“Meg wasn’t much good at nothing, ’cept fucking,” he said. “In bed she could make a pig speak French. Put her in the kitchen to cook dinner, she usually cooked a couple of pans or managed to catch the goddamn stove on fire.”
“I see you’re a liberated kind of guy.”
“Hey, we all got our cross to bear.”
“How long were y’all married?” I asked.
“About a year. We were pretty happy till she started accusing me of fucking around. Things went downhill after that. Then she started cheating on me.”
“Were you fucking around?”
“Hell, I’m a lawyer. We fuck everybody.”
“That doesn’t reassure me much. Guess you’ll be cutting out on your own.”
“What?”
“Your own law office. I mean, I’m inclined to believe you and your law partner might be on shaky ground.”
“Hell no. I was screwing his first wife and he caught me at it. Me and him got an understanding. I can get another wife easy enough, but a good partner like Tim is hard to come by. I took the sonofabitch out to lunch today. What happened to your face?”
“Kind of a fight,” I said. “It’s not important.”
“What’s your probleUs tom, then, Hank?”
I told it slowly and carefully, leaving out Bill’s present location and the fact that he and Arnold helped me break into the apartment and steal the video cassettes. In fact, I left Arnold out of the story altogether.
“Goddamn,” Virgil said when I finished. “That’s some situation. The videos. That photo album. You got ’em?”
“In the truck. The cassettes are copies. I’m playing it safe.”
I went out and got the cassettes and the album. I showed him the album first. “Shit,” he said. “I recognize some of these people. All unsolved cases, I think. Ones I know were killed within the last year or so. The last ones. Those the folks Bill told you about? The Disaster Club?”
I nodded.
“Let’s take a look at the cassettes,” Virgil said.
I gave him the cassettes and we watched the one with Fat Boy and the Doc, then the one with Bill and the Disaster Club. We didn’t talk until he had seen them both.
I said, “This gives Bill some kind of evidence. Right?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I recognize the one you’re calling Fat Boy. I know him as Oscar Caine. Know what he does?”
“I bet he’s with the cops,” I said.
“Close. How’d you know?”
I explained about the cars being put in Bill’s carport to make it look like the Disaster Club had driven back there and had fallen out. I told him about how the police came at such a perfect time, as if someone had been watching for Bill to show up. I told him that I thought the true killers had been a little too confident that their plan would work. It all pointed to inside knowledge of the police department.
“Well,” Virgil said. “Oscar isn’t a cop, but like I said, close. He’s in a peculiar position. He’s what you might call freelance. Started out as a freelance narc, and since then has gotten involved in a wider scope.”
“They have freelance narcs?”
“Yeah. They want ’em, they got ’em. Ole Oscar is an ace manipulator. He’s been under investigation, I bet, oh, half a dozen times, but he’s like shit that flies won’t light on.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Let me give you a scoop here. Oscar has been around since Methuselah was growing pubic hair. He’s older than he looks. Mid-sixties. Tough as a baboon’s ass. Knows how things work, and knowing how things work is even more important than being innocent or honest. Innocent and honest aren’t enough, you got someone like Oscar working against you.
“I’ve probed into Oscar’s affairs on occasion, and I know a lot about him, ’cause I’m nosy and an old lawyer who showed me the ropes hated him and filled me in on stuff a lot of people have forgotten or never knew. Like Oscar started out as a country lawyer over in Busby. One of his earliest cases involved the murder of a thirteen-year-old black girl. She was raped and murdered by a white bo bythe y named Cal Vincent. The Vincents over there are bigwigs. Got money. Position. This was back when a lot of white folks held a black person in slightly lower esteem than a pile of pig shit.
“This little gal was raped and murdered and the murderer took her home and tied her naked body to a tree out in her Mama’s and Daddy’s front yard, stuck a coon tail up her asshole, hung a sign around her neck said, ‘Niggers, your baby coon’s home.’
“Every goddamn body over there knew it was Cal Vincent killed her, cause he bragged about it. Said he’d fucked her so hard she died. Course, thing did her in was he strangled her.
“One of Cal’s friends had been involved in the rape, taking his turn, but he wasn’t for killing, just raping. Murder was too much for him. His conscience got him and he squealed and got so he was squealing outside of Busby and the whole thing came to trial. Guess who was hired to defend Cal Vincent?”
“Oscar Caine.”
“He painted Cal as a good, upstanding, white citizen, accused of killing a loose little colored gal, and everyone in the all white jury started out with the sincere belief that the gal, being black, was fucking around anyway. Oscar even made jokes about it. Jokes, mind you, about this murdered thirteen-year-old gal. Jokes about her and her Daddy. And the judge stood for it. Her own people couldn’t even come into the courtroom proper. They had to watch from a little balcony, listen to this sonofabitch, Oscar Caine, talk about that gal like she was bitch dog in heat.
“But the final tack in the billboard was when Oscar laid out a scenario that had this retarded black man accused of the crime, and he ended up being brought in and convicted on the basis of nothing but some slick bullshit from Oscar. They not only convicted that retarded fella, but a crowd got worked up enough a lynch mob was formed, and this black guy, who didn’t have a clue what he was being jailed for, was fed to the crowd by the Chief of Police. Chief claimed later he couldn’t stop them, and couldn’t identify any of them. Crowd took that poor black man, castrated him, hung him from a telephone pole with his pants around his ankles and watched him choke to death.
“Town was even proud of it. Until the early sixties, you could buy postcards at the drug store made from photographs of that poor man hanging, his pants around his ankles. There’d have been a magazine in that store so much as showed a white woman’s bare chest, or even a man in tight pants, the Baptists would have screamed loud enough to have knocked the President of the United States off his toilet. But the same store proudly sold cards of this castrated, retarded fella dangling like a grape.
“Point is, Oscar was made out like a hero. He was the one had gotten Cal Vincent off, and given them the opportunity to ‘hang ’em a nigger,’ and nobody in the white power structure gave a shit.
“A side note. The boy who admitted to rape, but not to murder. One who had seen Cal do it. He never came to trial for anything. But a month later he turned up drowned in the river. Fishing accident they called it. Could have been, I guess. Story is, he wasn’t known to fish.
“Oscar quit lawyerin’ in the mid-sixties, so let’s move up to about nineteen-seventy, and about this time, the Chief of Police in Busby, who was near ready to retire came up with a problem. Hisa p, s daughter was hanging out with some hippie types. Drug users. Came in from the big city. Rode bikes. Bought some land together and lived in some kind of weird religious commune in the woods outside of town. Had them a dome. Or an ashram. Some such thing. All that shit’s the same to me. This bunch laid around most of the day, sold and took drugs and fucked each other and were proud of it. They came into town now and then, parading themselves, and the locals couldn’t take all that tie-dyed shit and the long hair. They figured they were Manson types. My guess is they were just a bunch of kids going through a phase, probably into smoking a little grass. Nothing heavy. Hell, I smoked grass myself back then.