In the Blood (12 page)

“I expect I do.”

“He come a-roarin’ in here the first couple nights on that damn Harley, gunnin’ the engine outside my window so I couldn’t hear the tee-vee from two feet away. The third day I heard him coming and put my forty-five in my belt…I got a permit, you wanna see?”

“I’ll take your word, sir.”

“I jammed that hogleg in my pants and headed to the door. Bailes pulled up under my window. The sound was like a goddamn train wreck that kept going. When I stepped outside he put a finger in one nosehole and cleared out the other one on
the ground. He gave me a shit-eating grin with that lopsided face and said, ‘Loud enough for you, Pops?’”

“Your reply, sir?” I asked, knowing it was going to be the highlight of my day.

“I pulled that pistol out and said, ‘Almost as loud as your screamin’s gonna be when I blow a hole through your leg and into the crankcase.’”

“Bailes’s response, sir?”

“From that day on he cut the engine when he got close, glided up between the trailers.” The old sailor shook his head. “Gutless little pissant.”

“Gutless?” Harry said as we climbed back into the car. “Bailes creeps into a guarded hospital, fights a duel with a security guard, tries to hop out a window when cornered? Nuts, maybe. But not gutless.”

The computer in the car beeped and displayed an address. I shielded my eyes against the sun and studied. “Bailes’s mother, current surname Teasdale,” I said. “I’ll go tell mama her baby boy is gone. You want me to drop you off first?”

Given that Harry had fired the fatal shot, I didn’t know if he’d want to be there when I informed Bailes’s mama. He’d stay in the car, of course, but it’d still be an uncomfortable nearness.

Harry considered my offer for a couple of beats. “Thanks for the thought, bro. But I’ll be fine in the car. I’ll call the hospital for the latest on Noelle.”

“That’ll do the job, I suppose.”

Mrs Bailes/Teasdale lived in a scrofulous bungalow along a drainage canal. Vehicle carcasses
lined the street, waiting for repairs the owners could never afford. The yard was dirt and weeds. A silver GMC pickup sat in the drive, tool chest in the bed, not generally a lady’s kind of vehicle.

I waited for a pair of motorcycles to roar down the street, knocked again. For a split-second I noticed a strange sensation, like my knocking made a kettledrum sound. I looked around, making sure no one was playing a big drum nearby, but nothing. I knocked harder, but the drum effect was gone.

“Who the hell is it?” a male voice barked from inside.

I held my ID to the window on the door, saw the curtain slide, eyes inspect. The door opened to a big muscular guy in his early forties, with sunbronze skin and a Fabio-style hairdo. The guy pulled a red crushed-velvet bathrobe around him, hair still wet. The bathrobe was probably an XX-Large and seemed to fit just right. I didn’t like him on general principles.

“Sorry to disturb you,” I said. “Does LaVernia Teasedale live here?”

He began swinging the door shut. “Never heard the name before.”

I put up my hand to stop the door. “Records show she pays utilities on this house. If Miz Teasdale is here, I need to speak to her. If she’s not, I’ll be back.”

“What would a cop want with LaVernia?” the hulk growled. His biceps rippled like fluid stone.

“That’s between me and her.”

“She ain’t here. I dunno when she’ll be back. Maybe next week.” He tried the door-close again, I did the one-finger doorstop. I looked across the room, saw the ashtray and pretty much knew by the smell what I’d find. I slipped under the guy’s arm and across the floor.

“Hey!” he barked.

“Wrong,” I said, holding up the half-smoked joint plucked from the ashtray. “Not hay, sport. Grass.”

“Aw fuck,” he said. “You gotta be kidding. An’ I ain’t never seen it before anyway.”

I pocketed the doob. The house was dark, curtains drawn. I saw discount furniture in the living room, a couple of porno mags on the couch. I heard giggling in a back room, female. It sounded like a voice on the phone.

“
Didja like it?”
the voice asked. “
Was it all in focus
?”

I could see into the dining room. Instead of a table and chairs, there was a king-size mattress on the floor, a couple pillows. A movie camera was tripoded in the corner. There was a still camera on a table. In the opposing corner a black tripod held a floodlight, also angled down at the bed. Wires ran from equipment to a laptop computer on a low stool near the bed.

The guy saw where I was looking. “Now what? You got a problem with people making home movies?”

I’ve never been opposed to sexuality. I’ve
celebrated it with gusto when time and companion are right. And I don’t give a tinker’s damn what anyone does in the privacy of their home. But the keyword is
private
and beaming intimacies out over the internet for the entertainment of thousands of viewers seemed to defeat the word “intimate”. Plus, given the appearances of most who mingled body parts for viewing, the programs were an affront to aesthetics as well.

“Here’s the way it is, star,” I said, tiring of the repartee. “Either get Miz Teasdale, or tell me where I can find her. Elsewise you are gonna find your ass in jail.”

He sneered. “My lawyer will pop me in ten seconds.”

“Indeed, star,” I agreed. “And I’ll happily put your ass in there for free. But your lawyer will charge five hundred bucks to get it out.”

He started to say some smart-ass thing. I was about fed up with star-boy. I waggled a
no-no
finger with my right hand, said, “Get the lady.”

He scowled but folded, looking to the back of the house. “Vernia!”

“What?”

“A guy wants to talk to you. Some cop.”

A door opened in a back room; bedroom, I assumed. A petite teenaged girl stepped into the shadowed hall wearing a white blouse and short plaid skirt, the kind of dress worn by parochial schoolgirls. She had on blue knee socks and patent-leather loafers. I was about to turn and bust
bathrobe boy for statutory rape when the girl stepped into the living-room’s light.

I saw her youth was a façade of make-up, a lie of cosmetology. Squint and she was fourteen, open your eyes and she was forty-something. The effect was freakish, like a mummy with ten coats of pink paint, or something from a Ray Bradbury sideshow.

“I ain’t done nothing wrong,” the girl protested. Her whisky-soaked voice was three hundred years older than her appearance and suggested she’d done plenty wrong, but was pretty sure I wasn’t currently catching her at it.

“LaVernia Teasdale?” I asked, still spooked by the carnival face. “Formerly Bailes?”

“It was Bailes for four fuckin’ months. That was twenny-something years ago. Whadya want?”

“You’re Terry Lee’s Bailes’s mother?”

She lit a cigarette and let the smoke drift from her nose as she talked. “I ain’t seen that chickenshit kid in forever. Two years, mebbe.”

“How long did he live with you?” I figured there wasn’t much to be gleaned here, information-wise, but I tried for a bit of background before I laid the ugly news on her.

She shrugged. “’Til he was fifteen, sixteen? He kept running off, nothing I could do. So one day I just didn’t call the cops to look for him any more.”

“That was the last time you heard from him?” I asked.

She shrugged. “He calls mebbe once a year. He gets his ass in jail for some pissy-ass thing and calls me whining for bail money.”

“You ever give him any?” I asked.

“I don’t steal the shit. Why should I pay his bail?” She grinned. “Terry Lee still got a face like a squished basketball?”

The casualness of her words roiled my stomach. I breathed down anger and let a few seconds pass.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, ma’am,” I said, “but your boy’s dead.”

A look of mild confusion. “You mean like…dead?”

“Yes, that’s the dead I mean.”

She frowned at the news. Stubbed the cigarette dead in the ashtray.

“What am I s’posed to do now?”

“You might ask how he died,” I suggested, feeling my jaw muscles clench. “Or grieve. Or pray for his soul.”

None of my proposals seemed appealing. She looked to Fabio Hair for a second opinion. “What am I s’posed to do, Sweets?”

“Sweets” looked at me, a frown of concern on his broad face. He stepped close for a man-to-man conference. “This thing with Terry Lee,” he asked. “It gonna cost her anything to deal with?”

“He was over twenty-one,” I said, hearing drumbeat thunder in my head. “There’s no paternal obligation, legally. If the State drops Terry Lee into an unmarked hole, it won’t cost a penny. But she
might consider a small service, something to honor his life.”

Vernia Teasdale nee Bailes was eavesdropping.

“I ain’t got money for no fancy services and shit,” she brayed. “I got a tough life.”

The drumming in my head ramped into a roar, like an overloaded dynamo. From beside me the coffee table launched from the floor into the smelly little room to the side, taking out the camera and the lights and causing sparks to pop from a junction box on the floor.

The action seemed in slow motion. I remember a lot of yelling, but by the time I walked out, Mrs Teasdale and Sweets were nicely quiet.

When I got in the car Harry looked between me and the house.

“You OK, Cars? You’re kind of red in the face.”

“It was warm in there.”

He raised a curious eyebrow. “But everything went fine, right?”

“Hunky-dory, bro. How ‘bout we get a move on?”

Harry seemed deep in thought for a few miles, now and then shooting me a glance, as if uncertain about something. He took a deep breath, blew it out, sounding like he was changing gears in his head.

“You hear anything from the Dauphin Island cops on their part in the Noelle case?” he said. “Have they gotten anything from Briscoe?”

“I talked to Jimmy Gentry yesterday. He said Briscoe was all promises, but hadn’t really checked on anything like the ownership of the burned-down house.”

“Racist bastard,” Harry muttered. “How about you check, Carson? Briscoe ain’t gonna do squat for me.”

I sighed, picked up the phone, got the deskman, asked for Sheriff Briscoe. A gruff male voice answered like the mouth was at home watching TV and eating pizza and not in a supposedly professional law-enforcement agency.

“Yeah, what?”

“Briscoe?”

“Speaking. And it’s Sheriff Briscoe.”

“This is Carson Ryder. And it’s Detective Ryder. I’m calling about –”

“I know what you’re calling about, Deee-tective. We ain’t got nothing on harpoon man.”

“Nothing?”

“Like in zero. You ever have one of those cases has nothing to grab hold of? That’s this one. No one lived close to that place, no one heard anything, no one saw any fire. I’m about to close the books.”

“It’s only been a few days since –”

“The place was probably used as a meth lab. Some meth head got pissed at another, jammed a spear in his belly. Still had enough brains left to burn the place down ’fore he ran off. I gotta go. I got work to do.”

“Let someone else sort the mail, Briscoe. I need ten seconds of your twenty-second attention span.”

“What the hell are you –”

“Two things, Briscoe. One, the forensics lab found no residue of the chemicals used to make methedrine, and two, harpoons aren’t used to make meth either. A man was killed in that shack and, like you said, you’re the sheriff. Maybe you recall from your oath of office that the title comes with some expectations.”

The phone clicked dead. I sighed, dialed the county property evaluator’s office. The owner would be listed in tax records, a no-brainer. The woman
who answered was one of those personality-free, efficient types I love, answering my question within thirty seconds.

“The residence was owned for fifteen years by a Lewis Johnson. It sold twelve years back for twenty thousand dollars to a…to a…Oh my, I’d better spell it for you.”

I started to take down the name – and kept taking down the name – hoping the lead in my pencil lasted.

“Chakrabandhu Sintapiratpattanasai?”

Harry attempted to pronounce the name, no way of knowing if he was even close. He’d pulled over and parked, the better to devote his attention to the name.

I shrugged. “For all I know about Thai, it’s pronounced Chuck Smith.”

“Male or female?”

“I’ll assume male. Records show that CS bought the place a dozen years back, which dovetails with the upsurgence in Thai shrimp fishermen moving into the area.”

“Address? Phone?”

“No listed address. Phone disconnected five years back.”

“Probably switched to a cell and stiffed the phone company.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “A name we can’t pronounce, a phone we can’t call, an address that ain’t listed.”

“It’s an immigrant community,” Harry mused. “Extremely close-knit, I expect, the protection of the tribe. We have to assume that somewhere in the area is a Thai who has knowledge of his kinsman’s – CS’s – whereabouts.”

“So where from here, Mr Anthropology?” I asked.

“Let’s go to lunch and see if we can dig up some family Thais.” He grinned at me, the first time in days he’d looked happy about anything but Noelle. “Pun intended.”

We ended up at a tiny Thai restaurant and grocery in Harry’s neighborhood. We’d eaten there a few times, always a delicious experience. We sat in the eight-table dining area, the walls green and embellished with posters of Thai temples. Paper lanterns gave a soft light. The room was fragrant with garlic and ginger and chilis. The owner, a man in his early sixties, came out to meet us. Harry pulled him aside and spoke for a few minutes, and the man gave a half-bow and returned to the kitchen.

“Well?” I asked.

Harry said, “Mr Srisai thinks he speaks English worse than he does. He’s calling someone who might help us. It’ll be a few minutes.”

We ordered pad Thai and pad see yew, trading halfsies. Harry doused his with nam pla, I went heavy on the chili paste. We ate and watched visitors to the adjoining grocery select from a variety of vegetables that were unfamiliar to me, save for
ropy knots of ginger and fragrant sprays of cilantro. I saw a blue beamer pull from the street to the rear of the restaurant. I listened for the back door and heard it through the potwash din of the kitchen.