The Jealous Kind (21 page)

“I had a run-in with Vick Atlas at the Balinese Club in Galveston. His eyepatch came loose. Remember the firecrackers those guys were throwing? His eye was burned. That brick might have hit the windshield, but it's not what did the damage to his face.”

“The cops never knew that?”

“They probably didn't look at the medical report. Or maybe they don't care.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“We're off the hook,” I said. “All they've got is that bogus charge on the Krauser break-in.”

He began chewing more rapidly, his eyes burning holes in the air.

“The charge is bogus, right?” I said.

“Who cares?
Krauser and those pinheads who knocked me around are going to hang it on us anyway.”

“My father talked to my boss at the filling station,” I said. “My boss saw the detective examine my shoes. He said there wasn't any paint on them. The detective rubbed paint on them at Krauser's house.”

“It doesn't matter. If they cain't get us one way, they'll get us another. Nothing has changed.” He pulled the envelope from his back pocket and handed it to me. The flap was glued down. “Open it in the house.”

“What's in it?”

“Eight hundred spendolies.”

“How much?”

“For your bail and for your car getting pissed in and for any legal fees your dad had to pay. If you need more, I got it.”

“Where'd this come from?”

“Midnight auto supply. Houston is lighter one pink Caddy convertible, formerly owned by Grady Harrelson.”

“That's what Vick Atlas said. I thought he was crazy. You boosted Grady's car?”

“The Mexican guys from the jail gave me a little help. A police chief in Nuevo León loves his new car.”

“I can't believe you've done this. How much did you get for it?”

“Not a lot. It was a three-way split, and we had to pay off some guys at the border. So we pooled resources and made another business connection. This one was a real score. My cut was twenty-eight hundred.”

“Doing what?” I said, my heart tripping.

“Transporting a little laughing grass and a shitload of yellow jackets and redwings across the Rio Grande.”

I put the envelope back in his hand. “I don't want to hear this, Saber. Leave the money in a church. Throw it out the window in the Fifth Ward. Don't bring it here.”

“That's the way you feel?” he said.

“In spades.”

He took the gum out of his mouth and tossed it into my mother's hydrangea bed. “What
are we supposed to do? Keep squatting down for our daily nose lube?”

“Stay away from those Mexican guys.”

“Manny and Cholo are my friends. They were both in Gatesville. Manny did a one-bit in Huntsville. They don't take shit off anybody.”

“Listen to yourself,” I said.

“Take the money.”

“Not on your life.”

He got into his car and shut the door, then fired up the engine, revving it, filling the porte cochere with oil smoke. I walked around to his window. His shoulder was pointed into the door, the way teenage hoods drove. He looked up into my face, his T-shirt rolled into his armpits, an unlit cigarette hanging off his lip, the carefree Saber of old.

“Grady Harrelson told me Vick Atlas made a threat about chain-dragging the pair of us,” I said. “When I saw him in Galveston, he hung a chain out of his car window and said, ‘Meet your future, asshole.' ”

“And I'm the guy whose life is screwed up? That's a howl.”

He backed into the street and drove away, his stolen loudspeakers blasting out Lloyd Price's “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.”

I
WENT TO POLICE
headquarters downtown and asked to speak with Detective Merton Jenks.

The officer at the reception desk didn't look up. “He's at lunch.”

“It's eleven o'clock.”

“He eats five times a day.”

“What time will he be back?”

“He didn't say.”

“Where does he eat lunch?”

The officer looked up. “Two blocks down the street. It's the place with the gurney and the stomach pump by the door.”

I thought he was kidding until I got to a poolroom with a lunch counter and saw Jenks through the window. There was also a wood booth where customers could cash welfare checks and process bail
bonds. Jenks sat hunched over a meatball sandwich and a bowl of pinto beans he was eating with a spoon. I had to go to the restroom badly. I walked the length of the poolroom through smoke that was as thick and toxic as cotton poison, and used the toilet and washed my hands and dried them on my pants. Then I waited for somebody to push open the door so I wouldn't have to touch the knob. I went out and sat down next to Jenks without being invited. “Have you seen that washroom?”

“You ought to see the kitchen,” he replied.

“Why do you eat here?”

“The philosophic insight.” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “What do you want?”

“You heard about the medical information on Vick Atlas, right?”

“Your old man's lawyer did a good job on that. So what do you want?”

“My dad found a witness who can prove Saber and I are innocent of the break-in at Mr. Krauser's house.”

“Correct. You still haven't told me what you want.”

The last time I had seen him, he had acted in a friendly manner, and I didn't understand his irritability. I told him that.

“I'm a homicide detective, son,” he said. “I have more on my mind than this teenage bullshit.”

“Vick Atlas is threatening to chain-drag me and Saber behind his car. Tell me what we have to do to get clear of all this.”

“What you have to do? You ask me a question like that?”

“Who else can I ask? What's with this Detective Hopkins, the guy who tried to frame us for the break-in at Mr. Krauser's house?”

Two loud, unshaven men in unironed clothes stacked their pool cues and sat down beside us. They picked up menus and started to order.

“These seats are taken,” Jenks said.

“By who?” one man said.

“Me,” Jenks said.

They got up, one of them spinning the seat on the stool, looking back at us.

“Hopkins worked vice in Galveston,” Jenks said.

“Yeah?”

He looked straight ahead, widening his eyes in mock dismay. “I'll have a run at it another way. Hopkins has the same fascist politics as your metal-shop teacher. He also has chewing tobacco for brains. Put that together with his background in Galveston and you have your answer.” He bit into his sandwich.

“I'm lost.”

“Jesus.” He put down his sandwich. “There's a fortune going out of Galveston to the casinos and hotels in Vegas and Reno. The greaseballs are becoming respectable. Clint Harrelson is a big player, but he's not going to keep financing greaseballs till they clean up the mess you started. The issue is the dead Mexican girl. Did you kill her?”

“No, of course not.”

“If you didn't, who did?”

“Grady Harrelson and his friends?”

“I knew you'd work it out.”

“I saw Grady at my church. He went into the confessional. He's not a Catholic.”

Jenks had started in on his sandwich again. He replaced it on the plate. “He told you something?”

“Not directly. He was afraid the priest would inform on him.”

“What'd you tell him?”

“The confession is sealed, whether the person is Catholic or not,” I said.

“Tell me exactly what Grady Harrelson said to you.”

I told Jenks every detail I could remember. He was shaking his head before I finished. “That's not going to do it.”

“I think he was admitting he killed the girl,” I said.

His sleeves were rolled, his coat folded on the counter. He pinched his temples. I could see the tattoo of the red parachute on his arm, a green vein running through it.

“My girlfriend said you and her father were in the OSS together,” I said.

“What's your girlfriend's name?”

“Valerie Epstein.”

I saw the recognition in his eyes. “Her father is Goldie Epstein?”

“I don't know his first name. She's right? You were in the OSS?”

He stared into space, his thumb working up and down on the shaft of the spoon.

“Did I say something wrong?” I asked.

“What's Mr. Epstein's attitude on all this?”

“I know he doesn't like Grady Harrelson's father. He told Mr. Harrelson that he'd kill him if Mr. Harrelson tried to hurt Valerie or him.”

“Those were his words?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jenks picked up his coffee cup but didn't drink from it.

“You think Mr. Epstein was exaggerating?” I said.

The two loud pool shooters had grown louder. “You boys shut up before I come down there,” Jenks said. He turned back to me. He was breathing through his nose, obviously thinking about how much he should say. “Here's the short version: Mr. Harrelson should make sure his life insurance policies are up to date.”

“You never answered my question, sir.”

“What question, for God's sake? I swear, my heart goes out to your parents.”

“How do I get clear of all this?”

“I'll ask
you
a question: Where's your buddy Bledsoe? For some reason, you haven't mentioned a word about him.”

“I'm worried about him.”

“Worry about yourself. That kid is a born brig rat.”

“I think I know how to get out of this, sir. I need you to help me.”

“You're seventeen years old and you've got the magic solution? Does that strike you as a little vain?”

“The dead Mexican girl was Loren Nichols's cousin.”

“So?”

“He knows who did it, but he's scared. I want to talk to him. I'll have to give him some assurances.”

“Why do you think a kid like Nichols is going to do anything for a kid like you?”

“I know what it's like to be him.”

Jenks signaled the waiter. “Wrap up my sandwich and get my check, will you?”

A
FTER WORK, I FOUND
Loren Nichols's number in the city directory. When I called, he picked up on the second ring.

“I need to talk. Can I come to your house?” I said.

“Broussard?”

“Yep.”

“Tell me over the phone.”

“Not a good idea.”

“Mommy and Daddy are standing close by?” he said.

“Don't be disrespectful of my parents. I think Grady Harrelson killed your cousin. You want to pull your head out of your ass or not?”

“Come up to the Heights and say that.”

“Count on it,” I said, and hung up.

But I didn't get to keep my word.

I
T STARTED WITH
my mother. Some days she took off early from work and rode the bus to a clinic where she talked to a counselor. There she sometimes saw the effeminate and odd kid named Jimmy McDougal. Poor Jimmy. He was the butt of everyone's jokes, homely and awkward and gullible if someone showed him a teaspoon of kindness. He was in the corner of the waiting room, his hands clenched between his thighs, his face downcast as though he had wet his pants. My mother sat beside him and placed her hand on his back. “What's wrong, Jimmy? It can't be that bad, can it?”

“No, ma'am,” he said, the soles of his shoes tapping up and down. “I'm tops.”

“You don't have to hide things, Jimmy. You want to tell me what's troubling you all the time?”

He shook his head adamantly. “I'm doing okay. That's a fact, Miz Broussard.”

“Has Mr. Krauser hurt you?”

“Mr. Krauser takes me to ball games and shoots baskets with me at the Y. Leastways that's how it's been.”

“Tell me the truth, Jimmy.”

He crouched over, his fingers tightening, the blood leaving his knuckles. “I don't want to talk about it anymore, Miz Broussard.”

“Come home with me. We're
going to get to the bottom of this. I've already warned Mr. Krauser.”

“Oh, Miz Broussard, I don't want you doing that.”

“I told that vile man he'd better leave you alone or I'd take a quirt to him.”

“I'm already in trouble, Miz Broussard. I cain't handle any more.”

“What are you in trouble about?”

“I say the wrong things sometimes. I rehearse the right thing to say, but it always comes out wrong. It doesn't matter. I end up being a fool in front of others.”

“Is that your baseball cap?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Get it,” she said.

They took a crowded bus in traffic and diesel smoke and hundred-degree heat down West Alabama, and got off at the icehouse where my father drank, and walked to our small ivy-covered brick home on Hawthorne Street. I was just about to head for the Heights and Loren Nichols's house when they came through the front door.

“Aaron, fix us some ice water, please, while I talk to Jimmy,” my mother said. She pulled the long pin out of her pillbox hat and removed the hat and clicked on the ceiling fan in the living room.

“What's going on?” I said.

“I ran into Jimmy at the clinic, and now he and I are going to have a talk.”

I went into the kitchen, but I could hear every word through the open door.

“I know the signs, Jimmy. Where did that man touch you?”

“It was on accident. The first time, I mean.”

“The first time he touched you?”

“I took a shower at his house. We'd been working out. He was waiting for me to finish so he could take his shower. He bumped into me when I was coming out.”

“Out of the shower?” she said. “You were undressed?”

“Was I—”

“Were you naked?”

“Yes, I was naked.
He almost knocked me down. He picked me up. That's when he leaned over me and it touched me. On accident.”