The Jealous Kind (30 page)

“You should know. You've been following us for the last hour.”

“I must be slipping,” he said.

“You're a head taller than everybody else.”

“I have some information on those two gunsels who terrorized
Miss Valerie. They were running a couple of floating craps games and not piecing off the action. That's what probably got them killed.”

“It didn't have anything to do with Vick Atlas or Grady Harrelson?” I said.

“These sons of bitches don't need much reason to kill each other.” He coughed and took a small bottle wrapped in a paper bag from his coat pocket and drank from it. He seemed to take strength or comfort from it. “This here is codeine. We used to call it GI gin. It clears the pipes.”

“What do you want from us, sir?”

“I've got people on my back. Clint Harrelson got blown into his swimming pool in the richest section of River Oaks. The neighbors are not happy with the notion that his killer might be living close by.”

“What does that have to do with us?” I said.

“Maybe everything, maybe nothing. The truth is, I'm not sure who you are, son. I talked to your family physician.”

“Our family physician? He's a quack who sent my mother to electroshock.”

“He says you have a memory disorder just like you told me, except more serious. He says it's like an alcoholic blackout without the alcohol, which means the person having the blackout can do a lot more damage than a drunk person can. Does that seem a fair assessment of your spells?”

“You think I shot Mr. Harrelson?”

“It seems your whole family has shot somebody. I got to have a talk with Miss Valerie, too.”

He dropped his cigarette and covered it on the ground with his shoe. Through the entranceway, I could see the sawdust on the Coliseum floor and the animals in their pens and the lights burning overhead. I wanted to be among them, in the smell of wood chips and dung and ammonia and animal feed in the bins. “Sir, I can't begin to fathom your reasoning. People like Vick and Jaime Atlas and Grady and his friends are on the street, and you're questioning Valerie?”

“Grady Harrelson says he was sailboating down by Kemah the night his father was killed. Valerie's neighbors say Grady was at her house that evening.”

I felt the air go out of my chest. “Maybe they got their dates mixed up.”

“No, they're aware who Grady is and who his father was. They have no doubt about the date.”

“That doesn't make sense to me.”

“Because Valerie didn't tell you Grady was at her house?”

I couldn't look at him. “Maybe she wasn't home. Maybe Grady came by and left.”

“No, she was home that night,” he said. “All the lights were on. Three neighbors gave the same account.”

I saw Valerie coming through the crowd in her cotton skirt and tennis shoes and denim shirt sewn with cactus flowers. I stood up, as I was always taught to do when a woman approached me. She was smiling, obviously unsure what Detective Jenks was doing there. He stood up, too, offering the place where he had been sitting. She sat down between us. He told her the same thing he had told me. She gazed at the animals inside the Coliseum, showing no reaction while he talked.

“I don't remember what happened or who I saw that evening,” she said after he finished.

“You don't keep track of who comes by your house? The same night your ex-boyfriend's old man is murdered?”

“I stopped seeing Grady, even though he called regularly.”

“Your neighbors gave us false information?”

“Ask them.”

“I did. That's why I'm here,” Jenks said. “Don't try to vex me, Miss Valerie.”

“You're being victimized by a seventeen-year-old high school student?” she said.

“That's why I used the word ‘vex.' You're an expert at it, missy.”

“Was Grady at Kemah or not?” I asked Jenks. But my heart wasn't in the question. I believed what Jenks had said. Grady had been at Valerie's house and she hadn't told me. I felt a chasm opening under my feet.

Jenks coughed as though he had a wishbone in his throat. He put another cigarette into his mouth. “Sounds like somebody is lying. Who's lying, Miss Valerie?”

“I don't have any comment,” she replied, turning up her nose.

Jenks lit his cigarette, blowing smoke straight out in front of him. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his wrist.

“Those things will flat kill you, sir,” I said.

“No, you kids will. You're a goddamn morning-to-night pain in the ass.”

“It's impolite to swear in a lady's presence,” I said.

“One or both y'all is on the edge of committing a felony,” he said. “It's called aiding and abetting after the fact.”

He stood up. His face looked gray, tired, his long nose tubular like a teardrop, his skin rough as emery paper. He dropped his cigarette to the ground and stepped on it, but not before I saw the blood stippled on the butt.

“Miss Valerie, if you're covering up for Grady Harrelson, you're making the worst mistake of your life,” he said. “And you, Aaron Holland Broussard, are acting like you were hiding behind a cloud when God passed out the brains. Don't let that punk con you. You're a hundred times the man he is. What's the name of that bull you drew?”

“Original Sin.”

“Hope you have a soft landing.”

He walked into the crowd, his fedora low on his brow, his coat covering the badge on his belt and his holstered snub-nose, his massive shoulders and confident walk a poor disguise for the death he carried in his lungs.

V
ALERIE AND I WALKED
up and down the aisles among the livestock stalls and poultry and rabbit cages, neither looking at the other. I felt a sense of betrayal that was like a flame burning through the center of a sheet of paper, the circle spreading outward, curling the paper
into carbon. If you grow up in an alcoholic home, you learn a lesson that never leaves you: The need to satisfy the addiction comes first; everything else is secondary. Daily betrayal becomes a way of life.

We stopped in front of a stall where a huge York/Hamp sow was nursing a row of pink-and-gray piglets. I always loved animals. My favorite story in the Old Testament was the account of Noah and the Flood, which I believed then and believe now is deliberately misinterpreted by both Hebrews and Christians. In the antediluvian world, man was told by Yahweh that the stone knife should not break the skin of an animal. The first creatures loaded on the Ark were not people but animals who marched two by two into their new home made of gopher wood. When the earth was washed clean and the archer's bow was hung in the heavens, man was made a steward, not an exploiter, and was not allowed to harm his charges. I wanted to tell these things to Valerie. But I couldn't. I believed she had cut loose her boat from mine and was floating toward a place where Grady Harrelson waited for her.

“Why did you lie for him?” I said.

“I didn't lie for him,” she said. “I just didn't offer information that would hurt him.”

“It's called a lie of omission.”

She folded her arms on top of the stall's gate and fixed her eyes on the mama hog feeding her babies. “Grady is a child inside. I never should have gone out with him. I knew it was never going anywhere.”

“Then why did you?”

“Because the boy I loved and wanted to marry got killed in Korea.”

A man and woman close by looked at us, then glanced away. Valerie kept closing and opening her hands, her eyes flashing. Children were running up and down the aisle with balloons, their shoes splattered with sawdust and the runoff from the stalls. My head was reeling from the smell of ammonia and the sense that either Valerie was a stranger or I was driven by the same kind of jealousy I found so odious in others. The couple standing close by walked away.

“Why didn't you tell me you covered up for him?” I asked.

“I know what obstruction of justice is. I didn't want to make you party to it.
Why do you think Jenks said you're a hundred times the man Grady is?”

“He thinks I feel inferior to a guy like that?”

“Yes, that's exactly what he thinks. So don't act like it.”

“Put it on another level,” I said. “What if Grady isn't an innocent player in his father's death?”

“That's silly,” she replied.

“Who broke the neck of the Mexican girl, Wanda Estevan? She didn't do it to herself.”

I saw her cheeks color, her nostrils flare. It wasn't from anger, either. I knew fear when I saw it, particularly in a person who was rarely afraid.

“Grady wouldn't do that,” she said.

“Remember what you said to him when you threw his senior ring in his face at the drive-in? You called him cruel. You also warned me about what he and his friends could do to me. You had it right, Val. Grady and all his friends are cruel, and they're cruel for one reason only, just like Mr. Krauser was: They know they're unloved and they're frauds and others are about to catch on to them.”

I started to say more. I believed that Valerie thought her father capable of killing Mr. Harrelson and she didn't want to see an innocent person blamed for his death. But this time I kept my observations to myself.

“So you know all this, do you?” she asked, her face in a pout.

“Yes, I do, because I grew up scared, just like Grady, and for the same reasons. But I'm not like that anymore. My life changed because of one person, and that's the one I'm with now, the most beautiful girl in Texas. Now let's go see what all these animals have to say about it.”

C
ONTRARY TO MY
demeanor, I wasn't done with fear. That night I dreamed of bulls. There is no more dangerous event at a rodeo than bull riding, and in the days before padded vests and helmets with face guards, it was even more lethal. You can get hooked, ruptured, tangled up and dragged, stomped into marmalade, and flung into the boards.
A bull can corkscrew, spin like a top, stand up on his front legs with his back feet seven feet in the air, levitate straight off the turf, buck you on his horns, and as an afterthought, break your neck or snap your spine. He can reconfigure the entire muscular network along the backbone from eight to eleven inches so the back is not going in the same direction as the feet. Imagine driving a truck along the edge of a cliff at high speed while the wheels are coming off the axles, the brakes are failing, the gears are stripping, and the windshield is coming apart in your face.

Original Sin was notorious. He hooked a rider in Amarillo and crushed a clown in San Angelo and crashed over the boards into the stands in Big D. I woke up in a ball at two in the morning, shaking from a bad dream. I sat on the side of the bed and tried to clear my mind. The dream was not about Original Sin. I had dreamed of Detective Merton Jenks. In the dream Merton Jenks had become me, or I had become Merton Jenks, and one or both of us was about to die. The dream told me something else, too. The breath I drew into my lungs and took for granted was for him a second-by-second ordeal as well as a luxury he was about to lose. He had survived commando raids in Yugoslavia and parachuting behind German lines in France only to die a painful and humiliating death from the Pall Mall cigarettes. Jesus didn't pass by the blind man on the road when all the travelers did. I felt Merton Jenks was the blind man. In my foolish mind, I wanted to do something to help him.

The light in the bathroom was on, the door half open. My father was sitting on the edge of the tub, smoking a cigarette.

“Can't sleep?” I said.

“I snore. I thought I'd give your mother some rest,” he replied.

It wasn't true, of course. Like all depressives, my father suffered from insomnia; he also needed his nicotine, just as he needed his alcohol. I wanted to tell him of my feelings, but I never did, because I knew I would only add to his pain. Instead I told him of my anxiety about easing down in the chute onto the back of Original Sin, eighteen hundred pounds of black lethality.

“I'll be sitting in the stands,” he said.

“Mother's
not coming?”

“You know how she is. She doesn't like crowds.”

“She doesn't like being among what she calls common people.”

“People have their quirks. It's what makes us human. If we ignore other people's faults, we don't have to be defensive about our own.”

In all my years of growing up, I never heard him speak unkindly or critically of my mother, no matter how harshly she spoke of him.

“I was scared about riding Original Sin, but I dreamed about Detective Jenks,” I said. “Now I feel all right. Why's that?”

“Because when we think about other people's problems, our own don't seem so important.”

“I have a feeling he still has a crush on Miss Cisco.”

“The woman from Nevada? That's one person you need to forget, Aaron. Just like we need to get the Harrelson and Atlas families out of our lives.”

“Who do you reckon killed Mr. Harrelson?”

“Somebody cut from the same cloth he was. Somebody who's hateful and twisted and thinks he's the left hand of God.”

He dropped his cigarette hissing into the toilet bowl.

“You think Mr. Epstein could have done it?” I asked.

“Is he capable of killing someone? I'd say yes. Would he shoot an unarmed old man? I doubt it. It's someone else's grief. Don't make it your own, Aaron.”

“It's hard not to do sometimes.”

“I know,” he said.

I
DID NOT TAKE
my father's advice about not meddling. Early the next morning I drove to Grady Harrelson's house and knocked on the door. When no one answered, I knocked harder. Grady opened the door in a blue silk Japanese bathrobe covered with green dragons. He was unshaved and bleary-eyed and not happy to be awakened. “What's your fucking problem, Broussard?”