“Funny,” I said. “Leonard, think you might want to get in on this? Considering we might go to prison or get a needle in the arm for something we didn’t do?”
“I wasn’t in the house,” Leonard said. “I think I can turn on you and get a lighter sentence.”
“And me,” Marvin said, “I’m in pretty good shape. I just hired you guys to do a simple observation job. What the lady wanted. And the two of you went crazy. You went in there and shot him with an axe handle, Hap.”
“Nice,” I said.
“Look here,” Marvin said. “Let’s figure this thing. Jim Bob knows the lady, so maybe we start with him.”
“Nobody knows where he is,” I said. “I tried him on the phone before we came here. He’s not answering for whatever reason. For now, he’s out.”
“Then we got to think about what it was we were asked to do. Lady comes in and says she has a recommendation, and it’s from one of our best buddies, Jim Bob. She says she needs someone to protect her. To discourage someone. We take the job. You guys go over there and talk to her and hear her story and meet her lawyer. How am I doing so far?”
“Good,” I said.
“She tells you her husband is big, and it turns out he is. She tells you he is scary and he beat up a boyfriend, a date, whatever. But the guy that got whipped won’t press charges. Course, really, he doesn’t need to. The cops can go after Henry anyway, if they want. But they think: All right, guy got a beating, wouldn’t stand up for himself, so why should we bother? Kind of a Texas thing going there.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Shit, Leonard. Would you at least not smack?”
“Sorry,” Leonard said.
“But whatever, they know he’s going to be a shitty witness. Maybe he’ll say he fell down a few times and got banged up because he wants to keep his Man Ticket. Won’t admit he got a licking. By the way, this guy that took a beating. Who is he?”
I looked at Leonard.
Leonard said, “I don’t know.”
“Nor do I,” I said.
“You know what?” Marvin said. “I think this guy, whoever he is, would be a nice place to start. I think anyone with detective skills would have already thought of that.”
“We’ve been a little preoccupied,” I said.
“And you have limited detective skills,” Marvin said.
“Well, yeah, there’s that,” I said.
“Let me show you some detective work,” Marvin said.
He called his friend on the force. The one that knew the guy’s name. He wrote down the name and gave it to us.
Robert Unslerod.
Unslerod lived out in the country in a trailer. That was surprising. Not the kind of man Sharon Devon would date. Least I didn’t think so. She struck me as someone who liked money, a man who wore a tie and took her to good dinners and when he dropped trousers he’d be wearing silk shorts. She was someone that at least wanted a man with a nice car to take her out. The car parked in front of the trailer looked like something the farm pigs drove when they went out for a spin. From the looks of things Unslerod seemed to belong in mine and Leonard’s category. He seemed like the sort of guy Sharon Devon would wipe her ass on at best.
We knocked on the trailer door, but no one answered. Maybe Unslerod was actually taking a spin in his Porsche and this is just where he came to store his garbage. When he didn’t answer, I got a pad and pen out of my pocket and pressed it against the door to write a note.
The door swung open a little. A smell came out of there that was, to put it mildly, unpleasant.
“Not good, sir,” Leonard said.
“Nope.”
We went back to the car and stood by it.
“Call the cops?” I said.
“Might just be a dead raccoon under the trailer,” Leonard said.
“That stink is from inside the trailer,” I said.
“Might be a dead kitty cat inside,” Leonard said. “Maybe he went off for the week and forgot to leave Fluffy his kitty food and water dispenser.”
“And maybe that’s not it at all,” I said.
“Yeah, well, probably not,” Leonard said, opened the car door and got my revolver out of the glove box and held it by his side. “You get the axe handle.”
I got the axe handle. We went back to the trailer and I nudged the door with the toe of my old Tony Lama’s. It slid back. I stuck my head around the corner. It was dark in there. The stink was terrible, worse when we got completely inside.
There was a pile in the hallway between the living room and the bedroom, near the open bathroom door. It didn’t look like a lump in the rug. It was too big to be a cat.
“Shit,” I said.
We went over and looked. It was a man, facedown. The floor under him was dark, like a hole had opened up there. He was only wearing dark boxer shorts; my guess was they were not silk. We couldn’t tell too much about him there in the dark, but what we could tell was that he wasn’t just having a little nap.
Leonard went past me, and, holding the revolver in front of him, he looked in the bathroom.
“No one,” he said. He went along to the bedroom. The door was cracked. He looked in there. “And the hits just keep on coming.”
I went over and looked. There was a nude woman on the bed. There was enough light through the curtains I could tell she wasn’t napping either. It was hard to tell what she might have looked like. She was swollen up and her head was bloated. All I could tell was it was a female.
I used my elbow to turn on the light. She didn’t look any more identifiable. She looked worse. She was lying on her back with a hole in her forehead. It reminded me of the hole in the back of Henry’s head. The sheet under her head was dark and caked with blood. The sheet pulled over her went up to her waist. I was tempted to pull it over her head, but I resisted.
Back in the hall I used the axe handle to turn on the light so we could get a look at the man. He was facedown and was stuck to the floor by dried blood.
“Did you touch anything?” Leonard asked.
“The door with the toe of my boot and I used the axe handle on the light. Wait a minute, I put the note paper against the door . . . I didn’t touch anything but the paper though.”
“Okay, let’s keep it that way.”
We went outside and breathed in clean air.
“They been dead awhile,” Leonard said.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“And me without my deerstalker.”
We got in the car. Leonard put my revolver back in the glove box. I put the axe handle on the backseat.
I said, “I hope no one saw us drive in.”
“Probably not,” Leonard said. “No houses much. We didn’t pass any cars.”
It was a good guess. There was only a little dirt road leading to the trailer, and the property was a pasture with high grass and some trees at the back. Still, someone could have watched us turn in. Nothing for it but to hope no one had seen us arrive.
I pulled onto the road and eased along. Driving fast would just draw attention to us.
“This whole business is starting to stink worse than that trailer,” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m beginning to feel like you and me have been puppets all along, and that Sharon Devon is our puppeteer.”
“Time we cut the strings,” Leonard said.
We went to my place and Brett was home. She was cute in some old overalls worn over a paint-splattered shirt; it had got that way when we repaired a door and painted it. She had the cuffs of the overalls rolled up and she was barefoot. Her toenails were painted bright red. It went with her hair, which was tied back with a yellow tie. I made some coffee and we told Brett everything we knew. I always told Brett everything I knew. The only people I would tell that sort of thing were her and Leonard, maybe Marvin. Under certain circumstances, Jim Bob. In fact, when I got through telling Brett all we knew, she said, “Seems like you got to start with who put you in her camp.”
“Jim Bob,”
she said.
“Makes sense,” I said, “and maybe we can do that, but I got to say, if we were fooled, Jim Bob was fooled. And on top of that, I have tried him, without luck. He’s not answering his phone. I figure he’s turned it off on purpose. He may be in the middle of a job, and the kind of work he does often means the cell is off.”
“I wasn’t saying he had anything to do with it,” she said. “Just that he might give you some insight.”
“Yeah, he and Devon used to date,” Leonard said.
“Way back,” I said. “What I figure is she may have always been selfish, and over time, she became more of that. A whole lot of that. Enough so that it might lead to something that had to do with murder. Jim Bob, if he hadn’t seen her in awhile, he wouldn’t know that. Wouldn’t suspect it. He’d remember her as the woman he dated.”
“Problem with that,” Leonard said, “is I was with her when Henry was killed. And somehow I can’t see her breaking into that trailer and popping Unslerod and his girlfriend.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I figure whoever picked Henry’s lock picked the trailer lock, caught Unslerod heading for the bathroom, shot him, and was in the bedroom before the woman knew what happened. They were probably both dead in less than fifteen seconds. If it took that long. Wouldn’t have to be a professional killer, but someone who knew locks and was sneaky as an alley cat.”
“Or professional,” Leonard said. “I’m voting professional, but I’ll settle it could be either way.”
“Maybe you guys ought to forget all this,” Brett said. “You’re off the job. Not your problem, really. Maybe you stay out of it, she won’t try to pin it on you.”
“I don’t want to feel like I let her set me up and she got away with it,” I said. “Or that I somehow helped any plan she had all along to kill Henry. I don’t know how I helped, but I have this horrible feeling I did. We only got how bad Henry was from her. Unslerod, what did he do? What did his woman do? I don’t like it.”
“You know what?” Leonard said. “Actually, we didn’t just hear how bad Henry was from her. We heard it from the lawyer.”
“And he’s still in love with her,” I said.
“Bingo,” Leonard said. “You got any more cookies?”
Brett got up.
I said, “Don’t show him the stash.”
She laughed and opened a drawer next to the sink. It had two bags of vanilla cookies in it.
“And you know what, hon,” she said to Leonard, “I got you some Dr. Peppers.”
“Oh, hell,” Leonard said. “I swear, darling, I am going to quit being queer and go straight so I can take you away from Hap and you can keep me supplied in cookies and Dr. Peppers.”
Leonard was taking a nap on the couch, and Brett was upstairs in bed reading. I turned on the computer in Leonard’s bedroom we had built onto the house for him and did some checking on Frank the lawyer. What I got was Frank’s firm had been around a while. He owned it and employed other lawyers; in other words, he ran a large aquarium for sharks. I looked to find out about his cases, discovered his firm was pretty good. They had nice odds on their winnings. Not too many losses. They did everything from divorce to murder trials, but they didn’t seem to be ambulance chasers. As far as I could tell, they didn’t advertise on TV. They had been around long enough they didn’t have to. I called Marvin, told him what I found, asked if he might be able to find out more from some of his contacts. “After all,” I said, “as you have pointed out, you are the detective.”
“An attempt at flattery?”
“How’s it working?”
“I see it coming as clearly as an elephant trying to walk a high wire, so not so well.”
“But, then again, aren’t you the true detective?”
“Damn you, Hap Collins,” he said. “It is working. You have found my weak spot.”
I went upstairs and locked the door and took off my clothes and slid under the sheets with Brett. She was sitting up in bed with pillows at her back. She had the sheet pulled up over her. She had her reading glasses on, pushed down on her nose. She put the book in her lap.
“I hope you don’t think you’re going to get any,” she said.
“Any what?” I said.
“Don’t act coy with me,” she said.
“I just got naked,” I said. “It has nothing to do with you. I’m comfortable naked. Some of us are quite comfortable with our bodies, our nudity.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yep.”
“I’m reading, you know.”
“How’s the book?”
“Sucks.”
“So, want to do the nasty?”
“That is far from romantic,” she said. “But lucky for you I think a lot of that stuff is nonsense. The romantic stuff. I’m not as girly as I look. And then again, the book sucks, so that makes your suggestion a little more interesting.”
“Dear, believe me,” I said. “You are as girly as you need to be.”
She laid the book on the bed beside her. She dropped the sheet. She was naked too.
“Surprise,” she said.
The phone call woke me up. Brett stirred in my arms. “You get that,” she said. I slipped loose of her and put my feet on the floor and picked up the phone. It was Marvin. “You busy?” he asked.
“Not right now,” I said.
“This Henry guy,” he said. “He seems to have been a pretty straight dude. Made a lot of money in oil. He was a land speculator for the companies. His job was to get people to give up beautiful land so it could have trees cleared, the soil torn up by a bulldozer, concrete and oil drills put down. He made a lot of money. And then he didn’t.”
“It comes and goes,” I said.
“People were drilling everywhere because of the oil shortage talk, and then when they drilled in some places and didn’t find as much as they hoped, they quit drilling so much.”
“And he quit making money,” I said.
“But here’s some things,” Marvin said. “He has a daughter. Her name is Nora. My cop friends say she has been arrested. A lot. Mostly stupid stuff. Small amounts of drugs. Being at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. Not exactly a Bonnie Parker, more just troublesome. Lindsay Lohan without the fame and without that much money. Daddy had enough money to help her out of deep doo-doo, though, until he didn’t.”
“So what has she got to do with this?” I said.
“I’m not sure,” Marvin said. “Maybe nothing. But she didn’t get mentioned by Sharon Devon, did she?”
“Nope. The girl didn’t come up in conversation,” I said.
“My friend at the cop shop said Sharon and Henry always came down together to bail her out and such, and that it was pretty clear to them that the girl was close to Sharon. Like a mother. Her actual mother was dead. Car accident. Got an engine block through the chest.”
“So, you’re saying why didn’t the dog bark in the nighttime?” I said.
“That’s right. If they had a daughter and were divorcing, and the daughter was close to them both, why didn’t she come up in your conversation with Mrs. Devon? And where is she? She was supposed to be living with Henry. The cops have been looking for her too, and nothing. No one knows what happened to her.”
“Connected?”
“Maybe,” Marvin said. “Cops have tried to find her every which way, but it’s like she fell off the face of the earth. I’m not sure what that means or what we should do, but something about it bothers me.”
“The lawyer,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I figure he knows something more than we know and we ought to know it.”
“Lawyers have client privilege,” Marvin said.
“Sometimes that wavers if they think you’re going to beat the hell out of them,” I said. “Not saying we would, but maybe he could think we mean to, even if we don’t say we plan to. Just sort of insinuate.”
“Maybe we ought to just drop it,” Marvin said. ?
??A reason we ought to, and I have been holding this back for dramatic effect, is Sharon Devon went down to the station and said she didn’t think you had anything to do with Henry’s death, and that she sent you there, and you were only doing what she asked.”
“That’s kind of different than before,” I said.
“I guess she thought about it,” Marvin said.
“Or decided she didn’t need that dodge anymore.”
“Well, there’s a little bit more,” Marvin said. “She’s got a big insurance policy. Henry left everything to her and he’s got this policy that’s worth about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They weren’t divorced, and he hadn’t changed his will or his policy, so it all goes to her.”
“So she didn’t have any reason to make too much of a stink about us being involved,” I said.
“It clears the palate some,” Marvin said. “It gets attention away from her, and it’s just another unsolved murder. And there’s all that money. Maybe not as much as he would have had a few years back, but it’s more than starter change.”
“You think she had him hit?” I said.
“It happens,” he said, “but if so, why hire us in the first place?”
“It made Henry look like a bad man and it made us look like someone who might have put him down, and it confused the situation. It doesn’t seem to take much confusion to mess a jury up these days. If she could plant in people’s mind that he was dangerous, any sympathy there might be for him could be negated.”
“You sound like you’re holding something back, Hap,” Marvin said. “It’s not what you’re saying, but I know your tone well enough to know there’s something missing here.”
“Not really,” I said. “I was going to get around to telling you. Maybe, like you, I was holding it back for dramatic effect. I meant to tell you earlier, but I wanted to think about things first. Unslerod, you remember him?”
“The guy that got beat up by Henry,” Marvin said.
“He’s dead, and a woman who was with him is dead too.”
“Shit.”
“I haven’t called about it. I figured they weren’t going to get any deader. Maybe stinkier, but not deader.”