3 A Brewski for the Old Man

by Phyllis Smallman

  “Maybe. Who shot him?”

  “Don’t know.”

  She worried the inside of her cheek with her teeth. I knew something was coming I wouldn’t like. My chest tightened.

  “The police are looking for a pickup truck seen leaving the area shortly before he was found. That’s all there was on the news.”

  “Tully.” I buried my hands in my hair. “Oh my god, I told Tully about Ray John.” All those years I kept my mouth shut, why did I have to blow it now? “He went after him. Oh god, why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut just this once.”

  Marley lunged at me, wrapping her arms around me. We clung together, Marley saying, “You don’t know that, don’t know it was Tully. Don’t jump to conclusions.”

  I pulled away from her and looked into her face. “But it’s true, isn’t it?” I said.

  Her green eyes wavered and a tear slipped over the rim of her eye. Her freckles stood out like a rash on her ashen skin. She couldn’t hide the truth we both knew.

  I pushed down the covers and slid from the bed. “I have to find him.”

  “Whoa,” Marley said, grabbing at my oversized sleeping shirt. “Think about it.”

  “You think.” I pulled away and grabbed a pair of jeans from the closet. “Be sure and let me know what the results are. I have to find Tully.” I tried to stuff a foot into the twisted pant leg of my jeans, hopping on one foot and kicking, fighting the fabric. “If I’d gone on keeping my mouth shut this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Okay,” she said and picked up the bedside telephone and started punching in numbers.

  I conquered the jeans. “What are you doing?” I asked sucking in my stomach to do up the zipper. “You’re not going alone.”

  “I need to see Tully before they arrest him.” I took the phone away from her as the dental-office answering machine picked up. “Need to talk to him.” She looked doubtful. “I have to do this alone.”

  She plopped back onto the bed. “Poor Tully. This just can’t happen to him,” she sputtered. Hugging my pillow to her chest she wailed, “I love him.” She was crying for real now.

  “Why?” I was really curious about this. Why would anyone love Tully? I’d spent most of my life hating him and wishing I had another father, a normal one, someone I could do normal things with, someone I could depend on, someone who showed up when he said he would, someone to be proud of.

  Marley didn’t have to think about her answer. “He was just so different from mine,” she said. “Always a laugh and never giving advice.” Marley’s father was in insurance and had high standards, a hundred and eighty degrees from my old man. “Tully didn’t expect anything.”

  “How could he? He’s one of the world’s great screw-ups. He’s just proved that. How could he ever think this was making things better? It will hit the papers big-time now, murder and child abuse. The Jacaranda Sun is going to love it.”

  My pillow slammed into the wall. “When did you start caring so much about what people think?”

  True, I did care. My don’t-give-a-shit attitude had deserted me.

  “You’re getting to be just what you always hated,” she said, her voice accusing.

  “And what’s that?” I dropped my nightshirt on the floor and pulled a tee off a hanger.

  “You’re turning into a social climbing…” I turned to look at her.

  “You’re turning into your mother-in-law, you’re turning into Bernice,” she yelled.

  Her words rocked me before fury ripped through me. “Oh, thanks a whole hell of a lot. Don’t you think I have enough to deal with without you taking a piece out of me?”

  She bit the inside of her cheek. “Sorry.” It was reluctant and insincere, dragged out of her because of sympathy and not because she believed it.

  I turned away from her and pulled on the tee.

  “I’m just scared for Tully,” she wailed. “What if he does something stupid?”

  “Oh, you think he can do something more asinine than killing Ray John?”

  “What if he runs from the police?” She was crying again now. “What if he…” She couldn’t finish the thought.

  It took my breath away. What if? Here I was thinking about my problems when Tully was up to his ass in alligators. And Marley was right, somewhere along the way I’d started desperately seeking normal and belonging. Truth was, maybe I’d never been the rebel I thought I was.

  “What’s happening?” Lacey stood at the door. In her plaid pajama bottoms, white cropped top and bed head. She looked shockingly young.

  “I have some bad news for you, Lace,” I said. “Come and sit down.”

  “What?” she wailed, backing away. “Is it my mom?”

  “God no.” I took her arm. “It’s Ray John.” I told her what Marley had said.

  She looked confused, shaking her head in denial. “But I didn’t do it,” she whispered, looking at me in confusion. “I didn’t shoot him.”

  I led her to the bed and she flopped down. Marley wrapped her arms around Lacey and tried to pull her close.

  But Lacey resisted the embrace and demanded, “How could he be dead? I didn’t kill him.”

  “No one is saying that you killed him,” Marley soothed.

  “Don’t think that,” I said. “No one is accusing you.”

  “I wanted to,” Lacey blurted out.

  “We both did. Doesn’t mean we’re responsible. You can’t kill someone by wishing.” I knelt down in front of her. “If wishing could kill, he’d have been long dead before he ever got to you.”

  “My mom will be upset.” She was trying not to cry, sucking on her lips and hunching her shoulders together, trying to hold it in. “She really loved him.” Lacey wiped at her eyes. “When she called me last night she said she wanted me to come home. She said RJ just wanted us to be a family and if that wasn’t going to happen he was going to leave so Mom and I could be together again. She was terrified of him leaving. I told her what he did to me but she didn’t believe me. She said you’d put those ideas in my head.” Now she folded her arms on her knees and buried her head in them. We could barely catch her next words, “She said I was lying.”

  I looked at Marley over Lacey’s shuddering back. “Poor kid,” she said.

  “I’ll take you home, Lace.”

  When I picked up my keys off the bar I didn’t spare a thought for the fanny pack with the gun in it. I didn’t need it anymore so I didn’t notice it wasn’t there.

  Not noticing the Beretta was gone was only the first of the mistakes I made.

  C H A P T E R 2 0

  Rena was a mess, barely coherent and unable to recognize us at first. The police had come and gone, leaving her alone after delivering their news and offering to call someone, but Rena had kept to herself as she always did. Lacey wrapped her arms around her mother and rocked her gently, saying there, there, the eternal murmurs for a bad situation. Rena let it happen, not reaching out for her daughter or pushing her away. “Have you got a doctor?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Lacey answered and pointed to a drawer in the end table holding the phone.

  I took out the list of numbers and called the medical clinic. The doctor on duty called me back within five minutes. Then I drove to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription he ordered when what I really wanted to do was to go find Tully. I wanted to talk to him before the police got to him. I tried calling his house while I waited at the drive-through window of the drugstore. Tully didn’t have a cell and he wasn’t at home; perhaps the police had already picked him up. There was no answering machine, too hi-tech for Tully.

  On the way back to Blossom Avenue my mobile rang. Hoping it was Tully, I grabbed for it before the second ring. It was Styles.

  “Where are you?”

  “I took Lacey Cagel to her mother’s, then I picked up a prescription for tranquilizers and I’m about to drop them off.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Okay, when?”

  “Now, my office.”
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  “Can’t right now. Meet me at the Sunset about three.”

  “Now,” he bellowed.

  “See, ya.” I hit End. He could show up at three or not. It was all the same to me.

  I left Rena and Lacey to sort things out between them. When I pulled out onto the divided highway a cruiser turned onto Blossom behind me. Perhaps Styles had really lost his cool and sent them to pick me up.

  My purse rang and I fished out my mobile. “We need to talk,” Tully said.

  “Well, good morning to you too. Where are you? I’ve been phoning.”

  “I’m at Zig’s. Come over.”

  “I’m ten minutes away.”

  He hung up without saying goodbye but then he never did. I picked up donuts and coffee and headed for Uncle Ziggy’s.

  Ziggy Peek isn’t a real uncle. He and my dad were in ’Nam together where they’d sworn some undying devotion to each other in combat and when they got home they bonded over shooting rats out at Uncle Zig’s junkyard, a wasteland of wrecked cars and junked appliances surrounded by an eight-foot-high wood barricade.

  As a kid, Uncle Zig’s junkyard was my Wonderland and amusement park, home away from home. When other kids went to adventure parks, I built my own out of ruined vehicles, rusted appliances and broken furniture while Dad and Zig drank beer and told lies. I escaped out into the jungle of crap and into a world of my own creation. I built little rooms furnished with old car seats and crates for tables. With pocket books stolen from Uncle Zig’s stash to transport me to exotic worlds, I dreamt long hot afternoons away. And though it wouldn’t be anyone else’s idea of heaven, some of my happiest hours were spent fantasizing in that junkyard.

  Twenty years ago Uncle Zig’s property sat all alone on an empty stretch of the Tamiami Trail. Now strip malls and car dealerships had moved in and housing developments blossomed behind him. In fact, a gated community with four-hundred-thousand-dollar homes sat smack up against his back fence. Irate homeowners, who’d known the junkyard was there but built their mansions anyway, complained about rodents and other things coming from Uncle Zig’s scrap heap. They sent letters to the newspapers and lawyers to court to make his life hell.

  Uncle Zig was now in the interesting position of being land-rich and money-poor. The citizens’ group got a zoning change to prevent him from bringing in any more junk, so now he eked out a living selling used auto parts and running a small dirt-moving business. He could barely pay his taxes, never mind my friend Brian’s legal fees to fight off city planners and local homeowners. He was poor as dirt while owning millions of dollars’ worth of land.

  The walls of the barrier around Uncle Zig’s property were decorated with hubcabs of every conceivable model. I pulled into his turn-off and honked my horn while I searched for new models along the fence. The gates, rigged by Uncle Zig and Tully, opened magically before me.

  Against a backdrop of rusted steel and green mold, a strutting peacock stepped delicately across the hard-packed shell yard in front of me. I stopped while it stood and displayed its jeweled feathers, shaking them and crying mournfully. I laid on the horn. It yelled indignantly but pranced out of the way.

  I pulled in beside Tully’s piece of crap which was parked before a dilapidated construction trailer where Uncle Zig lived and worked.

  Tully and Uncle Zig sat on wooden captain’s chairs in front of the trailer. An empty white plastic lawn chair sat between them waiting for me. I was about to get double-teamed.

  Uncle Zig’s fat face split with a smile that warmed my heart and made me grin in response. At six-four and over three hundred pounds, Uncle Ziggy always looked like he was made up of leftover parts from the construction of other people, pieces that didn’t quite fit together on one person, especially one as big as he was. His long legs looked like they were better suited to a man at least a foot taller, but his arms were short and ended in slim delicate hands, hands surely meant for a surgeon or pianist. He always wore work gloves to protect those hands, whether out of vanity or caution I could never decide, and as a result his hands were always pale and soft, unlike his other weathered parts left bare to the sun. His face didn’t add up either. His nose was large and bulbous while his sparkling blue eyes, dots sunk into folds of fat like raisins stuck in a bun, were graced by long curling lashes, startling and feminine.

  He got up out of his chair and held out his arms to me. I set the coffee down on the empty lawn chair and walked into his embrace. He smelt of sweat, grease and something like sandalwood that I’d never been able to figure out but always identified with him. It was like Uncle Zig was wearing his own special scent.

  I stepped away from him. “What are these?” I asked, snapping yellow suspenders with black markings, looking like giant yardsticks holding up his oversized greasy black jeans. Stiff with grime, the jeans could probably stand up alone.

  “Your dad.” He hooked his thumbs in the suspenders and pulled them away from his chest, tipping backwards on his heels. “I’m always losing my damn tape measure. Your dad thought these would be a two-for. ’Course if I use them, my pants will fall down.” He threw back his head and laughed uproariously. “Bare-assed but accurate, that’s what I’ll be.”

  Tully didn’t even break into a smile, just lounged in his chair, one long leg stretched out, chin resting in his hand, waiting and watching. He may look relaxed but I knew he was a coiled spring, holding it together while we did our small talk. I kicked his foot. “So what did you get up to last night?” “I’ve been wondering the same about you,” he replied, lowering his hand and folding his hands across his waist. “Why don’t you tell us about it?”

  I handed Uncle Zig a coffee from the cardboard container and then gave Tully one. He took it, watching me, never letting his eyes drift from mine. Suddenly I got it.

  C H A P T E R 2 1

  “Hey, wait a minute, are you crazy? You think I killed him?”

  “Did you?” he asked.

  Stunned into silence, not something that happens to me often, my brain was taking in the irony of it. Here I was sure Tully had done the deed and he was thinking it was me. So if neither of us did it, who did?

  “Look, kid,” Tully said, “I don’t care if you blew the shit-head away. We just got to decide how we’re going to handle it.”

  I picked up the cardboard tray with my coffee and the donuts and flopped down on the chair. Giddiness was bubbling in me.

  “Should have come to me or your dad,” Uncle Zig put in. I handed Uncle Zig the bag of donuts and popped the top off my coffee. “Shouldn’t have done it yourself,” Uncle Zig added. “That was foolish.”

  I stared from one to the other trying to make sense of what I was hearing. “I should have come to you to kill someone?” I asked Uncle Zig.

  “Damn right.” He took a bite of donut, covering his lips in powdered sugar and asked around the donut, “What do you know about killing?” “What do you?”

  He hesitated, studying me, and then shoved the rest of his donut into his mouth. He looked at me while he chewed and then stretched his neck out and gave a huge swallow. “What do you thing I was doing in ’Nam?”

  He had a point there. I hadn’t thought of that. Vietnam was another life, hard to think of Uncle Zig running through a jungle or actually killing someone. At three hundred pounds he looked more cuddly than dangerous.

  Tully sat up straight in his chair. “As I see it we have a couple of options. You could go up to your mother’s but they’d have you in no time. No use hiding out in the States, so the first thing is we get you on a boat today and head south. I can take care of getting a boat, no problem. Don’t want to use my own, too easy to trace. We need one that no one will connect with us.” Totally intense, totally absorbed, thinking it through, he was planning our great escape.

  “We stay well away from any marinas, except for gas. From the Keys we can head for the Bahamas and from there down to South America and just get lost.” It was a route I’d planned on taking once before in my life. Maybe i
t was an example of genetic wiring. Maybe generations of Jenkins had run from every conceivable crime, a perfect example of survival of the fittest. Hysteria was bubbling up in me.

  “But we need to leave today, now,” Tully insisted.

  “Don’t even go back to your apartment to pack,” Uncle Zig said.

  “Right, stay here with Zig. They’ll never look for you here. Zig will take us to the marina and we’ll leave our trucks here behind the barricade where no one will ever find them.”

  “I’ll strip them for parts. There’ll be nothing left for the cops to find.”

  “But we need to make them think we’ve gone north,” Tully added.

  “When you’re gone, I’ll drive up to Georgia and use your credit cards,” Uncle Zig put in. “That will make the police think you’re heading north.”

  My head swiveled between them. “Have you two done this before?”

  “Naw,” said Tully. “Haven’t been out of the country since ’Nam but I’m pretty sure we can get to Venezuela or someplace like that without ID — boats come and go without people paying much attention — but I’m taking Zig’s and maybe we can get some for you. How about Marley’s birth certificate? That would work.”

  “And don’t worry about money,” Uncle Zig said. He reached out and patted my knee. “We’ve got that figured too. I’ll get some down to you wherever you end up.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’ve thought this all through,” I told them.

  “There’s another choice,” Tully said, hitching his chair around to face mine and leaning intently towards me. “The other thing I was thinking is that I go in there and confess to killing Ray John, god knows I wanted to, but you have to tell me everything and give me the gun.” His forgotten cup of coffee, hanging from his hand between his knees, emptied into the earth at his feet. “It’s up to you which way we do it.”

  “Gun?”

  “Yeah, I need that. I’ll shoot it, have my prints on it.” He pointed a forefinger at me. “And I need to know about the time and everything, need every little detail you can think of. There can’t be any holes or anything to trip me up.”