Wall of Glass

by Walter Satterthwait

  He was medium tall, five foot eight or nine, slender. He was wearing a gray plaid flannel shirt, faded jeans, and that bland insolent mask with which some teenagers confront a potentially hostile adult world. His hair was fine and wavy, so blond it was nearly white, and he was good-looking in an almost delicate way. A well-defined and sensitive mouth, a narrow pointed nose, and pale blue eyes with a wariness to them that didn’t quite match the arrogance of expression.

  Nodding, I stood up behind the desk and held out my hand. “Kevin Leighton?”

  Reluctantly he slipped his hand from his pocket and took mine, shook it.

  “Have a seat,” I told him.

  He sat down in the client’s chair in a manner so like Biddle’s it was uncanny. Legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles of his cowboy boots, fingers interlaced atop his chest.

  “Did your mother tell you,” I asked him, “what I wanted to see you about?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, right,” he said, his voice flat. “The necklace that got ripped off.”

  I nodded. “You think Frank Biddle stole it?”

  “Nah,” he said. His face twisted with scorn. It’s an emotion that comes easily to someone who hasn’t lived for very long. “Frank wasn’t even in town.”

  “The police think that Frank planned the thing with a man named Killebrew. You know him?”

  He shrugged. “Seen him around once or twice.”

  “With Frank?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He raised his eyebrows. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

  “I’m not trying to prove anything, Kevin. I’m just trying to find the necklace.”

  He nodded, mouth compressed, looking wearily up to the ceiling to demonstrate how fascinating he found all this.

  I said, “You were the last person to leave the house the night the necklace was stolen.”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged again. “What’re you, gonna arrest me?”

  “I understand that you forgot to turn on the alarm.”

  He snorted slightly. “That’s what they tell me.”

  “And what’s that mean?”

  He winced with impatience. “I was drunk, man. Ripped. I had some friends over and we partied. I don’t remember what I did. They say I didn’t turn it on; I didn’t turn it on.”

  “Were you doing coke that night?”

  He looked at me, puzzled, as though he’d never, never ever, heard of the stuff. “Doing what?”

  “Kevin, if you were in kindergarten instead of high school, I might buy the innocence number.”

  “Hey, man, we partied. We had drinks, seven and sevens, some screwdrivers. That was it.”

  “Why am I suddenly having a hard time believing that?”

  “Don’t know, man, and I don’t care. None of this was my idea, my coming here.”

  “I thought you might want to help me find your mother’s necklace.”

  “Right, yeah,” he said, and studied the ceiling some more.

  I asked him, “Did you see anything that night, when you left? An unfamiliar car parked near the house?”

  Another wince. “I did all this with the cops last year. Ask them.”

  “They’re not here. You are.”

  He sighed a long elaborate sigh. “Right,” he nodded. “Okay.” In a monotone, staring at the ceiling again, he chanted, “No I didn’t see any cars, no I didn’t see any strangers around the house, no I don’t have any idea who stole the stupid necklace, and no, I don’t give a shit.” He looked down at me. “Can I go now?”

  “Kevin,” I said, “I know you’re not going to believe this, but you are really beginning to piss me off.”

  “Well, that’s just too bad, isn’t it?”

  I stood up and came around the desk.

  “You touch me,” he said, sitting up straight, fingers clutching at the arm of the chair as he tucked his feet beneath it, “and my father’ll sue you for everything you’ve got.”

  “Uh-huh.” I sat down on the edge of the desk, put my hands against its top. “Kevin, do you have any idea what a thirty-eight caliber slug can do to the human body?”

  He sneered. It wasn’t a completely successful sneer, but then I outweighed him by about fifty pounds. “What’re you, gonna shoot me now?”

  “I’m talking about your friend Frank. Your dead friend Frank. Someone pumped four slugs into him. Let me tell you a little something about that, Kevin. A thirty-eight slug travels at around a thousand feet per second. I don’t know how good you are at math, probably not very, but that works out to a little more than seven hundred miles an hour. I want you to think about that, Kevin, think about this little piece of lead, doesn’t weigh more than a quarter of an ounce, but it’s traveling faster than a seven forty-seven. Now what it does when it smashes into you, it shatters bone into splinters and dust and it ruptures blood vessels; the shock just explodes them, and it piles up flesh ahead of it, muscle and ligaments and fat, and rams it all out through a hole in your back the size of a coffee cup.”

  His face had gone pale. He cleared his throat, discovered his bravado along with his voice. “So what’s the point?”

  “In Frank’s case, two of the slugs stayed inside him. One of them smashed a couple of ribs and turned his heart into Alpo.”

  He leaned forward, hands on the arm of the chair. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because we’re talking about a human being here, Kevin, maybe not much of one, but a human being that someone put four bullets in, and your mother tells me, goddammit, that you liked him.”

  His face clenched with fury. “I did like him!”

  “Then forget this James Dean shit and talk to me. Whoever shot him is still out there, Kevin. He’s still got the gun and he’s probably still got the necklace.”

  His anger and his hurt were still carrying him. “I don’t know anything about the necklace.”

  “Then tell me about Frank. Did he ever get coke for you?”

  “What difference does it make now?” His voice was beginning to fray.

  I leaned toward him. “So he did.”

  “All right, shit, yes. So what?” But this last bright flare of defiance, the words spat at me, consumed whatever was left. Suddenly he lowered his head, cupping his hand around his forehead so I couldn’t see his eyes. His shoulders moved slowly up, slowly down, in a long, deep, ragged sigh.

  I said, more softly, “I’m not the cops, Kevin. You want to do coke, that’s your business. And your problem. But I need to know about Frank. I need to get a handle on him. How often was he dealing for you?”

  “He wasn’t dealing.” He looked up at me, and his face was flushed, his mouth awry. A sob was trembling just behind his voice. “He did it as a favor.”

  I was feeling extremely pleased with myself just then. Within the space of only three or four hours today I had managed to reduce two people to grief, both of them barely out of childhood. J. Croft Inc., Freelance Funsters. Spreading mirth and merriment wherever we go. Ask about our group rates.

  “All right,” I said. “Tell me about the first time.”

  The first time, he told me—slowly, haltingly, with me nudging him gently along—had been on a horseback camping trip in the Kit Carson National Wilderness, north of town. He and Biddle had put in a good day, having traveled perhaps ten miles or so into the forest before setting up camp. Biddle had cooked the food, Kevin had helped clean up afterward. And then as the two of them sat against their bedrolls, the campfire flickering at their boots, a scene straight out of The Trail of the Lonesome Pines, Biddle had produced a pint of V.O. and a gram vial of coke.

  “Was this the first time you’d done coke?”

  “No. Practically everybody at school does it.”

  The teachers? I wondered. The principal? “All right,” I said, “so then what?”

  So then Biddle and Kevin had sipped at the pint and snorted from the vial and Biddle had regaled the boy with tales of Life on the Range amid the dogies and the tumbleweed. From the warmth in
Kevin’s eyes as he related all this, it was clear he was fond of Biddle. Years ago the fondness would’ve been called a crush; today, most likely, it’d be called unresolved Oedipal conflict, or, worse, latent homosexual propensities. To me, having met the boy’s parents, it simply seemed that he needed someone to look up to, and that Biddle had filled the bill. And Biddle, for his part, would’ve enjoyed an audience for his cowboy theatricality.

  “Did he ever get coke for you after that?” I asked.

  “Three or four times.” He looked at me, the face open, the blue eyes pleading. “But really, like I said, only as a favor. He never made any money off it. He always charged me what it cost him.”

  “How much was that?”

  “A hundred and twenty a gram.”

  The standard price, last I’d heard. “You only bought grams?”

  “Once a bunch of us got together and bought an eight-ball.”

  An eighth of an ounce, a little under three grams. “For how much?”

  “Two seventy-five.”

  Again, as far as I knew, the standard price. Maybe Biddle was charging what he’d paid. Which didn’t make him any more of a peach in my book. But on the other hand, despite Kevin’s hero worship, I found it difficult not to picture the man picking up every bit of spare change he could locate.

  Something occurred to me. “Kevin, you weren’t selling the stuff? At school?”

  “No, no. It was just for us, for me and my friends. We never sold any.”

  Maybe so, maybe not. I tended to believe him, but I’ve been wrong before. Something that becomes easier to remember, unfortunately, the older you get.

  “Did any of your friends buy from Frank?”

  “No. I was the only one. Frank made me promise not to tell where I was getting it.”

  “And you never did?”

  “No.” Surprised and indignant. After all, he’d given his word. Code of the West.

  “Were you buying from him before or after he stopped working at your house?”

  “Before, mostly. It was hard to get in touch with him after. I think he got me some one more time, before he went to Amarillo.”

  “And after he got back from Texas?”

  He shook his head. “I only saw him once or twice. He was too busy, he said.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Last week.”

  “Where?”

  “At the house.”

  “At your house?” My turn to be surprised; Felice Leighton had told me she hadn’t seen him. “Why’d he come?”

  “I don’t know. To see me, probably. But I never got a chance to talk to him. My sister opened the door first, and then my father was there, and he told Frank to get off the property or he’d call the police.”

  “Was your mother there?”

  He shook his head. “She was out.” He looked at me with what appeared to be genuine curiosity. “Why do you want to know so much about Frank?”

  I told him that Frank had come to my office to sell some stolen jewelry. “The more I know about Frank, the more likely I am to learn something about the necklace.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But you don’t know for sure that the jewelry he was talking about was my mother’s necklace.”

  Everybody’s a detective. “No,” I said, “I don’t. Kevin, why do you think your father disliked Frank so much?”

  “I don’t know. He used to like him a lot, and then suddenly, last year, he fired him.”

  “You and Frank never talked about it?”

  He shook his head. “I asked him, and Frank said it was like a personality conflict. I said—” he paused, uncertain.

  “You said what?”

  “Well, I called my father a bastard, and Frank got real mad and told me never to badmouth my old man. He said it was okay to badmouth your old man to his face, but never to other people.”

  It was a piece of homespun morality I wouldn’t have expected from Biddle. I asked the boy, “Kevin, did you know any other close friends Frank may’ve had?”

  He shrugged. “Only the big guy. Killebrew. I didn’t really like him. He was pretty scary.”

  “What about women? I got the impression that Frank liked the women.”

  Kevin grinned. “And they liked him.”

  “Did he mention any in particular?”

  “He never used names. He said a gentleman never used names. He told some pretty funny stories, though.”

  “No names at all?”

  “Well, there was Carla, the girl he lived with. And once—” another hesitation.

  “What?”

  “Well, once I saw him with Silvia Griego. They were in her car and Frank had his hand, you know, on the back of her neck.”

  “And who is Silvia Griego?”

  “She’s a friend of my mom’s. She owns an art gallery on Canyon Road.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell me, Kevin, that might help?”

  He shook his head. “But I don’t think Frank took that necklace.”

  “Someone did,” I said.

  IT WAS ALMOST SIX when Kevin Leighton left my office. I called Hector and caught him just as he was leaving his own.

  “So how’s it going, Philo?” he asked me.

  “Interesting,” I told him. “I’ve got something I think you can use.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Biddle was dealing coke. Small-timing it, anyway.”

  “Uh-huh. And naturally you’re not going to give me your source.”

  “Sorry, Hector.”

  He sighed. “You think the information’s solid?”

  “I think so. The source bought from him. Grams and eightballs.”

  “Where was Biddle getting it?”

  “I don’t know. But Benito Chavez is a possibility.”

  “He lives in Las Mujeres. I’ll have the Sheriff’s Department up there talk to him. Not that it’ll do much good.”

  “You sound dispirited, Hector.”

  “Is that the same as shitty?”

  “Nothing new on Biddle?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m going up to the Lone Star for a drink. Why not join me.”

  “Why the Lone Star?”

  “Biddle used to hang out there. I know Phil, the bartender. Maybe he can tell me something about Biddle’s friends and relations.”

  “Stacey Killebrew hangs out there these days.”

  “Good. It’s about time I talked to Stacey.”

  “Josh, stay away from Killebrew.”

  “Everyone keeps telling me that, Hector.”

  “Listen to them. Killebrew’s a fruitcake.”

  “According to Psychology Today, all your basic fruitcake needs is a little kindness and sympathy.”

  “You can’t believe everything you read.…”

  “Yeah, I read that somewhere. So you coming?”

  “Not tonight. Errands to run.”

  “All right. Talk to you later.”

  “Leave Killebrew alone, Josh.”

  “Sure, Hector.”

  “It’s your funeral.”

  EIGHT

  SOMETHING JABBED once at my right shoulder, quick and hard and insistent, and when I turned on the bar stool I found myself staring into the center of a T-shirted chest that seemed about six feet wide. I looked up, and kept looking up, and finally my stare found the dark brown eyes of Stacey Killebrew. They were set deeply back, above the high Slavic cheekbones and below the sandy eyebrows that matched the sandy mustache and the sandy thinning hair, and they were as friendly and inviting as a pair of gun muzzles.

  “You wanna talk to me?” he said in a flat West Texas drawl.

  I’d seen Killebrew one or twice a few years ago, before he became a guest of the state, and he’d always been a big man who kept himself fit. But a year and a half of pumping iron in the slammer had turned him into a fine figure of a man indeed. The sleeves of the T-shirt were rolled back to his thick shoulders, displaying biceps that wer
e a tad thicker than my thighs, with pectorals as rounded as grapefruit. His skin was so taut, stretched tight over the swollen muscles and the cable-wire ligaments, that it looked as if it could repel bullets. I wouldn’t have a chance to find out, not today, anyway. I still wasn’t carrying the revolver.

  I said, “Yeah, I would, as a matter of fact. Sit down and I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “You won’t buy me shit,” he said. His thin-lipped mouth moved hardly at all as he spoke—something else, perhaps, he’d picked up in prison. “You wanna talk,” he said, “we go outside.” He hooked his thumbs over an ornate silver and turquoise belt buckle.

  Phil, the bartender, had moved down to this end of the bar again and now he leaned toward the two of us and said, “No trouble, Stacey.” He kept his hands below the bartop.

  With no change of expression, Killebrew turned to him and said, “Tell you what, Phil. You pull out that billy and I’ll cram it so far up your ass I’ll pop your eyeballs out.”

  Phil had been a Green Beret in Vietnam and the bartender here for ten years. He was prepared to take this thing as far as Killebrew wanted to go with it. His hands still below the bar, he said, “I’m telling you, Stacey. It doesn’t happen here.”

  I stood up. Sitting on the stool I’d been in a bad position anyway. “No problem, Phil,” I said. “Mr. Killebrew and I are going to have a little chat.”

  “Right,” Killebrew said. He had eased smoothly away, a step or two, when I stood. Giving himself room. He jerked his head toward the entrance. “Out.”

  “I don’t think so,” I told him. Standing, I was eye to eye with him and as ready as I would ever be. Feet braced, knees loose, body away from the bar but left elbow resting casually on its top, ready to come up in a block. I would’ve felt considerably better about it if I hadn’t known that he was ready too.

  I said, “Right here is fine with me. If you’ve got the time, I’d like to ask you a few questions about Frank Biddle.”

  Right here was also fine with Killebrew. He said, “I hear you been badmouthin’ me behind my back.”

  “You hear wrong.” I was wondering if there was anywhere on that body I could hit him without hurting myself. Not the stomach; beneath the tight T-shirt it looked like washboard.

  For the first time, he smiled. His teeth were large and mulish, discolored yellow, and the smile didn’t do much for him. It didn’t do much for me, either. He said, “You callin’ me a liar?”