Red Dog

by Jason Miller

  WE WENT INSIDE THE HOUSE AND TO THE KITCHEN. CHEEZIE pushed his walker to the stove and started cooking: fresh tomatoes and garlic and handfuls of basil from that garden of his. A pot of salted water began to boil. I said I’d already had lunch, to which Cheezie responded I was nothing more than skin and bones, and I could either eat or be force-fed. I said in that case I’d eat. Cheezie remarked on the good sense that ran in my family. This was the way of the old Italians, as it had been my mother’s way. There wasn’t any point in arguing about it. Paul went to the bathroom to worry over his butt. Cheezie watched him go with sad eyes.

  “I warned him about that stupid can,” he said. “Warned him it’d come to evil, he tried it with the wrong hombre. He got caught cheating at warshers last year, too. Company picnic. Got beat up pretty good over it.”

  “How in the hell do you cheat at washers?”

  Cheezie shrugged. “A guy’s willing to work hard enough, he can cheat at anything.”

  “Why does he do it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess because he’s unhappy.”

  I said, “Cheezie, I’m involved in something—something bad. With the White Dragons. I need help.”

  Cheezie didn’t say anything for a while. His wooden spoon made stirring sounds in the sauté pan.

  “Last time you needed help, people died,” he said. “A woman and a man. Probably some others.”

  “They took my daughter, Cheezie. They took Anci. I could, I’d dig them up and kill them all over. But this isn’t about doing any murders. I just need to talk to someone.”

  “Been a long time,” he said, “since I knew any of those idiots. And that’s not even to mention their feelings about us Italians.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I also know you and my dad knew some of these guys back in your union days.”

  “Back then, you had to get along with a little bit of everybody. Even redneck racist yahoos. But Slim, I ain’t in the union no more.”

  “Once in, always in, Cheezie,” I said. “You taught me that.” I took out my little notebook and opened it and sat there with a pencil in my hand looking at him. He sighed.

  “There was a man in Bonnie name of Cecil Pines.”

  “Pines?”

  “But I think he’s dead now.”

  “Dang.”

  “No, it’s better this way. He was a bad man. Let’s see. Years ago, I read something about a ladies’ auxiliary starting up outside Elco, but I don’t know what ever came of it.”

  “Hard to believe,” I said. “You ever hear of a fat little fucker named Dennis Reach?”

  “Reach?” He pursed his lips and searched his memory, finally shaking his pom of white hair. “It don’t ring any bells, no.” He turned and looked at his boy, who’d slipped quietly back into the room. “You?”

  “Nope. No bells,” Paul said, but his cheeks had turned the color of overripe plums.

  “I knew a Reardon once, though,” Cheezie said. “When they killed him for trying to turn in his white sheet, the cops tried to write his death off as a bear attack.”

  “Tried to?”

  “Bears typically don’t use hammers.”

  “Ah.”

  “There were one or two others,” he said. “Most of the ones I knew well are dead, though, a long time. I could do some looking around, if you wanted.”

  “I don’t want that,” I said. “But if you think of anyone else, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a ring.”

  “I promise,” he said. He lifted the pan off the stovetop. “Now, no more talk about that scum. Not in my kitchen. It’s time to eat.”

  We ate. Well, I ate as much as I could, until I felt like a full tick, ready to pop. We chatted some more about this and that, the Miners baseball team over there in Marion, the new Ford line, the sorry state of hunting that year. Afterward, I told them good-bye and rose to go. I apologized to Paul for my goof with the pellet gun. I said I hoped his butt healed up quick, but he only frowned at me and grunted.

  I left the house. I knew he’d follow me, and he did. I was walking to the Triumph when Paul came out and walked quickly over to me.

  “You’re just lucky the old man is here with us, Slim,” he said. “Otherwise, you and I would be dancin’ right now. And not fun dancin’, neither.”

  “I know.”

  “Fightin’ dancin’, is what I mean.”

  “I know,” I said again. “I get it.”

  “I don’t hold with folks showing me up in my own house.”

  “Last I knew, this was your dad’s house, Paul.”

  “Be mine one day,” he said. “Might as well be mine now. Mine in all but law.”

  “Maybe you can get some of your White Dragon acquaintances to come teach me my manners.”

  “What?”

  “Reach,” I said. “Dennis Reach. You recognized his name. I can’t help wondering why that is.”

  Paul swallowed. He tried to laugh a little but failed. He scratched his butt and winced.

  “He’s that club owner, ain’t he?” he said.

  “Was. Don’t own nothing now but some dirt and an oblong box.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “You just said you did, dummy. Now tell me how and why or you’ll get that dance you were just talking about. And not fun dancing, either. Fighting dancing, is what I mean.”

  He didn’t like that, but he didn’t have any choice but to take it. He talked big, but he wasn’t big, either physically or in what you’d call spirit. A dishrag has more backbone.

  Finally, he said, “If it’ll get you out of here. I got to run into the house real quick, though.”

  He went inside. After a while, he jogged back out with something in his hands, an article from a newspaper. He gave it to me. It was about the most recent sheriff’s race in Jackson County. Accompanying it was a photograph of a tall man in oil-spattered blue jeans and a ball cap standing in front of a hand-painted sign that read Bet on Black.

  He said, “Dad saves them. Newspapers. I don’t know why. Your dad ever save anything?”

  “No.”

  “The man in the picture is J.T. Black. Used to be a deputy over there in Jackson County. Made a run for the big chair couple years back, but lost to that colored sheriff.”

  “Lindley.”

  “That’s him,” Paul said. “Anyway, this here is Black and his campaign slogan.”

  “Bet on Black?”

  “Clever, right?”

  “No, it’s not clever. Man’s running against a black candidate and puts up a sign says Bet on Black? It’s confusing as hell.”

  “I thought it was good.”

  “That’s because you’re a peckerwood idiot.”

  “Well, he got beat.”

  “And no wonder.”

  Paul sighed.

  “Anyway, Black was a brother.”

  “White Dragon?”

  “Yeah, and a friend of Dennis Reach’s. They used to run a little meth together out of Frankfurt. Ran the meth gangs, I mean.”

  “While he was a deputy? Or after?”

  “Both. Rumor was, that’s why he left the job. Sheriff at the time wanted to drop him for it, but couldn’t get neither him nor Reach. Those two liked to keep their hands clean. Let everybody else get bloody. Anyway, I thought he might be a place for you to start.”

  “I’m keeping this article,” I said. “Sorry again about your butt.”

  He sighed and shook his head, but then he laughed about it some.

  “Stay out of trouble, Slim, okay? You may not know it, but the old man loves you like a son.” His thin-lipped mouth made a sad shape. There are sons and there are sons. He turned and went back up the steps and into the house and closed the door. Family.

  Speaking of which:

  “So you learned the story of some haters, got a possible lead,” Anci said. “Good crime solving right there. Gold star.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Not that it matters any,” she said. “We already kn
ow who done it.”

  “You think you know. I don’t know anything yet.”

  “That’s because you aren’t reading all this Holmes. Read enough Holmes, you’d know it for sure,” she said. She paused to give me a quizzical look. “Why are you sitting that way?”

  “What way?”

  “Holding your belly like you swallowed a football.”

  “I’ve had two and a half lunches today,” I said. “A football would be a relief.”

  “Detective work is dangerous, and you’re so brave to do it,” she said. But she didn’t mean it, I could tell.

  After a while, I took my aching belly into the office at the back of the house and opened the safe to look at the Cleaveses’ overstuffed envelope. I reflected a moment on all the nice things I might do with it. Fixing the A/C, one. That was first on the list. A new motorcycle maybe, or maybe even a vacation to some faraway land where they had foreign murders and the femme fatales double-crossed you in an exotic language that sounded like a song. After a while, though, I decided I didn’t want a vacation or a new bike. I wanted Peggy to come home, and I wanted to not be chasing White Dragons for a living. I wanted a cup of coffee.

  I closed the safe on the money and my vacation wishes. I went into the kitchen and found Anci reading at the table, plugging away on yet another Holmes. The Valley of Fear, I think. Another good one. The article with the photo of J.T. Black was where I’d dropped it on the counter, and it was only when I looked at it again that I recognized him. Maybe it was the light. Or the fact that he’d changed his facial hair. Whatever, all I know is that for some reason it had taken me nearly an hour to recognize him as the guy with the giant mustache I’d seen that morning at Shotgun & Shakes, the one who’d awkwardly smooched Carol Ray Reach on her perfect cheek.

  Anci noticed me standing there, staring. She said, “Still feeling puny?”

  I said, “More and more all the time.”

  6.

  SO J.T. BLACK KNEW DENNIS REACH, AND THEY BOTH KNEW Carol Ray to some greater or lesser degree of intimacy. Now Reach was dead and Black was sniffing around his ex-wife. I wasn’t sure yet what it all meant or what the living members of the triangle were up to, but I was willing to bet my retirement it wasn’t anything you’d embroider on a throw pillow.

  Sheriff Wince wasn’t available. I tried his mobile and his office but he didn’t answer, and the deputy I spoke to instead said he’d been threatened with terrible things if he forwarded my call.

  I said, “Mine specifically or just anyone?”

  “You specifically.”

  “That’s not very flattering.”

  “We’re cops,” the boy said, “not flatter-bugs.”

  Lindley was in at the Jackson County sheriff’s station.

  He said, “Please tell me you want to confess.”

  “Why? Would that make you happy?”

  “Let me put it this way: I’ve got kids. Six kids. That’s a lot these days. Hell, it was a lot back when I was young. And, what’s more, they’re boys. It’s like living with a herd of wild beasts. You want so much as a morsel of food for yourself, you got to fight for it. You want to watch a program on the TV, it’s like going to war. The last twenty some-odd years, I can’t even fuck my wife without assurance of an audience and some kind of snide remark in the morning.”

  “Must be quite a show.”

  “Don’t make me come over there now.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And finally, finally, after a lifetime of this business, I’m about to pack the last of those little bastards off to college. Another month, I’ll be able to watch whatever the hell I want on the idiot box whenever I want, everything in that refrigerator will be mine, and I’ll be able to screw my wife in the middle of the living room floor and twice on Friday night, and there won’t be a word said about it except, ‘My God, R.L., you’re the greatest.’ I’ll be like a goddamn king.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And busting you would still make me happier.”

  “Dang.”

  “Just telling the truth. What’s on your mind? Assuming I give a damn.”

  I said, “I’m interested in what you can tell me about J.T. Black.”

  “And why, pray, should I tell you anything about him? You’re my prime suspect, after all.”

  “Humor me, would you? Maybe pretend I’m writing a story about it.”

  “Okay, write this in your story: J.T. Black is a big, mean, racist, shit-for-brains motherfucker. And that’s on the record, man. His daddy is a coal operator, has his own little string out this way, and the way I hear things he about owned this entire county, one time or another. J.T. was a deputy for a number of years before I busted his ass in the last election. Not bragging about it, just stating fact. End of story.”

  “He’s a White Dragon, isn’t he?”

  “He is,” R.L. said after a moment. “Leastways, he was. Way I understand things, Black and the Dragons had a bit of falling out.”

  “Any idea over what?”

  “Nope. You understand, we were never what you’d call close.”

  “He’s not on your Twitter feed?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I don’t even know.”

  “Man starts talking nonsense like that—Twitter and whatnot—needs to get his head screwed on right. What’s all this about, anyway? Why you suddenly interested in a gang of crazies like the Dragons?”

  “Have you got anything new in the Reach case?”

  “My momma told me never to answer a question with a question,” he said. “You think Black is tangled up in all that?”

  I said, “Don’t know. But Reach was a White Dragon and so was Black, and I just ran into J.T. the other day hanging around one of Reach’s ex-wives.”

  Lindley chuckled. “So you met Carol Ray, did you?”

  “Briefly but beautifully.”

  “She’s trouble, that one. And deeper into her former husband’s doings than she likes to let on. Cop in me thinks I should warn you about that. Other hand, she gets done with you, you’re like to be out of my hair for good and always. I’m thinking I’ll go with that idea. The second one. See where it leads.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I ignored him. I said, “She seemed to think Dennis might have been done in by his bad-ass buds.”

  “That’d be mighty convenient for you, wouldn’t it? Slim, I’ve worked more than my fair share of homicides. One thing they all had in common, the biggest asshole in closest proximity was almost always guilty. Guess who that is.”

  “I have a picture of it in my mind.”

  “Good. And one more thing before I bring this pleasant chat to a close: I catch you nosing around this business in my county, trying to fuck up my investigation, I will have your ass back in a cell so fast it’ll give you jet lag. You’ll be looking at obstruction of justice and accessory to murder. And that’s just the appetizer.”

  “What if I make you a personal promise to behave?”

  I won’t even share what Lindley said to that.

  It took me another couple hours to track down Reach’s other exes. One was a nurse’s aid at a cancer center in Ohio, the other ran a pricey yoga camp in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Neither of them was hiding out. Getting anything out of them, though, was a story unto itself. The nurse’s aid didn’t want to talk about it, said she was glad the motherfucker was dead—in so many words—and invited me to the Forest City for the party. At least the yoga instructor put on mournful airs.

  “It’s hard,” she said, her accent thick and slow, “terribly hard to feel sad and happy all at the same time. Conflicted. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “Of course, I didn’t want Dennis to suffer. Did he suffer?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe a little.”

  “Sad.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you say he suffered?”

  And on like
that for longer than comfort allowed.

  Jessie, the son Carol Ray had mentioned, belonged to the yoga instructor, but he was stationed in Germany and wouldn’t rotate home for another year and a half. Another dead end.

  By the time I was finished for the night, Anci had been asleep for hours and the house was that nighttime quiet when you can hear the clocks ticking. I finished the book I was reading—one of Anci’s mystery stories—and took out my phone and dialed Peggy.

  “Well, listen to what the cat dragged in.”

  “Is that me? Am I the thing the cat dragged in?”

  “That’s you, baby.”

  “Just as long as I know where things stand. How’s your sister?”

  Peggy said, “Let me put it this way, she’s single-handedly keeping the box wine industry in this country afloat. But we’re beginning to work a few things out. How’s everything back home?”

  I took a deep breath and gave her a quick rundown of everything that had happened.

  She said, “You’re kidding? A missing dog case turned into murder? I’ve only been gone three days.”

  “I know.”

  “I tell you, this is just like that damn thing with the chickens last year.”

  “Not exactly. I didn’t end up in the slammer over that one.”

  “No. Just the emergency room,” she said. “And you’re on the hook for it, too, this Reach business. What do you think it’s all about?”

  “Not sure yet, but I think it’s possible our man Reach was trying to skip a few rungs on his way up the White Dragon ladder and somebody took umbrage.”

  “Sounds like a working theory, anyway,” she said, “but are you sure these are the kind of people you want to get tangled up with?”

  “Assuredly not,” I said. “But I think I’ve got a lead or two around the periphery. Little luck, I can ask a couple of questions and settle the whole mess in another day or so. Far as I can tell, the worst of it’s already over.”

  “Here’s hoping.”

  I did hope it, too. Hoped it all profound. But it wasn’t to be, because that’s when I sniffed out the first trace of wood smoke on the air, a sharp tang that stung the eyes and tickled the nostrils. My mind instantly told me “woodstove,” but nobody with any sense would be burning a woodstove in that weather, not unless they were trying to see visions or sweat out demons. A campfire, then, maybe. But from where? The closest camping was nowhere. The scent grew stronger and kept growing until it stung my eyes and throat. I got up and walked off the porch to follow the smoke around back of the house, and then I saw and smelled it for what it really was: burning cedar.