When he looked up and saw me, he shook his head in annoyance. “What now?” he asked.
As I drew closer to the man I could see that his face was taut and drawn. “Don’t be that way,” I said cheerfully. “I might have dropped by to tell you that you’re completely off the hook on the Twiller killing.”
“Am I?”
“No.”
“Sheriff, I did not kill that woman!”
“No, but you could have hired it.”
“But what possible reason could I have had?”
“That’s an interesting question, isn’t it?”
He leaned back against the Dumpster and pulled a thin cigarillo from his shirt pocket and lighted it with a fancy gold lighter. When he did, his hand shook just a little and there were worry wrinkles around his eyes.
“You seem a mite nervous,” I said.
“Have you ever had the cops on your ass for something you didn’t do?”
“Don’t believe that I have. By the way, I found out that your buddy Lester Sipes was your silent partner in your business here, but he got out a few months ago. Mind telling me why?”
“He only came on board when I started up to help me get the store rolling. He always intended for me to buy his half.”
I gave him a sympathetic nod. “That was nice of him. I hope you’ve repaid his kindness.”
His eyes narrowed a little at this. “Sheriff, like I asked you the other day, what do you want from me?”
“A confession.”
“But I haven’t done anything.”
“Oh, we’ve all done something.”
“I need to get back inside.”
“You do that,” I said and stood watching as he walked across the parking lot, all the while puffing furiously on his cigarillo. My stop had accomplished one thing. It had told me that stress was eating the man up. I wondered how much longer he could hold it together before he cracked.
* * *
I went back to the office with the notion of attending to some pressing paperwork and getting it out of the way as quickly as I could. As soon as I walked in Maylene handed me a dirty scrap of paper with some illegible scribbles on it.
“What in thunder is this?” I asked.
“That’s a hand-delivered note from Lew Feemster. Some kid brought it in and said Lew wants you to meet him at Jeeter’s Tavern at nine this evening.”
Feemster was one of my oldest informants, an ex-con who’d gone down to Huntsville at the tender age of nineteen behind an armed robbery and shooting that he still claimed he hadn’t committed. My dad, who was certainly no fool, maintained that they hung that beef on Lew to get a rich boy from Lufkin off the hook. Whether that’s true or not, it’s a matter of record that he entered the penitentiary as a wet-behind-the-ears kid back in the days when the Texas prison system meant business. When he came out almost two decades later, he was bitter, cynical, and as mean as a rattlesnake. In his view, society had unjustly branded him as a criminal, and a criminal he would be content to remain, though he managed to avoid further incarceration. For the most part he gambled and bootlegged and dealt in corn whisky back when moonshining was a viable business. He was the best dice switcher I ever saw, and what he couldn’t do with a deck of cards could not be done.
In the early years of our relationship, I paid him for information by going easy on his bootlegging activities and overlooking the nighttime crap games he ran in various deserted sharecropper shacks around the county. I did this because the people I nailed through his information were always a far greater threat to society than the drinkers and gamblers. But in the last decade he’d begun to demand cash, and as he grew older he became ever more cantankerous and difficult to deal with.
“Was he expecting an answer?” I asked Maylene.
“No, he just said for you to be there and he’d make you a happy man.”
* * *
A little after five I was almost out the door on my way home when a phone call from Hotchkiss brought me back to my desk. “What’s up?” I asked.
“I just thought you might like a little update on Sipes.”
“You thought right. Fire away.”
“As you’ve probably guessed, we’re monitoring his bank transactions pretty closely.”
“Can you do that without him knowing?”
“Sure. It’s so easy now that all this business is computerized. My records, your records, everybody’s records … We just slip in on little cat’s feet and—”
“Spare me, please.”
He laughed, and his laughter was good-natured but a little mocking. “I’m just trying to get even with you for not telling us about that hiding place in Emmet Zorn’s floor.”
“I don’t know about any hiding place,” I said, lying smoothly. “And if there is one, how did you find it?”
He giggled. “Creepy-crawl, creepy-crawl…”
“Hotch, have you been drinking?”
“I may have had a couple.”
“Old Hoover would have your hide for a rug, boy.”
“He probably would, but he’s dead. Anyhow, I called to fill you in on Sipes. As we suspected, he’s been in something of a cash crunch lately, but in the last couple of days he’s hustled around and managed to come up with six hundred thousand dollars, which he deposited in one account. Then it went offshore by wire transfer.”
“Some of that gambling money he’s been hustling.”
“Part of it must have been.”
“That means he must have paid off the boys down in South America,” I said. “You know, if you think about it, we made a damn lucky guess on this one. Based on Arno’s presence here in Sequoya, we assumed that the South Americans were fronting the coke. We were wrong about why he was here, but we were right about the conclusion it led us to.”
“I was thinking about the same thing myself last night.”
“I guess this means Sipes is off the hook with his suppliers, then?”
“Maybe and maybe not. The people he’s dealing with are real animals, and they don’t like screwups. No matter how it shakes down, he’s going to be on thin ice with them.”
“And this is bad?” I asked.
“It could be. He’s not the only rich, high-profile bastard involved in the drug trade.”
“So?”
“We want to send the message that even the mighty can fall. That means we need Lester Sipes on his way to federal prison with plenty of publicity. Not beheaded and dumped in a swamp somewhere.”
“Beheaded?”
“That’s how that bunch he’s dealing with gets rid of people. It’s their signature method of execution.”
“Sounds like he’s running with his own kind. I keep thinking about the guy Sipes and his goons fed to the crabs.”
“Birds of a feather,” he said. “Beheading is supposed to have more emotional impact than shooting.”
“Well, it damn sure makes me perk up and take notice.”
“Me too,” he said, his voice suddenly deadly serious. “Especially since they don’t draw the line at federal agents. Remember when it leaked out to the press last year about those two DEA guys that disappeared down in Colombia? We know about it through informants, but we’ve never found the bodies so the government hasn’t released any official information yet.”
“But they were…”
“Yep, with machetes.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Jeeter’s was an oldtime, rural honky-tonk a few miles out of town off Route 9 South. Nestled in a small clearing in the woods at the end of a rutted gravel lane, it dated from an era that ended decades before country became cool. When the long-departed and now half-mythical Ed Jeeter built the building back in 1940, he installed a huge neon sign on the roof that spelled out “Jeeter’s” in fancy baroque script, and even though the place has gone through several subsequent owners, none have seen fit either to remove or change it. Now ancient and in its death throes, the sputtering old sign still cast a pale, greenish glow that on moonless
nights could be seen for a couple of miles back along the lonely road.
When I pulled into the parking lot that evening there were a dozen or so cars ringed around the small building, and the barroom was about half full. The club’s current proprietor was a stolid man called Tub who reigned over his small fiefdom from behind the bar and dispensed his beer with a maximum of steady efficiency and a minimum of talk. The furnishings were sparse. Aside from a short row of squeaky bar stools, the room held nothing beyond a dozen or so tables of chipped black Formica, a pair of languid, dust-encrusted ceiling fans, and an ancient Wurlitzer jukebox. The pulpy floor was unfinished pine, and the bare, unadorned walls were covered with plywood long darkened by several coats of cheap varnish and decades of tobacco smoke.
As I threaded my way between the tables, no one paid any attention to me. As dives go, Jeeter’s was a relatively peaceful place. Only a few times over the years had my department answered disturbance calls there, but sometimes I stopped by to have a beer simply because I loved to watch the regulars. They were a ghostly, interchangeable crew of tired, listless women with haystack hairdos and defeated faces, and weathered, khaki-clad men of indefinite age and vague occupation who drank their beer straight from the bottle and smoked their unfiltered Camels with the calm intensity of those who know they are doomed and can’t quite summon the energy to care. Misanthropes and loners, Jeeter’s patrons said little to one another, and what conversation there was to be heard above the faint hum of the wall-mounted air conditioner was a soft, murmured litany of failed marriages, ungrateful offspring, and leaking trailer houses.
Lew Feemster was a regular and looked the part as he sat at the back corner table drinking a Shiner longneck and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. In his late sixties, he was a pencil-thin man of medium height with a crown of unruly white hair and a nose that had been flattened and bent to one side, probably in a long-ago barroom brawl. That evening he wore a shirt of faded gray checks and a pair of rumpled khaki pants.
When I approached his table he looked up and gave me a sour frown. “If you want a damn beer you better go back and get it,” he said. “Tub don’t give no table service.”
I took a chair opposite him and said, “You’re sure ornery tonight. What’s the occasion?”
“I’m the same way I always am. It’s my hobby.”
“I’ve suspected that for years. What have you got for me?”
He smiled, and I wished he hadn’t. Lew’s smiles were the kind you’d expect to see at hangings. “I know where you can find Scott Kimball,” he said. “Or at least I’ll know where he’s gonna be a little while after noon tomorrow.”
I was surprised but shouldn’t have been. There were times when I thought the old buzzard knew more about my business than I did. “How in hell did you know I was hunting Scott Kimball?”
He cackled and then took a long pull on his beer before he answered. “Well, for one thing you’ve been rooting around under every bush in Caddo County asking if anybody has seen him. And in the second place, before he went to Houston he was running with that boy you arrested for shooting the preacher’s wife. It don’t take no Einstein to put it all together and figure out that you think Scott’s the one that pulled the trigger.”
“And you really know where he is?”
“I will tomorrow, I told you. I know for a fact that he’s in town and has been for several days.”
“Why don’t you know where he is tonight?”
Just as he often did, he flew off the handle for no apparent reason. “Because my source won’t know until tomorrow, damn it!” he snapped. “Kimball’s selling him a little something, and the kid’s being real coy about meeting with him.”
“Drugs?”
“No, some stolen money orders he got down in Houston. Just a few thousand dollars’ worth. He thinks my source is going to meet him and give him a quarter on the dollar for the damn things, but we’re willing to set him up for you. And that, by God, is all I’m saying. Are you interested?”
I knew I couldn’t probe any deeper without running the risk of having him get up and walk off. “Sure,” I said. “What’s it going to cost me?”
I could almost hear the wooden cogs creaking over in his old iron ball of a head as he calculated how much he could stick me for. I knew he didn’t care all that much about the money, but I also knew he wanted to gouge me as deeply as he could just because he was Lew Feemster and that’s what he did. “I’ve got to take care of my source too,” he said.
“How much, Lew?”
He ruminated a few seconds longer, then said, “Two fifty.”
“Done,” I said without hesitation and reached for my wallet.
“Hell’s bells!” he yelled. “I knew I could have got more.”
“Shut up and take the money,” I said. “Most snitches are content with enough to buy another bottle of cheap whisky or a little weed.”
“I ain’t most snitches. I know stuff they don’t know, and I’ve never steered you wrong.”
“That’s all true, but you could have made it easy on me and called in and not had me come all the way out here after a hard day. You know I’m good for it.”
He snatched up the money and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “I don’t want to make nothing easy on you nor nobody else,” he snarled.
“Why not?”
“Because I hate the goddamned human race, that’s why!” he said, his voice rising to the high, clear register of rage. Several people turned and looked at our table, then shrugged and went back to their beers.
“Settle down, you fractious old bastard. Now give me the particulars.”
He took his time about it, first building another of his hand-rolled cigarettes and finishing off his beer. Then he rose and went to the bar and got another longneck, and while he was there he indulged in a lengthy, heated, and no doubt pointless argument with Tub after first paying for the beer with change he laboriously dug piecemeal out of several pockets. Eventually he made his creaky way back to the table and sat down. He started to speak, but stopped and fished in his pockets for a light. Finding none, he began to rise again when I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him firmly back in his chair.
“Cut the crap and start talking, Lew,” I said. “Or I might decide to run your skinny ass in and lock you up for fraud. You’ve got the money, and now I want my information.”
“Ha! I’d like to see anything you could do in that Tinkertoy jail of yours that would get my attention. Why, down at the Ramsey unit I once spent three months in the hole and—”
“Hush. I’ve heard it all a dozen times before, and I don’t aim to hear it again. Now talk.”
All the while he’d been searching once again in his pockets. He came up with a kitchen match, which he struck on the underside of the table and touched to the end of his cigarette. Then for no reason I could see, he burst out in a high-pitched, braying laugh and then got strangled and coughed and snorted. Once he got his breath back, he sucked on his cigarette and drank a big swig of his beer. Finally, he looked across the table at me and smiled, enormously satisfied with himself for being such a jackass.
“Scott Kimball, Lew,” I said firmly. “Either start talking or I’m going to take my money back and be gone.”
He snorted one final snort and began to talk. “Ain’t hardly nobody noticed that he’s back in town. That’s because he’s changed his appearance a right smart. For one thing, he’s shaved his damn fool head. Not only that, but he’s growed himself one of them goatee beards. He’s got some little gal with him too.”
“A girl, huh?”
“That’s what I said, ain’t it?”
“Do you know her name?”
“Hell no, but any female running around with Scott Kimball is bound to be an idiot, so it don’t make no difference what they call her.”
“Have you seen her?”
He shook his head. “They tell me she’s blond and pretty good looking. And she’s got a little kid.�
��
I had no idea who “they” were and didn’t ask because it would just set him off again. It really didn’t matter since his information had always been good. “How long has he been in town?” I asked.
“Beats me. From what I understand he was here for a while, then he went back to Houston for a day or so. When he came back he had that girl with him.”
“Did anybody see him in Sequoya around the time Amanda Twiller was killed?”
“That, I don’t know,” he said.
“What’s he been doing since he’s been back this time?”
“Lurking around in the shadows and acting like an asshole, I guess. Ain’t that what he does best?”
“Come on. You must have some notion of why he’s in town.”
“Well, he’s kept a pretty low profile, but I did hear that he’s been trying to drum up some money. A pretty good chunk of money, in fact. The story is that he’s got some gambling debts. Ain’t that stupid? A punk kid like him running up gambling debts.”
“What’s he driving?”
“How in hell should I know? All these damn cars they’re making nowadays look like something squeezed out of a duck’s ass. I can’t tell one make from another.”
“Anything else?” I asked, rising to my feet.
He didn’t answer. His mood seemed to shift as it often did of late, and he gazed off across the room. I sat there looking down at him for a few seconds. He was not a pensive man, and I’d never seen him at a loss for words before. “What’s on your mind, old fellow?” I said.
He looked up at me. His rheumy, corpselike eyes actually held a little sadness, and when he spoke, his voice was soft and serious. “You really think Kimball shot that preacher’s wife, don’t you?”
Nights of the Red Moon Page 18
