“I think I’m going over to the school.”
“It’s all closed up, you know.”
“I know. But I just kind of …”
“… Sentimental journey.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “Come back by here on your way out of town.”
“Sonny?”
“Yes, hon?”
“Were you expecting me?”
“In what way?” Her eyelids fluttered a little.
“In a way that would make you tell me about Jersey Jakes, or the way you brought up Denny Martin. It was all just a little too much like a setup.”
“Oh.” She blinked her eyes. “It’s a setup all right.” She leveled a solid stare my way. “You’ve got no idea how much money some people have.”
Trying to keep up in the non-sequitur department, I said calmly, “So speaking of which: Tell me a little something about this Ronnard Raay.”
She settled back, closed her eyes tighter — as if she were seeing the vision she was recounting to me in her mind’s eye.
*
R. R. Higgins was a Macon boy. Macon was the home of Wesleyan College for Women — now simply Wesleyan College. Macon was also the home of Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers. And Macon was the home of Machine-Gun Ronnie Thompson, a certain archetype of southern mayors: white face, red neck, black gun. If you were white and rich in Macon in a certain era of southern grandeur, you were like the petite royals of Europe in another grand older time.
His mother was from a fine old family. A hybrid azalea had been named for her. Her cotillion at the Piedmont Driving Club in Atlanta had been the talk of the town for a week when she turned eighteen. She worked, noblesse oblige, with wayward girls — the then-current euphemism for pregnant unwed teens — and helped found the ladies’ adjunct golfing society of the South’s finest country club.
When she married a Macon Coca-Cola executive, a new empire was born. And Ronnard Raay was born right into it.
Rich as a Rockefeller, good-looking as a Kennedy, smooth as a julep — and just as covert. You drink a mint julep, all you taste is the magnolia-sugar-isn’t-life-grand-here-on-Tara mint. You never even know about the bourbon, until it’s too late and you can’t walk because you don’t know what your feet are.
Ronn met Dally at a mixer. A gentleman always meets a lady at such a function, or in church. That’s it. And Dally wasn’t much of a churchgoer, so her only shot at finer society was a sorority party on a polka dots and moonbeams Saturday night.
The usual “May I have this dance” later, he was wining, dining, charming, farming — whatever it is you do if you’re that rich and that smooth. Dally dug it all the way down to the ground. Who wouldn’t?
Things were entirely apple-blossom time for a while there, but they turned about as bad as it gets in the end. And then I came home, and all was forgotten.
*
“That’s the short version,” Sonny concluded. “For the novel — talk to that Sally what’s-her-name. You know.”
“I know, her college roommate. We spoke briefly, but I’m planning to stop by her place on my way back to Atlanta.” I sat back. “So you’re saying this Ronnard Raay — he was something, then.”
She only nodded, staring at the vacant lot across the street where bugs and worms and microbes waxed biologic in their dance of decay.
16. Glossy Abelia
Sometimes you take a trip home to find something there, and end up finding something in yourself instead. Pine Heights Elementary School was almost as ruined as the rest of the town. The only thing that made the old brick building seem alive was the abelia out front. Abelia is a swell bit of shrubbery that has glossy leaves and little white flowers that smell like your childhood on a hot summer day.
The smell was something I’d taken in maybe a thousand times, staring out the window of the fifth grade classroom, thinking about getting away from everything in that humid little podunk. But standing there that morning, all I could think about was how much I missed that time, those days. The Buddha truly said: you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry. That’s Blind Boy Buddha — also from Macon.
As I stood there, maybe it was the abelia or maybe it was the heat — maybe it was even the influence of Sonny’s visions — but my own mind’s eye was activated — flooded with images of quasi-childhood.
*
Dally was running down the long, hot alley in back of the row of stores downtown. We were playing hide-and-seek. She tripped and cut her shin on a green piece of glass, Coke bottle I guess.
She sat in the dirt, rocking back and forth, squeezing her leg and whispering under her breath.
She didn’t see me come up behind her.
“What are you saying?”
She jumped. “Flap! Damn it.”
“Sorry. I thought you knew I was here. What were you saying?”
She looked down at the blood. “I was praying to God to make it stop bleeding.”
“Praying? I didn’t know you did that.”
“You don’t know everything about me.”
I glanced down at the cut. “Didn’t work.”
She looked up at me. “Uh-huh. It was going way worse before I started praying.”
“That’s not it. You just slowed down bleeding because your blood is clotting, is all.” I was blessed with a memory of our biology homework.
She steadied herself on my side and got to her feet. “What would you rather believe in, Flap? God or clots?”
I was still looking at her leg. The bleeding had all but stopped.
“Both,” I told her. “God is in the clots.”
*
At least that’s the way I remember it. We were a fairly precocious pair, but I may have let memory color the dialogue a little.
I nosed around the building, letting the feelings from a long time past wash around me, thinking I might get a boost of something from it.
The sun was nearly overhead before I realized that I had already gotten what I’d come for: Dally saying, “You don’t know everything about me.”
17. Mixer
It was around twelve-thirty when I arrived at Sally Arnold’s office at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. It said “Prof. Arnold/Poultry Science” on her door.
I’d called her from Sonny’s, after Sonny and I had exchanged a few throwaway scraps under the heading of “catching up.” Sonny’d already told me everything she was going to. She didn’t even say goodbye when I left.
I stood in Sally’s doorway. She was on the phone, brightened when she saw me, pointed to the only chair in the room.
“All right, Syd,” she was saying, “I’ll be there. Got to fly, now. Bye.”
She set the phone down and leaned forward. “Flap, it’s so good to see you.”
“You too, Sally. Lunch?”
She grinned. “I brought us some fried chicken — since you were bragging on it — and some livers, and some vegetables. We could eat right here.”
The office was as small as a closet, cluttered with years of books and dust and papers and boxes and snapshots and cards and memos and grade books and junk. There wasn’t a window. The light was fluorescent. It didn’t seem like the greatest place in the universe to have our repast, but I assumed Sally had her reasons.
The chicken was on plates wrapped in tinfoil. She’d kept it in a small fridge she had in her office so it was as chilly as it was heavenly. On the plate were also baked beans and yellow potato salad. She had silverware, cloth napkins, and a glass pitcher of iced tea. She’d thought about the meal.
I ate. She tried twice to start a conversation, and stopped herself in mid-thought. Finally, she found the right words.
“Flap,” she announced, “what goes on between you and Dally is none of my business.”
“Okay.” I finished the drumstick.
“What went on between Ronn and Dally,” she went on, “is none of your business.”
“Unless Ronn is the person responsible for leaving notes of a threatening nature
, not to mention packages of a gruesome sort, at her place.” I set the bone on the edge of the plate. “Then we’ve got concerns.”
“You think it’s him that’s doing something like that to Dally.” It wasn’t a question.
“I do. He’s trying to scare her. And I don’t know why. He’s trying to muscle her, and …” I trailed off.
“… and she don’t want your help. Or else you wouldn’t be down here running all over creation trying to find out something you think you should already know.” Sally sat back. “But don’t you think” — she lowered her voice — “that she might be just a little bit embarrassed about everything that went on between her and Ronn.”
“Embarrassed?” I put the plate on her desk. “What went on between them?”
As it turned out, I ended up being sorry I’d asked, because Sally told me.
*
I was away, Dally was in college, Sally was the roommate. Wesleyan College was sedate, but you can’t go to college without experimenting in things you never thought you’d do when you lived at home. Dally’s version of that experimentation involved a rich boy, common recreational drugs of the day, and the heaviest flirtations this side of Mae West.
Sally and Dally were in their room on the night that changed her life, folding laundry and avoiding book work.
“Damn that Flap,” she said to Sally. “He won’t call. He won’t write. He won’t tell anybody where he is.” She stopped in mid-fold. “What if he never comes back?”
“He’ll be back.” Sally finished her pillowcases.
“But what if he never comes back, I’m saying. Or what if he’s killed or something. What am I going to do then?”
“It sounds to me like you’ve got it bad for him.” Sally sat on her bed.
“I think I like him a whole lot better than he likes me.” She sat too.
Sally sighed. “Well, it’s like that sometimes. Me and Charlie’s lucky. We both have the same pull, I guess you’d say.” She patted Dally’s shoulder. “You sure you don’t want to go to this mixer tonight? Might be fun.”
“I don’t want to horn in on you and Charlie.”
“Shoot,” Sally said, “once you get there, you’ll have men buzzing around you like crazy, and me and Charlie can sneak off.” She blushed.
“I don’t know.”
*
An hour and a half later, Dally met Ronnard Raay Higgins. He was dressed to the nines, jazzing all the girls, shaking hands with all the boys, swilling martinis instead of beer, and making himself the focus of nearly every conversation.
When Dally came into the room, he shut up. She could have that effect — still can — and everyone noticed.
Sometimes there’s a visible electricity between two people. Everyone stayed out from between Dally and Ronn for fear of being electrocuted by it.
By the end of the evening, Ronn was saying things like, “when we go to Paris” and “our place in the mountains” and Dally was as bowled over as she could get.
Their dates went from weekly to nightly inside of a month, and since she still hadn’t gotten any of the letters I’d written, Dally had signed off on me.
*
“Even when Dally found out about Ronn’s drugs and all, she just kept right on.” Sally swallowed a little of her tea. “I think she liked it. Some girls, you know, are drawn to a little badness.” Another grin. “Why you think she takes to you so much?”
“I’m not bad,” I corrected, “I’m just wrong.”
“Anyway,” she continued, “Dally liked an occasional little bit of cocaine and she liked the romance of the rich-boy crime scene in a small town.” She took a serious sweep of my face. “Everybody likes to live dangerously once in a while. Isn’t that what you were doing in the service?”
I had no answer for that.
“The fact is, except for when they were really wasted, Ronn and Dally were a real fun couple. And I believe if you’d have met him under different circumstances, he might have been the type man you’d run with up there in Atlanta.”
I had to stop and think about the borderline-criminal element I often took for consorts. I didn’t want to agree with her, but she was probably right.
“The only thing he couldn’t stand was running out of money. When his folks cut him off, which they did every so often if he got real wild, he’d just do some bad deal again, and get a bundle to tide him over until he could talk his daddy into letting the money gate open.”
“His parents cut him off?”
“Every so often. He usually took it in stride. I’m sure he’s grown out of it by now, but sometimes it used to get to him. He could be kind of panicky if he thought he was going to run out.” She leaned back. “You know, me too. Everybody’s that way, I guess.”
“But you don’t deal coke when you get economically challenged, I’m guessing.”
“Shoot.” She laughed. “I got animal tranquilizers, what would I want with cocaine?”
The phone rang to punctuate her joke. She picked it up. After she listened for a second, she looked right at me. “Send him up, please.”
She hung up. “I was talking to my friend Syd Martin before, when you came in? I wanted her to do me a favor. She did. She sent her son over to talk to you.”
That’s all Sally would say. But when I saw who came to the door of her office, I understood what the favor had been.
“Officer Martin? I believe you know Mr. Tucker?”
The kid was standing in the frame of the door, but he looked like he’d rather be almost anywhere in the universe.
“So,” I said, standing up, “you are Denny Martin after all. I was just talking about you over in Invisible just this morning.”
He nodded curtly, once.
“You want to come in, hon?”
He stood firm in the doorway.
“So, Officer Martin, I understand you gave a speeding ticket to one Mr. Jakes a while back.” I saw no point in beating around the bush.
“I don’t have to tell you about that.” He saw no point in cooperating.
“You don’t,” I said, coming to stand in front of him like a drill instructor in front of a recruit. “So I’ll tell you about that. You were given money by a Mr. Higgins to mess with anybody who was down this way asking about him.” I was bluffing, and I was doing it boldly — but it wasn’t a stretch. “And then you were given more money to mess with me. You could go to jail today, see — because that’s what they call illegal.”
“Mr. Jakes was speeding …” he started lamely.
“… shut up,” I interrupted. “Everybody speeds on that road. And, by the way, everybody parks on Simpson. Look, you tell me what I want to know, or we go talk to your sheriff. I’m ready either way.”
He stared. I think he was having visions of how life would be in jail.
“It wasn’t Higgins who gave me the money.” He let out a breath. “But that’s who it came from.”
“Who actually handed it to you?”
“Some of his employees. I don’t know their whole names. One is called Chuckie.”
“Why did Higgins do this?”
He looked me in the eye for the first time. “I honestly wouldn’t know that, Mr. Tucker. Maybe he doesn’t like you.”
But I could see all the chinks in the kid’s armor. He was about to cry. His eyes were red and his chin shook a little. Let’s say you live in a double-wide and you’ve got twins who want to eat a whole lot more than you thought they would. A couple of extra dollars just for handing out traffic tickets doesn’t seem all that bad. But when you’re forced to look into yourself and see that you’ve betrayed something about your basic nature — that can seem like the crime of the century. And it was my guess that Denny Martin’s basic nature was kicking its own guts out. It only took me a second more to come to the conclusion that messing with a kid like that was much worse than hassling me or Jersey Jakes.
So all of a sudden I really wanted to talk to Ronnard Raay Higgins about so many things — in
the worst way.
18. Déjà Vu
Déjà vu isn’t such a bad thing. The eerie feeling is kind of nice in a metaphysically reassuring sort of way. It can say, “You’re on the right path. You’ve done this before. It’s good.” It’s comforting.
On the other hand, when you’ve driven all afternoon to get home, fallen asleep on your sofa, and then you get a hysterical phone call at three in the morning, and then you get up and get back in your car and drive as fast as you can through the hot air along Ponce — air that won’t have had a chance to cool down by the time the sun comes up the next morning — and you go to a deserted nightclub to help a friend open up a grizzly package just like you did a few nights previous, the feeling of déjà vu can seem more like a needle than a quilt. Or more like a run-on sentence, maybe.
The new lifeless hand crawled out of the wrapping when I cut the same old butcher paper. This time it was attached to an equally lifeless body, still sporting a golden wedding band at the other.
Dally caught her breath, then sat at a stool.
I looked up at her. “Is this why you called me?”
“Did I know there was a body in there? No.” Blink. “Was I worried about what was in there? Yes.”
See? Déjà vu.
“Have any notion of telling me where this one came from?” I searched the package.
“Flap.” She sounded like a zombie.
“I see.” I stopped looking and rubbed my eyes. “Same deal as before? You were alone, you heard the door?”
She nodded absently. That’s all.
I may have mentioned that I have three rules. I’ve already made it clear that, no matter what, if she calls, I come. One of the other rules has to do with respecting her silences. Which proved a tough rule that night, given everything.
“Okay.” I took in a deep breath. “So is it about time to call our old policeman friend Detective Huyne, now? A dead body is a little more of an event than an errant hand.” I looked down at the mess. “Or should I unwrap the rest and see who this is?”
I already had my vote in mind. Open first, call later. Detective Burnish Huyne was a can of worms. Now, I don’t mean to disparage the guy by calling him that — or to imply anything about going fishing with him either, for that matter. I only brought up the term to say that calling him at that time of the morning — what with him sweet on Dally and me put off from the sorry way that he sometimes liked to treat me — would bring with it some difficulty. I was certain Dally wasn’t in the mood to handle it right then.
Dead Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 5) Page 8