When Venus Fell by Deborah Smith

had good reason to hate him now.

Four
    “I’m with the United States Treasury Department,” the man in the dark gray suit repeated, unsmilingly, after I insisted he hold up his badge and his driver’s license.
    It was only a few days after Pop’s death. We hadn’t even buried him yet. It had been a week of constant interrogations, of men tearing our house apart and pushing me into corners. “You’re from around here,” I said to the man, as I inspected his credentials. Even his photo had the crisp look of a mortician. His chin was shaved so closely I could see a blue vein beside his mouth. “I thought the Secret Service was in Washington.”
    “I’m from the New Orleans office,” he explained. “We have field offices everywhere.” He looked at me as if he had daughters but they didn’t talk back; he looked impatient. He stepped past me, latching a hand on the smooth, polished door framed by purple clematis. He didn’t say another word as he walked into the front hall and onward to the living room.
    He placed a tape recorder on the coffee table, removed a large notepad from his jacket, then sat down on the couch among the stacks of linen tablecloths I’d been folding. “Pull up that ottoman and have a seat across from the tape recorderhere, Venus,” he ordered casually, “and answer some questions for me.”
    I was ragged in grimy jeans and a T-shirt. I’d slept only a couple of hours a night. Each morning I presided over the dumped-out contents of every drawer in the house. The chaos had reduced me to small, obsessive efforts to fix, to replace, to restore order that was lost forever. “I don’t understand.”
    “Sit,” the man barked.
    I continued to stand, swaying. My head felt like a balloon. “My father didn’t kill anybody. And he certainly didn’t threaten the President.”
    “That’s not my problem. How he manipulated money is my area of interest. Credit cards, illegal transfers, fraudulent accounts, interstate financial shenanigans.”
    “I don’t know anything. He never discussed any of it with my sister and me. I’ve told so many people already.”
    “He discussed it enough to make you understand which files needed to be gotten rid of once he was in trouble.”
    “I’ve told everybody. A friend said he needed the files. I thought my father wanted him to have them.”
    “Sit down, please.”
    “I don’t think I should talk to you. I thought the Secret Service protected the President and other VIPs.”
    “That’s part of what we do. Now, you don’t have any idea whether your dad messed with funny money, do you?”
    “I don’t have to talk to you without our lawyer here. Why don’t you leave, please?”
    He stood. He took two long steps around the coffee table, nothing urgent about him, then suddenly he snatched me by the shoulders and shoved me onto the ottoman. He bent over me, his face beet-red and his eyes furious. “You self-righteous young woman,” he yelled. “You’re gonna end up in jail just like your old Commie-lovin’ dad. You’ve got nothing and nobody to cover for your pampered little behind anymore. This is not a piano contest. Your dad raised you and your sister in a sewer of filthy money. Everything in this fancy house reekswith the stink. From the clothes you wear”—he tugged at the sleeve of my T-shirt—“to the food in your kitchen, you have not got one thing to your name that can’t be taken away under the law. Because there’s not a damned dollar of your father’s money or his business or his belongings that isn’t tinged with the dirty red color of death and crime.”
    “Nobody can claim our house and take away everything.”
    “Watch us do it,” he said. “I hope you and your sister have friends who can help you out. Because we’re about to confiscate every penny of your dad’s money and every square inch of his belongings.”
    And they did.
    That was my encounter with the Secret Service. Guardians of the world’s leaders.