“Yes.”
“Darn right he don’t go out. He only gets in trouble.” I didn’t tell her that I was calling to get him in some trouble for me.
“Well, I wonder if I could talk to him.”
“They didn’t cancel his bail, did they?”
“No, but I need him to do me a favor.”
Suspicious. “What kind of a favor?”
“He’s still at the hotel every day?”
“Yeah, his uncle’s the only one who’d hire him.”
“Good. Then I need to talk to him.”
“I don’t want him in no more trouble.”
The way I had figured it out, he wouldn’t have to get in any trouble if he did what I told him.
“He’ll be fine.”
“And I didn’t appreciate that ‘Mrs. Dink.’”
“I apologize.”
“I’ll go get him.”
When he came on the line, Dink said, “The wife, she don’t care for you much.”
“I called her Mrs. Dink.”
“That ain’t why. She said you shoulda got me off on probation.”
“I did get you off on probation. Then you stole that cop’s billfold. That’s why you’re headed back to court.”
“Oh, yeah, I guess she forgot that.”
“Listen to me. I need you to do something for me.”
He listened.
“Thanks, McCain.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been needin’ to do something illegal. I’m goin’ nuts here.”
“It’s not illegal. Not if you do it the way I told you.”
“Well, at least it’s sneaky. That’s a start in the right direction.”
“Remember what you need to do, now.”
“You knock something off on the bill?”
“You mean the bill neither you nor your parents have paid me anything on for five years?”
“I guess you got a point there.”
“Call me as soon as you do it.”
13
I drove past both of the garages where the bikers tended to hang out when they weren’t at the Iron Cross, the tavern on the edge of town where the local gendarmes had to come in full force several times a week to break up fights. The local gendarmes often looked worse than the bikers when it was all done.
But there were no signs of Harleys or Indians anywhere. I assumed they were out on the highway or at one of their enclaves in the nearby woods.
I found a Debbie Todd Carlyle in the phone book and drove on out to the hardscrabble little acreage where chickens seemed to have taken over. They were everywhere. I had to park on the edge of the gravel road. There were too many of them in the drive to scatter.
Debbie, a heavyset woman in a red-and-black checked flannel shirt and jeans, stood with her hands on her hips watching me approach. She didn’t look happy.
When I had to slow down because I was entangled in chickens, she said, “You might as well go back to town, McCain. I don’t plan to talk to you.”
“I just came out to buy some chickens.”
“You know where you can shove your chickens.”
“Any special reason you seem to hate me? Your sister and I were good friends.”
“Good friends, my ass. She’d still be alive if it wasn’t for you. She shoulda kept her nose out of it.”
I was marooned on the front lawn amidst a sea of gabby white chickens. The one-story house in front of me needed a coat of paint and the 1949 Pontiac up on blocks needed a left front door.
“She was murdered.”
“You think I don’t know that, McCain? That’s exactly what I told her would happen, butting in like that.”
They pecked, they squawked, they shat. Their heads jerked back and forth. They were pretty ugly creatures when you came right down to it. But you had to feel sorry for them. They had but one mission on this planet. To be consumed.
I worked myself through a clutch of them, drawing a few feet closer to the small, old house.
“If you know she was murdered, Debbie, you should want to help me.”
“And end up like she did?”
“Did she tell you what she saw?”
“No, she didn’t. I told her not to. I didn’t want to get caught up in all this crap.” She had a broad face that would have been attractive if she’d wanted to make it so with a little soap and makeup. But she was a widow — her husband had died in a freak accident with a combine — and a doggedly antisocial one at that.
“So you might as well get out of here, McCain. I don’t know nothing about what she saw or didn’t see. That’s between you and her.”
“She’s dead, Debbie. You’re the only one who can help me.” Then: “She saw something, Debbie. Something to do with the murders the other night. You were her best friend. She must have told you something.”
“I said that she didn’t, McCain. Now I’m going back inside and finish my lunch.”
And that was all. She turned, went back inside, and closed and locked the door behind her.
And left me with the chickens. Their squawks were putting me on edge. “How about keeping it down?” I said.
Which, of course, did me a lot of good. If anything, they seemed suddenly louder.
They trailed me back to my ragtop. A pied piper I was. I got in my car and started up the engine. I decided to go up to the far end of the road and take the blacktop back to town. Shorter route and less damage to the machine than on this scaly road.
I roared the mufflers three or four times. The chickens scattered. I didn’t want to grind one of them to death beneath my wheels.
I set off, turning up the radio as I did so. The local stations still played Elvis’s “Return to Sender” from last year. I liked hearing Elvis sing just about anything, though I already missed his original sound when he was with Sun Records and covering songs like “Milk Cow Boogie” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Hard to grow up out here without at least a sneaking fondness for real country music.
Also hard to grow up out here without a real desire to protect your blood kin. People like Debbie always bothered me. I just didn’t understand how you could write off a sister the way she had.
14
“I wouldn’t go in there if I was you.”
“It’s a public place, isn’t it?”
“Not really. Especially not to fuzz.”
“Technically, I’m not fuzz. I’m private.”
“Yeah, but you work for the judge. You know how many Devils she’s sent up?”
“Two, that I remember.”
“Well, you remember wrong. Four. And two of ’em are still doin’ time.”
The Iron Cross was a one-story concrete-block building that had been painted black, apparently to suit the mood of the bikers who drank there. At this hour of the day the front and sides of the place were packed with motorcycles. The jukebox inside trembled with gut-bucket rock and roll. And the laughter was of the coarse, ugly kind of pirates in all those buried-treasure movies.
The man I was talking to was named Ray Peters. He was a sort of honorary biker. He’d lost a leg and an arm in Korea and now got around on a single crutch. The word his brother gave me — his brother being a nonbiker who ran illegal crap games and was frequently in need of my legal services — was that Ray never felt right around “normal” people. So he dressed in a sleeveless denim jacket, jeans tucked into motorcycle boots, and an eyepatch he justified wearing by saying that his left eye had been damaged in Korea, too. He had one big problem that I could see. Take away the rebellion and what you had was a sad, lonely, and very decent guy.
“How about I do you a favor?” he said, as if to prove my point. His blond-gray hair was so thin on top the sun had already baked his scalp brick red.
“A favor?”