The Jealous Kind (28 page)

“Grady Harrelson doesn't listen to that kind of music?”

“Guys like Grady listen to crap by Pat Boone,” I replied. “Besides, I read that Grady was on a sailboat when he got the news about his father.”

“Nobody in your acquaintance would have motivation to shoot Clint Harrelson?” he said.

I was already remembering my conversation with Saber's Mexican friends, particularly Cholo, who had said they were living in the Fifth Ward, the heart of the black district. They had a lot of records at their place. Albert Ammons's music was the kind you bought in a colored barbershop or a beauty parlor, not in a white neighborhood. Saber believed Clint Harrelson was behind Mr. Bledsoe's firing. He had also stolen Grady's convertible and sold it in Mexico. Was his desire for revenge so great that he would break into the Harrelson estate and torment the father with a rhythm-and-blues recording, then kill him?

It sounded ridiculous, except he had broken into Mr. Krauser's house and torn up his most valued possessions and used a retarded boy, Jimmy McDougal, to help him.

“Are you in a coma?” Jenks said.

“Why are you always insulting me?”

“Because you piss me off.”

In the background I heard a sound like someone sinking an opener into the top of a beer can.

“
I
piss
you
off?” I said.

My mother came out of nowhere. “Don't you dare use that language in this house,” she said. She ripped the receiver from my hand. “Detective Jenks, I could hear you in the kitchen. You are a great disappointment. I feel like washing your mouth out with soap. You are not to call here again.”

She set the receiver in the cradle, releasing her fingers quickly, as though avoiding germs on its surface.

I
BATHED AND LAY
down on my bed in the current of cool air that the attic fan drew through the screen. Major and the cats were piled beside me, snoring in the wonderful way animals snore. I felt a strange sense of peace about my home. That soon changed.

My father came in late, brushing against the doorway and the pictures on the wall in the hallway. A few minutes later I saw him through the partially open bathroom door. He was sitting on the edge of the tub, smoking a cigarette in his shirtsleeves and undershorts and socks, his garters clipped on his calves. His face was furrowed, his stubble gray, his hand trembling when he lifted his cigarette.

“Daddy?” I said.

He turned his head toward me, as though I were speaking to him from a great distance. “Aaron? What are you doing up? Don't you have to work tomorrow?”

“Can I help with something?”

He stared into empty space. “No, not really. None of us can. That's the great joke. It's all gone.
Everything. It was just a dream on Bayou Teche.
Parti avec la vent.
”

I could hear the paper on his cigarette crisp when he inhaled. I suspected that one day cigarettes would kill him. But that was not the fear I had as I looked at my father. No one had to convince me about the reality of hell. It wasn't a fiery pit. It lived and thrived in the human breast and consumed its host from night to morning.

T
HE NEXT DAY
I took Valerie to a hamburger joint for lunch, then dropped her off and went to Loren Nichols's house without telling her. I had reached a point where I realized I had been a fool. I was raised to believe that good triumphed over evil, that justice ultimately prevailed, and that God was on our side. We had rebuilt the bombed-out countries of our enemies through the Marshall Plan at a time when we could have turned the earth into a slave camp. Wouldn't it follow that we would do justice to our own at home?

I still believe in those precepts, but as we grow old and leave behind the pink clouds of our youth, we learn that truth often exists in degree rather than in absolutes. I had believed that the people who'd caused us so much harm would be brought to account. Valerie had almost been burned alive, and no one was in custody. I doubted that anyone of importance had been questioned. I thought Jenks believed her, but probably few of his colleagues did. Why should anyone worry about the fate of a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl in the Heights?

It had just started to rain when I knocked on Loren's door. He came to the screen wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of white trousers, his face blank. The screen was latched, but he made no move to unlatch it. His hair was wet-combed, curled up on the back of his neck. “I'm about to go to work.”

“Where do you work?”

“I'm a busboy at Luby's cafeteria.”

“I'll give you a ride.”

He looked past me to see if anyone was in my heap, then unhooked the latch. “Come upstairs. My mother is sleeping.”

The inside of his home looked like a mausoleum furnished from a secondhand store. I thought the banister on the stairs would cave before we reached the landing. The interior of his bedroom was another matter. The walls were covered with pencil sketches of people and classic automobiles and animals; the ceiling was hung with models of World War II airplanes, each delicate piece of balsa wood cut and shaved with an X-Acto knife and glued together and pinned down on a blueprint and assembled and covered with cutouts from tissue paper, then painted with a tiny brush and pasted with decals of Nazi swastikas and the American white star inside the blue circle and the rising sun of Imperial Japan. His electric guitar was on his bed, plugged into the amplifier on the rug. Through the window, I could see the tin roofs of his neighbors in the rain, purple with rust, the palm trees and live oaks and slash pines bending in the wind. It looked more like the Caribbean than a run-down part of town in North Houston.

“How much do you want for the thirty-two you showed me?” I asked.

“Is this about those guys who tried to hurt Valerie?”

I didn't answer.

“I shouldn't have started this,” he said. “You going after somebody in particular?”

“I think Vick Atlas was behind it.”

“Don't bet on that, man.”

“Then who tried to burn her?”

“Believe me, if I find out, there's going to be some guys hurting real bad.”

“How much do you want for the gun, Loren?”

“Nothing. It's not for sale. Does Valerie know about this?”

“No, she doesn't. I don't want you telling her, either.”

“You're not giving the orders. Who killed Grady Harrelson's old man?”

“Why ask me?” I said.

“Because you don't have a clue what you're doing. Because you'll probably end up popping the wrong guy.”

“I need the gun. Will you give it to me or not?”

He held me with his stare.

“I'm leaving,” I said.

“It's a big line you're stepping over, Broussard,” he said.

“That's another thing that bothers me about you, Loren. You call people by their last name.”

“If you smoke somebody, they visit you.”

“
Who
visits you?” I said.

“Dead people do. It's not like in the movies.”

“You've killed somebody?”

“Shut up.”

“You offered me the gun. Now honor your word or don't.”

I could see the heat go out of his face.

“Let me get an umbrella,” he said.

“How are your guitar lessons coming along?”

“Don't change the subject. You don't want to go to Gatesville, man. I never talk about it because people won't believe me. It's worse than Huntsville, especially in the shower or the toolshed, you get the picture?”

“I don't get
you,
” I said.

“What?”

“Your drawings and your model planes are works of art. With your talent, you could be anything you want. Ever think about going to Hollywood? I'm not putting you on.”

He gazed out the window at a garbage can rolling down the street in the rain. “Your father is an engineer or something. You live in the good part of town. You're a musician and you go steady with the most beautiful girl in Houston. But you're coming to me for a drop so you can wax a lamebrain like Vick Atlas? I grew up in juvie and Gatesville. I'm the guy needs straightening out?”

“What's a ‘drop'?”

He shook his head. “I'm going to hate myself for this the rest of my life. Follow me.”

W
HAT I DID NEXT
was not rational. But I didn't care. I got the address of the Atlas family's business office in Galveston and told Valerie I'd see her that night.

“You're going down there by yourself?” she said.

“Why not? The cops haven't helped us.”

“Then I'm going, too.”

“That's not a good idea.”

Bad choice of words.

“Aaron, we're in this together or we're not. Tell me which it is.”

One hour later we were in Galveston and motoring down Seawall Boulevard, the Gulf slate green, the waves streaming with rivulets of yellow sand when they crested and crashed on the beach. The air smelled like iodine and brass and salt and seaweed. The Atlas realty and vending machine office was located in a nineteenth-century home, painted battleship gray, close by the water. It had a small pike-fenced lawn with flower beds, and a shell parking lot on the side, lightning rods and a weather vane on the roof, rocking chairs on the porch, a gazebo with an American flag protruding at an angle from one of the wooden pillars. A client could not find a more welcoming and reassuring and wholesome environment in which to conduct business.

A bell tinkled above the door when we entered. No one was at the reception desk. Through the doorway of the dining room, I could see four men eating sandwiches, pushing pieces of meat back into their mouths, wiping off their chins with a smear of the wrist or hand.

I was afraid, and I was even more afraid that others would know I was afraid. Through a side window, I could see the Gulf and the waves swelling over the third sandbar, and I thought about the day I swam through the school of jellyfish.

The three men eating with Jaime Atlas were middle-aged and jowled and had heavy shoulders and paunches and wore their tropical
shirts outside their slacks. They were the kind of men who abused their bodies with cigarettes and alcohol and unhealthy food and wore the attrition as a badge of honor. Their eyes had the same deadness I had seen in the eyes of Benny Siegel and Frankie Carbo. I wanted to be back among the jellyfish. Atlas stopped eating, his sandwich crimped in one hand, his eyes close-set, like a ferret's. “What do you want?” he said.

“To see Mr. Atlas. You're Mr. Atlas, aren't you?”

“Who are you? What's your name? You make an appointment?”

My palms were tingling; my tongue seemed stuck to the roof of my mouth. “I'm Aaron Holland Broussard.”

“The one threw a brick in my boy's eye?”

“That's not what happened, Mr. Atlas. Vick tried to throw a firecracker at another car, and it blew up in his face.”

“Where the fuck you get that?”

“The prosecutor's office or the cops didn't tell you? Vick did the damage to himself.”

I saw his face shrink, as though his anger were sucking his glands dry. “Who do you think you are, coming in here talking shit? Answer me. You don't come in here and talk shit to me about my son. Who told you you could come here and do that? Don't just stand there. You got a speech defect? You got mutes in your family?”

Then I realized Vick had not only lied to his father, his father had not kept in contact with the authorities. In the meantime, Vick had allowed his father to direct his rage at Saber and me.

“Maybe Vick sent a couple of guys to terrorize my friend Miss Valerie,” I said. “He put his mouth in her hair. Is he around? I'd like to talk to him about it.”

“You were never taught manners?” he said. “You bust into somebody's luncheon and start making accusations? Where's your father work? Let's get him out here. Who is he? What's he do?”

The accent was an echo of the Bronx or the blue-collar neighborhoods in New Orleans, the vowels as round as baseballs. His eyebrows looked like half-moons of fur glued on his forehead. He wiped mayonnaise off his lip and then wiped his hand on the tablecloth. In
the meantime his three friends were visually undressing Valerie, indifferent to my presence or the awkwardness in her face.

“Why don't y'all show some goddamn manners yourselves?” I said.

Mr. Atlas set his sandwich down. He was breathing hard, his eyes heated, a canine tooth glistening behind his bottom lip. But whatever was on his mind, he didn't get a chance to say it.

“I did a study on you at Rice University,” Valerie said. “You are known as a terrible person in every place you have lived. Lucky Luciano said you are not to be trusted. You were kicked out of Greece as a pimp and dope smuggler. You killed a taxi driver in New Orleans. You should join a church or a synagogue and see if you can change your life, because people are embarrassed to be around you.”

I stared at her profile. It was like the masthead on a ship plowing through the waves.

“She's telling the truth,” I said. “I was at the library with her. There's a ton of material on you.”

Mr. Atlas's eyes were as black as obsidian. “Out.”

“No, we will not ‘out,' ” Valerie replied. “Your son has serious mental problems. He may have brain damage. Some people say it was you who scarred his face. You should be ashamed of yourself. What kind of example have you set? Look at the men you're with. They bully women because they're moral and physical cowards. Don't look at me. Look at yourselves. What are you? Nothing. Fat men who smell like salami.”

Atlas went to the front and dialed the phone on the receptionist's desk. “This is Jaime Atlas,” he said into the receiver, looking back at us. “I got some kids causing trouble in my office. Send an officer over here.”