Bad Chili

  We sat for a few minutes, studied the cars zipping by on the highway. I turned to Jim Bob, said, “You said you thought you might be wrong about King Arthur?”

  “Could be,” Jim Bob said. “I got to thinking you might be right, that I ought to follow all the leads, not make a snap judgment. I checked out this other fella, other name this Pierre gave you. Bill Cunningham.”

  “We didn’t tell you that,” I said.

  “I’ll come to that,” Jim Bob said. “Cunningham’s a lawyer. Nothing obviously funny about him. Fact is, I think he’s clean.”

  “I thought you said he was a lawyer,” Leonard said.

  “You’re right,” Jim Bob said. “I lost my head.”

  “So you don’t know anything more than you did know?” I said.

  “You know how I got on to King in the first place?” Jim Bob asked. “I come to town, I look around, I connect with this Raul in the park, follow him around, finally over to this hair spot, Antone’s. Raul gets killed, I go in there and ask around, pretend to be a Texas Ranger. Pierre, guy with the cartoon skunk voice, gave me a couple names. Same names you guys got.”

  “So?” I said.

  “I get to thinking, what if you’re right and chili man is just a low-rent crook, not into all this. I check out this Bill Cunningham, and nothin’. I get to thinkin’ what could be the source. You know, tryin’ to go back to where the river starts instead of just jumpin’ in and swimmin’.”

  “I don’t follow you,” I said.

  “The source for your information about King was Pierre. The source of my information about King was Pierre. That don’t mean nothin’ by itself, but why not check this Pierre out? So I watch this Antone’s. Being the astute sonofabitch I am, I notice bikers from next door like to wander in there, but ain’t none of them come out with haircuts or dye jobs.”

  “The biker connection?” Leonard said.

  “Bikers would show up at the rec hall over there, hang out a while, then go to Antone’s, in the back way, come out with little packages, get on their wheels and ride away. Interesting, huh?”

  “Very,” Leonard said.

  “That’s number one,” Jim Bob said. “Number two is I call a cop friend in Houston, someone can give me the information but can stay out of our business. This Pierre, it took some time to run him down on the computer, but his real name is Terry Wesley, and guess what? He’s got a rap sheet longer than the pope’s robes. Lot of it is pimpin’ young boys. In Houston he used to meet buses, catch the kids had run off from home. He’d befriend them, pull them into the service. Had them hangin’ around the goddamn Greyhound station hustlin’ goobers. Anyway, Pierre got busted for pimpin’ more than a couple times. Word was, he specialized in providin’ the rough trade. You know, guy comes in, wants to butt-fuck him a boy, likes to slap him around a bit. This way, fucker gets some ass, feels like a tough guy too. You’d be surprised how much of that shit goes on.”

  “Sad thing is,” Leonard said, “I ain’t much surprised at anything anymore.”

  “Got one more card to play,” Jim Bob said. “I followed one of the bikers carried a package out the back of the hair joint. He took a little road trip to Dallas. I followed. He delivered the package to a video store in Dallas. Got a little package back. My guess, a video for the store owner, money for Pierre, and a nice cut for the biker. Pierre, he’s got these bikers jettin’ all over East Texas. It’s an easy, cheap way to deliver the shit. And another thing, they can dub this crap forever.”

  “And there’s always new films,” Leonard said.

  “That’s right,” Jim Bob said. “It’s not like they got to have a Francis Ford Coppola behind the lens.”

  “Could King and Pierre be together on all this?” I asked.

  “I thought about that,” Jim Bob said. “It’s possible. But I don’t think so. I think Pierre gave us King’s name pretty easy. They were partners, he’d have held out.”

  “What gets me is it’s gays doin’ it to gays,” I said.

  “Welcome once again to the real world,” Leonard said.

  “I suggest we have a little talk with Pierre,” Jim Bob said. “Pretend to have taken Raul and Horse’s place as blackmailers, make him push a move. Then we gift-wrap him for the cops.”

  * * *

  We went in Jim Bob’s car to Antone’s. Pierre wasn’t there.

  “Well, where is he?” I asked the lady in charge.

  She was a heavyset blond lady whose hair looked as if it had been the recipient of many an experiment, the most recent being an incredible rat job that revealed pink patches of skull. She was badly made up with too much powder and lipstick, false eyelashes thick enough and long enough to support a transport plane. She was outgoing and windy as hell; had a mouth like a leaf blower. No doubt she had given phone death to many a listener.

  She said, “Well, I don’t rightly know where that little Frenchy is. He kind of comes and goes, you know. I’m in charge most of the time. Name’s Delores. Pierre has other things goin’ on I don’t know much about. Quite the little entrepreneur. Sometimes he’s here all week, sometimes you don’t see him for a week. I ain’t seen him for days. I open up, do hair, teach some of the students how to do hair, then I go home. You smell them peroxide fumes all day, you get so you can’t wait to get out of here. I go home and drink lots of goat’s milk. It’s supposed to help get rid of all kinds of toxins in the body, or at least that’s what my herbal medicine man tells me. He’s this Mex’kin lives on the other side of the railroad tracks. Hear him tell it, there ain’t a goddamn thing that goat milk can’t cure. ’Course, at four dollars a gallon, that shit ought to make you younger, tighten up your love sack, and put your cherry back in it. You boys want to leave a message?”

  “He comes back,” Jim Bob said, “just tell Pierre three fellows came by to extort some money out of him, but not to worry, we’ll be back.”

  “That’s a hell of a message,” she said.

  “Ain’t it?” Leonard said.

  “He got a home address?” Jim Bob asked.

  “I can look it up,” Delores said. “You know, I been workin’ for that little French twist for a full year now, and he ain’t never invited me or anyone here over to his house.”

  “Maybe he hangs his underwear on the doors,” Leonard said.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Delores said. “One thing I can do without is lookin’ at stains in drawers. My husband was terrible about that. I figure he wiped his butt, it was an accident, or his shorts got sucked up his crack. Way I figure, when he died, the undertaker had to use a hose and a putty knife to get him clean.”

  “Soul mates, huh?” Jim Bob said.

  “Hell, only thing that bastard had any soulful connection with was Championship Bowlin’, a beer, and a bag of taco chips, which is what I figure killed him. I’d have known that, I’d have kept a bigger supply around.”

  We followed her into Pierre’s office. She got out the phone book, flipped it open, found his name. “There it is,” she said.

  When we were outside in the parking lot, I said, “Gee, Jim Bob, right in the phone book. You’re quite the detective.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Jim Bob said.

  29

  Pierre’s house was easy to find. We drove over there and parked at the curb and sat for a moment.

  “Are we waiting for Pierre to come out to the curb?”

  Leonard said.

  “No,” Jim Bob said. “We’re gonna go up there and intimidate him.”

  “Intimidation is good,” Leonard said.

  “We don’t push in,” Jim Bob said. “We don’t go past the door. We just intimidate. We put him in a position where he wants our asses dead.”

  “He already wants our asses dead,” Leonard said.

  “What we’re gonna do is let him know we’re on to him,” Jim Bob said. “We’re gonna make him so nervous his shit will be nervous. Then we’ll leave. Let him think a while, see if he makes a play.”

  “If
he doesn’t?” Leonard asked.

  “We’ll come back on him like ass rash in a few days,” Jim Bob said. “We’ll keep it up until he’s got to scratch.”

  We walked up the drive. It was a nice drive. The lawn was well clipped. There was a sprinkler system going, which, considering we’d just had a lot of rain, seemed wasteful. The garage was locked up tight. The houses on either side were nice and well dressed. Suburbia, U.S.A.

  We went to the door. Jim Bob rang the bell.

  We waited.

  Jim Bob rang the bell again.

  “Maybe the bell doesn’t work,” Leonard said, and he knocked.

  We waited some more.

  “You boys stand here,” Jim Bob said, and he slipped around the side of the house.

  Leonard said, “Watch that sonofabitch move? He’s like a ghost.”

  “You think he moves good going around the side of a house, you ought to see him blow up a car, kick down a door, shoot two thugs to death, and run Big Man Mountain into the woods. Then take me out the back door with him. He may actually have been eating dinner while he was doin’ that.”

  Few moments later Jim Bob came back. He said, “Back door is opened. Been jimmied.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jim Bob said. “Uh-oh.”

  “What now?” Leonard asked.

  “Well,” Jim Bob said, “ain’t nobody seems to be lookin’, and since we don’t need a search warrant . . .”

  The back door had that distinctive Big Man Mountain look. It appeared a crowbar had been inserted, and with a heave, the door had been snapped free of its lock. Even with a crowbar, that took some muscle.

  Jim Bob kicked the door with the toe of his boot; it swung open, and we slipped inside. The air-conditioning unit was humming nicely. It felt good. Sunlight crept through the cracks of the living room curtains. Place looked like a magazine shoot. Expensive furniture, carpet, and paintings.

  Jim Bob knelt, pulled up his pants legs. He reached inside his boot, took out a little leather zippered case. He unzipped it. There was everything in that case but a change of clothes.

  Jim Bob removed a small wad of plastic from it. He replaced the case and unfolded the plastic. The plastic was several paper-thin gloves. He gave us each a pair. We put them on. He said, “Let’s look around.”

  I took the kitchen. There were food dishes on the table, some kind of leftover Chinese was my guess, but I couldn’t tell for certain. What was left of it was long spoiled, gone black and full of flies that had come in through the cracked back door. There were two smeary plates on the table, two wineglasses, a half bottle of red wine. Flies skated over the greasy plate and sat around on the mouth of the bottle, making small talk, I presumed.

  Jim Bob opened a bedroom door, peeked in. “This is sweet.”

  Leonard and I took a look. The decor had gone from Better Homes and Gardens to Elvis on drugs. It was a big bedroom with a round bed and a mirrored ceiling. The covers, crushed red velvet, were in a wad. There was a huge television set and a VCR. A glass bedside table with books on it. The books were photographs of nude men. On the walls were paintings of nude men making love to one another.

  We slid into the room and Jim Bob went around the bed and stopped and said, “This, however, isn’t so sweet.”

  Leonard and I took a look. Some guy I had never seen before lay there, tiger-striped underwear pulled down to his knees. His arms were bent at the elbows, his hands pushing palms up, as if he had ended up that way trying to fend someone off.

  He was long and lean and might have been in his thirties. He smelled bad and his gut was swollen. The air conditioning had kept him in pretty good shape and the stink was surprisingly minimal. There was a small, but well-defined hole in his forehead. Not a designer move, this hole. It didn’t go with the gold earring or the toupee that had blown off his noggin and onto the wall like a kitten tossed from a speeding car. A puddle of blood pooled under his head. I figured you rolled him over, you’d find an exit hole about the size of the national debt.

  “I think we can safely declare that whoever this fucker is, he’s dead,” Jim Bob said.

  “Any idea who he is?” I said.

  “One of Pierre’s boyfriends,” Leonard said.

  The bathroom door was partially open. I went over there and gave the door a shove. “Oh, shit,” I said.

  Flies rose up angrily, buzzed about, then found their footing again. Unlike the body on the bedroom floor, this job had taken some time. Pierre—I assumed it was Pierre from the general build and greasy hair—was naked, his knees on the floor in a pudding of dried blood. He was bent over and leaning into the tub. His hands were tied behind his back with blood-splattered zebra-striped underwear.

  There was something long, thin, and dark shoved up his ass, and what had once been his face was a swath of dark ruin and happy flies. His head nodded toward the tub as if bowing in reverence. There was blood on the wall, inside the tub, all around the body. There were footprints in the blood, and there was a towel on the floor where the man who had made the footprints had wiped the blood off his shoes.

  Way Pierre was arranged, it was obvious that whoever had shoved whatever up his ass had sat on the commode to do their work. Nice and comfy, easy to get to Pierre’s blow hole. Behind the commode on the wall was a plaque that said READING ROOM.

  On the floor next to the commode lay a heavy tenderizing mallet, a gold cigarette lighter, a box cutter, and a pair of tin snips.

  I eased in a little closer. Jim Bob and Leonard looked over my shoulder. The stink in there was more intense than in the bedroom. I put my hand over my mouth and breathed shallow breaths. I glanced in the tub. There were some messy things in there. I thought I recognized a dick and balls, but how can one tell about these things when they’re covered in gore and withered from a few days of disconnection? It could have been a blackened and withered banana and two dried grapes, for all I could tell. There were teeth in there too, some gums and jawbone attached. There was also a hole in the tub where a bullet had gone through the back of Pierre’s head and out the front and into the ceramic.

  “I guess intimidation is out, huh?” Jim Bob said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. “I don’t think we can beat this.”

  Jim Bob eased past me, lifted Pierre’s head by the hair, squatted down and took a look at his face. “It’s Pierre,” he said, confirming what we already knew. “And he’s had a dental job and a little tattoo work.”

  We leaned for a glance. Carved into his forehead with the box cutter was the word WELSHER. Below that, the tip of his nose was missing, and what had once been a mouth was just a gaping hole edged by bone and a tooth hanging by a strip of bloody skin.

  “What’s that in his ass?” Leonard asked.

  “Barbed wire,” Jim Bob said. “And you can be certain it wasn’t no fencin’ accident. I bet whoever stuck it up there didn’t even grease it.”

  “You know who stuck it up there?” I said. “You see the size of those prints? Way that back door was opened?”

  “Yeah,” Jim Bob said. “Big Man Mountain.”

  “So maybe you’re wrong a second time,” Leonard said. “Looks like Big Man and Pierre weren’t in cahoots.”

  “I think the word welsher carved into Pierre’s head explains a few things,” Jim Bob said.

  “Explain them to us somewhere else,” I said. “I’ve had about all this I can take.”

  We returned to the living room. The air was considerably better in there. Jim Bob said, “I think Pierre made some kind of financial arrangement with Big Man, and Pierre didn’t deliver, and Big Man took it personal. Figure Pierre was in here with his fist up this guy’s ass and Big Man came in and gave them a surprise party. A noise maker for the lover, and a bag of games for Pierre himself. I think toward the end there, it didn’t have nothing to do with money. Big Man had a mission in mind, and it was supposed to end with Pierre dying slowly and badly. And that’s just the way it went. Let’s finish loo
king.”

  We checked another bedroom. It was full of shelves, and on the shelves were rows and rows of videotapes. Jim Bob took a couple of them down, went back to the bedroom with the body and the VCR. Reluctantly, we followed. Jim Bob played a bit of each video.

  “Jesus,” Leonard said. “This shit is worse than the ones we got.”

  “Later stuff is my guess,” Jim Bob said. “Fucks like this, they start out doin’ a little rough stuff, then they build on it. Pretty soon, it’s beyond a few bites and pinches and ass whippin’s. It steps over into torture. You’ll note, the park isn’t the background for these. More seclusion. More time to make the kind of videos Pierre wanted to make, wanted to sell.”

  Jim Bob returned the videos to the shelves. We finished off our little escapade by looking in the garage. No car, but there was a motorcycle. It looked as if Big Man had traded out with Pierre, leaving his bike and taking Pierre’s car.

  We left out of there and drove away. It was a hot day now and the car’s air conditioner was off, but I felt a chill anyway.

  * * *

  We stopped at a self-service gas station, threw away the gloves we’d used. I called the police department with a little tip about a house with two dead bodies in it. Before they could ask any questions, I hung up.

  I went out to the car. Jim Bob had his hat pushed way back on his forehead and was pumping gas into his car’s tank and Leonard was using Bissinggame’s leisure-suit jacket to clean bugs off the windshield.

  I leaned against the car. I kept hearing those damn flies and smelling that stench, seeing that face that wasn’t a face. Poor bastard. Worse yet, he hadn’t even had the taste to wear decent jockey shorts. Who the fuck made them zebra-striped briefs anyway? There ought to be a law against that kind of shit. That and leisure suits.

  Leonard trash-canned the suit, came over, leaned next to me. “You know, you dampen that material, it makes a pretty good swipe.”

  “Neat,” I said.

  “How you doin’, man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, me neither,” Leonard said. “Lot has changed in a short time. I don’t know how I feel about anything. Poor old Leon.”