The Jealous Kind (24 page)

“Why?”

“Because he was afraid of Clint Harrelson and the kind of people who work for him. He probably thought he and Saber and I were being set up, and Cisco Napolitano dumped him because he wouldn't use his influence to get kids into Harrelson's indoctrination camps. A guy who went all the way to the Elbe River killed himself for no reason.”

Maybe my reasoning was self-serving and I was exonerating my mother at the expense of a suicide victim, but I didn't care. She had paid enough dues in this world, and Krauser had not, no matter how many Nazis he had killed.

She pushed aside her black cow and took a pencil and pad from her purse. “What was the title of that book Clint Harrelson was reading when you and your father went to his house?”

“I saw the word ‘eugenical' on the cover. It was written by a guy named Laughlin.”

She wrote it down. “I'll get right on this.”

“Maybe you shouldn't get too involved,” I said.

She gave me a look that made me blink. That was the downside of being in love with Valerie Epstein. You didn't tell her what to do.

“I mean, Detective Jenks has evidently been after these guys for years. The only thing he's gotten for it is indigestion.”

“Where is Saber now?”

“With a couple of Mexican drug dealers.”

“Tell him I want to talk to him.”

“What about?”

“He let you get arrested for a crime he committed. I'm going to give him a piece of my mind.”

“Let's take a pass on that,” I said.

Under the table, she put both of her tennis shoes on top of my cowboy boots.

“If I see him, I'll tell him,” I said.

She pounded her feet up and down.

“I'll call him,” I said.

“You never know when I'm kidding you, do you,” she replied.

I never saw anyone who had so much light in her eyes.

S
HE MADE CLINT
Harrelson the subject of her private investigation at her neighborhood public library, then expanded her operation to the library at Rice University. The filling station where I worked was a short distance away. The campus was green through the summer and winter and filled with oak trees, the buildings deep in shadow at sunset. As I approached her in the reading room and saw her at one of the tables, writing in her notepad, books spread open around her, I was reminded of Nancy Drew waging war with her fountain pen
against the sinister forces that threatened to destroy River Heights. Even though Valerie's mother had been murdered by Nazis, she believed that people were basically good. I did not think she would find anything in either a public or university library that would tell us anything we didn't know about Clint Harrelson or the people who ran the Galveston underworld. But I dared not tell her that.

“What'd you find?” I said, sitting down across from her, still wearing my green-and-white-striped gas station shirt.

“Clint Harrelson went to a military academy in Virginia,” she said. “He had a senatorial appointment to West Point, but he was expelled for hazing another cadet. Guess what? He did it again at Northwestern. Mr. Harrelson and his fraternity brothers hung a boy by his feet off a pier and ending up dropping him on the rocks. They not only killed him and hid the body, they did the same thing to another kid later on, although he survived.”

“Where'd you get all this?”

“The Chicago newspapers are on microfilm. Guess what Mr. Harrelson has a degree in. Anthropology. Look what I found on the Atlas family and the Mob's operations on the Gulf Coast.”

I didn't want to see it. I had no doubt about the kind of people the Harrelson and Atlas families were. They and others just like them did business with baseball bats while the law and decent people looked the other way. There were brothels and gambling joints along the entire rim of the Gulf of Mexico, even in Mississippi, which was supposedly a dry state, and they operated openly and with sanction by the authorities. Slot and racehorse machines were everywhere, and Louisiana cops in uniform with their badges pinned to their shirts worked behind the bar and served mixed drinks to underage kids. But I didn't want Valerie to know how I felt about the information she had worked so hard to find. Who wanted to offend Nancy Drew?

I read her notes and looked at the marked pages in the books and feigned as much interest as I could. “I haven't eaten supper yet. How about we go over to Bill Williams's for some fried chicken?”

“I have to go home and help my father with the income tax,” she said.

“You have time for a cold drink?”

“I'd better not. I'll see you tomorrow, Aaron.”

I walked her to her car. It was her father's, a four-door Chevrolet. Back then most families had only one car; many had none. The Epstein car was parked in a cul-de-sac in the shadows of slash pines silhouetted against the sun. It had just rained, and the windows and roof were showered with pine needles. The lights were on in the dormitories and the offices of a few professors; I wanted to believe they were a reminder that civilization was a constant and evil was not. But I couldn't shake the trepidation in my chest. It was the way I had felt before I swam out to the third sandbar south of Galveston Island into a school of jellyfish. I didn't want to let go of her.

“I'll follow you home,” I said.

“No, you will not.”

“Please.”

She kissed me lightly on the mouth. “See you in the morning, Kemosabe.”

The sun dropped below the campus buildings. I watched her drive away, her taillights winking like rubies in the shadows.

I
T WAS A
weeknight, and few vehicles were on the two-lane street she took into the north end of the city. The sky was black, creaking with electricity, like someone crumpling cellophane. Her windows were down. She could smell the clean odor of a storm and the coldness of the dust blowing in the street. Then at a stoplight, at an intersection where there were no other cars, she smelled gasoline. The light changed and she shifted into first gear and drove through the intersection, then looked in the rearview mirror just as heat lightning flared in the clouds. For an instant she thought she saw a drip line on the asphalt that led to her back bumper. She looked at the gas gauge. It was on empty.

There was a weed-grown vacant lot on each side of the road, a deserted house on one corner, a spreading oak on the other, a few lighted houses a block farther on. She was two miles from home, but she remembered a filling station three blocks back that was still open. She made a U-turn and drove slowly toward the stoplight. Then her engine coughed and shook once and died. She shifted into second and popped the clutch, trying to restart it. Her right front tire struck the curb, her headlights dimming as the battery went down. A car going in the same direction passed her. She tried to wave the driver down, but he kept going. The wind began blowing harder, buffeting her car, the first raindrops hitting the windshield as hard as hail.

She rolled up all the windows. A pair of headlights came around the corner and approached the rear of her car. The driver had his high beams on. He pulled to the curb forty feet behind her and cut his engine but left the lights on. The sky was black, the raindrops on the windshield as big as nickels. No one got out of the car.

She pumped the accelerator and pushed the starter, then gave up and pulled the keys from the ignition and bunched them in her right hand, allowing one key to protrude between her index and middle fingers. She stared into the rearview mirror until her eyes watered. The driver turned off his lights. The windows in the car were as dark as slate, impossible to see through; steam was rising off the hood. She opened her door and stepped into the rain.

“Who are you?” she called.

There was no response.

“I have a pistol. I'll use it,” she said.

The car was a 1949 or '50 Ford, with an outside spotlight on the driver's side. When lightning split the sky, she saw a man's face behind the wheel. He was wearing a dark cap with a lacquered bill. The door made a screeching sound when the driver opened it. He had on a heavy rubber slicker and unshined black shoes and trousers with a stripe down the leg. Another man stepped out on the passenger side. He was also wearing a slicker and a cap with a bill; he carried a flashlight and a one-gallon gasoline can. The two men walked toward her. The driver was tall, blade-faced, in his thirties, his expression calm, reassuring. He was standing four feet away.

“Saw you sputter. Figured it was a fuel problem,” he said. The rain was sliding off his cap and slicker. He felt under the bumper and smelled his hand. “You probably got a hole in your tank.”

“You're not cops,” she said.

“Why do you think that?”

“Your coats are wrong.”

“We're not Harris County cops, but we're cops,” he said. “You're lucky we came along. This is a bad neighborhood.”

“I live here. There's nothing bad about this neighborhood,” she said.

A car was coming up the street. The other man waved it by with his flashlight.

“I can walk to my house,” she said.

“We'll take you,” the driver said.

“No, you won't.”

“That's a strange attitude, missy,” he said. “We're police officers trying to help. Is there something in your car you don't want us to see?”

“You're not cops of any kind,” she said. “Your shoes have eyelets in them. They reflect light.”

The two men looked at each other. “You need to get out of the rain,” the driver said. “We also need to take a look inside your car.”

“Get away from me,” she said.

The driver twisted her wrist and pulled the keys from her hand. Then he threw them on the floor of the car and shoved her inside. When she tried to get out, he slammed her down again and handcuffed her to the steering wheel. He looked over his shoulder. A car was coming, its tires whirring on the asphalt. Its lights flashed across his face. His hair was uncut and his mouth had an overbite; he was older than she had thought. He blocked her from view while his friend waved the car on.

“My father will be looking for me,” she said. “He knows the streets I take to get home.”

The driver rubbed the back of his hand along her cheek. “I hate to do this to you, missy. But a job is a job. You should have stuck to your studies and such.”

The other man opened the passenger door and leaned inside.

“What are you all doing?” she said.

She heard the second man unscrew the cap from the can, and smelled the gasoline splashing on the floor and the plastic seat covers. She jerked against the handcuffs.

“Listen to me, missy,” the driver said. “I want to make this as easy as possible. I'm going to give you a shot. I guarantee in ten seconds you won't feel a thing. Close your eyes.”

She thought the size of her heart would shut down her lungs. Her eyes welled with tears. “Why are you doing this?”

“People always try to buy time. It won't change the outcome, sweetheart.”

“Don't call me that.”

“You're in a bad position to be giving orders.”

She spat in his face.

“I don't blame you,” he said. He wiped her spittle off his cheek and mouth. “But you're on your own now. Back away, Seth.”

The other man capped the can and stepped back into the rain, then kicked the passenger door shut, not touching any of the surfaces with his hands. The driver took a book of matches from his shirt pocket and pulled one loose. He shielded the matchbook with his body and dragged the match across the striker.

She held her eyes on his and pressed down on the horn with both her forearms. She never blinked, even when all the match heads flamed into a miniature torch.

“You should have let me inject you,” he said. “You're pretty. I hate to do this. But you dealt it, little girl.”

T
HE FLAME BURNED
down to his fingertips and died in his hand. He dropped the remnants of the matchbook and stepped back from Valerie's car. A big Buick with a grille that resembled chromed teeth roared down the street and came to a lurching stop two feet from Valerie's fender. The driver's door flew open, and Vick Atlas was in the street, his suit coat unbuttoned, a pearl-handled pistol pushed down in his belt. He was wearing his eyepatch. “What do you guys think you're doing?”

“Mr. Atlas?” the driver of the Ford said.

“Get away from her car,” Atlas said.

“Yes, sir,” the driver said. He brushed the soot from the dead matches off his fingers and held up his hands to show they were empty.

“You with the can,” Atlas said. “Set it on the ground.”

“You got it,” the man said.

Atlas walked closer so he could see inside Valerie's car. “Get those handcuffs off her.”

The driver reached inside with a tiny key and inserted it in each lock. His overbite and the vacuity in his eyes made her think of a barracuda swimming along the glass wall of an aquarium. He removed the handcuffs and dropped them into his pocket, never looking at her.

“I'll get you for this, buster,” she said.

He didn't answer. His attention was concentrated on Vick Atlas. “We were going to scare her.”

“Who you working for?” Atlas said.

“I don't know.”

“You're telling me you don't know who you work for? You think I'm dumb? That's what you're saying? You insult me to my face?”

“We get a phone call. We do the job,” the driver said.

“I know who you are,” Atlas said. “I'll be dialing you up, know what I mean?”

“We're gone, Mr. Atlas,” the driver said, stepping back toward his car, his hands raised.

“You're gone, all right,” Atlas said. “You got till three.”

Both men got into their Ford. The man with the overbite started the engine and backed straight to the next intersection, then turned on his lights and headed down a side street. Atlas reached into Valerie's car and offered his hand. “I'll take you home, Miss Valerie. I'll be dealing with those guys tomorrow. You'll never see them again.”