Devil Red

  “It didn’t sound any kind of way,” Marvin said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  She stood up from behind the desk and stuck her hand across at Marvin and he shook it.

  She didn’t sit back down, and she didn’t shake our hands. “I think I’ve explained everything, Mr. Hanson. I’ll let you fill your men in.”

  Hanson nodded, and she started for the door. Statler stood and spoke to her. “Do you mind if I meet you in the car, dear? I want a word with the gentlemen. You can handle the stairs fine, can’t you? And watch how slick it is.”

  “I’m not an invalid,” she said. “I’m just sad.”

  “Of course,” Cason said, turning on a smile that if it had been an inch wider and a smidgen brighter, might have knocked out the local electric grid.

  After she went out, Cason waited a moment, picked up the check she had written from the desk, and returned to his seat and rested the check on one knee with his hand on top of it. We all watched the check like buzzards discovering what was thought to be dead might still have some life in it, and just might get away.

  Cason said, “I know what she told you seems like an impossible job, because of the time factor. It’s a cold case. But I want to say, she’s serious. I brought her over here because she’s a friend of my mom’s and because I know a little about her subject. I’m a newspaper reporter. I’ve looked into this case, there’s something to it.”

  “So,” Leonard said, “what you’re saying is don’t just cash her check and hang out here drinking coffee?”

  “Something like that,” Cason said.

  Marvin said, “I not only resent that, I resent it enough to come out from behind this desk and slap the shit out of you. Even if one of these boys has to hold me up to do it.”

  “It might take more doing than you think,” Cason said.

  “My goodness,” Leonard said, “you must have had an extra bowl of oatmeal this morning.”

  “You want to be first?” Cason said.

  “Hey, Cason,” I said. “You look like a guy might be tough, but you mess with Leonard, when they’re cutting you open and putting your ruptured liver in a jar, your ghost will still be trying to figure out what truck hit you and when.”

  Cason looked at Leonard for a long moment. Leonard said, “What he said.”

  Cason smiled, studied Leonard. “You two are buddies. That is so sweet.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “we’re tough, and when times are rough we can sew our own clothes and grow a garden.”

  “Really?” Cason said.

  “No,” I said. “But we’re tough.”

  Cason smiled. “All right,” he said. “We’re all tough guys. It’s just that Mrs. Christopher is a friend of the family. Was my third-grade teacher. Her family has money, though she doesn’t look like it or act like it. Her dead husband was in oil, and he was in a lot of it. She came to me for help because I used to work for a paper in Houston doing investigative reporting. Now I’m over in Camp Rapture, writing a bullshit column. I decided she needed help that could be on it twenty-four seven, and that wasn’t me. Camp Rapture doesn’t have a private investigator, but she saw your ad. I was a little reluctant, but I didn’t know what else to do for her.”

  “Good to know we’re deeply wanted and widely respected,” Leonard said.

  “I put those ads in every paper in a fifty-mile radius,” Marvin said. “Your paper got me the only response.”

  “Try the online ads,” Cason said. “More people read those these days. I’m lucky I got a job, way newspapers are changing. But, the thing is, I knew a lot of investigators when I worked for the paper in Houston, and I didn’t think much of them. They mostly took up time and took up money. So I wanted to make sure you really would look into things.”

  “You can bet we’ll look into them,” I said. “Marvin is so honest it hurts our feelings, and we’re so honest we hurt our own feelings.”

  Cason grinned. “Mr. Hanson has my number. You need anything, give me a call. I have a friend who is a bear for research. Maybe we can help you.”

  “We’ll keep it in mind,” Marvin said.

  Cason put the check on the desk, smoothed it out where he had wrinkled it by pressing his palm across it twice, and went out. As he closed the door Leonard said, “Please do be careful of the stairs.”

  When he was gone, I said, “Damn, he’s out of our sight, what, three seconds, and I miss him already.”

  “Too bad he isn’t gay,” Leonard said. “For him, I could ditch John in a minute. He wears Old Spice. I like Old Spice.”

  “Frankly,” Marvin said, “he’s just the kind of guy I’d like to punch in the mouth.”

  “And,” Leonard said, “he’s just the kind of guy I’d like to have put something in my mouth.”

  “One of you is mean,” I said, “the other one is nasty.”

  8

  Marvin locked up and we walked downstairs to the lot. The girl in the shorts was no longer visible in front of the bike shop, but I checked just in case.

  “Now, what exactly is it we’re saying we’re gonna do?” I asked Marvin as we walked. “We’re all up in Cason’s face, and we’re all behind you, and we don’t even know what we’re talkin’ about.”

  “That isn’t new for you, is it?” Marvin said.

  “Ha. Ha,” I said.

  “For all we know,” Leonard said, “you’ve signed us up to jack off donkeys at an animal sperm bank.”

  “And the way I hear it,” I said, “you get through with the donkeys and go home, they don’t even call or write.”

  “I’ll explain at lunch,” Marvin said. “You get the money back?”

  “We did,” Leonard said, “and a teeny bit more. We figured it wasn’t dishonest for him to tip. Mrs. Johnson can use as much of it as she can get.”

  “What I’m wondering,” I said, “is what if Thomas and his friend Chunk want revenge on us or the client?”

  “Would they?” Marvin asked.

  “Well, one of them is missing a kneecap,” Leonard said, “and the other one will have to have his girlfriend pick his nose, wipe his ass, and pull his crank because his hand is kind of swollen up.”

  “He had it comin’,” Marvin said. “The sonofabitch.”

  “Some people might think the same of us,” I said.

  Marvin gave me a confused look.

  “He’s been reading some self-help books or somethin’,” Leonard said.

  I took the hundred I had taken from Thomas’s wallet and gave it to Marvin. “Here’s the booty.”

  “We’ll take it to her,” Marvin said, and put it in his wallet.

  9

  The day had started to grow cooler, but not so cool it was uncomfortable. The sky was gray and there were strips of gloomy clouds across it and they had fuzzed out the sun so that it looked like a lightbulb burning behind gauze. In the distance, on the horizon, in line with the street, the sky was darker and I saw a strip of lightning jump and flash away. The rain that had come early in the morning and retreated now had a companion, and it was blowing our way.

  We drove in Marvin’s car over to Mrs. Johnson’s house, which was on the edge of the area where we had been last night. We parked in her gravel driveway and got out. It was a very small house, but brightly painted in a kind of marigold color, and there were flower beds on either side of the little gravel walk. All the flowers were dead or sleeping.

  The rest of the neighborhood looked like a war zone.

  The house next door was up high on stone blocks, and lying just under it was a dead cat. It had been there long enough to have gone flat and was mostly an outline made of bits of white hair, scattered bones, and a skull. There was just enough flesh on the body to hold it in place. From where the cat was lying, and the looks of the place—a car out front with grown-up grass and a washing machine lying on its side—I had a feeling there wasn’t anyone over there looking for their kitty. The cat, like the washing machine, was just part of the landscape to Mrs. Johnson’s
next-door neighbors. They might have been all-right people doing the best they could, but I got to tell you, you got a dead cat lying in your yard you ought to bury it. That’s my motto. No dead animals in the yard for more than fifteen minutes.

  “I don’t think Fluffy is taking a nap,” Leonard said.

  “Nope,” I said.

  At her door, Marvin knocked, and after what seemed like time enough for a new species to have developed from a single cell, the door was answered by Mrs. Johnson. She looked like all the sap had been sucked out of her, she was so small and so wrinkled, but there was a hardness in her eyes that showed her life had been full of experience, and some of it might even have been good. She had a swollen right cheek and a cast on her hand.

  “Marvin,” she said. “And your boys?”

  We were all about the same age, so I found that comment amusing. But I really liked her voice. It was like high cane syrup with a touch of sulfur and a hint of gravel.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Marvin said, suddenly about twelve years old. “Me and the boys, we got somethin’ for you.”

  Marvin took out his wallet and removed the hundred-dollar bill and gave it to Mrs. Johnson. She took it and looked at it, said, “I ain’t got no change, son. But if you want to go change it, or wait until I can get someone to take it to town—”

  “No, ma’am. The fella who stole it, he decided he’d pay a little interest.”

  “He did, did he?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re a terrible liar, Marvin,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You think it’s right I take more than he stole?”

  “I think you have a cast and that cost money and a hundred dollars doesn’t cover it.”

  “Would you like to come in, sit a spell?”

  Marvin said, “No, ma’am, we really can’t. We’ve got some work to do. I don’t think you’re gonna be bothered again. But, you see him around, or he gives you any reason to feel nervous, call us, and we’ll have a talk with him.”

  “I always see him around,” she said. “He lives in the area.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I know. But … Well, you have any cause to worry, you call me.”

  “All right, dear,” she said. “And thank all of you.”

  Leonard and I smiled and nodded, and turned away, and just before the door closed, Mrs. Johnson said to me and Leonard, “Did you boys hurt him?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.

  “So he didn’t like it much?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “Did you break anything?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I believe we did.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well,” Leonard said, “I broke his hand, and Hap here broke the other guy’s knee and maybe a rib.”

  “I screamed when he broke my hand,” she said. “Did he scream?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said. “And he whimpered too.”

  She grinned. “But you boys didn’t get hurt?”

  “No, ma’am,” Leonard said. “We came out fine, though I may have strained my elbow a bit on a downswing.”

  “That Thomas sonofabitch had it comin’, breakin’ an old lady’s hand like that,” she said, “and me knowing him all my life. And that Chunk just watchin’.”

  We went to eat, and then Marvin took us to a coffee shop and showed us the file. It wasn’t what I expected. After coffee, Marvin took us to our car, and we didn’t say any more about it. Leonard drove me home and went home himself.

  10

  At home, I thought about what Marvin had shown us in the folder, what he had explained to us. I put my folder on the coffee table in the living room and left it there and walked around the house for a while, then tried to read and tried to watch television, and finally just sat on the couch and watched it get dark and start to rain in a way that made me feel sleepy and gloomy at the same time.

  I didn’t open the folder again, but that didn’t make what was in it leave my head. I thought about it all the time. I was also thinking about that poor dead cat, lying out beside a house where people lived or had lived, and it bothered me they had left it that way.

  I went upstairs and stripped down to my shorts and sat by the window. The rain plunked and splattered on the panes so hard I thought they might break. Lightning lit up now and again, and when it did I could see the house next door, appearing to stand behind a stream of bright blue beads, and then the lightning was gone, and it was as if the world had fallen down inside a pit.

  I got dressed and went out to the carport and got a shovel from the shed, a rain slicker, an umbrella, and drove over to where the house with the dead cat was.

  I got out of the car with my umbrella and shovel, and when I got to where the dead cat lay, I put the umbrella aside. A hard wind was blowing, and when I put it down, the wind rolled it across the yard.

  It was maybe midnight and nothing was stirring. I started digging in the yard. I dug a good hole that was long and deep, and then I used the shovel to pry the cat up from the ground. I put it in the hole and carefully covered it and told the cat I was sorry. I got my umbrella and shovel and went back to the car. By the time I put the shovel away I was so wet, rain slicker or not, I was starting to sprout gills.

  I still had the stuff Marvin had told us about to deal with. But I didn’t have to think about that poor cat anymore. It was down in the ground, wrapped in the earth, not just some hairy outline lying on the grass, pulverized by sunlight and moonlight and savage rain.

  When I got home, I undressed and toweled off and lay on the bed naked. I finally slipped under the covers, listening to the rain, the thunder. It sounded good now, not as forlorn as before, but I couldn’t sleep.

  I thought a little more about what Marvin had shown us, and then I thought about Brett, but that made me miss her. So I thought about something that soothed me as a kid. I was a man in a rocket ship, traveling through space, on my way to a brave new world. I was in a container with a mild unseen, odorless gas that was putting me into suspended animation. I would awake just before arrival and guide the ship in. It would be a world full of beautiful plants and weird animals, but there I would be strong. Like John Carter of Mars my Earth muscles would give me incredible strength and abilities on a world where there was lesser gravity. I would end up with a sword and I would kill monsters and get the girl in the end, and she would look like Brett.

  Only problem was, that little trick didn’t work this time. I still couldn’t sleep.

  I got up and put on a CD of selected doo-wop, but that wasn’t what I needed and I cut it off halfway through. I settled on Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, played them through, and when they were done, I turned off the CD player, settled in under the covers, hoping this time I could sleep.

  And then I heard a noise. It was a slight noise, a snicking sound coming from downstairs, and then someone gently closing the front door. I got my gun out of the nightstand drawer, and still naked as birth, eased open the bedroom door. A light went on downstairs. I heard the refrigerator door open.

  I eased down, slowly. When I got to the bottom stair, I turned and looked in the kitchen. Leonard, wet and dripping, was sitting at the table. He was eating a sandwich and had a glass of milk beside him. A bag of vanilla cookies was open and on the edge of the table. He looked at me, put his hand over his eyes, said, “For heaven sake. Put some clothes on, Hap. I’m trying to eat here. You could make a vulture throw up. That thing looks like a spoiled turkey neck.”

  11

  I went upstairs and put the gun in the drawer and pulled on my pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, slipped into my bunny ear slippers, and went downstairs. Leonard was at the kitchen counter with a loaf of bread and some fixin’s, making a fresh sandwich.

  “I see my nudity didn’t put you off eating my deviled ham,” I said.

  “Tuna fish,” Leonard said. “And I could suggest a better brand.”

  “You pay for it, I’ll buy it,” I said, taking a p
lace at the table. “So, what are you doing up at three in the morning eating my food and drinking my milk, and for all I know wearing my underwear and using my downstairs toothbrush? I knew I should have got that key back. I forgot all about it.”

  “You want a sandwich?”

  “Yeah. There’s some chips in the cabinet.”

  “Left side?”

  “Yep.”

  Leonard got the chips down and another plate and made me a tuna sandwich with cheese, light on the mayonnaise, just the way I like it. He made his with mayonnaise and mustard, got the jug of milk out of the fridge, put it on the table and then the sandwiches. He got a diet cola out for me and sat down.

  I said, “Just for the record, you are the only one in the universe that has mustard and mayonnaise on tuna, and you don’t drink milk with a tuna fish sandwich. Starving people all over the world wouldn’t eat mustard on tuna.”

  “I like milk and mustard on tuna.”

  “I’m just saying that makes you an alien and universally wrong and you’re keeping me up.”

  He chewed carefully. “I figured since I couldn’t sleep you shouldn’t, so I came over. Your car, the hood was steaming from the rain. You went out recently. So my guess is you haven’t been sleeping so good either.”

  “Is that really your business?”

  “Of course.”

  I sighed and put down my sandwich. “You remember that dead cat by Mrs. Johnson’s house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I buried it.”

  “You went out in the rain and buried a dead cat? Anyone see you do it?”

  “Don’t know, and don’t care.”

  Leonard nodded. “Cookie?” he said, pushing the cookie bag toward me.

  I took a vanilla cookie from the bag. Leonard moved the bag to his side of the table, and got up and removed a Dr Pepper bottle from the fridge, sat back down, and twisted off the cap. He took a long swig. “Man,” he said. “These are the good ones.”