“Harry?” I said.
“What, brother?”
“Ms. Danbury’s getting screwed by Buck Kincannon.”
I saw Harry’s hands squeeze tight on the wheel, like he was choking it.
“Lotta that going around,” he said.
CHAPTER 18
Harry and I returned to Mobile and silently pored through Rudolnick’s records. Our simmering funk made us a threat to others, set off by an errant word or gesture-one of Pace Logan’s wiseass remarks, for instance-but since we’d both been wounded by Buck Kincannon, we were safe with one another.
After an hour of reading psychoterminology, Harry pitched a stack back in the box. “How about we get Terry Baney to talk to the trucker, get a sketch made to pass out on the streets?” he suggested. Terry Baney was the departmental artist.
“Sketch? The perp doesn’t have a face to draw, Harry. We got one eyewitness, right? According to our wit, the perp looks like a Wookiee. Or maybe a yeti.”
“If you saw a yeti walking down the street, you’d remember it, Carson. Right?”
An hour later we were in the flower-lined hospital room of Arlin Dell. He’d been disconnected from most of the machines. The truck driver scowled, thinking our request strange.
“All I saw was hair, like I told you,” Dell said. “Remember Cousin Itt on The Addams Family? Draw him, just leave off the top hat.”
“Cousin Itt wore a bowler hat,” Terry Baney corrected. He sat in a chair beside Dell’s bed, a drawing pad in one hand, a thick pencil in the other. Harry and I leaned against the wall.
Dell rolled his eyes. “Bowler hat, top hat, whatever.”
Terry Baney was forty-three and looked like a man more at home with actuarial tables than drawing materials-slight, bespectacled, pomaded hair, a pink hue to his scrubbed cheeks. He wore a suit fresh from Kmart’s bargain rack; his only artsy touches were a bolo tie and silver belt buckle dotted with turquoise. But the man had a gift, an ability to coax fragments of recollections from witnesses, transforming them into representations that held not photographic exactitude but something better: emotive content.
Baney drew three shapes on his pad, a flattened circle, a circle, and a vertical oval. He turned the pad to Dell, tapped the drawings with his pencil.
“Which of these was the basic shape of the perpetrator’s head?”
“Come on,” Dell scoffed.
Baney smiled nonchalantly, kept the drawings in front of the trucker.
Dell thought a moment. “The middle one. Maybe more square, like a box.”
Baney ripped the page off, tossed it to the floor. He drew a squarish circle, began adding lines indicating hair shape.
“The hair, did it fall straight down like this?” He scribbled vertical lines from the oval. “Or did it fluff out to the sides, more like this?” Baney radiated lines out at an angle, creating a delta form.
“That one. It was fluffed out.”
“Did it fluff out straight? Or was it curly hair like this?” Baney drew curling lines.
“No, the other way. It was straight.”
Baney ripped the page away and started on a fresh sheet.
“The guy’s eyes, Mr. Dell. You said they were like holes in the middle of all that hair.”
Dell reached for the switch controlling the bed and raised himself higher. “Just holes. And they were kind of deep. Like his eyes were pushed back.”
“Let’s talk shape. Round holes like this?” Baney drew his perceptions. “Or were they more like this?” His hand flashed over the paper. The result suggested prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes.
Dell jabbed a finger at the pad. “That. I remember a white triangle above his eyes. Skin. Shaped like a tent from the front.”
“That indicates hair parted at the top,” Baney said, tossing aside a page, beginning fresh. His pencil skipped over the paper, a blur. “Right in the middle. That’s what makes the, uh…tent effect. Can I use that in the future, Mr. Dell? Tent effect?”
Dell grinned and nodded, pleased with his invention.
“The hairy man’s deep eyes,” Baney asked. “Small, large?”
Dell closed his eyes, thought. “Small. Or maybe they seemed that way because the guy was…” The trucker’s eyes popped open. “Angry. Scowling.” Dell frowned hard at Baney, indicating the look.
Baney nodded, kept working. “So, if I take a skinny basic face, add the cheekbone effect around the eyes, keep the hair straight but full, and put a part in the dead center, make his eyes tight with anger…”
Baney seemed transported, drawing, smudging, shading. After a minute he turned the pad to Dell.
“This remind you of anyone?”
The trucker’s eyes widened and his mouth fell open.
“It’s him. How the hell did you do that?”
Harry and I headed back to the department to photocopy the drawing, take it out on the street to run through our snitch network. We dropped the drawing on Harry’s desk, headed toward the coffee urn. When it sputtered and went dry, we headed downstairs to steal from the urn in Crimes Against Property.
When we returned, the drawing was on the floor beside Harry’s desk. The closest dick was Pace Logan, leaning against a column and studying a sheaf of papers. Shuttles stood beside him, looking pained.
“You got it wrong here,” Logan was lecturing Shuttles. “Plus your spelling is screwed. It’s perp-e-trator, not perp-a-trator.”
“Sorry, Pace,” Shuttles said. “I’ll redo the report.”
“Somebody mess with my desk?” Harry growled, staring at Logan.
Logan looked over his reading glasses. “Don’t have a meltdown, Nautilus. I looked at your silly-ass picture. I was walking by and couldn’t figure if it was Charlie Manson or Grizzly Adams.”
“How about getting it back on the desk next time?”
Logan shook his head and turned away, walking back to his cubicle. Harry muttered, “Two more months.”
We showed the pics around, gave several out to snitches and told them to call if they saw the guy. Of course, if he’d cut his hair and beard-odds being heavily that direction, unless he was a total lunatic-it was useless.
When we ran out of pics, we headed to Flanagan’s to grab a beer and a bowl of gumbo. Harry shot me an occasional glance that I felt but didn’t see. He pushed aside his bowl.
“What you gonna do, Carson? About Da-Ms. Danbury?”
“It’s already done.”
Harry clinked the spoon around his empty bowl.
“You’re sure about her and Kincannon? I mean, she really was-”
“I flat-out asked, Harry. She admitted she was boinking Buckie.”
Harry nodded. He shot a glance over my shoulder, grimaced. I turned to the TV above the bar. Dani was anchoring the six p.m. news slot, doing the papers-on-the-desk bit. She launched into a story on the morning’s fire.
“…man jumped before firefighters could reach him and pronounced dead at the hospital. A badly burned female body was found in the rubble, identification held pending notification of next of kin…”
“How about you switch that to another channel,” Harry called to Eloise, our waitress.
“Keep it on, Eloise,” I said. “And turn it up a bit.”
Harry shot me the eye.
“I have to get used to it,” I said, staring at the screen.
Harry cleared his throat and leaned close. “Uh, Carson, you ever think about, uh…”
I turned from the TV. “Messing with Buck Kincannon? Waiting outside Dani’s until I see them coming home
