by Lisa Sandlin
She didn’t. He finished telling her about the Seawall, and then he asked her how a man might see her again.
“I’m a married woman,” she said. “I’ll always be a married woman.”
“Don’t mean you’re dead.”
“Near enough.” She looked at her nail polish and looked at him over it. “My husband, he’s an older gentleman.”
He took that in, meaning she didn’t think he was an older gentleman, though he clearly was, older anyway than her—at the same time he took in the ring, gold band, no rosette of sparklers on her finger. She didn’t much sound like she was from Oklahoma. Clip to her speech. But the important part was that red hair, the bangs spilling across her forehead, the sweep of it onto her shoulders, red red red, and that she didn’t walk off while he was talking.
“My husband is out of town until tomorrow. He’s closed his office while he’s gone.” She said this like she was just holding up her part of the conversation. Wasn’t even looking at him. Surprise drove back his shoulders. He’d heard liars report lines like this but none had ever been directed at him.
A cloud shifted, and the sun did its Bible pose, sending out separate, dazzling rays. That just made it all better.
She ruined it a little when she added that her husband sometimes changed his plans. That her husband carried a gun. He didn’t like how that sounded. But the rays lit her up, and in the glint from under her long black lashes—she sure had the eyelashes on her and those eyes—he caught her drift. This was play-like. This was a bored woman’s game. He heartened. “Don’t make a hill of beans to me,” he said.
She said she could see that. He was the kind of man who’d walk straight in the front door, not sneak in the back one. “You look like you can handle yourself.”
It was the sentiment the man had waited all his life to hear. He wanted her phone number, but she took his, writing it down on the inside of the Juicy Fruit wrapper. She smiled at him. She had just the one night alone. Maybe she’d call this evening, maybe she wouldn’t, she said. She couldn’t tell yet.
His gut clenched. He felt like somebody was giving him a Santy Claus present, then snatching it back before he had good hold of it. He wanted to say something smart but couldn’t think of the right thing, so he settled for holding his jaw tight. As she got up, she swept a hand behind her neck and flipped the red hair off her shoulders. Then she thanked him for the Coke. Sashayed to her car, a new white Chevrolet. Waved. He just watched her.
The man sat out on the porch as the day burned on, in a lawn chair surrounded by some zone repelling time and the store behind him, the bayou in front of him, the rotten old boats and their tinker-toy engines, always going haywire. He had a son who’d died and a wife who’d died, a daughter who didn’t talk to him, and two grandkids that didn’t talk at all.
A pretty woman had told him he was a man who could handle himself.
Wrote his telephone number on a gum wrapper.
Red hair. Eyes like bluebonnets.
XXXIX
THE AMBULANCE GUYS pounded the stairs, running up the gurney. They left it parked in order to surround Delpha with their medical attentions and careful voices. Not soon enough for Phelan, they lifted her onto it, said they’d be taking her to the closest hospital, Hotel Dieu, and he could ride along. Knowing he couldn’t, Phelan squeezed her hand, loathe to let it slip from his. Her eyes shut.
He’d stood back for the swarming homicide squad, handed over the book to some unfamiliar detectives and was quarantined on the plaid sofa until he’d answered the same questions five or six times. Once they said he could go for now, he gladly put distance between himself and what was left of Dennis Deeterman. He jogged past patrolmen holding off a Channel 4 news crew, whose microphone he batted aside.
Phelan took up residence in Hotel Dieu’s waiting room and played the scene in the office over and over. How it must have been for Delpha. How it could have gone. How it did go.
A kid popped a potato chip bag with a smack-bam, jerking Phelan’s head up. The kid’s mother seized the hair top of his head and yanked him, yelping, into the chair beside her. People wandered out rattling change in their pockets, wandered back in with candy and coffee.
Phelan got on the pay phone. Couldn’t reach E.E. at work, couldn’t reach him at home. Talked with Maryann until a banker-type behind him said, “Playing through, pal.” Phelan said goodbye, and the banker seized the receiver, dialed, ripped off his tie, and crammed it into a pocket. Snarled, “Get down here, you piece of shit, she’s hanging on just for you.” Slammed down the receiver and marched from the waiting room.
Families, singles, couples sitting there cast furrowed-brow glances toward the exiting banker. People looked at each other and then somewhere else.
Phelan sat back down again, but stood up any time a white coat appeared in the doorway searching out next of kin. He hunched forward, elbows on knees. Unwelcome pictures flooded. He should have been there, could have been there in the office instead of pigging out on goddamn nectarines. Can it, he told himself, you got cops down at your office wading in Dennis Deeterman’s venomous blood, which he will never ever use again. Only thing that matters now is Delpha pulling through.
Close to six o’clock, a slight, baby-faced doctor with Afro sticking out from his white cap gave Delpha Wade’s brother the news that his sister was out of surgery and expected to survive.
“Can I see her?”
“Not yet. She’s gone back to sleep again. Take it easy on the visiting for twenty-four hours.”
Phelan’s processing mechanism had a lag in it. “What?”
“Just a precautionary measure. Calm down, Mr.…” The surgeon consulted a clipboard. “Wade. Twenty-four hours of solid rest. Come and visit tomorrow evening.”
“But that sounds like there’s some doubt that she’ll—”
“No, no, she’ll recover just fine.”
“Swear.”
The doctor’s gaze tightened. His professional demeanor gave way to the man behind it: he had a chest without heft, but he hefted it. “Your sister was stabbed, Clyde. All kinds of bad come with a wound like that, physical and otherwise. You’re talking to the doctor that sewed her up, and I have assured you she will recover. You want another color doctor, I can send one out. And I’m a surgeon, not a sorcerer. Some winged monkeys fly through the window, carry her off, that’ll be out of my league.”
Phelan was waving both hands. “No offense, no offense, no offense, promise you. Just I’m kinda…I’m all…she’s not my sister.”
“Oh. Well, OK then, all you gotta do is believe me.” The young doc bummed a cigarette to take back to doctorland.
Phelan called the station. Fontenot crowed, “She got that tahyo, I tell you, that girl—”
“Self-defense. I wanna hear E.E. say nobody’s gonna arrest her or anything.”
“Alohrs pas, cooyon. Nobody’s touching that girl. Is the doctors fixing her up good?”
Phelan blew out his breath. “She’ll make it. Don’t you ever go home, Sergeant Fontenot?”
“De temps en temps. Feed the dog. You want the chief.”
“Yeah.”
The sergeant informed him that E.E., a Bobcat, twenty men with shovels, and a rig of lights had set up in the woods back of Deeterman’s white ranch house. They were there along with County and some State, and what they expected to find left E.E. in no frame of mind to be interrupted.
Phelan thanked him and hung up the phone. Located a name in the phone book, jotted the address and number. He lit a cigarette and went to blow out the match when a man with a cigarette clenched savagely in his teeth loomed in front of him. Phelan held still, lit up the banker, too. Burnt his finger, shit, and the phantom finger set up a commiserating howl.
He swung out of Hotel Dieu’s parking lot, wended his way through the downtown and back onto I-10 to HWY 69, leaving the freeway out by the LVNA canal. He passed the water-processing plant, paralleled the embankment that held back dark water. Found the
street and turned. Big lots in this neighborhood, an acre, acre and a half each, brick ranch houses set back, nice lawns, oaks, dogwoods, shrubs. Chemists could afford these places. Plant managers could afford them. Lawyers, company owners, they could afford better.
He pulled into a driveway with two cars. ’66 Ford Falcon with a primered fender. Last year’s Impala 4-door, white. For Sale sign planted in the yard. Wind had risen, blowing his hair into what felt like peaks. He raked it down. This time, if it was needed, he had the right card. Several of them, as a matter of fact.
A tall guy, longish hair, answered the doorbell. Young man, he noted on closer inspection, it was the graven expression that conveyed age.
“Good evening, sir. I’m Steve Russell. Real estate.” Phelan extended a card. “Would you be the owner?”
The young man automatically took the card, answered no, called, “Mom. Real estate guy.” He handed over the card to the woman who approached his shoulder, but he didn’t leave. Stood there, slightly in back of her.
The woman, dressed unseasonably in black slacks and a close-fitting black T-shirt pushed up at the elbows, glanced first at the card and then out at Phelan.
“Evening, ma’am. Like I was telling the young man, my name is Steven Russell. I see your house is for sale. You may be happy with your agent, but if you’re not, I’d like to offer my services. Is there anything else I might do for you, Mrs. Robbins?”
She hadn’t introduced herself, but any respectable real estate agent would have learned the owner’s name. He wanted to use her name, the real one.
Wouldn’t have known her in a million years.
A hundred, anyway. The dead, pale-brown hair she brushed back as she looked up was almost as short as a man’s, chopped pieces on the crown, shaggy in front of her ears. Glasses rested low on her nose, and—a feather swiped his spine—he was not looking into the leaky dull-brown he’d looked into at Leon’s. Nope, how’d she do that? Her face, thinner now, was dominated by her eyes, and they were blue as cobalt.
And alert—she knew him, all right. Soon as she spoke, it was a lock.
“We’re satisfied with the company we’ve engaged, Mr.… Russell, but I wouldn’t mind hearing what your firm offers. I’ll show you the grove around back. My husband designed and planted it.”
“I’d love to see it.”
“Mom, the realtor we have’s fine.”
“I’m sure he is,” Phelan said. “I only stopped by—”
“Excuse me,” the young man said extra-softly. He turned from Phelan to his mother. “Thought you needed to go over to Margaret’s, Mom.”
“I’ve got time to talk to this man for five minutes. It’s OK. Go on and finish packing.”
Mrs. Robbins led Phelan around the side of the house to the back yard. There was no yard. He found himself gazing on a fairy forest that stretched far back to a wooden fence. Red brick pathways, lit by glow-lights in the grass, wound under the trees—must be fifty of them: fruit, pines, hardwoods, drooping willow yonder, nearest to him the broad waxy leaves of a magnolia, blooming its candlelight white. Fireflies darted and flickered among the trunks. The dampness here was cooler, breathing, murmuring, swaying, full of contrasting, leafy scents.
“Most every kind of tree that grows well here and some that don’t. That one to the west side is a sequoia. Ten years old.” Tension squelched the pride in her voice. “What do you want?”
“I’m a simple man. Had a little spare time and wanted to meet the woman I’d worked for.”
“You met her.”
“Lloyd’s pictures worked out for you?”
“Yes, well enough, and I have no idea what you mean.” The large eyes held him fixed until he broke off the contact and inclined his head, studying the pattern of the brick.
“Assumed that. Your husband’s logbook—who ended up with it?”
“Margaret brought it to me as soon as it showed up again. Once the sale went through, the logbook couldn’t incriminate anyone. She knew I’d want it. Because it was Charlie’s work.”
“Plato Willis is having bad dreams about bacteria. Who got which kind, Mrs. Robbins, and did Wallace get any?”
“Persistence is your strong suit, Mr. Phelan.” She glanced at her watch. “You have more bacteria in your own mouth than there are people in the world.”
He wasn’t going to get any more. The breeze cut through his hair. Involuntarily he turned back for a last look at the grove. Found himself drawn to strolling into it, mosquitos be damned. Silly, given the circumstances, like he shouldn’t be here in the first place and in the second place, this woman wanted to forget she knew him. Retroactively. But look at all this—he took in the waving branches, orchestra of murmurs, cut-lace shadows, the tiny auras of light. Out of the rise of insect din, he distinguished a tree frog’s ek ek. Rain, maybe. Despite himself, he said, “Your husband, he was an amazing guy.”
The woman collapsed from the middle. Phelan lunged, but she was suddenly sitting tucked, forehead on her knees and arms squeezing round, contracted into a tight package. Her head moved rhythmically, lifting and falling onto her knees, an odd, silent version of beating your head against a wall.
He held back till he couldn’t, then he reached, and she allowed him to steady her upright. “I haven’t found anything else yet that accommodates these ghastly…moments.” She glanced back. “I have to go now. And so should you.”
The son was walking toward them. He called, “Hey, Nixon’s on TV swearing he never had a clue about Watergate.” He seemed to be taking a wary inventory of his mother. When he drew even with them, he laid a loose arm around her shoulder. Said, softly again, to Phelan, “Full up on realtors” and accompanied his mother back into their house.
XXXX
PHELAN LEFT THE Robbins’ and pulled up near the end of the traffic jam on Concord around the white ranch. If this was Pop the Whip, he’d have been the tail. He estimated they could have been working four, five hours already. Squad cars, unmarked, Highway Patrol, ambulance, a fire truck. News vans from all three local stations. The shabby house was illuminated to brilliance from the light rig set up behind it.
The rubberneckers, piled up craning behind the yellow tape, parted for a canine officer trotting by with a German shepherd. After introducing himself to a cop as E.E.’s nephew and as a private investigator on the case, Phelan persuaded the guy to ask E.E. if he could observe.
“Red Rover, Red Rover, you can’t come over,” said the cop when he came back. He took his place by the tape, stamping backward on the foot of a pushy onlooker.
“Hey,” the onlooker protested. “My tax dollars and all that.”
“Yeah and all that.” The cop didn’t turn around.
An hour. Two. Phelan milled around, picking up what he could. Mainly how many officers were there, little sniping between the cops and firemen. He passed the newswoman whose mic he’d batted away earlier. Her formerly sleek blonde hair had frizzed into a globe shape. She was positioning a compact mirror and dabbing the mascara smears beneath her eyes.
A middle-aged couple pushed up to the yellow tape and asked to be let through. The officers held them off. “But you don’t understand,” the woman said, her voice rising, “you don’t get it. That could be my kid back there.”
Everyone in hearing range oriented themselves toward the pair. The father was saying their son had been missing for two months, that he thought he’d run off, but—
The mother squeezed fists against her head. “He never ran away,” she said. “He never, never, never.”
The cop tried to convince them information would move through channels as quickly as possible. Home might be the best place to wait, he suggested. The woman ducked under the tape and squirmed past him. She ran.
“Shit,” said one cop, and both of them jogged after her.
After maybe ten yards the woman slowed, plodded on another clumsy stride and then stopped, on her own. Stood still, her hair flagging out, her skirt blown against her legs. The palms
of her hands met, flat, in front of her face, and then sank down to cover her mouth.
The breeze, with its scent tendrils from the dead, carried into the people gathered behind the crime tape. Jostling ceased, then talking broke out. A woman dragged her kids away.
The two cops bookended the mother and gently turned her around. The newswoman was already cornering the father when Phelan heard a loud crack-k-k that rumbled on for several seconds and then echoed away. A minute later, the fire truck pulled out. Phelan eyed his watch. 10:28.
“Where they going?” A boy jumped up and down to see as they hit the sirens and the flashing lights.
“Put the wet stuff on the hot stuff,” his dad said.
*
He left Deeterman’s ranch house, but knew he couldn’t settle down in his own place, so he drove out to Leon’s and landed on a bar stool.
Patty Peavey served him a freebie Pearl. “Your hair’s standing up, Tom. You look like that white rabbit late for a date. Jesus, smell like him too.”
Phelan lifted the longneck to his dry lips. Johnny Carson as Carnac the Magnificent was holding a piece of paper to his forehead when Channel 4 news broke in and went live to the scene of an explosion and fire.
“Would you look at them chop those windows. That fire’s just rolling out now!” Patty’s hands clutched Phelan’s shoulder seam. “What’s…what’s that nut trying to do to the firemen?”
Phelan took a long look. Little hairs at the back of his neck levitated. Dug a dollar tip from his wallet, poured the beer into a go-cup and slid into his car.
He jogged to the outskirts of the blaze, cordoned off by squad cars parked crossways. Phelan mixed with the watchers. The neighbor that called it in kept retelling the story. Another pointed out the berserk homeowner restrained in the back seat of a cop car. Phelan hung around the flames, the shooting water, and the falling debris until there was just smoke rising from black. Then he left and bugged the graveyard crew at the police station. Returned in the light of day to the ruined house. Couple chimneys. Clawfoot tub. Backtracked to the station. He dragged home around noon, took off his shoes, and fell backwards on the bed.