Bad Chili (7 page)

In all the rooms the drawers had been dumped, books pulled onto the floors, and in the kitchen the flour, sugar, baking soda, stuff like that, were strewn about or were in the sink. In the bathroom the ceramic lid to the back of the toilet had been dropped and broken on the floor and someone had been pawing about in the plumbing.

I checked the back door. It had been jimmied, the lock snapped free by a crowbar, or some similar instrument. I pushed it open, stepped onto the screened-in porch Leonard had rebuilt, examined the aluminum-framed screen door that led outside. I was surprised to discover it was locked.

I went down the steps and looked around. The rain from the other night had left the ground soft and there were footprints in the mud. Big goddamn shoe prints. Bastard must have worn a size fourteen. The tracks were leading away from the house, not to it. I followed them into the woods, and from there I lost them. I was a fair tracker, but I wasn’t the Deerslayer.

Still, I took a flyer and went on through the woods a piece, over to where the foliage gave way to a muddy country road, and started up again on the other side. I walked out to the edge of the road just as an old pollen-coated brown pickup with two young men in it clattered by. They waved at me and I waved back.

I walked onto the road and looked around. It was a dirt road, so there were plenty of tracks, of course. Nothing odd about that. I walked along a piece and found a tire-smashed armadillo and a flattened copperhead, and finally took note of what I determined were the marks of motorcycle tires. Normally, that wouldn’t mean much, but they ran off the side of the road, and I discovered where they trailed red mud across the grass and into the woods. The bike had been pushed, because there were shoe tracks alongside the tire marks. The same big shoe tracks.

It didn’t take an Einstein to figure someone had driven off the road, pushed their bike into concealment, made their way on foot through the woods and into Leonard’s house. The tracks got lost in the thick leaves, so I went on through the woods and back to Leonard’s house and looked out back carefully until I found where the footprints exited the woods and came up on the south side of the back porch. I hadn’t seen these tracks earlier.

Whoever had entered the house had entered here, probably that way instead of through the screen door to stay down and out of view.

They had cut the screen loose at the bottom of the porch with wire cutters, pushed the screen up, slid under and inside. Then they’d jimmied the back door, and gone in. I assumed they had been quick and silent and purposeful about their task, entered at night, and taken their time ransacking the joint. Gone out the way they’d come in.

I decided I was thirsty, went inside the house and opened the refrigerator. The ice trays had been emptied on the floor and they had melted and water had run into some of the flour. There was a big footprint there, mixed with mud. I managed not to step in anything.

Some of the stuff inside the fridge had been thrown about. There were a few beers and Cokes in the fridge. I got one of the Cokes and popped the top and went out on the back porch and sat down on the steps and tried to think while I sipped it.

It might have been a common burglary, but I couldn’t figure what they had burgled. It didn’t look like vandalism either, least not completely. Someone had been looking for something. And whoever had done the looking had owned a motorcycle. Horse Dick had owned a bike. The bikers who chased Leonard owned motorcycles. The kid that delivered newspapers on this street owned one too. But he didn’t wear a size-fourteen shoe. Who the hell did?

I finished the Coke and looked at the tracks again, those leading into the woods, and those coming up on the side of the porch. I studied them carefully. They were pressed in pretty deep. Whoever had made those tracks was one big sonofabitch, and not just his shoe size. Guy could have been anywhere from two-fifty to three hundred pounds, or more. Maybe it was Bigfoot. Or Smokey the Bear. The thought of someone that huge made me a little queasy.

I went back through the house one more time, looking for clues, but nothing important jumped out at me. Which didn’t surprise me. I wasn’t much of a detective. I had enough problems just keeping up with socks that matched.

I closed the back door as best it would close, went through the house, locked the front door, stood on the front porch, finished my Coke and looked around.

The spot where the crack house used to be next door was nothing now but a patch of scorched earth and lumber. Someone’s chickens were loose and pecking around in the ruins. I wondered what would happen if the chickens found some old drugs in there. A little crack, some cocaine. They would certainly lay interesting eggs.

Across the street where MeMaw used to live a new owner had moved in. The new owner had painted the house hot Pepto-Bismol pink with chocolate trim, and they liked dark blue curtains and had yard butts on the brutally mowed lawn.

Yard butts are what Leonard and I call those stupid, painted, plywood cutouts that are supposed to look like an old man or an old grandma bending over in the yard, the grandpa showing you his overall-covered ass, the grandma’s dress hiked up, showing you her white-lace panties.

Leonard once told me he wanted to buy one of those plastic vaginas and butt holes you could get in sex shops and glue it on the seat of one of those grandmas. He figured if you were supposed to be looking up her dress, you might as well see something. It certainly would have been funny to see the owners of those yard butts come out the next morning to discover grandma giving the neighborhood a show.

I guess those dumb yard butts were better than those wooden Holstein cow sprinklers with a hose for a tail that swirled around and around tossing water. But not much.

I looked down the street, both ways, for no particular reason. Still looking for clues, I guess. All I noted was the street seemed to have changed a lot in the last few months. Some of the big trees along the pocked asphalt road had been cut down, and where there used to be shade there was sunlight. This neighborhood wasn’t the best in the world, with its poverty and drug problems, but I had liked coming here.

Now, Leonard’s house no longer seemed like Leonard’s house, like my home away from home. Things had changed. On the street. In the neighborhood. In the house. In our lives.

Perhaps I missed Leonard having a new crack house to burn down next door. He had burned two of them. Well, three of them, if you count the time I helped him do one.

Who knew? Maybe they’d move a new one in any day now. Hope springs eternal.

I took a moment to think about the sex life I didn’t have. Damn. I was getting as bad as Charlie. This kept up, me and him would be fucking.

I thought about Lt. Marvin Hanson, lying in bed in a deep coma. I assumed if I thought about how bad he had it, I could feel a hell of a lot better about being me.

It didn’t work. I still felt like shit.

I watched a couple of blue jays fighting in Leonard’s oak tree. Listened for a while to a small dog bark savagely at something somewhere off to the south. The dog didn’t want to stop barking. A car drove by, an old black man at the wheel, one arm out the window. He was wearing a blue baseball cap with the brim pushed up. He looked hot and tired and satisfied. I looked at my watch. Three-forty-five. Guy was probably just off work from the early shift at one of the plants around town. Must be nice to have a shift. A regular check. Probably had a wife to go home to. A dog. Some kids. A TV with cable instead of foil-covered rabbit ears. I used to have an antenna, but the wind blew it away. I wondered where my antenna was. I wondered where my youth was. I wondered if that fucker who drove by got the American Movie Classics channel.

The wind died down and I began to feel uncomfortably warm. I unbuttoned my top shirt button.

I watched the blue jays fight some more. The dog had stopped barking. I still felt warm. I checked out the pink house with chocolate trim again. The colors hadn’t changed and the lawn butts were still in place.

I looked at my watch once more.

Three-forty-six. Time was certainly shooting by.

I scratched my balls, got in my truck, and drove away from there.

I stopped at a pay phone and called Charlie. Before I could tell him the state of Leonard’s house, he said, “I hope you got something good.”

“It’s not that good. It’s about Leonard’s house. I just went by there. It’s been ransacked.”

“Maybe Leonard did it himself. Came back, grabbed some stuff he needed, made a mess.”

“I didn’t say it was messy. I said it was ransacked.”

I described the place to him. He was silent. If he had an opinion he didn’t voice it. Just before I started collecting Social Security, he said, “You need to come up with Leonard.”

“I’m working on it. Am I to think you no longer think he got nailed by bikers?”

“I think all kinds of ways. It keeps me from getting bored. And if you know where Leonard is, you ought to tell me.”

“So far, nothing.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Hap?”

“Gracious, no.”

“I’m not fuckin’ around here. This is some serious business.”

“I know that.”

“You put him up, hide him out, that’s a crime. You know that. Right?”

“Of course.”

“Are you talkin’ through a cardboard tube?”

“It’s my cold. It’s getting worse.”

“My cousin, he had a cold like that, neglected it. Fucker died. You takin’ medicine?”

“I’ve bought some, but no, I haven’t taken it yet. And I don’t believe you had a cousin who died of a cold.”

“Maybe it was my mother’s cousin.”

“You really aren’t that concerned about my cold, are you?”

“Hey, you’re sick, I’m sick.”

“You think you’ll soften me up, then I’ll confide something to you, don’t you?”

“You said it, I didn’t.”

“Let me ask you something. Raul. Is he a suspect in this case?”

“Everybody is a suspect. I’m thinking of running my wife in.”

“Come on, Charlie. You got Raul in custody? Know where he is?”

“No, and if you know where he is, you’d best tell me.”

“I just called ’cause I thought you should know about the house. You might want to go over there, bring some of your people, see if you can find a real clue. You could even bring your little Dick Tracy fingerprint kit.”

“You probably fucked up anything might have been there to find.”

“I don’t think so. I know I’m not a real policeman like you—”

“You’re not even a stuffed animal in a police hat.”

“Very true. But unlike you, I don’t have to step in shit to know a pile when I see it. And there is some shit goin’ on here that’s got nothing to do with Leonard. Not directly. At least I don’t think so.”

“You don’t sound all that certain to me. Maybe you got to step in shit after all.”

“Could be. But I did find a couple clues. You might take note of some footprints out back. They look to belong to Andre the Giant.”

I told him about my trek through the woods to the road, what I found there. I told him what I had touched. I said, “By the way, as you well know, it won’t be any surprise to find my fingerprints all over that house. And here’s an idea, and this is just an idea, mind you, and I don’t want you to take offense since it’s from a layman and you’re a real policeman with a badge and gun and everything, but you take fingerprints, what I’d do is see you have any other than Leonard’s, Raul’s, or mine.”

“My,” Charlie said, “you’re a regular Boston Blackie. This stuff about fingerprints. And that footprint business. Shit like that’ll bust the case wide open. All we got to do is make a cast of those footprints, make a shoe from that. Then we can go door to door and have people try it on. Shoe fits, we run the fucker in. . . . All right, Hap, get this. Time is running out, and I better not find you’re fuckin’ around on me.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Charlie.”

“The hell you wouldn’t.”

“Charlie, you really got to either smoke more so you’ll be less irritable, or you got to quit smoking so you can get some poontang and be less irritable.”

“What I’d like is to fuck like a snake, then afterwards smoke like a chimney. Hap, you listen here. We’re buddies, but when it comes to murder, that don’t buy much. Hear me talkin’?”

“I hear you. I keep hearin’ you. What the hell is with you? I still think you’re pissed about Kmart closing down.”

“It’s not an easy thing to get over. But don’t change the subject. I’ll make sure Leonard gets as fair a shake as he can get. If it’s self-defense, I’ll do all I can to get him off. But I’ll tell you now. I’m comin’ after him, and if I discover you’ve had anything to do with hiding him, then I’m coming after you too.”

“You said I had twenty-four hours. My understanding of that was I found him during that time, could straighten out things, you wouldn’t bother me. Even if I did know where he was. Isn’t that right? I had twenty-four hours, didn’t I?”

“
Had.
You got a lot less now. But I also said no promises if things changed around here.”

“Has something changed?”

Charlie let me hear the electricity in the phone for a while.

“Well, has it?” I asked.

“Just find Leonard,” Charlie said, “and listen close. I’m coming after you,” and he hung up.

I thought about that a moment, then understood what Charlie was trying to tell me. I called Leonard. I let it ring a couple times, hung up. Let it ring a couple times, hung up. Then repeated it. I hoped he’d realize it was some kind of code.

The third set of rings someone picked up the phone. I said, “This is me. If that’s you, might I suggest a stroll in the forest?”

The phone went dead. I took a moment to wonder if my phone was tapped, decided things had happened too quickly for that. I was okay. I was just feeling a streak of secret agent.

I pushed out of the phone booth and walked over to my truck. Down the road a piece I saw a yellow ’66 Pontiac parked next to the curb. There was a man sitting in it wearing a cowboy hat. He didn’t look like any of the cops I knew. He didn’t look like a cop. He didn’t look like anybody I knew, period. He didn’t seem to be watching me.