Dirty White Boys (27 page)

On the day it happened, he returned home and found her with a friend. Eventually the friend left, and she came downstairs and mixed herself a drink, still beautiful at sixty-one, and asked him how the newspaperman had liked the exhibition.

“Uh,” said Richard, aching with dread, “Mother, he didn’t show.”

“He what?”

“He didn’t show. Mother, I don’t know what happened, maybe he got lost.”

“Richard, I have over four thousand dollars invested in that exhibition! What do you mean, he didn’t show?”

He stood there, thirty years old, quavering like a child. He hated her almost as much as he hated himself.

“Call him,” she said.

“I did. He wasn’t there.”

“Call him
again.”

“Mother.”

“Call him, Richard, call him
now
. You silly little fool. You cannot let people simply
walk
on you. It’s why you always end up with nothing and why I always have to bail you out. I pay for everything, Richard. You get everything for free.”

He made the call.

The man was there.

“Uh, Mr. Peed, sorry, I told you I’d come by if I could. But the art critic thing is only part of my job; I also have to read all the Sunday feature copy and we got a little behind and I just couldn’t make it. It’s not
The New York Times
, you know. It’s just the
Daily Oklahoman.”

He hung up.

“Call him again,” his mother said.

He was never sure, not then, not in the immediate aftermath, not in the months of meditation, why it happened the way it did when it happened. Why that day, that minute? It could have been any other day, any other minute.

It was the maid who called the police.

He tried to make them see, he wasn’t trying to
blind
her. He was really trying to kill her. But the knife was short—it was a butter knife, quite blunt—and somehow she had
proven so much stronger than he thought; she’d gotten down beneath him so he couldn’t reach her heart. After the first pitiful blow, she’d sort of curled up, so he had to unpeel her, but she was very strong. The only place he could stab her was the face. The eyes? Well, the eyes
are
on the face, aren’t they? It wasn’t his fault.

Richard suddenly broke the surface of the water. He was way out in the river. The trees were hurtling by. It was much lighter.

A flood of sweet oxygen poured into his lungs. He smiled, but the water sucked him down again.

Richard yielded to death.

It embraced him and he embraced it. He felt its strong arms pull him in, smother him. There was no pain at all, only a persistent tugging that broke through the numbness in his body. He had a last dream of Lamar, of all things: pitiful, crude, powerful, violent Lamar. Odd that he should think of Lamar here at the end.

Lamar had him up on the surface. Richard choked on air.

“Calm down, goddammit, Richard,” screamed Lamar, “don’t fight me.”

He was upside down in somebody’s strong arms. The sky was bright and blue, the clouds rushed by. A helicopter should have come, but it didn’t. Nothing came. The roaring had ceased. He felt as if he were in one of the swimming pools of his boyhood and wanted to spit a gurgle of water to see if he could make Mother laugh.

He felt the ground, and in his exhaustion looked up to see that Odell had him and was pulling him ashore.

Lamar came out of the rushing red water a second later, beautiful in the gray dawn, soaked and muscular, his hair wet, his denim clothes plastered to him, his face grave with effort and pain.

He smiled at Richard.

“You are a peck of trouble, Richard, I swear.”

“C’mon, boys,” said Ruta Beth. “Let’s git before goddamned Johnny Cop shows.”

N
o one knew how to run a crime scene anymore, the old man lamented. It was stunning they got any evidence at all these days. These sloppy damn kids, rough and eager as untrained young dogs. No one had even erected a windbreak.

“Can’t you do a little something about the breeze, son?” he gently corrected. A young OSBI agent began to look around for something out of which to construct a barrier to prevent more wind erosion, but he was so clumsy in his efforts, C.D. worried that he’d do more harm than good.

The old man hawked a gob of phlegm out of his dry old throat and squatted in the dust. The wind whipped through the scrub oaks and, two hundred yards away, the angry red torrent of the river surged along toward Arkansas. It was high this time of year, full of the melted snows of the winter, and treacherous; other times of the year, it’d dry to a trickle. Had Lamar calculated on that, too? Was he
that
smart?

“It could be nothing,” said a young Ranger captain named Tippahoe, offered up by the great state of Texas as his opposite number.

“It could be our goddamn break,” said Lt. Henderson.

“I musta run a thousand tire tracks and I ain’t come up with diddly, ’less it’s to tie a specific vehicle to a specific location. Don’t know what good the goddamned track is without the vehicle.”

“Well, son, maybe you’re right and maybe you ain’t. Believe I’ll just play the hand out, as it’s the only one the Good Lord deemed fit to deal me.” He turned from the obstreperous Texas Ranger to a foolish-looking young Oklahoma highway patrolman lurking nearby with a walkie-talkie. “You got any word yet on those evidence technicians?”

“Sir, they’s coming. Tied up in traffic outside of Oklahoma City.”

“They can’t chopper ’em in?”

“Sir, all the choppers tied up in trauma delivery.”

“Okay, tell you what. You tell them Lieutenant Henderson says to call Colonel McClutcheon, the operations officer of the Four Hundred and First Aviation Battalion at Fort Sill. See if he can free up a Huey and get those boys in here before the glaciers arrive from Canada. Colonel Robert M. McClutcheon. He owes me a thing or two.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll
tell
’em, but—”

“That’s all, son.”

The small party was standing under a gloomy sky in the wasteland of scrub and low vegetation that was part of the Red River basin, on the Oklahoma side. A half mile or so away, on the Texas side, a Texas policeman had located a stolen Volvo in a ditch. This discovery had led to another: a stolen Camaro, once white, now painted orange and covered in a camouflaged tarpaulin. They were currently being dusted for prints by Ranger technicians, but C.D. knew what the prints would show: These were the various getaway vehicles stolen by Lamar Pye and his crew members.
There might be a print of the fourth member of the gang, but C.D. doubted it. Lamar was too smart.

But those discoveries, in turn, had yielded this tiny little scrap of hope on the Oklahoma riverbank. Here, in the dirt, a very, very good track off still another vehicle. C.D. appreciated the orderly way Lamar’s mind had worked, how cleverly he’d planned it out, stashing the legal vehicle at the end of the train of stolen ones so that as they made their final fallback to their hideout, they’d do so in a car that couldn’t, of itself, attract attention and whose plates would run legal if checked. Such a smart boy.

C.D. turned and made as if to mosey off just a bit in search of new evidence. But of course he slipped the brown paper bag from his left inside pocket, unscrewed the lid, and took a fast swig. I. W. Harper, seven years old, like the smoke off a prairie fire. He went to wooziness, then came back out, feeling calmer and more in charge. He screwed the lid back on, lightly, and slipped the pint into his pocket.

He turned back and had that odd feeling that everyone had been staring at him but had just that second looked away so as not to embarrass him. Everyone, that is, except for young Captain Tippahoe, whose face was knitted up with contempt and impatience.

And where were you, Tippahoe, when I shot it out with Luke Sweetwater and Indian Joe Brown in 1957? Where were you when I took six inches of blade in the stomach from crazy Sally Pogue and only saved my life with a .45 fired as she was getting up to my throat? What about the time I faced down two hundred citizens of Gem City and saved the lives of two innocent nigger brothers that I
knew
hadn’t raped Mrs. McLintock in 1966? Where were you, Tippahoe?

But Tippahoe didn’t know and wouldn’t care. He just
stepped back, took off his hat, and ran his hand through expensively trimmed hair and acted vaguely superior.

C.D. looked down at the little trace of ridges and grooves in the dust. It seemed to lose a bit of its distinction even as he watched, as a gust of wind took another quarter inch off the top.

Where are them damn boys
, he wondered. He wouldn’t let the Rangers do it. He only trusted his own OSBI team. He wanted another drink.

“I hope it lasts,” said Tippahoe. “And I hope it ain’t a goddamned wild goose chase. We sure don’t do things like this in Texas. What you gonna do, Lieutenant, track down all the cars in Oklahoma?”

“Oh, I may have a card or two up my old sleeve,” said C.D. and hawked another gob of phlegm into the wind.

He looked back at the track in the dust, which seemed to lose another millimeter of distinction. Was it the second piece of evidence, he wondered?

The agent sent to build the windbreak was now struggling with sticks and a blanket. It looked hopeless.

Come on, boys
, he thought.
Come on
.

“Lieutenant?”

“Yes, son?”

“They’re telling me the army’s going to detail a chopper to pick your team up in Oklahoma City.”

“Well, praise the Lord and pass the bourbon, son.”

Bud was changing the oil on his truck when Jen came out and told him the colonel was on the phone. It was Tuesday afternoon, about two. He’d gotten back from Wichita Falls the night before last, not even bothering to call Holly.

Then he had slept late, had had bad nightmares, awakening in a foul mood, no good to man or beast, wife, son, or
girlfriend. He had laid low the whole day, grouchy and forlorn, like an old cougar in its cave.

Now he was trying to make himself something human again.

He wiped Valvoline off his hands and went in the house.

“Sir?”

“Bud, I figure if you’re well enough to go bouncing out to Wichita Falls on your lonesome, you might be well enough to do some real work. Am I right?”

“Yes, you are.”

“No uniform necessary, Bud. You can go in plainclothes. I’d carry, though.”

“I always carry, Colonel.”

“You use your truck. Write the mileage, we’ll reimburse.”

“Got it.”

The colonel then explained what had happened.

Around ten yesterday morning, two Rangers had discovered the abandoned Camaro and the Volvo that Lamar had stolen on the Texas side of the Red River. A print team lifted some good latents, which were quickly made as Lamar, Odell, and Richard’s. Also discovered was a hundred yards of green No. 7 rigger’s rope, which could have been bought in any hardware store between Dallas-Ft. Worth and Oklahoma City. It had been stretched across the river. The team had evidently used it to get across.

“Don’t that beat all, Bud? That Lamar, he’s a goddamned genius. We got the bridges covered and helicopters with infrared, and he
still
beats us. Bud, he’s smarter than that even. The shell that was ejected from the shotgun that killed that lady probation officer? There was a print on it. Lamar’s! He loaded his buddy’s gun, because he knew we already had his prints!”

“He’s a goddamned smart boy, all right,” said Bud, wondering where he fit into the operation.

“Well, maybe Lamar done slipped up just a bit,” said the colonel. “On our side of the river, we found tracks of the car they had stashed to take them out of there. Old C. D. Henderson threw a goddamned red-ass tantrum and got them to make a cast. We faxed the tread to the FBI and we got a make just like that: It’s the pattern for a Goodyear 5400-B, a low-end nonreinforced radial made entirely for Japanese cars with sixty-inch wheelbases and six-inch tire wells. Goddamn if that old drunken coot didn’t hit a jackpot. Only three varieties of car can wear it—your Hyundai Excel, your Toyota Tercel, and your Nissan Sentra, from the years 1991 on. Moreover, two of the companies changed their design last year. So it can only be three model years of the Hyundais and the Toyotas and four model years of the Sentras. The last getaway job’s got to be one of those, you follow?”

“Got you,” said Bud.

“We shook out about forty-two hundred cars registered in South Oklahoma that can wear that set of tires, Bud. About two hundred of them are registered to people with felony convictions. We’re fixin’ to raid on them, just to be sure, because C.D. is dang sure they’ll run to kind.”

“I could—”

“No, Bud. Your raid days are over. We’re going door-to-door on the other four thousand. It’s going to take a heap of manhours, Bud. It ain’t the glory route, that’s for sure. I got five other ex-detectives and retired patrolmen working the job. You get the address, you find the car, you lookiesee the tires and if you get the right set of tires on the right car, you call in the license number and we see what we shake out. Maybe we stake out, maybe we raid, depending. Bud, you
can imagine, there’s a lot of goddamned public pressure on this one. That’s why we’re working so damned hard.”

“Yes sir.”

The colonel told him the Joint States Task Force was headquartered at the old City Hall Annex near the police station in downtown Lawton, where he’d show up to get his list, and Bud said he’d leave right away. The colonel said he appreciated it, but he knew he could count on Bud.

“Oh, and Bud?”

“Yes sir?”

“That other matter?”

Bud didn’t say a thing.

“Bud, you still there?”

“Yes sir.”

“That other matter. That’s in hand, ain’t it, Bud? Ain’t going to be no big scandal, a heroic patrol officer caught in a love nest with his partner’s widow, nothing like that?”

“No sir,” Bud said.

“Good. Knowed I could count on you, Bud.”

Bud went back outside. He tossed the empty oil bottles and the used filter into the trash can, and poured the used oil into a couple of Zerex containers. Then he picked up the two Craftsman wrenches he’d used and tossed them onto the clutter of his workbench. He felt a flash of shame: he could find time to sneak away and fuck Holly a couple of times a week, but he couldn’t take time to clean up after himself at home.