Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (13 page)

Janita sucked her teeth. "Who are you talking about?"

"There's a guy, works for Brickmeyer, looks like an inbred, Appalachian Bond villain, but I don't have an ID on him. Don't know who he is, where he's from, or what his connection to Brickmeyer is, beyond the obvious. That'll be the next step."

"I can feel something dark closing in on us."

"You're gonna have to give me some time, Janita. Leland Brickmeyer says he wants to slap me with a TRO so I can’t go near him."

"Guess you'll have to get creative, then."

"I can only bend the rules, not break them outright. I’m already a man sliding around in the mud."

"Why not?
Somebody
's been breaking rules. That don't mean it's Brickmeyer, but my son isn't dead for no reason at all."

"It's slippery. If I go vigilante, I'm no better than the people I'm trying to catch."

"You ain't killed nobody," she said.

Not yet, anyway, I thought. "I guess you're right."

"Course I'm right. You know what else I'm right about?"

I waited.

“You think everything around you can be explained.”

"Just because I'm not basing the whole investigation on weird shit doesn't mean I'm ignoring it. I can no more find Emmitt's murderer by trying to dream than I can solve an algebra equation by meditating on God’s existence."

"Hmmph," she said. "When I was a girl, my grandmother - that is to say, my uncle's mother - used to sit at the foot of my bed and tell me stories before I went to bed about what happens when we dream."

This wasn’t the kind of conversation I wanted to have with her. Still, I thought about the fact I had nearly killed her, so I indulged her. "What kinds of stories?"

"Oh, all kinds. Fantastical stories. Some of them revolved around the men who drove out evil spirits from this village or that one. Others were ghost stories her mother had confided to her when she was a child. She told me about the thin sheet that separates life and death. In her eyes, life on earth is a cocoon and we are just caterpillars. When we die, when the last breath is released, so are we."

"Does that give you any comfort about Emmitt's death, believing that something comes after this life?"

"Nothing gives me comfort, Rolson McKane. But my grandmother believed in the idea that stories, that knowledge of life and death, give us power over death. She told me so herself, but my mother warned me not to pay any attention. She tried to keep grandmama out of the house for that reason."

"Why?"

"Because grandmama had died giving birth to my mother thirty-plus years before."

I thought about the prayers to my mother, wishing for her to come back to me, in any form. “That sounds like too much for a child to handle.”

"The stories were what kept me up at night. Some of them were
so
scary. I had to learn about headless men patrolling the streets, and of people being buried alive and spending the rest of eternity ringing bells at midnight to warn the townspeople."

I could sympathize with that aspect of her story. "My Aunt Birdie used to talk about a ghost that wandered down the railroad, carrying a lamp and spending nights looking for his missing head. She took me out there once, and I got plenty scared, but we didn't see anything. Years later, I found out it was swamp gas that created the light."

"How do you know it wasn't also a spirit?"

"Forgive me, Mrs. Laveau, but how do
you
know that Emmitt has been in contact with you and - by extension - me?"

A long pause passed between us before she talked again. "That's probably a question better suited for my uncle," she said. "Why don't you come on by tomorrow and ask him all about it? You probably won't be able to get him to shut up. That's a trend in our family, talking when we shouldn’t. Goodbye, Rolson McKane."

With that, she hung up. I went into the kitchen and popped open a beer in the golden light of the fridge, and then I sat at the broken-down table by the windows and watched the trees wave at me for a couple of hours.

*  *  *

The next day, light pushed through trees to the east of me as I drove to the Brickmeyer compound. There, I waited. This time, I managed to catch Leland's right-hand man coming out of the house. I had parked off the road a few hundred feet and stalked up the main drive.

The man, wearing a button-down work shirt and faded Brickmeyer Ag & Timber camo hat, paused briefly before opening the truck door and getting in.

"I know who you are," he said through the open passenger window, slamming his door. His voice was low and resonant and only vaguely country, like he'd lived somewhere else before. "I won't make the same mistake as bossman."

I leaned against the truck, peeking my head into the cab, which smelled of dirt and grass and tobacco spit, and a hint of generic pine freshener thrown in for good measure. He pushed the key into the ignition - hard - turned it, and the engine rumbled to life.

My eyes drifted to the ignition, where a mass of silver and gold keys dangled from a single, big ring. "This your truck?" I asked, fighting the ruddy swell of the diesel.

"Company's," he replied, not matching my gaze.

I sucked my teeth. "Shame that key chain there doesn't have a company key fob, don't you think?"

"What?"

"Leland likes to doodle his name on anything he has a passing association with." I pointed at the hat. "Hell, he's even branded you. You telling me that doesn't include the company cars' key rings?"

The man flushed. His jaw muscles tensed as he clenched his teeth. "Step away from the truck, dickwad," he said, "before I make your asshole match your big fucking mouth."

I pursed my lips. "Reckon I'll be on my way, then. Speaking of assholes, your boss around? You get your marching orders from him every morning? That what you do here?"

"I'm about two seconds from getting out of this truck and stomping your ass into a mud puddle, friend."

I didn't doubt that he could do it. He was built like a UFC fighter gone to seed, or a man who bench presses Buicks for kicks. But I already had my mouth open. No stopping now. "I got seven pistol rounds say I put you down like a tired bull from a Hemingway novel before you get your foot anywhere
near
my ass." I spat on the passenger seat of the truck. "
Friend
."

"You shoot me, you better hope you kill me."

"That's the idea, Igor."

We stared in silence, him sitting behind the wheel, me leaning against the truck. In the mild heat of the idling engine. Breathing in the exhaust.

"What, ex-cop? You gonna
shoot
me for not talking to you? For not listening to your half-cocked fucking theories?"

I shrugged. He said, "What a chicken shit move."

"Coming from a grown man who babysits an entitled know-nothing."

"I hope they find your fingerprints all over the scene at that old nigger joint. I hope they fry your ass, because I'll get a front row seat. Bossman'll make sure of that."

"Oh, I bet he will," I said.

This time, he didn't answer. Rather, he sneered and raised the window to avoid answering me, yanking the column shift into reverse and backing away. He backed until he could throw the truck in drive, and then he pulled down the driveway. A couple of times the engine revved, the truck jerking forward like a dog trying to leash-train the master. He wanted to bark the tires on the blacktop, but I knew he wouldn't. He was fucking bought and paid for.

I walked up to the portico and knocked a couple of times, but nobody answered. Guess they saw me coming.

There was a BMW parked by the garage. Jeffrey's car. He had to be here. I stepped back and peered into the windows of the house, trying to find somebody looking down at me. I might as well have been trying to find answers at an empty house.

I pulled a small item out of my front pocket and turned it over in my fingers, suspecting I was about to do something both stupid and bullheaded. But I couldn't help myself. I felt the blood rush to my head as I dropped to one knee. I deposited the dusty Brickmeyer key fob on the portico and walked soundlessly down the driveway.

Your move, I thought.

*  *  *

My next stop was my lawyer's office. Jarrell told me nothing was new, but that my court date was coming up and it didn't look good for me to be driving around town. He also felt compelled to say that it definitely didn't look good for me to be seen at a bar. Having a drink, no less. I pretty much shrugged through the conversation and told him not to screen my calls.

"They're looking to serve you for a restraining order," he said, smiling, as if that might lighten the mood. On his face was an ancient scar, lightened by time and made less omnipresent by an abundance of wrinkles. He wasn't
that
old, but the years hadn't been kind. "You pissed in Leland's cream pie while he was trying to take a bite."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

A man’s words are his identity, sometimes. "You've got to pick up on my lingo. Anyway, turns out, Leland was trying to sell that land when that Laveau boy's body was found on it. Having you poke around only made it worse. Now nobody's going to want that bunch of rotted pine trees."

I chewed on a hangnail, thinking it over. "So, whoever killed Emmitt Laveau probably wanted to punish the Brickmeyers."

"Had everything riding on that one?"

"Kind of," I replied. It wasn’t like I even had a real theory, but I had kind of banked on finding a picture of Leland Brickmeyer standing next to Laveau’s body, winking at the camera like they used to in lynching photos. Something like that.

Turns out, it wouldn’t be that easy.

"You might want to lay off him, then. He's already beyond pissed that somebody had the audacity to dump a body out there. Now you're going around town, trying to make him out to be the mastermind behind it. If he's innocent - and it looks like he is - you might end up at the loony bin in Milledgeville instead of a jail cell."

"That's great news."

"I have told you and told you that digging around was a bad idea. If you get embroiled in a pissing match with Brickmeyer
or
the police force, you're going to look foolish and unstable in the eyes of the judge."

"Okay. Okay. I get it. Enough with the bathroom metaphors."

"Just keep your lunatic routine to a minimum, okay? You don't have to go around, trying to make up for what your daddy did."

"What did you say?" I felt sharp edges all over my skin.

Jarrell leaned forward in his chair, steepling his fingers in front of him. "Listen, buddy. Don't think I can't see the parallels between what your father did and what you're trying to do. They're perfect opposites."

"That's not it at all."

"Whatever. The thing is, you don't have to be ashamed. Nobody blames you for what he did. I defended the man, tried to do whatever I could to prove him innocent, but he had a lot of demons. I think you do, too, but this ain't the way to exorcise them."

I spat a corner of fingernail on the floor beside me. "This is different."

"He needed to go away. It was just his penance. He killed that man because, well, it had all to do with your mama. Not because the guy was black."

"I don't believe that for a second."

"Either way, he was guilty, and he did his time. Died doing it. He never got to tell you he was sorry, so now you're going around trying to make up for it by helping someone you hurt."

"So."

"It's a nice gesture, don't get me wrong. Whoever killed Laveau deserves a red hot poker up the ass, but don't screw yourself trying to bring him to justice."

My phone buzzed in the pocket of my jeans. I pulled it out, saw that it was D.L., and then pressed a button to send the call straight to voicemail. He'd have to wait. "Thanks, Jarrell."

"This isn't an act of charity. You're still paying me. But don't think for a second I don't care about what happens to you. Besides, you don't have enough money to keep me on retainer."

*  *  *

Deuce was pretending to be working when I opened the door to his office. He smiled without looking up and began clicking on his computer screen. "Damn, Rol, you almost ruined my game of solitaire."

"I figured you might be out seining the streets for bail jumpers." I had forgotten to check my voicemail for D.L.'s message, so I sent him a brief text, telling him I'd drop by the police department this afternoon. The old man hated texts, and so I hoped every one I sent was slowly dragging him into the current century.

"Word is,
you're
the one trying to snare people in nets, not me. Going around like you belong in one of Ed McBain's
87th Precinct
novels, and you are no Detective Carella."

"I kind of like getting all this attention. Maybe someone will figure out which literary detective I actually
am
like." I pressed send and closed the phone before sliding it into my pocket. The phone beeped mildly a moment later.