Thorazine Beach (11 page)

Somewhere back at city hall, these houses had street numbers. Out here, though, they had names.
The Briars. Cotton Hill. Levee Reach
. Clayton McCorkle’s
Winter Bayou
, I saw from the copied plat I’d scooped from Collierville’s planning department, was the only number on its street. A street I’d not be driving, I saw. The iron gate would have looked formidable if I’d been driving a tank. How he’d scooped private possession of a whole city street for his own was anyone’s guess. But, then, there’s a lot goes on in Memphis that has to do with extraordinary privilege.

I hadn’t come to see Barbara Jean, wasn’t intending to go in. I just wanted to see the place for myself. And couldn’t quite. Not from the gate, which gave a view of a curving rock wall and another inner gate. And security cams, on poles and trees—moving cams, I noted. I backed Mitzi out, guessing my picture had already been taken at the outer gate, looked for another viewpoint, and found it, finally, on the north side of the property, where some horticulturally horrific disease had evidently struck a stretch of hedge and left its limbs bereft of leaves. I parked, struggled up a rise, clambered to the top of the stone wall and over the crest of the rise where the wall ran lower than elsewhere. And, through the hedge’s barren limbs, saw.

The house loomed out of the hilltop, about the size of an aircraft carrier. A house built less for its style than for its brute visual weight. Not necessarily handsome, architecturally. And certainly not what you’d call beautiful. Impressive, yes—in the way a gigantic warehouse is impressive, when you see one for the first time. Imagine a McMansion—the kind you see in GeeTown and Collierville. You know how they assemble those. A French farmhouse roof here, white columns there, over here three dormers, there an eyebrow window, now a gable. A dog’s breakfast. “Architectonic,” you might say—a borrowing from every period, movement, regional style, and every bit of it
faux
. Like an ignorant, angry kid who stole every Lego piece in town and all he wanted was to make whatever he was building
big
.

Clayton McCorkle had made it big. In construction, mostly—not surprising, given the acres of square-footage I was staring at. I’d scouted him out at the Crescent Club, on the say-so of a couple of buddies who hung about the fringes of local wealth. The fact McCorkle met people at the Crescent Club—three, four times a week, the bartender told me—said a lot. If you were old money, if you had pedigree, you’d more likely meet at the University Club in Midtown, where you’d still hear, straight-faced, the term
respectability
, in accents that harkened back to an imagined Old South. The kind of respectability, incidentally, that meant the only black people on the premises were “servants.” And called that.

The Crescent Club, though, perched atop the building that lent its name, an elegantly anonymous late-eighties edifice that defined the east end of the Poplar-240 split. A building of vaguely styled “consultants,” a building of new-money brokers who’d made it on new-money clients and therefore could sport golf shirts and sockless, open-toed sandals in the office—the grown-up, monied equivalent of Memphis State frat boys sporting backwards ball caps and thinking themselves original, defiant, their own men. The Crescent Club took anyone who could write the cheque—more modest than the term
private club
might make you think—and didn’t actually smell. They’d even taken MacDonald, whose card I used at the door, my thumb over his picture.

Three times that week, I’d sat near Clayton McCorkle and his buddies—a breakfast and two lunches. No need for disguises or subterfuge—in a club, you’d expect to see the same people. I heard laughter. A couple of dirty crony-jokes. And a guy deeply into construction, construction people, and not much else. One day, he came in brushing dust off his khakis, which bore another, darker stain. “Guy on a site,” he said to the trio who’d been waiting too long and decided they’d best get on with lunch. “Not mine—a subcontractor’s guy. Half cut his thumb off with a skill-saw. I hadda take him to Collierville Baptist. Poor bastard got no insurance, so we’re gonna take care of him.” He sat, wrote the name out three times on his own business cards, handed them around. “Put this old boy in your prayers, y’all. Grace a God, nerves in his hand won’t be all fucked up.”

The Crescent Club was one thing. Clean. Air-conditioned. Safe. Out here at the house…I moved along the wall…

“You buying?” MacDonald said through the phone.

“Yep,” I said. “I’m expecting some money, so I thought I’d splurge. Big cheque from the Memphis PD for all that camera equipment.”

“Sarcastic bastard,” he said. “It’s what? Four o’clock. Perfect for tea. Does Bucks have crumpets?”

“Kind of,” I said. “Still British, Mac?”

“There’ll always be an England.”

“Shut up and get here,” I said. “We’re going to have a little chat.”

“You and me, Jack?”

“We’re two of the three,” I said, and all I got back was “Oh.”

MacDonald arrived, sat. “Nikki,” I said. “Get someone else to take the counter and come over here.”

“Jack, I can’t just—”

“Do it,” I said. The old platoon commander in me was talking again. And it worked. She sat, moved her chair oddly close to MacDonald’s.

“Now, old buddy,” MacDonald said. “Before we get into—”

“We are into it, Mac.”

He looked at me, looked away. Nikki looked at Mac, got nothing back.

“Nikki, that was Mac you called the morning you were…”

She breathed, looked me in the eye. “I figured you knew.”

“I’m slow on the uptake,” I said. “But I get it sooner or later.”

MacDonald sighed, exchanged a glance with Nikki. “We’ve been…
seeing
one another.”

“‘Seeing’?” I said. “Is
that
what they’re calling it now—”

Mac shook his head. “We’re…”

“We’re just friends,” Nikki said, and there wasn’t a hint of defensiveness.

“Fact is, Jack, I never had a girl—”

“Woman,” Nikki corrected, and he smiled. “I’m trying to convince this Neanderthal that some women possess grey matter beyond a brain stem and a set of nasty bits,” she said.

“So you two have been talking, what—books?”

“Yes,” said Mac with a touch of genuine indignation. “Literature and shit.”

“I see,” I said, hoping I was projecting a faint amusement. I felt my smile vanish as I added, “I’d like to talk about the ‘and shit.’”

MacDonald breathed. Nikki breathed. I didn’t.

Mac was about to speak, but Nikki broke the silence. “Jig’s up, Mac.”

“You. Nikki. You’re the reason Nikki was…”

Nikki’s face said, for the first time in days, she still felt the pain.

“Yes,” MacDonald said. “My fault. Best I can figure was, this guy wanted to hurt me by hurting someone…close to me. Figure he’d seen us out somewhere, some restaurant—”

“We like Chinese,” Nikki chimed in.

“New Nam King?” I asked.

“Ain’t the best place, but it’s…”

“Handy,” she said, looking at him, turning back to me. “You know—for conversation…”

“And shit,” I said.

“There isn’t any of that, Jack,” said Mac. “Not that it’d be
your
business.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and it occurred: It wasn’t my business.

“So who hit you?” I asked Nikki.

Mac filled it in. “We don’t know. Got a half-assed description—”

“I gave you a
very
good description,” Nikki intruded.

“Description, is all,” Mac added, touching the back of Nikki’s hand.

“Has to do with this whole ‘commission’ crap, doesn’t it,” I said. It wasn’t a question, and MacDonald’s silence said it needn’t have been.

“We don’t know who it was,” Mac said, and Nikki shrugged.

The next move was mine. “I think I do.”

I stuck to my word. Can’t lie to a lady. Barbara Jean McCorkle had asked for my discretion, and I honoured that.

Somehow, MacDonald knew better than to ask.

I’d been following Clayton McCorkle steadily for three days now. A time or two to his real estate office, a few more times to the Crescent Club. Twice way along Summer Avenue—once to what turned out to be some stand-around cocktail thing at Rhodes College. The other time, I lost him not far from the Paris Cinema, where he turned off on a side street and I missed him, dumb enough to be in the wrong lane. But I knew who lived on that street.

I kept squeezing MacDonald for whatever I could. I didn’t believe it all, and it was clear he was holding back. But still, he was far more forthcoming than usual. The ‘commission,’ of course, was bogus. Or half so. It was all off the books. “Personal,” MacDonald said, between him and Mayor Wharton. Seems Wharton wasn’t sure who he could count on, but he trusted Mac.
Someone
, Wharton knew, was dirty. Wharton had known Mac’s family from back when, and that still counts for a lot in Memphis. Why Mac had said anything at all to
me
, given all this hush-hush, about his ‘commission,’ his ‘task force,’ was a mystery I’d get to later. Right now, I was sitting on Clayton McCorkle and His Eminence, drinking tepid Styrofoam coffee in the car, outside a Collierville restaurant I couldn’t afford to walk into, let alone dine at.

When they came out, it was His Eminence I decided to follow. I wasn’t sure, but I thought McCorkle glanced my way not once, but twice.

There are things you don’t forget from infantry training. Whenever else you might sleep, it’s a hundred per cent stand-to for a half hour before and after dawn, a half hour before and after sunset. The sky’s still bright, but the ground is dark. It’s hard to pick out movement on the ground. Prime time for planned attack, prime time for ambush.

I’d got over a low stretch of wall surrounding the McCorkle residence, though not without a rip in the thigh of a pair of pants too good to rip. Damn things never tear on a seam, always someplace you’ll see the repair. Lynette had never believed in repairing things, though I was still darning socks when I met her. “You replace them,” she’d said.

I’d talked to Mac that afternoon. He’d called me. Unusually forthcoming, he simply announced, “We got ‘im.”

“Who?”

“Booking sheet says ‘Martavius Hooton.’”

“His Eminence?”

“Yup. A little less eminent than before.”

“Guess he won’t be delivering his Sunday sermon.”

“Guess not.”

“Hit the news yet, Mac? It’s gonna be all
over
town.”

“Ain’t gonna, Jack. Not for a coupla days.”

“You got him on ice?”

“Busy as our beleaguered police force is, Jack, it seems some paperwork has momentarily been misplaced, and the Right Reverend Hooton is currently residing with us in what you might call a…secure location.”

“Not 201 Poplar, I take it.”

“Oh, no, Jack. The commission has security arrangements of its own. Thanks to the cooperation of, shall we say, a not-so-nearby county.”

“And the charges?”

“I suspect you know, Jack.”

“I have an hypothesis or two.”

“‘An’ hypothesis, Jack? Isn’t that a little too English teacher, even for you?”

“Touché. Importing those Mexicans?”

“Yeah,” he said, squeezing a shrug through the phone. “And then some.”

“You mean sex trafficking. Girls from China, Phillipines.”

“Figured you knew,” he said.

“Figured you knew I knew.”

“I think what you don’t know is…three dead girls.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“You know, somehow, Jack, in all this fuss, I neglected to stick a GPS on your ass. Where you at?”

“About five minutes from Starbucks.”

“Jack, when aren’t you five minutes from Starbucks?”

“Fair point,” I said.

“And where will you be tonight?”

“Actually, I have no particular plans for this evening, Mac. What do you have in mind?”

“It’s not an invitation, Kemosabe. And you do most certainly have plans for tonight.”

“I do indeed.” And that’s all I gave him.

I don’t know why, but I kept playing the conversation over in my head as I squatted in one of the more unkempt hedges in this corner of the McCorkle property. Dusk gave way to dark, waiting to boredom. And boredom gave way to a set of earbuds and some Steely Dan. That oddly listenable Fagen whine.
Aja
…
when all my dime dancin’ is through
…

The beginning of a headache. Eyes wanting to close. A figure, leaving the house. Maybe—too tired to be certain.

I wished Mac had stuck me with a GPS. The next thing I knew was: First light. Massive swelling on the right side of my face. Me, on my side, my whole left side covered in mud and leaves. Grinding pain. And a light, sweet drizzle in the brightening dawn.

“Can you come down to my office?” MacDonald.

“Well, I could…”

“You must,” he said.

“I would if I knew where your fricking office was, MacDonald.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I meant to call, I really did. But Jack—”

“You see this thing on the news?”

“
What
thing?”

Sounded to me like:
Yeah, I know
. So I called him on it.

A sigh filled the phone.

“I replaced him, Jack. So now I reckon you know where my God damn office is.”

Not fifteen minutes before, Channel 5 had cut into whatever afternoon girl-TV I’d been watching. A cop, a major, Harold Formley, removed from his job in a big way. Press conference from Chief Larry, another from Mayor A.C. Wharton. Formley had been found with child porn on his office computer, of all things. Tucked away, he thought, behind some super-secret security wall. But he hadn’t figured on a new secretary with a masters in computing science she hadn’t mentioned on the job app. After the warrant, they found worse on his home computer. And pictures, printed, tucked in a briefcase he’d forgotten to take with him at the end of his shift. He’d been running protection for what had been called “parties.” For “gentlemen.” Gentlemen, that is, who
didn’t
prefer blondes, didn’t prefer the local pros, liked them exotic, liked them young. And, sometimes, liked it rough. Half a dozen cops on protection outside these parties—none, beyond Formley, named. Two lawyers, a couple of investment guys, and a lower-court judge, were the rumours, the TV said. No names there, either. Nothing known, they said, about the location of these parties. Except, vaguely, “the eastern part of the metro area.”