The Lacey Confession (6 page)

Sadie Fagan had a moustache. Not a thick one, dark and heavy, but noticeable nonetheless. It didn't bother Harry Levine, until he was a teenager. Then he found it kind of creepy. Later, as a grown man, keenly aware and eagerly appreciative of the intrigues a woman's body offered, Harry no longer concerned himself with Aunt Sadie's mildly hairy upper lip. She was his father's older sister, a squat woman, a fireplug not much more than five feet in her shoes. She was fat, but not like a lot of middle-aged women Harry saw around town. Not like the ones who always seemed to smoke menthol cigarettes. Not like the obese ones with huge asses and truck-tire thighs. And not like the ones who drove ten-year-old Pontiacs, wore oversize t-shirts emblazoned with NASCAR logos, and inevitably blocked the aisles at Wal-Mart. Aunt Sadie was solid and carried her weight well distributed. She had a big head, big ankles and a big everything else in between.

From what Harry could see, his father and Sadie shared only the same dark complexion. All resemblance ended there. In the photographs, the ones his mother and Sadie loved to show him, she always smiled. His father never did, not in any of them. And all the while Aunt Sadie never had any expression on her face except a happy smile.

As a kid, Harry thought his aunt's grin was permanently pasted on her face. She awoke smiling and went to sleep the same way. And it was there all the while in between, even when she was angry. When Harry was eleven he happened across a picture of the old Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella. Immediately, he recognized his aunt. Of course, she was neither black nor a man and hardly a ballplayer. She was, instead, very much a middle-class, suburban, New York Jewish woman, one who just happened to live in Roswell, Georgia.

Like so many southern white women, Jews and Christians alike, Sadie had what could only be politely called big hair. To Harry, the scent of hairspray meant his aunt was nearby. No matter what she wore—a bathrobe on a Sunday morning, Bermuda shorts and one of her husband Larry's old shirts while she worked in the garden, or a shiny, gleaming, rhinestone-studded floor-length evening gown like the ones she always wore to wedding receptions and took with her on Caribbean cruises—Sadie's hair was always perfect and very heavily lacquered. Stiff to the touch.

Harry was born in May 1974, six months after his father disappeared in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos or someplace else. Who really knew? His mother, Elana Morales, never believed the government's story, but what could she do? She wasn't his wife. The unfortunate David Levine drew a low number, got drafted in February, last saw Elana in August and disappeared, MIA, the second week of December 1973. He was never found.

Harry's mom, Elana, was Puerto Rican, a real Puerto Rican, not a New York Puerto Rican. She was a law student in New York City when she met David Levine, fell in love and moved in with him. They talked about getting married, talked about it, that's all. David fancied himself a poet. He worked at the Post Office and wrote long poems, that rarely rhymed, in small notebooks, sitting with Elana in coffeehouses and bars in Greenwich Village. Both of them were antiwar—who wasn't? It was the seventies. He really got screwed by his draft board. By then it was too late to get married and when Elana turned up pregnant, the Army couldn't care less.

Sadie and Larry Fagan moved from Brooklyn to Atlanta in 1966. Larry had made a business trip there a few months earlier—he sold medical equipment—loved it and worked himself into his company's southeastern office. Sadie was reluctant to leave New York, her family and friends, but she kept her misgivings to herself. Soon after arriving in Georgia, she realized her fears were unfounded and was more than happy to admit it. Sadie made new friends. So did Larry. They both loved living in Atlanta. Larry found his way to a senior management job with a major manufacturer of cardiac surgical supplies and the two of them settled in for the long haul.

Unfortunately, they couldn't have children. They never said exactly why not, but years later Harry discovered it was his uncle's fault. A low sperm count can give many women second thoughts, but Sadie stayed, sacrificed and saved her motherly love for her nephew. When Elana gave birth she gave Harry his father's name, Levine, and took it for herself too. She was alone in New York with a baby and another year of school before becoming an attorney. She needed money and she needed friends. Sadie and Larry invited her to come to Georgia, not for a visit but permanently. They implored her. “We're family,” they said. Elana accepted. She transferred to Emory University Law School and brought herself and her baby son to live with the Fagans.

That's the way Harry grew up. He and his mother lived downstairs on the lower level. They had two bedrooms, a living room, a small office for Elana and a bathroom. They had a separate entrance from the backyard, one that Elana never used. In high school, when Harry sneaked out after curfew and came home late, way late, he came and went via that special door. His mother knew. His aunt and uncle knew. It never crossed Harry's mind they had any idea. He thought he'd pulled one over.

They had a wonderful life in that house, all four of them. After her graduation, Elana passed the Bar and took a position with one of Atlanta's big, downtown law firms. Six years later, she realized she would never be made partner. Why? Although a Levine, she was Latino. While some Jews made partner, no such rewards awaited Latinos. She was unmarried. She was a mother. Who knew why? She quit. Elana Levine opened her own law office in Roswell, near home, all by herself. She did everything a lawyer could—wills; evictions; pre-nuptial agreements; divorce and custody; civil suits of all shapes and sizes; and minor criminal offences, DUIs and drug busts for rich suburban kids. As a Spanish speaker, she was sought out by Atlanta's growing Mexican population, usually for matters pertaining to immigration. Her practice thrived. Very soon she earned more money than Larry Fagan did. She paid half the family's expenses and could easily have afforded a home of her own but Elana never—not once, not ever—considered moving out. Sadie would not have allowed it anyway.

In the hot summer of 1991 Harry's mother was retained to represent two Mexican men, both undocumented, each charged with rape and murder. It was a death penalty case, high profile considering the nature of the crime and the defendants. The victim was a white woman, a cute blonde in her twenties. Family photos showed her glowing good looks and beaming personality. They were plastered all over local TV and in the newspapers. The time-honored, southern tradition of demonizing the dark-skinned perpetrator prepared to roll like a roaring train, full-steam at these . . . Mexicans. Elana mounted a spirited defense. In so doing she became the darling of the Atlanta media. An attractive woman, in her early forties, she was a natural for local television. That, like the defendants, she was herself a Latino was the icing on the cake.

The judge failed to put a gag order on the lawyers and Elana trumpeted her client's innocence. Television ate it up. The camera loved her: long hair, dark eyes, tan skin and ruby red lips. Both men were, in fact, completely innocent, falsely accused, indistinguishable by the local cops from any of a million Mexican men. They had absolutely nothing to do with the crime. There was no evidence and, after Elana's closing argument, no doubt about the verdict. Both of them were found not guilty. Their rejoicing was short-lived. No sooner had the judge declared the men “free to go,” than agents of the federal government, INS, approached, arrested and carried them off. They were illegals, wet-backs, undocumented—call them what you will—they were ripe for deportation.

The young, impressionable Harry was so taken by the circumstances of the case, by the job his mother had done, and by what he saw as the gross injustice of a callous, unfeeling federal government, he made up his mind right then what he would do for his life's work. He wanted to be a Foreign Service Officer. He wanted to represent his government with compassion and dignity, so people like his mother and her clients would no longer toil and suffer under the weight of a perfidious state. Of course, he was only seventeen years old.

After high school, Harry attended Tulane University in New Orleans, where he studied International Relations. He loved New Orleans yet always looked forward to coming home, to Roswell, for summer vacations, Thanksgiving and Christmas. He never went to Panama City or Ft. Lauderdale for Spring Break. He never drove across country for the summer, up to New England or west to California. Why would he? Why would anyone? he wondered. He went home. What could possibly be better than Roswell? When he graduated, Harry went north to the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He told his mother he needed a law degree from an Ivy League school. She was so proud. More than the education, the contacts he made and the imprimatur on his resume proved very helpful in the diplomatic corps. At twenty-five, Harry Levine took his top-list law degree and joined the Foreign Service.

The day he left the United States for his first assignment overseas was one of those spring days in Manhattan New Yorkers dream about all winter. A gentle, sweet-smelling, cool breeze mixed with a bright sun, high in a cloudless sky. Coats were unbuttoned. Jackets unzipped. People breathed deeply, smiled widely. Harry's plane didn't leave until late in the afternoon. He had all day to walk around and say goodbye to America. He was strolling on the sunny side of 23rd Street when he spotted the little record store with a big sign in the window: REAL RECORDS—VINYL LPs. Harry had always been a real record man. His father had quite a collection. His mother saved them—all of them—for Harry. He grew up with Jefferson Airplane, Marvin Gaye and The Mamas & The Papas. Sixties pop wasn't the only music his father liked. David Levine left his son hundreds of records, including a wide variety of jazz—Oscar Peterson, Art Blakey, Count Basie and Joe Williams. Harry loved those records for many reasons, not the least of which was, they were his connection to the father he knew about, but never knew. Poor David and poor Harry. Most children who grow up without a father are constantly told by their mother, whether true or not, how much their father loved them. Harry, of course, was well aware his birth came after his father was killed. Might it be, he sometimes wondered, that the records were more important to him than they ought to be?

After Tulane, just before he left for law school in Philadelphia, Harry decided he needed a really good record player, a top quality turntable. He was surprised to find no one sold any. The vinyl LP, invented by the engineers at Columbia Records in 1948, was already a relic of the past. The compact disc, with its seductive clarity, had pushed the record to forgotten bins in old music stores. So too was the fate of the record player, the quality turntable. Harry had no use for the CD. They were surely more precise than pressed vinyl, more like how one might think the music ought to sound. But, for Harry, the CD was less than the real thing, the sum failing to equal its parts. It was cold, empty. He just wanted a turntable and was disappointed when he couldn't find a store that sold good ones. Everywhere he looked, they either had none or the little, cheap, children's record players. The manager of a discount electronics superstore near the Roswell Mall told Harry there might be someone who could help him. “Try Fat Jack's,” he said. “He's got a place down the block from the Historic District, around the corner—I forget the name of the street. Look for it. If Jack is still in business, he'll get one for you.” Fat Jack's Audio was in a small strip center, one of four storefronts. It shared space with a chiropractor, a dry cleaner and a travel agency. There was a small sign above the door, but nothing in the window. Inside, Harry found an old man sitting on a car seat ripped from a Chevy or a Ford or some other 30-year-old American car. The car seat was on the floor, in the middle of the store, surrounded by boxes and boxes of records. The old man looked to be dozing.

“I'm looking for a turntable,” Harry said.

“Miss your records?” the old man asked, looking up, wide awake.

“No. I play them. It's just that . . .”

“Don't sound good enough for you?”

“Yes. That's right. So, I'm looking for a good turntable—at a reasonable price. Someone told me I could find Jack—Fat Jack—and he might have one I could buy.”

“I'm Jack,” the old guy said, standing up and offering his hand to Harry. “What do you like most about your records?” he asked. Harry stood there, surprised by the unexpected and somewhat personal question, thinking about an answer. When nothing came to mind, he repeated it back to Jack.

“What do I like most about my records?”

The old man, who was anything but fat—he looked average, quite normal in every way—smiled at Harry and walked slowly over to the counter beyond the boxes of records, toward the rear of the store. Harry noticed there was no overhead lighting. At least none that was turned on. Three floor lamps, one in the middle of the boxes, another by the counter where Jack was, and a third well behind him, visible through an open door leading to some sort of back room, illuminated the store. Harry wondered what kind of business this guy could do in a store this dark. He didn't see any turntables. He didn't see any equipment at all. Harry had no way of knowing Fat Jack made everything he sold, been doing it like that for decades.