Beluga (6 page)

“Title in it?”

Larry got cagey. “Maybe.”

“Give me the keys.”

“You ain't got no right to…”

I drew back a fist, and Larry dropped like a fainting goat.

“Key's in it,” Skeeter told me.

I said to Desmond, “I'll take care of the truck.”

The catfish pond boy shut down his tractor, climbed off, and came our way. He was a white guy, a farmer by the looks of him. He had a scraggly beard and a gut and jeans with the outline of a snuff tin on the left back pocket.

“Hey here,” he told us. Then him and Larry engaged in some sort of Masonic Def Jam handshake that ended in a hug. They had to have met in Parchman. There was no explaining it otherwise.

“Got a tarp in there?” I asked him.

“Probably scare something up,” he said.

I told Desmond, “You do that, and I'll get these boys a truck.”

“Don't be coming back here with no goddamn Chevy.” Larry had gone all bold now that his prison buddy was at hand.

I hit him anyway, a straight shot to the stomach. When it came to Larry, that was my Masonic Def Jam thing.

I had to think Larry was the one who'd crapped up that Tercel already. He'd spilled Crown Royal or something all over the console, and there were corn chip crumbs and tiny scraps of paper littering the floorboard like he was thinking of building a nest and had started gathering the goods.

So I first had to find the car wash in Belzoni, vacuum that Tercel out, and buy some wipes to tidy it up. Then I drove to a car lot just up 49, near a place called Bellewood. They had a couple of Dodge trucks. I tested both of them. One quit after a half mile. The other had a transmission that sounded like it was made from ball peen hammers. It clanged and rattled every time it even thought about shifting gears.

When I told that fellow, “Nope,” he tried to sell me a Galaxy station wagon. It didn't have the suspension to haul around tires, was almost sitting on the ground as it was, but I surely would have loved to have seen Beluga LaMonte rattling around the countryside in it.

So I kept heading north, stopping at car lots. I was a day late for a Ranger up around Isola, and then I struck out east toward Tibbet, where I knew a body man. He'd done a little work on my Ranchero and sometimes had a truck or a car or something for sale.

I was tearing through the countryside, fuming about Larry. I was having a conversation with Desmond in my head, trying to persuade him to my view of in-laws. I had an ex-wife, too, and she had a brother I felt no obligation to help. I sort of glossed over—even alone in Larry's Tercel—the part about him being a Lutheran minister and a narcotic in human form.

I was too busy, consequently, to notice the flashing lights at first. In fact, I didn't see them at all until I'd heard the siren. A couple of short yips snagged my attention, and I told Desmond and me together, “Aw, shit.”

I pulled over onto the shoulder. I went digging through the glove box. There was nearly an ounce of pot and a .22 derringer. I finally located the registration shoved behind the passenger's visor.

Officer Tula Raintree bent to peer in at me. “Well now” was all she said.

 

FIVE

My license was in my wallet. My wallet was in the cup holder of Desmond's car. While Larry's Tercel wasn't stolen outright, the claims of ownership were murky, and civilians were generally discouraged from carrying loaded guns and sacks of weed.

Tula Raintree explained all this to me in patient, officious detail.

When she asked if I had any questions, I showed her my cuffed wrists and just said, “Really?”

“Could have hooked them behind.”

True enough. “Yeah, well. Thanks for that,” I said.

As cop cars go, her backseat was clean. Either she hadn't picked up any vomiting drunks or seepy meth heads lately or she was a stickler about her county cruiser along with every other thing. I figured the latter, since she seemed to have an eye for criminals in the landscape, so I had to guess she hauled in plenty of riffraff.

“What happened to your truck thing?” she asked me.

That was what most people called it. Ford should have gone with that instead of Ranchero.

“Been riding with a buddy.”

“And the Toyota?”

“In-law's car. That stuff's all his. I didn't know what was in it.”

I could just see her eyes in the mirror through the Plexiglas divider. Her black hair was braided and coiled in the back with only a wisp or two hanging loose.

“Right,” she told me.

“Ask Kendell. He knows me. I used to be a cop.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Just taking a break.”

She gave me a look. “Right,” she said again. The dirty cops were often the ones who ended up taking breaks.

“Can you put this window up a little?” She had them both down all the way in the back, and my eardrums were fairly thumping.

She eyed me in the mirror. “Duponts?”

“This morning.” There's only so much Martinizing can do.

The windows stayed where they were.

Given the circumstances, I thought we got on pretty well. That's what I told Kendell, anyway, when he came by to see me on the holding bench. It was an old church pew out in the Greenville precinct hallway. They'd drilled holes in the seat that cuffs would fit through.

“I would have introduced you, you know,” Kendell told me. “You didn't need to go to all this trouble.”

“Wasn't like that. Beluga.” That was all I needed to say.

Kendell groaned and shook his head. He had vast personal experience with Beluga LaMonte. “What's he into now?”

Kendell was about as straight as straight arrows come, so our heart-to-heart out in the hallway couldn't really amount to much. I couldn't let him know that me and Desmond had bankrolled Beluga's heist.

“Laying around. Borrowing money from Shawnica, who's getting it from Desmond. Says he needs it for clothes, for interviews and shit, but it's mostly going for reefer and all the usual Larry crap.”

“Like that car?”

I nodded. “Bought it from some fool on time. I was trying to take it back.”

Tula stepped out into the hall. She saw me and Kendell in conversation and went back into the squad room.

“What are we going to do?” Kendell asked me.

“I don't want to send Larry back up. Think of what that'd do to Shawnica and what Shawnica would do to Desmond.” Mostly I didn't want Kendell getting any sort of whiff of Larry and Skeeter's truckload of tires.

“So the reefer's on you?”

“Can't I just have the gun and maybe the ticket instead?”

“Reefer's got to go somewhere.”

“Commode's all right with me.”

Kendell just smiled and shook his head.

“How much weight?” I asked him.

“Under a quarter. Hardly more than dust.”

That's not what I'd seen in the glove box. That much I knew for certain. If Kendell had dumped the bulk of it out, he sure didn't give anything away. That wasn't his style, though. He was a committed Lord's will sort of guy.

“Just going to fine me, right?”

“Got any warrants out on you?” Kendell was kidding, but hell, you never know.

I shook my head. “Can I beat the shit out of Larry?”

“Let Desmond. You can watch, though.”

“He won't do it. Shawnica'll keep him from it. She's a witch or something. I haven't quite figured it out.”

“Well.” Kendell stood up. “Go on, but don't kill him.”

“He just falls down when you hit him. He's even shiftless in a fight.”

Kendell made his usual going-about-my-business noises.

I was going to ask him to put in a good word for me with officer Tula Raintree—let her know I wasn't some nutty lowlife she'd be pulling and citing in a regular way—but I got the feeling, given the reefer she'd dumped, she might have figured that out already. That's what I'd decided to believe, anyway, by the time she joined me on the bench.

There was just one other guy, a scrawny oldster at the far end who was coming out of his shoes at the soles and smelled almost as bad as a Dupont.

“You all right, Teddy?” she asked him.

Teddy said something back. A few more teeth and a little less fortified wine would have helped.

“Throws rocks,” she told me of Teddy. “Usually at the Methodist church.”

Teddy, as if on cue, broke monumental wind. He told us, “Ha!”

Officer Raintree gave me my paperwork. I looked it over. The pot was down to a trace, and the derringer was written up “unloaded.” I was still going a solid thirty over the posted speed.

“Kendell tells me you're a stickler,” I said to her as I signed the charge sheet.

“I pick my spots.”

I raised my cuffed hand as far as I could and rattled the chain. “I'm not this guy. You know that, right?”

She sort of nodded, almost smiled. “Kendell tells me stuff, too.”

It was sort of like a first date, and I thought we were only halfway through it when she walked with me out to the street. We stopped in the shade of an ancient live oak. The precinct house in Greenville was on a formerly grand boulevard in a formerly sizable city that was dying with precious little grace. The air was hot and stank of fertilizer. A sedan rolled by and bottomed out in a pothole. Aside from me and Officer Raintree, there wasn't anybody else around.

I was going to offer to buy her lunch or something, but I was a touch too slow to talk.

“See ya,” she told me. “Slow it down a little.”

“You're not taking me back?” I was a good twenty miles from Larry's Tercel on the shoulder.

She stood there eyeing the middle distance like she was weighing her options. She finally told me, “Nope.” She smiled. She climbed the stairs and went inside.

When I couldn't reach Desmond, I called Pearl instead. She happened to be in Greenville already with one of her ladies groups. Cards or garden society or maybe even Presbyterians. She told me when I climbed in, but there was so much attendant prattle that the bare facts got swamped, undone, and washed away.

Pearl was wearing enough knockoff Chanel to keep her from smelling the Dupont on me, and she never even asked what I was doing in Greenville or why she'd picked me up in front of the police station. She pointed out empty storefronts all the way out of town and told me who'd occupied them through the years and what they'd sold.

Pearl was an appalling driver, a two-footer, a drifter, an incoherent speeder. She'd race to stop signs and dawdle on open straightaways. I didn't ride with her much. A trip with Pearl always had a curative effect. This day, I found myself doing probably a little more steering than Pearl. She'd get off on a story and veer from her lane. I'd reach over and pull us back. Our trip was a series of avoided head-on collisions and near sideswipes.

With every calamity we dodged, Pearl would giggle and say, “Oh my.”

It was the Delta belle in her that made her try to be girlish, even in her seventies. She and her friends all dressed young in flouncy blouses. They wore their hair in elaborate upswept dos, and they were more flirty and off-color with their chatter than the vast run of Presbyterians care to be. It was a Delta thing, I had to figure. They had cotillions in their pasts and had spent their early, glamorous years as princesses of the place. Now they held fast to the memories to the point of strangulation.

Pearl laid a hand to my thigh and finally asked me, “What in the world are you doing out here?” She didn't mean a thing by it. That was just the way that Pearl and her girlfriends were.

“Helping Desmond out,” I told her.

“Just saw his girlfriend,” she said and pointed.

“Shawnica?”

“The skinny, loud one?”

I nodded.

Pearl shook her head. “Not her.”

“What girlfriend?”

“Works at Zelda's.”

I must have looked baffled.

“Back by the levee. You'd never go in there. All shoes and handbags and underthings.”

“What's her name?”

Pearl shook her head. She very nearly clipped a combine that was taking up the majority of the road. It was my fault chiefly. I'd been distracted and a little hurt by the notion that Desmond had kept a romance from me. Especially considering that we were currently all tied up with his ex-wife.

“Pretty girl,” Pearl said. “Might drop a few pounds.” Pearl said that about most everybody because she was naturally emaciated. She thought that was a look most everybody would be best advised to aim for. “You don't know her?”

I shook my head.

“Funny.”

“Yeah.” I pointed out Larry's Tercel on the shoulder. “Funny.”

Pearl rolled up behind Larry's Toyota and banged it with her bumper. That was business as usual for Pearl. She was a contact parker.

She let me out and asked me the shortest way back to Indianola.

I pointed. “Straight to 49 and then left.”

She wiggled her fingers and told me, “Toodles.”

She pulled out in front of a bread truck and turned right about a half mile down the road.

*   *   *

I found a car lot on the truck route on the river side of Leland. The guy had pennants strung and a sort of picnic tent set up by the road. He had a bright yellow helium blimp tethered over his lot. It was bucking in the breeze. He was sitting in the tent shade sweating and waving at passing traffic. When I got there, his promotion consisted of him, his rat terrier, and me.

He offered me a go-cup full of iced tea, and I took it. The cups were embossed with crossed checkered flags and the words
SPEEDY'S MOTORS
.

“You Speedy?” I asked him.

He shook his head and swabbed his neck. “Weren't never no Speedy.”

“Then why not just Speedy Motors?”

He said something to his dog I couldn't quite make out. Then he turned back to me. “You want a car or something?”