Nail's Crossing

by Kris Lackey

  In front of the Tin Can Café in Connerville, Maytubby was only half out of his cruiser when Bond said, “Where’s my tasso at?”

  “I was going to surprise you.”

  “How? By bringing me something I asked for?”

  “Good point.” He pulled the keys from his pocket, then froze. “Ah, crap.”

  “You forget my surprise?”

  He unlocked the trunk and raised the lid slowly, peeking in.

  Hannah Bond laughed. “What’s wrong, still on the trotter?”

  He opened the trunk lid all the way, and they stared at shredded Styrofoam spattered with cayenne sauce. In the fire commotion, he hadn’t even noticed the carnage.

  “All right, Sergeant, you surprised me after all.” She shook her head. “One of them swamp bears get my tasso?”

  He slammed the trunk. “Evacuated a woman to the Red Cross in Konawa …”

  “Hungry, was she?” Bond raised an eyebrow.

  Maytubby snorted. “That lady was so hungry, she was cooking okra.”

  “Well, in that case, I don’t mind losing my tasso. I hope the Red Cross trims her nails.”

  An RC Cola thermometer nailed to the doorjamb registered 112. They sat at a gray Formica table. Hannah Bond ordered a chipped-beef barbecue sandwich with fries. Maytubby ordered sides of boiled carrots and beets. Bond said, “Seriously?” and looked up for sympathy from the waitress, who smiled and gave her the side-eye.

  When the waitress had left, he said, “Benny Magaw going to bust in on us and tell you to get to work?”

  “It’s my lunch hour. Besides, yesterday, which I spent in the city, was a day off.” She pulled a small spiral pad out of her pocket and flipped it open.

  “You wear your uniform up there?”

  “They’d think I was a rent-a-cop. Or ‘What’s a deputy from Bumfuck doing asking me questions?’ I wear a white shirt, my duty belt, with my badge on the belt. You can’t see the writing on a badge.”

  “Scrooby won’t touch Stoddard.”

  “Old Sol’s a law-and-order man, Bill.” Hannah made a crooked smile.

  “Didn’t seem that way in Louisiana.”

  From her notebook she pulled tightly folded photocopies of Stoddard’s old state senate campaign flyer and Majesty Tate’s driver’s license photo as it was reprinted in the paper. “Waited till the caddies at OCCC started leaving. There weren’t many. I managed to show the photos to two. Both recognized Stoddard, but the second one …” She looked at her notebook. “Josh Perkins. Said he saw Tate parked in front of the club a few months ago. He never saw them together. He also said she looked different someway. And she wasn’t in the Aveo.”

  “Please tell me it wasn’t a Cobalt.”

  “Not a Cobalt. It was a beater, an old Corolla.” She licked her thumb and flipped the page of her notebook. “Now. I wondered how Majesty Tate could look different someway but still enough like herself for the ID. Unless she wore sunglasses, her eyes would get your attention. Lips next, especially for a kid like Perkins.”

  “So you’re talking giant red Pretty Woman Vivian wig.”

  “I thought she would pick the other one—the peroxide pixie one. So, with my trusty Swiss Army Traveler scissors, I made her one from a scrap of newspaper. Then I waited until it was almost dark and went back to your motels, the Western Sky and the Old Route Sixty-Six. Could be we got different shift clerks. Anyway. Nobody had seen Stoddard at either motel. Of course, he wouldn’t like to show his face at a mom-and-pop motel in the city where he lived. When I held the little white wig over Majesty Tate’s hair, both clerks recognized her.”

  The waitress brought their orders. Maytubby, smelling the oak-smoked meat and the splash of bourbon in the sauce, bent to his microwaved vegetables with a great unfulfilled longing.

  “Too much to ask for a Lexus, I suppose.”

  “Too much to ask for the motel guys to remember a Lexus. They remembered that nothing about the car stuck out, so no, probably not a Lexus. No security cameras, which you know. She rented rooms several times, under different names and car makes and models, always paid with a fifty. Neither guy could remember or find any of the names she had used. But ‘Majesty’ nor ‘Tate’ rang a bell. They both said they didn’t alert the owner or the cops, because she had good manners and didn’t wear too hooker-y clothes.”

  “‘Not too hooker-y.’”

  “I don’t want to use their words.” Bond frowned and looked down.

  They ate without talking. Short-haul bobtails and propane trucks rumbled by on the highway. Whenever a motorcycle buzzed past, both of them looked it over.

  Hannah Bond mopped up the last puddle of sauce with a shred of white bun and pushed her clean platter away. “Fox going to let you keep working on this?”

  “Probably not. Can I have your newspaper wig for my Tate picture?”

  “Yep. You going back to headquarters now?”

  “No, back to the city. By way of Denver.”

  Bond looked out the window. “We’re going to bring the sons a bitches down, aren’t we, Bill?”

  “You betchum, Sam Ketcham.”

  She continued to watch the road. “My daddy used to say that.”

  Chapter 25

  The dome of the state capitol, rising behind the tattered facade of the Sun Ray Fellowship, glowed orange in a cloudless sunset. Maytubby parked the cruiser down the alley and walked, scanning the commercial strip for motorcycles. He also listened. Sun-melted tar in the lot stuck to his shoes as he tried the rear door. It was locked. The dead bolt, he could see, had not been thrown, and the knob lock set was new and cheap. He kicked the knob off.

  The last appliance had long ago been dragged from the former Dairy Whistle’s kitchen, leaving a confusion of capped pipes and hoses and vents. The place gave off a smell of rancid lard, bringing up memories of his great-grandmother’s kitchen. The cinder-block building was an oven. The huge tempera sunrise painted on the plate glass jaundiced the light inside. One broken metal folding chair on the concrete floor was all the furniture left from the mission. Even the pulpit—which every mission had to have—was gone.

  Maytubby played his flashlight along the baseboards. Dead roaches, chewed pens, an ant-picked mouse skeleton in a sprung trap. And wedged behind an electrical conduit, an order of service photocopied on canary paper. Maytubby saw that Pastor Woodley had awarded himself a doctor of divinity degree. His sermon three weeks ago was titled “God Is My Fuel Injector.” On the program, a child had drawn stick figures shooting stick guns at one another. The bullets were dashes. Above them some m-birds, and above those a sun. Next to the reverend doctor’s name, the child had drawn a frowny face with its tongue hanging out.

  The previous week’s attendance had been thirty-two, the collection seven hundred twelve dollars and thirty-two cents—not too shabby for a bush-league fraud.

  Maytubby searched through the participants to find those with unusual names. Jim Brown, the music leader, was out, as was Jaime Gómez, the guitarist. Elaine Arnholtz, the keyboardist—now, she was in. Maytubby folded the paper. He inhaled deeply but found nothing new in the air—still the trace of rancid grease. His great-grandmother had kept a rusty can of fresh lard next to her stove. Scooped the fat out with a spoon and then, with her index finger, launched the little white sailboat out onto a hot iron skillet, where it skated round and round till it sank into its own sea. Everything from okra to fry bread to pork chops, catfish, chicken, and dredged bacon went into that lard sea. And emerged sweet and brown and crisp.

  Walking out the back door, he saw the breadcrumb stuck to paving tar: Satan is Waitin’. The tar was a nice touch. But the brimstone tract had no connection with a Sun Ray Gospel Fellowship, which clearly looked on the bright side. The songs on the order of service were “God Fulfills Me” and “My Soul Soars.” The good reverend doctor’s sermon comparing the Creato
r to an auto part was neither Jonathan Edwards nor Joel Osteen. Trepanier was just bin-picking props. He had probably heard enough words in some little Acadian Catholic church to fool people who might have been reared in church but not in any denomination—people who didn’t know felix culpa from SpongeBob SquarePants.

  Elaine Arnholtz lived in half a brick duplex near Oklahoma City University. She was in her midtwenties, and when she first spoke, her voice told Maytubby that she was a nonsmoker from somewhere in southern Arkansas. She was fair and plump, with long blond hair and a pleasant, open face. After he identified himself and asked if she could answer some questions about her pastor, she didn’t grow defensive as he had expected.

  “Okay,” she said. “Is Dr. Dave all right? He just vanished into thin air a couple of weeks ago. He doesn’t answer his cell. Has he done something wrong?”

  “I don’t know where he is, either. I wish I did. As far as I know, he hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  “Is he an Indian? He didn’t look like an Indian.”

  Maytubby smiled. “I don’t know. How did you find out about Sun Ray?”

  She tugged at her earlobe. “Oh! I saw a flier in Coffee Slingers. I’d been looking for someplace where I could worship without following a lot of rules and getting guilt-tripped into a slew of responsibilities.”

  “What sort of a pastor was Dr. Dave?”

  “Real energetic. Made you feel good when the service was over. Folksy, I guess. He told funny stories.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Oh, about people in the country.”

  “In the bayou country?”

  “Yes, he did, and he had that cra-a-azy accent. It was so cute.”

  “He ever talk about damnation?”

  She lowered her face and shook her hair. “Oh, no. I would never go to a church like that. It would put me in such a bad mood, I could never commune with God’s spirit.”

  “Do you know where your pastor earned his degree?”

  Elaine Arnholtz looked at the ground. Looking up, she made a little moue. “You know, our fellowship wasn’t into rank and degrees and status. He never used any fifty-cent words.”

  “Why do you think he would use the title and print it before his name?”

  “I guess if I went to all the time and effort to get a doctorate, I’d sure put it in front of my name.” A little snap of defiance there.

  “Did you notice what he drove?”

  “Yeah, but only because it’s the same as mine except the year and color. He drove a white Chevy Cobalt.”

  “He never drove anything else?”

  She shook her head.

  Maytubby showed her photos of Solomon Stoddard and Majesty Tate. Stoddard’s photo was not on a campaign flier. She didn’t recognize Tate. “I’ve seen that guy a lot on television. He’s a politician or something. I mute him.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a gasbag. Plus, there’s something creepy about the way he always talks about family values but then struts around with his tarted-up whichever-number wife and never has raised a child.”

  “Lot of that going around.”

  “Doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.”

  “Did you ever see this guy, Solomon Stoddard, with Dr. Dave?”

  “You gotta be kidding. Dr. Dave wouldn’t go within a hundred miles of a fraud like that.”

  “Is Dr. Dave married?”

  “He’s a widower. His wife was killed three years ago by an amoeba she contracted when she was swimming in the Washita River.”

  “How awful.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Do you know where he lived?”

  She frowned, tugged her earlobe again. “Over in the eastern part of the state. He had another congregation over there. That place. He made jokes about it. Tushie?”

  “Tushka. Except nobody has lived in the Tushka house listed on his driver’s license for years, and his real name isn’t Dave Woodley.”

  Elaine Arnholtz narrowed her eyes and said nothing.

  Maytubby handed her his card. She looked at it a couple of seconds before she took it.

  “I’m sure it’s not true.”

  “Thank you so much for your time. If you see Dr. Dave, I would appreciate it if you would get in touch with me.”

  She shoved the door with a very cold shoulder. The door didn’t make it all the way to the jamb, which spoiled her exit. As he walked away, Maytubby waited for the door to slam, but it never did.

  Chapter 26

  Solomon Stoddard lived in a large brick Georgian Revival house off Hudson Avenue in Heritage Hills, a neighborhood built by oil in the first decades of the twentieth century. Many of the old houses had fallen into disrepair before the neighborhood gentrified. The houses were well drawn and built to last, so that in the twilight Maytubby couldn’t always tell which ones were decrepit survivors and which were revivers. Water rationing had eliminated one clue: the sun scorched the lawns of rich and poor alike. On his first pass by the house, he couldn’t be sure, but it wasn’t likely that Stoddard’s stone-fox wife would live in a dump.

  Though surveillance in a marked cruiser was never a good idea, Maytubby didn’t have much time, and it was, after all, the age of the rent-a-cop. The black Lighthorse cruiser would incite curiosity while there was still enough light for people to read the lettering, but in the dark it would simply be welcome security—to most residents. So, with an hour of dusk to kill, Maytubby drove over to Super Cao Nguyen, in the Asian District. He walked under glowing plastic palms and into the busy market, where he bought a vegetarian bánh mì sandwich, a carrot, a mango, and a cup of iced sugarcane juice. Eating the sandwich in his cruiser, he listened to a Radiolab show about the foot-long mantis shrimp, which has eyes with three times as many photoreceptor types as humans, trinocular vision, and mighty claws. Mantis shrimp were known to have stowed away in pieces of coral that ended up in aquariums, where they emerged, killed and ate every other living thing in the tank, and then smashed the glass.

  Streetlights flickered on up and down Classen Boulevard, and the last sunlight backlit a few fair-weather cumuli. Maytubby wondered what ultraviolet light looked like to mantis shrimp. He drove to Automobile Alley and bought a large cold-press at Coffee Slingers, then called Jill Milton and told her he wouldn’t be needing her protection tonight. He reassured her that he had not been tailed by any motorcycles. Then, when it was good and dark, he went into Heritage Hills and parked away from streetlights, next to a huge oleander on the cross street nearest Stoddard’s house.

  Very few cars passed. An upstairs light was on in Stoddard’s house, but drapery covered all the windows. Over the next few hours, lights went on and off, upstairs and down. Crickets were rubbing up a respectable din. Exactly at midnight, the house went dark.

  With spare napkins from Super Cao, Maytubby blotted sweat from his face and neck. It was still in the nineties, and the air didn’t stir. He hated surveillance, even on mild days. His coffee was running low, and he was sleepy. At half past two, a 1970 Porsche 914, its targa popped, squealed around the corner behind the cruiser and turned in two doors down from Stoddard. Two young men, drunk and talking loud, got out and peed into the shrubbery. One of them shouted, “Never, never!” Then they went inside. Maytubby ate the carrot. An hour later, he ate the mango.

  At half past five, he was awakened by newspapers slapping driveways. It was an hour before sunrise. A light was on downstairs in Stoddard’s house, toward the back, near the garage. A few minutes later, one of the two garage doors shuddered up, its guide wheels shrieking, and the bulb in the opener housing revealed an empty bay. Maytubby could see the side of the Lexus next door. So the wife wasn’t home. He pulled his short-barrel binoculars from under the seat.

  Headlights approached fast. The car that wheeled into the light of Stoddard’s garage was a white 2004
Cobalt coupe. Maytubby nodded in the dark. Last car the law would be looking for. The garage door closed before the driver got out, so Maytubby trained his glasses on the short walk between the house’s back door and the side door of the garage. The back porch was not lit, and the only light on inside the house went out. He put the glasses down.

  The house looked dark, but the downstairs windows had a dull glow from a lit interior room. The air was still very warm. AC condensers buzzed on and fell silent up and down the street. A mockingbird set up a twelve-tone ruction. A BNSF freight blew for crossings in Deep Deuce.

  The garage door shuddered and shrieked open. If Stoddard was going to conduct clandestine all-hours meetings in his house, he needed to invest in some WD-40. Maytubby watched the Cobalt drive away from him and make a left. Instead of following the car, he drove parallel to it. The Cobalt made the first left and drove right in front of Maytubby on Nineteenth Street. He waited for it to go over a little rise before tailing it. There weren’t many cars on the road, which was both good and bad. He wouldn’t lose the Cobalt, but he couldn’t easily hide the hulking Charger. He hung back several blocks, stopped when the Cobalt stopped at Classen Boulevard. It went left on Blackwelder and turned into the drive of a simplified prairie duplex from the thirties. A dead elm loomed in the front yard.

  Maytubby kicked the cruiser so he could stop Trepanier before he got inside. The yellow light from a sodium street lamp turned Dr. Dave’s hair a sickly orange. After memorizing the Cobalt’s tag, Maytubby lowered his passenger window and shouted, “Trepanier!”

  The man spun around and dropped his keys on the porch steps. Maytubby got out of the cruiser and walked quickly toward him. There were no motorcycles in the yard, no garage at the end of the drive. The sky had brightened enough to show the bafflement on Trepanier’s face as he squatted to retrieve the keys. He had waited too long to dye his hair, and his brown roots were visible. Maytubby introduced himself.