by Robert Crais
I went through everything that had happened since I’d last seen her, up to where René and LeRoy brought me to Milt’s farm. I had arranged the papers with the state documents on top, so she saw those first. As I spoke, a vertical frown line appeared between her eyebrows and she no longer looked happy and relaxed. She said, “These are real. These are court-sealed documents. How could he get these?”
“I don’t know.”
“Illegally possessing these is a felony under state law. They’re numbered and referenced, and I can have their authenticity checked, but these are real. These papers do in fact show that Jodi Taylor was born Marla Johnson. I can’t believe he has these.”
“Had.”
Ben came in to tell us that the coals were ready to be fired and Lucy went outside to make sure he did it safely. I sat at the counter with my wine, watching them, and found myself smiling. Ben struck the big safety matches and tossed them on the coals while Lucy supervised. They looked comfortable and at ease with each other, and you could see Lucy in his features and in the confident way he carried himself. Reflections. When the flames were rising and the grill was in place, Lucy returned and smiled at me smiling at her. She said, “What?”
“You guys look good together. Happy. I like that.”
She turned and looked at her son. He had left the grill and was climbing into a pecan tree. A knotted rope hung from the limbs, just like the tree in the front yard, but he didn’t use the rope. She said, “You seem to have passed the test.”
“What test?”
“He’s leaving us alone. He’s very protective of me.”
“Does he have to guard you often?”
She looked smug. “Often enough, thank you.” She took two plates from the Sub-Zero, one with hamburger patties and the other with sliced onions and tomatoes and lettuce, both covered with Saran Wrap, and put them out to warm. She returned to the file, now skimming Rebenack’s handwritten notes. “Who’s Leon Williams?”
“I don’t know, but you can tell from what’s written that these are the notes Rebenack made when he was digging into Jodi’s past, so Williams might be significant.”
Lucy made a note on the legal pad. “I’ve got a friend at the Baton Rouge Police Department. I’ll see if they have anything.”
“Okay. Here’s where it gets worse.” I showed her Jimmie Ray’s phone bills. I pointed out the long distance calls. “Do you recognize these phone numbers?”
She shook her head. “They’re calls to Los Angeles.”
“This is Sid. This is Jodi. Rebenack had at least seven conversations with Sid Markowitz over the past five months.”
Lucy didn’t move for a very long time, and then she left the kitchen. She came back a few minutes later with a leather datebook jammed with notes and papers and business cards. She opened it to a phone index and compared the numbers she found there with the numbers on the phone bill. She shook her head. “Sid never mentioned this to me.”
“Nor to me.” I pointed out the longest call. “Three days after this call Rebenack deposited thirty thousand dollars into a checking account. He used the money to buy a car.”
“Do you think he’s blackmailing them?”
“He admitted it.” I told her about Jimmie Ray and Milt and Luther.
“But blackmail doesn’t make sense. Jodi’s never kept her adoption a secret, and even if she had, so what? What could he blackmail them with?”
I spread my hands. “I guess that’s what we still have to figure out, and it doesn’t end with Jimmie Ray Rebenack. Milt has something going on, too, and I’m also guessing that it involves the Boudreauxs. That’s why the sheriff was out at the crawfish farm. That’s why the Boudreauxs are scared.”
Lucy brought her address book to the kitchen phone and stabbed in a number. She puffed out her cheeks and blew a hiss of breath while she waited. “This is Lucille Chenier calling for Mr. Markowitz. May I speak with him please?” She walked with the phone in a small circle. “You must have him call me as soon as possible. It’s urgent. Let me give you my home number.” She left the number, then hung up and went through it again with Jodi Taylor. No luck there, either.
I said, “I phoned them, too. They haven’t gotten back to me.”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe they didn’t tell us. We’ve got an Evangeline Parish sheriff involved with a convicted felon and possible blackmail, and no one tells us. Were we hired to uncover information that was already known?”
“Looks that way.”
She took off her glasses, rubbed at her eyes, then assembled the papers and put them aside. “Enough work, Mr. Cole. More wine.”
She held out her glass, and I poured.
When the coals were ready we brought out the burgers and put them on the grill. They hissed nicely, and soon the silky twilight air was filled with the smell of cooking meat. She had mixed ground sirloin with Worcestershire sauce, and it smelled wonderful. Somewhere a dog barked, and cicadas were making their buzz-saw racket. Ben was still in the tree, hanging upside-down. Lucy called, “Ben, it won’t be long. Wash your hands.”
Ben dropped out of the tree, but didn’t go in. “Can I have a cheeseburger?”
Lucy nodded. “Sure. Elvis?”
“You bet.”
She handed me the spatula and went in for the cheese. When she was gone I looked at Ben and caught him grinning at me. I said, “What?”
“She likes you.”
“She does?”
He nodded. “I heard her talking to her friend, Marsha. She called you Studly Do-Right.” He giggled.
I looked in at his mother and then I looked back at the hamburgers. “She probably wouldn’t like it that you told me.”
“Why not?”
“Women tell other women things that they don’t tell men. It’s a law they have.”
He giggled some more.
Lucy came back and put cheese on the hamburgers, then covered the grill so that the cheese would melt. Ben and I stood with straight faces until Ben couldn’t stand it anymore and giggled. I concentrated on the burgers, hoping that they wouldn’t overcook. Ben giggled harder. Lucy said, “What?”
I said, “Nothing.” Ben giggled harder.
Lucy smiled. “Hey! What were you guys saying?”
Ben giggled louder and I looked at Lucy. “Studly?”
Lucy turned a deep rich red. “Ben!”
Ben howled. I said, “It wasn’t Ben. I am Elvis Cole, the world’s greatest detective. I know all and see all, and there can be no secrets from the All-Seeing Eye.”
Lucy said, “I hate you both.”
Ben put out his hand and I gave him a low-five. Masculine superiority strikes again.
Lucy said, “Benjamin. Wash.”
Ben ran into the house, cackling, and Lucy shook her head. “That little traitor.”
I said, “Studly.”
She waved the spatula at me. “I was just being cute. Don’t get any ideas.”
“I won’t.”
“Fine.”
“But what do I do with the ones I’ve got?”
She closed her eyes, maybe envisioning the line we shouldn’t cross. “You’re really quite something, aren’t you?”
“Most people think so.”
She opened her eyes and looked at the sky. “Oh, God.”
“Well, no. But close.”
Lucy laughed, and I laughed, too.
When the cheese was melted we brought the burgers inside and ate them with the potato salad and cole slaw and the rest of the Sonoma-Cutre. Ben ate quickly, then asked to be excused and raced to the TV so that he could watch Star Trek—The Next Generation. Lucy called after him, “Not too loud!”
I said, “Won’t bother me. I like Star Trek.”
Ben yelled, “Cool!”
Lucy shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Oh, Studly.” She tilted her glass toward me. “Pour.”
So we watched TNG. It was the one where you follow the android, Data, through a twenty-four-hour pe
riod in his life, most of which is spent attempting to comprehend the vagaries of the humans around him. The fun comes in watching the logical, emotionless Data try to make sense of the human condition, which is akin to trying to make sense of the senseless. He never quite gets it, but he always keeps trying, writing endless programs for his android brain, trying to make the calculus of human behavior add up. When you think about it, that is not so different from what I do.
When Star Trek was over I said that I had better be going. I told Ben good night, and Lucy walked me out. I thought that she’d stop at the door, but she didn’t. It was a clear night, and pleasant. She said, “Will you drive back to Ville Platte tonight?”
“Yes. There are still plenty of questions and Jimmie Ray might be willing to answer them.”
She nodded. “Okay. I’ll call you there tomorrow as soon as I have something.”
“Great.” A man and a woman and an Akita walked past. The Akita was a big brindle pinto, and watched me suspiciously as his people nodded hello. I said, “Good-looking dog.”
The man said, “Thanks.”
Lucy and I stood silently until they were gone, vanishing gently in the humid dark.
We looked at each other. “This is the second time you’ve fed me. Thanks again.”
“It’s an ugly job, but somebody’s gotta do it.”
We both grinned. I said, “Oh, man. Dueling comedians.”
She looked at me carefully and said, “I have a good time with you.”
I nodded. “Me, too.”
Then she said, “Oh, damn.” She leaned forward, kissed me, then pulled away. “I’ve just kissed a man who ate dog. Yuck.”
She ran back into her house.
I guess there are lines, but sometimes lines bend.
13
The night canopy above the Atchafalaya Basin was velvet black as I drove through the sugar cane and the sweet potato fields and the living earth back to Ville Platte. A woman I had known for approximately four days had given me what was maybe the world’s shortest kiss, and I could not stop smiling about it. A lawyer, no less.
I folded up the grin and put it away and rolled down the window and breathed. Come to your senses, Cole. The air was warm and rich and alive with the smells of water and loam soil and blossoming plants. The sky was a cascade of stars. I started singing. I stopped singing and glanced in the mirror. Smiling, again. I let the smile stay and drove on. To hell with senses.
When I got back to Ville Platte there was a message from Jimmie Ray on the motel’s voice mail system, his voice tight and sounding scared. “This is Jimmie Ray Rebenack and you really put me in a world of hurt, podnuh.” You could hear him breathing into the phone. The breathing was strained. “It’s twenty after six right now, and I need to talk to ya. I’m at home.” He said the number and hung up.
It was now ten fifty-two, and there were no other messages in the voice mail.
I dialed his number and got a busy signal. I took off my shirt, then went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. I dialed his number again and again got a busy signal. I dialed his office, got his answering machine, and hung up without leaving a message. I redialed his home. Busy. I called the operator. “I need an emergency break-in.”
“Number, please?”
I gave her the number. She went away for a little bit and then she came back. “I’m sorry, sir, but that number seems to be off the hook.”
“He’s not on the line?”
“No, sir. The phone’s probably just off the hook. It happens all the time.”
I put my shirt back on and drove once more to Jimmie Ray’s house. A couple of houses on his street were still bright with life, but most of the street was dark and still. Jimmie Ray’s Mustang was parked at the curb in a dapple of moonshadows, and the front upstairs window of his duplex was lighted. The bedroom. Probably with a woman. They had probably been thrashing around and had knocked the phone out of its cradle. I left my car on the street, went to his front door, and rang the bell. I could hear the buzzer go off inside, but that was it. No giggles. No people scrambling for their clothes. I rang the bell twice more, then went around the side of the house and let myself in through the back exactly as I had twelve hours ago.
The ground floor was dark, and the kitchen still smelled of fried food, but now there was a sharp, ugly smell beneath it. I moved across the kitchen and stood in the darkness, listening. Light from the upstairs filtered down the stairwell and put a faint yellow glow in Jimmie Ray Rebenack’s bachelor-pad living room. I said, “Oh, Jimmie. You goof.”
The imitation zebra skin couch was tipped over on its back and Jimmie Ray Rebenack was lying across it, head down and arms out, Joey Buttafucco boots pointing toward the ceiling. The living room phone had been knocked off its hook when the couch went over. I took out the Dan Wesson, held it along my thigh, and went past Jimmie Ray to the stairs and listened again. Nothing. I went back to Jimmie Ray and looked without touching him. His neck was bent at a profound and unnatural angle, as if the vertebrae there had been separated by some tremendous force. His neck didn’t get that way by tripping over the couch or by falling down the stairs. It took a car wreck to do that to a neck. Or a four-story fall. His face was dark with lividity, and the big, stiff pompadour was crushed and matted on one side, the way it might be if someone with large hands had grabbed his head and pushed very hard to make the neck fail. René.
I went upstairs and looked in the two rooms, but everything was pretty much as it had been twelve hours ago, the magazines and posters still in their places in the back room, the bed still rumpled in the front room. The pants he had worn at Rossier’s crawfish farm were soaking in the upstairs lavatory. Getting out the pee stains. The front bedroom’s light was on, and the room showed no evidence of a search or other invasion. No one had come to search. No one had come to steal. Whoever had been here had come only to murder Jimmie Ray Rebenack, and they had probably done it not so very long after he’d called me. Maybe Jimmie Ray had finally realized that he was in over his head and had called for help. That was possible. A lot of things are possible until you’re dead.
The message counter on Jimmie Ray’s answering machine showed three messages. The first was a young woman who did not identify herself and who said that she missed Jimmie Ray and wanted to speak with him. The second message was from a guy named Phil who wanted to know if Jimmie Ray would like to pick up a couple of days’ mechanic work. Phil left a number and said he needed to hear by Friday. The third message was the young woman again, only this time she sounded irritated. She said she thought that Jimmie Ray was rotten for not calling her, but then her voice softened and said she really did wish he’d call because she really, really missed him. She whispered, “I love you, Jimmie,” and then she hung up. There were no other messages. So long, Jimmie Ray.
I left the upstairs light on and the rooms as I’d found them and Jimmie Ray Rebenack’s body in its frozen position across the overturned couch. I wiped the kitchen doorknob and the places on the jamb I might have touched, and then I let myself out and went around to the front porch and wiped the doorbell button. I called the police from a pay phone outside a Winn-Dixie supermarket. I gave them Jimmie Ray’s address twice, then said that there was a body on the premises. I hung up, wiped the phone, and went back to the motel where I called Lucy Chenier. Two hours ago I’d been feeling pretty good about things.
Lucy answered on the second ring, her voice clear the way it might be if she were awake and working. I said, “Rebenack’s been murdered.”
“Oh, Jesus God. How?”
“I think it was Rossier, but I can’t be sure. I think he paid off Jimmie for the double-dealing.”
She blew a loud breath. “Did you call the police?”
“Yes, but I didn’t identify myself.”
“They’ll want to speak with you.”
“If I talk with them I’ll bring in Jodi Taylor, and I don’t want to do that. Do you see?”
She said, “
Oh, my God.”
“Do you see?”
It took her a few seconds to answer. “I understand. What are you going to do?”
“Wait for you to find out about Leon Williams.”
She paused again. “Are you all right, Elvis?”
“Sure.”
“You sound upset.”
“I’m fine.”
“If you want to talk, I’m here.”
“I know. Call me when you find out about Leon Williams.”
We hung up, and in that moment my little motel room there in Ville Platte, Louisiana, became more empty than any room I have ever known. There were the sounds of crickets and frogs and the rumble of a passing truck, but the sounds seemed to heighten the emptiness rather than fill it. The cheap motel furniture stood out in a kind of stark clarity, as if everything were magnified through some great invisible lens, and the emptiness became oppressive.
I turned off the light and went out into the parking lot and breathed the warm air. I had come two thousand miles believing that I had been hired to uncover a woman’s medical history, and now a man was dead. He was a goof and an extortionist, but somewhere near his final moment a young woman had called and said that she loved him. I wondered if he had played back the message. Jimmie Ray Rebenack was just the kind of guy who would have missed the message, or, if he’d heard it, wouldn’t have listened. Guys like Jimmie Ray never quite learn that love doesn’t visit often, and that even when it comes, it can always change its mind and walk away. You never know.
I went back inside and double-locked the door and wedged one of the flimsy motel chairs under the knob. The locks and the chair wouldn’t keep out a guy like René, but there was always the Dan Wesson.
I lay on the bed and tried to sleep, but sleep, like love, is not always there when you want it.
14
The phone in my room rang at 9:14 the next morning as I stepped out of the shower. I had been up early, eating breakfast at the diner across from what used to be Jimmie Ray’s office and waiting for the morning paper. A couple of police cars had been outside the fish market, but when the paper came there was nothing in it about Jimmie Ray’s murder. Not enough lead time, I guess. When I answered the phone, Lucy Chenier said, “I spoke with my friend at BRPD.”
