Lone Star Noir Read online

  Phelan phoned Tyrrell Public Library. Formerly a church—thus the arches and stained glass—it was a downtown standout, a sand castle dripped from medieval gray stone. He asked the librarian to get a Miss Wade, who’d be in the reference section, going through newspapers.

  “This is not the bus station, sir. We don’t page people.”

  Seems like, Phelan thought while locating his desperately-polite-but-hurting voice, one bad crab always jumps in the gumbo.

  “I’m just as sorry as I can be, ma’am. But couldn’t you find my sister? We’re down at the funeral home, and our daddy’s lost his mind.”

  Clunk. Receiver on desk. Joe was still pulling files.

  Footsteps, then Delpha came on. “Hey, Bubba,” she said.

  Phelan grinned.

  She told him she’d call him back from a pay phone. “Call Joe’s,” he said.

  In three minutes Joe’s phone rang, and Delpha read out what she had so far. “Check this one from last night.” A Marvin Carter, eighteen, wandering down Delaware Street, apparent assault victim, transported to a hospital. Then, outside of husband-wife slugfests, thefts, one complaint of tap-dancing on the roof of a Dodge Duster, she’d found seven dope busts and two missing-boy reports. She gave him names and addresses, phone numbers from the cross directory.

  Joe dumped files on his desk, said, “Vacate my chair, son.” Phelan ignored him, boring in on each mug shot as he scribbled names on his unprofessional legal pad.

  One of the names was a Don Henry. Liberated from Huntsville two months back.

  Some D name, Don or Darrell.

  There you go. Cake.

  No mud, no grease, no 500-pound pipe, no lost body parts. Man, he should have split the rigs while he still had ten fingers.

  2:01. He drove back to the office and hit the phone. Got a child at the Henry number, asked for its mother.

  “She went the store. Git away, Dwight, I’m on the phone.” A wail from the background.

  “Honey, your daddy there?”

  The child scolded Dwight. Dwight was supposed to shut up while the child had dibs on the telephone. But little Dwight wasn’t lying down; he was pitching a fit.

  “Honey? Hey, kid!” Phelan hollered into the phone.

  “Shut up, Dwight! I cain’t hear myself talk. They took Daddy back Satiddy.”

  “Saturday? Back where, honey?”

  “Where he was. Is this Uncle Merle?” The child yelped. Now two wails mingled on the other end of the line.

  A woman’s harsh voice barked into the phone, “Lowdown, Merle, pumping the kids. They pulled Don’s paper, okay? You happy now? Gonna say ‘I told you so’? You and Ma can kiss my ass.” The phone crashed down.

  Saturday was six days ago. Frowning, Phelan X’d Don Henry. Next, mindful of the gray-haired volunteers in pink smocks on the end of the line, he called Baptist Hospital and inquired feelingly for his cousin Marvin Carter. Strike one. Next was Saint Elizabeth, long wait, transfer, and strike two. Finally Hotel Dieu and a single to first.

  He parked in a doctor’s space in front of the redbrick hospital by the port. Eau de Pinesol and polished tile. A nun gave him the room number.

  The face on the pillow was white-whiskered, toothless, and snoring. A pyramid of a woman in a red-flowered muumuu sat bedside. Phelan checked the room number. “Marvin Carter?”

  The woman sighed. “My husband’s name is Mar-tin. Cain’t y’all get nothing right?”

  Phelan loped back to the desk and stood in line behind a sturdy black woman and a teenage boy with a transistor radio broadcasting the day’s body count in a jungle on the other side of the globe. The boy’s face was lopsided, the wide bottom out of kilter with a narrow forehead. He nudged the dial and a song blared out. “Kung Fu Fighting.” The woman slapped shut a checkbook, snatched the transistor, and dialed back to the tinny announcer spewing numbers and Asian place names.

  “Jus’ keep listenin’. ’Cause you keep runnin’ nights, thas where you gonna be, in that war don’t never end, you hear me, Marvin? What you lookin at?” She scowled at Phelan.

  The boy turned so that Phelan verified the lopsidedness as swelling. He ventured, “Marvin Carter?”

  The woman’s eyes slitted as she asked who he was. Phelan told her, emphasizing that he was not a policeman. He told her that he was looking for Ricky Toups, kept his eyes on the boy.

  The boy flinched. Bingo.

  “Les’ go.” The woman pushed the teenager toward the glass doors.

  Phelan dogged them. “Did that to you, Marvin, what’s he gonna do to Ricky, huh? Want that on your slate? Could be a lot worse than the dope.”

  The boy tried the deadeye on Phelan. Couldn’t hold it.

  “We talking dope now?” The woman’s voice dropped below freezing. “You done lied to me, Marvin Carter.” Her slapping hand stopped short of the swollen jaw.

  Marvin grunted something that was probably “Don’t, Mama,” enough so Phelan understood his jaw was wired.

  “Ricky got you there promising dope,” Phelan said, “but that wasn’t all you got, was it?”

  The boy squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Wasn’t white kids did this to you? Was some grown man?” Marvin’s mother took hold of his skinny waist.

  “Listen,” Phelan leaned in, “if he said he’d hurt your mama here, I’ll take care of that. It’s just a line. But Ricky’s real. You know him, and he’s wherever you were last night. Help me find him, Marvin.”

  “Avy,” the boy said.

  “Avie? The street near the LNVA canal?”

  Shake from Marvin said no. And he mumbled again, “Avy.”

  “Davy? That’s his name?”

  A shudder ran through the teenager.

  Phelan scanned his list of parolees. Didn’t have to be one of them, but he had a feeling. “Dave Deeterman? Concord Street?”

  Shake from Marvin said yes. “Kakerd.” Marvin muttered directions, minus lots of consonants. The mother glared Phelan away, and Marvin bent down and shook against her neck.

  Phelan dashed back to the hospital’s two pay phones, called Delpha, told her where he was heading, and if she didn’t hear from him within the hour, to call Louis Reaud down at the station. “That’s R-E—”

  “Know how to spell it,” she said. “Guess your second client brought over your retainer. Somebody left a wrapped-up box at the door.”

  “Hot damn. Why didn’t she hand it to you?”

  “Don’t know. Just heard her on the stairs. Want me to unwrap the box?”

  “No time. ’Less it’s ticking, just hold on to it.”

  “Got time for one question, Mr. Phelan?”

  “Shoot.”

  Throat clearing. “You think you might hire me?”

  “Miss Wade, you were hired when you called me Bubba.” He hung up the silent phone and jogged for the doors.

  3:15. The house with the orange mailbox, painfully described by Marvin, was a dingy white ranch. It was set deep in the lot, backed up to tall pines and oak and magnolia, pockets of brush. Rusty-brown pine needles and dried magnolia leaves, big brown tongues, littered the ground. With oil shot up to twelve dollars a barrel, somebody’d be out here soon, hammering up pasteboard apartments, but for now wildlife was renting this leftover patch of the Big Thicket.

  No car, but ruts in the grass where one had parked.

  Phelan knocked on the door. Waited. Tried the knob, no dice. He went around the back to a screen porch that looked to be an add-on. Or it had been a screen porch before plywood was nailed over its large windows. A two-by-four had been pounded across the door; the hammer lying there in the dirt suggested that Dave Deeterman might be recently away from his desk. Maybe. Phelan could hear something. He beat on the door. “Ricky. Ricky Toups, you in there?”

  He put his ear to the door. Something. Phelan pounded again, louder. “I’m looking for Ricky Toups.”

  A low creaking. Rhythmic. What was that sound? Like a rocking chair with serious rust.


  He jogged back to his car, shoved a flashlight into his pocket, and snagged a pry bar. Ripped off the two-by-four. Opened the door. Directly across the porch was the door that led into the house. Phelan stepped over there, .38 drawn, and rattled it: locked. Already he was smelling piss in the hot, dead air. Then herb and cigarettes and some kind of dead-fish bayou stink. That creaky noise came from the far left, high up. He found a switch by the locked door and flipped it. Not a gleam.

  He’d got the creaks figured now, and he shined the white circle up and left, to their source.

  Christ Almighty.

  Phelan’s jaw sagged. On the top of metal shelves was a naked gargoyle, perched there. No, clinging. Haunches with a smooth, sheened back folded over them, fingers clawed around the metal, head cut sharply toward Phelan. Blinking eyes protruded from sunken holes; the downturned mouth wheezed.

  “Asthma, right?”

  An indrawn, “Yeah.”

  “Deeterman coming back?”

  Ricky Toups’s head bobbed loosely, flapping sweat-dark hair that had been dishwater-blond in last year’s school photo.

  “How long’s he been gone?”

  “Hour or—” The kid flung out a hand, pointing.

  Phelan zigzagged the light downward over matted orange shag littered with marijuana debris, the arm of a bamboo couch, beer cans. He pivoted. The shaft of light from the door revealed the round edge of a black pile that blended into the darkness. What? Shit? Most of him failed to make sense of what he saw. But not his skin—it was crawling off his belly, his nuts squeezing north of nutsack.

  The pile of shit shifted until only a tip remained. Then the tip disappeared into blackness.

  That it was heading toward him told Phelan enough. Most snakes light out for the hills; cottonmouths come at you.

  Phelan strode to the shelves and hauled Ricky down, shined the light till it hit the bamboo couch, and dumped the boy on it. “Keep your feet off the floor.”

  He scanned with the flashlight. Where the fuck was it?

  Shag. Spilt ashtray. More shag.

  Then the beam caught a section of sinuous black. He moved the light. There it was. Pouring toward him, triangular head outthrust.

  Phelan fired.

  The black snake convulsed but kept coming, tongue darting.

  He fired again. Still the black form writhed in the orange grass. He blew its head off with the third round.

  Phelan stepped wide of the quivering snake; wasn’t dead enough yet to keep the head from biting. Ears ringing, he tossed the flashlight, looped the boy’s arm around his neck, dragged him out of that room.

  He saw the blue thumb-sized bruises on the boy’s shoulders, a streak of blood on the back of his thigh, as he draped him in his own jacket and a blanket from his trunk. “It’s the hospital, Ricky, ’less you got a full inhaler at home.”

  “Home,” the kid panted, then turned the black tunnel of his eyes onto Phelan. “Book.”

  “What book?”

  But the kid folded, struggling for air.

  Phelan laid on the horn when they gunned into the Toups’s driveway. In two seconds, Caroleen Toups busted out of the house, face lit up like stadium lights.

  Phelan smoked in the Toups’s pine-paneled living room that opened onto a pine-paneled kitchen. Except for the mention of a book, he had hold of the thing: Deeterman slipped Ricky cash and dope, Ricky steered him boys. Too stupid to know the son of a bitch would turn on him. How many ran in a loop through Phelan’s brain. How many you bring him, Ricky?

  After a while, wearing jeans and breathing, Ricky Toups stumbled out into the living room, trailed by his bewildered mother, her hands clasped at chest level. “There’s a book,” he said. “Told him I didn’t have it. He didn’t care, said he’d be back for me.”

  “What kinda book?”

  “Like a diary. You gotta help Georgia.” He hit his inhaler, and his jaw jittered sideways like his head was trying to screw off.

  “She’s got the book. Her idea to take it?”

  Ricky’s bluish chapped lips parted, like he was going to deny this point, but that was back when he had all the answers, before today. “She said we could get big money from him. That’s where he went. To her house.”

  Phelan leapt up. “Call her.”

  Ricky mumbled into a phone on the kitchen wall then hung his head listening. The receiver fell to his side. “It’s okay. He came to her house but she’d already took it to your office.”

  Phelan’s stomach lurched.

  Ricky slid down the wall, hunkered. Georgia’d told Deeterman he could go get the book where she’d left it, wrapped up outside this private eye’s office. The guy wouldn’t be there; he was out looking for Ricky. She’d talked fast, peeking through a latched screen door with Phelan’s card taped to the outside of it.

  4:55. Phelan burned up I-10’s fast lane, swerving around truckers balling for New Orleans, cursing himself for wasting three rounds on a cottonmouth he could have outrun.

  He took the stairs soft. Worked the doorknob soundlessly, hoping Deeterman was somewhere ahead of the truckers on I-10, not sitting in Delpha’s chair watching the knob turn. Phelan eased into the still office, .38 out.

  Delpha Wade’s chair snugged to her desk. On top of it, the sheet with info on Client #2, typed on her release form. The door to his office stood ajar. Pressed against the jamb, Phelan pushed, swinging it open.

  He stepped into a curtain of bourbon fume and quiet in the air, waves of it, wave on wave, quiet.

  Until glass crunched under his shoe.

  The client chair drifted around. Delpha said, “I put it away in your bottom drawer. Under the whiskey bottle.”

  Phelan slid the gun on his desk next to a wad of brown paper, sank down to her.

  Her right hand hung behind the chair arm but her left lay on a small, worn ledger in the middle of a shiny darkness on her skirt. Different-sized spots stained her white blouse, spray and spatter, one red channel.

  “’Fore I could get that box for him, he pushed me out of the way and grabbed it. He coulda left. I thought he would. But he had to do one of those things they do. Those extras.” Her head lowered, shook once. “They just cain’t resist.”

  He’d seen the legs on the floor by now, the rest of the body blocked from view by the big metal desk, and he needed to get Louie here, get an ambulance first, but he couldn’t pick up the phone, couldn’t get that motion going because he was listening to her, hearing it in the waves of quiet that rolled over him, quiet riding on waves of quiet, waves widening out from a center—the bayou, singing with insects and frogs, the surge-and-retreat, keening whir of it, the stir in muddy water, and her voice low as that chorus, he heard how she was still holding the bottle when the man licked the knife and cut her, and after he licked it again, she broke the bottle on the edge of the desk and shoved it up through his throat. Then she took the book and she sat down.

  “You gonna find some boys.”

  “Delpha,” Phelan whispered. The half of her face he could see wore a sheen of sweat. He laced his fingers through the brown hair, soothed it back.

  Not a cloud in the gray-blue eyes that met his. The horizon inside them was clear.

  CATGIRL

  BY CLAUDIA SMITH

  Galveston

  The girls are waiting for the ferry, dangling their legs out the side of the van, popsicle juice dripping down their chins. Four girls: Trina, Tricia, Grace, and Allie. Tricia and Trina, the blond twins. Grace Hobel, the quiet one, their best friend. And Allie, kicking Grace in the shins gleefully. She wants the twins for her very own. They are beautiful, those two, and Allie wants to enter their twin world, to learn their twinspeak, to braid their matching white-blond hair. The twins’ mother is from Sweden. Allie loves her icewater eyes, her high cheekbones. She wears sunglasses and drinks throughout the day, but in a way that makes her seem slightly mussed, and not soused. Allie wants those twins for sleepovers. They smell like Ivory soap, those two. Even on the beach, after
days of swimming in the ocean, they smell sweetly of summer. Not Grace. Grace is getting breasts and has already started her period. She has a body odor problem.

  So these girls, setting off on their weekend with a mother the other mothers like because she is pretty and rich, know they will run on the beach, build sand castles, and stand around a bonfire with boys. They lick sticky fingers and sing a song about a smashed bumblebee.

  At first, they don’t notice the man who is behind them, watching, although if they did it would give them a kick; they like it when people watch them, especially together.

  Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack

  All dressed in black, black, black

  With silver buttons, buttons, buttons

  All down her back, back, back.

  She cannot read, read, read

  She cannot write, write, write

  But she can smoke, smoke, smoke

  Her father’s pipe, pipe, pipe.

  Then Grace sees the man and covers her mouth. She jabs Tricia’s ribs.

  “He likes your creamy thighs,” Allie says, just to see if Grace will hide behind her fingers. She does.

  “He looks like Kenny Rogers,” Trina says, and he does.

  “Maybe he is Kenny Rogers,” Allie says. It’s possible. His snow-white beard is very well groomed. His nose is red and a little bulbous.

  They sing “The Gambler” and point and laugh. He squints his eyes. They slam the door. The ferry has arrived.

  Melanie, the twins’ mother, puts out her cigarette. They are listening to Neil Diamond. Even Neil Diamond has a kind of soulful glamour when Melanie Parks listens to him.

  This all happened years ago, in the summer of 1982.

  The girls stand on the ferry, throwing day-old bread at the seagulls. Grace stands at the prow, looking down, waiting to be splashed. She turns green yet will not back away. She is prone to seasickness. But she never backs out of a dare. The girls have to admire her for that.