by Lisa Sandlin
“Did it,” she said. He warmed at the triumph in her voice.
“Did it. Need a few hours before I go talk to Jim Anderson. May not come in, just go over there first.”
“Wait. Anderson’s real name is Sparrow. That’d make Bell’s name Sparrow, too. His real name, Tom.”
Phelan lowered himself to his bed while he listened to some history. He swallowed four aspirin before he hung up. He wrapped ice in a towel, cuddled it to his knee. Then he pulled the covers to his ears, unthawed, and drifted away.
XXXIII
THE BEAUMONT ENTERPRISE ran a motor-mouthed Spiro Agnew photo next to the Vice President’s declaration that he would not quit over allegations of kickbacks and bribery, and that the Justice Department was “unprofessional, malicious, and outrageous.” A national sportswriter was screaming that Bobby Riggs had thrown last week’s hyped-up tennis match against Billie Jean King, while a letter-to-the-editor writer crowed that Riggs was now a “male chauvinist rabbit.” There was nothing yet on the dope bust, but had to be some rolled-sleeve reporter over in the newsroom now pounding the keys for an afternoon headline. Delpha had brought a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the Rosemont, ten cents to Oscar, thank you, and set it next to the lonely phone.
Tom’d be in this afternoon after he talked to Jim Anderson—Jim Sparrow—and maybe then they’d be calling Xavier Bell to tell him—if he ever answered his telephone—that they’d found his brother.
One snag. Just one maddening snag. If Sparrow was his real name…if the store full of pretty birds in New Orleans had been run, appropriately, by a family named Sparrow with two brothers, why weren’t there two baby brother Sparrows recorded in the original Louisiana Archive pages?
Born somewhere else was the only answer she could think of. Xavier Bell had said he was born and bred in New Orleans. Another lie. Delpha swept up the Archive pages, packed them in a file folder, slotted it into the gray file cabinet, and slammed the drawer shut.
Big, big, big waste of time.
Then she spent a few minutes not caring what Bell’s or Sparrow’s real name was. At eight thirty-five, the phone shrilled. She put welcome into “Phelan Investigations. How may we help you?”
“Help me?” The irate speaker had called before, and she had “let it ring a hundred times.” The help she wanted was for Phelan Investigations to confront her boyfriend’s wife and make her let go of him. She wasn’t sure where the wife lived, that was where the investigation part came in, but it was in a large house because she had five kids.
Delpha asked if the husband also lived in the house.
Yeah, he did. But he was leaving soon as he could pry the wife’s claws outa him. The caller thought Phelan could handle that part, too. How much would that cost her?
Bracing for the windstorm, Delpha suggested the caller’s problem was a personal matter between her and her boyfriend. She was sorry, but this was not what Phelan Investigations did.
On the other end, a wrathful breath indrew.
“Thank you for calling, ma’am, we wish you well.” Delpha hung up, stood up, and wandered the office.
She did care what Xavier Bell’s real name was, damn it. Maybe there was a second way to check that out.
At the Wertman’s store, gazing at the old Flo ri da map, an idea had sidled into her mind, and here was the thing about this idea: it had a novel feature. A hidden benefit. If it didn’t work, no one would lock her in solitary or assign her to the toilet-scrubbing roster or commandeer her pie or bruise her ribs with a mop handle or slap her, even, so her cheek stung or her temple throbbed, wherever the punishment landed. That’s what she told herself. Out here, if she was wrong, she was just wrong, and that didn’t necessarily have to leave bruises.
She was free now, and if she had to keep reminding herself every so often, she would.
Next, she repeated the advice her parole officer Joe Ford had given her on their first meeting: Act. If you have to put on an act, do it, put one on. And ask. For what you need. Seemed puny when he was telling it to her, but it had turned out to be sturdy advice.
It was ten a.m. in Jacksonville, Florida, nine a.m. here in Texas. The University of Houston’s library would be open. Delpha dialed the number she’d gotten from Directory Assistance. When a girl said, “Library,” Delpha interrupted in the friendliest tone she could conjure. “Help me out here, please. Is that Shirley Myers working the Reference desk today?” The young female voice had said uncertainly that she didn’t know Mrs. Myers. It was Mrs. Powell at the desk today.
“Oh, that’s right,” Delpha said ruefully. “It’s Monday. Mary Powell, right? Don’t you hate it when you’ve met somebody but you can’t quite remember their name?”
The soprano voice replied, more surely now, that Mrs. Powell’s first name was Adelaide, but only God could call her that.
“Right. Hadn’t Mrs. Powell worked at the library a long time?”
“God made Mrs. Powell then He made The Light and The Dark.”
Delpha said, “That’s who I’m after. Hand me on, please.”
When Mrs. Powell picked up, Delpha greeted her and asked her about the statute of limitations and how it worked in Texas for the crime of murder or attempted murder.
“There is no time limitation for the prosecution of murder or attempted murder.”
“My goodness, you didn’t even have to look that up,” Delpha said.
“It’s common knowledge. May I help you with anything else?”
“No, that’s it.” Delpha thanked her and hung up. She’d known the answer to that question. What she’d wanted—and had gotten—was Mrs. Powell’s tone of voice: the authoritative, matter-of-fact, no dog in the race last word. Angela was still too in love with being reference librarian to rap out an answer like that. A bored and bossy chow-line convict could do it as well, but without the correct undertone of neutral authority. Chow-line girl’d add an edge of superiority: she had the grits and you didn’t.
“There is no time limitation for the prosecution of murder or attempted murder…There is no time limitation for the prosecution of murder or attempted murder.” She sat forward in her chair, spine straight.
Then she called the Jacksonville, Florida, Police Department and asked for a detective who worked old cases. She was passed on until she heard: “John Perch.”
She identified herself and her employer and told Detective Perch what she wanted.
She heard a muffled, “I said cherry, Sweet Cheeks. Two of ‘em,” then he spoke into the phone. “Whose file you talking about?”
Delpha told him the alias she had, Rodney Harris, the year, 1969, and that there could have been a complaint for assault or worse. A man or men around sixty-five, seventy years old then. The other might be named Bell. Or Sparrow.
“Uh huh. I’m supposed to fire up my time machine, and root around for old files because some Miami reporter’s pecking around for deep background?”
Deep background—that lost her. She sat until she remembered Adelaide Powell would not be lost. “I’m not a reporter. I work for a firm of private investigators in Beaumont, Texas.”
“Oh. Oh, excuse me then. Because some Texas P.I. is curious. Does that just about get it, you’re curious?”
She could lie. Instead, she said slowly, “Yes.”
“Some woman P.I., if there is such a thing.” A laugh. A pause. A scraping sound, maybe of chair-legs against a floor. Delpha anticipated the clunk of the hang-up.
“Tell me what you look like first.”
She had planned to redeploy Adelaide Powell but the initial laugh and the guy’s jokey tone changed her strategy. Now she sat down, picked up a pencil, and bounced its eraser against the surface of her desk, the way Attorney Miles Blankenship had bounced his eraser against a legal pad.
“I’m six feet tall and I have black shiny hair in a French twist.”
Silence on the line. Somebody yelled Jones! in the background.
“When you take it down how long is it?”
> “First I need to know if you can get the files from four years ago.”
“Sure. Down the hall growing mold. How long?”
“I said, four years.”
“No, your hair. How long?”
“Oh.” Delpha’s mouth formed a straight line as she thought. “You know that hollow at a woman’s back? Right at the waist, ’fore the spine starts up?”
Perch cleared his throat. “I do.”
“That long.”
Another silence. Faint ringing of a phone.
“My wife never had long hair, but she used to have that spot. Yes, she did.”
“She still has it, Detective Perch.”
A sigh. “Somewhere. What’d you say you wanted? And what was your name?”
Delpha repeated her name, request, and number.
“Files are a mess. It could take me a month of Sundays.”
It didn’t. Perch called back at noon, saying fifty-two citizens had been put to bed with a shovel in 1969. Most cases closed. One case still unsolved was that of a convenience store clerk, who’d disappeared in February of that year. Bones discovered some twenty months later in marshland, M.E. reported cut marks to base of skull, spine. As to the names she was interested in…He proposed a trade, without disclosing that, of course, and she played her part. She looked down at herself. Instead of describing the pale blue blouse whose buttons she had resewn tighter and the washed-and-rewashed navy blue skirt, she was wearing one of those straight Chinese dresses with the high collar and the slit skirt. Wine red silk. Tight. No stockings. High-heeled sandals, backless.
Now, those names she gave him. What did he find?
He breathed out, “Nothing, baby.”
Delpha heard a soft crunch as her jaw hinges shifted. “You sure?”
Choppy breathing.
In the voice of the pitiless authority that was Adelaide Powell, she said, “Then what I got on, John, is your mama’s house dress. Old sack that rides up when she sits down with her knees apart.” She hung up.
That she’d played Perch’s horny game rankled. And that he’d wasted her time. So much for her wise idea.
But nobody was hauling her off to solitary, were they?
XXXIV
PHELAN’S LIMP HAD receded, but he wasn’t jogging. He wove his way through the small forest and up the grayed ramp to Jim Anderson’s door. No one answered his knock, so he and his mildly sore knee walked the sandy, needled ground around the house to the back, where two people occupied a landscaped clearing in the pines. One sat in a chaise lounge chair reading a newspaper, his ankles crossed. He was wearing bifocals, a pajama shirt over khakis and no hat, thin gray hair uncombed. The other—the one Delpha said wasn’t a teenager—was long-legged, wearing shorts and Keds tied with a double-knot. Light-colored bangs falling over his forehead, he leaned over the stone surround of a small homemade pond, planted with elephant ears and sedge grass, scooping a blue plastic pail in the green water. A pump hummed.
In the act of hauling out the full pail, the young-looking man by the pond turned his head, smiled, scattering water drips onto a stained white t-shirt. He waved and grinned at Phelan. Strange-looking guy, grayed-brown hair cut in lank bangs, chopped at the neck, fine wrinkles in the cheeks. He sloshed the pail and laughed, slow getting started then cracked himself up. “A-ha…a-ha…ah ah ah…huk huk kuk huk.” The man-sized little boy glanced up brightly at Phelan, as if to see if Phelan understood, as the boy did, that the water and the pail were wonderful.
It was sort of a wonderful sight, Phelan thought, though sad. Or maybe not. He smiled back at the boy with the pail, then approached the man in the chair.
“Excuse me, sir. Like to have a word with you.”
The older man in the chair turned a page and smoothed it down.
Phelan walked closer. “’Scuse me,” he said louder, “Mr. Anderson. Could I have a word?”
“Mannaggia!” The old man flinched and rared back, crumpling the newspaper in his lap.
Phelan introduced himself, adding that he was a private investigator on a case commissioned by a man who, they had reason to believe, was Mr. Anderson’s brother, though he wasn’t using the name Anderson.
“Wait a minute. Don’t know the name of your own client? What kind of an investigator are you?”
“Persistent. My best trait. Grant you it’s an unusual case. The client paid us to find his brother. If that’s you, well sir, I hope you’ve been dreaming of reconciliation.”
The old man peered at Phelan over the bifocals. Slowly his wrinkled face hardened. He removed the glasses and rested his forehead on his hand. His chest rose and fell. A wind rustled through the circle of pines.
Phelan thought that here was an old man growing ancient, somebody who hoped he wouldn’t meet the worst, and now he had. From the direction of the house came a dim chattering of birds. From the other direction, a rat-a-tat attack. He traced the loudmouth, a redheaded woodpecker high in an oak, just past the pines, then said, “Hope you’ll help us get this straight, sir.”
The old man spoke without raising his head. “Pal, you don’t even know what you did.”
The man with the bangs had dropped the blue pail in the pond and was staring toward his friend and then toward Phelan, dismay mashed into his loose face.
“Then tell me what I did, pretty please.”
“Bet he laid it on what an ingrate I am, what a dirty mooch. And he’s Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties.”
“Not exactly. Well, kinda.”
“Boo hoo. Ten’ll get you twenty he’s got somebody on you, Slick. You’ll track me, he’ll track you and get to my brother first. Boom, you get fired. That’ll be hunky dory with you because you already got paid upfront. Upshot is both of you jerks will go off patting your wallet and not know what really happened. It worked last time. When you find me, he’ll find me.” He jerked his head toward the pond. “And him,” he said harshly.
“Your friend.”
The old man pushed out his bottom lip.
Phelan let it go for a second while he thought of the dark sedan circling in the Bellas Hess parking lot. “Wait. So you’re saying while I’m out looking for you, all this time, he’s got a guy on me, so anywhere I went got reported back to him. Why?”
“Thinks he’s a sharp cookie.”
“What for?”
“He paid in cash, right? A lot. Promise you more?”
Phelan nodded.
“You got a office?”
“Yeah.”
“Secretary? If you do, she may get a message for you.”
“Yeah to both. What’s the message?”
A huff from the old guy. “What name did he give you?”
“Xavier Bell.”
“Bell. Uffa, Bell, what a joke. That’s him. Lemme give you a prediction. Next coupla days, you’re gonna get a phone call. He’s gonna call off your job toot sweet. Finito, kaput. The other dick’s working off some other name who knows what that is, he’ll only know you. His job’ll be over, too, and everbody goes on their merry way. Got it now, pal?”
He’d got it. The woodpecker was drilling away. Phelan cut his eyes up, telepathically wishing on it an attack by a flying tomcat. “OK. He tells us he wants to connect with his long-lost brother before he dies. He’s old as hell, excuse me, we believe him. So why is he looking for you?”
“He’s got a nail in his head.”
Phelan noted the bitterness in the old guy’s voice. “What?”
“Tryna tell you, that’s the $64,000 dollar question. I gave up asking it years ago. I just don’t wanna see his filthy snout.”
“You two hate each other so much, why not go off different directions and never write letters?”
The old man glared. “’Cause he’s lying, that’s why. Not about hating me. Not exactly. I’d say he hates me 70 percent…maybe 80. Twenty percent, he thinks he loves me.” He spun his index finger in circles by his hairy ear.
“Uh huh. Listen, how about we sit down inside and talk
this over.”
“Oh ho, no you don’t!” A finger stabbed toward Phelan. “Think I’d fall for that. Not buying the Brooklyn Bridge and not paying you one red cent, either.”
“And I’m not asking. This visit is on your brother’s dime, Mr…. Sparrow.” Phelan waited to see if he’d be contradicted over “Sparrow.” He wasn’t.
“I’ll only talk to you if you don’t tell him where we are. But he’s paying you, so you gonna tell him. I got nothing to say. Go chase yourself.”
“He said something about a settlement coming to you here in Beaumont. How’d he find that out?”
“Goddamnit” started a vibrant verse of cursing. “Could only be Louis’ office.”
“Who’s Louis?”
“Family lawyer. Also Ma’s cousin. About a hundred and fifty years old. Croaked right after she did, not so long ago—”
Phelan’s eyes widened. “Mother. Mind telling me how old she was?”
“Ninety-six. Nonna lasted to ninety. I’m ona break the chain.”
“What, you have health problems?”
Anderson-Sparrow judged Phelan with a narrow look. “So, I was sayin’. Louis left his practice to his feeb son-in-law, Sebastian. I bought this house, told Sebastian where to send the money. He knows not to tell, he swore just like Louis swore. Nothin’ to my brother about me, nothin’, zip, zero, niente. Sebastian musta messed up and dropped a little blood in the water. Now here’s Ugo and his fin.”
“Ugo.”
“That’s your party, wanna know his real name. Ugo used to go by Hugh at the store, more American. But he’s had other names.”
“Like you’re Jim Anderson?”
The old guy stared at him. “Now you’re cookin’. It ain’t so hard. By the way, what’d you say your name was?”