He Was Her Man (14 page)

And Loydell certainly didn’t say anything about their suicide pact—their plans for chucking it all in at 75, if not before—when she’d called down to the P.D. last night. She got Archie Blackshears on the phone. She asked him to send a patrol car out to check on Olive.

She knew better. She also knew better than to try to report Olive as a missing person. It was one hell of a lot harder to be missing than you’d think.

Archie had said, “Well, Loydell, Olive isn’t a minor, is she?”

“She’s seventy-two years old, same as me, Archie, as you know very well. I didn’t say she was missing. I said I was worried about her and just want somebody to drive by her house.”

“Well, is she mentally incompetent? If she’s not a minor or mentally incompetent or in need of some life-supporting medication, we can’t do a thing. Stand to get sued for invasion of privacy. She has the right to go off, do anything she wants to.”

“I know that, you idiot!” Loydell had slammed down the phone.

She’d thought for a few minutes about going next door and seeing if Archie’s daughter, Cynthia, was home, get her to drive out to Olive’s. Cynthia and Olive were real good friends, even after all that mess with Bobby Adair—Olive’s grandson and Cynthia’s boyfriend—being sent up for trying to kill Archie, which he didn’t, in the first place, and if he had, it would have been a blessing, is what they’d said, you asked most folks. Actually, she and Olive both loved Cynthia like she was a granddaughter, and Loydell had been pleased as punch to have Cynthia move in her rent house next door when Cynthia had left Archie’s house right after they sent Bobby to the pokey over at Cummins. Loydell found it cozy, having Cynthia around. But last night Cynthia’s lights had been out, and finally Loydell had gone to bed. Not that she’d slept much.

Now Loydell had finished her breakfast and made her way out to her two-door ice blue Chevette. She was talking to herself. Saying, Cops! Like I said to Sam, they sure don’t make ’em like they used to. Now they’re just a bunch of big old lazy overgrown boys mostly, like to dress up and carry guns. In cahoots with the big lawbreakers what make the money. Spend half their time sucking after what they can get from the drug dealers, don’t have the time anymore to help your ordinary tax-paying, law-abiding citizen. Why, she bet that even if Jinx had the good sense, which she didn’t, to call the Hot Springs P.D. about that Speed McKay, they wouldn’t do a thing. Well, maybe they just might if she went down there, sat and crossed her legs with one of those little bitty skirts she wore like she was still 16 years old. They might, once they’d got their eyes full. Then Loydell opened the door of the Chevette, stepped in, and was getting settled behind the steering wheel before it dawned on her that there was a young man standing in her driveway, leaned over knocking on the window on the passenger side.

“Jesus H. Christ!” said Loydell, who’d never thought that the Man Himself was listening to every word. If He did, she was sure He’d have already died of boredom.

“I’m sorry, I sure didn’t mean to scare you,” said the man, squatting down. He was a beanpole, tall but no bigger around than herself, and Loydell was a skinny little old woman, shrinking by the day. The man was a study in brown. Brown hair, brown eyes, dressed all in tan, suit, shirt, tie. Close your eyes, not much remained of him on your eyeballs.

“What do you want, son? I’ve got places to go,” said Loydell.

“I was just wondering…could you roll this window down, please, ma’am?”

Loydell did. She didn’t have the patience to try to make out what he was saying through the glass.

“I’m doing a market survey for Beckel & Sally, a shoe manufacturer out of Kansas City and…well, we’re curious about the fit of ladies’ shoes. You know, for years, manufacturers didn’t give a rip about whether or not women’s feet were comfortable.”

“You can say that again,” said Loydell looking down at her sensible black oxfords. “I order these out of a catalogue from a store in Indianapolis that specializes in comfy. All those years I stood around jails, well, you can bet I didn’t do it in high heels.”

At the mention of jail, the young man seemed to rock back a bit, and then he said, “Ma’am, I think that’s awfully interesting. Would you mind if I…?” He laid his hand on the door like he was going to open it.

“Make it snappy now,” said Loydell. “I don’t have all day.”

“I can certainly appreciate that.” He was sitting beside her in the Chevette before you could say Jack Robinson. He wasn’t a bad-looking boy, a little nervous maybe. “Ma’am, would it be too much of an imposition if I took a look at one of your special-order comfy shoes? It would help our research immeasurably if we knew what it was women really wanted.”

“Son.” Loydell laughed. “You figure that out, I’ll tell you, you can do better than the shoe business.” She reached over and untied her shoe with the sensible two-inch heel, the lug sole, the layer of shock-absorption just like those running shoes, the good arch support, your high-quality black calf uppers with the attractive stitching and the little diamond-shaped holes so your toes could breathe.

“Ummmmmh,” said the young man, breathing deeply himself, snuggling her shoe in his right hand like it was his heart’s desire. “Oh yes, ma’am, this is something all right.” Holding her shoe closer to his face, like he really wanted to get a good look.

But though Loydell realized she’d been a fool letting him in the car in the first place and giving him her shoe, she wasn’t fool enough to let him keep on sniffing, getting himself all worked up.

Because that’s exactly what he was doing.

The man was some kind of shoe-sniffing pervert. Loydell, with her years of experience in law enforcement, knew it took all kinds, but that didn’t mean she had to put up with it.

She said, just as sweetly as she could, “Excuse me,” which the young man hardly heard, he was off in toe-sniffing heaven, just like he’d done some kind of drug. She reached right over him and snapped open her glove compartment and pulled out her little .22 Jaguar Baretta, one of the perks of having been in law enforcement, and said, “Son, I’m gonna give you about two seconds to drop that clodhopper and get the hell out of my vehicle. I’d run you on down to the department, get them boys to lock you up, but I’ve got serious business on my mind.”

She’d say one thing for the young pervert. He knew how to move.

13

YOU KNOW THAT expression, that dog won’t hunt?
Bill Clinton used it in a speech up in New York during the Democratic Convention, and the Yankees said, What’s he mean? As if they wouldn’t know, they gave it a minute’s thought. Anyway, Pearl was the opposite of that dog. Hunting was what she wouldn’t stop. When they got to the city limits, that long stretch of strip shopping centers, Jack in the Boxes, and gas stations that have mushroomed at the edge of every American town, Sam was afraid the hound was going to be run over in traffic, so she got out and ran along behind her. Bobby brought up the rear, slumped down in the BMW and wearing a baseball cap he hoped would keep him incognito and out of the clutches of the Hot Springs P.D. Even though she did her share of exercise classes and fast-walking, Sam thought she was going to roll over and die by the time they came to the old part of town.

Hot Springs had begun as a single row of buildings on either side of a creek that flowed through the narrow mountain valley. Now that creek was Central Avenue, and the buildings on one side were the eight phantasmagorical bathhouses built in the twenties; on the other stood a row of 19th-century structures now housing art galleries, candy shops, stores that sold tourist bric-a-brac. On both sides of the street, the mountains sat right on backdoor steps.

Pearl loped along the sidewalk, pausing to take a whiz at one of the five-globed cast iron lampposts in front of the bathhouses. A little girl wearing a Mountain Valley Water T-shirt called,
Here, doggie, doggie, doggie,
to Pearl from a wooden rocker on the Fordyce Bathhouse’s front porch. But the dog trudged on.

She loped uphill past the Palace and Arlington hotels, both of which were snuggled in at Hot Springs Mountain’s feet, past dark green magnolias heavy with creamy blossoms that smelled of musk, sweet dreams, and chivalry long-dead. Just past the Arlington, Bobby tapped the horn, slowed down, and Sam rolled into the BMW’s cool leather upholstery like a batter sliding into home. Her brain was gone. Her only thoughts for a good five minutes were, Breathe in, breathe out.

Pearl, her pace steady as a metronome, climbed on out the north side of town, up a two-lane mountain road past a pottery, a flea market, rock shops, billboards for crystal mines where you could hunt for your own, past stone mansions and falling-down shacks and mobile homes, headed on up toward Hot Springs Village, where snowbirds perched in condos, and finally turned off at Mountain Valley, where the bottled water came from. Pearl went right on humping through mile after mile of Weyerhauser pine forests posted with little signs that said when the new trees had been planted. Bobby was hunkered down behind the wheel, looking more worried by the minute. Sam agreed, this was looking bad. What would Olive be doing way up here on this lonely mountain road broken by only an occasional mailbox? Nothing good. Sam shook her head.

Finally they came to the edge of Lake Ouachita, as serene a blue lake as you’d ever hope to see. Sam was entertaining visions of stripping off her sweaty clothes and jumping in for a dip, when Pearl nosed up a little gravel road and stopped.

She sat down in the middle of the road, her big neat head turning this way and that, her pale eyes mournful. Then she lumbered up and switched back and forth in circles.

They got out, and Bobby patted her on the head. “Which way, girl? What’s the matter? You came all this way and got lost?”

Pearl’s pink-brown nose checked the air, sniffed the ground, and then with fresh resolve she took off again, down the gravel road.

When she came to a little clearing through brush and shrub, she snuffled into the base of a big pine tree that had a fresh raw cut low in its bark oozing resin. There Pearl took her stand and began to chop. “Yo yo yo yo,” she sang. “Hunuruhu hoo hoo hoo hoo.”

Sam had gone coon-hunting once in north Alabama with Uncle George when she was a girl. It had been fun, following the bawling dogs through the woods, wearing the heavy boots and coveralls, smelling the bacon and wood smoke, listening to the men bragging and joking and telling tales. That is, until the moment she’d heard this very same sound, this chop on tree, and they’d come up on the dogs. The men had already said that the coon had run a good race, and once it was treed they’d pull their dogs off. But one man got carried away and shot the coon, which screamed as it tumbled into the dogs’ slobbering jaws. The shooting was a blessing, at least. But listening to Pearl chop, Sam again saw that coon ripped to bits of bloody fur and bones. She turned her head.

“Hi,” said the pretty redhead in bright yellow running shorts who was standing there on the side of the road like a mirage. Except Sam knew she was real because she’d watched her fleece a man named Slim out of two hundred dollars in the Palace lobby the night before. “Did your car break down?” asked Mickey. “Do y’all need some help?”

*

Mickey stayed to watch Sam and Bobby, who’d introduced themselves, tromp all over the woods. They’d said they were looking for Bobby’s car, an old black-and-gold Ford Sunliner, that had disappeared.

With Doc’s help, of course. Mickey knew that, and she knew the man had screwed up. He’d been getting reckless lately, not paying attention to details. And now, lookahere, they’re being tailed by a dog. The very dog that belonged to the woman they’d run a game on the afternoon before, and for what? She’d asked Doc about the take, he’d just grunted and opened another beer.

He was losing it. And this boozing was definitely getting on her nerves.

“So what you’re saying is, you think this dog is tracking the car?” Mickey asked. “Isn’t that kind of weird, that the dog would track the car?”

Bobby said, “There’s nothing weird, ma’am, when it comes to dogs. Why, I could tell you some stories, but then I bet you’ve read the same ones, things like dogs walking by themselves cross-country, like from Ohio to Montana, left accidentally at gas stations, rest stops. Dogs are wonderful creatures.”

“Lots better than most people,” said Sam, thinking of Harpo, her little Shih Tzu whom she’d left back in New Orleans with Ma Elise, Kitty’s grandmother. Harpo, her ever-faithful true love, who thought she hung the moon. She was the center of his universe. And then she thought of Harry, and his wandering gaze. Good old Harry. The son of a bitch could call her for the next hundred years, she wasn’t talking to him.

Mickey gave Sam a smile. She remembered Sam, of course, from the bar last night. Mickey always kept tabs on her audience, checking for cops—and prospective pigeons. Sometimes they’d be panting while they watched, they were so anxious to part with their money. This Sam wasn’t one of those. But Mickey had noted her, sitting alone, drinking bottled water. She hadn’t looked like a woman cruising, though there’d been something going on with the black man.

“You think that car’s hiding off down there?” she called when they followed Pearl down into a little ravine. She followed. “You can see the tracks up by that pine. They’re faint, but don’t you think those are tracks?” But they didn’t lead anywhere from there. It was as if the car had been driven in, parked up against that pine tree with the fresh cut, like maybe the car had hit it, then pulled out.

That seemed to be what Pearl thought, too. The dog came snuffling out of the ravine, circled around for a while, and then Mickey could see she was thinking about heading up the hill, up to the old stone house where the Sunliner had sat in the carport. That wouldn’t have been pretty.

But then Pearl circled again, and whatever it was she was smelling, it seemed to be stronger going back the way she’d come. Though she stopped several times and looked back over her shoulder at the little clearing beneath the pine tree. Then up at Mickey. Like Mickey knew what the hell was going on.