by A. W. Gray
“No way,” Nancy said, then had a thought and leaned closer to the tape recorder. “This is Nancy Cuellar speaking here. These policemen just turned off the tape and told me there’s another witness, but since the other witness might hurt their case against Lackey Ferguson, they don’t think they’ll use him.” She alternated a scathing glare between the two detectives. “How’s that, fellas?” Nancy said. “That the kind of evidence you’re looking for?”
13
“Deep . . . deeper. Oh, God, God, don’t ever stop.”
“Jesus, babe, I’m . . .”
“Not now, not now. Slower. Easy, easier. That’s . . . that’s it, oh, that’s it, that’s my . . . madre de Dios, oh, God, God, God, God . . .”
“I . . . I don’t think I . . . Jesus . . . now, I . . .”
“That’s it, oh, yes, yes, yes, my God, I . . .”
“Jesus.”
“Oh. Oh.”
“It’s . . .”
“Yes. Yes. it’s . . .”
“Jesus, it’s . . .”’
“Yes. Yes. Oh, angel, yes, yes, yes. That was . . . oh.”
“Did you . . .?”
“Oh, yes. How can you ask me?”
“Was it . . . ?
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“Do you know when you’re speaking in Spanish?” he said.
“Sure. If I didn’t know the difference I’d have a tough time of it. I’d look pretty dumb speaking Spanish to somebody that didn’t understand me.”
“I mean, when we’re doing it.”
She raised up on her elbows, looking down at him, at the square jaw and neat beard, the faint light from the digital clock-radio outlining his nose in shadow on his cheek. “Making love,” she said.
“Sure. Sure, that’s what I mean.”
“You don’t sound like it. „Doing it,’ that sounds like a couple of animals or something.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to. Do you know you’re speaking Spanish sometimes when we’re making love? How’s that?”
“Better. Sometimes when we are, I don’t know anything. Why, did I say something in Spanish?”
“Yeah. Just a couple of words.”
The FM station was playing “Send in the Clowns,” by Judy Collins. She lifted her leg, crossed her inner thigh over the top of his midsection, then rolled on top of him to reach the nightstand and adjust the volume, because she liked the words to the song. His pubic hair was wet and coarse against her leg. “I really didn’t know I was,” she said, then stretched out beside him on sheets damp with their perspiration, and laid her head against the hollow of his shoulder. She could have remained like that for days, cradled against her man while music played in the semidarkness. “Lackey,” she said.
“Yeah? Yeah, babe?”
“We need to talk about it.”
“I thought we were. I like it when you’re on top and moving side to side.”
She stroked his chin with her fingertips. “Not that. You know.”
He sighed. “That’s all I’ve been doing is talking about it. To Ronnie, those cops. Everybody.”
The ceiling in the dark was varied shades of gray and beige. When Nancy had been a little girl, she used to imagine spiders crawling on the ceiling and then bury her face in her pillow. “Did they give you a rough time?” she said.
“Didn’t I look like it? Me and Ronnie back there working our butts off trying to do the job without a crew and those two cops coming around screwing with us. Couple of grinning idiots is what they looked like. No telling how long they had those TV cameras waiting in front of the house. I come out to my pickup and there they are.”
“I thought you looked pretty innocent on the news,” Nancy said. “A hardworking man trying to get by.”
“They didn’t make me sound very innocent, that announcer guy. What’d he say, „the suspect on the job’ or something? Course the two cops stayed out back so it wouldn’t look like they were the ones that set it up. Coming on the ten p.m. news right after the bit on Mrs. Hardin’s funeral, I sure didn’t look so innocent. I looked like Jack the Ripper or somebody.”
“I thought her husband was the one that looked guilty, a whole lot more than you did,” Nancy said.
“You did?”
“Sure. It doesn’t look right, him playing in that golf tournament and then giving an interview right outside his wife’s funeral. A man that just lost his wife should be more grief-stricken. He stood up in front of those microphones like he was running for office.” She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “You know what?”
“What’s that?” Lackey said.
Nancy sat upright and hugged her knees, her ankles crossed, the warm skin of her thighs pressing against her bare nipples. “Well, if he was going to kill his wife, he set it up perfectly.”
“He wasn’t even home,” Lackey said. “I saw him leave myself, and the guy he played golf with is his alibi.”
“So maybe he had it done,” Nancy said.
“I thought about that, too. But if a guy was going to do that, what I think is that somebody’d just blow her away. Not all of that sexual stuff. “
“Unless that’s a coverup.”
Lackey suddenly laughed, his stomach muscles tightening, his shoulders heaving, rolling onto his side and cracking up as though he was watching a comedy show.
She grabbed a pillow and threw it at him; the pillow grazed his shoulder and toppled off of the bed to land beside the window. “What’s so funny?” Nancy said.
“I’m picturing me, if I was this real cool hit man from the mob or something, and the guy asking me, „How much extra does it cost for you to jack off on her?’”
“Lackey.”
“Well imagine that scene in The Godfather, like it was Luca Brasi and the look he’d get on his face when the guy asked him that.”
“I’m having a hard time imagining that,” Nancy said. “What I’m imagining is the scene with this guy I’m going to marry being led off in handcuffs while I’m crying my eyes out. Now, is that one funny, too?”
His smile faded; he rolled onto his back and clasped his hands behind his head, stretching out his legs and crossing his ankles. “No. It’d probably be funny to those two cops, though. Frick and Frack.”
“What did they say to you?” Nancy said.
“A lot of stuff, most of it just to get under my skin. They asked me who was with me when I did it. I thought that was kind of weird.”
“You mean, when you killed her?”
“Yeah,” he said.
She pressed her forehead against her knees. “That means the physical evidence doesn’t match,” she said.
“That’s what I thought.”
“It’s a good sign, but them trying to bring some unknown accomplice into it means they aren’t going to leave you alone.”
Lackey scooted onto his belly, stretched out his arm and lifted one corner of the windowshade. “That’s pretty easy to figure out. That car out there, the two guys sitting in the front seat aren’t there just to shoot the bull. Hey, one of „em just lit a cigarette.”
Nancy moved, catlike, rested her chin on his bare shoulder and looked through the window across the lawn, at the four-door car parked at the curb in the moonlight. “How long have you known they were there?” she said.
“They followed us home. Pulled up over there as I was parking the pickup in the driveway.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” she said.
He turned his head. There was a hint of irritation in the set of his jaw. “Why should I tell you everything, Nance? You don’t tell me everything.”
There was a tightening sensation in the muscles at the base of her neck. “What . . . ?”
“Those cops. They said they talked to you.”
She lowered her gaze. “You had enough on your mind.”
“They said you thought I did it,” Lackey said.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“That’s what I thought. But then you sort of forgot to tell
me you’d been talking to them.”
“You’re being silly,” Nancy said.
He maneuvered around to face her, reached out and laid his palm against her cheek. “I’m not trying to be silly. I can take anything except you lying to me.”
“I didn’t lie,” she said. “I just didn’t tell you about it.”
His lips tightened into a line. “Bastards. They can do whatever they want to me, but messing with you . . .”
“They’re just trying to get to you.”
“Well,” he said. “Well, they’re doing it.”
Her eyes suddenly misted. She studied his face, the prominent cheekbones, the picture she saw each night in her mind before she went to sleep. She stretched out and pressed against him, his chest against her nipples, his thighs against her own. “Hush. We’ll make it, angel,” she said.
“I had an aunt like that,” Charles Morrison told Roscoe Henley, “spent years getting all that education, wound up with a master’s degree, marries an old boy that barely could read. Spent the rest of her life teaching school supporting the guy, he’s sitting around on the front porch sucking on a beer all the time. Women are funny, some of „em are masochists.”
Henley was scooted forward on the seat, his fly open, holding the piss container between his legs. The stream of urine made a hollow sound, echoing around inside the half-gallon jar. “This guy can read, Charley,” Henley said. “Seemed like a pretty smart guy to me.”
“Come on, the guy’s a knuckle-buster,” Morrison said. “That’s why you got to figure he did that woman, she’s over there in that big house and he’s some construction worker. You think maybe it’s a racial thing?”
Henley finished pissing, shook the final drops into the bottle, screwed the lid onto the jar, raised up to move his pelvis forward while he zipped up his fly. “Pass the coffee. What racial thing you talking about?”
Morrison poured coffee from a thermos and passed the styrofoam cup over to his partner. “You know, the Mexican girl wanting to go around with the contractor guy, her having all that education. Maybe it’s like a lot of those black singers, Diana Ross and them. They make a little money the first thing you know they’re marrying a white guy. This Cuellar girl here, maybe she thinks she’s graduating up from her race and she’s going to marry her a white boy no matter what kind of a guy it is.”
Henley blew on the surface of his coffee as he let his gaze roam from the supercab pickup in the driveway to the small patch of lawn in front of Lackey Ferguson’s house. The lawn needed mowing; moonlight cast little shadows here and there where clumps of Johnson grass stood above the sparse Bermuda. “Know what I think, Charley?” Henley said.
“What’s that?”
“I think you’re some kind of half-assed bigot. We work a homicide over in Polytechnic you think these guys are shooting each other „cause they’re black. If two white guys get drunk and one shoots the other, you think they’re acting like a couple of niggers. Now you’re saying this girl’s got a racial thing, well I’ll tell you something. The only one’s got a racial hangup around here is you.”
Morrison reached for the piss container and unscrewed the lid. “Naw, hey, that ain’t right. I got a lot of buddies, a lot of the black guys on the city force and me get along real good. This one guy, this city patrolman, hell, we’re on the same bowling team.”
“Yeah,” Henley said. “He carries a one-ninety average and won a coupla trophies for you, but when the match is over you take all the white guys on the team out for a coupla beers and let the black guy fend for himself.”
“It’s for him,” Morrison said. “A lot of the places we go the guy would be uncomfortable.”
“You mean you‘d be uncomfortable. Look, Charley, you managed to get us on this stakeout, let’s just stake the guy out, okay? No more racial shit, we got enough problems without that. Besides, you get a look at that girl? She’s got no problem drumming up men, I don’t care what race the guy is.”
Morrison paused with the piss container positioned on the floorboard between his legs, swiveled his head and showed his partner a crooked grin. “You ever had any Mexican pussy?”
“Jesus Christ, Charley.”
“You’re getting pretty—” Morrison said, opening his own zipper, moving forward to position himself over the piss container. “You’re getting pretty touchy, Roscoe. I never knew you to be touchy before.”
“You never knew me to be staking out a guy that ain’t done nothing,” Henley said, “just because my partner happens to have a hard-on for the guy. Why didn’t you just get up out of the gutter and take a swing at the guy instead of all this?”
“Too many people standing around,” Morrison said as urine spattered into the container. “You can bet he wouldn’t be pushing me down like that it was just me and him. And they done the woman, Roscoe. Mr. Badass Ferguson in there, him and his buddy.”
“Jesus Christ, what buddy? Look, the guy Hardin, he said the contractor come by earlier to talk about building the bathhouse and it was just him. People saw Ferguson driving away from the place, just him again. Now just because we can’t get a match on the physical evidence, now there’s got to be a buddy. Now I haven’t said anything about all this, and I’m not going to say any more. You and Favor want to build a case around this guy, well I’m not stopping you. Just don’t expect me to—”
The porchlight at the house came suddenly on, a single yellow bulb glowing above the front door. Nancy Cuellar came out wearing thigh-length shorts and a baggy cotton shirt. She was barefoot. She descended the two steps into the yard, her expression urgent, motioning toward the two cops seated in the stakeout car. She cupped her hands in front of her mouth and shouted, “Please. Help, please, he’s . . .”
Henley yanked on the handle, shoved the car door open with his shoulder and sprinted across the lawn toward the girl, his hand digging for the pistol at his belt, while Morrison swore softly, capped the piss jar and set it aside, alighted from the driver’s side while zipping up his fly, and took off after his partner with long loping strides. Nancy was gesturing toward the house, her breath coming in short gasps. “In the bathroom. His wrists, I think he’s cut his wrists. Please . . .”
“Where is it, miss?” Henley said. “The bathroom, where is it?”
“At the back. Down the hall, it’s . . . hurry. Please hurry.”
Up onto the porch they charged, the slender bald cop, pistol ready, followed by the big blond guy, the blond’s head revolving on his neck as he looked warily from side to side, the petite barefoot Hispanic girl close on their heels. They dashed through the living room as floorboards creaked under their weight. Henley collided with a chair in the darkness, stumbled, righted himself, cursing, as on his left Nancy threw a switch and the overhead light illuminated the room. Nancy pointed to a hallway which branched off from the rear of the living room. “Down there,” she said. “It’s right down there.”
The detectives raced past her, following her direction down the corridor, both cops hustling now, guns drawn and ready, moving in the light spilling into the hallway from the living room. The bathroom door was open; small octagonal tiles were visible in alternating black and white. Henley entered first with Morrison close behind. The blond detective turned the light on, and the two stood shoulder to shoulder, their breathing ragged, pointing their guns around at a porcelain commode, a sink and mirror, an off-white shower curtain drawn closed in front of a tub. Morrison yanked the curtain aside, and the two cops stared at a gleaming white, empty bathtub as, behind them, the door slammed. A deadbolt slid into place with a solid click.
Morrison gaped at his partner, his jaw dropping as realization dawned. “Sonofabitch,” Morrison said. The sound muffled by the door, bare feet slapped on hardwood as Nancy retreated down the hallway. “Sonofa-bitch,” Morrison said. “She’s locked the fucking . . .”
Henley turned the knob and pushed with his shoulder. “Sonofabitch,” Henley said.
“Out of the way,” Morrison s
aid. “Out of the fucking way.”
Henley stepped aside as Morrison pointed his .38, blam, blam, blam, emptying the chambers as bullets thudded into wood and splinters flew and the bathroom was filled with the odor of burnt gunpowder. The lock shattered, the door sagged inward. Henley grabbed the edge of the door and yanked; the two cops charged back down the hallway and into the living room. The front door stood open; hot wind rustled the window curtains.
Back onto the porch the detectives ran. A block up the street, the tail lamps on Lackey Ferguson’s pickup glowed red as the supercab rounded the corner, bounced hard on its springs, and disappeared behind a row of houses.
Next door, a man stood in the yard wearing a bathrobe. “What the hell’s going on?” he yelled.
Morrison let his pistol hang by his hip as he stepped down from the porch. “Police,” he said. “Just get the fuck back inside.” He turned to his partner and shrugged.
Henley stood under the yellow porchlight, leaning against the doorjamb. He was laughing. “Guess it’s a racial thing, huh?” Detective Roscoe Henley said.
14
Frank Nichols was pretty sure that the seven would go. Just enough of the green seven was visible beyond the edge of the yellow nine so that if Frank missed the nine with the cue ball he’d get enough of the seven to cut it into the corner pocket. The five was a simple straight-in on the side, but Frank wanted to try the seven because, with just a little lefthand English, the cue ball would come off the rail and maybe knock in the nine as well. That was what Frank liked about Nine-Ball, the different ways to make the money shot. He placed his tongue near the roof of his mouth, whistling softly between his teeth as he chalked his cue, circling the table like a man stalking a deer, looking over the cut it would take to knock the deuce into the far corner, considering the backup action required to bring the cue ball back to the center for shape on the five. Nope. Nope. The seven was the shot. His mind made up, Frank returned to the end of the table, stretched his lanky body full-length and put one knee up on the rail, spread three fingers of his left hand on the felt, circled the cue with his thumb and index finger, drew the stick back and forth like the bow on a violin. “Touch shot, man,” Frank said. “Touch shot.”