He Was Her Man

by Sarah Shankman

  She said, just as sweetly as she could, “Excuse me,” which the young man hardly heard, he was off in toe-sniffing heaven, just like he’d done some kind of drug. She reached right over him and snapped open her glove compartment and pulled out her little .22 Jaguar Baretta, one of the perks of having been in law enforcement, and said, “Son, I’m gonna give you about two seconds to drop that clodhopper and get the hell out of my vehicle. I’d run you on down to the department, get them boys to lock you up, but I’ve got serious business on my mind.”

  She’d say one thing for the young pervert. He knew how to move.

  13

  YOU KNOW THAT expression, that dog won’t hunt? Bill Clinton used it in a speech up in New York during the Democratic Convention, and the Yankees said, What’s he mean? As if they wouldn’t know, they gave it a minute’s thought. Anyway, Pearl was the opposite of that dog. Hunting was what she wouldn’t stop. When they got to the city limits, that long stretch of strip shopping centers, Jack in the Boxes, and gas stations that have mushroomed at the edge of every American town, Sam was afraid the hound was going to be run over in traffic, so she got out and ran along behind her. Bobby brought up the rear, slumped down in the BMW and wearing a baseball cap he hoped would keep him incognito and out of the clutches of the Hot Springs P.D. Even though she did her share of exercise classes and fast-walking, Sam thought she was going to roll over and die by the time they came to the old part of town.

  Hot Springs had begun as a single row of buildings on either side of a creek that flowed through the narrow mountain valley. Now that creek was Central Avenue, and the buildings on one side were the eight phantasmagorical bathhouses built in the twenties; on the other stood a row of 19th-century structures now housing art galleries, candy shops, stores that sold tourist bric-a-brac. On both sides of the street, the mountains sat right on backdoor steps.

  Pearl loped along the sidewalk, pausing to take a whiz at one of the five-globed cast iron lampposts in front of the bathhouses. A little girl wearing a Mountain Valley Water T-shirt called, Here, doggie, doggie, doggie, to Pearl from a wooden rocker on the Fordyce Bathhouse’s front porch. But the dog trudged on.

  She loped uphill past the Palace and Arlington hotels, both of which were snuggled in at Hot Springs Mountain’s feet, past dark green magnolias heavy with creamy blossoms that smelled of musk, sweet dreams, and chivalry long-dead. Just past the Arlington, Bobby tapped the horn, slowed down, and Sam rolled into the BMW’s cool leather upholstery like a batter sliding into home. Her brain was gone. Her only thoughts for a good five minutes were, Breathe in, breathe out.

  Pearl, her pace steady as a metronome, climbed on out the north side of town, up a two-lane mountain road past a pottery, a flea market, rock shops, billboards for crystal mines where you could hunt for your own, past stone mansions and falling-down shacks and mobile homes, headed on up toward Hot Springs Village, where snowbirds perched in condos, and finally turned off at Mountain Valley, where the bottled water came from. Pearl went right on humping through mile after mile of Weyerhauser pine forests posted with little signs that said when the new trees had been planted. Bobby was hunkered down behind the wheel, looking more worried by the minute. Sam agreed, this was looking bad. What would Olive be doing way up here on this lonely mountain road broken by only an occasional mailbox? Nothing good. Sam shook her head.

  Finally they came to the edge of Lake Ouachita, as serene a blue lake as you’d ever hope to see. Sam was entertaining visions of stripping off her sweaty clothes and jumping in for a dip, when Pearl nosed up a little gravel road and stopped.

  She sat down in the middle of the road, her big neat head turning this way and that, her pale eyes mournful. Then she lumbered up and switched back and forth in circles.

  They got out, and Bobby patted her on the head. “Which way, girl? What’s the matter? You came all this way and got lost?”

  Pearl’s pink-brown nose checked the air, sniffed the ground, and then with fresh resolve she took off again, down the gravel road.

  When she came to a little clearing through brush and shrub, she snuffled into the base of a big pine tree that had a fresh raw cut low in its bark oozing resin. There Pearl took her stand and began to chop. “Yo yo yo yo,” she sang. “Hunuruhu hoo hoo hoo hoo.”

  Sam had gone coon-hunting once in north Alabama with Uncle George when she was a girl. It had been fun, following the bawling dogs through the woods, wearing the heavy boots and coveralls, smelling the bacon and wood smoke, listening to the men bragging and joking and telling tales. That is, until the moment she’d heard this very same sound, this chop on tree, and they’d come up on the dogs. The men had already said that the coon had run a good race, and once it was treed they’d pull their dogs off. But one man got carried away and shot the coon, which screamed as it tumbled into the dogs’ slobbering jaws. The shooting was a blessing, at least. But listening to Pearl chop, Sam again saw that coon ripped to bits of bloody fur and bones. She turned her head.

  “Hi,” said the pretty redhead in bright yellow running shorts who was standing there on the side of the road like a mirage. Except Sam knew she was real because she’d watched her fleece a man named Slim out of two hundred dollars in the Palace lobby the night before. “Did your car break down?” asked Mickey. “Do y’all need some help?”

  *

  Mickey stayed to watch Sam and Bobby, who’d introduced themselves, tromp all over the woods. They’d said they were looking for Bobby’s car, an old black-and-gold Ford Sunliner, that had disappeared.

  With Doc’s help, of course. Mickey knew that, and she knew the man had screwed up. He’d been getting reckless lately, not paying attention to details. And now, lookahere, they’re being tailed by a dog. The very dog that belonged to the woman they’d run a game on the afternoon before, and for what? She’d asked Doc about the take, he’d just grunted and opened another beer.

  He was losing it. And this boozing was definitely getting on her nerves.

  “So what you’re saying is, you think this dog is tracking the car?” Mickey asked. “Isn’t that kind of weird, that the dog would track the car?”

  Bobby said, “There’s nothing weird, ma’am, when it comes to dogs. Why, I could tell you some stories, but then I bet you’ve read the same ones, things like dogs walking by themselves cross-country, like from Ohio to Montana, left accidentally at gas stations, rest stops. Dogs are wonderful creatures.”

  “Lots better than most people,” said Sam, thinking of Harpo, her little Shih Tzu whom she’d left back in New Orleans with Ma Elise, Kitty’s grandmother. Harpo, her ever-faithful true love, who thought she hung the moon. She was the center of his universe. And then she thought of Harry, and his wandering gaze. Good old Harry. The son of a bitch could call her for the next hundred years, she wasn’t talking to him.

  Mickey gave Sam a smile. She remembered Sam, of course, from the bar last night. Mickey always kept tabs on her audience, checking for cops—and prospective pigeons. Sometimes they’d be panting while they watched, they were so anxious to part with their money. This Sam wasn’t one of those. But Mickey had noted her, sitting alone, drinking bottled water. She hadn’t looked like a woman cruising, though there’d been something going on with the black man.

  “You think that car’s hiding off down there?” she called when they followed Pearl down into a little ravine. She followed. “You can see the tracks up by that pine. They’re faint, but don’t you think those are tracks?” But they didn’t lead anywhere from there. It was as if the car had been driven in, parked up against that pine tree with the fresh cut, like maybe the car had hit it, then pulled out.

  That seemed to be what Pearl thought, too. The dog came snuffling out of the ravine, circled around for a while, and then Mickey could see she was thinking about heading up the hill, up to the old stone house where the Sunliner had sat in the carport. That wouldn’t have been pretty.

  But then Pearl circled again, and whatever it was she was smelling, it see
med to be stronger going back the way she’d come. Though she stopped several times and looked back over her shoulder at the little clearing beneath the pine tree. Then up at Mickey. Like Mickey knew what the hell was going on.

  *

  That’s what Mickey’d asked Doc when she got up to the house. What exactly the hell is going on?

  Doc was sitting on a stool in the big yellow kitchen drinking a beer. He looked rested, wearing a baby blue shirt with his khakis and boots this morning. The truth was, Doc was a good-looking man, if you liked the dark, dangerous-looking type. He still had all his teeth and his hair—with only a little silver at the temples. But there were those long lines from his hawklike nose to the corners of his thin mouth that Mickey thought said something about his disposition—which was generally sour. Tall and sinewy, he was in good shape, for his age. His lanky body seemed to thrive on hot dogs, Cheez Whiz, cigarettes. Last night, when they’d run into Hot Springs, they’d stopped at a grocery store on the way. Mickey had bought two bags of vegetables and fruit, leaving behind the white bread so soft you could wad a whole slice up into something the size of a marble. Doc had stocked up on junk.

  He didn’t answer her question now. Instead, he asked one of his own. “Where’ve you been?” As if he couldn’t tell looking at her in her running things. “I thought we agreed we’d stay put. You could have bumped into somebody.”

  “I did.” Mickey smiled. “Ran into some very interesting people who were looking for an old black-and-gold Sunliner. They had a hound with them I’ve met before. Seems the hound is a very smart hound, tracked that car way over here from that convenience store where you picked it up. Hound thinks the Sunliner spent some time down the road up against a pine tree.”

  She didn’t add that the woman named Sam had caught her act with a mark from Texas in the lobby of the Palace the night before. Because she wasn’t supposed to have sat down. That wasn’t in their game plan.

  But for the first time in her whole professional career, Mickey had the jitters. Well, it wasn’t her usual routine, this kind of scam. It’d made her nervous, and she, who could lie with the best of them, stare down a boss gambler like a bull in a field, she’d gone all to pieces walking around the hotel until she’d spied the easy mark, Slim, near the piano bar. Running her game, an old standard even a baby could do, was like singing herself a lullaby. It had calmed her right down.

  But it had exposed her more, too. She knew that. On the other hand, Doc wasn’t exactly following the original plan himself. They weren’t supposed to be stopping to bag any convenience stores. And something had happened there he wasn’t telling her about. She knew that. She just hoped it wasn’t something serious that was going to bring them both down. Bring her down, that’s what she was really worried about. The hell with him.

  Mickey was concerned. She didn’t like the way things were going at all. As soon as this thing paid off, she was splitting for California. She’d had enough of Doc and his mysterioso routine. Besides, he was a mean drunk, and recently he was drunk more than he was sober. She didn’t need this. She had plenty of relatives who were drunks back in Savannah.

  “Oh, yeah?” said Doc. “The hound thinks the car hit a tree?”

  Mickey stared at him. He stared back. That was the thing about a man who’d been working the con as long as he had. You could wave a .38 in his face, he wouldn’t blink. He’d made a life’s work out of lying, fooling people, holding that smile, that grin, that firm handshake, how do you do, my name’s Jim, Bill, Bob, Mac, Slick, let me tell you a little story—he never gave up a thing.

  Instead Doc cast another question out like it was a fancy fly on a line headed for a cool stream full of trout he’d spent the afternoon catching and releasing: “Hound say where the car is now?”

  14

  NOT FAR BACK down that mountain road, Pearl seemed to become discombobulated. Sam said, “Bobby, it looks like her nose is worn out. I think we ought to stop and put her in the car.”

  They did, and Pearl stretched out in the back seat and immediately began to snore.

  Then they took a shortcut Bobby remembered, and it wasn’t long before they were back at the Gas ’N Grub.

  “Maybe I ought to reconnoiter for a while,” Bobby said when they pulled up in Sam’s BMW. “I haven’t had any sleep for a while now. Think I’ll take me a little nap up at Mamaw’s house, then get cleaned up, start looking again.”

  And maybe take a little peek around the corner for Miss Cynthia Blackshears, the young woman he’d done two years’ time for, see if she’d changed her mind about speaking to him—that’s what Sam thought.

  She said, “I’ll leave you then, but let me use the phone before I go and see if Loydell came up with anything.” Loydell wasn’t home. “Well, I guess I ought to get on back to my friends.”

  Friend, singular, was what she hoped. As in Kitty alone, as in, please God, let Jinx be off rustling up the ransom money, or, better yet, talking to the cops. She wrote her room number on the back of her card and handed it to Bobby. “Let me hear from you later today, even if you haven’t turned up anything.”

  He said he would, and 15 minutes later Sam was standing in the Palace’s lobby staring at two messages.

  The first was a fax from Harry. Damn his eyes! She scanned down the long page to his signature at the bottom. Love, Harry, indeed. If he’d loved her, he would have given her more room. Or less. Oh, hell. She jammed the sheet, unread, in her jeans pocket.

  The second message was an invitation to join Kitty and Jinx for lunch at McClard’s Barbecue on Albert Pike Avenue, if she wasn’t too busy.

  Olive, Harry, and now Jinx—what she was was oh for three. But she’d never in her life passed on a pork sandwich.

  *

  Given her familiarity with Harry’s barbecue business, Sam could tell from the driveway that McClard’s was the real thing. It looked right, a sort of funky 1920s low squat stucco building, both its parking lots jammed with a mix of Cadillacs, Chevrolets, and pickup trucks. Eleven-thirty in the morning, there was a line of folks waiting out the door. And most importantly, the air was sweet with a mix of pig and pepper and hickory smoke.

  She peered through a big plate-glass window, and Kitty waved from a booth of red plastic, Formica, and fake wood.

  It smelled even better inside. Sliding into the booth, she said to the waitress in khakis and a maroon jersey, “A sliced pork sandwich with beans and slaw, Diet Dr Pepper, thank you, ma’am.” That taken care of, she could concentrate on visiting with Kitty. And Jinx, if she had to.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Kitty growled. She clearly didn’t feel as cute as she looked in her white slacks and the Elvis sweatshirt Sam had brought her back from Tupelo—where she and Harry had gone for a BBQ cook off, back in the good old days last year.

  “Sweetheart,” Sam said to her, “maybe you need to have another cup of coffee.” But Kitty didn’t let up with the steely glare. Sam raised both hands to the heavens. “Okay, you really want to know, I was out running with a young man and a dog. What can I say? I can’t seem to stay away from either one.”

  Flippant, she’d decided, was the right approach. They’d think she was joking, and she for sure didn’t want Jinx to know about Bobby Adair. The woman was perfectly capable of calling up the Hot Springs Police and turning him in for breaking parole, just to make Sam mad.

  She turned to the former Miss Hot Springs—who was done up in an hour’s worth of big hair and makeup, a microscopic black skirt, teetery high-heeled black pumps, black stockings, and a bright blue silk blouse that made the most of her considerable cleavage—and patted Jinx’s hand. “What have you done with your morning, sugar pie, other than get yourself all pretty?”

  Jinx didn’t say a word. She reached in the biggest black patent leather purse Sam had ever seen, pulled out a pair of movie-star sunglasses, and slapped them on. Then she turned back to her grilled cheese sandwich, which spoke volumes about her IQ, her taste, and her lack of qualification as
a human being, as far as Sam was concerned. Anyone who would order grilled cheese in a place that smelled this good ought to be put out of her misery.

  “I take it that you all did not have a very productive morning,” Sam offered.

  “No, we did not,” Kitty sighed. “Though God knows we tried.”

  “Well, do tell.”

  Kitty looked at Jinx, who was otherwise engaged, staring back at a large young man in the next booth who was wearing a gimme hat that said Peterbilt across the front. He’d had a forkful of chili spaghetti halfway to his mouth when he’d spotted Jinx and frozen.

  “I’d forgotten that she had that effect on men,” said Kitty. “You should have seen the look on Jinx’s friend Bo we went to visit this morning—like a deer caught in the headlights.”

  “And who’s Bo?” asked Sam.

  “President of the Hot Springs Amalgamated Savings Bank.”

  “The bank’s open on Sunday?”

  “It is if your name is Jinx and you went to high school with Bo.”

  “I see.”

  “I imagine he had a lot more hair and a lot less gut back in high school, but that didn’t keep him from being hot to trot, I’ll tell you that. He couldn’t wait to get Miss Jinx into that big old private office of his.”

  At that Jinx turned and pulled the sunglasses down a tad on her perfect nose and said to Kitty, without stopping to breathe, “Bo begged me to go to the homecoming dance with him our senior year, but I didn’t. I already had a quarterback and a nose guard duking it out for the honor. Anyway, he’s called me at least once a year ever since then, no matter if I was married or not. He’s always been married, since he knocked that Darlynn Millsaps up his freshman year at U of A. But, anyway, I guess he’s still a little sweet on me. That’s why he was willing to do me a tiny little favor.”

  “Which was?” Sam asked, knowing, a bank, it had to have something to do with the ransom money, but she wanted to hear the straight poop from Jinx.