Paul nodded.
I reached for the letter opener.
He stopped me. “Hold it.” He reached across the desk and got the local news section of the paper that was strewn on one edge of his desk. He wrapped the thing in two sheets, and then handed it to me.
“I never got a chance,” he said quickly, “to check on the other prints. Like I said, I think they were men’s prints …”
“… right.” I stuffed the newspaper package into my pocket. “One set’s probably mine, because I picked it up …”
“… I really don’t want to know any more,” Paul told me, standing and holding up his hands, as if he could stop the sound of my words from going into his ears.
“Okay.” I stood. Paul was a good friend. He just didn’t want to know too much. Once you know too much, it’s not like you can un-know it, no matter how hard you try. It’s in there, in your brain, keeping you awake at night, making you distracted by its shadow in the sunlight.
I knew how he felt. That was my problem — why I hadn’t slept all that well. I knew too much.
50. Gnosis/Geleafa
Knowledge, or, from the Greek: gnosis — by which we mean the condition of knowing something with a familiarity gained by experience, is crap. You can accumulate facts at the rate of a thousand or even a million a day for eighty or ninety years of life, and the second you die, it all goes away. Into thin air. So what good is the accumulation of facts? Belief is so much more important than knowledge, it isn’t even funny. Belief is the light that imparts meaning to any phenomenon. Belief is the filter through which we interpret our own peculiar realities. Belief is the glue that puts a soul back together whenever knowledge shatters it.
And belief, from the Old English geleafa, is, ladies and gentlemen: a habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or some thing.
That person for me was Dalliance Oglethorpe. That thing was whatever was left between us. I’m certain I could have stated it better after a good night’s sleep and a fine meal at, say, Le Giverny — but that was the trend of my thinking as I left the campus of Georgia Tech and headed east toward Easy.
I just wanted to see her, to talk to her, to tell her that whatever had happened, it wasn’t as important as our getting back together. Nothing else mattered. When you have a passion for somebody or something, nothing else ought to matter. When you have a habit of mind, you have to exercise that habit. When you have confidence and trust in someone, you have to believe them.
So, as the nose of my car edged into the parking lot in front of Easy, I’d say I was prepared to believe just about anything.
But the fact is, Fate can be pretty unrelenting when it wants to be. Dalliance Oglethorpe was not on the premises — no one was. In fact, a quick glance at the old watch proved that it was barely past midmorning. Which only proved my theory: Early to bed and early to rise gets you exactly nowhere, don’t let anybody kid you. The early bird gets the worm, all right — but I have no taste for worms, and so I think I’ll just sleep late, thanks.
What happened next wasn’t pretty: I had time to think. Time-to-think almost always spells disaster.
I started off thinking about all the high old times Dalliance and Ronnard used to have — and that Dally had admitted to liking them. That particular wonderful trip ended in visions of Dally hopping across the street and popping her letter opener into Ronnard’s chest.
But once that calmed down, I actually began to ponder the events, and tried to arrange them in different ways, like some chess player thinking out new strategies.
I was sitting there thinking just like that, sweating in my car, when Hal’s truck pulled up into the space next to mine — not quite an hour later.
“Kind of early for you, partner.”
I started rolling up the windows. “Yeah, it looks like it, but the fact is, this is actually the end of a long, late night.”
He looked at his watch. “I guess this would be a pretty late night if you hadn’t been to bed yet. Want some coffee?”
“That awful brown water you make? Not likely. I might finish off whatever’s left of my stash, though. Remember, it’s not morning for me, it’s just a very late night.”
“You’re drinking quite a bit in the daytime,” Hal said, locking his truck, “for you.”
“As fate would have it,” I explained, getting out of my car, “there’s been a whole lot more daytime to drink in — for me — lately.”
“I see.” He stood his ground and stared me down, leaning back against his truck with a toothpick in his mouth.
“I’m okay, Hal. But thanks for not asking.”
He shoved himself away from the fender and sauntered casually toward the front door.
The day was chigger-hot, cicadas and locusts chattering up the air. The heat from the asphalt in the parking lot was already serious enough to barbecue a rack of ribs, and the light was so bright it robbed color from the grass and weeds coming up through all the ruined parts of the pavement. Clouds seemed a medieval memory, and the sky was so seared by the sun that most of the blue had been leached.
I was glad for the relative dark of the bar, and the stale coolness of the air there.
Hal was merciful, and did not turn on the radio, as was his wont. Instead, he went right to my private place to look for my sustenance.
“Flap?” he called. “I’ve got to open something new. All you’ve got right here is the Puy Blanquet — and you don’t want to waste that on a midmorning gulp.”
“You know what I say?” I went to the stool closest to him. “I say ‘the hell I don’t.’ Pour me up a significant amount.”
He turned, eyed me, but finally went along with my plan. Within three short breaths, he had popped the cork, filled a larger glass, and left the rest of the bottle dangerously close to my pouring hand. Then he proceeded to his work and left me alone.
I sat, continuing my thinking rampage. Around about the end of the second glass, things were lining up pretty well. That’s when someone pounded on the door. Hal had locked it behind us — maybe in an unconscious attempt to prevent any further deliveries.
“I’ll get it.” I threw myself off the stool and made it to the door. “Who is it?”
“Dan.”
I opened. He entered.
Dan’s single syllable salutation: “Hal.”
Hal smiled. “Danny. Late night for you too?”
“Hm?” Dan seemed preoccupied.
“Flap was just telling me …”
“Do you want some coffee?” I interrupted Hal to ask Dan.
“Coffee?” He seemed momentarily puzzled by the concept. “Okay.”
Hal poured without further comment.
Dan made it to the bar, took the coffee mug, and then motioned me toward a table, away from Hal and the bar. I swooped up my bottle, thinking, from his demeanor, that I might need fortification.
We sat.
“Paul was freaked.” Danny sipped his coffee. “Good coffee, Hal.”
Hal didn’t turn. “Some people like it.”
“Paul just doesn’t enjoy handling weapons.” I sipped my wine.
“Weapons? I guess that would explain his pique.” Dan looked into his cup. “We’ll have to discuss that further. But at the moment, I think you’ll get a laugh out of the reason why Chuckie and Rimshot were paying me a visit.”
“Yes,” I admitted, “I could use a good laugh.”
“They came by to apologize,” he said steadily, “and to say that their business was concluded. All was well.” He sipped coffee. “I told them that I thought things were far from well, and I had to know more about why they had originally wanted to bop me. So we sat and talked in my living room for a while, and here is the long and the short of it, as follows: Ronnard Raay Higgins was recently a bad man. He was in charge of a significant circle of drugs and money, and when things didn’t go his way, he could be plenty mean. For example, when some crooked cop named Tommy Acree down his way in south Georgia messed w
ith Ronnard just recently, Ronnard held Tommy’s left hand down on the hood of his own hot police car, hacked off the hand with a tree surgeon’s tool, slapped Tom in the face with it — the guy’s own hand. Then Ronnard laughed like it was a pretty good joke of some sort, and took the hand with him as he drove away — with Rimshot and Chuckie in the car.”
“Tommy Acree? That was his hand?” I couldn’t believe it. “I know him. He and his cousin Lowe Acree …”
“… there’s more,” Danny interrupted.
“I know. Ronn sent Dally the hand, with a wedding ring on it, to give some sort of ‘remember we’re still married, don’t mess with me’ kind of message …”
“… no,” Dan butted in again, “Flap. I mean, there’s more.”
I stopped my glass halfway to my lips. I saw the look on Dan’s face. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll bite. What more is there?”
“The reason Ronnard Raay was so desperate of late,” Dan told me slowly and very softly, “was because Mug Lewis was into him for a big chunk of money, but Ronn had lost his head — went and killed Mug before Mug could pay it back.”
Danny sipped his coffee then, and let the full impact of the information sink into my somewhat befuddled consciousness.
“Chuckie and Rimjob were working for Ronnard.” I finally set my glass down.
“Rimshot,” Dan corrected.
“Ronnard heard that you were asking questions about him,” I went on, “so he sent the boys up to convince you to lay off. He didn’t know who you were, but the last thing he needed was some guy nosing around. Especially when the first thing he needed was cash, and he was increasingly insistent with Dalliance concerning same. And I’m convinced he was interested in eliminating me too — although he mostly just sent me a threatening cop-gram …”
“But he also had to be very sensitive, of course,” Danny continued, “in light of the fact that this Tommy Acree joker — who was in the hospital in Tifton, very much alive, though unconscious from loss of blood — was on the mind of every policeman in the area. So he also didn’t want someone like you or me stirring up the local constabulary.”
“Actually,” I clued him in, “the cops — at least the Atlanta cops — already knew Ronn had Mug killed. This is all meshing like some weird gear work in a Rube Goldberg invention.”
“Nice bit of surreal imagery. I had a more Hieronymus Bosch feeling, but you know best.”
“I know zip,” I told him in no uncertain terms. “But the fact is, I also have news for you. The police think that Ronnard Raay Higgins killed himself.”
“You don’t get many suicides,” Dan added calmly, “who stab themselves in the heart these days.”
“No,” I agreed, “you don’t. But that’s just what the police believe, so there you are. There’s a note, they say …”
“… a suicide note?” Dan closed his eyes. “One of us should have known something about that.”
“And the coroner confirms that the guy stuck himself,” I finished. “Though how they determine a thing like that, I wouldn’t know.”
“Angle of entry, force of blow,” Danny told me, “stuff on the stiff’s hand, that kind of thing.”
“And how you would know all about that, I couldn’t say. But there you are.”
“Oh,” he said, finishing his coffee, “I’m a cornucopia of ghoulish information. It’s a hobby of mine.”
“So there really are ways to tell if a guy stabbed himself.” I grabbed another sip of wine.
“That’s right. If the coroner says it’s suicide, it very well could be.”
“Hm.” I reached into my breast pocket. “Then I may have done kind of a foolish thing.”
He watched as I drew the package out and laid it on the table between us.
“This,” I said, shoving it toward him an inch or so, “is what we were going to talk about further — in the weapons department — a moment ago.” I patted it. “This, I’m now willing to believe, is the object Ronn used to kill himself. It’s Dally’s letter opener. It’s not a murder weapon at all, as we discover. It is merely an important element of a suicide scene which I have incorrectly removed and messed with.”
“You believe this because that guy Paul did his voodoo and found Ronnard Raay’s guts or blood type on it.” He looked down at the package with exactly the same facial expression I’m sure I had when I saw the severed hand in a similar-sized bundle.
Then he very carefully unwrapped it completely, gazed at the thing for a moment, then picked up my bottle of wine, poured an ounce or so out onto the letter opener, and turned to Hal.
“Oops. Hal.” His calm was unearthly. “I spilled some of this wine. Fling me over a bar rag, would you?”
Without a word, Hal tossed a dirty towel through the air directly at Dan’s head. Dan caught it with one hand. He picked up the blade end of the object in question, turned it over, sopping it in wine. Then he lifted it, shook it off, and wiped it like he was polishing a magic lamp, hoping a genie would appear. He worked at this task for at least a full minute, then wrapped it back up in some of the dry newspaper.
“There,” he said finally. “Now it is not a weapon of any sort, nor a crime scene essential. It is simply an object that somehow got misplaced from Ms. Oglethorpe’s office — an object which you will now take and put back where it rightly belongs.”
51. Knowledge
I looked down at the package. “You know, I never even told you the funny thing about this particular inconsequential object.”
“There’s something funny about it?” He seemed curious, more so than amused.
“Yeah. I found it in Jersey’s room.”
He only took a second. “And not in the room of the person who supposedly killed himself with it. I get that. And may I say: Does that disturb the suicide concept or what?”
“Right,” I agreed. “There’s not much chance that Ronn stabbed himself, stumbled into Jersey’s room, left the thing …”
“… wrapped himself in brown paper, stumbled across the street, and then plopped himself down right over there.” Dan inclined his head in the direction of the place where Ronnard’s body had been dumped. “This is a little amusing, after all.”
“Jakes.” That’s all I had to say. I was charging headlong into my reassessment of Jersey’s personality — again.
“He could have killed Higgins.” Dan was nodding slowly. “Then delivered the body.”
“But why?” I was still thinking of how he and I had hit it off, finally, and how I’d even thought of taking him on as the occasional partner.
“Let’s pretend for a second that Jakes was not entirely on the square. What if he saw a chance to get a big bundle of money for himself.”
“What if Jakes was like a double agent.” I saw what Danny was getting at. “Working for Dally, working for himself — hell, maybe he even went to Higgins and said he’d been sent by Dally but he’d help Higgins for a cut of the dough. Huyne told me that the notes Dally’d been finding were written by two different people. What if one of them was Jakes?”
“See,” Dan said, finishing his coffee, “it’s actually easy to speak ill of the dead, as it turns out.”
“I’m currently in a position,” I explained, “to speak ill of my grandmother.”
“I didn’t know you had a grandmother. But of course the real reason you removed the item from the scene is that you thought it was possible — just like the cops did until they developed their hilarious suicide theory — that our Ms. Oglethorpe, as you sometimes refer to her, might have done something rash.”
“This is all very confusing to a person like me.” I leaned my weight forward on the table, eyeing what was left of the wine after Danny’s twisted attempt at sterilization.
“You’ve been drinking a lot in the daytime,” Danny said without a hint of chastisement. “Maybe it’s that.”
“Fifty million Frenchmen do it every day.” I reached for the bottle. “And they don’t seem that confused to me. As a nation.�
��
“However much I’d like to,” he began, “I won’t argue that point. Because your real problem is a crisis of faith.”
See, when you just blurt it out like that, it sounds kind of obvious and jejune. But that was one of Danny’s specialties: shoving the obvious in my face when I was more amused with the mysterious. Or the confusing.
“Dally thinks you killed Ronn.” He just kept on offering glaring observations. “And you think she did it. The facts now seem to support either suicide, assisted by Jakes, or murder by Jakes put up to look like suicide to take the heat off.”
“Or.” I tilted my head. “Could still have been Dally, and Jakes is more on the up and up than we’ve been saying for the moment, here. She stuck him, then got Jakes to clean up the mess. She called me in a panic so I’d be her alibi when the body showed up on the floor over there. She pretended to accuse me to throw me off.”
“Or.” Dan stared at the spot where the body had been. “Could have been you. You stabbed him, flung the murder weapon into Jakes’s room, dragged the body over here, plopped it …”
“… hustled home just in time to get a call from Dally …”
“… ran back down here …”
“… hold it.” I sat up. “Mug Lewis. He killed Jakes. Did I tell you that?”
“This is your speculation?”
“No.” I pushed my glass away. Clearheaded thinking was what I needed — at least for a second. “I know he did it. I was here with Ronnard’s body when Mug came busting in and then he popped Jakes. He claimed Jakes came up behind him and attacked, but there was no evidence of that — none that I could see on the body when I was at the morgue. Not that I’m a forensics expert …”
“… well.” Dan’s fingers started moving involuntarily. When he was really thinking hard, his fingers would act like they were playing his tenor, and start to do the Charlie Parker twitch. “Mug Lewis. Jesus. He could … he could have killed Higgins.”
Dead Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 5) Page 20