White Hot (23 page)

“What about out at the fish shack? Did she let you pay then?”

Beck felt his ears turn hot with embarrassment. Just how much did the cagey old bastard know? He tried to maintain an inscrutable expression. “For a thin girl, she sure can pack it away. Cost me fifteen bucks to feed her that night, counting the change I left in the tip jar.”

Huff chuckled, but he didn’t let Beck’s joking divert him. “I’ve worked all my life for one thing, Beck,” he stated seriously. “You might think money. No. I like having money, but only because it buys you power. I’d rather have power than any material possession money can buy. Respect? Shit no. I don’t give a damn what anybody thinks of me. Whether they like me or despise me, it’s not my problem.”

Holding up his index finger, he said, “I’ve worked for this and this alone—for my name to outlive me. That’s it. Does that surprise you?” He waved his hand as though clearing away a pest. “You can keep your money and fancy thingamajigs, your honorary plaques for doing good deeds, your polite society bullshit. None of that matters to me. No, sir.

“All I want for my time and trouble is for the name Huff Hoyle to be remembered and repeated for a long time, even after I’m dead and buried. That means grandchildren, Beck. So far, I don’t have any, and I mean to remedy that.”

All joking aside now, Beck said, “You’ll have to rely on Chris.”

Huff frowned with annoyance and reached for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket before he remembered they were forbidden in this room. “Chris isn’t going to be a father anytime soon.” He then told Beck about Mary Beth’s tubal ligation.

“I didn’t know. Chris hadn’t said anything to me.”

“Well, that’s the sad state of affairs in that camp. So you see the problem? Chris has got to get that divorce by fair means or foul. But even if Mary Beth granted it to him tomorrow, he hasn’t got a future bride waiting in the wings. But you,” he said, fixing his gaze on Beck. “If you got down to business, I could have a grandson in ten months.”

Beck shook his head with incredulity. “This conversation gets more bizarre by the moment. First you have me married to a woman who can barely tolerate the sight of me, and now you have me fathering her child?

“Speaking for myself, I’m flabbergasted. But can you even imagine Sayre’s reaction to this idea? She’d either laugh the house down or scream it down. Either way, even to have a discussion with her about it, you’d have to approach her with a chair, whip, and muzzle. Now, can we drop this? It’s out of the question.”

Unfazed, Huff said, “Sure, there are some obstacles, but I can find a way around every one of them.”

“Not every one, Huff.”

“Name one.”

“Conflict of interest. I’m Chris’s lawyer.”

Huff furrowed his brow. “So? What’s that got to do with it?”

“So…Sayre thinks Deputy Wayne Scott may be on to something.”

He watched Huff’s face gradually evolve into a mask of rage. “She thinks Chris killed Danny? How could she? Why would she? Because of Iverson?”

“There’s the specter of that, certainly.”

“And?”

Beck looked down at his clasped hands. “She mentioned Sonnie Hallser.” Huff took so long to respond that eventually Beck raised his head and looked over at him. “She said that killing runs in the family.”

Huff’s face had turned so red that Beck had a fleeting fear he was about to go into cardiac arrest again. “Should I get you some water?”

Huff ignored the offer. “The Hallser incident happened a long time ago.”

“Not long enough apparently. Sayre has vivid recollections of it.”

“Does she recollect that I was never charged?”

“She does. But she wonders if maybe you didn’t…” He shook his head, unable to finish. “It doesn’t bear repeating.”

“She wonders if maybe I didn’t leave the shop floor until
after
Hallser stepped into that sandpit and was pulled into the machine? That maybe I even pushed him into it and left him there to bleed to death?”

Beck merely looked at him, offering no comment. Those had been the allegations leveled against Huff. They were never proven, were never even presented in a court of law. They’d been only marginally investigated.

“Sayre has always thought the worst of me,” Huff said. “When all I ever wanted was to make damn certain that I provided the best of everything for my family.” He came off the chaise and began to pace again. “When I was just a skinny little kid with Mississippi mud between my toes, I determined that nobody was ever going to walk over me, that I was never going to duck my head or grovel to anybody. I haven’t and I won’t, goddammit. If somebody questions my methods, that’s their problem, and that includes Miss Sayre Lynch Hoyle!”

“I didn’t mean to upset you, Huff. But you asked.”

Huff waved off the apology. “She’s going to think what she wants. Why she’d want to dredge up something that happened when she was just a mite, I can’t even begin to guess. She had run out of reasons to hate me, I suppose, and had to go scraping the bottom of the barrel to find another. Who the hell knows why she does anything? But she doesn’t have to feel kindly toward me to marry you.”

Then he drew himself up short, looked at Beck shrewdly, and gave a low chuckle. “You got me going, didn’t you? You thought, ‘I’ll raise the old man’s hackles, sidetrack him.’ You’re putting up smoke screens, boy. What’s really bothering you? Is it that Sayre’s been married twice before?”

“I’m in no position to judge her.”

“She was young,” Huff said, as though Beck hadn’t spoken. “Rash and impulsive and headstrong. She made bad choices.”

“That’s not quite accurate, is it, Huff? Weren’t her bridegrooms
your
choices?”

His eyes narrowed. “She tell you that?”

“No. Chris did.”

Huff moved his lips around an imaginary cigarette, as he was wont to do when he wasn’t actually smoking one. “The girl was out of control. Her life was a shambles and she seemed bent on making it worse. I was her only parent and saw it as my duty to step in and try to avoid total disaster. I’ll admit, it may have been a bit drastic to lay down an ultimatum that either she get married or else, but the situation called for me to be tough.

“I’ll tell you, Beck, you may be thinking ‘Poor Sayre,’ but don’t. She made the lives of those two men sheer misery. Oh, they asked for it. They wanted her. The second husband just as much as the first, even knowing the first marriage had gone south before the ink was dry on the marriage certificate. But they considered her worth the hell she put them through. She was a beauty, a firebrand. Wild and…well, you know.”

Yeah, he knew, all right. She was all of that. His hands had felt it. His lips had tasted it. But better not to linger on thoughts of it. “When the first marriage ended, why did you insist on the second?”

“She wasn’t straightened out yet.”

“Was she still in love with Clark Daly?”

Huff’s scowl deepened. “You know about that, too?”

“Not much. Some.”

“I was right to bust up that little romance, wasn’t I? Look how he turned out. Do you think Sayre would be happy with him now? He’s the town drunk. Living hand to mouth. A failure. Now tell me I was wrong to prevent that match.”

Beck withheld further comment. Obviously it was a touchy subject to both Huff and Sayre.

Huff gave Beck a calculating look. “I bet it’s crossed your mind.”

“What?”

“What she’s like between the sheets.”

“For godsake, Huff.” He shot to his feet. “I’m not listening to any more of this.”

He turned toward the door and nearly collided with Chris as he strolled in. “You’re not listening to any more of what?”

“I’m trying to persuade Beck to marry Sayre,” Huff said.

Chris looked at Beck, his dark eyes dancing with amusement over the secret they shared about the interlude he’d interrupted. “Should I be airing out my tux?”

“I told Huff he was delusional. And apparently you’re living in a dreamworld, too.”

His tone caused Chris to take a step back. “What’s got you so steamed?”

“What the hell were you doing out at the fishing camp?”

“What?” Huff exclaimed.

“That’s what Red called me about earlier,” Beck explained. “He was giving us a heads-up. Seems Wayne Scott returned to the sheriff’s office a while ago, barely able to contain his excitement because he’d caught Chris inside the cabin at the fishing camp.”

“So fucking what? I’m going to get a drink.”

As he turned to leave, Beck reached out and caught him by the arm. Chris angrily shook off his grip, but he remained where he was. Beck said, “What were you doing out there?”

“It’s my cabin.”

“It’s a crime scene. Do you know how that makes you look?”

“No. How?”

“Guilty.”

The two glared at one another, each as angry as the other. Chris was the first to back down. “It’s nothing for either Scott or you to get worked up about. I took Lila on a picnic this afternoon, mistakenly thinking it would be romantic. I wanted to soften her up in case I need her as an alibi for Sunday afternoon. I thought if I acted needy, emotionally fragile, her nurturing instincts would kick in.”

“How’d it go?”

“Turns out Lila doesn’t have any nurturing instincts,” he replied dryly. “But I’m still working on her.”

Beck wasn’t satisfied with the evasive answer, but he didn’t take issue with it now. “You still haven’t explained why you went to the camp.”

“It was on the way as I drove back into town. I saw the turnoff and acted on impulse. I hadn’t been there since…it happened, and I wanted to see the cabin for myself.

“I went inside and looked around. It’s been cleaned up, but you can still see bloodstains. I stayed no more than a few minutes. When I came out, there was Scott, leaning against his squad car with this stupid smirk on his face.”

“What did he say?”

“Something clever about criminals always returning to the scene of the crime. I told him to go screw himself. He asked me what I was doing in there and if I’d removed anything.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. You told me not to answer any questions without you present.”

“What happened then?”

“I got in my car and left him standing there.”

“Chris,
did
you remove anything from the cabin?”

He looked like he might tell Beck to go screw himself, too. But he only gave him a clipped no, then added, “The only thing I touched was the doorknob to let myself in.”

Beck wasn’t sure he believed that, but he asked no more questions. Although it would be helpful if Chris were completely honest with him, he wasn’t required to be. A lawyer didn’t always want to know his client’s guilt or innocence.

“Hopefully no damage was done,” he said with more confidence than he felt. “I just wish you had consulted me before you went out there.”

“You’re my lawyer, not my kindergarten teacher.”

Using that as his parting shot, Chris left the room. A few moments later he reentered the conservatory with a highball glass in hand. As he sat down on a small settee, he looked around as though he’d never been in the room before. “Why are we in here?”

“I’d been in the den all day and needed a change of scenery,” Huff said. “This is where Beck found me when he stopped by to talk over some matters.”

“Like what…besides a pending marriage between you and Sayre? Which I find laughable, by the way.”

“So do I,” Beck said. “And any discussion of that ends here.” He gave Huff a hard look, then turned back to Chris. “I stopped by to bring Huff up to speed on several issues.” He enumerated the topics like bullet points on an interoffice memo.

“Those are hardly trivialities,” Chris said. “You couldn’t have waited on me to have this conference? It’s becoming a habit of yours to cut me out of the loop.”

“It wasn’t intentional, Chris. Huff asked and—”

“He answered,” Huff said, interrupting. “He can fill you in on the details later, Chris. Right now, there’s something else we need to discuss. It’s serious and it concerns Sayre.”

“I told you, the subject is closed.”

“It’s not about that, Beck. It’s something else.”

Chris sipped his whiskey. “I can hardly wait. What’s my dear little sister up to now?”

I
t was Saturday night, and Slap Watkins had nowhere to go.

Since ten o’clock that morning, he’d been drinking in a honky-tonk located so deep in the swamp that unless you knew it was there, you’d never find it. The anonymity was intentional. The clientele seldom went by the names on their birth certificates and took exception to nosy questions.

He’d played a lot of pool and lost heavily on his gambles. Then a woman with a missing front tooth and a nose ring had turned down his offer to buy her a drink. She looked at his ears and laughed out loud. “I ain’t that thirsty.”

Following that rejection, he’d made his stumbling exit from the place, asking himself who needed that kind of abuse. Slap had never been a happy drunk. Instead, spirits tended to make him surly. The drunker he was, the nastier his disposition. Tonight he was extremely drunk.

His piss factor went off the charts when he returned to the buddy’s house where he’d been staying. “They came looking for you, man.” The guy—right then Slap was a little foggy on his name—was blocking the door with his bony body, talking to him through a rusty screen, which was uncomfortably reminiscent of the rare visits he’d had from friends while in prison.

“Who did?”

“Two deputies from the sheriff’s office. ’Bout four o’clock this afternoon. My ol’ lady wigged out.”

She would. She operated a meth lab out of the bathroom. “They say what they wanted me for?”

“Naw. But as they were getting back in their squad car, I overheard one of them say something about Hoyle. Anyhow, my ol’ lady says you can’t stay here no more, Slap. Sorry, man, but fuck…” He raised his knobby shoulders in a shrug. “You know how it is.”

Swell. So now he had nowhere to stay, and—this was the clincher—the sheriff’s office was looking for him. He couldn’t buy a break, could he? Story of his life.

He’d been initiated into violence by a father who beat him regularly and further coached by a passel of siblings who teased him about his ears. Their ridicule was merciless. He had learned to defend himself just as ruthlessly. He belonged to a clan of short-tempered, hotheaded brawlers whose sole resolution to even the slightest tiff involved some form of weaponry, even if it was one’s own hands, feet, or teeth.

Those violent tendencies were percolating inside him now as he sped along a back road on his motorcycle. Everything he owned was packed in a roll tied behind the seat. He was trying to think clearly and calmly, but his brain was pickled in cheap alcohol, making his reasoning powers a bit dodgy, which was unfortunate because he had some serious decisions to make.

First off, where was he going to light? With kinfolk? He had them spread all over southern Louisiana, but he didn’t like any of them much. His uncle reminded him of his late daddy, and Slap had hated that mean son of a bitch. Most of his relatives had whining kids who got on his nerves.

A few weeks ago a cousin had agreed to let him sleep on his living room sofa. But after only one night he’d accused Slap of entertaining impure thoughts about his wife. Slap had laughed and said she was so butt ugly that only a blind man could entertain impure thoughts about her.

Actually she wasn’t
that
ugly, and he hadn’t only entertained impure thoughts but had acted on them with her practically begging him to, and urging him to hurry up and finish before her old man got back from the store with the six-pack of Bud and a jar of mayonnaise she’d sent him after.

But in any case, the accusation had put an end to that. He’d moved out and started mooching off friends.

There were lots of them scattered around, too. But now he’d been kicked out of one place because the law was looking for him. Word got around. He’d be like a man with a contagious disease. None of his friends would want him bunking under their roofs.

And why had two deputies come around looking for him?

Well, duh.

He didn’t want to think the worst, but he wasn’t stupid. They’d mentioned Hoyle, and Slap would bet his left nut they were referring to the one recently deceased.

Afterward, he thought he must have been guided by a sub…sublim…sub-something thought. What did you call those messages deep inside your brain that made you do stuff before you were even aware of it? He didn’t think he had a destination in mind, but he must have. Because he found himself on the pretty rural road where the Hoyles lived.

Yep, there it was, their mansion, sitting among oak trees so perfect they looked fake, like something in a movie. The sun was setting behind the house, outlining it in gold. It was large enough to house a whole cell block. One thing you could say about it, it was prettier and cleaner than their foundry. He drove past the estate, along a white rail fence that looked harmless enough, but Slap wouldn’t trust it not to be wired with electricity.

The sonsabitches. Thought they were the lords of the land. They for goddamn sure lived like it, didn’t they?

As he drove past the house a second time, he saw Chris Hoyle jog down the front steps and climb into his silver Porsche. Slap sped up so he wouldn’t be seen spying on the house. Luckily, when Chris drove out of the lane, he turned in the opposite direction. Slap made a U-turn and followed at a safe distance.

Hoyle didn’t go far before turning off the road and driving through an open gate. The house at the end of the drive was much smaller than the Hoyles’, but it was a damn sight better than anything Slap had ever lived in.

Beck Merchant, Hoyle’s trusty sidekick, came out the front door and got into the Porsche. Again, Slap sped up and went past Merchant’s house so they wouldn’t see him. He grinned into the hot air that whipped against his face. Whatever their plans were for this Saturday night, they were about to change.

Beck hadn’t wanted to go out with Chris tonight.

He’d spent an idle Saturday at home. He’d washed his pickup and given Frito a bath and good brushing. These were activities that he could do while trying to unravel the problems besetting him.

When Chris had called late that afternoon and invited him to go out, he’d declined. But Chris had been persuasive. “We haven’t been out together since Danny died. We’ve been on edge with each other because of all the crap that’s going on. Let’s go out and forget about our troubles for a few hours.”

“Where are we headed?” Beck asked now. Chris was driving away from town.

“I thought the Razorback.”

“I don’t want to go there. It’s too boozy, noisy, and crowded.”

Chris cut a glance at him. “You’re getting old, Beck.”

“I’m just not in the mood for it tonight.”

“Thinking about my sister?”

Chris was heckling him, but he responded seriously. “In fact, that’s exactly what I’m thinking about. What is she after?”

“I don’t have a clue.”

That was what Chris had said yesterday after Huff told them that Sayre had been making the rounds of the jurors on Chris’s trial. “She’s talking to anyone who’ll talk to her.”

When Beck had asked why she was doing that, both Huff and Chris had pled ignorance. They had shrugged as though befuddled by Sayre’s activities and what had prompted them. But their worry over it was inconsistent with their claim to be clueless. Huff hadn’t liked her talking to those jurors. Nor had Chris. That bothered Beck greatly.

Chris interrupted his reverie by asking, “What’s this?”

“What?” Beck turned around to see what had attracted Chris’s attention in his rearview mirror. A motorcycle was behind them, and it was roaring up fast.

“Wasn’t he driving past my house as I came out?” Beck asked rhetorically. Then, “Oh, hell. That’s—”

“Our friend Slap Watkins. I thought Red was handling that situation.”

“Obviously he hasn’t found him yet.” Beck reached for the cell phone clipped to his belt, intending to call the sheriff. “You can outrun him in this, but try and keep him in sight. I’ll give Red our location. Maybe we can keep Watkins busy long enough for Red to get here.”

Just as he said that, the motorcycle rammed the back of the Porsche.

Chris cursed lavishly. He sped up, then shouted, “Hold on!” Less than a second later, he stamped on the brakes. Beck hadn’t had time to brace himself before the tightening seat belt caught him hard across his chest.

Averting a total disaster, in which Chris and Beck would probably have been decapitated as the bike sailed over the Porsche, Watkins managed to cut his front wheel sharply to the left. It clipped the left rear fender of the Porsche before skidding across the road on its side, Slap’s left leg beneath it. He pulled himself free, got to his feet, then came at them in a hopping-running limp while shaking his fist and yelling obscenities.

Beck’s phone had been jarred from his hand when Chris hit the car’s brakes. Unbuckling his seat belt, he searched the floorboard for it.

“Call Red. I’ll take care of this.” Before Beck could advise against it, Chris got out of the car and immediately went on the offensive.

“You must want to talk to me real bad, Slap.”

“You know what I want.”

“More Hoyle blood, I assume.”

Slap cut his eyes toward Beck, who’d just retrieved his phone from the floorboard. “Drop it, Merchant!”

“Not until you back down and cool off.”

Suddenly looking nervous and indecisive, Slap licked his lips before swinging his gaze back to Chris, who said, “My brother’s blood wasn’t enough for you?”

“Is that why the sheriff’s looking for me?”

“Unless you’ve killed somebody else.”

He took one lurching step toward Chris. “You goddamn—”

That was all he got out before Chris bent double and head-butted Slap in his midsection, sending him reeling backward. Slap reacted with the reflexes of a habitual fighter. Beck quickly pressed 911 on his phone, then tossed it onto the seat, knowing that the emergency call would be traced to their location.

He clambered out the passenger door but hadn’t noticed that the car had stopped on the shoulder of the road. He didn’t anticipate the deep ditch and stepped into it hard, lost his footing, and fell. By the time he got back on his feet and climbed out of the ditch, Chris and Slap were standing on either side of the white stripe in the center of the road, frozen in a tableau that crackled with tension.

Chris was holding his arm against his side. Blood seeped through his fingers. Slap looked down at the knife in his hand, blinking at it stupidly as it dripped blood onto the hot tarmac. Lifting his head, he looked at Chris with an expression of stunned disbelief. Then he turned on his heel and ran back to the motorcycle.

Chris took several staggering steps after him.

“Let him go.” Beck grabbed a handful of Chris’s shirt and held him back. “They’ll get him.” Chris’s knees buckled, and he dropped to the ground.

Slap righted his bike, hopped onto it, and as soon as the motor roared to life, he sped away. In the still night, the sound was deafening.

Beck helped Chris to his feet and ushered him around to the passenger side of the car. “Watch your step. We’re on the edge of the ditch. Are you all right?”

Chris nodded, then muttered, “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” Glancing down at his arm, he said, “Cocksucker cut me.”

“I called nine-one-one.” As he put Chris in the seat, Beck picked up his phone. “Shit! They’ve got me on hold!”

“I’m fine, Beck. It’s only a flesh wound.”

Beck looked at the arm Chris extended to him. A long cut ran from his biceps to his wrist. The wound didn’t appear to be deep, but darkness had fallen and there were no lights by which to see. It might be more severe than it looked. “You don’t know where that knife has been.”

“Take me to Doc Caroe. He’ll give me an antibiotic.”

Chris wouldn’t hear of being taken to the emergency room. Beck gave up trying to insist and called Red Harper instead. The sheriff wasn’t available, but a dispatcher took down all the information. “Tell Red we’re on our way to Dr. Caroe’s house.”

By the time Beck had completed his call, they had reached the neat brick home of the family physician. He had settled in for an evening of HBO, he told them when he answered the door in his pajamas. Like all his clothing, they were several sizes too large and made him look like a gnome as he led them down a dim and narrow hallway into a room at the rear of his house that was outfitted to serve as an examination room.

“This was where my father practiced medicine for over fifty years,” he explained to Beck. “Even after I set up the office on Lafayette Street and renovated this house, I kept this room ready to treat emergencies.”

He concurred with Chris that the knife wound, while ugly, wasn’t deep enough to require stitches. He cleaned it with antiseptic that stung so bad it brought tears to Chris’s eyes, then wound it in a gauze bandage. “I’m going to give you a butt-full of antibiotic. Drop your pants.”

Chris got the injection and as he was readjusting his trousers said, “Are we all agreed not to tell Huff about this?”

“Why not?” Caroe asked absently as he placed the disposable syringe into a hazardous waste container affixed to the wall.

“Hearing that his only surviving son was knifed may not be good for his heart.”

Caroe looked at Chris blankly for several seconds, then said, “Ah, right, right. Good thinking. Too soon after his heart attack.”

“He’ll hear about it from Red anyway,” Beck said. “If we don’t tell him, he’ll be mad as hell and his blood pressure will still go up.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Chris said. “Let’s at least hold off until tomorrow, though. I’ll tell him over breakfast. Maybe by that time Watkins will be in custody and Huff won’t get too upset.”

As they were leaving, Red Harper arrived. “We’ve got an APB out on Watkins’s motorcycle,” he said as he got out of his car and approached them. “Officers are focusing on the roads in the vicinity of where you saw him. How’s your arm, Chris?”

“It’ll be fine. Just find Slap and be quick about it.”

“Problem is, he’s got kinfolk and cronies all over the place, in every surrounding parish. Lots of places to hide in the swamp, and those people don’t rat each other out. You start asking questions, they clam up, and you can’t pry information out of them with a crowbar.”