  Milton stood and extended his hand. “Hello.”

  Alexander sucked the spoon clean. He left Milton’s hand hanging.

  “What did you do after Katrina? You stick around?”

  “No,” Milton said.

  “Flew straight out of here, right? Forgot all about us?”

  “No. I didn’t forget.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Alexander,” Elsie said severely, looking at Milton in apology.

  “Nah, Mom, things like that, they gotta be said. What’s this like for you, you here to look at how the poor black folk are managing? Like a bit of misery with your tourism?”

  “That’s enough,” Solomon said, pressing his hands down on the table so that he could get his feet beneath him.

  Alexander smiled, sudden and surprising, and pressed his hand on his father’s shoulder to stop him from rising. “S’alright,” he said, slurring. “I was just pulling his chain, is all. How you doing, buddy?”

  “I’m well,” Milton said.

  “What do you want?” Solomon asked his son.

  “Told you. I was in the neighbourhood. Thought I’d come over and say hi to my mom and pops.”

  “You don’t ever just do that,” Elsie chided him sadly.

  “Well, you know, I’m busy—”

  “Doing what?” Solomon interrupted. “Last time I looked, you weren’t doing shit.”

  “Thinking about going back to finish my studies,” he said, pretending hard to be hurt. It was an obvious lie. Milton saw through it the moment the words came out of his mouth, but Solomon’s face opened a little and showed a little hope. Milton felt a prickle of anger that Alexander was toying with him that way.

  He could see that Izzy wasn’t fooled. Elsie wasn’t, either. “What do you really want, Alex, like I needed to ask?”

  “I was hoping, maybe you could advance me a little cash. I’m behind on my rent. Landlord say he’s gonna throw me out if I don’t get straight with him, and, that happens, there ain’t no way I’m going to be able to think about getting that qualification.”

  Solomon reached into the pocket of his slacks and pulled out his wallet. “How much you want?”

  “No,” Izzy said, standing so quickly that she knocked over her empty glass.

  Alexander turned to her, his face dark with anger. “Back off.”

  She ignored him. “No, Pops. Put it away.”

  “I said back—”

  “You know what he’s going to spend it on as well as I do. You don’t pay rent, Alex. The places you been living, they don’t charge, least not for that, do they?”

  “What would you know about the places I been living?”

  “I’ve seen enough of them. I built houses where some of them used to be.”

  Milton felt exquisitely awkward. He had expected an interesting evening, one that had the potential to be pleasant, and
now he was in the middle of a personal family argument. He knew that the Bartholomews were proud people, it was obvious from their hospitality and the way that they worked at their house, and he knew that this would be terribly embarrassing for them. Knowing that, and that his presence made it so much worse for them, made him feel embarrassed, too.

  He stood. “I should be going,” he said apologetically.

  “No,” Elsie said firmly. “Please—sit down. We haven’t finished our meal yet. Alexander’s the one who needs to be leaving.”

  Alexander looked at her for a long moment, and Milton feared that he was going to defy her. He started to consider what he would do if he became violent. He would have to do something. Alexander was scrawny and would be simple enough to subdue, but would that just make things worse?

  Alexander sneered at them. “Fuck it,” he said. “Fuck you, all y’all. You prefer to have your dinner with someone like that, someone who don’t give a good goddamn fuck about you, you go right ahead, it don’t mean nothing to me.”

  “Mind your language in this house,” Solomon said.

  “Yeah, and fuck you too. I’ll find the money somewhere else.”

  With that, he turned on his heel and left the room. There was a pause, the sound of something soft being thrown to the floor, and then the slamming of the door.

  Milton remembered. His jacket was hanging out there, and his wallet was inside it. He knew, without even having to check, that Alexander had lifted it. Izzy went into the hall, and Milton followed behind. The jacket was on the floor. She picked it up and gave it to him. It was lighter, and he didn’t need to check.