A Garden of Vipers

by Jack Kerley

  Harry’s cell went off in his pocket. He fumbled it free, looked at the screen for the incoming number, didn’t seem to recognize it. He put the phone to his face, brightened.

  “Hi, Arn, what’s up?”

  Harry paused. Leaned forward. “What? When?”

  He listened with his hand on his forehead. Grunted a few times. Hung up. Turned to me.

  “Cade Barlow was found in his garage this morning. He shut the door, cut the gas line to his water heater in the garage. Then he sat on his shiny Harley and rode into the sunset. Or wherever.”

  I slammed my fist on my thigh. “He leave a suicide note?”

  “Nothing but a body on a bike, the asshole.”

  I thought for a few moments.

  “He was already dead, Harry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Arn Norlin said Barlow was a decent cop until four years back. That’s when he got odd. Arn described it as Barlow seeming like he’d lost someone he loved. Maybe he traded his integrity for thirty pieces of silver. Or chrome, in this case.”

  “Barlow lost himself when he sold his honor? That’s what you’re saying?”

  I shrugged. “It fits.”

  Harry leaned back in his chair with his mouth open and tapped a yellow pencil against his cheek. It made a hollow sound.

  “Wonder who bought it?” he said. “Barlow’s honor.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Rather than second-hand Clair’s take on the Kincannons, I wanted Harry to hear it from her own lips. I had a growing sense that our complicated journey was about to take us into the realm of the Furies.

  She didn’t sit behind her desk, but in a wingback chair in the corner of her office. Harry and I sat close. Clair wore a cream pantsuit tailored to the millimeter, a bright silk blouse, lavender. She crossed her long legs and leaned forward, aiming the big blue headlights at Harry and me.

  “Here’s the condensed story, Harry: Money is power. The only restraint on power is personal morality. That’s not innate, it’s learned. Trouble is, the Kincannons never had that on their lesson plan. If they had a coat of arms, it would say Me First. If you had to characterize the family as a single entity, it would be a devious child.”

  Harry said, “Why do people bend at the waist when they hear the name?”

  “The Kincannons spend vast sums to appear like benevolent royalty, to be adored by the public. It doesn’t hurt that the boys look like movie stars.”

  Harry said, “Carson told me about the one hand giving, the other taking. It sounds like if they had a third hand, it’d carry a knife.”

  “Don’t gamble that it doesn’t, Harry. Do you actually think they, or one of them, have something to do with your case?”

  “There’s no hard evidence,” Harry said. “But the circumstantial pile is growing.”

  “There’s nothing to go after them with?”

  Harry rubbed his temples and shook his head.

  “We’ve discovered some things from a reporter, but we need personal insights. Not how may lawyers or PR people they have, not how many millions they keep in the Caymans. Something about them as people. History. Personalities. We need to know if they have any ghosts in the machinery we can leverage.”

  Clair stood, brow creased in thought. She walked to her window and tapped her nail against its surface as she gazed into the day, her graceful form backlit by filtered sunlight. I felt my breath catch and turned away.

  “Ory Aubusson,” she said, turning.

  “Roy Orbison?” Harry said.

  “Ory Aubusson,” Clair corrected, going to her desk. She picked up her BlackBerry, tapped the keys. “Ory was Buck Kincannon Senior’s best friend years back. Ory’s got money, but nothing like the Kincannons. Ory married a woman who made him slow down. Buck Senior married one who pushed him into hyperdrive.”

  “How do you know Aubusson?” I asked.

  “He was part of a crowd I hung with when dating Zane. Ory’s a piece of work, in his seventies now, bawdy, cantankerous. Smarter than he looks, one thing to keep in mind.”

  “You think he’ll talk to us?”

  Clair picked up her phone, a slim finger poised over the keypad. “If I ask him to see you, he will. If he decides to kick you off his property two minutes later, he’ll do that, too.”

  The call got through. Clair chirped, purred, told a couple of stories. Then slid us in the door. She hung up.

  “He’ll see you tomorrow in the early afternoon. I’ll get you the address.”

  We headed for the door. Clair got there ahead of us, pushed it shut. She leaned against the door, her eyes tense.

  “If you’re wrong, if you screw up, the Kincannons will tear you to pieces, hound you with lawyers, get you kicked off the force. Even if you’re right, it could happen. And you don’t even know if you’re right.”

  “We’re right,” Harry said. “Still doesn’t negate any of the other possibilities, though.”

  Clair stepped aside. Harry started down the hall, pulling out his cell to check for messages. She turned to me, her voice low.

  “Are you all right, Ryder? With your personal upheaval?”

  “Keeping busy. I think it’s the answer.”

  “Too busy to get together and talk? That was tomorrow night, you know.”

  “Sevenish, if I recall.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder. Gave it a gentle squeeze. Said, “Stay safe, Carson.”

  The door reopened and I followed after my partner, a bell-like ringing in my ears.

  Harry had to go to the prosecutor’s office to straighten out a time line on an upcoming trial, and I envied him a few moments thinking about something else, even if it was another murder. I dug out our mass of paper and started at the beginning, the Wookiee jumping from the Mazda and running into the truck’s headlamps. The knife in the rainy gutter. The oddities with the extra water in Taneesha’s car.

  After a half hour I dropped my head to my hands and rubbed my eyes.

  “I know that look,” said a voice at my back, Tyree Shuttles. “Frustration, pure and simple.”

  “This isn’t simple frustration, Tyree,” I said. “This is the new and improved frustration—a hundred percent more for no added charge.”

  “Grab a bowl of gumbo at Flanagan’s?” he suggested.

  “Anything to get out of here.”

  Like the last time we’d spoken, Shuttles had silent lapses where he’d seemed far away, making a decision, or mulling his own set of problems. After just a few spoonfuls of crawfish gumbo, he pushed his bowl away, stared into my eyes, seemed to make the choice.

  “You were one of the last guys in the department to make detective, Carson. You remember how it was to be new, right?”

  “It’s a whole ’nother world. Something not fitting right yet?”

  He looked down at his hands. “It’s Pace and me. There’s something not working in our chemistry. It’s keeping me awake at night. Maybe I’m not up to his…expectations or something.”

  “Expectations? Pace Logan?”

  Shuttles rubbed his face. “Not me personally, I hope, but more like new school versus old school. I’m college, he’s not. I had criminology courses, profiling, tactics, strategies, psychology, sociology, you name it, I took it.”

  “Damn,” I said, impressed.

  “I had a scholarship, made it easy. But Pace, well…he’s just got the street experience. The hard-fought smarts, doing things in ways I don’t quite get. I respect his years of experience, and want to learn from it. You know, Pace, he’s a doggone good guy and, uh, he knows people and, uh…”

  “He’s great with children and loves his mother dearly,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You’ve got a helluva start on Logan’s retirement-party speech, Tyree. But hard to miss that Logan wants to get his gold watch and get gone. He can do a little or a lot before he leaves, and a little’s a lot easier.”

  I admired Shuttles’s protection of his partner, trying not to d
is Logan. But Tyree had a future in the department while Logan had only a past, and it was time for Shuttles to start cutting his own piece of the pie.

  I said, “Everything you learned, everything you’ve seen…does it suggest Pace Logan is a good detective, or a mediocre one? And for the record, what we say doesn’t reach past here.” I knocked the edge of the table.

  “For sure?”

  “’Til death do us part. What’s wrong?”

  Shuttles leaned forward, his voice a whisper. Fear in his eyes. “I soft-pedaled what I think about Pace. He’s getting paranoid. He thinks I’m trying to undercut him, just because I’m interested in contemporary techniques and equipment, the latest in forensics, that type of thing. Plus he’s got that fixation with Harry. Like that night with the Franks woman.”

  “Franklin, Taneesha Franklin…And what fixation?”

  “When he heard Harry and you were heading to the scene, it was like we were in this big competition, he had to race over and grab the case.”

  I grunted. “First case he ever grabbed, I imagine.”

  “Then there’s the things on the Hibney case, remember our burned woman?”

  “Hard to forget. Things like what?”

  “Like telling me I’m keeping stuff from him. He doesn’t get out of the car to interview anyone, just pisses on me whatever I come back with. Like he’s angry with me. He ever work with a black partner before?”

  “I don’t think it’s that, Tyree. I think he’s just a miserable human being.”

  “For sure. Plus he’s getting weird his last couple months. I hate to say it, but I’ll be glad when he retires. He worries me.”

  I thought it over. “I’ve seen old-guard types getting ready to retire before. Some can’t wait, others get depressed. Maybe he’s just getting the blues, taking it out on you. Just wait it out, Tyree. And thanks for letting me in the door.”

  Shuttles leaned back and let his shoulders slump in the chair, like he’d just set down a wheelbarrow full of bricks.

  CHAPTER 34

  Morning came and Harry and I headed to Ory Aubusson’s place in Baldwin County. I studied the MapQuest sheet.

  “It should be right up around the bend.”

  The road curved; ahead and to the right we saw an imposing yellow house with at least five acres of front lawn, a couple of live oaks per acre, the oaks garnished with Spanish moss. The house was plantation style, a full gallery to the front. I saw a solitary figure sitting on the gallery.

  “Should be Aubusson,” I said. “He told Clair he’d be waiting outside.”

  Aubusson was in his late seventies. He was in a huge antique wheelchair, an oaken throne with wheels, a marble table beside him, cane propped against the table. He’d once been a large and robust man, but age had bent his back, gnarled his hands, and turned his hair to smoky wisps of gray. Aubusson wore belted khaki pants and a white shirt, a scarlet bow tie below his strident Adam’s apple. His daughter was with him, a sturdy, handsome woman in her late forties. She pulled on the back of Aubusson’s chair.

  “Come on, Daddy. Let me get you out of the sun.”

  “Leave off, Ella. I got company. Bring me out a whiskey.”

  “It ain’t close to noon, Daddy. And you’re not even supposed to…” She stared at the old man with a look that was supposed to be anger, but held too much fondness. She shrugged, turned toward the door.

  Aubusson aimed a long finger at chairs set before his. “Put some cushions under your butts, boys. You’re cops, surely you know how to sit.”

  He laughed, a wheezy caw. His daughter brought a heavy crystal tumbler of amber liquid, set it down, shook her head, and retreated inside. Aubusson took a long drink, wiped his chin with the back of his hand.

  “See, what it is is a generation thing. I came up before all this stuff—whiskey, tobacco, fatted-up food, pussy—was supposed to kill you. So it don’t. Ever’ time one of my friends decided to start eating right and exercising, they tipped over in a year.”

  He lifted the tumbler, drank. I smelled a scent like flint and barley; high-end scotch.

  “Why didn’t Miz Swanscott come along?” Aubusson asked. Swanscott was Clair’s maiden name.

  I said, “She’s working. She sends her regards.”

  His eyes got wistful. “Miz Clair Swanscott, or Peltier, as she goes by now, was as fine a piece of young womanhood as I ever laid eyes on, far too fine for that worthless ex-husband and, unfortunately, far too young for me.” The eyes switched to the present and turned to me.

  “Clair said you wanted to talk a bit about Buck, the old days.”

  I nodded. Close enough for now.

  The old man shook the ice in his glass. A heavy brown wasp buzzed before his eyes, hovered. Aubusson backhanded it away.

  “Buck Senior and me’s about the same age, came up the same place, over by Bay Minette. We stayed tight for years, made money pretty young, starting with timber, pulpwood. Ol’ Buck kept going, dee-versified, as they say. I always figured dee-versified meant to cut off part of a poem.”

  Light tickled in the old man’s eyes. He knew we hadn’t expected the wordplay.

  “You ran with him how long?” Harry asked.

  “We stayed thick up through his courting and early part of his married life, Maylene dropping babies like a brood mare. I swear that woman’s pussy musta growed so loose you could—”

  “How many kids she have?” I asked.

  “Six or seven. Not all of ’em made it. Sickly, I guess. There was a couple miscarriages. A stillborn kid.”

  Harry said, “What was she like? Maylene?”

  “You ever meet her?” Aubusson asked.

  I said, “I saw her once at a company party. She wasn’t real conversational. Or real happy-looking.”

  He cackled. “She became what she was meant to become, a tough, mean old woman showing the world that, by God, she’s built a family people have to respect.”

  “Family,” Harry said. “That’s Buck, Nelson, Racine, right? You know them, I take it. From when they were growing up?”

  Aubusson seemed to straighten in his chair, become taller. He looked hard into our eyes.

  “Why are you people really here? There’s no reason for anyone to talk about Buck Senior. He’s up there on that spread, in the back house. I saw him seven–eight years back. Walkin’ around in his jammies and grinnin’ like a kid on Christmas, ’cept kids know how to wipe their mouths. Had a negra nursemaid followin’ him around, doin’ for him. He looked at me and farted, started laughing. Basically, he’s dead. I’m gonna ask again: Why are you here?”

  I leaned forward. “We’re not sure why we’re here, sir. We may never be sure. But we think there are some strange goings-on that might center around the family. To be frank, I’m talking the possibility of murder.”

  “Ella!” the old man bayed. He thumped his cane on the floor of the gallery. The door banged open. I could already hear the coming words:

  Wheel me back in the house, baby, and kick these people off our propity.

  The daughter arrived. Stood beside her father.

  “What is it now, Daddy?”

  Aubusson held his glass high; it glinted in the light.

  “Hit me again, girl. I got to tell some funny stories and I need my throat wet to do it.”

  Lucas had purchased a desk, a simple and noninvolving task. He went to a Staples, paid cash for the desk and the delivery. It was not the company’s largest desk, more midrange. Lucas thought of it as a practice desk. He pictured the desk with training wheels and started laughing.

  A chair accompanied the desk, ergonomic, with a handle like a turn signal under the seat. Lucas twiddled and adjusted until his legs fit perfectly beneath the desk and he was well supported from all angles. He had also purchased a pack of pens and some writing paper. He set the pad on the desk and centered the title atop his page in bold strokes.

  C(S,T) = SN(d1)-Ke-rTN(d2)

  For the next hour he wrote beneath the title equa
tion, adding subsets and refinements and a doodle of a dog puppet he found particularly amusing. At the bottom of the page, he wrote, Buck: Run this by someone who knows about money.

  He made another trip to the phone outside the gas station, sitting in his little green Subaru and waiting for a heavy man with a greasy mustache to finish talking. Lucas was two miles from the KEI offices and knew Crandell would have people wandering within that perimeter, several photos of Lucas in their possession, both the hairy Lucas and the clean Lucas. The clean-shaven Lucas photos would be dated, and wouldn’t show him in a suit and tie, like he’d taken to wearing.

  Practicing.

  Lucas hunkered down in his seat. The fat man yelled something into the phone about a busted differential and waddled away. It took a minute to get through to Buck Kincannon’s duplicitous secretary. He assured her that he knew her boss. When she asked his name, he came up with “Mr. Lucas Runamok,” carefully spelling it for the woman.

  “R-U-N-A-M-O-K. It’s an Icelandic name,” he offered. “Like Reykjavík.”

  “Hello?” Kincannon said after the call had transferred, suspicion in his voice. “Who is this?”

  “How’s it hanging, Buck? There’s a fax coming your way in precisely one hour. I suggest you be there to receive the transmission.”

  Lucas dropped the phone to the cradle and revisited Staples. He paid to have a fax sent at a specified time, tipping the clerk twenty dollars. Lucas returned to his office and practiced tying and untying his tie.

  At five minutes before the appointed hour he leaned into the Celestron scope. At thirty seconds after the hour, Buck Kincannon raced into his office, fax page in hand. He closed the door, then crossed the room and closed the blinds.

  It didn’t matter, Lucas thought, snugging another four-in-hand knot to his throat. He knew what would be going through Buck Kincannon’s head. And that a record of his call would secretly move to Nelson Kincannon as soon as the lusty little assistant with the fat legs got the chance.

  Lucas pulled his tie loose and thought a moment. He decided to try a Windsor knot.