Cash City, page 14
He turned and faced me now for the first time since he had climbed the knoll. Beneath his bloodshot eyes, dark pouches sagged halfway down his face.
“How old was your boy?”
“I don’t talk about my son.”
“Oh, okay. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not personal. When other people talk about it—makes it feel cheap.”
“I understand. Did they ever catch the fella who did it at least?”
“Not yet.”
“I just want to catch the people who did this to my baby. You can understand that. That’s all I want is to catch those bastards and watch them burn.”
“About that,” I leaned against the tree, “I need to ask you, do any of the people who were at the funeral today live close to you down there on the West End?”
“No,” he shook his head. “Wait.”
He rocked back on his heels and tilted his head back to where it seemed like he was peering up through the branches of the tree.
“No, my cousin Janet used to live a couple blocks away, but she moved to the East End last year. The rest of my family is all still down in Kentucky and Katherine’s side is all over there across the river in Ohio. Why?”
“I’ve tracked your daughter’s movements on the night she was found up to a point. She was back in the neighborhood. I believe she may have been trying to get home. Now, either I’m wrong and she wasn’t going home, or something occurred to where she never made it. Someone picked her up or she stopped somewhere else, I don’t know.”
“Where was she walking from?”
“A boyfriend’s house.”
Cammack twitched.
“That’s who you should be checkin’ out, that boyfriend of hers. That’s who got her into this business.”
“She had a few boyfriends, Joe.”
Cammack raised a palm in the air.
“I don’t want to hear no more.”
“She had been a few places that night.”
“I don’t want to hear no more,” he yelled at me.
One final question gnawed at my gut. I didn’t particularly want to ask it, nor have it answered, but I couldn’t avoid it any longer so I put it to him.
“Did Trisha make it home that night, Joe?”
Joe looked down once more to the gravesite of the only child born to him, then over to the tiny figure of his wife in the passenger seat of their car. Her face was cupped in her hands, shoulders visibly convulsing.
He slipped a hand into his inner breast pocket and removed a flask, unscrewed the lid, took a long tug and sighed, “Yes, she made it home.” With his voice flat and absent of emotion, as if he had detached from the proceedings and was simply relating the details of some mundane memory, some trivial matter, Joe Cammack related his account of the night his daughter died.
“It was late. I couldn’t sleep and I was tossin’ and turnin’ all over the place, so I figured I would let Katherine get some sleep because she hasn’t slept well since Trish disappeared and she had fell to sleep that night, for a change. I was in the kitchen, sitting at the table. Had a drink in front of me but I wasn’t really drinkin’ it. Just sippin’. Didn’t hear Trish come in. She just kind of appeared at the doorway. She could have been there for a long time, I don’t know. I looked up and she was just standing there, starin’ at me. I could tell she was fucked up. Her eyes were all glazed like. But I was so excited to see her I didn’t care. I got up and went over to her. I remember I was saying, ‘Thank God, thank God, thank God you’re alright.’ Then I hugged her and she didn’t hug me back, which I didn’t care about. I was just so happy she was back.
“I couldn’t wait to tell Katherine. Finally, all her worrying herself sick could be over, you know. I was about to go wake her up and I pulled back from Trish and she was still just staring right through me. I told her that I loved her and everything was gonna be good now. But then she said something that made me kinda step back. She said, ‘You love me, huh? Why don’t you show me how much you love me?’ I asked her what she meant by that and she asked me if I had any of the Motor. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she grabbed me, she grabbed me between my legs and said, ‘C’mon, I know you want me. Give me some of that Motor and you can have me any way you want me. You can have me all night.’ I pushed her away but then she kept coming at me, trying to kiss me and clawing at me. I didn’t know what to do. I kept fighting her off and pleading with her.
“She started to get belligerent then, saying all kinds of nasty things, callin’ me nasty names. Sayin’ I wasn’t man enough for her. Trish would never talk to me like that. I knew she was out of her head, but I couldn’t stop her. She just kept comin’ for me. I started trying to get her to be quiet, shushing her, so she wouldn’t wake up Katherine. That’s when she started undressing. She took off her clothes and started touching herself and saying that she had what I needed. She said I could do whatever I wanted to her. Said I’d never felt anything ‘til I’d felt her. I shouldn’t have had to see that.
“I told her I wanted her to put her clothes back on and sit down. She gave me this look, scary, and her eyes—I swear they was red. Not just the whites, even the colored part. She said, ‘Why you lookin’ at me like that bitch.’ Them was the last words she ever uttered. Her mouth started to foam up and her eyes fluttered, rolled back in her head and she flopped down to the ground and started convulsing, shaking all over the floor.”
Cammack shuddered at the memory.
“I didn’t know what to do. I was trying not to wake up Katherine. I didn’t want her to see what was happening. I tried to give Trish some water and I got down there with her and I was cradling her in my arms and soothing her and I thought she might be comin’ out of it. She stopped shaking and the gunk stopped leaking out of her mouth, but then she looked at me with this disappointed face, like she couldn’t believe I would let this happen to her. And she went all limp. I thought maybe she was all right for a second, but she was dead.”
The pleasant breeze that blew through the leaves of the trees had quit, leaving the air thick and sticky. Sweat trickled down my back.
“She didn’t know who you were, Joe. It was like you said. She was out of her head. Her getting to your house was on instinct. That wasn’t really her. Joe?”
Cammack was no longer present; he was off reliving that night.
“You took her to the river.”
He nodded.
“I knew where I could take her where she wouldn’t be found. If I put her in down there by the shallows, I thought maybe that would be better. If Katherine believed Trish might still be alive, out there somewhere in the world, having fun, making something of herself. At least Katherine would have hope, you know. Something to live for. That’d be better than the truth. Better than this shit.
“So I wrapped my baby in a blanket, put her in the back seat of my car and drove her down there to the river. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t put her in that water. I just ran away. I ran away.”
A few days before, standing in my office, Joe Cammack had been an imposing presence. Now he looked a foot shorter. He was a brittle, irreparable old man, never to be whole again.
“I just wanted the person who made her into what she became to pay.”
“There’s nobody to blame here, Joe. She put herself where she was.”
“Perhaps.” Joe shook his head slowly and chewed the front of his lower lip. “When did you know it was me?”
“I didn’t know. It crossed my mind last night that she might have been heading home. That she might have made it there, I had to entertain the possibility. You know the river, worked it for years. Whoever took her down there knew where to put her in. The day you came to hire me you had fresh mud on your shoes, size thirteen shoes I’m assuming, that looked similar to mud by the river. Now, that didn’t mean anything because you hadn’t put her there yet. But it got my mind working. I’d hoped I was wrong, that it wasn’t you.”
“I wish it wasn’t me either, friend. I wish—”
He tipped the flask back.
“You should know what you set in motion. A woman died because of this business. Her five kids no longer have a mother. They’re getting split up as we speak, shipped off in all different directions to live with strangers. I was shot at and could have been killed.”
“Yeah,” Joe winced. “I wish I was sorrier about it, but to be honest with you, Mr. Malick, I am sorry you got shot at and I’m sorry about that lady’s kids and all, but really I don’t give a goddamn no more. You can turn me in to the authorities if you want to. It don’t matter.”
Off to our right a column of cars, all with bereavement flags on their hoods, snaked their way down the lane and disappeared over the hill.
“Somebody else getting buried.”
“I don’t see any point in turning you over. You’ve had enough. Take care of yourself, Joe.”
I left him on the knoll and walked down the lane past his wife sitting in their car. She never looked up from her hands. Her shoulders were still shaking from her crying. When I drove out of there Cammack hadn’t moved from beneath the tree.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In the Tank
I drove to the nearest ATM and withdrew a hundred dollars from my bank account. The remaining balance: a whopping two hundred seventeen dollars and fifty-three cents. Some business needed to be drummed up and drummed up quick, but that would have to wait until tomorrow because on this day I was getting drunk.
At The Red Head, I deposited sixty dollars’ worth of Maker’s Mark into my belly in less than two hours and was feeling great about it when that belligerent drunk that haunted the place sidled up next to me.
“This seat taken?” he asked, chipper as a fucking bluebird.
“Yeah.”
He laughed as if I were funny, squeezed my shoulder and planted himself on the stool.
“And how is your day coming along, sir?”
“Worse, now.”
The chatterbox ordered a beer from Tadpole, who kept an eye on me as he pulled the beer from the cooler, twisted off the top and served it to the guy. The guy was long and loose-limbed. His thin fingers looked like they were strangling the bottle as he lifted it to his mouth and took loud swishing gulps.
He set the bottle on the bar, opened his mouth wide and made some satisfied vowel sounds.
“My name’s Teddy,” Teddy the drunk said, engaging me. “Haven’t seen you in here before. You from around here?”
“Are you fucking serious?”
He squinted and leaned closer to scrutinize my face.
“Have we met?”
“You gotta be kidding me,” I said sourly. “I’ve seen you in here a hundred times. Last night and the night before you ear-banged me so hard I wished I was deaf.”
“That doesn’t sound like me,” Teddy the drunk said. A perplexed expression made his face droopy and stupid.
“It was you.”
“Doesn’t sound like me. I don’t remember you and I’m not a talker.”
“Listen, it was you. Don’t try to tell me it wasn’t you when you know goddamn well you get so fucked you can’t see straight or even form a goddamn sentence.”
Teddy the drunk huffed, affording me a whiff of his rot breath. I fluttered my hand in front of my face to shoo away the smell.
“Don’t talk to me that way taking the Lord’s name in vain. I’ve never seen you and I think you’re plum crazy. I don’t know what’s got you so rankled, but I won’t stand for nobody talking to me like that.”
“Fine, I’m the crazy. Just don’t talk to me, not about the ills of technology or any other bullshit.”
When I mentioned the technology thing, a faint recognition came into Teddy’s face, but left just as quickly. Even if he realized that he’d chatted me up before, pride prevented him from backing down now. The black whiskers at the corners of his mouth twitched.
“I’m not going to sit and take this horseshit from you.”
I motioned across the bar.
“There are fifty other seats in here. Choose one.”
“You’re an asshole.”
He hocked a loogie onto the floor.
Tadpole chimed in.
“Take it easy, Teddy.”
“I’m just trying to converse while I wet my whistle a little. Just a little conversation to pass the time. And this fuckbucket,” he jerked a thumb my way, “decides to be a cantankerous son of a bitch. Someone needs to learn him a lesson.”
I said, “It’s not gonna be you.”
“The hell it ain’t. I’m not scared of you.”
“Take it easy, fellas,” Tadpole said.
“C’mon you asshole,” Teddy taunted. He grabbed his beer bottle by the neck, stood up from the stool and cocked the bottle up by his shoulder. Beer spilled from the bottle onto his shoulder and feet and he cursed at himself.
Tadpole hollered, “What the fuck, Teddy? Take it outside.”
I took a sip of my Maker’s, placed it on the bar and swiveled around to face the guy. He was crouched down with that beer bottle still raised and his left elbow sticking out to act as a shield. His eyes were bugging out of his head.
I said, “You want a piece of me?”
“I want some fucking all of it.”
“Why don’t you put that bottle down and fight like a man?”
Teddy bristled, indignant at my calling out his masculinity, and promptly set the bottle down on the bar. As soon as he did I picked it up and smacked it across his face. Teddy the drunk yelped and covered his face with his hands. Blood spurted through his fingers as he collapsed to the floor.
“My eye, my eye, I cain’t see! I cain’t see!”
While Teddy lay there bleeding and screaming, I sat back down and picked up where I left off with my drink. A couple of people got up from the booths to tend to Teddy. Tadpole came around the bar with a towel and a cold compress. He shot me a disgusted look.
“You saw him,” I said. “I’ve always been cordial.”
One or two people had gotten on their cell phones right after the altercation. A cruiser must have been in the vicinity because a pair of uni’s arrived before I even finished my drink. Upon their entrance, everyone in the bar pointed their fingers at me. A unanimous vote. The officers wrenched my arms back, snapped on the cuffs and marched me out of there. At the station, they processed me and tossed me in the drunk tank.
A metal bench ran the length of the three cinderblock walls. In the corner was a metal toilet. There were two other guys in there. One, a fat sweaty mouth-breather sitting with his elbows on his knees, stared at me like I was familiar. I didn’t recognize him. The other guy was propped against the toilet, half-conscious, dried puke all down his front. He kept nodding off until his head smacked the toilet, wherein he would sit back up to do it all again.
I sat on the empty bench along the far wall. The sweaty one, nose wheezing with every fat breath, aimed a wooly finger at me and declared, “You’re that pig busted me for stealing copper from those wires.”
I said, “Wasn’t me, not a cop,” then lay down on the cold bench and shut my eyes.
I woke up with two thick hands wrapped tight around my throat. I punched and slapped at the bends of his elbows but the fat fucker didn’t budge. He had gravity and a few hundred pounds working for him. There must have been a security camera in there because four guards came hustling in and tasered him in the middle of his back. His whole body went rigid and he released my neck and fell to the floor like a sack. I flung myself upright, sucking for air and clutching at my windpipe to make sure it was still intact.
It took a minute for the air to get going in and out properly. The guards gave me a cursory once over to make sure I was going to live. Then each guard took hold of one of the fat guy’s limbs to haul him out of there, but he was too heavy to lift. They had to drag him by the ankles into another cell. The guy covered in puke slept through the whole ordeal.
My throat hurt like hell. For the next few hours I tried not to swallow. In that time, two more guys got thrown in the tank, nobody I knew. Around nine p.m. one of the guards opened the cell and bellowed my name. Willis Hively had already visited the property clerk and was waiting in the holding room with my possessions.
“Rumor going around somebody tried to murder you in here, too.”
“It’s all the rage.”
He tossed me my wallet and looked at the marks on my neck, let out a little whistle.
“Jesus.”
“My money better be in here.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t take your forty bucks.”
So he’d sifted through my wallet. I stuck it in my back pocket, strapped on my gun and put on the flat cap. Hive held up my phone.
“You have four missed calls from me. You planning on returning one ever?”
I snatched my phone out of his hand.
“You want to come search my place too or have you already done that while you had me pinned in here.”
“I’m not searching anything. What are you doing getting into a bar fight?”
“He started it.”
“Enough witnesses from The Red Head agree with you. Else you’d be staying put in here. Tadpole said you didn’t need to hit him with the bottle though.”
I shrugged.
“C’mon,” Hive said. “We can talk while I drive you home.”
Outside the night was warm and the town was still. Hive drove us into the Southside.
“You find Tricky Jackson?”
