Late Rain (31 page)

“It’s his final offer, Sonny,” Corrine said. “LaVell made that very clear.”

The rye had forced some color into Gramm’s cheeks. “You delivered the message, Corrine, and you can deliver this one for me. Tell Wayne LaVell to go fuck himself.”

“I’ll be going to your funeral before the month is out.” Corrine started to get up, but Gramm waved her down.

“I want to know one thing,” he said. “You never told me why. What are you getting out of this?”

Corrine sat back and crossed her legs. Another angle presented itself. It had been nudging its way into her thoughts during the course of the meeting.

“Can you pull a trigger, Sonny?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not a complicated question.”

Gramm squinted and scratched at his cheek. A moment later, he let his hand fall. “He’s got something on you too, doesn’t he?”

Corrine nodded.

“And what you’re saying is you and me ...,” Gramm began moving back and forth behind the desk.

Corrine nodded again.

“The house would work best,” Gramm said, nodding his head. “It’s quiet and private. You can tell LaVell that I’ll sign the papers, but that I refused to meet anywhere else but there. Tell him too I want you there as a witness when I sign.”

“He’ll probably bring along Raychard Balen.”

“You’ll be a good distraction, Corrine. You can wear something sexy, talk things up, move around the room.”

“Ok.” She’d hoped to push Sonny in the right direction and then step back, stay off the scene of the meeting itself and simply let things unfold, but she realized Sonny was right even if his reasoning was wrong. She needed to be there to monitor his liquor intake if nothing else and to make sure he kept his resolve. There was too much left to chance otherwise.

And that was the one thing Corrine was sure of. They had one chance and only one to finish off Wayne LaVell. He wouldn’t give them another.

“What about Raychard Balen?” she said.

Gramm gave a dismissive wave. “Let him scramble back under his rock. With LaVell dead, he has nothing to gain. He won’t bother us.”

Corrine wasn’t so sure about that, but let it pass for now. She’d make sure they got back to Balen.

She waited while Gramm went over the set-up one more time, coaxing the idea of murdering Wayne LaVell into a sequence of actions and then letting the details find and settle into their place in the sequence, Corrine watching Gramm carefully as he paced, waiting for that moment when his expression told her he was ready to carry through.

“It has to be at the house,” Gramm said. “It’ll only work if he agrees to meet there.”

“He will,” Corrine said. “He wants the properties.”

Gramm stopped pacing. “Why should LaVell believe you’ve convinced me to sell in the first place?”

“Because he thinks you’re weak, Sonny.” Corrine paused and stood up, letting him feel the full weight of the insult. “He’ll believe because I’ll tell him I agreed to fuck you on the side on a semi-regular basis, and you settled for that and his offer.”

Gramm cocked his head and looked at Corrine for a long moment. He started to reach for the bottle of rye, but Corrine stepped up and pulled it toward her.

“You never answered my earlier question, Sonny,” she said. “

Yes,” he said, taking the bottle back. “Hell yes, I can pull a trigger. You’ll see.”

CROY WENDALL was thinking about
shovel
and
radio.
He was digging in the middle of a grove of pecan trees. The ground was hard and dry. The radio was on the cell phone Mr. Balen had given him, and man on the radio was talking about fires. Croy’s tooth hurt.

Shovel. Radio.

Croy had tried, but he couldn’t find any words to rhyme with either one, so that made the words just what they were and the things he was doing.

He was digging and listening.

There were a lot of fires. The man on the radio told where they were and how big. He said things like “efforts to contain” and “raging” too.

One of the fires was burning near the Two-Bridge River, close to the cabin Croy had stayed at, and he could see the cabin in his head while he dug, and he could see the tree next to the cabin where he had hung the frogs on the limbs, and then he could see the frogs, everything inside them dried out so that their skin was more like little pieces of paper hanging from the limbs than skin, and then he could see the fire on its way to meet them.

The fire was not like
shovel
or
radio.

It was like the fire had been an idea inside the frogs when Croy caught and put them in the bags and then hung them on the tree, and then inside that idea there had been another one about the frogs’ skin turning dry and like little pieces of paper that the fire would one day come and burn up.

Croy quit shoveling for a minute and chewed some aspirin. His tooth was hot. Croy had forgotten to tell Mr. Balen about the tooth when Mr. Balen had called him at the cabin and told him about the crime he needed Croy to do, and Croy had not mentioned it since because he was very busy doing the crime Mr. Balen had told him about.

The sore tooth was like a little fire in Croy’s mouth, and when the man on the radio talked about the other fires, it was like he was talking about Croy’s tooth too.

Croy picked up the shovel and started digging again.

The man on the radio disappeared.

A woman began talking. She stretched out the vowels inside her words.

The woman was on a radio show called
One Way.
For a while, some people sang God-songs. One of them had a part in it about a fiery sword and lambs and blood.

Then the woman came back on the radio and talked about God some more. She said God was not the name of things in this world. She called him a
Force.

Croy kept digging. He thought about God the way the woman said on the radio, and he thought about the frogs and the fire that was on its way to meet them, and the day grew very large, and Croy was in the middle of it.

BEN DECOVIC LEFT MESSAGES.

He layered the space on Anne Carson’s answering machine with them. He called her cell, and when it went straight to voice-mail, he filled it with more messages.

He stopped by the Salt Box, but got no further than the front foyer when one of the greeters recognized him and handed over an envelope with his first name inked on it and holding inside a telegraphed message from Anne:
Please. Not at work. I need this job.

Ben inked one of his own—
where and when then?—
and asked the greeter to pass it on to Anne.

No reply.

Roil and blur
. At the end of day or middle of the night, that’s what Ben Decovic was looking at. He was afraid things were starting to get away from him again. He resurrected the practice of marking hash lines on the inside of his wrist to monitor his drinking.

He ran his own version of home movies, ransacking his memories with Anne, trying to re-create the moment when everything went bad, when he’d called her by his dead wife’s name, and he went from not believing it had happened to not wanting to believe it happened to not sure of anything that had happened except the fact of a dark bedroom, a locked door, and two bodies.

Ben understood exhaustion and what it could blunt or erase. He began volunteering for double shifts. First shift was west Magnolia Beach and Old Market Boulevard with all its attendant commercial clutter. Second shift suited him better. He drew south Magnolia Beach and with it, everything that had begun and ended on Sentinel Avenue.

Ben parked a half block up from where Third Street intersected with Sentinel and radioed in. He walked in the direction of Mac’s Shack, which, at least according to Jamison Blake’s neighbor, Marilyn Keane, had been Blake’s second home.

Ben’s visit to the Shack started out as an instant replay of his previous one yesterday afternoon, Ben stepping inside, walking over and unplugging the jukebox, and then asking the not quite rhetorical question about outstanding warrants, the patrons glancing over their shoulders and then down at their drinks, which they quickly emptied before making a mass exodus worthy of any that Moses had been able to muster among the tribes.

Which, once again, left Ben and T.C., the bartender, in a silent standoff.

Maybe a decade and a half ago T.C.’s glower had been genuinely and intractably intimidating, but the years had taken some of the edge off its menace. It had a PG-13 quality to it now, a shopworn malevolence that T.C., with muscle running to fat and ponytailed braid running to silver, could not quite hide.

Ben stood in the middle of Mac’s Shack and waited him out.

T.C. picked up a bar rag and then set it back down. He looked over at the jukebox and then back. The muscles in his throat tensed, then relaxed. He was like a chameleon whose protective coloration had temporarily gone south on him.

Ben waited some more.

“Ok, ok,” T.C. said finally. “Enough of this shit. I can’t afford losing any more business. This is supposed to be Happy Hour. You ask your questions, and I’ll conversate.”

Ben took a stool at the bar. He waved off T.C.’s offer of a draft.

“About Jamison Blake,” he said.

“It was Lester, wasn’t it?” T.C. said. “Him or Danny. It just hit me, who it probably was, one or the other who pointed you here.”

“It doesn’t matter who I talked to,” Ben said, pulling out his notebook. “It’s you and me now, T.C.”

“Those fucking guys.” T.C. shook his head and then jammed his hand into the cooler and pulled out a beer. He opened it with a church key chained to his belt and took a long swallow.

Ben tapped his pen against the bar and ran through the preliminaries, establishing that Jamison Blake had qualified as a regular at Mac’s and that he’d been living with Missy Newton, who sometimes accompanied him to the bar, and that T.C. had, in fact, been bartending on the day Jamison and Missy had been killed.

“Anything unusual that afternoon?” Ben asked. “Jamison acting differently?”

“No,” T.C. said. “Jamie drank some beers, we bullshitted, and he left.”

“What’d you talk about?”

T.C. shrugged. “I don’t know. This is a bar. In a bar you get a lot of bar talk.”

The door to the street opened, and a thin man in a green baseball cap poked his head and part of a shoulder inside. Ben smiled and waved. The man backed out and quietly shut the door.

T.C. sighed. “With Jamie, it was probably about money, ok? He always had money problems. Which I personally can identify with right now on account of what this talk is costing me.”

Ben watched T.C. take another long swallow of beer. “How about Sonny Gramm? Jamison ever talk about him or his troubles?”

“Yeah, but so did a lot of other people,” T.C. said. “It’s not exactly what you call a secret, Sonny Gramm’s in trouble. Sonny’s been around forever. You hear things. Everybody does.”

“What did Jamison have to say about Gramm’s troubles?”

T.C. shook his head. “Look, you never met Jamie, right? You don’t know what he was like. A nice guy, ok, but Jamie, he liked to act bigger than he was. You know what I mean? No crime in that, but that’s what the guy was like. Music, politics, women, anything you got an opinion on, Jamie thought he had the last and best word.”

The phone started ringing. T.C. looked from it to Ben and back again.

He sighed and let it ring through. “A couple times,” he said, “somebody in here brings up Gramm’s Mustang getting messed up, Gramm hiring another bodyguard, you know, like that, and Jamie looks over at me, he winks and got this smile on this face, like he knows something but can’t tell. It being Jamie, I didn’t think it was anything but business as usual.”

“Jamison ever mention Stanley Tedros?”

T.C. frowned. “What? Now you think Jamie killed Stanley Tedros?”

“Do you?” Ben said.

“Nah,” T.C. said, shaking his head. “He liked the idea of the reward money. All the regulars in here did. Bar talk, like I said.”

“Any sense with Jamison that it was more than talk?”

“Come on,” T.C. said. “Remember what I just said about knowing the guy. Jamie was a bullshitter. A couple times he maybe mentioned he could get his hands on what the guy—” T.C. broke off, squinting. “What’s the guy’s name, the nephew?”

“Buddy Tedros,” Ben said.

“Yeah. Jamie claimed he was close to getting what Buddy Tedros was after. Said he had something all worked out, he was going to sidestep the police altogether, just deal with that Buddy Tedros, not give him his name or anything like that. Jamie was going to set all the terms, and Buddy Tedros was going to have to go along with them if he wanted to know who killed his uncle.” T.C. paused and hit his beer again.

He leaned closer to Ben. “That was Jamie, ok? He was a bullshit artist. Nothing more complicated than that. He was always hatching something. Once he told me about a plan he had to catch shrimp with magnets. It never stopped with him.”

“Was he talking about Buddy Tedros and the reward on the afternoon he was killed?”

T.C. threw up his hands and stepped back. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe probably. He was in a good mood, I remember that.”

Ben looked down at his notes then back up at T.C., who was standing with his arms crossed on his chest, his namesake tattooed on each bicep, Ben recognizing the old Hanna-Barbera cartoon character, Top Cat. He remembered Top Cat lived in an old galvanized garbage can and wore a straw boater and a vest. What he could not remember, looking at T.C.’s biceps, was an episode in which Top Cat gave someone the finger or held a bloodied knife triumphantly above his head.

The bar lights flickered.

“Old wiring,” T.C. said.

“A couple more questions,” Ben said.

“Let’s get it done.” T.C. unfolded his arms. “You’ve already wrecked Happy Hour. I want you out of here.”

“Did Jamison ever talk about any of his friends? One guy in particular, I’m thinking about. Someone named Clay?”

“Croy,” T.C. said. “I don’t know if that’s a first or last name though. Never met him. Jamie was always talking about him not being normal and doing robot things.”