“Sounds like it.”
“It's easy to exploit a man's weakness, twist it to make something intentional appear accidental. Anybody under the sun knew homeboy was fond of expensive cars, so of course he got jacked driving his Escalade. Made it easier to believe it could actually go down that way."
"And you know it went down another way?"
"Man, the shit I could reveal to you, partner, would make you lock up shop forever. Problem is, I should know better than to convince you. You've got a bug in your ass about the Laveau case, and building it up is only going to make you want it even more."
"Then why are you telling me all this?"
"I don't know, brother." He paused, blew out a dissatisfied breath. "I reckon I just want you to be safe, that's all. You got a good heart."
"Thanks."
"The problem is your head is usually jammed so far up your ass you can't listen to it beating to know better."
"But you said yourself the LJPD was tripping over its own shoelaces."
"Rumors in this town float like turds in lemonade, but I ain't heard the slightest peep about a dirty cop. Brickmeyer treats that place like a preacher's daughter who gets naked after a couple beers, so it could be anybody."
"Bullen."
"He's got a poker face like a Halloween mask, Rol. It don't ever change. He was blessed at birth with the ability to look unhappy about everything. I wouldn't take that too far."
"But he has access. He's been on the force long enough that people don't even think twice about him. And that's the big thing. He could be the inside guy for Brickmeyer."
Deuce laughed out loud. "Impossible."
"How's that?"
"The happy juice is pickling your brain, old friend," Deuce said. "Bullen can't stand Leland Brickmeyer. Can't stand the whole Brickmeyer clan."
It was my turn to sigh. "Yeah."
"Leland's daddy took what little land the Bullens owned a few decades ago."
I stared out of the window and tried to come up with an alternate explanation. Deuce kept on talking while I contemplated.
"I did a bond for a dude a couple years back who told me everything. Said Leland's pops, William - they also called him Big Bill, on account of his fat ass - had a real hard-on for the Bullen land. It wasn't much, but it's practically overflowing with trees. Good ones."
"Oh yeah, it's over by the old abandoned intersection, where they were thinking about building a new school way back when."
"Right. The haunted one. That place used to be owned by the Bullens. Their daddy whore-hopped and gambled around town, couldn't hold a job, even when his wife was still alive. When it got to be too bad for a peckerwood like him, and he couldn't siphon off another dollar for himself or his family, Big Bill promised in secret to give him a loan and use the land as collateral. That's what I was told happened in private, but what happened in public was that Brickmeyer said he bought the land fair and square. Since Bill had some pull around town and Josiah Bullen wasn't nothing but a drunk, the Brickmeyers ended up with the land."
"I just figured Ron was plainly spiteful. I didn’t know he actually had a reason."
"To complicate things, word is that town officials worked in collusion to back up the Brickmeyers. After all, they had their fingers in each other's pies."
"So this town was basically carved up by a small group of people and has been kept that way ever since."
"You got it. Local politics at their finest. Bunch of damned shady people in Lumber Junction, but truth be told, the Bullens ain't any better.”
“You think they’re involved in the murder?”
He seemed to contemplate this for a time. “Hard to say. But they got something the other, more respectable folks don't have."
"What's that?"
"A grudge. Combine that with the fact that Ronald and his brother are sick little puppies, and then you've got no way of predicting what they're capable of.”
“But you can’t decide if they’re involved or not. Seems like a battle between the two of them. The only unknown is how or why the Laveau kid got sucked in the middle of it all.”
“Never can tell. There are problems between families that go back a hundred years. You can go and ask your old father-in-law all about this town. His people go way back here, too. Not quite like the Brickmeyers or the Stokers, but they have a history. Pop in on old Al sometime and see if you can't wriggle out his family's involvement in all this."
Deuce chuckled. I said, "Well, I'm glad you think it's funny, because I surely damned don't."
"The problem is that the system ain't broke for those who ain't broke. Unless you've got some trick up your sleeve that I don't know about it, the money's always going to win. It's just the way things go down here. Same as everywhere else, I reckon."
"It doesn't have to be that way."
Duece considered it. He said, "And if this was your problem, then you would have a clear moral obligation to fight it. But you are choosing to be a part of this, fella."
"It's a kind of injustice. If I don't fight it, on some level, I feel like I'm siding with whoever did it."
"You need to be asking yourself, 'To what extent should I be involved?' It ain't all that clear. Just because you want to help doesn't necessarily mean you have a right to."
"You're starting to sound like D.L."
"No, I'm not," he continued. "D.L. represents the law. He's telling you what you ought to do legally. He's acting on behalf of your best legal interests. And of the law's interests as well."
"And what do you represent?"
"I'm helping you decide where you practically fit in, and even though you don't listen to me, I got to keep chipping away at you."
"I'm just trying to make things right."
"No, you're not. There's something running just underneath it, something you're not telling anybody. And it’s making you irrational. I don’t want you getting yourself killed because some decayed thing is wriggling around in your brain."
“Yeah. Well.”
We crossed through an open gate and rounded the corner to find a ragged set of trailers put up on cinder blocks. In the front yard, a skinny, unwashed kid in overalls had something dangling from one hand. On getting out of the car, I saw it was a snake.
"What the world you doing playing with a snake," Deuce said to the boy.
The kid, startled, waited for a moment and then held it up and shook it. "It's dead," he said, and smiled. His teeth were the color of rich caramel. He wasn't older than four or five.
"Where's your daddy?" Deuce asked. "He inside?"
The boy nodded. "Be careful. He's on them drugs, and he's cleaning his gun. I heard it go off a while back. He might turn it on you the way he did mama."
Deuce glanced back at me and then turned back to the boy. "We're going to go inside, maybe talk some sense into him. If we can't, you don't go in until he's sobered up some, okay?"
"All righty," the boy said, and he turned and went running off down the hill, holding the dead snake above his head like some kind of monstrous streamer.
"You carrying?"
"Nope," I said. "I talked to you right after I left the funeral."
"You want to wait out here?"
I shrugged. "Whatever you want."
Deuce stared at the house for a minute, then said, "Follow in behind me. I might need your help. Marcus Castellaw's a big ‘un. And if he's cleaning his gun, it's the first time he's cleaned anything in his life. I don’t want him turning that damn rifle or whatever on me."
We took a few steps toward the house, and Deuce added, "He's unemotional, as well. Real stoic. You won't know he's going to strike until he actually does it."
The clay yard was decorated with broken secondhand things, lawn mowers and toys and chairs. Plastic Coke bottles and candy wrappers littered the ground. I wondered if these people had ever owned anything brand new in their lives.
The irony was that these people used to live off the land by hunting and fishing. Being dragg
ed into modern life had reduced them to unwashed vagabonds. They had lost sight of even the few things they did right and did well, even if most of it was wrong.
At the top of the broken cinder block steps, a purely rotten smell wafted through the open door. It reeked of spoiled food and stale body odor. Something just underneath that smelled raw and meaty, like blood but more metallic.
Not again, I thought.
"Jesus God," Deuce said, pulling the neck of his shirt above his nose.
The single-wide’s interior was as junk-filled as the yard. I stepped in cautiously behind Deuce and covered my mouth and nose with my tie. How anyone could survive in this was beyond me.
There was a small bedroom at the end of the hallway to our left, and part of Marcus Castellaw was visible, laid up in the bed. Deuce raised his pistol and went down the hall in a slow and measured way.
"Mister Castellaw, we're coming back there. If you're holding a firearm, I'd like for you to drop it right now."
There was no answer. It scared me shitless in a way that was becoming customary, of late. I waited for a response in the form of a pistol shot.
Deuce basically blocked the entire hall and had to turn sideways to get through the doorway. Nevertheless, a sound I will never forget emerged from the bedroom. It was a watery, bubbly, dejected gurgle, something out of a Stephen King short story. "Help me," he said.
A moment passed where nothing happened, and then Deuce turned to me, his eyes more panicked than I had ever seen them. He dropped the gun to his side, and he said, with surprisingly calm, "Call 911."
I backed away, working entirely on instinct, and hurried outside. I barely had a signal but managed to get through to a tinny-sounding man on the other line. I was only able to describe our position as being "out where the Castellaws live," and he seemed to understand that, so I finished the conversation and walked back inside on gelatinous legs.
Deuce met me in the living room area. "He's hallucinating," he said. "Says he can see the line between life and death and is thinking about taking a step in one direction. There's probably enough meth in him to kill two horses."
"What happened?"
The big man grimaced. "Go see, if you want to know."
So I did. I walked back there to see Castellaw. On the crate next to the bed lay an open baggie of meth and a recently used pipe. The chemical smell of it still lingered in the air.
Castellaw himself lay unmoving on the bed. He'd shot himself in the head but had missed enough of the brain to finish the job. He was a big, shirtless mound, almost as big as the bed itself. An abstract spray of blood covered the pillow behind him. His eyes moved from side to side, without a trace of life in them.
As I entered, his lips curled into an ironic smile. "I missed," he said.
"Don't talk, Mister Castellaw," Deuce said.
He ignored the advice. His voice was low and whispery but entirely audible. "Death ain’t nothin’ but a doorway, and on the other side of it I can see my wife."
"I see," I said, making idle chatter. I could feel Deuce glaring at me from behind. "Is she in heaven?"
"No such thing," he said. "She's been here the whole time. I just couldn't see her for all the other shit in the way. But now I can. She’s here right now, matter fact."
I felt my throat tighten up. "Is she... the only person you can see?"
Deuce placed one hand on my shoulder. "Rol, that's enough."
"Ayuh. There’s others," Castellaw said, and his smile broadened. A trickle of blood slid down the side of his face. "Somebody special you lookin’ for?"
The pressure on my shoulder increased. I tried to put it in the back of my mind. "Is anybody talking about me? Can you see anyone else?"
"Rolson?" he said. He cringed, and his eyes went distant. "Can’t you tell?" He tried to laugh, but the gesture only seemed to happen inside of his mind.
"Stay with me," I said. "Tell me if there's anybody in there named Emmitt. Emmitt Laveau. Has he tried to talk to you? Have you dreamed about him?"
Before he could respond, Deuce looped one arm around my stomach and dragged me backward. My hands reached for anything to grasp, but the molding only tore away as I was flung to the floor of the dirty single-wide.
"The hell's wrong with you, Rolson? Have you completely lost it?"
I tried to get something intelligible out, but “uh” was all that occurred to me.
"He's hallucinating. He's on the verge of death. He's not psychic. Every answer he gives you saps a little more energy from him."
"But what if he's not hallucinating."
The look in Deuce's eyes was hateful. "You've lost your mind, man. Go wait out in the car. I’ll be out there in a goddamn minute."
* * *
I waited in the passenger seat until the ambulance took Castellaw away. Deuce followed them out and got into the car. "He might live," he said, turning the key and slipping the transmission into reverse. We didn't talk on the way back to town. I wasn't going to bother trying to explain myself to him. Not that he'd be obliged to listen to me at this point.
While involved in my own thoughts, I must have drifted off to some other place, because I didn’t even see the little boy scamper up and knock on the window.
“I was about to come looking for you,” I lied, smiling.
“I bet y’all done forgot ‘bout me,” he replied. Smiling draped his father’s face over the boy’s features. It was a mask of ignorance, one he’d be wearing the rest of his life, even without his messy heap of a father.
I started to lie to the boy, but I said, “I’ve had things on my mind, and lots of important stuff has been slipping by me. Like keeping you safe and sound.”
“I’m safe,” he said, holding up the snake. “Look at this. I ain’t even got to fear what crawls with no legs. God punished snakes by makin’ ‘em slide on their bellies, and I ain’t a-feared of them.”
Well, it’s dead.
That’s what I wanted to say but didn’t. I glanced from the house and then back at the kid. “I see that. What’s your name?”
“Nod,” he said. “Ain’t my real name but nobody’s called me by anything but Nod since I can remember. Teachers don’t even say my real name anymore. Didn’t take ‘em long to figure out I don’t like it.”
“Where’s that come from, the nickname?”
He had been looking at his snake, kind of staring down at his feet and the other things surrounding them, so when he looked up at me, he had to squint. I kind of half leaned out of the car to give him the impression that I wasn't hiding in the squad car.
“Daddy. One time he said something ‘bout me being the one to make him live out here, like a bunch of nobodies.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But I also used to shake my head when I was a baby. Didn’t never stop moving my head, even when I slept, so I been called Nod ever since.”
He shrugged, and it seemed like an automatic gesture, one he ended up giving every time he had to explain himself and the origin of his name, so it didn’t appear to bother him all that much.
Before I could tell him he was a smart kid, he said, “My daddy ain’t havin’ a spell, is he? I can’t take him when he gets to grinding his teeth, clickin’ ‘em together and rubbin’ ‘em so they make that sound. It ain’t a sound even a crazy man could abide.”
“I didn’t see him grinding his teeth.”
The kid looked worried.
“You know,” I said, “my daddy died a long time ago, and so I haven’t had him around in a long time.”
“That’s sad.” He said it perfunctorily, the way people are supposed to say something whenever they hear bad news. There was no emotion behind it. The kid was starting to stare at his daddy’s trailer.
“Even though he’s gone, he’s taught me an important lesson.”
The boy just stared.
“See, he was a hard man to get to know. Stony. Harsh. Kind of like your old man. Did what he wanted to, and he didn’t care much for people telling h
im how to live. He lived his own way, and he never really took anybody’s advice on what to do, no matter who it hurt.”
“What’d he teach you?”
“He taught me that you don’t have to end up like your daddy. And he taught me that you can’t worry for him the way he worries for you. He should be worried about you, not the other way around.
“I’d just as soon live in the woods by myself than live without my daddy,” he replied. The idea of loss was the only thing he’d taken from that whole bit. Oh well. He’d learn, I supposed, and he’d probably have to learn the hard way.
I was about to invite him to play in the yard until Deuce came out, but that was about the time some DFCS people showed up and tried to explain to that boy they’d be taking him somewhere else. Far away from here, probably.
* * *
When Deuce dropped me off at my car, I couldn't abide the thought of going home yet, so I ended up stopping by a place called Nana's Kitchen.
Other than a Dairy Queen and two gas stations serving food from behind the counter, Nana's was one of the only restaurants in town. It served comfort food, cooked mostly by the owner herself. Truth be told, I wasn’t even that hungry, but something about being out among people (and not at a bar) was enticing. I still hadn’t recovered from the bout of sickness I had suffered the last time I’d drank.
As usual, the place was overly crowded but there was no line so I was able to order immediately. I felt eyes all over me, but eventually I got over it. I settled for the fried pork chops with a side of mashed potatoes and creamed corn. I waited by the counter as the food was scooped onto a plate and handed to me by one of the black women who worked with Nana.
A handful of seats were available, and not a single one seemed inviting.
The only smiling face to meet my own belonged to an older lady in a flower print dress and thick glasses. "Mrs. Sidley, how are you?" I said.
She put down her Dean Koontz paperback and raised a wrinkled, arthritic hand for me to shake. "Have a seat, Rolson. I'm about getting tired of sitting by myself anyway."
"I appreciate it. How have you been?"
"A whole sight better than you, I suppose. Didn't I teach you better than to go out and drive when you were drunk?"
Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery Page 16
