The Next Time You Die

by Harry Hunsicker

“I don’t want to hear about your love life.”

  “How about this then? I’m in Oak Cliff without a ride.”

  “You need to get to North Dallas. No sign of Reese Cunningham but you’re gonna want to check this out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll explain later.” She recited the address and hung up. We finished the coffee and left.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Dallas was a car town, L.A. without the mountains or movie stars.

  The mass transit system consisted of a couple thousand diesel-belching buses and a barely there, bewildering light-rail system. The buses operated on schedules designed to get people in the southern section to their North Dallas domestic servant jobs, while the trains moved empty cars around the city.

  Olson phoned his partner, sat down on a curb, and produced yet another flask, this one from his boot. He took a long swig and passed out. I debated whether to call 911. I dragged him off the street and into the alcove of a bakery, checking his pulse and vitals as best I could. The problem appeared to be based more on the alcohol and less on his injuries.

  Twenty minutes later, a brand-new Bentley drove up and stopped.

  The hazard lights came on.

  The door opened.

  Delmar, my friend’s same-sex life partner and the meanest man in this hemisphere, stepped out.

  He wore a perfectly tailored dark blue three-button suit over a cream silk shirt with a pair of woven leather loafers. The outfit probably cost more than my last three house payments. Delmar did very well in the buying and selling of investment-grade firearms.

  I waved hello.

  He frowned and crossed his arms.

  Because his partner and I shared a blood bond forged in the heat of battle, Delmar had to put up with me. He didn’t like it and didn’t particularly care if I knew it or not.

  He walked to where we were huddled in the shade of the old building, looked down at the unconscious Olson and then at me. “What the hell did you do to him this time?”

  “New guys in town were trying a shakedown.” I stood up. “Didn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “Sell it somewhere else.” Delmar looked at his partner.

  “Business good?” I nodded toward the quarter-million-dollar automobile.

  “Where’s his Suburban?”

  “Somebody stole the wheels.” A Ford pickup painted neon metallic green drove by, the front bumper about a half inch above the pavement. The ground shook from the Tejano rap blaring from behind its darkened windows.

  Delmar waited until the truck passed before speaking. “I try to put up with the bad shit you get him involved in. I really do.”

  “Me?” I tried not to sound too incredulous.

  “The thing last month? With the guys from Miami?” Delmar waved his hands in the smoggy air of Jefferson Avenue. “That was so unnecessary.”

  “It was Olson’s deal. He asked me to ride along.” I tried to control my anger. “The last thing I said before it went to shit was to quit doing business with Cubans.”

  “Let’s not get bogged down in the details, okay?” Delmar walked to where his partner lay. He grabbed one arm.

  Olson’s eyes rolled open. “Where am I?”

  “What happened to his face?” Delmar said. “And his shirt?”

  “A bad guy named Jesus Rundell.” I grabbed Olson’s other arm. Together we pulled him to his feet.

  “What the hell . . . is he drunk?” Delmar looped an arm over his shoulders. “It’s the middle of the afternoon, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s my fault. Everything. Made him drink a bottle of scotch at lunch.” I helped walk Olson to the rear passenger door of the Bentley. “Then I registered him as a Democrat.”

  “Fuck off, Hank.” Delmar eased his partner’s legs inside the plush automobile and shut the door.

  “After that he gave a big donation to Handgun Control, Inc.” I opened the front passenger-side door and sat down on the smooth leather seat. “Expect to get a real nice letter from Sarah Brady next week.”

  Delmar got behind the steering wheel but didn’t respond. Despite their sexual orientation, both he and Olson possessed political views somewhere to the right of Pat Buchanan. Then there was the whole Second Amendment thing.

  I laughed to myself and reclined the seat.

  Twenty minutes later, we pulled into the driveway of their converted duplex on Hershel Street in the Oak Lawn section of central Dallas. Delmar stopped the car in the shade of the magnolia tree that dominated the front yard.

  Their home looked unassuming, but I knew that it was fortified only slightly less than the White House. It sat directly across the street from the local office of the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Defamation League.

  Olson woke up, looked around, and got out of the car like nothing had happened. His partner and I followed. Olson ignored us and went inside. Delmar and I stared at each other, the Bentley forming a barrier between us. The leaves of the magnolia dappled the afternoon sun across the hood. A dog barked from a long way off.

  “He’ll be all right,” I said.

  “What was the guy’s name?”

  “Rundell.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  I told him.

  Delmar chewed his lip.

  “If he shows up, don’t waste time talking,” I said.

  He looked at me as if I were simple-minded but didn’t say anything.

  “I need a car. Got anything to spare?”

  “Pepe has the Mercedes,” he said. “Won’t be back for an hour or so.”

  I didn’t want to know who Pepe was or why he had the Benz. I didn’t say anything.

  Delmar stared at me for a few moments. “You’re not taking my new Bentley. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I don’t think I’m classy enough to drive it, anyway.”

  “Shit.”

  “What?” I raised my hands.

  “You really piss me off sometimes, you know that?” He tossed me the keys.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Bentley handled like a sports car half its size, reminding me of the black Trans Am I’d owned briefly in high school before wrecking it on the way home from a Belinda Carlisle concert. The English vehicle also had a powerful motor like my old Pontiac, as evidenced by the strip of rubber I accidentally left on the driveway as I was backing up.

  Delmar chased me for half a block, yelling. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, which was probably just as well.

  By the time I had gotten to the corner of Oak Lawn, I was pretty comfortable with all the switches and buttons, except for the creepy British voice that kept telling me to fasten my seatbelt.

  I headed away from downtown. Reese Cunningham’s parents lived in the Preston Hollow section of North Dallas, a tony area of multiacre lots and gigantic homes designed to look like French chateaus and English castles. The Bentley would fit in perfectly.

  From Inwood Road I turned right onto Deloache. Pretty soon the busy city disappeared, replaced with a narrow tree-covered avenue, both sides lined by massive stone walls and wrought-iron gates. I made a couple of more turns until I found the correct street.

  Casa Cunningham was nestled behind an ivy-covered brick wall that stretched for three or four hundred yards in either direction from the massive carved wooden doors that formed the entrance to the estate.

  I called Nolan. She didn’t answer. I inched forward to an intercom on a steel pole protruding from the driveway surface. The intercom was old and weathered and had only one button and a single speaker, no dialing pad or anything else.

  I pressed the button and leaned out the window, waiting to answer whoever spoke to me.

  Nothing happened. After a long ten seconds, the wooden doors began to swing slowly inward. I put the Bentley in gear and eased down the driveway into the Cunningham grounds.

  Bradford pear trees lined the curving asphalt; beyond them lay sloping hills of grass and trees leading downward to the center of t
he estate. In the distance, a redbrick mansion sprawled next to a small creek. The house looked like an English manor glistening in the hot Texas sun, a set location from Masterpiece Theater.

  But the grounds on either side of the driveway were unkempt, grass too long in places, too withered and brown in others. The trees needed trimming; the ruts and grooves in the driveway ached for a patching.

  As I got closer, the disrepair of the main house became more apparent: peeling paint, gap-toothed shutters, empty flower beds. My truck was parked in the middle of the circular drive, by the front door. I stopped behind it, got out, and walked to the entrance.

  The air felt cooler in this part of town, the vegetation soaking up some of the heat. Robins warbled from the live oaks in front of the home as water trickled over the rocks in the creek. I smelled leaves composting to dirt, oily residue on the asphalt, and the moldy aroma of a house not properly cared for.

  The front door opened. Tess McPherson stood in the entryway. We walked through a two-story foyer, the floors marble, the staircase wide and twirling upward into a chintz-covered hallway.

  “Welcome to Weirdville.” She pointed to the right. “We’re in the sunroom.”

  I followed her into a long, narrow chamber off the entryway. The walls were bright yellow. The furniture was green and lemony, plush and angular at the same time, as if it had been new around the time of the Watergate scandal. The place smelled like mothballs and dust.

  Tess motioned to the far side of the room where a woman sat in the corner in a low-slung chair next to a glass-topped table. The chair was covered in a flower-patterned fabric, yellow and orange. The table was empty except for a lamp, a rotary telephone, a Rubik’s Cube, and an autographed picture of Larry Hagman during his J. R. Ewing days.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You must be Lee Oswald.” She held up a mottled hand, palm down. “The girls have been telling me all about you.”

  She could have been fifty or eighty; it was hard to tell. The plastic surgeries had stretched her face so much her cheeks looked like drum skins; her lips were frozen in a perpetual half grin, half grimace. The most startling feature, however, was her hair. The platinum locks were Panhandle big, teased wider than her shoulders, held in place by who knows how much hairspray.

  “Call me Hank.” I sat down next to Tess on a terra-cotta velour love seat.

  “Call me Bunny.” She wore gold-sequined house shoes and a loose-fitting warm-up suit on her bony frame. A diamond the size of a peach pit was on her right middle finger. On her left wrist was a gold Rolex, the secret decoder device for women of a certain age in particular Dallas zip codes.

  I turned to Tess. “Where’s Nolan?”

  “Upstairs,” Bunny answered for her. “Doing research on your problem.”

  “Research?” I cocked an eyebrow.

  “She’s in Reese’s room,” Tess said. “I’m keeping our, uh . . . hostess company.”

  “My late husband knew Jack Ruby.” Bunny Cunningham touched one strand of her immense hairdo as if to see if everything was in place.

  “That’s nice.” I crossed my legs and tried to look casual. “We need to talk to your son.”

  “You’re not any relation to the other Oswald, are you?”

  “Where is Reese at the moment?” I picked up the Rubik’s Cube, looked at it for a second, and then put it back down.

  “Mrs. Cunningham was just about to tell me when you came in,” Tess said.

  “That was my son’s.” Bunny pointed to the cube, a vacant look on her face. “My husband gave it to him right before he died.”

  “About Reese . . .” I tried not to sound impatient.

  “He was a good man, my husband. They named a building after him at SMU.”

  “Why don’t you tell us a little about him, Bunny.” I sighed. This was going to take longer than originally planned.

  “Mort was one of the last wildcatters.” Bunny dabbed a piece of tissue at the corner of one eye. “He died on a rig, doing what he loved.”

  The name finally clicked in my head. Mortimer Cunningham, a legendary Texas oilman. A hard-partying roustabout who made and lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of his career. His death had involved a waitress at the Elks Lodge in Buda, Texas, and a jealous husband, not an oil rig.

  “When did he pass away?” Tess said.

  Bunny sniffled. “Nineteen eighty-five. Reese was a freshman in high school.”

  I did the math. Her son was around thirty-five now, a little younger than I was. I got a mental image of the man. Three and a half decades on this planet, looking for an identity in the shadow of a boisterous and grandiose rich man, doomed forever to be The-Son-of instead of his own person.

  “We met in Waco,” she said.

  I nodded and tried to look as if I cared.

  “You see, I was from a little town east of there.”

  “Where?” Tess frowned.

  I perked up. East of Waco would be Barringer country.

  “What’s the name of the town?” I said.

  Bunny looked as if she were going to speak again but stopped when my partner entered the room.

  “We’re too late.” Nolan’s face was blanched, eyes wide. She looked sick to her stomach.

  Nobody made a sound. Bunny Cunningham fanned herself with one hand.

  Nolan walked out of the room. I heard the front door open and close.

  I jumped up. “Where’s Reese’s room?”

  “At the end of the hall.” Bunny stood also. “What on earth was she talking about? He said he was going to take a nap.”

  I ran out of the Cunningham sunroom. Took the stairs two at a time, Tess on my heels. At the top to the right was a long hallway leading to the back of the house. To the left was an open door that obviously went to the master suite. Tess and I slowed when we got to the hall.

  Another dead body, judging by Nolan’s reaction. Jesus Rundell had beaten us here somehow.

  At the end of the hallway was a partially closed door, a rolled-up towel lying on the floor. I stepped into Reese’s part of the house, and the cloying stench of perfume swept over me. The room was a sitting area, a sofa and two easy chairs on one side, a desk with a computer on the other. A crack pipe sat on the desk next to several rolled-up balls of foil and a dozen or so pills scattered haphazardly across the surface. A half-empty jug of grocery-store wine was on the floor.

  There were four or five overflowing ashtrays on the coffee table by the sofa. I kept waiting to smell the stale cigarette smoke but couldn’t because of the perfume. Dust was everywhere.

  “Reese sure was a party animal.” Tess pointed to the pipe and wine on the desk.

  On the far side of the room was another door, leading into a bedroom, I was willing to bet.

  Tess placed her hand on the knob.

  I ran across the room and grabbed her arm. “Don’t go in there.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Reese Cunningham was dead.

  I looked at the condition of his body, thought about the drugs and cigarettes in the other room, and figured his heart had blown a main seal a year or so before.

  The skin on his face was still intact, though now desiccated and loose on his skull. The lips had curled back, exposing his teeth, and the bedspread covering what was left of his body was stained where the gasses had finally erupted from his midsection.

  “Holy shit.” Tess stood at the foot of the bed. “Is that him? H-he’s been there for . . .”

  “A long-ass time.” I looked around the room and saw nothing much of interest, a big-screen TV on one wall, a door leading to the bathroom on the other. The still air was a weird mix of smells, fetid earth and perfume and dust. “I’m guessing Bunny has a problem with reality.”

  “W-w-what do we do now?” Tess was shivering, her face pale like Nolan’s had been.

  “I don’t know.”

  “She’s been living here. With that.” Tess placed one hand on her stomach, the other in front of her
mouth. Her shoulders hunched forward as if she were going to be sick. She dashed out of the bedroom.

  I mentally ran through everything. Linville had lied; Reese had checked out at least a year ago. What was in the file of a dead man that was so important? And why would a mobster from South Texas care about it?

  I went into the other room.

  “Here’s a reminder of an appointment with a doctor.” Tess was at the desk, holding a slip of paper. “A cardiologist.”

  I opened a drawer at random and found a bong.

  “What exactly are we looking for, anyway?” Tess shuffled through more papers, her voice becoming shrill.

  “I don’t know.” I walked out of the room and down the hall.

  At the head of the stairs, I turned left and entered the master suite. Another desk was in the sitting area. I sat down and started looking through paperwork. After a while, the picture became a little clearer.

  Reese Cunningham had been an only child. His mother had no one left except for a second cousin in Houston. No husband, no son, and from the looks of things, not a lot of money, either. Mortimer the wildcatter had checked out on the downswing. I found a delinquent notice for the property taxes on the estate. I found statements from brokerage houses and banks, all the figures declining. The charade was about over for one-time society bigwig Bunny Cunningham.

  What I did not find was anything that would help me understand the connection among the players involved. Tess walked into the room and stood beside me. I briefly explained what I had learned. She told me about her hurried examination of Reese’s room. Nada.

  We went downstairs. Bunny hadn’t moved. She held the Rubik’s Cube in her lap. Her eyes were moist. I sat in the velour love seat and placed one hand on hers.

  “Bunny. This is really important.” I squeezed her fingers gently. “Do you know anything about the Barringer family, from East Texas?”

  “Reese is still asleep?”

  I nodded.

  “The Barringers?” She frowned. “I don’t get out much anymore, you know.”

  “What about a man named Lucas Linville or Jesus Rundell?”

  She shook her head.