As we were getting in the car, my cell rang again.
It was Barker.
“Maybe we ought to talk,” he said.
“All right.”
“You got to understand I’m putting my neck on the chopping block, right on it.”
“Not if they don’t see you put it there,” I said.
“That’s the problem, they just might, they just might.”
“When?” I said.
“How about you come by the office, say five thirty?”
“Can’t. I have another meeting with someone about this case.”
“Who?”
“Client confidentiality.”
“You know there’s nothing legal about a private investigator and their client having confidentiality.”
“Nothing legal, but I gave my word.”
“You might give all you know up if the wrong people get hold of you,” he said.
“I don’t doubt that,” I said. “I think I would cave right away if they brought out a pair of pliers and a ball-peen hammer. But right now I’m sitting pretty in my car with my best friend and I have a bellyful of hamburger and nobody is threatening me.”
“Six thirty, then?”
I considered. I looked at Leonard as I muted the phone.
“Barker. He wants to meet at six thirty.”
“We can make it work,” Leonard said.
“Seven,” I said.
Leonard shrugged.
I pushed the mute button off, said, “Seven p.m. Your office.”
“Oh, hell no. How about we meet at the old Camp Rapture High School, out by the tennis courts. No one goes there anymore, not since they built the new school.”
“Seven p.m. Old Camp Rapture High School tennis courts.”
I hung up and Leonard said, “Now, if someone would call and say you’ve won a million dollars, this could be a real good day.”
“When it rains it pours.”
“Someone did call with some money like that, you’d split it with your dear friend and brother, wouldn’t you?”
“Not likely,” I said. “Remember the cookies?”
27
The four-hundred-year-old vampire had quite an appetite.
“Be careful there,” Leonard said, “you nearly ate the paper napkin.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Reba said.
“You’ve just about had the left side of the menu,” I said, “so is there a point where you actually give me some information about how it was Timpson Weed killed Jamar? Or did you just con us into a free meal?”
“I’m going to need a couple fried apple pies.”
“Are you?”
“Don’t know I got a thing to say I don’t get a couple pies.”
“Would you like a cup of coffee with that?” Leonard said. “Maybe a silver sugar bowl and a matching spoon, and when you finish I can wipe your mouth for you?”
“Naw, but I’ll take a glass of milk.”
“Eat any more, you’re going to blow up,” Leonard said.
“I can eat a lot,” she said.
“We’ve seen that,” Leonard said.
“I ain’t eat nothing all day, so thought might as well get my fill, but I ain’t there yet. Still got an appetite.”
I went to get the fried pies and the milk.
When I came back, Reba was licking her fingers.
“I hope you washed good or that ain’t your wiping hand,” Leonard said.
“You a funny nigger,” Reba said, but she didn’t actually look amused.
I gave her the pies and the milk.
“That milk ain’t as cold as I like,” she said.
“Well, shit, Hap,” Leonard said. “You go back there and tell them to ice that milk. The princess likes it real cold.”
“Enough of this,” I said. “I texted the photo of the hundred. We’ve bought you a week’s worth of groceries, and so far we only know you like milk with your fried pies.”
She sipped the milk and it gave her a frothy mustache.
I pulled the hundred-dollar bill from my wallet and put it on the table. I carefully put my wallet back in my pocket and pressed the bill out with both hands.
“It’s a crisp, fresh one hundred right out of the bank. Probably flown in from the mint this morning.”
“How pretty it is don’t impress me none,” she said. “It’s how it spends.”
“For Christ sakes,” Leonard said. “It spends like a hundred-dollar bill. That’s how it spends.”
“Can’t buy as much with a hundred as you used to,” Reba said.
“Used to,” Leonard said. “You hardly been alive long enough to know when the price of gas last went up.”
“Our deal was a hundred,” I said.
“I’m thinking now you could maybe add a twenty to that to sweeten it on up to serious sugar,” she said.
“They’re fixing to find you in a ditch tomorrow with a goddamn McDonald’s sack over your head,” Leonard said. “Get on and tell us what you brought us here for.”
She didn’t say anything.
I sighed. I got my wallet out and removed a twenty, which was all I had left, and put it on top of the hundred.
“That’s it,” I said. “You either got information or you don’t. Tell it, or we walk, and with the cash.”
She reached over for the money.
Leonard slapped his hand down on the bills.
“That ole dog ain’t going to hunt,” he said. “You got to at least give us a taste of this big information you got. We don’t get a taste, you don’t get a taste.”
Reba leaned back in her chair. She took her carton of milk and sipped it like it was fine bourbon.
“Timpson was the cause Jamar got killed, and he was upset about it.”
“And you know this how?” I asked.
“I heard him and this fat white fella talking about it, out in the parking lot. I was in a tree.”
“There’s one fucking tree in the projects, except for those down on the creek, and you were in it?” Leonard said. “Lying on a limb like a constrictor snake at just the right time to overhear a conversation between Timpson and a fat guy? That’s some rich shit, girl.”
“I climb up there all the time. There’s a hollow up there I keep stuff in. Here come this fat white fellow and he pulls up right under where I am. Sits in his car. Could see him through the window glass. Calls on his phone, and here comes Weed out of the projects, coming down to the parking lot. Fat man gets out of the car and he and Weed lean on the car door and they talk.”
“And you heard all this from a tree?” Leonard said.
“They right under me, so, yeah, I did.”
“Could’ve told us this before,” I said.
“Wasn’t nothing in it for me until you made that offer, and I wasn’t gonna talk in front of them niggers out there, or they’d come down on me when I got the money.”
“All right, then,” I said. “What did they say?”
“When they start talking, I got quiet and still, ’cause I figured this wasn’t something I was supposed to know, way they was meeting and all. My mama may have been a drug addict, but she didn’t raise no fool for a daughter.”
“Go on,” I said.
“So Weed, he tells this fat man he wants him to do something for him, ’cause on the back end there might be some money. He says he wants him to tell the cops he gonna go to another bunch of law and tell them that they made him fight Jamar, and that he near beat him to death, and then they finished him off. Told him to say the body was in the projects. But it wasn’t.”
“You’re sure you heard right?” I said.
“I ain’t old enough to be deaf yet,” she said. “Said if the law didn’t pay him some real money, he was gonna say they did it, and he was gonna say they did it up in the projects, ’cause there was gonna be a whole lot of politicians could say it was police brutality, up there where all the black folks were.”
“He was going to blackmail the police force?” I
said.
“If that means he was gonna tell what really happened and say he didn’t have no choice but to do what he did, yeah, then he was gonna do that, and he was gonna be quiet, they give him some money.”
“Not exactly feeling his conscience,” Leonard said.
“Maybe a bit of column A, a bit of column B,” I said. “So, you’re certain Jamar was killed somewhere else?”
“I never seen nothing, and them niggers run the lot from daylight to dark didn’t see nothing either.”
“How would you know if anyone else in the projects saw something or didn’t?” I said.
“Please. Them fuckers can’t keep they mouths shut if you glued they lips together with superglue.”
“Really doesn’t matter where he was killed,” Leonard said. “He was killed, and that’s what matters.”
I nodded at Leonard, then turned my attention to Reba. “Any idea how Weed knew the fat man?”
“I ain’t never seen him before,” she said. “I don’t even know what he do.”
I looked at Leonard.
We had a real good idea what it was he do, and who he was.
28
We dropped Reba off on Choctaw Street with a to-go order in a bag. Four hamburgers and four fries and four apple pies. She didn’t say Thank you, Kiss my ass, or Hope you get hit by a car.
She got out, slammed the back door, and started walking toward the projects.
“I miss that little bitch already,” Leonard said.
We sat parked at the top of Choctaw and waited until we thought Reba had gone into the projects, added time for her to get to her place, then I coasted us down and past the projects. There was one great oak at the edge of the lot. It was big and the limbs were wide. A little girl like Reba, she could have been up there, and if no one looked up, they might not have seen her. Past the oak and the projects were more trees, and then there was a creek. I drove over a short concrete bridge, found a place to turn around, and drove past the projects again, on up Choctaw Street.
We still had time before seven p.m., so we went to a coffee shop Cason Statler had taken us to once, sat there with strong cups of coffee, and watched the clock.
“What do you think about Reba’s information?” I said.
“I got to think she got a nice crisp hundred-dollar bill, and about a century’s worth of greasy food she’ll be shitting out about the time we take our old-age pension.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“I guess I do, but I keep thinking, okay, she just happens to be in a tree in the parking lot. The only tree, and Barker, ’cause that’s who it sounds like it is, pulls up and Weed comes out and she hears their conversation?”
“I believe her,” I said. “Not that I don’t think the sweet Reba might tell a little lie, she took a notion. But I think she’s telling the truth. That description fits Barker to a T. It’s such an odd story it strikes me as true. Even she couldn’t pull a story like that out of thin air.”
“I have more faith in her lying, conniving self than you do,” Leonard said.
We waited until six forty and drove over to the old high school. I don’t know exactly when it was abandoned and the new one was built, but the old one was a lot better constructed than the new one that was off the edge of the main highway. The new one looked like a prison.
The old one had been built by the WPA during the thirties. There were some additions in the fifties. There was a football stadium within walking distance. Out back were tennis courts. Somehow it was decided a new location was better for the students, and the new school was built. One day, I presumed, they would knock this one down, along with the stone memories of all those men Roosevelt put to work.
The side road at the back of the school was dark. The few streetlights had been rocked out or shot out some time back. I parked by the old gym. I got a flashlight out of the glove box. Leonard put his fedora on the seat between us, and we got out and started walking along a narrow street behind the school, near the tennis courts. I turned on the light and flashed it along the gym. It was covered in graffiti, most of it instructional of a sort and anatomically impossible.
“What the hell is Barker?” Leonard said. “A bat?”
I turned off the flashlight.
“I’m not liking this,” I said.
That’s when we saw headlights and a car turning off the main street and into the little avenue that split the gym and the tennis courts. The stadium loomed in the distance, reminiscent of a small Roman Colosseum.
After a moment the car stopped and the driver’s door opened and we could see someone get out. It was Barker. We could tell by his shape.
I flicked on the flashlight and we walked over there.
When we were past the tennis court, almost to the little, dark avenue, lights came on at one end of it, and then another car came the way Barker had come and pulled up near Barker’s car. The car on the other end pulled up close and kept the lights on. The lights were harshly bright and we were pinned between them.
I looked at Barker. He was standing by his car, his hands having no place to rest comfortably; they fluttered against the sides of his legs.
“You fucked us over, didn’t you?” I said.
“I had to,” he said. “My daughter.”
“We live through this, she may still be fatherless,” Leonard said.
Doors slammed at both ends of the street, and we could see shapes coming toward us. In front of the bright headlights they looked like dark cutouts.
“Hey, if isn’t my colored friend,” a voice said.
“Sheerfault,” Leonard said. “Of course. I only dreamed you were dead.”
A shape moved closer to us, and now we could make out Sheerfault. Behind him trailed his pet gargoyle, Bobo.
“Bobo,” I said, “how’s the ole cucumber hanging?”
“Shut up,” Bobo said.
Now from the other end another man came toward us. He was well tailored in a nice blue suit and had perfectly combed blond hair. He had a face that looked as if it belonged on the front of a men’s fashion magazine, not somewhere in the shadows behind an abandoned school. When he was close I could smell his cologne.
I said, “I’m going to guess you’re Coldpoint.”
“That’s a good guess,” he said. I noted now another part of his wardrobe that I had overlooked at first. He had a handgun held down close to his leg.
“It’s nice you invited us out here,” I said to Barker, “but I think maybe we’ll head out now. ”
“No,” said Coldpoint. “You won’t be leaving until I say you’re leaving.”
He and Bobo and Sheerfault were all close to us now, and no one looked particularly friendly. Coldpoint continued to let the gun hang by his side.
“I guess we could stay awhile,” I said.
Coldpoint smiled. “Of course you can. What we got here is just a friendly chat.”
“Gun makes it less friendly,” Leonard said.
“This is merely a room monitor of sorts,” Coldpoint said. “We’re not in a room, but you get the idea. Barker here told us you were meddling in police business.”
“Monkey business,” Leonard said.
“Hell,” Sheerfault said. “You should know, them monkeys being your kin and all.”
“No need for racial invective,” Coldpoint said.
“Sorry,” Sheerfault said. “Just don’t like niggers, and this one in particular.”
“’Cause you know you didn’t really whip my ass, and can’t,” Leonard said.
“I got the trophy,” Sheerfault said, and gave us his shit-eating grin. “I got the money.”
“I’m going to ask everyone to shut up, and I want you boys to get in the car,” Coldpoint said.
“I take it you don’t mean our car,” I said.
“You take it right.”
He pointed to the car he, Sheerfault, and Bobo had climbed out of.
We didn’t move.
He lifted his gun but didn’t poin
t it at us, merely held it in such a way as to be a persistent reminder. “Afraid I got to insist.”
Barker, still standing where he had been, lifted his head, said, “It isn’t personal. Really. It isn’t personal.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Leonard said.
“Go away,” Coldpoint said to Barker.
Barker got in his car and started it up, backed down the little avenue and onto the street, turned it into place, and drove away.
At gunpoint, me and Leonard got in the car. Sheerfault and Bobo rode in the backseat with us. Like magicians, they had produced handguns. They poked them against our ribs. I had Bobo on my side, and I figured I got the worst of that deal. He had breath that stank like a dead skunk’s ass.
“I bet you get a lot of grooming products for Christmas,” I said.
“What?” he said.
Coldpoint climbed in behind the wheel, turned on the engine and the lights.
“Can we go through a drive-through?” Bobo said. “I’m hungry.”
“Later, Bobo,” Coldpoint said.
“I could use a sandwich too,” Leonard said.
No response. Coldpoint eased the car between the stadium and the gym, and gunned it along the dark and silent street.
“I guess yelling for the police isn’t going to help much, is it?” I said.
They didn’t bother to respond to that.
Coldpoint drove on.
“You two, you think you’re helping out people that are downtrodden, don’t you.”
“Our client paid us.”
“I researched you two, and what I get out of it is, you are do-gooders.”
“That how you see it?” Leonard said.
Coldpoint nodded. “You got to understand, this is a dog-eat-dog world. My mother, she was a party animal, never saw her. Dad liked to drink with friends. Drop us off outside a bar, and he’d go inside and drink. Us being me and my sister. We got food out of the dumpster out back of the bar. A piece of this, a piece of that. Sometimes something nasty was on it, but you know what, we ate it.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Leonard said.
“I figured right then and there you had to get yours, and you had to get it the way you wanted to get it. My sister, she didn’t think that way. She became a public defender.”