“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 cars. 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 peek, 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 good a lock picker, and to tell the truth, it’s seldom like on TV, least for me. It always takes 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 them 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 make me 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 that 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 with me,” said the sheriff to me.