Cutting Loose, page 9
“He impressed you.”
Emmett pondered. “Yeah, in a way, he did. Thinking ’bout him just from what I saw and heard, I can’t peg him as a guy who would do shit like this.”
“So―”
“I get the sense of a person with a life, something solid there.”
Emmett recognized the flicker of cynicism on Travis’s face. Travis was an old-timer who had been through the alphabet of criminal conduct, and Emmett smiled, acknowledging that.
“Emmett, the guy won’t give his prints.”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t the only one. Sometimes people say, heck no, ’less you’ve got a court order, no dice, check out the Constitution.”
Travis said nothing, and Emmett said, “Okay, look, Mack, I’m not saying he’s not dirty. If he is, that would simplify our job. I mean, he’s our only lead.”
“It comes down to the prints. And we know already they’re his. The rest of it is just window-dressing.”
“Mack, you’re right. I’m not arguing. I got to say, the odds are, he’s our guy.”
Travis, near retirement, a snappy dresser with a fine career in his slipstream, had the distant look in his eyes of someone who could no longer be surprised or shocked. Three years before, he had been shot when attempting to arrest a drug runner at an improvised airfield close to the border. That happened in the desert just north of the border from Juarez. Travis had always shot a tight group in competition, but, this time, the drug runner had an Uzi and Travis was on the wrong foot when turning to face him. In spite of his awkward stance, Travis fired and hit the perpetrator, who fired at the same time. The dealer died on the spot, but Travis was hit in the shoulder. Alone, twenty miles from the possibility of help, he turned, walked a few paces, and fell into an arroyo, where he spent the night, assuming his death was inevitable, but he was surprised to see, when his parched eyelids parted, a sun that told him he was still alive. His partner, Phil, had been unable to accompany him to the meeting, but when Travis did not return, he followed the coordinates Travis had recorded on a pad beside a phone. A helicopter, sweeping the area as Phil drove those solitary tracks below, guided him to a patch of red that seemed incongruous, and he found Travis, unconscious, in the arroyo, clad in a high-visibility vest.
All cops know it is a lottery if you live or die. The odds are incalculable. A bullet goes this way or it goes that way, and a family mourns a parent or–the world is unchanged, and that parent walks through the door in the evening the same as always. What vagary of fortune could predict the outcome? That unknowable element was the background of every cop’s life.
Travis was not the only cop Emmett knew who faced life after such a shooting; it was always there in the background, like white noise―the possibility of an encounter that would change everything. Travis was no weakling: his record showed that plainly; but he had been content to take a desk assignment for a couple of years. Finally, he asked to finish his career in the field, and Gil Kramer, that enigma to his colleagues, had agreed, suggesting he be paired with Emmett. The decision suited Emmett, who had great respect for Travis, though he found himself in the position of having a partner who should have been his superior, in terms of experience and miles on the clock. It proved not to be a problem: they fell immediately into a good-natured relationship that precluded the possibility of discord.
Travis, many years before, had married a Mexican girl he had originally arrested trying to cross the border; she had sworn at him and needed to be restrained, and was repatriated after a detention of two weeks. When she was released, she was wearing a skirt that covered her modesty and not much else, and it was Travis who signed her exit release. She wrote to him a couple of weeks later, suggesting they write to each other, but he was too canny to fall for a honey trap. He looked at her résumé, which was available since she had been a teacher, and wondered what her story was. He was someone who had never been involved in matters of the heart; his experiences had been of the purely carnal sort; but something about her spoke to him. Was it more of the same? Was he being led by his cock?
He learned that she supported her parents, and worked, free, for a medical facility. Travis knew you could do goodly deeds and still have an eye on the main chance; that motives could be as mixed as a burrito. He had lived his life as someone who did not give an inch. Everyone, he believed, had an angle; there were no exceptions.
Finally, lying in his bed, unable to get any peace, he decided he would take a chance on this girl. Was he an idiot? He decided that he was, but that he would write to her regardless. Two weeks later, he flew south. They had the best sex of his life, and the decision was made. Years later, with three children, he knew his decision had been sound.
“So, where do we go from here, Emmett?”
“We need a full rundown on who he is. That’ll be tough. A guy his age who’s never figured in the court system―so far as we know―I mean, he’s slick. But there’s always something.”
“He doesn’t fit a template.”
“For sure. This isn’t a guy who needs to do crime. I mean, he has the brains to run an agency. He’s not some low-life with no choices. So, if it isn’t money, it’s sex. Are we saying this is a unique crime in his life? That would present a slew of difficulties for us. There’d be no thread to follow. So, we need to look at his private life. Who he dates, is there anyone steady, does he have a string of girls, the whole thing.”
“He’s a single guy, the records say. So why does he need to kill this girl? Not like he has to hide some infidelity. Possible he just likes to kill, but then there’d be others. Those guys don’t stop, once they get the taste for it.”
“This one―short, kind of homely, affable―”
“Not out of the killer textbook.”
Emmett laughed. One of the old-timers in Masonville used to say, “There’s no killer textbook, guys,” and that had become a mantra.
“Les, God bless him,” said Travis. “Fishing in the Everglades right now.”
Les had a point, Emmett knew, which was based on a lifetime of experience. New thinking, though, suggested that analysis of killers was very much a possibility. Criminal profilers, a new breed emerging from the FBI, showed there was much to be learned from talking to killers like Richard Speck and Ed Kemper. Understanding killers did not mean justifying their actions; it was a means of finding them. The rest of it was for the courts.
“Jed Mead was there in his office,” said Emmett.
“Really? I love that ad.”
“Yeah. ’Nother one I like right now, the singing raisins in―uh―”
“Heard it on the Grapevine.”
“Right. I’m thinking, he’s got a show Thursday, Shepley Hall, invited me along. I might just go. Have a beer with him. Pick his brains.”
“Okay. So, back home Friday.”
“Sure.”
By Thursday evening, they had completed their round of interviews, and all the prints they had gathered were being processed to maintain the fiction of a wide-spread inquiry.
“Sir,” said the bouncer. “Back stage is off-limits.”
Emmett held up his ticket, signed by Mead.
“Okay, sir, straight through.”
Mead, still wiping sweat from his face with a towel, talking with friends, lifted a hand to Emmett and pointed at the drinks table. Emmett, off-duty, took a glass of red wine; the guy next to him, choosing orange juice, said, “Great show.”
“Yeah,” said Emmett, and realized he was taking to Roy Orbison. Mead walked over and draped an arm round Orbison’s shoulders.
“Glad you could both make it.”
“Oh man,” said Emmett. “I’m in heaven.”
Orbison laughed. “Jed can put on a show.”
“Those notes you hit, Roy,” said Mead. “My shorts don’t ride that high.”
“You hit a good one on Cajun Queen.”
“Glad you noticed. I always fret if I’ll make it.”
“My early days,” said Orbison, “I didn’t have a cinch on my voice. It could head off somewhere I wasn’t expecting. Kinda like a corncrake.”
“Roy, gimme a break,” said Mead.
“Sir,” said Orbison, “are you in the music business?”
“No, just a fan, like everyone else out there. And it’s Emmett, please.”
“You bet. Emmett, I’m sure I’ve seen your face. Got to be on the tube.”
“Face like this,” said Emmett, “it’s one you want to forget.”
“Emmett,” said Mead, “That face, you should be a character actor in the movies.”
“Oh man,” said Emmett. “That‘s like saying I look like I been run over by a truck.”
Orbison, laughing, said, “I didn’t get anywhere by being pretty.”
“Emmett,” said Mead, “is one of the good guys.”
“We need all we can get,” said Orbison.
A guy across the room kept flicking a look at Mead. He was dressed in gray, wore his hair cut short, and had a tanned face that showed no emotion. His faded, pale blue eyes seemed to disappear against the tan so one seemed to be looking through him at light beyond. The skin of his face seemed to lie tight against the skull. A jolt shot through Emmett: with all his experience, he knew instinctively that this guy was dealing and Mead was using.
Emmett glanced at Mead’s eyes but the overhanging lids made it hard to judge if he was high. Drugs were endemic in show business, but, for all that, Emmett felt a little disappointed in Mead. Perhaps he was wrong; but he knew that the guy with the pale eyes was, in cop parlance, dirty. After an hour, the crowd began to thin, and Emmett, thinking it was time to go, turned and found himself looking into those same eyes. Emmett smiled and said, “Jed gives it everything, doesn’t he?”
“Sure does. He’ll crash out when he gets home, sleep all day.”
“I believe it. Gotta say, I grew up listening to his kinda music on the radio. Scruggs picking on a banjo, Hank Williams, the Opry, all of it.”
“That’s my story, too. I’m here cos I love me some country music, and Jed is bedrock.”
“He surely is.”
“Jed and me, we go way back, so, oftentimes I’m at his gigs. Noah Wetherspoon,” the guy said and held out a hand.
“Emmett Capps.”
“Emmett, you like country, you’re doing something right.”
Emmett laughed and said, “Noah? Name like that, I’m betting you had you some god-fearing parents.”
“Emmett, I surely did. My daddy drug us to church twice on Sunday, and he never forgot grace before dinner.”
“A grounding like that, it sets you on the right rails.”
“Emmett―I gotta say, I was a sinner in my wild and wooly youth.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Chasing tail, drinking a tad too much. But with age comes wisdom.”
“Sins like that, Noah, I hold my hand up too. Wisdom? I’ll leave that one.”
“That’s surely an east Texas accent I’m hearing, Emmett.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Hey, I love it. College types nowadays, they think, you got an accent, you’re uneducated. That gets me mad.”
“Me too. They’re the ones without the understanding.”
“Emmett, I believe I could talk with you all day.”
Emmett knew he was being checked; if the guy was a dealer, he would be looking for any encroachment on his turf. Emmett had been told so many times he did not look like a cop he believed it, so either Wetherspoon had good antennae or he kept a watchful eye on any new face. Emmett knew, though, that Wetherspoon would question Mead about him, and learn he was a Ranger; that would be an interesting conversation.
“Emmett, you around for a few days? I got a barbecue coming up.”
“I’d like to make it, Noah, but I’m flying out tomorrow.”
The skin lying tight on the face, and the absent eyes, created the illusion to Emmett that he was talking to bones and ligament rather than a person.
Wetherspoon handed him a card, and said, “You’re in town again, give me a call.”
“For sure.”
“All right,” said Gerry Watts, the DA, wearing a charcoal-gray suit, maroon tie, and wingtips. “It’s him. No question. But it isn’t a case.”
Emmett knew he was right.
“The prints are there, but that proves nothing. So, where do we go from here?”
Gil Kramer, saying nothing, cocked an eye at Emmett.
“We’ll need to investigate Appelbaum in depth. All of it. All we can learn.”
“The load we’ve got already―we can’t do it without our colleagues in Tennessee.” said Kramer. “Question is, who runs it?”
“The case is yours, Emmett,” said Watts. “Am I right, Gil?”
“For sure.”
“So, if they find anything, they give it to you.”
Emmett nodded. “Okay.”
THREE
“I ’member that,” said Wetherspoon. “Jackson, Mississippi, I believe.”
“Yes, it was,” said Mead. “I was forgetting you were there. So, I found what became my favorite guitar. Feller gave me a sweet deal on it too, cos he was a fan.” Mead smiled, looking at his Martin D35 hanging on the wall. “Not a rare guitar, but that’s the one for me. It sounds like honey tastes.”
“Sure does.”
Through the window of his living room, Emmett saw Wetherspoon’s driver waiting in the dark-red Chevrolet.
“That guy,” said Mead. “He can come in, Noah. I don’t like to see him sitting out there.”
“Touchette?” Wetherspoon laughed. “He’s fine. Got no social skills, likes to stay out of the way.”
“Uh huh. Okay.”
“Found him through his sister, LaBrea, chick working at a dating agency. Got this French name, forget the spelling, it’s, yeah, Tooshet.”
Mead watched Touchette for a moment more, sitting there behind the wheel, reading a newspaper, then turned and said, “So, the dinner?”
“It went fine. I got my arrangement.”
“Let me fix you a rum Lewis.”
“Sure.”
They took their drinks and walked through the house to a pool, where a girl in a bikini was sunbathing on a lounger. “Janis,” said Mead, “Noah.”
Wetherspoon wiggled fingertips at her, and she said, “Hi.”
“Janis is working on some lyrics for me.”
“Uh huh.”
“She’s got rhymes you never heard of.”
She looked over her sunglasses and said, “How hard would it be?”
“Go over two syllables,” said Wetherspoon, “us peasants won’t understand.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
“So,” said Wetherspoon, “you getting down with this country shit?”
“Cowboy stuff, country lore,” she said. “Trying to work it in.”
“Yeah? Keep it simple. Gal shoots her boyfriend, dog dies, she jumps off a bridge.”
“Right,” said Janis. “We’ve all been there.”
“Ain’t never been shot. Ain’t never had no boyfriend, neither,” said Wetherspoon.
“You’re kidding.”
“Mm mm.”
“Don’t knock it. You may discover a lot about yourself.”
“Nothing I want to know, honey.”
“These are new times, Noah.”
“Nothin’ new ’bout me, Janis. I hark back a ways.”
“Noah, that sounds a little stuffy. Gotta hang loose.”
“Hang loose? Like a bat from the rafters? You gotta give me lessons.”
“She’s tied up,” said Mead, “giving me lessons.”
“Oh boy,” said Janis. “Can we ease up a little here?”
“This new-age shit,” said Wetherspoon. “Gotta say, it’s flying a mile over my head.”
“Why, Noah,” said Janis. “Are you some kind of dinosaur?”
“Honey, I don’t know ’bout that, but I got a hide an inch thick.”
“Why do I believe that?”
“So, you shot your boyfriend and jumped off the bridge?”
“Yeah, but I can swim.”
Janis almost managed to look demure, lying there on the sunbed.
“Babe,” said Mead. “Noah ’n’ me gonna step aside for a moment to talk business.”
“You got it.”
They sat under a canopy and touched glasses.
“Appelbaum, for sure,” said Wetherspoon, “knows his trade.”
“I had some bad years. Just glad to be back on an even keel.”
“Sure. Jew guys got the angles.”
“Mm hmm.”
“Top lawyers all Jews. Fact.”
“Uh huh.”
“Dates lined up?”
“Sure. I get antsy, thinking of the old days. I see guys with less talent going all the way. But hell―it’s a lottery. At least I got a basis now.”
“Right.”
“But things are always tough. Now’s no different.”
“Sure.”
“If I could get that hook, that perspective, I could be back up there.”
“It’ll happen.”
“Gotta hope.”
“Jed, tell me, who was that guy backstage? The shit-kicker type―Emmett?”
“Oh, yeah, Emmett.”
“He’s in the business?”
“Not hardly.”
“So . . .”
“Yeah, just a guy I met the other day at Sim’s office.”
“Uh huh.”
Janis dove into the pool, and they both watched her smooth crawl-stroke.
“Looking fine there,” said Wetherspoon.
“Keeps in shape.”
“She was born in shape.”
“Let me freshen your glass.”
There were bottles on a counter under the awning and he topped both their drinks.
“So, that guy,” said Wetherspoon.
“Yeah, up at Sol’s.”
“But not in the business.”
“Right.”
Mead was taking his time; he knew Wetherspoon had to put a label on any new face.
“Rancher?”
“Uh―no. Point of fact, he was there on official business.”
“Yeah? What kind of official business?”
