“Shoes?” I looked around his place. It was a wreck: clothes everywhere, empty bottles, take-out cartons, a pizza box with a year’s worth of cigarette butts in it, and one lamp lit in an otherwise darkened room. “I’d say that’s a strange coincidence, if I hadn’t already just been dismissing the entire concept.”
“Concept? Got no idea what you’re talking about.” He looked down at my feet. “Are those Florsheims?”
“That’s right, the old-style kind” — I nodded — “with the soles as hard as tap shoes. Got these in a vintage store.”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “Don’t make shoes like that anymore.”
“That’s right.” I tried to think about where I might sit down, then just decided to stand. “Like, say, two-toned shoes. Don’t make those much anymore either. The guy we’re looking for together? The one who menaced Lucrezia downstairs in the women’s room? He was wearing shoes like that, I think.”
I could hear the popping and whirring coming from inside his cranium. He could tell I was saying something significant, and he knew that somewhere in the back of his head he knew what it was, but he couldn’t quite get it all put together. His brows were knit and his eyes nearly crossed with the effort.
Then, like sunrise on the walls of Troy, a dawning hope passed over his expression, and he locked eyes with me. “Two-tones.”
“Anybody you know wear black-and-tan two-toned tormentors?”
He craned his neck my way. “You wouldn’t be asking if you didn’t already know. That’s my belief. So I’ll tell you. I do know someone who wears shoes like that.”
“And here’s where two and two really do come in handy: I think it’s the same person who is bothering your friend and mine, Dalliance Oglethorpe.”
He sat on the bed as if he were suddenly taken with a terrible pain in his bean, rubbing his forehead with his fingers.
“Damn, Flap,” he finally told me. “You really are good.” He cast his eyes up toward me. “Did you do that voodoo thing you do?”
“I love that song,” I started, “but the answer is no. I just got lucky, I think. And I’m still wary of such a coincidence.”
“That’s why you didn’t see it right away,” he said, collecting his thoughts. “You would have got the connection quicker if it were harder to get, or weirder. This is just too clean, too pat.”
“Which is why I’m ready to discard it, but it made me suddenly see other things clearly: such as the fact that the man you’re keeping an eye on for Ms. Oglethorpe and the man who just came storming out of her office are probably one and the same. In the first place, Dally doesn’t have that many people messing with her, so the odds are highly in my favor anyway. But the fact that you just sat down on the bed and knew or thought you knew who I was talking about tells me that I’m probably right.” I shoved my hands into my pants pockets and leaned back against the hotel-room wall. “Man, I’m good.”
You could tell by the look on poor Jakes’s face that he was just realizing what he’d given away. First came recognition, then surprise, then anger, then resolve — all in a neat thirty-second package. It was entertaining.
“Well,” he said, patting his knees with the palms of his hands and standing, “you got me. I thought we were friends, but you did get the better of me there, and I take my hat off to you.”
“I’d just as soon you didn’t take anything more off,” I said, trying not to look at those boxer shorts. “Could we just stick to conversation?”
“If there’s any possibility that my guy and your guy are the same guy, we’d better know it pretty quick. See anything that looks like pants around here?”
I didn’t want to look. “Are you going to tell me your guy’s name now, or are we still playing the ‘I’m-a-detective-with-a-code’ game?”
He stopped, sighed, and looked up at me. “Well, even if I don’t, the way you’re going, you’ll find out sooner or later anyway. Hey!”
His hand shot downward into a pile of shadows, and when he brought it back, his fingers were clutching wrinkled fabric that had once been a pair of blue double-pleated pants.
“Now,” he said, shoving one foot into his find, “all I need is a shoe or two, and I’m good to go.” He smiled. “Though, they’re not going to be as sharp as yours.” He locked eyes with me. “Or those two-toned affairs … that I hear Ronnard Raay Higgins wears when he’s out and about.”
“Who Ray What?”
“R-o-n-n-a-r-d. And Raay has two a’s in it too.” Jakes continued putting on his pants, and spoke, this time almost to himself. “Guy’s a real case.”
“Two g’s in Higgins, as well, I guess.”
“Right,” he answered absently, looking for shoes.
“So,” I continued, looking for shoes too, despite myself, “at least he’s got consistency going for him. Terrible name, though.”
“Suits him.” That was Jersey’s assessment. “Did I tell you about the hand?”
“The hand?”
“The guy cut off somebody’s hand and put it in a package …”
“… that he gave to Dally, I know all about that, and Dally told you that I knew. I’ve tried to blot it out of my mind. I’m gathering now that she, at first, thought it was Higgins’s hand?”
“How do I know what she thought?”
I let it go and moved on. “Where’d he get a hand like that, do you think?”
“How did he keep from messing up those nice cool shoes” — Jakes shook his head — “if he got it himself? That’s a good question too.”
“Hey.” I looked up from the chaos of the floor.
“What?” He looked around, thinking, I guess, that I’d found his shoes.
“I’m sorry I tricked you and I appreciate your telling me Higgins’s name. I owe you one.”
He halted his search. “You don’t owe me, Flap.” His voice was warm as the air on the street. For one brief second — it passed quickly — I considered that taking on the occasional partner in my business endeavors was actually a good thing.
Luckily, before I could do anything about it, I beat it out of town. That can sometimes give a person perspective. How was I supposed to know it would give me a rash instead?
12. Rash Thinking
The drive to Invisible via Tifton was tedious, flat, endless, hot, worthless, stupid — and utterly devoid of any radio relief. Sometimes the static sounds like an ocean and it can be soothing, but you can only listen for so long before you have to turn off the damned radio and commence that most dangerous of travel enterprises: thinking.
It has long been my belief that thinking is the ruination of humankind. Once you start thinking about something, it becomes an objectified construct in your mind, and it ceases to be the actual thing it is. Take, for example, thinking about the past.
What are you really doing? You’re thinking about your reconstruction of events in the past, you’re not — as most of us are misled to believe — watching a movie documentary of the events.
Still, when there’s nothing on the radio and there’s nothing to see out the window and you’re driving home at eighty miles per hour, you can’t help but think about the past.
Playing in the cinema of my recollection were scenes of the other times in our lives that Dally and I had been out of sync. The first of these was when she was home from college on spring break her first year, and I had just decided to leave the country.
“You did what?”
“I enlisted.”
She dropped the bundle of dirty clothes she’d had in her arms. We were standing in her mother’s kitchen. The old farmhouse was so hot that you could actually get relief by walking outside and standing directly in the sun.
Dally’s first year at Wesleyan was going nicely. I’d visited or she’d come home nearly every weekend, so it was more or less like having her still around — only better. Things between us seemed to have been accelerated by her weekly absence. I was twice as glad to see her when she came home; twice as demonstrative about
how much I’d missed her. Until I made what turned out to be a fairly momentous decision.
“If you enlist,” I tried to explain, “you get to choose what you do. If you get drafted, they just shove you into anything.”
“What’s there to choose?” She was completely irate. “It’s the army. That’s the opposite of choice.”
“I’m going into Intelligence,” I told her.
“That’s my favorite joke,” she said with absolutely no humor whatsoever. “‘Army Intelligence, a contradiction in terms.’”
“But, see …” I trailed off. The clarity of my decision was somehow eroded by the ferocity of her opposition to it.
“This is what you always do, you know.” She sat at the table.
“I always do?” I wanted to keep up the argument, but she was right. Every time we’d ever gotten to the point of really getting serious about our feelings, I’d take a powder. I’d get a summer job that took me to Ty Ty or a sleepover camp at Pine Mountain. But this was a big one.
The kitchen was like a hundred other farm kitchens in that part of south Georgia: spotless linoleum floor, big plain wooden table, two refrigerators, and something boiling on the stove twenty-four hours a day.
Dally’s mom was leaning with her back against the sink, holding a colander full of purple hull field peas she’d just picked. Her dad had gone over to Sonny’s Store to get gas for the tractor.
“Dally, honey,” she said softly, “Flap’s got to get out of this little town just like you do. He’s just got his own way, that’s all …”
“… that’s not why he’s doing this, Momma.” Dally’s eyes flashed hotter than the flame on the stove. “He doesn’t even know what his draft number is, yet. He’s doing what he does best: He’s backing off, he’s getting the big picture.” Her shades of irony deepened. “He’s the amazing disappearing Zen boy.”
That stopped Mrs. Oglethorpe pretty soundly. “Sugar, half the time I got no idea what you’re talking about … and the other half I don’t want to know.” She turned toward the sink again. The back of her blue dress was like the sky just after sunset.
“Dally,” I began, “you’ve really got this all wrong.”
She focused a glare so blinding on me that I took a short step back, right into the screen door.
“Mr. Non-attachment. Every time we get close,” she whispered, “you get gone.”
*
Driving the highway home in the heat of the day with all the windows open, air washing around me like white-water rapids, I was forced to look at a pretty uncomfortable conclusion. Dally was right. The history of our relationship was traced by two steps forward and one step back — a little dance of avoidance, abandonment, and something else that starts with the letter A — maybe, in this case, army.
13. Sunset
I pulled into Tifton around sunset. The Lancaster Hotel, a huge old Victorian ship of a house close to the downtown area, had vacancies. It was also known around that part of the state for fine country cuisine — another concept that Dally considered a contradiction in terms. Another way in which we disagreed. I’d eaten there many a time in my youth and had found the fare there aces.
I parked on a side street, in the shade, instead of in the hot lot. I only had a small knapsack with me.
The lobby was cool and dark.
“Evening.” The man behind the desk was about a hundred and twenty-seven years old, wearing, I was convinced, a shirt he’d gone to high school in.
“Hey. Got a room?”
“Yes, sir. Just yourself?”
“That’s right.” I got out my wallet. “I think just one night at this point, but what if I want to stay a little longer?”
“That could happen.” He managed a quasi-affable look before his features fell back to their natural gloomy disposition. “A single is forty-seven dollars a night, includes breakfast. Dinner’s extra. All the rooms got private baths now. Plus cable.”
“Okay, then.” I signed the register, gave him cash for one night, and took the key he handed me.
“Top of the stairs, then left.”
Room 7 was done in burgundy and green — a masculine room. The Unclaimed Freight-style “antiques” were a little dusty, and the cable television, as it turned out, featured three religious channels, two country music video twenty-four-hour programs, CNN, and the three broadcast channels.
It would be dark soon, and I decided to wait a turn or two before heading over to Invisible, maybe even get a fresh start in the morning. There were a few things I could do while I was in Tifton anyway. I could eat a fine down-home meal. I could take a stroll down Simpson Street and see all the nice gardens. I could call Sally Arnold.
Sally had been born and raised in Tifton, gone to college in Macon with Dally, and come back home to marry and share her knowledge. I’d only met her once, and Dally didn’t talk about her much, but she was a fine person, and I had one of my famous intuitions about her. I thought I could get something from her about Dally’s past … and the strange man who was vexing her.
I pulled the phone over close to the bed, pulled out my spiral-bound memory pad, and dialed Sally Arnold down at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. It was the only number I had for her. Left a message on her office machine of a fishing nature.
“Hey, Sally, it’s Flap Tucker, Dally’s friend. I’m in Tifton at the Lancaster. We met when I was down there in Beautiful, Georgia, a while back for that reunion dinner on the grounds, you know, with the Turner family, and all. Look, I wanted to ask you something about you and your husband Charlie, and Dally, when you all were going to Wesleyan. And I was in the service. I’m trying to — you know, I’m teasing Dally about it, and I can’t remember the name of that other guy that was buzzing around her at the time.” I didn’t think my voice bluff sounded like a barking dog — but that’s what it felt like. As far as I knew, there had never been anybody else trying to get next to Dally but Charlie Arnold, and he’d married Dally’s college roommate Sally. Ancient history. “She’s told me the guy’s name, I just can’t remember. You could call me at the hotel if you wanted, I’m only in town tonight. Back home visiting — on other business, and thought I’d give you a ring. Maybe even luck out on an invitation for some of your world-famous fried chicken. Or you could call my number in Atlanta, if we miss each other. Thanks, Sally.” I gave her the number at the hotel and then my home phone.
Sometimes when you make up a bluff like that, you feel kind of clever, like you’ve pulled something off. I just felt tired.
*
I felt like sleep had just sapped me when the phone rang. Groggy, I pulled the receiver toward the general area of my face.
“Hello?”
“Flap? It’s Sally. Sally Arnold.”
“Yes,” I answered. “How are you?” I tried sitting up. The clock said it was six-thirty, but I couldn’t tell if that was AM or PM.
“Not that good” — she sounded thoughtful — “considering the circumstances.”
She let out a hefty sigh and then didn’t talk, so I thought maybe I should start.
“I’m sorry. What’s the matter?”
“What in the world are you doing in Tifton?”
“Business, that’s all.” I rubbed my eyes. “What’s up?”
“Why are you asking about Ronnard Raay?”
It only took me another second to wake up completely. “Higgins?” That’s all I could manage.
“Yeah,” she went on. “How do you know about him? Dally made us all swear we wouldn’t talk about him.”
“Uh-huh.” When you bluff, the less said, the better.
“But since you know. It’s kind of your fault, in a way — that’s what she always thought, anyway. She was there at college, you were in the service. What with you gone, she kind of went wild, see? So when Ronn started paying her all kinds of attention, she went overboard.”
“Go on.” It didn’t even sound like my voice.
“He was a charmer, I’ll give him that.” Sall
y’s voice got quieter. “But I guess if you’ve got money, you always seem a little more … what’s the word?”
“Rich?”
“Debonair. Ronn was from big money. He bought up a lot of land around here. I think he owns Dally’s old place. He doesn’t do anything with it, though. He’s not here. I don’t know where he stays. He’s old Macon money, and his mother was a Canton in Atlanta. So maybe he’s up there.”
Blue blood, old money, Piedmont Driving Club, southern aristocracy, made a mint in old Coca-Cola and ruthless business deals — that’s how you spelled Canton.
“Anyway, it was all over a long time ago — that big old fight Dally had with Ronn that night. It was on account of if his parents found out about Dally, they’d have a fit.” She lowered her voice. “He called her white trash.”
“Dalliance is descended from the man who founded Georgia,” I announced. “That goes a long way …”
“… it was just a fight, Flap. You know how you say things in a fight you don’t really mean — not afterward, anyway. But it was one mean bit of yelling. Charlie and I had to break it up. I don’t believe I ever saw Ronn again after that night. It wasn’t until two weeks later that I saw Dally.” Softer again. “When I visited her at the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
Sally sounded like a ghost. “She was in the Millegeville.”
She meant the State Mental Hospital in Millegeville — Georgia’s Bedlam.
“Well” — I heard my voice scratch out across the air — “this story just gets better and better.”
“You didn’t know that either?” Sally paused. “I thought she would have told you everything. Maybe I’d better just shut up.”
“Get to the part where Dally goes nuts.”
“Oh,” Sally was quick to answer, “she didn’t go nuts. She tried to kill Ronn — he said — and he had her locked up.”
“She tried to kill him?”
“Well,” she began, like she was telling me about two little kids fighting, “he came after her first. He swung at her with that thing you use to change tires with. But she had a kitchen knife, they say, and stabbed at him three or four times before he quit coming at her.” Her voice dropped ghostly. “I think there might have been liquor or even drugs involved.”
Dead Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 5) Page 6
