Rusty Puppy

  “He reported Jamar’s death to the police, right?”

  “Now that I think about it, I believe he had a lawyer do it.”

  “That’s new,” Leonard said.

  “He could afford a lawyer?” I said.

  “It was Tom Barker. Ambulance chaser. Cruises hospitals and such, does a lot of work where if he wins, he takes a bite out of the settlement. I’m sure he saw some kind of money in it, eventually. Guy like Barker, he lives a lot on eventually. My guess is he thought the department might want to settle the case without accepting fault, and the settlement would give him a nice payday.”

  “Okay,” Leonard said. “Lawyer thinks he might drum up some kind of suit and make some dough, that makes sense. But the thing still bothers me is why would Weed want to go to the police if the police were the ones responsible? Why would he think that would work out? It would put a target on his back with the Camp Rapture department.”

  “You got me there,” Manny said. “But I can talk to the one or two people I’m still friendly with at the department. They aren’t actually in cahoots with the rest of them. I can make a few phone calls. But no promises.”

  “Good enough,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said, “but watch your ass. I don’t think these dudes are playing around.”

  “I assure you,” Manny said, “they are not. But neither am I.”

  24

  On Monday we looked up Tom Barker and drove over to his office in Camp Rapture. It was off an alley and you had to go through a paint-peeling door to reach the hallway that led to his office. The hallway was dark enough to grow mushrooms.

  Barker’s pebbled-glass door was decorated with time-worn black stenciling that read TOM BARKER, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. Underneath that was a list: SEMI-TRUCK INJURY, PHYSICIAN MALPRACTICE SUITS, DUIS, PERSONAL INJURY. I GOT YOU COVERED.

  “He’s got us covered,” Leonard said.

  “Seems like it.”

  “Might be a good idea. We have a lot of personal injury.”

  I opened the door and went in. The outer office was small and tight with a desk taking up much of it. A young girl behind the desk who looked like she still had two years to go before she was a high-school student glanced up at us.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Is Mr. Barker in?”

  “He’s out,” she said.

  She was a little thing with shoulder-length brown hair, a bit of baby fat, and a cute face sprinkled with acne that had been covered over with makeup that appeared to have been designed for another skin tone.

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?” Leonard asked.

  “Uh-uh. I don’t work here, really. I’m his daughter, Connie. He doesn’t have a receptionist right now. Last one quit a year ago. Hasn’t hired anyone else. Sometimes, after school, I help out.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Maybe I could give my name and a phone number—”

  That’s when the door opened and a man with a very similar face to the girl’s, minus the acne and the makeup, came in. He was short and a little portly, but it wasn’t baby fat. This was hard-earned marbling. He had thinning brown hair and wore a brown suit that fit him about as comfortably as a three-piece suit fits a groundhog. He gave us a practiced grin, letting us know he could get that settlement for us, though we might have to go around with neck braces for a couple weeks. There were a few bottom teeth missing on the left side of his mouth. Like the suit, he had seen better days.

  “Gentlemen, what can I do you for?”

  “Can I go now?” the girl said.

  “Sure, honey, go on ahead. You go on.”

  Connie started toward the door, was stopped by Barker. He got out his wallet and gave her a twenty and she went out and shut the door. When he’d opened his wallet I noticed there weren’t many other bills in it and they looked like ones.

  “Kids,” he said. “They go to lunch, they got to have soup to nuts and a cookie to go. Kids.”

  We smiled. We couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  “Come in the office. Come on.”

  He opened another pebbled-glass door, this one minus the stenciling, and in we went. There was a saggy leather couch in there, and there was a blanket on the couch, and a pillow. Barker picked up the blanket and folded it and took the pillow and carried all of it to an open closet and stuffed it inside and closed the door.

  “Me and the wife,” he said. “We’re kind of taking a break. I been sleeping here.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Barker sat behind his desk and we sat in hard wooden chairs in front of his desk. Thirty seconds later, my ass felt like it was broken.

  “Oh.” He stood up suddenly. “I forgot to introduce myself.” He leaned over his desk. Leonard and I stood up and shook his hand in turn. “Tom Barker.”

  “Yes,” Leonard said. “We know.”

  “Of course you do. Of course.”

  We all settled into our seats.

  “I’d offer a beverage, some coffee, but you know, I’m plumb out. Need to make a store run. Been real busy. Plumb out of everything.”

  He looked like the last time he’d been to the store you had to harvest your own coffee beans.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “We work for a private investigator, and we’re looking into the death of Jamar Elton,” Leonard said. “And while we’re at it, we might as well throw in Timpson Weed.”

  “Oh…Oh…I see. Yeah. Well, I don’t know that I can help you with that. Just don’t know I can.”

  “But you know about it,” I said.

  “A little. Very little. Just a tiny bit.”

  “You were the spokesperson for Timpson Weed, as I understand,” I said. “You told the cops what he had seen.”

  “I did. I did. That I did.”

  He looked nervous, like his dick was in a sausage grinder and someone angry had a hand on the crank. The man’s repetition of words and phrases was starting to crawl along my backbone.

  “We just wanted to know what was said, and why Timpson had you speak to them about Jamar, and how that worked out.”

  “There’s really nothing. Nothing. I was just doing a kind of favor.”

  “There were no money possibilities in it for you?” I said.

  “Not really. Not really…Well, maybe. But it didn’t come to anything. I like to make myself available, you know.”

  “Could you maybe tell us a little about what Mr. Weed had you do, and why?” I said. “Jamar’s mother is our client and obviously it’s all tied together. Here, let me show you who we work for.”

  I took out one of the cards Brett had made up for us and put it on his desk, then leaned back in my chair. The card lay on the desk in front of him. He leaned over and looked at it.

  He read the card out loud, like we might not know what was on it. “‘Brett Sawyer Investigations. Hap Collins, Leonard Pine.’ That’s you two?”

  “Still is,” Leonard said. I was hoping my man didn’t get too testy and start pissing off Barker. Leonard is not patient with bullshit. Start laying that on him, Leonard goes negative and mean, and sometimes pretty damn funny pretty damn quick.

  “Jamar’s mother hired us,” I said. “We’re just trying to find out how he died.”

  “I see. I see.”

  Barker wasn’t actually acting like he did see.

  “I sort of hit a wall with that. Hit a wall.”

  “What kind of wall?” Leonard said. “A blue wall?”

  “It’s not really anything I can talk about,” Barker said.

  “Or won’t talk about?” Leonard said.

  “Now, there’s no need to be smart, be smart, you see, no need.”

  “Would you rather us be dumb?” Leonard said. “You’re treating us like we’re dumb. We know you went to the station for Timpson Weed, and you told the cops he saw Jamar beat to death.”

  “I don’t like your tone. I don’t.”

  “We aren’t trying to be tuneful,” I said. “We are trying to find out what happened to a
young man for his mother, and I guess, while we’re at it, we’d like to know what happened to Mr. Weed, and what this has to do with the Camp Rapture police force, and what was said by them when you told them what you told them. And just for icing, why does this all make you so nervous?”

  “I have to leave, leave now,” he said. “You need to go first.”

  “I guess so,” Leonard said. “You leave, we’d feel pretty silly sitting in your office by ourselves.”

  “We could play checkers,” I said.

  “Like you remembered to bring a game board and checkers,” Leonard said.

  “We wouldn’t be drinking a cup of coffee, that’s for sure,” I said.

  “I’m quite ready for you to go now, go on out,” Barker said.

  “Who the hell is going to know what you tell us besides us?” Leonard said.

  “All right. All right. It’s time for you two to go. Go on now. Go.”

  We sat for a moment. Barker stood up, pushed his chair under his desk, put his hands on the back of it, and looked at us.

  Taking our time, we got up and started out. When we got to his inner office door, I turned around and looked at him.

  “What if it was your daughter, Barker? What if something happened to her and you thought someone might know something. Maybe just a piece of something, and they wouldn’t tell you? How would you feel?”

  “That’s a low blow, bringing my daughter into it. A low blow.”

  “Jamar’s mother suffered an even worse low blow,” I said. “Her child isn’t coming back.”

  “Get out now, or I’ll…”

  “Were you going to say ‘call the police’?” Leonard said. “I don’t think you’re going to call the police. I think maybe you’re afraid of them.”

  “Go. Go now.”

  We went through the outer office, down the dark hall, out to the alley, and back to our car. There was a flyer for a gun show under the windshield wiper.

  25

  As we sat in the car at the curb, Leonard said, “Okay, there is definitely a big turd in the soup somewhere.”

  “Agreed, and on that note, how about lunch?”

  “Just as long as we don’t have soup,” Leonard said.

  We drove back to LaBorde and to a café downtown on the square. A diner. It was our first time there. We had been meaning to try it.

  An older woman with silver hair so severely bound back it damn near pulled her cheeks over her ears showed us to a table. I asked her if they had crayons for Leonard, but she just stared at me.

  “He likes to color,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said and, without a hint of humor, said, “We do have crayons.”

  “He’s messing with you,” Leonard said.

  “Oh, I see. Long morning. I should have got that.”

  “Bad joke,” I said.

  She took our drink orders and went away.

  “I can’t draw a direct line to what’s going on with all this Jamar business and the Timpson Weed aka Chicken Fucker business,” Leonard said.

  “Maybe not a direct line, but you can draw a wavy line right through Charm, Jamar, Weed, and Barker. That’s enough for me, the connections. And I bet if we look real close, we’ll see that line runs right through Coldpoint, Sheerfault, and the train-fucked Bobo.”

  “And there’s Manny too,” Leonard said.

  “She’s just to one side of the line, at least as far as I can tell, but yeah, she’s in the vicinity.”

  “She has too many rumors and not enough solid information,” Leonard said. “And I’m wondering about Timpson turning in information to that lawyer, and then the lawyer telling it to the cops, and suddenly the lawyer is frightened out of his skin.”

  “He did look scared,” I said.

  “Yeah. You’d have thought we were the Ebola virus.”

  “‘Hey, how are you? We’re the Ebola virus, and we’ve come to kill you.’”

  “Yep. That’s how he acted.”

  “Barker looks like he scrapes by. He doesn’t seem like a mastermind, and doesn’t seem like someone cops would have on their payroll normally, but what if they paid him to keep his mouth shut?”

  Leonard shook his head. “But he didn’t keep his mouth shut. He told them about Jamar being beat to death, told them what Weed told him to tell them. Since then he’s gotten nervous. Well, he was most likely always nervous, but now he’s like a pig that just saw the butcher pull up.”

  “I think the money may have come after he said what he said to them. They told him, ‘That’s a nice story, but if we hear it again, we’re going to pull your asshole over your ears and drop you down an old well somewhere.’”

  The waitress came back with our drinks and menus. We glanced at the menus, and before she could go away, I ordered a chicken salad and Leonard ordered a hamburger with fries. A hamburger and fries was what I wanted, but I forced myself to have a salad.

  “So what we know is what we know,” I said, “but now we know what we know is more shadowy than we thought.”

  My cell buzzed. I took it out and looked at the number. I didn’t recognize it. “Get me some more tea, will you?” I said to Leonard, having already sucked down the glass I had while we were talking. I’m a serious ice tea drinker.

  I got up and went outside and answered the cell.

  “Hey, this you? White man with the loudmouthed nigger?”

  I recognized that voice. It was Reba, the four-hundred-year-old vampire.

  “You got him,” I said. “But cut the nigger stuff, okay?”

  “You paying good money?”

  “For what?”

  “Information, asshole. You was the one said it.”

  “Depends on the information. But please, I had asshole legally dropped from my name.”

  “That was a mistake.”

  I walked along in front of the restaurant, glanced through the plate-glass window, and saw Leonard watching me. I walked on farther down the sidewalk and stopped in front of a shop that sold Texas souvenirs.

  “That Timpson not only screw the ass out of chickens, he kill that boy himself.”

  “That boy?”

  “Jamar. The dead fucker. You and me talked before, right? I ain’t dialed the wrong number and got the wrong honky.”

  I let that sink in.

  “I’m the right honky. How do you know?”

  “I want to see some money first before I tell you squat.”

  “How much money?”

  “I figure it’s worth ten thousand dollars.”

  “Oh, really. I haven’t got ten thousand dollars. What the hell, girl? Ten thousand dollars. You out of your mind. I look like Rockefeller?”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Okay, a hundred.”

  “A hundred thousand?” I said, just to mess with her.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Nope.”

  “All right, then,” she said. “Hundred dollars.”

  “That sounds more like it, if you have something that’s worth a hundred.”

  “I want to see that hundred dollars. Take a photo and text it to me.”

  “I haven’t got a hundred dollars on me. I use my debit card mostly. I got a few bills, that’s it.”

  “Well, then, you ain’t gonna get no new information, is you?”

  Leonard was right. This wasn’t a little girl. This was indeed a four-hundred-year-old vampire.

  “How about this? I get a hundred dollars out of the bank, text a photo of it to you, then you call me back with the information.”

  “Naw. You send that photo to me, then I’ll call where we can meet, and then you feed me something good at McDonald’s.”

  “They have something good at McDonald’s?”

  “Don’t get snooty on me,” she said. “I like me some McDonald’s. And to me, you look like you’d get down on some supersize French fries in a New York minute.”

  “Like you’d know a New York minute.”

  “
Yeah,” Reba said. “I ain’t got no idea what that means, but it sounds fast.”

  “When does this need to happen, this trip to McDonald’s?”

  “I got business now,” she said, as if I would really think she had business. And as I thought about it, she just might’ve. She could have business terrorizing squirrels, shooting birds the finger, knocking streetlights out with a rock.

  “When, then?”

  “This afternoon, say five thirty. Meet me on Choctaw Street. It’s below the projects.”

  “I know where it is,” I said.

  “But we don’t got no business till you text me a picture of that hundred.”

  “I could just show up with it,” I said. “Either way, you got to trust I’m going to give it to you.”

  “You give it to me, and then I give you the information.”

  “What if your information sucks?”

  “It don’t.”

  “Yeah, but what if it does?”

  “Then you out a hundred, ain’t you, Mr. White Man.”

  “I hate you,” I said.

  “Hate me on up to five thirty, then show up with a hundred dollars in your hand.”

  26

  When I went back inside, Leonard was eating my salad.

  “What the hell, man?”

  “It came out first. I was hungry.”

  “So you’re eating my salad?”

  “Looks that way, don’t it? And you know what I did? You’re going to thank me for this, Hap. I ordered you a hamburger and fries, ’cause I know that’s what you want.”

  “I’m trying to be healthier.”

  “Not today. This salad is damn good, though. Who was the call?”

  “My broker.”

  “Yeah. I hope you fire him. I know your finances.”

  I told him all that Reba had said.

  “You can’t count on her doing nothing but working a deal,” Leonard said.

  “Crossed my mind,” I said.

  “Instead of a hundred dollars, you ought to bring a stake and a mallet, and drive it through her heart.”

  “I’m starting to think you might be right.”

  “Damn tootin’, I’m right.”

  We ate and I paid the bill. Leonard seemed to have forgotten his wallet.