The spot where the crack house used to be next door was nothing now but a patch of scorched earth and lumber. Someone’s chickens were loose and pecking around in the ruins. I wondered what would happen if the chickens found some old drugs in there. A little crack, some cocaine. They would certainly lay interesting eggs.
Across the street where MeMaw used to live a new owner had moved in. The new owner had painted the house hot Pepto-Bismol pink with chocolate trim, and they liked dark blue curtains and had yard butts on the brutally mowed lawn.
Yard butts are what Leonard and I call those stupid, painted, plywood cutouts that are supposed to look like an old man or an old grandma bending over in the yard, the grandpa showing you his overall-covered ass, the grandma’s dress hiked up, showing you her white-lace panties.
Leonard once told me he wanted to buy one of those plastic vaginas and butt holes you could get in sex shops and glue it on the seat of one of those grandmas. He figured if you were supposed to be looking up her dress, you might as well see something. It certainly would have been funny to see the owners of those yard butts come out the next morning to discover grandma giving the neighborhood a show.
I guess those dumb yard butts were better than those wooden Holstein cow sprinklers with a hose for a tail that swirled around and around tossing water. But not much.
I looked down the street, both ways, for no particular reason. Still looking for clues, I guess. All I noted was the street seemed to have changed a lot in the last few months. Some of the big trees along the pocked asphalt road had been cut down, and where there used to be shade there was sunlight. This neighborhood wasn’t the best in the world, with its poverty and drug problems, but I had liked coming here.
Now, Leonard’s house no longer seemed like Leonard’s house, like my home away from home. Things had changed. On the street. In the neighborhood. In the house. In our lives.
Perhaps I missed Leonard having a new crack house to burn down next door. He had burned two of them. Well, three of them, if you count the time I helped him do one.
Who knew? Maybe they’d move a new one in any day now. Hope springs eternal.
I took a moment to think about the sex life I didn’t have. Damn. I was getting as bad as Charlie. This kept up, me and him would be fucking.
I thought about Lt. Marvin Hanson, lying in bed in a deep coma. I assumed if I thought about how bad he had it, I could feel a hell of a lot better about being me.
It didn’t work. I still felt like shit.
I watched a couple of blue jays fighting in Leonard’s oak tree. Listened for a while to a small dog bark savagely at something somewhere off to the south. The dog didn’t want to stop barking. A car drove by, an old black man at the wheel, one arm out the window. He was wearing a blue baseball cap with the brim pushed up. He looked hot and tired and satisfied. I looked at my watch. Three-forty-five. Guy was probably just off work from the early shift at one of the plants around town. Must be nice to have a shift. A regular check. Probably had a wife to go home to. A dog. Some kids. A TV with cable instead of foil-covered rabbit ears. I used to have an antenna, but the wind blew it away. I wondered where my antenna was. I wondered where my youth was. I wondered if that fucker who drove by got the American Movie Classics channel.
The wind died down and I began to feel uncomfortably warm. I unbuttoned my top shirt button.
I watched the blue jays fight some more. The dog had stopped barking. I still felt warm. I checked out the pink house with chocolate trim again. The colors hadn’t changed and the lawn butts were still in place.
I looked at my watch once more.
Three-forty-six. Time was certainly shooting by.
I scratched my balls, got in my truck, and drove away from there.
8
I stopped at a pay phone and called Charlie. Before I could tell him the state of Leonard’s house, he said, “I hope you got something good.”
“It’s not that good. It’s about Leonard’s house. I just went by there. It’s been ransacked.”
“Maybe Leonard did it himself. Came back, grabbed some stuff he needed, made a mess.”
“I didn’t say it was messy. I said it was ransacked.”
I described the place to him. He was silent. If he had an opinion he didn’t voice it. Just before I started collecting Social Security, he said, “You need to come up with Leonard.”
“I’m working on it. Am I to think you no longer think he got nailed by bikers?”
“I think all kinds of ways. It keeps me from getting bored. And if you know where Leonard is, you ought to tell me.”
“So far, nothing.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Hap?”
“Gracious, no.”
“I’m not fuckin’ around here. This is some serious business.”
“I know that.”
“You put him up, hide him out, that’s a crime. You know that. Right?”
“Of course.”
“Are you talkin’ through a cardboard tube?”
“It’s my cold. It’s getting worse.”
“My cousin, he had a cold like that, neglected it. Fucker died. You takin’ medicine?”
“I’ve bought some, but no, I haven’t taken it yet. And I don’t believe you had a cousin who died of a cold.”
“Maybe it was my mother’s cousin.”
“You really aren’t that concerned about my cold, are you?”
“Hey, you’re sick, I’m sick.”
“You think you’ll soften me up, then I’ll confide something to you, don’t you?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
“Let me ask you something. Raul. Is he a suspect in this case?”
“Everybody is a suspect. I’m thinking of running my wife in.”
“Come on, Charlie. You got Raul in custody? Know where he is?”
“No, and if you know where he is, you’d best tell me.”
“I just called ’cause I thought you should know about the house. You might want to go over there, bring some of your people, see if you can find a real clue. You could even bring your little Dick Tracy fingerprint kit.”
“You probably fucked up anything might have been there to find.”
“I don’t think so. I know I’m not a real policeman like you-”
“You’re not even a stuffed animal in a police hat.”
“Very true. But unlike you, I don’t have to step in shit to know a pile when I see it. And there is some shit goin’ on here that’s got nothing to do with Leonard. Not directly. At least I don’t think so.”
“You don’t sound all that certain to me. Maybe you got to step in shit after all.”
“Could be. But I did find a couple clues. You might take note of some footprints out back. They look to belong to Andre the Giant.”
I told him about my trek through the woods to the road, what I found there. I told him what I had touched. I said, “By the way, as you well know, it won’t be any surprise to find my fingerprints all over that house. And here’s an idea, and this is just an idea, mind you, and I don’t want you to take offense since it’s from a layman and you’re a real policeman with a badge and gun and everything, but you take fingerprints, what I’d do is see you have any other than Leonard’s, Raul’s, or mine.”
“My,” Charlie said, “you’re a regular Boston Blackie. This stuff about fingerprints. And that footprint business. Shit like that’ll bust the case wide open. All we got to do is make a cast of those footprints, make a shoe from that. Then we can go door to door and have people try it on. Shoe fits, we run the fucker in… All right, Hap, get this. Time is running out, and I better not find you’re fuckin’ around on me.”
“I wouldn’t do that, Charlie.”
“The hell you wouldn’t.”
“Charlie, you really got to either smoke more so you’ll be less irritable, or you got to quit smoking so you can get some poontang and be less irritable.”
“What I’d like is to fuck like a snake, then afterwards smoke like a chimney. Hap, you listen here. We’re buddies, but when it comes to murder, that don’t buy much. Hear me talkin’?”