Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (7 page)

Without another word, he stalked purposefully to his unmarked car and drove away. I watched through the screen door and then closed myself off from the world for a little while.

Something raw and electric swelled in me, and I succumbed to the urge to douse the exposed wires by opening a beer, downing it in mere gulps right there in the kitchen. The damned thing barely made it from the fridge to the trash can before it was empty.

I burped and closed my eyes. The rush was immediate, both relaxing and panic-inducing. Drinking, after hearing that news, should have made me ashamed. It didn't. It just made me want a cigarette. Nothing better for shaky nerves and irresponsible fears.

Fear, it should be said, is an emotion devoid of rationality, and sometimes the groundswell, the sheer force of it, can wash away anything that's not bolted down. It's what drives people to drink, to use drugs, to walk out on marriages, hide out and wallow in pity. It's what caused me to open that second beer, and then a third, all before noon. Drinking wasn't going to help solve any problems, but it sure did a good job of turning down the volume for a while.

*  *  *

Later, I fetched my tennis shoes from the bedroom and laced them up tight for a walk across the road. I had begun to believe that erasing my name completely off the suspect list meant ensuring the real killer didn't just slip away. Detective Hunter might have been an asshole trying to scare me, but musical chairs is musical chairs. Last one left standing when the song ends is out. Worse miscarriages of justice have occurred, and it seemed to fit with my recent fall from, well, not grace, really, but fall from
something
.

Even though bruised clouds lurched across the sky, there was no rain and no wind. Walking into the pines felt like stomping in a graveyard. I tucked the .45 into my jeans as I crossed the boundary between mine and Brickmeyer's land, ducking behind a diseased long-leaf pine just before a vehicle went by. I had lost the capacity to trust passing cars.

I approached the Boogie House with some caution. Something strange fluttered in my guts whenever I saw the faded, darkening boards of that place.

Caution tape surrounded the building, strung through the trees like bright yellow spider web. I ducked under it and gave a good hard look inside. The smell of death lingered in the air. I held my breath and stared for a long time, waiting for I don't know what. A sign. Something.

The piano began to play itself an old, familiar tune. What keys remained on the thing bounced up and down to the rhythm, and the song went through a verse and a chorus before dying out. Slowly, you see, as if the pianist were on his last breath and playing the song out as he died.

“Goddamn greatest hits melody,” I said, raising my voice. “What good is fucking with me going to do here? I’m on
your
side.”

It was a ludicrous thing to say, but it worked.

The song stopped, and moments later a rat the size of a pro athlete’s shoe scampered out of a hole in the piano and moved across the keys. I guess the rats, they all play Fats Domino these days.

In the daylight, there was nothing supernatural about the Boogie House. Just an old, forgotten building, full of secrets that wanted out in the open.

I looked at the rat and sighed. “I wonder if that kid’s life was the price that had to be paid to uncover the story behind this place,” I said. The rat turned and fled back into the piano without responding. I considered myself grateful for not receiving an answer.

A crow perched on a sagging beam cawed before flitting away. I hoped it was an augur of Laveau's ghost - I wanted to meet the fucking spirit or whatever  when I was awake - but it was apparently only visible in my dreams. I’d have to wait for the sun to go down, I guessed.

I went over and looked at the corner where the big guy had popped up and shot at me. There wasn’t a sign anybody had been here at all. Not a scrap of paper, or an old McDonald’s wrapper. Nothing. Whoever had been out here had no intention of staying, and he probably wasn’t a squatter.

Or maybe he was a squatter, and I was building a case out of the strands of my own sanity. It wasn’t completely out of the equation.

If not, if he had been out here with a purpose, what was his connection to the dead body? He put him out here? Was he on his way to retrieve him? Had the juke joint - and I had to keep this point buried so that I would not be committed in Milledgeville - but had the juke joint
called out to me for help
?

It was a ridiculous thought, but not necessarily untrue. If that man had come out there to take the body off for burial - or whatever he had planned on doing with it - then it was the last chance for anybody to discover that the kid was dead at all, and I had happened upon the scene at the last possible minute.

Supernatural forces didn’t bother me. Didn’t scare me, either. I’d had unsettling experiences in my life. I was no stranger to the other side. I sometimes feel like my mother has been trying to reach me from wherever she is since I was a little boy. Sometimes I think it’s what sent me to drinking, but sometimes it probably functions as my salvation, so I take it to mean whatever is most expedient in the moment.

Dissatisfied, I retraced my steps through the woods, staring down at my feet as I walked, trying to find the diesel's tracks. I stopped. Ahead of me was a patch of rutted, near-dried mud. Bingo. Not enough to get a tire profile, but enough for me to noodle around with.

Seeing the tracks filled me with measurable hope, but all I ended up finding was a blue key chain with big block lettering: BRICKMEYER AG & TIMBER. Holding it by the edges to avoid pressing fingerprints onto it, I looked for something out of the ordinary. But no, it was just a key chain. Could have been anybody's. Taking it would be tampering. Leaving it might mean it would be lost in a shoddy comb-through of the land.

I slipped it into my pocket and went back home, breathing in deep the smell of dying trees.

*  *  *

When I got back to the house, as I passed through the last row of pines, I saw an unfamiliar sedan parked askew in my driveway. I dropped to my knees, scanning my surroundings. With the sun high above me, everything took on a washed-out look. I crept forward into the ditch and kept watch until a tall black woman emerged from the vehicle and leaned against the driver's side door.

I arched up out of the hole and approached slowly. "'Lo, Mrs. Laveau," I called, as I crossed the road. I could barely speak, my heart was beating so fast.

"Hey, there, Rolson McKane," she said. "What you doing jumping in and out of ditches? Playing army? I could see you clean across the road."

"It's a long story," I managed. "Being careful these days, that's all."

"Least you're on foot."

I searched for something conciliatory to say. "It's terrible what happened. I know it doesn't mean much, but I'll do what I can."

Her eyes had focused not on me, but on the copse of trees just behind my right shoulder. Thinking of what she might be looking for gave me an uneasy feeling She said, "Come on, now. Invite me inside. This damn leg of mine is just about to drive me crazy."

*  *  *

The sound two cars make when they collide can keep you up nights. From the inside, it sounds like the world is ending, and there's nothing you can do to convince yourself it isn't. When you dream, you can hear the sound of metal on metal, of front bumpers crumbling under sheer force, of radiators spewing steamy fluid like severed jugulars in a blizzard, of tires screaming, drowning everything else out, and all you can think is,
I will never get in a car if I get out of this.

I hit Janita Laveau going forty-one miles per hour in a thirty five zone. It wasn't quite a head-on collision and I didn't quite T-bone her, either. The impact could be heard for four blocks, and one man said, on the record, that it sounded like Hell being unleashed on Main Street.

From what I have been told, the accident bordered on miraculous. I ran a stop sign I'd used hundreds or maybe thousands of times. Just went right through it, slowing down only when a champagne blur passed in front of me. The impact put Janita's car on two wheels, but luckily it came back down instead of careening into the IGA across the street.

The tires held, according to witnesses, and, while momentum carried my Buick across the road and into the empty grocery store lot, Janita's Caddy lingered magically on the two wheels for a few seconds, balancing between disaster and safety, before deciding to come down on the side of safety.

I wouldn't know. I was blacked out entirely, couldn't have passed a sobriety test if mere consciousness were the only requirement. They say drunks survive wrecks because they're drunk. Sober people tense up and break bones. I guess that's true. I don't want to put the theory to a test again, but I escaped with a bloodied nose and some odd little cuts on my arms and face.

Oh, and one hell of a hangover. So sore the next morning I could barely move when Deuce came and got me. From jail. But I survived. Janita survived. I got arrested, but that seemed all right somehow.

Bits and pieces come back to me occasionally. I'll hear something, and my head will tilt at an angle, the way a guitarist's will if he thinks a string is out of tune. At best I'll get a few seconds of uninterrupted carnage, succeeded by a skip in the record of memory. It only happened a couple of weeks ago, and I think that, eventually, it will come back to me without interruption. The basic story, though, works just as well: I went out, got drunk, and then drove. End of story.

Janita Laveau sat for a good while on my dusty couch, hands pressed on her lap, lips clenched, staring at the empty bottles littering my coffee table like oversized chess pieces. I sat across from her, in the exact spot the detective had occupied earlier that morning. I scratched my head and waited, wondering what she would think of the detective's oblique insinuation that I was involved in her son's death.

She spent the first half-hour painting a portrait of her son in broad, genial strokes. I had seen Emmitt around town, once or twice when he was much younger, and several times more recently. Always alone. Always unsmiling. He had spent a few years elsewhere and had returned to work “a real job,” as Janita put it. He'd been an artsy-type, like the hipster kids down at Savannah College of Art and Design. He never quite lived up to his potential. He went right to hanging drywall until he could get a teaching certificate.

"He seemed like a wonderful person," I said, when she was done.

"It's a custom for people to give glory to the dead," she said, wincing at her own words, "but in this case, everything I could say about my Emmitt is true. He was an angel of this world, wouldn't hurt another person even if it was deserved. He was a quiet, gentle boy. He grew into a quiet, gentle man. Nobody who knew him would want him hurt, not for any reason. He'd never gotten into so much as a fistfight in school.”

“I hope they find out who did this,” I said. Acknowledging that I had begun a surface investigation into the matter seemed unnecessary and potentially insulting in the moment.

She gave me a penetrating look and continued. “The image I still have of him is one where he's just learning how to play the guitar. Just ten or eleven years old, balancing that big acoustic on his knees. The way his legs dangled from the chair he sat in made him look like a ventriloquist's dummy. But he learned quick, and he loved to play, could sit down and strum for hours without looking up. If he hadn't been so interested in everything, he might have become a famous guitar player, something like that. I guess. I don't know. My mind feels so cloudy right now."

"I hate to ask this, Mrs. Laveau, but why didn’t you go to the authorities yourself? In your own words, he'd been gone for some time."

She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief pulled from her purse. "My son was a rambling soul, never could get tied down too long. This was the longest he'd spent in the Junction. He'd been saving money, like always, so he could travel around, do something else for awhile."

"I see."

"He didn't come home for a few days, and I didn’t worry at first, because I knew how he could be, so I just washed his clothes and put them in his room. Folded them up and smelled them, smelling him, and then put them away. You just don't ever know sometimes, Mr. McKane, the last time you're going to see someone you love. I had a brief flash of that myself recently, you understand."

I did. "I'm sorry," I said impotently. "For everything, especially what I could have controlled. Never thought being careless would hurt anybody but myself, ma'am. I was wrong, and I'll be reminded of that night for the rest of my life."

"Wasn't
my
time to go," she said, finally, confidently. "I got no other way to explain it. Wasn't my time to go, and it definitely wasn't your time to go to jail. I don't bear no grudge against you, because now it seems so petty. And I used to be one to do things I might advise against now. Hmm. Do you believe in fate, Rolson McKane?"

"I don’t know that I do. I heard you've been lobbying for them to take it easy on me. I hope that's why you're out here this afternoon, to shed some light on a topic that's got me worried and confused. No offense."