Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (9 page)

I took my time getting back to the truck, trying hard to steal glances back at the windows. Leland seemed like a peeker, but I never once saw the curtains of a single window pulled aside.

Oh well.

It was then I noticed a nice, big obstacle in my way.

A truck the size of a freight liner blocked the driveway, in a circular alcove designed for cars to lie in wait. If there was a flaw, it was that the driveway only had enough space for one vehicle.

The windows were tinted but the windshield was not, so I saw the outline of a husky dude hunched over the wheel. I waved and he gave a few fingers in response. The truck was a diesel, white, had all the qualities of the one I was looking for. Even as I turned to leave, trying to get a better look at the truck's tag, it had pulled forward, giving me nothing but a blurry glance at the back license plate.

I kept glancing uncomfortably at the rearview mirror as I drove home, but this time, nothing followed me.

*  *  *

Despite my better judgment, I ended up at Virgil's Bar again. I felt a sense of accomplishment for giving Brickmeyer the what’s what, so a couple of beers were in order. It was still light out, but the regulars already seemed to be tilting dangerously to one side. Most of them were in the bar to get business done. They were not fucking around. They drank real drinks. Got real drunk. Told sloppy, outrageous lies with a slight glimmer in their eyes. I felt very much at home.

I pinned a stool down at one end of the bar and felt a familiarity in the tattered leather as I leaned back. Every chair in the place had a heavily-used feel, and stuffing poked out of the holes not covered by beer labels or duct tape.

I took the bar-thinker's pose, hunched forward and staring into the senseless gold of my High Life. Unlike the other patrons, I wasn't contemplating where it had gone wrong with
me
. There would be time for that when this was all over. I was thinking about Emmitt Laveau, what reason he had entered my life, and the distraction helped keep my blood from doing the jitterbug inside of me.

In a late afternoon draining of color, the bar was a good companion, the stale beer smell and hazy smoke cloud pressing against the ceiling. The doors had been left open to let in some fresh air. It was conducive to drinking.

So that's what I did. I drank, and it felt nice. The beer gave me a pleasant buzz, even if I had to fight off the nagging feeling that maybe it wasn’t making me a better dude.

A hard clap on the back jarred me out of my thoughts. I jerked and turned to face the third or fourth biggest man I'd ever seen in my life.

Luckily, he smiled. "Rol, it looked like you were staring into a crystal ball there.” He pointed at the beer. “There ain’t where you’ll see anything worth finding."

"Deuce.
Jesus
. You scared me. Shit. Don't you know it's not a good thing to do to me these days?"

Deuce took a seat, pointed at my beer, signaling to the barkeep for a High Life. The stool seemed to grunt under his weight. "Fuck, man, you're the talk of the town. This is the last place I should expect you to be.”

He paused and sighed. “Yet, here you are."

"Should I be worried?" I lit a cigarette.

"As a bail bondsman, I would offer up that you don't be seen drinking in public, especially
with
a bail bondsman. Might complicate your case. Still, man’s got to make his own mistakes. Can’t make them for him."

"Least this way," I said, taking a long tug on my cigarette, "you know I'm not a flight risk. Can't go very far if I'm tickling my drunk bone here."

Louis arrived with the High Life, and Deuce knocked back a third of it in a single gulp. He grimaced like a man who'd found a cigarette in his coffee mug. "I normally drink Bud. This stuff, pigs wouldn't roll around in." He shrugged and took another swig before putting it down. "It's cold, I guess."

"That it is. Cold beer and cold hearts; that's all they got in here."

Looking around, Deuce said, "Beats working for a living."

He turned and raised his beer to a few people, who grinned and waved back. He was the only black dude in the bar, and though the George Wallace mentality sometimes still pervaded the Junction, it had never applied to him.

People were probably too afraid to enforce it.

"You don't mean that. You're practically a workaholic, for Chrissakes."

He smiled. "No, no I don't. And yes. Yes, I am." He referenced a small rip in the neckline of his t-shirt with a disarming wink. Somebody had obviously gotten the worst end of that deal. "When your job's as fun as mine, you don't hit the snooze button."

"That good, huh?"

It was an answer he always had ready, whenever he got the question about his work. "Oh, it's a job. Has its slow days. Has its bad days. But for the most part, it's good work. Don't have the same day twice, that's for sure."

He took a sidelong glance down the length of the bar and turned his gaze back to me. "Fact is, I've pulled in about a quarter of the people here."

Louis lined five beers up on the bar and flicked off their tops with a practices flick of his bottle opener. Good bartender. Quiet guy, nonjudgmental. He served each man, as he always did, with a curt nod and servile grin, and the old bearded men, in chambray work shirts and dirty jeans, orange with Georgia clay or spotted black with oil stains, turned back to their conversations with a kind of desperate energy.

I went ahead and paid for Deuce’s second round. He’d had a rough day, but he didn’t mind that. He didn't have to work very hard to be good at his job. A couple years on the D-Line for the Saints afforded him the kind of leisure at his job most nine-to-fivers dream about, both financially and physically. He wasn’t an asshole or a bully because he didn’t have to be. He was bigger than most men by half, but it was also just his natural disposition.

Guys he dealt with now, though, don't fear big guys. They'd been hardened by the gutters of this world and tried to find weakness in a man’s size. Didn't matter. I'd once seen Deuce drag two lifers in on their court dates, both men sweating and dazed but otherwise all right. He wasn't mean but he was hard-nosed and didn't shy away from violence.

I made friends with Deuce freshman year of high school, before he had scouts breathing down his neck. One of my only true friends in this world.

Maybe the only one.

SportsCenter was playing on the old tube set above the bar, and we watched basketball highlights for a minute before Deuce said, "The world spinnin' the opposite way? I haven't heard from you in a while."

He was avoiding the television, all of the scores. The spreads. The over-unders. Sometimes, he didn’t care to look at SportsCenter at all. Sometimes, I covered his drinks.
Hey, man, I got a spending problem this week
. Not often, but those nights tended to be the ones where we stared into our glasses and didn’t say much.

"Cooped up. Stomping patterns into the floors at my house. You know the deal. After the whole thing with you-know-what, I keep a low profile."

"And, what, stumbling onto dead men is the way to remake your image? Hey, can we change this," he called to Louis down at the other end of the bar. "I fucking hate SportsCenter."

This wasn’t one of his weeks, apparently.

We lingered for a while, just concentrating on the way the end of a day feels. I finished my first beer and immediately anticipated the second. Drinking is only half the thrill of drinking. Having a full glass on the bar or in your hand, waiting on the next sip, is the other half.

It's comforting. You drink when there is a drink in front of you, and you spend the moments in between in anticipation. After a while, they all taste bland and you relish only in the coldness or of the comfort they provide in conversation.

Louis changed the television to a non-sports station,
Seinfeld
re-runs, and he turned to us for approval. One set of dudes turned in our direction, looking bent up about the channel change, but they quickly turned back to their conversation when they saw us. Or Deuce.

We stared at the screen, pretending to watch. Most everybody else could give a shit about the television, even if half of them were staring at it.

"What you gonna do, Rol?" he asked. "Can't be a cop anymore. Lotta things they can forget down here, but what you did’s not one of them."

"Same as you when you decided not to play football anymore. I'll get along. I reckon I'll work on cars. Build some custom furniture, maybe. I got two good hands on me."

"When they're not shaking."

I held one up in my defense. "Steady as a board."

Deuce nodded at my beer. His eyes were full of friendly contempt. "And what do you think causes that?"

"The stress of life." I laughed. "Finding dead bodies. Running into ladies when you're drunk. That sort of thing."

I sat there, twirled the beer on the counter, mulled over how to say it. Finally, I just did. "Deuce," I said, "I think maybe this whole thing with this dead guy is bigger than just a bump and dump, more than just a couple of white boys torturing some guy 'cause he was black."

He raised an eyebrow. "And your proof?"

I told him, starting with waking up hungover and going over to the Boogie House, omitting, of course, the bit about the flashing lights and music. I took him right on up to this afternoon, with the diesel truck pulling up outside Brickmeyer's mansion. I tried to make sense of the offhand comments about the Hoover Dam and the concrete in his pool, but he didn't care about that.

"Any word on that license yet?"

"None whatsoever."

"Do you know of a connection between the dead kid and Brickmeyer? This guy didn't catch him going with a hooker or burning some kind of legal document, did he?"

"God, I kind of hope so. But no, nothing right now. Just speculation. Brickmeyer's acting weird."

"He doesn't like for anyone to assume he's anything but the Second Coming. It's a kind of complex rich kids have. Leland Brickmeyer doesn't look like he's been in the deep end of the family's gene pool, but he's not stupid. The old man gave him a crash course in how to be a major league fuckwad, and now the old man's dead, so Leland doesn't have the guidance to keep him from slipping off the tracks."

"Normally," I said, "in these cases, the politician's banging a groupie of some kind, or hiding some kind of racketeering charge."

"Racketeering?"

"Something like that. It's usually something illegal and something awful, something worth covering up, and in this day and age, a scandal that can't stick doesn't ruin a politician's career. Think of
Clinton and Bush. They avoided scandal after scandal, because they managed to discredit the charges being leveled against them."

"And you think that's what's happening here?"

"Of course I do. It's why I'm framming the hive with a stick. I want to see what happens when the bees come out pissed and ready to sting."

"Uh-huh," Deuce said. He tilted back his bottle and killed the last of his drink. Another one appeared moments later. Louis nodded and then went off to go fiddle with an unopened bottle of Maker's Mark. “And what if you’re framming the wrong hive?”

“I’m good with hunches,” I said, a half-assed defense.

“You know this town,” he replied. “Know how people act here. We’re not so far from the times when federal agents had to escort black kids into school. It can’t be that impossible to imagine someone offing a dude because he’s not white. And then you go and level that charge at a Brickmeyer?
The
Brickmeyer?”

I said, "He is not out of touch with reality, but he has enough handlers to keep him, um, sort of distanced from it. Friends and family, they kiss his ass to the point they need Chapstick just to be around him."

"So you want to rock the boat a little bit."

"I want to tip the boat over, dump the young patriarch in the water and see if he swims-"

"Or if he sinks."

"Exactly," I said. "He's never really had anybody in his face, so this is my chance, before he can have a chance to really disappear into his own little burrow. He cannot have enough plausible deniability to avoid questioning."

"This is all assuming that he has a part in this. Otherwise, you're ruining an innocent man."

"Right. Okay."

"Keep the blinders off is what I'm saying. I mean, the dude wouldn’t have the body dumped on his own land.”

"But it makes it easy to deny."

"Why not just get rid of the body completely?" he said.

"Unless he wanted it to seem obvious."

"Yeah, okay. I don't quite buy it, but if that's what you're working with, hey, whatever.”

"He was defensive. I'm going to work under the assumption that he had
something
to do with it until I can no longer go down that road."

"I'll take my chances."

"If you do anything stupid, there's only so far out on the limb I can go, and not if I have to risk my own neck. Consider yourself warned."