Eye of the Cricket (7 page)
Read Eye of the Cricket Online
Authors: James Sallis
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural, #General
"And how would you like to pay for this, sir?"
Cash okay?
She punched it in on the computer (I heard a printer start up in back) and told me that would be $9.98.1 pushed a ten across
the breast-high table. She went back and got a copy of the printout for me.
"You'd like these delivered to what address, sir?"
Oh, you don't have to deliver them, I said.
She looked up. "I'm sorry?"
They're for you.
WE LIVE METAPHORICALLY, striving always to match our lives to images we've accepted or imagined for them—family man, middle
American, tine believer, gangster—contriving these containers, a succession of them, that preserve us, define us, that keep
us from spilling out and give us shape, but rarely fit.
Kendall Cibbs lived this way more than most: everything about him expressed itself inrelationship to one piece of land or
another.
Using the number Deborah O'Neil gave me, I firsttried toreach him at what was apparently an office. A woman answered "White
House Properties," and when I asked for Mr. Gibbs inquired, "This was in regard to a listed, or a potential, property?"
Listed
and
potential
instead of selling and buying. Pure class. Admitting that Mr. Cibbs was out of the office (her tone implying that he was rarely,
perhaps never,
in
the office), she suggested that I try another number, which proved to be a Garden District tour service. There, they thought
Gibbs was out looking at a commercial plot on Bayou St. John, after which, to the best of their knowledge, he had no further
appointments.
Once again I explained my interest: that I was handling a missing-persons case and needed to speak with Mr. Gibbs in regard
to a recent acquisition, a donut shop at Jackson and Prytania. Former donut shop. I never implied any connection with the
police, but the young man to whom I spoke assumed police business and, being
authorized
to do so, at his discretion, in such cases (ends of words neatly tucked under, a moment's pause before any new sentence began),
decided he could give me Mr. Gibbs's beeper number.
I punched it in and within the quarter-hour had The Man himself calling from what sounded like a very busy street.
"Kendallgibbs," he said. All one word.
I told him who I was, what I wanted.
"I got a brother on the force, you know, fourteen years. Gerard Gibbs? Last four or five of them behind a desk. Light went
out
on
Poydras, he's doing emergency traffic direction and gets run down by a drunk never even noticed he hit him. Worst job in the
world. They put a muzzle on you, draw targets on your chest and Kick Me signs on your backside, scatter birdseed around you
for pay."
I grunted what I hoped he'd take as assent.
"Okay. I'm away from my computer now, so I don't have access to files, paperwork. Of course, being a little old-fashioned,
I do still manage to keep a thing or two in my head. What you want's not too complicated, I can probably help you."
"Thing I need most is to get in touch with the manager."
"There's not one. Assistant manager'd be the one you'd want Manager walked out over a year ago. People who own the place think,
Why pay someone to manage when this assistant's already doing it for scut wages."
"Guy with Woody Woodpecker hair?"
"Yeah, that's him all right. Keep expecting him to go Ha-ha-ha-fta-ha. Haiti worker, though. Boy
was
the damn store. He hired, rode herd, ran totals and made daily bank drops, did more than half the baking himself, cleaned
up when he could. I'm keeping him in mind, something comes up. Keith LeRoy."
"Then you have an address for him."
"Near's I know, no one does. Wouldn't give out an address, phone number. Boy plays it close to the chest."
Portrait of the middle-aged detective as Elmer Fudd running headlong into a wall. Staggering back arock on his heels.
"Well, is there anything—"
"I didn't say I couldn't help you, Griffin. You want his beeper, or E-mail?"
Beeper or E-mail. Guy's twenty years old, ran a donut shop for minimum wage, and he's got a beeper? E-mail? The world was
getting away from me at an alarming rate. Sometimes I forgot.
Gibbs gave me both and I thanked him. He said no problem. Anytime.
"Yo," a voice said on the phonefiveminutes after I beeped.
"Keith LeRoy?"
"What chu want wit'im?"
I told him briefly, reminded him that we'd met three days back at Tast-T Donut.
He interrupted me, gliding back from street talk to standard. "I remember. Big guy, black suit—looked like linen—gold silk
shirt. You still looking for Shon?"
"Yes." Four days in a row now, off and on. I was setting personal records for dogged persistence.
"Good to have some continuity in your life. Excuse me." I heard two voices speaking, one quarrelsome, the other flat and uninflected,
just out of range of intelligibility. Neither sounded like LeRoy's. Then he said something and the voices stopped. "Sorry.
I don't know what good this will do you, if any at all, but you're welcome to it."
"Whatever it is, it has to be better than what I have now."
"Yeah. Way we live, here in this great land. Okay. Last few times I saw him, Delany was hanging with a guy. Thought he was
a friend, I'm sure—Delany didn't have any others—but the guy had that look in his eye, throw you over for a dollar?"
"You ever get his name?"
"Never came up. He'd just show up, wait outside for Delany to get off. Leaning against a wall, sitting on a customer's car.
I asked Delany who he was once and he said that's my cousin. I told him tell his cousin to stay off the customers' cars from
now on."
"That it?"
"Warned you it was thin."
"Then I'll try fattening it up. You have my thanks."
"And you have my you're-welcomes.
Damn
ain't we a couple of well-bred, civilized types."
"Who would have thought it?"
"Not
my
mother, for sure. Later, Griffin."
I sat looking at the envelope Sam Delany had given me, at the phone numbers printed on it, on the back flap, in precise, squarish
figures. Nine times out of ten, the one thing they don't tell you is the very thing you need to know, the thing that would
have kept you from running around in circles, into walls, dead ends and, often as not, trouble.
I dialed the number for Delany's rentedroom, then, glancing up at the clock, his mother's. He'd said he took care of the family.
Maybe that included watching the younger kids after school.
"Baldwin-Delany residence." The eight-year-old, from the sound of it.
"Could I speak to Sam Delany?" I said.
"May I ask who's calling?"
I told her.
"I'll see if he's in."
He was, and was on the phone in the time it took to hand the receiver over.
"Mr. Griffin. Thank you for calling. You have news?"
"Nothing substantial." I told him about the donut shop closing, briefly recounted my conversations at the florist's next door
and with Keith LeRoy. "Reason I'm calling is to ask if you know anything about a cousin of Shon's, guy he's been seen with
lately."
"How lately?"
I said I wasn't sure. Couple of weeks maybe.
"And someone told you this was Shon's cousin?"
"That's how Shon identified him to the assistant manager at the donut shop, yes. Sounded like they might be tight. Getting
that way, anyhow."
"Did you get a name?"
"No."
Moments went by. I could hear a TV in the background. X-Men, Ninja Turtles, something on that order. Kids' voices.
"I was afraid of that."
"So afraid that you didn't bother to tell me about it."
"I guess I thought if I said it aloud, somehow that was going to make it true. Like the kids when they were younger. They'd
be in bed at night and think they saw something in the corner, so they'd be very careful not to look that way. Because if
they did, it was going to be there."
"So who's this cousin?"
"His name's Armantine Rauch, everyone calls him Army. And he's not a cousin, he's Shon's half brother—like I am. One of Shon's
old man's
other
adventures."
"You know him?"
"Much to my displeasure and misfortune, I do. Years back, Army showed up on our doorstep saying he had no other place to go.
I was about Shon's age then—fifteen, sixteen. Mom's a pushover, as always. Has no idea how she's going to take care of the
kids she already has but never even skips a beat before taking in this new one."
"How long was he with you?"
"Less than a year. First, money started disappearing from the coffee can in the kitchen, then from Mom's purse. Never
much
money, mind you, because there
wasn't
much. Fifty cents here, a dollar. Then we heard neighbors start complaining. Mail was missing from their box, they'd say.
A grill or a lawn chair left on the gallery had disappeared. One man said the gallon of gas he'd put in his moped the night
before, to get to work on, was gone when he went out the next morning 'round five. Few clays later, a car got stolen from
up the street. Not long after, police came knocking at the door. Wanted to know if an Armantine Rauch lived there."
"This had happened before, then."
"Every place he lived."
"It's the kind of thing that usually escalates."
"Did here too. Cops came by more than once, those last months. But then on one of the rare days Armantine actually went to
school a teacher told him to do something he didn't feel much like doing and wound up with a pair of scissors in his chest.
Kids said you could hear the air gushing out around them whenever the teacher, Mr. Sacher was his name, tried to talk, tell
someone to please go get help."
"Rauch get tried for that?"
"After about fifteen social workers and agencies and this-n-thats you never heaid of or saw before quit arguing, he did. Mama
said we'd probably never see him again. Too goddamn bad. She used to visit, the firstyear or so, but it got to be way too
hard on her and she stopped going. Funny. Maybe some ways, all that's why I'm in law school." He paused. "Almost in law school."
"He was tried as a juvenile?"
"Yes. Sentenced to twenty years, but they told us he'd be out when he hit twenty-one."
"And you haven't seen him since then, right? He didn't turn up at your mother's, you had no reason to think Shon might have
taken up with him."
"Not really. Just that thinking about it, Shon disappearing that way, then finding out how things'd started changing on him
and how none of us knew that, it gave me a bad feeling. Made me wonder."
"Okay, for the time being I guess that's it. Unless you have something else you forgot to tell me."
"No. I'm sorry."
"I'll get back to you."
"What—" he began.
But I hung up and immediately dialed Don.
"What's the name again?" he said after I briefed him. "This is local, right? We know where this kid was? Just a minute. Damn
computer's just sitting here blinking at me."
Too many people surfing on the Third Wave.
"I'm waiting . . . waiting . . . I said
later,"
he told someone. "Here it is. Armantine 'Army' or 'R. M.' Rauch. Went up on attempted second-degree, twenty to thirty. Remanded
to LTI by judicial order. That's Louisiana Training Institute, and I've no doubt he
was
trained there, though not quite the way society intended. On the street they call it going to college."
"Plea-bargained? "
"Couldn't. They'd have tried to kick it down to manslaughter, even aggravated assault, but statutes say if the wound's to
trunk or head it's gotta be second-degree. Evidence of past offenses, the usual escalation, was also entered."
"He's out?"
"Nineteenth of August. Happy birthday."
"Just like that."
"Yeah, butterfly time. The weird thing is, we have an address. I guess Rauch was carrying on an extensive correspondence while
he was in prison, wanted to be sure it got continued once he was outside."
I climbed out of the cab in front of a tract house just across the parish line off Old Metairie Road. Almost certainly it
had been military housing, later converted to fifties sub-suburban with accrual of screened-in porch, cinder-block utility
room and partial second floor. Plywood nailed to the windows signaled a more recent conversion to abandoned building. The
yard was ankle deep in rotting leaves, bright green clover, grenadelike pinecones.
Don's address had taken me to a poolroom-lounge on Jefferson Highway. The owner-bartender didn't appreciate my questions near
as much as he had my business when I first came in and ordered a beer, and the whole thing quickly developed into one of those
standard dialogues involving baseball bats produced from beneath the bar and bodies hauled across the top of it, after which
he decided maybe it would be okay to tell me where R. M. was staying.
The front door gave with a sharp tug, nails pulling free of well-worn holes. Inside I found hard evidence of habitation: hot
plate, pans, stack of dishes, aluminum percolator, canned goods, large tin of coffee, clothes that smelled of sweat hanging
from nails in the wall. A plastic ice chest wi th two beer cans half afloat in tepid water and a pile of empty, crushed ones
nearby.
In one comer, tucked under a sleeping bag, I found torn envelopes addressed to Armantine Rauch and letters beginning
Dear Arm.