White Hot (19 page)

Chris gave Beck an arch look. “You’re noticing my wardrobe now? Have you gone queer on me?” Then he laughed. “No, you haven’t gone queer. Given the way your tongue was mating with Sayre’s tonsils.”

Beck refused to be diverted. “I remember what you were wearing because when I got to your house, I was on the verge of melting. The back of my shirt was damp, just from the short drive over. I noticed the difference in us. You looked like you’d stepped out of a bandbox. You had just cleaned up, hadn’t you?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It’ll make a difference if Selma is put on the witness stand and has to testify under oath what she found, or didn’t find, in your clothes hamper between Saturday afternoon after you left for Breaux Bridge and Sunday afternoon. She’ll have to testify that you took a shower in the vicinity of three o’clock, after Danny was shot in the head sometime between one and two-thirty.” Beck looked at him hard. “Did you leave the house on Sunday?”

Chris stared at Beck with an unwavering gaze, then relented with a drawn-out sigh. He raised his hands in surrender. “Guilty.”

Beck felt a weight as solid as an anchor land against his chest, but he tried to keep his anxiety under control and his voice even. “Where did you go, Chris? And why did you have to shower and change clothes shortly before I got to the house?”

“Remember that nasty incriminating evidence on Monica Lewinsky’s dress?” He spread his hands wide and grinned. “Caught without a condom. Can you believe it? At my age. I had to pull out before I came.”

“Who were you with?”

“Lila. I knew George was playing golf with Huff. So I went over to her place for some afternoon delight.”

“For chrissake, why didn’t you tell me this? When you were first questioned about how you spent your Sunday afternoon, why didn’t you say you were with someone? Lila is your alibi.”

“That’ll go over real well with the sheriff.”

It took Beck a moment to connect the dots; then he groaned, “Oh, shit.”

“Right. Lila is Red’s sister’s daughter. I couldn’t have been killing my brother because I was going down on our sheriff’s niece. I’d rather avoid telling him that, although right now I’m not feeling too kindly toward him.”

“If you’re forced to produce an alibi, can we count on her to back you up?”

“I’d rather not involve her,” Chris said with a slight wince. “Besides being Red’s niece, I don’t know that she would jeopardize her marriage to George by owning up to an affair. She makes fun of him constantly, but he’s spoiled her rotten, buys her anything she wants. He’s besotted, and as long as she puts out occasionally it’s an arrangement that makes them both happy. She would probably lie to protect that feather bed she’s made for herself.”

“You were with her for two hours?”

“Well, I wasn’t watching the clock, but that sounds about right.”

“Did anybody see you at their house?”

“We take great pains to prevent that.”

“All right. We’ll hold Lila in abeyance, to be used only if absolutely necessary.”

“It won’t be necessary,” Chris said. “They’ve got nothing but circumstantial evidence. I know from experience, having been falsely accused of murder before, that that isn’t enough.”

“This time is different, Chris. This time they’ve got a body.”

“Right. The body. I try not to think about that. I’m glad that Red could identify Danny, instead of one of us having to. But you saw the inside of the cabin. It was a mess, wasn’t it?”

“That’s why they wanted to see your clothing. The shooter would have been spattered with—”

“Beck, enough. Okay?”

“Don’t get queasy yet. If it goes to trial, they’ll show crime scene photos.”

“It won’t go to trial. Or if it does, it won’t be
my
trial.”

They were quiet for a while and let the last chorus of—and this was ironically chilling to Beck—“Jailhouse Rock” play out. Chris finished his drink, then out of nowhere asked, “Have you fucked Sayre yet?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Look at the man’s expression. Surprise. Innocence. Righteous indignation. Why, the idea never entered his mind.” He laughed. “Have you?”

“You’ve got more than that to worry about,” Beck said tightly.

“I’m not the only one who has noticed some electricity there. Huff remarked on it, too.”

“There is no ‘it.’ ”

“Hm. I guess the steam rising off the two of you there in your kitchen was due to the barometric pressure.”

Beck gave him a baleful look.

“If it’s not you that’s keeping her here, then what is?” Chris persisted. “She hates Destiny and everybody in it, especially if his name is Hoyle.”

Beck didn’t tell him that Sayre suspected him of killing their younger brother. Surely that would bother Chris as much as it bothered him. He was also concerned about what Sayre might do to try to prove herself right. She wasn’t easily intimidated, and just from the short time he’d known her, it had become evident to him that once she set her mind on something, she was damned and determined to see it through.

“Your dick is your business,” Chris said.

“Thank you.”

“But I’d be less than a friend if I didn’t offer you a word of caution. Sayre is—”

“Look, don’t go there. All right?”

Chris shot him a wry grin. “Beck, my friend, you took the words right out of my mouth.”

I
t was hot.

That was one thing you could say about coastal Mississippi in the summertime, and the summer of 1945 was no exception. It was so hot that even grasshoppers died of heatstroke. Tomatoes ripened and burst open on their vines before they could be picked.

Although one time, when Huff and his daddy were really hungry, they’d gathered up some busted tomatoes from off the ground of somebody’s garden, dusted the dirt and ants off them, and ate them for supper.

Huff was eight years old that summer. Everybody you met was carrying on about the victory over the Germans. Whipping the Japs was only a matter of time. There were parades in the streets of nearly every town they traveled through. People waved flags, not the usual Stars and Bars, but the U.S. flag.

Huff didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. The war hadn’t affected him and his daddy much. His daddy hadn’t been in the armed services. Huff didn’t know why that was, because most men his daddy’s age wore a uniform of one sort or another. Passenger trains were packed full of soldiers and sailors, and on one occasion he and his daddy shared a freight car with two black men in uniform. Huff hadn’t liked that. His daddy hadn’t either, and ordinarily he would have told them to get the hell out and find themselves another freight car. But his daddy had said it was all right this once because those boys were fighting for their country.

If the Army would take niggers, Huff couldn’t understand why they hadn’t wanted his daddy. He figured it was because of him. What would have happened to him if his daddy had been sent away to kill Nazis and Japs? They moved around so much, never living in any one place for long, that maybe the Army didn’t even know his daddy’s name. Or maybe the Army was just like everybody else—they flat didn’t want his daddy, thinking him no’ccount, or dimwitted, rather than just poor and uneducated.

His daddy had lived through the Great Depression. Huff wasn’t sure what that was, but he knew it was bad. His daddy had tried to explain it, and from what he said, Huff gathered that the Depression had been like a war, because it affected the whole country, but the enemy had been poverty. His daddy’s family had lost that war.

But they’d always been poor. That was why his daddy didn’t have but three years of schooling. He’d had to work in cotton fields alongside his own daddy, and sometimes even his ma. “Her hands a-bleedin’ and with a baby or two hanging on her tit,” he would say, looking downcast.

His daddy’s folks were dead now, like Huff’s own mother. When Huff asked what had killed them, his daddy had said, “Being poor, I reckon.”

That summer of ’45, jobs were even harder to come by because so many soldiers were returning from the war, looking for work. There wasn’t enough to go around. So it was like a miracle when Mr. J. D. Humphrey hired his daddy to work in an auto salvage yard.

It was hot, dirty work, but his daddy was grateful for the job and put his back to it. When somebody came to J. D. Humphrey’s place looking for a spare part for an early model car, his daddy would forage through acres of junked autos until he found what the customer needed.

At the end of every day, he’d be covered with filth, smeared with grease, bleeding from mean scratches made by rusty metal, his muscles aching from pulling motors from stubborn chassis. But he was so glad to have steady work, he never complained.

Huff hung around the junkyard with him. He was small for his age and shy about talking to anybody except his daddy. He would be allowed to do odd jobs, like fetching a needed tool from the shed or stacking retread tires. Mr. J. D. Humphrey even gave him a cast-off inner tube that had been patched so many times it wasn’t worth anything. He played with it in the dusty yard while his daddy worked from sunup to sundown every day except Sunday.

His daddy told him that if things kept up, he might be able to go to school when it commenced in the fall. He was a little late starting, his daddy told him, but he was sure he could catch up to the other kids in no time.

Huff couldn’t wait to go to school like other boys. Many times, he’d watched them from a distance as they laughed and horsed around in the school yard, tossing a ball to each other or chasing girls who squealed and giggled and wore ribbons in their hair.

That summer their home was an abandoned shack. The folks who had lived there before had left a lot of trash behind, but also a cotton mattress on the floor and a few pieces of rickety furniture. He and his daddy kicked the varmints out and moved in.

The night that changed Huff’s life forever was typically hot, but even more humid than usual. Sweat didn’t evaporate but rolled along your skin, leaving muddy trails until it finally dripped off, landing in the dust and making damp little craters like first raindrops. It was hard to take a deep breath because the air was so thick and oppressive. On their walk home from the junkyard, his daddy had remarked on how hot and still it was and predicted a storm before morning.

They had just sat down to eat their evening meal of cold bacon, corn bread, and wild plums that they’d picked from trees along the road when they heard a car approaching the shack.

No one ever came to visit them, so who could it be?

Huff’s heart clenched up like a fist, and he had to push down a swallow of dry corn bread. It must be the owner of the shack, wanting to know just what the hell they were doing in his house, sleeping on his mattress, eating off his three-legged table. He would kick them out, and they wouldn’t have a place to stay anymore.

What if they couldn’t find another place to live before school started the Tuesday after Labor Day? Huff had been living for the Tuesday after Labor Day. His daddy had marked it for him on the calendar with the picture of the naked lady that hung in Mr. J. D. Humphrey’s office. That was when he could join the rest of the kids on the school playground and maybe learn to play their games.

His heart in his throat, Huff joined his daddy at the empty window frame and saw a shiny black-and-white car with a red light on top of it. Sitting inside the car with the lawman was Mr. J. D. Humphrey. But he wasn’t smiling like he’d been when he’d given Huff the inner tube. And when they got out and headed toward the shack, the peace officer was smacking a billy club against his hard, wide palm.

His daddy told Huff to stay inside and went out to greet the visitors. “Evenin’, Mr. Humphrey.”

“I don’t want any trouble from you.”

“Sir?”

“Hand it over.”

“Hand what over, Mr. Humphrey?”

“Don’t play dumb with us, boy,” the lawman barked. “J.D. knows you took it.”

“I didn’t take nothing.”

“That cigar box, where I keep all the cash?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, it’s gone missing. Now who else coulda taken it?”

“I don’t know, sir, but it wasn’t me.”

“You dumb piece o’ white trash, you think I believe that?”

Huff peered over the window ledge. Mr. Humphrey’s face had turned real red. The law officer was smiling, but he sure didn’t look very friendly. He passed his billy club to Mr. Humphrey. “Maybe this’ll put some smarts into him.”

“Mr. Humphrey, I—”

That was all his daddy had a chance to say before Mr. Humphrey struck him with the club. It caught his daddy on the shoulder and must have hurt something terrible because he went down on one knee. “I swear, I wouldn’t steal—”

Mr. Humphrey hit him again, this time in the head, and it sounded like an ax splitting a stick of firewood lengthwise. His daddy keeled over onto the ground. He lay real still and didn’t make a sound.

Huff stood rooted to his spot at the window. He was breathing hard, with disbelief, with terror.

“Jesus, J.D., you whacked him right good.” The lawman chuckled, bending down over his daddy.

“That’ll teach him to steal from me.”

“Won’t teach him nothing.” The lawman straightened up and withdrew a handkerchief from his back pocket. He used it to wipe blood off his fingers. “He’s dead.”

“You shittin’ me?”

“Dead as a hammer.”

Mr. Humphrey hefted the club as though weighing it. “Has this thing got an iron rod in it?”

“Good for nigger-knocking.” The lawman nudged Huff’s daddy with the toe of his boot. “What was his name?”

Mr. J. D. Humphrey told him. But he didn’t get the name quite right. “He was just a white trash drifter. You try and do the Christian thing, give a down-and-outer a helping hand, and he winds up biting it.”

“Ain’t that the gospel truth?” The lawman shook his head over the sorrow of it. “Well, I’ll get the undertaker out here tomorrow. I guess the county’ll have to pay for the burial.”

“I heard the medical school up to the university can always use spare cadavers.”

“There’s a thought.”

“I reckon he stashed your money somewhere inside this rathole.”

The two entered the shack and spotted Huff hunkered down beneath the window, cowering against the wall that was insulated with old editions of the Biloxi newspaper. “Oh, hell. Forgot about his boy.”

The lawman tilted back his hat, propped his hands on his hips, and frowned down at Huff. “Scrawny little puke, ain’t he?”

“Trailed his sorry daddy everywhere. Ask me, I think he’s a bit backward.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know his real name,” Mr. J. D. Humphrey replied. “All’s I ever heard his daddy call him was Huff.”

“Huff?”

“Huff?”

Eventually he realized that his name wasn’t coming to him from out of that hot evening in the summer of 1945.

He suffered the inexpressible sense of loss that he always did upon emerging from this recurring dream. He was always glad to dream it because it was like having a visit with his daddy. But it never ended happily. When he woke up, his daddy was always dead and he was left alone.

He opened his eyes. Chris and Beck were standing on either side of his hospital bed. Chris smiled. “Welcome back. You were in la-la land.”

Embarrassed by the soundness of his slumber and the sentimentality his dream always conjured, Huff sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Just catching a little catnap.”

“Catnap?” Chris said, laughing. “You were practically comatose. I didn’t think we were going to wake you up. You were talking in your sleep, too. Saying something about not getting a name right. What were you dreaming?”

“Damned if I remember,” he grumbled.

“We came to help you get ready for your trip home,” Beck said, “but obviously we’re too late to be of much use.”

He’d been up and dressed since before daylight. He’d never been one to lie about in bed, and being in the hospital hadn’t changed that habit. “I’m ready to get out of here.”

“We’re past ready to see you go.” Dr. Caroe breezed in, his lab coat snapping like a sail behind him. “The staff has had their fill of your foul disposition.”

“Then sign me out. I’m already late for work.”

“Don’t even think about it, Huff. You’re going home,” the doctor said.

“I’m needed at the foundry.”

“You need more rest before you resume normal activity.”

“Bullshit. I’ve been doing nothing but laying on my ass for two days.”

Eventually they compromised. He would go home today and rest, and if he was feeling well enough tomorrow, he could return to work for a few hours, gradually building back up to his previous schedule. This quarrel was all part of the grand charade, of course, performed for the benefit of Beck and Chris.

Caroe, the son of a bitch, was making like Al Pacino in the role of caring physician. He would give Huff the green light on returning to work when Huff gave him the greenbacks for helping him convincingly fake a heart attack.

The dismissal paperwork put a huge strain on his patience, as did having to leave the building in a wheelchair. By the time they finally got him home, he was in a high snit.

“He’s meaner than a snake,” Chris said to Selma. “Beware.”

Unmindful of the warning, she fluttered around Huff, settled him into the den with a glass of iced tea and a lap blanket, which he threw off, bellowing, “I’m not a goddamn invalid and it’s ninety fucking degrees outside! If you want to be working here tomorrow, don’t ever tuck me into this chair with a blanket!”

“I’m not deaf so you don’t have to yell. And mind your tongue, too.” With characteristic aplomb, she picked up the blanket and re-folded it. “What do you want for lunch?”

“Fried chicken.”

“Well you’re having grilled fish and steamed vegetables.” That was her parting shot as she left the room, soundly closing the door behind her.

“Selma’s the only one who can get away with talking back to you,” Chris said from across the room. He was throwing darts, but with a notable lack of inspiration.

Beck was seated on the sofa, one ankle propped on the opposite knee, arms stretched along the back cushion.

Huff put a match to his second cigarette since leaving the hospital. “You’re doing a damn lousy job of it.”

“Damn lousy job of what?” Beck asked.

“Pretending that you don’t have a care in the world.” Fanning out the match, he said, “Drop the playacting and tell me what’s going on.”

“Dr. Caroe told you not to smoke.”