The Jealous Kind (34 page)

“Yeah, I've heard him speak of you,” the sergeant said. He hung up.

I waited an hour and put a pencil crossways into my mouth and called again. The same cop picked up.

“This is Franklin W. Dixon, features editor at the
Houston Press.
Our photographer is supposed to do a shoot at Detective Jenks's home. Evidently he screwed up the address, and the staff writer is out of the office. Can you confirm Detective Jenks's address for me?”

“Hang on,” the sergeant replied. “I got it in the file.”

T
HE HOUSE WAS
located in an old rural neighborhood off the Galveston highway. It was a place of tin roofs and slash pines and dirt streets
and a volunteer fire department and a general store. At night you could see wisps of chemical smoke that hung like wraiths above the electric brilliance of the oil refineries in Texas City. Jenks lived in a decaying biscuit-colored bungalow with ventilated storm shutters on the windows, a tire swing suspended from a pecan tree in the front yard. The pillars on the porch were wound with Fourth of July bunting, the path to the front steps lined with rosebushes.

The inside door was open, the screen unlatched. I tapped on the jamb. Jenks came to the door in his socks, a newspaper in his hand, glasses on his nose. “How'd you know where I live?”

“I think you told me.”

“No, I didn't.”

“Can I have a few minutes?”

He pushed the screen open and went back into the living room. There was a flintlock rifle over the mantel, a framed array of medals on another wall, a rack of magazines and paperback books by an upholstered couch. On the coffee table was a bouquet of flowers wrapped with blue and silver foil. I didn't see or hear anyone else in the house; there was no sign of a woman's presence.

“You've been pretty busy,” he said, indicating the flowers.

“Sir?”

“Look at the card.”

I picked it up from the pot.

“Read it aloud,” he said.

“ ‘Merton, you're probably a dick on several levels, but I've known worse. Call me if you need your battery charged. I've always been a sucker for losers.' ” I put the card back on the flowers. “Pretty poetic.”

“You told Cisco I was sick?” he said.

“Yes, sir, I passed on my impressions.”

“I love the way you put things.”

“She said you did her dirty.”

“You came here to tell me that?”

“No, sir, I don't believe you'd do her dirty.”

He sat in a stuffed chair and put his feet on a cloth-covered stool. “Sit down.”

I sat on the couch. He took a fresh pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and looked through the window at a bird on the porch rail. He seemed to forget I was in the room.

“I got something weighing on my mind,” I said. “I can't take it to anybody else, at least not anybody who'd understand.”

His eyes refound me in the gloom. “Maybe you should talk to a preacher.”

“Most of them aren't built for serious problems.”

“I never thought about it like that.” He pulled the red strip off the cellophane on his cigarettes.

“You're going to smoke those?” I said.

“When you're on third base, you don't tend to worry about a cigarette or two.” His face held no emotion, neither fear nor animus nor pity nor regret. After he lit the cigarette, he gazed at me through the smoke.

“I have dreams,” I said. “In one of them I see Mr. Harrelson dying by his swimming pool. In the dream I have a forty-five in my hand. You told me you could smell a killer and I wasn't one.”

“You think you killed Mr. Harrelson?”

“Not me. Maybe another me, one that I don't let come out except in my dreams.”

“That crap belongs in motion pictures.”

“That's the kind of thing ignorant people say. You're not ignorant.”

I waited for him to get mad. But he didn't. He drew in on his cigarette, the ash reddening. “What else did you want to know?”

“Loren Nichols says Vick Atlas's father might put a bomb in our family car.”

“He told you that, did he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you want to know if Jaime Atlas is that vicious or crazy?” I nodded. He stared into space. “You want something to eat or a cup of coffee?”

“No, sir, I want you to tell me the truth.”

“Jaime Atlas was an enforcer for the Mob in Chicago and New York. He crushed a man's head in a vise. He used a blowtorch on others. He'd start with the armpits and work down to the genitalia.”

I could feel my eyes shining, the room going out of shape.

“You okay?” Detective Jenks said.

“Yes, sir, I think so.”

“No, you're not. Pure evil has come into your life through no fault of your own. That's how people are destroyed. They blame themselves as though somehow they deserve what's happening to them.”

“What can I do?”

“Not a thing. You wanted the truth. That's the truth.”

He coughed into his hand as though a piece of glass were caught in his lungs. He put out his cigarette in an ashtray and rubbed his hand on his knee. I felt helpless, floating away. Supposedly the courts, the police and sheriff's departments, the prosecutors, the FBI, the parole system, and the jails and hospitals for the criminally insane were there to protect the innocent. Why was my family being made a sacrificial offering to evil men? Outside, the wind was blowing from the Gulf, the air peppered with salt and rain, the pine trees glistening in the sunlight.

“I'd like to kill them all,” I said.

“Kill who?”

“Jaime Atlas. His son. The people who work for him. The people who allow these guys to stay on the street. Every one of these sons of bitches.”

“You're starting to worry me.”

I got up to go. “Who's going to take care of you?”

“Take care of
me
?”

“It's obvious you don't have anybody. There's blood on your cigarettes. Your lungs sound like a junkyard.”

“Cisco told you I did her dirty?”

“What?” I said, unable to follow the way his mind worked.

“That I betrayed her?”

“Not in those words.”

“You've got a lot of anger in you, son,” he said. “Don't let it turn on you. It'll flat tear you up.”

B
Y THE TIME
I got home, the sky was turning black and the house creaked with wind, even though it was made of brick. I brought Major and Skippy and Bugs and Snuggs inside and sat with my guitar in my father's study. His manuscript pages were placed neatly in a stack on his desk pad. I began to read the account told him by his grandfather about the events at Marye's Heights on December 13, 1862. The boys in butternut were entrenched with muskets and artillery behind a stone wall at the top of the rise. All afternoon, Union troops went up the hill, wave after wave, and were slaughtered by the thousands, to the point where they slipped in their own gore and the Confederates no longer wanted to fire upon them.

I wondered how anyone could be so brave. I also wondered why I could not rid myself of the well of fear that seemed to draw me into its maw. The answer was simple: I feared for my family, and I resented myself for placing them in harm's way. I was also experiencing a syndrome that I would one day learn was characteristic of almost everyone who has been a victim of violent crime.

I had no answers. I was just short of eighteen. I loved my mother and father and Valerie and my animals. All I wanted to do was be with them and forget the Atlases and Harrelsons of this world. Unfortunately, the fury and mire and complexity of human veins do not work like that.

T
HE RAIN HAD
started falling in solitary drops when Saber's heap bounced into the driveway, its pair of fuzzy dice swinging from the rearview mirror. He got out, laughing before he could start his narrative.

“What is it?” I said.

He was shaking his head, unable to stop laughing. He fell back against the car, trying to catch his breath.

“Are you loaded?” I said.

There were tears in his eyes. “You won't believe it.”

“Believe what?”

He started to speak again, then went weak all over and had to open the car door and sit on the seat. “I just pissed inside Grady Harrelson's head,” he said, losing control again. “Oh, it was beautiful. It'll take him weeks to figure everything out. He's royally screwed six ways from breakfast and in serious danger.” He was doubling over, laughing so hard he had to hold his ribs, his face turning red.

“What did you do?” I said.

“Grady's been shacking up in a motel on Wayside Drive with the wife of a guy who drives a wrecker on the night shift, a total animal who's been in Huntsville twice for felony assault. Grady bought a convertible just like the one we boosted and sold in Mexico. I followed them to the motel last night and waited until they went to eat, then gave the maid two dollars to put a plateful of chocolate fudge laced with Ex-Lax in their room.” He started laughing again.

“Will you stop it?” I said.

He wiped at his face with a handkerchief. “Hang on. It gets better. I boosted his new convertible, then waited a couple of hours for the Ex-Lax to kick in so they'd be fighting to get on the bowl. I called the husband's emergency number and told him Grady was putting the blocks to his old lady and gave him the motel address.” Saber was stamping on the driveway. “I watched it from across the street. The animal arrives and kicks the door off its hinges. Grady is inside in his Jockey underwear, and the broad is going nuts, and Grady is trying to
explain himself, then he realizes his new car is gone and accuses the animal of stealing it.” Saber tried to stand up, then fell back on the car seat wheezing, his nose running, his entire face slick with tears.

“Saber, when are you going to grow up?”

“Never. Come on, don't be so serious,” he replied. “You should have seen Grady. There was a brown stripe through the seat of his Jockeys. People were coming out of their rooms, and cops were shouting at them to get back inside. Grady started cussing at a cop, and the cop shoved him on the concrete. His face was white. I thought he was going to have a nervous breakdown.”

“What are you going to do with his car?”

“Dump it in colored town.”

“That doesn't sound like your friends,” I said.

“Manny and Cholo? They don't want any more heat from guys like Vick Atlas and Grady. You know what Manny said? ‘Don't mess with guys who got juice.' ”

“I'm really impressed with their great knowledge. When are you going to stop listening to these liars?” I said. “Come inside.”

“What for?”

“To wash your face.”

“You got to lighten up, Aaron,” he said, starting to get control of himself. “Things will work out. We'll always be buds, right?”

“I didn't bust us up,” I said.

“Okay, so I was wrong. Look, you're already smiling. We've got senior year coming up. It's going to be a gas.”

“Promise me you're going to dump the car, Saber.”

“What do I want with it?”

“Where is it now?” I said.

“Manny has it in a garage for safekeeping. It's fine. You're always worrying. Let's get a couple of beers and drink them in the park.”

“Jaime Atlas might kill my whole family,” I said. “Detective Jenks told me he was an enforcer in Chicago and New York. He burned his victims' armpits and genitalia with a blowtorch. That's why I'm not laughing a lot.”

The mirth went out of his face. He wiped his eyes. I never realized
how long his eyelashes were or how much they reminded me of a girl's. “Jaime Atlas did what?”

T
HE RAIN POUNDED
down for almost an hour, flooding the streets, then the storm was gone and the sky was once again as bright and hot as tin. I drove to Valerie's. Mr. Epstein was on his hands and knees weeding around the rosebushes in front of the house, bare-chested in cutoffs, in full sun, the gold hair on his back soggy with sweat. He grinned up at me, his arms thorn-pricked and speckled with dirt. “She's inside.”

“How you doin', sir?” I said in the same way my father always addressed another man.

He didn't answer. He just continued to grin into my face. I was never comfortable around Mr. Epstein, perhaps because I was intimate with his daughter. Or maybe there was another reason. I knew little of the violence that is a constant in the lives of some men and a last resort for others and for some an option that doesn't exist. I knew Mr. Epstein was not a member of the latter group. But where did he fit? He was a leftist and perhaps an ideologue; as a commando, he must have killed enemy soldiers or even civilians with a knife or his bare hands. How do you wash that kind of guilt off your hands?

I sat down on the steps and tried to hold his gaze. “I talked with Detective Jenks today.”

“Is Merton okay?”

“I think he's real sick. In the lungs. Maybe the heart, too.”

“Sorry to hear that. Merton knows how to take it to them.”

“Sir?”

“He carries a badge, but he writes his own rules. They all do.”

“Who's ‘they'?”

He grinned again. “They.”

“Mr. Epstein, I'm sorry for bringing all this trouble into Valerie's life.”

“You didn't have anything to do with it.”

“You could fool me, sir.” Again he didn't reply. I went on, “Detective Jenks told me some terrible things about Jaime Atlas.”

Mr. Epstein sat up on his haunches and wiped the mud off his hands on his cutoffs, his eyebrows beady with moisture. “The man who comes after you is only a man. Most assassins are cowards.”

“Jaime Atlas crushed a man's head in a vise.”

“Don't believe everything you hear.”