by Jim Nesbitt
The father wore horn-rimmed glasses, had rheumy blue eyes and a smile that could freeze a fire hydrant in mid-summer. He had an eye for art and stakehorsed a small Deep Ellum gallery. He also had a taste for Oreo cookies, the kind where he was the creamy white center and two black hustlers, any two, were the well-muscled wafers.
“I understand you want to talk to me about Alan and the whereabouts of his killer.”
Burch nodded and got the cold smile.
“I have given my attorney a statement that details everything I know about my son and that man. I don’t have anything else to add and can’t think of a solitary thing that I have left out. As for the whereabouts of this killer, I should think that is your job to track him down.”
The smile again, meant as an icy dustoff. Burch lit a Lucky. The man frowned at the smell of smoke.
“Do you mind ...”
“Yeah, I do. I mind waiting downstairs with the hired help because you’re too damn busy to talk to me about your son’s death. And I mind one huge helluva lot getting a bunch of uppity bullshit about statements given to attorneys. I got a couple of questions and if you want to make your next meeting, you’ll answer them.”
No smile, just frost. They stared at each other. Burch blew smoke toward the father’s face, causing him to blink.
“Gotcha. You don’t seem too upset by your son’s death.”
“I’m afraid I don’t show emotion very well.”
“A rock would do a better job.”
Burch concentrated on taking a drag from his Lucky. He felt the father’s eyes on him, then heard the quick sound of a tongue being popped against the back of the teeth.
“My son and I were never close. In my mind, he was a mistake -- a breach of contract between my wife and I.”
“Did he hate you?”
“Hate was too strong an emotion for our relationship. Oh, how to put it -- casual indifference? Yes, that would be the phrase.”
“Did you introduce Alan to Sam?”
A cough, then an annoyed tone.
“They met at a reception I threw for a visiting artist.”
“Who introduced them?”
“I hardly know. It seemed to be a case of boy meets boy.”
“How did you feel about that?”
“Feel? How was I supposed to feel -- my son was a homosexual. That didn’t make me particularly proud, but we had reached an accommodation.”
Burch stared a hole into the frost. The father’s eyes broke toward paper on his desk.
“You knew Sam already, right?”
“He was a sculptor of some talent, good enough to win regional recognition.”
“But you knew him from someplace other than your art circles, right?”
“Just what are you saying, detective?”
“Just this -- rump rangering seems to run in the family. You and Sam were suck buddies long before he started dragging his thing through your son’s back door. And I bet Sam let you watch. Now, I don’t give a popcorn fart about what two or three adults do behind closed doors -- they can fuck zebras for all I care. But I do care about somebody pimpin’ their son out just to keep some meth-head artist on the reservation. Helluva way to keep your gallery afloat. Or was it true love between you and Sam?”
The father turned heel and left the room. A bodyguard stepped up.
“Not today, son. I have no desire to kick your young ass across this pretty office.”
“Oh, we don’t have to muscle a shithead like you. Fact is, I have to leave you spotless so the man can make the one phone call that will flush your career.”
Sewer Breath was waiting when he got back to the office. Another suspension with recommendation for dismissal. Another ruling by the board that gave him some time off, but left him on the force. And he tracked down Sam during his hiatus, running him to ground in Toronto, living with an older art professor, working in a gallery just off Yonge Street.
Two RCMP plainclothesmen walked through the front door. Burch came through the back. When they called Sam’s name in clipped, cold tones, he started to run. Burch caught him in the throat with a clothesline forearm Lee Roy Jordan would have loved.
Sprawled on the floor, gagging for breath, Sam drew the same cool, appraising look from the Mounties that patrons used for the welded triangles of hammered steel and the garage door-sized swath of canvas with the three, broad zigzags of black and yellow paint he tried to sell for five or six figures. There was the quick up-and-down -- all that was missing was a click of the program against the teeth, a slight intake of breath and a move to the next object d’art.
Cuffs from the Mounties. Burch leaned down, pinning Sam’s arms back, listening to him wheeze, talking low like a parent to a child.
“Now this gaggin -- nothin’ like your old boyfriend felt when you wrapped that wire around his neck. No sir. That wire bit deep ...”
Handcuffs ratcheted tight against the wrist.
“... and that boy, he turned red, then blue and started swallowing his tongue, right? And pissin’ and shittin’ right there in the bathtub, right? A bad way to die. I wouldn’t want to go that way if I had a choice. But you know, you might get lucky. Death Row’s gettin’ overpopulated, so they’re bringing in the Big Needle. Just a shot and you’re gone. It’s a good way to go out, don’t you think?”
Sam stopped wheezing.
“What the hell are you talkin’ about, you cracker dumbass?”
Burch jerked Sam’s head back with a handful of well-moussed hair and leaned in close.
“Just this -- I’ll be watchin’ you die. I’ll wave you bye-bye and enjoy it. You think about that when they wheel you in that room.”
Burch never called his city Big D. Just the D. No adjectives. No modifiers. Like death and divorce, none were necessary. Just a cold letter for a city that could cut your heart out, eat it, then smile. If a profit could be turned.
There are blue and bitter winter mornings when Dallas seems particularly icy and soulless. In the brittle sunlight, its glass towers are glittering but mirthless. Its streets have no warmth and offer no shelter from the piercing wind.
On a morning like this, a retired Braniff Airlines mechanic opened the lid on his first coffee and unchained a parking lot near the West End for the rush hour crunch. He found a hooker named Candy Slice, bound and gagged with strips of her own pantyhose, between an abandoned Subaru and a dented Eldorado.
Her pimp, Ronnie Bedoin, a skinny Cajun with hair that looked like it had been rinsed in brown axle grease, tried to brush off Burch’s questions with bottom-line logic that would have won over Ivan Boesky.
“Man, why get your head heated up? I don’t. Whores get killed. Part of the business. Least she wasn’t the top filly in my stable.”
Burch took it personal. He bounced Bedoin into the cinderblock wall of the bar they were in and started banging his head against the concrete. In front of his partner, a public defender who liked seedy nightlife and an off-duty cop pulling a security shift for the bar.
That earned him his final suspension. Sewer Breath took his badge and his old service revolver, the one he never carried once he got the Colt.
“Of all the dumbass ways I thought you’d finally fuck up, I would have never picked playing wallball with the pimp of a dead hooker in broad daylight with his own partner, a lawyer and another cop lookin’ on. Must have been true love.”
Close.
Three weeks after his first wife left him for a Jew-boy salesman who pumped iron and wore gold neck chains, Candy Slice found him in a bar on Harry Hines, deep in a whiskey fog. He knew her from her prime days with Ross’ stable; he had busted her twice. Prime had been some years ago. For both of them.
Her real name was Ruby Sweat. She was from Nacogdoches. When he was with vice, he treated her with the rough respect he gave all the hookers he came across. No fre
ebies. No hand jobs in the squad car. No blow jobs in the restroom of the Tastee Freeze. Sometimes a cup of coffee on nights when a blue norther hit town.
They talked. She took him home. No fee.
There was a small, red heart tattooed just above the mousy brown pelt of her sex -- a color that didn’t match her auburn hair. He ran his finger along the long scar that ran the length of her belly, the mark of a C-section. She grabbed a flap of his fat, the part that flopped from his narrow hips toward his crotch, and gave it a shake.
“Battle scars, baby. We both got `em.”
She fucked him slow, grinding him between ample hips, riding high at first, then pitching forward so she could better match him thrust for thrust. When they finished, she said: “Don’t worry much about losing her, baby. You ain’t a grown up till you got at least one divorce under your belt.”
He said nothing.
“And don’t worry about the size of your dick none `cause she left you for another man. You got a real active tongue. That’s an asset that makes up for a lot.”
He grunted: “Some compensation.”
“Now don’t pout, sugar. It’s what it’s all about. Compensation and adaptation.”
This was after she told him his seed tasted like boiled okra.
Chapter 6
“Thought T-Roy was dead.”
“Wrong thought, Big ‘Un.”
“Thought he crossed ol’ Neville and wound up in an unfortunate accident.”
“You heard wrong.”
He felt his jaw tighten. She was still pointing the Colt at his paunch.
“Heard he got greedy. Wanted to be El Jefe. Heard they splattered his young ass while he was layin’ pipe. Down Reynosa way.”
“You got the greed part right. And the pipe. And they did do some splattering. But that mean little fucker is still alive.”
“What’s that to me?”
“Don’t make me laugh, Big ‘Un, I know you’re not that stupid. T-Roy did your partner, right? And he’s still alive, right?”
“That was a long time ago, lady. And I never did like the Maltese Falcon. Besides, T-Roy didn’t pull that trigger. Boy named Estaban did. And I killed him already.”
“Ah, Big ‘Un. Don’t job me like this. You know you’d love to see T-Roy dead.”
“Maybe so. But I’m a lazy sumbitch. I’d shoot T-Roy dead if I saw him walking on the same side of the street I was, but I’ll be goddammed if I’ll traipse clear down to Mexico to kill his skinny little butt.”
“Get up. We’re going to see somebody.”
She draped his coat over her left arm, covering the big Colt. She flicked her head, motioning toward the door.
“Leave the bandana. You’ll smell up my car.”
“I’ll stain your seats.”
“No, just your jacket.”
They walked out of the cafe and into the stale night heat. He looked back at her. She flicked her head again, toward a midnight blue ’67 Cutlass with a white rag top and vanity plates that said: LATER. Detroit muscle. Made before the Arabs and their oil embargo.
She flipped him the keys and watched as he unlocked the door. She whistled, then pitched his jacket, hitting him in the face. By the time he clawed the fabric away and draped the jacket across the rolled leather bucket of the driver’s seat, she was opening the passenger door with her own set of keys, her eyes on him, the gun leveled through the open door.
The car fired up with the rattle of glass packs. He kept the four-speed Muncie in neutral and punched the accelerator twice, rapping the pipes, drinking in the rich noise of a big V-8, a 330-cubic-inch Jetfire Rocket with a four-barrel carb. It was a sound that echoed the boom times, from the heady days of jerkoffs at cocktail parties pushing the notion that Texas was the nation’s Third Coast. It was a sound that bellowed, ‘Fuck You, Yankee! Freeze In The Goddam Dark!’
“My, my. This is a ride.”
“Knock yourself out, Big ‘Un. Head up Central.”
He pulled out slowly in first to clear the other parked cars, then stepped on it hard after shifting into second, enjoying the powerful pull of classic American Iron as he banged the shifter into third and fourth.
“Easy now, Big ‘Un. You won’t like what happens if a cop pulls us over.”
“Thought you tole me to knock myself out.”
When they reached Central, the best 1930s parkway ever built in the 1950s, the traffic was typically stop and go for no particular reason. In a few months, it would get worse when the state started a ten-year project to widen the road all the way up to the LBJ. That took the shine off of driving an endangered species of auto. It gave him some long, silent minutes to think about things he had forgotten.
The girl and her gun didn’t count. They weren’t even there. His mind was on Moore, T-Roy and the anger he had to eat in his last six years on the force. He saw Moore and Consuela, dead on the deck. He heard Sewer Breath and the slights of every other asshole who used Moore’s death as a lever on him.
“Quit pounding the wheel!”
“What?”
“You heard me. Quit poundin’ the damn wheel. Traffic will clear in a minute. No big deal, right?”
He looked at her with an arched eyebrow.
“Right. No big deal.”
His jaw was clenched and sore. Blood touched his tongue from the hole he had chewed in the side of his mouth.
Central opened up as they went under the LBJ and past the new construction around Richardson. Past Plano, he spurred the big eight, watching the tach jump and the speedometer climb well past eighty. They crossed the Grayson County line and took a farm-to-market east toward Tom Bean.
The Colt stayed leveled at his paunch.
The land had an uneven roll to it -- grassy hills and scrubby pastures frosted by moonlight, broken by trees that only bordered creek banks and bottom land. A ribbon of gravel and dirt ran to their left, away from the road and around the base of a hill. She pointed. He turned.
They drove for more than a mile, passing cattle, horses and peacocks that screamed at the dark of early morning. Next up -- a brick wall with razor wire on top and an arched stone gateway with surveillance cameras. The road started to rise up the side of another large hill, bare of trees, pointing toward a low-slung ranch house, bathed in floodlights, with a wrap-around porch, rocking chairs flanking the front door and, at the center of a thicket of antennae, a satellite dish on the roof.
There was a widow’s walk on the brow of the roof. Two men with binoculars and scoped assault rifles watched them drive up. One scanned the inside of the car with a Star Scope. He looked back down the road as they got out of the car.
The view was a security man’s dream -- an eight-mile horizon from the highest point of land in this section of the county, a tree line that was more than a half mile away, clear ground between the house and the wall except for some dogwoods, some chinaberry trees, a springhouse and a small barn.
“Ross’s place, right?”
She said nothing.
“Modest home for a modest man. Didn’t think he was the ranching type, though. Thought pimps, dealers and chop shops were his style.”
“Get with it, Big ‘Un. He’s retired. A gentleman rancher. A little oil. A few head of cattle. Some horses.”
“And some muscle boys with Star Scopes and guns that go brrrrrrup, brrrrrrrup, brrrrrrrup. Yeah, the good life.”
Burch laughed, but it came out sharp, dry and without a speck of humor. She watched him. The Colt was gone, inside her purse, he guessed. He laughed again -- the bark of a dog.
“So the boys have me covered and you can put that popgun away, right lady? I’m covered, right?”
He spun around, holding his hands up in mock surrender, kicking up dust with his boots.
“Cover me, boys. I’m a fairly dangerous man who’s pissed in his pants and
let a iddy, biddy girl drag him the hell out of his own favorite cafe.”
He shuffled his feet in the dust. He laughed his dog laugh.
“Look out. Look out.”
“Get a grip, Big ‘Un.”
“Grip this, sweetcheeks. Only watch out, ol’ John Henry might piss on you.”
She said nothing. He kept shuffling to the beat of anger that was pumping up from deep inside.
“You know, I fuckin’ love this. You’ve got me thinking about a dead man who used to be my friend. You tell me a scumbag I thought was dead is alive and kickin’. And you bring me up here to see how life has been good to a piece of shit I used to chase when I wore a badge I can’t wear no more.”
He could feel the blood flushing his face and feel the muscles of his neck and jaw cord up.
“This is so fuckin’ lovely I can’t stand it. I drew a line a long time ago. You hear me? I drew a line. And now you and your cute damn Colt and Neville-fuckin’-Ross want me to erase that line. Right? Well, you listen. I ate a lot of shit from assholes who are no better than your buddy, Mr. Ross. They wore badges, but they weren’t a damn bit different.
“Now I got a life doin’ what I know how to do. It ain’t much, but I sleep at night, I don’t work for no assholes and I don’t have to eat shit no more. There ain’t no room for T-Roy or the ghosts of dead partners.”
“An elegant speech, Mr. Burch. Perhaps you would care to give it to me instead of the girl.”
Ross stood on the top step of the porch, looking every inch the patrón. His dark hair was white now, thick and slicked back from his temples and a high forehead. His face was fat, sleek and tanned. He wore a red silk shirt. The rest of his outfit was Johnny Cash black -- a leather vest, twill trousers and hand-tooled boots with underslung riding heels.