Beluga (12 page)

She winked and said, “All right.”

I read the menu about fourteen times and drank two huge iced teas. I'd already switched tables once and then switched back again.

“You okay?” the waitress swung by to ask me. I knew by now her name was Holly.

I nodded, but I must not have looked it. She lingered. I said, “A little edgy.” That's when Officer Tula Raintree and her son came in.

Tula had changed, but not the way most people change. Your dentist out of his crisp white tunic still looks like your dentist in his tailored suit. The Tula in the restaurant hardly resembled the Tula at the station. She was what she had to be on duty. Downtime, she was something entirely else.

Holly knew them. She picked up CJ, and when Tula pointed my way, Holly said, “Him?” with what, to my ear, sounded a touch more incredulous than I'd have liked.

I was standing with my napkin in hand when they finally made it to me.

“CJ,” Tula said. “This is Mr. Reid.”

“Nick,” I told him. He had a firm shake for a kid.

Then CJ said, “I'm going,” and he went scampering off toward the toilet.

“I'll go with him,” I said.

I like kids. I think I like kids. CJ made it easy on me. It was all I could do to keep up with him. He knew right where the men's room was. The door was locked, and he banged on it until the guy inside shouted, “Give me a damn minute.”

CJ looked up and told me, “Oooohhh.”

The guy came out angry but softened straightaway. “Go on, then,” he told CJ and held the door for him.

I couldn't say much but “Sorry” and followed the kid inside.

He had no need of me beyond escort. He wiped the seat. He got undone. He perched on the toilet and told me, “Peeing.” More a point of information than anything else. He finished. He flushed. He fixed his trousers. He went to the sink and soaped and washed while I went over to do my business.

He just stared at me until I said, “Peeing.”

CJ was a happy, well-behaved boy. That made itself plain right away. He went back to the table in decent order, no running through the place. The black woman who cooked in the tiny kitchen came out to give him a hug and a corn dodger fresh from the fryer. His mother had fixed a chair for him with a booster seat, to my left and to her right so I'd be looking at her right across the table.

She was something to see out of uniform and not trying to look all mannish. I was trying not to stare at her, but the transformation was pretty stunning. In her uniform, she wouldn't let herself project much beyond handsome. No makeup to speak of. Tight hair. Only the occasional, hard-won smile. She was all undone in the restaurant. Beautiful black hair sweeping across her face. A little eye shadow or something that brought out the girlishness in her. Her dark skin against a white blouse. She was wearing a locket or something. She sipped her tea, glanced at the menu. It was a pleasure to see her up to something other than writing me a ticket.

“So,” I said. “Glad you guys are here.” I turned toward CJ. “What's good, buddy?'

“Burger.”

“He's kind of a specialist,” Tula told me.

CJ was singing to himself and playing with his fork. Officer T. Raintree leaned my way. “Got a whiff of something on the radio this morning. Kendell thought maybe you could clear it up.”

“I'll give it a shot.”

“EMTs got called to a house out by Geneill. Elysium. Know it?”

I gave her my best blank stare and casual shake of the head.

“Shambrough plantation. Ringing a bell?”

I went with my sad smile. “Can't say it is.”

“They treated a girl on-site. Stitches in her head. She wouldn't let them take her in. Said she fell down. The techs said Shambrough looked like he fell down with her. For some reason or another—he wasn't exactly clear on this—Kendell thought of you.”

“Huh,” I told her. “Can't see why.”

“I couldn't either until he filled me in. Kendell thinks you and Desmond have been up to all kinds of no good.”

“That's just the Baptist in him talking.”

“And he's still fond of you. That's what I don't get. You might start by explaining that to me.”

I sipped my tea and thought about it. “Kendell knows I'm one of the good guys,” I said.

CJ had been saying for a quarter minute there, “Momma, momma, momma.” Tula had ignored him, boring in on me instead. She gave me a final hard once-over. “You'd better be,” she told me. Then she turned to her son and asked him, “What is it, sweetie?”

The rest of dinner was given over to small talk and general chatter. With CJ. With Holly, the waitress. With some whiskery old bar rat who came in and knew Tula one way or another. It was easy enough as first dates go. That's how I thought of it, anyway.

I saw her out to her car, an impeccable little Honda. I helped strap CJ in. She was half under the wheel before I could get around to her side of the car. I ended up laying a hand on her shoulder like I was her priest or something.

“See ya,” she told me.

I think I said, “Yeah.”

And that was pretty much that.

 

ELEVEN

I drove past Officer T. Raintree's house to make sure she'd gotten home all right. Then I headed straight home and watched the Braves play a meaningless late-season game against a team a little deeper in the basement than they were.

Desmond woke me with a phone call. It was going on eight in the morning by then. I figured he had some K-Lo work he was waiting on me to show up for.

I told him, “I'm coming,” instead of “Hello.”

“We've got a problem,” Desmond said.

Our lives at that moment were little more than a tapestry of problems. So having
a
problem sounded to me like a noticeable improvement.

“Larry?” I asked him.

“Belzoni,” Desmond told me. “Kendell wants you down here in half an hour. Out at the catfish ponds.”

“That's not even his county.”

“Just get in the damn car and come on.”

So I drove out to that catfish farm. I needn't have worried about the tires. The trailer was gone. The blue tarp we'd covered it with was piled on the ground. There was a fire truck parked by the tractor shed, a trio of county cruisers, a couple of rescue squad trucks, what looked like a state sedan, and a 4
×
4 with its back hatch open. I'd seen that vehicle before. It belonged to the gentleman who served as crime scene coroner for four contiguous counties. I'd met him over breakfast once. Kendell had introduced him. He'd told two lame jokes right in a row and then had hit us with a pun.

“Gallows humor,” Kendell had said by way of apology.

“Hell, man,” I told him, “don't blame the dead for that.”

Kendell and Desmond were standing with a guy in a necktie up past the tractor shed. Kendell whistled and waved me over. Somebody was sure to be killed.

He was wet. They'd fished him out of a pond. I realized I didn't even know his name. He was just Larry's con friend with the snuff box and the honest wage. He was laid out faceup on a scarlet blanket from one of the EMT trucks, and he clearly hadn't needed to drown because he'd probably died from the beating he'd had.

“Know him?” Kendell asked me.

“Friend of Larry's.”

“Yeah, but do you
know
him?”

“Just to say hey. Couldn't even tell you his name.”

Kendell consulted his notepad. “Jonathan Randolph Simms.”

“What the hell happened to him?”

Kendell turned to the guy in the necktie. “Show him,” he said.

The gentleman handed me a digital camera and showed me what button to hit. I got a parade of images. They'd stuck him in the nearest pond headfirst. There were a couple of shots of just his boots poking out of the water, his pale shins exposed. Then photographs of a couple of EMT techs hauling him up and placing him on the blanket they'd spread out for that purpose.

As I was handing the camera back, the guy in the necktie told me, “Fish went at him a little. Something else went at him a lot.”

“Who are you?”

He dug out his state police badge. An Arkansas state police detective.

“What's Little Rock want with shit like this?”

“Tell him,” that guy said to Kendell.

“Izzy's girl,” Kendell said. “They've been onto her for a while.” He pulled a mug shot out of his notebook. It was her, all right, but with peroxided hair. She was wearing a jailhouse jumpsuit unzipped to reveal her neck tattoo.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“Gloria Marie Johansson,” the Arkansas cop told me.

I glanced at the girl in the mug shot and then handed it back to Kendell. “This the girl that did the number on Izzy?”

Kendell nodded.

“Ever seen her?” the guy from Arkansas asked me.

I'd become awfully glib at lying. I shook my head and told him, “Not sure I'd want to.”

I can't say why exactly I didn't tell them what I'd gotten up to out at Shambrough's. Now that we were all agreed they were treacherous lowlifes and possibly homicidal, there probably wouldn't have been much harm in me confessing what I'd done. I suppose it was habit by this point. I'd learned to hold everything close.

Desmond hadn't uttered a word. I was waiting for him to chime in so I could get a read on how much he'd let out of the bag. If anybody was going to give up Larry and Skeeter, it had to be Desmond.

I just waited. There was plenty to look at. The coroner was kneeling beside the body. He had his liver probe in hand and showed it to us. “Water'll throw everything off.” He plunged the thermometer probe straight through the skin before I could turn away.

“What do you figure they wanted?” Kendell asked me.

“They who?”

“That girl and … whoever.”

“I thought Izzy said it was just her.”

Kendell nodded. “Guess he did.”

Kendell motioned for us to follow him into the tractor shed. Once he'd turned his back to me, I gave Desmond as inquiring a look as I could manage. He just shook his head a little, and I couldn't at all be sure what that meant.

There were tools all over the place. The dirt floor of the shed was churned up. A length of sack rope was tied to the tractor's steering wheel. Another to its exhaust stack.

“He's got marks on his wrists,” Kendell told us. “Looks like he got tied up.” Kendell leaned back against the tractor with his arms extended—farmyard crucifixion. “Something like this,” he told us. “I wouldn't call that much of a fight.”

Kendell pointed to where the trailer had been. “Looks like they took something out of here.”

Desmond nodded and finally chimed in. “Looks like.”

Then nothing got said for longer than me and Desmond were comfortable with. Kendell let us soak in the carnage, even pointed out some of it to us. That old tractor was blood spattered and gored up pretty good. There were drying puddles of blood and stray human giblets on the ground.

“Anybody you want to call? Tell him to look over his shoulder?” Kendell pointed toward the road. “Best go on and do it. If it was me, I might just bring him in before he gets dead, too.”

Desmond managed a groany grunt.

“We'll get back to you,” I told Kendell.

The Arkansas guy looked like he wanted to keep us around for a while, but Kendell did some explaining to him, and he let us walk away. Down the gravel track and past all the vehicles to where we'd both parked, hard by the blacktop.

“What did you tell him?” I asked Desmond.

“Told him I'd tell him shit in a while.”

“You giving up Larry?”

“I don't know. Got to do some thinking.”

With Desmond, that meant he had to eat, so I followed him to the knockoff Sonic.

Since we were sitting at the same table as the day before, Desmond hit the Dumpster without even bothering to aim. He just bundled up his sack and made a blind, forlorn toss.

“I don't want to defend Larry,” I told Desmond, “but he might go up for good this time. It's not just tires anymore.”

“He didn't have nothing to do with that.”

“The law might see it another way. But for Larry and Skeeter and the shit they got up to, none of this would have happened.”

“If we hadn't put the money up, it wouldn't have happened either.”

Desmond had a point, and I acknowledged it by letting it just sit there unchallenged.

“What am I going to tell Shawnica?”

I had to figure that was coming.

“You might start with ‘Your brother's a shithead' and go from there.”

“How much you figure the catfish guy knew?”

“Ever seen him up in Indianola?”

“Never seen him anywhere before last week.”

“Beat up like that, he would have told them what he knew. Must not have known anything. Not enough, anyway.”

“Maybe,” Desmond said and then added a little hotly—hotly anyway for Desmond—“Just had to go and poke them, didn't you?”

“Did you forget Izzy and that woman in Sunflower? Some people come prepoked. Primed for shit like this.”

“What are we going to do?” he asked me.

“First thing, we've got to figure how we want this to play out. Do we want to give it all over to Kendell and the Arkansas state police? Just let them have Larry and Skeeter, and whatever happens happens? Or do we want to clean up this damn mess ourselves?”

Desmond tapped his chest with his beefy index finger.

“I'm guessing these guys are all in from here on out. Nobody goes to the hospital. Everybody goes to the morgue.”

“So what do we do?” Desmond asked me.

“We go after
them
.”

*   *   *

We started with Kendell. Desmond called him and told him we wanted to have a word. Just him and us. No necktie guy. Desmond set it up for some bow lake on the far side of Panther Burn. It was back in a wildlife refuge, a scrubby patch of fallow ground.