Red Dog (5 page)

I
'VE BEEN IN WORSE JAILS, AND IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE OFF
season, because my lone cellmate was a former ventilation boss who'd gone after his unfaithful wife with a Weedwhacker. He must have been pushing eighty, and he moved with the painful resolve of someone who'd worked underground too long. His breaths were the rasping snorts of camel snores—or what I imagined camel snores to be—but somehow he'd chased the old woman out of their ancestral home and down a half mile of deer path and into a dry streambed, where the whacker finally and mercifully sputtered itself empty of fuel. I told him to think about forgiving his wife and getting himself a good lawyer. He asked me if I knew one, and I just laughed and laughed until he flipped over on his bunk to face the wall.

After another little forever, a deputy with a face like mashed turnips brought me a telephone on a wooden stool. I asked him to dial it for me, told him my dialing finger had been hurt by the mean cop with the mustache. He chuckled about that some then showed me his own finger—not his dialing finger—before going back to watching the tube or
strangling his chicken or whatever deputies did when the boss wasn't around and the professional criminals were taking a personal day.

I put in a call to my own lawyer, but the worthless shit wasn't in, so I left a message and then phoned Anci, first sucking a few deep breaths to brace for what I knew was coming.

“You're kidding?” she said, when I'd given her the rundown.

“I wish,” I said. “But this time even the extenuating circumstances have extenuating circumstances.”

“Uh-huh. That's what you said last time. Remember the thing with the chickens?”

“I thought we agreed not to talk about the thing with the chickens.”

“You agreed. I don't remember agreeing.”

“I remember it different maybe.”

“You get hit in the head a lot. Forget things. What happened to the dog?”

“Technically, she's evidence in a homicide, but the county doesn't have a shelter, so they called the Cleaves. I understand they've already been by to pick her up.”

“At least someone's happy, then,” she said.

“I'm guessing that someone ain't you.”

“No. No it is not. This a hold-and-release kind of deal?”

“I sure hope so.”

Anci said, “See you in seventy-two, then,” and hung up on me.

The warm support of children is one of the great comforts in a parent's life. Seriously, you can ask them.

After a few hours, I was cuffed again and led into interrogation. It was a small room, smaller than my cell even, and they'd crammed in too big a table and too many chairs. There were cops in there, too. Uniform officers, I mean. Their presence didn't have any purpose that I could detect. They weren't sweating me or taking notes about the case or bouncing me around for fun. They were just bored and waiting for the show to begin.

After a while, one of them looked at me with gathered eyebrows and said, “You really kill that guy? Reach?”

“No.”

“I can't fathom why you'd do something like that,” he said, shaking his head. “It's just mean.”

“I didn't do it.”

“I used to go out there sometimes,” he continued. “Classic Country. Pretty nice place.”

“I guess.”

“Seriously, it was. Food was pretty good, too. He did that catfish sandwich I liked. One with that sauce. What do you call it?”

“Tartar?”

“That's the stuff. Tartar. I like it. And there were things to play, too. Games. Darts in the back room. That kind of thing.”

“He got one of them mechanical bulls,” I said, and the cop nodded.

“Got it and liked to show it off on account of he could afford such a gadget, but it was unplugged. Too many insurance claims. You put a bull and a bunch of drunks in the
same room like that, you're always going to get insurance claims. It's one of them inevitables. I guess old Reach finally come to his senses about it.” He paused a moment, reflective, and then said, “It was a good place for dancing, though. That's for sure.”

Well, that perked up some ears. The other cops laughed and joked at him a little for liking to boogie, big old tough county lawman like that, and he got sore about it. He turned away from me and his remembrance of lights fantastic to share words with his brother officers. He explained that his wife liked to dance and that as her life partner he had a responsibility to make her happy by doing some of the things she enjoyed. Those other cops, he bet their wives liked to cut a rug sometimes, too, even if they never said so out loud, but they never got dancing. They were neglected. Someday maybe a real dancin' man would come along, and then their wives might go dancing with him instead, and the error of their ways would be laid bare but too late. He got pretty hot about it, but it was a nice enough speech, and in the end the other cops were shamed and fell silent. I hadn't laughed at him, but I felt ashamed, too. I thought I might take Peggy dancing more often, she got back from her sister's. I didn't want no dancin' man to come along, and I said so, and the deputy looked at me and nodded, and I nodded at him, grateful for his wisdom, and then the door opened and the sheriff came in.

He said, “You ain't called a lawyer?”

“Tried to, but he wasn't around,” I said. “He's one of these characters always takes off on you.”

“You'll pardon me saying so, that don't sound like much of a lawyer.”

“He's inside the budget, though,” I said.

The sheriff was satisfied. He didn't want me having a lawyer, anyway—good, bad, or indifferent. He waved a hand, and the other cops filed out of the room. He pulled out a chair and sat opposite. He put a recorder on the table between us and switched it on and said the date and time and his name and mine. My real name. He added that I was commonly called Slim around those parts, result of some time spent in the coal mines. I told the recorder that this was so. The sheriff told me to shut up.

He was on the young side for his office—early fifties, I guess—with a handsome black face and the beginnings of silver at his temples. His name tag said R.L. Lindley, but I didn't need to read any name tag. Everybody in those parts had heard of R.L. Lindley, him being Little Egypt's only black county sheriff and all, but we'd never been formally introduced.

He said, “I hope you don't mind we skip the usual back-and-forth, son. Keep this direct.”

“I guess I don't mind.”

“Fine. Now, why don't you start by telling me—directlike, mind you—why I shouldn't drop your troublemaking ass down the deepest, darkest hole I can find.”

“The more I think about it, though, too much directness can be dull.”

“That your answer?”

“Be patient,” I said. “That's only
one
of my answers. Got plenty of others. You might even eventually like one.”

“No offense, but I kinda doubt that,” he said. “You know what? I'm in a generous mood tonight, some reason. I'm going to do something I ain't never do. Give you a second chance here. Let you start fresh. How about that?”

I nodded at his agreeableness. “Okay. Thanks. What if we start fresh with the fact that I didn't do anything.”

“Just an innocent bystander, that right?”

“Innocent as a napping puppy,” I said and told my story. Parts of it, anyway. I left out that I'd been the one to cuff Reach to the drain, that I'd cut off his thumb, everything about Wesley Tremble, and the fact that Dennis was angrier at someone called Carol Ray than he was at me. Call me crazy, but when you deal with rural cops it's best to keep your cards in your sleeves and a chain on your wallet. Plus, there was the little matter of me wanting first crack at whoever had killed Dennis Reach. So what was left wasn't much, and a lot of it was lies or lies of omission. A cheese grater has fewer holes.

“So you're just a guy looking for a dog? That what you're saying?”

“Yep.”

“For sixty bucks?”

“Sixty-five,” I said.

“Sixty-five.” He nodded. He mulled it over some and then finally said, “Okay, then, way I see it is this. And feel free to stop me if you disagree.”

“I'll stop you.”

“Way I see it is this. Either you're a liar and a killer, or else you are some kind of major-league chump. I'll let you tell me which.”

“What if I want to call myself something else?”

He shrugged.

“Stick a feather in your ass, call yourself a Tyrolean hat, all I care. You still got to choose one of mine. You got a reputation in this part of the world, Slim. That business last year—Luster and Galligan and that mess—they say you were right there in the middle of it, and they ain't even ever accounted for all the bodies. Plenty of stuff since then, too. This thing recently with the chickens.”

“I don't like to talk about the thing with the chickens.”

Lindley ignored me. He said, “I don't even know what to say about that kind of a thing. Grown person behaving that way. I kind of wondered when you might bring your act into my county. Kind of wondered what I'd do when you did, too.”

“So what's your decision?”

He thought a little about that, consternation in his face. You could tell he wasn't about to offer me five dollars and a yellow balloon. Finally, he said, “I got to think you're on the hook for this. Whether or not I can charge you for it today, you're on the hook. People have a habit of disappearing around you, Slim. Dying, too. And too many parts of your story plain old don't add up.”

He banged the table with his hand. Right on cue, a pair of deputies came back in and plucked me from my chair.

“Do me a favor, would you?” I said before they led me out.

Lindley looked at me with smiling eyes. He said, “Oh, gee, I was hoping you'd ask.”

“Come on, man.”

“Sitting here this whole time thinking, why hasn't Slim asked me to do him a favor? I wish he would. And now you have. Makes my night.”

“Okay, please.”

“Well, since you sprinkled a little sugar on top . . .”

“Call Ben Wince.”

“Your sheriff buddy over there to Randolph? He'll vouch for you, that it?”

“I like to think he would, yes.” But for all I know Lindley wasn't listening. Some jokes weren't worth more than one laugh.

I never found out if he did my favor. They kept me seventy-two hours then kicked me loose when I didn't cry on their shoulders and sign a confession. They couldn't tie me to the murder weapon, maybe, but possibly there was something else.

Even my cut-rate lawyer didn't know. Maybe I should say
especially
my cut-rate lawyer didn't know. You never met a person who didn't know so many things with so much conviction. This was a kid from Red Bud, a farm boy who'd got his law degree at a college they advertise on television and who reminded you of nothing so much as a mobbed-up version of Huckleberry Finn. He had ragged red hair and an odd birthmark on his left cheek and a slight overbite.
He struggled pitiably with courtroom Latin. The rest of his personal style he appeared to have gleaned from B-grade gangster flicks: double-breasted pinstriped suits from the Walmart, a black Lincoln Continental he must have inherited from a dead relative, and, in his imitation snakeskin briefcase, a Colt .357 Python. A volcano of a gun I liked to think he had never fired and hoped he never would. When he materialized near the end of my third day of incarceration, sporting a brand-new set of black eyes from a vacation to West Memphis, Arkansas, the cops acted like he wasn't worth wasting a Kleenex on.

“The police are hiding something,” he said, and the desk sergeant winked at the two of us and cracked a theatrical grin as he handed over the manila envelope with my name on the front and my life inside, but the kid didn't get it. He never got a joke, that I know of, not even his own.

Lew's truck was impounded in the car yard across town, so I got a lift from the kid, handed my ticket to a fat lady in a climate-controlled metal box, and in ten minutes was on the road back toward Tolu and the Mandamus compound. My head was full of worries, though, the dark arithmetic of murder, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to just set it all down and walk away. Whoever had shot Dennis Reach hated him so much that they'd killed him like an animal on a leash. I wanted to know who and I wanted to know why and I wanted, if possible, to atone in some small way for putting that leash on him in the first place. Halfway to Harrisburg, I dialed the Randolph County sheriff's office on my cell.

“What is it, Slim? I'm eating my supper,” Ben Wince said.

“Filling station burrito?”

“No.”

“Filling station corn dog?”

“Strike two.”

“Something from a filling station, though?”

“Between you and me, it's one of these frozen diet dinners.”

“Lean Cuisine?”

“Healthy Choice. Chicken Florentine. Supposed to only have two hundred ninety calories, but I'd be shocked if it had even that many. I've seen bigger food in a dollhouse. Is there a point to this call? Or are you just filling time with your favorite hobby?”

“I guess you heard about my troubles.”

“Everybody has.”

“Do me a favor, would you? Find out why the Jackson County sheriff let me go.”

“Don't have to find out. Already know. They didn't have evidence to hold you, they let you go. That's how these things work.”

“No, they don't.”

“I know.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, in this case here, it's enough. Dennis Reach was shot at close range with a Colt rifle. AR-15 model. Dang things seem to be everywhere these days, don't they? I guess there really is no such thing as bad publicity. Anyway, your
man Reach was shot with one of them nasty things. He must have turned his head at the last second, because the shell glanced off his right cheekbone and tunneled through the nasal cavity before blowing his brainpan all over the dirty dishes. Otherwise, it would have taken his head clean off. How's that for TMI?”