by George Wier
“Excuse me, Minnie,” Micah asked. “We just gave Mr. Muldoon what appears to have been some bad news.”
“Hmm. What was it?”
“We told him someone he once knew had died,” Cueball replied.
“Who?”
“A man named Homer Underwood.”
Minnie grew quiet.
“What is it?” Cueball asked.
“Mr. Underwood had been trying to contact Denny for years. I have always been instructed to turn him away and not relay his messages.”
“Why?” Micah asked.
“I think something happened between the two of them.”
Micah nodded.
Cueball turned to go, but Micah stood rooted to the spot, staring at the young woman. Cueball turned back and waited.
“May I call you later?” Micah asked her.
“Of course.”
• • •
The long tale Denny Muldoon told Cueball and Micah that day was to be the last tale he told anyone. Denny Muldoon passed away two nights later. Micah received the news from Minnie. It was to be the first of many long conversations between the two.
[ 31 ]
There are few moments while in the midst of an unfolding catastrophe that are not surreal. The passage of time takes on a certain quality, a graininess of texture or flavor, perhaps not unlike the occasion of being mauled by a vicious animal or the headlong last-ditch flight to outrun a tornado. Some things in life are constant: water runs downhill, offal smells, and bad goes to worse in a twinkling.
Lyle Fisher and Big Bart Dumas stepped out of Lyle’s ‘38 Ford panel truck onto the white rock driveway of the home on Broadway Street and into disaster.
“We going up and knocking on the front door?” Bart asked in hushed tones. The driveway was fifty yards long.
“Not exactly. I’m knocking on the front door. You’re going around back. These are rich folks. They’ve got people who tend the garden, people who wash their cars…all kinds of people. Just act like you belong and everything will be fine.”
“But I don’t belong,” Bart protested.
“This is just a friendly visit,” Lyle said and winked at him.
As they approached the curve of the drive where it turned in front of the house, Lyle motioned Bart to head down the side towards the back. Bart shrugged and walked into the cool shade. He paused to see Lyle step up onto the long front porch with its ceiling fans and wicker furniture laid out like a parlor. Lyle motioned him on.
Bart passed a cistern which caught the runoff from the roof and resisted the urge to plunge his hands and face into the cool water. The aroma of baked pie assaulted his nose. His stomach rumbled. His hands shook. A rivulet of sweat went down his back and he shivered at it. This was to be no social visit, despite what Lyle had said. There would be no sitting on the veranda holding a fork just so. The infant was likely in one of the upstairs bedrooms, probably sleeping.
A sense of wrongness settled down upon his hulking frame like a well-worn cloak. It was a cold, enveloping thing. For some reason Bart thought about catfish.
At the rear of the house he paused and took a quick look around the corner. The back porch was screened-in, no doubt for those barmy nights when the mosquitoes took to hunting for blood in swarms. There was a clothesline twenty feet back of the front steps and there were diapers there. These diapers, however, appeared as though they were silk.
He heard the door chime then and forgot for a moment he had an accomplice. A woman’s footsteps on hardwood floors came from within, going forward. Maybe the rear of the house would be vacant. This was his chance.
“Dammit,” Bart breathed. “Dammit to hell. Here goes nothing.”
He stepped around the corner.
As he went up the rear steps a voice called out from behind him: “Hey! What you doin’ heah?”
Bart farted loudly. He turned to see a thin black woman with an empty clothes basket standing near the opposite corner of the house from which he had come.
“Uh. I’m, uh, going inside,” Bart said, and then tried to smile.
“Wait!” the voice called, but Bart plunged on ahead. The screen door screeched open and he took four steps across the back porch—not gathering a single detail about the space—and went in through the wide-open rear door of the house, the air from his passage lifting the page of a calendar on the wall beside him. But there was no turning back. His body was a machine put into motion.
“Hey!” the voice called out in alarm, though still outside and somewhat muffled.
Along a hallway and past a kitchen, a narrow interior stairway beckoned. Up.
Into an ill-lit interior hallway on the second floor. He heard the screen door slam downstairs and knew it to be the maid he had ignored.
Within moments all manner of hell would come calling.
An open doorway and a quick peek inside. A wooden crib not far from a four-poster bed. No other person present. The walls of the elaborate crib were lined with quilts, all nice and comfy.
Across the floor to the crib. A pair of ice blue eyes greeted him. The child broke into a grin.
Bart picked up the kid and hefted him to his shoulder and turned to go. And at that exact moment he heard the shouting.
• • •
Down the hallway at a dead run, down the stairs.
“You’re not going to take my baby!” he heard distinctly. A girl’s voice, shouting. “Somebody! Help me! They’re trying to take my baby!”
“Now hold on, Miss!” Lyle’s voice, muffled, distant, attempting to reason.
When he got to the kitchen, Bart heard the shotgun blast.
He took two steps toward the back door and stopped in his tracks.
“Lyle!” Bart shouted.
Silence.
He turned, shifted the kid from one shoulder to the other and ran in the direction of the gunfire.
He heard another scream, this one a woman’s, and the front door of the house slammed and running feet pounded across the front porch outside. That would be the maid, Bart somehow knew.
It was all going so fast. Through a door, past a formal dining room and into a large living room.
A bad rendition of Lyle—like one of those department store manikins—lay sprawled across a burgundy, crushed-velvet settee twenty feet away. Lyle was riven and tattered from his right ear down to his chest. A girl—a young girl—stood close to him, her fist clutched against her lips. God, she was beautiful. The shotgun fell from her other hand to the floor. At that moment she sensed Bart behind her, turned her white-as-a-sheet face towards him to take in both his sheer size and the bundle he carried on his shoulder.
She screamed.
The infant at his shoulder clutched at his neck, hugging him.
“It’s okay,” Bart cooed softly to the child. He lunged forward just as the woman began to reach down for the shotgun again and he managed to kick it out of her hands so that it skittered across the floor and under the settee where Lyle lay bleeding out his life’s blood.
“I’m taking him, girlie,” Bart said. “Now stop screamin’ and git, before I have to hurt you.”
For a moment the girl simply stood there, dwarfed by him. Her mouth opened as if to reply, but then her eyes did a little dance in their sockets for an instant or two, and Bart was reminded of one of those one-armed bandits they kept in the back of the Balinese Room. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she folded up and fainted.
“Goddamn,” Bart said under his breath. He knew he had mere minutes to get going. But what to do? A baby at his neck, his co-kidnapper wounded and bleeding, a woman fainted dead away, a screaming maid right now running for the neighbors.
Lyle coughed and flecks of blood flew from his mouth.
“Come on, boss,” Bart said. “We gotta get going.”
Lyle tried to answer, but the words came out in a gargle of sound.
Bart reached down and scooped Lyle Fisher up with one arm around his waist and made for the large archway and
the open front door beyond.
• • •
“The ferry,” Bart said out loud as the wind whistled past. The turn-off toward the ferry was about twenty blocks north. A lone siren whined in the distance. “We’ll never make it past the ferry, will we, boss?” He turned briefly to regard Lyle Fisher and found Lyle staring at him.
“Boss?” he said, but Lyle didn’t blink.
“Oh no, boss. Not now. Not like this.”
• • •
Bart turned the truck onto a dirt road just before the ferry. Half a mile further on he found a lone pier with not a single living soul in evidence nearby.
He stopped the truck, patted the wailing child on the head, closed the door and went around and pulled Lyle’s body out. Lyle felt like he weighed five hundred pounds, but he reasoned it was because he was “dead weight.” He took him out onto the dock and dropped him into the surf to the side.
“I’m powerful sorry, boss,” he said. The waters of Galveston Bay swallowed Lyle Fisher so utterly and completely that for a fleeting instant it was as if the man had never existed. But then after a minute the body came back up and lolled in the surf against the pilings beneath him.
And as Bart watched, the crabs came.
• • •
The ride home in Lyle’s panel truck took ten minutes from the ferry to his driveway. They were the longest ten minutes of Bartholomew Elrood Dumas’s entire life.
Quite fortunately neither his wife nor his brats were home to note either his condition or the nature of his luggage.
• • •
Having washed the blood from his hands and gotten the fire going in the trash barrel in the back yard, Bart chucked his bloody clothes into the fire, making sure none of his neighbors would be able to see what it was he was burning. For good measure, he threw the kitchen trash on top of it and the blaze grew merry, eating away the fuel with a hungry relish as only fire can.
He went back inside, donned a fresh shirt, checked on the baby lying on the couch—he was sleeping, as if nothing in the world had occurred—and then went back out front. He regarded Lyle’s truck for a moment, then furrowed his brow and thought on it ever-so-deeply.
He walked over to the truck, opened it and fished around. Nothing. He opened the glove box. Nothing. He stepped back and regarded the interior. There was something behind the seat. He stepped forward and thumbed the latch that released the seat and it sprang forward. There was a paper sack there, one of those twenty-pound brown supermarket bags. He fished it out.
Inside he found fifty thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills.
[ 32 ]
It had been a week since Micah and Cueball’s visit to Denny Muldoon in Beaumont and five days following his death. The two men were still no closer to catching Harrison Lynch.
Rusty Taylor had the night off, his first in the last six months, and so Micah Lanscomb took the shift.
Micah tooled the Daihatsu pickup around the Island, varying his pattern as best he could, doubling back upon himself and turning off to distant checkpoints he had checked thirty minutes beforehand. Things had a tendency to fall into…less randomness. He was doing the best he could to defeat that and become completely unpredictable. You never knew who was watching a certain business, building or a warehouse, waiting for security to show up and then depart, not to be seen for several hours.
The moonless night was a black velvet blanket laid loosely over the island. There was hardly any breeze. The air was close, if a bit damp, as it ever seemed to be, and the temperature hovered around eighty degrees. Not enough to complain about, but just enough to make the brow bead with sweat.
The vision of Minnie’s face—Muldoon’s nurse—came before his eyes.
At times he tried to recall Diana’s face from all those years before, but couldn’t summon it. He had no pictures of her. He had nothing, no tangible thing from his old life. It was as if he had been reincarnated here on the island, yet into the same body, with full knowledge of his past existence—an existence he knew too well but couldn’t properly recall. That existence had been the real life, and this current life just a shadow of it.
Not knowing exactly where he was going after he checked the southwestern-most account—a vacation home for one of Cueball’s many friends that had been vacant for the greater part of the year—Micah found himself in front of a pay phone outside a convenience store.
He sat with his truck idling and the twin beams of his headlights illuminating the phone with its silvery cord. Maybe he’d be lucky and it would be out of order.
He turned off the motor and climbed out.
When he lifted the receiver, there was the resonating ‘click’ of the thing coming to life.
Micah deposited a quarter, fished her phone number out of his shirt pocket, dialed the number, then realized he hadn’t checked the time. What was it? 1:00 a.m.?
“Hello?” the sleepy voice said.
“Hi,” he said. “Minnie, this is Micah Lanscomb.”
“Micah! Oh. I’ve been hoping you would call.”
“I’ve been hoping I would too. I’m sorry it’s so late.”
“It’s alright. I wasn’t sleeping well anyway. And the house is different since Denny…”
“Yeah,” Micah said, and then found he didn’t really have much to say. “We must have talked for an hour the other night. I suppose I just wanted to hear your voice again. I’m selfish that way.”
“Aw. That’s the nicest thing anyone ever said to me. Denny’s family is letting me stay here a few more nights, but then I have to leave. I suppose I’ll find a place.”
“Why don’t you move to Galveston?” Micah asked. “There’s nursing jobs here, I expect.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“Yes. On behalf of the citizens and the Chamber of Commerce, I, Micah Lanscomb, invite you to Galveston.”
“Thank you. You’re a charmer, Micah. When can I see you?” Minne asked.
“I’d like for it to be soon,” Micah said. “I’m on patrol right now. Working. But…the truth is I’m not sure I want you to be here on this island until we catch…until things have settled out.”
“For my safety?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“How gallant.”
There came one of those moments that was both interminable in length and yet not near long enough where the two of them were content to abide in the wake of each other’s silence. Micah had only ever encountered a moment such as that twice before—the first when he was backstage after Diana’s concert peering into her eyes just before he asked her out to dinner. The second was when he was contained within the well of his own silence beneath the sea, dying. It had been his first night on the island during the storm, and he had to decide whether to drown or to live.
“I’ll call you when this business is over.”
“You do that, Micah. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Silence again. Perhaps three minutes of it, if he had cared to glance at a clock.
“Goodbye, Minnie,” Micah Lanscomb said.
“Goodbye, Micah,” and it took her ten seconds to hang up.
[ 33 ]
Denny Muldoon was putting out the figurative fire that had erupted under him. The fire had a name, and that name was Robert L. “Bobby” Donnegal, the cabbie who had tipped off the local newspaperman, Homer Underwood, about the Mattie Wickett whorehouse murders.
At the moment, Bonaparte Foley was paying the cabbie a visit and attempting to put the fear of God into the man. It was the right kind of job for Foley too. Foley was all piss and vinegar and slow steam. The more subtle work, however, was Muldoon’s strong suit.
“Can I get you something to drink, Mr. Underwood?” Muldoon asked, and made as if to open the bottom drawer of the desk. He had a bottle of Highland Scotch, placed there moments before his meeting with Underwood, but he wasn’t too keen on sharing it. Anything, though, could be required to keep Underwood from running the story. The biggest piece of news was
the murder of Bevo Martindale, one of the sheriff’s deputies Longnight had cut to ribbons along with the whores. It wasn’t that no one would care for the deaths of a few prostitutes and their madam. No. But Martindale was a big man locally. The story of Martindale’s murder, along with the other victims, could potentially start a firestorm that would spook Longnight and make it impossible to catch the murderous son of a bitch. He could see the headlines already: Bogeyman stalks Galveston! And with a second header proclaiming something like: Post Office Street Murder Spree Coverup! Big news. Lots of papers sold. Five hundred or a thousand bogus phone calls per day jamming the Island switchboard.
“I don’t drink so early in the day, Mr. Muldoon. Or is it ‘Officer’ Muldoon?”
“It’s Denny. That’s fine. It’s too early for me too. I was just being neighborly.”
“How can I help you, Denny?”
Muldoon sat back in his chair and regarded the man before him. Underwood wore a white cotton shirt and plain black suspenders. He had a cigar in his shirt pocket—probably waiting for a moment of privacy somewhere. Underwood knew why he was there. There was no hiding it on his face, although Muldoon could tell that the man was used to hiding a great deal. There was a hint of amusement there too, mingled with anticipation and quiet victory. He had a story to run. Perhaps the biggest story for the Island since the 1900 hurricane had wiped the place nearly clean.
“It might be a tall order,” Muldoon said and let that sink in.
“Why don’t you ask then?”
Muldoon leaned forward and placed his elbows on the desk in front of him. It was the police chief’s office, and he had borrowed it from the man solely for this meeting.
“I’ll ask then. Mr. Underwood, you sell newspapers. It’s your job to print stories. So it is with some reluctance that I am forced to ask you to not do your job for a while.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Really it’s just the one story, and you know exactly what I’m talking about. Bobby Donnegal tells the story to his sister of what he finds one fine morning when he returns to Ms. Wickett’s boarding house. The sister tells her best friend. This best friend happens to work for Homer Underwood at the Galveston Daily News. A few calls are made. Nope. No one has seen Bevo Martindale for some days. Nope. Ms. Wickett has closed her boarding house and gone off somewhere. But this story told by this cabbie, Donnegal? It starts getting bigger in the telling. Now there’s talk of a Texas Ranger and an FBI agent. See what I mean?”
