Genuine Fraud(45)

He said good morning brightly as Jule passed him. Immie and Forrest weren’t up yet. Brooke’s rental car wasn’t in the driveway. Jule grabbed a pile of clothes she’d laid out earlier and hung them up on the hook next to the outdoor shower. Then she went in.

She washed, shaved her legs, and thought about Scott. He was very, very pretty. She wondered about his lat workouts and his all-cash payments. How had he become a guy who was willing to bleach other people’s toilets and mow their yards? He looked and sounded like the great white hetero action hero you saw in movie after movie. He could probably have most things he wanted in this world without too much effort. Nothing was pushing him down, but here he was. Cleaning.

Maybe he liked it that way. But maybe he didn’t.

When she turned off the water, Scott and Imogen were talking on the deck.

“You have to help me,” he said, his voice low.

“No, I don’t, actually.”

“Please.”

“I can’t get involved.”

“You don’t have to be involved, Imogen. I came to you for help because I trust you.”

Immie sighed. “You came to me because I have a bank account.”

“That’s not it. We have a connection.”

“Hello?”

“All those afternoons at my place. I didn’t ask for anything. You came there because you wanted to.”

“I haven’t been to your place for a week,” said Imogen to Scott.

“I miss you.”

“I’m not paying your debt.” Immie’s voice was firm.

“I just need a loan. To get by. Till these guys get off me.”

“It’s a bad idea,” said Imogen. “You should go to the bank. Or borrow against a credit card.”

“I don’t have a credit card. These guys are—they’re not messing around. They left notes inside my car. They—”

“You shouldn’t have been gambling,” snapped Immie. “I thought you were smarter than that.”

“Can’t you front me enough to get this debt paid off? Then you won’t have to see me again. I’ll pay you back and disappear, I promise.”

“A minute ago you were all about what a great connection we have. Now you’re promising to disappear?”

“I have nothing,” pleaded Scott. “There’s five bucks in my wallet right now.”

“Where’s your family?”

“My dad split a long time ago. My mom got cancer when I was seventeen,” said Scott. “I don’t have anybody.”

Immie was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”

“Please, Immie. Cupcake.”

“Don’t start with that. Forrest is upstairs.”

“If you’ll just help me, I can leave quietly.”

“Is that a threat?”

“I’m asking for help from a friend to pay a debt, that’s all. Ten thousand dollars is nothing to someone like you.”

“Why do you owe the money? What did you bet on?”

Scott muttered his answer. “Dogfight.”

“No.” Immie sounded shocked.

“I had a good dog.”

“Dogfighting is a blood sport. That’s a felony.”

“There was this rescue dog I knew about; she was a real scrapper. And I know a guy who sets up fights sometimes. He has a couple pit bulls. It wasn’t, like, an organized thing.”

“It was organized if this guy sets up fights. There are laws against that. It’s cruel.”

“This dog liked to fight.”

“Don’t say that,” said Imogen. “Just don’t. If someone adopted her and was kind with her, she would have—”

“You didn’t meet this dog,” said Scott, petulant. “Anyway, we had the fight, and she lost, all right? I stopped it before she got hurt too bad, because you can if you’re the owner of a dog, because she was— The fight wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

Jule held still, protected by the wall of the outdoor shower. She didn’t dare move.

“That meant I lost money for all these guys who bet on her,” Scott went on. “They said I should have let her play it to the death. I said the rules say an owner can stop the fight. They said yeah, but no one does that because you shaft all the people who bet on your dog.” He was crying now. “And they want their bet money back. The guy who organized the fight wants his investment back, too. He says people complained, that I ruined his business by fighting a dog when I was…I’m scared, Imogen. I don’t know how to fix this without your help.”

“Let me explain the situation to you,” Imogen said slowly. “You are my yard boy, my pool boy, my cleaner. You work here. You have done a decent job, and you’ve been a good guy to hang around with now and again. That does not put me under any obligation to help you when you have done an illegal and immoral thing to a poor, defenseless dog.”

Jule began to sweat.

The way Imogen said yard boy, pool boy, cleaner. It was so cold. Jule hadn’t seen Immie face to face with anyone she disdained until now.

“You won’t help me, then?” Scott asked.

“We hardly know each other.”