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Beluga Page 5


  “What happened to your truck thing?” she asked me.

  That was what most people called it. Ford should have gone with that instead of Ranchero.

  “Been riding with a buddy.”

  “And the Toyota?”

  “In-law’s car. That stuff’s all his. I didn’t know what was in it.”

  I could just see her eyes in the mirror through the Plexiglas divider. Her black hair was braided and coiled in the back with only a wisp or two hanging loose.

  “Right,” she told me.

  “Ask Kendell. He knows me. I used to be a cop.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Just taking a break.”

  She gave me a look. “Right,” she said again. The dirty cops were often the ones who ended up taking breaks.

  “Can you put this window up a little?” She had them both down all the way in the back, and my eardrums were fairly thumping.

  She eyed me in the mirror. “Duponts?”

  “This morning.” There’s only so much Martinizing can do.

  The windows stayed where they were.

  Given the circumstances, I thought we got on pretty well. That’s what I told Kendell, anyway, when he came by to see me on the holding bench. It was an old church pew out in the Greenville precinct hallway. They’d drilled holes in the seat that cuffs would fit through.

  “I would have introduced you, you know,” Kendell told me. “You didn’t need to go to all this trouble.”

  “Wasn’t like that. Beluga.” That was all I needed to say.

  Kendell groaned and shook his head. He had vast personal experience with Beluga LaMonte. “What’s he into now?”

  Kendell was about as straight as straight arrows come, so our heart-to-heart out in the hallway couldn’t really amount to much. I couldn’t let him know that me and Desmond had bankrolled Beluga’s heist.

  “Laying around. Borrowing money from Shawnica, who’s getting it from Desmond. Says he needs it for clothes, for interviews and shit, but it’s mostly going for reefer and all the usual Larry crap.”

  “Like that car?”

  I nodded. “Bought it from some fool on time. I was trying to take it back.”

  Tula stepped out into the hall. She saw me and Kendell in conversation and went back into the squad room.

  “What are we going to do?” Kendell asked me.

  “I don’t want to send Larry back up. Think of what that’d do to Shawnica and what Shawnica would do to Desmond.” Mostly I didn’t want Kendell getting any sort of whiff of Larry and Skeeter’s truckload of tires.

  “So the reefer’s on you?”

  “Can’t I just have the gun and maybe the ticket instead?”

  “Reefer’s got to go somewhere.”

  “Commode’s all right with me.”

  Kendell just smiled and shook his head.

  “How much weight?” I asked him.

  “Under a quarter. Hardly more than dust.”

  That’s not what I’d seen in the glove box. That much I knew for certain. If Kendell had dumped the bulk of it out, he sure didn’t give anything away. That wasn’t his style, though. He was a committed Lord’s will sort of guy.

  “Just going to fine me, right?”

  “Got any warrants out on you?” Kendell was kidding, but hell, you never know.

  I shook my head. “Can I beat the shit out of Larry?”

  “Let Desmond. You can watch, though.”

  “He won’t do it. Shawnica’ll keep him from it. She’s a witch or something. I haven’t quite figured it out.”

  “Well.” Kendell stood up. “Go on, but don’t kill him.”

  “He just falls down when you hit him. He’s even shiftless in a fight.”

  Kendell made his usual going-about-my-business noises.

  I was going to ask him to put in a good word for me with officer Tula Raintree—let her know I wasn’t some nutty lowlife she’d be pulling and citing in a regular way—but I got the feeling, given the reefer she’d dumped, she might have figured that out already. That’s what I’d decided to believe, anyway, by the time she joined me on the bench.

  There was just one other guy, a scrawny oldster at the far end who was coming out of his shoes at the soles and smelled almost as bad as a Dupont.

  “You all right, Teddy?” she asked him.

  Teddy said something back. A few more teeth and a little less fortified wine would have helped.

  “Throws rocks,” she told me of Teddy. “Usually at the Methodist church.”

  Teddy, as if on cue, broke monumental wind. He told us, “Ha!”

  Officer Raintree gave me my paperwork. I looked it over. The pot was down to a trace, and the derringer was written up “unloaded.” I was still going a solid thirty over the posted speed.

  “Kendell tells me you’re a stickler,” I said to her as I signed the charge sheet.

  “I pick my spots.”

  I raised my cuffed hand as far as I could and rattled the chain. “I’m not this guy. You know that, right?”

  She sort of nodded, almost smiled. “Kendell tells me stuff, too.”

  It was sort of like a first date, and I thought we were only halfway through it when she walked with me out to the street. We stopped in the shade of an ancient live oak. The precinct house in Greenville was on a formerly grand boulevard in a formerly sizable city that was dying with precious little grace. The air was hot and stank of fertilizer. A sedan rolled by and bottomed out in a pothole. Aside from me and Officer Raintree, there wasn’t anybody else around.

  I was going to offer to buy her lunch or something, but I was a touch too slow to talk.

  “See ya,” she told me. “Slow it down a little.”

  “You’re not taking me back?” I was a good twenty miles from Larry’s Tercel on the shoulder.

  She stood there eyeing the middle distance like she was weighing her options. She finally told me, “Nope.” She smiled. She climbed the stairs and went inside.

  When I couldn’t reach Desmond, I called Pearl instead. She happened to be in Greenville already with one of her ladies groups. Cards or garden society or maybe even Presbyterians. She told me when I climbed in, but there was so much attendant prattle that the bare facts got swamped, undone, and washed away.

  Pearl was wearing enough knockoff Chanel to keep her from smelling the Dupont on me, and she never even asked what I was doing in Greenville or why she’d picked me up in front of the police station. She pointed out empty storefronts all the way out of town and told me who’d occupied them through the years and what they’d sold.

  Pearl was an appalling driver, a two-footer, a drifter, an incoherent speeder. She’d race to stop signs and dawdle on open straightaways. I didn’t ride with her much. A trip with Pearl always had a curative effect. This day, I found myself doing probably a little more steering than Pearl. She’d get off on a story and veer from her lane. I’d reach over and pull us back. Our trip was a series of avoided head-on collisions and near sideswipes.

  With every calamity we dodged, Pearl would giggle and say, “Oh my.”

  It was the Delta belle in her that made her try to be girlish, even in her seventies. She and her friends all dressed young in flouncy blouses. They wore their hair in elaborate upswept dos, and they were more flirty and off-color with their chatter than the vast run of Presbyterians care to be. It was a Delta thing, I had to figure. They had cotillions in their pasts and had spent their early, glamorous years as princesses of the place. Now they held fast to the memories to the point of strangulation.

  Pearl laid a hand to my thigh and finally asked me, “What in the world are you doing out here?” She didn’t mean a thing by it. That was just the way that Pearl and her girlfriends were.

  “Helping Desmond out,” I told her.

  “Just saw his girlfriend,” she said and pointed.

  “Shawnica?”

  “The skinny, loud one?”

  I nodded.

  Pearl shook her head. “Not her.”<
br />
  “What girlfriend?”

  “Works at Zelda’s.”

  I must have looked baffled.

  “Back by the levee. You’d never go in there. All shoes and handbags and underthings.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Pearl shook her head. She very nearly clipped a combine that was taking up the majority of the road. It was my fault chiefly. I’d been distracted and a little hurt by the notion that Desmond had kept a romance from me. Especially considering that we were currently all tied up with his ex-wife.

  “Pretty girl,” Pearl said. “Might drop a few pounds.” Pearl said that about most everybody because she was naturally emaciated. She thought that was a look most everybody would be best advised to aim for. “You don’t know her?”

  I shook my head.

  “Funny.”

  “Yeah.” I pointed out Larry’s Tercel on the shoulder. “Funny.”

  Pearl rolled up behind Larry’s Toyota and banged it with her bumper. That was business as usual for Pearl. She was a contact parker.

  She let me out and asked me the shortest way back to Indianola.

  I pointed. “Straight to 49 and then left.”

  She wiggled her fingers and told me, “Toodles.”

  She pulled out in front of a bread truck and turned right about a half mile down the road.

  * * *

  I found a car lot on the truck route on the river side of Leland. The guy had pennants strung and a sort of picnic tent set up by the road. He had a bright yellow helium blimp tethered over his lot. It was bucking in the breeze. He was sitting in the tent shade sweating and waving at passing traffic. When I got there, his promotion consisted of him, his rat terrier, and me.

  He offered me a go-cup full of iced tea, and I took it. The cups were embossed with crossed checkered flags and the words SPEEDY’S MOTORS.

  “You Speedy?” I asked him.

  He shook his head and swabbed his neck. “Weren’t never no Speedy.”

  “Then why not just Speedy Motors?”

  He said something to his dog I couldn’t quite make out. Then he turned back to me. “You want a car or something?”

  He wasn’t thrilled to hear I’d come for a swap. He groused about it as he circled Larry’s Tercel and soaked it in. He lifted the hood, then stuck his head through the passenger window and surveyed the interior.

  “Title clean?”

  I nodded.

  He eyed the shiny Rolls-Royce grille. “I don’t know. Guess the niggers’ll buy it. Key in it?”

  I nodded again. The guy who wasn’t Speedy climbed in, started Larry’s car up, and tore out onto the truck route. I could still hear him winding the gears when he was probably a half mile away.

  His terrier came over and sniffed me. Duponts. He backed off with a growl.

  The guy who wasn’t Speedy traded straight up for a Chevy pickup. He was willing to go for a Ford, but I knew Larry would like a Chevy less. It was their pint-sized model and was a little rusted out from hauling fertilizer. The radio didn’t work and the compressor was dead, so Larry and Skeeter wouldn’t have any air-conditioning or music. All in all, it was a fitting vehicle for a worthless layabout.

  The guy who wasn’t Speedy wanted fifty dollars from me. When I asked him why, he said, “Got to get something out of the deal.”

  “You’re getting that,” I told him and pointed at Larry’s Tercel.

  “You know what I mean.” He rubbed his fingertips together in the universal sign for lucre. “Got to feed Homer.” The terrier barked. We settled on twenty-five.

  Rats or something had built a nest back under that Chevy’s dashboard. They’d gotten insulation from somewhere, and it kept boiling out as I drove. I was coughing like a miner by the time I got to Indianola.

  Desmond was just where I expected to find him, in his spot at the Sonic. Larry was riding shotgun. Skeeter was pitched up between the seats watching Desmond demonstrate how to dress a Coney Island. Like Kendell and like Tula Raintree, Desmond was a stickler, too, but he concentrated the bulk of his stickling on his hot dogs. He couldn’t do much about the rest of the world, but he could control his ketchup and relish.

  I pulled in beside them and blew the horn. They all glared at me at first. Particularly Desmond. Horn blowing wasn’t acceptable Sonic etiquette. Then they saw who it was, and only Larry continued to have a fit.

  “Shit, man,” he told me.

  He came out of Desmond’s Escalade to survey what he knew must be his Chevy.

  Beluga LaMonte shook his head and groaned. “What did I tell you? What did I tell him?”

  Skeeter said, “No Chevy.”

  I shrugged and tossed Larry the keys. “Best I could do.”

  “Shit,” Larry told me. He eyed his new wheels. “Shit,” Larry told me again.

  “We’re going to check on that trailer in two days’ time, and it’d better be half empty,” I said.

  Larry huffed and looked exasperated. He glanced at Desmond, who nodded.

  “What’s your damn hurry?”

  “Day after tomorrow. Got it?” Larry just looked at me. “Got it?” Skeeter nodded. “Go on,” I told them.

  With a show of distaste, Larry climbed into the Chevy. Skeeter gathered their lunch and joined him as Larry fired the engine up. That Chevy smoked a little. It chugged. It was hitting on most of its cylinders but in no useful sequence.

  “Ain’t no tunes,” Larry told me. “And what’s this shit?” He showed me a tuft of insulation.

  “See you Thursday,” I said.

  Larry found reverse, and they went sputtering out of the place.

  “What took you?” Desmond asked me. He had a mouthful of hot dog by then.

  “Took a while to find a truck. Got arrested.” Desmond stopped chewing. “Kendell didn’t call you?”

  He shook his head. “Arrested for what?”

  “The shit in Larry’s car.”

  Desmond chewed some more and squinted at me.

  “Sack of pot. A gun.”

  Desmond managed a nod. “He kind of remembered after you’d left.”

  “Kendell says I can’t kill him.”

  “Kendell’s like that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about your girlfriend? The one in Greenville. I’ve got to be hearing this shit from Pearl?”

  That caught Desmond by surprise. He studied his Coney Island. He took a huge, deliberate bite. He chewed for a quarter minute before he asked me, “What girlfriend’s that?”

  “The one at the shoe store. Pearl knows all about her, and here I’m doing shit still for Shawnica.”

  This was about as close as me and Desmond ever came to arguing. He ate a curly fry and weighed his options.

  “Ain’t my girlfriend. I just see her sometimes. Church friend,” Desmond told me. He went to a Pentecostal place up the road in Moorhead when he was feeling especially sinful or his mother was too much of a trial. He’d go off and pray or just sit for three hours in the sanctuary where the bishop who ran the place would tell his flock what appalling sinners they were.

  I’d gone to a service once with Desmond. He was having some sort of crisis, a blend of blood pressure trouble and Shawnica. He’d parked on a pew and dropped off to sleep. I’d stayed awake for the music and the testimony. The sermon wore me out a little, a fractured bit of business about end times and homosexuals. I came away believing there’d be no mincing when the final trumpet blew.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about her?”

  Desmond shrugged. “Sorry,” he said. “Probably should have.”

  “Don’t want to hear stuff like that from Pearl.”

  “How does she know?’

  “Given that her ears are ornamental, I can’t say, but she knows, all right.”

  “My momma probably.”

  “She knows, too?”

  Desmond nodded.

  “Tell me this means you’re putting Shawnica behind you. And that goddamn Larry.”

  “Trying,” D
esmond told me.

  “They get these tires all sold, we’re done? Right?”

  Desmond nodded. That took the sting out of the secret girlfriend a little.

  “Want to give me a bite? I’m starving.”

  Desmond was spreading relish on his second Coney Island. He looked from me to the dog and back again. He finally told me, “No.”

  SIX

  Skeeter and Larry had both been pals in Parchman with a guy called Izzy. He was nervous and scrawny and got along by being agreeable. He was the sort of inmate who’d get you what you needed or find somebody who could.

  Izzy was from Oklahoma or somewhere, not the Delta, anyway. He was a meth cooker when he first got arrested. Then he was a burglar. Then he was an arsonist. Then he was a vagrant and a meth cooker again. Kendell had considerable experience with him, didn’t put much stock in Izzy. Izzy was one of those guys you were better off doubting because he couldn’t tell anything straight.

  So when Kendell called me a couple of days after I’d traded in Larry’s Tercel and told me, “Got something from Izzy you might want to hear,” I got a bad feeling because Izzy usually trafficked in stuff nobody anywhere would want to know about.

  It was our day to catch up with Skeeter and Larry. I was due to pick up Desmond at Kalil’s. He was checking on repo jobs between Indianola and Belzoni. Desmond was efficient that way. As long as we were driving by, we might as well scuff up whoever had gotten behind and needed scuffing.

  Desmond had a couple of possibles by the time I found him at the counter with Kalil.

  “Did you tell him we’re through with Duponts?”

  Desmond nodded.

  I said to Kalil, “I had to throw my clothes away.”

  Kalil shook his head and threw up his hands in his usual show of exasperation.

  I nudged Desmond. “Wrinkle,” I told him. “Take what you’ve got and let’s go.”

  On the way to Greenville in my Ranchero I told Desmond everything Kendell had told me.

  “Little guy with the twitch?”

  I nodded.

  “What do you figure?”

  “Must be some kind of Skeeter and Larry shit. Otherwise, Kendell wouldn’t have bothered.”

  “Think Izzy gave it up to Kendell? The whole damn thing?”