by Lisa Sandlin
“Fourteen.”
Phelan quelled the whistle welling up. That let out check kiting, forgery, embezzling from the till, and dope. He was about to ask her the delicate when she handed it to him on a foil tray. “Voluntary manslaughter.”
“And you did fourteen?”
“He was very dead, Mr. Phelan.”
His brain shoved: the picture fell into the slot. Phelan’d been a teenager, jazzed by blood-slinging, and reporters had loved the story. Underage waitress in a bayou dive, waiting for the owner to collect the take. Alone. Two guys thrown out earlier came back. Father and son, that was the kicker. The son had beat her, raped her, cut on her. But surprise. Somehow the knife had changed hands. The father had got slashed and son punctured. When the owner’s headlights showed, the father abandoned his son and peeled out in their car. Delpha Wade had not let nature take its course. She finished off Junior on the pine dance floor.
The Gatesville certificate was being fit into a stamped-leather purse, prison-made, durable and fashion-free. She gathered her feet under her. But didn’t stand up. Those eyes got to him. No hope, no despair. Just a storm cloud back on the blue horizon.
The outer door tapped. A hesitant tap, like a mouse was out there. “’Scuse me,” Phelan said and stood. His chair flopped its wooden seat upward like its next occupant would arrive in it via the ceiling. He wrenched it up. The seat surrendered again. “Gotta fix that,” he muttered.
When he looked up, he saw Delpha Wade’s straight back, walking out. Funny, he’d had the distinct impression she wouldn’t fold so easy.
“Forgot your purse, Miss Wade.”
“No, I didn’t.” She shut the door between their offices—or rather, the door between his office and whoever got the secretary job’s office—quietly. He heard “Good morning, ma’am. Do you have an appointment to see Mr. Phelan?” Her dry voice was smooth as a Yale lock.
I’ll be damned. Phelan tipped the chair’s seat into loading position and sat in it, like a boss should.
Mumbling. “May I ask what your visit is in reference to?”
More mumbling, a lot of it. Then—Phelan hated this sound—sobbing. Not that he hadn’t prepared for it. He’d bought a box of tissues at the dimestore for the brokenhearted wives. Stashed it in the desk’s bottom drawer next to the husbands’ fifth of Kentucky. Had his .38 in a drawer, its license in his wallet, P.I. license on the wall, new-minted business cards. An ex-con impersonating a secretary.
Delpha Wade entered, closing the door behind her. “Can you see a client now, Mr. Phelan?”
“Bring her on.” Despite the sobs, he was rooting for the Personnel Manager of one of the big refineries, Goodyear would do, who had a problem executive, thief or liar, and while she was here, she would see that new employees needed a pre-hire background check. Maybe the old ones too, say, couple thousand of them.
“You can go in now, Mrs. Toups.”
A bone-thin woman in yesterday’s makeup and rumpled shirtwaist took the doorway. Leatherette purse in her fists, little gold nameplate like a cashier’s pinned over her left breast. The two slashes between her eyebrows deepened. “You’re kinda young. I was looking for—”
“An old, retired cop?” Delpha Wade said. On “cop” her neutral voice bunched. “Mr. Phelan has a fresh point of view.”
What Mr. Phelan had was a fresh legal pad. He wielded a ballpoint over it. “Please, sit down, Mrs. Toups. Tell me what I can do for you.”
Delpha Wade scooped an elbow, tucked her into the client chair, at the same time saying, “Can I get you some coffee? Cream and sugar?”
Phelan furrowed his own brow, trying to grow some wrinkles. Coffee, he thought. What coffee?
“Take a Coke, if you got one.”
The inner door closed behind Delpha Wade. He heard the outer door shut too. His first client stammered into her troubles, Phelan’s ballpoint despoiled the virginal legal pad. The tissues stayed in their drawer. Caroleen Toups had her own hankie.
By the time his pretend-secretary returned with a dewy bottle of Coke, Phelan had the story. The Toups lived over on the north side, not far off Concord, nothing that could be called a neighborhood, more like one of a string of old wood houses individually hacked out of the woods. Her boy Ricky was into something, and she didn’t like it. He’d been skipping school. Running around all hours. Then last night Ricky had not come home.
Gently, Phelan asked, “Report that to the police?”
“Six o’clock this morning. They said boys run off all the time.”
Phelan silently agreed, having once waked on a New Orleans sidewalk, littered, lacquered, and sorry somebody’d pounded rebar through his forehead. “What does your husband think?”
“He passed last fall. Took a virus in his heart.” Her reddened eyes offered to share that grief with him, but Phelan bowed his head and went on.
“Does Ricky have a favorite item of clothing?”
“Some silly shoes that make him taller. And a ZZ Top T-shirt says Rio Grande Mud on it.”
“Would you know if those are gone from his room?”
“I would…Mr. Phelan.” Having managed to bestow on T. Phelan’s callow mug that title of respect, Mrs. Toups looked at him hopefully. “They’re not.”
“Have a piggy bank?”
She snapped the purse open and took out a roll, Andrew Jackson on top. “Till about midnight,” she said, “I read the Enterprise. That’s where I saw your ad. After midnight, I searched my son’s room with a fine-tooth comb. This was in a cigar box under his bed. Along with some baseball cards and twisty cigarettes. There’s three hundred and ten dollars here. Ricky’s in tenth grade, Mr. Phelan. He doesn’t have a job.”
The phone rang in the outer office, followed by the light click of the reconditioned Selectric. “You wouldn’t a brought a picture of him?”
Mrs. Toups dug into the leatherette, handed over a school photo. Fair and baby-faced, long-haired like a lot of kids these days. Grinning like he was saddled on a Christmas pony. Ricky Toups when he still had a daddy.
The mother’s tired eyes held a rising rim of water. “Why I wanted you to look old and tough—you find Ricky, scare him good. I can’t take anymore a this.”
Phelan was jolted by a gut feeling, a pact connecting him to that haggard mother. He hadn’t expected that. Was that a regular thing? Who knew.
“OK,” he said quickly. While Mrs. Toups sipped her Coke, he scrawled her address and phone number, then asked for an inventory of Ricky’s friends. Make that friend. He jotted the name of a neighbor girl, Georgia Watson. School? French High, Phelan’s own alma mater, an orange brick sprawl with a patchy football field. The legal pad was broken in now.
He wrote in her name on a standard contract and slid it toward her. He’d practiced the next part so he could spit it out without blinking. “Fee is seventy-five a day. Plus expenses.”
Nobody was blinking here. Mrs. Toups peeled off five Jacksons. “Could you start now?”
“First day’s crucial on a missing child case,” Phelan said, like he knew. “You’re at the top of the schedule.”
He guided Mrs. Toups through the outer office to the door. To his right, Delpha Wade sat behind the secretary’s desk, receiver tucked into her neck, typing. Typing what? And where had she got the paper?
“A Mrs. Lloyd Elliott would like to speak with you about a confidential matter. Says her husband’s an attorney.” Delpha Wade’s dry voice was hushed, and she rubbed her thumb and fingers together in the universal sign for money.
Mrs. Toups stuck her reddened face back in the door, a last plea on it. But at the sight of Phelan taking the phone, she ducked her head and left.
“Tom Phelan,” he said.
Local accent, bit of a throb in the speaker’s voice, odd. But direct. The woman on the phone told him she wanted her husband followed and why. She’d pay a retainer. Cash.
“That’ll work. I’ll get back to you very soon, ma’am. Please leave relevant details with my…wit
h Miss Wade. You can trust her.”
And don’t I hope that’s true, he thought, clattering down the stairs.
*
The band was playing when Phelan pulled up to French High School. God, did he remember this parking lot: clubhouse, theatre, and smoking lounge. He lit up for nostalgia’s sake.
A little shit-kicker perched on the trunk of a Mustang nudged back his Resistol. He had his boots on the bumper, one knee jack-hammering hard enough to shiver the car. Phelan offered him a smoke.
Haughtily, the kid produced some Bull and rolled his own. “Take a light.”
Phelan obliged. “You know Georgia Watson?”
“Out there. Georgia’s in Belles.” The boy lofted his chin toward the field that joined the parking lot.
“What about Ricky Toups?”
The kid tugged down the hat, blew out smoke. “Kinda old to be into weed, ain’t ya?”
“That why people come looking for Ricky?”
Marlboro-Man-in-training doused the homemade, stashed it behind his ear. Slid off the trunk and booked.
Phelan turned toward the field, where the band played a lazy version of “Grazing in the Grass.” The Buffalo Belles were high-kicking, locked shoulder to shoulder. Line of smiling faces, white, black, and café au lait, bouncing hair and breasts, hundred and twenty teenage legs, kicked up high. Fondly remembering a pair of those white boots hooked over his shoulders post-game, he strolled toward the rousing sight.
After their routine, the girls milled sideline while the band marched patterns. Phelan asked for Georgia and found her, said he wanted to talk.
This is who Ricky Toups thought hung the moon? Georgia Watson had an overloaded bra, all right, and cutoffs so short the hems of white pockets poked out like underwear. But she was a dish-faced girl with frizzled hair and cagey brown eyes. Braided gold chain tucked into the neck of a white T-shirt washed thin.
She steered him away from the knots of babbling girls. Her smile threw a murky light into the brown eyes. Black smudges beneath them from her gobbed eyelashes.
He introduced himself with a business card. “Ricky Toups’ mother asked me to check up on him. He got any new friends you know about?”
She jettisoned the smile, shrugged.
“C’mon, Georgia. Ricky thinks you’re his friend.”
She made a production of whispering. “Ricky was helping this guy with something, but I think that’s all over.”
“Something?”
“Something,” she hissed. She angled toward some girls frankly staring at her and Phelan and fluttered her fingers in a wave. Nobody waved back.
“This guy. Why’s Ricky not helping him anymore?”
Georgia shook her head, looking over Phelan’s shoulder like she was refusing somebody who wasn’t there. “Fun at first, then he turned irritable. Ricky’s gonna quit hanging out with him, even though that means—” Her trap shut.
“Giving up the green,” Phelan finished. His little finger flicked out the braided chain around the girl’s neck. Fancy G in 24-carat. “How long y’all had this irritable friend?”
The head shaking continued, like a tic now.
Phelan violated her personal space. “Name. And where the guy lives.”
The girl backed up. “I don’t know, some D name, Don or Darrell or something. Gotta go now.”
Phelan caught her arm. “Ricky didn’t come home last night.”
White showed around the brown eyes. She spit out a sentence, included her phone number when pressed, then jerked her arm away and ran back to the other girls on the sideline. They practiced dance steps in bunches, laughed, horsed around. Georgia stood apart biting her bottom lip, the little white square of his business card pinched in her fingers.
11:22. He drove back to the office, took the stairs two at a time. Delpha handed him Mrs. Lloyd Elliott’s details neatly typed on the back of a sheet of paper. He flipped the sheet over. Delpha Wade’s discharge from Gatesville: April 13, 1973. Five foot six, hundred and twenty pounds. Hair brown, eyes blue. 32. Voluntary manslaughter.
“Only paper around,” she said.
Phelan laid a ten on the desk. “Get some. Then see what’s up in the Toups’ neighborhood, say, the last three months. Thought this was a kid pushing weed for pocket money, but could be dirtier water.” He told her what Georgia Watson had given him: the D name, Don or Darrell, and that Ricky brought other boys over to the guy’s house to party. “I’m guessing Georgia might’ve pitched in with that.”
Delpha met his eyes for a second. Then, without comment, she flipped through the phone book while he went to his office, got the .38 out of a drawer and loaded it. He glanced out the window. Calinda Blanchard, the New Rosemont’s proprietress, rag in hand, shooting the glass part of the door with Windex.
When he came out, Delpha had the phone book open to the city map section. “Got a cross directory?” she asked.
Phelan went back and got it from his office. “Run through the—”
“Newspaper’s police blotter.”
“Right. Down at the—”
“Library,” she said. She left, both books hugged to her chest.
Just another girl off to school.
The parole office faced the police station. His buddy Joe Ford was in, but busy. Phelan helped himself to a couple glazed donuts from an open box. Early lunch. Joe read from a manila file to one guy Phelan was related to and another he recognized on sight. That one took notes on a little spiral pad. Phelan, toting the long legal pad, realized he should have one of the little spirals. Neater, slipped in a jacket pocket. More professional. Joe closed the folder and kept on talking. One guy gave a low whistle, the other laughed.
Joe stood up, did a double-take. “Hey, speak of the devil. Tommy, come on down.”
Phelan shook hands with Fred Abels, detective. Stuck his hand out to the other, but the man bear-hugged him. “Hey, Uncle E.E.,” Phelan said.
E.E. boomed, “Bougre, t’es fou ouais toi! T’as engage un prisonnier.” Which meant Phelan was crazy for hiring himself a convict. Abels, sporting a Burt Reynolds’ ’stache and burns, only not sexy, studied Phelan like he was a mud tire track lifted from a scene.
Who said he’d hired anybody?
Phelan zeroed in on Joe, who raised his eyebrows, pulled down his lips, shook his head to indicate the purity permeating his soul.
“OK.” Phelan set hands on his hips and broadened his stance. “All right. So my friend here appeals to my famous heart of gold. So I interview his girl. So she stuck some bad-doer. So what.”
“Minced that one, yeah. I worked that case.” E.E. wagged a finger. “I’m ona tell you, cher, lock up the letter opener.” He punched his nephew’s arm, nodded at Joe, and he and Abels ambled off, chortling.
“You loud mouth bastard,” Phelan said to Joe. “Give me the dopers and perverts north side of town.” Commandeering Joe’s chair, Phelan reeled off some street names.
“That’s confidential.”
“Could have my secretary call you.”
“Hand full a Gimme and a mouth full a Much obliged—that’s you.” Joe squinted, put-upon. “Not my territory, but old Parker lives in the can.” Joe stalked over to his co-worker Parker’s vacant desk, the messy one next to his clean one, and rambled through its file drawers.
Phelan phoned Tyrrell Public Library. He asked the librarian to get a Miss Wade, who’d be in the reference section, going through newspapers.
“This is not a bus station, sir. We don’t page people.”
Seemed like, Phelan thought while locating his desperately-polite-but-hurting voice, one bad crab always jumps in the gumbo. “I’m just as sorry as I can be, ma’am. But couldn’t you find my sister? We’re down the funeral home and our daddy’s lost his mind.”
Clunk. Receiver on desk. Joe was still pulling files.
Footsteps, then Delpha came on. “Hey, Bubba,” she said.
Phelan grinned.
She told him she’d call him back from a pay ph
one. “Call Joe’s,” he said.
In three minutes, Joe’s phone rang, and Delpha read out what she had so far. “Check this one from last night.” A Marvin Carter, 18, wandering down Delaware Street, apparent assault victim, transported to a hospital. Then, outside of husband-wife slug fests, thefts, one complaint of tap-dancing on the roof of a Dodge Duster, she’d found seven dope busts and a missing child report. She gave him names and addresses, phone numbers from the cross directory.
Joe set files on his desk, neatened them up, said “Vacate my chair, son.” Phelan ignored him, boring in on each mugshot as he scribbled names on his unprofessional legal pad.
One of the names was a Don Henry. Sprung from Huntsville two months back.
Some D name, Don or Darrell.
There you go. Cake.
No mud, no grease, no five-hundred-pound pipe, no lost body parts. Man, he should have split the rigs while he still had ten fingers.
2:01. He drove back to the office and hit the phone. Got a child at the Henry number, asked for its mother.
“She went the store. Git away, Dwight, I’m on the phone.” A wail from the background.
“Honey, your daddy there?”
The child scolded Dwight. Dwight was supposed to shut up while the child had dibs on the telephone. But Dwight wasn’t lying down. He was pitching a fit.
“Honey? Hey, kid!” Phelan hollered into the phone.
“Shut up, Dwight! I cain’t hear myself talk. They took Daddy back Satiddy.”
“Saturday? Back where?”
“Where he was. Is this Uncle Merle?” The child yelped. Now two wails mingled on the other end of the line.
A woman’s harsh voice barked into the phone, “Low down, Merle, pumping the kids. They pulled Don’s paper, OK? You happy now? Gonna say ‘I told you so’? You and Ma can kiss my ass.” The phone crashed down.
Saturday was six days ago. Frowning, Phelan X’d Don Henry. Next, mindful of the tender volunteers in pink smocks on the end of the line, he inquired feelingly for his cousin Marvin Carter. Baptist Hospital, strike. St. Elizabeth, long wait, transfer, and strike. Hotel Dieu, single to first.