Paint It Black (4 page)

He found Bledsoe out in the lobby, staring at the wanted posters. Bledsoe turned when he heard Louis approach.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?”

“Did she talk to you?”

Louis leveled his eyes at the lawyer. “I don't think I'm the ‘brother' you thought I was.”

“I was hoping—”

“I know what you were hoping,” Louis interrupted. “It's not going to work. Your client couldn't care less what color I am.”

Bledsoe let out a sigh and bent to pick up his briefcase. He straightened, gazed out the glass doors, then looked back at Louis. “I'm sorry you had to come such a long way for nothing,” he said. “I'll make sure you're reimbursed for your expenses thus far.” He stuck out his hand.

Louis stared at it. “I'm fired?”

Bledsoe blinked. “But you said—”

“All I said was your client doesn't like me,” Louis said. “I don't like her either. But I don't think she's guilty.”

Bledsoe dropped his hand. “So you're taking the case?”

Louis paused. “Yeah, yeah, I guess I am.”

Bledsoe's lips tipped upward and he thrust out his hand again. Louis returned his sweaty handshake.

“I need to talk to the police chief,” Louis said.

“Dan Wainwright,” Bledsoe said quickly. “I already told him about you. He's retired FBI, a bit of a hardass, unfortunately.”

Louis suppressed a sigh. “Great. How's he feel about private investigators?”

Bledsoe was steering him toward the front offices. “I don't know. All I know is he isn't crazy about me.”

Dan Wainwright's door was open and Bledsoe led Louis to it. Louis watched as Bledsoe stammered out an introduction and left, actually backing out the door like some supplicant. Louis turned his attention to the man before him. Wainwright's pale blue eyes were steady on Louis's face.

“You're trapped in a room with a tiger, a rattlesnake, and a lawyer and you have a gun with two bullets,” Wainwright said. “What should you do?”

Louis shrugged.

“You shoot the lawyer. Twice.”

Louis didn't smile.

Wainwright stared at Louis, shook his head, then dropped down in his chair with a sigh.

“Okay, I told Bledsoe I'd give you ten minutes. Clock's running.”

Louis considered the man sitting across the desk from him. Dan Wainwright was about fifty-five but had the air of an older man. It wasn't his face. It was heavily creased but ruddy with health and topped with an unruly but striking shock of thick white hair. It wasn't his body either. Wainwright was six-five, maybe two-thirty, linebacker-gone-lax, and his head almost looked too small for his robust frame. It was something intangible, like the man were some plodding, primeval creature whose species was losing the gene wars. Louis thought of Ollie Wickshaw in that moment and how his old partner used to say that some people just seemed to have old souls. Dan Wainwright looked like he had been stalking the earth for eons.

“I just saw Roberta Tatum,” Louis said.

“A real sweetheart,” Wainwright said.

“You think she did it,” Louis said.

Wainwright nodded. “It's classic. There was a pattern.”

“She has no record. Not even a speeding ticket.”

“I mean the abuse,” Wainwright said. “He knocked her around, she took it for years. Finally, she just snapped and bit him back.”

“I don't get that feeling,” Louis said.

“Well, I guess that's what she's paying you for.”

Louis stared at Wainwright, trying to read what was in his eyes. He couldn't tell if the man was annoyed or amused.

“You got your license?” Wainwright asked.

“What?”

“Your PI license. You gotta have one to operate in this state.”

“No,” Louis said.

“What about your gun? You need paper for that, too.”

“I'm not carrying right now,” Louis said, avoiding Wainwright's gaze.

Wainwright pursed his lips, twirling slightly in his beat-up vinyl chair. He scribbled something on a paper and slid it across the desk. “Here's the number in Tallahassee. Call them. I won't bust your balls over the license for now.”

Louis slipped the scrap in his pocket. The phone rang and Wainwright answered it. Louis used the break to look around the office. Unlike that of his last chief's, it offered no clues to the personality of its occupant. The furniture was old and spartan, a couple of scarred metal filing cabinets and a watercooler. On the walls, there was the usual glass case with police patches from across the country, a departmental photo that looked ten years old, several engraved
IN APPRECIATION
plaques, one from an Adrian, Michigan, civic group. There was also a glass box that held an FBI badge, a well-worn FBI sleeve patch and ID card, all mounted on a light green matte board that was scribbled with good-byes.

On the desk, there was one framed photograph of two kids, a boy of about six and a girl about eight. The only other personal item sat on a filing cabinet—an old deflated football encased in Plexiglas.

“Bledsoe said you're from Michigan,” Wainwright said, hanging up the phone.

“I grew up around Detroit, worked in a small force up North,” Louis said. He wondered if Wainwright knew about his three months with the Loon Lake police. He hoped not. He needed this man's cooperation; he didn't need him to know why he had had to leave.

“I was born in Mt. Clemens,” Wainwright said. “I was with the bureau in Detroit from fifty-seven till I retired in seventy-nine.” He paused. “Detroit was a great town in those days. A doubleheader at Briggs, a couple of coneys at Lafayette.”

He saw the blank look on Louis's face.

“How old are you?” he asked.

Louis tried not to bristle. “Twenty-six.”

“And you got a feeling about Roberta.”

“I'd just like to explore some things,” Louis said. When Wainwright didn't say anything, he added, “And it would be easier with your help.”

Wainwright let out a sigh. “Look, Mr. . . .”

“Kincaid. Louis Kincaid.”

“We all know what happened here.”

“Apparently. You moved awful fast on that arrest.”

“It's got nothing to do with Roberta Tatum being black. It's just the pattern.”

“I don't know about patterns. I'm just after the truth here,” Louis said.

Wainwright's pale blue eyes locked on Louis. “The truth. Interesting concept.”

He reached behind him and tossed a file folder across the desk. “Okay, here's the truth.”

Louis didn't move.

“Take it. Look at it. Whoever killed this poor bastard was really pissed. That's passion, Mr. Kincaid. Strangers . . . muggers . . . whatever, they don't have passion. Wives, now they're a whole different story.”

Louis opened the folder. It was neatly organized and he flipped immediately to the crime scene photos.

Walter Tatum was on his back, spread-eagled. What looked like a green or blue shirt was soaked in blood and his face was a brown blur against the tan sand.

Louis felt his stomach quiver and he swallowed dryly. He turned the pages slowly. Knife wounds, some deep, some surface . . . gaping wounds in dead flesh. A shotgun blast to the thigh. Tatum's skin ripped apart, leaving a tattered, fleshy hole splattered with blood.

Then a close-up of his face. Roberta was wrong; Walter Tatum still had a face but it wasn't the face she had known. It was swollen with black patches visible beneath Tatum's cinnamon-colored skin.

Louis tightened his facial muscles to keep from gagging. He closed the file and put it down.

Wainwright was watching him. He nodded toward the watercooler. Louis went to it and filled a Dixie Cup. He stood with his back to Wainwright, staring at a Rotary Club plaque while he drank it.

He heard Wainwright hoist his large body out of the swivel chair and turned.

“Come on, then, if you're ready.”

“Where?”

“You want to see the crime scene, don't you?”

There was garbage everywhere. Beer bottles, soda cans, bits of Styrofoam coolers, McDonald's wrappers, fishing line, broken flip-flops, Cheet-Os bags, rotting bait fish, and used Pampers. It lay there in the rocks at the water's edge, a blob of color and stench, baking in the hot sun. Up on the causeway, the sun glistened on the silvery water. But there, just three feet below, the place where Walter Tatum had taken his last breath was a cesspool of human detritus.

Louis stood up on the swale looking down at it. Someone had already ripped down the yellow police tape and it lay tangled in with the junk. The rest of the shoreline didn't appear so littered. Wainwright came up to stand beside him.

“How come there's so much junk here?”

Wainwright shrugged. “The way the tide goes. It gets caught here for some reason. Usually, the crews clean it out.”

“Were you able to get anything from this?” Louis asked.

“We hauled two bags out of here after we took the body. This stuff is all new.” Wainwright kicked a bottle down into the rocks. “People are pigs,” he said.

Louis shielded his eyes to look down the causeway road. There was light traffic, a few fishermen casting nets in the surf a couple hundred yards away. “Who found the body?” he asked.

“Some kid fishing. It hadn't been here long, the ME figures less than twelve hours maybe.”

Louis stared at the nearby trees—some sea grapes and tall scraggly pines that didn't offer any real cover. “I don't think this was planned,” Louis said. “If someone had planned to kill Walter Tatum, they wouldn't have picked this place.”

“They would if they were following him,” Wainwright said. “The wires on the distributor cap were loose. We know someone pulled up behind him, but it was too wet to get a tread.”

Wainwright motioned toward the sand and gravel alongside the road. “He was shot here, then he was dragged, still alive, over there. That's where he was stabbed and beaten.”

Louis kicked at the shells and gravel. Why shoot someone in the leg out in the open on the road? Why not shoot him in the chest and get it over with? Why use precious time to stab someone you could have killed instantly with a shotgun? And why the torturous postmortem beating? Maybe Wainwright was right. Maybe the murder was personal.

“What gauge shotgun?” Louis asked.

“Don't know. ME isn't done yet. I'm expecting the report later today or tomorrow.”

Louis glanced at Wainwright. “You really think Roberta Tatum is this smart? Or even this lucky?” he asked.

“I think she's that mean.”

Louis sighed and started back toward Wainwright's cruiser. He heard Wainwright's radio go off and someone say something about a suspect.

Wainwright shoved the radio back in his belt. “We got him.”

“Who?” Louis asked. “The brother?”

“Yup. Walked right up in front of my surveillance team at Roberta's store. Let's go.”

 

 

He didn't act like a wanted man. Hanging out in the shade of a gumbo limbo tree, Levon Baylis drew slowly on his cigarette and watched the blue puffs drift lazily above his head. He glanced to his right, not suspiciously, but out of boredom, tired of waiting on someone.

Reaching under a baggy orange T-shirt, he scratched at his stomach, hefted his balls, then walked a few feet across the sandy parking lot, coming out of the shadows. The sun glinted off his bald head. He was a big man, no less than six-three, with gleaming biceps and thick legs.

For a moment, Louis thought he was heading into the grocery. It was a small wooden structure, painted blue and white, with
ISLAND DELI AND LIQUOR
above the window. But then Levon headed toward the back.

Louis glanced at Wainwright. He calmly picked up the mike and radioed the surveillance car to stand by. He killed the ignition.

“Don't forget, you're only an observer,” Wainwright said.

Louis nodded and the cruiser's doors opened. Wainwright started across the street at a stiff trot, Louis a few feet to his left. Levon heard the doors slam and looked up at them.

A thick stream of smoke rose from his lips as his mind tried to grasp what was happening. His eyes scoured the street for an escape route.

He chose backward, through the store.

Louis ran up the wooden steps, slamming into the door ahead of the others. Someone screamed and a bottle fell somewhere behind him. A flash of orange and another slammed door.

Louis jumped over a stack of Budweiser, skidded around a corner, and stopped cold in a dimly lit storage room. He pulled in a quick breath, then ran forward, hearing a clamor of footsteps behind him. Radio traffic filled the small store and suddenly there was a rush of voices and bodies.

A door banged open, flooding the room with sunlight, and Levon was gone. Louis followed him out, blinking against the sun.

He spotted Levon sprinting down the dusty street, his powerful legs pumping. Louis knew he wasn't going to catch him. Then, suddenly, there was a kid on a bike, and Levon went crashing into him.

The kid skidded into the dirt and Levon scrambled to his feet. There was just enough time. Louis launched himself, sailed over a trash can, and fell on Levon's back. It knocked the air out of him but he hung on. But Levon was not going down. Louis clung to his back, feeling the man tense to buck him off.

One of Wainwright's men caught up and grabbed Levon's arm, but Levon threw him into a fence as if he were a bag of laundry. Louis clung to Levon's back.

“Stop!” Louis grunted. “Stop!”

“Fuck you! Get off me!”

Levon veered and slammed his shoulder—and Louis—into a tree.

“Shit!” Louis yelled, gripping Levon's thick neck.

Levon lunged to his right now, crushing Louis again against another palm tree.

Pain shot through his back. He couldn't breathe. But he hung on as Levon dragged him down the street.

Suddenly they were out in bright sun. Louis could see a flash of silver blue. Water, they were near water. He was slipping and he dug his fingers into Levon's neck, trying to put pressure on his throat, but he couldn't get a grip. Levon staggered out onto a dock, jerked around, and slammed his body into a piling. Louis lost his grip and flew off the dock.

He bounced against a boat and hit the water face-first. Salt water rushed into his nose and he fought his way to the surface. He shook the water off, gasping for breath. It took a second for him to realize he could touch bottom.

Suddenly, he heard the sound of a motor. He spun around and saw Levon crouched in a small motorboat. Levon hit the throttle and the boat churned away.

Louis dragged himself up onto the dock. His face was hot with humiliation, his shoulder was on fire, and there was a strong ache creeping up his back. He heard voices and looked up to see Wainwright and the deputy who had been hurled into the fence running down the dock toward him.

They stopped short and watched as Levon's motorboat became a glint against the shimmering water.

“Notify the sheriff, Candy,” Wainwright said tightly. “Tell him Levon is heading east from Sutter's Marina toward the mainland. Kill the roadblocks on the causeway. And see if you can find the owner of that boat. Go!”

Candy spun away. Wainwright went over to Louis, who was sitting on the dock, head bowed.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I think.” He couldn't move his shoulder. It was probably dislocated. “You have any idea where he's going?” Louis asked.

Wainwright squinted toward the far shore. “Depends on how much gas he's got. There's a million places he could put in.”

Louis wiped his face. “I'm sorry. I couldn't hold him.”

Wainwright pulled his gaze from the shoreline back to Louis. He held out a hand. “You're lucky he didn't kill you,” he said flatly. “You saved me a lot of paperwork.”