Highway 61 Resurfaced (v5)

by Bill Fitzhugh

  “I’m sorry,” she said, giving him a kiss on the cheek. “But I thought of something.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But I want a rain check.”

  “You got it.” She opened the box, pulled out the photo from Shelby LeFleur’s birthday party, and examined it through the lens.

  Rick said, “What’re we looking at?”

  “Not sure we’re looking at anything.” She pointed at the face of one of the women in the picture. “Does that look like a beauty mark to you?”

  He looked closer. “Yeah. Why?”

  Lollie sorted through the photos in Ruth’s box until she found the one she was looking for. It was the woman with the Cindy Crawford beauty mark. “Remember her?”

  Rick nodded. “Yeah, so?”

  She turned it over and pointed at the writing: “042251LL.” “April 22, 1951, LL.” She pointed at the names in the caption of the newspaper photo. “LL,” she said, “Lettie LeFleur.”

  23

  PIGFOOT’S EARS WERE ringing like Christmas bells. The Remington thundered like a cannon in the confines of Buddy’s front room. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air as Pigfoot stared at what he’d done.

  Buddy had a look about him that suggested a rich mixture of confusion and surprise. He couldn’t understand why he was still on his feet when he should have been knocked backward and slumped against the wall, dead or dying. He’d expected the pain to be far worse too. His hands felt for the wound, but there was nothing. Pigfoot had missed. Or had he? Maybe he’d hit what he was aiming at. Buddy turned to see where the shot had gone and saw a hole in his porkpie. He was so surprised that all he could think to say was “You shot my hat.”

  Pigfoot seemed disappointed by the level of gratitude. He said, “Nigger, be thankful I let you take it off first.”

  Buddy looked at the hat again, then at Pigfoot. “I figured you’d come to kill me.”

  Pigfoot worked the bolt action, spitting out the empty cartridge and chambering a new load. “Can’t think of but a few things I’d like more,” he said.

  Buddy was getting angry now. The pain in his back and side was awful. He needed his drink or, if he was going to die by Pigfoot’s hand, he just wanted it over with. A curling vein rose on his temple as he raised his voice and said, “Well, go on then, nigger, what’re you waitin’ on?”

  “Waitin’? You don’t know nothin’ ’bout that,” Pigfoot said. “I waited fifty years.” He raised the gun and fired again, punching another hole in the porkpie.

  Buddy looked at his hat again, then back at Pigfoot and said, “I think it’s dead already. Now you gone kill me or what?”

  Pigfoot shook his head gravely. “You ain’t no use to me dead.” He worked the bolt again. The hot brass casing chimed as it hit the wood floor. The new load slid into place.

  Buddy didn’t understand this at all. Man’s been sitting in a prison cell, waiting fifty years for this moment, and now, instead of killing him, says he’s got some use for him. “What that’s supposed to mean?”

  “Means I’m giving you a chance to make good.”

  Buddy had mixed feelings about that notion. He’d spent most of his life trying to convince himself that he hadn’t done anything wrong in the first place, or at least that he’d done the same as anybody would have in that situation. And he’d been able to sell that to himself as long as he wasn’t looking Pigfoot in the eye. But now? Seeing the lines in that face? Those eyes with fifty years of prison in them? Buddy was torn by his rage on the one hand and his urge to confess and beg forgiveness on the other. He knew a man’s true character was revealed under pressure, and this chance to make good, as Pigfoot called it, threatened to show people what kind of man he really was. And that pissed him off. If he’d been anywhere but that hospital earlier, somebody’d already be dead.

  Staring down that rifle barrel, the pain worse with every breath, Buddy thought it might be better if Pigfoot just went on and put him out of his misery. Kill two birds and one old black man with the one stone. Hoping to antagonize Pigfoot enough that he’d forget about giving him that chance to make good, Buddy took a step forward, pointing at his own chest. “Go on, shoot!”

  Pigfoot never changed expression as he squeezed the trigger. This time, the hat flew off the rack. “Like I said, you ain’t no use to me dead.”

  Buddy was about to take another step when the pain snapped on him like a bear trap. He staggered sideways and lowered himself weakly onto the sofa. Pigfoot watched impassively as Buddy struggled to catch his breath and keep his eyes open. He’d seen men suffer worse, and it didn’t bother him to watch this, though it didn’t bring him as much pleasure as he might have expected.

  When it passed, Buddy heaved a sigh and said, “Well, if you ain’t got no use for me dead, you best hurry and use me.”

  Pigfoot tilted his head back and scratched under his neck. He’d seen it before. “Cancer?”

  “It ain’t a cold.” Buddy pointed across the room. “You wanna drink? I know I do.”

  Pigfoot had already found the pistol and razor in the kitchen and he didn’t think Buddy would come at him with a bottle. Besides, they needed to talk and he thought some whiskey would help lubricate the conversation. So he said, “I take some.”

  Buddy struggled to his feet and crossed the room. As he passed Pigfoot he said, “That’s a nice-lookin’ suit.” He grabbed two glasses and the bottle of whiskey and came back pouring. They didn’t talk much at first, just sat there and drank. The more whiskey he got in him, the sorrier Buddy felt about everything, from what happened to Pigfoot to his own imminent demise. He kept looking at this man he used to know, searching for a sign of humanity, but it looked like they’d taken that from him and left him with a face of stone. So it came as a surprise to Buddy when, a couple of drinks later, Pigfoot said, “I shouldn’tuh drove off like I did.”

  Buddy shook his head. “We were all scared,” he said. “They knew where our families lived. My sister had those chirren and I was tryin’ to protect ’em.”

  “You had to do what you did.”

  “We was stuck with some bad choices.”

  “I shouldn’tuh stopped in the first place. None of this woulda happened.”

  “They threatened Willie’s chirren too.” He finished his drink in a gulp. “And you know they’da done it.”

  “You couldn’t take the chance,” Pigfoot said. “Nobody gone blame you for that.”

  “We all felt bad. Willie went and found Jesus, Earl just about gone outta his mind, and I’d bet I worried this cancer onto myself.”

  “Can’t change the past,” Pigfoot said.

  “No, you can’t.”

  He looked at his glass and said, “So I come back, try and change the future.”

  “How you gone do that?”

  “I got this lawyer.”

  RICK LOOKED UP from comparing the two pictures. “Okay, let’s say it’s her. So what?”

  “I hate to generalize,” Lollie said. “But if a girl’s willing to pose like that for a man who’s not her husband, I bet she’s willing to have an affair with him too. And if Henry LeFleur caught his wife with Yankee trash like Hamp Doogan, you know he’d do like any good southern gentleman and kill him. Then he’d just coerce Buddy, Willie, and Earl into framing Pigfoot.”

  “It’s a neat package all right, but it hinges on a lot we don’t know.”

  “Like?”

  “Like does she even have the beauty mark?”

  “True.”

  “And like, when did the LeFleurs get married? And what was Lettie’s maiden name?”

  “Why would that matter?”

  “Because if she was L.L. before she got married, and if that’s when she posed for Doogan, that would mitigate Henry’s motive a bit.”

  “Maybe Lettie killed Hamp and Henry had to clean up the mess.”

  Rick seemed doubtful. “Why would Lettie kill him?”

  “I don’t know, to get her respect back?”

  Rick gave h
er a skeptical look. “Is that what you’d do?”

  “I’d have to kill too many people to get mine back but …” She shrugged. “Okay, maybe not.” After a moment, Lollie said, “Maybe she posed for him before getting married and then after she got married, Hamp tried to blackmail her.”

  “I thought Ruby said Hamp wasn’t the blackmailing sort.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Okay, let’s say Henry did it and framed Pigfoot. How does that help us identify faux Lollie and her partner?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t know. But I’ve got a hunch they’re connected.”

  “A hunch.” Lollie shrugged, then smiled and said, “Well, I’ve worked with less.”

  They went to the computer and found that Lettie’s maiden name was Biggs and that she was, in fact, Lettie LeFleur at the time the photo was taken. “So,” Rick said, “now we need to find out about the beauty mark.”

  “Well, Miss Lettie done gone to Memphis to catch a plane,” Lollie said in an exaggerated accent. “You want to go back to the LeFleurs and ask Henry or Annie Mae?”

  “No thanks.” Rick shook his head. “Let’s go ask someone else who’d know.”

  Lollie looked at the caption of the newspaper photo. “She’s got a son named Monroe, a daugher-in-law, and a truckful of cousins, take your pick.”

  Rick shook his head, pointing at the guy in the front of the picture. “Her father-in-law.”

  “He’s ninety-five,” Lollie said, pointing at the picture. “The poor guy looks like he’s made out of pipe cleaners.”

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  “What about Crazy Earl Tate?”

  “Hell, he’s only seventy-three,” Rick said. “He can wait.”

  CRAIL WOKE TO the dull thud of a car door slamming shut in the distance. His eyes trembled open as he tried to remember where he was and why he was there, not to mention why he was turning yellow and losing patches of blistered skin. Without lifting his head from the carpet, he could see some tools scattered on the floor and, beyond that, a safe with its door dangling by a hinge. He could smell ash, gasoline, and singed hair. It was all familiar and distant at the same time. Oh yeah, he remembered, the lawyer’s office. The Crown Royal, the files, the fire. He blinked to clear his vision and that’s when he saw what appeared to be two plastic reels, the sort used on professional tape machines. A wave of euphoria swept over Crail as it dawned on him. He’d found the tapes. They’d been in the safe, just as he’d suspected. Lord, wasn’t Cuffie going to be proud? He blinked again and, as things came into focus, he noticed something funny about the reels of tape. But it wasn’t ha-ha funny so much as it was peculiar funny. The reels had been warped by heat and the tapes were, for lack of a better word, melted, fused together and useless.

  Was this good or bad or did it matter at all? Before he could explore the question more fully, he heard keys jangling outside the door. He figured it was either the cops or the lawyer; either way it was bad news. He could hear Cuffie now, telling him he had to get up, do whatever he had to. He couldn’t let her down, so, using the chair to hoist himself up, Crail tried to get to his feet. He didn’t realize, for a moment, that the OxyContin had worn off. When he put weight on his bad leg, it felt like that linebacker had hit his knee again. It gave out and he crumpled into a pile on the floor behind the desk, cursing in a low voice.

  A moment later, the door to the office creaked open. Jeremy Lynch stepped into the room slowly, suspicious, and said, “What the hell?”

  Between the hangover and the fear, Crail’s head was throbbing like a twenty-inch subwoofer. Confident in his inability to talk his way out of the situation, Crail grabbed the tire iron, rolled onto his stomach, and played dead.

  A moment later, Lynch came around the desk and, seeing a body lying there, was moved to say, “Jesus!”

  The room went quiet for a few seconds and Crail imagined the guy standing there wondering what the hell this body was doing in his office. He heard Lynch mumble, “Oh, man, I just bought that.” This was followed by the sound of a wing tip kicking an empty Crown Royal bottle. A second later Crail felt a shoe nudging his ribs. “Hey, you!” Crail kept playing possum even as Lynch said, “You dead or alive?”

  Crail opened his mouth to say “Dead” before he realized it was the sort of trick question a lawyer would ask. He lay there trying to think of something he could do that would make Cuffie proud. But before he had any ideas, Lynch kicked him pretty good. Well, feeling the way he did, this was the sort of shit Crail wasn’t going to put up with, so he gritted his teeth and rolled over, swinging the tire iron.

  Jeremy Lynch jumped, but not fast or far enough. The tool took a bite out of his shin and he tumbled into a cursing pile of his own. “Sonofabitchgoddammitthathurtslikeamutherfucker!”

  While the lawyer rolled around cursing, Crail pulled himself up and leaned against the desk. It felt like his brain was swelling to burst. He wagged the tire iron weakly and said, “Shut up or I’ll hit you again.”

  Lynch was still rolling from side to side, clutching his leg with two bloody hands and blinking back tears. There were two screwdrivers, both flathead, part of a ballpoint pen, and a pair of needle-nose pliers on the floor near where he had landed. It didn’t take him long to figure out that he’d interrupted this guy in the middle of what appeared to be a bizarre combination of attempted burglary and arson. Either that or the guy was just a total fuckup.

  As an attorney with some experience in criminal law, Jeremy Lynch had it on good authority that people who walked in on this sort of crime frequently ended up dead. Since he figured this guy was going to kill him, or try to anyway, he started thinking about how to escape. When Crail looked up at the window with the missing curtain, Lynch furtively picked up one of the screwdrivers and cupped it, waiting for a chance to … to what? he thought. He wasn’t a violent man. What was he going to do? Stab the guy in the neck? No, he needed something smarter than that and certainly less messy.

  Crail rubbed his free hand across his face and took a deep breath. “You got any aspirin?”

  “Top drawer,” Lynch said, pointing at the desk. That’s when he noticed Crail’s knee ballooning out of the hole in his pants. It was swollen and grotesquely discolored. And it gave him an idea. Lynch pointed at it and said, “What the hell happened to you?”

  Chewing on three aspirin, Crail looked down with red-rimmed eyes and said, “Guy stabbed me with a fork.”

  Lynch gave him a sympathetic wince. “Ewww, man,” he said. “That must’ve hurt like a sonofabitch.”

  Crail nodded. “Hit the bone.”

  “Ewww.” He gestured at it. “Looks like it might be a little infected too.”

  “Yeah, but I got some antibiotics.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Lynch said. “Those things are great, a marvel of science.”

  While that much was true, one of the many things neither Crail nor Jeremy Lynch knew was that when bacteria enters bone tissue (as had happened when Lamar Suggs sank that fork into Crail’s knee), the resulting infection is known as osteomyelitis. And given that the proper treatment for that was a six-week course of penicillinase-resistant synthetic penicillin and a third-generation cephalosporin, it was going to do Crail precious little good to keep taking the Bactrim.

  Jeremy Lynch took a moment to make the sort of face he hoped would convey the impression that he was recalling a fine and pertinent point of law. Then he pointed a lawyerly finger at Crail and said, “I tell you what, you ought to sue the shit out of whoever did that to you.”

  The notion took Crail by surprise and, at first blush, he liked the sound of it. He said, “Really?”

  “Hell yes,” Lynch said, wagging his finger in a judicial fashion. “I do it all the time.” He waved a hand in the air and said, “Case like this is probably worth five, ten million dollars, especially if we can try it down in Jefferson County.” He pointed at Crail. “Those are some plaintiffs’ juries down there, I’m telling you.”

  Crail gave it
some thought as he struggled to choke down the aspirin. He’d heard about how trial lawyers were making big bucks for the good people of Mississippi. He’d seen those billboards advertising their services: “Have you been injured? You may have a claim! Contact the law offices of Strut, Swagger, and Preen.” Things like that. But as much as he liked the idea, he thought there might be a small hitch, so he said, “I don’t think we can sue him.”

  “What makes you say that?” Like a parent to an insecure child.

  Crail tipped his head to one side and shrugged. “Guy’s dead.”

  Lynch waved him off as if he’d said the guy was out of town for a day. “No problem.” He reached up to his desk. “Slide me a legal pad, would you?” Crail pushed one into his hand while Lynch pulled a pen from his coat. “We’ll sue his estate.” He clicked his pen and prepared to write. “Now, tell me, when did this happen?”

  “Pretty recent.”

  “And how did he die?”

  Crail actually looked a bit embarrassed when he said, “Uhhh, I sorta killed him.”

  Without batting an eye Lynch said, “But in self-defense, right?”

  Crail looked down at his throbbing knee, hesitating as he said, “I guess you could say that.”

  “Of course you can! He stabbed you with a fork. That’s why you came to see me.”

  “I dunno …”

  “Trust me.” He pointed at Crail. “You need legal help.”

  24

  CRAIL AND HIS new attorney left Jackson driving north on Highway 49. After stopping for a cold six-pack, Crail swallowed three Bactrim, snorted two lines of meth, and popped another OxyContin. By the time they reached Bentonia, all of his pain had subsided.

  The same, however, could not be said for his attorney, who was nursing a busted lip, a loose tooth, and an eye that was swelling shut. And his leg still hurt like hell where the tire iron had landed. Lynch thought his tibia might be broken or, at the very least, fractured. He wanted to look at it, see if it needed to be set or stitched or something. But that would have to wait, since he currently found himself curled up in the pitch-black trunk of Crail’s car.