Memphis Luck

by Gerald Duff

  “What y’all blue knockers want?” Lo Lo said, backing up from the door, both hands held out to the side, clearly visible to both detectives.

  “Look at that, Sergeant Ragsdale,” Tyrone said. “I told you Lo Lo would know how to do. See how pretty he’s acting? He understands just how to stand when he’s talking to officers of the law.”

  “He’s had plenty of practice, what I think,” J.W. said. “I’d be surprised if he didn’t remember how to act, all them times he’s been bent over, having people feel of his ass. I bet you half of Memphis would know blindfolded it was Lo Lo the way his buns is been patted down and pawed over time and time again.”

  “I ain’t done nothing for y’all to come here in the middle of the night,” Lo Lo said. “I be trying to sleep. You ain’t got no paper on me. It ain’t none out there now.”

  “We don’t need no fucking papers when a man asks us to come inside his house, Lo Lo,” Tyrone said. “You did the polite and nice thing, said come on in, and we did.”

  “Here we are,” J.W. said, “right in the parlor of your house, and Lord God, ain’t it a sight? You never heard of picking things up off the floor and at least laying them on top of each other, so it looks like something’s been put somewhere and not just throwed at the wall and let stay where it hits? Damn, Lo Lo, that’s the first housekeeping trick you learn when you start living indoors. Read your ladies’ section of the Commercial Appeal and learn something. Shit, Lo Lo.”

  “I don’t prescribe to the newspaper,” Lo Lo Tedrick said, backing further into the room, his open hands still extended to the side. J.W. noted that Lo Lo stepped adroitly over the piles of clothing, pizza boxes, beer cans, used paper plates, DVD boxes and CD sleeves, and what looked like the innards of a fuel-injection system from a General Motors product, and he did so without a falter or a look down behind him.

  “Lo Lo,” J.W. said. “I see I owe you an apology, and I take back what I been saying about your housekeeping. You do know your layout here, because I see you ain’t falling down or catching your feet in any of this shit. You just happen to use a different organizing plan than most housekeepers do. But it is a plan here. I’m man enough to say I’m wrong when I see that I am.”

  “No,” Tyrone Walker said. “You’re wrong when you say you’re wrong, Sergeant Ragsdale. Lo Lo hadn’t got a plan here, no more than a house cat does when he’s using his litter box. He just knows by instinct where the shit’s buried, and he won’t step in it himself. Anybody else, it’s their tough fucking luck. Right, Lo Lo?”

  “Them two bitches back in yonder’s supposed to pick stuff up and wash around and all, but they too sorry to do it,” Lo Lo Tedrick said, gesturing over his shoulder toward a hall that led out of the front room. “I can’t do everything myself around here.”

  “Ain’t it the goddamn truth?” Tyrone said, shaking his head as though in deep sorrow. “You can’t get good bitches no more. All they want to do is lie up in the bed, watch TV, and snort blow all day. But what you going to do, right?”

  Lo Lo nodded, but didn’t say anything, beginning now to let his arms drop to his side.

  “Yeah,” J.W. said. “You can relax a little, Mr. Tedrick. We all see you’re used to doing just that very thing here in your den, and like Sergeant Walker said, we ain’t here for nothing more than a little talk.”

  “This won’t take no more than two minutes of your valuable time, Lo Lo,” Tyrone said. “Provided you give us just that little bit of information we need.”

  “I ain’t been doing nothing,” Lo Lo said. “Just trying to make a living and get my GED diploma done finished.”

  “Don’t get me started to laughing,” Tyrone said. “I ain’t got time for it, and we didn’t come here to Baby Street for the entertainment value you trying to give us. I want to ask you about a Bones Family claimer, get you to give us his name and location. That’s all we interested in, period.”

  “Listen here,” Lo Lo Tedrick said. “I don’t know nothing about no Bones Family business. I ain’t in that no more, see.”

  Stepping forward on his right foot and pivoting, Tyrone Walker backhanded Lo Lo across the face hard enough to rattle the windows in the living room of the house on Baby Street.

  “You can’t do that,” Lo Lo said, rubbing his face with both hands. “Goddamn.”

  “Don’t never say listen here to me, motherfucker,” Tyrone said. “Only one says that to me’s my wife, and she ain’t here.”

  Lo Lo blinked and backed up, this time upsetting a stack of something behind him.

  “See what you made Sergeant Walker do?” J.W. said. “Now you done ruined your own floorplan.”

  “The punk’s at Central High School,” Tyrone said, leaning forward as though a harness was fastened to his shoulders with its fibers strained to the breaking point as it held him. “His name is Antwan Harrell, and he’s running with a kid named Randall McNeill. He’s the one we looking for, McNeill.”

  “Antwan,” Lo Lo said. “Yeah, he Double Lunch’s brother, but I don’t care what he claim. He ain’t Bones.”

  “You know what I recommend?” J.W. said. “Not to be sticking my nose in here between y’all, but I think if you got word to Antwan to give us a call when the sun comes up this morning, let us know where Randall McNeill might happen to be, why, hell we’d just go on about our business. Wouldn’t we, Sergeant Walker?”

  Tyrone said nothing but leaned a little stronger into the harness that nobody but him could see, his eyes fixed on Lo Lo’s face.

  “Damn, Mr. Officer,” Lo Lo said. “I ain’t done nothing to you. I’m just a working man trying to get his rest before he has to get up in the morning and be back out on the job.”

  “I believe,” J.W. said in a thoughtful tone, “that ain’t the way to try to play this thing, Lo Lo, with Sergeant Walker. See, he just naturally hates and despises having to listen to bullshit. It gives him some kind of indigestion or something. I don’t know exactly what it is, since I ain’t no medical doctor. But let me tell you what I’ve noticed over the years of observing him in the kind of condition you putting him into. He gets plumb dyspeptic. Rolaids nor Tums won’t touch it. What you say? You want my advice, or do you want me to go outside and wait in the car while y’all work on through this thing?”

  “No sir,” Lo Lo said, still rubbing the side of his face. “Don’t be going outside none. Y’all want me to get ahold of Antwan and see where Do Run Run is, right? And then let y’all know asap.”

  “Do Run Run?” J.W. said. “Randall McNeill got him a street name, huh? He been broke yet?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Officer,” Lo Lo said. “When you say that about broke. But I’ll surely find out what Antwan knows about Do Run Run quick as I can.”

  “You standing there with that crooked little finger on your hand,” Tyrone Walker said, “and you’re trying to tell us you don’t know what getting broke means? You still lying and shucking and expecting us to believe your bullshit.”

  “Naw, naw,” Lo Lo said, lifting his left hand up as though for inspection by a government official at a border crossing in a hot climate. “I got this pinkie caught in a fan belt when I was working on my car. That’s what mess it up.”

  “Setting the timing, I suppose,” J.W. said. “It was misfiring and all, I reckon. And you’re a crack mechanic, right?”

  “Sergeant Ragsdale,” Tyrone said, “this asshole is lying to us again, and I will not stand for him to keep on acting like we as dumb as he is. I will not bear it.”

  “I understand,” J.W. said. “But I’ll tell you what. If we ain’t got the true word on Do Run Run by the time we start the morning shift at the Midtown station, I promise you we’ll catch up with Lo Lo before sundown and reason further with him. How about that?”

  “All right,” Tyrone said. “I got to get out of this house and draw me a breath of clean air or I don’t know what I might do. My lungs is about to bust from holding back.”

  “Y’all’s phone will be
ringing before nine o’clock,” Lo Lo Tedrick said. “I flat guarantee you I’m going to find out what Antwan knows about Do Run Run just as soon as I get my shoes on.”

  “Well,” J.W. said, winking at Lo Lo and putting out a hand gingerly toward his partner as though to coax him into a neutral corner, “I’ll take that as a promise, Lo Lo, and I’ll be sitting right by that phone waiting for it to ring.”

  Outside in the car, as Tyrone fired up the engine, he looked over at J.W. in the passenger seat and began to laugh.

  “That went pretty well, J.W., damn if it didn’t.”

  “You put on a hell of an act, Tyrone,” J.W. said. “You had me believing you for a minute or two there.”

  “I really don’t think I was acting,” Tyrone said, “and I know you don’t believe but half of what you literally see, J.W.”

  “I believe in the International House of Pancakes, for one thing,” J.W. said. “I’m a keeper of the carbohydrate faith. Let’s go eat.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Tyrone

  The telephone on Tyrone Walker’s desk blinked its light at him, and Tyrone looked at it as though it was announcing news that no man in his right mind would want to hear, not picking it up until it began to ring as well as blink.

  “Why’d you make it do that, Myra?” Tyrone said. “You didn’t need to set the dogs on me.”

  “If you’d pick up quicker or activate your voice mail to begin with, I wouldn’t have to let it ring, too, Sergeant Walker,” Myra said. “I ain’t the one designed the system. I just know how to make it do.”

  “It ain’t your job to do anything else, right? Is that what you telling me?”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” Myra said. “You got a call here.”

  “You just trying to drive me crazy, talking about your mouth, Myra,” Tyrone Walker said. “You know that’s cruel to a man, getting him all worked up.”

  “It’s some clerk two’s would give you up for sexual harassment, saying stuff like that to a woman in the work environment, Tyrone. You going to take this call or not?”

  “Yeah, anything to get my mind off what you just said. Put it through.”

  “Yo,” somebody said after a pause and a couple of electronic clicks and tones, “this here that homicide detective be named Tyrone Walker?”

  “Yo back at you, my brother,” Tyrone Walker said, dropping his voice into the lower range and rhythm often heard on the streets of South Memphis, North Memphis, Downtown Memphis, but definitely not East Memphis.

  “You talking to him. Who’s this on my phone?”

  “This Lo Lo, the man you and that cracker sergeant done talked to in the middle of the night.”

  “You could’ve fooled me, Lo Lo,” Tyrone said. “I thought it was Denzel Washington calling, wanting to play me in one of these here thriller movies. Now I’m all disappointed.”

  “Naw, it’s Lo Lo Tedrick, that’s who. Not who you just said.”

  “Don’t go putting yourself down now, Lo Lo. Denzel ain’t nothing up beside you, the way you sound on the phone. And I tell you what. I won’t even say a word to Sergeant Ragsdale about that name you just called him. Now what’s on your mind?”

  “I figure I do something for you, you do something for me.”

  “That’s the way it works sometimes, all right,” Tyrone said. “Long as you got something I want. What you got, Lo Lo?”

  “Well, er uh,” Lo Lo said. “First, what you got for me, Sergeant Walker, if I tell you something about a thing y’all been wanting to know yonder in the homicide place? That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Let me put it this way, Lo Lo,” Tyrone said. “I got stuff to do, so if you got something to tell me that’ll do me some good, I might forget where you stay. Maybe I won’t be seeing you on any more nice little visits, unless I just have to. Maybe I plumb forget how to get to Baby Street, I don’t know.”

  “All right, then. See, I’m trying to live a quiet life now, kick back, take care of my kids and all. Visit with my babies’s mamas. Smell the roses, you understand.”

  “Aw,” Tyrone said. “Ain’t that nice. But what you got for me, Lo Lo?”

  “That old lady that got done in her house on Montgomery, you know? I got a name for you.”

  “You talking about Mrs. Beulahdene Jackson now,” Tyrone said, beginning to write on the corner of a piece of paper on his desk. “I’m very interested in hearing a name from you, Lo Lo.”

  “The name I’m giving you ain’t Bones Family now,” Lo Lo Tedrick said. “Bones ain’t in this shit.”

  “I got you.”

  “Do Run Run,” Lo Lo said. “He ain’t Bones, remember, no matter what he been saying, but that’s the name I been give.”

  “Do Run Run? That’s Randall Eugene McNeill, right?” Tyrone said. “We been looking for that young scholar. His mama’s all worried to death about him.”

  “I know y’all are,” Lo Lo said. “You done told me that.”

  “All right, Lo Lo,” Tyrone Walker said. “I ain’t going to ask you where you come up with this name, if it’s the right one, you understand. I give you that much slack. I do appreciate your nice little call this morning.”

  “I ain’t said nothing to you,” Lo Lo said. “I ain’t on this phone.”

  “No, you sure ain’t,” Tyrone said. “And I won’t be coming out to Baby Street neither, if what you’re not on the phone to me about does give me some help. But if it don’t, you know, well shit, I just have to look in on old friends, see how they’re making out and all. Maybe meet the kids and all like that, you know.”

  “I’m gone,” Lo Lo Tedrick said and broke the connection.

  Tyrone Walker hung up the phone, looked at the wall across from his desk, the one lined with badly framed photographs of past award-winning officers in the Memphis Homicide Division, and then began to write on a new sheet of paper. Where was J.W. Ragsdale when you needed him, he asked himself, and then answered his own question. In the fucking Mississippi Delta, of course, wandering through his past with a barbecue sandwich in one hand and a strange woman in the other. I do predict and know that for a fact. I’ll give him a call on his cell phone, see if he can figure out which button to push to make it work.

  NINETEEN

  Tonto, Bob, Earl, and Coy

  The van was wrong. Bob Ferry kept saying that to anybody close enough to hear him, pointing out the wrongness of the color – a bright, almost luminous shade of green – the fact that the lettering on the sides, front, and back declared the plumbing business the van represented was located in Forrest City, Arkansas, but that the tag was Shelby County, Tennessee.

  “Who’s not going to remember that?” Bob Ferry said. “It’d take a blind man not to be able to remember this damn cartoon buggy and everybody in it.”

  “Who looks at a fucking van?” Earl Winston said. “I never do. I know that much for sure.”

  “I’ll tell you who looks at it,” Bob Ferry said. “The guard at the entrance gate, that’s who looks at it. The one who writes down the name of every service vehicle that goes into the Nathan B. Forrest Estates, that’s who I’m talking about.”

  “That’s his job,” Earl Winston said. “That’s why the guard does it. He don’t give a shit about what color it is.”

  “Of course it’s his job. Who’s arguing about that? And look,” Bob Ferry said, pointing to the purple lettering against the green background, “see where it’s from? Forrest City, Arkansas, and you think that not’s going to be a little extra attention-getter for the guard sitting in the booth of the Nathan B. Forrest Estates?”

  “The guard’s a Mexican,” Earl Winston said, “the time of day we’re going in there.”

  “So fucking what?” Bob Ferry said.

  “They used to bright colors and weird-looking shit, Mexicans is. He ain’t going to notice nothing. You ever look at the car a Mexican will drive?”

  “Racism is eating this country up,” Bob Ferry said. “It’s making every
body in it as dumb as a fence post.”

  “You throwing off on me, Buddy-Ro?” Earl Winston said, dropping his voice into the gravelly range. “You looking to get messed up?”

  “All right,” Tonto Batiste said. “Cut out this crap. Bob’s right about the Forrest City sign. We’ll put some duct tape on top of that wherever it is on the van. There ain’t no reason to ask people to notice stuff.”

  “That’s better,” Bob Ferry said. “That’s the point I’m trying to make. You’re reading it right.”

  “But,” Tonto went on, “we ain’t going to be using the damn van long enough to count for much anyway. Now are we?”

  “Not long, no,” Bob Ferry said. “But I just like to be careful. Details are important. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Duct tape is good for just about every thing,” Coy Bridges said. “They give rolls of it to astronauts when they go up in space. To make repairs and all that shit.”

  “Let me ask one question more,” Bob Ferry said. “Then I’ll give up. Where’d you get the van, Earl?”

  “At the van getting place, that’s where I got it.”

  “Tell us where you got the fucking van, Earl,” Tonto Batiste said. “And let’s get this goddamn thing going.”

  “I got it where you get a plumber’s van at night,” Earl Winston said. “Parking lot of a titty bar on Winchester, while the old boy from Arkansas driving it was inside getting his rocks off. That’s where.”

  “That‘s the first thing that makes sense I’ve heard today,” Bob Ferry said. “That makes me feel better. At least you didn’t drive to Forrest City, Arkansas, and pick it out special.”

  “What they say about duct tape was that it was discovered by this old boy that never made dime one off of it,” Coy Bridges said. “He got fucked over by the corporate world. Them suits.”

  “Do tell,” Tonto Batiste said. “All right, I’m driving, Coy’s in the passenger seat, Bob and Earl in the back out of sight. When do we get started?”

  “Any time we want to now,” Bob Ferry said. “It’s after two o’clock, and that’s when Fulgencia says he’s in there by himself every day of the week.”