Bad Chili cap-4

by Joe R. Lansdale

  I sat down on the couch and waited. Leonard had his pipe with him, the one he smokes now and then. He packed it carefully because his hands were shaking. He lit it and puffed. He used the remote to turn off the television.

  He said, “So I’m sittin’ home alone, thinking, always a dangerous thing for me, and I ask myself, this videotape business, it’s obvious someone is looking for something, and it’s on video. What could it be?”

  “And the answer is?”

  “I didn’t come up with anything. I asked myself another question. Why would they come to my place to look for the video? That one seemed obvious.”

  “Raul,” I said. “We’ve determined that possibility already.”

  “That’s right. Raul got a video belongs to someone else, and whoever it belongs to, they go looking for it.”

  “So why didn’t they check Horse Dick’s place instead of yours?”

  “I thought of that. I called Charlie and said, ‘You know my place was trashed because someone was looking for something. What about Horse Dick’s joint?’ Charlie tells me, yeah, it was wrecked. I tell him about my videos missin’, and we get to talkin’, and he says he was the one inspected Horse’s place and didn’t remember seeing any videotapes there. Didn’t think about it at the time. Wasn’t looking for any. But he recalled a VCR, and now that he thought about it, that didn’t make sense. Could be that way, you know, like Horse Dick only rents videos, but usually where there’s a VCR there’s a videotape or two. You know what else Charlie told me?”

  “No.”

  Leonard took a deep breath on this one. “This is hard, man. Raul, he didn’t die from hitting that tree. Wasn’t shot either. Charlie, he got back to headquarters after the funeral, and he’s bawlin’ his men out, ones looked over the hill, and they showed him pictures and video, Hap. Pictures of the tree, the hill, and Horse Dick’s body, and all along the woods, and guess what?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Raul wasn’t there.”

  “They overlooked him.”

  “No. They didn’t miss him. Charlie pushes for the autopsy report, looks it over. Coroner, he’d been told to just take it like it looks: someone, assailants unknown, killed Horse Dick, and Raul died in the motorcycle crash. Chief, he don’t want to deal with any other possibilities because of fearin’ it might connect with a gay killin’, then it would come out Horse Dick was a butt-hole bandit and a cop. Thing is, Raul was thrown off the bike, but that didn’t kill him. Whoever they is, ones shot Horse Dick, somebody… They took Raul with them.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. “They took him, kept him a while, hooked some kind of battery to his balls and gave him a jumpstart. Several times. Coroner thinks they wetted him up to get the kind of contact they wanted with the cables. They broke his foot. Probably stomped it. They used some kind of bat or board on his knees and shins. They pushed all his fingers back till they broke. They broke his arms and twisted them behind his back and cranked them around some more, making those nerves jump. They finally twisted his neck with some kind of garotte, stove in his head with something heavy, stuck his noggin back in the helmet, took him out there and dumped him where they got him.”

  “Christ, Leonard. You’re sure?”

  “Charlie’s sure. The coroner’s sure. Raul was lyin’ out there rotting these last few days, but he hasn’t been there the whole time.”

  I sat amazed, a little sick to my stomach. “I’m surprised Charlie would tell you all this.”

  “You heard what Charlie said earlier. Chief’s tied his hands. Won’t let Charlie do what needs to be done. Ain’t no one gonna do much about this shit. Couple queers aced is almost good business far as the chief’s concerned. As for Charlie, he sounds dispirited. Like he’s losin’ his will to be a cop. So, it’s you and me, bubba.”

  I thought about that a moment. I said, “I don’t know it’s our place to deal with something like this, Leonard. It’s police business. I think what Charlie’s implying is we find something good, something helpful, we report it. But he’s not suggesting we take the law into our own hands.”

  “You’re not listening, Hap. It’s police business when they want to make it their business. They don’t make it their business, then I got to make it my business.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Maybe I’ll put it to music and you’ll like it better. You want to hear the rest of what I think?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think they – whoever they is – tortured Raul for the whereabouts of the tape or tapes. Raul wasn’t a tough guy, but he must have felt strong about this one, Hap, ’cause he didn’t give it up. He lied. Told them what they wanted was where it wasn’t. They tried him out. They checked Horse Dick’s place. No dice. So they talk to him some more in that special way they have. So now he puts them on my place, thinkin’ he’s gainin’ some time to maybe get away. Or maybe he is a tough guy. Tougher than I knew. Whatever, he puts them on me ’cause maybe he thought I could handle them. Figured he sent them there and I was there, I’d handle them. Or maybe he didn’t give a shit about me. But the thing is, they tossed my place and didn’t find anything. They decide to give Raul a little more business, or maybe they just got tired of his bullshit and finished him. Or maybe he died sooner than they expected. Thing is, he goes out without giving them what they want to know.”

  Leonard paused to relight his pipe. I said, “Question immediately comes to mind is, how do you know they didn’t find the video? Maybe it was at your place and you didn’t know it. Raul had a house key, could have hid it there. Or maybe they went to your place first, hit Horse Dick’s second. Maybe he had it.”

  “I thought of that,” Leonard said. “But I also thought Raul might have hid it somewhere else. So my next question was, where would he hide it? Remember what I told you about all the crap going on at my place, my mail being screwed around with-”

  “The other address,” I said.

  “That’s why you’re my friend,” Leonard said. “You can keep up with me. Almost. Mailbox out here isn’t checked often. I come out maybe once every month or so. It doesn’t get any mail to speak of anymore since I switched back to the town address. Mostly just junk mail. It’s a huge mailbox, so it’s a pretty safe place to leave something. I drove over tonight, got out my trusty flashlight, looked in the mailbox, and what do you think I found?”

  “That Jiffy bag by your chair,” I said.

  “Bingo, my man. That and some junk mail. And you won’t believe what’s in the Jiffy.”

  Leonard grabbed the Jiffy bag, took a little notebook out of it and tossed it at me. I grabbed it and looked at it. It was a standard promotional-style notebook for King Arthur Chili, a local business.

  “I couldn’t make heads or tails out of that,” Leonard said. “Wait before you look. There’s a couple of videotapes inside as well. I’ve seen one of them. I got it loaded in the VCR. I want you to see it.”

  Leonard plucked the remote out of his lap, turned on the set and the VCR. I moved over and stood behind him to watch.

  There was static and darkness, then gray shapes. The gray shapes became clearer, but never too clear. One of the shapes was a tanker-style truck. It was parked and a hose was being fed from it into a hole in cement, a hole like a cistern, and you could hear the sound of a pump sucking up the contents of the cistern, running it into the truck. The other gray shapes were two men with the truck. One of them was scrawny, with longish hair and a dark cap of some kind. He had on jeans and a jean jacket with the sleeves cut out. No shirt. Classic TV and movie-biker garb. The other guy wore jeans and a dark T-shirt and jackboots. He had long hair tied back in a ponytail. He looked about fifty-five or so and was about the size of the Green Giant who sells peas on the commercials.

  “Bigfoot!” I said.

  “Bingo again,” Leonard said. “He’s also Big Man Mountain.”

  “Say what?”

  “Pro
fessional wrestler. One of LaBorde’s claims to fame. He was a villain on the circuit. Retired a year or two ago. Read about it in the paper. Word is they retired him ’cause of some shit he had goin’ down, but I don’t remember what it was. But there was a scandal.”

  “I seldom read the papers,” I said.

  “Well,” Leonard said, “you should. But that’s him.”

  “How can you tell? I can’t see his face worth shit.”

  “True, but how many long-haired guys have you heard of weigh about three-fifty and stand well over six foot?”

  “I don’t know of any.”

  “Well, I know of one. Big Man Mountain. Bigfoot, as you call him. He dressed that same way when he wrestled, as a biker. And it appears that’s his normal attire.”

  There was more of this, two guys standing around while the hose sucked the contents of the cistern. Then the two guys got in the truck and the video jumped around in blackness and static. When it started up again, there were more clips of this activity with the tanker, and in some cases I recognized where they were, the back of restaurants in town. A Mexican restaurant where Leonard and I often ate because the food was cheap and good, another restaurant where the food was good, but not cheap, and we didn’t eat there. We wanted to, though.

  Besides the work with the tanker truck, there were also some clips of this big truck with sideboards and the same guys and two other guys dressed in similar garb. They were parked behind a building, loading barrels onto the back of the truck. As with all the video, the guys looked nervous and furtive.

  “The rest of the tape is just more of this,” Leonard said.

  “I don’t get it. Why would Raul mail himself a tape of some bikers sucking crap out of cisterns and putting barrels on trucks?”

  Leonard cut off the VCR and the set. “Do you remember that article I read to you a few months back? Out of the paper?”

  “No. I hardly remember where I was yesterday.”

  “Man, you got to pay more attention to the newspapers,” Leonard said. “Grease nappers.”

  “Grease nappers? What grease… Wait a minute… The folks stealing grease from restaurants, selling it to the recycling folks. It was kind of a humorous article. Something about ‘Police Set Grease Trap for Suspects.’”

  “That’s it. Except the police didn’t catch anyone. And if you remember, there’s lots of money in grease napping.”

  I went back to my spot on the couch. I said, “You tryin’ to tell me Raul was filming grease nappers, and they caught him, tortured and killed him over it?”

  “There’s lots of money in grease,” Leonard said. “Silly as it sounds, with just limited facilities, you can make up to a couple thou a day. Better-organized than that, hittin’ LaBorde, Lufkin, Tyler, you could make a hell of a lot more. Maybe ten thousand a day. People have been murdered for a lot less than that. And if they thought the whistle was going to be blown, they could have murdered Raul, and it wouldn’t be for grease. It would be for money.”

  “All right,” I said. “Say the grease nappers were filmed by Raul. You got to ask yourself, why? I mean, since when is Raul an investigative reporter?”

  “I don’t know he was. I think these tapes belong to Horse Dick, the cop. He’s undercover, acting like one of the guys. That’s why it jumps around. Sometimes he’s helpin’ them do the work. Then, when he’s standin’ over to the side, smokin’ a cigarette, pissin’ or somethin’, he filmed them with a hidden camera. Later he had the stuff put on video, for easy viewing. While he’s doing this investigation, he falls in with Raul and they start swappin’ spit and sperm, and pretty soon it’s pillow talk, and Raul knows everything Horse Dick knows. That could be what led to Raul’s demise.”

  “What about the chief? Wouldn’t he have this information? If so, why would Horse or Raul hide it in your mailbox?”

  “Maybe Horse Dick didn’t have time to get the stuff to the chief. Maybe he was waiting until he had a full investigation. Maybe the chief has a copy. I don’t know. Thing is, I believe Raul got wrapped up in this business pretty tight, got to thinking he was some kind of hot-shit undercover guy himself. Horse Dick tells him things are getting tight, maybe they ought to get rid of the tapes for a while, so Raul mails them to my old address. That’s his handwriting on the envelope. Then, when Raul gets caught by the bad guys, he doesn’t tell them where they are. How’s that sound?”

  “Lots of things wrong with that scenario. Why would Raul and Horse Dick not turn the evidence over to the chief, they thought they were in trouble? Why wouldn’t Raul tell these thugs where the videos are? Torture like that, you’d tell anyone anything they wanted to know. And if you don’t mind me saying so, Raul wasn’t that tough.”

  “I don’t really have an answer for that, but things occurred to me. Back when I was burning those crack houses, rumor was the chief was getting a slice of the drug pie, which was why the houses kept being built up. Him and the owner of the houses were supposed to be in cahoots.”

  “Never been any proof of that,” I said, “though I don’t doubt it.”

  “Chief sent Horse Dick in to investigate drugs through the bikers. Maybe this is law enforcement, and maybe its the chief’s way of getting enough evidence on the bikers to make sure he gets a cut. Horse Dick figures this out, so he doesn’t hand in the videos. He hides them. That kind of explains why the chief isn’t pursuing this business. It could be more than just the gay thing.”

  “Problem with that theory, Leonard, is the video is of grease nappers, not drug lords.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Leonard said, and relit his pipe. “But it could all connect.”

  “I guess. Sounds thin to me. But if drugs were happening along with the grease napping, wouldn’t there be videos of drug activity?”

  “Maybe this was the best Horse Dick could get on them,” Leonard said. “Could be like the way you use income tax fraud to get gangsters for worse business. Nail them for grease, you put the drug business out of business.”

  “There’s something in that,” I said. “What about the other video?”

  “I was going to give it a look-see, but then you came home. My guess is more of the same.”

  We loaded the video. It wasn’t about grease napping. It was two guys walking, and it was easy to recognize the place. It was LaBorde Park. I recognized the bench the guys were walking past. I knew the camera view was being taken through the shrubbery across the way. The lighting was bad, just some of the pole lights in the park, and the camera jumped this way and that, but it was enough to see the two guys. They stopped walking, and one guy put his hands on the other guy’s shoulders. Now that their faces were toward us, code bars appeared, disguising their features. The guy who was being held by the shoulders got down on his knees and unbuckled his partner’s pants, probed for goober, found it, put it in his mouth.

  Suddenly some fellas burst out of the bushes. They rushed the guy doing the suck work, and the guy having it done on him stepped back and watched. The guy who had planned to treat the other one got kicked, slapped, and rolled in the dirt. This went on so long it was almost too much to watch. After a while the guy who had offered his dick came over with his tool still hanging out and a knife in his hand. He put the knife to the assaulted man’s throat, made him do what he had wanted to do in the first place. While the guy on his knees sucked, the guy with the knife used his free hand to pull a cigarette pack out of his pocket. He shook out a smoke and put it where the bar code was. His hand put away the pack and came up with a lighter, then the lighter flame went behind the code bar. The lighter came down and was put away. From the way the smoker acted, he could have been alone.

  The guy on his knees was still at work; the smoker used the knife to tap him on the head, to keep a kind of rhythm, sang, “Mama’s little baby love shortnin’, shortnin’, mama’s little baby love shortnin’ bread,” over and over. And he wasn’t even in tune.

  The others stood around and jeered and watched and wore their code bars.
When the job was finished on the smoker, the others got in line and took their turn.

  When they were all finished, they shoved their victim down and went away. The camera went off and the video showed us some blackness, some gray, then it was over. It was one of the most humiliating things I’d ever seen.

  “Not exactly Oscar material, is it?” I said.

  “Jesus,” Leonard said. “What was that all about?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Was it staged?”

  “I don’t know,” Leonard said. “But I tell you this, if it was, it sure blurs the line… Amateur films?”

  “Maybe. But what’s the deal? One film on grease napping, the other on gay bashing? Or is it supposed to be some kind of sex tape?”

  “It didn’t have anything to do with sex, Hap. It’s about power, man. Gays, they’re more of a target than women or blacks. Most folks think a gay gets a beating, they get what they deserve.”

  “Could have been a gang of gays doing it,” I said.

  “That’s possible,” Leonard said, “but straights like their dicks sucked bad as anyone, especially when it humiliates someone and empowers them.”

  “I’m going to have to keep you away from those pop-psychology books,” I said.

  “You know, you’re right,” Leonard said. “I’m startin’ to sound like you. You won’t tell anyone I used that word empower, will you?”

  “I’ll try and keep it under my hat. But, whatever, the same question still begs to be answered. What is it all about? What’s the connection between grease and a fucked-up film like this?”

  Leonard shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s something in the notebook. Me, I couldn’t make diddle out of it.”

  I got it and opened it. There were rows of letters. Stuff like YCU – ART – QWEP. Beside that, another set. And another. All across the page and down. I looked the notebook over slowly. There were ten pages of this stuff.