Read Online Crunch Time by Diane Mott Davidson - Free Book Online

would creep in and offer half the asking price. If the owner or the bank refused her offer, she’d move on, buying houses after foreclosure or at auction. She wouldn’t fix and flip, because nobody wanted that house in the first place, right? She’d fix and rent. On the low end of the market, renters aren’t demanding. If Donna does have a difficult tenant, she just doesn’t renew their lease. If you’re renting at the low end? If you’re desperate and you’re just one step removed from sleeping in your car? Donna’s your woman.”
    “How do you know all this?” I asked.
    Yolanda shook her head. “I got to know Donna real well when I was renting from her.”
    “But she always looks so—”
    “Poor and downtrodden? That’s part of her shtick. Or it was. Lately, she’s cleaned up her act. Maybe she’s putting that insurance money to good use.”
    “How did Humberto know you were having problems?” Tom asked, giving me a dark, stop interrupting this interrogation glare.
    Yolanda cocked her head at Tom. “You ever tried to keep something secret in this town?”
    “Goldy didn’t know your house burned down,” said Tom. “Goldy wasn’t aware of Donna Lamar’s circumstances.”
    Yolanda gave me a puzzled look. “Well, I haven’t got a clue as to how you didn’t hear the news about our rental, and about Donna.” I stared at my friend. Somehow, her answer seemed . . . calculated. Was I picking up on Tom’s distrust of Yolanda? That afternoon, my friend had told me all kinds of details about her relationship with Kris. And yet she had not told me that her rental house had burned down, or that her landlady was a jackal. Why not?
    Before I could ask her some questions, Tom intervened. “So Humberto, your family’s friend, somehow knew you were having problems, and he came around and offered to help you.”
    “ Yes. ”
    “He just showed up out of the blue.”
    Yolanda shook her head. “He heard it someplace, I don’t know where. Maybe the news. You don’t believe that he heard it through the town grapevine, then ask him how he knew. You want to hear the story or not?”
    “I wouldn’t believe a single word that came out of Humberto Captain’s mouth,” Tom replied.
    Yolanda placed her hands palm down on our kitchen table. “Yes, Humberto showed up, out of the blue, as you said. He asked if we needed money. I said we did. He gave me that seventeen thousand. He wanted to know if we had a place to stay. I said I could ask someone I was working for if we could stay with him. At Ernest’s, I put the money under the mattress because I couldn’t think where else to put it.”
    I stood up and looked for something to do. This whole conversation was making me uncomfortable. First I was on Yolanda’s side, then I was on Tom’s, then back again. I’d be useless on a jury.
    “But you didn’t go stay somewhere Humberto supplied,” Tom was saying now. “You asked Ernest McLeod if you could stay with him—”
    “ Yes. ” Yolanda’s eyes flashed. “So what ?”
    Tom leaned across the kitchen table. “You went to stay with Ernest McLeod, after your rental mysteriously burned down—”
    “Would you quit saying the rental mysteriously burned down? I’ve only talked to sheriff’s department investigators sixteen times about that stupid house, which was a firetrap, by the way. And no, I still don’t know how somebody would go about getting a Unifrutco oil can these days, and using it to spread accelerant—”
    “—and you had no place to go,” Tom said, continuing as if she hadn’t spoken, “despite the fact that you had a rich boyfriend with a big house who would have loved to have you back, with no conditions. But then Humberto Captain showed up while your rental house was still smoking. He appeared unannounced, wanting to give you money. And, let’s see. I’ll bet he was wearing one of his beige tropical suits. Makes him look like a Miami gangster.”
    “Gee whiz,” said Yolanda,