Prime Suspect

by A. W. Gray

  So anytime he was watching TV and the news was about to come on, Everett changed the channel. He had it down to a science. It had been a little harder in the joint because one of the perverts might put up a bitch, but in the joint the back of Everett’s hand, or the threat of having Everett’s strange-looking cock shoved down their throats, had pretty much kept the perverts in line. In the cellblock, Everett Thomas Wilson had ruled the day room.

  Here in his own apartment, all he had to do was turn the channel selector. Click-click, no more grinning nigger or faggy-looking white guy. Just as the nine-to-ten network program was winding down and was about to show five minutes’ worth of commercials, Everett would get up from the sofa and switch to Channel Eleven. Channel Eleven was an independent, showing fifteen minutes’ worth of news from nine-forty-five until ten and then coming on at the hour with Benny Hill. Everett didn’t really think that Benny Hill was very funny, kind of a fat British guy who did a lot of slapstick, but Benny Hill damn sure beat the news and had a lot of big-titted women on his program.

  But on this particular night when the network came on with the commercials, Everett’s mind was someplace else. He was picturing the girl and the soccer ball—Christ, but that bitch had had an ass on her—and he stared off into space through the Miller Lite, Cadillac, and Eveready ads. By the time Everett snapped to, the ten o’clock news was already on the air. He lumbered over to the set to switch to Benny Hill, but once there froze with his hand on the channel selector.

  He heard one word that caught his attention: “Hardin.” Everett backed quickly away in order to see the picture, a kind-of-pretty nigger girl giving a five-second preview of what was coming on the news. “Major suspect” was the second phrase that Everett caught; a major suspect in the Hardin murder. He left the channel selector alone and retreated to the couch, a stumpy hairy-chested man with arms hanging to his knees, barefoot and wearing only a pair of Bermuda shorts, moving across the dirty hardwood floor, flopping down finally on the sofa cushions, picking up a bag of Cheetos from the end table and stuffing a fistful from the bag into his mouth. He chewed, crunching the salty Cheetos with crooked teeth and washing them down with Coke, and watched the news.

  Which for the first twenty minutes was a lot of bullshit, more pictures of George Bush playing golf and more pictures of wimpy hostages bawling at the camera. So much bullshit, in fact, that three different times Everett got up from the sofa and nearly switched over to Benny Hill. But each time he did, the anchorperson would come on with another teaser, saying that in a few minutes they were going to show the suspect in the Hardin murder, so Everett would retreat to the sofa and put up with the bullshit.

  Finally, there it was, a shot of downtown Fort Worth with an Assistant District Attorney (who looked like a fat little prick just like every other prosecutor Everett had seen) giving an interview on the sidewalk. Then the scene cut to the sidewalk outside the entrance to an office building, showing a guy with a weightlifter’s build, clad in jeans and T-shirt, coming down the street with one arm around a Mexican broad.

  Everett’s eyes narrowed. His jaw froze with his mouth open, and crumbs of soggy Cheeto dropped from his lips and stuck to his chin. Jesus, this steady-eyed dude on television looked like somebody you might not want to fuck with, arms ridged with muscle, solid chest, and strong nimble legs like a middleweight fighter. Everett watched as though hypnotized, watched as Lackey Ferguson strode purposefully away from his girl and grabbed the cop by the tie, then shoved the cop head over heels into the gutter. One tough son of a bitch, this guy might be. The picture on the TV screen cut quickly to a full-length shot of the tough guy, stern-eyed gaze on the camera, as he paused long enough to open a car door for the chili-pepper girl and put her in the front seat. There was a closeup of the girl, tears streaming down her cheeks as she got in the car. Then the news segment ended. The program continued.

  The sports guy was next, giving the baseball scores, but Everett was no longer paying attention. His gaze was frozen on the spot on the screen where, seconds ago, the girl’s image had been, the closeup of her soft pretty features, dark eyes and long curved lashes. She’d been crying.

  It was as though something had taken control of Everett’s body. His hand dropped into his lap and his eyes glazed. In seconds he was pulling feverishly at his crotch. His eyes closed passionately and he moaned.

  9

  One time when Lackey Ferguson had been stationed in Germany, a young corporal in the outfit had lost his mother. For some reason the boy’s relatives hadn’t gotten through to him on the phone, and the kid had learned of his mother’s death by mail. On the night the letter had come, Lackey and the corporal had gone into Wiesbaden. There they’d found an isolated tavern where the two of them had been the only customers who had spoken English and had drunk pitchers of dark beer until three or four in the morning. Around two o’clock, the corporal had broken down. Lackey had sat there at the rough wooden table and listened to the boy’s sobs and would have given anything to have been able to ease the pain that the kid must have felt. It had been a totally helpless feeling, and was the same feeling that Lackey had now, seated in his pickup in front of Nancy’s apartment house at midnight, cradling her in his arms while she cried against his shoulder.

  “Maybe it would,” Lackey said, then swallowed a lump in his throat and said, “Maybe it would be better if you didn’t see me any more till this is over. We could tell people that you don’t want to go around with a guy that’s, you know, under suspicion or whatever they’re saying.” The stereo was on low volume and Lackey had switched from country and western to an easy-listening station; the song now playing was “French Foreign Legion,” an old, old oldie by Frank Sinatra. Forty yards from the pickup, across a lawn of mowed Bermuda grass and two sidewalks, a single bulb glowed above the steps leading to Nancy’s place. A block away, the lights on Loop 820 made a faint illumination on the horizon, and, heard through the pickup’s open window, distant freeway traffic rumbled.

  Nancy moved slightly away from him and tilted her head, looking up with her face illuminated in the glow from the overhead streetlamp. Her lashes were stuck together in a row of dark wet points. “If that’s what you want,” she said softly. “If that’s, God, if that’s what you . . .” She buried her face in the hollow of his shoulder and cried even harder, her shoulders heaving, her breath coming in brief gasps.

  He spread his hand and laid his open palm against the back of her head, feeling the unsprayed softness of her hair. “Hey. Hey, you know better than that. It’s just that your job, those lawyers aren’t going to want anything like this. Those guys aren’t going to like you being on television a bit.”

  “To hell with them,” Nancy said, her voice muffled against him, using the tame English cussword, about the only cussword other than “damn” that Lackey had ever heard from her. “If they don’t like it, I’ll go to Whattaburger or somewhere,” Nancy said. “That’s silly, you talking like that.” She backed away once more, sniffling, her despair shifting into a determined thoughtfulness. “They found her in her bedroom. Were you in there?”

  “Jesus Christ, Nancy.”

  She placed four fingers over his lips, shut her eyes tightly and shook her head. “We don’t have time to be dumb, either one of us. You’re a man and all—if I have to, I can live with it. They do some criminal defense work down at the office, you know. We’re talking about evidence. Now. Were you?” Her gaze was steady, no hint of jealousy in her look, just a very interested and very smart girl looking for information. Sometimes when they were goofing off, it was easy for Lackey to forget just how smart Nancy was.

  “I went in that house twice,” Lackey said. “Once with her and her husband, that was in the parlor. Then I went to the bank and came back. The second time it was just me and her. We went through this big den, you ought to see that room, we went through this big den into the kitchen. I went out the same way.” He was really glad that he hadn’t fooled around with Marissa Hardin, really gla
d now because he knew that under the circumstances he wouldn’t have been able to lie to Nancy about it.

  “Think very hard,” Nancy said. “What did you touch?”

  “She gave me a milkshake.”

  Her eyes twinkled suddenly in the moonlight. “Chocolate or vanilla?”

  “There wasn’t any milk. Nancy—”

  “Hush. A sense of humor is important right now. What was it exactly?”

  “A health kick, it was orange juice and an egg, I think. She whipped it up in a blender and I remember it tasted like an Orange Julius.”

  She scooted away from him on the seat, drew up one leg and sat on her ankle. A foot of tensed thigh showed below the hem of her skirt. “So you handled a glass. That means they’ll have a fingerprint. What else happened?”

  “You already know she wrote me out a check.”

  “That’s right. And you cashed it, they’ll try and make a big deal over that. Like you knew you had to run to the bank with the check because you knew she was dead.”

  He ground his knuckles into the palm of his hand. “I can’t understand why they didn’t put me in jail. If I was them . . .” Lackey wondered briefly how long the helpless feeling was going to last.

  “They don’t have to. You’re not going anywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re following you. Just try and leave town and see how far you get. Downtown today, did they take any samples from you?”

  He studied the top of the steering wheel. “I guess you have to know about that.”

  “Me or your lawyer. Or both, we’d better talk about retaining one,” Nancy said. Nervous as he was, Lackey didn’t miss Nancy’s use of “we.” Nancy and Lackey, in it together.

  “I can’t afford one of those guys,” Lackey said. “Unless I used the fifteen thousand. Then they’d probably get me for stealing the money.”

  “What tests?” Nancy said.

  “Well. Well, they took a hair.”

  “From your head?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Down there, huh?” Nancy said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then whoever it was must have raped her. Did they take semen?” She blinked clinically, this girl around whom Lackey was careful not to say “shit” or anything.

  “Aw, Nancy,” he said.

  “We’re getting married, Lackey. And we’ve been to bed together. Come on, did they take semen?”

  “Yeah.”

  She folded her arms and pertly nodded her head. “That’s good.”

  “That’s funny, I didn’t think it was so hot.”

  “That’s the reason they didn’t arrest you, dope.” She pronounced dope more like “dop,” with just a trace of a Hispanic accent. “They’ve got your fingerprint on a glass in the kitchen and the canceled check from the bank,” she said, “but without a match on the semen and the pubic hair they can’t place you in the bedroom. I’ll bet they have a comparison the first thing in the morning, and if there’s even a hint of a match you’ll be in the county before noon. Mr. Brantley defended a guy on a rape charge and they let him walk around loose for three days before they picked him up.”

  He brightened slightly, getting her drift, getting into the swing of trying to figure out what evidence the D.A. might have. “She entered that check in her book,” he said.

  She cocked her head. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Her ledger, she subtracted it, I remember she looked around for a calculator and then did it in her head. I mean, if I was standing there saying, write me a check or I’ll kill you, something like that, would she take the time to do that?”

  “It’s a thought,” Nancy said, pinching her chin. “But they’d just say you waited until she’d written the check before you started to get rough with her.”

  “Oh,” Lackey said.

  “No, it all comes down to the samples. It doesn’t mean they’ll leave you alone if they don’t get a match, but they won’t arrest you until they can get more evidence. Or invent more, whatever.”

  “Well, I—”

  Lackey stopped in midsentence, jumped slightly as headlights shone in his rearview mirror. The car approached from behind them, coming down the dark street at a pretty good clip, then pulled suddenly to the curb and screeched to a halt with its nose close to Lackey’s bumper. The car’s lights stayed on. Its doors opened and slammed shut. Jesus, Lackey thought, are they coming for me already? Nancy gasped, turned to peer fearfully through the rear window. In the beam of the headlights, her pupils shrank instantly into twin pencil points.

  “Stay,” Lackey said, drawing a breath. “Stay put, hon.” His knees slightly rubbery, hearing in his mind the metallic rasp of handcuffs as they closed around his wrists, he got out of the pickup and walked to the rear.

  He’d gone about halfway, had come abreast of the pickup’s bed, when he stopped and squinted at the car’s headlights. One of the lights shone brightly while the other was dim and flickering. The car badly needed a tuneup; its hood vibrated as the engine missed. Visible between the headlamps was a rocket-shaped hood ornament; the car was an Olds, fifty-nine or sixty. What the hell? Lackey thought, that isn’t any cop car. What in. . . ?

  Alvin Cuellar came past the nose of the Oldsmobile, approached with his square shoulders outlined in the glow of the headlights. He stopped a few feet away and said, “Ho, Lackey Ferguson.”

  Herman Cuellar came around the rear of the pickup to stand shoulder to shoulder with his nephew. Alvin was Nancy’s older brother and had been a year ahead of Lackey in school; Herman had been full-grown when Lackey had been a kid, and had operated his own auto repair business for twenty years or so. Herman was maybe forty-five. Even could have been fifty, Lackey wasn’t sure. But Herman still did all of the heavy engine work himself, and was in pretty good shape regardless of his age. Lackey leaned against the side of the pickup and said, “Hey. What’s goin’ on?”

  “Now you and me always got along,” Alvin said, holding up a hand palm out. “So I tell you the same thing I tole my mama. We don’t want no chit, let’s get that straight.” He was a couple of inches taller than his uncle, the top of his head on a level with the bridge of Lackey’s nose. Alvin was on the angular side where Herman had beefy shoulders and a thick chest. Both men wore plain white T-shirts and faded jeans.

  “That’s what I tell my sister, Nancy’s mama, too,” Herman said. “I don’t want no chit wid anybody. So how „bout you, Lackey? You want any chit?”

  “Course not,” Lackey said.

  “That’s good,” Alvin said. “Nobody wants no chit wid nobody. We all in agreement, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Lackey said. “I don’t want any shit, you don’t want any shit. So like I said, what’s goin’ on?” Alvin had been a pretty good dash man in high school, but wasn’t doing any working out right now. His slightly protruding gut told Lackey that much. Lackey figured he could take either of the two alone. Both at once, he doubted it. Besides, he didn’t want that. Nancy had enough problems with her family as it was.

  “But if chit come along,” Alvin said, “don’t nobody going to run from it. Mama seen the news tonight. You got my little sister’s picture on the television, huh?”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” Lackey said. “And I’ve done nothing, I don’t care what you—”

  “We ain’t saying you did,” Herman said. “And chit like that ain’t nothing the Lackey we know going to fuck with. But that ain’t helping Nancy’s mama none, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Lackey said. “I guess I do.”

  “We awful proud of my sister,” Alvin said. “And she didn’t go through no college so some dude could get her on no ten p.m. crime news, you know what I mean?”

  “I don’t want her on any crime report, either,” Lackey said. “But that’s something I can’t do anything about. Not right now.”

  “So what we’re saying is,” Alvin said, “that maybe you ought to leave my sister be till you can get this chit straightened out. What
you think?”

  Lackey opened his mouth to answer, then closed it. Nancy was suddenly at his side, her hands on her hips, the scent of her perfume in Lackey’s nostrils, Nancy slim and pretty, the legal secretary in high heels and business dress facing off against two guys in T-shirts. “No necessito mi familia,” Nancy said. “Por que tu estas aqui?” Lackey didn’t have any idea what she was saying, but the defiant tilt to her chin was enough.

  Alvin dropped his gaze to the asphalt and answered her in Spanish, and then Nancy took a step closer to her brother and said something in Spanish as well. Then Herman said something, also in Spanish, and Nancy cut him off in midsentence with a few choice words of her own. Lackey caught “pindejo” and tried to remember what Ronnie Ferias had told him that meant in English, and at the same time he wondered why Nancy didn’t mind cussing at her own family but wouldn’t cuss at her fiancée. Must have something to do with them all growing up in the same house together. Whatever she was telling them it was putting them in their place, both Herman and Alvin were looking sheepishly down at their shoes.

  Finally Nancy stepped close to Lackey, put her arm through his and hugged him to her. “He’s my man, hermano y tio,” Nancy said. “And pretty soon he’s going to be my husband and part of your family. Anybody that can’t live with that needs to go find themselves another relative. You understand what I’m telling you?”

  10

  At seven-thirty on Wednesday morning, Oscar Ferguson set his coffee cup into the saucer with a soft glassy clink. “The trouble is that the service manager’s afraid to get that white coat dirty. I used to get right down into the engine with the mechanic and show the guy what was wrong with his car. That’s what my customers wanted, and now I’m a customer it’s what I want, too. Show me somebody that’ll do that, and that’s the guy that’s getting my business.” There were deep creases around his nose and eyes, his skin like leather from spending time in the sunlight, showing a tan the color of stained oak even though the hot season had just begun. Oscar mowed the yard three times a week, and by August he’d be hard to distinguish at a distance from one of the Mexicans. When Lackey had been a kid his dad had mowed on Sundays only, which had been his only day off from Hudiberg Chevrolet’s service department.