by Jim Nisbet
Before Royce knew what hit him, the guitar player had sprung out of his chair and straddled Royce on the sofa. Royce momentarily held the man off as if the act were a lame plot hatched merely to interrupt his enjoyment of the football game, keeping the guitarist’s body to one side of him so he could keep his eyes on the screen. But as he leaped the guitarist shouted, “By God know that they’re fucking with a by God GEN-u-whine REP-tile!” and quickly burned two holes right next to each other on the side of Royce’s neck with the red hot end of his cigarette. The act was so aggressive that Royce’s pain took him completely by surprise and the cigarette had extinguished itself on his neck under the pressure of the application of the second burn before he reacted.
Royce screamed. He rolled onto the floor between the sofa and the table, clutching both hands to his neck, curling around the wound like a fishing worm around the inserted hook.
The guitarist stood away and let him howl. He took a drag on the cigarette stub, saw it was dead and flicked it toward the writhing creature at his feet, laughing. “Man,” he said, “you been snake-bit.” He leaned toward Royce and tapped his shoulder with his fist. “Fast Eddie Lamark’s the name,” he leered, “and gen-u-whine reptile trauma is my game.”
He picked up the bottle just as Royce kicked the table hard enough to turn it over, and took a long swallow.
NINE
Eddie Lamark finished the whiskey and considered the bottle. Then he threw it through the television.
The tube imploded with a dull thud, like a door slamming in a distant room, and went black. The sound of the football game continued around the fumes drifting up out of the jagged hole, as if narrating an obscure contest between minerals. Then there was a spitting sound and the narration faded to nothing. A bluish color flickered over the face of the jagged glass, like distant heat lightning. Being an unhappily married prison doctor, Royce had witnessed a fair amount of violence in his time, but when he’d been its victim, it hadn’t been random; and when it had been random, he’d never been its victim. Therefore, after Royce stood up, twisting around the small room with both his hands covering the twin burns on his neck, and asked what the hell it’d all been done to him for, he wasn’t too surprised when Eddie gave him raised eyebrows, took a beat, then shrugged and shook his head. But Royce was nonetheless mad, and Eddie Lamark’s honest shrug only further enraged him; so, still holding onto his neck with one hand, he took a swing at Lamark with the other. He missed. Lamark retaliated by burying his fist in Royce’s stomach. It was a deep, satisfying hit that dropped the older man to his knees. Then Lamark backed off as inexplicably as he’d begun. Royce knelt on the ragged carpet, struggling to hold down the eighty-six-proof bile that threatened to choke him as he gasped for his wind. He was in a perfect position; Lamark might have dealt him a blow to the side of his head that might well have killed him.
Instead, Lamark stood back and lit a cigarette. One drag, two. He blew smoke at the match, but the match didn’t go out. Then he leaned forward a bit and grabbed Royce by the chin. He twisted it roughly and contemplated Royce’s face by matchlight.
“Who the fuck are you, mister?” The playfulness was all gone from his voice.
Royce was hurt and could not breathe well and didn’t want to answer that question, but he suddenly guessed that Lamark was going to set him on fire. With a yell he twisted away from the match, fell against the sofa and onto the floor.
Eddie Lamark showed some teeth with a smile. A curl of smoke lifted out of his open mouth. He breathed smoke at the match until it went out.
Royce cowered on the floor in the darkness. His thoughts went to the Gladstone bag he’d hidden behind the sofa. There he’d find an unguent for the burns and enough sodium thiopental to freeze Lamark’s leer into a death mask. Never before had Royce so strongly felt the hatred that overwhelmed him now, not even in his worst nights with Pamela. In ten minutes Lamark had succeeded in releasing years of confusion and frustration, and simultaneously focused himself as the sole and most accessible object by which Royce might obtain some relief. Royce used this hatred to face down his pain and strive for reason. His breath whistled through his clenched teeth.
Through the court transcripts and other materials he’d found in Thurman’s file, Royce was fairly convinced that Lamark and Colleen Valdez had been very close to Bobby Mencken at the time of the convenience store robbery and murder for which Mencken had been put to death. The prosecutor’s case had been strong but highly circumstantial. Mencken had been nabbed fleeing the scene. The murder weapon turned up nearby with Mencken’s prints all over it. Valdez and Lamark had been interviewed a week or so later, but nothing came of it. They were each other’s alibis. Mencken took the rap.
But Royce couldn’t forget the man’s eyes the night he helped him die. Mencken had been innocent.
Anyway, Royce was operating on that theory.
He thought “operating” was kind of a loose term.
Royce sat up in the corner between the couch and the wall. He licked two fingers and pressed them over the two burns on his neck and waited in the darkness. Across the tiny room he could see the glow of Lamark’s cigarette. It would be damn hard to believe that Mencken had taken the fall for this Eddie guy. Not if this was his normal behavior, and Royce had no reason to think the man ever behaved otherwise.
The girl, though. She might once have been worth taking a risk for. But a sacrifice?
It was then that Royce remembered the two round disks of shiny scar tissue on Mencken’s shoulder. Now Royce lay cowering on the floor in a Dallas tenement with his fingers pressed painfully to two wounds that, when healed, would look just like them.
He would be wearing Eddie Lamark’s brand.
Just like Bobby Mencken.
A yellow overhead light suddenly illuminated the room.
“What’s going on in here?”
Colleen Valdez stood in the bedroom door to Royce’s right, hugging herself in her taffeta robe and looking very sleepy. She scratched her head with one hand and looked at Royce, then passed her eyes over the wreckage of the room until they found Eddie, who stood against the opposite wall. “What time is it?” she yawned.
“Time to get a new bottle of whiskey and a new television,” Eddie said. “Where you been?”
“Oh, man,” she said through the yawn. “I just took a shot that reminded me why I became such useless trash in the first place.” As she spoke she leaned over and righted the table blocking the doorway. “Anyway, I think it did,” she added. “The last thing I remember is this guy here,” she pointed to Royce, “catching me when I passed out in the hallway. Thanks.”
Royce nodded, not taking his eyes off Lamark.
Pause.
“So,” she said, taking the last cigarette out of a package on top of the ruined television. She eyed the broken neck of the whiskey bottle protruding from the hole in the picture tube and added, “Looks like we’re getting all our vices in one place, here.”
“So let’s go get a bottle and a television,” Eddie said, not taking his eyes off Royce. “Who is this guy, anyway?”
Colleen Valdez turned her head and held a match to her cigarette. “Said he was a friend of Bobby Mink’s,” she said, waving out the match.
“Stir?” Lamark asked.
Royce said nothing, but he was pleasantly surprised to hear that Colleen Valdez was able to remember meeting him earlier that afternoon.
“Don’t fight like he was in stir,” Lamark observed.
“I’m an intellectual,” Royce said defensively.
Lamark flexed the fingers of his punching hand, opening and closing them as he watched Royce through the smoke of the cigarette in his mouth.
“Is that the same thing as smart?” Colleen asked absently, looking for an ashtray for her match. Though moving a little on the slow side, she was markedly more alert than the first time Royce had met her, and correspondingly more interesting to look at. She was much taller than Royce had thought her at first. She gave
up on the ashtray and flipped the dead match onto the table. “That’s the kind Bobby liked.”
“Funny time to be showing up,” Lamark said, “Bobby going down just day before yesterday and all. Why here?”
“I came to find out how civilized people behave themselves,” Royce said. “Figured any friend of Bobby’s would know all about it.”
Lamark laughed.
“Fucking and fighting,” Colleen said as she headed for the kitchen. “Nothing’s changed.” Royce and Eddie watched each other. Royce had gotten his wind back now and thought he was sailing pretty well around any hard facts that might have tripped him up. He realized, though, that he would have to be delicate in the matter of introducing these people to the contents of his Gladstone bag. Undoubtedly, there were some items in there that they would be wanting to consume right away. The morphine, for example, would save the likes of these two the trouble of hitting the streets for at least a couple of days.
A sense of having found an edge to the prevailing chaos of this new environment infused a bit of much-needed calm into the panicked helplessness threatening Royce’s presence of mind. Though the morphine was undoubtably a playable card, he had few illusions as to whether Lamark or even the girl might not kill him for it if he played it wrong.
He felt like a tourist in Manhattan, speaking no English, who suddenly wakes up to the fact that it’s 3:00 A.M. on a Tuesday, and he’s wandering around Times Square wearing suspenders and lederhosen and a Miss Liberty T-shirt with a passport and two thousand dollars in traveler’s checks sticking out of his back pocket and an expensive camera on a strap around his neck: vulnerable.
But his fear was tinged with excitement. His pain was tempered by the knowledge that the first lead he’d gotten out of the Mencken file had led him straight to at least one person completely capable of having committed the acts for which the state of Texas had held Bobby Mencken responsible.
If he could prove it, Mencken was as good as avenged. Royce looked at Lamark in a new, strange light. Lamark’s death might be the vehicle of Mencken’s vindication. And now it would be a pleasure to effect it, given the provocation Lamark had just supplied him. Royce would be glad to trade Eddie Lamark a brand for a hot shot. Were such square deals still available on this tangled earth?
The thought occurred to him that if Lamark were as crazy as he acted, all Royce might have to do would be to ask him who killed Amanda Johnson, a mother of five who worked nights in a convenience store at $3.25 an hour to make ends meet. Eddie might tell him.
The thought also occurred to him that this snake Lamark, being crazy and possibly smart, probably wouldn’t allow him enough time to find out much of anything. Certainly, guilty or not, he’d managed to be smarter than Mencken. He hadn’t gotten caught.
“I hadn’t seen Bobby much since he went up to Death Row anyway,” Royce offered. “We got to be friends when he was heavily into… physical therapy. Yeah.” A pain shot through Royce’s gut. He clutched it with both hands and winced. “Physical therapy.”
Lamark shook his head very slowly and said, “It’s a cinch you aren’t into physical therapy, Jack.”
Royce closed his eyes and bit his lip against the pain. “I was into the theoretical side of things,” he said lamely, although warming to the fabrication, “I was the therapist. Trusty, you understand. I was a doctor outside…”
Lamark frowned slightly. “A doctor?” His lip curled into a sneer. “What kind of doctor?”
Royce shook his head. “Doesn’t make any difference. I, uh… I went down writing scrips for upper-class junkies.”
Lamark smiled hopefully. “You still got a license?”
Royce laughed. “You mean to drive?”
Lamark shook his head, laughing begrudgingly.
“Anyway,” Royce continued, “I was up for parole on account of good behavior and it just so happens I came out a few days ago, right before Bobby Mink…” He let his voice trail off. After a minute he picked up the thread again in a slightly different tone, substituting a slight bitterness for a slight melancholy. “My wife met me at the gate and gave me my old Gladstone bag with some clothes in it. Then the sheriff’s deputy with her gave me a summons to divorce court, an injunction not to ever darken the door of my own house again, and the keys and title to my own pickup truck. Then we parted ways. For good, I guess.”
Royce noticed the hem of the taffeta housecoat just around the corner of the entry hall, where Colleen Valdez was leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette and listening to his story. The one brown bare foot he could see was small and had a fine arch to it.
Eddie looked at the end of his own cigarette. “And how’s old Thurman?” he asked simply.
Royce flicked his eyes from Colleen’s foot to Eddie’s face. Eddie kept watching his cigarette. In the hall, Colleen raised her cigarette to her lips and held it there, not inhaling.
This is getting easy, Royce thought. He played the tension for a moment, then two, then said, “Same as always. He’d probably just love a night on the town with you, Eddie.”
Eddie raised an eyebrow and nodded thoughtfully at his cigarette.
“But what he really wanted was to spend a lifetime giving Bobby whatever he wanted. He called Bobby Snowball, after some screwy novel he’d read, and would get his lines crossed in the office just making up stories about himself and Snowball.”
Royce saw a plume of smoke bloom in the hallway in front of Colleen. Eddie continued to nod thoughtfully, his lips pursed, watching the smoke rise between his fingers.
“Bobby never had much to do with the queens, though. He liked the punks, I guess.”
Eddie looked up.
“They call you Doc? That what they call you inside?” Colleen leaned around the corner and looked at Royce.
Royce nodded. He’d already told his name but Eddie wanted a handle. Several very dumb pseudonyms flashed across his mind. Lonnie Childs. Miles Torn. Elmer Ship-ault. But he was new at this undercover stuff. Besides, he had a driver’s license and a truck registration and too many other ways to accidentally blow holes in his story to be fooling around with a fake name. So he told the truth. “Lots of them call me Doc, yeah. But the real name’s Royce. Franklin Royce. Most folks call me Royce, or Frank.” He shook his head and almost blushed. “Bobby called me Rolls. Rolls Royce.” He smiled up at his two hosts. “Just like you, Eddie.”
Eddie looked down at him. A ring of smoke spun away from the wall where Colleen stood.
For a moment all Royce could hear was a very loud silence. Then he noticed that the crickets in this part of Dallas were almost as loud as the ones outside the prison in Hunts-ville or his house in Giddings. Somewhere up the street beyond the mouth of the dead-end alley, someone leaned on a car horn and yelled something unintelligible. Some kind of whistle blew far away, tentatively. The heat was still with them. The exertion Eddie had just put himself through showed in the rivulets of sweat on his thin, muscular frame. Royce himself had a drop of sweat on the end of his nose, and his eyes stung from the salty moisture leaking into them from above. The small living room reeked of damp cigarette ashes and stale tobacco smoke and fried electronics and mildew and decay. The whistle got loud and turned out to be the persistent boil of water in a teakettle in the kitchen. Colleen Valdez’ robe disappeared and soon the smell of cheap instant coffee found its way down the hall to the trashed living room, like the odor of fresh dirt dug from a trench.
Eddie flipped his cigarette through the hole in the front of the television set and hefted the hulk to his shoulder. He carried the ruined appliance out the front door, turned left onto the breezeway and dropped it over the banister at the back staircase. The television exploded on the pavement in the alley three stories below. When he came back in the apartment, Colleen had brought three cups of steaming bad coffee into the living room and offered one to Royce. There was no milk or sugar. The brew was rank and hot.
Sitting with his back against the wall, Royce found his attention once aga
in drawn to Colleen’s strange beauty. Her legs folded over the couch to the floor. The front of the robe slit over them to her thighs. These parts of her were perfectly beautiful, to Royce’s thinking, and all the more fascinating when contrasted with her ruined yet haunting face. The beauty of her face hovered just beneath its devastated surface in the same way a fine design can be detected in the architecture of a house long since abandoned to the slow decay of the seasons. This is not to say that she was old by any means; she couldn’t have been thirty. Aside from her face, and despite her apparent long career of dissolution, Colleen Valdez’ body and figure had the suppleness and resilience of that of a seventeen-year-old girl. These assets were visible to Royce, and he felt urges and desires stirring that he’d denied himself for a long, long time. And he felt old and shapeless and unattractive as well.
Eddie and Colleen were making small talk about an upper-crust address. Royce paid little attention to them, finding himself instead drifting lazily on a wave of sensuality that lulled the aches so recently induced by Mr. Lamark, mixed strangely with them, assuaged their pain for him. He sat on the floor with his back to the wall, sipping hot coffee, not two feet from Colleen’s calves and thighs. He tried to imagine how her skin might feel to his fingertips as they made their ways gingerly up her calves, over the rounded, dimpled knees, separating them gently, along the velvety unshaven insides of her thighs .
“Hey, Rolls Royce!” Eddie was addressing him. Royce tore his eyes off the fleshly mantra and found both Colleen and Eddie looking down at him from the sofa.
“Yo,” Royce smiled sheepishly
“You still got that pickup truck?”
“At your service,” he said gallantly. “Mind if I spend the night?”
“Not at all,” Eddie said. “Any friend of Bobby Mink’s is a friend of ours. We have a little job to do first, though. ”
