“That’s the bar? The Swamp Rat?”
“Yeah. The only one in town.”
“Do you think any of the people at the Swamp Rat would talk a little more freely to me than they would to you?”
“They might. If they thought you were a friend of Jason’s.”
“Let me think on that. I might come down and have a beer with the boys.”
I thought about it for about five minutes. It would take me about two hours to drive to Belleville. If Blakemoore’s friends thought I was his buddy, I might learn something they were hesitant to tell the law. I called Logan, ran it by him and Jock. They were ready to travel, but I told them I thought it would be best if I went alone. I could explain my coming to town for Blakemoore’s funeral. I’d let them think he and I’d done business together over the years. I might not be able to explain why Jock and Logan were with me. I called Lieutenant Foreman and told him I would be in Belleville that evening.
I went onto the Internet and looked up Jason Blakemoore. There was quite a lot about his football career at the university, but nothing afterward. Apparently the pros thought him too small to play in their league, so his career was over, his name gone from the sports pages. I looked him up on the Florida Bar Web site. No ethical problems. I could find nothing else. He was a cipher.
My Explorer was still in the shop. I’d borrowed Logan’s big Crown Vic for my trip to New College. “Can I use your car tonight?” I asked.
“Sure. We have Jock’s rental.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Take your weapon,” said Logan.
“Don’t worry. I’ll put the Sig in the glove compartment and carry the thirty-eight.”
“Wait a minute, Matt. Jock wants to talk to you.”
“Matt,” said Jock, “I think it would be a good idea if Logan and I came down anyway. In case you need backup. We can take separate cars and we don’t have to let anybody know that we know you.”
“That might not be a bad idea,” I said. “I’ll be over in a few minutes.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
It was dark and quiet except for the sounds from the Swamp Rat Bar. Laughter, an old Johnny Mathis song blaring from the jukebox, loud voices, all mixed together in a mélange of noise that floated on the night air, the decibel level waxing and waning as the front door opened and closed, people entering and leaving, the only sign of life in a block of empty storefronts, two-story buildings that ached with age and neglect. The scars of failure were everywhere, a street of broken dreams, of bankruptcy and loss and age and sorrow and regrets for what might have been. Belleville was a town in its death throes. Soon it would be only a memory, an abandoned town reclaimed by the swamp from which it had been wrung. I wondered if the people in the bar knew this and were partying their way to their doom, like people in a town awaiting the plume of radiation slipping inexorably toward them from a faraway nuclear war.
Blakemoore’s funeral was scheduled for the next day at the little Baptist church at the end of the street, the only street that went all the way through town. I doubted there’d be many people there. The funeral was the excuse I’d make for being in town.
We are a society of rituals. Death, birth, marriage, graduations, baptisms, birthdays. They have grown up around our needs for validation, for celebration, and for grief. Some people die without leaving a dent in our universe. One day they’re just gone and the world does not even hiccup. Others leave mammoth impressions, their lives writ large on the tablet of life. And most of us leave only a few to feel the pain of our passing, to think about us as they move ever closer to their own appointment in Samarra. I had no way of knowing if anybody grieved over the death of this small-town lawyer, but I was betting that he left no impression on the world at large.
It had rained, a quick shower passing over on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. I was in Logan’s car, parked across the street from the Swamp Rat, sitting, watching the bar. I didn’t know what I was waiting for, but maybe I’d see something out of place, something or someone who didn’t belong in this miserable town. A biker, maybe. I knew that Jock and Logan were in the rental Pontiac on the other side of the square. They’d pulled up a couple of minutes before.
We’d put together a plan of sorts that afternoon at Logan’s. We’d go in after dark and I would visit the bar, try to chat up some of the regulars. I’d tell them that I was a lawyer and that I had done some work with Jason; that I’d come to pay my respects and needed a beer. A good cover story is a simple one, and with any luck I’d pick up some information that had been hidden from Charlie Foreman.
I watched as a woman came out of the bar and turned down the street. She had tired feet. I could tell by the way she trudged the sidewalk, a woman who waited tables or worked a machine on an assembly line. Except there were no assembly lines in Belleville. She looked sixty, but probably was no more than forty, a body desiccated by too much whiskey, too many cigarettes, too many late nights. Her body language hinted of exhaustion and despair, a woman living in the present with no discernable future, not unlike this miserable town.
She passed the tavern’s windows where the lights washed onto the sidewalk, the colorful neon beer sign throwing a rainbow of reflection on the wet pavement. I wondered, as I always do, about what kind of life had brought her here. When did she first smoke a cigarette or take a drink of cheap whiskey, or lose her virginity? What turned a young girl into the woman I saw leaving the bar? Then she was around the corner and out of my life forever. I’d never know the answers.
Her sojourn through my consciousness had lasted less than a minute, but I knew somehow that she had worked her way into my memory banks, back there in the brain where we store information of questionable value. Someday, way out in the future, I would hear Johnny Mathis croon the song that floated out of the bar as I sat there, and the woman would come unbidden into my memory. Maybe she was only a mirage, or maybe as I sat in the darkened car I needed something to hang onto, some semblance of humanity in a world gone crazy.
I sighed, a little embarrassed at my melancholy thoughts, glad my buddies weren’t privy to them. I got out of the car and walked toward the Swamp Rat Bar, my .38 in the pocket of my windbreaker, a golf shirt under it, a pair of jeans and hiking boots completing my wardrobe.
The door to the Swamp Rat was made of heavy glass, fixed into a metal frame. It opened either in or out, depending on which direction one was moving. I pushed it open and walked into a smoky space that was narrower than it had seemed from the outside. The jukebox was loud, Hank Williams singing “Your Cheating Heart,” an old song sung by a man who died too young. There was a long bar taking up the entire length of one side of the room. Narrow booths sat on the other side, seating for two. They were all empty, but the bar stools were mostly filled. I saw a vacant one down near the far end and walked toward it.
Thoughts began to crowd my brain, a sense of déjà vu, a cold fearful hand clutching at the wisps of memory. I stopped walking, wondering what was going on. Had I been in this bar before? No. Strong feelings of regret and grief and longing were settling over me, scaring the hell out of me. And in a flash a long-repressed memory took hold, came bounding to the front of my brain, and almost overwhelmed me with its power. I saw it clearly, could smell the place, hear the voices and the music. Another time. Another place. A lifetime ago. The day a boy lost his innocence and became a man before his time.
The scene that invaded my mind as I stood in the Swamp Rat Bar was clearer than the reality. Time wheeled away, taking me back many years. A vision flashed, one that I had long ago relegated to oblivion, or so I thought. A memory that I could hardly bear.
I saw a dim tavern from another time, the floor made of scarred terrazzo, no tables, a long bar running the length of the place. The stools were full. Hard-working men enjoying a drink, a little wind-down time before heading home to wife and kids and an early morning and another day of drudge and boredom. The bar was a refuge, a place to get a buzz, to think happy thoughts a
bout what might have been, to share a tale with another soul who understood how it was to be poor and uneducated in the mid-century Deep South.
A medley of odors filled the place, stale beer, dried sweat, and cigarette smoke blown about by the anemic flow of conditioned air from the unit placed high in the wall opposite the bar. A jukebox sat in the corner, the colored lights set into its plastic face providing a look of gaiety in this essentially cheerless place. Hank Williams, now dead but still mourned in the culture from which these men sprang, crooned a ballad about cheating hearts and tears of regret.
The red brick building that had housed the bar for longer than anyone remembered was old and hunkered in a block of forlorn structures built in the late nineteenth century out near the rail yards that sustained the small town. It stood two stories tall, with a sagging veranda fronting the second floor, its brick façade dingy from lack of maintenance. It looked tired, worn out by the incessant soot produced by the steam engines that had once lived and worked in the nearby yard, and later, the residue of diesel exhaust that powered the newer behemoths that provided a small living for the men who worked for the railroad and came every evening to drink in this shabby place.
The boy stood at the door, the light of late afternoon silhouetting him. He took a step inside, letting the heavy glass door glide closed behind him. He waited for a moment, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dimness of the place. He was a child, no more than six or seven years old, his brown hair plastered to his head by the rain that was falling outside. He wore faded jeans and a white T-shirt, high-top sneakers frayed at the edges, the rubber worn down, no socks. He stood quietly, as if contemplating this strange assortment of large men.
A sliver of dread arced across his brain. He didn’t belong here, didn’t want to be here. But his mother was in the car parked at the curb, the old station wagon with the wooden sides rotting into mushy pulp, the burgundy metal dented and pitted with rust and age.
“Go get yore daddy,” she’d said. “Go on, now. Tell him supper’s ready.”
The boy didn’t question the order. It was the first time he’d been sent into a bar, but he sensed that it would become a recurring errand, that he would be needed again and again to herd his father home. He’d already taken a man’s place in the household, listening to his mother complain about all that was wrong with her life, her poverty, her drunken husband, her lousy children who drove her nuts. He knew his father wouldn’t come home, understood that he didn’t want to come home to the small apartment they rented from a real estate man, where the sounds of fighting slipped through the thin walls separating the other apartments in the old house when hard men with no hope took their frustrations out on the sadeyed women who were their wives.
The boy would eat his supper with his mother and little brother at the table in the kitchen, enduring yet another tirade as she sipped her booze and ranted about how much better her life would have been had she only married the druggist from Valdosta. He’d eat his scrambled eggs and grits and johnnycake like every other night, because the meal was cheap and easy to fix, even for a woman with a bourbon-addled brain.
As his eyes adjusted to the semidarkness, the boy saw his father at the far end of the bar, talking to the man next to him, laughing at something the man said. It was a long walk down that bar and the boy was ashamed to be making it. He knew that eyes of strangers would stare at him and the men would pity him and think his father less of a man because somebody had sent his boy into the bar to get him.
The child had been toughened by his dreary existence, by the stories his mother told of how bad her life was and his father’s reminder that he’d had it much tougher when he was a sharecropper’s son living on the edge of starvation in Depression-era Georgia. He would make that walk, but he knew that the smell of the place would find a permanent home in the shadowy recesses where he stored dark memories. He stood as tall as he could and stepped off.
The catcalls started. A man at the bar noticed him and said, “Boy, you got an ID?”
Other men looked at him and took up the chorus of jokes. They were not unkind men, and many of them had children the boy’s age. They were just having a little fun, poking at a small human that most would have died protecting from harm had it come to that.
The boy was mortified at the not unexpected comments. He held his head high and marched down the line like a general inspecting his troops. He came to the end and stood before his father. “Daddy,” he said, “Mama says you got to come home to supper.”
His father looked at him for a moment without recognition as if seeing an apparition of someone he loved but didn’t know had died. The boy stood fast, embarrassment creeping up his spine. His father was too drunk to see him. Then the light came back into the man’s eyes. He smiled, because he truly loved his son. If he was discomfited by the boy’s presence, he didn’t show it.
“Matthew,” he said, “want a Coca Cola?”
“No, sir. We got to go, Daddy. Supper’s ready.”
“Tell yore mama I’ll be along directly. Y’all go on home now. I’ll see you there.”
“Mama says you got to come now.”
His father’s voice tightened. “Go on, Matthew. Do what I tell you. Tell yore mama I’ll be there shortly, hear?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll tell her.”
The boy turned and walked out of the bar, the silence in the place more distressing than the catcalls.
Shit. I came back to the reality of the Swamp Rat Bar. A few seconds, no more than two or three, had passed while I stood rooted in a bad memory. I walked on down to the empty stool, took a seat, smiled at the bartender, and ordered a Miller Lite.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The man straddling the stool next to me was in his sixties, wore three days of beard stubble, a T-shirt stained by something dark, faded jeans. His gray hair was falling over his ears in the haphazard way of a man in need of a haircut.
“You’re new in town,” he said.
“Just passing through.”
“Ain’t no hotels around here.”
“I know. I’m staying over near Naples.”
He blew out some air, a sigh maybe. “Lord. What brings a traveling man into this dump of a town?”
“I came for a funeral.”
“The only funeral around here is for Jason Blakemoore.”
“Yeah.”
“You know Jason?”
“I had some dealings with him.”
“Trouble?”
“No. I’m a lawyer. We were working on a case together.”
“Where you from?”
“Longboat Key, up near Sarasota.”
The man stuck out his hand. “I’m Billy Joe Cuthbert. Folks call me B.J.”
I shook his hand, felt the calluses of a man who was used to hard work. “Matt Royal.”
“You just get in?”
“Yeah. Drove down from Longboat. I wanted to get my bearings, make sure I didn’t miss finding the church tomorrow. Saw the bar and needed a beer.”
“You know Jason well?”
“No. Just talked to him on the phone.”
“I thought you said you were working on a case together.”
“We were. Sort of. A friend of mine tried to hire Jason to help him out on a matter, and Jason asked me to lend a hand.”
“You work together long?”
“No. Just the past few days.”
“That’s a long way to come to a funeral for a guy you really didn’t know.”
“I remember when he used to play football up at Gainesville.”
“Ah.”
“He was pretty good.”
“Yeah. That was probably the best time of his life. What kind of case did y’all have together?”
“Something to do with some Seminole claims. We didn’t get too far into it before he was killed.”
“It wasn’t about that black guy who claimed to be a Seminole, was it?”
“That’s it.”
“Funny. Jason was
in here Thursday night talking about that one. Said the black guy was from the Bahamas, but claimed to be a Seminole. I been here all my life, knowed a lot of Indians. Ain’t never seen one who was black. I figured it was some sort of scam and old Jason wasn’t smart enough to figure it out.”
The conversation had become inquisitorial and that raised my suspicion at first. As we talked, I began to think it was just the nature of smalltown gossip, a local plumbing the mind of the visitor, adding to his stock of stories for other nights whiled away in the Swamp Rat Bar.
I finished my beer and signaled the bartender for another. “Did Jason say anything about the claim?”
B.J. shook his head. “Just said the guy had a paper that backed up the claim. Oh, and he did say something about getting a lawyer up the coast to help him out. That musta been you.”
The man sitting next to B.J. had been listening to us, watching closely. We weren’t talking loudly and I suspected he was having a hard time separating our conversation from the din surrounding us. I hadn’t paid much attention to him, thinking he was just another local interested in the rare stranger in the town’s only gin mill. He slid off his stool, threw some money on the bar, and walked toward the door. He was a big man, middle-aged, hard looking. He had ruddy skin and had accumulated some fat, but he looked powerful, a man who did heavy labor outdoors. He wore a sweat-stained ball cap with the logo of a tractor manufacturer on it, the bill pulled low almost touching his bushy eyebrows. He was wearing a checkered short-sleeved shirt, dirty jeans, and work boots.
I watched him leave and turned back to my conversation with B.J. “That probably was me Jason was talking about. Did he say anything else?”
“No. That was about it. He didn’t talk a lot. Kind of a lonely fellow, if you know what I mean. A few beers every day and then he walked home. I always wondered what he did in that little house all by himself. Watched lots of TV, I guess. Sports, probably.”
“Do you know if Jason told anybody else about the Seminole guy?”
Bitter Legacy: A Matt Royal Mystery (Matt Royal Mysteries) Page 16