by Shane Lusher
“You bet,” Tuan said. They rang off, and he hitched his pants up over his buttocks.
Why Kara, a former cheerleader and Miss Friendship Festival Queen, was into a fat guy like Tuan, was beyond him. Although there was the condition of their sharing the same interests in bed, which were light years beyond what most of the men her age in Tazewell County were into.
She’d also once bitten a guy’s ear completely off, when he’d tried to date rape her after she’d had too much peach schnapps. Witnesses said that she wouldn't let go of it, even after the guy had clawed open one of her eyelids and scratched her cornea so badly that she never really had regained eyesight in that eye.
It left her with a permanent cockeyed look that Tuan found sexier than the rest of her body.
She’d held onto that ear, gnawing, until it came off and the cops came. The guy had refused to press charges, seeing as they’d caught him, his ear in her mouth and her panties ripped, around her knees, his no-longer erect penis covered with trace DNA from her genitalia.
“There was, like, no penetration,” she’d said to Tuan matter-of-factly, when recounting the event.
Now that story turned him on. Not the part about raping, but the other part. He also knew that he was forty-two years old to her twenty-four. She would lose interest in him pretty fast.
You had to eat your dinner when it was served. If you waited around, it got cold, or someone else took it away.
“Ah, fuck it,” Tuan said finally, and jumped down into the hole.
Hard to see how the police could have found anything, with all the ash and the blackness of the fire. Still, he knew that if they were looking for it, they would have found it.
It helped if you were smart enough to know what you were looking for. It also helped if you actually cared about the person who had just died, and Tuan was banking on the police not caring all that much about Sweeney.
Nobody else did, at least.
He crouched down in the filth, poking around at the rubbish that covered what appeared to be a table. He pulled back a jagged piece of smoldered sheetrock and tossed it over to the side.
Just a sawhorse with a few nails hanging out of it, some charred buckets beneath.
What had Sweeney done with them?
Tuan tried to remember what the house had looked like before it had burnt down. He turned, facing the back wall of the house.
The garage was to his right. The living room had been behind him, in the front. In the back, the kitchen.
Which meant the bedroom had to have been somewhere to his left.
He picked his way through the ash and melted garbage until he was standing in the southeastern corner of the basement. Stomping around in the splintered chunks of plywood that had been Sweeney’s ground floor, his foot met some resistance.
He picked up a charred two-by-four and pried away some of the rubble, revealing a mangled bedpost and next to it, a metal filing cabinet.
“Bingo,” Tuan said.
He moved quickly, the sweat pouring down over his shirt in the sun and the dirt. The top drawer of the filing cabinet was locked, but it had been twisted in such a way that it didn’t matter. He shoved the end of the two-by-four into the hole and pried, and the whole cabinet just came apart.
He was bending down to open the cigar box that had fallen out when So Hot For Her chimed out from his back pocket. As he pulled out the cell phone, he opened the box and pocketed its contents.
“Talk to me, baby,” he said into the receiver.
“Sorry, Tuan,” Karen's voice rang out, just as cheerful as always. “I just heard something that says Sweeney's death wasn't suicide.”
“Who said that?” Tuan asked. He pulled out a sawhorse and propped it up against the wall. He put a hand up on to the top of the foundation, tried to pull himself up, and cut his hand in the process.
“God-DAMMIT,” he said into the phone.
“What?” Karen said.
“Nothing,” Tuan said. He finally succeeded in getting one leg up over the top, and rolled out into the yard.
He lay there in the dirt, panting.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Tuan said again. He rolled over and came slowly to his feet. “Well, I guess you'll have to add something to the story,” he said.
“You sure you still want to run it?” Kara asked. “You know how things are around here.”
“You mean the Dukes and Hazzard feel this place has?”
“Very funny,” Kara said. “You're probably, like, old enough to remember the original show.”
That he was. That he was.
“Friday nights, baby. Hedged in by Dallas and The Incredible Hulk.”
He was still out of breath when he got back to his car. He wondered briefly if he should just call the cops and tell them he’d been there.
No. The police didn’t return to the scene of a crime. They got one chance, and once they left it, they broke the chain of custody. Any kind of trace evidence he might have left would be inadmissible. And nobody would be looking for it anyway.
He was just being paranoid.
“He-lloooo?” Kara called out. Tuan had forgotten they were still on the phone. “You baked or something?” She sounded worried. She smoked pretty regularly, but as far as she was concerned, Tuan was the most tee-totaling son of a bitch she’d ever known.
Tuan laughed. “Sorry, Kara,” he said. “No. It's cool. Run it.”
“Run it as is or with the new news?”
“Run the whole thing,” Tuan said.
Seven
By the time Rassi dropped me back at the farm, it was past noon and the sun was at its zenith. Since quitting smoking, I’d become something of a distance jogger, and even though I still hated it, it was what I did when the cinnamon sticks wouldn’t cut the cravings.
I was sweating before I’d crossed the bridge, and once I’d gotten down the half mile of lane and west on Franklin Street, my shirt was well on the way to being drenched. I crossed the Dillon Creek and kept running until I hit Springfield Road and turned left again toward the town where Darren Roe had lived.
That’s when I slowed to a walk. Thirty-eight years old. Heart attack territory. The ground around me was flat, with no trees in sight, and I could feel and see the waves of heat rising up out of the blacktop. I stopped, looked around, stretched my legs, and kept going.
When I crossed the Dillon Creek again, I started running. I made the two miles in just under twelve minutes.
* * *
Rassi had told me that Roe lived in Dillon. The road didn’t even rise as I crossed the town limits, the cornfields giving way to mangy yards littered with the occasional child’s bike and trees of diverse heritage: some maples, a few pines, and a lot of hedge.
The town was unincorporated, the sign at the side of the road bearing only its name, and no population. From where I was standing, I could see the other end of town. There were maybe fifty houses, max.
I stopped beneath a birch and switched off the music on my smart phone. Opening up the internet application, I searched for the address, and, finding it, turned on the map.
Holding it out in front of me, I took the first right and then jogged up the two hundred yards or so toward the little red pin on my screen.
The Roe residence was a postwar single-family home, the wraparound porch sagging, the white paint peeling. Shingles were missing from the roof.
An old, moldy couch with no feet sat next to the front door. Looking up the driveway that ran between Roe’s yard and the neighbor’s, I saw that the property extended all the way back to a field, at the edge of which sat a barn in even more disrepair than the house.
I went up the front walk, the concrete slabs cracked, brown moss poking out from between the seams, and climbed the steps to the front door.
The curtains in the window next to it were drawn, and someone had nailed plywood over the glass in the door. I pressed the buzzer on the frame and stood back and waited.
Nearly a minute passed. I was about to ring again when the door opened a crack. I could see the chain drawn across the space between the door and the frame, and the face of an African-American woman peered out from within.
“Yeah?” she asked.
“Mrs. Roe?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Who are you?”
The door opened slightly, but the chain was still on. I could see that she was wearing a T-shirt and sweat pants.
“I’m Dana Hartman,” I said. “Tad Ely’s brother.”
She made a face. “What do you want?” The door closed slightly.
“I was wondering if I could talk to you about your husband,” I said.
“You with the police?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Well, sort of.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“I work for the sheriff,” I said.
“He know something about who killed Darren?” she asked.
Just then there was a voice from within, and she turned for a moment. I heard murmuring, and then a child’s voice asking who was at the door.
“You just go back in there,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
“I got nothing to say to you,” she said, and the door began to shut.
“Mrs. Roe,” I said. “I’ve been asked to look into your husband’s death by a friend.”
“You said you weren’t a cop,” she said. “What, you some kind of private eye?”
“Exactly,” I said. “I was wondering if I could come in and talk to you.”
“That’s not going to happen,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Well. Can you-”
“I already told everybody everything I know,” she said. “My lawyer says I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
Everybody has a lawyer nowadays.
“But your lawyer doesn’t even know who I am,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said, mimicking my earlier response. She turned away to look behind her.
“Wait,” I said.
“No,” she said. “You wait. I already talked to your brother. He died, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I talked to him. Darren talked to him.”
“Darren talked to him?” I asked. “Before he died?”
“No, afterwards,” she said and rolled her eyes. “Don’t you people talk to each other?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Roe, I just started-”
“All I know is, Darren talked to your brother and then the next thing I know is, he’s dead,” she said. “You figure it out.”
She slammed the door. I stood there looking at the peeling paint for a moment and then I walked down the stairs and started my run back to the farm.
I took a shower, wrapped myself in a towel and then went into the basement bedroom to pick out a suit.
That’s one thing I do. I always wear suits when I leave the house. I’ve been doing it five to six days a week for over fifteen years.
While the rest of the IT world wore cargo pants and flip-flops to work, Diamond Ben insisted that we all continue to wear a suit and tie. Our CEO once said that this was how IBM got big in the sixties, by being the guys in the black suits. Branding. That was what he called it.
Quite frankly, we all thought this was bullshit. But Diamond Ben paid well, better than the Big Five IT consulting companies, and they gave us a clothing allowance.
Long story short: I had lots of suits and ties. I didn’t have much else, besides jogging shorts and T-shirts. Since rolling away from Diamond Ben, or rather, since going freelance and selling myself off to one single company, I hadn’t been out to do any clothing shopping.
I’d always hated the suits. Not the actual clothing, but the people who wore them.
Didn’t someone once say that we become the thing we hate the most? Now I could barely leave the house without one.
Add that to the list of my vices.
I was just putting on my shoes when Rassi called on my cell.
“Can you make it over here a little earlier?” he asked.
I looked at my phone. Two o’clock.
“When do you need me to be there?” I asked. Before, we had agreed that I would stop by the sheriff’s department around four to pick up the files.
“Can you be here at three?” Rassi asked.
“Sure, no problem,” I said. I stood up and walked over to the thermostat and switched off the air. My head had that cotton ball feeling again. “Hey, I got a question.”
“Yeah?” Rassi said.
“I ran over to Dillon and talked to Darren Roe’s wife,” I said as I opened the window in the kitchen and breathed in the loamy smell of the grass.
“Oh, shit, you talked to her?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Is that a problem?”
“I hope not,” Rassi said.
“Why?” I asked. I walked into the living room and opened the slider. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”
“Yeah, but Dubois is pissed,” Rassi said. “He doesn’t want you looking at Roe or Sweeney. He just wants you on Trueblood.”
I walked out onto the porch. “And why is that?”
“He’ll explain it all when you get here,” Rassi said. “He wants to talk to you. So does Wayne Trueblood.”
“I thought you cleared all of this beforehand,” I said.
“I did,” Rassi said. He seemed unsure.
“Did you? Or was this some fly-by-night idea of yours?”
“A little of both,” Rassi said. “Anyway, Wayne wants to meet you. Says he read about you.”
“Do the relatives of the deceased have a say in who does the investigating?” I asked, thinking about Roe’s demeanor and her attitude toward the police.
“You do if you’re Wayne Trueblood,” Rassi said.
I thought about that. “What’s he read about me?” I asked.
“He said some article in the Chicago Tribune.”
“Hopefully only the good stuff,” I said. I walked down the steps to the walk and the driveway. “Anyway, I’ll be there at three, but I wanted to ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“Darren Roe’s wife-”
“Her name is Tasha.”
“Tasha Roe said that Tad talked to her husband just before he went missing,” I said. “You know anything about that?”
“I know that he talked to him,” Rassi said slowly. “I don’t know what they talked about.”
“Who was the primary on Roe?”
“Tad did that himself,” Rassi said.
“Is that normal? Don’t you usually assign that to a detective?”
“I told you, we don’t have that many on staff here,” Rassi said. “Sometimes you have to double up. Besides, I got the feeling Tad felt bad.”
“About what?”
“About Roe getting killed right after he talked to him.”
“He never said anything at all?” I asked.
“Sorry, man, I don’t know anything about it,” Rassi said.
“That’s strange,” I said.
“Yeah,” Rassi said. “Anyway, I got to go. Trueblood just got here. I’ve been summoned to the boss’s office.”
I merged onto I-155 out of Tremont five minutes later. I was driving to Pekin in a back-assed roundabout way, but I needed some time and some music to blow off steam. My old maroon Taurus coughed and complained, but it got its way up to seventy and held there nicely.
As far as vehicles went, I’d never seen the point in owning something more powerful, or more stylish, than the one I’d bought just out of college. Even if you have something that’s fast and cool, you’re still bound by the legal speed limit. Unless you're a cop, of course.
It also had the benefit of having a cassette player, and since I'd found several shoeboxes in the storage room in the basement filled with old cassette tapes from high school, I just really couldn’t resist.
I rolled down the windows and put on Van Halen’s OU
812, bought at Kmart, summer of '87 or '88, back when I'd been a fat kid. It was a mediocre album by anyone’s standards, but it would do in a pinch.
The grass in the median was scorched. The last mow job looked to have been too short, and all that remained was dark brown stubble.
I passed Morton and got onto 74, got off at the next exit and took Route 98 to 29, coming into Pekin from the north, past run-down shotgun shacks, the soil in the yards sandy, the grass dead and brown.
By the time I got to Capitol Street, it was two forty-five. I parked in front of the Java’s, went in and got a coffee, and walked on down to the sheriff’s department.
Janine got Rassi on the phone. When he came down the hall he looked wrung out, as if he’d been up all night between the morning and this afternoon.
He was, however, wearing a suit, and when he shook my hand I said,“You going to a funeral?”
Janine laughed as we moved away, down the hall toward the back of the building.
“Yeah,” Rassi said. “Mine. You’re looking pretty dapper.”
“Dapper?” I said.
“That Italian?” he asked, gesturing toward my tie.
“Sears and Roebuck,” I answered. “This is my work uniform. You told me not to change.”
“Yeah, well,” Rassi said as he swiped an ID badge over a security sensor and the door in front of us opened. “First impressions and all of that.”
I turned and glanced out the glass front of the sheriff’s building. The sun had just hit that late-afternoon July angle that cast everything in such blinding, yet indirect, light that made the world seem artificial.
I had a sudden, bad twinge in a remote, cobwebbed area of my mind. It was the kind of thing I got when I knew there was a bug in the software but couldn’t find it. That place where you say it’s right on the tip of your tongue. It’s important, but you just can’t remember what the hell it is.
Someone needed to come up with a better term for that feeling.
Rassi roused me from my reveries.
“You coming or going?” he asked. He was still holding the door. “If this stays open any longer, the alarm’s going to go off.”
