I said, “Always wanted to be Mr. Senior Mid-South.”
“Me, too,” U said. “What’s that say, Airport Holiday Inn?”
“Yeah.”
“First class, brother.”
Glass walls covered the entire back half of the house as if it had been built in a cutaway to show the interior. Outside, there was a small wooden deck with iron chairs and a table with a Cinzano umbrella. No women. Damn it.
Wind from the Mississippi made knocking sounds against the huge sheet of glass, and outside I could see small, immature pines bending.
A door opened from the southern edge of the house and I heard some awful post-Eagles, Don Henley music blasting from a far room. “All She Wants to Do Is Dance.”
Two more young women followed him, both looking tired as hell, as he began pointing to the black granite floor. “Mr. Clean. All over. Watch the carpets. Don’t even think about getting them wet.”
They nodded but made faces at his back as he passed.
Cook wore tight bicycle shorts, circa nineteen eighty-seven, and this bizarre satin tank top that was just plain disturbing. It really didn’t qualify as a shirt since it darted below his nipples and lotion-tanned chest.
He fluffed up the spikes on his gray head and crossed his arms over his chest in order to make his balloon-sized biceps even larger. A massive leather weight belt covered most of his stomach.
“Five minutes,” he said.
He walked ahead, back to the weight room, with the bad music blaring, and I looked at U and shrugged. “Maybe he’ll give us six… Six would be nice.”
He’d filled the room with rows of chrome Nautilus equipment and several racks of free weights. A back wall of windows overlooked the river, but the others were covered in mirrors. A beefy guy in a Golden Lotus T-shirt lay sprawled on a weight bench while being spotted by a guy who, although bald, could’ve been his twin. The same tanned hide and veined puffy look of a steroid addict.
“Man, this is a hell of a lot better than Saints camp,” U said. “Remember?”
“You mean the junkyard? Hell, yes. Had to drive through all those wrecked cars just to get to practice.”
“You come here to swap little tales, or to talk?” Cook said, sitting his Spandexed ass on a Nautilus machine and working out his neck in a perpetual nod.
“Don’t,” U said, waiting for me to drive a truck through his comment. “Fight it.”
The beefy man benching re-racked the weight with a clanging thud and grunted as if someone had just stepped on his crotch. I wanted to tell him that 315 pounds didn’t really call for a show. But I stayed with U’s plan, holding more comments inside.
Then I decided to get right to it. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were working with Levi Ransom?”
Cook kept nodding yes, until he gave a big grunt, and cranked out a last rep on the machine.
He wiped off his face with a towel and took a sip from a bottle of Evian.
“We’ve been through this. Door is back the way you came.”
“I saw the police report on Mary James and Eddie Porter. Levi Ransom killed them. You were washing money for the Dixie Mafia. What happened, Cook, needed a favor? You needed to flex a little and prove you were a badass?”
“Fuck you,” he said, moving on to a bicep machine for preacher curls. He bent over the bench, almost in a prayerlike pose, and muscled up a bar attached to a pulley system.
“What did Eddie Porter do? Find out about your deal with Ransom?”
He ignored me. I looked around the mirrored room.
U had wandered off. He was talking to the two meatheads. I thought I overheard him giving tips on how to bench more. One of the boys was smiling.
Cook took another sip of water.
“If you’d been straight with me, Loretta wouldn’t have been shot.”
The intensity in his face broke away. His jaw fell slack.
“No one told you?” I asked. “Didn’t figure you to be a true friend of hers anyway.”
Then the son of a bitch really snapped.
I could tell he’d been trying to keep it in. Red-faced and breathing deep lungfuls of air. But after I said “true friend,” his arms darted out and yanked me into a headlock and began pounding me in the face. He only got off two quick jabs to my cheek and forehead before I pulled my head out and twisted his arm behind his back.
He fell to his knees with a high-pitched scream.
The meatheads ran to him.
But U had drawn a gun and yelled for them to stay. It was the type of command you’d give a dog.
They stayed. Cook buckled with intense pain. I wanted to hold him there forever.
Chapter 56
“Cool it,” I said. I spoke as pleasantly as I could to a man I’d brought to his knees with pain. I twisted his arm an inch higher behind his back.
“You motherfucker,” Cook screamed. “Don’t you ever say that, you goddamned cocksucker. Come into my house? I’ll kill your ass.”
I pulled his arm even higher, heard a slight crack, and then let his arm relax about two inches. He grunted; I let him go. He almost fell on his face, but caught himself with the other arm and used the preacher machine to stand.
“They shot her in the chest and left her bleeding on the floor of JoJo’s bar. Nice people. Even set fire to the business that JoJo had run for thirty-five years, man. You know what that means? You know what kind of sweat and patience and hard work that takes? She had to lie on the ground of the bar and watch their whole life burn around her while she waited to either bleed to death or catch on fire. Yeah, Cook, you’re a great friend to her.”
He closed his eyes and stood there for a moment, catching his breath and rotating his arm in its socket.
U walked over and turned off the boombox. He told the men to sit down but one still tried to get to Cook.
“Sit down!” Cook yelled.
We were all quiet for several moments. I think Cook wanted to cry, if he’d had any soul or conscience left. But the only emotion he seemed to possess in grief was shutting his damned mouth.
The wind battered the wall of glass and the sky became dark for a few moments. Then the room became light again, bright yellow beams streaking across the tops of trees lining the Bluffs.
“You come with me,” Cook said, pointing outside. “They stay.”
I followed him to the deck, hanging stilt-legged off the side of the house. The view made my stomach jump a little as the wind loosely blew the tops of the trees and my hair. I put my hands in my pockets and stayed silent. Most of the time when you wanted information, it was best to shut up.
Out in the natural light, Cook looked much older than I thought. Small lines had formed above his upper lip and loose folds of skin fell over his eyelids.
“Eddie Porter was a great friend,” he said, his hands on the railing as he looked down at the river passing in muddy, swirling circles. “I tried to help him even after I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Eddie Porter stole two hundred and seventy thousand dollars from Bluff City.”
I shook my head.
“It’s not what you think,” he said, his voice more twangy than usual. Less controlled. “It wasn’t my money, it was Ransom’s. He floated me for the studio and for an Ampex recorder when I got started. He sometimes used us to run through some cash. He never took anything we made, only got back what he’d given… Porter took it all.”
“So why did he kill Clyde’s wife?”
“Eddie was in love with Mary. Ransom knew it.” Cook wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Killing him would be too easy. He wanted Eddie to watch Mary hurt for a while.”
“Jesus,” I said. “So, if Clyde was there, why didn’t they kill him, too?”
“Ransom didn’t know he was there. Clyde was hiding in some old car outside. Clyde told me about seeing it. I told him to keep quiet, but he’d repeat the story to anyone who’d listen. When Ransom heard about it, he said he was going to go put a bullet in Clyde that night. But I begged him. I begged that hick bastard to leave my friend alone. I told him about Clyde’s mind problems and how he was living on the street now. I said he’d be dead in a couple weeks, and I really believed it. I don’t think Ransom showed him mercy, I just think he couldn’t find him. When Clyde reappeared five years later, everything was buried.”