by Lisa Sandlin
“Tom Phelan. Look, Mr. Sparrow. Like I said, he hired me to find his brother, give him the location. That’s what the contract reads. It doesn’t say shit about any contact with the brother. Maybe you have a good reason I should sit in on your meeting. Or that somebody should. Why would that be? Convince me.”
“Reason. What’s the matter with you? Reason doesn’t enter into this.” The old man folded the newspaper, reached out to set it on a stump. “C’mon, Raff—”
He launched himself out of the chaise lounge with enough force to tip it over, hurried and maneuvered to his knees beside the other man. The tall one had slipped down the stone onto the ground, lips twisted, his arms and shoulders shaking. Both hands had cramped into fists, wrists straining at right angles. Sparrow pulled at his waist with both hands.
Phelan ran and helped him turn the convulsing younger man onto his side. A fist smacked his cheekbone. “Let’s get his head off the ground.” He peeled off his jacket and stuffed it under the guy’s head—fists were clenched and flailing, a string of saliva oozing from his lips. His pupils had rolled up near his lids, showing wide white crescents below.
Phelan held onto him. “Lips are turning blue.”
“Relax. They’ll come back when it’s over,” Sparrow said in a soothing tone.
“This happen a lot?”
“Enough.” Gently, “Raffie, it’s OK. I’m here. I’m with you, pal.” He started up a hoarse, short-winded chant. In a couple seconds, Phelan identified it as a song in some foreign language. Just enough tune to tell the song was in a minor key, and that its lines repeated. Automatically, the old man mopped snot from Raffie’s nose with a handkerchief, dried his mouth. When his voice lifted on a single high note, his eyebrows also lifted, and the vertical wrinkles in his face grew longer.
Phelan waited it out.
He’d done this before, guys with epilepsy brought on by head injuries. Only one plain-vanilla epileptic, an FNG who’d kept his med history to himself because his dad, granddad on back to Pickett’s Charge had been Army, and they’d let him enlist. Two noble buddies spilled his secret after finding him jolting facedown in his bunk.
Now Phelan scooped his right hand beneath his own jacket, keeping Raffie’s head from pressing into the dirt, his left laid lightly against the gray hair. “He’s breathing,” he said. The shaking was falling off.
Raffie gasped and barked, then snorted, over and over. Sparrow rubbed his back, almost absently, hissing the song.
Phelan set his fingers to Raffie’s wrist and counted the pulse. The older friend rumbled the same sounds twice, running out of steam. His tanned old face looked like it had been wadded up, let loose, and retained every wrinkle.
Phelan pressed his fingers against the throat this time, glanced over at Sparrow. “Heart’s still way up.” When he got no response, he hesitated, then spoke louder.
“Heart rate’s high. Chance that might not be the seizure. You know that?”
Sparrow raised his face. His eyebrows were squeezed down, lids drooping over all but the inner corners of his eyes. He knew.
“It’s a blessing,” he muttered.
Phelan considered him for a while. “You get that side, I’ll take this one.” They helped the disoriented man upright. He swayed. Both of them took a step with him. Only the top half of his body went with them. He tilted forward, sagging.
“Lemme get his chair. Then we can push him to the back door there.”
“I can handle him. Name’s Raffie, right?” Phelan said, though that was the one name he was sure of.
“Yeah. For Rafael.”
“Raffie, I’m gonna carry you a little ways. Don’t be afraid, OK. Just to the screen porch over there. Won’t drop you, I promise.”
Phelan picked up the tall man, tough to balance. Got his bony length distributed, then plowed with him up to the screen porch, skidding once on a pinecone, which didn’t help out his knee any. Sparrow held open the door for them. Phelan angled sideways then carried the man up two cement steps and over the spongy green Astro-turfed floor of the porch. A washing machine and a folding table piled with a jumble of towels and underwear stood to the right of the door. To the left, cardboard boxes of toys, a stack of plastic pails, and, farther left, bags of fertilizer and birdseed. Phelan inched and sidled over the green polyester grass in order not to knock Raffie’s big Keds against the doorways, then against the walls of the hall. The older man led the way to the first bedroom, one with a rocking chair, a portable television, and a single bed. Together they draped and arranged Raffie onto it. Head to head, Raffie petted Phelan’s face before he let go.
The stripes of the old guy’s pajama shirt were heaving. He had to stand there and catch his breath. “Most people,” he said, “less they know somebody with fits, they get embarrassed. Or scared. You know somebody with fits?”
“Army medic, once on a time.”
“Well, thanks. I got him now.” He dragged the rocking chair over thin, beige carpet, parallel to Raffie’s bedside, and lowered himself into it.
Phelan gestured down the hall in the direction of the rest of the house, saying, “Could I trouble you to make a phone call?”
“I look like a sap? Hell, no.”
“OK, can I get y’all anything? That filling station on the corner’d have cold drinks and Eskimo pies. Your brother says you made bad things happen. I’d like to hear your side before I notify him I found you.”
The man in the bed drew the sheet up to his chin. His eyelids half-closed.
Sparrow slumped. “I made bad things happen. Yeah. Hadn’t you? You wanna hear my side, well, there’s a real switcheroo. You mean that, come back another time. I’m busy now.”
XXXV
“IT’S HIM, ISN’T it?” Delpha leaned toward Phelan as he came into the office. “Jim Anderson’s Rodney.”
He hooked a hand at her, and she followed him, rolling a client chair to the other side of his desk. They confronted each other.
“Yeah,” he said. “He is.”
“Sparrow.”
“Sparrow. Used it, and he didn’t contradict me.”
“I could call Bell, see if he answers his phone. Or we could both stay late and see if he calls us again.”
Phelan said nothing.
The brightness faded from Delpha’s eyes. “What’s the deal?”
“We got interrupted. I got an invitation to finish up. Still—” Phelan told her, described his meeting with Sparrow, a.k.a. Jim Anderson, and Sparrow’s low opinion of their client. Described Raffie.
“Raffie. Does sound like a little boy. But he’s not. You saw him up close?” Her voice changed. “So. That black car at Bellas Hess was a P.I.’s.”
“Good chance. If that’s true then Bell’s gonna know. If the guy was on me today. Didn’t see him if he was. Thing is—”
“That maybe we’re not on our client’s side here.”
Phelan met her eyes. “We said, in black and white, that we would find Bell’s brother and tell him where he was. And the thing is, a contract is a goddamn contract. Like a promise is a promise.”
“Yeah, Tom, but if your good friends Bonnie and Clyde asked you the address of your daddy’s bank, you’re not giving it to ‘em. Listen, ‘member me talking about Mr. Wally, the business teacher at Gatesville?”
“Yep,”—Phelan wadded up yesterday’s sports section and swished the ball of newsprint into the wastebasket—“I do remember Mr. Wally.”
She ignored the frustration and settled back against the client chair’s high leather back. “OK. Mr. Wally used to read us a lot of rules and procedures. He also said not everthing’s in the book. What I’m hearing is you like Mr. Anderson better than Mr. Bell.”
“On the money,” Phelan said quietly.
“So tell or not tell where Bell’s brother is. When we been paid to tell.” She didn’t necessarily agree, but she liked Tom for saying a promise was a promise. Liked him for making this dilemma.
“If the other P.I.’s found
Sparrow, then doesn’t matter what we do.” She shrugged. “If he hadn’t, then hear the man out.”
Phelan stared past her. “Wait a minute.” He reminded her of the Elliott case, in which a fortune had hinged on one seemingly routine phrase in an annual company contract. “You got Bell’s contract?”
Delpha went to the file cabinet and pulled a file, walked back to Phelan’s desk reading it. She sat and read the whole first page, for the first time paying attention to paragraphs and not just the blanks to be filled in. “Where’d you get this form from?”
“P.I. agency in Houston. Said I had a thief in my body shop and couldn’t figure which one he was. I took their contract and said I’d get back to them if my partner agreed. Got a bookkeeper to type it over with my business name and address.”
Delpha said, “Joe Ford musta give you his advice one time or nuther. OK, read this part under ‘Scope.’”
Phelan mumbled through the six or seven lines, ending with The parties hereby agree that the following investigative services have been requested by CLIENT under this Agreement and will be provided by AGENCY, but that the actual time and manner in which the following investigative services are conducted shall be left to the sole discretion of the AGENCY.
“‘Time and manner of services’…,” Phelan repeated, his voice cheering up, “‘…sole discretion of the agency.’ Can I get a witness?”
“Amen.” Delpha returned the contract to its folder, and the folder to the files. They could handle Bell with their own discretion, their way.
She came back to tell him who she’d telephoned yesterday: the detective in Jacksonville, Florida, see if any Rodney Harris and/or Xavier Bell or Sparrow had disturbed the peace in that place during 1969. The cop had mistaken her for a reporter. “You know what deep background is?”
Phelan had flicked his lighter. Now he dragged on a cigarette, and courting danger, leaned back in his hazardous desk chair. “Newspaper thing. Reporter gets a story, but he can’t quote the source by name. Still valuable to him because it’s a lead.” He looked up. “That’s what you been doing?” He smiled. “Digging up deep background. Either that was quite a training course Mr. Wally gave y’all in Gatesville, or you got instinct.”
“Didn’t pay off. Told me a 7-11 clerk disappeared in ’69. Turned up, finally, as a skeleton with cut marks on the bones. But information about a Harris or Bell or Sparrow, skunk didn’t give me anything. Just thought if I could’ve found out stuff that went on between them before, we might know more about what’s going on now.”
“Delpha.”
“What.”
“Don’t get set on one of ’em’s wearing a white hat. Or a black, for that matter. This is family shit.”
“I know that. Just gleanin’ information.”
“Cloudy all over, then. Don’t suppose we had a call for another job?”
“We’re open all day.” She gave Phelan a modest smile so he’d get that she wasn’t making fun. Though she was, a little.
Couple hours later, they did get a call, from a thin male voice that wanted them to investigate the accuracy of an obituary. As soon as Delpha honed in with specific questions, though, the voice waned further. It needed to think more, might call back, thanks, goodbye. She was reminded of a mouse she caught sight of one night when she was washing dishes. She took a step toward it, and it whisked away.
Phelan asked her about the call, hopeful, and she had to disappoint him. Around four-thirty, with strain between his brows, he came into her section of the office, told her he thought he’d attend Happy Hour over at Crockett Street. “Don’t suppose you want a drink?”
She looked up at him.
“Right, parole, sorry. Well, any serious callers, including your deep background fellow, leave a note on my desk. I’ll check in here before I go home. Tomorrow, I’ll go finish up Anderson, and we’ll use our discretion like crazy. But now, let’s talk about your raise.”
“I don’t wanna bust the business for it. Need a job more than a raise.”
“I understand that.” He waited a minute then went ahead with it. “That advertising mailing you did…anything ever come of that?” That was the task Delpha was working on the day Dennis Deeterman came through their door.
“Not yet. Might still.”
“Send one to the D.A. Know they’re more likely to hire a ex-cop investigator, but what the hell. And pay yourself another dollar an hour.”
Her lips formed a straight line. “Appreciate it, I do, but—”
He contemplated her. “You don’t trust me, do you, to carry that much? Couple hundred more a month.”
She broke eye contact, rested her head on the palm of her hand. Spoke downward to her desk.
“I don’t trust nobody, Tom. No offense.”
Phelan’s brow tightened further. In lieu of touching her, he tapped her desk, dislodging the little red dictionary on the edge of it. He caught it before it hit the floor, set it back. Murmured “No offense” and left for the bar.
XXXVI
COUPLE OF SALTY Dogs to the good, he ambled back to the office. Heat still rising from the concrete in this paved-over downtown, but a breeze played in a couple trees. Getting cool tonight, might dip to a few degrees under seventy. The ice had healed his knee as far as he could tell, and he was light-footed. A police detective in the bar with a girlfriend had recognized him, idled over to pull his coat about the bust at High Island. Mentioned that the Chief was happy as all get-out.
About to climb the stairs, Phelan startled at the sight of Elvis Presley’s wife standing on the top stair, stepping carefully down. She stopped and chirped, “You’re here!” Her colorful face lit up.
Mrs. Frank Sweeney?
Sure looked like Priscilla P.: glamorous eye makeup, that sweep of lofty dark hair, the minidress. Bare legs and high heels. A wave of earthy perfume swept him as she turned around and headed for his door. Phelan unlocked it for her, followed her in.
“Didn’t want your secretary to send a bill,” she said over her shoulder. “No need for any record of that, so I just came down here to settle up. Frank woulda blown through all that money, but I handle the checkbook. I got some left.”
Phelan meant to go behind his desk to the drawer with the deposit slips, but she was holding out a handful of cash, so he had to come and get it.
“You don’t keep it in the bank, Mrs. Sweeney?”
“Cheryl. Hell, no. I got coffee cans like everybody else.”
Phelan smiled. “What you driving now, Cheryl?”
“Plymouth Belvedere. ’66 push button. Looks like a ruler on wheels.” One corner of her pink lips pulled up.
“You can go visit the Mustang down at the impound lot. Guess Frank’s back working for his mother.”
She nodded. “And bitching about it. Listen, Tom, I wanted to apologize to your face for that jackass kicking you like that. After you brought him home free and clear. Your secretary, she gone for the day?”
“Yeah. It’s…” he checked his watch. “Six-ten. You almost missed me.”
She flung back her long, straight hair, shook her head so it fanned out before splashing onto her shoulder. “Well, you know…” Her take-charge voice softened uncharacteristically. “I wouldn’t wanna miss you.”
A chime dinged above Phelan’s left ear, softly audible, simultaneously visible in his mind’s eye as a silver exclamation point. The signal to stop and look at what was going down. No XL work shirt hiding the curves—a long-sleeved paisley number with a ruffle falling over each wrist and a hem that would ride up to her crank case if she sat down. This must be a standing-up kind of dress. It came to Phelan that Cheryl looked…glittery. Not just her frosted pink lipstick. Glimmers twinkled from her pink cheeks too and her eyelids. Stardust.
He diverted the topic from himself. “How’s your little man?”
“With his grandma tonight.”
“And Frank Sr.?”
“Out.”
Without turning away from him, Cheryl rea
ched behind herself and closed the door of his office.
“So y’all didn’t make up from your fight.” Phelan slid his hands in his pockets.
“It’s the kinda fight that keeps breaking out again, if you know what I mean.” Her prettily-painted brows and mouth contracted. “It’s not fair. It pisses me off. In the Bible it says ‘A virtuous wife is the crown of her husband.’ Tell me it isn’t a goddamn virtue to keep your husband out of jail.” She searched his gaze.
“What does the bible say about gratitude?”
“Says give thanks to the Lord. And I did that. But Frank’ll eat dirt before he admits any thanks are due to me. He’s most comfortable looking down on people.” A sly intention formed in the black-outlined eyes. She stepped forward, took hold of Phelan’s belt, and pulled his chest to hers. “You ’member we have an arrangement, me and Frank.”
“I do, and it’s none of my business.” Phelan detached her hand from his belt.
She slipped her hand away from his, twined her arm around his neck, went up on her tiptoes and kissed him with great warm soft wet enthusiasm. It had been a while since Phelan had had any touch, and despite his opinion of her (enterprising, married) and her husband (dog shit), Cheryl’s pliable mouth drew like a surge from him. Heart-shaped face. Cascade of dark hair down her back. But the chime had sounded. And the chime knew. What was in front of him was a clear and present treat followed by a comet’s-tail of trouble. He pulled back. She tilted her head and kissed his neck, breathed in his mouth, and, at the same time, fit her left hand to him.
Aw, man.
His response was instant and solid. His hand slid under the short dress where it did not come into contact with nylon or cotton. Just Cheryl Sweeney. She moaned and dragged them both against the door. He muttered, “On the pill?”
“Close enough.”
“Nah, huh uh.” Phelan straightened.
“OK! IUD.” She stepped to him and delicately licked the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. “One of those copper things that—”
“Got it. But you wanna be all carried away, listen…” he shook his head, “not gonna happen. Hold on.” Phelan disengaged, went over to the desk and pulled out the generally unused middle drawer, reached to the back, returned, peeling open the foil.