Read Online On the Ropes: A Duffy Dombrowski Mystery by Tom Schreck - Free Book Online Page B

want to be indebted to him.
    “I can’t, Doc, I’m going to be away then,” I said.
    “DAT, DAT … shit,” he said. He couldn’t have been too upset because he only let out two DATs.
    Finally, he turned his attention to Claudia, who was anxious to talk about her committee. Claudia kept on about how the new committee was going to ensure that our paperwork was always in compliance. It was crystal clear that she was trying to get a reaction from me in front of the board members. Before I could respond to Claudia’s bait about the new committee, I heard Hymie’s entrance.
    “Where’s that goy friend of mine?” Hymie said. “The one who should be wearing the Star of David on his trunks, he’s a Jew in harp’s clothing!”
    “Hymie!” I got up to greet my buddy. “Shalom aleichem! My friend,” I said.
    “You hear this schmeckel?” he said. “He’s not foolin’ me—he’s not a Jew—but I love ’im.” He pinched my cheek.
    I smiled and looked down at the four gray hairs and multiple liver spots that made up his scalp. He was about five foot six, with glasses and two Miracle-Ears turned up to maximum. He had on his tan Sansabelts and white shoes.
    “Hey Hymie—shalom,” LT said.
    “Oh, hello, Lawrence,” Hymie said.
    He also turned and greeted Claudia, and soon after that they went in the boardroom to talk privately about Walanda’s death and to wait on the rest of the board. They’d probably also talk about my written warning. Hymie wouldn’t be pleased, but he wouldn’t stand in the way of what had to be done because he knew that type of influence wasn’t right. I understood that, and I wouldn’t ask him for anything different.

    After the board met privately for about forty-five minutes, they called Monique and me into the boardroom to introduce us to the quality assurance process. Besides Claudia, Hymie, and Espidera, the committee was made up of Mrs. Sheila Silver, a board member and retired social worker; Rhonda Bowerman, the executive director of the Eagle Heights Jewish Unified Services, which was about forty-five miles away; and Gabbibb.
    Sheila Silver was a goof. She had an MSW degree and passed her certification, so she was a certified social worker, but as far as I could tell, she had never worked a day in her life. She was in her early fifties, with jet-black hair, overplucked eyebrows, and every possible type of plastic surgery you could imagine. She weighed about 115 pounds and talked incessantly about losing weight, dieting, and exercise, though she always had an injury of some sort that kept her from actually doing much other than hiring a personal trainer. She was always coming from or going to her therapist, her hairdresser, her ob/gyn, or the manicurist.
    Sheila was married to an ophthalmologist who was the first guy in Crawford to do laser surgery. They were set financially, but you couldn’t pay me enough to deal with Sheila. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t mean, she was just incredibly self-absorbed. The type of person that never wanted to offend you, not because she didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but rather because she didn’t want anything to bother her conscience. Sheila knew social work theory and kept abreast of current events, but she had never actually gotten her hands dirty working with real people.
    Bowerman did the same job as Claudia at our sister agency. The Eagle Heights clinic operated in much the same way as ours with the exception that many of their clients came from more rural areas. Eagle Heights is a couple of towns away from Kingsville, where the new halfway house was going to be, and is about a forty-five minute drive from Crawford. There are dairy farms and cornfields, but there’s also some of that unwashed small-town feel to the area. Lots of broken-down cars and large, rusted appliances in big backyards that lead out to sections of woods where kids go to drink, get high, and feel each other up. Many of these people lived on public