“Where are you from, dear?” Sally asked.
“Harlingen. In the Rio Grande Valley.”
Willie perked up. He had hardly spoken a word since the sheriff and Bobby arrived. “Is that right? I used to know a lot of citrus growers from the Valley. They’d come up to the Dallas market with produce by the truck load and twenty Mexicans to hawk it. And those jokers that owned those farms be sitting up there like plantation masters.”
“Daddy!”
“It’s alright. My mother and all her family were pickers. My father’s father was a patròn. We all come from everything.”
Seastrunk said, “Things have changed. I remember working campaigns in Austin in the ‘50s, before I moved back up here. Your political operative would pay the patrones in the Valley a lump sum in cash, deliver the votes of their people.”
“That’s a problem of having a one-party state.”
“Hell, we’re pretty much back to one party again now.”
“Things had to change.”
Geoff’s eyes darted from the investigator to the sheriff as he dabbed some butter on one last piece of corn bread. “That must have been something, Austin in the ‘50s and early ‘60s.”
“It was something. City was in a ferment. The height of the civil rights movement. And most of this state was treating integration like a plague. Or an invasion. And we young bucks down in Austin thinking we’d figured out all the answers at our bull sessions at Scholtz’s. Maybe we had.
“And the music. This was the folk revival period, you know? People like Lighnin’ Hopkins, Flaco’s daddy—they gave our scene some indigenous character they didn’t have so much in the college towns up north. Let me tell you, I remember seeing Janis Joplin play at the Texas Union before anybody knew her name and thinking she was the most talented freak to ever bust out the blues.”
Bobby said, “Sheriff Seastrunk used to drink beer and pick guitar with Kinky Friedman and his bunch.”
Seastrunk demurred, chewed.
“Sheriff, I seem to remember you picking an old guitar yourself on the front porch while Margaret and I gossiped in her bedroom.”
“Well I—”
Geoff lapped up this cultural history like a kitten at sweet cream. “That’s right, Sheriff. I do remember you mentioning that you play.”
“Tell you what. I knew this would be a picnic, so I brought along my old six-string just in case. If y’all really want—”
“Alright! Play us something, Sheriff!”
Everybody laughed at Joey’s outburst. Seastrunk rose to retrieve his guitar from the cruiser, and Bobby said, “He never takes much convincing.” And then the sheriff played a few old country ballads and some more bluesy numbers and an ancient Carter Family classic and Geoff smiled and sang along with this motley community gathered on the bayou. Joey clapped and stomped and Geoff eyed the boy as he had noticed Seastrunk doing from time to time throughout the evening, and he sensed that he and the sheriff shared some inscrutable feeling of awe regarding the child. As if Joey possessed some magnificent but unstable power too great for his small frame. But that night, as he peppered the deputy with questions and cheered on the musical sheriff, he seemed like any other excited eleven-year-old. And Geoff felt his heart cry for the child—and for the child he had lost, for the child who had never been born.
•
After Seastrunk and Bobby headed out, Willie said, “I want to talk to my lawyer in private. You’re invited, young lady.”
The three of them walked down to the water’s edge while Sally and the boy cleaned up. The lights were on at the little catfish place on the main road across bayou. The Spanish moss obscured the stars through the trees. Willie took a flask from his hip pocket and offered it to Marisol and Geoff. Marisol shook her head and Geoff took a swig. Cheap gin.
Marisol said, “Your grandson seems like a fine boy, Mr. Kincaid.”
“Joey’s alright, young lady. Likes to fish. Knows the water. Miracle he’s turned out so good, knock on wood.”
“How do you mean?”
“His daddy was a no-account lumber hauler from Lufkin. Offered to split the cost of an abortion and didn’t want to have no more to do with it. Can you imagine? She was thirty years old when it happened—figured she’d never have no kids. Had a husband once who couldn’t make ‘em, then he run off. Anyway, she’d knock me upside the head if she knew I was telling on her like this.”
Something about Willie’s monologue seemed forced and untrue to Geoff, but he did not push it, could think of no reason why the old man would invent and then tell such a story.
Nobody spoke for a while and they looked at the glimmering stars and Geoff thought of Joey’s eyes. Then Willie said, “Y’all think this thing’s really over—that those twins did it, end of story?”
“Seems that way, Willie,” Geoff said, still watching the stars.
Willie lit a cigarette, narrowing his gaze at them in the match light. “Don’t tell Sal. I swore I quit.”
While the old man smoked, they watched the darkening water in silence.
Then Marisol straightened. “Hey. What’s that?”
They followed her stare. A rat-like creature the size of a house cat looked back at them, yellow eyes glowing in the soft moon light.
“Dang ol’ nutria.” Willie waved his arms. “Scat!”
The thing turned tail and ran to the bayou. Marisol said, “Guys, it was blue.”
“Grayish, probably,” Geoff said. The sight of the thing had turned his stomach. “Just a trick of the light.”
“You say everything’s a trick of the light, Mr. Science. And I say that animal was no natural color.”
Geoff rubbed his face and wished just for a moment that he was drunk. The moment passed.
“I’ve seen other blue ones ‘round here,” Willie said.
“And it’s paws—they looked like hands.”
“They were just big rat paws, Marisol.”
“I saw one chuck a rock at a pelican once—durn near knocked it out.”
Geoff rolled his eyes, but nobody noticed in the gloom.
“That thing looked more like a monkey than a rat.”
Willie laughed. “A monkey with big, ugly ol’ teeth.”
“Come on y’all. It’s getting dark.”
Willie stomped out his cigarette. He didn’t look up as he spoke next. The humor had gone out of his voice. “That’s what the Bordelon girl was looking into, you know? The weird critters we have around here.”
Trying to mask his impatience, Geoff said, “Well, Eileen did say something about ecosystem research. But really, I doubt we’ll ever really know what Dalia was working on. Sadly.”
“I think Ms. Bordelon’s murder was just a tragic coincidence, Willie,” Marisol said.
“Well, I hope y’all don’t give up on finding out what’s going on around that refinery.”
Geoff looked over—his client’s eyes looked strange in the gloom. Frightened. It gave Geoff a chill that he pushed away; he would fight to retain this night’s good feeling. Placing a hand on the old man’s hunched shoulder, he said, “Of course not, Willie. We’re going to do what we can to stop that pollution and make Texronco clean it up.”
They walked up to the house. Geoff and Marisol popped inside just long enough to say their thanks and goodbyes to Sally and Joey, scrubbing away in the kitchen. Sally dried her pink hands and gave them both hugs. Geoff tried not to stiffen but he did. He heard Marisol give a little laugh of surprise at this display of affection from a woman she just met that night.
Making their way down the clay and gravel driveway, laden with leftovers at Sally’s insistence, a serenade of crickets and toads and God knows what followed them in the light of the moon and the stars and the swampland’s own luminescence, and Geoff met Marisol’s gaze and she winked at him with dark eyes twinkling and he felt a strange new happiness blooming in the pungent spring air like he hadn’t felt in the past two years.
We can still get to Dallas by m
idnight—maybe she’ll join me for a nightcap?
Geoff’s phone rang just as he unlocked the Mercedes. He listened. He said, “I understand.” He closed his phone and stared at the hood of his car as Marisol paused at the passenger side.
Then he said, “Eileen’s dead.”
Chapter 14
Jimmy Lee Monroe sat in his pickup parked in the lot of a ruined Tulane Avenue motel open only for day laborers and junkies and the likes of him. His nose throbbed, his eyebrows were singed, and his black t-shirt was smeared with blood and snot. He listened to his boss’s—his lord and master’s—harangue with slow cool tears on his flushed cheeks.
“You didn’t find it, did you, Jimmy Lee? I give you one job to do and you screw it up like you screw up everything in your worthless white trash life.”
“I blew up the lab, Speaker. If it was in there, it’s gone now.” His voice sounded nasal and garbled in his own ears. His hand trembled. The phone felt heavy.
“Damn it, Jimmy Lee. But did you ever see it?”
“The chink bitch wouldn’t talk. She—”
“Yes or no: did you see it?”
“Nossir.”
“Did you search the lab real good?”
Pause. “Yessir. But I never found it.”
“And so you just blew up the place? And killed the bitch who might of known where it is? Is that it?”
“Just to be safe. You said you wanted the thing destroyed. So I figured, just in case—”
“Damn it, Jimmy Lee. I want to know it’s destroyed. And if you haven’t seen it, it might still be out there.” The Speakers voice sounded raspy, snarling with rage. “Did you search the house?”
“What house?”
“The professor’s house, you ignorant piece if trash.”
“Well, no. You said to search the lab. You didn’t say nothing about the house.”
“Listen. You’re going to search that house. You’re going to search every other place she might have been. You’re going to crawl over every inch of that goddamn cesspool of a city until you find it or until there’s nowhere left to search. And until I’m convinced, you won’t see a cent. You won’t see a passport. You won’t see a ticket. And if you try to bail on me, my people will catch you. I’ve got FBI. I’ve got CIA. I’ve got the fucking Texas Rangers. And I’ve got a buddy at Huntsville who’ll set aside a bunk in the sodomy unit just for you. You hear me, Jimmy Lee?”
Jimmy Lee wept. “Yeah, Speaker. I hear you.”
A pause on the line. Breathing. “We’ve been through some times together, son. Don’t let me down now.”
•
The Speaker had given him her name, Eileen Kim, but Jimmy Lee just thought of her as the chink bitch—short and frumpy and tired looking. He could tell that she might once have been attractive in an exotic kind of way, like the little Oriental whores he saw from time to time at the massage parlor in Shreveport. He expected no trouble taking from her what he wanted.
He cased her house throughout the day and followed when she left and figured he had caught a break when she headed to her lab at the university, quiet on this Saturday afternoon in the first semester open since the storm. She would lead him right to it, the Speaker’s prize, then he would finish her and collect his reward.
He parked on a side street with a view of the lab’s entrance and watched her go in, swiping a key card to open the door of the solid old university building. Eyeing the parking spots out front and seeing the lights inside flicker on when she entered, he felt confident she was alone. He waited a bit to let her settle in, to become involved in whatever nasty science she was up to, and then he drew his Glock and went inside. Stupid bitch hadn’t even bothered to reset the lock.
He followed a corridor to the one lab with the lights on and entered a world of gleaming modern equipment in contrast to the century-old brick and mortar outside. Her back to him, his target had donned a white lab coat and stood before a large metal instrument of some sort.
“So where’s the product, chink?”
The woman turned and looked at him with no fear or panic in her gaze. “I’m Korean-American. How the hell did you get in here?”
“Ain’t so hard.” He leveled the handgun at her. “And I’ll leave just as easy when you give me the goods.”
Crossing her arms before her chest, eyes remaining calm, the scientist said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Her coolness creeped him out. He wanted, needed, her to beg, to plead. To weep at his feet for mercy. But her icy gaze betrayed no emotion. He felt his hand holding the gun threaten to waver. He willed his aim true. “Let’s cut the bullshit. I know your nigger bitch gave you the shit. So hand it over.” He snorted a cackling laugh. “We done her good, but I think I could do you worse.”
Lips snarling, rage finally began to cloud her eyes.
Jimmy Lee smiled. “That’s right. That little nigger begged us to stop. Until she begged us to keep going.”
“You lie!”
Enjoying himself now, he took a step forward. “So give me what she stole, and maybe I won’t kill you when I’m done.”
Now she growled, her long straight hair hanging down. “Get the fuck out of my lab, you redneck motherfu—”
Jimmy Lee lowered his aim and pulled the trigger and watched her knee disappear into a pink mist. The pop of the semi-automatic reverberated in the tight vaulted space. The scientist screamed but did not fall to the floor, reaching back to support herself against the counter. Hair flailing, her head whirled in agony but then came to rest and her cold eyes once again bore into him. “Come and take it from me, you sick bastard.”
He grinned and stepped forward, ready to shove her to the ground and grab whatever rested on the counter at her back. But as he got close she raised her arms, lifting some metal machine from behind her, ripping its power cord from the socket, and Jimmy Lee had time to marvel in fear at her strength as she remained upright with one knee turned to mush, and then she brought the metal thing down hard in the center of his face and he heard a sick wet crack as his nose turned to pulp. Through the gushing blood, he saw a tube filled with a pinkish substance fly from the machine and shatter on the floor. Then he found the woman’s head and cold cocked her and she fell to the ground with an angry but somehow joyous yell and lay there on her back. Screaming in rage and pain, he stood over her and fired the Glock into her until he had obliterated her triumphant snarling grin.
•
Fading toward unconsciousness, Jimmy Lee had found a jug of some sort of alcohol labeled flammable and had doused the bloody scene. Setting fire with his cigarette lighter, something in the room blew up almost too soon, and he barely escaped. He had not searched the lab. He lied to the Speaker, had probably destroyed what the great man was after. He knew he had fucked up.
Despair and pain engulfed him as he sat in his truck amid the reek of his own sweat and blood. He wept. Soon, he would return to the scientist’s house, just so he could report to the Speaker that he had searched it. But for now he could do little more than make his way into the motel and his mildewed bed.
Chapter 15
They drove straight to the bar. Geoff called Tony Abruzzo on the way, told him they would need the Corner. Tony’s Corner: not the name of the bar but a recessed nook within it where the fat man met the small time dealers and pimps and other minor sleaze that earned him his living, an out-of-the-way table the proprietor was always willing to reserve for him, even if it meant booting a group of hapless college kids or downtown suits.
Marisol at the wheel, barely speaking except to advise him on piecing together the still unfolding New Orleans night, now three hundred miles away and receding. He stayed on the phone most of the way—with the New Orleans police, and with his friends and contacts in that city whom had known Eileen.
A colleague of Eileen’s, a professor whom Geoff knew well, had called with the gruesome news. The murder looked like an robbery—shot dead in her lab, the place torched to destroy
any evidence. Plausible enough; crime was ticking up again in the city since the storm, getting worse even, as the criminal gangs sought to reestablish dominance over depleted territory. But at the university? And then an explosion taking out the entire building? It seemed like overkill.
Geoff also tried calling T-Jacques’ cell. Kicked to voice mail every time. And with each recorded message, he felt a growing certainty that he had been a fool, that something was awry, that the damn refinery held more secrets than a little chemical discharge, secrets worth killing for, as T-Jacques had believed from the beginning.
They pulled into the dark Dallas night. In the worn leather sofas of the Corner, set at a right angle framing a cheap coffee table set with ash trays and a red glass candle holder, Marisol and Tony sat facing Geoff
The P.I. said, “It could still all be a coincidence, Waltz. We need to sleep. You need to grieve. We’ll figure it out. If there is anything to figure out. But we can’t accomplish much of anything tonight.”
“I know. But it’s not a coincidence. Street crime’s bad, but the university’s safe.”
Tony smoked and squinted at him. “It’s looking ugly, man. But Marisol’s right. You should have a few drinks to Eileen and then call it a night. Start fresh in the morning.”
Geoff poured himself another shot of bourbon. The candle flame shown clear over the line of liquid in the bottle Tony had gotten for the table. Three-fifths depleted. Geoff knew it was mostly him. His head swam with memories of Eileen, their college days, the rough times since. He was in too much shock to weep. And too angry. Sleep, Geoff. Christ, you’re not making sense. Just let them put you to bed … He leaned and he saw the candle flames (flames?) dancing in front of fat Tony and his cigarette like a debased altar.
Marisol fiddled with a laptop.
“What the fuck you doing?”
Tony put one of his beefy hands on his wrist. And though his face floated in triplicate, the hand made a calming slab.
“Pulling up that number on T-Jacques’s flash drive,” she said. “I have an idea.”
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