“Oh, yeah. The splattered brains gave him away.”
Lights jumped around outside the window. I took a look. Cop cars.
“My turn to say shit,” I said.
“What?” Leonard said.
“I think our donkey is in a ditch.”
The chief of police said, “I see you so much, maybe we ought to have a chair put in, something with your name on it, like those movie directors have.”
“That would be nice,” I said. “Maybe with a built-in drink holder.”
We had gotten off the subject, but we had sure been on it a lot for the last hour or so. My butt was tired and I had answered the same question so much it was starting to sound new when I heard it. I was starting to think maybe I should make up new answers. The truth wasn’t working.
“Why don’t you kind of run over things again,” the chief said.
“So you can see if I slip up?”
“That’s the idea, yeah.”
“I might ought to call for a lawyer.”
“You asking for that?” the chief said.
“No, I’m just thinking about it. But without a lawyer, I’m going to say it one more time. I didn’t kill him.”
“You had a gun on you.”
“Weak ploy, Chief. Wrong caliber.”
“You can’t know that,” the chief said.
“I’ve seen what a gun like mine can do. It would have made a bigger mess.”
“Maybe you had another gun.”
“Sure. Two-Gun Hap. What did I do with the other one, hide it up the big guy’s ass?”
“We can take a look.”
“Go right ahead. There’s no one going to stop you. Least of all Henry. You can prowl around in there all day. Bring the kids.”
“All right,” the chief said. “I don’t think you did it.”
“That’s nice of you,” I said.
“Least not by yourself,” he said. “I’m thinking there was you and your partner, Leonard, and he got away. Quick out the back door.”
“That’s a shitty theory,” I said. “He was with Sharon Devon, being a bodyguard.”
I had told him all of this, but he liked to pretend we had never discussed it. It’s how we danced. I figured Leonard was in another room with someone else, being interrogated same as me.
“So, what’s your theory?” he asked.
“My theory is I was there to make sure he didn’t bother his soon to be ex-wife.”
“And how were you to do this?”
Now we were getting into new territory. “Idea was to keep an eye on him.”
“And if he went to see his wife with bad intent?”
“I was supposed to dissuade him.”
“And how, pray tell, were you supposed to do that?” the chief asked.
“I was going to reason with him. Really, man. We been all over this so many times you could tell me my story.”
“Reason with him, huh,” he said. “I got to keep coming back to the part about you were in his house and he was dead and you had a gun and an axe handle.”
“Sometimes reason requires visual aids,” I said.
“Just wrap it up a little,” he said, leaning back in his chair, placing his hands behind his head. “Tell me the good part, about how you went in the house and found him like that. Tell me why you went in again.”
I sighed. “I was watching the house. I heard a shot. I went down there and went in the back way. The door was open. Henry was hanging on the sink. I think he knew I was following him. Not at that moment. He didn’t know anything right then. But before that I think he knew. He made me.”
“A clever boy like you?” the chief said.
“Even squirrels fall out of trees. But maybe he was looking up the hill at me in my car. Someone was in the house. They may have come in the back way. The door was open. They snuck up on him.”
“That could be Leonard,” the chief said.
“But it wasn’t,” I said.
“You might not have found the door open,” he said. “You might have broke in to kill him. The lock had been worked. We could tell from the scratches. A lock kit. You could have come in using that.”
“Did you find a lock kit on me?”
“Maybe you stashed it somewhere with the other gun, the one you used to shoot Henry.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I stuck them both down the commode along with my spare Range Rover and flushed them.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t seem so likely,” he said. “I think all those things together might cause a clog. I mean, you know, after the Range Rover.”
“What was I saying?”
“You heard a shot.”
“So, someone slipped in and shot Henry. I heard the shot. I went down there. When I did, whoever killed him saw me. I figure they were in that patch of woods behind the house. They called the cops. It put you on me and off of them, whoever them is.”
“The one with the lock-pick kit and the right-caliber gun?” he said.
“That would be him or her, yes.”
“You want a candy bar?”
“What?” I said.
“Candy bar,” he said. “I got a couple in the drawer.”
“Really?”
He opened his desk drawer and took out two Paydays and put them on the desk. “Go ahead,” he said.
I took one and peeled the wrapper off and put it on the desk. “It’s a little warm, kind of melted,” I said.
“It’s free,” he said.
“That’s true,” I said, and took a bite. When I finished chewing, I said, “You don’t think I did this, do you? I mean, you said you didn’t, but really, do you?”
“No, but you’re the kind of guy who could do it,” he said.
“Shoot him in the back of the head?”
“I think you’d do it any way you could get it done,” he said. “I planned to shoot a guy big as Henry, I’d have shot him in the back of the head. You know, these are pretty good.”
“Yeah,” I said, and ate the rest of mine.
The chief eased out his breath. “No, I don’t think you did it, but it’s my job to ask, and I can’t treat you any different from anyone else.”
“And if you act like you’re really on my side, give me a candy bar and all, I’ll slip up and tell you something that will hang me.”
“It’s the sort of thing that’s happened,” he said.
“But not to me,” I said.
“So it’s not working?”
“Nope.”
“You can go,” he said. “But we might come back around to this again. Same questions. Maybe some new ones to go with it. Could be your answers will change.”
“Just restock on candy bars,” I said.
I got up and went out.
Leonard came to the house about an hour later. When he came in I poured him a cup of coffee and put it on the table along with a bag of vanilla cookies.
“I had a candy bar,” I said. “Did you?”
“No . . . they gave you a candy bar?” he said.
“Yep. It’s my charm.”
“What kind of shit is that?” he said. “They didn’t offer me a candy bar. They didn’t offer me a fucking stick of gum.”
“Did you talk to the chief?”
Leonard shook his head. “I talked to a major asshole who was about five-four and wanted to be six-six and wished twelve inches of that would be dick. Tell you another thing, I saw Sharon there when I came in, and she looked at me like I had crapped a turd on the tile.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Yeah. And the guy grilling me, he said she rolled over on us.”
“They lie like that to get you to give things up,” I said.
“I know that, Hap. You think I don’t know that?”
“I know you know that,” I said. “I’m just saying.”
“What I’m telling you though, I saw her there in the hall, and I got the vibes.”
“Tell me about the vibes,” I said.
“I think we been butt-fuck
ed vibes, that’s what they were.”
“Define butt-fucked.”
“She had you go over there to watch the guy, and then she had someone go over there and pop him, and guess who takes the rap?”
“They’re going to have a hard time proving I shot him with the wrong gun and hit him with an axe handle when I didn’t.”
“They think she hired you and me to pop him,” Leonard said. “That’s how it looks, so to help herself out, to make them not think that, she’s got to paint us like we went rogue on the deal. Just decided it was easier to lay him down than to follow him around. She may have had it planned that way all along.”
“It could be like that,” I said. “Though you were at her house.”
“But that doesn’t do you any good, and she could still make me part of the plan. Say I wasn’t there. I could get the rap as the actual shooter.”
“She sure seems to be tossing us on the track in front of a train quick-like,” I said. “Quick enough you got to wonder.”
“Yep. . . . Where’s Brett?”
“She picked up a shift for a friend. . . . So what do we do now?”
“I suggest,” Leonard said, “we don’t let ourselves get screwed any more than we already have. That’s what I suggest.”
“How do we do that?” I asked.
“I ask questions, as wise men do. I do not provide the answers.”
“So, you think I’ll come up with something?” I said.
“Probably not,” he said. “Why I asked where Brett was.”
At Marvin’s office I sat in the chair in front of the desk and Leonard sat on a stool by the counter with the coffee. He had the bag of vanilla wafers with him. He had not offered me or Marvin any, and I was the one who bought them for him. He was sipping a cup of Marvin’s bad coffee and eating the wafers. He would put one in his mouth and close his eyes and look as satisfied as a lion with a gazelle in its stomach. If he had had a Dr. Pepper, his favorite drink, he would have floated to the ceiling and farted vanilla.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Marvin said, after I explained it to him. “You know what’s worse? She never paid her bill.”
“That is the least of our worries,” I said.
“It’s high on my list,” he said. “Hey, I didn’t ask you guys to kill him. I just wanted you to do right, get me paid so I could dole out a few bucks to you two. That way, I would have enough for a house payment.”
“Funny,” I said. “Leonard, think you might want to get in on this? Considering we might go to prison or get a needle in the arm for something we didn’t do?”
“I wasn’t in the house,” Leonard said. “I think I can turn on you and get a lighter sentence.”
“And me,” Marvin said, “I’m in pretty good shape. I just hired you guys to do a simple observation job. What the lady wanted. And the two of you went crazy. You went in there and shot him with an axe handle, Hap.”
“Nice,” I said.
“Look here,” Marvin said. “Let’s figure this thing. Jim Bob knows the lady, so maybe we start with him.”
“Nobody knows where he is,” I said. “I tried him on the phone before we came here. He’s not answering for whatever reason. For now, he’s out.”
“Then we got to think about what it was we were asked to do. Lady comes in and says she has a recommendation, and it’s from one of our best buddies, Jim Bob. She says she needs someone to protect her. To discourage someone. We take the job. You guys go over there and talk to her and hear her story and meet her lawyer. How am I doing so far?”
“Good,” I said.
“She tells you her husband is big, and it turns out he is. She tells you he is scary and he beat up a boyfriend, a date, whatever. But the guy that got whipped won’t press charges. Course, really, he doesn’t need to. The cops can go after Henry anyway, if they want. But they think: All right, guy got a beating, wouldn’t stand up for himself, so why should we bother? Kind of a Texas thing going there.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Shit, Leonard. Would you at least not smack?”
“Sorry,” Leonard said.
“But whatever, they know he’s going to be a shitty witness. Maybe he’ll say he fell down a few times and got banged up because he wants to keep his Man Ticket. Won’t admit he got a licking. By the way, this guy that took a beating. Who is he?”
I looked at Leonard.
Leonard said, “I don’t know.”
“Nor do I,” I said.
“You know what?” Marvin said. “I think this guy, whoever he is, would be a nice place to start. I think anyone with detective skills would have already thought of that.”
“We’ve been a little preoccupied,” I said.
“And you have limited detective skills,” Marvin said.
“Well, yeah, there’s that,” I said.
“Let me show you some detective work,” Marvin said.
He called his friend on the force. The one that knew the guy’s name. He wrote down the name and gave it to us.
Robert Unslerod.
Unslerod lived out in the country in a trailer. That was surprising. Not the kind of man Sharon Devon would date. Least I didn’t think so. She struck me as someone who liked money, a man who wore a tie and took her to good dinners and when he dropped trousers he’d be wearing silk shorts. She was someone that at least wanted a man with a nice car to take her out. The car parked in front of the trailer looked like something the farm pigs drove when they went out for a spin. From the looks of things Unslerod seemed to belong in mine and Leonard’s category. He seemed like the sort of guy Sharon Devon would wipe her ass on at best.
We knocked on the trailer door, but no one answered. Maybe Unslerod was actually taking a spin in his Porsche and this is just where he came to store his garbage. When he didn’t answer, I got a pad and pen out of my pocket and pressed it against the door to write a note.
The door swung open a little. A smell came out of there that was, to put it mildly, unpleasant.
“Not good, sir,” Leonard said.
“Nope.”
We went back to the car and stood by it.
“Call the cops?” I said.
“Might just be a dead raccoon under the trailer,” Leonard said.
“That stink is from inside the trailer,” I said.
“Might be a dead kitty cat inside,” Leonard said. “Maybe he went off for the week and forgot to leave Fluffy his kitty food and water dispenser.”
“And maybe that’s not it at all,” I said.
“Yeah, well, probably not,” Leonard said, opened the car door and got my revolver out of the glove box and held it by his side. “You get the axe handle.”
I got the axe handle. We went back to the trailer and I nudged the door with the toe of my old Tony Lama’s. It slid back. I stuck my head around the corner. It was dark in there. The stink was terrible, worse when we got completely inside.
There was a pile in the hallway between the living room and the bedroom, near the open bathroom door. It didn’t look like a lump in the rug. It was too big to be a cat.
“Shit,” I said.
We went over and looked. It was a man, facedown. The floor under him was dark, like a hole had opened up there. He was only wearing dark boxer shorts; my guess was they were not silk. We couldn’t tell too much about him there in the dark, but what we could tell was that he wasn’t just having a little nap.
Leonard went past me, and, holding the revolver in front of him, he looked in the bathroom.
“No one,” he said. He went along to the bedroom. The door was cracked. He looked in there. “And the hits just keep on coming.”
I went over and looked. There was a nude woman on the bed. There was enough light through the curtains I could tell she wasn’t napping either. It was hard to tell what she might have looked like. She was swollen up and her head was bloated. All I could tell was it was a female.
I used my elbow to turn on the light. She didn’t look any more identifiable. She loo
ked worse. She was lying on her back with a hole in her forehead. It reminded me of the hole in the back of Henry’s head. The sheet under her head was dark and caked with blood. The sheet pulled over her went up to her waist. I was tempted to pull it over her head, but I resisted.
Back in the hall I used the axe handle to turn on the light so we could get a look at the man. He was facedown and was stuck to the floor by dried blood.
“Did you touch anything?” Leonard asked.
“The door with the toe of my boot and I used my elbow on the light. Wait a minute, I put the note paper against the door . . . I didn’t touch anything but the paper though.”
“Okay, let’s keep it that way.”
We went outside and breathed in clean air.
“They been dead awhile,” Leonard said.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“And me without my deerstalker.”
We got in the car. Leonard put my revolver back in the glove box. I put the axe handle on the backseat.
I said, “I hope no one saw us drive in.”
“Probably not,” Leonard said. “No houses much. We didn’t pass any cars.”
It was a good guess. There was only a little dirt road leading to the trailer, and the property was a pasture with high grass and some trees at the back. Still, someone could have watched us turn in. Nothing for it but to hope no one had seen us arrive.
I pulled onto the road and eased along. Driving fast would just draw attention to us.
“This whole business is starting to stink worse than that trailer,” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m beginning to feel like you and me have been puppets all along, and that Sharon Devon is our puppeteer.”
“Time we cut the strings,” Leonard said.
We went to my place and Brett was home. She was cute in some old overalls worn over a paint-splattered shirt; it had got that way when we repaired a door and painted it. She had the cuffs of the overalls rolled up and she was barefoot. Her toenails were painted bright red. It went with her hair, which was tied back with a yellow tie. I made some coffee and we told Brett everything we knew. I always told Brett everything I knew. The only people I would tell that sort of thing were her and Leonard, maybe Marvin. Under certain circumstances, Jim Bob. In fact, when I got through telling Brett all we knew, she said, “Seems like you got to start with who put you in her camp.