Rogues Page 13

  I kept hoping Marvin would have something for me so I could quit, but so far, nothing. I did have that week’s paycheck from the dog-food plant in my wallet, though.

  “What are you doing up?” I asked.

  “Worrying,” she said.

  I sat down at the table with her.

  “We have enough money, right?”

  “We got plenty for a change. It’s Tillie.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “It’s not like before,” Brett said. What she meant was a little of column A, a little of column B.

  Column A was where she got in with a biker club at the local poke and got hauled off to be a prostitute, partly on purpose, as it was her profession, and partly against her will because they didn’t plan to pay her. We had rescued her from that, me, Brett, and Leonard. She had then gone off and gotten into a series of domestic problems over in Tyler, but those were the sort of things Brett got her out of, or at least managed to avert catastrophe for a while. Every time Brett mentioned Tillie it meant she would be packing a bag, putting her job on hold, and going off for a few days to straighten some stupid thing out that never should have happened in the first place. Since she was Brett’s daughter, I tried to care about her. But she didn’t like me and I didn’t like her. But I did love Brett, so I tried to be supportive as possible, but Brett knew how I felt.

  “You have to go for a few days?” I asked.

  “May be more to it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “She’s missing.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time she took a powder for a while. You know how she is. Goes off without a word, comes back without one, unless she needs money or a tornado got the double-wide.”

  “It’s not all her fault.”

  “Brett, baby. Don’t give me the stuff about how you weren’t a good mother.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You were young yourself, and I don’t think you did all that bad. You had some circumstances, and you did what you could for her. She’s mostly a mess of her choosing.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you’re not convinced.”

  “It doesn’t matter. She’s my daughter.”

  “You got me there,” I said.

  “I got a call from a friend of hers. You don’t know her. Her name is Monica, and she’s all right. I think she’s got a better head on her shoulders than Tillie. I met her when I was there last. I think she’s been a pretty good guide for my girl. Fact is, I sort of thought Tillie was getting it together, and I’ve been keeping in touch with Monica about it. She called to say they were supposed to go to a movie, a girl’s night out. Only Tillie didn’t show. Didn’t call. And now it’s three days later. Monica said when she got over being mad, she got into being worried. Says the guy Tillie lives with, that he could be the problem. He used to run whores, and Tillie could easily fall back into that life. I mean … Well, there’s a bit of a drug problem with the guy, and Tillie, sometimes. He could have gotten tough with Tillie. He might be trying to make some money off of her, or he might have gotten into something bad and Tillie got dragged with him.”

  “Monica think he’s holding her at home?”

  “Maybe worse.”

  “I thought he was supposed to be all right.”

  “Me too,” she said. “But lately, not so much. At first, he was a kind of Prince Charming, an ex-druggie who was doing good, then all of a sudden he didn’t want her out of the house, didn’t want her contacting anyone. Didn’t want her seeing Monica. But Monica thinks its because he was choosing who he wanted Tillie to see.”

  “Prostitution,” I said.

  Brett nodded. “Yeah, it’s how those kind of guys play. Like they care about you, or they got some of the same problems they’re kicking, and the next thing Tillie knows she’s on the nose candy again and is selling her ass, and then pretty soon she’s not getting any money from the sell. He gets it all.”

  “The pimp gets it all, keeps her drugged, and keeps the money flowing in.”

  “Yeah,” Brett said. “Exactly. It’s happened to her before, and you know that, so—”

  “You’re thinking it could happen again.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I am.”

  “’Course it doesn’t matter, and it may not have been planned. He may have just fallen off the wagon and grabbed her as he fell. After he got the prize he wanted, he didn’t want to share it or show it around.”

  “He liked showing her around at first, all right,” Brett said. “He liked her to dress sexy, and then if anyone looked, he was mad. She was for him, and yet he wanted to parade her and not have anyone look at the parade. Later on, he wanted to bring people to the parade. Maybe when his drug habit got bad. I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want to know she’s safe.”

  “And you want me to check it out?”

  “I want us to check it out.”

  “Let me drive back to the dog-food plant and quit with prejudice first.”

  “Short notice,” Brett said.

  “I know,” I said. “But then so was this.”

  It felt odd going off to see about something like this without Leonard. I liked having him around in these kinds of circumstances. He helped strengthen my backbone. I liked to think I was already pretty firm in that area, but it never hurt to have your brother from another mother there to keep you feeling confident.

  Tillie lived just outside of Tyler, between there and Bullock, a little burg outside of the city. Tyler wasn’t up there with Dallas and Houston, but it was a big town, or small city, depending on how you liked your labels. A hundred thousand or so, with lots of traffic, illegal immigrants, and college students. The immigrants they liked to hire to get work done cheap, then use them for every scapegoat situation possible, forgetting they wouldn’t even be there to blame for what they did and for what they didn’t do, if they weren’t offered the jobs in the first place.

  When we got to Tillie’s house we found two cars in the carport. Brett said, “That’s Tillie’s and Robert’s car. Both cars are here.”

  I went over and knocked on the front door, but no one answered. It’s hard to explain, but sometimes you knock, you know someone’s inside, and other times it has a hollow feel, like you’re tapping on a sun-bleached skull, thinking a brain that isn’t inside of it anymore is going to wake up. And sometimes you’re just full of shit and whoever is inside is hiding. I remember my mother doing that from time to time when a bill collector came around. I always wondered if they knew we were inside, hiding out on paying the rent we hadn’t earned yet, but would pay, hiding out from paying a car payment, hoping they wouldn’t haul the car away.

  I went around back and knocked but got the same lack of response. I walked around the house with Brett and we looked in windows when there was a window to look in. Most were covered with blinds or curtains, but the kitchen window at the back had the curtains pulled back, and we could see inside by cupping our hands around our faces and pressing them against the glass. There was nothing to see, though.

  Finally we went back out to my car. We leaned on the hood.

  I said, “You want me to get inside?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I called the police yesterday, well, it was the sheriff’s department, but they wouldn’t do anything.”

  “Not twenty-four hours?” I said.

  “Actually, it has been. Over. But the thing is, they’ve dealt with her before.” I didn’t know all the details on that, but I figured as much. Tillie tended to get in trouble, run off from time to time, so they weren’t quick on using manpower to chase a sometime prostitute and drug user, and full-time pain in the ass.

  “Okay,” I said. “Going to make an executive decision. I’m going to break in.”

  There were houses around, but no activity, and I didn’t see anyone parting the curtains for a peak, so I got a lock-picking kit out of the glove box that I use with the agency from time to time, went around back, and got to it. I’m not that goo
d a lock picker, and to tell the truth, it’s seldom like on TV, least for me. It always take a while. This door was easy though, so it only took me about five minutes, and then me and Brett were inside.

  Brett called out. “Tillie. Robert. It’s Mom.”

  No one answered. Her words bounced off the wall.

  “Hang by the door,” I said.

  I went through the house, looked in all the rooms. There was no one handy, but in the living room a chair and a coffee table were turned over, some drink of some kind spilled on the floor and gone sticky, a broken glass nearby. I went back and told Brett what I had seen.

  “Maybe now we can get the law interested,” I said.

  Outside, out back, I saw there was a thin trail of blood drops. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now, coming out of the house and with the sun just right, I could see it. It looked like someone had dropped rubies of assorted size in the grass. I said, “Brett, honey. Go out to the car and sit behind the wheel. Here are the keys in case you need to leave. And if you do, leave. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “We’ll get the gun out of the glove box.”

  I have a conceal carry permit, but I seldom carry the gun. Fact is, I don’t like the idea of one, but in my line of work—and I don’t just mean watchman at the dog-food plant—stuff sometimes requires one.

  We went and got the pistol out of the glove box, an old-style revolver, and walked after the blood drops.

  It trailed into the woods, and then we didn’t see much of it anymore. We went along the trail a bit more, and I saw where something had been pulled into the bushes, mashing the down. We went up in there and found a body lying on the ground. It was lying facedown. I shouldn’t have moved the body, but I nudged it with my foot so as to turn it over. The face looking up at me was that of a young man and it had eyes full of ants and the victim’s nose was flattened and scraped where it had been dragged along the ground. There was a bullet hole in the chest, or so I assumed. I had seen a few of them, and it had been delivered right through the shirt pocket. I could see there was another one in his right side. I figured one shot had wounded him, he had made a break for it, and whoever shot him caught up with him and shot him again, then dragged him in the bushes. I also noted the man had tattoos up and down both arms, and not very good ones. They looked as if they had been put there by a drunk trying to write in Sanskrit and hieroglyphics. Either that or a cellmate.

  Brett was standing right there with me. She said, “That’s him.”

  “Meaning Robert, Tillie’s boyfriend.”

  “Yeah,” she said, and started looking around. Me too. I sort of expected to find her daughter’s body, but we didn’t. We even went back to the house and walked through it without handling anything but the doorknob, just in case we had missed Tillie on first pass, stuffed under a bed, in a closet, or a freezer. They didn’t have a freezer and she wasn’t under the bed or in a closet.

  I put my pistol back in the glove box of the car and called 911.

  What they sent out was a young guy wearing an oversized pair of pants and a badge as shiny as a child’s Christmas dreams. He had a gun on his hip that was large enough to think he might have been expecting elephants to give him trouble. He had on a cowboy hat that seemed too tall, the brim too wide. He looked like someone playing shoot ’em up. He told me he was a deputy.

  There was another guy with him, older, sitting on the passenger side of the car. The young guy got out and the old guy didn’t. He just opened the door and sat there. He looked like a man waiting for retirement and not sure he’d make it. He might have been forty, but there was something in his face that made him seem older. He had a smaller gun on his hip. I could see that clearly, and he had a cowboy hat on his knee.

  The younger man listened to us make our statement. He looked interested and wrote some stuff down on a notepad. I told him I had a gun in my glove box and I had a permit, just so things wouldn’t get dicey in case they found it later. After a time, the older man got out of the car and came over. He said, “You get it all down, Olford?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the deputy.

  I saw then that the guy in front of us had a badge that said: sheriff on it. It looked very much like those kind of badges we used to buy as kids, ones came with a cap gun and no caps. You had to buy those separate.

  He asked us some of the same questions, just to see if we’d trip up, I figure. He didn’t look at me much when I answered. He studied Brett constantly. I didn’t blame him. She looked fine, as always. Long red hair tumbling over her shoulders, great body kept firm through exercise, and the kind of face that would make Wonder Woman beat herself in the head with a hammer.

  “Walk me,” said the sheriff to me.

  “I’m coming too,” Brett said. “I’m no shrinking violet.”

  “I bet you aren’t,” said the sheriff. “Olford, you go sit in the car and get your notes straight.

  “They’re straight, Sheriff,” Olford said.

  “Go sit in the car anyway,” he said.

  We walked along a ways. The sheriff, who we learned was named Nathan Hews, said, “Olford is the mayor’s boy. Whatcha gonna do?”

  “Did he get his uniform from Goodwill”?” I asked.

  “Don’t be disrespectful,” the sheriff said. “He stole that off a wash line.”

  We came to the body. I said, “I turned him over.”

  “Not supposed to do that,” Sheriff Hews said.

  “I know. But I checked to see if he was alive.”

  “When they look like this, facedown or faceup, you got to know they’re dead.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “You know something,” the sheriff said. “You called things in, said who you two were, so I made some calls, checked some things out. The chief over in LaBorde, he said you’re a real pain in the ass. That you usually run with a black guy named Leonard.”

  “Yep, that’s me,” I said. “I mean, I run with a black guy named Leonard. I don’t know about the pain-in-the-ass part.”

  “I think you do,” he said. “Chief told me some things.”

  “Blabbermouth,” I said.

  When we finished looking at the body, we walked back to the car. The sheriff had Olford get a camera out of their car and go out and take some pictures.

  “We don’t have a real team,” he said. “There’s me, Olford, one other deputy, and a dispatcher. Sometimes we get free doughnuts though.”

  “That’s keeping in form,” I said.

  “You betcha,” he said. He looked at Brett. “You seem to be holding up well, considering your daughter is missing and a man is dead.”

  He was still playing us, trying to see we had anything to do with the business that had gone down.

  “Trust me,” Brett said. “I’m worried sick.”

  We had to stay at a motel for a couple of hours before the sheriff showed up with a lack of information. “We didn’t find your daughter,” he said to Brett. “That could be good news.”

  “Could be,” Brett said. What the sheriff had missed in his absence was Brett’s breaking down and crying, but he could probably notice the red in her eyes. She listened to what he had to say and went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  He said to me, “Listen, I’m going to square with you. Going to tell you what you probably have already figured. I’m a one-horse sheriff in a one-horse town with two deputies who are working their first murder case. They’re more suited to chasing down renegade cats and dogs and figuring out who stole whose graham crackers at the nursery school. If we had one. I’m not telling you to go off on your own, and there’s bigger law can be brought into this. But I was you, from what I know about you, I’d tell you on the sly, which is what I’m doing now, just in case you don’t get it, to do some looking on your own.”

  I nodded, said, “You got any idea where I should start?”

  “I said I was a one-horse sheriff, but I once upon a time did some city work. I came here so I’d see
fewer bodies. So far, I’ve seen fewer. This is the first murder that isn’t a suicide I’ve seen in five years. The dead man is Robert Austin, he was for some shit. The girl, your woman’s daughter, word was she did some business, if you know what I mean.”

  “That word is probably good,” I said.

  “This guy, Robert, sold drugs and sold her. Town like this, people who used her services … Well, everyone knows. Everyone here knows the size of their neighbor’s turds and can tell one’s stink from the other. Thing is, Robert, he was most likely selling drugs for Buster Smith. Buster runs a Gospel Opry show over in Marvel Creek.”

  “I was born there,” I said.

  “Then you know the place. Used to be tough as a doorstop and sharp as a razor. All that booze out there on Hell’s half mile. Now it’s a town known for antiques and all the tonks are gone. The Gospel Opry, well, they say that’s a cover for old Buster. Marvel Creek sees him as a pious businessman. Me, I see him as a man gives real Christians like me a bad name.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “He’s about fifty, with slicked-back hair and a very cool manner. Wears awful plaid sports jackets all the time. I’ve met him a time or two, when I was over that way. I even went to the Opry once. Good entertainment. But the word kept drifting back about him, and though it’s rumor, I’ve come to believe it. He’s an operator living a simple life on the surface, putting himself in a squeaky-clean front while he does the bad stuff out the back door. He’s got everyone that matters over there in his pocket.

  “Another thing, there’s a guy named Kevin Crisper hangs out at the Go-Mart here, sits on a bench out front. It’s his bench. He works his drug deals there, and rumor is, though we can’t prove it, he works for Buster. I keep a watch on him, but so far I haven’t caught him doing what he shouldn’t be doing. He has a guy or two to help him out. They all got a few snags on their arrest sheet, but nothing that keeps them anywhere behind bars. I mean, I know what they’re doing, and I can’t prove it. I can’t do to them what needs to be done. Thing is, though, Kevin Crisper does sales of drugs and gets a percentage. Buster gets the lion’s share because he provides the goods. At least the dope. Tillie, and I want to say this before your girlfriend comes back, she was a self-operator, but word was she was getting pretty deep in the drugs and that maybe she didn’t know if she was about to shit or go blind. She was down in the dead zone with one brain cell or two for a life preserver, and that was it. Robert, he might have been farming her out through this Kevin. Probably was. And Tillie, like I said, she might as well have been a blow-up sex doll, way her mind was messed up.”