Baney nodded, kept working. “So, if I take a skinny basic face, add the cheekbone effect around the eyes, keep the hair straight but full, and put a part in the dead center, make his eyes tight with anger…”
Baney seemed transported, drawing, smudging, shading. After a minute he turned the pad to Dell.
“This remind you of anyone?”
The trucker’s eyes widened and his mouth fell open.
“It’s him. How the hell did you do that?”
Harry and I headed back to the department to photocopy the drawing, take it out on the street to run through our snitch network. We dropped the drawing on Harry’s desk, headed toward the coffee urn. When it sputtered and went dry, we headed downstairs to steal from the urn in Crimes Against Property.
When we returned, the drawing was on the floor beside Harry’s desk. The closest dick was Pace Logan, leaning against a column and studying a sheaf of papers. Shuttles stood beside him, looking pained.
“You got it wrong here,” Logan was lecturing Shuttles. “Plus your spelling is screwed. It’s perp-e-trator, not perp-a-trator.”
“Sorry, Pace,” Shuttles said. “I’ll redo the report.”
“Somebody mess with my desk?” Harry growled, staring at Logan.
Logan looked over his reading glasses. “Don’t have a meltdown, Nautilus. I looked at your silly-ass picture. I was walking by and couldn’t figure if it was Charlie Manson or Grizzly Adams.”
“How about getting it back on the desk next time?”
Logan shook his head and turned away, walking back to his cubicle. Harry muttered, “Two more months.”
We showed the pics around, gave several out to snitches and told them to call if they saw the guy. Of course, if he’d cut his hair and beard-odds being heavily that direction, unless he was a total lunatic-it was useless.
When we ran out of pics, we headed to Flanagan’s to grab a beer and a bowl of gumbo. Harry shot me an occasional glance that I felt but didn’t see. He pushed aside his bowl.
“What you gonna do, Carson? About Da-Ms. Danbury?”
“It’s already done.”
Harry clinked the spoon around his empty bowl.
“You’re sure about her and Kincannon? I mean, she really was-”
“I flat-out asked, Harry. She admitted she was boinking Buckie.”
Harry nodded. He shot a glance over my shoulder, grimaced. I turned to the TV above the bar. Dani was anchoring the six p.m. news slot, doing the papers-on-the-desk bit. She launched into a story on the morning’s fire.
“…man jumped before firefighters could reach him and pronounced dead at the hospital. A badly burned female body was found in the rubble, identification held pending notification of next of kin…”
“How about you switch that to another channel,” Harry called to Eloise, our waitress.
“Keep it on, Eloise,” I said. “And turn it up a bit.”
Harry shot me the eye.
“I have to get used to it,” I said, staring at the screen.
Harry cleared his throat and leaned close. “Uh, Carson, you ever think about, uh…”
I turned from the TV. “Messing with Buck Kincannon? Waiting outside Dani’s until I see them coming home one night, ripping out Buckie’s eyes and kicking them up his ass so far he’s staring at what he had for dinner?”
“Yeah. You ever think about stuff like that?”
“Never.”
“That’s good. I’ve got to head home. My ass is worn out.” He slipped on his jacket, tossed a few bills on the table, walked to the door. He turned and came back.
“What now?” I said to Harry’s looming form, hands in his pockets.
“You know if you ever lit into a guy like that you could kiss your job good-bye.”
“I know, Harry.”
“Good.”
He turned away. Paused. Turned back around.
“Your job would be gone in an hour, Carson. No, a finger snap.”
“I realize that, bro.”
“I know,” he sighed. “I’m just making sure I do.”
CHAPTER 19
I slept some that night. It was between four-fifteen and five-forty-five, I think. The rest of the time I stared at pictures forming and re-forming on my shadowed ceiling. Listened to words tumbling through the darkened air.
She’ll betray you. They always betray us, don’t they?
The words were my brother’s words, Jeremy. He was, by all measures of the human mind, insane. Driven mad by our father’s relentless punishments and beatings, Jeremy had at age sixteen killed our father. Over the years he had killed five women. In his twisted mind he was avenging himself on our mother for never protecting him.
But she was blameless, little more than a child herself. It was the three of us against my father, a trio of Chihuahuas caged with a rabid Doberman.
Jeremy was incarcerated at an institution west of Montgomery. I was a hesitant visitor every four months on average. Last year I had taken Dani with me to visit Jeremy. He hated women, and the visit had not gone well, ending with him forecasting that my relationship with Dani would end in betrayal.
His senses were uncanny. Had he seen something I had not? Or was it just his usual antifemale ranting?
I had planned on visiting my brother soon, was overdue by a month, in fact. But when he would ask, as he always did, How’s your little love-muffin, Carson? Has she betrayed you yet? I did not want to admit the truth: that she had tried me for a year, found me wanting, and had taken up with a man who could deliver her the world wrapped in silk and served with champagne.
I decided to postpone my visit this time around. Take a break from Jeremy. He wasn’t going anywhere.
I stumbled from bed at six, turned on NPR, and fixed coffee. Figuring I needed the caffeine, I used four tablespoons per cup, drank four cups, buzzed off to the department.
Harry showed up with a half dozen ham biscuits, correctly figuring I hadn’t eaten. We chomped biscuits and shuffled through phone slips from the previous day, hoping for points of gold glittering in the mud. Harry read a slip, reread it. Snicked it with a fingernail.
“Something here, maybe. Lemme make a call.”
Harry got up and went to the conference room to phone, returning a call to a snitch. When we told a snitch no one was listening as they talked, we told the truth. Maybe it didn’t mean much, but that’s the way we played it.
Harry was back a minute later, eyebrows raised.
“You know Leroy Dinkins?” he asked.
I searched my memory and saw nothing but an amorphous blob wriggling in a doorway. It took me a second to realize my mind was showing me Leroy.
“Met him once when I was in uniform,” I said. “A shoplifting beef. Leroy got stuck when he tried to run out the back door of a grocery downtown, the back door a lot smaller than the front. He was about eighteen, if I recall.”
“That’s blubber butt himself,” Harry said, scowling at the slip. “I got this snitch hangs with Leroy Dinkins sometimes. He says Leroy was cadging drinks at a bar named Lucky’s when a guy looking like our drawing comes in. They talk in private, the hairball leaves. Suddenly Leroy’s ordering from his own pocket.”
“The hairball gave Leroy some money,” I said.
“That’s the way my snitch saw it.”
“Why’d your snitch tattle on his buddy Dinkins?”
Harry laughed. “Leroy drank all night and didn’t buy anyone else a single pop. My snitch got pissed off, dropped the dime.”
“Leroy should learn to share,” I said. “You know where bubble butt lives?”
“With his mama.” Harry grinned. “Where else?”
Leroy Dinkins was easy to spot: a hulking mass on a porch. Harry knew Dinkins better than I did, filling me in as we drifted into a space in front of Dinkins’s house, a tiny frame bungalow.
“Leroy’s the original fraidy-cat, Carson. Placid, flaccid, and lazy-assed. Hangs at the edge of the street scene, too lily-livered to get in any serious trouble. Scared to death of doing time.”