Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery

by T. Blake Braddy

  As I approached, the room became awash in a hellishly orange light, casting every inch of my surroundings in a sinister glow. I stumbled. In my stupor, I couldn’t focus, save for putting one heavy foot in front of the other, so the room became a soupy mess underfoot.

  Momentum dragged me forward. I could tell now that I was dreaming, but it made the physics of my world no more manageable. I overshot my target, as people in dreams often do, so I had to backtrack to meet Emmitt Laveau, who stepped forward, dressed in a suit and brandishing a tattered old acoustic guitar, plucking a boogie-woogie rhythm with his thumb and two first fingers. He was smiling, but the way it looked wasn’t right. There was something sinister in the way his lips had peeled away, revealing broken, rotting teeth.

  In that moment, I saw the reflection of his uncle in him. They had identical smiles, and even the facade of death couldn’t mask their facial similarities. In fingerpicking that jumping, bouncy, up-and-down riff, he had that look, that certain slyness, and it shone through with stark clarity.

  I didn’t recognize the song, but Emmitt was looking at me like I should have known it, and the longer he played it, the more it seemed as though I did know it. It built to a blurry mess of fingers and notes, and just when I thought I had the name of the song, when it was on the tip of my tongue, he slowed to a stop.

  Finishing up the last bar, he placed the guitar at his side and leaned on it. The final notes echoed solemnly through the Boogie House, but the illumination surrounding everything remained. It flickered like a dying flame and deepened to an angry orange, almost red, as Emmitt opened his mouth. His face was pallid and sunken and somewhat distorted, but yet he smiled. "I lost some weight," he said. "Embalmed me. Cut me up. Couldn't find nothing but the fact that I was dead."

  I looked down, regarded his stomach. The gassy spare tire had disappeared, cutting a more distinctly human figure, less ghastly and still horrifying all the same. The suit didn't help his appearance, either, because it hung loosely over his newly gaunt frame. Similarly, his face revealed some rot, but make-up concealed the gory bits, mostly. "I see," I said, struggling to say anything at all. The dream world was taking some getting used to.

  His smile became a frown, and the shape and texture of his face shriveled into something grotesque. "The marvel of modern make-up. Still gonna be a closed casket deal, though, I'm afraid. They couldn't quite put me back together again."

  Laveau leaned back against empty air, bringing the guitar up to a playing position and flicking the strings in a slow, dinky drone, a bow-den-dow-den-dow-down sort of fashion. It was the sound of a hundred years of accumulated blues, and in that moment each note coursed through me like electricity.

  "I can't speak his name, you know. One of the curses of my situation," he said, shaking his head somberly.

  "Your killer? The name of your killer?" I asked, stupidly. He nodded, humming a troubling, dissonant melody. I stood there, dumbly enraptured, even if the notes seemed to be emanating, not from the sound hole in the guitar itself, but from my head. "Why not?"

  "Would you be able to prove the truth in court anyway? Without evidence, would this stand? ‘Hey, man, I know y’all didn’t find any fingerprints or physical evidence down there at the Boogie Place - whatever - but I got this cat coming to visit me in my sleep. That enough to convict somebody on?’ See what I mean?"

  "Who said it would go that far?"

  "Your cloak is made of ink and not of blood. You'll stick to the shadows until this plays out, and you'll not force your breath if you don't have to."

  "I don't know what that means," I said.

  “I wish we could go on a trip,” he said. “Right on down the road.”

  “To the Brickmeyer house?”

  “Maybe. Yeah. Shit, maybe not. Every time I see you, there’s a goddamn chunk missing from my brain. I figure that’s a literal and a figurative thing, too. Somebody did this to me, and hell, even I’m forgetting who’s to blame.”

  “How come it’s me, Emmitt? It can’t just be that I plowed into your mom’s car, can it? I’m at a goddamn loss as to what I’m supposed to be learning from you.”

  Emmitt smirked and returned to his guitar playing. The tempo sped up, and his fingers went from plucking the strings to strumming them, his hand a blur against the guitar's body. He sang a blues song I had heard a hundred times before and yet not a single time, and I was entranced by it.

  In the orange-ish glow, his performance took on an intense, sinister quality. He bobbed his head and strummed the guitar, and every aspect was unnatural. No one could move that quickly, could produce so many melodies on a single guitar. Similarly, his voice had become orchestral, the sound of a dozen men and women singing simultaneously, a choir of such melancholic scope that I struggled to listen to it. And yet, it was hauntingly beautiful.

  When he finished, he said, "Some blues songs are full of love, even if they appear to be about heartache."

  "Are you in love?"

  He smiled. "I got to be on down the road now. Not in the direction I s’pose you’d like me to go, but I can go. I gotta go. There's an audience waiting for me, and I am the main attraction."

  Emmitt lowered the guitar and turned away, holding his instrument the way a child might carry an unwanted doll. He reached the wall on the opposite side of the building and disappeared on impact.

  Lights flickered on, and the dilapidated jukebox in the corner fired to life, its mechanical arm exchanging one vinyl record for another. The song that erupted either from the speakers or inside my head was “Death Letter Blues.”

  * * *

  I awoke, and though the Boogie House faded, the orange glow did not. I stared at it while my mind caught up with reality. The dreams of the Boogie House were becoming more real with each iteration, and the equilibrium of the real world was being turned upside down, so that it made as little sense as the dream world.

  It took a minute to realize that the light in my room was not just the overlap between my waking and dreaming lives. It was coming from outside, and it turned out to be brake lights from a vehicle parked in my yard.

  I leaped out of bed, ignoring my sickness, and grabbed the .45 from the nightstand. I stumbled down the hallway, trying to keep my balance, and through the walls I heard the vehicle pulling away. The front door was open, and Vanessa was leaning against the frame, staring out through the half-open screen door. The vehicle, so far as I could tell, was completely out of sight.

  "Who was that?" I asked.

  Startled, Vanessa turned back toward me. She looked haggard and sleepy. "Don't know," she said.

  I stared at her.

  "I don't," she said. "I have no idea. I heard a muffler, and then I got up to see who it was. When I opened the door, whoever it was peeled out. I think I startled them."

  "What kind of vehicle was it?"

  "I'm not sure. Truck, maybe. I just saw the taillights."

  "You didn't see if it was a truck or not?"

  "It could have been. It was loud. I don't know, Rolson. I'm coming down, and I can't trust anything around me."

  "Okay," I said, though I wasn't satisfied.

  I called the station and waited for somebody to pick up. Once I got an answer, I said, "This is Rolson McKane. Somebody's trying to intimidate me, and I'd like for an officer to drive out here to check things out."

  "Who?" said the voice on the other line. I didn't quite recognize it.

  "Don't know. But they trespassed on my land. Drove almost right up to my bedroom window and then drove off."

  "What do you want us to do?"

  "Make a note of it. Come out here. I'm sure the vehicle left tire tracks in the yard. Perhaps those could be analyzed or something, to tie them to the person who killed Emmitt Laveau."

  The smoky voice on the other end of the line sighed. "We'll get somebody out there."

  "Thanks," I said, my teeth clenched, and hung up. I went outside and waited for an hour for someone to show up, trying to ignore what I thought was
a flicker of light in the woods.

  When I was convinced that I'd still be waiting in the morning, I went in the bedroom and did not sleep for the rest of the night.

  Eighth Chapter

  The next morning, the shower head spurting to life dragged me from sleep. I was exhausted, so rather than get out of bed, I listened to the spatter of water in the next room and stared contemplatively at the stain on the ceiling.

  My mind wandered into the shower with Vanessa, if only briefly, compelled by the cloyingly fragrant shower gel, and I attempted to connect the sound of the water with Vanessa's own movements, thinking of what she must look like right now.

  I had been alone for too long.

  Once I snapped out of it, a sneaking sense of shame spread through me. Vanessa was sick, depressed, and no longer my consideration, sexually speaking. Still, an empty house decays quickly, more than on a simple, literal level.

  Once the water stopped hissing, I shambled stiff-legged into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee, dumping spoonfuls of cheap, bitter grounds in the filter and pouring water in the boiler before flipping the switch. It burbled pleasantly while I watched.

  I heard shuffling feet behind me and turned to see Vanessa standing in the kitchen’s entrance, drying her hair with a towel and wearing some old clothes I had kept after the divorce.

  "Showered," she said. Her lips were bloodless and tight. She looked like a broken porcelain doll. "Hope I’m not imposing."

  "There's enough coffee here for you, too. You still like it black?”

  "Thanks," she said.

  She poured herself a cup and sat in one of the chairs by the kitchen table, the ceramic mug resting on her knees. I leaned against the door frame and anticipated something. An apology, a note of gratitude, maybe some sort of clear-headed explanation of how she’d acted before. But she gave me nothing. We drank in silence, her looking blankly across the kitchen to the living room, and me staring down at her. It was reminiscent of the end of our relationship, before she slipped out under cover of night with a suitcase and her car keys.

  "I know I look like hell," she said. "God, when I peeked in the mirror this mornin', I thought it was somebody else's face in there, no shit. For a minute, I was worried a curse had been put on me."

  My stomach gurgled. I still felt the unpleasantness of whatever had come over me the night before. "You look fine," I said. She did look slightly better, but she was a far sight from the person she had been.

  "No I don't, Rolson." She checked her face in a nearby hanging mirror. "My face is all splotchy, and I've got pimples for the first time in I can't remember how long, and I'm pale. Oh my God, am I pale. I look like a freaking haint."

  "Taking care of yourself will help heal all of that. Coming back here, getting away from all that...stuff, is the first step in getting better."

  She rolled her eyes. "Let's hope so. I can't go out in public like this."

  "How did you handle it before?"

  "I stayed inside most of the time. Had no reason to go out."

  I did a half-groan, half-grunt, and, changing the subject, said, "There's somewhere I got to be today. I reckon you can stay here, long as you don't go off and pawn everything I own."

  She took a sip of coffee. "I ain't going to do that, Rolson. Yesterday. Well. I mean, yesterday I wasn’t in my head. Yeah, I was looking through your stuff, but that was a different story. I was coming down. It's like having ants in your bloodstream. Nothing like being drunk and needing whiskey. I was absolutely dying for a fix."

  "That being said, this isn't your house anymore. You forfeited that when you let that shit claw its way into your life and drag you out of town."

  "I just need somewhere to mellow out for the time being. I'm tiptoeing on the ledge, and I feel like I have no choice but to jump off. Oh, Jesus."

  She began to break down, but when I didn't comfort her, she swallowed the tears and ran her fingers through her hair gently, the way she used to. Vanessa had good hands, expressive, smooth, dainty hands, and she normally talked with them, using big gestures and movements to convey her ideas. But that aspect of her was gone, at least for now. She kept her hands close, like she was guarding something.

  I watched her recompose herself, and I said, "If anybody comes knocking at the door, you make yourself as invisible as possible. There's a bad element sneaking around the property, and they might want to make trouble. If they start to try and get in, then call me on my cell."

  She smiled, confused, but I shook my head. "It's not a joke. These people mean business, no fucking around. You get any sort of strange vibe, don't hesitate to call."

  "Where are you going?"

  I finished the bitterest part of my coffee and placed the mug on the kitchen counter. "A funeral."

  * * *

  The parking lot out behind the Tan-Shoat Funeral Home was packed with washed and waxed vehicles. People had begun to fight back against the tyranny of the pollen. During the spring months, Georgia is worse than Egypt during the plagues. I parked in the farthest corner of the lot and sat drumming the steering wheel until the accumulation of heat was too much for me to bear.

  The funeral home was small and quaint and neat, the parking lot freshly paved and awnings recently painted. The brick building housed one of the most successful and long-standing businesses in the county. Dealing in death is a lucrative profession, and the Tan-Shoats (they riot if you do not include both names) demonstrated an uncanny proficiency at it.

  Walter Tan-Shoat himself was a younger man, too young to be handling death, but he had taken over for his father and grandfather, both killed in a fire at the family cabin. He was perpetually outfitted in a black suit and was so pale his skin practically glowed white.

  Perhaps because of his youth, people didn’t seem to get along with him quite the way they did with his forebears. Customers got the impression he didn't much care for people, dead or alive, so ultimately it was the name that pushed the business along. (His father and grandfather, it was secretly known, had belonged to the Klan, burning crosses in people's yards and getting blacks convicted of crimes they would not, let alone could not, have committed.)

  The car door creaked open, and I got out and put on a pair of old aviators, watching grieving people exit their vehicles and move with purpose toward the funeral home.

  My back itched. Goddamned suit. I only have one; it is neither comfortable nor black. It is a deep navy, too small, and smells slightly off, but it is appropriate enough for these occasions.

  In fact, though, I felt underdressed. Some funeral-goers wore black, of course, while others sauntered down the sidewalk in bright yellow and green and pink dresses. Women accessorized with floppy black hats and decadent three-inch heels. Men were decked out in equally impressive suits, elaborately and fastidiously coordinated with shoes and socks and pocket squares.

  I went into the cool main funeral parlor and signed the guest book before finding a seat with some non-family attendees, who took this event as a sign to chitchat about everyone in the building. The woman at my right was a shriveled old prune whose name I thought was Lucretia Davenport, and to her right was Betty Raines. The pair of them couldn’t have been worse gossips, and so I spent the majority of the service alternating between ignoring them and cringing when I could not.

  A hush fell over the room, and I turned in my seat to see Janita Laveau enter through the main doors, flanked by her uncle, who winked and nodded at me. Everyone in the place stood reverently as she was escorted down the main aisle.

  Grief hung palpably in the air wherever she was. Janita pushed forward with dignity. She was not crying, though it was not for lack of trying. When she turned to acknowledge others in the crowd, some of them broke down, as if Janita was performing a reverse miracle, cursing people with grief rather than taking it away, even as she herself maintained a semblance of composure.

  I leaned sideways and studied the modest casket, whose lid was shut and covered in various floral arrangements. M
rs. Laveau collapsed into a seat on the front pew, her head bent forward. Uncle K placed one arm on her shoulders and leaned in, as if to tell her something. When he was finished, she nodded and raised her head, not upward toward the heavens but straight ahead, a heartbreakingly solitary gaze.

  My attention was then drawn to the casket. A basic and yet elegant brown box of a thing, it shined under the glare of the parlor's house lights, and throughout the various prayers, my eyes flicked in its direction. I had become acutely aware of the fact that a version of that body visited me in my dreams, and it cast the whole event in another light.

  Halfway through the service, with Preacher Weatherhead going on and on about joy, sorrow, and its opposites, I submitted to an urge to look behind me.

  Leland Brickmeyer, henchman in tow, stood against the parlor's back wall, his hands pressed together below his chin in what seemed to be mock prayer. His eyes caught mine, and he betrayed himself with the slightest smile. Ever the attention-seeking politician.

  Up front, Weatherhead ended his portion of the service. Reverend Gladys Kicklighter hobbled to the podium and patted his brow with a white lace handkerchief. As if in response, the parlor air grew hotter. The suit was suffocating me. I broke out in beer sweats, and people all around me fanned themselves with the hymnals in the pews ahead of them.

  I heard a minute guitar melody emerge from the front of the room, tinny as the sound of a blues-themed music box. It was the sort of scratchy tune only a slide guitarist can muster, and I glanced around. People download the strangest ringtones, I thought. I expected an embarrassed mourner to quietly end the disruption. I glanced from the pews to the podium. Reverend Kicklighter didn’t seem to notice it, even though the sound continued. Did he not want to ruin the funeral by acknowledging it? Kicklighter, it should be noted, wasn’t known for his even temper. However, the song kept on ringing out in the small room, tinkling along just under Kicklighter’s labored breathing.