The Right Wrong Number: An Ed Earl Burch Novel

by Jim Nesbitt

  “We want you to track down Mr. Crowe and end his pain. We also want you to find out what happened to our goods. The coke and pearl got diverted, we think to Houston. We’ll tell you where to check. Four or five possibilities there. The jewels haven’t moved otherwise we’d of heard. He’s probably stashed ’em along with the money. He’s had help on this — find out who, whether it’s on this end, down at the border or in Houston. Could be some people we’re familiar with but maybe not.”

  The suit slipped an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “We want this done fast and at a distance from us. We don’t care how messy it gets long as it gets done. This here is a twenty percent down — the fee is a quarter mil plus a cut of what you recover. Say ten percent.”

  Louis puckered his mouth in a silent whistle, playing the hod-carrier overwhelmed by fat money. The Third Eye recorded the suit’s pleased reaction, the slight smile around the Dunhill that rode on his lip.

  “One other thing. Crowe’s wife. We don’t know if she’s in on this or not. Looks like he split and left her holding the bag on some other deals. People are leanin’ on her. And we hear she’s tryin’ to track him down. Could be bullshit though.”

  “She’s still in Houston, right?”

  “You got it.”

  “My first stop then. Familiar territory, guy.”

  “A bitch of a town. No class. Buncha rednecks who struck oil trying to buy culture. They got a Brennan’s there, though. Same folks as run Commander’s. Try it.”

  Louis pocketed the envelope and took a last swig of coffee. It was cold. So was the sweat that still caused his shirt to cling to his chest. He shook hands with the suit and left, stepping into the stinging rain of an afternoon thundershower. The clouds were black and purple, fresh-boiled from the Gulf, full of moisture that just added to the fetid humidity that wrapped itself around New Orleans, close and rancidly suffocating, like the breath of an old whore, a whore as ancient and alive as the city itself.

  EIGHT

  Years ago, when his homicide shield still had some of its shine and his coarse black hair wasn’t streaked with white, whenever the phone rang after midnight, Cider Jones knew one of three people would be on the other side of the line — his partner, drunk and whining about a lost love or sober and summoning him to duty; his ex-wife, hysterical about an alimony check that bounced or angry about a matrimonial offense committed years ago and brought up during therapy he was paying for; or some desk-bound stiff whose belly bulged the buttons of his uniform, telling him to go pull his partner out of a bar or go look at another fresh kill.

  If he had to drive out into the night to rescue his partner, he would work himself into a frothy rage that swept away the grogginess of sleep, his knuckles white and hard as a roll of quarters as he gripped the wheel, ready to yank Cortez out of whatever shit he had drunkenly stepped into — by the necktie, the collar or the first thing handy he could wrap his hand around — willing to slap the bejesus out of whoever was hassling the man who watched his back.

  If he was headed to another killing, the drive across town took forever and the knuckles were white with something other than anger. He dreaded going there and couldn’t get there fast enough, the same mix of fear and anticipation that filled him before the gridiron games that left both his knees scarred by the surgeon’s scalpel, giving him a lifelong hitch in his stride.

  Used to be, the victim would always be a male or a female — but that was no long a constant you could count on. Sometimes, it was a child, the toughest of all things to look at and still maintain a cop’s detachment. Not often though, not back then. Now was a different story — parents and babysitters and strangers and siblings snuffed children all the time.

  From there, the permutations multiplied, serpentining their way through the mind in set upon set, angle upon possible angle. But back in the days when he could always count on the identity of his after-midnight callers, these random and endless patterns of homicide seemed more orderly to him.

  The methods of death were many and varied and Cider learned them all; he registered their throw-weight, their specific gravity, their particular atomic composition and the terrible light they threw upon the capabilities of the human animal when it preyed upon another. The victims would be suffocated, garroted, shot, stabbed, strangled, gassed, gagged, chain-whipped, tire-ironed, electrocuted, splattered on the concrete from ten floors up, cleaved with an axe, clobbered with a baseball bat, sawed in disposable pieces, drowned in the pool or bathtub, hung from the closet clothes rack or any of the other creative ways one human being can find to end the life of another.

  Cider tallied the other distinguishing differences like an accountant making entries in a ledger — the age of the victim, his or her economic station and social status, the place of the kill and the accompanying degree of savagery or calm coldness, whether the walls were painted with blood or whether the victim looked peaceful and asleep, with only a trickle of blood from the mouth and small, neat holes in the forehead and the base of the skull to let you know this was someone who would never wake up from a professional’s quick and sure caress.

  There was the small, eye-catching detail that might mean everything or nothing. The hand turned up like a casual wave across a crowded lobby. The ripped fingernail with the tiny flecks of skin. The banana-yellow panties with the Chiquita logo. The thumb-shaped bruise on the throat. The half-eaten sandwich. The smear of blood from the anus or the vagina. The fat snake of milk that pooled across a kitchen floor in a lazy S past spatters of blood and a spilled bag of groceries — cantaloupes, a can of Community Coffee, a box of Rice Krispies, a twelve-pack of Charmin. An open bottle of The Macallan 12 that still stood upright in a living room looking like a freshly trashed playground for gorillas.

  That last one helped him catch a whore-snuffing roughneck from Morgan City. Man developed a sudden taste for single malt Scotch after one kill. Left the bottle. Left a partial print. Stupid move. Good eye for single malt, though.

  And then, there was the Big M — motive, a word bandied about on all the TV cop and courtroom shows. Which wasn’t much of a distinguishing variable at all, at least in Cider’s mind. Somebody wanted somebody else dead, a primal urge as old as the serpent and the garden. He saw it as a separate thing, an entity unto itself, something with its own power, logic and mobility, leaving its own pattern and signature. The rationale the killer attached to this ancient lust didn’t much matter to him — jealousy, greed, revenge or kicks — except as a marker on the path to a collar or an endlessly open file in his drawer.

  How a killer killed mattered more to Cider. Each individual had a murderous style, a deadly rhythm that kicked off the low, humming vibrations of his own internal tuning fork. Like a sodbuster seeking water with a divining rod, Cider trusted those vibes.

  He trusted something else as well — what the victims told him in wide-eyed death, what he saw as he squatted on his bootheels and gazed into a set of sightless lenses, searching for a shard of image, a sense of the horror of this life’s last moments or the utter unknowing surprise of having the plug yanked out violently, without warning or time to flinch or record a thought of what was happening.

  Sometimes, the eyes told him nothing. At other times, a great deal, silently passing him information that would rise from his innards as he worked a case, causing the tuning fork to vibrate at a faster frequency, clicking confusion into clear focus.

  It used to drive Cortez crazy. At the crime scene, he’d snicker or blow his breath in exasperation, like a stable nag anxious to head back to the barn and reluctant to clop another few yards up a well-worn trail. Over the ritual post-scene meal at an all-night Mex cafe off Westheimer, Cortez would sop up his huevos con chorizo with a corn tortilla and quiz him loudly, sweat from the hot sauce beading up on his bullet-shaped bald head.

  What the hell d’ya see in a pair of dead eyes, breed? What d’ya think they can tell ya that a forensics report can’t? You know, you keep up this Inj
un mystic shit and they’re gonna bounce you from the department on a psycho. They talk about you downtown all the time — fuckin’ Apache half-breed redneck motherfucker communin’ with his murder victims. Captain asked me about it the other day. What the fuck m’ I s’posed to say? Nah, he don’t do that Cap. He just cleans their teeth and straightens their collars so they’ll look good for the autopsy.

  Cider smiled at the memory of Cortez, his mouth stuffed, yellow-brown goop dripping from a gnawed tortilla and smearing his close-cropped mustache, nagging him, aiming for a rise and getting nothing but an arched eyebrow and a jet of cigarette smoke. He never corrected Cortez about his Indian heritage — his grandfather was a Comanche shaman, not Apache. Not that Cortez would know the difference. Nor did he ever tell his partner that another voice snickered and nagged, the voice of his long-dead redneck daddy, a roustabout from Wink, that rowdiest of West Texas oil towns. In his mind and in his dreams, he and daddy would argue back and forth about the value of communing with the dead, daddy punctuating his points with a dollop of tobacco juice from the cut plug he fed into his face. Or twisting a well-chewed King Edward on his lip.

  Too late to tell Cortez he had a confederate in his nagging. Too late to tell him anything — he was dead seven years, killed in the Hill Country near the mouth of the world’s sixth-largest bat cave by a psycho black hit man with an Uzi and a bad toupee. The same psycho planted three slugs in Cider’s chest and shoulder, smashing bone and giving him something besides his knees to gauge a coming change in the weather.

  A rogue pee-eye from Dallas, an ex-homicide cop named Burch, put a Third Eye in the psycho’s forehead with a Colt 1911, saving Cider and the state the trouble of having to track down and burn the killer. Up until the psycho showed up to ruin their day in a cave-side ambush, Cider, Cortez and four local deputies had been trailing Burch and a crazy blonde from Tennessee, chasing the two runaways because they were the main suspects in four murders.

  A real shithole of a case — everybody was a dirtbag, from Burch to the victims, including an old-line Dallas crime patron, a Houston lawyer who fronted for a gang of border narcos and a mahogany-bodied woman who was the main mama of the gang’s chieftain, a red-headed crazoid named T-Roy Bonafacio.

  Nobody got the Big Needle. Everybody wound up dead, even one of Burch’s ex-wives, brought along to talk Burch out of any stand off, killed at the cave by the psycho, along with Cortez and the four deputies. Everybody dead or long gone. Everybody except Cider and Burch, who was cleared by the Tennessee blonde before she disappeared.

  Cider wanted somebody to pay, either by his hand or the state’s, but couldn’t do anything from a hospital bed with holes in his chest and shoulder. And when he got out, there was only Burch, obviously a patsy in this game, not a player.

  No matter how loathsome and tempting a target Burch looked, pride wouldn’t let Cider drop the hammer on him no matter how much he wanted vengeance, no matter how much he wanted somebody’s head on a spike for his partner’s death, no matter how much he hated Burch for being alive when Cortez was dead. And that was all it boiled down to — Cider wanted payback; all he got was air, bad memories and an augmented ability to gauge changes in the weather with body parts.

  He swung his dark-brown LTD into a new condo complex off Post Oak Road, cruising past the open wrought-iron gate and the wall of freshly mortared brick, rolling toward the parked patrol cars with their flashing rack of lights and past the gawking residents in their shorts, nightgowns and other forms of hastily thrown-on garments. There was no pre-game mix of dread and anticipation, just the heavy weight of more of the same he had already seen too many times pressing down on his soul.

  Stepping out of his car, he saw a blue he recognized from his old patrol days — a guy named Horton, thicker, grayer and more weathered than he remembered but still possessing the good street cop’s ability to fight indifference and cynicism with the narrow professional’s pride in doing the job right and tolerating nothing slack. The crime scene was secure. The other blues were outside the yellow plastic police line. Nobody was inside the victim’s apartment, messing up the carpet with cigarette ash and boot mud, picking up ashtrays or framed pictures, pocketing cash or other loose valuables.

  “A real wall-painter, this one. Got blood spattered clear up to the ceiling in the bedroom. Blood tracks in the bathroom and the hallway, too.”

  “Got a make on the victim?”

  “Yeah. Arthur Lexington Yates. Male Caucasian. DOB 5/24/48. Five-nine. Two-fifty — that’s being kind. Fucker ain’t seen that weight since Nixon. Brown hair — what there is of it. Brown eyes. Beard.”

  “A citizen or a player?”

  “Carpet salesman by day. Player by night. Got a sheet longer than a roll of paper towels. Drug-related mostly. Some strong-arm work. A shitload of fencing beefs. A chop shop roust, looks like. Did trey-of-a-seven at Huntsville for one of the stolen properties.”

  “This wouldn’t be Hoghead Yates would it? One of Manny Ruiz’s crew?”

  “Glad to see you plainclothes fellas tryin’ to stay on top of things but we need to catch you up.”

  “Christ, ol’ Hoghead. Damn. I nailed him for stapling a grocer’s hand to a butcher block one time. Fucker walked when the grocer had a sudden crisis of faith in our legal system.”

  “He moved up in the world before he bought it. Word is he went from running Manny’s supply routes to doing the same for another outfit.”

  “How’d Manny like that?”

  “Not worth a shit but he couldn’t do much about it. Not without getting himself dead.”

  “By who — the other outfit? Who the fuck are they?”

  “Not sure but they got some juice. Enough to keep our late buddy out of Manny’s gunsights and themselves out of ours. Until now.”

  “Hmmm. Guess the Mexican standoff is over. Was Hog still running the same game — carpets and coke?”

  “Yeah, far as I know. Or carpets and horse. Whatever was sellin’. Getcha a good price on a nice shag in puke green and a brick of China white rolled up inside, how ’bout it?”

  Cider coughed up a dry laugh. Like a horse shying away from the starting gate, he wanted to stay with Horton and not go into that apartment.

  “M.E. here yet?”

  “Naw, she’s crosstown workin’ another 11-44.”

  “She?”

  “Yew bet. Lucille Bates. She of the big tits and big ass. Wish I could get her to ride my Johnson again.”

  Cider chuckled. He and Lucille played a few rounds of mattress roulette back in his younger days.

  “The crosstown look to be a 187?”

  Horton nodded.

  “Lucille will be a while. Might as well go in and take a peek. These the blues that took the call?”

  “Yeah, those two. Hill and Martinez. Kids. Pumpin’ iron all the time. Wearin’ them fuckin’ biker gloves. I hate that shit.”

  Horton dug a pouch of Red Man out of his back pocket.

  “You still chew?”

  “Naw. That stuff’s too stout for me anymore. Gave it up when I gave up softball. Gotta save my knees and gums for old age. I cheat every once in a while but only with the tamer stuff.”

  Horton nodded as he stuffed leaf into his jaw.

  “Tell Lucille to call me when she’s done here.”

  Horton nodded again, ducked his head to the right and shot a thick stream of brown into the curbside grass. Cider walked over to the two young blues. Both were linebacker big — bulging pecs, flaring lats, biceps like bocce balls, all stretching the fabric of crisply pressed uniforms. Both wore their hair in the modified brush cut favored by suburban metalheads, Hill’s blond, Martinez’s black. They had the rolling swagger of jocks and lifelong ironheads, free-weight addicts who thought the true path to exalted street cop status ran in the same direction as the ability to outmuscle and intimidate anybody, from the dirtbags to broken-down homicide lieutenants.

  They crowded close, leaning in as they answered his questions
in flat, uninterested tones, rolling their heads, flexing their arms and shoulders, hulking well inside his personal comfort zone but just short of truly getting in his face. He could smell Aramis riding over the musk of fresh sweat, Wrigley’s Spearmint skating on top of breath soured by coffee, onions and the copper penny-and-sweat sock scent dredged up from the lungs by a quick session of iron just before roll call.

  He quickly ran them through the traps. Call at zero-one-thirty-two. Complaint about loud music from a unit at the back of the complex. Party out of hand, the caller said, a resident named Deterling, William J., 204 Bayou Laplace Court.

  Hill took the call. Rolled up at zero-one-forty-three. Heard the music well before he got to the rear of the complex. Lights on, windows open on the only occupied condo in the unit, the last one built in the complex. Second-floor residence. Saw nobody on the balcony or moving across the windows. Saw no crowd of cars that would indicate a party going on.

  Called for backup. Martinez answered. Rolled up at zero-one-fifty-four.

  Hill took the lead. Martinez covered. Cider could see them, combat-flexed, pistols drawn, hoping for some action. Covered the four rooms and the balcony. Noted the body. Couldn’t miss it — more than 300 pounds of blubber hanging by a web packing strap from a ceiling beam.

  Checked for signs of life. None. Secured the premises and called for a supervisor — Horton. Zero-two-eighteen.

  Always a line to walk here. You want the main picture but you also want to go in fresh and ready to let it all come to you, not primed to lean the wrong way by what another man just saw. Grab the barest details, the key stuff, the fleeting items that were gone by the time you got there but might have hung around for a blue to see, smell or feel. Jot ’em down. Get on in there. Filter out the opinions and the bustin’-for-detective slant that some blues always tried to trot out.