“Is it coincidence that all these guys look stupid?” he said.
“That’s a pre-prerequisite.”
He shook his head. “No, I’ve never seen any of them.”
“You said Lebeau wanted to get laid.”
“He was definitely the guy hanging on to a couple of soiled doves.”
“Can I talk to them?”
He scratched his face with his prosthetic hand. “I don’t remember which ones he talked to, Dave. He was drunk and didn’t have any money. I felt sorry for him.”
“He didn’t have trouble with anyone?”
“No. What was he inside for?”
“Manslaughter knocked down from first-degree homicide.”
“He was actually dragged behind a car?”
“Somebody pulled his teeth first.”
“Jesus, I thought Iraq was bad. Sorry I couldn’t be more help. You want another Dr Pepper?”
“There’re two more photos I’d like you to look at.” I clicked on the unshaved front-view and side-view mug shots of a man in prison whites that I had gotten from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
“Yeah, he was in here,” Skip said. “A nice-looking guy. A little edgy. He wasn’t shopping for the trade. I wondered what he was doing here. He drank soda pop.”
“That’s Hugo Tillinger. He’s an escapee from the Texas penal system. You’re sure he was here?”
“Yeah, last week.”
“Was he with Travis Lebeau?”
Skip looked into space, then back at me. Someone was tapping on the bar for another drink. Skip served him and came back. “I remember him because he sat alone at the end of the bar and ordered a soft drink. When a working girl came on to him, he was polite but not interested. In a dump like this, it’s trick, trade, or travel. It puts me in a bad spot sometimes. I mean, telling people to beat it.”
“You told Tillinger to leave?”
“I let him slide. He seemed like a nice guy. That attitude gets me in trouble with the boss.”
“Think hard. Did you see him talking to Lebeau?”
“Yeah, maybe. I can’t be sure.” He closed and opened his eyes. “It seemed like they knew each other.”
“Did Tillinger leave with anyone?”
“I don’t know.”
I was about to give up.
“But he said something weird.”
“Like what?”
“ ‘You ought to be in the movies.’ I said, ‘You wising off?’ He said I had him wrong, that he had some movie connections with people who got Hurricane Carter out of jail. He said I was photogenic. I told him to get his eyes examined.”
“That’s Tillinger. That’s our guy.”
“What was he in for?”
“Burning his wife and daughter to death.”
Skip blew out his breath. He poured the remainder of the Dr Pepper can into my glass. “You know what’s the most depressing aspect of my job?”
“No.”
“Cleaning the bathroom at two a.m. and thinking about the people who were in there,” he said. “Ever have that feeling?”
Every day, I thought. But I didn’t say it.
I went back to the department. On the way to my office, I passed Axel Devereaux in the corridor. He looked through me. When a guy like Devereaux looks through you, you’d better watch your ass.
“Axel?”
He turned around.
“Want to meet somewhere and talk this out?” I said.
“Talk it out? I feel like ripping your face off.”
“Because I hit you?”
“No, because you’re a goddamn liar.”
“I lied about what?”
“Me killing Sean McClain’s pets. You spread it around.”
“You mocked him,” I said. “You imitated the sounds of his cat and dog.”
“Whoever told you that is a liar. Just like you.”
“At my age, I don’t have a lot to lose, Axel. Know what I mean?”
“You’ll see me coming, asshole. I ain’t a sneak that goes around bad-mouthing people.”
Unless you are familiar with the nature of Southern white trash, you will not understand the following: They are a genetically produced breed whose commonality is a state of mind and not related to the social class to which they belong. Economics has nothing to do with their origins or their behavior. You cannot change them. They glory in violence and cruelty and brag on their ignorance, and would have no problem manning the ovens at Auschwitz. That’s not hyperbole. When I looked into Axel’s eyes, I knew my slap across his face had been a slap across his soul and that one day I would pay for it.
“You dealt the play when you disrespected my partner,” I said. “But I shouldn’t have struck you. For that I apologize. That also means I’m done.”
He put a toothpick in his mouth, then removed and stared at it, a glint in his eye. “So you got no problem.”
I walked away, then glanced back at him before entering my office. He was still standing in the corridor, by himself, silhouetted against a window like a black cutout without features or humanity.
I had three open homicide files on my desk: Lucinda Arceneaux floated out to sea on a cross; Joe Molinari hanged in a shrimp net from a tree; and Travis Lebeau tortured and dragged to death. In terms of forensic evidence, we had nothing that would necessarily connect one case to the other. But the histrionic nature of each homicide couldn’t be denied. There were also threads that seemed to overlap. The man Lucinda Arceneaux tried to get off death row had broken out of a prison hospital and come here rather than a large urban area where he could hide more conveniently. He’d also gone out of his way to tell a bartender he knew people connected to the film industry. The man who had befriended him, Travis Lebeau, had ended up dead. But where did Joe Molinari fit in? His life had been lived almost invisibly. Had he been selected randomly by a lunatic and posed to represent the Hanged Man in the tarot, or had Bailey Ribbons and I let our imaginations go unchecked?
Normally, the motivation in any premeditated homicide involves sex or money or power or any combination of the three. The similarity in the Arceneaux and Molinari homicides was the lack of motivation and the possibility of religious fanaticism bordering on madness. The horrible death of Travis Lebeau may have been simply a revenge killing by the AB. But the fact remained that his friend was the escaped convict Hugo Tillinger, and Tillinger was a friend of Lucinda Arceneaux’s. Tillinger had known both people, and now both were dead.
Tillinger was the only lead we had. Skip, my bartender friend, had said Tillinger was a nice guy. A jury in Texas had thought otherwise. But what did we actually know about him?
He may or may not have killed his family. He was argumentative and had inflexible moral attitudes. He had probably broken into three fishing camps but had taken little of value and seemed to have no record of dishonesty. Skip had said he didn’t belong in a bar that was one cut above a hot-pillow joint. A Texas gunbull had called him a lying son of a bitch you shouldn’t turn your back on.
All of which added up to take your choice.
That evening I went home late and stood at the back of my property and threw moldy pecans into the current and watched them sink out of sight. Snuggs sat by my foot, sniffing the breeze, his tail draped over my loafer. I heard Alafair walk up behind me. “What’s goin’ on, big guy?”
“Eighty-six the big-guy stuff, please.”
“I signed on with Desmond’s group,” she said. “I might be going out to Arizona.”
“Sorry — what?”
“I’m going to do the rewrite on the script. I’m also going to have a small acting role.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“I’ll be flying out to the location with Lou next week.”
“Lou Wexler?”
“Yeah,” she said. “What about it?”