“Speaking of coincidence” — Dan nodded — “not to mention that Curtis bears an uncanny resemblance to a guy they used to call Mug Lewis.”
“I noticed that, too,” I said, avoiding Dan’s eyes.
“This is the guy,” Lucy began, ducking under the tape and stepping lightly into the room, “or I mean this is the room of the guy you think might have crowded me. The one I was supposed to go look at in the morgue.”
“Right.” I was still looking for any angle on all the coincidence. “Best not to run yourself too far in, either. It’s called ‘disturbing the scene.’”
“Scene of what?” She blinked in my direction.
“We believe that Ronnard Raay Higgins died in this room,” Dan explained plainly, “and was carted across the street in a plain brown wrapper.”
“What’s he talking about?” She looked at me.
“I didn’t tell you the whole story,” I said, “but mainly the guy who zoomed you was also menacing our Ms. Oglethorpe as well, and he was also in big with bad drug money — or is that in bad with big drug money — but nevertheless, and oh by the way, did I happen to mention he was Ms. Oglethorpe’s husband?”
Before anyone could comment on the nuttiness of my short but brief tirade, a familiar voice startled us all. “Miss? You’ll have to step out of the room.”
I turned. “Detective Huyne. What a pleasure.”
“Tucker,” he said patiently, “I have such a lot to say to you.”
“Look,” I started, “I’m here with my operative and my client investigating the possibility that the inhabitant of this room was the same man who attacked my client.”
Huyne looked back and forth between Dan and Lucy before he caught my eye again and heaved a mountainous sigh. “I don’t even want to know which one of these miscreants …”
“… miscreants?” Lucy’s hackles were on end.
“… is your client” — Huyne ignored her — “and which is your so-called operative. All I care about is that you all get the hell out of my crime scene. And then somebody needs to explain the two semiconscious policemen downstairs.”
“Lucy,” I beckoned.
She stood her ground for a second, then looked at me. I inclined my head toward the hallway.
She sipped a breath through her nostrils and then reluctantly acquiesced.
“I thought we agreed a couple of chapters back,” I said to Huyne, “that you would cut me loose a little and have those boys lay off me. They tried to arrest me for running a red light just now, you know.”
“And you were supposed to call me, remember? You’re lucky they didn’t fling you into the trunk of their car and haul your ass to Birmingham and back. But that’s neither here nor there at this point. I came to tell you something I think you’ll want to know.”
Lucy was just ducking her head under the tape when Huyne made the announcement he’d really come to make — the one that stopped my heart.
“I thought you’d like to hear,” he said, as if he were continuing an ongoing conversation with me, “that we’ve arrested Ms. Oglethorpe for the murder of her husband.”
44. Dreamland
Visiting Dalliance Oglethorpe in jail was an experience I don’t think I could ever bring myself to talk about.
Sometimes, in the red labyrinth of dreams, you visit a cold gray hallway. And inside a cell where the sun’s refused to shine, you see someone you love — broken, dejected, at an end. Your own suffering isn’t a fraction as bad as seeing someone you love suffer. But it’s only a bad dream, you keep saying to yourself. And then you wake up.
I woke up from that nightmare when I left the station house, just after the sun had risen. She was being held there until they could transfer her. We hadn’t said much. But the last sentences were important.
“What with your big secret marriage out in the open and your previous investigator dead,” I had said, studying the pattern of the floor in her holding cell — a visit that Huyne had arranged, which reinvented my opinion of the guy considerably, “I think I’ll just take the bull by the horns and find out who killed your husband.”
“Flap …”
“… it doesn’t really matter what you have to say on the subject at this point,” I interrupted. “I’m doing it.”
She knew the tone. She knew I meant it.
So instead of the ten thousand other things she might have said, she said the magic word: “Thanks.”
And I was gone.
Huyne had taken care of the rookies on the floor of the Clairmont. Buster the concierge had told everyone most of the story, omitting — I wasn’t certain why — the presence of “Curtis.”
I was handed — and I’m not making this up — a “courtesy warning.”
I said to the one cop, “What do I do with this?”
He said, “It doesn’t matter. It has no official police standing. It’s just a courtesy warning.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s very courteous indeed. I’ll think twice about running that red light again, I can tell you.”
He said that he hoped I got the mange, and that concluded our meeting.
The day was already hot. Midsummer air around me was as still as the grave. It didn’t matter. I was marble on the inside, and more tired than Sisyphus after the first century. Still, I knew what I had to do.
I didn’t even bother going home. I got back into my car and got to Easy, parked in back, went straight to Dally’s office, and sat in her chair. I didn’t know if I thought it would help or I just wanted to sit in her chair.
I took off my shoes, loosened my tie, and waited.
You have to wait. The angel is shy and doesn’t always come right away. Patience is one of my least attributes, and patience is essential. That’s a lesson I’ve learned over and over and over again.
I sat. I watched the motes of dust float in the amber light from her desk lamp. I let my eyes unfocus. I was thinking that I’d been doing this little trick for years and I still didn’t understand it. Every time I’d tried to think about it, the picture’d just gotten fuzzier. So that the more I’d done it, the less I’d understood it. But I knew you had to sit and wait, try to be a blank slate. I saw a National Geographic story once about an Aboriginal tribe in Australia who all thought that dreaming was the real life, and the waking hours were just what you had to do to rest up from the dream time. They seemed pretty happy.
I was just waiting.
And somewhere about the third year of my waiting, I realized I was already in dreamland.
Dreamland was very nice in the middle of the summer, what with the foliage — and the nymphs.
I was Bottom, the jackass-headed buffoon. I was lumbering through the midsummer night in my dream, watching lights blink on and off all around me. There was Huyne as Oberon. Dally as Titania. Lucy was Puck — paging Dr. Freud. Danny was Danny, a very amused audience member. Mug Lewis and poor old Jersey Jakes were Pyramus and Thisbe. And here’s the good part: I thought I could solve the riddle. But that’s what the jackass always thinks.
The next thing I knew, I was in a darker part of the woods, and Jersey came stumbling toward me, trying to speak, but he couldn’t because there was a high-heeled shoe stuck in his chest, the heel had stabbed his heart and he was mouthing Dally’s name and holding out his hand.
Then he dropped like a stone and he was dead.
Still, his hand — his left hand — was twitching and trying to write something in the dirt on the ground, but it was hard to see in the moonlight.
He was dead and he was still trying desperately to tell me something. And all around him the ground was cluttered and chaotic. Like the floor of his room at the Clairmont.
But that was a mistake, thinking like that — thinking about something outside of the vision-state. I was shot out of the dream like a bottle rocket. I lurched forward in Dally’s chair.
Damn, I thought, you know better than to think when you’re in dreamland.
45. Chaos Theory
And I didn’t just lurch forward. I lurched and then stood and I was headed for the door before the momentum of my expulsion from the dream subsided. By then the will to barge across the street and break the law was strong enough to carry me past the doorframe and out of the club.
I was certain I had seen something on the floor of Jersey’s room that had triggered some other thing in my mind. That’s what the image in my trance-state was all about. I had to go and stare at the mess long enough to see what it was. I was hoping maybe Buster was off.
*
No such luck.
“You back?” He was more irritated than ever, but he didn’t bother to stand. “Should I just go ahead and call the cops now?”
“Can if you want to,” I said, “but it’ll only make Huyne madder than he already is. I’ve just recently left the jailhouse, where he’s already up to his ears in all the suspects he can handle.”
The poor guy was thinking as hard as he could, but it simply wasn’t enough. He finally gave up.
“Okay, what the hell.” He looked away. “What do I care?”
I was on the steps before he was finished with his sentence.
Jersey’s room was also barred by the yellow police tape — I imagined it was a common enough decor accent in the hallways of that particular place.
I slipped under it and tried not to let my feet touch the floor, but gravity won out, and I stepped on something breakable right away. I crunched a glass. It had been buried under newspapers and towels.
The whole room looked like a post-disaster newspaper photo. Much worse than the few days before when I’d roused him out of it. “Wreckage of Hurricane Jakes. Details at ten.” No one would ever suppose that all the carnage in that ten-by-ten could have been perpetrated by a human being. Magazines and wrecked clothes were everywhere. Take-out cartons and pizza boxes ruled. The walls were a cobwebbed pattern of dust and arcane wallpaper. The ceiling was yellowed from years of inhabitants who had ignored the no-smoking plaques. The bed was askew, the chair at the desk was turned over, the lamp by the bed was broken, and the shade at the window was torn. It looked like — and here I paraphrase Hunter Thompson — a museum exhibit: “Denizens of the Underworld — see their filthy living habits!” No one person could have created such dark chaos. A team of behavioral scientists working around the clock had concocted this environment. “Your hoodlum believes in the disoriented living space, because his whole life is psychopathically off kilter, hence our mock-up of the typical quarters of your criminal element.”
I’m saying the place was a mess.
I waded into the room, trying my best not to break anything else. I let my eyes roam over the rubble.
What was it, I kept thinking, that poor old Jersey Jakes was trying to tell me from beyond the grave?
Month-old newspapers, unopened mail, single crusted socks, a set of fingernail clippers, three coffee cups, two glass ashtrays, an antique brass letter opener, cardboard, pants, shirts, double-colored cloth shoes, ties, two hats, five beer cans, a pillowcase, and a clear plastic bear filled with honey — these were a few of my favorite things.
I gave some thought to righting the chair, having a seat, and trying my trick while I was staring at the mess. But the thought of what might come crawling from underneath the bed — that undiscovered country — gave me pause. Besides, after about a half an hour’s worth of useless rumination, my whole theory — that I could have seen something there that hadn’t registered consciously but was somehow stuck in my Jung-brain — seemed utterly ridiculous in general.
I decided to wander on back downstairs to see if I could discover where Mug might have gone. Strictly speaking, he was still a client. So was Lucy, for that matter. I was still waiting to hear from her after her trip to the morgue, a visit with odd little Reese, but I was certain it would only be a confirmation call: Yes, that was the guy who mashed me. Good riddance/bad rubbish. That sort of thing.
I was ducking my head back under the yellow ribbon when I crunched on the same glass I’d broken on the way in. I looked down for a second. When I did, I caught a glint of something from the single ray of morning light through the torn place in the shade. It was something important.
“Damn.” I thought it called for an audible expression.
I took a step back into the room and bent over. The thing that had caught my eye was the antique letter opener.
It only took a second before I realized where I’d seen it before — and who had been holding it in her lovely hand.
46. Somebody’s Blood
Letter opener in pocket, I flew downstairs and waved a small message to Buster on my way out of his lobby. My message was simple: I hope I never come back here again, I hope this is the last time I see you in this life.
He seemed to understand, and I felt a shared wish, a kindred mutuality on the subject.
I was back across the street in no time. Molecules seemed to be moving like a whirlwind around me, and I thought I was about to make some very unpleasant discoveries. Some more very unpleasant discoveries.
I had to get the letter opener tested right away, to prove that the idea ransacking my brain was erroneous — that the last time I’d seen that blade hadn’t been in Dally’s office, in Dally’s hand, threatening Ronnard Raay. It just looked like that letter opener.
I stood outside the Clairmont for a minute trying to remember where my car was. That’s how whacked I was. By the time I remembered it was behind Easy, I was already in such an agitated state that I couldn’t find my keys, and they were right there in my pocket.
I was certain that the last time I’d seen the letter opener that I was concealing, wrapped in newspaper, in my breast pocket — the one that I’d just removed from a crime scene — was when Dally had been holding it in her hand the day Ronnard Raay had been in her office. I remembered then that I’d thought she was holding it like a weapon.
How it had gotten into Jersey’s room I had no idea, but I really didn’t want Huyne or his boys or anybody else finding it and putting that famous old two and two together.
I made it across Ponce and into my car, finally grasping the concept that my keys were where they always were.
I headed straight to the laboratory of this guy Paul, a longtime friend and occasional helper.
He was a professor at Georgia Tech. We’d known each other for ages. He’d also been sweet on Dally for the same amount of time. I thought he would help and I thought he would keep quiet about helping — as he usually did. Hence, I dispatched myself to his digs with remarkable haste. Down Ponce, left on Peachtree, right on North, past the Varsity, and onto the campus. I made it in under ten minutes.
He was bent over a Bunsen burner.
“Paul.”
He jerked as if someone had shot him in the leg, eyes wildly searching the big room for the source of the voice.
“It’s me, Paul. Flap.”
“Jesus.”
“No. Flap. But thanks for the compliment.”
“What the hell are you doing here at this time of day?” Paul knew me as a denizen of the night.
“I’ve got trouble. You need to look at this thing I’ve got in my pocket and tell me everything there is to know about it. And you’ve got to do it quick. But before I show it to you, you also have to promise not to say anything about it to anyone ever. That’s important.”
“It’s about Dalliance.” He could see it in my face, I guess.
“Can you do this or not?” I locked eyes with him.
He blinked once, saw the steel in my gaze, and nodded. “I can do that.”
I assessed his solidarity, judged it complete, reached into my coat pocket, peeled back the paper, and presented the letter opener.
He looked at the thing in my hand, then back up at me. “Gee. Just like Clue. Isn’t a letter opener one of the weapons in Clue? Miss Scarlet, with a letter opener, in the library?”
I remained silent. He got the message.
He reached into his pocket, pulled on a pair of
surgeon’s rubber gloves, and took the thing out of my hand.
“Sit. I’ll be a while.” He started off, then turned. “You do want to wait?”
I nodded. “Use your phone?”
He pointed to his office and was gone.
I made my way past the tables and lab equipment to his little cubicle. It was the same kind of mess that Dally’s office was: Everything looked like chaos, but Paul had a system, one only he could understand. Ask him where anything was, and he’d go right to it. Me? I barely found the phone. It was under a splayed magazine, opened to an article about a woman who had figured out how to slow down light — so slow you could almost see it travel.
I sat at Paul’s desk, pulled out the crumpled check I still hadn’t cashed, and dialed the number on it.
“So?” she answered.
“So did you go look at a dead body? And isn’t Reese a character?”
“Flap?” Her voice changed dramatically, warmed and lightened, which did something to my stomach — or my heart. It was hard to tell which at that point.
“Yeah.” I managed to make my voice sound casual, “How’re you doing?”
“I’m okay.” Shy. “Where are you?”
“Working. So did you go see Ronnard Raay’s two-tones?”
“I did. I don’t think he’s the guy.”
Hello? “Not the guy?”
“Well,” she cleared her throat, “it’s kind of hard to tell when you’re looking at a cold white slab of dead guy in place of a hot, coked-up juggernaut, but, no, I don’t think it was the same guy who mooched me, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Not the same kind of shoes. This stiff I just saw? He was a fancy dresser. The guy who rushed me was a thrift-store character.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The guy who bothered me smelled like mothballs, don’t you remember I told you. The stiff I saw at the morgue? It’s not my guy.”
“Look again.” I wasn’t willing to let it go.
“I’m not going back there to look at that dead guy again. I’ve seen enough dead guys.”
Dead Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 5) Page 18
