Читать книгу Bluff Walk - Charles R. Crawford - Страница 12

6 _____________________

Right at dawn, sleeping on my stomach, I woke up to a warm weight on my butt and two strong hands making lazy circles on my back. I lay still, and pretended I was still asleep, till the hands left my back and bare feet slid down the outsides of my legs. Soft breasts with hard nipples pushed against my back, and hair tickled my neck and the side of my face.

“Wake up, love, and turn over,” a husky voice whispered in my ear.

I did as I was told, and smiled into blue eyes. She looked down at me. “Have you been awake all this time or do you have to go to the bathroom?”

“Awake,” I answered.

“Good,” she said, reaching into my nightstand, “I don’t want to wait any longer.”

Later, holding an armful of warm Dutch flight attendant, I asked her how long she was in town.

“Just till day after tomorrow, then back to Amsterdam. I’m too tired to go back to my place. Can I sleep here?”

“You know you can, but I have to get up,” I said.

“Not till I go to sleep,” she said, tightening her arm around my chest.

Mary Arenduyk had been on the Amsterdam to Memphis flight for nine months, and shared an apartment below me with four other attendants, two or three of whom might be in town at the same time. I liked her, and she liked me, and we had agreed that it probably wouldn’t get beyond that, but it was still fun. I didn’t ask her about men in Holland, and she didn’t ask me about other women in Memphis. For me, there weren’t any, but I didn’t see the point of forcing the issue.

After her breathing slowed and her arm relaxed across my chest, I slipped out of bed and showered. Then I dressed quietly, and had coffee and cereal on the balcony before going into the office.

I made phone calls for an hour or two on other cases, then turned my attention to Tuggle.

It was likely that the police had known Thomas was a fence, especially since he had served time, but for some reason they had decided he was also into crack. Maybe he was, but his bondsman thought the idea was ridiculous. Looking at it objectively, I had to agree with Jackson. Thomas had obviously devoted a great deal of time to his stolen garments business, which appeared to be hugely successful. I had practiced law and worked as a PI long enough to know that many courses in life weren’t dictated by good sense, but Thomas’s success indicated he had some sense. A crack dealer’s life was violent and usually short, and not as profitable as Thomas’s venture. Thomas would be in the ideal position to compare the two industries, and I doubted he would choose to diversify into crack.

I called an acquaintance in the district attorney’s office and explained my situation. She would not confirm my suspicion that the probable cause for Thomas’s arrest came from an informant. She did confirm Jackson’s statement that Thomas did not have an attorney of record, but represented himself at the bail hearing. And she gave me the names of the arresting officers.

I had to decide where to concentrate my search. I could try to see if Thomas had any associates or friends who might know his whereabouts, but they were even less likely than his mother to be candid. Besides, I felt pretty confident that if Henry Jackson had not heard anything from his clientele, it was unlikely that I would have any better luck.

The unconfirmed informant was the obvious best potential source of meaningful information, but identifying him or her and then getting them to talk was going to be a challenge. If they even existed. The arresting officers might not even know the name of the informant, and their supervisor probably wouldn’t tell me. The police would have their own investigation into Thomas’s disappearance, but their purpose in finding him would be to arrest a bail jumper, not to ease his mother’s heart. I doubted very much that they would want to give out any information that might let me find him first.

One possibility was to have Amanda enter an appearance as Thomas’s attorney of record, and ask for the government’s case against him in order to defend it. I didn’t know enough about criminal law to know if this was practical, or if she would even be allowed to represent him without proof that he had hired her. I would ask her about the feasibility of doing it that way, but I didn’t think it would reveal anything fast. In the meantime, I decided to give it a shot my own way.

I looked in on Mary, who was still sleeping heavily. I left her a note, and then walked the block to the parking garage where I kept my truck. I drove down Union Avenue through the medical center and past every fast food outlet known to man to the west precinct station house, parked, and walked in. The police probably wouldn’t tell me anything, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask. And if I asked in person, instead of over the telephone, it might be a little bit harder to say no.

Except for the police cars parked around, the station looks like any other business on the street. It doesn’t look much different in the public areas inside, either, except for the uniforms, and it smells better than the fast food restaurants, since all arrested suspects go directly to the Criminal Justice Center downtown without a stop at the precinct.

The civilian receptionist took my card and request to speak to a detective and politely asked me to take a seat. I sat down and flipped through a fitness magazine. I had just decided that the text wasn’t much but that some of the pictures were pretty good when a door opened and a voice said “Mr. McAlister?”

I looked up and saw an angular white man well over six feet, with his wet looking dark blond hair cut just on the long side of a flattop. He was wearing grey pleated slacks, a starched blue button down shirt and an expensive-looking tie that matched his light green eyes. An empty tan leather holster was attached to the belt on the left side of his waist, positioned for a cross draw with his right hand.

“Yes,” I said, standing up. He stuck out his right hand and introduced himself. “I’m Lieutenant Steiner, detective squad. I understand that you asked for a detective?”

I nodded my head as I shook his hand. “Come on back to my office,” he said, leading me through the door.

I followed him down a couple of halls, breathing his cologne and another half familiar scent all the way. A surreptitious sniff at my hand revealed that I smelled like both odors now, too.

He turned into a small office that contained a metal desk and a swivel chair, and was lined with filing cabinets. It was an internal office, so there were no windows. There were no photographs on the walls or desk, just a pile of folders on one side and a spread open newspaper on the other side. On the newspaper there was a greasy looking rag and a short pistol barrel cleaning rod with a dirty cotton patch stuck in the end. An open bottle of Hoppe’s gun oil lent its fruity smell to the room and answered my question about the mystery odor. A Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special with the three inch barrel and an open cylinder lay on the paper beside a box of .38 Special hollow points.

“Sorry for the mess,” he said, sitting down behind the desk and waving at another chair. “I was at the range this morning and I didn’t get a chance to clean my weapon there.”

“No problem,” I said. “I’ve always liked the smell of Hoppe’s. It reminds me of my father. He would always use it to clean his shotgun after he went duck hunting.”

“You duck hunt?” he asked, running the rod through each one of the chambers in the cylinder.

“Sometimes,” I said. “I don’t belong to a club, but I’ll go two or three times a year with friends. Sort of for old times sake. What about you?”

“No, I’m out at four in the morning freezing my ass off enough in this job not to want to do it for fun.”

I could have asked him about his golf game then, or whether he was a University of Memphis basketball fan, and kept on talking for another fifteen or twenty minutes about nothing. But I didn’t say anything for a minute while he peered through each of the five chambers.

He then set the gun down on the paper with the cylinder still open. “So, how can I help you?”

I explained about Thomas, and told him the name of the two arresting officers. “I was told they were working out of this precinct, and so I thought you might be able to tell me something that would help me find Tuggle,” I said. “I assume you’re looking for him, too, so I figured you wouldn’t mind telling me what you know,” I lied. “I’ll be glad to tell you what I know, but it’s not much.”

“I’m familiar with the Tuggle case,” he said. “But you go first.”

I had already decided that, despite Lucy’s wishes, talking to the police wouldn’t harm Thomas. She had the ingrained distrust of the police that was almost a genetic code in many of her race, even though the mayor and about half of the force were now black. The police were already looking for Thomas, and they might let something slip that would let me find him first. If I found him, I could then decide what to do about the law. And I doubted that I knew anything that they didn’t.

I told him that I was working for the family, and that I had talked to Thomas’s bail bondsman. I told him that Jackson didn’t think Thomas was a crack dealer, but I didn’t mention his other business. Basically, I told him that I didn’t have anything.

When I had finished, he said, “That’s it so far, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s not much, and I don’t know if it’s going to get any better,” I said.

“You realize if you find him that you have a legal obligation to advise us, right? If you don’t, you’ll be an accessory,” he said.

“I hadn’t really thought about it like that, but I guess you’re right,” I said.

“Now,” he said, “you said you’re working for his family. Do you mind telling me exactly which family member?”

I didn’t see any point in not answering, so I told him I was working for Thomas’s mother.

“If a crack dealer’s mother is paying you to look for him, she’s probably doing it with money he made selling crack,” he said. “That bother you?”

I started to tell him about Amanda, but decided not to. I didn’t want him calling her and asking her questions.

I shrugged. “I don’t have any indications that’s where she’s getting my fee.”

He smiled and began to load his revolver.

“I’m serious,” I said. “His mother doesn’t think he’s a crack dealer, which I admit doesn’t carry a hell of a lot of weight, but neither does his bondsman. His bondsman said he wouldn’t have put up the bond for him if he thought he was.”

Steiner was picking rounds out of the cartridge box using the oily rag to cover his fingers. He didn’t want fingerprint oil to get on the shells and then transfer to the insides of the cylinder and cause rust. He filled all five chambers, and then gently closed the cylinder using the oily rag over his hand. Holding only the checkered walnut grips, he slipped the little gun into its holster and snapped the strap.

“Everybody else is going around with fifteen shot semi-automatics these days. You feel comfortable with a five shot revolver?” I asked.

“You know what they say,” he replied, grinning. “It’s not what you got, but how you use it. No, really, the guys out in the patrol cars need the firepower, they never know what’s going to pop up. But I’m comfortable with five shots in my job because I know where they’re going, and most of the people who’ll be shooting at me with their Berettas and Glocks have no idea how to hit anything with a firearm. They watch television, they think you just point the gun in the general direction of someone, pull the trigger, and they fall over dead. They need fifteen shots to have a chance of connecting, and they’re still most likely to shoot some innocent passerby.”

“You know this from experience?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said and grinned again, with a sparkle in his eyes.

I smiled back at him automatically, but I didn’t like that grin. When I didn’t say anything, he asked, “What else do you know about Thomas Tuggle?”

“Jackson, his bondsman, told me he had served time for receiving stolen property. I’ve got his picture and his address. That’s about it.”

“That’s not much.” He screwed the top back on the bottle of Hoppe’s and stuck it in a shoebox with the rest of the cleaning material. He put the top on the box and put it away in a drawer. Either he hadn’t heard about oily rags and spontaneous combustion, or he didn’t care. At least he put the cartridges in a separate drawer.

I figured it was his turn, so I asked, “Why did the police think Thomas was dealing?”

“We had probable cause to believe that he was,” Steiner replied.

“Can you tell me what that was?” I asked.

“No, I really can’t. It will come out in the court proceeding, if there ever is one,” he said as he wiped his hands on a wad of tissues.

“Can you tell me if it was an informant?” I asked, hoping for some type of indication that it was, even if he wouldn’t tell me whom.

“I really can’t say one way or the other,” he replied evenly. If he gave some hint as to the answer, I didn’t pick it up.

“Do you have any ideas where he might be?” I asked. “I mean in general.”

“I couldn’t tell you if I did,” he replied. “I tell you what I think, and you tell his mother, and she tells him, and he goes somewhere else. Then I’m the dumbass.”

“You think that’s why she hired me?” I asked. His statement implied that I was the dumbass, and he didn’t want me to pass it on.

“Probably not. It’s a lot of trouble for a little bit of information, but you never know.”

“Well, I won’t take up any more of your time,” I said, standing up. “Thanks for talking to me.”

“Are you licensed to carry?” he asked, as he stood up, too.

“Yes,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because looking for a crack dealer can be dangerous work. He’s not going to stop and let you explain that you’re not a cop, that his momma just wants him to call home. He’s going to shoot you dead. If you’re licensed to carry, do it. Better yet, forget the whole thing and let us find him.”

“I’ve never heard of a cop telling a private citizen to carry a weapon,” I said.

“You’re a PI, so you cross the line. If you’re going to persist in acting like a cop, you’d better be ready to defend yourself. If you do get a line on Thomas, the best thing you can do is call me.”

“Even if he can’t shoot straight?” I asked.

He gave me the same disturbing grin. “He doesn’t have to shoot straight if he puts the muzzle against the back of your head.”

As I drove back downtown, I tried to figure out if I had learned anything. It was pretty easy to decide that I hadn’t. I then tried to decide if Steiner had learned anything from me that would be useful to him in finding Thomas. Other than the fact that I was looking for him, too, I couldn’t think of anything I had said that would help him. I didn’t figure the police would have the resources to follow me around just on the off chance it might help them catch one accused crack dealer. I also figured that they weren’t doing much proactively to find him in the first place. They probably assumed that he had blown town and that their best chance of getting him back would be when he got arrested the next time in another city and the outstanding warrant showed up on the computer. Call it a wash.

I had thought about asking Steiner what he knew about Thomas’s wholesale to the consumer business, but, even though I assumed he knew about it, I concluded that it was probably not a good idea. Amanda was going to be pissed anyway if she found out I had talked to the cops at all, much less suggested to them that Thomas was engaged in a lucrative criminal enterprise.

I got back to the office around five, and found a note from Mary saying to call her if I wanted to go out for dinner. I checked my voice mail and flipped through the bills and offers for credit cards that the mailman had left me, then went into my apartment for a beer.

I sat on the balcony facing west, and watched the earth spin me away from the sun. Cicadas hummed from the stand of magnolias beneath my window, and the direct sunlight on my face was still hot but not as heavy as August. It was barely fall by the calendar, but during the day it was still more summer than autumn.

I was going nowhere fast on the Tuggle investigation, and I wasn’t sure how to pick up the pace. I would talk to Amanda tomorrow about her trying to get information on the police’s case against Thomas, especially the identity of an informant, but I thought there should be something else I could do.

I finished my beer and went inside and called Mary. I told her to be ready in ten minutes and dress casual. When I stopped by to get her, she was dressed in sandals, blue jeans and a white t-shirt that almost came down to her navel. It was obvious she was not wearing a bra.

“Am I okay for where we are going?” she asked. I loved it when she didn’t use contractions.

“If you were any more okay you’d cause a riot,” I said. I saw from the look in her eyes that she was trying to understand this remark, so I quickly added, “You look perfect, great.”

She smiled, gave me a quick kiss and picked up her purse and a margarita in a plastic cup. I declined a drink for the road, and we went down to the garage where I kept my pickup.

We headed out of downtown on Third Street just as full dark came on. As we got further into south Memphis, knots of young black men stood on street corners, talking and jiving and listening to boom boxes. Hookers cruised the sidewalks, and cop cars cruised the streets, but both groups looked like it was still too early to really get down to business.

Then the road ran under an Illinois Central railroad overpass, and dropped down off the last Chickasaw Bluff onto the Mississippi Delta. In daytime, the levee that snaked down the side of the river for hundreds of miles would have been visible on our right, and we could have seen the end of the hills from the east on our left. Even at night, though, and in a vehicle going sixty-five miles per hour, there was a strong sense of utter flatness, of uninterrupted space. Of no place to hide.

Casino gambling had come to northwest Mississippi in the 1990s in a big way, and now ranked behind only Vegas and Atlantic City as a gaming destination. We were soon in the midst of thousands of other people from the city who were making the short trip down the highway to try their luck. Billboards and gas stations appeared in the cotton and soybean fields that lined the road, and then we could see the casinos on our right along the river. By law, they had to be on the water, but the requirement was interpreted very loosely, and a small canal that ran around the casino and connected to the river was enough. The fields along the river had been owned by large farmers who already had plenty of money, but who had sold or leased parts of their land to the gambling interests and suddenly climbed several more notches on the wealth scale.

The casinos had brought jobs and money to Tunica County, one of the poorest in the country, and offered another form of entertainment to the region, gaming and Vegas type shows. They had also provided some people with the opportunity to discover they could not resist the temptation to bet, even if losing the money meant their children would go hungry.

Mary hadn’t said a word since we crossed into Mississippi, but had sat with her window wide open and her legs pulled up under her, breathing in the cool night air and the smells of the drying vegetation in the fields. Despite several months off and on in Memphis, it still had the newness and excitement of a foreign country to her. This sense was heightened by the vast differences between her urbanized, sophisticated country, and a place like Memphis that was set down in the middle of vast stretches of forest and farmland, and held areas within the city limits that it was worth your life to drive into at night. The Netherlands were already old and settled when Chickasaws were the only human residents in what is now Memphis. In the town’s early days, bears had roamed the streets at night, picking off free-ranging pigs and stray dogs. The nighttime predators were still there, but they weren’t just looking for a meal anymore.

Mary felt me looking at her, and turned and smiled at me. “I like this,” she said.

“I like you,” I said.

She put her hand on my thigh and turned back to the window. She still hadn’t asked where we were going, and made no comment as we rode past the last turn off for the casinos.

The traffic thinned out as we left the gambling crowd behind. We went through the town of Tunica and headed on down, deeper into the Delta, till we got to an intersection with a two-lane state highway and turned right, west toward the river. In a few miles, the highway came to the levee and turned south. We stayed on it for less than a mile, paralleling the levee. I slowed and turned off on a gravel road that ran up and over the levee and into a stand of trees. No other cars were visible, but a haze of dust in the headlights showed that we weren’t the only ones to come this way.

We came out of the trees into a cotton field that stretched away on both sides as far as you could see in the starlight. The taillights of two or three other vehicles showed ahead of us. A ground fog was starting to form in the field, and I shivered in the damp breeze that came through Mary’s window. She must have felt my leg shake, because she patted it once and rolled up her window.

The field eventually came to an end in another stand of trees. We could see lights shining through the trunks and branches. We pulled into an open place in the trees that served as a parking lot, stopped between two other pickups, and got out onto a surface that was part gravel, part dust and part flattened beer cans. Dozens of cars, trucks and motorcycles were parked helter skelter around us. Light and honky tonk music shot out at us from a building barely visible through the trees.

As we got closer to the source of the lights and music, we could see an old one story structure made of gray, weathered boards with a rusted tin roof. It sat out over black water, supported by pilings that stuck up a good ten feet out of the water, its floor higher than our heads. A ramp made out of wide planks ran from the shore to an uncovered porch along the right side of the building. A frame without a door stood at the end of the ramp, and a neon sign affixed to its top proclaimed “Dude’s Joint.”

Dude’s was built over an oxbow lake, formed when the river changed channels and left a semicircular lake, full of the fish and other creatures that lived in the Mississippi. Cypress trees dotted its shoreline and grew out in the lake, their knees sticking up here and there out of the water like shark fins. It filled in some each year with mud and vegetation, but the annual flood helped scour it back out and replenished its marine life. It would probably disappear altogether eventually, but not in my lifetime. It had been six months since the last flood, and after a hot, dry summer the mud along the shore gave off a fetid odor of garbage and dead fish.

Dude’s had been at this location for more years than I could remember. It was only open for business when the water wasn’t high enough to cover the parking lot or the road across the cotton field, and the building itself was washed off its pilings every ten or fifteen years when a big flood came. The walls were always rebuilt out of some cheap material, plywood or pressboard or the lumber from abandoned farm buildings that made up this incarnation. Since 1953, when a corner of the outdoor deck collapsed and three drunken patrons had drowned, the floor had been made of stout lumber, but it still creaked and groaned under a full load of customers.

The place had always drawn an eclectic crowd, ranging from bikers and rednecks to fraternity boys from Ole Miss and slummers from Memphis. The mix made for an interesting crowd and more interesting fights. The only thing you didn’t see was any black faces. Dude didn’t believe in that kind of diversity.

Years ago, I had asked a bartender who Dude was, and had gotten only a shrug and shake of the head in reply. I knew who the current Dude was, though.

The mud stink was masked by the smell of beer and cigarette smoke as soon as we stepped off the ramp onto the porch. Men and women sat in metal folding chairs around small wooden tables made out of scrap lumber. The end of a chair leg occasionally fell down into a crack between the floor decking, adding to the confusion and hilarity. Naked light bulbs were strung along wires that ran from the building on the left to poles at the side of the porch, and a bar stretched along the side of the deck by the building. Four bartenders worked furiously to keep up with the waitresses bringing orders from the tables and the people stacked up two deep shouting their own orders and passing money over the heads of the people in front of them.

I had to pull Mary in front of me and guide her with a hand on her left shoulder as we weaved our way through the crowd toward the back of the deck. The cool wind through the truck window had accentuated Mary’s figure, and several of the men we passed couldn’t help staring at her. I didn’t blame them.

As Mary came abreast of a table halfway down the forty-yard long platform, a large hand attached to a beefy forearm shot out and grabbed her thigh. I pushed on her shoulder with my left hand and kept walking, slamming my right thigh up as hard as I could into the locked out elbow. I heard a grunt of pain above the music and crowd noise at the same time the arm and hand windmilled up past my face and back over the shoulder of a man with a red beard wearing a camouflage baseball cap and t-shirt. I had a fleeting glimpse of a fountain of beer shooting into the air as his hand impacted a cup held by a person sitting beside him, then we were into the crowd and out of sight.

It had happened in a second, and as I looked over at Mary I realized that she wasn’t even aware that she had been grabbed. I took a few quick looks over my shoulder to make sure the guy with the hand wasn’t coming, but I didn’t see any sign of him. The crowd was so thick that he might not have realized what happened, either.

The deck ran a few yards past the end of the building on its left. A yellow rope was strung waist high from the rail of the deck to the corner of the building. Behind the rope were four large tables, three of which were surrounded by small, boisterous crowds. One person sat alone at the fourth table.

A dark, wiry man about six feet tall wearing a western style shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, and a belt with a rodeo buckle, stood by the rope. He had a soda can in his left hand to hold the tobacco juice from the bulging cud in his cheek, and a lit cigarette in his right hand. His eyes looked like they had decided to go ahead and get it over with and not wait around till his habit killed the rest of him.

“This is a private area,” he said, not looking at Mary but keeping his zombie eyes on me. “You’ll have to find a table somewhere else.”

“Have you tried the patch?” I asked with my best sincere smile.

“What do you mean?” he asked me back.

“You know,” I said. “The nicotine patch.”

“I don’t want to quit,” he retorted.

“Not to quit,” I said. “So you can get more nicotine into your body.”

“Look, bud, ya’ll will have to go sit somewhere else,” was all he said, though I thought I had seen something flash in his eyes for a second.

“I came to say hello to Tommy,” I said, gesturing with a nod of my head to the table in the far corner with the solitary figure.

“Everybody wants to say hello to Tommy. My job is to make sure that he gets a quiet evening,” he said.

Mary was holding on to my left arm, smiling up at Smoky’s face, but he hadn’t looked at her once. I was beginning to think that he was either a great bodyguard or that something other than his eyes was dead, too.

“If Tommy wants a quiet evening, who are all the people at the other tables?” I asked.

“Just a few friends, partner. Now you and the lady need to move along.”

“Well, I’m another friend, and Tommy told me to drop by any time,” I said. I got a business card out of my wallet and held it out to him. “I’d appreciate it if you gave him my card and told him I’d like to give him my regards.”

He took a deep drag on the cigarette and then reached out for the card. As he took it with his thumb and forefinger he twisted his hand down, trying to catch my hand with the glowing ember of the cigarette sticking up between his index and middle fingers. Someone had done that to me before with a cigar and I still had a round scar at the base of my thumb. Once burned, twice shy, and I had my hand six inches back from his by the time the tip of his smoke punched through empty air. I kept my forearm up, ready to block the left jab that was the next move, but the soda can never moved. For the second time I thought I saw a spark in his eyes as he waited for my reaction, but when I made no move toward him they faded back into blackness.

He stuck the cigarette back into his mouth, and said, “Wait here. Don’t come past the rope.” He took two backward steps, then turned and walked back to the far table. I had been wondering, only partly academically, where he kept his business, but I still couldn’t see any sign of a weapon.

“John, I don’t care where we sit,” Mary said. “Are you going to get in a fight with that man?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not once he’s talked to the man at the table.”

I could see him bend over the seated figure, hand him my card and point over at us. Then he straightened up and walked back. He lifted the yellow rope up to head height, and gestured back behind him. “Tommy says come on over,” he said.

He watched me as we walked under the rope, and I watched him right back. The fact that I couldn’t figure out where he kept his gun made me more, not less, leery of him. I resisted the urge to say I told you so.

Before we got to the table in the corner, Tommy Traylor stood up and yelled, “John, you old sonofabitch, come on over here!” A few heads turned at the other tables, but they all went right back to partying.

Tommy was smiling broadly, but his lips stayed together, covering his crooked teeth. He gathered me into a big bear hug, whacking my back hard with his right hand. The top of his bald head glistened pinkly against my chest as I pounded on his wide, fleshy back with my open hand. I had learned from previous encounters that being hugged by Tommy was less embarrassing if you returned his manly backslapping instead of just standing there with your arms trying to reach around him.

“Goddam, son, you need to put on some weight. I can get my arms clean around you,” he said, grabbing my shoulder and beaming up into my face. “Sit down here and have a plate of swamp chicken with me,” he said, gesturing at a plate stacked with fried meat.

I half turned to introduce Mary, but before I could say anything he grabbed her and gave her the same hug, without the back beating. Mary, who had learned to expect the unexpected on our dates, hugged him right back. Tommy swiveled his head toward me, and said, “Son, I hate to hurt your feelings, but I’d a lot rather grab aholt of her than you.”

“I’m relieved to hear it, Tommy,” I said, as he turned back to Mary.

“Now, what’s your name, sweetheart?” he asked, holding her back away from him.

Mary didn’t talk a lot but she liked to speak for herself. “My name is Mary Arenduyk,” she said, holding out her right hand. The gesture seemed superfluous after the friendly mauling she had just received, but Tommy took it in both of this and shook it up and down. “I’m Tommy Taylor,” he said. “And I sure am pleased to meet you. Where are you from? England? You don’t talk like us.”

“The Netherlands,” Mary said. “But that’s close to England.”

“Well, you sure got a pretty voice. Now sit down here with me,” he said as he pulled out a chair for her.

A waitress came up to the table as we took chairs on either side of Tommy. Beside Tommys plate of food was an open quart bottle of Jack Daniels’ Black Label that was half gone and a large foam cup that was full of sour mash and crushed ice. The waitress looked like a biker’s girl with her oily jeans, black t-shirt and a tattoo on each forearm. She had bottle blond hair and a face that might have been pretty before the injury that broke her nose and left a four inch long scar across her left cheekbone. Harley wreck or abusive boyfriend, take your pick.

She leaned on Tommy so that one of the large, sagging breasts under her t-shirt rested on his shoulder. “What are your friends drinking, Tommy?” she asked.

“What do you want, Mary?” Tommy asked. “Some wine, a beer?”

“May I have some of your whiskey, please?” she asked him back.

“Well, sure you can. Do you want a Coke with it?”

“No, thank you, just a cup of ice like you have,” she said.

“You heard the lady, sweetie,” he said to the waitress.

“I’ll take a Bud, please,” I said.

“A cup of ice and a Budweiser,” Tommy said unnecessarily. “And bring ’em some munchies while they decide what they want for supper.” Tommy reached up and stroked the breast laid out on his shoulder, and the waitress bent down and kissed him on top of his bald head before carrying our order into the kitchen.

“Is this true love, Tommy? You didn’t even introduce us,” I said.

“What? Oh, you mean Jessie?” he said. “She’s real pretty, ain’t she?”

“Yes, she’s very attractive,” I said with a totally straight face.

“She has beautiful eyes,” Mary said. I hadn’t even noticed Jessie’s eyes, but I had never heard Mary say anything she didn’t mean. Tommy responded to Mary’s obvious sincerity and began to engage her in conversation. Jessie returned quickly with my beer, a cup full of ice for Mary, and a bucket full of more crushed ice. She held a stack of paper plates and two big platters, one of hush puppies and one of UFOs (unidentified fried objects) with a bowl of horseradish dipping sauce in front of Tommy. He gave her a quick smile, but still didn’t offer any introductions.

Tommy poured a good four or five ounces of whiskey into Mary’s cup, then began heaping a paper plate full of food for her. I listened to him identify the battered covered objects for her: tomato, pickle, chicken, zucchini, shrimp, turtle, and oyster.

“You decide what you like best then we’ll get you a whole plate,” he said.

“What is your favorite?” Mary asked, as she took a big swallow of whiskey.

“I call it swamp chicken, but it’s really soft-shelled turtle,” he said. “A soft-shell will eat anything it can get, dead or alive, so its meat can be a bit strong. Most white people won’t eat it, but I’ve always been partial to it. Now a nigger’ll tell you that an alligator snapping turtle tastes better cause they don’t eat as much dead stuff. But I won’t eat a snappin’ turtle. You know why?”

Mary shook her head and drank more whiskey.

“Because a snappin’ turtle can live to be a hundred years old, maybe older. It just don’t seem right to me to eat something that lives so long. Kind of takes em out of the food category for me, you know?”

“That is a very interesting way of thinking,” Mary said, nodding her head. “Would you show me which of these on my plate is turtle for eating?”

“That’s a piece right there,” Tommy said, pointing with his fork. “But like I said, you may find it a little strong.”

Mary picked up the chunk Tommy indicated, dropped it and her fingers in the sauce, and stuck the whole piece in her mouth. She chewed twice, swallowed, licked her fingers, then took a swig of blackjack. She smiled, then reached for another piece.

“Then again, you might not,” Tommy said.

I watched the two of them discussing food and drinking whiskey, Tommy enjoying Mary’s appetite and throwing out country witticisms that Mary laughed at even though she didn’t understand half of them.

Except for less hair and about forty more pounds, Tommy looked about the same as he had when I’d met him twenty years earlier in high school. His fat kept his face smooth and shiny, and his eyes twinkled like blue neon bulbs.

In school, he’d been one of the few remaining country boys in a community that was changing rapidly from farms to suburbs. Jokes about his height and his accent seemed not to faze him. He was friendly and outgoing and talked to everybody from the principal to the janitors and from the homecoming queen to guys like me who didn’t hardly talk to anybody. He was nicknamed Tiny Tommy, or TT for short, and I never heard him object to it. But he had introduced himself to me as Tommy, so that’s what I called him.

No one ever knew for sure about the darker side of Tommy, but I saw the first hint of it my sophomore year. He and I were in the same gym class, and a bunch of us were changing clothes when two senior football players grabbed Tommy and threw him into one of the big wire cage lockers. One of them stuck a ballpoint pen through the latch, trapping him. Then they pulled out their dicks and began to piss on him through the wire. Tommy put his hands over his face and tried to turn away from them, but the locker was too tight. “There’s some tee tee for you, TT,” one of them said, and they both laughed so hard their urine came out in spurts.

I hardly ever acted without thinking, even then, but this was so outrageous that I yelled to them to stop. One of them yelled back over his shoulder, “Shut up, you little fucker, or we’ll shit on you.”

They were finished by then, anyway, and they zipped up and walked out, still laughing. The rest of the boys in the locker room walked out quickly, laughing nervously or frowning with shame and disgust.

Tommy was stuck tight in the locker, urine dripping off his chin and nose and puddling at his feet. I got the pen out of the latch, and pulled the locker open, wetting my hand in the process.

Tommy squeezed out of the locker and immediately began taking off his clothes. He wouldn’t look at me. “Well, hey, they got me good, didn’t they,” he said with a sound that could have been a laugh or a sob. “Yeah, yeah, that was a good joke all right,” he said in a steadier voice.

“Tommy, that wasn’t any kind of a joke,” I said. I was so mad and so embarrassed for him that I could hardly talk. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. Let’s go to the principal right now and tell him what happened.”

Tommy was stripped off by now, but he looked at me and said, “John, I appreciate you at least trying. Now I’m going to take another shower and find some sweats that I can wear to class.”

“Do you want me to go ahead and tell the principal?” I asked.

“There ain’t no need to tell the principal. Them boys was just having some fun,” Tommy said.

“Come on, Tommy. That’s not right. They ought to be punished.”

He stared up at me intently, and said, “It happened to me, John, not you. I don’t want the principal to know, you got it?”

It was one of those three or four things that happen to every kid, when he learns the world is made up of the strong and the weak, and that fairness is not a universally held ideal. It took weeks for it to fade in my mind, but in the meantime Tommy was his usual self, talking and laughing with everyone, showing up at all the games, pep rallies and dances as if he was the biggest man on campus.

About a month after the locker room incident, on a warm fall day, a police car pulled up in front of the school while most of the senior class was sitting outside eating lunch. The students watched curiously as the two cops, acting on an anonymous tip, went in the building and met the principal, who was coming out of his office with a bolt cutter. The principal guided them to the locker of one of the boys who had peed on Tommy, and snipped the combination lock off. In a brown paper grocery sack, the policemen found eight one ounce sandwich bags of marijuana. Subsequent tests would show that one of the bags was covered with the boy’s fingerprints. That bag, in addition to the marijuana, contained some bread crumbs and mayonnaise residue.

They walked back outside, and the principal pointed to the owner of the locker. The two cops walked over to him and announced that he was under arrest for possession of illegal drugs with intent to sell. They made him lie flat on the sidewalk while they roughly searched him and handcuffed him. Then they yanked him up, read him his rights, and threw him in the back of the patrol car.

Some of those present said he worked his mouth open and closed like a fish, but no words came out. Everyone else sat in stunned silence. As the police car drove off, the principal said loudly, “That is what happens to drug pushers. Let it be a lesson to you.”

The football player’s father had held him back a year so he would have a better shot at playing college ball for a big program. The strategy had worked and his son had already accepted a full scholarship at the University of Alabama starting the next fall. His father couldn’t have known that the same strategy would result in his son being tried as an adult and sentenced to five years. We never saw him again.

The other boy who had degraded Tommy was one of the wealthiest kids in school. His family lived on a twenty-acre estate outside of town, complete with horses that no one ever rode. It was next door to the small working farm where Tommy’s parents continued to try to eke out a living.

About a month after the other player was arrested, the rich kid was on his way home from a dance about two in the morning. He turned off the main road onto the long tree-lined drive that led to his house, and punched the accelerator on the Trans Am he had gotten for his sixteenth birthday. Halfway down the drive, going eighty miles an hour, the low-slung car hit a six-inch thick dead limb that had fallen from an overhanging tree and lay diagonally across the road. The car went airborne and veered to the left, twisting on its axis in mid-air and impacting a foot thick oak while it was upside down and ten feet off the ground. Every one agreed that it was a miracle the driver survived. He came back to school three months later, walking with a cane, dragging his left foot and carrying a towel to mop up the drool he couldn’t stop.

I was fifteen years old, and there were some things I couldn’t even imagine yet, so it was years before I suspected a link between Tommy and his tormentors’ misfortunes. We had never been close friends, and that didn’t change. He went his way, and I went mine. After graduation, I went off to college, and Tommy took a job at a local manufacturing plant. I didn’t see him for years, until one night Kathleen and I were pulled over by a sheriff’s car as we came back from a client’s Christmas party out in the county. I knew I had been speeding, and I was nervously trying to remember how many drinks I had had and figure out whether I should take the breathalyzer test. I rolled the window down as the deputy walked up beside me, and a familiar voice said, “Would you step out of the car please, sir?”

Before I could get out, Tommy was shining his light on me, and then asked, “Shit, John, is that you?”

We stood out in the cold on the shoulder of the road for half an hour, catching up on old times, me talking too much out of relief that I wasn’t going to spend the night in jail. He stuck his head in the window to say hello to Kathleen, but she stayed in the running car for warmth. He had joined the sheriff’s department three years earlier and thought it was a great job. He was impressed that I was a lawyer. We promised to stay in touch, but of course didn’t.

A couple of years later, just before Kathleen left me, Tommy called me at the office one day. The area of the county in which his parents had farmed had developed like everywhere else. They had both died within the last few years. Tommy, as sole heir, was receiving offers from developers who wanted to build subdivisions. Tommy had received one offer from a man who didn’t want to buy the land, but wanted to go in with Tommy as partners to develop it themselves. He promised that Tommy would make at least twice as much money this way.

Tommy told me that he had checked the guy out through the sheriff’s department and couldn’t find anything of a criminal nature against him. But he wanted me to see what I could find out about him.

I asked the head of our real estate section what he knew about the developer. He had me pull the door of his office shut, said not to quote him, and told me the developer would be indicted before the end of the year on a variety of federal charges.

When I called Tommy back and told him not to do the deal, he said he had already decided that it was the way to make the most money. He had all the documents and was just about to sign them. He appreciated my advice, but thought he would go ahead and deed over the property to a limited liability company that the developer had formed. I told him I couldn’t say why, but it would be a big mistake. A lot of cops, like a lot of lawyers, think that their ability to judge character is infallible. Tommy had decided the developer was honest, and he didn’t want to believe he might have been wrong. He pressed me for more information, but I told him that was all I could say. Tommy hung up the phone still undecided on what he was going to do.

A week later, the headline on the business page of The Commercial Appeal announced that the developer had been indicted on sixty counts of bank and mail fraud. Tommy called me that afternoon and thanked me for my advice. After I told him he was welcome, and he told me to send him a bill, he asked, “John, what happens if a person has signed a deed, but it was never recorded. It’s no good, right?”

“If you mean is it legally binding between the parties, sure it is,” I said. “It just wouldn’t be effective against another purchaser who didn’t know about it.”

“Well, what if the seller found out that the buyer was a lying, thieving sonofabitch and changed his mind before the deed was recorded, and just took the deed back. Then there wouldn’t be any proof that he had made the transfer, would there?”

“Under the statute of frauds, there has to be some writing to prove a transfer of real estate, but the buyer could testify that there had been one and that the seller had taken it back. Besides, all deeds are notarized, so the notary could testify that there had been a deed.”

“Let’s just say that the notary is a real good friend of the seller and not worry about what she’ll say.”

“Tommy, what are we talking about here, man?” I asked. “If you went ahead and did the deal with this guy, we can file a petition to set aside the deed for fraud. The other things you’re talking about are illegal. You’re a cop, you know that.”

“John, I’m just talking hypothetically here, you know,” Tommy said. “Don’t get all excited.”

“Tommy, I can’t give you advice on how to break the law,” I said.

“John, let me just ask you one more hypothetical question. Okay? For old time’s sake?”

“Okay, Tommy.”

“If this fellow who had been ripped off filed a petition, like you said, but this other fellow, the crooked one, was in a whole lot of other shit, probably going to file bankruptcy, maybe go to jail, how long would it be before he got his property back?”

“I won’t lie to you, Tommy, it could be a long time. The bankruptcy trustee would probably try to keep all of the assets intact to pay off all the other creditors, so he would fight tooth and nail to keep the property.”

“Hey, John, I appreciate your advice. Like I said, send me a bill.”

I never heard anything about the developer claiming that he owned Tommy’s property. Maybe he decided that it would just get him into more of the same kind of trouble he was already in, or maybe Tommy persuaded him that it was not in his best interest to swindle a cop.

In any event, Tommy decided that I was a great lawyer, even though all I had done was give him some inside information. He sold his property a few months later for over two million dollars, and our firm handled the closing for him. He promptly quit the sheriff’s department and went into business for himself, but he was always vague about what that business was. He only told me that he had figured out some ways to make money if you had money while he was working for the sheriff. My firm didn’t do any legal work on his new ventures.

By now, Tommy and Mary had finished off the platter of battered meat and vegetables, and Tommy was starting in on the hushpuppies. Through a mouth of cornmeal, he gestured at me and said to Mary, “Did you know that this fellow here you’re with tonight used to be one of the best lawyers in Memphis?”

Mary only smiled, first at him and then at me.

“It’s the truth,” Tommy said. “And now he’s one of the best private investigators around. Why, hell, just last month he got the goods on some rich faggot, nobody knows how.”

“Hey, come on, Tommy,” I winced, “that’s supposed to be confidential. How did you know about that? And don’t say faggot.”

“Confidential?” he asked loudly. “Hell, son, something that good ain’t gonna stay confidential for long. And don’t go correcting my grammar. I just called him a name, you’re the one who took the movies of him engaged in unnatural acts.”

“You may have a point, Tommy,” I said.

“Course I have a point,” he said. “The man was a faggot, so I call him a faggot. Besides, you don’t try to get me to quit saying nigger anymore.”

“I gave up on that one after about the hundredth try,” I said.

Mary reached out and put her hand on Tommy’s arm. “Tommy,” she said, “I don’t like those words either. You are too nice a man to use them.”

Tommy looked at her for a minute, and then said, “Mary, if you don’t like them words, I won’t use them in front of you, and I’ll try not to use them at all.” Tommy turned to me and said “See, John, you just need to learn how to ask.”

“I don’t think I could ever ask like that,” I said.

Jessie brought my catfish surrounded by hushpuppies, French fries and slaw. While I ate, I told Tommy about Thomas Tuggle. Tommy hadn’t heard of Tuggle by his real name or his street name. He had been out of the sheriff’s department for several years, and figured Thomas’s troubles had probably been with the MPD. Mary listened to my story intently, her eyes darting back and forth between Tommy and me.

“John,” Tommy said when I had finished, “this is kind of a funny sounding case, don’t you think? I mean, whoever heard of hiring a PI to track down a, uh, black crack dealer?”

“He’s not a crack dealer, Tommy. His bondsman admits he’s a crook, but says he’s not that kind of crook.”

“Some of the guys on the MPD may think their shit don’t stink, but I never heard of ‘em arresting a dealer who wasn’t a dealer.”

“Whether he’s a dealer or not, his mother wants me to find him,” I said.

“Are you sure you’re going to get paid for this?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m getting paid.”

“Well, I’ll make a couple of calls, see if any of my old buddies know anything that might help you.” I knew from past experience that Tommy’s old buddies weren’t just from the sheriff’s department, but were also people he knew in his current businesses.

Just then Tommy’s bodyguard walked up to the table and bent over and whispered in Tommy’s ear as he pointed over to the rope where two men stood. “Okay, tell em I’ll be with ‘em in a minute,” Tommy said.

The man straightened up, looked at me, and then walked back toward the rope.

“Tommy, I got to ask you,” I said. “Where does he keep his gun?”

“Promise not to tell?” he asked.

“Promise,” I said. “It’s just professional curiosity.”

“He keeps a small frame Glock nine millimeter in the front of his jeans. He hides the handle behind that big belt buckle and the barrel sticks straight down.”

“That sounds slow to me,” I said. “He’d have to flip the buckle back with his left hand before he could pull the pistol out with his right.”

“Believe it,” Tommy said, “it’s not slow.”

“I hope he doesn’t get in too much of a hurry. You know a Glock doesn’t have a safety, don’t you?” I asked.