Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (18 page)

I could hear ice cubes clinking in a glass and a woman’s voice in the background.

“Did you hear me?” I said.

“Yeah, that’s a good attitude, son,” he said. “No need to call back. I’m kind of tied up right now, get my drift? One day I’ll stop flying the flag, I guess, but not for a while.”

“Good night, Lloyd.”

“Weldon, tell me you’re not going to be an ongoing pain in the ass.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.

Chapter

12

I
T WAS SUNDAY
night when I got a phone call in Houston that reminded me of a line in the Bible: There are those who are made different in the womb. I had heard the voice before. It was full of rust, the words coming from a place where humanity and pity had never taken hold. “Bet you don’t know who this is,” the voice said.

“The Cajun dance hall outside Opelousas. You and your friends followed us into the parking lot,” I said.

“You got a good memory, boy. Got a business deal for you.”

“What’s your name?”

“I’ll tell you when we meet. You know where the Bloody Bucket is at?”

“No.”

“I’ll give you directions.”

“I think it’s better that you not call here anymore.”

“Your wife like her new piano? What was that piece she was playing about five minutes ago? ‘Clair de lune’?”

On the corner, at the end of the esplanade, there was a telephone booth under a streetlamp. I thought I could see a man’s silhouette inside.

“Cat got your tongue?” the caller said.

“Tell me where you are,” I said.

I took my raincoat out of the hallway closet and went upstairs. Then I came back down wearing the coat. Rosita was still playing the piano. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“Some fellow wants to talk to me about a business deal. I’ll be back shortly.”

“Why are you wearing your raincoat?”

I put my right hand in the pocket, adjusting the weight of the coat on my shoulders. “It’s fixing to rain.”

She looked out the window. A solitary raindrop struck the glass. “Don’t be long. It’s Sunday. You need to relax a little more, Weldon.”

Geographically, the distance from our neighborhood in the Heights to the Bloody Bucket was no more than two miles. In terms of the cultural divide, the distance could not have been greater. It was a beer joint that prided itself on its violent clientele. The women were either masochists or over-the-hill whores; hardly a man drinking in there had not been in Huntsville or Sugar Land. Houston cops didn’t enter the Bloody Bucket except in numbers, usually with a baton hanging from the wrist.

The interior was painted red and black; the only illumination came from the neon beer signs on the wall behind the bar and the electrified rippling colors inside the casing of the Wurlitzer and the tin-shaded bulb hanging above the pool table. My caller was sitting in a booth by the entrance to the women’s restroom, his hands folded on the tabletop, a cigarette burning in an ashtray inches away. I sat down across from him. “What’s your name?” I said.

“There’s coat hooks by the door if you want to hang up your coat,” he replied.

“I’m fine. Are you going to tell me who you are?”

“Harlan McFey. I’m a private investigator. Want to see my ID?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you can buy one at any pawnshop on Congress Street. You fond of looking in people’s windows, Mr. McFey?”

“If the occasion demands it.” He took a puff off his cigarette and returned the cigarette to the ashtray. He opened a manila folder on the tabletop. “We got a four-inch file on you and people of your acquaintance. I’m willing to share it. I’m also willing to share information on the man who hired me to bird-dog you and yours. Here’s for openers.” He handed me the top torn half of a blown-up black-and-white photograph. “She’s enough to make any man forget his Christian upbringing. If we can come to a business agreement, I’ll show you who’s underneath her. Believe me when I say it’s not her husband.”

In the photo, Linda Gail’s head was tilted back, her mouth open in the midst of orgasm, her bare breasts as taut as cantaloupes. I pushed the photo back across the table. “What are you after?” I said.

“A percentage of that offshore well y’all are drilling south of Lake Charles.”

“Is that all?”

“I’ve been picking up rich men’s crumbs all my life. I think it’s time I get in on the entrée.”

“Let me tell you what you’re going to get out of this, Mr. McFey. With luck, you’ll stay alive. If you show this photo to Hershel Pine, he’ll probably kill you. If he doesn’t, there’s a good chance I will.”

He picked up his cigarette from the ashtray and took another puff, squinting as he did, breathing the smoke out of his nose before he stubbed out the cigarette. “You and me go way back; you’re just not aware of it. I know that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow and Raymond Hamilton and his girlfriend came to your house in 1934. I was a guard in Eastham Pen when Bonnie and Clyde shot their way inside the gates and killed a guard. That guard was a friend of mine. So I made a point of talking to Raymond before he died, reminding the boy of his sins and what was awaiting him when he met Old Sparky. I also watched him ride the bolt. You know what those boys mean when they say ‘ride the bolt,’ don’t you? I know everything about your wife, too.” He lit another cigarette and waited for me to speak.

“I’ve run across my share of white trash, Mr. McFey, but I think you’ve set a new standard,” I said.

He smiled while the bartender served him a bottle of Pearl off a circular tray. He poured his glass full and salted the foam. He took a sip and wiped his mouth, then licked the salt off the web of skin behind his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve got some other things here that might interest you. Your daddy left y’all in ’33, didn’t he?”

An electric fan on a stanchion was blowing across the tops of the booths. Nonetheless, I could feel the temperature rising in the room, my body heat intensifying inside the raincoat. I touched the back of my neck. My skin seemed on fire. “It’s warm in here, isn’t it?” I said. I pulled my raincoat off my right arm and let it flop on the seat, my hand resting on a hard lump inside the pocket. “Would you repeat what you just said?”

“Your father went to parts unknown and never came home,” he replied. He slipped an eight-by-ten off a stack of photos and set it in front of me. He placed a penlight next to it. “Take a look and tell me what that is.”

The photograph showed an excavation dug around a section of pipe buried five feet deep in the ground. “That’s called a bell hole,” I said.

“When there’s a leak in the pipe, it’s got to be dug up and rewelded on the joint, right?” he said.

“Yes, the hole around the joint has the shape of a bell, hence the name. What does this have to do with my father?”

He placed another photo on top of the first one. “See anybody in that group you recognize?” He tilted his glass and emptied it, the salt draining down to the edge. “Come on, boy, who do you see?”

There were four men digging inside the bell hole. They were all thin, their stomachs flat as shirt board, their clothes loose on their bodies. They looked like Depression-era men who might have climbed out from under a boxcar. One of them was wearing a slug cap and staring straight at the camera, as though bemused, as though he didn’t belong there.

“That’s my father.”

“Thought you’d be interested.”

“Where did you get this?”

“Out of a company file.”

The furrows in McFey’s face resembled erosion in a pan full of dirt. His eyes contained a darkness I had seen in few men. A canine tooth shone just behind his lip. “Maybe I shouldn’t show you this last one, but here it is. The explosion down in that hole flat blew them to hell. You can see the smoke rising off what’s left of their clothes.”

My left hand was crimped on the edge of the photograph; my right hand held the penlight. I felt a tremolo in my fingers that I could hardly control.

He said, “As I understand it, when a bell hole blows out, it’s for one reason only: Somebody at the pump station left the shutoff valve open. Am I correct on that?”

“That’s right.”

“These photos were taken for a company magazine article. After the explosion, they got buried in a file cabinet. They probably could have handled a negligence suit for pennies, but the man who owns that company knows how to make the eagle scream.”

“You need to tell me the company’s name, Mr. McFey.”

“Mine to know, lessen we strike us a deal.”

I got up from the booth and draped my coat over my forearm. I put on my hat. Three motorcyclists were drinking at the bar, their bare arms swollen with gristle and wrapped with hair. Someone was playing a pinball machine, smashing its corners with the heels of his hands. “How long were you outside my window?”

“I wasn’t. I was standing on your front porch. I was gonna ring the bell, then decided to call instead.”

“I see. You’re no voyeur?”

He put the photos back in the manila envelope and closed it. “I can make your life easier. Take it or leave it.”

“My guess is your employer fired you, Mr. McFey. I have the feeling you’re not particularly employable right now.”

He looked up at me, the corner of his mouth wrinkling. “You’re not curious about who Miss Linda Gail was entertaining?”

I went out into the sudden coolness of the wind and the smell of rain and the heat lightning coursing through the clouds. I put on my raincoat and stood in the doorway of an abandoned brick building three doors down from the beer joint. Ten minutes later, Harlan McFey walked out on the street and blew his nose in a handkerchief. He looked in both directions and replaced his handkerchief in his pocket, then walked to a darkened filling station on the corner where he had parked his car. He never heard me until I was two feet from him. I shoved him inside his car.

“Do you know what I’m holding?” I asked.

He stared at my hand. “A Luger.”

“If the Waffen SS captured you with one of these, they shot you with it. My wife was a guest of the SS. Did you discover that in your research?”

“Yes.”

“What else did you learn about her?”

“She’s a Red.”

“Is there anything you want to tell me?”

“No.”

“Do you believe I’m capable of killing you?”

His eyes left mine. He looked at nothing. I hit him across the bridge of the nose with the butt of the Luger. He made a muffled sound that could have been a word but probably wasn’t; he bent over, cupping his nose with both hands, blood dripping on the front of his shirt.

“Do you want to tell me who you work for?”

“No, sir,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter. I already know. If you come near my wife or me again, I’ll shoot you through the face.” I caught him by the necktie and pulled him out on the concrete. I removed the photo of my father wearing his slug cap and threw the rest of the folder down a storm drain. I squatted next to McFey. “Are you all right?”

“What do I look like?”

“You watched Raymond Hamilton die in the electric chair?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Just to see him suffer?”

“I just wanted to tell him something.”

“What?”

“How Bonnie and Clyde died. How she screamed like a banshee when they capped her. I wanted him to know they hurt like hell.”

I walked away and left him bleeding on the concrete. I don’t know if men are evil by choice or if some are born without a conscience. I suspected Harlan McFey knew the answer. I didn’t think he would ever share it with the rest of us.

I
WAS DUE BACK
on the job Monday morning, but I called Hershel and put him in charge and, after breakfast, headed straight for Roy Wiseheart’s home in River Oaks. On a street of mansions, I passed the home of which Linda Gail Pine was so proud. It was couched on a small, treeless lot. With its flat roof and off-white hand-grimed stucco walls, it could have been a store that sold used automobile tires. I wondered if she had knocked on the neighbors’ doors to introduce herself, or brought them a home-baked pie or wildflowers she had picked in a vacant field. Her gladness of heart, the rural innocence that dwelled alongside her obtuseness toward her husband’s adoration, made me grieve, if only for a moment, on the pain and disappointment that were waiting for her in the wings.

Roy Wiseheart and his wife lived on an estate that even by River Oaks’s standards was so majestic and massive in its architectural dimensions that you got lost looking at it. Its fluted columns were three stories high; its white paint glowed like a symbol of capitalistic purity inside a bower of towering oaks. The ambiance of lichen-stained stone birdbaths and tarnished sundials and hanging trumpet vine and roses that climbed up trellises to the second story were all part of an antebellum stage set that had no relationship to the rough-hewn legacy of Sam Houston. Even the carriage houses and the servant quarters were made of soft antique brick that probably came from historical teardowns in the Carolinas. As I stood on the breezy porch and rang the chimes, I felt like I was about to walk through a doorway into the classical world, and once there I might not want to leave it.

Roy Wiseheart pulled open the door, smiling broadly, as though I had walked in on a joke he had told to someone else. “Holland, you rascal! You won’t believe who I just got off the phone with,” he said. “Come in, come in! This is hilarious.”

He walked toward the breakfast room, talking over his shoulder. “You just missed Whorehouse Harlan by three minutes. I’m talking about McFey, the guy who tried to shake you down.” He laughed so hard he had to sit down. “ ‘Whorehouse’ is his nickname. Know why? He had venereal disease of the face. That’s how he got those furrows in his skin. Guess under what circumstances he contracted it? The key word is ‘under.’”

“I’ll pass.”

“He says you broke his nose.”

“I doubt that.”

“Holland, you’re heck on wheels. God, I’m glad you dropped by.”

Through the French doors, I could see flowers blooming in the shade of the live oaks, the potted Hong Kong orchids beaded with dew on the brick terrace, the swimming pool that looked as blue and cool as a Roman bath. His breakfast table was set with warmers containing ham and bacon and biscuits and redeye gravy and scrambled eggs. “Eat up,” he said.