I’m thinking about that as she opens the door to get out of my truck—how she wanted me to have what I’d always wanted even if it was a little too late to get the kick out of it the way I would have when I was a kid. I’m thinking about her big and tender heart, and how sometimes I like to imagine that I’m the only one who knows it. These days, my life is made from tales like this.
Laura turns around and leans back into the truck. She looks at me for a good while. The air has a snap in it this close to Christmas. Blue lights hang from the eaves of her bungalow—she’s left them on. For some reason, blue Christmas lights always make me sadder than sad. She says to me, “Richie’s always been a hothead. You shouldn’t have left him there.”
“I tried to turn around,” I say. “You were the one who told me to keep going.”
She gets that little smile on her lips, the one that always makes me melt, the playful grin that dares me to call bullshit on her, the one she knows I can’t resist.
“Did I?” she says.
I reach out and grab her by the arm. “You know damn well you did.”
She winces and tries to pull her arm free, but I hold on. “Don’t be such a gorilla,” she says.
“You owe me,” I say.
“Oh hell,” she says, “we owe each other. Guess we’ll have to just keep paying on the tab.”
I let her go then.
“Jesus, what a night,” she says. “Don’t worry about Richie. I’m sure he’ll be fine.”
* * *
But Richie’s not fine. I go into work the next day, and he’s not there. He’s a maintenance guy like me, and let me tell you it’s not a bad job, working on campus, watching the co-eds come and go. “Not bad at all,” Richie always says. “Money in the bank.”
“Richie sick?” I ask the supervisor, and he tells me he doesn’t know. He hasn’t heard squat from him.
“That’s not like Richie,” I say, and the supervisor just shrugs and hands me a work order for a leaking toilet in a men’s room at the University Center.
After work, I swing by Richie’s, and right away I know something’s up. His Jeep Wrangler isn’t in the driveway, but his front door is standing wide open.
I park along the street behind a black Ford Explorer and then make my way up the walk. I don’t know what to think when I reach the front steps and can hear voices coming from the back of the house. I knock on the door frame. “Hey, Richie,” I call out. “Is that you, man? It’s me, Cappy.”
The voices go quiet, and I try to decide what to do. Finally, I step into the house. It’s a cloudy day, late afternoon, and the light is fading fast.
“Richie?” I say again, and then I switch on the living room overhead.
That’s when I see it, a bloody handprint on the wall, just inside the front door.
I back away from it. The place is cold, and the chain from the ceiling fan is ticking against the housing, rattled by the wind. All around me are Richie’s things—a Carhartt jacket tossed on his recliner; a pair of brown cowboy boots, the toes scuffed, the heels worn down, on the floor beside the chair; a red toolbox in the corner; some shop rags on the kitchen counter; his Gibson bass still plugged into the amp; the pictures of flowers that he takes at the Memphis Botanic Garden in their frames on the walls, one of them a shot of purple azaleas just to the right of the bloodstain, its frame crooked—but Richie is still nowhere to be seen.
Before I can decide what to do, a man appears from the back of the house. He moves with purpose up the hall toward me, a tall man in a navy-blue suit, a head of thick gray hair, and a trim gray mustache. A man who’s used to being in control; I can tell by the way he holds himself as he strides toward me, and the way he speaks when he finally does.
“Cappy? That’s what folks call you, right? You work with Richard Bondurant, yes?”
“I know Richie,” I say.
Then I see a second man coming down the hall, a bulldog of a man, short and squat, in a long leather coat that squeaks when he walks. I can see his white shirt collar digging into the folds of skin, and his red necktie knotted perfectly at his Adam’s apple. Most of all, though, I see what he’s carrying with him—my Stars and Bars skull cap, the one I left behind when push came to shove at Hercules’s place.
“Phillip Trezevant Morgan?” he says, using my real name, my full name, which confirms what I’ve already assumed. These men are police detectives, and they know more about me than I’d rather they did. He holds out my skull cap. “My guess is you’re looking for this.”
* * *
And that’s how I end up downtown at 201 Poplar, a place you don’t want to be—trust me on that—especially if the folks who have questions for you are homicide dicks. The tall one calls me Cappy again.
“Cappy,” he says, “we need to know a few things.”
He offers me coffee in a paper cup, and I take it, trying to be friendly because after all I’m not guilty of anything. If these dicks want to have a little chat, I’ll go along. I’ve agreed to this. I’ve even driven myself downtown, the dicks following me.
The tall one pours himself a cup of joe and sits down across from me at the table. He brushes a finger over his mustache. The one who reminds me of a bulldog still has on his leather jacket. I can smell him as he passes behind me—leather and tobacco smoke and the menthol scent of too much Aqua Velva aftershave. His jacket creaks as he settles into a swivel desk chair to my right. He leans back in it, a file folder in his hands.
“Mr. Morgan,” he says, and I cringe because all of this reminds me of sitting in my ex-wife’s attorney’s office listening to him call me mister with a hiss to the s as if I didn’t deserve the title. “Mr. Morgan,” the bulldog dick says, “we know you were involved in an altercation last night in Orange Mound. House on Saratoga Street. A party that got out of hand. A shot fired from a Glock 17.”
“A little disagreement,” I say.
“It was more than that, Cappy,” the tall dick says. “Was that the last time you saw Richie?”
I sip my coffee. Then I say, “Is he in trouble?”
“Could be. Cappy, do you know a man named Everett Simpson?”
“Negative,” I say.
That’s when the bulldog dick leans forward. He lays the file folder on the table and fingers it open. The first thing I see is a photograph of a man facedown on the floor, a bullet hole behind his ear, blood all over his black tank top and his bare shoulder, and over at the edge of the photo, also on the floor, is my Stars and Bars skull cap.
“Everett Simpson,” the bulldog dick says. “I believe you know him as Hercules.”
“Cappy.” The tall dick leans forward in his chair, closing the distance between us. “Do you know where we can find Richie Bondurant?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“Any idea how your skull cap ended up in this picture?”
“Someone yanked it off my head as I was leaving that house on Saratoga. I left it behind.”
“Must have been in a hurry.”
“I was. In a hurry to walk away from trouble.”
The bulldog dick says, “Some guys just can’t walk fast enough for that. Trouble always catches up with them.”
“You should get an attorney,” the tall dick says. “Trust me, Cappy. Things are about to get tight for you.”
“Why’s that?”
“We’ve got a hunch you know who killed Everett Simpson.”
“I don’t need an attorney,” I say. “I’m clean. Whatever went on at that house on Saratoga after I left, I don’t have a clue.”
The bulldog dick snorts. “’Course you don’t. But what went on at Bondurant’s house later that night? That’s what we want to know. That’s where we found the body—in one of the bedrooms.”
I agree to let them interrogate me without having an attorney present. I don’t have anything to hide. They already have the facts about Richie and that Glock and how he held it on Hercules while Laura and I made our getaway. People like the girl in the coonskin
cap have given them the skinny, and I have nothing at all to tell them outside of the fact that I took Laura to her house and then I went home. I went to work the next morning, and when I was done for the day, I drove to Richie’s and that’s where I met up with the two of them.
“That’s all I know,” I tell them. “Every bit of it.”
The tall dick asks me if I’ll agree to let them take my fingerprints and a sample of my blood. “If you’re really clean,” he says, “the prints and the blood will eliminate you as a suspect.”
“Sure,” I say. “Absolutely. Take what you need.”
A technician takes my prints, and a nurse draws my blood. This is what Laura would do if she were here, and I think how ironic that would be, the woman at the heart of the dustup with Hercules, entering a vial of my blood into the chain of custody, passed from the nurse to the tall dick and from him to an evidence clerk. Laura has told me the drill. The chain of custody is just what it says, a carefully documented trail of who handles the evidence and where it goes, a means of being certain that no one can plant any fraudulent evidence, a system where everyone takes great care to assure that everything is on the up and up.
I roll down my sleeve and button my cuff. I’ve given the dicks what they want, and they have no call to keep me there any longer.
“We might have more questions,” tall dick says, and I say I’m sure they know how to find me.
* * *
I drive straight to Laura’s.
“You should have let me go back,” I say, brushing past her when she opens the door. “I could have stopped it. I could have taken care of him.”
“Calm down, Cappy,” she says. “What’s the story?”
I tell her everything. There in her house with candles burning that smell like peppermint, there with the silver garland on the fireplace mantel and the Christmas tree decorated with red bows and twinkle lights, there where I’ve sat so many times thinking this is what it should feel like to be home. I tell her about the bloody handprint, the dicks and their questions, and how I had to tell them about being with her the night of the party before they handed over my skull cap and told me I could go; I was no longer a person of interest. I tell her that Hercules is dead and the police are looking for Richie.
For a long time Laura doesn’t say a thing. She paces back and forth in front of the fireplace. Then she comes to the sofa where I’m sitting. A big round candle is burning on the coffee table. She bites her lip. “I know where he is.”
“Richie? How can you know?”
She bends over and blows out the candle. I sit there in the glow from the lights on the Christmas tree.
“That handprint?” she says. “It’s mine.”
Now it’s her turn to talk, and as she does, I’m feeling what I did when I finally found out my wife’s secrets—the sex tapes, the gambling debts. I feel myself shrinking, getting smaller and smaller until I’m sure I’ll disappear. I’m thinking, as I did then, that everyone’s life is a lie. All the people you walk around with, the ones you thought you could count on to be who you need them to be. When push comes to shove, you’re on your own; you have to look out for yourself. When I left Laura at her house the night of the party, I had no idea that she was soon to have a visitor—two, to be exact: Hercules and Richie.
“Hercules was apologetic,” she tells me, “but Richie was still pissed off.”
They were at Laura’s, because Richie figured he’d find me there. He’d made Hercules drive him over, the Glock held on him all the way, and held on him still as they stood there in Laura’s house.
“That’s just like Cappy,” Richie had said. “He starts trouble, and then when I save his ass he disappears.” He poked Hercules in the small of the back with his Glock. “Now look at what I got on my hands. What the hell am I supposed to do with him?”
Laura told him that maybe he could just let Hercules go. “At least you haven’t shot him,” she said.
“I tried to,” Richie said. “He was lucky I missed. Now if I let him go, he might do the same to me.”
“That’s the truth,” Hercules said, and then there they were, the three of them. “Your move, brother,” he said to Richie. “Aren’t you about tired of holding that gun?”
He was, Laura tells me. “I could see that right off. He’d got himself in a fix . . . Well, really, Cappy, you were the one who’d made things tight for him . . . and now he didn’t know what to do.”
That’s when she told him, “Richie, why don’t we just take you home?” She asked Hercules if that would be all right with him. If he wouldn’t mind, that is, taking Richie to his place, and if he didn’t mind if she rode along and then the two of them could come back to her house and . . . Well, let’s just say Laura gave Hercules reason to believe that he’d be seeing her in her sexy socks and nothing else in right short order.
“But you were afraid of him,” I say to her. “You begged me to come and get you. You wanted me to take care of you.”
“Sorry, Cappy,” she says. “I thought you knew I wasn’t anyone to count on.”
I want to believe it’s not true, and I don’t want to hear the rest of her story, but I know I’ll have to listen because Hercules is dead, and Richie’s nowhere to be found, and thanks to my Stars and Bars skull cap, those dicks aren’t completely done with me. They had no reason to arrest me, but they certainly indicated that they might come calling again before this is all played out. Now I have to find out what sort of trouble Laura might be in and how she came to leave that bloody handprint on Richie’s wall.
Then, before continuing, she takes my hand, and I feel the old twinge of love I doubt I’ll ever lose for her.
“Come on,” she says. “I’ll take you to Richie.”
“You know where he is?”
She tells me he’s downtown across from the train station at a joint called Earnestine and Hazel’s. He’s on the down low, waiting for Laura to bring him the cash he’ll need to buy a ticket for the City of New Orleans, which will take him north to Chicago.
“You drive, Cappy.” She picks up her leather coat and her purse. “I’m too nervous.”
* * *
Just as she opens the door, the two dicks step up onto her porch. The tall one flashes his badge.
“Lauralee Devereaux?” he says.
Her knees buckle, and I grab her so she won’t go down. I’ve never forgotten the way her lifeless body felt as she sagged against me—like air or water or second chances that never work out.
“Well, look who we have here,” the bulldog dick says. “About to go somewhere, are we?”
I don’t know, as I stand there holding Laura, the whole story of Hercules and how he ended up shot to death. That story waits to be written in the Commercial Appeal—the story of how Laura and Hercules drove Richie home, and how once they were there Hercules said he had to use the bathroom. Richie balked at that, but Laura insisted. “Oh, for God’s sake, Richie. You still have a gun, don’t you? What could go wrong?”
Plenty, as it turned out. I was sleeping when this all went down. I had no part in it. I didn’t know that Richie had picked up my skull cap from the floor of the house on Saratoga and stuffed it into his jacket pocket, knowing I’d want him to do that. I hadn’t deserved that kindness, not after the way I’d run out on him.
And I didn’t know that when Hercules came out of the bathroom at Richie’s place, Laura was holding the Glock. “Richie had already pulled back the slide to load a round into the firing chamber. He was showing me how to squeeze the trigger.”
That’s when Hercules rushed Richie. He lowered his shoulder and drove Richie into the wall. “Shoot him,” Richie said to Laura. “Shoot him. Now.”
Hercules jerked his head toward Laura and saw her holding the Glock. Richie took that chance to make it to his bedroom. Hercules said to Laura, “You won’t shoot me, will you, baby? Not a sweet piece like you.”
Then he headed toward Richie’s bedroom. Laura followed, and when she got there, she
saw Richie swing a baseball bat and catch Hercules flush on the side of his head. That’s when my skull cap came out of Richie’s pocket. That’s when Hercules went down.
I had dreamt about Laura that night. I remember it very distinctly. We were in bed and she was taking off her socks, but there was always another pair underneath. She took off one pair, two pair, three pair, four, and as she did, she recited these lines from Dr. Seuss:
And here’s a new trick, Mr. Knox . . .
Socks on chicks and chicks on fox.
Fox on clocks on bricks and blocks.
Bricks and blocks on Knox on box.
I woke up crying. I tried to tell myself not to be mad at Laura. It was just a dream, and really, even if it was real, how would she have known what I’d chosen to never tell her—that the thing that finally broke my wife and me, the thing that drove us both to do crazy things with no regard for the hurt we were causing, was the death of our little girl, whose favorite Dr. Seuss had been Fox in Socks. Laura had no way of knowing that I’d read that book to my daughter over and over while she was at St. Jude’s, nothing to be done about the neuroblastoma in her brain.
That had happened in the real world, the one I counted on Laura to help me forget. And in the real world, while I slept and dreamt and woke up trembling, Laura knelt on the floor beside Hercules, put the Glock to his skull, right behind his ear, and, just like Richie had taught her, she squeezed the trigger.
“There was so much blood,” she told the reporter from the Commercial Appeal.
Now, wherever I go, and whatever happens to me, I know I’ll be thinking about how it’s wrong to put so much stock in one person. No one can save us. And I’ll be thinking about Richie that night at Earnestine and Hazel’s. Maybe he was at the bar enjoying a soul burger, or maybe he was shooting pool, or listening to the juke box that folks swear is haunted and plays tunes to fit the conversations going on at nearby tables, or maybe he was at the bar upstairs where the brothel used to be. Maybe he was thinking he was almost gone. Just a few minutes more, and Laura would be there with the money. He’d ride the train north, and a whole new life would begin.
Memphis Noir Page 11
