Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery

by T. Blake Braddy

  People were probably too afraid to enforce it.

  "You don't mean that. You're practically a workaholic, for Chrissakes."

  He smiled. "No, no I don't. And yes. Yes, I am." He referenced a small rip in the neckline of his t-shirt with a disarming wink. Somebody had obviously gotten the worst end of that deal. "When your job's as fun as mine, you don't hit the snooze button."

  "That good, huh?"

  It was an answer he always had ready, whenever he got the question about his work. "Oh, it's a job. Has its slow days. Has its bad days. But for the most part, it's good work. Don't have the same day twice, that's for sure."

  He took a sidelong glance down the length of the bar and turned his gaze back to me. "Fact is, I've pulled in about a quarter of the people here."

  Louis lined five beers up on the bar and flicked off their tops with a practices flick of his bottle opener. Good bartender. Quiet guy, nonjudgmental. He served each man, as he always did, with a curt nod and servile grin, and the old bearded men, in chambray work shirts and dirty jeans, orange with Georgia clay or spotted black with oil stains, turned back to their conversations with a kind of desperate energy.

  I went ahead and paid for Deuce’s second round. He’d had a rough day, but he didn’t mind that. He didn't have to work very hard to be good at his job. A couple years on the D-Line for the Saints afforded him the kind of leisure at his job most nine-to-fivers dream about, both financially and physically. He wasn’t an asshole or a bully because he didn’t have to be. He was bigger than most men by half, but it was also just his natural disposition.

  Guys he dealt with now, though, don't fear big guys. They'd been hardened by the gutters of this world and tried to find weakness in a man’s size. Didn't matter. I'd once seen Deuce drag two lifers in on their court dates, both men sweating and dazed but otherwise all right. He wasn't mean but he was hard-nosed and didn't shy away from violence.

  I made friends with Deuce freshman year of high school, before he had scouts breathing down his neck. One of my only true friends in this world.

  Maybe the only one.

  SportsCenter was playing on the old tube set above the bar, and we watched basketball highlights for a minute before Deuce said, "The world spinnin' the opposite way? I haven't heard from you in a while."

  He was avoiding the television, all of the scores. The spreads. The over-unders. Sometimes, he didn’t care to look at SportsCenter at all. Sometimes, I covered his drinks. Hey, man, I got a spending problem this week. Not often, but those nights tended to be the ones where we stared into our glasses and didn’t say much.

  "Cooped up. Stomping patterns into the floors at my house. You know the deal. After the whole thing with you-know-what, I keep a low profile."

  "And, what, stumbling onto dead men is the way to remake your image? Hey, can we change this," he called to Louis down at the other end of the bar. "I fucking hate SportsCenter."

  This wasn’t one of his weeks, apparently.

  We lingered for a while, just concentrating on the way the end of a day feels. I finished my first beer and immediately anticipated the second. Drinking is only half the thrill of drinking. Having a full glass on the bar or in your hand, waiting on the next sip, is the other half.

  It's comforting. You drink when there is a drink in front of you, and you spend the moments in between in anticipation. After a while, they all taste bland and you relish only in the coldness or of the comfort they provide in conversation.

  Louis changed the television to a non-sports station, Seinfeld re-runs, and he turned to us for approval. One set of dudes turned in our direction, looking bent up about the channel change, but they quickly turned back to their conversation when they saw us. Or Deuce.

  We stared at the screen, pretending to watch. Most everybody else could give a shit about the television, even if half of them were staring at it.

  "What you gonna do, Rol?" he asked. "Can't be a cop anymore. Lotta things they can forget down here, but what you did’s not one of them."

  "Same as you when you decided not to play football anymore. I'll get along. I reckon I'll work on cars. Build some custom furniture, maybe. I got two good hands on me."

  "When they're not shaking."

  I held one up in my defense. "Steady as a board."

  Deuce nodded at my beer. His eyes were full of friendly contempt. "And what do you think causes that?"

  "The stress of life." I laughed. "Finding dead bodies. Running into ladies when you're drunk. That sort of thing."

  I sat there, twirled the beer on the counter, mulled over how to say it. Finally, I just did. "Deuce," I said, "I think maybe this whole thing with this dead guy is bigger than just a bump and dump, more than just a couple of white boys torturing some guy 'cause he was black."

  He raised an eyebrow. "And your proof?"

  I told him, starting with waking up hungover and going over to the Boogie House, omitting, of course, the bit about the flashing lights and music. I took him right on up to this afternoon, with the diesel truck pulling up outside Brickmeyer's mansion. I tried to make sense of the offhand comments about the Hoover Dam and the concrete in his pool, but he didn't care about that.

  "Any word on that license yet?"

  "None whatsoever."

  "Do you know of a connection between the dead kid and Brickmeyer? This guy didn't catch him going with a hooker or burning some kind of legal document, did he?"

  "God, I kind of hope so. But no, nothing right now. Just speculation. Brickmeyer's acting weird."

  "He doesn't like for anyone to assume he's anything but the Second Coming. It's a kind of complex rich kids have. Leland Brickmeyer doesn't look like he's been in the deep end of the family's gene pool, but he's not stupid. The old man gave him a crash course in how to be a major league fuckwad, and now the old man's dead, so Leland doesn't have the guidance to keep him from slipping off the tracks."

  "Normally," I said, "in these cases, the politician's banging a groupie of some kind, or hiding some kind of racketeering charge."

  "Racketeering?"

  "Something like that. It's usually something illegal and something awful, something worth covering up, and in this day and age, a scandal that can't stick doesn't ruin a politician's career. Think of Clinton and Bush. They avoided scandal after scandal, because they managed to discredit the charges being leveled against them."

  "And you think that's what's happening here?"

  "Of course I do. It's why I'm framming the hive with a stick. I want to see what happens when the bees come out pissed and ready to sting."

  "Uh-huh," Deuce said. He tilted back his bottle and killed the last of his drink. Another one appeared moments later. Louis nodded and then went off to go fiddle with an unopened bottle of Maker's Mark. “And what if you’re framming the wrong hive?”

  “I’m good with hunches,” I said, a half-assed defense.

  “You know this town,” he replied. “Know how people act here. We’re not so far from the times when federal agents had to escort black kids into school. It can’t be that impossible to imagine someone offing a dude because he’s not white. And then you go and level that charge at a Brickmeyer? The Brickmeyer?”

  I said, "He is not out of touch with reality, but he has enough handlers to keep him, um, sort of distanced from it. Friends and family, they kiss his ass to the point they need Chapstick just to be around him."

  "So you want to rock the boat a little bit."

  "I want to tip the boat over, dump the young patriarch in the water and see if he swims-"

  "Or if he sinks."

  "Exactly," I said. "He's never really had anybody in his face, so this is my chance, before he can have a chance to really disappear into his own little burrow. He cannot have enough plausible deniability to avoid questioning."

  "This is all assuming that he has a part in this. Otherwise, you're ruining an innocent man."

  "Right. Okay."

  "Keep the blinders off is what I'm saying
. I mean, the dude wouldn’t have the body dumped on his own land.”

  "But it makes it easy to deny."

  "Why not just get rid of the body completely?" he said.

  "Unless he wanted it to seem obvious."

  "Yeah, okay. I don't quite buy it, but if that's what you're working with, hey, whatever.”

  "He was defensive. I'm going to work under the assumption that he had something to do with it until I can no longer go down that road."

  "I'll take my chances."

  "If you do anything stupid, there's only so far out on the limb I can go, and not if I have to risk my own neck. Consider yourself warned."

  I drained the last of my beer, tasting something not unlike rancid dishwater. "Sure," I said. "Don't expect a call, then."

  "Hubris has ruined plenty of people, Rol,” Deuce warned. “Don't let yourself be one of them. Small towns are like small oceans, full of piranhas and sharks."

  "Piranhas are freshwater."

  "Don’t fuck with my logic, man. People like Brickmeyer, they're the sharks, and everybody else who wants to be anybody, they're the piranhas. Once the shark gets all chewed up and spit out, then one of those little piranhas starts growing. Gets bigger, and the cycle starts over."

  "I see what you're saying."

  "The key is, though it may seem like there's a lot going against you, there's also a lot going for you. People hiding around the edges, waiting for you to take down the shark. They'll help you, for sure, but don't be surprised if the same people who help you end up turning you into chum for everybody else to feed on."

  I took that last statement to heart.

  I got up, patted Deuce on the shoulder. "Be careful." He had his fingers steepled together and shook his head as I made my way toward the exit.

  "And show up for your court date," he said, just as I closed the door behind me. "I don't wanna have to come find you."

  * * *

  I drove down the street to the IGA and picked up a whole, uncooked chicken, a sack of potatoes, cigarettes and beer and then went home.

  I do sort of like to cook, but I’m not very good at it. I never could make food for groups of people or anything, or work in a restaurant, but I can fry up southern food so it's edible.

  It’s calming. There is something entrancing about the repetitive actions of preparing and cooking food - the constant cup-and-ball game of moving food and ingredients, only to have it end up on a plate - and it keeps me from thinking about all the things I’d fucked up. I can leave my mind in a suspended state. So I cook.

  I do make a pretty mean country fried steak. I can say that.

  The key is to drop whatever it is you're frying, from thinly sliced crookneck squash to cube steak, in the pan when the grease hits the right temperature. Cook it when the grease is too hot and you'll burn the flour; throw it in lukewarm grease you’ll end up with mushy food. You've got to burn plenty of drumsticks before you get it right.

  I rinsed the chicken and cut it up, dipping the sections into a mixture of egg yolks, salt, pepper, and Louisiana hot sauce before powdering them with flour and tossing them into the pan, which was almost too hot but not quite. Some people take the skin off because it's healthier. I don't. I leave the skin on. I'm old-fashioned. I reuse oil, sometimes old bacon grease. I do use vegetable oil, but not olive oil. It changes the flavor. My Aunt Birdie would curse God Himself if she saw me using it to cook.

  For the sides, I cheated and cooked canned cream corn. I put it on the stove with pepper and quarter-stick of butter in it and let it simmer while I boiled and mashed the potatoes with the skins still on, stirring in spoonfuls of sour cream for flavor. Peel some potatoes and leave the skins on others, and don’t mash them too vigorously, or you’ll turn them soupy. Not good.

  I made a great big plate and took two beers and my cigarettes outside and ate on the tailgate of the F150. I thought it'd be good to enjoy an evening unspoiled by rain.

  After dinner, I scraped the leftovers off my plate out by the trees for the strays and put the rest in the fridge for later. I smoked a cigarette outside, wondering what to do next. If I wanted to get Brickmeyer hot, I had to do something public, something embarrassing to his family. I thought on it for a while but never actually came up with anything.

  Later, D.L. called me while I absently channel-surfed. I muted the TV and answered. "You that desperate down there at the station, calling me on your own time?"

  His laugh sounded like dried twigs in a wood chipper. "I don't have any of my own time, my boy. Didn't you ever learn that? I just have hours of theirs I don't spend at the office."

  "That's why you make the big bucks."

  "I reckon. Listen, Rolson, about that license plate you gave me."

  My heart dipped in my chest. He sounded dour. "Find out who it belongs to?"

  He sighed. "We did. Dead end, partner. It's stolen."

  "Stolen?"

  "Took the tag off some old abandoned wreck, hadn't been registered to anybody in years. Make and the model are immaterial, as you probably already figured. Down here, diesel trucks are as common as camo. We got fifty or sixty just like it, right down the color, from here to Dublin."

  "Damnit."

  "That's right. I know you’re probably not going to listen to me, but whatever you do, don't piss anybody off. You made the find. They probably just wanted to make sure you weren't going to be any trouble."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Somebody saw Laveau out at your house today. That have to do with the one thing, or the other?"

  "You got eyes everywhere, don't you, Chief? Lot of reach for such a small department."

  "Somebody made a pass by your house." He laughed again briefly, a dry cackle. "And you won't be doing shit with this investigation, Rolson. I hear of you sticking your fingers in the pie, I'll cut 'em off. You hear me? You got bigger things, personal things, to be worrying about. Worry about those. This dead Laveau guy doesn't have anything to do with you."

  "You're right. I'll back off," I said. I made it sound convincing.

  "Damn better. No disrespect to Mrs. Laveau, but it looks to me like she's using your, uh, situation to call in a favor. She wants you playing vigilante because she knows you feel like you owe her."

  "So."

  "So if by the grace of God you're able to track down the killer before we do, what do you think she's going to have you do? Call us? Turn him into the police so he can stand trial?"

  There was a pause on the line. I couldn't think of anything to say. "Don't kid yourself, Rol. She's playing you, big time, and it's not going to end well. Either she wants you to kill the punk for revenge's sake, or she wants you take some kind of fall. I've seen it happen before. Don't let yourself get sucked into something you can't get out of. I'd hate for that to happen to you, dumb-ass or not. Okay?"

  D.L. hung up. I placed my phone on the edge of my knee and twirled it mindlessly, watching the way it spun around. If Janita Laveau was lying, she had a pretty convincing scam going.

  "I guess we'll see, " I said to nothing and nobody in particular.

  * * *

  When the sound of high-performance mufflers yanked me from sleep, I had been dreaming about a river that was made of money. Cars had never been the thing to haunt me - I’ve never cared for the woods too much - but now it seemed like I was living in some hellish Stephen King novel.

  I leaped up, grabbed the .45 from the bedside table, and went outside, aiming at nothing and everything. The truck had been nearby but was now tear-assing it down the road a ways. In the absence of a city, cars make a hell of an echoey racket, especially with glass pack mufflers on the back.

  As I swept the perimeter, a single image from my dream kept coming back to me: someone floating in the midst of all that cash. Going down through a swampy entrenchment in bare feet, I looked for just the right silhouette. Just the right combination of light and dark. Maybe the moon glinting off a windshield. Or a gun glinting against pale moonlight. It was not so
dark that I wouldn’t have seen it.

  It took fifteen minutes for me to come to my senses.

  You're losing it, old buddy, I thought. Soon the fucking trees will be a threat. You cannot jump at every backfire, and there are a lot of backfires out here.

  After another few minutes of searching, I straightened up and headed back toward the house. What was I going to do, find a truck in the mud of a nearby field?

  I stopped in the middle of the road, glancing back and forth between my house and the Brickmeyer tract. Something pinged in my chest, sending shivers down my arms. The darkness of the woods was calling to me, and I considered a late-night walk.

  It was silly, devoid of any real logic, but it was more enticing than going back to bed. So I let my intuition drive me into the woods at midnight.

  I turned and walked toward the Boogie House. A slick wire tightened around my guts, and I felt my testicles draw up against me. A vaguely human shape was slinking between two rows of trees. I stopped cold. Could have been a lot of things, I tried to convince myself. A white-tailed deer, maybe. Or light playing tricks on me. But it wasn’t. It was a person.

  I moved quietly toward the woods, my mind filling with fantastically disturbing images. The woods, in turn, responded with silent awe. The chaotic weather of the last few days had subsided. There wasn't a breeze making branches rattle together. No cicadas or crickets. No raccoons scuttling about in the underbrush. Just me, the silence, and the Boogie House.

  And it happened again.

  The music started up, quietly at first. A guitar in the dark, playing a low blues chord progression. It was the sound of somebody warming up on a six string acoustic. I stopped and listened. The shadows around me grew into shapeless, watery pools. I kept going.

  They always get fear wrong in the movies. You don’t shit your pants and scream yourself blind when something happens. If you’re smart, you don’t do that. More likely, you convince yourself everything is all right until you’re convinced it’s not. And then, even then, you just sort of gulp it down and go on with your life. There’s no running and screaming, just a kind of halfhearted acceptance that you or the world is crazy.