A Garden of Vipers

by Jack Kerley

  “Warm and fuzzy,” I noted. “A good photo op.”

  “Mr. Lawyer suggested organizing a parade for the transfer station. All we had to do was show up, moms and dads and kids and aunts and uncles, get the cleanest people we knew to come—”

  “The cleanest people?” Harry said.

  “Not a second thought about what he was saying.”

  “Scumbucket,” Harry whispered.

  Ms. Baker said, “All parade permits would be handled, all news media in place. Mr. Lawyer even had scripts. ‘A step ahead for our children,’ ‘Children are the future when parents have jobs,’ ‘Chemitrol Means Community Control.’ Our clean people were to chant this lying shit like fucking parrots—pardon my French. I told the guy he could wrap his flyers with barbwire and stick ’em where the sun don’t shine. A little more politely than that, maybe. Not a lot.”

  “The money dried up?” I said.

  “The field got padlocked. Within a week it was all over.”

  “You never heard from Kincannon?” Harry’s voice was a rasp.

  “I thought about making a stink. But then I realized they could point to a bunch of bats and gloves and uniforms and we’d come off like whining ingrates. Of course, the uniforms got dirty and torn, the equipment fell apart. And without a decent place to play, the kids lost interest.”

  Mardy Baker closed her eyes, rubbed them with her fingertips.

  “I thanked God a thousand times for sending such good-hearted people here. The next year they were at the door with their hands out, our payback time.”

  “I understand something,” I said to Harry. “Clair said few of the truly wealthy give with both hands. I thought she meant the Kincannons were exceptions, using both hands to ladle out the lucre. She really meant one hand passes out the goodies, because the other one’s busy grabbing something back.”

  Ms. Baker looked at me over her coffee.

  “One hand gives, the other hand takes,” she said. “Damn if that don’t sum it right up.”

  A deflated Harry retraced our route in, passing by the warehouse, a cheap frame and metal structure squatting on two acres of asphalt, the cyclone-fenced lot now home to industrial equipment—trailers, crane assemblies, scaffolding. He stared as an equipment truck pulled from the building, a small dozer trailered behind, MAGNOLIA INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENTS painted on the truck’s door.

  Harry pointed. “There’s where it was, the field. Know who owns Magnolia Industrial Developments?”

  “The Kincannons,” I ventured.

  “Bastards.”

  Harry drove down the street where the meth head had stood, doing ten miles an hour, looking back and forth, stopping to scan down alleys.

  “Looking for something in particular?” I asked.

  “The meth head, the kid with the mouth like cancer. Haaa-i-eee. I figured out he was trying to say my name. He must have been one of the ballplayers from back then, one of the kids. It’s the only way he could have known me.”

  “I’m sorry, bro,” I said.

  “I swear if Buck Kincannon was in front of me right now, cop or no cop, I’d nail that son of a bitch to the side of a barn, stand a hundred feet away, and teach myself how to shoot a bow and arrow.”

  I’d been trying to figure when and how to tell Harry about Dani. This seemed appropriate.

  “Harry?” I said.

  “What, brother?”

  “Ms. Danbury’s getting screwed by Buck Kincannon.”

  I saw Harry’s hands squeeze tight on the wheel, like he was choking it.

  “Lotta that going around,” he said.

  CHAPTER 18

  Harry and I returned to Mobile and silently pored through Rudolnick’s records. Our simmering funk made us a threat to others, set off by an errant word or gesture—one of Pace Logan’s wiseass remarks, for instance—but since we’d both been wounded by Buck Kincannon, we were safe with one another.

  After an hour of reading psychoterminology, Harry pitched a stack back in the box. “How about we get Terry Baney to talk to the trucker, get a sketch made to pass out on the streets?” he suggested. Terry Baney was the departmental artist.

  “Sketch? The perp doesn’t have a face to draw, Harry. We got one eyewitness, right? According to our wit, the perp looks like a Wookiee. Or maybe a yeti.”

  “If you saw a yeti walking down the street, you’d remember it, Carson. Right?”

  An hour later we were in the flower-lined hospital room of Arlin Dell. He’d been disconnected from most of the machines. The truck driver scowled, thinking our request strange.

  “All I saw was hair, like I told you,” Dell said. “Remember Cousin Itt on The Addams Family? Draw him, just leave off the top hat.”

  “Cousin Itt wore a bowler hat,” Terry Baney corrected. He sat in a chair beside Dell’s bed, a drawing pad in one hand, a thick pencil in the other. Harry and I leaned against the wall.

  Dell rolled his eyes. “Bowler hat, top hat, whatever.”

  Terry Baney was forty-three and looked like a man more at home with actuarial tables than drawing materials—slight, bespectacled, pomaded hair, a pink hue to his scrubbed cheeks. He wore a suit fresh from Kmart’s bargain rack; his only artsy touches were a bolo tie and silver belt buckle dotted with turquoise. But the man had a gift, an ability to coax fragments of recollections from witnesses, transforming them into representations that held not photographic exactitude but something better: emotive content.

  Baney drew three shapes on his pad, a flattened circle, a circle, and a vertical oval. He turned the pad to Dell, tapped the drawings with his pencil.

  “Which of these was the basic shape of the perpetrator’s head?”

  “Come on,” Dell scoffed.

  Baney smiled nonchalantly, kept the drawings in front of the trucker.

  Dell thought a moment. “The middle one. Maybe more square, like a box.”

  Baney ripped the page off, tossed it to the floor. He drew a squarish circle, began adding lines indicating hair shape.

  “The hair, did it fall straight down like this?” He scribbled vertical lines from the oval. “Or did it fluff out to the sides, more like this?” Baney radiated lines out at an angle, creating a delta form.

  “That one. It was fluffed out.”

  “Did it fluff out straight? Or was it curly hair like this?” Baney drew curling lines.

  “No, the other way. It was straight.”

  Baney ripped the page away and started on a fresh sheet.

  “The guy’s eyes, Mr. Dell. You said they were like holes in the middle of all that hair.”

  Dell reached for the switch controlling the bed and raised himself higher. “Just holes. And they were kind of deep. Like his eyes were pushed back.”

  “Let’s talk shape. Round holes like this?” Baney drew his perceptions. “Or were they more like this?” His hand flashed over the paper. The result suggested prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes.

  Dell jabbed a finger at the pad. “That. I remember a white triangle above his eyes. Skin. Shaped like a tent from the front.”

  “That indicates hair parted at the top,” Baney said, tossing aside a page, beginning fresh. His pencil skipped over the paper, a blur. “Right in the middle. That’s what makes the, uh…tent effect. Can I use that in the future, Mr. Dell? Tent effect?”

  Dell grinned and nodded, pleased with his invention.

  “The hairy man’s deep eyes,” Baney asked. “Small, large?”

  Dell closed his eyes, thought. “Small. Or maybe they seemed that way because the guy was…” The trucker’s eyes popped open. “Angry. Scowling.” Dell frowned hard at Baney, indicating the look.

  Baney nodded, kept working. “So, if I take a skinny basic face, add the cheekbone effect around the eyes, keep the hair straight but full, and put a part in the dead center, make his eyes tight with anger…”

  Baney seemed transported, drawing, smudging, shading. After a minute he turned the pad to Dell.

  “This remin
d you of anyone?”

  The trucker’s eyes widened and his mouth fell open.

  “It’s him. How the hell did you do that?”

  Harry and I headed back to the department to photocopy the drawing, take it out on the street to run through our snitch network. We dropped the drawing on Harry’s desk, headed toward the coffee urn. When it sputtered and went dry, we headed downstairs to steal from the urn in Crimes Against Property.

  When we returned, the drawing was on the floor beside Harry’s desk. The closest dick was Pace Logan, leaning against a column and studying a sheaf of papers. Shuttles stood beside him, looking pained.

  “You got it wrong here,” Logan was lecturing Shuttles. “Plus your spelling is screwed. It’s perp-e-trator, not perp-a-trator.”

  “Sorry, Pace,” Shuttles said. “I’ll redo the report.”

  “Somebody mess with my desk?” Harry growled, staring at Logan.

  Logan looked over his reading glasses. “Don’t have a meltdown, Nautilus. I looked at your silly-ass picture. I was walking by and couldn’t figure if it was Charlie Manson or Grizzly Adams.”

  “How about getting it back on the desk next time?”

  Logan shook his head and turned away, walking back to his cubicle. Harry muttered, “Two more months.”

  We showed the pics around, gave several out to snitches and told them to call if they saw the guy. Of course, if he’d cut his hair and beard—odds being heavily that direction, unless he was a total lunatic—it was useless.

  When we ran out of pics, we headed to Flanagan’s to grab a beer and a bowl of gumbo. Harry shot me an occasional glance that I felt but didn’t see. He pushed aside his bowl.

  “What you gonna do, Carson? About Da—Ms. Danbury?”

  “It’s already done.”

  Harry clinked the spoon around his empty bowl.

  “You’re sure about her and Kincannon? I mean, she really was—”

  “I flat-out asked, Harry. She admitted she was boinking Buckie.”

  Harry nodded. He shot a glance over my shoulder, grimaced. I turned to the TV above the bar. Dani was anchoring the six p.m. news slot, doing the papers-on-the-desk bit. She launched into a story on the morning’s fire.

  “…man jumped before firefighters could reach him and pronounced dead at the hospital. A badly burned female body was found in the rubble, identification held pending notification of next of kin…”

  “How about you switch that to another channel,” Harry called to Eloise, our waitress.

  “Keep it on, Eloise,” I said. “And turn it up a bit.”

  Harry shot me the eye.

  “I have to get used to it,” I said, staring at the screen.

  Harry cleared his throat and leaned close. “Uh, Carson, you ever think about, uh…”

  I turned from the TV. “Messing with Buck Kincannon? Waiting outside Dani’s until I see them coming home one night, ripping out Buckie’s eyes and kicking them up his ass so far he’s staring at what he had for dinner?”

  “Yeah. You ever think about stuff like that?”

  “Never.”

  “That’s good. I’ve got to head home. My ass is worn out.” He slipped on his jacket, tossed a few bills on the table, walked to the door. He turned and came back.

  “What now?” I said to Harry’s looming form, hands in his pockets.

  “You know if you ever lit into a guy like that you could kiss your job good-bye.”

  “I know, Harry.”

  “Good.”

  He turned away. Paused. Turned back around.

  “Your job would be gone in an hour, Carson. No, a finger snap.”

  “I realize that, bro.”

  “I know,” he sighed. “I’m just making sure I do.”

  CHAPTER 19

  I slept some that night. It was between four-fifteen and five-forty-five, I think. The rest of the time I stared at pictures forming and re-forming on my shadowed ceiling. Listened to words tumbling through the darkened air.

  She’ll betray you. They always betray us, don’t they?

  The words were my brother’s words, Jeremy. He was, by all measures of the human mind, insane. Driven mad by our father’s relentless punishments and beatings, Jeremy had at age sixteen killed our father. Over the years he had killed five women. In his twisted mind he was avenging himself on our mother for never protecting him.

  But she was blameless, little more than a child herself. It was the three of us against my father, a trio of Chihuahuas caged with a rabid Doberman.

  Jeremy was incarcerated at an institution west of Montgomery. I was a hesitant visitor every four months on average. Last year I had taken Dani with me to visit Jeremy. He hated women, and the visit had not gone well, ending with him forecasting that my relationship with Dani would end in betrayal.

  His senses were uncanny. Had he seen something I had not? Or was it just his usual antifemale ranting?

  I had planned on visiting my brother soon, was overdue by a month, in fact. But when he would ask, as he always did, How’s your little love-muffin, Carson? Has she betrayed you yet? I did not want to admit the truth: that she had tried me for a year, found me wanting, and had taken up with a man who could deliver her the world wrapped in silk and served with champagne.

  I decided to postpone my visit this time around. Take a break from Jeremy. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  I stumbled from bed at six, turned on NPR, and fixed coffee. Figuring I needed the caffeine, I used four tablespoons per cup, drank four cups, buzzed off to the department.

  Harry showed up with a half dozen ham biscuits, correctly figuring I hadn’t eaten. We chomped biscuits and shuffled through phone slips from the previous day, hoping for points of gold glittering in the mud. Harry read a slip, reread it. Snicked it with a fingernail.

  “Something here, maybe. Lemme make a call.”

  Harry got up and went to the conference room to phone, returning a call to a snitch. When we told a snitch no one was listening as they talked, we told the truth. Maybe it didn’t mean much, but that’s the way we played it.

  Harry was back a minute later, eyebrows raised.

  “You know Leroy Dinkins?” he asked.

  I searched my memory and saw nothing but an amorphous blob wriggling in a doorway. It took me a second to realize my mind was showing me Leroy.

  “Met him once when I was in uniform,” I said. “A shoplifting beef. Leroy got stuck when he tried to run out the back door of a grocery downtown, the back door a lot smaller than the front. He was about eighteen, if I recall.”

  “That’s blubber butt himself,” Harry said, scowling at the slip. “I got this snitch hangs with Leroy Dinkins sometimes. He says Leroy was cadging drinks at a bar named Lucky’s when a guy looking like our drawing comes in. They talk in private, the hairball leaves. Suddenly Leroy’s ordering from his own pocket.”

  “The hairball gave Leroy some money,” I said.

  “That’s the way my snitch saw it.”

  “Why’d your snitch tattle on his buddy Dinkins?”

  Harry laughed. “Leroy drank all night and didn’t buy anyone else a single pop. My snitch got pissed off, dropped the dime.”

  “Leroy should learn to share,” I said. “You know where bubble butt lives?”

  “With his mama.” Harry grinned. “Where else?”

  Leroy Dinkins was easy to spot: a hulking mass on a porch. Harry knew Dinkins better than I did, filling me in as we drifted into a space in front of Dinkins’s house, a tiny frame bungalow.

  “Leroy’s the original fraidy-cat, Carson. Placid, flaccid, and lazy-assed. Hangs at the edge of the street scene, too lily-livered to get in any serious trouble. Scared to death of doing time.”

  I nodded. There were guys in the can who’d rather see a fat guy than a slim woman. Harry continued his assessment. “Leroy’s not real bright, but he’s all over the hood, and he’s got two big fat ears that suck up information that he sells. Who’s got the best reefer, where the upmarket
hookers hang. He’s less a doer than a connector.”

  “How should we approach him, bro?”

  “Like he’s about twelve years old.”

  Dinkins was testing the limits of a lounge chair, lying back. He wore a kinte cloth–pattern shirt the size of a bedspread over voluminous jeans and orange plastic flip-flops. He tensed as we pulled to the curb, looked stricken when we headed up the sidewalk.

  “Howdy, Leroy, remember me?” I asked. “Here’s a hint, the front half of you was outside Packy’s EZ Mart, the back half was inside.”

  “Dunno what you talkin’ about.”

  Leroy Dinkins was sucking a forty of Coors Light and nearing the bottom of an industrial-size bag of cheese puffs. A wide circle around his mouth was orange with cheese-puff dust, like clown makeup.

  Harry gave Leroy the hard eye. “Rumor has it you were at a joint called Lucky’s a few days back.”

  “So wha’? I go to Lucky’s two–three times a week. They got good po’ boys and cheese fries.”

  “Plus Lucky’s has wide doors, right?” Harry said.

  “Why you botherin’ me? Bein’ nasty and all?”

  Harry leaned close. “We’re looking for a guy. You might remember him, looks like King Kong maybe? Face that’s all fur.”

  Dinkins pushed himself up from the chair, the Goodyear blimp filled with Jell-O and struggling to get aloft.

  “I got to go inside and fix my mama’s supper. She has to eat same time every day.”

  I stepped between him and the door. “Come on, Leroy, you’re not in a jam. Did you sell this guy something?”

  “I don’t know nobody look like that,” he whined. “I gotta go inside.”

  The door pushed open behind me and bumped my ass. I turned to a petite woman in her sixties wearing horn-rim glasses, the frames adorned with rhinestones. She was leaning on a cane. I figured she’d been behind the door trying to hear our conversation.

  “Leroy, you didn’t tell me you had company.”

  “They salesmen, Mama. They just leaving.”

  She looked at me, squinted. “What you boys selling?”