Devil Red

  “Local hole punch?” I said.

  “Yep,” Marvin said. “According to Will Turner, a retired cop I talked to, guy who actually interviewed Mini first, after Godzilla did the chop and suck thing. He got the impression that Mini was trying to fit in. Boys liked her for the drawer shuckin’ part, but not for too much else.”

  “If only she could have yodeled,” Leonard said.

  “You are a heartless sonofabitch,” I said.

  “I was thinkin’ she and her buddies killin’ that drunk frat rat was the heartless part,” Leonard said. “And as a reward, her mother wins eight million dollars for buying a two-dollar ticket. What’s up with that?”

  “Bought the ticket at a filling station,” Marvin said. “When she got some of the money, she went out to get drunk in celebration, leaving her husband home with a glass of milk and a bologna sandwich. She got so drunk she fell asleep in her car on the railroad track.”

  “I see this coming,” Leonard said.

  “She didn’t,” Marvin said. “A train knocked her ass about two miles down the track and into some woods and into a sink of water. Next morning they found the car. Someone finally saw the roof of the car sticking out of the water, shining in the sunlight. She turned out to have a car engine stuck up her ass. But the good news, my contact said, was the air bag opened.”

  “That technology,” I said, “it’s somethin’.”

  “I presume the husband inherits?” Leonard said.

  Marvin shook his head. “Nope. Mini’s mother, Twilla, bought herself a new car and a hairdo and about three thousand dollars’ worth of duds on credit, then went to a lawyer and made a will. She left it to her daughter should anything happen to her. This was two weeks before Mini was found dead. Little later, Twilla got hit by the train. Not long after, the daughter and the boyfriend bit it.”

  “Was anyone next in line for the money after Mini?” I asked.

  “The animal shelter,” Marvin said. “She liked cats. Not dogs, just cats.”

  “Prejudice is an ugly thing,” Leonard said.

  “Bert, her husband, wasn’t completely left out. He got ten thousand. But that had to bite his butt. Him with ten thousand and the cats with almost eight million dollars. That buys a lot of catnip.”

  “So Bert could have a grudge,” I said.

  “I guess the cats are looking over their shoulders,” Leonard said.

  “Cops looked into him,” Marvin said, “up one side and down another. They couldn’t find anything that led them to think he was involved or did anything himself. But it’s a motive. I don’t know how it would connect to the other girls, but maybe he was trying to make it look like the murders were connected with what Godzilla and the girls had done. According to what I got here in my notes, Bert wasn’t big enough or tough enough to do much but give Sharon’s cats to the animal shelter. That was about the extent of his mean as far as the cops can see. Still, we won’t take him off the suspect list.”

  “June might have a place on that list too,” Leonard said. “I don’t know how much I buy the ‘she really loved her brother’ bit. She didn’t like the idea that he might get that inheritance instead of her. She had the money to make a hit, and if Mini was there when it was set up, so be it. Not that June needs the inheritance, but the ones who don’t need it are often the ones who want more of it.”

  “All right,” Marvin said. “June’s on the list too.”

  “Do you think it’s odd that Mini’s mom made out a will right after getting the money?” I said.

  “Not really,” Marvin said. “She was old enough to think about it. Maybe she finally felt motherly and thought if anything happened to her, Mini would get it and she would check out making up for not being the best mom in the world. And if Mini died, well, there was the animal shelter. The husband did hire a lawyer on contingency to try and pry the money from the fuzzy little paws of all those desperate kitties. I don’t know how that worked out. But there’s nothing about Bert that has to mean murder. And the mother, well, I figure too much alcohol and a big case of the stupids did her in.”

  I glanced over at Leonard and his deerstalker. I turned to Marvin. “Do you come across many murders where a fella didn’t like his best friend’s hat?”

  “No,” Marvin said, looking at Leonard, “but I can understand the impulse.”

  19

  Marvin gave us some contact information for people we might want to talk to, and I folded that up and put it in my coat pocket. We left when his sandwich arrived. We knew when we weren’t wanted.

  At my place we fried up some egg sandwiches and sat on the couch and turned so we could look at each other. Leonard had finally taken off the deerstalker, so it was easier to do.

  We decided we had to see Mini’s stepdad, Bert. I called the cell number we had for him. The phone rang awhile, but finally he answered.

  I told him we were investigating his stepdaughter’s murder, that the mother of Mini’s boyfriend had hired us, and could we meet up with him.

  “Can’t we just talk over the phone?” he said.

  “I suppose, but we’d rather do it in person.”

  “Not anything I can tell you, and since I don’t know you, I ain’t wantin’ you to come out to the house.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve had threats.”

  “Threats?” I asked.

  “That’s all I’ll say about it.”

  “Look, I don’t know about the threats, but we’re on the up-and-up. What say we meet someplace public? We’ll buy you lunch.”

  “Made a sandwich already.”

  “Well,” I said, “how about just meeting you in town?”

  He was silent for so long I thought the connection was broken. But just when I was about to give up, he said, “I’m going out to the auction barn, catch me there.”

  “Not sure what you look like.”

  “Call my goddamn cell, man. Use your head. When you get there, call me.”

  On the way out to the auction barn, I said, “He sounds paranoid.”

  “Doesn’t mean someone’s not after him,” Leonard said.

  “Take off the hat, Leonard. Where we’re going is cowboy country. You going in there looking like that, you’re asking for trouble. Only thing missing is a purse.”

  “This is anything but effeminate,” he said. “In Merry Ole England they wore these to hunt deer. Real men. Real guns. Real deer. And this hat.”

  “Deer probably laughed themselves to death.”

  When we got out to the auction barn, the parking lot was full of pickups and trailers and everything smelled like animal shit; it was so thick you almost had to climb over the reek to get to the auction barn.

  Inside, the place looked like an ad for chewing tobacco and blue jeans. Cowboy hats floated on the crowd, and there was a lot of crowd. Last time I’d seen that many people was in a rerun of The Ten Commandments. Who knew cows were that exciting. The animal crap smell was now so intense I felt I needed mountaineer equipment to scale it.

  We started moving in among them, and as we went, Leonard pulled the deerstalker out of his back pocket, unfolded it, and popped it out like a wet towel and put it on.

  “You sonofabitch,” I said.

  20

  As we rambled through the crowd, a tall cowboy with a hatband full of toothpicks watched Leonard pass with open curiosity. I was right behind Leonard. I said to the cowboy, “He’s working a child’s party after this.”

  The cowboy looked at me and nodded, like that explained everything.

  We found a spot with a break in people, and went there. I took out my cell and called.

  “Yeah,” Bert said.

  “This is Hap Collins. I spoke to you earlier.”

  “What about?”

  I was more than a little certain now that Bert was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

  “Your stepdaughter. You told me to call.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m over by the door. Too many people in there, and hot
.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Meet you there. What’s your description?”

  “What’s yours?”

  “There’s two of us. I’m about six foot with brown hair, stocky. The guy with me is black—”

  “Black?” He seemed surprised.

  “Yeah. There’s a whole race of them. He’s just one of them.”

  “Black, huh.”

  “Now and always.”

  There were actually a few black cowboys scattered about the barn, but they had on the proper duds. I said, “You’ll know us because he’s bigger than me and has gray at the temples. Oh yeah, he’s got on a funny hat.”

  “Hey,” Leonard said.

  21

  It was hot in the auction barn, and it felt good to come out into the open air. There were a number of men and women in cowboy hats and gimme caps out there, and a few of them were smoking cigarettes. One was wiping cow shit off his boots, scraping them over the edge of a concrete step.

  That guy, the shit scraper, turned and looked at us. He smiled when he saw Leonard. I had a suspicion he was Bert. He was tall and strong-looking in a working man sort of way; had long muscles and a face that had seen too much sun, and maybe too many fists.

  “Damn, man, that is the ugliest goddamn hat I ever seen,” Bert said, coming over, pushing his cowboy hat back on his head. “You just wear that to crap in?”

  I thought, Bert, my man, you are taking your life into your own hands. Leonard stood there with his hands in front of him, right folded over left, at his belt buckle. That was how he stood when he wanted to look casual but was ready to knock your head off.

  Leonard said, “Naw, I crap in cowboy hats. This I keep clean.”

  Bert and Leonard looked at each other. Bert looked like a tough hombre. Thing was, though, Leonard was a tough hombre.

  I said, “Bert, we’re just trying to find out who killed your daughter.”

  “Stepdaughter,” he said. “Could have been anybody.”

  “So no idea?”

  “I got an idea.”

  “And?” Leonard said.

  “Keeping it to myself.”

  “You tell the cops what you thought?” Leonard asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Didn’t care for Mini much. A real weird one and a bitch. Don’t like her mother much now. Left her money to the daughter, then to a bunch of fuckin’ cats. How about that? Cats. What the fuck are cat’s gonna buy?”

  “Cat toys,” Leonard said.

  Bert gave Leonard a look.

  “And there’s catnip,” Leonard said.

  “Listen, I don’t really care I talk to you guys or not,” Bert said.

  “What if there was money in it?” I said. I wasn’t sure where I was going with that, but I had a hunch Mrs. Christopher might be willing to put out a few dollars for information.

  “That depends,” I said.

  “On what?” Bert said.

  “The quality of the information,” Leonard said, just like he knew what I was thinking. And he probably did.

  “Well, money talks, and bullshit walks,” Bert said. “You two don’t exactly look like fucking Fort Knox.”

  “We’re not talking about our money,” I said.

  “How much of the other fella’s money, then?”

  “Again, that depends,” I said.

  Bert let that run through his head, which I considered was an easy task.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I got a feeling I say too much I might get in trouble.”

  “With who?” I said.

  “That’s my business.”

  I could see he was actually nervous, but was waffling on the matter.

  “How about I give you a card,” I said, “and you call us if you change your mind. This offer is short-term.”

  “How short-term?” he asked.

  “How about tomorrow morning,” Leonard said.

  “I think you’d take it two weeks from now,” he said.

  “And I think you don’t know us too well,” Leonard said.

  I took out my wallet and opened it up and took out a card. I gave it to him.

  He looked at it, then at me. “Hanson Investigations. Well, if you’re Hap Collins, then you must be Hanson.”

  “Nope,” Leonard said. “We work for Hanson.”

  “You change your mind, call us,” I said.

  Bert turned the card around and around in his hands. He was giving it serious thought. Finally he put the card in his shirt pocket. He said, “I’ll consider on it.”

  And then he turned and walked away, across the parking lot. We watched until he got in a black truck so old I didn’t know what decade it was from. He cranked it, and we kept watching while it coughed smoke and rattled away like something broken tumbling downhill.

  “You have cards?” Leonard said. “I don’t have any cards.”

  “Marvin gave them to me.”

  “He didn’t give me any.”

  “He told me to tell you we would share.”

  “How are you sharing if you’re carrying the cards and I don’t have any?”

  “I’ll share for the both of us,” I said.

  Driving back to my place, I said, “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Leonard said. “He’s an odd one. He’s either paranoid, or has delusions of his own importance, or he knows something and he didn’t tell us. And what he knows he’s trying to turn into money. Maybe with someone else, and us, but the someone else may be someone he shouldn’t have messed with. I think he may actually have been afraid. He was acting tough, but—”

  “He was overacting,” I said.

  “Yep, we ought to know. We do it all the time.”

  22

  Back home, upstairs in the bedroom, I called Brett on my cell. She answered on the first ring.

  “So, just sitting around waiting for me to call?” I said.

  “Actually,” she said, “I’m sitting around in case my boyfriend calls.”

  “Is he handsome?”

  “Not particularly, but he looks great by phone.”

  “Is he hung?”

  “Nope, but I can dream.”

  “This boyfriend, would he be me?”

  “He would.”

  “Thanks for lifting my spirits.”

  “You know I love you, even with all your deficiencies.”

  “How are things?”

  “Well, pretty good for a small-blown crisis, but it’s the same crisis,” Brett said. “The one where my daughter is leading a screwed-up life, but pretends she wants to change and tells me all her woes, then goes right back to doing what she’s always done, being who she always was and is. A whore who drinks too much and buys her clothes at expensive stores in Houston, and her underwear at Wal-Mart.”

  “And you’re thinking it’s your fault?”

  “Some of it is my fault. Except for the Wal-Mart underwear … Oh, hell. Who am I talking to? You know I buy mine there too.”

  “Your ex had a little to do with Tillie’s problems.”

  “True, but I didn’t have to set his head on fire. I think it set a bad example.”

  “Maybe a little,” I said.

  “Are you doing okay in the private detective business?”

  “Well, I’m in it. And there’s supposed to be a big check at the end of the rainbow, and me and Leonard got to hear some neat stuff about vampires, devil heads, a dog-eaten body, and a white trash winning the lottery and getting hit by a train. Oh, and a bunch of cats inherited the lottery money.”

  “Say what?”

  I told her all that I had learned.

  When I finished, Brett said, “That’s some weird stuff.”

  “You think? When are you coming home?”

  “Tomorrow. I’ll be home by noon.”

  “Really?”

  “I just made up my mind. Tillie was the same before I got here, and she’ll be the same after I leave.”

  “How is
the prostitute business?”

  “Booming. One of her johns asked me if I wanted to pull a mother and daughter.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah, I made three hundred dollars and there was a pony involved.”

  “Is that all you made? The pony factor alone was worth three hundred.”

  23

  Leonard was about his business that night, which I thought might be trying to call John and talk him into coming back. I figured Leonard was close to the end of his rope on that. He was sticking with John better than anyone before, but I knew him well enough to know he had a destination in mind, and once he arrived there, if John came back to him bare-ass naked swinging his dick, Leonard wouldn’t be interested anymore. Once he cut you loose, he cut you loose.

  Me, I pined over everything, worried about everything. I was worrying now. I was worrying that Bert wouldn’t call. I was thinking if he did, he wouldn’t know anything and that he would just try to work us for money. I was thinking me promising money was stupid. I was thinking I could dip into my savings and come up with a few thousand, if I had to, but I didn’t want to, and I didn’t want to spend the client’s money either.

  I was also thinking Bert was just a dumb goober with a brain full of imaginary foes. A man shot down by disappointment, thinking about those cats with his dead wife’s lottery money, as if they actually held it in their little furry paws.

  I went upstairs and crawled into bed with nothing on but my underwear and read from a good book until midnight. Then I put the book down with only one chapter to go.

  I put it down because I was thinking about things that had come at me sideways, out of the past. I don’t know what sent them to the forefront, but this sort of thing had been happening for a while. All I could think about when things got quiet was the violence I had done in my life, or been around. Gunfire and fistfights, blood and gray matter splattered on the wall. The way it hit me right then, it was like I had looked in the wrong direction while crossing a road and had been hit by a truck.

  I found that I was even breathing rapidly.