Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (25 page)

I balked. I didn't quite know how to answer the question. Ron was not prone to anything but insults. A couple of answers floated in my head, but I couldn't reach out and grab a single one. I just stared at my hands, watched the way my fingers drummed the steering wheel.

"I might've stepped on Jeffrey Brickmeyer's toes a little bit," I said, finally.

Bullen snorted. When he next spoke, he stared directly at the two forlorn cops. "His old man can afford harder shoes than that. If he can't handle getting them stomped every once in awhile, he's got no business riding the man's coattails into politics."

I kept still while Bullen and Ricky stared one another down. Owen's eyes burned holes in the side of my face, but I kept my eyes fixed in the distance.

Finally, Ricky said, "Owen, let's ride out. Let this sack of shit deal with the alcoholic. If he plows into another helpless woman, it's gonna be his ass in the wood chipper."

"I doubt it," Bullen said under his breath.

Once they had pulled away, he turned back to me. "Get on out of here, Rolson. I don't think they'll bother you, for now."

"What do you have against them?"

"They're shills for Leland, and I don't care for either one of them much."

"And how are you managing to stay out of the fire? I heard heads are on the chopping block about this," I said.

"They wouldn't dare shitcan me," he said. "I've got the keys to all the secret rooms. They let me go, and the beans I spill would haunt this town for years."

"I see. But that still doesn't explain what you're doing helping me."

He crossed his arms and leaned against the car. Across the street, a little girl was riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, weaving between pedestrians. Bullen watched her disappear around the corner on her Dora the Explorer ride and then said, "I used to think you had a stick up your ass for no reason. A real sad sack, and I can’t stand that self-pitying shit. This was all based on what happened when you was a kid."

"Folks generally have sympathy for people who lose their parents at a young age."

Something in his face twinged. "See, that's part of the problem. It's coming back to me. You have a sense of entitled sympathy. Nobody's exempt from a painful upbringing."

"Well, you're telling me now, so-"

"Rolson, listen. Damnit. What I've come to realize is, you've shown yourself to be more than just a self-destructive asshole. And I'll tell you another thing."

"Nothing's stopping you now. You're on a roll."

He smiled, seeming to reflect on something other than me. "The other thing is, you're giving Leland Brickmeyer one hell of a guided tour through his personal nightmare."

"What's that mean?"

"That man's not had to work for anything his whole life. He's been able to buy off the opinions of the town. Been happening in the Junction since the railroad tracks were laid. You're the first person to call bullshit on him, and he don't know how to respond."

"I'm not doing it to frustrate him. I think he's hiding something."

Bullen pushed off from the side of the car. One hand reached up to scratch the back of his head. "Either way, even if he's not guilty of covering up that boy's murder, he's being exposed for a phony. If that's all you can accomplish, I'll be satisfied."

As he walked away, I experienced a moment's pang of regret at not asking him about his father’s land. I had been grilling everyone else, but I guess Bullen had done me a solid, so he was off the hook. For now.

He reached the rear of the car and stopped, seeming to contemplate a minor point, and then he came back to the driver's side door. He said, "Oh, and here's a picture that showed up at the office this morning."

It was me and Leland Brickmeyer shaking hands outside Emmitt Laveau's funeral. It had been shot in such a way that obscured our mutual hatred. From that angle, the handshake appeared sincere. I was mortified.

As I surveyed it he said, "I managed to snag it before anybody saw it."

I looked for the photographer's viewpoint. I said, "Not that anybody at the police station would see anything wrong with that picture, save for the fact that I'm in it."

"Touche," he said. The word tumbled out awkwardly. "Isn't that what you said earlier?"

"Yep."

"There's one of two implications here. Either the photographer wants people to believe that you and Leland are hiding something together-"

"In which case, the blackmailer's completely off the mark, because nobody has enough of a beef to implicate Leland Brickmeyer." I wanted to finish by saying
except you,
but my mind choked on the phrase.

He said, "This story's getting pretty big. If a party interested in running against Leland wants to cause static, this would be the easiest way to do it."

"But that implies I'm the suspect. That's the only way this works."

Bullen shrugged. "The other thing I was going to say is that whoever took the photograph wants to throw
the both
of you under the bus. If you keep showing up around the Brickmeyers, that might be exactly what happens."

"This is the only one, though."

"Who's to say there aren't others?" He nodded at me and sort of half-smiled. "You can keep that one."

“I’m still going to track down your brother,” I said.

“Good luck,” he replied.

With that, he turned and strolled back to his cruiser. The way I used to look at him, I thought his walk was something of an arrogant saunter, but it wasn’t until then I saw that it was a slight limp that made him walk that way. He was hurting, and it wasn’t a recent thing. He might have been carrying one of his legs with him his whole life, hurting the whole time.

I drove away with my mind full of burs. Along the side of the road, someone had placed little political road signs, as if there were an election, and the text on them read “We Stand Behind Brickmeyer.”

Another one read “The Brickmeyers are the foundation of this town.”

Jesus. No one group was credited with the sentiment, and it might have been fine if there weren’t just so many of them. One seemed to appear every fifty feet for the whole of my drive home, as if the message were meant specifically for me.

Well, isn’t it, I wondered.

*  *  *

A man who doesn't want to be found in a town as small as Lumber Junction can become damn near invisible. If H.W. was going to answer any questions about his recent whereabouts and why he was in town, I’d have to flash a light on him, make him scurry out of the pantry.

It takes a special kind of person to draw him out in the open, and it just so happened I had two people in mind for such a task.

I went to Virgil's and seated myself next to the old pulpwooders, telling them what I needed. They responded, in turn, with nearly toothless grins. Lyle said, "Boy, there something wrong with you? For the longest time, I thought your right hand
was
a Miller High Life. Now that you don’t have one, it seems maybe you’re not disfigured."

Red elbowed him. "I can see the reds of your eyes have turned white. That makes you suspect, partner. Can’t be trusted, no sir."

Giggling at their own jokes, they flicked dirty peanuts into their mouths and washed them down with beer.

"Laugh it up," I said, hoping the change the subject, "but I'm here strictly on business."

They regarded each other with pat skepticism. I waited, my eyes bouncing from one to the other. I said, "I can wait. Take your time."

I went down to my end of the bar and ordered a Coke, no ice, and sipped it without looking in the pulpwooders' direction. I didn't want to spook them. They thought me being sober meant I was up to something, no different than when an old drinking buddy finds Jesus.

It took them two songs to reach a decision. They approached me, keeping their distance as they spoke. "You need somebody to be smoked out of the woodwork, so to speak?" Red asked. He looked sort of like Popeye, if Popeye had done forty years of knuckle-grinding work.

"It needs to be kept secret. As if you can't tell, people are skeptical of me. I show my face, and folks get edgy. Can I trust you?"

"Ain't that what it's all about? Ain't that why you called on us?"

I sipped my soda. It was somewhat flavorless here, like chewing raw lettuce at an all-you-can-eat buffet, but it kept my hands moving, and at a bar, having a distraction was the main point. I said, "This man, the one you're scouting, he might be dangerous, but-"

"You just give us a name and a fitting down payment, and we'll make sure daylight touches his ass by tomorrow. Then we'll contact you when we know the
for sure
location."

"I just want you to
find
him. That understood? He finds out anybody's looking for him, he's gone. He'll leave town. I do not want that."

The old man cackled and elbowed his partner again. "Ain't no problem at all. I heard about your troubles, and I don't blame you for wanting somebody else to take some heat off of you. Shit, I'm a hunnert percent stunned that you would step foot back into a bar, what with the potential for jail brushing up against you at every turn."

"Everyone insists on reminding me of that."

"Cause ever body thinks you're as crazy as a goddamn
loon
, that's why," he said. "I ain't no different. It's like watching a snake fight a mongoose. You can never tell which one's gonna end up laying belly up in the grass. No offense, Rolson, but right now my money's not on you."

"That's all right, I suppose, so long as you don't do anything to tilt the odds."

Red raised his hands defensively, smiling in a way that made me sick to my stomach. He rubbed his hands together, popping his knuckles, and a glimmer of life flickered in his bloodshot eyes. "Hey, you're the paying customer, bud. That's the only thing's gonna influence
me
."

“Let me ask you something else,” I said. “You guys have been living in this town your whole lives.”

“Didn’t even leave the county for the first fifteen years of my life,” Red said.

“Same here,” Lyle added. “Had a friend take a photograph of me at the county line one time, right before I crossed it the first time, and that ain’t no joke.”

“That when you was drafted?” Red asked.

“Yessir. Got shipped off to Khe Sanh in late ‘67, just in time to see the U.S. Air Force bombed Central Vietnam to the Dark Ages.”

I said, “That must have been a hell of a time to see the world. Listen, in addition to all of this other business, I’ve been thinking a lot about my lawyer-”

Red smiled and sucked air through one of the gaps in his teeth. “You just now figuring out he’s an old, limp prick?”

“Sort of,” I said. “He’s always been kind to my family, but people have let slip some things he might be keeping chained up in the shadows of his younger days.”

“Anybody old enough to remember him don’t know of no shadows,” Red replied, and Lyle nodded in agreement. “Man’s got the benefit of time behind him.”

“In what way?”

“Distance always makes the past look softer than it probably was at the time. Makes things forgivable, but - man alive - he was a snake and a scorpion when he was a young feller.”

Lyle added, “Even called Big Bill Brickmeyer a ‘nigger lover’ in a town meeting one time, full in view of all the black folks starting to take Dr. King’s lead on that race stuff.”

“What?”

“Mean as a goddamn rattlesnake,” Red said. “He damn sure was.”

“What changed in the man?”

Red raised his eyebrows and blew out a long breath. “Mid-eighties, a black kid in his twenties turned up dead, but nothing came of it. Things was different back then. This kid was sort of a troublemaker, had no mama and daddy. Wasn’t nobody concerned with catching whoever threw him in a ditch.”

Lyle took a swig of his beer. “We all have something to be ashamed of from back in them days,” he said. “Nothing like that, but we didn’t help matters none.”

“Anyway, after that story sort of went away, Jarrell seemed to have a change of heart. Started fighting against all the shit he’d been fighting for all them years. It looked sorta funny on him at first, but he started to wear it well, and - hell - that’s the man I reckon he is today.”

It wasn’t something I wanted to hear right now, but it was filling in some of the pieces of my own life. If he was this staunch a racist when I was a kid, it would explain why he had defended my father in court.

Red raised a hand and waggled one wrinkled finger at me. “And that dead young man ain’t the half of what Jarrell Clements has done in his life.”

I thought of the bumbling, slightly pudgy old man he had become, and I had trouble imagining his more vicious side. But I had to trust these two, because I don’t know if they knew what guile was, let alone how to put it in action.

Lyle cleared his throat. “There was the time he said he was going to gut that old preacher man.”

“The one that was out at Ridge Bluff all them years? That’s right. Said all their jumping around and screaming wouldn’t do no good, that they was still on a quick ride to Hell.”