All the Devil's Creatures (16 page)

Despair and pain engulfed him as he sat in his truck amid the reek of his own sweat and blood. He wept. Soon, he would return to the scientist’s house, just so he could report to the Speaker that he had searched it. But for now he could do little more than make his way into the motel and his mildewed bed.

T
hey drove straight to the bar. Geoff called Tony Abruzzo on the way, told him they would need the Corner. Tony’s Corner: not the name of the bar but a recessed nook within it where the fat man met the small time dealers and pimps and other minor sleaze that earned him his living, an out-of-the-way table the proprietor was always willing to reserve for him, even if it meant booting a group of hapless college kids or downtown suits.

Marisol at the wheel, barely speaking except to advise him on piecing together the still unfolding New Orleans night, now three hundred miles away and receding. He stayed on the phone most of the way—with the New Orleans police, and with his friends and contacts in that city whom had known Eileen.

A colleague of Eileen’s, a professor whom Geoff knew well, had called with the gruesome news. The murder looked like an robbery—shot dead in her lab, the place torched to destroy any evidence. Plausible enough; crime was ticking up again in the city since the storm, getting worse even, as the criminal gangs sought to reestablish dominance over depleted territory. But at the university? And then an explosion taking out the entire building? It seemed like overkill.

Geoff also tried calling T-Jacques’ cell. Kicked to voice mail every time. And with each recorded message, he felt a growing certainty that he had been a fool, that something was awry, that the damn refinery held more secrets than a little chemical discharge, secrets worth killing for, as T-Jacques had believed from the beginning.

They pulled into the dark Dallas night. In the worn leather sofas of the Corner, set at a right angle framing a cheap coffee table set with ash trays and a red glass candle holder, Marisol and Tony sat facing Geoff

The P.I. said, “It could still all be a coincidence, Waltz. We need to sleep. You need to grieve. We’ll figure it out. If there is anything to figure out. But we can’t accomplish much of anything tonight.”

“I know. But it’s not a coincidence. Street crime’s bad, but the university’s safe.”

Tony smoked and squinted at him. “It’s looking ugly, man. But Marisol’s right. You should have a few drinks to Eileen and then call it a night. Start fresh in the morning.”

Geoff poured himself another shot of bourbon. The candle flame shown clear over the line of liquid in the bottle Tony had gotten for the table. Three-fifths depleted. Geoff knew it was mostly him. His head swam with memories of Eileen, their college days, the rough times since. He was in too much shock to weep. And too angry.
Sleep, Geoff. Christ, you’re not making sense. Just let them put you to bed …
He leaned and he saw the candle flames (
flames?
) dancing in front of fat Tony and his cigarette like a debased altar.

Marisol fiddled with a laptop.

“What the fuck you doing?”

Tony put one of his beefy hands on his wrist. And though his face floated in triplicate, the hand made a calming slab.

“Pulling up that number on T-Jacques’s flash drive,” she said. “I have an idea.”

Geoff leaned back on the greasy leather and laughed and said,
yeah, it’s about time
, and laughed some more and grabbed for the bottle but before he could put it to his lips, Tony’s hand on his wrist brought it down with the gentleness of a louvered door.

Ignoring all this, Marisol said, “Maybe it’s a phone number. I’m going to call it—I mean, we’ve got to try everything at this point.”

Geoff heard himself say,
With a 000 area code? You’re wack
, and then darkness and then his own bed and he dreamt of a white room where Eileen wrote on a chalk board and his dead wife Janie rocked their infant son whose heart beat he could hear in echo, and Janie told him they were okay and it would all be okay as Joey Kincaid stood in a corner and wept.

S
tepping out of the courthouse annex, Bobby spotted Tasha Carter walking along the square and waved. She crossed over to him.

“Heading for lunch, deputy?”

He met her gaze. “You want to join me?”

She responded with nothing more than a little nod and upturned lips. Walking under awnings and lampposts that spoke of more prosperous years on the square, past Steptoe’s Hardware and a ramshackle antique store and empty storefronts, to the little café—the only place left to eat downtown now that both drugstore lunch counters had closed—he watched her hair, a perfect glistening wave.

They ordered iced tea and looked at menus they had pretty much memorized.

“How’s our big case coming?” Bobby asked.

“Well, you know the preliminary hearing was yesterday. Both Tatum twins pled not guilty. For now they’re both staying mum. Of course, you know the forensics puts their truck at the scene. And I do think the DNA will come back a match.” She paused and peered up at him over the table. “But then, there’s a bit of a problem with that.”

“What is it?” He leaned back in his chair.

“They’re identical twins, so their DNA’s identical. If it’s a match, we’ll still have no way to know which one of them was there.”

“They were both there. When they’re not in jail or on a rig, they’re never apart.”

She grinned at him with eyebrows raised. “Might not be so easy to prove in court.”

Looking down to the table, he bit his lip. “Shit. Fucking lawyers.” Then, moving his gaze back up to hers, “No offense. I meant the other kind.”

She laughed silently, leaning her head back so her neck touched the back of her chair. “None taken. But seriously,” she paused and narrowed her eyes, “I think I can figure out a way to deal with it.”

“Good.”

Their food arrived—a club sandwich, a cheeseburger, corn chips. They ate for a while in silence, and then Tasha said, “If they have any sense at all, they’ll try to cop a plea in exchange for life once we put the DNA on the table.” She took a sip of tea and leaned in close and licked her lips. “And between you and me, we’d take that deal. We’re not going to have a trial if we can help it. Politically, a trial might help my boss—assuming we would win. But for some reason—again, on the down low—Robert Duchamp has taken a real interest in this case. I mean, I know everyone has, and he’s always wheeling and dealing—he won’t countenance any black eye on this town. But still, he’s really pressuring the DA to get this case off the docket with a warm body or two in Huntsville.”

Bobby was glad she had not brought up his rushed arrest, the questionable search. He said, “The Speaker’s been talking to the sheriff, too.”

Tasha smirked. “I’ll bet his conversations with my boss are more pleasant than his with your boss.”

“I know that’s right. They hate each other. But really, I think they see eye to eye on this case, truth be known.”

“You should hear my uncle go off on Duchamp.”

“The Rev? He’s all right.”

She patted her lips and threw her napkin down with a little too much force. “When he’s not fighting fifty-year-old battles, anyway.” Bobby saw a harsh light in her eyes, a cynicism befitting a much older woman. “But the DA and Duchamp are tight. Which means it’s part of my job to keep Duchamp happy.”

•

Bobby and Tasha continued to meet for lunch in that little café over the course of that week, a surreal period in the wake of the murder and the protests and the odd refracting glare of cable news attention. And Bobby began to look for sideways glances from the café’s regulars—though he never saw any.

But one day he said, “Good thing I’m a lawman, or else we might get called in for threatened miscegenation.”

Shaking catsup onto her plate, Tasha did not look at him. “Oh, stop it. It’s not 1950 anymore.”

“It is for some of these yokels. After the Bordelon murder—”

“Backwoods cretins. They exist in some form everywhere.” She looked at him. “You don’t have much respect for your own people, Bobby. Why stick around?”

Bobby shook his head and scanned the room.
My people?
“I tried to go off to school, wanted to make it to the city. But my mother got sick—breast cancer, in and out of remission. And my poor ol’ dad’s half nuts. I’m an only child—someone’s got to look after them.”

She half smiled at him. “That’s quaint.”

Bobby didn’t smile back “Okay, then. What are you doing here? I know you’re Reverend Carter’s niece, but you didn’t grow up here, right?”

“We left when I was six. My dad, he’s in politics. Got in with the governor at the time, Mark White, this was in the ‘80s, and we moved to Austin and that’s where I grew up. Went to Spelman and loved Atlanta. Then Yale Law.”

He looked at her over the rim of his over-sized plastic glass, feeling the ice cubes gather on his upper lip. “That’s pretty sweet. So why’d you come back the this shitburg?”

“Yale was a blast,” she said. “And I considered staying back east. But there’s too much family in Texas. So I moved to Houston—clerked for a federal judge, then took an associate position at a big law firm. Great pay, but I hated it. Poring through boxes of documents for twelve hours a day just to help one corporation screw over another one.”

“Okay.”

She laughed. “You see right through me, don’t you?”

He was not sure that he did. But then she leaned in close and said with narrowed eyes, “I do have an angle. Hargrave’s going to run for the Court of Criminal Appeals as soon as a promising seat opens up. I may not be ready to take his place immediately, but I do expect to move up …”

“And run for district attorney? In this county?”

“Just as a stepping stone.” She must have caught his incredulous look, gave him a sly grin in return. “What? You don’t think a black woman could do it?”

“I’m not saying that—”

“See, you’re thinking I would run as a Democrat, on my uncle’s name. That would never work. I’d get ninety-nine percent of the black vote but only, maybe, twenty percent of the whites—tops. No more than forty percent of the total. But as a Republican … Duchamp might be dead nationally but his machine still has a lot of power locally. With his and Hargrave’s endorsement, I’d have a good shot in the primary. Then, in the general, siphon off a nice hunk of the black vote from the Democrats to make up for losing the racist wing of the Republican party, and I’m home free.”

She smiled. He grinned and grunted and shook his head back, admiring her acumen. He did not begrudge her opportunism and realized then that her budding relationship with him was an outgrowth of that opportunism—she saw him as just a local redneck maybe a little smarter than the rest who had had a recent star turn on national television. Someone she could use and enjoy. And someone with the sheriff’s ear—a local political figure with whom she had little pull. He felt he could muster enough self confidence not to let this bother him.
We both have to take what we can get in this shitburg.

•

On the first hot day of the year, Bobby walked to the courthouse annex after lunch, and as he wiped his brow in the glare with his good arm, a joyous commotion on the lawn compounded his disoriented feeling. The protestors danced and sang to the sounds of odd percussive instruments Bobby did not recognize, and their flowing hemp clothing and colorful banners brought to his mind a medieval fair. The college kids and professional hippies kept their encampment clean, though their sheer numbers had worn the grass to mud. They demanded not only justice for Dalia Bordelon but also an end to racism, an end to poverty and to hunger. An end to war—specific wars and all wars. An answer to all grievances and injustices. On the periphery, their counterparts from the civil rights organizations smiled and swayed to the music but dressed more stiffly and carried serious signs with messages targeted to the case at hand, signaling that for them this was not a vacation or an excuse for a road trip but rather another day on a job that would never end.

Bobby stepped inside the annex intending to stay just long enough to turn in some paperwork before heading back out to his favorite country road to ticket the occasional speeder or illegal trailer, but then he heard the sheriff call from his inner chamber.

“Bobby, get in here and sit down. There may be another angle to this Bordelon killing yet.”

In the conversation with the Sheriff that followed, Bobby learned that his department was not alone in investigating the Bordelon murder, that Geoff Waltz and Marisol Solis were on the case as well.

And unlike Bobby, the sad sack Dallas lawyer and his Mexican P.I. were not convinced the Tatum twins had acted alone.

R
obert Duchamp paced his study and thumbed the digits on his phone with the skill of a teenager, sending encrypted messages to his fellows, fielding their panicked responses, and negotiating with the Doctor’s swarthy factotum, the despicable Prince. Still Jimmy Lee had failed to recover the priceless living product, the little bit of perfection—the culmination of the Doctor’s work. And the work of his grandfather, and of so many visionary men of science before them.

Kathleen walked into his office and he said, “Can’t you knock?”

She paused in the doorway for a split second and then she marched straight to him in her Sunday dress and pearls and heels and slapped him across the face. “I will walk into any room of my own house I damn well please.”

He sat down behind his desk and cradled his head in his palms. “Alright, dear. I’m sorry. It’s just these damn …
idiots
…” He swept his arm across his desk, knocking trinkets and plaques and photos and a thousand dollar pen set to the floor.

“You calm down. Now, the curator’s dinner is less than a week away. You need to tell me what you want regarding the caterer.”

She was still angry—he could tell by her pronounced West Texas twang. But his shoulders slumped as the rage fell out of him. “I don’t care, Kathleen. Really.”