Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery

by T. Blake Braddy

  I approached the Boogie House with some caution. Something strange fluttered in my guts whenever I saw the faded, darkening boards of that place.

  Caution tape surrounded the building, strung through the trees like bright yellow spider web. I ducked under it and gave a good hard look inside. The smell of death lingered in the air. I held my breath and stared for a long time, waiting for I don't know what. A sign. Something.

  The piano began to play itself an old, familiar tune. What keys remained on the thing bounced up and down to the rhythm, and the song went through a verse and a chorus before dying out. Slowly, you see, as if the pianist were on his last breath and playing the song out as he died.

  “Goddamn greatest hits melody,” I said, raising my voice. “What good is fucking with me going to do here? I’m on your side.”

  It was a ludicrous thing to say, but it worked.

  The song stopped, and moments later a rat the size of a pro athlete’s shoe scampered out of a hole in the piano and moved across the keys. I guess the rats, they all play Fats Domino these days.

  In the daylight, there was nothing supernatural about the Boogie House. Just an old, forgotten building, full of secrets that wanted out in the open.

  I looked at the rat and sighed. “I wonder if that kid’s life was the price that had to be paid to uncover the story behind this place,” I said. The rat turned and fled back into the piano without responding. I considered myself grateful for not receiving an answer.

  A crow perched on a sagging beam cawed before flitting away. I hoped it was an augur of Laveau's ghost - I wanted to meet the fucking spirit or whatever when I was awake - but it was apparently only visible in my dreams. I’d have to wait for the sun to go down, I guessed.

  I went over and looked at the corner where the big guy had popped up and shot at me. There wasn’t a sign anybody had been here at all. Not a scrap of paper, or an old McDonald’s wrapper. Nothing. Whoever had been out here had no intention of staying, and he probably wasn’t a squatter.

  Or maybe he was a squatter, and I was building a case out of the strands of my own sanity. It wasn’t completely out of the equation.

  If not, if he had been out here with a purpose, what was his connection to the dead body? He put him out here? Was he on his way to retrieve him? Had the juke joint - and I had to keep this point buried so that I would not be committed in Milledgeville - but had the juke joint called out to me for help?

  It was a ridiculous thought, but not necessarily untrue. If that man had come out there to take the body off for burial - or whatever he had planned on doing with it - then it was the last chance for anybody to discover that the kid was dead at all, and I had happened upon the scene at the last possible minute.

  Supernatural forces didn’t bother me. Didn’t scare me, either. I’d had unsettling experiences in my life. I was no stranger to the other side. I sometimes feel like my mother has been trying to reach me from wherever she is since I was a little boy. Sometimes I think it’s what sent me to drinking, but sometimes it probably functions as my salvation, so I take it to mean whatever is most expedient in the moment.

  Dissatisfied, I retraced my steps through the woods, staring down at my feet as I walked, trying to find the diesel's tracks. I stopped. Ahead of me was a patch of rutted, near-dried mud. Bingo. Not enough to get a tire profile, but enough for me to noodle around with.

  Seeing the tracks filled me with measurable hope, but all I ended up finding was a blue key chain with big block lettering: BRICKMEYER AG & TIMBER. Holding it by the edges to avoid pressing fingerprints onto it, I looked for something out of the ordinary. But no, it was just a key chain. Could have been anybody's. Taking it would be tampering. Leaving it might mean it would be lost in a shoddy comb-through of the land.

  I slipped it into my pocket and went back home, breathing in deep the smell of dying trees.

  * * *

  When I got back to the house, as I passed through the last row of pines, I saw an unfamiliar sedan parked askew in my driveway. I dropped to my knees, scanning my surroundings. With the sun high above me, everything took on a washed-out look. I crept forward into the ditch and kept watch until a tall black woman emerged from the vehicle and leaned against the driver's side door.

  I arched up out of the hole and approached slowly. "'Lo, Mrs. Laveau," I called, as I crossed the road. I could barely speak, my heart was beating so fast.

  "Hey, there, Rolson McKane," she said. "What you doing jumping in and out of ditches? Playing army? I could see you clean across the road."

  "It's a long story," I managed. "Being careful these days, that's all."

  "Least you're on foot."

  I searched for something conciliatory to say. "It's terrible what happened. I know it doesn't mean much, but I'll do what I can."

  Her eyes had focused not on me, but on the copse of trees just behind my right shoulder. Thinking of what she might be looking for gave me an uneasy feeling She said, "Come on, now. Invite me inside. This damn leg of mine is just about to drive me crazy."

  * * *

  The sound two cars make when they collide can keep you up nights. From the inside, it sounds like the world is ending, and there's nothing you can do to convince yourself it isn't. When you dream, you can hear the sound of metal on metal, of front bumpers crumbling under sheer force, of radiators spewing steamy fluid like severed jugulars in a blizzard, of tires screaming, drowning everything else out, and all you can think is, I will never get in a car if I get out of this.

  I hit Janita Laveau going forty-one miles per hour in a thirty five zone. It wasn't quite a head-on collision and I didn't quite T-bone her, either. The impact could be heard for four blocks, and one man said, on the record, that it sounded like Hell being unleashed on Main Street.

  From what I have been told, the accident bordered on miraculous. I ran a stop sign I'd used hundreds or maybe thousands of times. Just went right through it, slowing down only when a champagne blur passed in front of me. The impact put Janita's car on two wheels, but luckily it came back down instead of careening into the IGA across the street.

  The tires held, according to witnesses, and, while momentum carried my Buick across the road and into the empty grocery store lot, Janita's Caddy lingered magically on the two wheels for a few seconds, balancing between disaster and safety, before deciding to come down on the side of safety.

  I wouldn't know. I was blacked out entirely, couldn't have passed a sobriety test if mere consciousness were the only requirement. They say drunks survive wrecks because they're drunk. Sober people tense up and break bones. I guess that's true. I don't want to put the theory to a test again, but I escaped with a bloodied nose and some odd little cuts on my arms and face.

  Oh, and one hell of a hangover. So sore the next morning I could barely move when Deuce came and got me. From jail. But I survived. Janita survived. I got arrested, but that seemed all right somehow.

  Bits and pieces come back to me occasionally. I'll hear something, and my head will tilt at an angle, the way a guitarist's will if he thinks a string is out of tune. At best I'll get a few seconds of uninterrupted carnage, succeeded by a skip in the record of memory. It only happened a couple of weeks ago, and I think that, eventually, it will come back to me without interruption. The basic story, though, works just as well: I went out, got drunk, and then drove. End of story.

  Janita Laveau sat for a good while on my dusty couch, hands pressed on her lap, lips clenched, staring at the empty bottles littering my coffee table like oversized chess pieces. I sat across from her, in the exact spot the detective had occupied earlier that morning. I scratched my head and waited, wondering what she would think of the detective's oblique insinuation that I was involved in her son's death.

  She spent the first half-hour painting a portrait of her son in broad, genial strokes. I had seen Emmitt around town, once or twice when he was much younger, and several times more recently. Always alone. Always unsmiling. He had spent a few years else
where and had returned to work “a real job,” as Janita put it. He'd been an artsy-type, like the hipster kids down at Savannah College of Art and Design. He never quite lived up to his potential. He went right to hanging drywall until he could get a teaching certificate.

  "He seemed like a wonderful person," I said, when she was done.

  "It's a custom for people to give glory to the dead," she said, wincing at her own words, "but in this case, everything I could say about my Emmitt is true. He was an angel of this world, wouldn't hurt another person even if it was deserved. He was a quiet, gentle boy. He grew into a quiet, gentle man. Nobody who knew him would want him hurt, not for any reason. He'd never gotten into so much as a fistfight in school.”

  “I hope they find out who did this,” I said. Acknowledging that I had begun a surface investigation into the matter seemed unnecessary and potentially insulting in the moment.

  She gave me a penetrating look and continued. “The image I still have of him is one where he's just learning how to play the guitar. Just ten or eleven years old, balancing that big acoustic on his knees. The way his legs dangled from the chair he sat in made him look like a ventriloquist's dummy. But he learned quick, and he loved to play, could sit down and strum for hours without looking up. If he hadn't been so interested in everything, he might have become a famous guitar player, something like that. I guess. I don't know. My mind feels so cloudy right now."

  "I hate to ask this, Mrs. Laveau, but why didn’t you go to the authorities yourself? In your own words, he'd been gone for some time."

  She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief pulled from her purse. "My son was a rambling soul, never could get tied down too long. This was the longest he'd spent in the Junction. He'd been saving money, like always, so he could travel around, do something else for awhile."

  "I see."

  "He didn't come home for a few days, and I didn’t worry at first, because I knew how he could be, so I just washed his clothes and put them in his room. Folded them up and smelled them, smelling him, and then put them away. You just don't ever know sometimes, Mr. McKane, the last time you're going to see someone you love. I had a brief flash of that myself recently, you understand."

  I did. "I'm sorry," I said impotently. "For everything, especially what I could have controlled. Never thought being careless would hurt anybody but myself, ma'am. I was wrong, and I'll be reminded of that night for the rest of my life."

  "Wasn't my time to go," she said, finally, confidently. "I got no other way to explain it. Wasn't my time to go, and it definitely wasn't your time to go to jail. I don't bear no grudge against you, because now it seems so petty. And I used to be one to do things I might advise against now. Hmm. Do you believe in fate, Rolson McKane?"

  "I don’t know that I do. I heard you've been lobbying for them to take it easy on me. I hope that's why you're out here this afternoon, to shed some light on a topic that's got me worried and confused. No offense."

  Janita peered over my shoulder, focusing maybe on the yard through the blinds and maybe nothing at all. There was always the woods. They loomed over everything now, literally and metaphorically, and I was continuously thinking of them. I suspect that Janita Laveau thought of them now quite a bit herself.

  I knew how frantic the mind becomes when somebody dies, how it scrambles through mental archives, pulling and storing the most important ones for later and immediately dumping those without any real meaning. There wasn't a memory of my mother's life that I hadn't compromised. Time and drink and just life in general had ravaged the old file system, made my mother into a representation of the real thing instead of the real thing itself.

  "The way he died," she said, "that was no accident."

  "No, it wasn't. His life was taken from him." Offering her solace was all I could do. Parroting her words back to her was more helpful to the situation than risking upsetting her.

  But she saw through it. She hadn't come here for an easy conversation.

  "That's not what I mean. Of course he had no control over that. What is obvious is that somebody had it out for him, and they took it out on him. What I'd like to find out - what I must find out - is what in the world somebody would want in doing that to him."

  "I understand that," I said.

  "It'd be different if it was some kind of accident, if he got sick or fell off a roof or tried to break up a robbery. Even if he took his own life, it would be different from the way it happened. Better or worse, I don't know. I keep thinking about that, would that change my opinion on how it ended up, would I be more at peace, but I can't. It's just one of those things that your mind works up to keep you from going slap damn crazy."

  This time, I held her gaze firmly. "Won't change a thing, I can promise."

  "But it was no accident. And it wasn't no coincidence that you found him, either. You realize what that would mean, if it was just a coincidence?" I shook my head, but she kept on talking. "It'd mean the universe was random, that nothing means anything, and I don't want to live in a world like that. I'm a believer in fate."

  "Uh-huh," I said.

  "What I'm getting at is, maybe you were pulled into my orbit for a reason, like a planet from some other place in the solar system. I don't like you much, but if you was meant to help me and you get carted off to jail, then you can't help me find my son's killer, now can you?"

  "What if that was fate, too?" I asked.

  She stared at me, reaching one hand up and smoothing down loose strands of hair. "I can't take my chances on that idea."

  "I can't in good conscience take this on if you haven't contemplated all the possibilities."

  "Not for nothing, Mr. McKane, but what do you think I've been contemplating since the accident, since my son disappeared and didn't come home? Do you think I am taking this lightly?"

  "It's something I had to say."

  She rolled her eyes. "You are one stubborn-ass man."

  We sat in silence. I picked my cell phone off the table and fidgeted with it, flicking it open and closing it and twirling it absentmindedly. Nervous habit.

  Finally, Janita said, "I hope you're not expecting I pay you."

  I laughed, and it sounded more like a bark than human emotion. "I ain't exactly rolling in the dough, Mrs. Laveau," I said.

  "Neither am I," Janita said patiently. "And I won't be any richer two days or two weeks or two months from now, when you call in the dogs."

  "Call in the dogs. Huh."

  "And you won't be any richer, either, Rolson McKane, because you are going to do this for free."

  "Wait a second," I said. "You come in here, asking me to help you-"

  "Uh-unh. I am not asking you to help me. I am telling you, requiring you, to help me."

  "Really?" I wasn’t actually angry, but I wanted to see where this conversation was headed, and also to push a little bit to see if she would let anything out during this conversation that I could hang onto for a while.

  "I need your help, no doubt about that. But I can’t ask for it."

  "And I get what in return for this?"

  She leaned back. "You get your life back. Maybe. Maybe this fate thing is true, and you’ll get some, I don’t know, spiritual reward. And you should be hoping for that most of all. Piece of mind, or something close to it."

  "I don’t mean to squabble, Mrs. Laveau, but-"

  "Something's broken in you, son, and I believe you know that. You're off-balance. Maybe not mentally, maybe not even that much. But there is something wrong with you, and this may fix it."

  Her eyes returned to the window over my shoulder. She continued, "I don’t have any faith in the rednecks they got up there at the police station. They don’t care a bit for my boy, especially that grizzly bear-lookin’ one.”

  “Bullen.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Some of them talk about you like they’d like to see you end up the same way.”

  "They resent me marrying Vanessa, Chief's daughter. Thought I was kissing ass somehow. We dated a long time
before I thought I wanted to be a cop. But you know how rumors are: doesn't matter when or where they start."

  She sighed. "I just don’t trust them to do what’s best for me, for my baby’s memory. There’s something to it.”

  “I can believe that,” I said.

  There was another long pause, and she said, “I’ve been having bad dreams, McKane. Unsettling dreams. How about you? How are you sleeping these days?”

  “Fine,” I squeaked.

  “Coroner tells me my son's been dead for five days. Five days ago, I dreamed about white horses grazing in a field. I was always told dreaming about white horses means somebody close to you was going to die. I knew even in that dream who it was supposed to be for. And it wasn't a dream dream, the way most dreams are.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Walking through the field, I saw somebody standing off with the horses, petting them, keeping them company. When it came time for the person to turn around, show me her face, she did, but I woke up."

  "Who was it?"

  "Me, Rolson McKane. Me in the flesh. Well, maybe, future me. Wearing the very clothes I am going to be wearing to my son's funeral."

  "Wow," I said. It was all I could manage. My mouth had gone dry, and the words got lodged in my throat. I coughed and said, "That's a vivid dream."

  "It was and it wasn't. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Now, the clothes I was going to wear, I haven't put them on in years, haven't even really thought about them since buying them, but I know for a fact I am going to press them and wear them for the funeral."

  "So your dream helped you decide what to wear?"

  "I don't know. That's why dreams do matter. You understand? I'll never know whether I chose to wear those clothes, or if I was bound to wear them anyway, if the whole thing was out of my hands. All because of a dream."