Thorazine Beach

by Bradley Harris

  “My husband,” she said. “Clayton.” A faint smile that came a little late.

  I smiled back, equally faint, hoping my smile didn’t convey what had just occurred to me: He was the guy I’d seen with His Eminence, at the New Nam King.

  “So…blackmail,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Blackmail of…?”

  “I’m…not sure.”

  “Blackmail for…?”

  “Well, money, of course,” she said in a silly-question way.

  “How much?”

  “They haven’t asked.”

  “Who’s ‘they,’ Barbara Jean?”

  “They…haven’t said.”

  “No calls, no note?”

  “Um…not…not as yet.”

  “And I am investigating…what? Exactly.”

  “It’s a bit…” I was beginning to hate the way she paused as if searching for words, and the way I’d caught myself doing it, too. “Delicate,” she said.

  “Always is. So…”

  She hesitated.

  “Look,” I said, sharply enough to regret it. I re-set my tone. “What I mean, Barbara Jean, is, I need to know where I’m looking, who I’m looking at, and what I’m looking for.”

  She nodded, gathered herself. “The where is determined by the whom, and the whom is…”

  I ventured a little, to fill it in. “Clayton,” I said. She looked back at me, expressionless, and I knew I was right. “And what am I looking at the whom for?”

  Kleenex. Face turned away. Incipient tear. I half-thought it was contrived. But only half. “I think he may be, how can I put this…implicated…in something.”

  Christ, we’re all implicated. I breathed. “Barbara Jean,” I said. “I need to know whatever it is you know, if I’m going to do anything.”

  She sighed. “There’s been a good deal of money about the house, lately.”

  “What does your husband do?”

  “He’s in real estate development,” she said. “Federman Properties. He owns it now” I knew the company. A few strip mall units—you’d see their signs here and there. Some properties they owned, some they just brokered. Big enough business for a guy to make a hell of a good living. But not Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

  “And what—I presume there’s something you haven’t told me yet—is this thing he’s ‘implicated’ in.”

  “As I said, Jack, there’s been a good deal of money about the house.”

  “By which you mean…”

  “Cash,” she said behind a sip from her cup.

  “And by ‘cash’ you mean…?”

  Straight out, without a blink: “Briefcases full.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Like, enough to get you to Barbados and back?”

  “Enough to get you to the moon and back.”

  “Does he know you know?”

  She shrugged. “Things haven’t been…” A bit of the old Barbara Jean came back, the Southern woman ever in search of a discreet way to put things. “There are inevitable strains in a marriage.” A deliberated pause. “You understand, Jack, I think, hmm?”

  Jab. “Yeah, I do.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack. Forgive me, but…whatever did happen between you and … Lynette?”

  I wasn’t willing to play. “Inevitable strains,” I said. “Now, the million-dollar question. What’s with the girls?”

  “Clayton started a second business,” she said.

  “Import-export?”

  Her face said she didn’t appreciate the sarcastic edge. “It was nannies at first,” she said. “Au pair girls, that sort of thing.”

  “At first…” I prodded.

  “Then I began to suspect…well, you’ve seen the pictures.”

  “Yes. And where did you see them?”

  “In one of the…briefcases.”

  “You mean, actual briefcases full of…?”

  “Yes,” she said, and looked right at me. “Clayton has a built-in gun cabinet—I don’t even know the combination. He likes target shooting, hunting, that sort of—”

  “Thing, yes. And—”

  “And one day he’d left…well, it was open, and—”

  “You looked.”

  “It was wide open, and there was one of the guns missing and, well, I thought it was so odd to find a briefcase in…so naturally I…I looked.”

  “You didn’t ask him?”

  “Well, as I said, there’s a certain…stress…in any marriage.”

  “And a little more now,” I said.

  More Kleenex. “I love my husband,” she said. “Notwithstanding…”

  “Of course,” I said. It sounded like token sympathy, even to me. “And you want…”

  “I want to know,” she said, plucking up some nerve and quickly losing it. “And I want this to be over.”

  Barbara Jean gathered the pics, returned them to the folder, the folder to her case. “You are,” she said, “trustworthy, are you not?”

  She wanted an answer. I didn’t give it.

  “Mr. Minyard,” she said—where did that come from? “I’ve come to expect a certain degree of loyalty…” I closed my eyes. The words sounded like Isaac Breitzen in lipstick.

  She looked at me. I looked back, not quite knowing what my face said.

  Her face relaxed—a bit deliberately, I thought—then took on a touch of Southern coquette. “I’m sorry, Jack, it’s all so…” She looked away. Lip. Eyes down. Kleenex yet again.

  I admit: I’m a sucker for certain things, certain images. Mike Hammer, Spenser—they can be tough, bar-bourbon, unfiltered. Me, as a detective—I’m totally decaf and whipped cream. I leaned in and touched her arm. “No. Barbara Jean…I’m sorry.”

  “Let’s go outside a minute,” she said. We did, sat at one of the tables under a green umbrella that cast no meaningful shade, and if anything added to the heat. I’d never seen Barbara Jean smoke. But she pulled out a package of Nat Sherman’s—black, gold-tipped, expensive as all get-out. She offered me one but I stuck with my own. Her lighter, I saw, was a Dunhill, antique, gold. I flicked my own yellow BiC. The way she let me was, in its way, revealing. As if she’d learned it, learned it in some kind of calculated, dress-for-success way, from the kind of women who know how to impress men in cocktail lounges. Touch the man’s hand lightly as he lights it…that’s it…just a gentle brush. That, and a warm, smoky smile. “I’m a late starter,” she said. “But I’ve learned, it calms me. And I do like…” She smiled again. “…a certain style.”

  Two grand in cash and an hour later—yes, I did wonder where the cash came from, but I didn’t ask—I’d agreed to a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t have. Strict confidentiality. No police. Daily reports—in person, never by phone. I was to keep working whatever jobs Eileen gave me—and I tucked MacDonald in there, too, though we never mentioned him. That, she said, would be part of the cover. No one, she said, could know I was working for her. In return for this: two grand a week, just like today, till I was done.

  “Well, Jack,” she said. “I am so grateful. And—look at the time…you’ll want to be getting started, I expect.”

  Nikki came out the door, a melmac plate in her left hand, spoon in her right, mouth full, plopped herself down at our table. “Hell of a casserole, BJ,” she said, and turned to me. “Jack, I’ll give you the dish out of the fridge, coupla days, when I’m done and run it through the diswasher, and you can take it back to BJ.”

  16.

  22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31 July

  Night Out Back in the Yard,

  Birdwatching

  “Come on, MacDonald. It rained all last night. Third night in a row it’s—”

  “Jack I need you to…”

  I need I need I need.

  “You are cashing stamps like crazy, here, MacDonald.”

  “I know, I know, I know.”

  We’d both cashed a hundred, a thousand, between the two of us, all those years. And had still more to go, I hoped. Bitching was just part
of the deal.

  “I saved your ass, MacDonald.”

  “I saved your ass, Chubby Checker.”

  True, both counts, and more than once. Without all that saving, there’d be two less asses in town, no doubt.

  I’d stopped asking why and what for. The best I’d squeezed out of MacDonald was some cockamamie thing about him working with the feds on “one of those importing-pelts, illegal-poaching, take-no-whales, save-the-tiger things. You know, Jack—you go for that shit, you get the Greenpeace calendar.”

  He’d been speaking for a few months, now, in terms like commission, task force. It was mostly here-and-there stuff. Mentions, allusions. It was all fuzzy—annoyingly vague, at times. Crap. I’d begun to wonder which it really was—whether he wanted to tell me, not tell me, or half-tell me. I’d settled on the last, and tried not to prod or poke. I’d filed a few snippets away. Wildlife, he’d said a couple of times. Even, once, the World Wildlife Federation. Then: Smuggling.

  His story was a steaming pile of Bravo Sierra—a lot of it, anyway. That much I knew. But the one part I bought, straight-up, was what I got when I asked him why he wasn’t the one out here suffering. All that patent-leather MacDonald bravado drained from his face. “All I can tell you is, there’s something dirty, Jack. Inside. Very dirty. Very…threatening. I think they’re…watching me.” That pulled me halfway in. Then that one word, his word, scared, made up the rest. Tough bastard. Patrol car. Burglary. Narcotics. Vice. Homicide, even, for a little stretch. I’d never heard him say that word. Scared. What could I do?

  And so it came to pass. One more night. Half-hot air, cold rain, rattling on my old Canadian Forces poncho. Days before, I’d rigged a little lean-to, one I could set up and take down each night, tucked in between the big dirt pile and a bush. A little brush for cammo, break up the shape. Each morning I’d hide my lean-to, poncho and poles and a couple of lengths of rope, under the edge of a stack of debris, dig it out again at night. Rain pants, rain jacket, some cammo paint and cut-up pieces of ghillie suit to mask the shape and shine and silhouette of my gear. All of it surplus-store crap—yet another benefit to life on Summer Avenue.

  After the third night, I’d stopped relying on MacDonald to bring me, park me, pick me up, and had begun parking my car at an all-night Mapco I’d found three blocks along Raines, the other direction from the grocery. I gave the night guy ten each time to watch my car. Sweet deal, he thought. And I could use the exercise. I made up a story about going out for hours-long walks, about nighttime bird-watching. Silly, that—I needn’t have given him that, he likely didn’t give a rodent’s rear. But the story did explain all the gear I was lugging. I even tucked a birding book under my arm the first night, and passionately outlined my intense desire to photograph the secret mating rituals of the yellow-breasted corncrake. The guy bought the ten, if not the tale. And MacDonald appreciated, he said, my self-sufficiency. Which meant, I suppose, he appreciated the extra chances to be with her.

  My instructions from Mac were: Look for a full-size container from either of two specific container companies—Hanjin, and Hapag-Lloyd. Both common, though Lloyd a little the less so. Look for serial numbers that ended in certain three-digit strings: 481, 603, 709—there were a few others, long since committed to memory. Look for one of these containers that the crane plops in this exact position. Mac had drawn me a diagram: the position I’d be looking for was to be lined up under the left edge of the main container-yard building and, beyond that, the tallest radio mast on top of the hump yard control tower. Then, look for the gang graffiti. Specific gang graffiti, spray-painted right under or right beside the container company’s name. Then: two more things. One, look for a fifty-three-foot trailer, a Crete, way on the left, darker end of the trailer lot, near the south gate, where they hardly ever parked anything. Two, if I saw the Crete there, call MacDonald. Stat.

  Funny symbol, that gang thing. Didn’t look like any Memphis gang’s, or any gang I knew of, but then MacDonald or any cop would tell you there’s a new gang a week in town. This one MacDonald had once called “Three-six-gamma,” the shape he’d drawn on the yellow stickie no one was ever to see:

  Circles and crosses appear all the time in gang graffiti. I’d sat through MacDonald’s own seminar on the subject, a couple of years back. The symbols were mostly more complicated than this one. You’d get a circle cut up by an X, numbers would mean addresses, dates, times of gang meetings, and whichever quadrant the number was in would tell you which—address, date, or time.

  When he’d first shown me, I’d been suspicious about the gamma-thing. “Gangs do Greek letters?”

  “Has been known,” he said. “But not generally, no. They’re not desperately literate. Not so much interested in your classical languages and lit.”

  “Not a Memphis-based gang, Mac. Is it?”

  “Umm…no. Least…I don’t think so.”

  “Where from, then?”

  “Uh, Seattle, we think.”

  We, indeed. I’d already made a bet with myself that, if I were to call the Seattle gangs unit—Tacoma, Vancouver, anywhere up that way—they’d tell me they’d never heard of anything called three-six-gamma. I could have called, could have faxed, would have got some kind of an answer, even without being a cop. But if I got that answer, I’d know MacDonald was lying. I was willing to know that. But not to know it. Not beyond a reasonable doubt. Not beyond that point where every guy in the firing squad gets to believe he’s the one who got the blank round.

  Sat. Watched. Coffee from my thermos. Sat. Tuna sandwich. Sat. Watched. Yawned. Snickers bar, nice and hard, from my mini-cooler. I stopped after one bite, tossed the rest into the outer dark. Contraband.

  More than one night I’d seen Hanjins and Lloyds bearing numbers with what seemed the right three final digits. But an eight, more closely inspected, became a three—that sort of thing. Once, I’d seen what I thought was the symbol, but the wrong serial, the wrong company’s container. False alarms both, MacDonald told me. Don’t worry about it. How the hell could he be that sure?

  Sometime after midnight, 31st July to the 1st of August. The rain let up a little.

  Sounds. Not unusual. Cracking branch. Movement, small animal—there was something here, I’d learned, that was attracting feral cats. Quiet again. Right now, no movement over in the yard. The craneman’s coffee break, I assumed. The hiss of the drizzling rain. The layer of steam it made over the ground.

  My head jerked. I heard what I hoped had been only a few seconds of snoring. The cranes were moving again. My video-cam’s tripod had tipped over, the camera doing a close-up digital documentary of my dirt pile.

  Sounds. Behind. Unusual. Foot on gravel—definitely not animal. Other foot on gravel—heavier. Coming nearer, but other side of the pile, other side of the ditch. Stopped. Froze. Footfall again. Light. Heavier. And, in between, the gentlest little thud. Slow. Light. Little thud. Heavier.

  Waiting.

  “Don’t you fucking move.”

  Loud enough, directed enough I knew he meant me, knew exactly where I was. Railway cop? No, no—that little thump, it sounded for all the world like a cane, of all the bloody things.

  Then: Unmistakable. Chuck-chick. Pump-action shotgun.

  “I’m coming over,” the voice said, some gravel in it. And more than a hint of an experience I surely didn’t want to be on the wrong end of.

  I knew for sure when he started onto the board-bridge Mac had laid for me. Light. Cane. Heavy. Not a railway cop. Not a Memphis cop. Not anyone with a badge. Not a nice grown-up you can run to.

  “Don’t you fucking move.”

  I breathed.

  I moved.

  I ran, as much as a man of sixty with eighty-five extra pounds can be said to run at all. Busted out of my lean-to, left all my gear. My toes tripped on rocks, branches, gopher holes. More than once I fell, my hands, arms, scraped each time. More than once, I banged my shins on what I guessed was scrap steel, broken concrete. A rip on a protruding piece of
rebar.

  Diabetes. Peripheral neuropathy. You have no idea. The skin on my shins screamed.

  “God damn you!” behind me. And I wondered whether he mightn’t get that wish. Jesus Jesus Jesus, I said, whether aloud or inside I didn’t know, and couldn’t tell whether it was swearing or prayer.

  The flash, first. Then the sound of the blast. Cocked. Flash. Blast. Shot at twice, now.

  I took breathless cover behind a mound of dirt. He’d had the advantage, still had it. I’d been silhouetted the whole way against the blazing lights of the container yard, and would be again whenever I got up. I stayed low, looked around the mound, rather than over. I felt inside my lower pant leg for what was running there, felt it on my fingers. I couldn’t see, so I tasted. Blood, all right. But not enough that he’d hit me—just a bad bump.

  “God damn you!” again.

  I winced, till I realized from the voice’s faintness that he hadn’t come much closer than this side of the ditch, the gap in the fence, maybe the dirt pile. And I saw no sign of a flashlight. Still, he might be coming on yet, however slowly or clumsily. I couldn’t stay long. I waited, breathed, till either I figured he was gone or until I couldn’t stand it anymore—couldn’t tell you which.

  Minutes. No idea how many—I didn’t dare open my cell phone to see. But long enough that I had to pee, and did it, rolling sideways, into a little depression I’d felt in the dirt.

  The pee smelled, I smelled, and it had to have been an hour. Slowly as I could—and that’s pretty slow—I rose. Turned. And walked toward the yard. Couple of thousand bucks in gear be damned—I wasn’t going back that way.

  The container yard’s main building loomed large. The cranes creaked and squealed, cables hummed, and containers banged ever louder.

  What would I do? Waltz right into the container building? What would I get—a cheery greeting, a cup of cocoa and a comforting blanket, a ride to the main gate? Hell, I was filthy, head to toe, and bloodied here and there, my face included. Limping, too, I realized. No, there’d be trespassing charges and—