Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time (27 page)

“C’mon . . . I wanna know, let’s hear what’s been going down since I last seen you.”

I took a mouthful of beer and began to recount to Vic how I had been sent the sliced-off ears belonging to Clarence Mayfield and the chicken’s foot, and how I’d disposed of them earlier.

“It looks like you’re making some real nasty friends in real low places, brother. Whoever it is that cut Clarence up wants you off their case and they’ve sent you a pretty straightforward message to back off. I suppose I’d be wasting my breath if I told you that you should back down on this shit.”

“Would you?” I asked, hoping to get the further benefit of my relation’s streetwise wisdom. I then regretted asking such a dumb question to somebody like Vic, who didn’t know the meaning of the term “back down”.

“Hell no! I’d find whatever gutter-crawling bastard had sent those ears to me an’ I’d be stuffing them down their t’roats and the chicken’s foot up their ass.”

I chose to ignore Vic’s advice and concentrated on telling him what I’d found out over the last few days: how I’d followed up the leads Hoo Shoo Dupree had given to me, my meeting with Virginia Landry, the visit I’d received earlier that afternoon from Earl Linney, and my unsubstantiated belief that he and the barrister Terrence Blanchard were linked in some way. Vic listened patiently, not making eye contact with me while I spoke, weighing up in his head what I was saying and considering the implications of my words.

When I’d finished, he waited for a short while, mulling over the facts of my report to him before asking me a question.

“So tell me, this Landry chick . . . she a stunner?”

He pumped his eyebrows up and down a couple of times in quick succession while drumming the edge of the table with the flats of his hands.

“C’mon, cough it up, I needs to know if she’s hot, brother!”

“Jesus, Vic! Can’t you think of anyting else? All that stuff I just laid on you and all you can think of is whether the damn woman’s hot or not. She was a decent lady, fine-looking, that’s all I gotta say.”

I picked up my glass and sank the rest of my stout, and dropped the empty pot back onto the table, unable to hide my frustration at my cousin’s glibness.

“Fine-looking lady, is that so?”

I felt Vic staring across at me while an invisible flush of warmth hit my cheeks as I reluctantly recollected Virginia Landry’s waiflike beauty, and he mischievously ribbed me some more.

“Man, I git the feelin’ this fine-looking lady floats your boat; tell me I ain’t wrong? And befo’ you git on your high horse, brother, that’s cool, cos it’s ’bout time you got your hands on a piece o’ tasty skirt, put some life back into . . .”

Vic stopped himself mid sentence and I looked out across the empty dance floor and shuffled uncomfortably in my seat as the heated embarrassment leaked out of me. He realised he’d touched a raw nerve as soon as he’d made his flippant remarks and leant over towards me, placing his hand on my arm gently as I continued to gaze out into the uneasy emptiness of the night club. When he spoke and broke into my silent state it was with a surprising tenderness that I did not expect or honestly believe him to be capable of.

“JT, I wish I could take the hurt away, brother, I surely do. You know I gotta real big mouth sometimes and I don’t know when to keep it zipped. I never meant to mess with your grief.”

His head dropped and we both sat silently for a moment. I turned back to Vic and watched as he slowly rose from his seat and carefully collected the empty glasses from the table. There was an unmasked sadness in his eyes as he nodded an unspoken apology towards me. He walked over to the bar, shaking his head from side to side, and I knew that he was privately punishing himself for his ill-chosen quips. He strode across the floor unable to hide his anger at himself, his huge shoulders hung down low like a dejected prizefighter who was reluctantly leaving the ring after losing on points in the twelfth. When he returned a few minutes later with our glasses refilled, his mood had lightened and it was as if the brief, awkward conversation that had just taken place between us had never happened and that the ghosts from my past that he had accidently awoken within me had been exorcised from his memory so as not to cause me further injury. He put the pint of stout in front of me with one hand, then jovially slapped my shoulder hard, his huge hand knocking me forward in my seat. If there had been any bad blood between us, then the simple gesture of offering me another drink and a swift manly clout across my upper body was how he expected what had passed between us to be forgotten. It was a simple and effective act of contrition that I could not deny him.

When Vic finally spoke again, he chose to return to the subject of Earl Linney.

“Why’d you think that two-faced Jamaican Linney got you involved in this mess in the first place? He came outta nowhere and he’s been slinging greenbacks at you like he’s got a fuckin’ printing press in his back yard ever since. Just think on about the kinda weird shit he’s been laying on you these past few weeks; it reeks o’ trouble, man. I’m telling you, I wouldn’t trust the bastard as far as I could t’row him. Hell, every word that spills outta that old nigger’s mouth sounds like one big pack o’ lies. If you ask me, he’s gonna let you take the fall fo’ someting he’s most probably up to his thick neck in.”

Vic didn’t give me a chance to reply or interject an opinion. He was on a roll and intended to stay on it.

“Another ting, there’s this honky lawyer you found living out in that big joint in the country. Linney tells you he barely knows him, yet you say he nearly messed his britches when you mentioned his name. You tell him there’s been a sighting of the damn mute he’s paying you to find and that this Blanchard dude is having scrubbed-up cock-rats run down to his place by what has to be bent law, just so that he and his loaded brethren can stick their dicks into a little piece of forbidden ebony cooch. The fact he still wants you to go it alone and not come clean with what you know to the local police is another crock o’ shit . . . Brother, that bird, he don’t fly straight, I’m telling you fo’ sure.”

“Maybe you’re right, Vic, maybe Linney is involved in Stella’s disappearance, maybe he is setting me up as a patsy or perhaps what he’s been telling me all along has been the trute. All I know is that I have to do what I think is right and try to find out what the hell has happened to her.”

Vic was about to interrupt me, but I lifted my hand to prevent him from butting in and continued speaking.

“If I find that the alderman is dirty in all o’ this then I’m gonna make damn sure that he spends some time behind bars. I can’t explain it any better, but I’ve come this far and I need see it through to the end – you gotta see that?”

“JT, I told you befo’, you ain’t a copper no more. Git real on this. You’ve been up against bent law and men with money and power once befo’: that ended real bad fo’ you. Don’t you be repeating the same shit twice, man, it ain’t worth it, only person that’s gonna git hurt in all this is you.”

Vic blew out a heavy breath of air, knowing that his words were falling upon deaf ears. He rested back against the red vinyl-covered seat and stared back at me, his frustration evident upon his chiselled features. I finished the rest of my beer, stuck my hand into the inside pocket of my jacket, pulled out the money that Earl Linney had given me earlier and slid it across the table towards Vic, who whistled quietly to himself at the bundle of notes that sat in front of him.

“Stash that with my other stuff.”

“No problem . . .”

He picked up the cash, folded it in half again and got up outta his seat, putting the wad of notes into his coat pocket as he took himself out of the booth.

“Now, you sure you don’t wanna keep a bit of this back, git some style in the rain mac department? You can sling that other old rag out fo’ the bin man.”

He grinned at me as he turned up the collar of his own flash coat and walked out of the club without looking back, seemingly without a care in the world. But in truth I had unsettled him with my bravado talk of taking on another man’s problems and possibly going toe to toe with a faceless enemy that I knew so little about and who was clearly capable of doing me great harm.

After Vic had left I bought myself another pint and sat thinking about his advice and mulling over his words of caution and whether he was in fact right about how I should throw in the towel and get the hell out of Earl Linney’s spiral of chaos as quick as I could. What Vic had said made a lot of sense, but I’d rarely taken the counsel of others, well meaning or not, and my cousin’s advice to quit while I could had failed to make the impact he’d hoped it would. Something inside of me told me that I needed to see the job through to the end and find out the truth regarding Stella Hopkins’ disappearance.

Sitting slumped in the booth, I felt my eyes struggle to stay open as the need for sleep overwhelmed my thoughts. I jerked my body into an upright position along with my sluggish consciousness and swirled the last dregs of my beer around the bottom of the glass before tipping it towards my lips and downing the remainder in a final draught, then sat the empty glass in front of me as a veil of fatigue washed over my weary body. My watch said that it was just after midnight. I grabbed my coat and pulled it on, then made my way upstairs out into the dark, bitter chill of the early hours.

I stood and briefly looked up and down the still quietness of Grosvenor Road, taking note of the solitary but familiar car parked further up on the opposite side of the street. The blue neon sign of the Speed Bird club buzzed and flickered above me as I slowly did up the buttons of the dog-eared duffle and drew my trilby across my face before starting off back towards my digs, fully aware that from the silver Ford the unmistakable faces of Elrod “Hurps” Haddon and the crew-cut cop who had attacked me with the slapjack were watching me disappear into the night.

I was too full of beer and rum to think straight any more. My body ached and was so dead-beat tired that by the time I got back to my bedsit all I was fit for was taking a quick pee, kicking my clothes across the floor of my room and falling into bed. Any thoughts of Elrod Haddon and the crew-cut cop sitting back in that car on Grosvenor Road were quickly eradicated from my consciousness as my body submitted to its natural desire to sleep.

*

Ellie’s nocturnal homecoming to me is always the same. She appears out of the penetrating firestorm and into my waiting arms as I rest, taking advantage of the privacy that heavy slumber allows, empowering within her the ability to reach into the unseen protected sentiments of our cherished past and permitting us to return to the shared love we swathed ourselves in when she freely walked upon the earth and we believed our happiness had no end to it. Now, in the darkness of my dreams, that joy is scattered into fleeting moments of idyllic reverie. My once flawless memories of her are now frequently tarnished by the cruelty of my waking into a world where she no longer exists and I remain, tormented and alone. But for tonight we return to each other and briefly exist at our most contented, reliving a seamlessly perfect memory of a perfect day.

The splendour of this time is always shattered by the returning bouquet of smouldering ash and charred human flesh, but on this occasion my nightly delusion is somehow different and I feel the presence of another soul who remains anonymous and silently stalks our intimacy in the previously impenetrable and private Eden that my mind has created.

We walk barefooted, as we always do, along the pink sands of Needham’s Point towards the makeshift beach house, with its roof covered in heavy layers of palm fronds and with its slatted wood floor, which I would cover with a couple of red and green checked woollen blankets so that we could stretch out together. Now protected from the rays of the strong midday sun, my back propped up against the back of the shack with Ellie lying between my legs and her head resting against my chest, I gently caress her arm with my fingertips and the sweet aroma of coconut oil and ozone drifts from the jet-black curls of her long hair as we look out of the open doorway towards the gently breaking waves of an azure sea.

I close my eyes and feel the warmth of a gentle breeze that blows in from off of the sombre shoreline and I allow myself to drift deeper towards a sense of a shared tranquillity that is conveyed by the ebb and flow of a placid tide. As I lose myself in the stillness of the hushed moment, then for the first time in my secluded dream state I sense a tiny hand gently take my own and feel the lips of a child touch my ear and whisper, “Sing to me, Daddy, sing me the song that sends me to sleep.”

*

It was the sound of splintering wood and the bouncing rattle of the Yale lock spinning across the polished floorboards of my hall way that sent her soothing voice back towards the timeless hideaway I was being drawn from. I shot up naked off of the mattress as the multiple thuds of heavily studded boots made their way at speed towards my closed bedroom door. I leapt towards it in the hope of rolling the bolt across to lock myself in, to give me a little more time to work out an exit plan, when with two hefty strikes to the edge of the doorjamb it was nearly kicked off its hinges by the intruders on the other side. I instinctively backed up as two uniformed police officers burst through the two-foot-wide gap of the now unsealed doorway and ran at me, slamming me down hard on to the mattress of my bed. I shouted out and fought to try to free myself from their grasp, and one of the cops drove his clenched fist into my guts, winding me.

They spun me over onto my stomach, grabbing hold of my wrists, burning my skin with their leather-gloved hands and yanking both my arms out behind my back to restrain me. A further two coppers sped through the door and grabbed at my flaying legs, pinning them down to the bed by my ankles. I was held tightly at the neck in a pincer grip by one of the officers and my right cheek was pushed into the mattress, and I watched as the distinct outline of a fifth man calmly walked around the periphery of my vision, then stood over me watching as the four others held me down. I tried to relax my body against the powerful grasp of my captors and found sufficient breath within me to speak again just as the unknown figure took a clump of my hair in his hand and with brutal force wrenched my head back so that I was staring into the emotionless, hard eyes of what had to be a plain-clothed officer.