Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (41 page)

Thirteenth Chapter

I walked home in my wet clothes. I was hoarse and tired and my head hurt. With no keys, I had to finagle my way into the house through a stubborn window. I kicked my shoes into an empty corner of the living room and went straight for the shower. H.W. and the pulpwooders weren’t getting any deader.

I dressed in a dirty old shirt and jeans and started out toward town. With no phone and no vehicle, I was left with my own two dogs to get me everywhere. However, just as I topped the hill down from the house, an elderly neighbor offered me a lift. I agreed, telling him my destination, and we rode wordlessly to town. He dropped me off and waved absently as I closed the door.

I went up to the front door and knocked. A trim woman on the other end of middle age answered the door, made up and yet haggard all the same. We exchanged a moment of silence before she spoke. "D.L.'s in the study," Paula said, somewhat hoarsely. I smelled something sweet and familiar on her breath. Something brown and in a bottle with a name like Jack or Jim or Evan on the label. "Get you anything?"

"No, thank you," I replied.

"Lord, I'm hurting," she said finally, as if in explanation. She wasn’t waiting for me to heap on sympathy, not that she needed to. "This ain't supposed to happen."

I leaned against the iron railing. "I know."

"Parents don't bury their children. I'm burying my only daughter." It seemed to echo a statement from Janita Laveau.

"You did the best you could, Paula."

"Lord. Lord. Lord." She pressed her lips together so that they turned white. She swallowed, catching herself. Her stare passed through me, settling nowhere in particular, and she wiped at the corners of her eyes.

"I wish I had come sooner," I said quietly. "You probably needed some help."

"Nothing you could have done. Not this morning, anyway. I reckon you tried to help her, and she, well, God, I think she was just beyond being helped." She paused, shrugging. "I never smoked dope once in my life. I hadn't even had so much as a beer since she was born. Dee, well, he did some, but not really in front of her and not to an extreme. But today, I sat down and drank a whole pint of whiskey. D.L.'s, of course, since I didn't have anything of the sort in the house. I hate the way it tastes, but I drank every last drop of it."

"Huh," I said. "Did it help?"

She rolled her eyes. "It got me drunk. Made me sick,
so
sick. But it didn't help. In a way, I wanted it to pain God to see this happening to me. To
us
. Don't He give a good goddamn we're here in this predicament?” She paused, looking down at the floor, maybe for an answer. Then she added, “I just want to know what we did to bring this on ourselves."

It isn't anything
you
did, I wanted to say, thinking maybe it was
I
who had cursed
them
. It seemed as though I was the common factor in their misery.

But I let Paula say her piece.

"When she got hooked on that dirty stuff, I blamed you. God help me, I did. I didn't think the two of you were right for each other. She was always a seeker, looking in the wrong places, and well, Rolson, you're just so blessed quiet. You're an enabler, and not without your problems."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I loved her. If I could have locked her up to keep her from doing this, I would have."

"I'm going to blame everybody for this, long as I live. I don't have reason to, but I got something lodged in my heart that's gonna keep that feeling from ever leaving me. It'll be trapped there until my dying day.” She paused again, then, straightening up, said, “Come on in. It might start raining soon."

"I think it will," I said, and followed her in.

The house smelled like leftovers - Paula said people had brought over all kinds of food - and she led me down the hardwood hallway to a bare, paint-chipped door. Our feet echoed in the house, as quiet as the graveyard had been. She paused just outside and put her hands on her hips, sniffing once and then running hair behind her ear with one finger. I looked down.

“The viewing will be tomorrow night, the funeral the next morning at eleven.”

I said that I would be there.

"Go on in," she said. "Nothing to be afraid of, except he's worse off than I am."

D.L. was sitting in a leather chair behind his desk, eyes half-closed, smoking the most pungent cigar I've ever encountered, clutching a half-empty bottle of J&B. Through the nebulous haze of smoke, I saw that he was both drunk and distraught, but he straightened up somewhat as I approached him.

“I should have come earlier,” I said again, but D.L. waved off the idea without responding. He’d leveled his focus on the scotch glass for now.

I didn’t know quite how to proceed, to push the conversation forward, so I shared in a mutual silence with him. I sat in the chair across the desk and waited, and in turn he sat quietly in the darkness of his office, feeding off the silence.

"I handed in a resignation today," he said, after a spell. "Can't do it anymore. I've got no will to protect and serve. Got no one I want to protect, save for Paula. Whole damn town could be dead, for all I care."

A knife went through me. I thought about H.W. and the pulpers but kept my mouth shut. He seemed to be eternally out of the mood to hear bad news.

I said, "It wasn't your fault."

"I’m as much to blame as anybody, no matter if we raised her to avoid drugs or we pushed the dope into her lungs. She’s my daughter, and I’m responsible for her always. I should have never let her go, not even for a second.”

I started to speak, but he quieted me with another wave of the hand. “I’m not interested in avoiding blame, Rol. I know I tried to help her, but it doesn’t feel like I did enough right now, and I don’t want to hear any different.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Let me know when you’re ready for it.”

“Maybe never,” he replied. “I don’t know. Pity is the damnedest thing, and when you’re wallowing in it, you don’t ever imagine yourself getting out. All feels so
close
, you know?”

I nodded.

“And so for now I just want to be drunk and stay drunk and forget that there’s anything outside of the walls of this house. Everything outside here should just disappear. Like it’s all a dream.”

As if on cue, he swilled from the bottle of scotch and then replaced the cap. He said, “Reality don’t work like that. We can’t just sit in here and wither away. There’s plans we got to make. Calling relatives and getting ready for the funeral, that sorta thing.”

“I’ll help any way I can, D.L.,” I said, and he nodded this time.

He said, “Thought I had myself ready for this moment. Lord knows I pictured it enough times. But there ain’t no right way to rehearse for death. When it comes, it’s sloppier and meaner than anybody can predict.”

He added, “And it fucking hurts, too.”

“But you couldn’t have picked up every junkie, everybody she could score from. By and by, it’s got to be up to her.”

D.L. paused. He looked like he was trying to cobble the words together from a jumble of letters on his desk. “Vanessa didn’t buy from a street dealer. She didn’t self-destruct."

That hit me as curious, and I felt an ever-growing pit in my stomach. “I don't think I follow.”

I did, but for some reason, I wanted D.L. to tell me, as if he weren’t in enough pain himself.

“She was
killed
, Rol. I don't have any proof, and I don’t know exactly how, but I’ve been working in law enforcement long enough to know the difference between an accident and a goddamn murder, and I can tell you that this was no accidental overdose.”

“Oh,” I said. It was all I could think to say. My mind began to swim away from me. D.L. wrestled with his tears and eventually got them under control.

“I’ve got hunches, even if they’re all I’ve got. Now, this ain’t something I could tell Vanessa’s mother, but it’s been rolling around in my head ever since I got the call.”

I thought of the way Van had been acting the last few days, talking incessantly at some points and then clamming up without any indication why. It certainly made sense that she might have been doing something to get herself in trouble.

I said, “She was running. Maybe in looking behind her, she plowed into something she didn’t see coming.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but I think it’s even worse than that. I haven’t any evidence, but man alive, I’ve been having these
dreams
.”

My mind rolled over, but before I could start the process of formulating a question, he continued talking. “She mention Brickmeyer around you?”

I thought about it. “She might have mentioned him a few times” - I was thinking specifically about our conversation regarding Jeffrey - “so, yeah, I guess she did.”

Something about the way he looked at me confirmed my silent suspicion, that, were this not an accident, that the Brickmeyer family had had something to do with her death.

However, I didn’t want to step too far, to speculate too much. D.L. - God bless him - was not in a state to think clearly. If she’d been held down and pumped full of drugs, fine, but I wasn’t about to gloss over the possibility that her demons had gotten the better of her.

“She made some curious explanations for herself when she came to stay with us those nights. Had a lot of questions about that murder, about the dead Laveau boy, and about you. Laid on the couch and chewed her fingers, asking all sorts of things that wouldn’t naturally have occurred to her.”

“And so you think the Brickmeyers approached her, maybe promised to hook her up, if she snooped around the case?”

“It’s a cynical view, Rolson, but I just got to believe it’s the case.” He paused. “I know you ain’t got to believe it, and you probably think I’ve gone loony, but every time the wheel comes around on this, something else clicks into place.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy, D.L.,” I said.

“And it doesn’t make a difference to me what people think, or are going to think, because I saw the look in her eyes when she came back home. She was different, more like the little girl I remembered, rather than the monster she had become, and so I can only believe she’d changed. Whether or not it was the truth, I’ll never know. She never got a chance to prove that to all of us. But I think I had it right.”

D.L. wavered, eyes glossy with tears, and he pressed both hands against his face. Covering himself. Hiding from his true feelings. Trying to push them back down.

Once he’d caught himself, he continued. “How about her
boyfriend
? She ever tell you about why she left him?"

"He was killed. She didn’t feel safe, so she fled back home. It seemed right."

"That ain't why she left him. Vanessa, God rest her soul, she had a lot of problems, and maybe this last thing sent her over the edge. Maybe she couldn't atone for it, but she stole that poor sumbitch’s money. Well, I shouldn't say that. It wasn't
his
money at all. Was an organization's money, if you catch my drift."

I was having trouble making the connection. If Brickmeyer was going
quid pro quo
with her, then there was no need for a transfer of money. She would be given drugs for information. Push the right button and receive a pill. That sort of deal.

But if she had stolen money, then that added a whole new wrinkle for what she was trying to hide and who she was trying to hide
from
. That I hadn’t noticed any strangers lingering around town didn’t mean they weren’t here and weren’t looking for her.

Or maybe they had just only made it down to Lumber Junction now.

“Maybe this was their payback,” I said. “The drug ring’s. What if it wasn’t Brickmeyer at all?”

He looked impressed." You might've made a good cop, someday, if you had gotten all them cobwebs out of your head."

I still didn’t buy it entirely, because I figured they would have come around the house looking for her before now. I would have noticed some heavies asking around town about Vanessa, and usually the guys tracking down money aren’t too subtle with the locals.

Suddenly, the memory of that truck riding away, seemingly for no reason that night, popped into my head. Explained some things. Maybe.

And thinking about it left me with an unsavory conclusion. "So she didn’t come back because she wanted to.”

“I'm sure some of it was because she loved you, so don’t get the impression she was using you. That’s where some belief has to come in, even if it is delusional. Some of it was earnest. But she was a sick girl. She had a lot of problems."

We sat silently for a long time in shared grief. Finally, D.L. said, “I need to be alone now, son. Don’t forget to say goodbye to Paula on your way out.”

Over my shoulder, opening the door, I said, “I’ll make sure I find out what really happened, D.L. Whatever will put you at peace.”